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March 19, 2010
Rabbi Berel Wein: The Divine is in the details
JWisdom.com Stewards of sacrifice with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Why Obama is waging war on Israel
March 18, 2010
Cal Thomas: Israel's New Enemy: America?
JWisdom.com Love me not? with Rabbi David Aaron (5 minutes)
Jonathan Rosenblum: Washington Throws a Tantrum
March 17, 2010
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Orwell, Santayana, and Me
Jonathan Tobin: How Many Lives Is Biden's Pride Worth?
March 16, 2010
Steven Emerson: Combating Lawfare
JWisdom.com How to perform a miracle with Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair (4 minutes)
Anne Bayefsky: Behind Obama's Dangerous Overreaction on Israel
March 15, 2010
The Jewish Ethicist By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Father's obligations toward minor children
JWisdom.com Moody, Grumpy, Irritable Children with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Judith Graham: Get the whole picture before a CT
March 12, 2010
Rabbi David Aaron: You CAN have Heaven on Earth
JWisdom.com Manufacturing mediums with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: The march of the Red-Green brigades
March 11, 2010
Glenn Garvin: Conspiracy theories, why people believe them and how they spread
JWisdom.com For Yourself, Not By Yourself with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
The Kosher Gourmet by Linda Gassenheimer : Turn leftovers into tasty New England hash
Paul Richter: Biden promises 'viable Palestine' is in the offing
March 10, 2010
Paul Greenberg: Death Checks In
JWisdom.com How To Get A (Real) Life with Rabbi Warren Goldstein ( EXTENDED EPISODE)
Paul Richter: Israel exerts soverign right to its capital as Biden looks on astounded
Richard A. Serrano: 'Jihad Jane' indictment alleges threat from within U.S.
March 9, 2010
Wesley Pruden: Joe's Israeli adventure
JWisdom.com Free To Be (Responsibly) You and Me! with Rabbi Naftali Brawer ( 8 MINUTES)
David G. Savage: Supreme Court to rule on free speech in case of soldier's funeral
March 8, 2010
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Make a fuss about those who cuss?
JWisdom.com Finding or Losing Yourself? Here's How! with Rabbi David Aaron ( 5 MINUTES)
Steven Emerson: America must learn from the UK about the future of Islamist subversion
March 5, 2010
Rabbi Berel Wein: Golden Calf still with us --- except it has multiplied
JWisdom.com The Limits of Eternity with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 MINUTES)
Caroline B. Glick: Biden's lost cause
March 4, 2010
Alan M. Dershowitz: How About A Real Campaign Against Abuses?
JWisdom.com Using Things, Loving People with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff ( 7 MINUTES)
Jordan "Gorf" Gorfinkel's Everything's Relative
March 3, 2010
JWisdom.com Grasping The Name of Your Life Game with Rabbi Warren Goldstein ( 8 MINUTES)
The Kosher Gourmet by Marialisa Calta : A cowboy's recipes for really good grub
March 2, 2010
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Someone's there
Diane Toroian Keaggy : Have we misunderstood Michelangelo?
March 1, 2010
JWisdom.com Whole in One with Rabbi David Aaron ( 5 MINUTES)
Michael Muskal: Hillary meets with Israeli official, discusses gefilte fish dispute
Feb. 26, 2010
Rabbi Francis Nataf: The Megilla of Spring
JWisdom.com A Biblical Secret for a More Powerful You with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 MINUTES)
Caroline B. Glick: When rhetoric rules the roost
Feb. 25, 2010
The Jewish Ethicist By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: When walking away from your mortgage is both economically sound and makes ethical sense
JWisdom.com The Second Most Important Question in Your Life with Rabbi Yehoshua Karsh ( 5 MINUTES)
Seema Mehta : U.S.-Israel relations raised in California's Senate race --- by conservatives
Feb. 24, 2010
Rabbi Avi Shafran: The gift of the ‘prayer bomber’
Steven Emerson: Why Religious Freedom Commission is under attack
Feb. 23, 2010
Dennis Prager: Government, Yes! The Divine and Parents, No!
JWisdom.com The Last Laugh of Enlightenment with Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair ( 5 MINUTES)
Anne Applebaum: Prepare for war with Iran --- in case Israel strikes
Feb. 22, 2010
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Is it not refreshing Tiger Woods' career has crashed and burned so dramatically?
JWisdom.com Esther and the third Truth with Rabbi David Aaron ( 9 MINUTES)
Kelly Brewington: Going smoke-free may raise diabetes risk
Feb. 19, 2010
Rabbi David Aaron: Is the Divine beyond us or within us?
JWisdom.com Olympic Faith with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 MINUTES)
Caroline B. Glick: Israel and the West are perpetrators of a myth that endangers the Jewish State
Feb. 18, 2010
Cal Thomas: Who is Rashad Hussain?
JWisdom.com A Wedding Disaster to Remember with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein ( 3 MINUTES)
Feb. 17, 2010
JWisdom.com Think your life is messed up? with Rabbi David Aaron ( 11 MINUTES)
Greg Logan: 'Greatest Jewish sporting event of all time since David versus Goliath' may be postponed because of bar mitzvah
Feb. 16, 2010
Anya Martin : Boy's 'cerebral palsy' fixed with diet
JWisdom.com Feet On The Street Spirituality with Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 8 MINUTES)
Marty Peretz: Let Europe Mind Its Own Business. It Brings Nothing To The Table Save For Mischief
Feb. 15, 2010
Herb Geduld: Lincoln and the Jews
JWisdom.com Are Our Children Really Ours? with Rabbi Mordechai Becher ( 5 MINUTES)
Susan King: 'Wolf Man' reflected writer's wartime Jewish experience

Jewish World Review Oct. 12, 2004 / 27 Tishrei, 5765

Fear and loathing in the Fatherland

By Suzanne Fields


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | BERLIN — Like most Europeans, the Germans have a love-hate relationship with America, psychologically deep and politically shallow. They love our culture, high and low, even as they sneer at "Schicki-Micki" — "Mickey Mouse chic." They imitate the best in avant-garde art, pop culture and middle-class prosperity and deride the boorish and vulgar in American life. (Sometimes they imitate the vulgar and boorish, too.)


The conflicting attitudes are reflections of the conflicted way they see themselves. They're mesmerized by the American presidential campaign, and as they watch — and try to figure out what's going on — naive ambivalence becomes ever more obvious and ever more hypocritical.


August Hanning, the head of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, held a press conference the other day and he ladled out familiar European mush over what's happening in Iraq, noting that the path to security and democracy is "still very rocky." But he conceded that rocky or not, Germany shares with America a mutual stake in the outcome. "All of us have a common interest, whether we take part in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq" or not, he said. "This country must be stabilized."


Even John Kerry, who says lots of foreign leaders (all unnamed) want Americans to elect him and that he's the man who can build a winning coalition of these reluctant allies, now concedes that whoever these mystery nations are they don't include France and Germany. In something less than felicitous language, he specifically singled out France and Germany as allies who "aren't going to trade their young for our young in body bags."

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So we're back to the drawing board. Somebody's got to do the heavy lifting and thank heaven for the United States. Once more with feeling, Europeans are asking themselves what kind of world they would be living in if the Americans, boorish and vulgar as they may be, were not in it. This becomes not an issue of nationalism or chauvinism but about "all of us," and about who wants to destroy "all of us."


This embarrasses many Germans mightily, because the ghost of the Third Reich still hovers over everything here. Even the youngest of the Germans understands history and feels the ghostly touch of evil. You can hardly walk anywhere in Berlin without bumping into reminders of the Holocaust. Small bronze plaques mark doorways throughout the city where Jews were taken from their homes and sent to Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. An enormous Holocaust Memorial, with its 2,700 stones commemorating the death of six million Jews, rises above the Brandenburg Gate that is the symbol of German nationhood.


But when you talk to young men and women in Berlin, so acutely sensitive to what Hitler did, they seem utterly unable to comprehend the implications of doing nothing about a man like Saddam Hussein, whose Hitler-like atrocities are documented in the mass graves of the tortured and the damned. Germans simply refuse to see the analogies to Hitler that are so obvious to everyone else, and that modern technology renders an evil tyrant with ambition and means far more dangerous than der Fuehrer ever was. Hitler never had an A-bomb.


Young men and women in their 30s and 40s, hanging out in the coffee shops and cyber cafes, don't want to think about Hitler. Going on endlessly about George Bush as the enemy of the people is much more fun. Contemporary German cultural attitudes suggest clues as to why this is.


From February to September, more than 1.2 million persons looked at an exhibition of paintings and sculpture lent by New York's Museum of Modern Art at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The renowned collection showed some of America's most famous artists along with Europeans, including contemporary Germans. Men and women camped out with sleeping bags and bottles of water to have a place in line when the doors opened each day. The buzz was electric.


German critics saw the show as reflective only of American imperialism and mammon — art that owed more to something stolen from Europe than to anything American. Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, analyzed the split between the waiting line and the critical reviews as a "a tale of two Europes" — of those who love American culture high and low and of those who resent it because it is so seductive.


There's a similar reaction to American political leadership. "It is hard enough to live with a giant that spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined and unleashes its might on places like Afghanistan and Iraq," writes Mr. Joffe. "It grates even more to see the Gulliver Unbound dominate European culture from McDonald's to MoMA. The fear and loathing of America will outlive President George W. Bush."


There's a caution here for the senator and his friends, too.

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