Showing posts with label past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label past. Show all posts

Thursday, April 28, 2016

A Personal/Open Letter to Naz Shah

Dear Ms Shah,
You don't know me and I only read about you in the Guardian article that stated your opinions regarding Israel and Israelis, and the subsequent turn of events. Still since you showed such interest in the future of my country and its people I would like to tell you a little about my past, it is a typical Jewish story
The last time my father saw his parents and his brother was in 1934, when he was 21 year old. He had worked for a Jewish firm in Berlin, and as the Nazis were putting a pressure of everything Jewish, the firm was transferred to Tel Aviv, my father moved there as well. This is how my father was the only one from his family to be saved from the Nazis.
My mother came to Tel Aviv, at the age of 17 with her family, they were Zionists and were granted certificates to immigrate to Israel because my grandfather had a job waiting, and his children were all under 18.
At that time, the 1930s, my country was under a  British Mandate (it got the mandate to rule that area in the early 1920s and it lasted till 1948) Immigration was banned, but some certificates were granted, my parents were the lucky ones. 
Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

Sunday, March 6, 2016

"Where Ignorance Is Bliss”: Bashing The Whistleblower

Although the Western German film, The Nasty Girl (1990) is not directly about feminism, it is no coincidence that the heroine, Sonja, is an intelligent and curious school girl, the pride and joy of her small town.The film is based on the biography of the journalist Anna Rosmus who grew up Passau in Bavaria. The nasty Girl is an example of the intolerable price that one brave whistleblower ends up paying for discovering and exposing the truth.
When young Sonja decides to enter an essay competition and chooses the topic: “My town during the third Reich,” she has no idea what this topic entails. Moreover, she doesn’t know anything about, her town, Pfilzing’s Nazi past, and can’t imagine the Pandora Box she is about to open. As she embarks on a quest to discover what really happened in her quaint little town, she threatens to expose forgotten secrets, which were hidden for almost 50 years.
This seemingly innocuous assignment, takes over Sonja's life and gradually shatters her world, and that of the people close to her. The townspeople unite against her and from being the town’s darling Sonja becomes an outcast.
Please keep reading in the Times of Israel