alwaysperfectlywrite

(Shallow polemic on pro-Israel lobby David Cesarani Comment is free guardian.co.uk)

Hitherto I’ve kept very quiet about the row which (inevitably) followed Monday’s Channel 4 TV Dispatches programme. Peter Oborne did everything possible to provoke viewers on both sides of the divide and even  as a “shallow polemic” his show succeeded admirably.

As my husband remarked, his hour-long empty twaddle ended with the equivalent of a legal disclaimer, so saving Channel 4’s lawyers much time and possibly a huge hike in their libel insurance premium.

However, with the honourable exception of historian, Professor David Cesarani (link above), our most senior pro-Israel watchers and writers have since sunk their estimable case in a mire of over-written pomposity or silly satire. Irony should be left to the  experts on grave issues or it becomes banal - even infantile.

So, for Heaven’s Sake, let write with clarity and brevity:

• There has never been - and never will be a ‘Jewish’ - let alone an ‘Israel lobby’ in the U.K. The community is too small and its wealthy elite so small they are barely worth mentioning in this context.

• There are, however, individuals who do wield an enormous amount of personal clout. They come from an honourable line started by the likes of Montefiore, Disraeli et al. They MOST DEFINITELY DO NOT and CANNOT formulate or even sway government foreign policy on their own.

• Until less than 30 years ago it simply was unfashionable for British Jews to be pro-Conservative. When members of my own family started voting Tory they were laughed at.

• But such attitudes are as much a matter of fashion as anything else. The pendulum began swing right as many British Jews became  more affluent. It was bound to happen.

• So the late Manchester MP, Michael Fidler, took advantage of this and with the help of former Soviet Jewry campaigner, Sylvia Sheff formed the Conservative Friends of Israel. His first chairman was Sir Hugh Fraser, former husband of  Lady Antonia who later married Harold Pinter. I mention this, not for cheap gossip but to highlight the differences in (political) mindsets within  personal relationships and how, on a very grand scale, they may turn the tide of popular opinion.

As I want to be brief, I’ll end here. But of course the show did Israel more harm than good: It was supposed to!

msniw

A “very important” letter from Rabbi Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Ireland, appealing for help to expose the Nazi persecution of German Jews has just been sold at auction for 3000 Euros  - about £2,600.

It was written on 01 May 1933 to Hugh Kennedy, the Chief Justice of Ireland and contains an early account of Nazi atrocities.

The handwritten manuscript went to auction on Saturday last - a sad piece of mistiming in my view as the auctioneers must have known that many Orthodox Jewish buyers would be fascinated by the sale.

A distraught Rabbi Herzog wrote:

‘The position is going from bad to worse. We no longer cry out about the atrocities but I have it from an indubitable source that Jews are being killed in Germany every day, though with such devilish methodicity and “scientific” design and plan that it is difficult to speak of pogroms in Germany. Many Jews brought to the extreme end of despair are committing suicide. A very prominent Jewish jurist, one of the leading figures in German Jewry whom I know personally has exclaimed: “Would to Heaven that 5,000 Jews were killed in Germany in one open pogrom, for then the world might wake up!”‘

The letter was accompanied by a list of 29 prominent Irish personalities, whom Rabbi Herzog - later Chief Rabbi of Israel - claimed would support his protest. They included Cardinal MacRory, Archbishop Gregg and  the poet, W.B. Yeats. Rabbi Herzog’s  son, Chaim, became President of the State of Israel.

Whyte’s auctioneers described the item(s) as being “on printed letterhead 27 by 22cm., 10.5 by 8.5in. Provenance: Hugh Kennedy; thence by descent Letter from Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Ireland to Chief Justice Kennedy. 1 May `1933. 4pp. all hand-written. Original envelope by registered mail to Kennedy’s home at Newstead, Clonskeagh.

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Believe it! Don’t believe it! But all of us Victor Meldrew types were left open–mouthed to learn that The Israeli - Palestinian trade union Association insists that Palestinian workers and unions don’t support boycott, divestment and sanctions, (BDS) campaigns.

“In an extraordinary series of blog postings, http://www.tufi.org.uk/delegation-blog/ British trade unionists visiting Israel and Palestine have learned that Palestinian workers and their unions are not enthusiastic supporters of the campaign for boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel.

In fact, they were told bluntly that the BDS campaign is bad news for Palestinians.

USDAW National Executive member Mike Dixon wrote: “There was a discussion about the boycott and it is clear that Palestinians don’t want it – all they want is equal pay and a living.”

The communications director for the Advance union added:

“Listening to people from both communities on the subject of the proposed international trade union boycott, it is evident that all parties oppose this action.  In a meeting with the Jerusalem Municipality workers, one view from the Palestinian contingent was that a boycott would be more detrimental to the Arab workforce than any other. The reason for this was that in the event of economic sanctions, it would cause a detrimental impact on the employment levels of their community.”

So I didn’t need to buy extra Sabra hummus after all! Oh, go on! Of course I did. It’s just a little bit gorgeous. Especially with the added pine nuts!

msniw

The sort of mid-Autumn day which makes poets warble saw us wend our way to Birmingham for the saddest, most tender of family reunions.

The diminished ranks of the Wood and Hawkins families were gathering to pay tribute to two family matriarchs who had been loved nearly as much by assembled cousins and friends as by their own children. Both Audrey and Cynthia, though some years my  parents’ senior, had survived them by more than a decade and as the veils were removed from their respective double headstones  it was like watching two marvellously burnished pieces of toast pop from the manicured earth.

The stones bore so many names, so many lives of which I’m barely aware … Yet Birmingham’s  Jewish community is tiny compared to those of Manchester and London and the one Jewish cemetery is contained behind elaborate gates on two sides of the same road.

 The ‘new’ section, which I’ve visited twice in recent years, displays carefully mown lawns and well-preserved graves which survived a hate-attack in 2004 when 60 headstones were either destroyed or defaced with swastikas.

I wondered briefly if those on this senseless rampage had been the sort of louts we saw performing Community Service at  nearby Brookvale Park earlier in the afternoon. What I noticed also made me muse on the use of such sentences: One of the lads was sitting unnoticed and smoking under the arch of the bridge he was supposed to be painting!

It might do such kids – and community relations - more good for them to help maintain the cemetery, which also boasts a graceful Grade 11 listed ohel (prayer chapel) of Moorish design.

The chapel’s wooden memorial boards and their gilt and black lettering belie the wicked canards  often retold about the  Jewish contribution to past British war efforts.

Fifty-two local Jewish soldiers served and returned after The Great War while 28 came home after serving in World War II. One of those serving was a grenadier and another man died later in ‘The Malayan Emergency’ - a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army from 1948 to 1960.

The chapel windows, unusually for a place of Jewish worship, include images of Biblical characters. This idiosyncrasy  is typical of undemanding ‘Jewish Birmingham’  where I recall that the ‘cathedral’ synagogue - Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, Singer’s Hill – has stained glass windows with similar figures.

Moreover on the afternoon I’m describing, Rabbi Yossi Jacobs, the  current minister at ‘Singer’s Hill’,  allowed my cousin  to make a hesped (tribute) to her mother, Cynthia.  I know from personal experience that any woman’s input would be forbidden in Manchester and London so I am glad that  he did not stop her speaking despite his own strictly Orthodox background.

I wonder again if this agreeable young fellow is aware that my cousins and I were kids in the hey-day of his predecessors, Rev (later Rabbi) Dr Chaim Pearl and Rev Reuben Brookes who co-wrote the much-loved and used A Guide To  Jewish  Knowledge?

Does he know that we attended children’s services in the  Bet Hamedrash (synagogue-cum-study room) adjacent to the main sanctuary, just like those he organises and that we, too, were awarded ‘attendance prizes’ to encourage us to go there regularly? 

I thought of this, first after the dedication of a bench in memory of a teenage cousin who had died  in a road accident in Israel but more when I recognised long-standing family friends whom I’d known ‘forever’  and had probably not seen since my own childhood. When I (re)-introduced myself, first they were startled into silence.

Then ‘Aunty F…’, as I once knew her, made me ‘twice a child’  by cupping my face in her hands and remarking that her kitchen wall still bore an embroidered picture made by my Grandma Dora. Only later did I remember that I still had a child’s ‘pop-up’ haggada (Passover seder service prayer book) which she had given me, aged seven.

Then after posting this piece, I remembered when I first heard the genius of T. S. Eliot: It was sitting on the stairs in their house in Harborne on a Sabbath afternoon and being read Macavity: The Mystery Cat. All this, more than 13 years since my mother’s death and heaven knows how many more since they had ever seen one another or spoken.

Our unbearably poignant day ended on a lighter note with the Wood Family enjoying a traditional English afternoon tea at a smart city-centre hotel in the manner so much enjoyed by my ineffably elegant Aunt Cynthia and thus we  toasted her sweet memory.

I penned this piece initially on Remembrance Day afternoon but it could have been written after visiting any number of cemeteries, memorial gardens or even Beth Shalom, the Holocaust Centre in Newark, Nottinghamshire. Whenever I go to such places, I am at once covered in an almost palpable peace that resounds like plangent bells.

No wonder that London Rabbi  Jonathan Wittenberg remarked in an achingly sad Jewish Chronicle essay just before  this year’s Jewish Day of Atonement:

” … love touched me in that cemetery in a the simultaneous awareness of the beauty, and fragility, of life. The thought of the tenderness and daily affection, of the arguments and making up, and of the grief of parting, says to us, ‘While you can, over the fleeting, limited time that you have life, live it with love!’”

While reflecting on times and people past, I’m concluding at a slight tangent with reference to the death of one of the great men of Anglo-Jewry in my own lifetime.

I met Israel Finestein twice as a reporter. He was almost ridiculously kind and generous with his time and help, even loaning me his speech notes to aid my report of a complex history lecture. So I give you (with thanks to Frank Baigel of the Manchester branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England) the full tribute from his friend, Michael Davies:

“His Honour Judge Israel  Finestein QC passed away last week in London at the age of 88. One of the leading historians of Anglo Jewry he was twice President of the Jewish Historical Society of England, a much sought after lecturer and the author of seven books and many articles on 18^th and 19^th century England and the Jews.

“But this was only part of his contribution to the Jewish community.</a></a> He was President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (and revised the constitution), a Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, the President of Norwood and sometime chairman of the Jewish Museum of London and the Jews’ College library. A founder of the Hillel Foundation, he was both an Orthodox Jew and an English gentleman.

“As a student in Cambridge he was active in the Jewish Society and the Inter-University Jewish Federation – now the Union of Jewish Students - (where we first met) and went on to attain the very rare double-first degree in History. He commenced an academic career but switched to the law and rapidly became a barrister and Queen’s Council. Soon appointed to the bench of the Crown Court he was also a deputy judge of the High Court and will be remembered by jurists for his work with the Mental Health Tribunal.

“Always called ‘Shmuel’ by family and friends, he was my close friend for more than 70 years. He married my cousin Marion and they were together for over 50 years. Three days before he died we took tea together. He was as bright and fascinating as ever and we recalled the years together, the family (he never recovered completely from Marion’s sudden death) the situation in Israel (he continued to envy me for making aliyah – emigrating to Israel) and the diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore, before presenting me with a copy of his book Anglo-Jewry in Changing Times. His death was sudden but not unexpected. May his memory be blessed!”

msniw

I don’t know what the rest of the world was doing last Saturday night but Brian and I beat a trail to Cineworld, Bolton to see Bright Star, Jane Campion’s much vaunted bio-pic of John Keats and his love for Fanny Brawne.

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death”.

I was very interested to see the film, having had a deep emotional attachment to Keats’s best-known verse since my mid-teens when – like many of you out there -  I could quote vast chunks of Ode To Autumn, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, etc by heart.

But herein lies the trouble with this exquisitely shot, beautifully costumed and delightfully acted movie:

Campion has behaved like a lovelorn adolescent over her own creation, making it so interminably slow and   effetely sentimental that there were moments during the 119 minutes running-time when I found  a “drowsy numbness pain(ed) my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk …”

I confess  not to have previously known Bright Star – said to be Keats’s last sonnet and composed  on board ship off the Dorset coast at Lulworth, on his way to Italy, where he died. But his sonnet to Fanny – recited in part during the movie – used to be among my party-pieces.

I had first came across it in a gorgeous book, Literary England, published by Random House, New York in 1944 as the  development of a picture essay which had appeared in Life Magazine the previous year. Most of the fabulous monochrome photographs are by David E Scherman, the accompanying text is written  by Richard Wilcox while the preface is penned by Christopher Morley.

The editors also used a less successful – umm ‘ballad’ - by Keats, Robin Hood as an adjunct to a picture of a splendid oak in Sherwood Forest.

The volume had been given to my mother by a  GI boyfriend whom she had met while he was stationed in Bournemouth.

I suggest that Literary England contrasts very well with British novelist, Margaret Drabble’s A Writer’s Britain. Re-published in September, it  offers a serious look at how Britain’s finest writers have been so inspired by the landscape that they have helped to give generations of readers a particular image of the countryside they depict.  

Meanwhile I must tell you of my own peculiarly personal attachment to the Drabble family – although they are blissfully unaware of it!

When I lived in Sheffield during the late 60s I attended High Storrs Grammar School. There, before the school went ‘co-ed’ and ‘comprehensive’ at a swoop, ‘Mrs Drabble’, aunt to  Margaret Drabble and Antonia Byatt, ruled the English Department with a rod of iron. Sadly (for me) she concentrated on intelligent and clever pupils so I was never taught by her. However, she was responsible for inviting Margaret to talk to us senior girls about her then latest novel.

My most vivid memory of her otherwise is of her sailing the school corridors, apparently stern behind, her magnificent bosom swaying before her  like the prow of a majestic galleon. I’d love to think that she, along with the wonderful people who did teach me English - ‘Mrs Smith’ ‘Mrs Allison’ and ‘Mr Brown’ - are all still living and enjoying the pleasure of reading the books they helped me to understand in so much depth. My eternal thanks to them all.

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Today I’ve been to the shops and I bought a bottle of Kedem grape juice, several Tivall vegetarian items, Yarden hummus and aubergine dip.

All the produce had travelled from Israel and was on display at Morrisons Supermarket, Whitefield, Bury, North Manchester despite a fusillade of empty threats and bully-boy tactics from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign whose members are  supposed to be staging a boycott this week against the sale of Israeli produce both at Morrisons and Waitrose  outlets. But there was no-one in evidence from the PSC when we shopped at Whitefield this morning.

Indeed, true to its spirit of communal enterprise, the only fuss at the store came just before 11.00 a.m. when shoppers and staff were reminded to observe two-minutes silence for Remembrance Day.

Furthermore,  I was able to pay in part for my goods with a £5.00 voucher from the ‘Morrisons Miles’ loyalty scheme. Afterwards, I spoke to a duty manager and asked him to pass on my thanks to his colleagues, not only for providing a splendid general community service but for supporting Israel. I do so hope my comments wend their way to head office. The year-old Whitefield branch has worked very hard indeed to please me and several warm acquaintances whom I see in the store nearly every week and all concerned deserve every kind word they receive.

msniw

September 1973 and I travel from Sheffield to Manchester by train to start a new job. It’s a journey I know well but my notoriously poor sense of space and direction kicks in and I get off the bus from Piccadilly Station at the wrong end of Prestwich.

A fatherly chap sees small, ungainly me struggling with an outsize travel bag, stops his car and offers me a lift. I accept and 10 minutes later after a chat in which I learn his own daughter is a Blue Bell dancer I’m dropped  outside the front door of my first digs.

Several years and not much to yack about later, I’m still in North Manchester and walking down Bury New Road very late evening after a reporting job. A seedy character slows his car and offers me a lift. I keep my head down and trot home -  by now a  Salford bedsit  – as fast as my pudgy pins can carry me.

Yeah, I’m still here - and so is  journalist, Lynne Barber who 12 years before me was picked up by an attractive guy twice her age while waiting for a bus in the pouring rain. But her story is glamorous enough to have made into a glorious film.

An Education – with a screen adaptation by Nick Hornby - is a semi-fictionalised account of her memoir so before I do the forensics, I’ll give you the official synopsis:

“It’s 1961 and attractive, bright 16-year-old schoolgirl, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is poised on the brink of womanhood. Stifled by the tedium of adolescent routine, Jenny can’t wait for adult life to begin. One rainy day, her suburban life is upended by the arrival of an unsuitable suitor, 30- ish David (Peter Sarsgaard). Urbane and witty, David introduces Jenny to a glittering new world of classical concerts and late-night suppers. Just as the family’s long-held dream of getting their brilliant daughter into Oxford seems within reach, Jenny is tempted by another kind of life. Will David be the making of Jenny or her undoing?”

Neither my own  tale nor the  blurb  even begin to scratch the surface of the film or the real-life story behind it, whose narrative is set just before the 60s really begin to swing. Not only is the unsuitable man   shifty Jewish wide-boy, David Goldman, but wildly-precocious Jenny’s parents encourage her to marry him as they see it as a cheaper, easier alternative to earning a degree at Oxford.

In a far briefer time than the more recent technological revolution changed life forever, people a few years my senior experienced free-love, dope, feminism, the legalisation of homosexuality, the near-abolition of capital punishment and a massive lurch towards left-wing liberalism.

Even the Catholic Church got in on the act and while Jenny’s headmistress (a stunning cameo performance by Emma Thompson) mouths the traditional cant about  Jews as Christ killers, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) dropped centuries of Holocaust-generating antisemitism and made Jew-hatred  a sin.

I was fascinated to watch this scene on a second level knowing that in reality Thompson often babbles the ‘new antisemitism’ against modern Israel.

Certainly age-old antipathies don’t disappear over-night and my guesses are several:

• Jenny’s (Barber’s) headmistress would have had her prejudices reinforced when it was learned that ‘David’ (really Simon Goldman) was not only as shady as hell but an associate of the Jewish racketeering slum landlord, Peter Rachman. I’d love to know, incidentally, if Barber and novelist,  Linda Grant have discussed the latter’s novel, The Clothes On Their Backs, which features Rachman as ‘Sándor Kovacs’. Grant has said: “(I have been forced) to think of the moral dilemma posed by the sheer existence of people like Peter Rachman … His flashiness and lust for life. The ethical problem he poses - a man who is a Holocaust survivor and goes on to become a slum landlord - is the central one of our age …”

• Goldman’s long-suffering wife stayed with him through innumerable affairs with much younger women, not  only for the sake of their children but because in the early 1960s a divorce would have been far more difficult and twice as humiliating as the adultery. This situation would have been magnified a hundredfold in the tight-knit Jewish community during an age when one was “a Jew at home and a non-Jew in the street”.

• A third – extremely shaky - hunch is that Barber’s eventual husband, David Cardiff, described in a newspaper interview as “an olive-skinned, dark-haired artist” was of  Jewish stock. Her in-laws, Maurice Cardiff and  former RSC actress Leonora nee Freeman had to elope to Gretna Green to marry as Maurice’s  parents had disapproved of the match.

If I’m correct, then the  self-willed Barber is as fair-minded as she is brainy. But her early life-lesson taught her to   trust no-one – least of all her parents - for whom she continues to harbour a  spirited, robust contempt.  I’m unsure whether I’d express such  feelings publicly knowing that they are still alive and that such behaviour could injure associated, innocent parties.

While I must suppose that being an only child creates an obstinately self-centred attitude, I suggest that her very status forced her parents to concentrate  their often misplaced attention on her from the outset. I must also muse that like many driven, excessively gifted people she’s also highly sexed and  was born on the cusp of an era which allowed her to fulfil both that urge and a quite aggressive independence to the limit.

But her story is set in London. The north-west provinces – including Liverpool and Manchester – were far behind. I’ve been assured that in the early 60s local kids drank nothing stronger than coffee, even at hip city-centre dance clubs.

A few years down the line a trendy late-night supper club like the“Garden of Eden” in Manchester’s Whitworth Street didn’t last long and a  young Irish comic named Dave Allen who performed there complete with fag-end and whisky glass wished he hadn’t bothered to make the trip.

But all that was before 1973, the Yom Kippur War and more than 30 years of intermittent and increasingly serious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activity on student campuses. All of this seems to have turned the latest generation of Jewish kids to drink. But let me leave you wanting more…

This piece first appeared on Blogcritics:  http://blogcritics.org/video/article/lynn-barbers-an-education-out-of/

<a href=’http://blogcritics.org/video/article/lynn-barbers-an-education-out-of/’>Lynn Barber’s <i>An Education</i>: Out Of Eden In London and Manchester</a>

Technorati Tags: Lynn Barber,An Education,Nick Hornby,Peter Rachman,Sheffield,Manchester,Oxford University,Swinging 60s,Dave Allen,Three Coins,Garden of Eden,Yom Kippur War,‘Booze for Jews’

msniw

No matter, while Gore captured the hearts and imagination of the thinking world with his documentary about climate change, Dershowitz has done much the same for Israel’s supporters with his own ‘inconvenient truth’ -  The Case for Israel. Those who made the documentary with him explain:

“ We made this film as a proactive defence of Israel. While Israel repeatedly demonstrates its commitment to peace, anti-Israel activity continues to rise in the media, on campuses, in the churches and in the international community. Israel’s detractors-some with international prominence-blame Israel for the conflict. They deny the fact that Israel has made painful concessions in working toward a two-state solution, which include the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza initiated by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and that Israel has expressed readiness to take additional painful measures.

“They ignore the rise in Gaza of Hamas, which rejects peaceful coexistence. They turn a blind eye to the grave challenges inherent in the Palestinian Authority’s unstable governance of the West Bank under Mahmoud Abbas. They rarely acknowledge the ongoing terrorist attacks against Israeli children and other civilians, and they equate that terrorism with Israel’s attempts to protect its citizens. For Israel’s detractors, there is only one focus for fault: Israel.

“Clearly, as Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz states in his seminal work The Case for Israel, “the time has come for a proactive defence of Israel to be offered in the court of public opinion.”

“We produced this documentary to present a vigorous case for Israel-for its basic right to exist, to protect its citizens from terrorism, and to defend its borders from hostile enemies-in a highly accessible multimedia format. Alan Dershowitz has achieved international distinction as one of Israel’s most prominent and articulate advocates. He plays a central role in this documentary as adviser and on-camera presence and argues forcefully that real peace in the Middle East can only occur when the Palestinians, Arabs and their allies value the creation of a Palestinian homeland more than they oppose the presence of a Jewish state. Through incisive conversations with key judicial, political and academic leaders, Dershowitz refutes deeply entrenched misperceptions about Israel’s history, Jewish claims to a homeland, individual rights under Israel’s democratic system of government, the security fence, and military conduct in the face of terrorist attacks.

“He closes with a formidable warning that the greatest threat to Israel is also the greatest threat to international peace and security: Iran’s aggressive nuclear ambitions, driven by a zealous anti-Zionist, anti-democratic mission that is championed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unchecked, a nuclear-armed Iran or its terrorist surrogate would imperil targets far beyond Tel Aviv.

“This project is truly a team effort. We are indebted to Alan Dershowitz for his intellectual vitality and vigorous engagement with the wide-range of leaders who support Israel’s fundamental democratic values. We also want to extend great appreciation to the Adelson Family Foundation for its vision and willingness to step up to the plate at the earliest stages of this project. CAMERA has served as a tremendous partner in so many ways, including financial support, logistical arrangements, and serving as a constant and constructive sounding board at all phases.

“Making this film was the beginning step. We invite you to join us in going forward to make the case for Israel in the court of public opinion.

Gloria Z. Greenfield & Michael Yohay

Doc Emet Productions”

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“But soon a wonder came to light,

That showed the rogues they lied:

The man recovered of the bite,

The dog it was that died.”

Oliver Goldsmith, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog

If I use a phrase like ‘fraternal lodge’ or ‘freemasonry’,  many readers will react badly.

They will  think immediately of  weird rites; exclusive, male orientated social networking – and absolute secrecy.

It is this very concealment which gives quite ordinary organisations and their members a raffish glamour  and leads to rumours of criminality.

Sometimes the accusations ring true, so the world is still fascinated by the death of the Italian banker, Roberto Calvi, found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge, London in 1982.

 Calvi, known as “God’s banker” due to his Vatican links, had also been a member of a clandestine Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2). He was almost certainly murdered by the Mafia but those charged were acquitted after a long court case in June 2007 due to insufficient evidence.

 Now a quirky and occasionally funny look at fraternal lodges and their potentially nefarious activities comes in The Lodge – A Tale of Corruption, the latest novel from thriller writer, David H Brandin.

California-based Brandin who hails from Chicago has belonged to US fraternal orders of the type he illustrates but insists:

“I’ve never witnessed the greed, avarice, and corruption which serve as the backbone of this novel. Most of the volunteers I’ve worked with were straightforward and honest. The events in this book did not happen. Still, volunteers are human and make mistakes. Could these events happen in an order? Perhaps they could …”

That aside, Brandin uses an extensive knowledge of San Francisco and Chicago along with his   love of  deep sea diving to give us the sort of zip-along, page-turning murder mystery which  helps to make a long flight less arduous. He tells me - honour bright - that he had to research the details about the US Mafia and its association with a wide-boy builder – and I believe him where thousands may demur!

Meanwhile he intends to continue in the tradition pioneered by Red Tent author, Anita Diamant, and promote his book directly to audiences where it’s bound to be sure-fire success.  I consider The Lodge to be  an excellent – and far better written - follow-up to his first full-length thriller, The Horns of Moses, which I’m more than half-convinced helped to inspire Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds.

No matter, Brandin’s publisher, iUniverse have granted The Lodge its Rising Star Award and has made it an Editor’s Choice.

 The Lodge is available on-line and in bookstores @ $17.95  (ISBN: 978-1-4401-7210-6 - paperback); $27.95 (ISBN: 978-1-4401-7208-3 - cloth) or as an e-book @ $6.00 (ISBN: 978-1-4401-7209-0).

msniw

It’s about 18 months since I last visited The  Octagon Theatre, Bolton. It was to see a fairly pedestrian production of   Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Now I find that Miller’s equally brilliant All My Sons has been hijacked by local Israel haters as part of a so-called ‘investigation’.

Miller, a proud if religiously non-observant Jew, was among the great English-language playwrights of the 20th century. As usual, Jews who seem  scared of being disliked by playground bullies,  today topped the bill of a Lancashire farce at the Octagon directed by the Manchester Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The theatre hosted  a performance of  Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, labelled antisemitic by critics  and the simultaneous performance of Seven Other Children, the Jewish response to Churchill’s ‘opus’.

Even as I write (Sabbath or not!) Jonathan Hoffman,   Zionist Federation vice chairman  and Richard Gold of Engage were due to be on hand in an attempt to counter the remarks of  five pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel speakers during a four-hour debate.

Like the attempted supermarket boycott I highlighted last week, it is typical of Israel’s foes that  Saturday  was chosen for this event as  many Orthodox Jews neither could nor would go on a Sabbath afternoon. It was hoped that Christian Friends of Israel would be there to state Israel’s case.

The pro-Palestinians included South African-born Richard Kuper, Chairman and Publications Officer of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Linda Clair, Chairman of the Manchester Palestine Solidarity Campaign.  She visited the Palestinian Authority with the “Zyara” group during the summer, with stops at Ramallah and Bethlehem and had been joined by two of her grandchildren, one of whom is a drama  student and hopes to do theatre work with Palestinian children.

Ms Clair is described as being of ‘Jewish origin’. But her connection to Judaism and the Manchester Jewish community is far stronger than the phrase implies. Her mother was recently buried under the auspices of the Sha’arei Shalom North Manchester Reform Synagogue and I helped with some of the funeral arrangements and with those for the headstone unveiling planned for early 2010. Further, I understand that her husband is the brother of another member of the synagogue.

Indeed, I’ve been advised that the couple work for the immigration service, which I consider not only to be a very noble career but in direct line from the biblical prophetic tradition. In my view there are a million ways to be ‘frum’ (pious) and this is one of them. All the more pity then, that Ms Clair and family cannot give as much to their Jewish brethren in Israel as to their Palestinian counterparts. If only they realised, there are as many vastly impoverished, undervalued and underfed Jewish kids in Israel as there are Muslim children in Gaza. But she and too much of the rest of the world would rather invent their own truths than face the real facts.

If I didn’t consider it a total waste of time, I’d challenge Miss Clair, Mr Kuper et al to front another, equally worthy group. I’d name it “Jews for Justice for Fellow Jews”.

Before closing, I must explain that this unpleasant episode reminds me very much of something which happened to me as we left the theatre after that performance of The Crucible. I couldn’t concentrate on discussing the pros and cons as I was conscious of being ‘centre stage’ for  two nearby young Muslim women who giggled and pointed at me for more than five minutes. I ignored them  to avoid a confrontation but even now, I’m unsure of their intentions and why they tried to provoke me.

Details of the video above:

“(Manchester, England. 7th June 2008. Palestine Lives 2008 is a celebration of Palestinian art, culture, history and experience organised by Manchester Palestine Solidarity Campaign. It brings together artists, poets and musicians from Palestine and England to celebrate Palestine and its culture 60 year after the Palestinian Nakba, Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
There are stalls informing people of issues facing people in the Middle East, as well as peace organisations campaigning not just for peace in the region but against nuclear weapons and all war. Speakers bring messages of solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for peace and justice. This event comes at a time when the situation in Gaza is at crisis point with people, especially children, starving and dying due to lack of food, water and medicines, but first and foremost the actions of the Israeli occupation forces)”.

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