Happy Birthday to June Foray, 96. Cruelly underappreciated; amazingly talented, and in way more things than you think she has been (Brady Bunch? Yup. Married with Children? Sure. Rugrats? Powerpuff Girls? Twilight Zone? Get Smart? Check, check, check, check.). HOF-level just for Natasha Fatale.
Good stuff:
1. Seth Masket on recall elections.
2. Phil Arena on Syria.
3. And Andrew Sprung on J Street and the ADL.
Sprung's commentary, and the linked pieces, are interesting in that they touch on something I've been thinking about since our great genetics debates with backyard: given all the reasons to explain the Holocaust (war and zenophobia and Depression and all the rest), there's one reason you can't say, for political correctness purposes, but it may trump all the rest: its a bad business for a race (here the Ashkenazim, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe) to do really well for themselves in a region where a) they are a minority and b) the majority is struggling, and c) the majority doesn't like them all that much in the best of times.
ReplyDeleteTo the extent that Jacobson and other ADL members probably skew a bit older than the J Street folks, I would guess they are more keenly aware than J Street types of the role Ashkenazi success (as outsiders in lands where the natives were doing poorly) played in their subsequent destruction. They're probably smart not to say it in public. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they talk about it at dinner.
Against that backdrop, its hard to fathom how Palestine, as currently constituted, being smushed together with Israel in one state would end well for the Jews. Maybe it would take a Hail Mary (sorry for the mixed religious metaphor) pass from Kerry or someone to get to a two-state solution, but its hard to see, given the current landscape, how anything else is viable for the Jews long-term.
Based, of course, on stuff you can't say but (at least) the older generation of Jewish folks no doubt knows.
Well, thank you, Seth Masket, for writing the most depressing article I'll read all day.
ReplyDeleteIf I were president, June Foray would get the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her work is amazing, and in interviews she seems like a class act through and through.
ReplyDeleteSeconded. And it's a shame that she was on so many classic Warner's cartoons without credit.
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