I feel your angst, Suzy.  Public fora are often a scary place to express opinions.  There is a lot of hate out there.  In my heart, I am aligned with your passion, your sorrow, your concern.  For Jews, WW II will always be a part of the subconscious.  I have had the same dreams.  It is in our DNA.  

 Hi Suzy,

I am not Jewish, but I am reminded of this, which we have probably all heard but maybe need to be reminded of it anyway:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.  

-- Martin Niemoller 

Some things are out of our control.  But I do believe that you, I, and others reading this, should do everything within our power to NEVER let this (what happened in WWII) happen again.  

I do understand that it is still happening in this world, and that you, I, and anyone who is human and aware should do everything and anything within our power to change this or stop it.

That said, I believe that education is a key.  Teaching the children, in other countries, and in our own country, that this is wrong, is a start.  The Diary of Annie Frank is an important "tool".   Her voice speaks to us still.  I, too, read it when I was in grade school.  Maybe it is time for me to read it again.

I admire your courage and honesty in posting this.

I want to say something to help.  All that I can think of is:

"When you are suffering (worried)

 You need to ask yourself if you can do anything about it.

 If you can, there is no need to worry.

 If you cannot, there is also no need to worry."

Forgive me, but I cannot remember the source of this quote. But if anyone knows, please let me know.

I do not feel that this contradicts the above quote by Martin Niemoller.

I just want you to know that I admire you for posting this.  And I want you to know that I, and others are listening, and hear you. 

Also,  Suzy, (on another subject), in looking up your profile on iThou, I came across your link to one of your writings, which I very much enjoyed!  

I hope it's okay for me to post that link here.  I found it very descriptive and pleasant to read, and it left me wanting more!   Here is the link:

http://www.escapeartist.com/efam/60/Travel_To_Venice.html

Do you have more?!?  More writings?

Thank you for your post.

Sincerely,

antje blue zen puppy 

Plays well with others 

 Some (many) of those comments that you mentioned in your above post were an atrocious affront to humanity in general.  I think that many people just make ignorant comments on the internet because they want to get a rise out of someone, or they are just totally ignorant (or both).

Don't take those comments as a reflection of how the general population of this world is thinking!

Some people are just sick, and/or want to get a rise out of people by making sick, mean, and/or ignorant comments.

I do not believe -- do not WANT to believe -- that these type of comments are a reflection of the opinions of the general populace.

So please do not worry, Suzy.  It's sad, but people sometimes make rude comments.

Namaste 

Plays well with others

The internet is filled with ignorant racist stuck people.  (That is why they have come to the mental asylum known as Earth).  But it also has conscious, caring , clear and wonderful human beings.  

The holocaust happened.  And it happened to, I hear, over 50 million human beings.

As I read books like the Law of Attraction and watch the horror of the Bush administration which has caused 20 years

of devolution I can only look within to see where am I acting like a fascist today for working on myself seems to be the only contribution I might be able to make.  What are the lessons?  To get involved.  To speak out.  (For me, since I ought not preach...to pray and meditate).  Boycott the fascist media that allows Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly and the others on the air who aid and abets war and propaganda of the rich corporate elite that even now the Supreme Court is listening to.  Embrace truthtellers like Moyers and NPR radio.  Back politicians like Kucinich.  Thwart the warmongers and war profiteers under whatever guise they come.  My former wife and my daughter are "Jewish" and I mention this because my ex use to call me a goy.  I am not well versed in yiddish, Judiasm or Israel.  Though I am beginning to study them a little more now.  When she called me a Goy it hurt because it felt separative.  It is in Separativeness we all lose.  And it is in Unity we all win.  Physical violence, as far as I am concerned is always wrong.  I like my church because it was once called the Church of all Religions (not as an egoic one upsmanship but as an act of inclusion).  And it is Spirituality I now place my faith in which perhaps transcends all religions.  I am merely looking at what is so for me in this moment.  I believe in equality and freedom.  I am for the holocaust not happening again ever on Earth.  The words of many Spiritual people say all Men are Brothers.  And this is true.  Everyone in fact is you (us, me), I say though it may sound insane.  

I am reading the Aquarian Conspiracy and it is intelligent and profound.  It challenges me and my thought that the majority should rule.  I am uncomfortable with this new thought but am looking at it anyway.  I read it yesterday and the book is not in front of me now as I am again traveling, on the road.  The thought that as long as one voice dissents that one voice should not be muzzled...  And in this creativity/Democracy and Truth may come.

Let there be compassion.  Let there be awareness.  

Watchfully yours.  Rob G. 

I sent out an email to several close friends which was very similar to what I posted above.

My friend replied with the following regarding her now-adult son, with whom she has strained relations.

BTW: She herself is a Jew, which means that so is her son - although he refuses to acknowlege it. Now she regrets that because her ex-husband was not Jewish, she never encouraged her children to be aware their own Jewishness. (BTW:I have always been taught from birth that Judaism is not just a religion, but also a distinct ethnic group, and this has very been recently found via the Human Genome Project to be factual based on haplotype; see more at the link below - although c'mon, look at my photo; is it not obvious? If it's not, then you're probably not a Jew...%^)

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_a_Jew%3F

But I digress: here is here email in it's entirety, and it gives me chills. It also breaks her heart not only because of the emotional rift it has created, but also because of the guilt she herself now feels for having not made enough of an effort to defy her ex-husband and to encourage her children to embrace their own Jewishness.

My father, an English soldier, was at Auschwitz in an U.S. Army unit to break the camp from the Nazis. The release was bittersweet as people, who had managed to barely hang on to life, literally died in his arms.  He took and kept a Nazi flag and once he died, my son's family actually stole the flag not realizing nor caring about its significance.

My son as a young teenager actually disbelieved that the Holocaust had actually happened and that the camps were made up.  Even with sitting down with him and showing him the evidence, he still, to this day as an adult, thinks "it was made up".  It is very scary how people discount such an horrible act and scoff that it was 60 years ago, it's in the past.  I agree, antisemitism is growing again and I don't like what I'm seeing happening in this economy.

BTW: Goy or Goyim simply means "any non-Jewish person(s)". It is not considered a derogatory term, Neither is "shiksa" (a non-Jewish female), "shaygets" (a non-Jewish male), or "shvartze"(any Black person, who may or may not be Jewish - either by conversion (Sammy Davis, Jr.), or by birth (As in the case of my own older daughter.)

My older daughter Ariel is Ashkenazi on my side, and Portuguese from Cabo Verde (via Providence, R.I.) plus Seminole on her father's side. She prefers to refer to herself as a "macaroon"...

...then there is my granddaughter Leira, who we are still trying to come up with a cute "Yinglish" nickname for: Suggestions? (Leiras's father is mixed: Black + Chinese (paternal grandmother), Black + Irish (His mother has kinky red hair, freckles, white skin and "black" features"), and then after that even they lose track...Fortune Cookie maybe?)

Ultimatlely though, I have raised both of my daughters, mostly on my own - 15 years apart and each by different non-Jewish fathers, that to be a Jew is, as  Hannah Arendt repeatedly asserted a principle of claiming Jewish identity in the face of anti-Semitism:

 "If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever"; "A man attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or a Frenchman. The world can only conclude from this that he is simply not defending himself at all."

I hope that this also helps to explain why Anne Frank meant so much to me: She could have been me. It was only luck - or in my case, the unluckiness of my great-aunt's husband's death in an accident in Poland which forced her to immigrate along with my great-grandparents to America around 1900 because it forced the closure of the family dry-goods store in a small mostly Jewish city right on the border between Poland, Hungary and Russia, which fell to the Germans at the very end of WWII...

Thank You: I hadn't Googled myself lately, but look at that - I'm all over the place: There's also that album which plays on my home page, and the liner notes about the buncha 60s legends who I got to back me up in the studio for (it was a spec album for CBS that was never released... "Too psychedelic..." was the complaint from the suits at CBS in 1985.

http://www.isound.com/suzy_fischer_featuring_the_dinosaurs___john_c

If you're a Dead Head, or you liked the Airplane or Big Bro, and especially John Cipollina, this is a collectors item apparently, althoughI think I've been paid about $12 total for 22,000+ hits on the iSound site, so I just took the download function off of it...The "BIO" tab has all of the liner notes.

I have used to have a big photo album page on AOL, incl. lots of Esalen but then they started to chrage me for emailing my own stuff out so I took it down. It's on my hard drive, and if I could figure out where else to put it I would.

There a buncha verbal volleyball with me and Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman and a bunch other chefs being chef-like on the "blog" section in here somewhere under my name, and also on Ruhlman.com (do a search for "Chef Suzy" and or "Pastry Chef Suzy"around Mar-Sep '07 when some crazed Bourdain groupie named "Sorcha" knocked out my hard drive with a remote Vista hack  - apparently Mr.Sorcha is/was a MS employee with hacker code ), and then I have a new unfinished site at www.PastryChefSuzy.com.for my new patent-pending all Dark Chocolate and Real Dairy Cream Truffles. Also, if you Google Pastry Chef Suzy there are some reviews from the Chicago Candy Expo last May.

If you disdain chef-like profanity, then I'd give the Bourdain.Ruhlman stuff an NC17

...and I'm still on Match.com as "Suzy In Alameda"

      Hope springs eternal - even 38,786 winkies later...

 http://www.isound.com/suzy_fischer_featuring_the_dinosaurs___john_c

 I use Google Chrome (mostly) as my browser.  For some reason, I found that I had to copy your above link, then paste it into a new tab to make it work.  I don't know if anyone else will encounter this  trouble, but if you do, that's how I made it work!

Thank you, Suzy for this link.  Now I'm going back to it so I can listen to your songs.  :) 

Plays well with others

Thanks for the heads up, ABZP--nice seeing you.  :-)  

Hot links are connecting to the iThou welcome page.  Also, the link editor window opens blank--won't allow me to create hot ("clickable") links.  (Mac OS 10.5.8.  Safari and Firefox.)

 Just click on my iThou.com photo above, or on the "people" page, and it'll take you to you to my home page on iThou.com and if your sound on your computer is working the music starts playing from the iSound.com site automatically without even needing to leave iThou.com...(Thank you Albert %^D )

If you get tired of it, just scroll down below that big black box where a photo used to be (before AOL shut down their photo album link) and you can mute the music or stop it by clicking on the bottom left corner of the music window OR just turn the sound on your computer off on your own keyboard.

I like "Easy Evil" the best, although I should probably like "White Hot Spotlight" best because I wrote it. Sometimes I'll go for months without listening to any of it, and then I'll drop in here and it'll pop up unexpectedly and I'll like something else better - like the intro to "Watchtower" (Dylan - NOT Jimi! (I mean that as a joke - but it's truuuue %^)

I also really like "Sad to See You Go" - both versions -  because it was written years ago by a good friend of mine George Pedersen who is now homeless in Berkeley on Telegraph Ave. What a shame for genius like that to go unrecognized and unrewarded.

If any of those folks who did downloaded it and passed it on for free via some of the other (ahem...) more well-know band member's fansites, maybe it'll give you some idea of how unfair it is for artists to not be paid fairly for downloads (Listening is fine; listening is a "love" for the artist, but pirating downloads isn't fair, especially to folks like George, to whom I would gladly have given all of the the royalties to. He deserves them and he needs them. This is also a reason I had to disable the "download" function on the original iSound.com site...

Also because  - I shit you not - Dylan's lawyers called the producer Fred Catero, who had been Dylan's original Columbia engineer in the 60s - and threatened to take legal action, until Fred called his good friend Bobby (THE Bobby) while we were at the studio remixing from the original tapes onto CD a couple of years ago and got his mitzvah on these two versions. I was so fartutzed I practically plotzed! OMG: He actually heard my version: OMG! OMG! Even my mother was kvelling "Bob Dylan practically sued my daughter!!!"

The acoustic versions were done when I was 18, and the producer/engineer on those tracks (the last 4) is now THE Dr. Daniel Levitin, best selling author and subject of a recent PBS Nova special about "Your Brain on Music", which is really funny to me, because the last time I saw him he was about 21 and his brain was not only on music, but also on the white powder laid out on the studio mixing board. (Maybe that's how he got the idea - hmmm...I never thought of that before, but back then in the late 70s, was there ever a time when your brain was NOT on music if it was also on white powder - if you you get my drift? (Sorry; I punned.)

I digress (alot) Albert - if you're out there; is there any way to retrieve my photo albums that used to be on iThou via AOLs photo link, which is now defunct?

I lost a whole bunch of photos when my old Vista-based hard drive was hacked (see my blog (NC17) "The Mind of a Pastry Chef" on the blog; the part about the crazed Anthony Bourdain groupie whose husband happened to be an insider on the Vista project at Microsoft sent me an email letter bomb that killed my hard drive so dead that even the best data recovery folks in the Bay Area couldn't retrieve it.)?

I've never tried it personally, but I've heard that  http://photobucket.com  is a good site (and free) on which to store photos online.

Plays well with others

My granddaughter Leira, a.k.a. The Little Macaroon will finally get to have a real Hanukkah with candles and presents and everything. Thanks to the video of Anne Frank essay posted here and on YouTube. Mazel Tov, and L'chaim!

 - Suzy Fischer

Mom,

I would love to have a real Hanukkah celebration. We have room at our new place.
Why don't we set a date and make it a big deal. I'm sure Leira would love
that!!!

--- On Thu, 10/8/09, suzypfisch@aol.com <suzypfisch@aol.com> wrote:

> From: suzypfisch@aol.com <suzypfisch@aol.com>
> Subject: Re: IN MEMORIAM - 63 YEARS LATER
> To: ams32000@yahoo.com
> Date: Thursday, October 8, 2009, 1:02 PM
 
Dear Ariel,
 
So can we  PLEASE have a real Hanukkah this year, and I have the wiki page that will explain to Jason (Ariel's husband; a practicing 7th Day Adventist) why the Star of David is not the same thing as an inverted Pagan 5-pointed star?
 
" Hannah Arendt repeatedly asserted a principle of claiming Jewish identity in the face of anti-Semitism:
 
 "If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever"; "A man  attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or a Frenchman. The world can only conclude from this that he is simply not defending himself at all."
 
 
 Also: I posted to Esalen's alumni website
 and talked about you and Leira and what is a "macaroon"... http://www.ithou.org/node/5355
 
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: Ariel <ams32000@yahoo.com>

> To: Mom <suzypfisch@aol.com>; MOM

> Sent: Thu, Oct 8, 2009 12:53 pm
>
> Subject: Fwd: IN MEMORIAM - 63 YEARS LATER

> Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Ariel"
> Date: October 8, 2009 8:57:54 AM PDT

 Subject: IN MEMORIAM - 63 YEARS LATER

The prize doesn't always go to the most  deserving....
 
 RE: Irena Sendler
 
> There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady
> named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto,
> as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior motive' ...
> She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled
> infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the
> back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she
> trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing
> this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi's
> broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names
> of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most
> had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.
>
> Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize ...
> She was not selected.  
>
> Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
>
> Powerful message, especially the "cartoon."
> Let us never forget!  
> 63 years later

> Please read the little cartoon carefully, it's
> powerful. Then read the comments
> at the end...
>
> I'm doing my small part by forwarding this
> message. I hope you'll consider
>
> doing the same...
>
> It is now more than 60 years after the Second World
> War in Europe ended This
>
> e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory
> of the six million Jews,
>
> 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900
> Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and
> humiliated with the German and Russian Peoples looking the other way!
 
> Now, more than ever, with Iraq , Iran , and others,
> claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it's imperative to make
> sure the world never forgets,
> because there are others who would like to do it
> again...

> This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people
> worldwide!
>
> Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help
> us distribute it around
> the world.
 
> Please send this e-mail to people you know and ask
> them to continue the
> memorial chain.
> >
> Please don't just delete it.