Posts Tagged ‘Sharon Udasin’
Can Palin Win Over Jews?
Then McCain tapped a little-known Alaska governor as his vice presidential pick, one who had a habit of dividing the country into East Coast city folk and the so-called real Americans who live in more rural areas.
The Jewish community, it turned out, shuddered. And Obama ended up with 78 percent of the Jewish vote.
A year and a half later, Obama’s popularity with Jewish voters is sinking, and a group of Jewish conservatives is now touting Sarah Palin as the Republicans’ latest best hope to win over Jewish voters.
The big question: Will Obama’s growing problems with the Jewish community translate into popularity for a Republican only recently seen as a poison pill with Jewish voters?
Philadelphia political activist and former Philadelphia Exponent editor Benyamin Korn thinks so. The self-described “Independent” just launched a new website, “Jews for Palin – A Home Page for Jewish Independents,” to galvanize Jewish support based on Palin’s positions on Israel, energy independence and fiscal responsibility and her outspoken advocacy on “family values” issues.
To Korn, a presidential win for Palin would be no different than Ronald Reagan’s rise from “B-list movie-star” to California governor and the presidency, or Margaret Thatcher’s ascendance from grocer’s daughter to prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Worried by what he views as Obama’s chilly attitude toward Israel and complacency toward Iran, Korn said he was anxious to find someone capable of unseating the president in the next election — and despite the skepticism of numerous political scientists, he believes Palin’s personality and views on U.S.-Israel relations will prove attractive to Jewish voters.
“We are so upset about Obama’s Middle East policy that we’re looking for his biggest opponent — she is the leading voice,” Korn told The Jewish Week. “We have been impressed by Gov. Palin’s brilliance, charisma and courage, and we have supported her and wanted to see her advance since she made her acceptance speech at the Republican nominating convention.”
The site, launched by a team of six, has received over 10,000 hits in its first 11 days of operation, according to Korn. Since its incorporation as an LLC, the organization has received several small contributions along with one major donation.
Many political observers are not all that impressed.
“Anyone can launch a website, and a good deal of the 2012 presidential campaign will be fought on the Internet — this site seems to be an effort in that war,” said Sandy Maisel, a professor of government at Colby College in Maine. “However, Palin will draw little Jewish support — and I think it is noteworthy that none of the groups that they say launched the group have their names listed.”
Korn brushes off this omission, saying that the “the paint is still wet” on a project that was rushed because of his sense of urgency about deteriorating U.S.-Israel relations. He said he will announce an official advisory board in the coming weeks. Continue reading…
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From the website’s front page gallery:
Israel: Solar Light Unto The Nations?
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Jason Gewirtz is the senior producer for a CNBC documentary called “Beyond the Barrel: The Race to Fuel the Future,” which began airing last week and focuses on Israeli innovation in the clean-tech industry. While Israel has become a hub for alternative energy research, the Jewish state has yet to put many of its ideas into practice and is still almost completely reliant on oil, Gewirtz says. Gewirtz and his crew also explore Canadian alternative energy usage at the Olympics, German entrepreneurship in solar energy and Chinese environmental research.
A: How did you originally envision this project, and why so much emphasis on Israel?
Q: I pitched this because Israel was hosting an alternative energy conference in Eilat in February. … I wanted to have the reporter stand on the Red Sea, where you can see Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Israel. It’s sort of a shot across Saudi Arabia’s bow — here’s the world’s biggest oil producer, and just 15 miles away they’re having this alternative energy conference.
Evaluate Israel’s relationship to China, a country that is involved in alternative energy research but is also becoming a leading trade partner with Iran.
A lot of Israeli companies are also trying to do a lot of business with China because they’re able to mass-produce things. … Of course there are political problems with Israel and China. China is about to become Iran’s biggest trading partner and acquires about 14 percent of its oil from Iran. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be business with China.
What are some of the most impressive Israeli solar energy developments?
One is Yuval Susskind’s Aora Power at Kibbutz Samar in the Negev. We drove down there from Jerusalem, and from about 40 miles away you start to see this huge tower that is able to capture rays and energy beamed back up from thousands of mirrors pointed at it. This type of “community solar” will be useful for places in India and Africa, where there’s no grid connection and residents need hot water and power from within their own villages.
Another solar energy entrepreneur, Yosef Abramowitz, won many legal battles in order to hook up his company, Arava Power, to the national grid.
What about alternatives other than solar?
The Jewish Picasso Of Tremont
Hidden behind rows of shoddy warehouses, auto-repair junkyards and single-room-occupancy tenements, the Museum of the People of the World is largely invisible to the sporadic passersby in its gritty Bronx location, just east of the Grand Concourse and down the hill from the jagged bedrock of Tremont’s Echo Park.
The museum of what, you say? Where?
In a city of museums — from one on sex to one on biblical art — you won’t find this one in any museum index or listing, in print or online.
The quirky, intensely personal museum, which carries the New Age-y subtitle “A Sanctuary for All Who Enter” and only recently opened to the public, is a testament to one man’s creativity, vision and, perhaps, obsession. It houses hundreds of works, in a dizzying array of media, all made by the hands of 91-year-old Herbert Lagin — a tinkerer, inventor and self-taught “outsider” artist. In a huge storage space adjacent to the lamp-manufacturing facility Lagin has owned and operated for the past 60 years, the works memorialize the Holocaust, 9/11 and religious refugees.
A nondescript door marked “4269” leads inside the facility, which occupies the rear of the bright-orange Western Beef factory outlet. Once inside, past the pastel blue corridor, its paint peeling, a sun-filled and brightly lamp-lit section of the warehouse contains tri-fold screens filled with abstract paintings, chain links dangling from the ceiling and original glasswork scattered here and there. Admission is free, and any donations go to various causes around the world, most recently Haiti.
“He actually redesigned the space with all sorts of machinery and everything — it’s really amazing he did this on his own,” says Lagin’s daughter, Robin Langsam, who is one of five children and is a teacher in Armonk. “He created the vision of it and really followed through.”
A widower, Lagin lives in Great Neck, L.I., but drives in to Tremont several days a week to work in his factory-turned-museum. He says he conceptualized this museum just in the past few years, has been creating artwork since the third grade, when he’d reproduce pictures from classroom textbooks. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lagin graduated from Long Island University while working in a lamp factory and was poised to head to medical school when the Great Depression struck. Foregoing medical school in an effort to support his parents, Lagin continued working at the lamp-manufacturing facility and eventually opened his own factory in the 1950s and purchased other Tremont properties. In addition to his artwork, Lagin has been something of an inventor, acquiring patents for a lamp-mounting tool, a recovery pillow for open-heart surgery patients and forge-proof traveler’s checks, among other items, although never actually marketing these products.
“He’s always been ingenious and creative, even doing something as simple as taking out his little pocketknife and making handles on boxes,” Langsam says. She then maps her father’s artistic trajectory from mixed media to watercolors to copper to etched glass and today, to markers, Cray-Pas and collages.
“You find people who late in their life, when they finish what they’ve had to do for a living, really take on this amazing outburst of original and quite extraordinary artistic expression,” says Selig Sacks, a trustee of the American Folk Art Museum who in 2009 was named one of the top 250 collectors in Art & Antiques Magazine. Sacks examined 40 photos of Lagin’s work, at the request of The Jewish Week.
Near the entrance to the museum, a panel of photographs features twilight snapshots from Lagin’s Great Neck, L.I., backyard of what appears to be the Star of Bethlehem, the star that revealed the birth of Jesus to the magi in Christian tradition. Nearby is a wall spread of framed black-and-white photographs from the U.S. government’s Holocaust archives, to which Lagin has added color and replaced some of the victims’ heads with those of figures like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Islamic terrorists. “That’s [Ahmadinejad] — him as a Jew,” said Lagin, who may well be the only Jewish regular in the largely Hispanic and African-American Tremont neighborhood. “Everybody’s a Jew based on history.”
Around the space hang black chain links symbolic of wartime bondage, and behind the photographs mixed colors of paint trickle down the wall like blood. In a corner hangs a wooden cutout of a man, dangling from the ceiling on a hangman’s noose. Continue reading…
**Also re-posted on Jewlicious.com
Snapshot from The Jewish Week’s homepage:
Israel Versus iPad
Israel may be in a tense standoff with U.S. President Barack Obama, but the high-tech-savvy country seemed to be picking a fight this week with another formidable foe: Apple. And the Jewish state’s decision to ban the iPad, Apple’s vaunted new e-tablet, had tech writers and bloggers the world over scratching their heads trying to understand the move.
The reason? Israel’s explanation of the ban didn’t seem to add up.
“This device’s wireless strengths violate Israeli law and will overpower other wireless devices in Israel,” Ministry of Communications spokesman Yechiel Shavi told The Wall Street Journal, claiming that U.S. wireless standards permit stronger signals than those acceptable in Europe and Israel.
As of Sunday, customs officials had confiscated dozens of the devices, at Ben-Gurion International Airport, according to reports.
Tech writers are bewildered as to why other European countries haven’t voiced similar qualms. Among other mobile gadgets, Apple’s ever-popular iPhone — a device that Israel readily allows — actually carries a stronger signal than that of the iPad, noted tech analyst Richard Doherty in that same Journal article.
Some experts are even suggesting that the Israeli powerbrokers are actually trying to rig the country’s iPad market. By barring consumers from bringing in the device from the U.S., the government will force Israeli consumers to purchase iPads through Israel’s sole licensed Apple retailer, iDigital, blogs David Shamah, a high-tech correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and other publications. iDigital, several articles have noted, happens to be owned and operated by Nehemia Peres, the son of Israeli President Shimon Peres.
“Israel has some of the leading experts in the IT [information technology] area in the world,” said new-media scholar Andre Oboler. “The Israeli government should move to get independent advice.” Continue reading…
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