At one time, it was said that the rarest creature in the world was a non-Jewish violinist. Jews—like Jascha Heifetz – dominated the field.

    George Bernard Shaw, besides being a notable playwright, was an astute music critic.

Once, after hearing Heifetz perform, he dropped him a note:

My dear Heifetz:

Your recital has filled me and my wife with anxiety. If you provoke a jealous God by playing with such superhuman perfection, you will die young. I

earnestly advise you to play something badly every night before going to bed instead of saying your prayers. No mere mortal should presume to play as

faultlessly as that.

sincerely,

G. Bernard Shaw                                                                             13 June 1920

A question sent to Yahoo’s Ask section:

What personality traits do Jews have in common?

The following was voted the best answer:

good deli

funny

$

smart

tolerant

A quote from the 2009 book, “A Fine Romance,” by David Lehman, subtitled: “Jewish Songwriters, American Songs”:

The lyricists of American popular songs “followed a Jewish imperative in their abundant humor, wit, and cleverness and in their ability to mix sadness with elation and to produce thereby the mysterious tangle of romance. I’m prepared even to argue that the great American standards—such as ‘Blue Skies,’ ‘The Lady is a Tramp,’ ‘I Got Rhythm,’ ‘The Way You Look Tonight,’ ‘My Funny Valentine,’ ‘Tea for Two,’ ‘Love Me or Leave Me,’ ‘All the Things You Are,’ ‘Over the Rainbow,’ and ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’—are in some fundamental way inflected with Judaism even when the composer or lyricist was neither by birth nor by conviction Jewish. (Only one of the ten songs I just mentioned was entirely the work of a non-Jew, and he acknowledged that he was ‘writing Jewish.’)”
 
  The song: “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” The composer: Cole Porter.

  The “romance” in the songs was supposedly the Jewish songwriters’ “passionate romance with America.”
***
Lenny Bruce is quoted in the book as saying:

“To me, if you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish.”

A German physicist who worked for the Nazis, Herbert Matare, 97, lives in northern Germany now. He was interviewed by a writer for The Atlantic Monthly (March 2010).

  Matare said that he had never been a Nazi. He told of being questioned by the SS for suggesting to a neighbor that Hitler should be killed to speed up the end of the war.

    Lately his interest has turned to eugenics.  He seems to have “a deeply held fear that surging populations in the developing world will one day overwhelm and destroy the West. Compounding his concern, he said, is ‘the simple fact’ that people of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are not as intelligent as people of European descent. ‘There’s a gene you can check for brain development, and this gene is not there,’ he told me. [This is nonsense.] The more such populations are allowed to multiply, the likelier it becomes that they will pollute the gene pool and, in doing so, impede human progress.” He wants to “rein in birth rates in the developing world.”

Given his opposition to the Nazis, how does he reconcile his views with theirs?

    “You can always do something in exaggeration. The Third Reich went overboard because they didn’t have the guts to decide who was really useless and who was not…. People say what they did was eugenic. It was dysgenic! It was dysgenic because the Jews were more intelligent than the Germans.”

A small mistake someone made?

    Eugenics, clearly, remains a scary, dangerous point of view.

The following is a copy of an article by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008.

By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth—Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.  In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent.  We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe .

Graham Greene (1904-1991), the gifted British novelist (“The End the Affair,” “Our Man in Havana,” “The Third Man”), never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and this failure “has sometimes been ascribed to the untimely anti-semitism of his pre-war novels,” to quote Professor John Carey of Oxford.

Greene’s anti-semitism was “casual,” like T.S. Eliot’s and G.K. Chesterton’s; as Carey points out, “it was typical of Greene’s class and time.” (By the way, I have a letter from T.S. Eliot apologizing for the anti-semitic tone of some of his poems.)

Occasionally Greene would write “entertainments”—thrillers. In one of them, “A Gun for Sale,” there’s a “venomous Jewish industrialist, Sir Marcus, in league with international Jewish financiers and armaments manufacturers.” The Hollywood film made from the book, “This Gun for Hire,” with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, did not identify the evil industrialist’s religion or ethnicity.

In another of Greene’s “entertainments,” “Brighton Rock,” there’s a Jewish gang leader named Colleoni: “He looked as a man might look who owned the whole world…the cash registers and the policemen, Parliament and the laws which say ‘This is Right and this is Wrong.’”

Professor Carey comments: Hitler ”would have applauded Greene’s portrait of Colleoni….”

The subsequent film, “Brighton Rock,” starring Richard Attenborough, did not suggest that Colleoni was Jewish.

Carey’s conclusion: “In retrospect it seems regrettable that Greene should have published material that allowed such [negative] inferences to be drawn at a time when the persecution of Jews in Germany was already well advanced and many refugees were seeking asylum abroad.”

In 1981, Greene won the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, a high honor.

I’m glad he never won the Nobel.

***

Detecting Terrorists at Airports

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ajNpR6bmes

***

The following is about the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Look at the photos full screen and you’ll feel as though you are really there.
SCROLL DOWN, AND CLICK ON ATTACHMENT

KOTEL EN 360°

hold your cursor and you can move to any location, then change pictures and do the same. It scrolls up down, left right
 

    http://www.360tr.net/kudus/aglamaduvar_tr/index.html

Items from “Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance,” by Michael Goldfarb,
Simon & Schuster, 2009

                                                          ***
In Berlin during the 18th century, there “was a growing understanding of the contribution made to the city’s culture by this small minority and that its sensitivities should be acknowledged. In 1788, at a performance of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ at the National Theater, an actor came out before the curtain went up and apologized for the way Shakespeare portrayed Jews in his play.”
                                                        ***
“In the 1720s, the French philosopher Montesquieu wrote, ‘The Jewish religion is an old tree trunk that has produced two branches that have covered the entire earth: I mean Mohammedanism and Christianity… It is a mother who has given birth to two daughters who have covered her with a thousand plagues.”
                                                        ***
“It was already an old joke in Germany by the middle of the 1830s that ‘Doctor’ was a Jewish first name.”
                                                        ***
Influenced apparently by his father, “On his 13th birthday, Benjamin Disraeli [former prime minister of England] was baptized instead of bar mitzvahed. Yet throughout his life, Disraeli was identified by others as Jewish and acknowledged himself the strong Jewish component of his personality.”
                                                        ***
About Jacob Freud, Sigmund’s father: “When he was a young man, if a Christian coming down the sidewalk shouted at him, ‘Jud mach mores!’ ‘Jew show your manners!’ he had to take off his hat and step into the muddy road, just as Moses Mendelssohn or Mayer Amschel Rothschild had had to.” But Sigmund “had no interest in stepping aside.”

There was a New York rabbi whose son got a job transfer to Louisiana.

Two weeks later, the son phoned the father: “Dad, I met a girl, fell in love, and we’re gonna get married.”

The rabbi said, “Son, you know what they say about those Southern belles. They can’t cook, they can’t clean house, they don’t make love, and she’s gonna call you Jew Boy for the rest of your life.”

The son replied, “I don’t care. I love her and I’m going to marry her.”

Two weeks later, the son called the father again. “Dad, I married her!”

The rabbi said, “What about all the things I warned you about?

“Dad, she cooks like a dream, she keeps the house spic-and-span, and loves making love.” “What about the last thing?

“We came to an understanding. She doesn’t call me Jew Boy and I don’t call her Schvartza.”