Karl Marx!

The name conjures up an intimidating bearded revolutionary intent on violently overthrowing society.
Shlomo Avineri, professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University and former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, shatters that conception in his superb new biography, Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution (Yale University Press).
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Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, a region in Germany’s Rhineland under French rule, where Jews enjoyed the fruits of emancipation. Both of his grandfathers were rabbis. With Napoleon’s defeat, the repressive Congress of 1815 ceded control of Trier to Prussia. Under the new regime, Karl’s father, changed his name from Heschel to Heinrich and had his family converted to Lutheranism to gain a position in the Prussian civil service.

​Marx  never practiced any form of Christianity, but his baptism permitted him to marry Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of an aristocratic German family. His in-laws, however, did not provide the couple and their three daughters with much financial support.

Rabbi Stephen Fuchs and his wife, Victoria, had a choice to make, a choice that would transform their lives. Should they cut all ties with Germany, where their parents were born and survived the Holocaust, or should they begin a positive dialogue with Germans?

They opted for the latter, devoting themselves to a simple yet profound message of reconciliation and hope: Wir können die Vergangenheit nicht ungeschehen machen, aber wir können gemeinsam an einer besseren Zukunft arbeiten. (We cannot undo the past, but the future is ours to shape.)
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The couple’s bittersweet mission is laid bare in …And Often the First Jew(Mazo, Jerusalem), a 136-page collection of diary-like essays.  The title represents the sad fact they are the first Jews many people living in postwar Germany had ever met.

​An apocryphal story describes how children in Jerusalem would yell “Elohim! Elohim!” (God! God!) when they saw Martin Buber (1878-1965) with his full “silken white beard.” According to the account, Buber smiled at the adoring youngsters and said,” Yes!”

In his highly readable and concise biography – Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press) – of the famous philosopher, Paul Mendes-Flohr, chief editor of the 22-volume German language collection of Buber’s works, described him as a man who championed “a life of dialogue” and taught that “all real living is meeting.”
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At his birth in Vienna, “faulty obstetric forceps” left Martin with an “embarrassingly twisted lower lip” (as an adult he made certain to cover much of his “deformed” mouth with a beard). His mother “eloped” with a Russian officer and abandoned her son at age three. Buber later recalled how he looked out a window and “tried desperately to catch his mother’s attention, but she disappeared over the horizon without looking back.”

James Rudin, BA ’55, today a rabbi, scholar, author, and professor at Saint Leo University in Florida, was a GW Hatchet sports editor in 1953-’54 and he covered the first GW men’s basketball team to make the NCAA Tournament. The Colonials, Southern Conference champions that season and ranked as high as seventh by The Associated Press, went 23-3 overall and 10-0 in the conference, and lost in the NCAA Tournament’s first round to North Carolina State, 75-73.

Rudin, then 19 years old, carpooled with players to road games as part of multi-car caravans and he got to know the team, as well as then-GW coach Bill Reinhart.
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On the 65th anniversary of GW’s first NCAA Tournament team, the now-84-year-old Rudin remembers the laconic Reinhart, the man who (purportedly) invented the fast break and built Oregon’s program in the 1920s, mentored future Hall of Fame Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach, BS ’40, MA ’41, HON ’93, and finished with a 319-237 record at GW over 24 seasons between 1935 to 1966*. No coach has won more basketball games in GW history.

In her new book, Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures (Yale University Press), essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman captures the turbulent life of one of America’s most talented and prolific screenwriters. Hecht also wrote novels, magazine articles, multi-media historical pageants, and hard-hitting political commentaries.

Though he never spent more than eight weeks on a script, Hecht succeeded in creating crackling dialogue and fast-talking characters. The French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard called Hecht “a genius who invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” Indeed, Hecht worked on nearly 200 films, sometimes without credit, including Gone with the Wind, Roman Holiday, A Farewell to Arms, The Front Page, Spellbound, Notorious, A Star Is Born, Wuthering Heights, Gunga Din, Stagecoach, Strangers on a Train, Duel in the Sun, and Scarface.
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Born on New York City’s Lower East Side in 1893, Hecht moved at age 10 with his immigrant parents to Racine, WI. Following high school graduation, he headed for Chicago, where he became a brilliant newspaper reporter in the years before World War I. His journalistic experiences, especially in bars, brothels, and boarding houses, found expression in his classic stage play The Front Page, adapted later as a film.

(RNS) — On June 6, the world will commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of the French Normandy coast that turned the tide of World War II. D-Day was “the beginning of the end” of Hitler’s “Thousand Year” Nazi Reich because it created the second front that German generals had dreaded: Fighting the Soviet Union in the East and the Western Allies in the West, the generals had warned their demonic Führer, was certain to end in a catastrophic defeat for the Fatherland.

That day I was a youngster growing up in Alexandria, Va., a few miles from our nation’s capital. My father, a U.S. Army major, was stationed at Fort Belvoir on the Potomac River, and our family spent almost every Sunday at Mackenzie Hall, the fort’s Officers Club, enjoying the superb food, shooting billiards or swimming.

While we ate and played, other Jewish children of my generation were trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. Their terrifying existence included brutal arrests, transports to German death camps in filthy crowded railroad boxcars, grisly medical experiments, wretched ghettos, widespread disease. For many of these young Jews, deliverance would only come with death by poison gas, starvation or bullets. It is estimated 1.5 million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust.
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I am forever haunted by the knowledge that had I been born during the 1930s in Transylvania instead of Pennsylvania, I would have been one of the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

(RNS) — As others have said, translating from one language to another is like kissing through a handkerchief: It’s close, but not the real thing. 

This is especially true when it involves translating the sacred Hebrew Bible, a text that millions of people believe is the literal word of God and whose “newest” additions to the canon are at least 1,900 years old.
How difficult is such a task?

Imagine that 1,900 years from now, in 3919, a future translator came across a sentence about politics that someone might write today: “Many ardent supporters are dancing in the end zone because they believe the senator hit it out of the park with yesterday’s speech.  As a result, they happily assert, the ball is now in someone else’s court.”
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To understand this mix of metaphors demands a familiarity with contemporary football, baseball and basketball terminology. They’d need to know that “the park” in this case does not mean a public area set aside for relaxation, flowers and trees, but rather a sports stadium. The translator of the distant future would also need to know that the word “court” in this context denotes an athletic arena, and not a place to adjudicate legal issues, nor does it mean an ingratiating description of gaining the favor of someone. Only then could an authentic translation even begin.

During his lifetime, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was frequently confused with another internationally famous photographer: his friend Edward Steichen. So, too, were Stieglitz’s remarkable achievements often overshadowed by the fame of his wife, artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

But Phyllis Rose’s book Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters (part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series) brings her subject out of the shadows and into his deserved place in history as the person who made “taking pictures” a respected art form. Rose, a literary critic and a retired professor of English literature at Wesleyan University, has combined her knowledge of photography and modern art with an excellent grasp of the historical trends and events that shaped the artistic world from the Victorian and Gilded Ages to the end of World War II.

Alfred Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey into a wealthy, highly cultured German-Jewish family. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Germany following the failed political revolution in 1848. Alfred’s father, Edward, was a kunstmensch, an art man who “read Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare…studied works by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Leonardo…”

​(RNS) — There have been more positive encounters between Roman Catholics and the Jewish people since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 than there were in the first 2,000 years of the Christian church. But one major flashpoint has remained unresolved: the bitter controversy swirling around the role played by Eugenio Pacelli, whose 19-year pontificate as Pius XII began in 1939, in the wartime treatment of European Jews.

Today Pope Francis announced that the Vatican archives covering Pius XII’s reign will at last be opened. I have been personally involved in this dispute for more than three decades and have long demanded that this obstacle needs to be fully and finally removed if the historic revolution in Catholic-Jewish relations is to deepen and advance.

The most serious charge made against Pius XII by his critics, Catholic and Jewish, is that he was inactive, indifferent, and ineffective in the face of Nazi Germany’s horrific policy of mass murder during the Holocaust, when six million Jews were killed in the heart of what Pope John Paul II has called “Christian Europe.”