21 May
Uncategorized

The French Railroad On Trial

By Symi Rom-Rymer Reuters reported this week that 100 French and American plaintiffs are suing SNCF, the French national railroad company, for their role in transporting French Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust.  The group, made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendents, insist that it’s not about the money, but rather about exposing the crimes in which the rail company participated. "‘It is about money but not in the way they mean,’" said William Wajnryb, whose father died at Auschwitz. “When people make accusations about money, they should look at the SNCF first of all," he said. "The core of this story is that the SNCF got money for deporting Jews.’” I certainly understand the motivation that is driving these plaintiffs to sue the SNCF.  The trauma of the Holocaust coupled with the French government’s...

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04 May
Uncategorized

Fabulous, Feel-good, and Fatwa-Free

By Symi Rom-Rymer When a Muslim and a Jew walk into a bar, it’s a joke.  When a Muslim discovers he was born Jewish, it’s a movie.  The Infidel, shown as part of the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, is the story of Mahmud Nasir (Omid Djalili), a middle-aged Muslim man from London’s East End, who discovers after his mother’s death that he was adopted as a baby.  Not only was he adopted, but his birth parents were Jews.  Jews who named him Solomon (Solly) Shimshillewitz, or as his new friend Leonard Goldberg (Richard Schiff) suggests: Jewy-Jew-JewJewawtiz. While Nasir is trying to cope with his new identity, he also must deal with the impending marriage of his son to the stepdaughter of one of Egypt’s most radical imams, Arshad El Masri (Yigal Naor).  The movie takes off when...

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14 Apr
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Shtetl Life Reexamined

By Symi Rom-Rymer A picture is worth a thousand words, so goes the old cliché.  But as Alana Newhouse’s recently published New York Times article on Roman Vishniac demonstrates, what that picture is actually saying is often more complicated than it seems. Her piece focuses on Vishniac’s “A Vanished World,” a pictorial representation of pre-World War II Jewish life in Eastern Europe.  Or at least, that’s how it was marketed and sold.  But through Newhouse’s piece, we come to learn that the photos used in the book showed only one part (the poor and the religious) of that world.  They did not, as Vishniac claimed, represent the totality of shtetl life.  Instead, these photos were taken so that the Joint Distribution Committee--a committee that worked on behalf of impoverished and persecuted Jews around the world--could fund-raise. The reality,...

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15 Mar
Uncategorized

The Jews of Modern Poland

By Symi Rom-Rymer The New York Times recently published a piece recently about a former Polish neo-Nazi who discovered his Jewish roots as an adult and is now ultra-Orthodox.  As he acknowledges in the article, “he was drawn to extremes.” Pawel’s (now Pinchas’) story is certainly engrossing.  Not only do we learn that he has Jewish roots, but that his grandparents, who are still living, are Jewish and hid their religion from him so that he would not exposed to anti-Semitism.  Moreover, his wife (also a former skinhead), also comes from a Jewish family and both of their families are from the same Jewish community.   His journey from skinhead to Orthodox Jew, then, tells both his personal story as well as that of contemporary Poland and how truly intertwined Jewish and Polish communities are just below the...

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11 Mar
Uncategorized

Oscar and the Jews

By Symi Rom-Rymer This year’s Oscars brought us some surprises (Sandra Bullock), some truly painful dance sequences (I’m looking at you Adam Shankman), and some deserving winners (The Hurt Locker). It also proved, once again, that Hollywood wouldn’t be funny without the Jews.   From a running gag about Meryl Streep’s Hitler memorabilia collection to Ben Stiller speaking ‘Na’vi’—which sounded suspiciously Hebraic--we got all the best jokes.   Teetering on the thin line between hilarious and offensive (and what Oscar night doesn’t?) here are my favorite Jewish moments of the 82nd Academy Awards: Abe Foxman giving his additional stamp of approval for the movie An Education (he already spoke out in favor of Inglorious Bastards) which features a Jewish con-artist protagonist.  As JWeekly.com writes, “the ADL noted that ‘there is nothing in the film to suggest that the main character represents...

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27 Jan
Latest

A Double Standard?

By Symi Rom-Rymer Michael Kimmelman’s recent article, “When Fear Turns Graphic,” offered a peek into the process behind making political art, with the recent Swiss pro-minaret ban ads as his focal point.  Unfortunately, for me, whatever insights he hoped to share were overshadowed by a surprising naïveté when addressing anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe and his condescending tone towards Americans—his readers. First of all, Kimmelman airily dismissed concerns over Switzerland’s latent racism: “Much predictable tut-tutting ensued about Swiss xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get pretty much the same results elsewhere.” Then, he insulted our intelligence by equating the German and Muslim immigrant experience in Switzerland.  “A 46-year-old German (yes, an immigrant himself in Switzerland), he is the father of two adopted children from North Africa although he declined to talk about his personal life.” Finally, he patronized...

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29 Dec
Latest

The Cat's Meow

By Symi Rom-Rymer While perusing the bookshelves at Barnes and Nobel yesterday, I came across a wonderful graphic novel entitled The Rabbi’s Cat by the French author, Joann Sfar, best known in the US for his children’s series, The Little Vampire.  The Rabbi’s Cat tells the story of a Rabbi, his daughter Zlabya, and their talking cat who live in Algiers in the 1930s when Algeria was still part of France.  Narrated by the cat, who is studying to become Bar Mitzvah, the intricate illustrations and the gentle, yet poignant story line draws readers into a seemingly simple world that soon reveals itself in all its complexities.  Situated on the line between perfect and flawed, wise and bumbling, sacred and profane, Sfar’s characters made me nostalgic for a time and place that exists only within his,...

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22 Dec
Latest

A Declaration of War

By Symi Rom-Rymer Well, the mystery is solved…sort of.  The infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign stolen from Auschwitz on December 18 has been recovered on the other side of the country from where it was taken.  At this point, the Polish police are refusing to comment on the circumstances surrounding the theft or on its motivation, although five men have been detained.  But what has been most striking throughout this whole incident is the wild rhetoric that erupted in its wake.  The comment that really got my attention, was one made by Avner Shalev, director of Yad Vashem (Israel’s memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust) the day the sign was reported missing.  According to reports by the BBC, he called the theft “a true declaration of war.” To which I say:  Mr. Shalev, please explain...

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17 Dec
Latest

Do You Want to Friend Heino?

By Symi Rom-Rymer "My name is Henio Zytomirski. I am seven-years-old. I live on 3 Szewska Street in Lublin.”  So begins the profile of Heino Zytomirski, a young addition to Facebook. Why should we care? Because Heino is dead--a young victim of the Holocaust.  His profile and status updates are written by Piotr Buzek, a 22 year-old staff member of the Brama Grodzka Cultural Center in Lublin, Poland. The Center says that it is harnessing new technology to teach the internet generation about the history of Jews in Poland and to keep their memory alive. To be perfectly honest, I feel queasy about this approach. First of all, much of what the Center does focuses on Lublin’s Jewish past. Which is important and necessary. But in doing so, it also looks backwards and not ahead. There is increasing evidence that Jewish...

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13 Nov
Arts & Culture, Culture, Latest, Misc, Religion

The Forward 50: 2008 Jews of the Year

By Jeremy Gillick The Forward has published its annual list of America’s 50 most important Jews: the Forward 50. Winners include Rahm Emanuel, Obama's newly appointed Chief of Staff, about whom you can read here. There's also Morris Allen, a Conservative Rabbi from Minnesota who helped re-invent kashrut as a moral rather than merely legal imperative, just as Agriprocessors, America's largest kosher meat producer, sunk deeper and deeper into sin, exploitation and eventually, bankruptcy. Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of the new, liberal Jewish, Israel lobby group J-Street, is at the top of the list too. Although this choice is perhaps more a reflection of the Forward's editorial stance than of Ben-Ami's success, the creation of a viable alternative to AIPAC is, at the very least, a major symbolic accomplishment. And it could become much more than that. Here's what Moment...

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