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Laura Kessler

LAUREN ISAACS – The Zen of Passover Cleaning During Wartime

by Laura Kessler April 18, 2024

written by Laura Kessler

Lauren Isaacs takes a break from Passover cleaning to reflect on the traditions and principles that sustain the Jewish people even – if not especially – during war time.

Catch more of Lauren on BIPACT News.

Lauren Isaacs is a Canadian-Israeli who made Aliyah at the age of 23. Lauren has worked in the Israel advocacy field for many years as a public speaker and Zionist activist for Hasbara Fellowships and Herut Canada, and is now a licensed Israeli tour guide. She currently lives in Jerusalem and loves traveling all over the Holy Land! Her tourism website is www.israelwithlauren.com

www.israelwithlauren.com

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April 18, 2024 0 comments

WOWS 8: “Death to Death!” – Dearborn, Michigan

by Laura Kessler April 13, 2024

written by Laura Kessler

OPINION — Thane Rosenbaum addresses the disturbing death threats coming from Dearborn, Michigan in the latest episode of What Others Won’t Say.

With Senior Political & Cultural Analyst Thane Rosenbaum

Thane’s Monologue:

Well, I am afraid it has started: The Arab Street is soon coming to Main Street, unless we make it very clear that America is not trading its democracy for a caliphate.

In Michigan, this past week, pro-Hamas demonstrators chanted, “Death to America!” The congresswoman who represents that district refused to condemn her constituents. The Founding Fathers gave us the First Amendment so as to debate the issues of the day, not to issue death sentences.

In Jihadist Dearborn, I can’t imagine a Christmas Tree or a Hanukkah Menorah ths coming December not being burned down.

There’s seemingly only one people on Earth for whom a point of departure in viewpoint demands not civilized disagreement, but demands for death.

Europeans have endured these spectacles for over 20 years now, attacks on democratic norms, a religion not of liberty but compliance. America has been spared—until now. Israel’s latest war with Hamas has unleashed the entire Islamist playbook.

It has always puzzled me: When Islamists and pro-Hamas, anti-Israel anti-Semites gather in public, burning flags, scuffling with police, shouting down speakers or shutting down public gatherings, is there anything, and I mean anything, they won’t pump their fists and scream death to?

We’ve long heard “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” but there’s also been “Death to British novelists,” “Death to Dutch filmmakers,” “Death to Danish cartoonists!” “Death to French cartoonists!” (Islamists really despise cartoons), “Death to the Pope!” The Pope?

Where does it stop? “Death to Christianity!” “Death to Buddhism,” “Death to Passivism!” “Death to Hummus!”– if made by Israelis. (By the way, I do think that Arabs make better hummus than Jews, but let’s leave that for another day.)

No other people engage in these deafening public death chants. What if the people of Luxemburg shouted, “Death to France!” Or Americans chanting, “Death to Canada.” Even murderous countries don’t do this. The Chinese screaming, “Death to Hong Kong!?” North Koreans, “Death to South Korea!?”

The bitter irony is that these mobs of shrieking Muslims, faces red with hatred, are purportedly gathered to protest a “genocide” in Gaza. In case you’re still fuzzy on these facts, Israel is at war with Hamas after 1,200 of its citizens were murdered, beheaded and gang-raped, and over 200 taken hostage. Many of those hostages, we are now discovering, are dead. Israel’s retaliation has been, legally and morally, a just war.

Genocide, legally and morally, is not simply people dying in war. Jews didn’t die in World War II. They were murdered in the Holocaust.

The Palestinian population has more than doubled since the “Occupation,” which means they are multiplying, not subtracting. Civilians, especially the children, are collateral damage, and not victims of a genocide.

Ironically, the same people chanting, “Stop Genocide!” are calling for the death of Jews and Americans. They don’t have a problem with death. They glorify death and zealously believe they are rewarded by martyrdom.

Is Islam a religion, or a death cult? It’s not an Islamophobic question, it’s an important one that decent, civilized people should ask: especially if you are Muslim. So much blood is joyously being spilled. You’re telling me this is what Allah wishes for your people?

Thane Rosenbaum, for the Jewish TV Channel

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April 13, 2024 0 comments

Anews Bipact Health Health

Becoming Janet: Janet Singer Applefield on Talking Point

by Laura Kessler March 18, 2024

written by Laura Kessler

Becoming Janet: Holocaust Lessons for a Post 10/7 World

Reinventing Ourselves after Trauma

Janet Singer Applefield discusses her upcoming Holocaust Memoir with Laura Kessler. As a child survivor, she discusses her journey of resilience through several names and identities before being reunited with her father and beginning a new life. One of the lessons we can learn from Janet and other Holocaust survivors is how to be resilient after trauma and successfully transform our identities for a new chapter of Jewish survival and healing after the unimaginable loss of 10/7.

Official site: janetapplefield.com

Facebook: facebook.com/janet.applefield

Instagram: instagram.com/janetapplefield/

Amazon book preorder: https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Janet-Finding-Myself-Holocaust/dp/B0CQPRRDLG/

Talking Point BIPACT News

Janet Singer Applefield is a child survivor of the Holocaust, author, and notable speaker. She earned her Master of Social Work at Boston University and practiced as a clinical social worker in the court system with perpetrators of hate crimes in the Greater Boston area for 30+ years. Janet speaks openly about her experiences with thousands of people each year through regular speaking engagements. In 2021, she was invited to tell her story before the Massachusetts State Legislature, on the occasion of the passage Bill H.692, an act mandating statewide genocide education in all middle and secondary schools. Becoming Janet: Finding Myself in the Holocaust will be released on May 7, 2024 and available at bookstores and online retailers.

When Janet first arrived in the U.S. in 1947, her father insisted that she relay to him everything she could remember since they were separated in August of 1942, so that he could capture it in writing. During his life, they never spoke about their collective torture. She discovered the seven hand script pages in 1984 in a box of yellowed papers, translated the document, and it became a blueprint for her self-discovery. Janet learned of those who saved her during the war and she was able to meet her rescuers in person that same year. They are now recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem in Israel.

At 88 years old, Janet continues to be an avid reader and international traveler. She has three children and five grandchildren and lives south of Boston, MA.

Study Guide Questions for Teachers:

Did Janet’s story affect you? Describe how.
What does Janet mean when she says that her Aryan features probably saved her life?
The Nazis disseminated messages of hatred toward Jews. What were some of the messages they used to fuel antisemitism?
Why might someone hate someone else merely because they are different from themselves?
What does the term “legacy” mean to you?
Write a letter to Gustawa. Tell her if there are any ways in which you identify with her.
Gustawa, her father, and other Jews who returned to Nowy Targ at the end of the war met with danger even though the war was over. How do you explain this?
How was Gustawa changed by her experiences during and after the war? How have trauma and tragic loss influenced Janet’s identity? How have your own circumstances shaped your character?
Why do you think Gustawa was asked to take a new name when she arrived to register for elementary school?
What does it mean to be resilient? Describe two examples of resilience from Janet’s story, and share a time when you had to recover quickly from challenges in your own life.
Think about the freedoms and security you enjoy. How would you feel if they were taken away from you?
In Janet’s story, why do you think some people chose to look away from injustice while others chose to stand up and make a difference even though it meant risking their own lives? What factors influenced their choices?
Janet wrote that the choices we make can have a ripple effect. What is one thing you can do to make a positive difference?

Becoming Janet: Finding Myself in the Holocaust

Launching May 7, 2024

Available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

janetapplefield.com

Facebook: janetapplefield

Instagram: @janetapplefield

March 18, 2024 0 comments

Anews Art & Entertainment Bipact

WOWS 7: And the Oscar goes to…

by Laura Kessler March 17, 2024

written by Laura Kessler

Thane Rosenbaum addresses the shocking Jonathan Glazer scandal at the Oscars in the latest episode of What Others Won’t Say.

With Senior Political & Cultural Analyst Thane Rosenbaum

Thane’s Monologue:

And the Oscar for Jewish self-hatred goes to … more about that later.

Long before anyone had ever seen Holocaust movies like “Schindler’s List,” “The Pianist,” and “Sophie’s Choice,” an iconic American funnyman, director, writer and sight-gag specialist, Jerry Lewis, back in 1972, directed the film, “The Day the Clown Cried.”

Don’t remember seeing it? Well, that’s because it was never released, and to this day, the whereabouts of the original print remains a mystery. The film was instantly deemed unwatchable.

It was about a washed-up circus clown, interned in Auschwitz, who leads the children to the gas chambers. 1972 was a mere 27 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Everything about the film violated the moral and aesthetic principles of art. It dared to reimagine the death camps, factories of mass murder, where the systematic extermination, and then cremation, of two out of every three Jews of Europe was largely achieved.

A clown misleading the children to their deaths? Even Lewis never wanted anyone to see the movie. He was mortified by it. The producers blamed him, but they, too, understood that audiences were not ready for such a grotesque cinematic spectacle.

Less than a week ago, a Holocaust film received an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. It depicted life directly outside of Aushwitz—the blithely desensitized, normalized life of the camp’s commandant. How did this high-ranking Nazi and his family manage to live so closely to the barbaric, so obtuse to the atrocious, so casually unaffected by what was taking place on the other side of their garden?

The idea of the film is not really all that original. “Sophie’s Choice” covered the same blood-soaked ground and ashen skies.

But what was unexpected on Oscar night was the acceptance speech of the film’s director. Having made a film that explored the extreme consequences of moral failure, he created his own, informing a global audience: “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”

Yeah, he was referring to Israel and its war in Gaza. He was comparing Israel’s war of self-defense to the Nazi genocide of Jews; and Hamas’ citizen army of human shields to six million Jewish victims. He wanted the world to know that he wasn’t at all like the Jews in Israel who kill Palestinians. He was morally superior to them, and wanted the Hollywood elite to know that he can and should be invited to glamorous parties because he had just renounced his Jewishness.

The Jews of Europe didn’t launch rockets at Germany for 20 years. Jews never beheaded German babies or burned them alive. They didn’t gang rape and mutilate German teenage girls. They weren’t terrorists. They were truly innocent civilians.

Ironically, this film director made a movie about monsters, and then somehow misidentified what modern monsters look like. It was his people who had hijacked the Holocaust for their own murderous ends.

He could have told the audience: “It’s happening again. And we promised Never Again. To my people. Return the hostages!”

Instead, the director exposed himself as a clown.

View more at the BIPACT Channel