Essays and viewpoints

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Last month in the JN I shared similarities between myself and quarterback Tom Brady, one of which was we both knew when it was the right time to retire from football. Tom called it quits after an illustrious 22-year NFL career that included seven Super Bowl wins, while I hung up my athletic cup after only a few weeks of getting my tuchus kicked unmercifully as a member of Southfield’s Mary Thompson Jr. High School Titans seventh grade heavyweight squad.

Well, as you no doubt know by now, after only 40 days into retirement, Tom Brady had a change of heart and decided to un-retire and return as the starting QB for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

At the time of his retirement Brady said: “It is now time to focus my time and energy on other things that require my attention.” Well, he must have attention deficit because after 40 days he benched his wife and three young kids for a return to the gridiron. I guess if waking up every day in a waterfront mansion in Florida with a super model by your side can’t keep your attention, nothing will. Except football.

Of his flip-flop, Brady said he had “unfinished business” to attend to. If a seven-time Super Bowl champion has unfinished business, what does that leave the Detroit Lions left to accomplish? Future headline: Entire Lions team and ownership retire after winning a first-round playoff game. Ford family says: “There’s no way we can ever top this.”

It’s obvious Brady had a rude reckoning with reality. Despite his 2021 salary, with bonuses, bringing it to around $40 million, he still has three young kids to put through college. And have you seen gas prices lately? Plus, Tom will be 45-years old when he suits up for his 23rd season this fall. That means he still has 20 years left before he can go on Medicare and over 20 years before he can start collecting Social Security unless he takes it early. Talk about a financial wake-up call.

Meanwhile, news of Tom Brady’s un-retirement brings up a subject that has long been a source of annoyance for me, mostly generated from the entertainment industry, specifically singers who go on “Farewell Tours”... more than once.

Cher reportedly had one of the highest-grossing farewell tours ending in 2005 pulling in upwards of $250 million, which (stand by for a run on sentence) sustained her until she un-retired in 2008 to perform in residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which earned her another $60 million, which she scraped by on until she un-retired and hit the road on her Dressed to Kill Tour in 2014, pulling in close to $55 million, which she managed to eke by on until she un-retired in 2017 to do another residency in Las Vegas. I got you, babe? No, she got us, in the pocketbook.

I’m sorry, but if you’re a singer who lured folks into forking well over a quarter billion dollars in tickets for a last chance to come say goodbye to you, then those tickets, and all the other faux farewell tour tickets, should be refunded. And if you have the chutzpah to un-retire yet again, then those tickets should be free to those fans who came to say goodbye to you before. Or at the very least pay for their parking.

Who could forget when Barbra Streisand retired in 2000? Apparently, Barbra. She went on to un-retire several more times over the last two decades. And she laments why “you don’t bring me flowers anymore?” Why? We can’t afford it. I paid $350 a ticket to see Babs at the Palace of Auburn Hills in

1994. OK, it was worth it. Elton John first retired in 1977 but several other farewell tours would follow over the decades. Then just this past Feb. 8 and 9, John bid adieu again for the “last” time at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit during his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour. But wouldn’t you know Alan Muskovitz Contributing it, it’s road construction season and apparently even

Writer the yellow brick road is in need of repair. Not to worry, Elton will defray those costs by returning to say goodbye again, again, at Comerica Park on July 18. I conclude by telling you about one farewell tour in the entertainment business that actually did stick. Hard to believe, but this Saturday, March 26, marks the 12th anniversary of Dick Purtan’s retirement from radio. I was honored to be a part of Purtan’s People for 20 years and that final broadcast. Could Dick and Purtan’s People be coaxed out of retirement? Highly unlikely — unless we could find a cassette or CD player to play our old comedy bits on ... and who has one of those anymore?

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Alan Muskovitz is a writer, voice-over/ acting talent, speaker, and emcee. Visit his website at laughwithbigal.com. Like Al on Facebook and reach him at amuskovitz@thejewishnews.com.

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Some 1.5 million refugees — more than five times the population of Haifa — have reached Poland over the last two weeks via its border with wartorn Ukraine. Ukrainians, Israelis, Indians, Americans, Nigerians and nationals of more than 160 other countries have crossed the border to Poland and been told, “You’re safe now.”

Since the start of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, approximately 100,000 people have entered Poland daily, escaping bombs, ruined houses, wrecked hospitals, fear, famine and freezing cold. One and a half million human tragedies, fleeing the horrors of war.

Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine has triggered a humanitarian crisis unseen in Europe since World War II. More than 2.5 million people had fled Ukraine as of March 11. The forecasts say the number of refugees could quickly reach 5 million, and even higher numbers are not unlikely. Some will continue on to other destinations, mostly in Europe. More than half have remained in Poland so far, and in all likelihood will stay for a long time.

A quick and adequate response to humanitarian disaster on this scale requires efficient coordination and logistics, long-term vision and a systemic approach to providing assistance.

From the very first day of this unparalleled crisis, Poland has been demonstrating great solidarity and providing immense humanitarian assistance to its neighbor. The Polish government, which had been preparing for various scenarios, set up temporary reception centers and assigned an agency to coordinate the delivery of the aid flowing into Poland, some from international donors, to Ukrainian territory. Every day, 100 trucks full of aid have entered Ukraine from Poland. Nearly 8,000 tons of humanitarian assistance have been delivered to Ukraine thus far.

The flood of aid had to be streamlined through a dedicated hub close to the border to reduce the number of parties in contact with already-

strained Ukrainian authorities. The aid Israel is sending to Ukraine through Poland, too, has also been delivered in close coordination with official Polish entities. Countless grassroots goodwill initiatives have sprung up across Poland. The Poles have opened their homes to host people they do not Agata Czaplinska know. The railway has offered

JNS refugees free travel. Telecom companies have offered them free phone calls and internet service. Newspapers and internet portals have started publishing news and guidance in Ukrainian. Dedicated radio stations have been launched by broadcasters near the border to spread up-to-date practical advice in Ukrainian. Hoteliers, small and large entrepreneurs from the tourist

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JTA A fter decades of fearing that we would forget the horrors of our recent past, I am starting to fear the opposite possibility: that we Jews remember our history all too well but feel powerless to act on its lessons. The Russian invasion of Ukraine invites analogies to our traumatic past. History begs us to learn from what came before. These analogies to the past are never perfect. Seeing analogies between past and present does not mean we think that anything that happened in the past would be identical to anything happening in the present.

For comparisons to be useful, however, they need not be exact. It is enough for us as Jews to see familiarity in the past and resemblance in the present. We do this to activate our sense of responsibility, to ask if we have seen this plot point before, to figure out how we are supposed to act in the story to change the inevitability of the outcome. We become different people when we remember, as the past merges with the present and points to the choices we might make.

But now: What if we remember well, but cannot act upon it? Will Jewish memory become a prison of our powerlessness?

I grew up believing that appeasement was just one rung above fascist tyranny itself, and at times possibly worse: Appeasers replace responsibility with naivete and facilitate demonic evil even when they know better. The narrative of the West juxtaposes Churchill the hero with Chamberlain the villain; the philosopher Avishai Margalit uses Chamberlain as the archetype of the “rotten compromise,” for making concessions that make people skeptical of the morality of compromise altogether. I know that the sanctions regime imposed against Putin’s Russia and his oligarchs are the most severe in history, and still I wonder: What is the threshold of appeasement, and will we know if we have crossed it?

We still debate FDR’s decision not to bomb the train tracks leading to Auschwitz. It was a viable option, and we know this because Jewish leaders pleaded with American officials to consider it, and they decided against it. None of us has any idea whether such a bombing operation would have succeeded, much less whether it would have made a dent in the Final Solution. But our memory of the story makes us wonder whether it might have, and it makes us furiously study the current invasion, seeking opportunities for a similar intervention.

At the same time, we fear that we will only know what actions we should have taken a long time from now, and that our children will study such actions with the same helplessness that plagues us when we read about FDR’s decisions.

My great-grandparents came to America well before World War II. But I have read about and feel chastened by America’s turning away Jewish refugees during the war. I am in shock watching the largest and fastest-developing refugee crisis unfolding before us and seeing our country failing to participate in a proportionate way — given our size and economic power — to the absorption and resettlement efforts. Why do we have a museum celebrating American intervention in wartime, as we do in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and why do we have such a profound educational apparatus focused on helping Americans understand how to not be a bystander, if not for moments like this?

It is not hard to imagine the museum that will one day mark

this unfolding atrocity. Our insistence on memory — and the belief that it will change things — never quite works. This is because the invocation of memory can be banal, and because it can pull us apart. “Never again” is everywhere now — Meir Kahane’s appeal to Jewish self-defense became a rallying cry to prevent genocide, Yehuda Kurtzer a banner to fight immigrant detention, a slogan for schools and gun control. And whatever we wanted the legacy of the Shoah to be, we have in no case been successful. American presidents mouthed these words seriously even as they failed to intervene, or intervened too late, to stop genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Syria and elsewhere. If the fear was forgetting, it was unfounded. But remembering and acting on the memory is something else entirely. The legacy of our past indicts us when we can’t carry the former into the latter. I never expected — even watching the politics of memory pull apart the legacy of remembering for opposing political ends — that we would shift from a fear of forgetting to the fear that comes with remembering. The past glares at us now, it revisits us every day in the news cycle, and I am scared. It is not because we have forgotten it, but precisely because we remember it, and we do not know how to heed it.

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Yehuda Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and host of the Identity/Crisis podcast.

I’ve long felt that Joe Biden passed the “kishkes” test when it came to his support for Israel. Since meeting Golda Meir as a junior senator in 1973, the man has met every Israeli prime minister. Like many others in our community, I took for granted that he’d always have Israel’s back, in a world obsessed with maligning the world’s only Jewish state.

I wish I still felt that way.

Whether Biden realizes

it or not, the terrible deal he’s about to make with the terror regime in Iran endangers Israel and the rest of the region. It’s widely accepted by now that in his zeal to get Iran to sign a nuclear deal — any nuclear deal, apparently — Biden has squandered David Suissa America’s enormous leverage

The Jewish Journal and caved to virtually every Iranian demand.

I’ve read countless analyses from experts across the political spectrum, and they’re pretty consistent with this conclusion from a former intelligence officer specializing on Iranian terrorism, Michael Pregent, writing in Newsweek: “If the Biden administration jumps back into the Iran nuclear deal without addressing undeclared sites, sunset clauses, ballistic missiles, regional behavior, terrorism and human rights, then it will have entered a worse deal than even the one in 2015.”

Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt, who can hardly be called an extremist, also cautioned that Biden’s deal is “far from adequate to confront the full range of threats generated by this regime.”

What kind of regime? Greenblatt spells it out: “The largest state sponsor of antisemitism on the planet, constantly churning out genocidal memes and disseminating hostile propaganda against Jews,” one whose “stated desire to annihilate the Jewish state must be taken seriously.”

Beyond this genocidal threat to Israel, Greenblatt adds the broader “danger that Iran poses to the region

Irecently read an article on Aish.com about specific behaviors that make New Year’s resolutions effective. It said that we should set concrete goals rather than general, overly ambitious goals. We should expect challenges along the way, and we should realize that the motivation we may feel today might not be as strong tomorrow.

As I read this, I felt like I was finally able to describe an element of my high school experience. As the academic year’s end approaches, I look back and remember how anxious I sometimes used to feel while thinking about academics, athletics, extracurriculars and social life, in addition to the many other elements of being a high schooler.

When I felt overwhelmed in high school, it was almost always when I unknowingly was acting opposite this article’s recommendations. I had goals that were so broad and ambitious that achieving them was almost guaranteed to not happen and, as a result, knowing how and where to take action was nearly impossible as well.

But, campaigning to be a part of student government, for example, seemed interesting to me, and so I did that. Both of my brothers ran on the cross-country team, so I also ran throughout high school. My relationship with JARC began in seventh grade, so I always managed to find time to volunteer every month.

While none of these specific examples are anything particularly special on their own, the important point is that when I had reasonable goals with clear courses of action, the feelings of being overwhelmed lessened greatly, and I was able to accomplish more than I thought I could.

I believe that whether intentional or not, this article made an important point about making effective change. Whether it’s in your own life, your local community or even

globally, if you want to fix everything all at once with no clear path to do so, it’s a recipe for failure and burnout. To make any sustainable change, you need to create a plan and take actions at an appropriate pace. During the past four years, Andy Tukel my responsibilities did not increase linearly, and if they did, it would not have been fair to myself. While it may sound cliche, I think that high school allowed me to experience this lesson firsthand, and reading this article allowed me to better articulate the idea that I was feeling. This idea is very similar to the Talmudic phrase, “Tafasta Merube, Lo Tafasta,” which directly translates to, “If you

and the world through its support of proxy militias and employment of terror as statecraft,” with “activities [that] span nearly every continent [as] they have left death and debris in their wake in countries such as Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey, Bulgaria and even in the U.S.”

Biden’s own Central Command General Kenneth McKenzie has called Iran’s 3,000 ballistic missiles “the greatest threat to the region’s security.” Nothing in the deal addresses that threat.

It’s perplexing why Biden would think that freeing up billions in sanctions relief to such a terror regime in return for dubious promises from a cheating and deceitful country would be such a good idea.

I’ve heard several explanations: He views the deal as upholding his and former President Barack Obama’s legacy; he wants to undo anything that former President Donald Trump did; he’s desperate for any kind of “win” after the disastrous exit from Afghanistan; he needs to lower gas prices to boost his approval numbers, and removing the sanctions against oil-wealthy Iran will help do that; he’s just following the advice of his overeager negotiators in Vienna (which would mean, of course, ignoring the three members of his Iran team who quit last month because Biden was being too soft.)

The truth, however, is that it doesn’t really matter why Biden has caved to Iran. What matters is that he seems determined to push a deal through no matter what, and the Jewish world must not remain silent.

Should we be grateful that the Russians, reeling from global sanctions, have introduced last-minute demands that may scuttle the deal? Not necessarily. Just like we saw with his former boss, Obama, when the most powerful man in the world decides he wants a deal — and that intention has been conveyed loud and clear to the wily Mullahs in Tehran — he gets his way, regardless of the obstacles, and regardless of how lousy the final deal is.

From what I hear from sources, the real stumbling block is the Iranian insistence (not unreasonable, I may add) that a future administration won’t just cancel the deal, as the Trump administration did. Because it’s so hard to offer such guarantees, if anything kills the deal, that will be it.

But because Iran desperately needs the sanctions lifted, some kind of compromise is likely. The perverted irony is that the most hated country on the planet right now, Russia, may be asked to play a role to overcome that final hurdle.

As the final hour approaches, the Jewish world must not wait until the deal is sealed to express its outrage.

President Biden has every right to sign a deal that may well endanger Israel and the region, and we have every right to let him know that we feel betrayed by a friend.

David Suissa is editor-in-chief and publisher of Tribe Media Corp, and “Jewish Journal.” He can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com. This article was first published by the Jewish Journal.

have seized a lot, you have not seized.” This phrase is often interpreted to mean trying to do too much or having an overly ambitious goal often result in failure.

Every person has their own challenges. It’s likely that at least some of them can’t be solved easily or quickly. Although this is frustrating, the advice laid out in this article makes dealing with this reality slightly less troubling.

Reflecting back, I’m not actually sure that this article had any deeper meaning or was meant to be interpreted this intensely. But, in my opinion, the deeper lesson offered here is wasted if only used when considering how to improve one’s New Year’s resolutions.

Andy Tukel is a senior and all-school President at Frankel Jewish Academy. POLAND EQUALS SOLIDARITY continued from page 6

industry, as well as municipalities, NGOs and local volunteer-based civil society are providing shelter and feeding those in need.

According to a recent poll, some 75% of Poles have already engaged in some form of aid to refugees from Ukraine. To encourage such endeavors, the Polish government is introducing stipends for people who host refugees. Measures undertaken and coordinated by the government and grassroots efforts combined with the actions of the Ukrainian diaspora already present in Poland have so far averted a need for refugee camps.

Obviously, in such a crisis, a society’s generosity and massive mobilization can only be complementary to long-term solutions at the state level. That is why Polish authorities have just adopted special legislation giving Ukrainian refugees the right to work and access social services and benefits, under the same conditions as citizens of Poland. Children who recently fled from Ukraine are already attending school in Poland. Universities are admitting students unable to continue their studies at home. Healthcare coverage and family benefits have been extended to Ukrainian refugees, as well.

Poland is struggling to see that nobody fleeing Ukraine is left behind, and encourages international partners to match our efforts.

You might ask, what has made Poland the champion of the Ukrainian refugees’ cause? The answer is that the memory of the atrocities of World War II and the suffering of the civilian population is still alive in Poland.

Eighty years after the war, we know what it means to lose everybody and everything in a single day. We know what it means to have to flee your home and wander the world for years, searching for refuge. We also remember the asylum and assistance extended to the Polish people in the early 1980s when the harsh measures of martial law were introduced by the then-Communist authorities of Poland, with the blessing of Soviet Moscow, to suppress the massive “Solidarity” movement that dared to oppose the communist regime. Solidarity is the brand of Poland.

Agata Czaplińska is acting ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Israel. This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.