The Cutting Edge

A prestigious craft show in the U.S. capital offers one-of-a-kind creations by more than 120 artists working in a variety of media. One artist lucky enough to be selected said sharing her skills with women overseas is just as significant.

Basket artist Jackie Abrams began making traditional, functional baskets in 1975. Today, she makes two lines of contemporary baskets using non-traditional materials.

“One are [is] coiled baskets using a very traditional coil technique where it’s stitched… and for that I use recycled fabric,” she explained. “I also weave other baskets with a heavy cotton paper and wire to make a form…reminiscent of a woman’s form,” said Abrams. She describes her coiled baskets as her "Spirit Vessels." "The exposed cores represent their essential beings, their solid inner cores, giving strength, always visible. Each stitch connects and reinforces the rows that came before. The frayed edges are a part of their lives," she said. Read more ..

Few traces remain of the early Southeast Asian societies that produced the Hindu and Buddhist sculptures in a monumental new exhibit opening April 14, 2014 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Five years in the making, “Lost Kingdoms” shows works from the 5th to the 8th century, an era when Hinduism and Buddhism took root in Southeast Asia.

"We're shedding a spotlight on the very early kingdoms of Southeast Asia, almost unknown," said Thomas Campbell, director of the museum. "This is an area from which the corpus is minute: It's only a few hundred pieces,” he said. “And we have essentially brought the greatest pieces here to the Metropolitan, so, for the first time, the public can really see the development, the evolution of culture in this early period in this region of the world."

Most of the 160 works have not previously been seen outside their home countries, he said. They include national treasures lent by Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and, for the first time, Burma, also known as Myanmar, in addition to Western collectors and museums. Read more ..

After Anatevka follows Sholom Aleichem’s timeless character, Tevye the milkman, as he moves his family from Russia to Palestine. Tevye, the wisecracking, Bible-quoting man of God, tells the story of his family’s new life against the backdrop of the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land prior to the establishment of the State of Israel.

In After Anatevka, Tevye decides to take his wife and three youngest daughters (the three eldest remain in Russia with their husbands) to live on a kibbutz where he must adjust to a secular lifestyle and struggle with the tension between the kibbutzniks’ “religion” of labor and his Jewish beliefs.

While Tevye is uncomfortable with the lack of religiosity on the kibbutz, he is gratified to be the one who can teach the laws and traditions of Judaism to the members. As the most learned man on the secular kibbutz, Tevye takes on his long desired role to be the authority on Jewish law who is sought out for answers to difficult questions of law and religion. See video here.

The clash between tradition and life in Palestine manifests itself, however, in Tevye’s relationship with his daughters, who become assimilated in the kibbutz culture. For example, Tevye is thrilled to learn that one daughter wants to marry the son of a wealthy Jew from the city, but is dismayed when he discovers the young man is a socialist who is estranged from his family. Read more ..

Prize-winning authors, international rights organizations, and legal experts Monday joined the Authors Guild in fighting what they call Google’s dangerous and unprecedented violation of copyright law. They filed eight stinging friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the Guild’s appeal in Authors Guild v. Google, agreeing that Judge Denny Chin’s decision in the case should be overturned. The briefs can be viewed in their entirety at the end of this blog post.

“Google’s ambitions respected no borders,” said Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson. “Millions of copyrighted books by authors from every major country were swept in to Google’s scheme. As the new filings demonstrate, not just authors but also photographers, visual artists, songwriters, and publishers around the world find it particularly galling that a wealthy American company would try to find a way to use their creations for free.” Read more ..

Stephen Haigh has written a comprehensive and provocative book on the future of the nation state and how the world order is likely to alter as governments and the global population become increasingly interconnected. He argues that “the novel pressures applied to Westphalian geology by universal, globalizing forces have resulted in major upheaval: there is no going back, since what was thought to be bedrock is proving infirm.”

The goal of this essay is to discuss Haigh’s thesis and major arguments from a Latin American perspective. Haigh explains that “globalization does not leave states untouched… the pressures it exerts are transforming states into political arenas that must accommodate universal and particular as true complements.” While one is not prepared to challenge that globalization is affecting the world order, some of his arguments are not fully applicable to Latin America.

Thesis and Sources

Haigh argues that the future of nation states will be the creation of a new global order, which he labels as neo-medievalism, where the Westphalian system will still exist, but will have adapted to a more interconnected world. He also acknowledges the benefits, and potential perils, of growing cosmopolitan societies, specifically the “thick” globalization and the role of transnational entities (be they corporations, ethnic movements or criminal entities). It should be stressed that this debate is carried out largely from a theoretical point of view, despite his utilization of brief case studies, such as, the future of the European Union regarding integration among its plethora of members or U.S. foreign policy after 9/11. Read more ..

In The Blue Man and Other Stories of the Skin, I try to reveal how lucky we are to have such a magical and amazing natural covering—our skin. Our skin and ourselves are partners in a world that thrives every day as one nourishes and protects and even learns from the other.

Yet at times there is a breakdown in our cherished skin barrier and in the pages of The Blue Man I try to explore both the reason and stories behind it. The book includes the agony of certain diseases and their attendant psychological toll, how the skin and our perception of it influence our social, cultural, spiritual and physical being—and how we can learn and grow from our new knowledge.

Step into my office. Each day I try to heal the pain, both psychological and physical, that illness of the skin causes people. On many days, my primary role is that of a nurturer, and I explain that many of the skin diseases are not only chronic in nature but at best only palliative care can be provided. Although there may be a general perception that patients are only minimally affected by their skin conditions, those that have protracted and severe conditions often endure serious psychosocial repercussions.

Not only can their occupational lives be harshly disrupted, but all activities of daily living, including sleep, hobbies and social contact may be disturbed. Using the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and other Quality of Life (QOL) studies, researchers have uncovered significant impairments of work, school, and personal relationships. Read more ..

A remarkable montage opens the fifth and final part of The Story of the Jews, the BBC documentary series written and presented by the historian Simon Schama. It is early morning in Tel Aviv, and Schama is pacing the streets as the city comes to life. Cars snake around a busy intersection, someone tunes a radio, an elderly lady sits on a public bench gazing at the passing traffic. And then, suddenly, the familiar hubbub is pierced by the sound of a siren. The proximate cause is not a surprise attack, but an annual act of remembrance.

It is Yom Ha-Shoah, and for one minute on this day every year, Israelis stop what they are doing to pay silent tribute to the millions exterminated during the Holocaust. As Schama’s visual representation of the siren’s impact unfolds, drivers step outside of their vehicles, while doctors and nurses scurrying around a busy hospital become motionless. High school students put their pens down and stand quietly at their desks. At an army base, IDF soldiers salute as an Israeli flag flutters in the breeze. In a retirement home, the residents shuffle to their feet; one woman, her arm marked with tattooed numbers, blinks with an air of disbelief as she stands, head bowed, deep in reflection. Read more ..

You can’t not love and hate the same person," says Nick (Jim Broadbent) to Meg (Lindsay Duncan) — "usually in the space of five minutes, in my experience." It’s the kind of writerly line — the writer in this case being Hanif Kureishi — that looks good on the page but proves a real bear the moment you try to illustrate it dramatically. In the case of Le Week-End, directed by Roger Michel (who also collaborated with Mr Kureishi on The Mother and Venus, both about mismatched sexual partners), Mr Kureishi has made it even more difficult for himself by putting his characters through the kind of mutually self-lacerating dialogue that makes Nick and Meg reminiscent of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But sooner or later there comes out of nowhere — spoiler alert! — a plainly contrived peripeteia, after which love may be supposed to come on shift to take over for hate. It’s supposed to be a comedy, after all.

At the end you may find yourself asking, as I did, what was that about? The answer, I guess, is an excuse for an outpouring of liberal, or rather leftie, angst and disappointment at how the world has turned out for people of a certain age — Mr Broadbent and Miss Duncan are both elder baby boomers — compared with what they expected from it as young would-be revolutionaries in the 1960s. Hence the setting in Paris, which is where Nick and Meg spent their honeymoon and presumably imbibed some of the enthusiasm of the soixante-huitards — he as a self-proclaimed anarchist and minor-league academic philosopher and she as a member of "the feminist Taliban" (at least according to her now-disgruntled husband). "I was brilliant at school, a star at university; I’m amazed at how mediocre I have turned out to be," says morose Nick early on in the proceedings. You can see where this is going. Read more ..

If there is anything that is clear about the occasionally unclear Judeo-Christian Scriptural account of the Creation, it is that it was an act of anthropocentrism. Mankind was seen by the author or authors of Genesis as the masterwork of God, who is said to have created man in his own image and to have given him dominion over the rest of the creation. All the rest of the Bible, in both Testaments, has to do with God’s relationship with men, not animals or any other part of the Creation.

Accordingly, if there is any doctrine or belief about or representation of the Biblical account which we can be sure is false to it and to its spirit, it is the fashionable view among the literary hangers-on of the environmentalist movement that mankind is a disease of nature or a bit of filth from which the properly natural world needs to be purified. “The world has cancer, and the cancer is man,” as the Club of Rome’s Mankind at the Turning-Point puts it.

That is not a possible point of view for anyone claiming to be “true to the essence, values, and integrity” of the Biblical story of Noah, as Darren Aronofsky and the other makers of Noah do. Yet their Noah (played by Russell Crowe) would be right at home among the Club of Rome types. In short, he is a nut job. J. Hoberman, who thinks the movie “the most Jewish biblical blockbuster ever made,” says that it “presents the spectacle of a literal-minded patriarch run amok.”

But to be literal-minded you need a literal text, a piece of writing, to be literal-minded about. Neither the Biblical nor the movie Noah has any such thing. The God of the Old Testament speaks directly to Noah and is all business about what the latter is to do and the exact dimensions of the Ark he is to build. The movie Noah gets his instructions from “the Creator” (as he is always referred to there) in dreams or agonized and picturesque meditations, just like the radical environmentalists of today whom he so much resembles. We don’t know exactly what these instructions are, but they apparently include what he believes to be an order to murder his own new-born grand-daughters. As A.O. Scott of The New York Times delicately puts it, “Noah’s instability — he walks up to the boundary that separates faith from fanaticism, and then leaps across it — is not, strictly speaking, in the source material.” Read more ..

In June 1950, Edward Barsky went to jail. So did ten other members of the board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC). Their crime? They refused to relinquish to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) membership and other lists of their organization, which had been dedicated since its founding in 1942 to helping European anti-fascists in hiding and exile. This act of defiance by Barsky and his JAFRC colleagues was heroic and constitutionally justified, as the United States Supreme Court eventually confirmed in a case protecting NAACP membership lists from scrutiny by white supremacist state governments: According to the Court, the threat of publicity and reprisal compromised the right of political association. In the Barsky case that reprisal could be deadly. Among the names on JAFRC lists were those of former Spanish Loyalists still hiding out in Spain and elsewhere across Europe; exposure would potentially put them in the hands of Franco’s brutal secret police.

But until the Court decided the NAACP case in 1958, HUAC had its way. And what, after all, did the committee want with that list or any of the other membership lists it subpoenaed in the long nightmare we call “McCarthyism?” As this fine little book by Australian historian Phillip Deery makes clear, reprisal and intimidation were the whole point. Deery traces the campaign against JAFRC through the lives of five of its members, most of them relatively unknown in the history of McCarthyism. Their stories, heroic, tragic and painful, are well worth reading.

Barsky and the JAFRC’s ordeal began in 1945, when a newly reconstituted HUAC launched their first post-war inquisition of the American left. That date is important. This was the “first flexing of political muscle by HUAC,” Deery writes. And its successful attack on JAFRC established the “framework…for future congressional inquisitions that were to become such an emblematic feature of McCarthyism.” Moreover, the fact that the assault on JAFRC “commenced very early in the postwar period,” underscores an important truth about McCarthyism: It started a good two years before the beginning of the Cold War. So, as a new generation of Cold War historians is beginning to make clear, the Red Scare was not triggered by an unmistakable Soviet menace against the United States. That threat could not be plausibly identified until at least 1947. By that year, Barsky and his associates had already been convicted in a federal court. Among them were two New York University professors, Edwin Berry Burgum and Lyman Bradley, as well as the novelist Howard Fast and JAFRC executive secretary, Helen Bryan, a Quaker activist. Only some of them were Communists. All of them spent time in jail. Read more ..

Stokely Carmichael was an icon of the black freedom struggle during the late 1960s and early 1970s. His call for black power frightened many whites, while providing black Americans with a sense of pride and empowerment.  Yet today Carmichael is largely forgotten, unlike Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., who have maintained their iconic status in the history books and popular imagination. Peniel E. Joseph, professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University and a leading scholar of the black power movement, seeks to correct this oversight with a well-researched and written biography of Carmichael. Drawing upon extensive archival research internationally and in the United State (including declassified FBI surveillance), along with interviews from Carmichael’s associates and close analysis of the activist’s many speeches, Joseph crafts a sympathetic but not uncritical account of the controversial civil rights leader.

Born in 1941 on the island of Trinidad, Carmichael followed his parents to New York City in 1952. His father Adolphus was a carpenter who believed in the American dream, but Stokely always insisted that his stoic father worked himself into an early grave in pursuit of that elusive dream. The family lived in a largely white Italian neighborhood, and Carmichael was one of the few black students at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. He sought a different college experience, enrolling at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and becoming involved with the civil rights movement through the Nonviolent Action Group. Although critics of Carmichael later claimed that he was fond of radical rhetoric but was averse to the dangers of confrontation with the white establishment, Joseph illustrates that as a college student Carmichael spent his summers in the South where he was beaten and arrested, serving time in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm state prison. Read more ..

The word for "lunchbox" in Hindi is dabba, and the people who deliver lunchboxes, mostly from their wives at home to husbands working in the ever-growing office population of Bombay — which the politically correct are now commanded to re-name "Mumbai" — are called dabbawallahs. As we are reminded in Dabba or The Lunchbox, directed by Ritesh Batra from his own screenplay, the system devised by the dabbawallahs for getting the right lunchbox to the right recipient is world-famous for not making mistakes in spite of its not being the product of modern electronic information-management. Why, their system has been studied by Harvard University, as her dabbawallah (Sadashiv Kondaji Pokarkar) proudly informs lonely housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) when she complains that he has been taking the lunchbox she prepares every day to a man who is not her husband. He is sure he could not have made the mistake she and we know he has made.

This is a vital piece of information in the film because it is against the background of the supposed infallibility of the system that both Ila and Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), the sad widower who is receiving her husband’s lunchboxes, gradually come to see the mistake as no mistake at all. As the puppyish Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), Saajan’s young protégé and designated successor at the company from which he is about to retire, quotes his mother as saying, "Sometimes the wrong train will get you to the right station."

That Shaikh, an orphan, treats his mother as being still alive and continuing to dispense wisdom is, perhaps, a similar kind of mistake. The perfect system of the dabbawallahs thus stands for the dispensation of the gods or the fates in the film, who have a natural place in every truly romantic story and who may, likewise, be supposed to be right even when they are wrong. Read more ..

Wes Anderson’s long flirtation with whimsy has finally resulted in their tying the knot in The Grand Budapest Hotel. I’m afraid that the union cannot be a very happy one, at least not for film-goers, though it does provide a certain amount of fun. In Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998) and, to a lesser extent, The Royal Tenenbaums, of 2001, Mr Anderson still had one foot planted in reality, but since then he has been steadily losing this toehold, presumably on account of being told too often how delightfully whimsical are such subsequent productions as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), The Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012).

The last-named at least had something semi-serious to say about the kind of childish innocence which must have produced its whimsy in the first place, and if Grand Budapest Hotel has a similar saving grace, it is the performance of Ralph Fiennes in the role of Gustav H., said to be the Hotel’s legendary concierge in the 1930s. Mr Fiennes’s hitherto unsuspected talent for comedy makes the scenes he is in, which are most of those in the movie, a constant delight, in spite of periodic reminders that the dialogue is not natural to him.

You may frequently hear, for example, the characteristic British pronunciation of the distinctively American "swear" word "goddamn" with a single medial "d" instead of the authentic double-d of us red-blooded Americans. It’s a dead giveaway, not only to his own origins but to those of the movie itself. As his character is supposed to be neither British nor American but someone of indeterminate nationality living in the fictional country of Zubrowka, said improbably to have been once the seat of a great empire, in an even more fictional version of Mitteleuropa between the wars, the jarring effect of his Read more ..

In 1910, the most famous and highest paid woman in the most popular entertainment medium in the United States, vaudeville, was a leggy but not particularly attractive singer-dancer-comedienne who had no special talent for singing, dancing, or comedy. Appearing in an unkempt mop of blonde, curly hair and wackily flamboyant costumes, Eva Tanguay raced, pranced, skipped, and whirled across the stage, dancing hyperactively, telling jokes, and singing songs, often about herself, in a high-pitched, almost screechy voice that seemed always on the verge of breaking into her cackling laugh. Preceded and followed by wild publicity wherever she performed across America, she billed herself modestly as “The Girl Who Made Vaudeville Famous.” And today she is all but forgotten.

It is surprising that Andrew Erdman’s book is Tanguay’s first biography, popular or academic. Even the mid-twentieth century nostalgia industry, bent on making a profit from memories of “the good old days” all but overlooked Tanguay. Erdman discusses the biopic of 1952, “The I Don’t Care Girl,” starring the immortal Mitzi Gaynor but, as he rightly notes, the film not only makes a hash of her life, it was much more about Hollywood than it was about Tanguay. This book, in contrast, goes to great and admirable lengths to get the story right. In the end, however, like Eva Tanguay’s signature song and her act in general, The Queen of Vaudeville leaves us wondering why we should care.

Tanguay was born in Quebec in 1878, but grew up in the mill town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, a place that saw its share of late 19th century theatrical troupes, circuses, medicine shows, and variety performers. She took up performing as a child at amateur nights and local stage presentations, and began touring professionally at age 10 as the title character in a theater troupe’s version of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Tanguay’s activities in her teen years remain difficult to discern: she seems to have worked in various performing groups, and Erdman argues convincingly, if from circumstantial evidence, that she had an illegitimate daughter, born when Tanguay was around 18, who was then raised by her brother. Tanguay rose into public notice in the frothy popular musical stage shows when she was in her early to mid-twenties, playing flighty, bubbly characters. In these shows, according to Erdman, Tanguay discovered “the powerful appeal of freakish, kinesthetic energy mixed with a useful show of leg and curve.” (p. 55) In 1904 a producer decided to build a show around Tanguay called The Sambo Girl. The show was successful, and Tanguay scored a great hit with the song, “I Don’t Care,” that defined her stage persona for the rest of her life:

I don’t care, I don’t care,
What they may think of me,
I’m happy go lucky,
Men say I am plucky,
So jolly and care free . . . Read more ..

Achieving success in Hollywood is difficult. For actors with disabilities such as hearing loss, it is even tougher, since roles for the deaf are limited.  A civil rights organization is celebrating the accomplishments of deaf artists in Hollywood who have paved the way for others.Natasha Ofili has read lips her entire life.

"I was born hearing. Then I had a high fever at 18 months and I lost my hearing at 18 months," said Ofili. Ofili is an accomplished fashion designer and an aspiring actress. She's having her picture taken hoping her photos will get noticed by casting directors. Her photographer, who's also deaf, tells her how she's doing.

"You know how you look and your stuff," said the photographer. "Awesome!" Ofili recently landed a lead role in a short film called "Words Not Spoken". She hopes it is the beginning of more work to come. "For me it's like art. Like fashion is art. And when I got into acting it was very emotional - the story connecting to the character. Like it drew me into it," she said. Read more ..

When many of us think of precious objects, the largest gems or the most famous paintings may come to mind.  But certain rare violins inspire the same awe - and command the same astronomical prices - as these other treasures.

The “Vieuxtemps” violin played by American virtuoso Anne Akiko Meyers is worth well over $16 million.  It was made in Italy in 1741 by Guarneri del Gesu and represents the pinnacle of violinmaking’s Golden Age. Meyers says it is unlike any instrument she’s ever played.

“The G string is so dark and rich. It really can sound like a cello…. the E string sounds like you are in a really sky high cathedral listening to music pouring out," she said.

The violin is dubbed “The Vieuxtemps” after Henri Vieuxtemps, the great 19th century violinist who once owned and cherished it.  It is only one of the ultra-rare antique instruments that pass through Paolo Alberghini’s showroom in Manhattan. Read more ..

A newly deciphered 1,800-year-old letter from an Egyptian solider serving in a Roman legion in Europe to his family back home shows striking similarities to what some soldiers may be feeling here and now.

Rice Religious Studies graduate student Grant Adamson took up the task in 2011 when he was assigned the papyrus to work on during a summer institute hosted at Brigham Young University (BYU).

The private letter sent home by Roman military recruit Aurelius Polion was originally discovered in 1899 by the expedition team of Grenfell and Hunt in the ancient Egyptian city of Tebtunis. It had been catalogued and described briefly before, but to this point no one had deciphered and published the letter, which was written mostly in Greek.

“This letter was just one of many documents that Grenfell and Hunt unearthed,” Adamson said. “And because it was in such bad shape, no one had worked much on it for about 100 years.” Even now portions of the letter’s contents are uncertain or missing and not possible to reconstruct.

Polion’s letter to his brother, sister and his mother, “the bread seller,” reads like one of a man who is very desperate to reach his family after sending six letters that have gone unanswered. He wrote in part: Read more ..

In Peace After Marriage, Arafat is a lonely, neurotic, pornography-addicted 30-year-old living in Brooklyn, New York, with Palestinian immigrant parents who want him to find a suitable bride, preferably a girl from "back home." It's a broad, sexually-frank comedy that looks to Woody Allen's early films for inspiration, although the satire is softer-edged, and the romance less ambivalent.

Writer-director Ghazi Albuliwi, who also stars in the film, says it is semi-autobiographical, although he doesn't admit to some of the broader aspects of the comedy: trying to dispose of a suitcase full of pornography, for example, Arafat is apprehended by New York police who suspect he's hiding a bomb.

Albuliwi, who was born in a refugee camp in Jordan to Palestinian parents who later immigrated to the U.S., grew up in Brooklyn, with friends from various backgrounds, he says, not only other Arab Americans, but blacks, whites, and Latinos. Read more ..

Author Edwin Black

Fourteen local and national Jewish organizations and synagogues will gather in Englewood, New Jersey, at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, March 25, 2014, to confront the BDS movement and 501(c)(3) groups who finance the movement and make it work. The community-wide event, to be live globally streamed with audience participation worldwide, is called “Time to Unite.” The extraordinary event is the brain child of Unity4Unity leader Lee Lasher. “Time to Unite” was specifically called to hear revelations by bestselling investigative author Edwin Black whose latest book, Financing the Flames, has ignited international repercussions about the role of tax-exempt and taxpayer monies, as well as the human rights movement, in creating a culture of violence, confrontation, and terrorism in Israel. Black’s previous works include million-copy international seller IBM and the Holocaust and the award-winning JTA series “Funding Hate.” In Financing the Flames, Black spotlights American taxpayer-supported monies funding Palestinian salaries for terrorists in Israeli prisons, as well as the organic connection of the New Israel Fund to the BDS movement and the NIF's robust funding of “agitation human rights NGOs.”

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The fourteen Jewish organizations and synagogues supporting the event include Unite4Unity, Congregation Ahavath Torah, East Hill Synagogue, Temple Emanu-el, Temple Rishon, Temple Avodat Shalom, Congregation Bnai Yeshurun and The Glen Rock Jewish Center, as well as the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, and the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey. Cosponsors include the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, and the Jewish Virtual Library.

Last month, Black embarked upon a parliamentary tour of four legislatures in four weeks: The House of Commons in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, and the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. At each stop along the way, Black astonished lawmakers with details of donor nation funding for specific terrorists under a Palestinian law called the Law of the Prisoner under the aegis of the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners. The author also spotlighted how the New Israel Fund has marshaled hundreds of millions of dollars to help establish the BDS movement, and to finance confrontation NGOs, which, according to Israeli Knesset leaders and a broad swatch of Israeli military men, seem devoted to destabilizing the Israel Defense Forces and erasing the Jewish identity from the state of Israel. Read more ..

For many years, the relationship between Broadway and Hollywood went one way: from stage to screen.

But in the past couple of decades, some of the biggest Broadway hits have been adapted from films - think Hairspray or Kinky Boots. Four of the big new musicals opening this spring are based on movies, including Rocky: The Musical.

The show’s creators knew they faced challenges when adapting Sylvester Stallone’s Academy Award-winning boxing movie for the stage.

"If you speak to all of the authors and all of the creative team, their instinctive reaction, when first hearing about Rocky becoming a musical, ranges from incredulity to plain crazy," said Bill Taylor. 

Rocky presents a kind of double-edged sword; there’s a built-in audience that loves the film, but also has expectations. They'll hear Bill Conti’s iconic theme, but the rest of the score is by Tony Award winners Lynn Ahrens and Steven Flaherty. Read more ..

It's been called the greatest story ever told, so it's not surprising Hollywood has turned to the Bible for inspiration for almost a century.

The trend toward these kinds of films remains strong; the movie industry expects to produce 16 faith-based movies this year alone. Many of them may be forgotten just weeks after their release, while others have the potential to become blockbusters.

So what makes religion-inspired movies successful?

Son of God, about the life of Jesus, opened recently and is doing very well at the box office. Churches around the country are renting movie theaters for their members to watch the film. American University Philosophy professor Martyn Oliver says films that offer a popular depiction of Jesus target Christian audiences. Read more ..

Founded in 1897, the Jewish Daily Forward was a newspaper published in the Yiddish language when  in 1990 it added a weekly English version and hired Seth Lipsky as its editor. One of Lipsky’s predecessors was Abraham Cahan, the legendary founder and editor of the publication for half a century, and naturally, he was acutely aware of the significance of his new position. 

He discovered that reading Cahan’s writings helped reveal political positions with which he could readily relate, notably, staunch opposition to communism and support for the State of Israel.  In time, his interpretation of Cahan’s views became controversial as he was often accused of misrepresenting Cahan’s  opinions. In the process, Lipsky shifted the Forward politically from left to right.  In 2000, Lipsky moved on and revived an earlier newspaper The New York Sun as a conservative voice, which he edited for eight years.

Cahan first demonstrated an independent streak in his Czarist Russian homeland.  There he abandoned the Orthodox Judaism of his parents to become a “nonbeliever.”  Nevertheless, Lipsky notes, quoting Cahan’s friend and associate David Shub, he became a “warm Jew” who “preached tolerance for religious Jews.”  Long an ardent socialist, Cahan in time embraced capitalism, and as an anti-Zionist initially influenced in Russia by the General Jewish Labor Bund, he eventually became a friend of Israel..

Though his views changed over time, Cahan remained a fixture on the New York City scene.  He was in essence a newspaperman who built a journalistic beacon for the city’s Jewish immigrant community, which he attempted to Americanize.  In addition, he was a short story writer and novelist whose tale of an immigrant’s material success in the garment industry, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), became a classic that reflected his conscience as well as that of the community he addressed.  Lipsky generously quotes from this novel, as well as Cahan’s other works, including the novels Yekl: A Tale of the NewYork Ghetto, and The White Terror and the Red, short stories, an autobiography, andthe Forward’s human interest feature, A Bintel Brief.  The latter was a popular column that featured letters from readers who sought and received advice from the newspaper’s editor. Read more ..

As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tries to bring Israeli and Palestinian leaders together on a framework peace agreement, a group of young Israelis and Palestinians is already working in harmony. They are the musicians of Heartbeat, a social movement using the power of music to transform conflict.

The young musicians performed at a Congressional office building in Washington to raise awareness of their vision of a better future for the Middle East.

Since 2007, Heartbeat has brought Palestinian and Israeli high school students and young adults together to talk, listen and make music. The songs they write weave traditional and modern Eastern and Western styles. The lyrics, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, reflect dialogue that takes place among group members and the often tense society they live in.

“We have this song which asks, ‘What’s the Wall good for?'" said Israeli Guy Gefen, 22, who has been with Heartbeat from the start. “I think when people are afraid, they put those walls. They put those physical and psychological walls and it makes it that much easier to be afraid; it makes it that much easier to hate. And I say there’s no need for that. You don’t need to be afraid, you don’t need to hate.” Read more ..

Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph memorializes him as “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.”  In his last years, this paragon of the Enlightenment worked hard on that final legacy.  Architecturally and academically, his plan for his “academical village” was a model of balance and rationality: the campus near Charlottesville was geometrically exact, with pavilions for professors and rooms for students arrayed around a central library (not, as at other colleges, a chapel).  The curriculum would allow students a choice of studies, including secular and scientific fields not offered at the more traditional colleges that already dotted the landscape of the new nation.

Alas, it turned out that there was a worm in the apple of this intellectual Eden.  For two decades after its founding, the University was rattled, hammered, battered, and baffled by wave after wave of student violence.  Journalists Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos note that “in schools both of the North and the South, students looked for excuses to smash furniture, break glass, and resist authority.  Students often seemed glad to escalate confrontations with professors into riots.”  But at Virginia the outbursts were especially common and violent.   “What made the mayhem at the University of Virginia unique,” the authors add, “was the stakes; the school was new and experimental, unsure of the public’s support and uncertain of its own future.  No powerful church denomination backed the university, no well-connected alumni group stood ready to come to its defense.”  Indeed, many religiously inclined people devoutly hoped that the “godless” institution would fail.  If the University’s reputation sank low enough, the Virginia legislature might well be persuaded to cut off its vital annual funding. Read more ..

All five Academy Award contenders for Best Foreign Language Film deliver universal messages while immersing audiences in their distinct cultures.

One of these films, Hany Abu-Assad’s thriller Omar  from Palestine, is the first film to be endorsed by the Palestinian authority.

Omar is a Palestinian baker who routinely climbs over the Israeli separation barrier to visit his girlfriend Nadia and his childhood friends Tarek and Amjad. Both Omar and Amjad are in love with Nadia.  Her brother Tarek uses the rivalry and asks them to prove themselves by killing an Israeli soldier. Amjad does the killing but Omar gets arrested for it. Rami, an Israeli security agent, ensnares Omar with an ultimatum. Either he becomes a collaborator or he spends the rest of his life in jail. Read more ..

Almost 40 years after the communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and embarked on a four-year reign of terror and genocide, many of those who survived are finally able to talk about it. That includes a film director whose documentary about the Khmer Rouge received an Oscar nomination - the first for a Cambodian film.

Some survivors living in the United States say the film brought back painful memories but helps in the healing process.

Long Beach, California, is home to the largest Cambodian community outside Cambodia. Life in the United States is a stark contrast to the life Chan Hopson escaped in Cambodia and depicted in the documentary, The Missing Picture.

”When I was watching the film, I relived my life from the beginning to the end," she said. "I saw these people in my village who were killed, died of starvation and were tortured.” Hopson was 34 years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power. She says they killed her husband and five brothers. Read more ..

In this volume for the series Iowa and the Midwest Experience, historian and attorney Jon K. Lauck makes an eloquent and passionate brief for restoring the history of the Midwest to a central place in American historiography.  Lauck observes that in contrast with regions such as the South, New England, and Far West, the Midwest has almost disappeared from the history classroom, monograph, and scholarly journal. Arguing that the Midwest is almost quintessentially American, Lauck insists that restoring the region to a more prominent place in the American history canon would provide a degree of unity to historical discourse which has been missing from recent scholarly emphasis upon the topics of race, gender, and class. Lauck also seeks to resurrect the historical reputations of Frederick Jackson Turner and other Prairie Historians of the early to mid-twentieth century, including John D. Hicks, Frederick Merk, and Clarence A. Alvord. Asserting that despite some shortcomings reflecting the times in which they lived, Lauck maintains that these scholars offer models of engagement which may prove useful to contemporary historians. There is considerable merit to Lauck’s contention that the Midwest, a more diverse region than often assumed, deserves more attention from today’s scholars; however, returning the Prairie Historians to the forefront of scholarship may be a tougher sale.

Borrowing from Turner’s definition of the Middle West in a 1901 essay, Lauck views the region as including the states of Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, although the author acknowledges that he focuses upon the prairie Midwest as opposed to the areas more connected to forests and industry around the Great Lakes. In making his case that the Midwest plays a pivotal role in American history, Lauck writes, “The Midwest matters, in short, because it helps explain the course of foundational events in North America, the origins of the American Revolution, the political and social foundations of the American republic, the outcome of the Civil War, and the emergence of the United States as a world power that shaped global events” (14). Lauck goes on to argue that the settlement of the Midwestern frontier connects the region with the concept of American exceptionalism “or the view that the political and social development of the United States was unique and a decisive break from Europe” (25). While some contemporary American historians may question the concept of American exceptionalism and Lauck’s positive reading of American capitalism, there is considerable merit to his assertion that the Midwestern offers an avenue of inquiry into essential questions and events which have shaped the American experience. Read more ..

Sunday is Oscars Night in Hollywood.  And while the Oscar nominated actors and actresses have the larger fan base, insiders also will be paying attention to the five film composers whose work has garnered them nominations for Best Score.

The opening music for The Book Thief is just one small part of the varied and complex score John Williams composed for the film about a German family that hides a Jewish man in its home during World War II. The 82-year-old Williams has been nominated for an Academy Award 49 times, but his most recent win was 20 years ago for Schindler’s List.

Hollywood veteran Dan Carlin, who chairs the Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program at the University of Southern California, thought a Best Score Oscar for The Book Thief would be well deserved. He pointed to one musical sequence called "Revealing the Secret," in which the main character, a young girl who has been saved from the death camps, told her best friend about the Jewish man her family was protecting. "It just grabs your heart and rips it out.  It’s a very emotional cue.  And John can do that probably better than anyone else.  He’s amazing," he said. Read more ..

Many books have been written about the financing of war, but Edwin Black’s latest book is about the financing of peace. That would seem like a positive theme, except that Black reveals that the financing of peace is really the financing of war.

Edwin Black has a history of writing investigative reports about the financing of conflict and Financing the Flames: How Tax-Exempt and Public Money Fuel a Culture of Confrontation and Terror in Israel is firmly in that tradition. Black picks up where he left off with his investigation of the Ford Foundation’s bigoted Anti-Israel shenanigans at Durban to look at the left’s financing of the conflict in Israel.

Israel is a small country and most Israeli Jews and Arabs already know that the conflict is stirred up by interested parties. They know that rocks don’t just get thrown randomly at soldiers and confrontations between Jewish and Arab villages are often staged by interested parties who don’t even live there.

The conflict was always externally encouraged, whether it was the British and the Nazis playing spy games or Iran and the Soviet Union funneling money and instructions to terrorists, but the perpetuation of the conflict has interwoven a mesh of conflict profiteers into the country, from hordes of stringers and journalists looking for a conflict photo or terror interview to sell, and over to the networks of non-profit organizations stirring up violence on an even larger scale and for even uglier motives. It is this network of non-profits, some little known outside Israel, which is the topic of Black’s book.

The demonization of Israel, from the high range of official documents like the Goldstone Report to the low range of viral videos on YouTube, doesn’t just happen. It’s the for-profit work of non-profit organizations that finance a campaign that sometimes falls just narrowly short of open terrorism. Read more ..

The work of Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat, whose photographs, films and video installations deal with gender, politics and religion in the Islamic world, has been heralded by art critics and collected by major museums.

Although Neshat has lived in the United States since the 1970s, her work has most often been focused on the lives of women in Iran, and more recently with the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Egypt.
 
In 2010, a critic for The Huffington Post named her "Artist of the Decade," saying that Neshat's art reflects the struggle for human rights by "voiding stereotypes," revealing the "diversity within Islam and Iran." Neshat's 2009 film, Women Without Men, a magical-realist tale of women in Iran at the time of the 1953 coup, won the top directing award at the Venice Film Festival. Read more ..

With the considerable media attention being paid to the fiftieth anniversary of the February 1964 appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, it is rather obvious that the rock music of the 1960s exercised considerable influence over American culture during that turbulent era and continues to cast a large shadow down to the present. Acknowledging this impact, Michael J. Kramer, who teaches history and American Studies at Northwestern University, in The Republic of Rock examines the relationship between rock music and citizenship in the sixties counterculture. In this provocative academic book, Kramer probes deeply into the countercultural archives of art posters, underground newspapers, music, press releases, and interviews to establish how the rock music scene in San Francisco presented both a challenge to traditional values, while simultaneously embracing a hip capitalism which commercialized the counterculture.  Kramer argues that the acid rock scene in San Francisco became a community in which music was a primary avenue through which to address issues of citizenship in what eventually was known as Woodstock nation.

Then Kramer proceeds to take his readers on a “magical mystery tour” of sorts as he connects the San Francisco scene directly with the Vietnam War, asserting that the U. S. military promoted a sense of hip militarism by playing hard rock such as Jimi Hendrix on the official Armed Forces Vietnam Network, tolerating pirate soldier radio stations, and even promoting the formation of soldier rock bands with the Entertainment Vietnam program. The military sought to bolster morale through allowing soldiers to enjoy leisure time with favorite musical styles, maintaining a degree of connection with the world beyond the war in Vietnam. Although the themes introduced in much of the acid rock music were anti-establishment, the military programs never endorsed anti-war attitudes, but as Kramer notes, the strategy of hip militarism was a risky one as it encouraged soldiers to pursue their own definitions of citizenship. Kramer concludes, “The circulation of rock music between the city of peace, love, and flowers and the country of war, turmoil, and Napalm created a counterculture that pulsated with life-or-death questions of belonging, dissent, hope, and fear” (8). Read more ..

The Snowden Files, a fascinating and very readable book, is the first one out dealing with Edward Snowden’s stunning revelations about the National Security Agency’s domestic and foreign spying and the efforts to restrain and, if possible, arrest him. Luke Harding is The Guardian’s foreign correspondent and co-author with David Leigh of Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy and Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia.

In it, Harding adroitly chronicles the struggles of journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald who published the initial article about Snowden’s disclosures in The Guardian, the liberal British newspaper, Ewen MacAskill, a veteran reporter sent by the The Guardian to check out his veracity, and Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker of the Iraqi-centered My Country My Country, who says she’s been detained and questioned and her possessions taken from her about forty times by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The trio met Snowden for the first time in a Hong Kong hotel room and then helped broadcast his exposés to the world. 

Harding spends time on his newspaper’s determination to publish the story despite the Conservative government’s threats and its destruction of the newspaper’s hard drives. He demonstrates how British spymasters, operating in a country without First Amendment protection or a written constitution, genuflected before Washington because Uncle Sam paid their bills, or as one cynic at Government Communications Headquarters, the British counterpart to the NSA, told Harding, “We have the brains, they have the money.”

He also describes American pressure on The Guardian’s U.S. editor, the hard-driving Janine Gibson, and her small, computer-savvy staff, not to print Snowden’s leaks. She worried lest the material in her possession be stolen before portions appeared, as they later did, in the New York Times, Washington Post and Der Spiegel. Nevertheless, she published Greenwald’s article, which opened with: “The NSA is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top-secret court order issued in April.” Read more ..

In a hearing at the European Parliament in Brussels, members of the deliberative body heard how a number of charitable organizations funded by public money are financing the flames that make peace in Israel more difficult.

The conference was organized by EP Member Michal Kaminski, who hails from Poland. The legislators heard from Edwin Black, an American investigative journalist and author of several books who specializes in human rights and the interplay between economics and politics in the Middle East.

Black presented his latest book on the subject, which shows how, instead of promoting peace and reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis, a variety of taxpayer-subsidized organizations have funded a culture where peace does not pay, but warfare and confrontation do. In 'Fanning the Flames: How Tax-Exempt and Public Money Fuel a Culture of Confrontation and Terror in Israel', Black shows how tax exempt non-profits are actually funding terrorists and delegitimize Israeli authority.

Edwin Black said on February 12 of his investigation, "I was struck by the amount of money that’s going into the Palestinian Authority and the fact that it’s going to promote peace and reconciliation. But it’s actually accomplishing the opposite, funding a specific terrorism program which is actually administered by the Ministry of Prisoners in the Palestinian Authority, pursuant to a law, called the law of the prisoner, which creates monthly salaries for convicted terrorists which escalate by the number of people that are killed. This is open, it is known, it is not denied and they’re getting this money from the EU and from the United States tax payer." Read more ..

In The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency, James Toobin, who teaches in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami of Ohio, shows that, above all, Roosevelt’s is a great story, one full of drama, multiple what-ifs, incredible highs, and unfathomable lows. Toobin vividly brings FDR’s journey to life.

Yes, Roosevelt’s tale has been well told by a wide variety of accomplished historians. But Toobin’s book is unique in that it focuses on the crucial period following his 1921 polio diagnosis up until his election to the presidency in 1932. This is the story of not only FDR’s struggle with polio, but of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, and Roosevelt’s tenuous place in it.

How much did polio shape the essential character of the man? After reading this account, one can only come to the conclusion: a whole lot—and probably even more than anyone will ever know.

Everyone experiences setbacks in life. But Roosevelt’s was one of the most dramatic in American political history. Before polio, FDR had it all: health, wealth, charm, education, and an unlimited future. “Had he ever been unnerved, even seriously frightened?” (79) Toobin asks. Probably not, it is safe to presume. After the onset of polio, he would need assistance the rest of his life with everything that he did. When FDR was told he had polio, Eleanor Roosevelt recalled, his face took on an expression that she said she saw but one other time: when he was informed about the Pearl Harbor attack.

Yet as Toobin notes, polio might have, rather astonishingly, actually made him president; had Roosevelt remained in politics and public life in the early-to-mid 1920s, during the Republican ascendency, and during Al Smith’s reign as New York’s governor, he would have surely lost many elections. Timing is everything, and he had the good fortune to be elected governor of New York in 1928 and then reelected in 1930 just as the Depression began. The wilderness years actually benefited FDR, politically speaking. Read more ..

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power in Iran 35 years ago on February 11, Iran's filmmakers had good reason to worry.

The strict code of censorship ushered in by the Islamic Revolution convinced many that creativity and film were no longer compatible in Iran.

Yet today, despite the continuing strict censorship rules governing them, Iran's artistic films -- as opposed to the country's commercial-release films -- are universally acclaimed as among the most innovative and important participants in international film festivals.

The filmmakers' ability to overcome the suffocation of censorship, while still working under it, is one of the rare successes in the daily struggle ordinary Iranians wage to have greater personal freedom under an authoritarian regime. At the same time, the battle against censorship has had a great influence in forging the look and style of Iranian art films, which have earned a place of distinction in the eyes of film lovers worldwide. Read more ..

After only six weeks in release, Lone Survivor is closing in on the box office record set last year by Zero Dark Thirty for movies about our post-9/11 wars. Yet it has received little publicity compared not just with Kathryn Bigelow’s film, which courted controversy with scenes of torture that portrayed the torturers sympathetically, but also with the string of anti-war flops that came before it. Hollywood and the media desperately wanted people to like those movies for the sake of their political agenda, but people didn’t like them and didn’t go to see them.

Zero Dark Thirty at least looked to people like it was pro-American. Lone Survivor, directed by Peter Berg, has carefully removed the (allegedly "right-wing") politics in the true-life account by the actual lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell (played in the movie by Mark Wahlberg), of a Navy SEAL operation in Afghanistan in 2005 that went badly wrong, and people are flocking to it. The critics and the media generally have taken a somewhat more sour view, sometimes supplying their own political subtext out of frustration with Mr Berg’s reticence. Richard Corliss’s clueless review in Time was headlined: "Why Are We in Afghanistan?"

The movie itself is the best argument for regarding that question as supremely irrelevant from the point of view of the SEALs and those, still the majority of Americans, who identify themselves with such brave men rather than the intellectually stateless moralists. Ever since the media and the film industry were captured by the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era, it has been almost impossible for us to see war in the movies or on television as combat soldiers see it, which is with more or less complete disregard for the political or diplomatic side of things, except where that prevents them, as increasingly it does, from doing their job. Read more ..

On February 9, 1964, the Beatles made their U.S. television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Millions of viewers rocked to the performance that sparked a musical revolution. In fact, Nielsen ratings say nearly half of all U.S. television sets in use at the time were tuned in to the broadcast of the variety show.

Fifty years after Beatlemania began, tributes to the band can be seen from the Capitol Records Tower in Los Angeles to JFK International Airport in New York, where the band first landed on American soil.

Karen Gromada, a teenager when the Beatles hit it big, showed up at JFK Airport with a poster of band member Paul McCartney in hand to celebrate the anniversary. "I was watching the TV that night on the 9th and taking pictures of the TV as a 13-year-old just rapt," Gromada said. "I've been a fan always." Others at the JFK anniversary celebration included John Lennon's sister, Julia Baird, and Jillian L'Eplatenier, one of the Pan Am flight attendants on the Beatles' first flight to New York. Read more ..

In the early 1900s, a sound came out of African-American communities in the southern U.S. states that came to be called the blues. Some of the deepest roots of the music come from the rich farming region known as the Mississippi Delta.

A little over a century ago, poor African-American laborers in Mississippi took up European instruments like the guitar and harmonica to play soulful and expressive music called the blues.

It was a time when the rich fields of the Delta region required many laborers. Clarksdale, Mississippi, home of the Delta Blues Museum, was a transportation hub then, according to museum director Shelley Ritter. "With so many farms, there was an opportunity for a lot of work and then we had the river here and the railroad was here," she said.

One of the largest exhibits in the museum is the reassembled farm cabin where famed bluesman Muddy Waters once lived. He and other bluesmen honed their skills in Clarksdale, which offered workers music and more. "On Saturdays or on weekends, when the laborers were given time off, they would all come into town and avail themselves of all the vices, if you will, as well as the wares," Ritter said. Read more ..

First on this review’s agenda, a note to the publisher:  For many years, a common approach to nonfiction titles and subtitles was to have an attention-getting, but somewhat mysterious, phrase as the title, followed by a subtitle that explained what the book was really about.  Recently, however, the marketing departments have evidently taken charge, especially of the subtitle, and a remarkably creative lot they are not.  Little known people or events are invariably being hyped as “transformative,” as “changing the course” of history.  (This morning’s spam from Amazon.com about “New and Notable History Books” brought news of both Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America and Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World.) But you, Simon & Schuster, by using BOTH “transformed” and “changed the course” in your subtitle, have finally exhausted my patience.  Enough, already!  Stop it!

Samuel Freedman’s books—this is his seventh—don’t need that kind of crude hyperventilating.   His The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond  (1996)—note the non-bloviating subtitle-- was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The subtitle of Small Victories (1991), an engaging exploration of urban education, was helpful and modest: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School.

Freedman doesn’t try all that hard to deliver what the subtitle promises, and it’s just as well.  His story about the paths that brought Jake Gaither’s Florida A&M Rattlers and Eddie Robinson’s Grambling Tigers to the 1967 Orange Blossom Bowl, widely viewed as the championship of black college football, is well told.  But despite the author’s rhetorical gestures towards defining it as a turning point, it’s clear that the event, which drew a large crowd to Miami’s Orange Bowl, was just one more step on the long and winding road to black equality.  Indeed, Freedman tacks on a chapter about the Tampa Classic of 1969, which pitted Florida A&M against the all-white University of Tampa—and was arguably more of a turning point than the Orange Blossom Bowl:  “Such a contest had never taken place in the South.” Read more ..

During and after World War I, and especially after the notorious Palmer Raids, the government and a legion of vigilantes went hunting for “subversive” left-wingers. Phones were tapped and postal workers opened mail, which led an old-fashioned traditionalist named  Henry L. Stimson, Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State, to close down the government’s cryptological section  in 1929 with a quaint warning,  “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” How charming, how innocent, how calming.

In late 1970, however, William Davidon, “a mild-mannered physics professor at Haverford College,” writes Betty Medsger, decided to issue a frontal challenge to government snoopers (full-discloser: I interviewed him several times about another case) and  “privately asked a few people this question: ‘What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?’”

Davidon hated the Vietnam War and a draft which forced reluctant kids into the military, which he believed had helped make the country an imperial, warrior state.  Inspired by pacifist men of action Dan Berrigan and A.J. Muste, he wanted to do more than march and picket and lend his name to antiwar ads.

To do so, he recruited six like-minded men and two women who “were looking for more powerful nonviolent ways to protest the war.” Betty Medsger’s striking and well-paced investigative reportage in The Burglary, sympathetically describes the burglars, and unkindly to say the least, J. Edgar Hoover and his relentless pursuit of political opponents.

On March 8, 1971, ironically  the day of the epic and widely-viewed Ali-Frazier bout,  eight otherwise commonplace people, led by Davidon, forced open the door of an FBI office in Media, a suburb of Philadelphia, with a homemade crowbar and snatched about a thousand confidential files, which when publicized, sent Hoover and his supporters into shock.  Never before had the unchallenged FBI been so violated. The burglars’ unprecedented catch revealed what Hoover’s FBI had been up to for decades. As Medsger carefully outlines the raid and its consequences, she reveals that  Hoover had been running a “secret” and illegitimate FBI program called  Cointelpro, whose purpose was to destroy dissent and dissenters. The burglars also discovered a long-established “Security Index,” aimed at rounding up and detaining “subversives” in the event of a “crisis.” Read more ..