Letters
LETTERS To the Editor: Thank you so much for Albert Vorspan's article on Jewish names (January 1977). My brother and I arrived in the United States with the balabatishe names Ruth and Hilel...
...Karl Marx (of all people) is not important...
...As examples, she offered Melvin or Florence...
...find a place well within the parameters of middle class respectability...
...Perhaps Dr...
...Two sex partners, both simultaneously trying to erase guilt sensations, may feel they are soulmates...
...Senator Clark, while consistently following a firm line on the need for "meaningful change" in South Africa, found that "as you travel...
...That goal of awareness, of which Rabbi Greenberg spoke, is rather foreign to the sexual revolution...
...you begin to discover the complexities on each issue...
...Thus, the priority for the American Jewish community must now be to infuse Russian Jews with a sense of Jewishness so as to provide positive motivation for further aliyah, or, minimally, to maintain some form of Jewish life within the USSR...
...His use of the word "holocaust" to describe the situation of blacks here is demeaning to the memory of our brothers and sisters lost in the Holocaust in Europe...
...January 1977) is an incisive, fair perspective on the neshira issue, but one more important point needs to be added: Most of the Zionists and religious Jews in the USSR were among the first wave to reach Israel during 1964-1975...
...Trude Weiss-Rosmarin New York, New York To the Editor: I greatly enjoyed reading Benno Weiser Varon's article on Hebrew language in your December issue...
...Rabbi Jacob S. Friedman Ocean, New Jersey To the Editor: Jacob Neusner's review, "With the Jews of South Africa" (November 1976) is acute, perceptive, compassionate...
...A "Yasher Koach" to you...
...We were embraced by relatives who wanted to know what our Jewish names were...
...Some were even funnier...
...But it's pretty likely that they're each so sensitively tuned into themselves that' 'the fullest awareness of God in the other person" is an impossible attainment for either of them...
...However, I would make but a couple of points...
...And that brings me to the second point: it is the whites who face a potential holocaust, in particular, the Afrikaner, the only group of whites to have developed into a distinct peoContinued on page 67 Continued from page 8 pie...
...This is a good example of Dr...
...S. Levin Johannesburg, South Africa To the Editor: Professor Neusner may well have won distinction as a scholar of religious and Judaic studies, and he certainly writes with a quality of persuasive eloquence...
...in articles in Jewish publications...
...Ellen Hellman Johannesburg, South Africa Jacob Neusner replies: Dr...
...How does a ruling minority preserve its integrity, and its future, against a hostile majority...
...Three hundred years of history has given them hegemony in this land, but for how long...
...Gay Talese, in calling Jews "the wanderers on the outside of established society," described our Janus-like stance in, for example, Seventeenth Century Holland, Franz Josefs Vienna and, for some of us, modern America...
...Ruth Salomon King New York, New York To the Editor: Neil Shister's article ("Sex: Professionals and Lay People," December 1976) is rich in subtle and thought-provoking challenges...
...He maintained that "the Philistines who gave Palestine and the Palestinians their name got theirs from the Hebrew word plishtim which means 'invaders.'" This is not so...
...What I find sad in such a response as this is Dr...
...But "With the Jews of South Africa'* (November 1976) demonstrates that as a social analyst he lacks knowledge, understanding, and perception...
...They explained that cousin Jerome and his sister Doris were named for our grandparents Joseph and Deborah...
...When our last child was born, cousin Sylvia (Sarah) asked why I didn't give our children Jewish names...
...According to Professor J.C...
...Glenn Richter National Coordinator, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry New York, New York To the Editor: After reading "Let My People Go—Where?," I felt that I had to share with you my feeling that you presented this most complex and difficult issue in a most responsible manner...
...Ethel Taft Assistant Director, Jewish Family Service Los Angeles, California To the Editor: Bravos and hurrahs to Leonard Fein for his straight, clear account of the dropout controversy...
...As to my description of (white) anti-Semitism in the Republic, I thought that I understated matters...
...A generation ago unmarried couples, homosexual couples, adulterers and spouse-swappers would say, "I can't talk about what I'm doing, because I shouldn't be doing it...
...For example, the relationship of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the South African Zionist Federation, far from being "mutually contemptuous" as Professor Neusner asserts, happens to be one of cordial cooperation...
...If I tell the world, I'll wash away my feelings of guilt...
...Greenberg, the name Philistine is first found in the Egyptian form prst as the name of one of the "People of the Sea" who invaded Egypt around 1200 B.C.E...
...They are treasures, certainly, and gems to be cherished...
...Thus, contrary to Varon's claims, the name cannot make a good theme for historical philosophizing...
...Fortunately, grass roots American Jewry and irate Soviet Jews in Israel managed to smoke out the scheme and spark a debate...
...It is the spiritual centrality of Israel to the Jewish people which has been the basis for most aliyah...
...The ill wind between the Deputies and the Zionists already has broken into print (e.g...
...He might find the wider horizons it opens rewarding...
...Communist, in the Republic, applies to anyone not in favor of the status quo...
...True, I also saw and reported how many people live rather comfortably and, while mouthing the right platitudes...
...I would respectfully commend to Professor Neusner that he follow this pattern of travel...
...Professor Neusner perceives South Africa as "a land of simple truths...
...So they tell the world and I believe that the telling, and the revolt against guilt that underlies it, are the real sexual revolution...
...This certainly won't be easy, as the destruction of the recent unofficial Jewish Cultural Symposium made clear...
...The name occurs in Assyrian sources as both Pilisti and Palastu" {Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible...
...We met Seth whose Jewish name was Samuel, and Miriam whose Jewish name was Malka...
...Hellmann's mental-set...
...As a South African and a Jewess who has lived a long life of intense commitment to the country of her birth and all its peoples, I, like countless others, am deeply aware of the blight of institutionalized racial discrimination which ravages this country, and of the glaring injustices to which it gives rise...
...Hellman did not hear about Minister of Justice Kruger's statement (since apologized for) that "Eichmann, after all, was a Jew," so the Jews brought the Holocaust on their own heads...
...Shister's essay makes me ask, what is this "sexual revolution...
...Rabbi Rifat Sonsino, Ph.D...
...Fein, in exquisite detail, exposes the entire sordid plot in which a few "Jewish leaders" attempt to play God...
...Greenfield further points out that "there is no acceptible Semitic etymology for this name, and it is quite probably of Indo-European origin...
...In my article, I never referred to "Jewish communists" at all, but to "the prisoners and exiles...
...Are more people sexually active, and in wilder ways, than a generation ago, a century ago...
...We know what we test, and we test what we can control and manipulate, and thank God that when we set out to manipulate human beings they wiggle through many a loophole...
...But the key to her letter is the reference "to Jewish communists" (small c...
...What I was told privately confirmed what already had appeared in public...
...The Hebrew word pelishti "is an ethnic adjective based on the territorial designation pelisheth...
...Glencoe, Illinois To the Editor: Your January 1977 issue was most interesting and informative...
...These all of a sudden are "communists"!—an astonishing switch on Dr...
...Far more eloquent than words, your pictures capture the feelings, emotions, committment and rapture of Yiddishkeit...
...Still, her letter captures...
...but Jewish existence has never been less than a constant challenge...
...Talese's Jews who "attack the whole social order" can see enemies in Gentile and Jewish society indiscriminately, as the article's interviewees Reems and Abrams demonstrate...
...Who knows...
...Hellman's part...
...The sexual revolution, if I understand its terms, hasn't advanced past narcissism...
...For me personally, it was good to see in print a validation of the position that I and many others in the Jewish communal service have taken in the last few months...
...Hellman's incapacity to perceive what was self-evident to many who read my article, namely, the deep expression of love and commitment represented therein...
...But, likewise, together with many others, I find the positively astounding arrogance and self-righteousness of Professor Neusner's indictment totally unacceptable---- But what else can be expected of the brave soul who loftily decides, without encumbering himself by any research, that Jewish communists in South Africa drew their inspiration from Moses and not from Marx...
...And why should it not be the case since once there is bigotry, it will know no limits...
...Who is inaccurate now...
...My brother and I arrived in the United States with the balabatishe names Ruth and Hilel Salomon...
...The blacks are persecuted and humiliated, yes, but are in no danger of being exterminated...
...American Jews of the 1970's will not make the mistake of the 1940's and accept blindly the doctrine that "Papa knows best," whether Papa is an Israeli or an American "leader...
...The first is quite disingenuous...
...Rabbi Daniel E. Kerman Buffalo, New York To the Editor: "Let My People Go—Where...
...I can't talk about my guilt either, because it's the feeling that goes naturally with what I'm doing...
...A distinguished journalist, who interviewed me at some length (and whom I interviewed in return), confirmed that Jew-hatred is widespread among the whites...
...Those who now leave are devoid of almost any Jewish background, and choose between Israel and the United States on largely materialistic grounds...
...God bless Africa...
...The article contains numerous contradictions, half-truths, exaggerations, wild generalizations obviously based on remarks made by a few unrepresentative informants, and blatant mis-statements...
...I have much sympathy for the Afrikaner...
...Permit me, however, to correct one of his statements...
...Irene Manekofsky Vice President, Union of Councils for Soviet Jews Arlington, Virginia To the Editor: In an interview with Muki Tzur which appears in his latest book, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, Gershom Scholem recalls that back in 1917, in his early days in the Zionist movement, he insisted that "it is forbidden to engage in propaganda so long as the propagandist is not setting an example...
...Hellman's examples of my "misleading presentation" are simply delicious...
...I married Edward Jefferey (Esau) and we named our children Deborah Anne, Judith Rachel, Jonathan Zachary, and Gideon Jeremiah...
...The people I listen to now say, "I feel guilty but I shouldn't, because there's nothing wrong with what I'm doing...
...Please convey this quote to the sundry Zionists, etc., who want to use pressure on Russian Jews to do what they themselves will not...
...In this he differs from Senator Dick Clark, who was also a recent visitor to South Africa...
...the mind-set of that smug, inhospitable, anti-intellectual, and self-righteous class of Jews who claim, falsely, to speak for the whole of Africa's Jewry...
...However, I must especially congratulate you on the meaningfully impressive display of photographs in the "Our Faces" segments...
...But there's undoubtedly a revolution in guilt about sex...
...I stressed the many ways in which South African Jewry brings forth exemplars of the noblest truths of Judaism...
...His description of the extent of anti-Semitism and of the strength of such Nazi-inspired organizations is as false as is his generalization about SABC television, which he based on an isolated and openly deplored incident...
...So maybe nobody knows if there's a revolution in sex activity...
Vol. 2 • February 1977 • No. 5
