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In this issue
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review January 2, 2009 / 6 Teves 5769

2009, a beginning

By Greg Crosby


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Here we are in the beginning of a new year - 2009. Amazing. I wonder if people one hundred years ago thought that 1909 was "Amazing" too. I'm sure emerging out of the 1800's the year 1909 must have sounded pretty futuristic to them. Imagine - the 20th Century only eight years old! How modern the year "1909" must have sounded! How new! A wonderful brand spanking new century all spread out before them loaded with hope, fresh ideas and grand expectations galore. People's optimism must have been terrific. Little did they know.


By 1914 the innocence of that new century was fading fast. World War I was underway. The Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo; pacifist Jean Jaures was murdered in Paris; war was declared by Austro-Hugary against Serbia; Germany declares war on Russia and France and invades Belgium; Britain declares war on Germany; Austria declares war on Russia, Serbia and Montenegro declare war on Germany; British troops land in France; France declares war on Austria; Britain declares war on Austria; France and Britain declare war on Turkey; Russians invade E. Prussia; Germans occupy Liege; and on and on and on.


The First World War will continue through 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1918 until armistice is signed between the Allies and Germany on November 11th. It was to have been the war to end all wars, but it later proved to be just the beginning of a conflict that would continue to fester for the next 20 years and come into full bloom and be forever known as World War II. The total military death count for WWI was around 8.5 million. WWII was 55 million military dead.


The death camps of Hitler saw 6 million Jews exterminated. The massacres by the Japanese include the Bataan Death March (16,000 POW's) and Manila Massacre (70,000). In total about 15,500,000 people died in the Asia/Pacific War.


The 20th Century also saw the rise of communism across the globe resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people including over 70 million in China and over 61 million in Russia/USSR alone. The Russian figure would include the Russian Civil War (9 million). The Armenian massacres of 1915 - 1923 bring another 1,500,000 deaths. Add up China's atrocities, the killings in Africa and other places and the toll rises by many more millions.


Our past century was bloody, brutal and horrific. But on the other hand, the 20th Century heralded some of the greatest technology of human kind. Silk-screen printing, airplanes, helicopters, rockets, stainless steel, gas turbine, synthetic materials, the jet engine, television, vacuum cleaners, and conveyor belts. Aspirin, surgical transplants, electrocardiograph, iron lung, antibiotics, therapeutic drugs, kidney machine, artificial heart. Safety razors, cloud-seeding, microwave cooking, photoelectric cell, radar, transistors, computers, fiber optics, lasers. And more and more. Inventions and technology that has saved lives and improved living for all people.


The 20th Century also produced some of history's greatest talents in the arts. Think about the emergence of popular culture in records, radio, motion pictures, and television (Okay, scratch television. But three out of four ain't bad). In pop music names like Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Lerner and Loewe, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Ella Fitzgerald, and Judy Garland just to name the few of the top of my head.


In the Fine Arts we had Henry Moore, Mary Cassatt, Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Matisse, Kandinsky, Hopper, Beckmann. There was the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. In music there was Stravinsky, Toscanini, Copland, Bernstein, Schonberg, Weill, Richard Strauss, Pablo Casals, Maria Callas, and so many others.


Our amazing film directors, actors, actresses, performers of every kind that created the movies that we now call "classics" are too many to mention here but they too, are the contributors of the 20th Century. The iconic singers of each generation that brought us the music of our times, of the 20th Century - names like Crosby, Sinatra, Nat Cole and Elvis. Did anyone in 1909 think that such talent was in the offing? Could anybody have guessed the impact that the motion picture would have on popular culture? Or that the advent of television would change the world forevermore? Hardly.


I guess the point to all this is that we really have no idea what a new year, let alone a new decade or new century has in store for us. Horrors or beauty. Pain or pleasure. Wonderment or anxiety. Tears or laughter. In all probability, we will have some of all of the above. How much of which, only G-d knows. My best wish for all of you in the coming year is that the good outweighs the bad by ten thousand fold.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.


JWR contributor Greg Crosby, former creative head for Walt Disney publications, has written thousands of comics, hundreds of children's books, dozens of essays, and a letter to his congressman. A freelance writer in Southern California, you may contact him by clicking here.

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© 2008, Greg Crosby

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