Other items in today’s column include:
*Political bytes
*Coming our way
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Evelyn Marcus and Rosa Zeegers are a Jewish lesbian couple who uprooted themselves from Holland and moved to the United States because they saw ugly anti-Semitic history repeating itself in Europe. Anti-Semitic graffiti, beatings, rallies, bombings, and demonstrations all seemed to presage the same kind of Holocaust that their parents had lived through. Now, they are seeing some of the same troubling signs in the United States — last Passover’s shooting at San Diego County’s own Chabad of Poway being just one example.
In the 90-minute Never Again is Now, coming to Amazon Prime October 23rd, they document what happened to their parents’ generation under Nazism; what’s happening to Europe currently because of radical Islamism; and how the extreme right, the far left, and radical Islamists, especially on college campuses, seem to be coalescing, solidifying, and institutionalizing anti-Semitism in the United States.
While our Jewish readers may be all too familiar with the events of the Holocaust, they may experience new horror in the realization of how parallel some of the events that are taking place today in Europe, and increasingly in the United States, parallel the early stages of Nazism. The thrust of the documentary is that if people had stood up to Nazism early, instead of looking the other way, it might have been stopped dead in its tracks. Clearly today’s anti-Semitism must not be permitted to flourish unopposed.
Today, the documentary argues, the new forces of anti-Semitism — radical Islam, the Alt-Right, and the hardcore Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel campus movements such as BDS — must be confronted through the American democratic process. Laws are needed to be enacted, and enforced, against organized hate movements, against speeches by imams that call for the death of Jews, and against intimidation and violence toward Jews wherever they may be, whether walking down a city street or studying on a campus.
Enlightening aspects of the documentary are interviews with Muslims who bravely oppose Islamism even at the cost of themselves becoming targets of hate. Among the interviewees are Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch legislator who now is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Pakistani-British physician Qanta Ahmed, and Pakistani-American Shireen Qudosi, a national correspondent for the Clarion Project, which seeks to counter radical Islamism.
While there are those who oppose anti-Semitism, Hirsi Ali expresses concern that “all of us who talk about this are on the fringe,” whereas Muslim political and religious leaders who either openly espouse anti-Semitism or wink at it are far more in the mainstream. Ahmed says if Muslims remain silent in the face of anti-Semitism “we are contributing to the desecration of our own faith.” True Islam, she says, is threatened by political islamism, which she describes as a “totalitarian ideology” which like totalitarians of the past requires a “cosmic enemy” or scapegoat. Islamism has identified that enemy as Judaism. Qudosi says there should be penalties for people like an imam preaching and teaching at UC Davis who openly called upon Muslims to kill Jews. Though he later apologized, no action was taken against the man.
Marcus and Zeegers tell their own reactions to the hate they encountered in Europe, and interview numerous fellow Jews who describe what it’s like to live with constant harrassment, open hostility, and even physical violence. Christian politicians and academicians also are interviewed in the well-documented film.
Never Again is Now is an important documentary, representing the personal way that Marcus and Zeegers are legally standing up against anti-Semitism, even as all of us must possibly now or assuredly later take our stands for the safety of the Jewish people.
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Political bytes
* Attorney Joe Leventhal won the endorsement of the Republican County Central Committee for the San Diego City Council’s 5th District seat. Tony Krvaric, chairman of the local Republican Party, expressed confidence that Leventhal “will be an advocate for San Digo taxpayers by advancing strong fiscal reform and accountability on the City Council.”
* After a four-way debate before the Republican County Central Committee, none of the GOP candidates in the 50th Congressional District won that body’s endorsement Monday night. The party did not endorse incumbent Duncan Hunter, nor did it give the greenlight to radio host Carl DeMaio, former U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, nor state Senator Brian Jones. To win endorsement 33 votes were needed from the 49-member committee, according to reporter Ken Stone of the Times of San Diego.
* San Diego City Council President Georgette Gomez has been endorsed by the Equality PAC in her bid for the 53rd Congressional District seat from which Susan Davis is retiring. The Equality PAC is the political arm of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus. It is co-chaired by U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat.
* Assemblyman Brian Maienschein’s bill to expand food waste diversion programs in San Diego has been signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. According to the legislator about 40 percent of edible food is wasted, and 95 percent of that wasted food goes into landfills. He said the Feeding San Diego program currently is rescuing 12 million pounds of food per year, and hopes to rescue another 14 million pounds. Feeding San Diego will receive a $500,000 CalRecycle grant.
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Coming our way
* Dancer Sharon Sandweiss will be among performers in the San Diego Dance Theater’s (SDDT) production of “Senior Prom” at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Without out Walls (WoW) Festival at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., on Sunday, Oct. 20, in Building 177 at Liberty Station. As part of SDDT’s Aging Creatively senior dance program, director Jean Isaacs, “creates a fun evening to highlight this innately humorous, immersive, intergenerational event.” The setting for the 20 dancers is a “senior” prom in which there are a variety of activities including line dancing, spiking the bunch bowl and crowning the king and queen. More information is available via the SDDT website.
* “From Karlsbad to Carlsbad: Music from the Hinterlands of Central and Eastern Europe” will be performed by Hot Pstromi violinist Yale Strom, vocalist Elizabeth Schwartz, and Fred Benedeti, guitar; Tripp Sprague, tenor sax, and Gene Perry, Afro-Cuban percussion in a 7 p.m. concert, Sunday, Oct. 20, at the New Arts Theatre, 2787 State Street, Carlsbad. The concert will reflect the play Intimate Apparel that deals with the friendship between a Chasidic tailor and an Afro-Caribbean seamstress.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com