That Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, was concerned about American blacks is not news (“Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s little-known anti-racist legacy,” Aug. 2). He wrote in 1910 that there was not “anywhere in the civilized world,” including Russia and Romania, “the kind of inequality” that existed in “democratic” America, and that lynchings in the American South were worse than the pogroms in Kishinev. His early novel, Virginia, revolves around the complicated psychology of an American southern woman raped during a slave rebellion and her Swedish husband. In some respects, Jabotinsky wrote, Jews were better off in czarist Russia than in the United States.
What Zuroff fails to mention in his article on the (72nd, not 70th!) anniversary of Jabotinsky’s death is the context for his subject’s feelings. Most of the early Zionists were profoundly affected by American segregation and deeply moved by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Jabotinsky called, the single “book which most directly influenced history.” Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir was similarly appreciative of it, and the book was one of the few novels in founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s library. The founders of the state on the right and the left were acutely sensitive to prejudice and inequality anywhere, which they invariably saw as analogous to the experiences of the Jewish People. They understood from their own lives why a Jewish state was an imperative, but their perception did not blind them to the suffering of others.
I wrote about all of this some two decades ago in my book, The Israeli-American Connection: Its Roots in the Yishuv, 1914-1945.
Michael Brown
Toronto
* * *
The Olympics
It should come as no surprise that the Palestinian Authority would object to the request for one minute of silence to commemorate the massacre of the 11 Israeli athletes butchered in the 1972 Munich Olympics. After all, this is a society that names its streets and parks after suicide bombers and celebrated the death of thousands of Americans during the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Commendations should be given to U.S. President Barack Obama, our federal government and the Italian delegation to the 2012 London Olympiad who supported the request for one minute of silence. Also to be applauded is Brian Williams of CTV and Bob Costas of NBC, who voiced their support when the Israeli athletes walked into the London stadium.
I am not surprised that Canada’s Dick Pound has remained silent. During past Olympics, he refused to acknowledge letters criticizing the International Olympic Committee for not punishing and expelling Iran for failing to compete against Israeli athletes. I would have expected more from an Olympian and a high-ranking IOC member.
Bert Raphael
Thornhill, Ont.
* * *
Gov’t cuts to archival program
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has eliminated the $1.71-million National Archival Development Program and made drastic cuts to its staffing due to the recent federal budget (“Archivists denounce federal budget,” June 14). The cuts – a total of $10 million over three years – will lead to the loss of specialized professionals who process the records and care for them so they can be made available in person or digitally to researchers in Canada and around the world. It takes more than simple scanning to keep these important documentary resources available to researchers in perpetuity.
Genealogy is much more than formulating a family tree for one’s amusement – there are much more serious reasons for doing this type of research, including finding lost or estranged relatives, such as survivors of wars or of the Holocaust; genetic research, such as tracking genetic diseases in families in order to avoid spreading these; finding a bone marrow match in families (genealogical research has saved lives), and finding siblings or relatives unwittingly separated as a result of tragedies or catastrophes.
One of the things that might have been done to help avoid having to make such drastic cuts is to have increased the fees for researching and mailing documents to those who request them. I would ask this government to please reconsider the recently implemented devastating budget cuts to LAC.
Merle Kastner
Vice-President and Programming Chair
Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal