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By: Darius2025

Darius2025 — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 03:27:17 +0000

Jews… worse than black people. Milking it for a few thousand years longer. Just f’n stop it already and get over it. Shit happened.

By: Maria

Maria — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 03:13:13 +0000

I grew up in the post WWII Argentina. Jacobo Timerman was correct. The “dirty war” thinking was much more far reaching. Videla had publicly announced that they wanted to ‘eradicate the subversive mind.’ If Jews figured in large numbers among the disappeared it is because they are highly educated and liberal in thought. Many non-Jews were also incarcerated and tortured. Women professionals, in particular, suffered a great deal. Argentina in 1978 was not the country I had known. You were at risk if you spoke the wrong word on a bus, if you did not carry your ID on you, or disagreed with ridiculous propositions such as Carter is a Communist or Blacks are racially inferior because they are always dictators, or people have freedom in Argentina. Everybody who was not extreme right, pro-junta or male oriented could be defined as subversive. IT is a human rights problem.

By: wgbh

wgbh — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:06:51 +0000

i remember those days as if they were yesterday. jacabo and rch were cut out of the same mold and they certainly enjoyed each other, so i understand. but the real issue was always gravier. everything else was a ruse. years latter it came back and touched my good friends pepe and ricardo. the all disappeared the same way! it really is a very interesting story!

By: Rabbi Dario Feiguin

Rabbi Dario Feiguin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:45:31 +0000

I was a teenager in those hard times in Argentina. My great concerns were soccer, philosophy and rock and roll. But I was there in the middle of the storm. I was several times beated by the police just for having long hair. In those times “La Opinion” was almost the unique newspaper not controlled by the Junta. Every human being I know is full of contradictions, lights and shadows. Jacobo Timerman was a warm and kind person who used to say his own truth no matter how easy or difficult was for some sectors of power to swallow it. I knew him and his family. He was in my precarious asbestos house at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sharing a Shabbat Dinner. I agree with Jacobo, as my Teacher Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer taught me, that Criticism is not lack of love. On the contrary, it might be an act of true love. I also realized after so many years how different is reality when it impacts you. How different is speaking about torture before than after you has been tortured. As I said, most of us are just human beings, neither saints nor monsters. But I have a deep respect and a profound admiration for that loving man who said what he felt knowing that as a Jew he wil be punished with brutal cruelty.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:57:01 +0000

Timmerman actually represents how many Jews feel towards Israel and their fellow Jews. As long as we are victim we are loved. When we try to defend ourselves we are fascist aggressors. As a resident of Israel I can tell you that no other country in the world would have put up with the cross border attacks from Lebanon that were occurring then. Today I especially find this sort of criticism amusing from Liberal Jews in the US, who, in response to 1 attack in New York support the destruction of Afghanistan and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians half way around the world, while condemning Israel for responding to 8 years of shelling and sniping from neighboring Gaza.

By: Chas Hardholtz

Chas Hardholtz — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:45:45 +0000

Professor Kevane has truly spoken truth to Power. Brava!

By: Joe Gotlib

Joe Gotlib — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:18:43 +0000

Thos article that I found in a blog is the best possible answer to the so called “professor” Kevane

http://blog.z-word.com/2010/01/jacobo-timerman-smeared/

Jacobo Timerman Smeared
Published by Eamonn McDonagh on January 29, 2010 in Argentina, antisemitism, bad journalism and intelligentsia.
1.

Many readers will be familiar with the name of the Argentine journalist and publisher Jacobo Timerman. Kidnapped and tortured by agents of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, he was eventually allowed to leave for Israel where he wrote a book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number that was to become a classic account of the horrors of military rule in Argentina.

I mention him here because of the appearance of this bizarre and repugnant text by Bridget Kevane in Tablet. It’s hard to fathom the author’s intentions but it doesn’t seem excessive to suggest that she seeks to play down his suffering and insinuate that he somehow deserved what happened to him because he didn’t live his Jewishness in a way she approves of.

One of the most immediately striking problems about the essay is that the author seems to think that she has made some sort of big discovery about Timerman in the shape of newly declassified cables from the US Embassy which report conversations with him. She appears to find it particularly troubling that he is reported as denying the existence of antisemitism in Argentina. Well, so what if he did? He may have had any number of reasons for saying so and even if he said it and meant it, what does that change in our view of him as a victim of state terror? Is there an appropriate set of opinions for all Jews to have on the question of antisemitism? Do you have to have a set of well-founded opinions in order to have rights.

She describes Timerman as having been “arrested” and later as hoping to have “charges” against him “cleared up quickly”. What actually happened is that he was kidnapped and savagely tortured by group of fanatically antisemitic members of the security forces. The pretext for the kidnap – apart from the racial hatred of those who carried it out – was to find out what had happened to, and if possible to steal, the fortune of David Graiver, a banker and business associate of Timerman’s, who had died in a plane crash in Mexico. The author also speaks of the “Graiver scandal”, presumably on the basis of his supposed relations with the Montoneros revolutionary Peronist movement and doesn’t hold back from describing it as “the legal reason” for Timerman’s “imprisonment”.

The author’s mimicry of the soothing euphemisms employed by the terrorist regime that ran Argentina at the time would be outrageous in any context, it’s doubly so coming from someone who seeks to judge Timerman’s conduct.

By the time he founded La Opinión, Timerman had lived through several military coups and changes in government and he had intimate connections with almost every regime.

A miserable attempt at a smear. As a journalist and later a publisher Timerman had little choice but to develop what relations he could with those who were in a position to censor and generally control the press. The same goes for every other person in Argentina doing the same kind of work.

Timerman is also chided for his friendship with Juan José Güiraldes, a scion of Argentina’s land-owning aristocracy.

Having Güiraldes on his side, working with him on journalistic ventures such as the newsweekly Confirmado granted Timerman full acceptance in the Argentine elite; his adopted homeland came to view him as one of its own.

At this point I’d modestly suggest that getting fully accepted by the Argentine elite probably has more to do with having lots of money than having one particular friend and that goes for Jews and Gentiles.

Professor Kevane has no bones about making stuff up in her attempt to portray Argentina as some sort of hell for Jews.

… in 1919, Buenos Aires had experienced a pogrom that resulted in 800 dead and 4,000 wounded.

What she’s talking about is an event known as La Semana Trágica, a series of disturbances which certainly involved attacks on Jews and synagogues but also attacks on socialist and anarchist organizations. A pogrom, in the sense that term is normally understood, it certainly was not.

Timerman was a towering figure in the history of Argentine journalism. He had flaws and committed numerous errors of judgment. The most important of these was failing to spot that the 1976-83 dictatorship was going to be quite different from the ones that preceded it, that it would behave with unprecedented barbarity and with genocidal intent. He paid very dearly for that mistake. It ill behooves a contemporary academic to serenely echo the language of his torturers while sneering at the way he chose to live his life.

A disproportionately high number of Argentine Jews suffered a similar or worse fate to that of Timerman, a fate that didn’t depend on how, or to what extent they had attempted to assimilate into Argentine society but rather on the criminal hatred of those that inflicted it on them.

By: George Smathers

George Smathers — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 03:09:46 +0000

Like many sophomoric wits Fisher et al. miss the author’s subtle and nuanced argument and instead assail her painful truth. Timerman was one more Stockholmed Jew that convinced himself that the old rules no longer applied. He brings to mind the purged apparatchiks who while being hauled away by the NKVD shouted “Tell Comrade Stalin!”

Our prairie schoolmarm has seen through the gauzy hagiography one normally meets of Timerman. Rather than perpetuating a soothing caricature, she has illuminated the discordant tones of a 20th Century leftist Jew. For this Kevane deserves high praise rather than puerile scorn.

By: Earl Ganz

Earl Ganz — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:21:03 +0000

Dear Jerrold Katz,

When a sophist argues, the first thing he tries to do is destroy his or her opponents’ character,
usually by questioning his or her opponents’ motives for taking the positions they do. It’s a
deplorable tactic and lazy too. Emanuel Pearl is guilty of doing this. And he doesn’t need to.
What he almost did but didn’t follow through on was to point out that Ms. Kevane was attacking
the character of Jacobo Timmerman because he refused to demonize the people of Argentina.

Ms. Kevane’s teaching at Montana State in Bozeman has nothing to do with anything. If she
is trying to get a better paying job, fine. I taught at the University of Montana for thirty years
and it was wonderful. Leslie Fiedler taught there for twenty-five years and did his best work.
In my first note to this article I mentioned Ms. Kevane’s living in Montana only to show the
contradiction built into her position. According to her logic every Jew in America would have
to move to Israel to be safe. It’s a position I don’t agree with but it’s a position. No, the
terrible thing about her article is its character assassination.

By: Dodi Meyer

Dodi Meyer — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:08:14 +0000

As someone who lived in Argentina through those years and was afraid of becoming one of the dissapeared , I find it very troubling that someone so foreign to the hisotry and truth can write such an article. Crticizing someone who was tortured and detained with no due process of law because of his stance against injustice, is completely ludicrous.

By: Jerrold Katz

Jerrold Katz — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:02:44 +0000

I have very little knowledge about Timmerman other than what was published in the media. However I find that berating Bridget Kevane because she teaches in Montana suggests that each writer is an elitist bigot. Before you berate me, I have graduate degrees from the east coast Ivy League Schools.

By: Emanuel Pearl

Emanuel Pearl — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:48:55 +0000

It’s always a problem when a third-rate mind tries to understand a first-rate mind. I sympathize with Kevane’s efforts to get out of Montana and onto the faculty of a good university, but this all-too obvious ploy won’t work. Her article is so far off the mark it’s laughable–shoddy scholarship at its worst. She has a developed a half-baked construct and imposed it on the facts. Timerman wasn’t desperate to be acccepted by the establishement. He was the editor of a powerful newspaper and a prominent figure in Argentina before the coup. He risked that position and his life to fight injustice. I don’t think Harvard will be calling anytime soon, but you might want to try the National Enquirer.

By: Alejandro Katz

Alejandro Katz — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:57:22 +0000

I live in Spain. I escaped argentina when i was 17 because my mother had many friends who started to dissapear. We werre readers of La Opinion because it was the only major newspaper that published attacks aginst the military. Timerman paid dearly for it. Thats why for us the victims of the genocide , he is a true hero. I dont understand her point: if he was suchan apologist , why was he taken and the newspaper confiscated ? who wrote this?

By: Roberto Bronstein

Roberto Bronstein — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:44:53 +0000

The author is totally ignorant of what was going on in Argentina in 1977. The same month Timerman was kidnapped two other journalists of la Opinion were kidnapped never to be seen again. They were not the only ones.Several other workers of his daily were killed in the first year of the dictatorship. I knew those people and and I know how much Timerman dis for them and for any person who were in danger. At the end he paid a price but we are many who will never forget him.
I am sorry to read such garbage as your article.

By: Earl Ganz

Earl Ganz — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:10:46 +0000

I agree with Jay Fisher. The article is much too simple and the bias of the author too
apparent. It seems to me that Mr. Timerman was a brave and good man and a brave
and good Jew. As for Jews never being safe outside of Israel, I wonder why Ms. Kevane
does not flee Bozeman . How brave of her to live in wild gentile Montana.

By: Jay Fisher

Jay Fisher — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:32:51 +0000

I believe the author is far too harsh in her criticism of Jacobo Timerman. She neglects to incorporate two key elements into her analysis of Timerman and what he was trying to do during the incredibly difficult time of the Dirty War: 1.) La Opinion was already considered one of the most leftist of newspapers published in Argentina at that time. It, and its staff, automatically came under the microscope of the dictatorship by nature of its political orientation; 2.) Jacobo Timerman was the boss of La Opinion. Thus, he felt a responsibility to his staff to keep the newspaper going (and his workers employed) while also ensuring their safety by not appearing too inflammatory to the ruling junta (which could have lead to staff becoming “desaparecidos” on their own).

Thus, Timerman had to walk the narrowest of tightropes. While he could have done “more,” the fact that he was able to do anything for as long as he did speaks volumes to his efforts. La Opinion is credited as being only one of two newspapers in Argentina (the other being the Buenos Aires Herald) as having published anything about the disappeared and the junta’s excesses during the Dirty War.