This comes from the Jewish Heritage E-Report (June 27, 2008)
World News about Jewish Art, Architecture & Historic sites from the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM)
Edited by Samuel D. Gruber / Contact and send news items to
samuelgruber_at_gmail.com

Jamaica: Documentation of 18th Jewish Cemetery at Hunt's Bay
(Ainsley Henriques, Rachel Frankel, Anne Hersh and Samuel Gruber contributed to this article)

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An amazingly simple legacy of free speech, civil disobedience, philosophy of language and culture criticism all wrapped up in the guise of stand up comedy.

New York City to me has rarely been to me the voice of Woody Allen or Seinfeld. New York City has always been the voice, the "tawk" and the raunchy wit of George Carlin.

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Twat

To celebrate George Carlin as a champion our civil rights and the integrity of the US Constitution I give you thee the original stand up skit that went into the Supreme Court Decision of FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION v. PACIFICA FOUNDATION, 438 U.S. 726, 98 S.Ct. 3026 (1978).

Magna Carta, the Great Charter that established the rights of the subject versus the sovereign, including the fundamental right of Habeas Corpus, was signed - technically, had the King's seal affixed - on today's date in 1215, 793 years ago.

That's certainly worth remembering, given that even the passage of almost eight centuries has not been sufficient to create a proper respect for this fundamental right among so-called "conservatives".

So today, raise a glass to Magna Carta and the five Supreme Court Justices who just, again, reminded George Bush and his co-conspirators that the fundamental laws of the land remain in force. Thankfully, the nation can look forward to the end of Bush's term in office in just, at this writing, 218 days; that may just be worth raising another glass over.

I have been reading two books that deal with pre-Columbian America: 1421 by Gavin Menzies and 1491 by Charles Mann. Both present controvesial but interesting theories of what happened before Columbus in the Americas. I find my self only partly convinced by each book and, in fact, think that the two theories wind up, in their extreme forms, to be mutually exclusive.

My mother was an Anthropologist and as a kid we often went to museums of all sorts. I was exposed to pre-Columbian art and archaeology, but never found it as compelling as European and Asian art and archaeology. Looking back, I felt little connection with pre-Columbian cultures. I had more connection to modern Native American culture than ancient, as if in some ways I bought the olf fallicy that Native Americans didn't really have a history of their own. I think I first awakened to the pre-Columbian cultures in graduate school when I was lucky enough to see the Treasures of Sipan exhibit at UCLA (the only US museum that got to display the exhibit...it is permanently housed in Peru). This was billed as being as spectacular as the Treasures of King Tut which I had seen and was amazed by as a kid. I scoffed at that, but still went to see it. It was just as spectacular as any ancient art and I was blown away. The Treasures of Sipan showed artifacts from a nearly untouched tomb from the Moche culture in South America. It made me appreciate just what the ancient Andean cultures were really like and was the first time I felt an affinity with a pre-Columbian culture.

Recently I wrote a piece kind of throwing together the ideas of human evolution and personal genealogy, two things that clearly are ultimately connected because they both come down to simple genetics and who begat whom, but in reality are so separated in time that we cannot properly connect them. But those who accept genealogies and DNA tests for paternity have to accept evolution, because the concepts are the same. Ultimately genes work a certain way and we understand how they work quite well. Evolution is no great mystery or controversy. What is amazing is that Darwin, with no concept of genes, came up with a system that once genes were studied was found to fit very well how genes actually work. Genetics and Evolution started as separate fields, but amazingly the two separate fields merged almost perfectly. To me genealogy is simply what we can see up close of our evolutionary path. Once we get a few generations back, the branches of our ancestry become quite tangled and hard to see...but they are there. And their imprint is in our genes.

One of my annual diaries (when I remember to do them) is honoring the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during WW II, which happened to coincide with Hitler's birthday in 1943. I happen to feel that it was a particularly good birthday present for Hitler: the defeat of his elite force by a bunch of half starved, barely armed Jews.

This year the anniversary is particularly poignant because, as in 1943, Passover began at sundown on April 19th and April 20th, the day the uprising took off, was the first day of Passover.

Last night, at the Seder we attended, the hostess compiled her own Haggadah for the evening. Within it she included something that seemed out of place and too modern...except that it was perfectly appropriate for a night that in 1943 was the Passover Seder, such as it was, just before the Warsaw uprising. In her photocopied Haggadah she included this (source unknown):

Every year at Passover I write a diary focused on the origins of Jews. This year I have one new insight into the origins of Judaism, and it comes from a direction that isn't quite what I was expecting, and it both goes along with and maybe modifies what is in the bible. So if you have read this before, keep with it, because I caught on to one of the earliest signs of something new in "Israel" originating in Egypt...just like the Passover legend suggests.

Passover celebrates, supposedly, the escape of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. This escape is considered one of the defining moments in Judaism, perhaps THE defining moment. Into this event is placed the entirety of the ancient Jewish identity, supposedly divided into "12 tribes," as well as the defining of Jewish religious law. That is a lot to put into one holiday!

Race, ethnicity, culture, family...all important to people. But usually we think of these things completely separate from reality.

I have been reading several books that together have put some of this into perspective. Each of us are part of the whole sweep of human evolution, and we are all related in a very real, genetic way.

This man might be your ancestor:

(Ramesses II, king of Egypt, 13th century BC)

Yep, I bet lots of people today could, if only we had all the information, trace their ancestry back to this man. I would guess somewhere in the millions of people today are his descendants.

Go back far enough and we are all related. This is a fact. Or, more precisely, every little piece of our DNA ultimately derives from a common ancestor that can be traced back to some specific time and place.

To all of our Jewish readers, Hag Hanukkah Sameach. This is the first night of Chanukkah, that minor holiday that got blown out of proportion due to marketing. Since Christmas got marketed to kids' greed, Chanukkah had to be so marketed as well.

Fundamentally, Chanukkah is a historical holiday. Although the clebration commemorates a supposed miracle (the use of one day's worth of oil for a full 8 days needed to purify the Temple) the underlying meaning is historical.

Sobibor was almost the forgotten Nazi Death Camp. It was almost forgotten because the SS themselves tried to eradicate all traces of the camp. The camp had become an embarrassment after nearly half the Jews at the camp rebelled and escaped.

That rebellion happened today in 1943.

Sobibor was one of the actual "Death Camps" where extermination was the primary goal. Most concentration camps focused on working the prisoners to death. The "Death Camps" focused on killing them as fast as they could. There were six death camps, all located in Poland: Aucshwitz II, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. More than 250,000 people were murdered at Sobibor alone. Both Treblinka and Sobibor were destroyed thanks to Jewish uprisings.

At 4 PM, Oct. 14th, 1943, rebels led by Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky started killing SS soldiers at Sobibor. The first to die was the camp's deputy commander, killed as he visited the tailor's shop to try on a new uniform. Here is an account of that first blow as told by a survivor: