Displaying posts tagged with

“atmosphere”

Dec
17
2009
Life By Alex Fein | 34 comments

Winning Friends and Influencing People 3: Anti-Semitism, The Hiatus, and Secret GLBT Business.

I’ve written before about the story of my paternal grandmother’s Holocaust survival. In short, her father, a religious Jew, made friends with the local priest long before the catastrophic events that wiped out Polish Jewry.
As Jews from my family’s village were packed off to the concentration camps, this priest managed to forge papers for my [...]

Sep
2
2009
Life By Alex Fein | 13 comments

The Community Survey: Civil Discussion, the “Volunteer” Canard, and Intimidation

Yesterday, Mum and I attended the afternoon session of Andrew Marcus’s discussion of the community survey, at Monash University.
I urge everyone who can, to get hold of a copy of the survey results. At the presentation, we were also offered “Key Findings from the 2006 Census” on Victoria’s Jews, collated by Markus and Tanya Aronov.
Markus’s [...]

Jun
25
2009
Life By Alex Fein | 16 comments

Loewenstein: Why Bother?

Antony Loewenstein has provided fodder for this blog on a number of occasions. Some of our readers have asked whether writing about Loewenstein serves any function, or indeed, whether such posts provide him with oxygen or legitimacy.
Let me state for the record: I have no personal beef with Mr Loewenstein. I met him once, quite [...]

Jun
2
2009
Life By Alex Fein | 22 comments

Zionism on Campus: a New Approach

There is no more fertile ground than the Western campus for all manner of anti-Zionist activity. How such activity can be countered is an important question, not only because Israel and Zionists are misrepresented, but because often, people come to university without eve having known or cared about Israel or Jews, and their formative experiences [...]

May
21
2009
Life By Alex Fein | 7 comments

Reader Response 4: Coups, Town Halls, and the Reluctance to Comment

It would seem prudent to gather some momentum, and to get a feel for the common ground shared by all Jewish moderates before storming Beit Weizman.

While the last sentence is somewhat tongue in cheek, it does allude to an idea that emerged at The Sensible Jew: what do people think of an open meeting, to which all Melbourne Jews are welcome, in which we could ask the leaders of the ZFA, ECAJ, AIJAC, and other bodies some questions regarding their recent media performance, and their claims to legitimate representation?

Would such a meeting do any good? Is it at all worthwhile? Are our institutions so rotten that attempting to graft democratic elements onto them would be futile? If so, by what mechanisms could an alternative leadership be established?

May
20
2009
Opinion By Alex Fein | 6 comments

Reader Response 3: Media and Anti-Semitism

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series reader response

Firstly, the observation has been made on more than one occasion that there are genuine anti-Semites (some of whom are Jewish) active in the media. The Sensible Jew believes that this point is moot. Apart from the impossibility of determining exactly which journalists and editors are indeed anti-Semitic, we must acknowledge that certain people with various ideological agendas will always abuse their positions in the media. Such people cannot be “rooted out.”

May
19
2009
Opinion By Alex Fein | 2 comments

So What Do We Do? Jews and the Media

It often seems that we’re in an impossible bind. As commenters, Blistering, Paroggan, and Frochel have asked, how does our community deal with a media that is (The Australian excluded) either hostile or indifferent to us? How do we best approach matters such as the 8 minute play, and other issues rife with propagandising on both sides? We’ll begin with some of our ideas for change, but this is by no means an exhaustive list and we ask our readers to contribute their ideas.

May
19
2009
Opinion By Alex Fein | 23 comments

Michael Fagenblat’s Presentation at the Seven Jewish Children Reading

Seven Jewish Children is not an anti-Semitic play. On the contrary, its challenging message deserves to be heard, especially by Jews, Israelis and Zionists. However in the context of a Nakba commemoration for Australian Friends of Palestine, the play risks degenerating from being challenging and useful to useless self-validation. Here, then, are seven responses to Seven Jewish Children in the context of a commemoration marking what Palestinians call the Nakba–the Catastrophe–of 1948.

May
18
2009
Opinion By Alex Fein | 8 comments

Reader Response 2: Incompetence, Negligence, and Legitimacy

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series reader response

One needn’t be planning the overthrow of ECAJ. Or the abolition of AIJAC as self appointed spokespeople for our community. We only seek to make public what has traditionally been private: disquiet with the direction our community’s leadership, and our interaction with the wider public. If this should inspire concrete change for the better, that would be wonderful, but that is not our job, nor has it ever been the brief of this site.