Klezmer Institute

Klezmer Institute is delighted to announce that it has been awarded a @NEHgov Scholarly Editions grant for 2022-2024 for the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Critical Editions Project. NEH Press Release: bit.ly/3bYkcRO #neh #humanities #klezmerinstitute #kmdmp #kiselgof

I think we should seriously start referring to the demographic transformation of South-West Sydney over the past 50 years as a form of ethnic cleansing. The story of the Bankstown Synagogue is a case in point. Built in 1913, the Bankstown Synagogue was the first Jewish synagogue in suburban Sydney. It was firebombed and destroyed in 1991 as the suburb of Bankstown rapidly filled up with Islamist migrants escaping the Lebanese Civil War. I was only dimly aware of the story before I decided to try look up the location of the Bankstown Synagogue today on Google Streetview. I was just curious to see what the street looked like today. And then it hit me. My jaw literally dropped to the floor. The destroyed Bankstown Synagogue stood just a few doors down from the site of the Al Madinah Dawah Center today - the extremist ISIS linked mosque in Bankstown that radicalised the Bondi shooter Naveed Akram. So Naveed Akram was radicalised on a street where Australian Jews once prayed before being driven out essentially by ethnic cleansing. Within living memory, Bankstown moved from being a majority Anglo-Christian suburb with a functioning Jewish congregation to a plurality-Muslim suburb dominated by harsh and extreme forms of Islam. It really is Australia's Molenbeek. If you compare known ISIS foreign fighter recruitment rates from South-West Sydney with census data from the mid-2010s you quickly come to the shocking conclusion that roughly 1 in every 100 young Muslim men in this part of Sydney fought for ISIS in the mid-2010s - or were stopped by Australian authorities right as they were leaving the country to do so. Naveed Akram was radicalised to mass murder Jewish Australians at a mosque located just a few doors down from a destroyed synagogue. Yes, this is ethnic cleansing.

Ryan Goodman has the right frame and the NBC reporting fills in the piece that makes this more than a pattern story. Hegseth pressed Army Secretary Driscoll for months to pull these officers. Driscoll said no. So Hegseth did it himself, without the legal authority to selectively remove individual names - the system is specifically designed to prevent that. When Gen. Randy George asked to meet and discuss the blocked promotions, Hegseth refused. Then fired him. Mid-term, two years before his tenure was up. Nine officials. All four branches. “Not a single service has been immune.” The Pentagon called it fake news. They haven’t disputed a name.

The Army Chief of Staff, a combat veteran with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, asked Pete Hegseth why he was blocking the promotions of two Black officers and two female officers who had earned them. Hegseth refused to answer. Then he fired him. Nine U.S. officials told NBC News that Hegseth has blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military. Hegseth has now fired or sidelined more than a dozen generals and admirals. He is an out-of-control, unqualified former TV host and nobody in the Republican Party will say a word about it because they don’t want to make Trump angry. nbcnews.com/politics/natio…

I am the VP of Workforce Economics at Oracle. We are worth $420 billion. On Tuesday, we sent 30,000 employees a termination email at 6 AM. Not 9. Not business hours. Six in the morning. They woke up to the word "eliminated." The email came from "Oracle Leadership." Not a manager. Not a name. Oracle Leadership. It said: "We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made." By the time they read the word "grateful," their access to email, files, and Slack had already been revoked. The gratitude was the last Oracle communication they received. We did not eliminate the roles. We eliminated the salaries. In the same fiscal year, we filed 3,126 H-1B petitions to hire foreign workers. 436 this year alone. The roles are identical. The pay is not. An H-1B software engineer earns $87,000. The domestic median for the same work is $106,000. Eighty-three percent of H-1B workers are classified at entry-level wages for senior positions. The industry calls this a skills gap. It is a pay cut that requires a passport. The visa is tied to the employer. If the worker leaves, they lose their legal right to remain in the country. If they negotiate, they risk the same. If they organize, the sponsor declines to renew. That is retention. Our revenue this quarter is $17.2 billion. Up 22%. Net income up 95%. We have $553 billion in committed future contracts. Up 325%. These are not the numbers of a company that needs to lay anyone off. We took a $2.1 billion restructuring charge. That is the cost of the gratitude. It frees up $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. That cash services $156 billion in AI data centers we are building. Starting 2028, OpenAI pays us $82 million per day. Larry Ellison is worth $189 billion. He pledged $51 billion in Oracle shares as collateral for the Stargate AI venture. Announced at the White House. The stock rose 4% on Tuesday. The day of the 6 AM emails. Wall Street did not see 30,000 people. They saw the margin. Amazon laid off 30,000 since October. Filed thousands of H-1B petitions in the same window. This is not one company. This is the operating model. Fire the salary. Keep the role. Fill it with someone whose legal right to remain in the country depends on your continued sponsorship. Pay them less. They will not complain. They cannot. One employee's father worked at Oracle for 20 years. No phone call. No meeting. An email at 6 AM and a locked laptop. The role is still open. The people we fired are free. The people we hired are not.

"ICE: Do you have your ID Nadine’s Husband: Yea, what did you hit me for? Nadine: We’re citizens, there’s no reason to carry them Husband: This is my status and I’m getting my passport for you ICE: Ok, do you have ID on you? Husband: Yeah, but I need his information. He just hit my car. Nadine: Yeah, we need all the insurance information because you guys are damaging our vehicle. As the bizarre exchange continued, Nadine and her husband tried to get identifying information for the ICE agents that just intentionally rammed their government vehicle into their car. The ICE agent refused to answer—claiming they don’t have to provide the victims of their vehicular assault with any information. After Nadine tried to leave her car to write down the license plate number of the ICE agent who rammed into them, ICE threatened her with arrest! Husband: You have to have a reasonable cause ICE: Sit tight Nadine: You guys hit our car and had no reason to come after us Nadine: I will be contacting the lawyers and the ACLU. Husband: Go behind them and get their [license] plates because I don’t want that car to just take off. Nadine: Alright I’m getting out of the car to get plates. ICE: Stay in the vehicle mam—do not get out of the car. Nadine: You really think you can tell me what to do? ICE: You get out of the car you’ll be obstructing. Nadine: I’m not obstructing for leaving my vehicle! [ICE agent then reads off a law claiming Nadine would be obstructing if she gets out of her car] Nadine: That’s a lie! I’ll make sure that’s charged. What’s your badge numbers? ICE: I don’t have to answer any questions mam Nadine: Actually as a federal officer you are obligated to give me your name and badge number if you are doing something. ICE: “I think TikTok has lied to you.” In this upside down—growingly fascist country—Trump’s masked secret police are literally ramming into the vehicles of random Minnesotans and then harassing the victims to show their papers." ICE RAMS Into Car, Demands VICTIMS Show Their Papers: “We're Citizens!” open.substack.com/pub/statuscoup…

The teenager bagging groceries today asked if I wanted my bread on top. I said yes. He nodded seriously and said, "Good call. Structural integrity is everything." Then he arranged my bags like he was building a cathedral. His coworker laughed at him. But my bread arrived home unpunched, my tomatoes unbrushed. Sometimes the people who care too much about small things are exactly who we need.

All this talk of a ballroom to service the super wealthy while the rest of us continue to pay more for healthcare and basic essentials makes me think of this powerful political cartoon from 1906, the artist is William Balfour Ker.

I live in Chicago… I live a block over from Cicero. ICE visited my home yesterday. ICE didn’t knock. ICE tried to forcefully open my window. ICE opened my screen and asked me to sign papers. I AM an American Citizen. Born on U.S. soil. ICE forcefully tried to enter my home! WAKE UP AMERICA!

As a Palestinian who refuses to parrot our leadership’s lies, I have to say it bluntly: Telling Mizrahi Jews - Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and the rest of the Arab world, that they are doing “ethnic cleansing” to us is the gaslight of the century. Let’s start with facts. Mizrahi Jews didn’t “come from Europe.” They lived in the Middle East for thousands of years, long before Islam, long before Arab conquest, long before any modern state. Their ancestors spoke the same ancient Hebrew mentioned in the Qur’an’s stories, they prayed facing Jerusalem, and their communities in Babylon, Damascus, and Sana’a existed for over 2,500 years. They are as indigenous to this region as the olive trees, as native to the Middle East as we are. When Arab states turned against them in the 20th century, after Israel was established, they were ethnically cleansed: homes looted, businesses seized, citizenship revoked, synagogues burned, people lynched. Nearly a million Jews were expelled from Arab lands. Most fled to Israel with nothing. And now, decades later, our leadership dares to call them the colonizers? The same families who were driven from Baghdad, Aleppo, and Tripoli - who rebuilt their lives from refugee camps in Israel, are accused of committing the same crime that was done to them. That’s not just hypocrisy; it’s historical amnesia. If we truly want justice, we have to stop gaslighting our neighbors and start acknowledging that their story is Middle Eastern too. Our liberation won’t come from denying theirs.

(Non-Jewish) opera singer Sarah Callinan was hired to sing at a Rosh Hashana service. She witnessed firsthand the level of security now required for Jews to practice their faith safely. Thank you so much, Sarah, for speaking up. You’re right, this situation is not okay, but your video made it just a little more bearable.

The true and hilarious story of "Jew Church." US Army soldiers in basic combat training started attending Jewish services more and more. Why? Well, here's the first-hand story from the veteran who kinda started it... Thank you for your service, "livefromthebus."🇺🇸🫡

So here's a thing I got asked when I was talking about teen birth rates and the national birth rate generally: "If girls/women are most fertile from 15-30, why are we losing more than a decade to that for education for no good reason?" I'm not going to entertain "why 15-17 year

The Trump administration has cancelled all present and future NEH grants, including those already awarded. The NEH is a vanishingly small drop in the bucket of federal funding, but is nevertheless vital to supporting local museums, music, artists, and scholarship.

Yesterday I received one of the highest and most ancient honors in London, the Freedom of the City. But the celebration soured into an experience of indignity when upon arriving, I found that there was no ramp for me to access the stage. 🧵

The Klezmer Archive team is hiring for two positions! 1. Visual/UI Designer to design interfaces and develop a preliminary visual identity for the project. 2. front-end developer to lay down a technological foundation for our project. #NEH tinyurl.com/mppfhn9n

BREAKING: Former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has announced he will not vote for Donald Trump. It’s unprecedented to see so many high-ranking Republicans abandon their party’s nominee.

@RokhlK :(

So depressing. I came across the account of someone I used to be friendly with in the yiddish world. their tweets (not to mention their entire raison d'etre) are just full on racist grievance, delivered in full on troll mode. ... How does a "nice" person end up there? 🤢

We set a very ambitious goal for this fundraiser and we're almost done with the campaign!If you have already donated, thank you! Still thinking about donating? Your donation might get us across the 50% threshold! #klezmerinstitute #annualfundraiser #ashkenazicexpressiveculture

Thank you, friends!! We're going to keep going a few more days - stay tuned for a couple more letters in your inboxes! #klezmerinstitute #fundraiser #annualfundraiser

YOU inspire us. <3 Check your email for a note from Executive Director, Christina Crowder. @CrowderKlezmer #annualfundraiser #fundraisercampaign #klezmerinstitute #klezmerland #yiddishland