April 20th is Hitler’s Birthday. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler wanted to give Hitler a particularly nice birthday present. He decided that in honor of Hitler’s birthday he would eliminate the entire Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw, which had been causing trouble in the early months of 1943.

Instead, the Jews of Warsaw gave Hitler a present that he certainly didn’t want: months of armed rebellion that DEFEATED the German army repeatedly and wasn’t completely crushed until October 1943, though major combat operations, to borrow a phrase, were completed around May. Including the periods of more sporadic fighting, this resistance lasted far longer than the German take over of Poland as a whole, which took scarcely one month. It is pointed out in Melvin Konner’s book Unsettled that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, largely fought by Jews but with some Polish uprisings occurring at the same time and inspired by the Jewish uprising, also lasted longer than the time it took Germany to defeat France, though again you have to include the period of more sporadic fighting as well as the main combat.

The uprising was partly inspired by the Socialist Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair (coincidentally, my mother briefly belonged to this organization in her youth). Insurgency started in January, 1943. By the end of January the Ghetto was actually controlled by two armed Jewish organizations, one led by Mordechai Anielewicz, of Hashomer Hatzair, and Zivia Lubetkin (who survived the uprising) and the other led by Dawid Mordechaj Apfelbaum, a former officer in the Polish army. As Passover began on April 19th, Himmler’s birthday present to Hitler also began, with thousands of German, Polish and Ukrainian forces attacking the Ghetto. They moved in at 4 a.m. They moved throughout the Ghetto and believed they had occupied it within 4 hours. Then, at the intersection of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets, the insurgents struck with a single captured machine gun, ample small arms fire, and many Molotov cocktails. The Germans were completely routed by the Jewish insurgents by 2 P.M., providing Hitler with a major embarrassment for his birthday.  read more »

March is an insane month for the amount of political events you can go to. The proof is in the amount of political heavy hitters DL21C was able to wrangle during that month : Jon Kerry, Wesley Clark, John Tester, John Edwards, Bill Richardson. It is also an insane month for the amount of technology and media conferences you can get invited to, the most important (at least for me) being SXSW --but there's eTech and IDPI as well.

I missed almost all the events involving presidential candidates because of the amount of conferences I was involved in during the month of March. Once I was done with my last one, ARC's national conference on "Facing Race", I was free to enjoy a candidate or two by the end of the month. I wasn't able to make it to the John Edwards event (I was having some fun at a party with Nancy Pelosi).

So 3/26 was Bill Richardson's lucky number.  read more »

I had not intended to post so much Jewish-oriented material recently and don't want to start being a one-issue diarist. But this item is pretty important. Seems the Lithuanian government is slating the ancient Jewish cemetary in Vilnius for destruction.

Choral synagogue in Vilnius

There once was a thriving and highly respected Jewish population in Lithuania. Vilnius was called the "Jerusalem of Europe" by Napoleon, so great was the fame of its Jewish scholars. One of the greatest Orthodox Jewish sages, Elijah ben Solomon (called the Vilna Gaon) came from Vilnus and had a profound effect on yeshiva teaching. During the period of Lithuanian independence (1918-1940) Jews served loyally and bravely in the Lithuanian army.

An old photo of the Jewish quarter.

Now there are only about 4000 Jews left in Lithuania. And the cemetary where generations of Jews of Vilnius are buried is now threatened.

The cemetary.

From Guysen Israël News:  read more »

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

At a time when I was simultaneously becoming more agnostic/atheist and more Jewish (perhaps in the tradition of Isaac Deutcher who recognized a place within Judaism for non-believing Jews), I quite naturally posed the age old question of just what it means to be a Jew. Parts of my quest to answer this question for myself have become diaries on various blogs. Genetic, cultural, tribal, religious, nationalistic and historical definitions of Judaism all combine into a mish mash that must be confusing to non-Jews but that I have come to see as a very key aspect to Jewish identity. I have come to see this identity crisis as a core part of Judaism that goes back as far as we can trace.

That’s how I think. Immerse in the complexity and maybe even add to that complexity with some paradoxes: atheists can be perfectly good Jews, identity crisis can be a defining feature of identity, etc.

My wife thinks differently than I. And her response to the question of Jewish identity was characteristically terse and to the point:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”  read more »

I have shared with this community my ongoing and very personal search for my Jewish heritage and identity more than once, most recently, lovingly and visually in a diary based on a talk I gave at a Jewish Genealogical conference.

What I have not shared as much is the academic backdrop to this personal search. I am inspired to share this academic backdrop with you as I reread one of the books that is key to this backdrop: Melvin Konner’s 2003 book Unsettled. This book is billed as an “anthropology of the Jews” and covers the entire panorama of Jewish existence at least to some degree. It is primarily this book I want to share with you.

But first I want to also mention a few other books that complement Unsettled as what I would consider “must read” books for an understanding of Jews as a people. Most particularly I consider Israel Finkelstein’s iconoclastic book The Bible Unearthed a must read. It is considered one of the more radical interpretations of the archaeological evidence, but it by and large rings true to me particularly in light of the far less radical work The Canaanites, by Jonathan N. Tubb, which I read at about the same time as The Bible Unearthed. I found the evidence presented in each work to dovetail very nicely and reading The Canaanites gave me a better appreciation for The Bible Unearthed. Two supposedly counter-views to Finkelstein’s work were written by William G. Dever, Who Were and What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Oddly, to me Dever comes off far more in agreement with Finkelstein than at odds with him and it seems to me that Dever obsesses over differences with Finkelstein in details…so much so that he felt the need to write TWO books more or less directly addressing Finkelstein’s work. But reading Dever’s view as a partial counterpoint to Finkelstein’s book is well worthwhile. Together, these four books, perhaps with the additional Finkelstein book David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, are to me key books for understanding the origins of Israel and the Jews and I cannot stress enough how important this is to an understanding of being Jewish. Jews are nothing if not obsessed with the thousands of years of tradition that they are a part of and reading these archaeological works gives you a very good sense of what that tradition really is. Judaism was NOT at its start a monotheistic religion, for example. But it WAS a religion that shunned the eating of pork.  read more »