Beginnings
While our attention is riveted on events in Teheran—and properly so—the death in Cambodia continues. The fate of 60 Americans held hostage in Iran is more dramatic than the ongoing genocide in...
...Try to explain the number, to make it more graphic—say, for example, that six million dead means that every 30 seconds of every 24 hour day of every 365 day year for six full years, a Jew was killed—and you get no closer to understanding, to comprehending the number...
...What gnaws, I suppose, is that no students have taken to the streets to demand that somehow, we find ways to bring relief to the Cambodians...
...So here we are, bearers of a proud name, and extenders of warm and wonderful wishes for the Chanukah season...
...Perhaps it is the number itself that inhabits our reaction...
...Still, something gnaws at me...
...Let us suppose that we send millions of dollars and hundreds of doctors and dozens of planes, and it is all too late, that we end up saving not two million, but only . . . how many...
...Our new readers may want to know, and our anniversary provides an appropriate occasion for re-telling, whence moment derives its name...
...Chag sameach...
...Imagine that instead of destroying Sodom, he had proposed to save some other place, but only if the numbers that could be saved warranted His intervention...
...And now we are told that it may well be too late for the Cambodians...
...Imagine that God had come to Abraham with a different proposition...
...Please read this issue slowly, so that it can last for six weeks instead of the usual four...
...Well, let us suppose that it is too late, that by a month or two we have missed starvation's deadline...
...Would he not have persuaded God that intervention was warranted if only 100—or 60— might be saved...
...Say, perhaps, 60...
...Sixty is so much more comprehensible than two million...
...Accordingly, it will be mailed about mid-January...
...Vladimir Lazaris's memoir of his own participation in the Soviet resistance movement is also, in my judgment, an especially exciting piece...
...The gripping eye-witness account we offer here is excerpted from a much longer manuscript, and we hope to bring you other parts of Lazaris's story in, future issues...
...A Chanukah gift to our readers is presented on page 5 in this issue...
...Der Moment was the leading daily newspaper (Yiddish) of pre-war Warsaw...
...And imagine that he had started with a large number—six million, or even two...
...How many lives saved will have made it worth the effort...
...Lately, our government has invested some effort in the saving of these lives...
...Will that do...
...I am proud that we commence our fifth volume with so auspicious an issue as this...
...Until now, we've not had a detailed account of how it feels to be part of that movement, of what it means, for example, to take part in a demonstration in a country where demonstrations do not last for more than a minute or so...
...No one understands what six million meant, no one can...
...The Cambodians started dying some months ago, and an untold number—in the millions—have already perished...
...Two million Cambodians are dying...
...Lately, the media have devoted some attention to the matter...
...Jacob Cohen's review of FDR's strategy regarding American entry into World War JI jepresents a kind of revised revisionism...
...It has become commonplace, in recent years, to deprecate Roosevelt's seriousness of purpose, and for those of us who grew up thinking that Roosevelt and President were synonyms, that's been a hard one to swallow...
...When we began casting about for a name for this magazine, it seemed to us appropriate to honor the tradition which holds that our new-born should be named after our deceased ancestors...
...Lately, we have started caring about them...
...Please remember that our next issue is the January/February issue, one of two each year which bracket two months...
...Would Abraham not have bargained just as we are told he did for the righteous of Sodom and Gemorrah...
...The Roosevelt story is not so simple, however, and Cohen shows that we have been rather excessive in our effort to bury the Roosevelt legend...
...We swallowed it, at least part way, because the fashion of the times is to deprecate, to assume that behind every act of nobility, there's a con, behind every wise tactic there's a selfish scheme...
...The fate of 60 Americans held hostage in Iran is more dramatic than the ongoing genocide in Cambodia, and I accept—and share—in the popular outrage Americans feel regarding what the Iranians have done...
...There is concern, but no outrage, no outcry, no developed sense of the calamity that unfolds before our blinking eyes...
Vol. 5 • December 1979 • No. 1
