Memorable Encounter
I read in The Jewish Press (Week in Review, March 3), the sad news of the death of Leah Adler, Steven Spielberg’s mother, at the age of 97.
You published in the same issue a beautiful tribute by Jeanne Litvin titled “My Good Friend, Leah Adler, Will Be Missed.”
Eleven years ago my wife, Anne, and I had the privilege of meeting Leah Adler at The Milky Way, her kosher restaurant in Los Angeles.
It was one encounter, but a memorable one. We remember a simple, natural, charming, and leibedig woman.
Dr. Elie Feuerwerker
Highland Park, NJ
Schumer’s Double Standard
Re “The Troubling DNC Election” (editorial, March 3):
It was surely perplexing that New York Senator Chuck Schumer led the support for Keith Ellison, who once worked for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, in the race for Democratic National Committee chairman.
But Schumer’s perplexing behavior was again on display with his attack on Attorney General Sessions, as he sanctimoniously lectured him that “there cannot be even the scintilla of doubt about the impartiality and fairness of the attorney general.”
Was Schumer as concerned about the “impartiality and fairness” of the two most recent attorneys general?
Eric Holder’s Department of Justice operated as a virtual mirror to President Obama’s agenda. His successor, Loretta Lynch, assured everyone that during her very private airport meeting with Bill Clinton they discussed only their grandchildren and golf scores.
Schumer’s blatant hypocrisy is stunning in its depth and scandalous in its scope.
Fay Dicker
Lakewood, NJ
On Balance, A Good Speech
President Trump has surprised everyone again and again: when he first ran for the White House, when he won the Republican nomination, and when he won the White House, to name only the three most obvious occasions.
He did it again last week when he delivered the best speech of his political career, and presumably of his life. There were moments of genuinely fine oratory in his address to a joint session of Congress, and none of the meandering diversions with which he has ruined speeches before (notably his convention acceptance speech). He was, perhaps for the first time, truly and impressively presidential.
He was successful in front of Congress not simply because he avoided blunders and was dignified and frequently powerful. It was also because he steered skillfully between the Scylla of vacuous platitudes and the Charybdis of wonkish detail that even many of his more experienced predecessors have failed to avoid.
Trump delved into policy without going through a boring laundry list, as President Bill Clinton sometimes did. He spent time on the most important topics – replacing Obamacare, repairing our broken immigration system, and reforming taxes. He offered specific directions for the implementation of those reforms, mostly within the guidelines of orthodox Republican thinking.
Conservatives still have plenty to grouse about. Trump’s healthcare policies are expensive, as are his infrastructure ideas, and the president proposed no way to pay for these other than by the massive economic growth he promises. We hope that promise comes to pass, but Trump cannot guarantee its delivery. He also attacked free trade, citing President Lincoln, of all people, as his mentor on protectionism.
But on balance there was much more conservatism than big-government Trumpism in the speech.
Brian J. Goldenfeld
Woodland Hills, CA
Silence Over Iran
If you yell fire in a theater when there is no fire, you can be sentenced to jail time. Hitler wrote before he became chancellor of Germany what he would do if he were ever placed in a position of power, and the world saw him do it.
Iran doesn’t yell fire; it simply says that if given the opportunity it would kill every man, woman, and child in Israel and America. The world is silent even though a country led by evil men openly continues to train and finance suicide killers all over the world.
And those evil men are developing ICBMs along with nuclear weapons for a future day of reckoning. And again the world sits still.
The time has come for the people living in the countries that are members of the UN to demand that their representatives vote to expel Iran for violating the basic principles of the UN charter – and the very purpose for which the organization was created.
Norman Ciment
Miami Beach, FL
Truman And Holocaust Survivors
Re “From Cyrus to Truman,” the March 3 Eretz Yisrael in the Haftarah column:
In his memoirs, President Truman wrote:
“The fate of the Jewish victims of Hitlerism was a matter of deep personal concern for me. I have always been disturbed by the tragedy of people who have been made victims of intolerance and fanaticism because of their race, color, or religion. These things should not be possible in a civilized society. Russia and Poland, in recent history, have been terrible persecutors of the Jews, and east of the Rhine, ghettos were the rule, some of them going back to the Middle Ages.
“But the organized brutality of the Nazis against the Jews in Germany was one of the most shocking crimes of all times. The plight of the victims who had survived the mad genocide of Hitler’s Germany was a challenge to Western Civilization, and I as president I undertook to do something about it. One of the solutions being proposed was a national Jewish home in Palestine.”
Early in his administration President Truman wrote to Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, about Jewish Holocaust survivors, saying:
“There is a great interest in America in the Palestine problem. The drastic restrictions imposed on Jewish immigration by the British White Paper of May 1939 continue to provoke passionate protest from Americans most interested in Palestine and the Jewish problem. They fervently urge the lifting of these restrictions which deny to the Jews, who have been so cruelly uprooted by ruthless Nazi persecutions, entrance into the land which represents for so many of them their only hope of survival.
“Knowing your deep and sympathetic interest in Jewish settlement in Palestine, I venture to express to you the hope that the British government may find it possible without delay to lift the restrictions of the White Paper on Jewish immigration to Palestine.”
After Churchill was defeated in the next election and a Labour government took power, Truman called on Britain to allow 100,000 Jews to enter pre-state Israel. He was rebuffed.
If only Truman had been listened to, how different history would have been. How many lives would have been saved? King Cyrus, as ruler of most of the then-known world, had the power to issue the proclamation for Jews to return to the Land of Israel. Truman did not have this power, because Britain occupied the Promised Land. But when Israeli independence was declared, Truman was the first head of state to give the new state of Israel de facto recognition.
Reuven Solomon
Forest Hills, NY