FROM OUR ARCHIVES
50 YEARS AGO
November 5, 1967
A British seaman who was released from a Soviet prison said that the inmates included “a lot of old men and a lot of Jews.” Soviet prison life he described as “sheer hell.” He told newsmen that conditions in the prison camp where he was held were abominable and added: “I saw people die, mostly from lack of food.”
UNESCO called for unbiased education for the 55,000 refugee children in the areas occupied by Israel during the Six Day War. The resolution called for necessary measures to be taken to “ensure that everywhere education should respect the national, religious and linguistic traditions of the inhabitants, and that its nature should not be altered for political reasons.” They also agreed with Israeli authorities on deleting passages they considered offensive from the textbooks used in schools. Moshe Avidor, the Israeli delegate, quoted some of the passages from the books, The sentence “We shall tighten the siege around Israel until she is strangled” was used as an example in a grammar book, he said. Elsewhere the Jews were called “wicked criminals who must perish.”
25 YEARS AGO
November 5, 1992
Two California Democrats made history by becoming the first women and the first Jews in the state’s history to be elected to the US Senate. Dianne Feinstein, the former mayor of San Francisco, easily defeated the incumbent appointed senator, and congresswoman Barbara Boxer won a narrower victory over Bruce Herschensohn, a conservative Jewish television commentator. Feinstein, hailing the political Year of the Woman, declared triumphantly that “The roosters may crow, but the hens deliver the goods.” California voters also easily defeated an initiative which would have legalized euthanasia by allowing terminally ill patients to request “aid in dying” from physicians. The proposition had been strongly opposed by Orthodox and other rabbis.
One man not sorry to see president George H.W. Bush defeated in the US elections was former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, who charged that Bush, in a second term, would have pressed Israel to return to the 1967 borders. “He was convinced that Israel must return to the borders of 1967, and we had a problem [with that],” Shamir said. “It could very much be that he [Bush] would have tried to impose his approach,” he said, adding, “There is no need to have pity on him.”
After 14 years of disaffection, American Jews returned to their traditional Democratic roots, with eight out of 10 nationwide having voted for Bill Clinton. The key to Clinton’s support among Jews, analysts agreed, was the candidate’s inclusionary campaign. While Bush consistently approached Jewish groups with an attempt to appeal to what he termed his pro-Israel record, Clinton refused to appeal to blacks, Jews, women or gays as special interest groups, instead focusing on universal domestic issues such as the economy and healthcare reform. “If this election proved nothing else, it demonstrated that American Jews are not single-issue voters,” said Steve Gutow, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “This community cares about domestic issues such as the economy, a woman’s right to choose, health care and education, as well as strengthened US-Israel relations. The Clinton-Gore campaign was successful in the Jewish community because it understood this.”