Letters

Another Creator?

Craig Anthony, in his May 21 letter, makes the curious statement that "God did not create homosexuals." This raises the question as to who did.

Postulating a Creator other than the Almighty strikes me as a greater threat to Judaism than any attempted midrashic justification of same-sex attachments.

Nina Wouk | Menlo Park




'A great complement'

Reading Stephen Dobbs' book review of Ruth Gay's "Safe Among the Germans" (May 21 j.) brought to mind Barbara Honigmann's "A Love Made Out of Nothing," the novella that won the Koret Jewish Book Award in fiction this year.

Like Gay, Honigmann focuses on the lives of European Jews who returned to Germany after the war. Her characters struggle to find new meaning in their lives but instead often find themselves trapped and isolated by their past in completely unexpected ways.

Perhaps one reason Honigmann is able to convey the story so vividly is that her own family lived the struggle, fleeing their home in East Berlin at the onset of war, only to return to it, and the nightmares lurking there, in the post-war period.

For those of you who have not read it yet, I highly recommend "A Love Made Out of Nothing." It's a great complement to Gay's history of post-war Jewish repatriation to Germany.

Stephanie Singer | San Francisco




'A propitious time'

Thank you for your very positive May 21 review, "Painful miracle," of "My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports," which was just issued on DVD.

It came at a very propitious time since the Kindertransport Association is having its national conference in the Bay Area on Oct. 22-24. Several well-known speakers, including Walter Kohn, 1998 Nobel laureate in physics who came on a Kindertransport from Vienna to England in 1939, and Berkeley writer and historian Fred Rosenbaum of Lehrhaus Judaica, are scheduled to speak.

Bertha Leverton, founder of the original Reunion of the Kinder, is coming from London to attend.

In addition, "My Knees Were Jumping" will be shown.

Further details on the conference can be found at.

Ralph Samuel | Oakland




Two ideas

Many single or married elderly Jews in Alameda County live sadly isolated and very unhappy since "their Jewish home," which provided a sense of security, was transferred to suburbia. I would hope that East Bay federation will consider their needs and offer some help, rather than waiting for catastrophic needs bringing on helplessness, for too many elderly are too proud to admit to needs or loneliness.

What can the federation do?

n A series of scheduled buses to take them to Jewish events all over the area, with sliding fees confidentially arranged.

n A volunteer or volunteer family found to befriend and stand by with a helping hand. As a community, we cannot expect Jewish family service workers to meet all needs themselves because, unfortunately, they have too many clients with urgent needs all the time.

I grew up in a Jewish community in Antwerp, Belgium, where needs were anticipated and taken care of discreetly so personal dignity was always preserved.

Arnoldine Berlin | Oakland




Policy questioned

Many thoughtful people are able to debate the Israel-Palestine conflict by addressing the legitimate claims and concerns of both sides. Such reasoned discourse is sadly rare here in the Athens of the West, where the norm is extravagant demonization and disingenuous enhancement of facts.

Berkeley's famed "free speech" often means screaming down or otherwise intimidating the opposition, usually for being insufficiently P.C.

The Berkeley Daily Planet's executive editor, Becky O'Malley, has now grandly announced a 30-day "acrimony break" from correspondence on the Israel-Palestine issue. Regrettably it is the Planet's well-worn "legitimate criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitism" policy that has fostered the climate of acrimony by printing inflammatory letters that would never see the day of light in a serious newspaper and have made the Planet a receptive forum for unseemly rubbish that passes for serious discourse.

A better policy might be "being entitled to an opinion does not mean it's OK to make up facts."

Richard Riffer | Berkeley




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