Media Focus

MEDIA FOCUS Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish The New Yorker recently (March 19) featured a short report on the work of Al Grand, a retired New York City schoolteacher who translates Gilbert and...

...Richard Haas, the National Security Council Advisor on the Middle East...
...Readers are invited to submit excerpts from the press to Media, moment Magazine, 3000 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20008...
...After years of importuning, Grand finally convinced the Gilbert and Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island to stage a miniature production of his Yiddish H.M.S...
...Ikh ken gut shisn un ikh hob nit moyre far di Mafia...
...Grand does make some slight emendations...
...Neither Israeli leaders nor Arafat command the authority over their constituencies that Begin and Sadat enjoyed when President Carter asked them to make painful compromises...
...Now the company perAl Grand as Der Admiral in Der Yiddisher Pinafore...
...The audience went wild...
...Everyone I am training for leadership will have perfect features...
...They are pragmatists and, for example, regard Israel with no particular opposition and no special sympathy...
...and Henry Rowen, who has similar duties in the Pentagon at the International Security Affairs agency...
...The lawyers also contended that Pollard had not violated the terms of his plea agreement by granting two interviews to Blitzer...
...Other changes, according to the New Yorker article: "In the original Pirates of Penzance the nursemaid Ruth apprentices Frederic to a pirate instead of to a pilot, because she is hard of hearing...
...Second, can a reasonably secure compromise be worked out by which Palestinians and Israelis can share the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean...
...This group includes: Dennis Ross, the Policy Planning Chief, in many fields the closest foreign policy advisor to the Secretary of State (he has certainly elevated the Policy Planning staff to a new role of importance in this administration...
...And I'm going to enumerate all my good qualities in a Yiddish song...
...Arafat's Version of Soviet Jewish Threat Remarks by Yasir Arafat to Jordanian government officials in Baghdad, Iraq, carried by the Jordanian Ad Duatour newspaper and Kuwait's KUNA news agency, monitored in Beirut by UPI, March 26, 1990: "Arafat warned that Israel was using the influx of Soviet Jews to press ahead with plans for a 'greater Israel.' "'The Israeli enemy will now go on implementing his plan for a greater Israel...following the migration of Jews from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Ethiopia,' Arafat was quoted as saying...
...ALL: In kurtzn vil er zogn unz yetst ven er endigt op zayn lid— Er iz a Groyser General un er iz oykh a guter Yid...
...There is a remarkable coterie of figures who are known for their ability and which includes a significant number of identified Jews...
...And they maintained that the government had coerced Pollard's guilty plea by tying it to the sentencing of his wife, Anne, suffering from biliary dyskinesia, a rare stomach disorder...
...It doesn't really work in English, does it...
...The Arab-Israeli struggle is not about changing a regime or replacing tyranny with freedom...
...Grand added...
...Daniel Kurtzer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, dealing with Arab-Israeli negotiations...
...Middle East Peace Prospects Dim You don't have to be one of the shrewdest observers of the Middle East—as Samuel Lewis, former United States ambassador to Israel, is—to conclude, as Lewis does in a recent New York Times piece, that "prospects for any early breakthrough [in the Middle East peace process] appear dim...
...Alexander Haig...
...much more sharply visible on our campuses, which in turn have so often functioned as early-warning systems with regard to where American society as a whole is headed...
...Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense...
...They are joined by several non-Jews: Lawrence Eagleburger, Deputy Secretary of State...
...On the Middle East, there are only two individuals in the Bush Administration who can be considered to be particularly partisan...
...And while Gilbert's Major General knows math and history inside out, Der Groyser General reads Guy de Maupassant and bakes a mean honey cake...
...Too many on both sides still "cling to diametrically opposed conceptions of the final outcome of any peace process...
...He anchors Pinafore in Tel Aviv, for example...
...he told his interviewer...
...Ikh gey oysrekh'nenyetst mayn' ale mayles in a Yiddish lid...
...This is the most pro-Israel coterie of second tier officials in American history, and this list does not even include kindred figures such as Richard Schifter, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs...
...Stephen Trachtenberg is president of George Washington University and a professor of public administration...
...He is currently on a campaign to reverse the 'Zionism is racism' resolution...
...The Holocaust "has been exaggerated...
...Meanwhile an ad hoc coalition of Knesset factions requested that the Israeli government grant Pollard honorary Israeli citizenship, but the government ruled against the request...
...and Harvey Sickerman, a favorite Baker speechwriter...
...MEDIA FOCUS Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish The New Yorker recently (March 19) featured a short report on the work of Al Grand, a retired New York City schoolteacher who translates Gilbert and Sullivan into Yiddish...
...Grand sang the Yiddish version of the Major General's tongue twister for the New Yorker reporter, translating as he went along: "Ikh bin der Groyser General un ikh bin oykh a guler Yid...
...Arafat claimed that a 'greater Israel' would include 'Palestine, Jordan and large parts of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and that the first step in MEDIA FOCUS implementation of such a plan would be the annexation of Jordan.'" Pollard Tries to Withdraw Guilty Plea Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard's lawyers have 61ed with the U.S...
...So the gray top level is matched by a dynamic and more pro-Israel second level in this administration...
...Vuitton is too Jewish...
...He also advises his upper-crust followers, "Don't ever carry a Vuitton bag...
...they loved it...
...I am only interested in archduchesses and lords...
...He claimed some 300,000 Soviet Jews had settled in Israeli-occupied territories so far...
...From Stephen Joel Trachtenberg's address, "Iz Es Gut Fer de YidnV to the National Capital Association of B'nai B'rith on February 6, 1990...
...At this time, says Lewis, the major antagonists have not concluded that the status quo is intolerable—or intolerable enough to outweigh the perceived risks of making fundamental concessions...
...What is quite unique and interesting about the Bush administration is the make-up of the second tier of foreign policy officials...
...One is the vice president, who is edging out a more pro-Israeli position than he had in the Senate...
...All in all, a gloomy prospect for the peace process...
...As regards the Middle East, these were also people of extremes— extremely pro-Israeli or, in the case of Weinberger, particularly antagonistic, 'The personnel of the Bush administration, as in its style, present an image of gray, not black and white...
...On the other hand, there is White House chief of staff John Sununu, the highest ranking Arab-American executive branch official in American history, a man who is closer to the president in terms of time spent with him than perhaps any other senior aide, and who is clearly not sympathetic...
...Pinafore...
...rafia," "shmafia," A-HA...
...Grand's Yiddish renditions practically every weekend...
...I am the Major General and I'm also a good Jew...
...They are sympathetic to Israel and yet many of them have been entrusted with conducting American policy...
...Von Mierers' movement, Eternal Values, has taken hold of the rich, young and beautiful of New York's upper East Side, and some of his proclamations chillingly echo Hitler, who, he says, was "divinely inspired...
...I believe in the master race...
...Israel is evaluated in terms of its perceived political and strategic importance, but without any grand romantic vision...
...Chairman of the Interior Committee Ovadia Eli said it could harm both Israel and Pollard to grant him citizenship while he remains in an American prison...
...William Casey, the head of the CIA until his death...
...Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy...
...GENERAL: Ikh lern gut Gemorah un mit Toyre bin ikh gut bakant, Un alemol bay tog un nakht...
...Abraham Sofaer, the State Department legal counsel...
...The lawyers charged that the government had "breached the promises it made to the defendant in the plea agreement....Particularly egregious were declarations from former Secretary of Defense [Caspar] Weinberger...which, among other things, falsely accused Pollard of having committed treason...
...forms one of Mr...
...George Shultz, who was a kind of charismatic anti-charismatic figure but who, especially in pro-Israeli circles, developed a considerable following...
...Groyser General GENERAL: Ikh bin der Groyser General un ikh bin oykh a guter Yid, Ikh gey oysrekh'nen yetst mayn ale mayles in a Yiddish lid, Ikh hob a kluge kop un ikh farshtey Einstein's teyorie, Ikh ken dertseyln ales fun di gantse welt hi stone, Wl bin zeyer gut bakant fun ale mayses fun de Maupassant, Ikh tants, un zing, un makh a shpas— ikh bin a mentch mrt groys talant, Ikh ken gut bakn lekakh un ikh veys fun fotografia -(thinfang of a rhyme:) - "afia...
...and] Jews have to understand that their natures encourage pogroms," according to von Mierers...
...Contrasting Styles of Reagan and Bush on Middle East In a recent issue of the Jerusalem Letter/ Viewpoints, published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, UCLA Professor Steven L. Spiegel analyzed the differing styles of the Reagan and Bush administrations regarding the Middle East: "In terms of personnel, the Reagan administration, in keeping with the president himself, was an administration of great personalities, controversial, but figures who attracted follow-ings, who attracted attention: Reagan himself...
...East Side Anti-Semite In the March Vanity Fair story, "East Side Alien," author Marie Brenner uncovers New Age cult leader Frederick von Mierers' darker side: anti-Semitism...
...Nor has there been at this time anything like the secret groundwork laid in 1977 between Israel and Egypt...
...It is, first, about whether the existence of the tiny Jewish homeland in a region dominated by Arabs will be permanent or transient...
...He also stated that "Jews have been evil since the beginning of time" and his love of the Aryan race is underlined in his statement, "Germans have created everything...
...Early Warning "What the media refer to rather vaguely as a fissure opening up between American Jews who continue to affiliate themselves with Israel and those beginning to distance themselves from Zionism is...
...Indeed, so gray is this administration and so lacking in personalities that its most photogenic and quotable figure is Dan Quayle...
...John Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State...
...Peace may be breaking out all over, according to Lewis, but the Middle East is different—"devilishly more complicated [than Eastern Europe's regaining its freedom...
...April 1990...
...halt ikh di siddur in mayn hant, In kurtzn vil ikh zogn aykh yetst ven ikh en dig op mayn lid, Ikh bin a Groyser General un ikh bin oykh a guter Yid...
...Aaron David Miller, Middle East advisor on the Policy Planning staff...
...ALL: Er ken gut shisn un er hot nit moyre far di Mafia, Er ken gut shisn un er hot nit moyre far di Mafia, Er ken gut shisn un er hot nit moyre far di Mafi-Mafia...
...Only Hermes...
...in Grand's Yiddish version, Rivke mistakenly brings Fayvl to gazlonitn (robbers) instead of to rabonim (rabbis...
...Richard Clarke, Assistant Secretary of State for Political and Military Affairs...
...Painted by llene Volk Firetog...
...Hider was a misunderstood genius...
...or Richard Burt, the chief arms control negotiator...
...District Court in Washington to allow Pollard to withdraw his guilty plea, Wolf Blitzer wrote in the Washington Jewish Week (March 22, 1990), following up his moment article ("Free Pollard—A Cause for American Jews...

Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3


 
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