I’m sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon and reading through this trilogy of books on Holocaust survivors. The writing is spare while the photos glow.
Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror–visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you’re not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit.”
I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race–conniving, indestructible, taking and taking. My grandparents were not excluded from this suspicion. The same year, during a family dinner conversation about Terri Schiavo, my father made the serious request that should he fall into a vegetative state, he would like for us to keep him on life support indefinitely. Today he and I are estranged for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason.
When words like “victim” are over-used, we lose our sensitivity to life’s true victims, those who’ve been the butt of monstrous cruelty.
If you are compassionate to everyone, then you are compassionate to no one because “compassion” by its definition means you dole it out unequally.
One thing that strikes me from these particular survivor stories is that despite their suffering, they picked themselves up and made more impressive lives than most of those in the Western world who did not suffer out of the norm.
Press release: The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the oldest Holocaust museum in the U.S., and A Dime and A Penny Foundation, a Holocaust non profit, are pleased to announce the release of the portrait book trilogy, Living Witnesses: Triumph Over Tragedy.
“The books serve as a reminder and a testament to the spirit of survival burning in anyone who suffers and overcomes,” said Mark Rothman, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
The project captures the lives and experiences of Holocaust Survivors including 30 people from Los Angeles as well as other parts of the US, Israel and Europe. Each photo illustrates the glorious conquest of the heart-wrenching past and how those experiences helped shape the Survivors’ lives. Book proceeds will be donated to Jewish Family Services on behalf of Holocaust Survivors in need.
“I understand the value of a photograph,” said Monni Must, portrait photographer and co-author of the books. “Five years ago when I lost my daughter tragically, I turned to Holocaust Survivors who not only taught me the value of a photograph, but they taught me the most important lesson of all: how to go on in the wake of tragedy.”
The world-renowned, one hundred and three year old Sir Nicholas Winton, a man responsible for saving the lives of 669 children during the Holocaust, is one of the many featured in the project. Sir Winton lead an effort to provide safe train passage from Europe to London as part of what became known as the kinder transports.
All three books are available on-line for $350.00 at http://dimeandpenny.org/store/. Holocaust Survivors will receive a discount.
As Survivors age, organizations such as Jewish Family Services find them needing increasing amounts of a wide range of assistance. Their needs are often much greater than those of other elderly men and women, in large part because of the deprivations they suffered during the Holocaust.
About Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust:
Holocaust Survivors founded the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in the early 1960s as a permanent repository for their personal artifacts from the Holocaust and the world the Nazis destroyed. Today the Museum hosts docent-led school tours, survivor lectures, exhibitions on the Holocaust, and numerous special events. Museum admission is always free. Visit us on-line at http://www.lamoth.org on the Web.
About A Dime and A Penny Foundation:
A Dime and A Penny 501(c)3 was created in 2011 by Detroit-based photographer Monni Must. The photographic charity endeavors of the organization exist to help others find hope in the midst of tragedy. The foundation produces books, exhibits and other projects whose proceeds help those in need. To RSVP, email RSVP (at) dimeandpenny (dot) org or for more information about visit http://www.dimeandpenny.org/ .
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In this April 2011 speech, Dennis Prager said: “Of course it’s only a small fraction of Muslims who do evil. It’s always only a small fraction of a group who do evil. It was only a small fraction of Germans who committed atrocities during WWII.”
“I don’t know of a single attack by Christians on innocents in the name of Christ in my lifetime.”
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I don’t think I’ve seen hookers walking around 90035 looking for business. There have been a couple of odd-looking blonde women walking around who looked like hookers but they weren’t obvious.
Kenneth Lowenstein posts: “around 2am several female prostitutes were walking past mexikosher looking for business. Please help Support Shmira Patrol so we can establish more evening patrols so we can push this out of our neighborhoods.”
I wonder if these were real hookers or just girls dressed for Halloween?
So I’ll meet women and I’ll think, this one has the personality, and this one has the looks and this one has the brains. Why can’t one woman have it all? And if she did, would she want me too?
At age 46, my options have narrowed. I’m trying to figure out how much mental illness I can handle in a woman.
When I fall for a woman and don’t want to live without her, all the comparisons I’m prone to fall away. Though sometimes I’ll think about how A in my past was great at X and B was great at Y and C had awesome attributes and D was smooth…
I had the hell beaten out of me as a kid and whenever anyone comes up from behind me or I get startled by an unexpected noise, I instinctively jump. Adrenalin surges through my system. I freak out. I feel like I’m about to get beaten again, even if it is only a friend unexpectedly from behind putting his hands on my shoulders. My most frightening memory from childhood was getting held underwater for about ten seconds by the kids in the grade above me at Pacific Union College.
People who work with me can tell that I have that beaten dog syndrome. It’s a certain look in my eyes when I get yelled at.
My upbringing’s influence is so difficult to disentangle. I keep thinking I’m past it and then it rears its ugly head again. I used to tell my therapists to focus on the present, but stuff from my past keeps warping me, so we might tiptoe back there a bit. It’s useless to say you forgive people in your past without realizing clearly what happened, what choices others made that negatively effected you, and then when you face that, then and only then can you effectively choose to let it go. Otherwise, you’re stuck playing out stuff you won’t look at.
So this new friend went to South America and took native drugs and vomited and defecated for a day or two and then came home completely changed. His negative imprinting from childhood was gone. He has appropriate confidence in himself. He wears bright colors. He’s kicking ass. Can Native American throw-up drugs really do that for you or is he fooling himself?
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When I started listening to Dennis Prager on KABC radio in 1988, I quickly came to see Judaism as a step-by-step system for making a better world. In late 1989, I decided to convert. I thought that by observing the law, joining the holy community, and immersing myself in Torah that I would morally transform myself.
It didn’t work. My corruption, my emotional addictions, my psychological baggage destroyed almost everything I tried to do.
On the other hand, I think I’ve made some moral progress over the past year as a result of a decade of psycho-therapy, three years of Alexander Technique teacher training (which retrained my reactions to stimuli) and 18-months of 12-step work. This work has allowed me to get more benefit from Judaism. I’ve cleared away some of the junk that was getting in the way of my becoming a decent person.
It’s far easier to become religious or spiritual or observant or saved than to become decent.
I used to hold by all these moral guidelines for myself that I learned from Torah and from my upbringing, and then when the rubber hit the road, I was more often than not in moral free-fall, just falling, falling, falling and feeling that there was no one to catch me and knowing that I should catch myself but waiting nonetheless for others to intervene to stop me from myself and curious to see how much I could get away with, and then when others intervened and put a halt to my shenanigans, I hated them for stopping me from my fun. I react badly when others put strict limits on me. I don’t like feeling like a child again even though I know I’m acting like a child.
When I was a little boy, my parents would put me down for a nap after lunch. And every day they did this, I’d scream and rage. I hated it. I hated being told what to do. And then I’d fall asleep.
Q: Do you have rage against God?
L: I don’t have a relationship with God. Or if I do, it is distant. I am not conscious of having any emotions towards God, except some awkward gratitude for being alive. I’m cognizant that God judges. That He is the lawgiver.
Q: Do you obey God?
L: I try to.
Q: How does that play out in Orthodox Judaism?
L: Orthodox Judaism is primarily a set of practices. It doesn’t matter practically whether or not you have a relationship with God. What you need to have to be a part of Orthodox Judaism is fidelity to a set of behaviors.
Q: So you don’t have to deal with God?
L: Not really.
Q: What about the rabbis?
L: I’m wary of rabbis. I used to get close to them but then they expected too much from me in return. So now I usually keep my distance so I can have the freedom to say what I want.
Q: Do you rage against authority now? Against the rabbis?
L: At times. I have less rage in me than I used to have. Through 12-step work, through psycho-therapy, through age, I’ve calmed down and have greater maturity than I did. I’ve learned to let go of resentment and much of my fear. I no longer build cases against people in my head.
Q: Is there any spirituality?
L: I’m not a spiritual person.
Q: Do you keep that private?
L: No.
Q: Spirituality is not part of Orthodox Judaism?
L: For a few. For the Hasidim.
Q: You don’t consider spirituality a religious practice?
L: It can be.
Q: What about kabbalah?
L: I’m not interested in that.
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The lead (Lena Dunham) says her gay ex-boyfriend Elijah is “getting certified in Alexander Technique, which is the gayest thing I’ve heard in my entire life.”
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I got some kindergarten in England around age five and I might’ve learned to read then.
In late 1972, my family returned to Avondale College, a Seventh-Day Adventist institution two hours drive north of Sydney. My dad chaired the Religion Department. He had two PhDs.
Sister Ellen G. White, the founding prophet of the church, taught that it was good for kids to begin school late, so I ran wild from age six to eight. I was pretty lonely. I only had one friend — Wayne Cherry — and he was at school.
So I ran around in the bush outside our home, a mile from the college. I had a tomahawk. I chopped down trees and imagined I was blazing a trail like they did in the Wild West in America. I told myself Cowboys and Indians stories.
There weren’t many abos around. They were mainly in the cities. You’d see them passed out drunk in the gutter after they got their welfare checks.
When I finally entered school in second grade in January 1973, my social skills were not strong. I used my brain to make fun of people. I remember one day in class, I dribbled urine down my leg.
My parents caught me lying and so as punishment, I had to bike the mile home to eat lunch and by the time I got back to school, recess was over.
I told a lot of lies because I didn’t want to get hit by my parents for sinning (eating candy etc) and I usually got found out so I was always getting punished and exiled from normal contact with my classmates.
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Dennis Prager calls the Lena Dunham video “unbelievably reprehensible” and “grotesque” and “a new low. That’s part of the Left. Everything that elevates the human is denigrated by Leftism.”
Nov 1, 1980: On Thursday night, at a working class bar in Bayonne, N.J., Ronald Reagan said, “I know what it’s like to pull the Republican lever for the first time, because I used to be a Democrat myself, and I can tell you it only hurts for a minute and then it feels just great.”
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I never held with 12-step programs. Sure, I was glad that they worked for some people, but I didn’t take them seriously. I didn’t respect them.
Why not? Chiefly because of the First Step where participants admitted that they were powerless before their addiction.
I didn’t buy that. I felt completely in control of my life.
Second, I found the notion that addiction was a disease to be absurd. You mean a bloke who can’t stop drinking has an illness like cancer?
I didn’t see excess drinking and drugging and the like as a disease. I saw them as a failure of moral will.
Third, I didn’t buy that having this disease and being helpless in front of your addiction was a valid excuse for bad behavior. I didn’t buy that you could go around and apologize to people for hurting them because “you were sick.”
As Genesis says, “Sin crouches at the door but you can rule over it.”
Since elementary school (probably since eighth grade), however, I’ve had the conviction that I have an addictive personality. I just didn’t think deeply about what that meant.
I would never try drugs or alcohol (when I became Jewish, I’d swallow the requisite mouthful of wine for kiddish but that was it, I never drank alcohol for pleasure and I’ve never tried any type of illegal drug nor ever taken a prescription drug for escape or for pleasure). While my peers got wasted, I abstained. I knew it would destroy me. While others could dabble in vice, I knew that I’d get hooked.
It was a big reason I never purchased the services of a prostitute. I feared I’d like it too much. I never bought a lap dance for the same reason.
I got into gambling in high school. I loved the rush. It made me forget my misery, my lack of comfort in my own skin. I would bet with my friends over everything possible. One day in 1982 I met a new friend, a neighbor. I bet him over a game of golf in his back yard. I won $5. To my horror, he asked his dad for the money. He said he had lost it to me in a bet. I immediately forgave him. His dad said to me, “That was very wise.”
I bet with other students at Placer High School. One took me for about $1400 on horse racing. I was graduating and leaving for Australia. I paid him off about $200 and asked him to forgive me the rest. He did.
After that, I resolved to never bet again. I fell down once when in Australia I succumbed to social pressure and put a bet down on the Melbourne Cup horse race. That was my last bet with my own money.
When I was in Las Vegas circa 2007, a friend gave me $20 to play the slots and I did because it was her money. I won’t bet my own.
Early on in my psycho-therapy, in 1998, my therapist asked me if I thought I might be a sex addict. I was certainly out to get all the sex I could with attractive women, but anything I did get, with few exceptions, took place within relationships that usually lasted from a few months to a year.
I said no, I wasn’t a sex addict, because I never did anything out of control. I never did anything criminal. I never felt in the grip of a compulsion so strong that I ignored consequences. I never avoided reality so that I could masturbate. I never patronized hookers or strips clubs. I didn’t look at pornography every day. I was just a normal bloke.
In April of 2011, my psycho-therapist said that it sounded like I had eroticized rage. I went home, Googled the term, and realized he was right and even though I only expressed my rage in socially acceptable terms, the rage was a sickness in my soul and holding back my life. I needed to get help. I needed 12-step work.
I told my therapist this at our next session and he recommended a program. A couple of weeks later, I went to my first ever 12-step meeting.
I wasn’t freaked out. I felt a tad awkward but simply accepted that this was the next logical step for my life and all beginnings were difficult. This seemed easier than my first yoga class. Now that was weird. Everyone had white turbans.
By this point, I had been porn-free for about six months. I was on a good trajectory.
I’ve got a strong pragmatic streak. I’ll try anything if it can’t hurt me. And if something helps me, I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense.
By living in so many different homes during my first four years of life, I learned flexibility. That I had ideological objections to 12-Steps wasn’t going to stop me from exploring if they could help me. When I was thinking about converting to Judaism in the early 1990s, I had all sorts of questions and objections, but I put them on the back burner when I saw that becoming Jewish was what I needed to do.
When I decided to explore yoga in 2009, it didn’t stop me that much of it seemed weird and dangerous and culty. When I met attractive women, it didn’t stop me if we had different political and religious views. I’m willing to go along with a lot of things I don’t agree with if I think they can benefit my life.
At my first 12-Step meeting, an even mixture of men and women, the speaker talked about how all of his relationships went through predictable patterns. They started off great and then they fell apart. He realized it might have something to do with him. And so he found this program and it had turned his life around.
I gave a three-minute share at that first meeting. Afterward, I met people who’d ready about me in the LA Weekly. They knew my story. I met a guy who came from the same type of Seventh-Day Adventist upbringing I had.
My first time in a 12-step meeting? Far less daunting than my first time in yoga. My first time in temple? Now that was daunting. I chose to go to 12-step, nobody pushed me, so it was easy. Converting to Reform Judaism was hard, converting to Orthodox Judaism was harder, but 12-steps have been fun.
I said to people outside my first meeting that I was a sucker for self-help. I was willing to try anything. I was told that 12-Steps wasn’t self-help. It was about self-transcendence. The answer to our addictions was through service to others.
I kept coming to meetings. I liked many of the people I met there. I got a lot of wisdom from them.
I remember a conversation with one guy after a meeting. He had the same predilections as me. We liked our women to dress up in certain ways. We pursued intensity more than intimacy.
“You know that this stuff we’re talking about isn’t our problem,” he said. “It’s just how we act out. Our problem is an intimacy disorder.”
It took me a while to find a sponsor because all the guys who were potential sponsors seemed like Nazis. I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do.
The longer I stayed in the program, the more impressed I became. I saw how it changed people’s lives for the good. I let my objections fall away and started working the 12-Steps. The more work I did, the more I realized how the sickness of my emotional addictions were reducing my life.
Instead of feeling hopeless, tormented and ill at ease much of the time, I found greater degrees of peace with myself, with God and with others.
Fifteen months into my work, I was asked to be the lead speaker to a meeting. That shook me up and spurred me to work harder on the 12 Steps, to up my bottom lines (behavior I wanted to avoid) to include a complete cessation from masturbation, and to more diligently pursue the program.
I knew I had pursued a lot of great things in my life but usually in such a half-assed way that they brought no glory to what I publicly espoused. Now I was convinced that this was caused by the corruption of my emotional addictions and that 12-step work would help me.
Yet I feared that I was a serial enthusiast and that many other times in my life, I though I had found the answer, found the key that would unlock my highest self, only to quickly fall back to my self-destructive patterns.
Why would this time be any different?
Where do I stand on my old objections to 12-Step programs? I’ve let them go. I see the program helping me and others. I don’t think the labels of “addiction” and “disease” matter. If working the program works for you, if it helps you to use these labels, then use them. There’s no need to argue over them if that prevents you from getting 12-step help. If you want to work any program, you have to accept its fundamental premises or to at least be willing to act as if they are true.
As we say in the program, take actions you don’t believe in and you’ll get results you can’t imagine.
“Whenever a guy does something remotely sensitive and heartfelt, his friends say to him, “So why don’t you just suck a dick and be done with it?” If you have an umbrella when it’s raining, your friends say to you, “What are you? Some kind of fag?” If you order a cookie or a banana with your pancake, they say, “Are you a fairy? Syrup isn’t sweet enough for you?” That’s why guys drop dead so young. It’s all those decades repressing the desire to ask for a cookie.” (Bill Burr)
I’m not just a sex addict. I’m also a love addict.
Pia writes on page nine: “Although I see love addiction most often in female partners of sexual-romantic relationships, it is also possible for males to be Love Addicts. A person can also relate as a Love Addict in other kinds of relationships, such as with a parent, one’s children, a mother-in-law, a counselor, a close friend, a religious leader, a Twelve-Step sponsor, or a movie star.”
My Love Addict has come out in relationships with guys. Not because I had any kind of romantic or sexual feelings for them, but because being with them made me feel whole. When these friendships ended, it was as wrenching as the end of a romantic relationship.
I remember after one died a few years ago, my friend told me: “Here’s the feeling in this house — I don’t trust you, my wife hates you, and my kids fear you.”
I was so devastated that I missed our friendship for more than a year. Every day I thought about our time together. I sketched out notes for a novel about it but never wrote it.
Eventually we became friends again and then that died and I haven’t spoken to him in years.
Still, there was that one Shabbos afternoon when I was running down Pico Blvd for Mincha. It was cold and rainy. I ran past my friend in my thin suit and he said, “We have to get you a coat.”
I know I could get myself a coat, but that would not mean anything to me. However, the idea that someone else would get me a coat to make sure I was warm made me feel great.
In the end, he never got me a coat and I never got me a coat. I live in Los Angeles after all. But I have that wonderful memory of being cared for.
I know I’ve been seeking out substitute father figures all of my life. That’s probably my Love Addict.
It’s hard to disentangle all my neuroses.
If you don’t get nurturing in your first few years, you’ll likely go through your life feeling worthless and longing for a rescuer. You’ll meet powerful busy people and you just get a feeling that they can fix you.
Pia Mellody writes on page 17:
When the parent abandons the child, the child receives the message that “I won’t care for you because you are worthless.” Abandoned children can’t get nurture and affirmation from outside because their caregivers deserts them: and they can’t nurture and affirm themselves because they are too immature and non one has taught them what healthy nurture is. So almost all Love Addicts enter adult relationships with a built-in sense of defectiveness and worthlessness and the belief that they are helpless to care for themselves, which comes directly out of the original abandonment by the parent.
When I step into a 12-step meeting, it’s easy to spot who’s in the throes of addiction and who’s in recovery. People in recovery are buoyant while those in addiction are compressed, collapsed and depressed.
While listening to the following 12-step lecture on making a complete moral inventory, I was interested to hear the work described as a technique of subtraction. When you take away the things you’ve been doing to get in your way, such as making a substance, process or persons your higher power, the right thing naturally asserts itself.
Same with Alexander Technique. When you let go of unnecessary tightening and compression, good use naturally springs up.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
