Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/mordecai-specktor/page/3/)
The Olympic movement professes to be above politics; but politics has dogged the Olympic Games since 1936. Berlin won the bid for the summer Olympics; and then the Nazi regime came to power, in 1933.
Hava nagila, hava nagila (Let us rejoice, let us rejoice) / Hava nagila ve-nismecha (Let us rejoice and be glad)
On Sept. 27, 2012, a recently terminated employee at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis went out to his car for a handgun, then returned to the workplace and gunned down Reuven Rahamim, the company’s founder, four other employees and a UPS driver who happened to be making a delivery. The shooter, Andrew Engeldinger, then shot himself to death.
Singer Max Raabe stands erect before the microphone, garbed in a tuxedo and tails with his blonde hair slicked back, and croons songs that were the rage of Berlin during the 1920s and ’30s, the time of the Weimar Republic.
Avishai Cohen is feeling under the weather. During a recent telephone interview with the AJW from his home in Tel Aviv, he sounds a little groggy, and he apologizes for his diminished physical state.
Thinking about same-sex marriage is changing in the United States. For example, there was the front-page headline in Tuesday’s edition of the New York Times: “Republicans Sign Brief in Support of Gay Marriage.”Again, this appeared in the New York Times, not The Onion.The story is about a lawsuit seeking to strike down California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8. A contingent of Republican notables have signed onto a friend of the court brief in support of the lawsuit that goes before the Supreme Court next month. The high court also will hear arguments in a challenge to the 1986 federal Defense of Marriage Act.The Times story notes that the Republican-backed amicus brief — signed by “top advisers to former President George W. Bush, four former governors and two members of Congress” — argues that gay people have a right to marry under the U.S. Constitution. This position “amounts to a direct challenge to Speaker John A. Boehner and reflects the civil war in the party since the November election.”The Proposition 8 case already has a “powerful conservative supporter,” Theodore B. Olson, who was the former solicitor general under President Bush and is one of the lawsuit’s two lead lawyers, according to the newspaper.The Times story also notes: “Legal analysts said the brief had the potential to sway conservative justices as much for the prominent names attached to it as for its legal arguments. Continue Reading
Sen. Sandra L. Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, has a spacious office in the Capitol, just down the hall from the House and Senate chambers. She is the second Jewish president of the Minnesota Senate — the late Sen. Allen Spear represented a Minneapolis district in the Senate for 28 years, and served as president for eight years, from 1992 to 2000.
In early January, state Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, sent me an e-mail, complementing my editorial about the horrific mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. Paymar wrote that, as the incoming chair of the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee, he planned to hold hearings “on gun control, school security, lack of resources for families with mental health problems, the need for training at identifying people with domestic abuse backgrounds and troubled employees, etc.”
On Jan. 31, U.S. District Court Judge Donovan W. Frank today granted ConAgra Foods’ motion to dismiss the class action lawsuit brought by consumers who alleged that Hebrew National sold hot dogs and other meat products that were not “100% kosher,” as the company claimed in its advertising.