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Nov. 6, 2009
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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 July 18, 2008 15 Tamuz, 5768

Spectacle in Berlin

By Suzanne Fields


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Barack Obama is a man in a hurry. He had barely quieted the criticism of his using the presidential seal with his name on it as a prop for his speeches before he suggested that he wanted to follow Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to Berlin to make a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. He got a lot of public reminders that Reagan and Clinton waited until they were sworn in to use the famous gate as backdrop.


The history and reflected glory of the Brandenburg Gate has trapped ambitious men before. What was built as an elaborate toll gate to collect from everyone entering and leaving the city quickly became a symbol of national honor. Napoleon marched under it when he entered Berlin in triumph in 1806. He seized the bronze goddess of peace and her chariot, pulled by four horses, from her place atop the gate and took it home to Paris as booty of war. France returned it eight years later, and the Germans gave her a new identity, calling her Victoria, goddess of victory.


When Paris fell to the Nazis in the summer of 1940, the Wehrmacht troops marched through the Brandenburg Gate swathed in swastikas. After Berlin was divided between East and West following the war, the bronze fell into neglect and disrepair, to be restored to monumental glory only when Germany was unified.


Barack Obama wants to bask in a little of that reflected glory, perhaps to ride in his imagination on one of the horses of the goddess of victory. Stung by critics, he dispatched his men to scout for other sites. There are lots to choose from. The restored Reichstag, with its gorgeous glass dome, would make a splendid photo-op, marking the return of democracy to Germany. The new United States Embassy on Pariser Platz is a symbol of renewed U.S.-German relations — but George Bush the elder got there first, cutting a red ribbon to open the embassy on the Fourth of July. He also should be wary of the embassy because it resembles a vast bunker with its security requirements, and Berlin has given bunkers a bad name.


Obama could take a short walk from the embassy to pose at "Germania," an exhibition of models of the buildings Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, planned as a grand city to celebrate Nazi triumph after World War II. The Volkshalle, or people's hall, was modeled on Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome, intended as a world capital "comparable only to Egypt, Babylon or Rome." The hall would have been so large that the breath of the spectators would have become moisture to fall as an indoor rain. Sen. Obama could reflect there on how the hot air of big talk sometimes comes to naught.


A speech at the Olympic Stadium would recall the cheers for Jesse Owen, the black runner whose four gold medals in 1936 humiliated Der Fuehrer, mocking his rants of Aryan superiority. Sen. Obama could make the point that using the Olympics to score cheap political points is risky business. (China, take note.)


The senator could find a heroic backdrop at soon-to-close Tempelhof International Airport, nexus of the Berlin Airlift that saved the city's residents from cold and hunger when the Soviets tried to strangle West Berlin into submission in 1948.


The senator's scouts will confront difficulty and irony no matter where they pose him in Berlin. He's not running for office in Germany, and wherever he goes he'll remind thoughtful folks back home that George W. Bush is responsible for the warm relationship with the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Obama in Berlin might even remind American voters of some of Hillary Clinton's sharp criticism in the primary season, such as her remark that although Sen. Obama had been chairman of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, he never called a single hearing.


Spectacle draws crowds, but it can't replace substance. Merkel offered John McCain equal time in Berlin, but he probably doesn't need it. Aware that spectacle at the Brandenburg Gate might look more like the Nuremberg rally than an American-style political rally, a chastened Obama told The New York Times that he doesn't want the setting to distract from his message. "Our goal is for me to lay out how I think about the next administration's role in rebuilding a trans-Atlantic alliance."


The Europeans are swooning over Barack Obama, and wherever he speaks he'll no doubt stir big crowds. But Europeans still don't vote in our elections. Not yet.

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