"Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail."
-Theodore Roosevelt
“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
Hon. Alex Kozinski, dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F.3d 567 (9th Circuit 2003).
The Smoky Row Elementary School in Carmel, Indiana held an “International Festival” on March 7 where children can display information about their cultural heritage in booths for everyone to see.
One booth included things like “The Children of Israel has always been a difficult nation” and “The Jews plotted to crucify Issa (Jesus).”
The local Jewish community complained and the school district apologized.
But how could any teacher have allowed this display to begin with?
Meet the Maxwell House Haggadah, a Seder favourite.
For more than a millennium, the haggadah has been the centerpiece of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The book sets out the ceremony for the Seder meal, when families tell the biblical Exodus story of God delivering the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt.
Joseph Jacobs from the Lower East Side started an advertising firm in 1919. Jacobs was determined to introduce the value of marketing to the growing population of Jewish Americans. That’s when he met Joel Owsley Cheek of the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company, parent company to Maxwell House coffee. Jacobs met with Cheek to discuss placement of ads for Maxwell House in Jewish publications.
Consulting a rabbi from the Lower East Side, who declared that technically coffee beans were like berries and therefore kosher for Passover, Jacobs secured a rabbinical stamp of approval for Maxwell coffee in 1923.
Years later during the Great Depression, Maxwell House turned to Jacobs for marketing help as the company was losing money to discounted coffee competitors. The idea was to give away a free Haggadah with every can of coffee.
It worked. According to a market report commissioned by the Joseph Jacobs Organization to guide its marketing efforts, Maxwell House became the coffee of choice for Jewish households around New York City.
The Maxwell House Haggadah remained largely the same through the 1940s and ‘50s, and soon achieved the status of a Passover classic. Yet the 1965 version marked a definitive break with the past. As 1960s culture introduced more minimalist, graphic art, raging against the classicism of the past, the haggadah’s images changed to reflect the times. And though the written text remained largely the same, the addition of English transliterations of blessings and prayers hinted at Americanizing Jews’ loss of Hebrew reading skills.
For the next 30 years, very little changed in the haggadah. But in 2000, it finally received a visual makeover, as seen in an advertisement that year. Stark graphics, popular since the mid-‘60s, were replaced with nostalgic photos depicting an intergenerational family at a Seder. This tender imagery invoked tradition at a time when many Americans had grown more distant from their Jewish communities, prompting concern from Jewish leaders.
In 2009, the haggadah achieved worldwide fame when President Barack Obama used it to conduct his first White House Seder. Shortly after, it underwent a complete overhaul for the 21st century. Maxwell House’s version was now less illustrated and included more written text, like the haggadahs used by more religious Jews. By eliminating antiquated words like “thee” and “thine,” the new version felt more relevant for a younger and more secular Jewish population.
In the following years, various versions have been distributed, in 2019 Maxwell House released the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel version entitled “Midge’s Haggadah”.
Still, the Maxwell House Haggadah is the most widely used Haggadah in the world with an estimated 50 million copies in print.
Source: Humans of Judaism, Wikipedia,
Kerri Steinberg, Department Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Otis College of Art and Design, The Conversation.
It turns out, then, that Columbia had something of a Nazi problem on campus. They were privileged kids in masks, but functionally Nazis nonetheless, obsessed with Nazi symbolism and Nazi language. Their violence toward the building workers only increased over time, as did their anti-Semitic harassment of Jews on campus.
This is what makes Columbia so unsympathetic. If Trump were merely trying to make an example of them, it could be easily demonstrated by showing that Columbia’s disorder was representative of the situation at universities across the country. But is it really the case that the Nazified atmosphere at Columbia is par for the course in American higher education? I don’t think academics at other schools really want to make this argument.
And thus we have the real reason for the administration’s treatment of Columbia: The “elite” institution deserved it.
Meanwhile, the case has raised another problem, this one much more widespread than the Nazi stuff. Columbia doesn’t want to comply with the government’s conditions, but according to the Journal there’s an emerging consensus that “the school has limited options because it relies on federal money.”
No one is forcing these schools to gorge themselves on public money. But with that reliance comes certain obligations.
The current crisis, then, provides an opportunity for schools to reconsider this model of higher education. They really can gain the kind of independence they crave, but that comes at a steep cost. Either way, it is not the Jewish students or the building workers like Wilson and Torres who put them in this position, and university administrators should stop making excuses and looking for scapegoats.
For those who have never worked in or abject to banking, this is 100% intentional. Accounting is very thorough (as it must be, it’s a fucking bank) and rest assured if you owed $41 let alone any amount needing a comma then it would be corrected immediately. You never hear stories of how a bank “lost” or is “missing” your loan amount.
Police in #Tira, in cooperation with special units, conducted a search of a house in the city, where a monkey suspected of being mistreated was found, along with a gun and ammunition. A 27-year-old suspect was arrested for investigation, with the participation of officials from the Nature Conservation Authority. The monkey was also taken for examination and treatment.
فذت الشرطة في #الطيرة، بالتعاون مع وحدات خاصة، عملية تفتيش في منزل بالمدينة، حيث عُثر على #قرد يُشتبه بتعرضه لسوء معاملة، إضافة إلى مسدس وذخيرة. تم القبض على مشتبه به (27 عامًا) للتحقيق بمشاركة مسؤولي سلطة حماية الطبيعة. كما تم نقل القرد للفحص والعلاج.
