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The Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County(JGSCV) will hold a general meeting, co-sponsored with Temple Adat Elohim, on Sunday, March 1, 2015 1:30-3:30 PM at Temple Adat Elohim 2420 E. Hillcrest Drive, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Program: The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York is often off the radar screen for many genealogists but the library is home to almost half a million volumes including manuscripts, rare books and archives. The archives are a treasure yet to be explored by so many of us and yet it is a rich repository of records of Jewish communities, institutions and prominent individuals in the US and Europe. We will take a digital trip and explore some of the treasures that can be found at JTS. Included in these archives are transcriptions of notes, memos and correspondence between the State Department and offices in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Warsaw and Bucharest from 1863-1906 that concern the legal position and persecution of Jews; and correspondence and notes about the Jewish community in France from 1700's until after WWII. We will also explore a variety of ketubot and mohel books and talk about the way all of these materials help us in our research.
Speaker: Dr. Janette Silverman is the JewishGen Ukraine SIG Coordinator. She was the president of the Phoenix Jewish Genealogy Society for 5 years, and is active on the IAJGS Membership Development Committee. Since 2007 she has served as a Moderator for the JewishGen Discussion Group. Her doctoral dissertation, "In Living Memory" is about Jewish genealogical research. Janette has been researching family history for almost 30 years. Janette is the Outreach Director for the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education of The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
The Schmoozing Corner: which is held starting 1:10PM will be facilitated by JGSCV founding member and board member, Warren Blatt The Schmoozing Corner is available if you would like individual insights for your genealogical pursuits from an experienced JGSCV member 20 minutes before each meeting.
We return with our 5-minute genealogical hint which is at the beginning of the meeting. JGSCV treasurer, Karen Lewy will be talking on Finding Interesting Information on Death Certificates
Our traveling library will be available starting at 1:00PM. To see which books are in our traveling library see our website under library- traveling (www.jgscv.org )
The Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County is dedicated to sharing genealogical information, techniques and research tools with anyone interested in Jewish genealogy and family history. There is no charge to attend the meeting. Anyone may join JGSCV.
The 2015 Membership Drive is well on its way. Annual dues paid now are good through December 2015. Forms are available at the meeting, on the JGSCV website-under Membership- and in the JGSCV newsletter, Venturing Into Our Past.
The National Genealogical Society (NGS) Board of Directors announced today, February 19, 2015 that they have appointed an new Executive Director, Ed Grandi. He will focus on the NGS growing portfolio of specialized family history learning resources. He had long experience in senior corporate roles specializing in insurance and risk management for nonprofits and most recently served as an Executive Director to a patient-interest association in Washington, D.C.
NGS, along with IAJGS and the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) are the sponsoring members of the Records Preservation and Access Committee ( RPAC).
Board for Certification of Genealogists Free Webinar on Complex Evidence: What it Is, How it Works, Why it Matters. February 24, 2015
The Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) is holding a free webinar on” Complex Evidence: What It Is, How It Works, Why It Matters” with F. Warren Bittner CG. It is open to all genealogists. It is scheduled for Tuesday, February 24 8PM EST and will run about 90 minutes. Check http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ for the time conversion in your locale.
To register ( which is required) go to: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3412355591969569026 .
Each of us have been challenged with our genealogical research putting together all the pieces of evidence to reach a sound conclusion to tell a story from our findings. The Genealogical Proof Standard is something all of us should be using to assure that our information is correct. This presentation uses a case study from multiple sources to solve a problem helping us learn the process along the way. To read more go to: http://blog.bcgcertification.org/
The speaker is a professional genealogist based in Utah and has been awarded first place National Genealogical Society’s (NGS) 2012 Family History Writing Contest, and has spoken at numerous genealogical conferences including the NGS, FGS, Southern California Genealogical Jamboree, Association of Professional Genealogists and more.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IN THE END, a "millennium" is too big a concept for the imagination. A thousand years equals 30 generations, a duration that has no flesh and blood dimension. Half a millennium ago, Columbus had just landed in the Western hemisphere; half that again, America had not yet been born.
But a century has resonance for us, spanning the two or three lifetimes that we have touched. For example, I can trace my own grandparents' path back to Moravia and the Ukraine, though I can't go any further back than that. My grandparents were married just before the turn of the last century, and their children's lives began with it. Brief as this interval is in the overall span of time, three generations is probably enough to understand ourselves as human beings.
Looking behind us, this century of ours was mostly a stage for the destructive dramas of a secular religious faith called "socialism." It is a faith inspired by the dream of a social redemption realized through human rather than divine power, through the force of politics and the state. In its communist form, the efforts of this faith ruined whole continents and destroyed a world of human lives. Have we learned from these disasters, or will the passions of this faith follow us into the century to come?
For an answer, I turned to the pages of the Nation, an institution of the left that participated in these dramas across the entire century, and whose editorial stances on each defining moment of the communist project have been utterly refuted by historical events. The editors of the Nation supported the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist collectivization, the infamous purge trials and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe and the Maoist tyranny in China, the communist conquest of South Vietnam and Pol Pot's genocidal revolution and, of course, Castro's long-lived dictatorship in Cuba.
During the Cold War to contain the expansion of the Soviet empire, the editors of the Nation opposed the Truman Doctrine, the formation of NATO and SEATO, and the efforts of western military and intelligence organizations generally to stem the Soviet tide.
Over five decades, the editors of the Nation waged journalistic war against the defenders of freedom in the West, against America's "cold warrior" presidents Truman and Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. At the same time the Nation was the defender of Soviet shills and Soviet spies like Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service and the Rosenbergs. As recently as this month -- the last of the century -- its editor was still defending Alger Hiss.
Like the Bourbons of old, the editors of the Nation seem to have learned nothing essential and forgotten nothing as well. During the slow unfolding of the Marxist collapse, the socialist movement they foster as a faith was often fragmented and surreptitious. Now, at this turn of a century, the movement itself is more influential in American political and cultural life than it has been at any time in the American past. Its adherents reach into the White House and the Congress; they are the sitting leadership of the AFL-CIO and of the principal academic, professional, and arts associations, and of many of the most important media institutions as well.
In this pre-millennial hour -- December 1999 -- the editors of the Nation chose to run two stories -- an appraisal of the socialist century past and a harbinger of the socialist century to come -- that provide the answer to my question.
In the Dec. 13 issue, there is a long review article called "Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge En Noir [The Red in Black]," written by the magazine's longtime "European Editor," Daniel Singer, a godson disciple of the Trotskyist writer Isaac Deutscher, and the magazine's resident expert on the subject of the communist experience.
The main focus of Singer's article is "The Black Book of Communism," a French treatise that attempts to sum up the human horror of the project to make a better world. According to the book's authors, during the 20th century between 85 and 100 million human beings were slaughtered in peacetime by Marxists in the effort to realize their impossible dream. As a foreword by Martin Malia reasonably suggests, "Any realistic accounting of communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia."
That is the minimal lesson one might expect to learn from the unbroken record of the socialist utopias of the century just past. But it is exactly the lesson the Nation fervently rejects. Writes Singer: "Our aim -- let us not be ashamed to say so -- is to revive the belief in collective action and in the possibility of radical transformation in our lives." He refers to this passion for social redemption as "the Promethean spirit of humankind," a term that reprises the precise language Marx used when he launched his destructive project over 150 years ago.
For Singer and the Nation, the unrelieved horror and failure of socialist experiments over the course of a century is not a lesson in sobriety for those who promoted and supported them, nor a reason to reconsider the faith. It is just a tragedy of errors that need not discourage them and need never be repeated. For the Nation this is the story of "a revolution in a backward country failing to spread and the terrible result then presented to the world as a model."
In other words, had there been sufficient communists in America and Europe to make revolutions there as well, the utopia that socialists had dreamed of would have been realized in fact. With communists triumphant everywhere, the Marxist fantasy would have come true.
And lo and behold, in the very next issue, a Nation editorial, "Street Fight in Seattle," hails the eruption of political violence in the state of Washington as a beacon of socialist renewal in the nation as a whole. The protest against the emerging global market, the editorial gloats, is "something not seen since the sixties" -- when the anti-capitalist, anti-market, anti-property forces of the left last took their socialist fantasies and nihilist agendas to America's streets.
The voices recorded are familiar ones: "A week ago no one even knew what the World Trade Organization was," proclaimed Tom Hayden, one of the most destructive luddites of the previous generation, who did not miss the opportunity to join the demonstration. "Now these protests have made WTO a household word. And not a very pretty word."
From generation to generation, the message has not changed one iota. Declaims the Nation: "A corporate-dominated WTO that puts profits before people and property rights before human rights can no longer sustain its current course." It quotes Gerald McEntee, a leader of the government unions and a major power in Democratic Party politics: "We refuse to be marketized." Quoting the famous words of a '60s leader, McEntee proclaimed: "We have to name the system, and that system is corporate capitalism."
In other words, the Nation's war is still directed against a system that in the last 50 years has brought unimagined well-being to millions of people previously excluded from all but the barest minimum of the fruits of their labor -- a system which is the only creator of democratic freedoms the world has ever known.
The Nation's mantra -- "Profits before people and property rights before human rights" -- is the anathema on the system that was formulated by Marx and is now resurrected in Seattle. But how is it possible for any sentient human being to have lived through the 20th century without coming to understand that property rights are the basis of any rights that human beings have ever been able to secure, and that far from conflicting with human needs, profits are the only practical engine ever devised that even half-succeeded in fulfilling them.
Such willful ignorance does not stem from lack of intelligence, but has a deeper source in human desires that can only be satisfied by religious faith. The socialist dream of achieving a kingdom of heaven on earth is as old as Eden. "You shall be as G-d," was the serpent's fatal promise then. It is the "Promethean" dream that Marx identified as his own and that the Nation editors are intent to keep alive. It is the idea of putting a human design on the impersonal structures of the social order beginning with the economic market and extending to the constitutional order. In wishing this, socialists fail to understand that a market that human beings cannot control and a political process they are bound to respect are the very disciplines that human beings require in order to be human.
Without such restraints and the limits they impose, humanity quickly descends into the barbarism the 20th century has made us all too familiar with, yet whose lessons -- as we go into the 21st -- the Nation and its comrades have not learned.
In the end, is there anything really new under the sun, as far as the passions that inspire and the reasons that guide us are concerned? The Homeric epics, which are the first literature of our civilization, were written three millennia ago, yet they are inhabited by people whose emotions and calculations are familiar today. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle, the ethics of the religious founders who lived more than two millennia ago, pretty much encompass the ideas, ethics and religious faiths we see around us today.
Call this continuity "human nature." We are bounded by who we are and what we can learn. In the matter of how we live and react, what we can learn about ourselves is pretty well set by the real individuals who connect with us, and by whom we are touched. One or two, or at most three generations encompass this extended family of flesh and blood contacts. A century or so will do it.
So that's my millennial question: Have we learned from the Marxist disaster of this century, or are we doomed to repeat it in the next?
JWR contributor David Horowitz is editor of Front Page Magazine and the author of several books, including, Hating Whitey, Art of Political War, Radical Son : A Generational Odyssey . Comment on this article by clicking here.