Letters

'Blue-eyed Jewess'

Reading Michal Lev-Ram's July 30 column on "looking Jewish" reminded me of an interesting story that happened 25 years ago on a subway platform in Sweden.

I am a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewess who grew up in Minneapolis and had always "passed" for a fellow Scandinavian. Even my last name, the "typically" Jewish "Eisenberg," was mistaken by naive Minnesotans as being akin to "Soderberg" or "Malmberg."

So, imagine my surprise when I was visiting Stockholm and was standing on a subway platform amongst a hundred Swedes when an out-of-breath, lost Israeli musician came running up to me and asked me how to get to the symphony hall.

Resisting the old Carnegie Hall punch line ("Practice, practice, practice!"), I said I didn't know as I was a tourist myself.

I then asked him what made him approach me when there were dozens of others he could have gone up to. Without missing a beat, he shrugged and said, "I looked around and you were the only Jew I saw!"

Andrea Carla Michaels | San Francisco




The peaceful way

"The settler minority will win over Gaza because it won't back down," by Larry Derfner in the Aug. 6 j., left out the peaceful way of removing insecure and undesirable settlements not contiguous to Israel proper.

Don't use police or the army, just shut down the subsidies.

If the Arabs weren't receiving grants from so many countries, and if homicidal suicidal bombers were not promised large sums of money for their families, they might have sued for peace (like the Germans and Japanese did in World War II) by now.

Gerson Jacobs | Greenbrae




Across the divides

Thank you for your very hopeful Aug. 6 editorial about the upcoming Progressives' Aug. 21-23 conference on anti-Semitism and the Left in last week's j. 

The headline ("'Unlearning' anti-Israelism") and focus, however, may have left an impression that the conference holds a position relating to Israel, Palestine or the conflict. It is important to know that the conference itself has taken no position on these issues. 

Rather, the individual workshop leaders will represent their personal (and quite varied) positions, while they encourage meaningful dialogue. 

In relation to the Middle East, we hope to get beyond the impasse of "It's anti-Semitic to criticize Israel" or "The accusation of anti-Semitism stops criticism of Israel," to a more deep, complex and personal analysis. 

The conference is intended to be a place where respectful and effective communication between socially concerned individuals can take place across such divides of differing opinion and emotional reaction. For, in the words of Robert Anthony, "Your enemy may become your friend if you allow him to be who he is."

Judy Andreas | Berkeley




'Wisdom of hindsight'

Dennis Ross Aug. 6 j. opinion ("In hindsight, Arafat was no partner in peace") should be commended for asking himself the tough question: "Why didn't I see that [Arafat] was incapable of ending the conflict with Israel."

But his answers all have to do with Yasser Arafat's tactics of negotiation, and his deceitfulness in those negotiations.

It took a decade for Ross and many (though not all) Israelis to discover that Arafat was never really going to negotiate peace between Israel and a Palestinian state. For Ross and the Israelis of the Oslo process, that is the hard-earned and costly wisdom of hindsight.

What Ross might have seen from the beginning, which his article never mentions, was and is Arafat's policy of "incitement," the continued teaching in Palestinian Authority schools of every kind and at every level of the most vicious kind of anti-Semitism, of hatred of the Jews in Israel and elsewhere.

When the systematic and purposeful teaching in Palestinian schools of hatred against Jews ends, we may begin to see the possibilities of peace between those peoples in that land.

Martin Trow | Berkeley




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