New Article: Killing Off the Sephardic Heritage from the “Inside”: Louis Solomon “Proclaims Liberty” from the Sephardic Heritage in the Name of Tikvah Meir Soloveichik
David Shasha
Killing Off the Sephardic Heritage from the “Inside”: Louis Solomon “Proclaims Liberty” from the Sephardic Heritage in the Name of Tikvah Meir Soloveichik
On the day prior to Thanksgiving, I received the weekly “Coronavirus Update from the Parnas” e-mail from formerly-Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel bigwig Louis Solomon, that once again got me to thinking about White Jewish Supremacy and the depressing erasure of the Sephardic heritage.
I have written many articles on the Synagogue’s sad descent into Tikvah Fund radical nihilism under the leadership of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, but have never presented actual first-hand evidence from the SI members themselves. I thought it would be a propitious moment to do so now, as Solomon is quite representative of the sentiment there.
He is apparently a very important New York lawyer, as we can see from his firm’s website:
https://www.reedsmith.com/en/professionals/s/solomon-louis-m
Interestingly, when we read to the very bottom of the page, the expected YU bona fides appears.
And it just so happens that the year before he graduated from YU, ever-welcoming home to the “Idiot Sephardim,” then SI Rabbi Marc Angel was defending Ashkenazim against the “Grandee” Sephardim, in a debate with the historian Malcolm Stern:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXd29FZzlYVFk5dXc/edit
Which I discussed in my “Pottersville” article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V-uAEYS_aBAnDNMDPwvzIUFn9hbTy6n5jVknqrDTUN8/edit
It is probable that Solomon entered YU under Angel’s devoted Washington Heights influence, which would have ushered him into self-hatred and “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit in the face of the intimidating White Jewish Supremacy.
I do wonder if he attended the 1975 SI event and learned from it. It would make some sense given who he is today.
His Thanksgiving missive was chock full of his breezily arrogant David Brooksian flourishes, with an especial devotion to his Synagogue’s current rabbi.
Here is the letter in full:
Dear Shearith Israel family,
Factual Cruelty. It is going on 50 years that we have all known. Without
qualification or doubt, as The Main Ingredients taught us in one of the great
earworms of the Twentieth Century, their R&B classic from 1972, Everybody
Everybody plays the fool sometimes
There's no exception to the rule
Listen, baby
It may be factual, may be cruel
I ain't lyin'
Everybody plays the fool
So we deeply know that the factual may nonetheless be cruel. What better way to describe COVID-19 as we enter, or don’t enter, The Fifth Wave, but as we are
definitely seeing an uptick in disease spread – or if you are given to dramatic
headlines, a SURGE. In our area, COVID-19 infections continue to increase;
hospitalizations continue to decrease. We continue to see breakthrough cases of
friends and even fellow congregants who are testing positive and, in some cases,
feeling symptoms, mild or more severe, even though they are fully-vaxxed. We
want to return to pre-COVID-19 normalcy without having to mask or remain
socially distant or chilly because we are outside or have opened all the windows in a taxi.
I’ve already told you how you can avoid playing the fool when it comes to
synagogue return. It is by coming back for Friday night services (defining “night”
at this time of year as, well, mid-afternoon on Friday). In just over an hour it will
make you feel safe and warm in the glow of Shabbat lights, our magical minhag,
ethereal choir, and Rabbi Soloveichik’s always inspiring Friday Night Lights talk.
I have not misled you. I certainly have tried not to. Going back to live Friday
Night Lights really has, in Trustee David Sable’s words, returned the resplendent
“majesty of Shabbat to the Upper West Side”.
This week’s Daf Yomi pages of Tractate Taanit include page 11a. The page
contains two stories about two “plonis” (the plural of “ploni”, the transliteration of the Aramaic word for the anonymous pseudonym “what’s his name” or “this
guy/gal”). Both stories describe a person who does not share in the distress or
misery of the community. Of him/her it is said, if you have separated yourself
from the community in such times of distress, you will not witness the consolation of the community when they are delivered from the afflictions. Do not separate yourself. Much awaits your return. Need I say anything more than that there was chulent at the Kiddush this past Shabbat! If you are able to make it and feel comfortable, please come. You will be transported, and we will be enriched as a community by your presence.
Then we can figure out something else to play the fool over. There is no end of
opportunities for that in our post-modern world.
Giving Thanks. In Friday Night Lights this past Shabbat, Rabbi Soloveichik
addressed how Shabbat has been seen and written about by non-Jews. And the
beautiful words and thoughts, his and theirs, got me thinking.
As the first and thus oldest Jewish congregation in North America, we rightly
remind ourselves and others of our Congregation’s noble, even illustrious, past.
We have a list of our “firsts” – and we are rightly proud of them. Indeed, our very historicity serves as a connecting device, making us feel a part of the Great “J Continuum” (see my email of 7/16/20). But what did precede us? On whose
shoulders did we stand to make it all happen? In Malcolm Gladwell’s otherwise
unremarkable book Outliers: The Story of Success, he is fairly effective in showing that success is usually the product of a lot of hard work and more than just a Little Help from My Friends. So what were our antecedents? Whom do we have to thank?
As a community, we are assiduous in remembering the Jewish congregations that helped support our early period on these shores. Indeed, so important is the paying of that homage that, at the Kal Nidre service on the evening of Kippur, a special, once-a-year “blessing is added for the congregations of Amsterdam, London, Curacao and Surinam”, says Dr. Pool in a note on page 29 of our Kippur Machzor (for Hebrew text, see page 332 of the same volume). Interestingly, these congregations “aided in the establishment of [Shearith Israel’s] first synagogue building in 1730” (id. at 24). But we were already here 76 years by 1730. What about prior to 1730?
We know that by 1655 we had a Sefer Torah, and we know that for some years
during that century we prayed in people’s homes. But what we don’t often talk
about is the role other faiths played in our survival in pre-Colonial times. We
should make this a larger part of our historical narrative. We have a perfect
opportunity to embrace (well, you know what I mean) many members of a church that played a central role in helping our early Shearith Israelites. I’m referring to the church variously known as the Dutch Reformed Church, the Collegiate Church of New York, the West End Collegiate Church, and, as a result of their most recent re-brand, the West End Church. Many of their members will be joining us for our Thanksgiving Pack-a-thon tomorrow – as they have been for each of the six years we have been setting aside part of our Thanksgiving morning to pack food for undernourished and needy New Yorkers.
We know this history both from representatives of the West End Church and from our own records (see for example de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World, especially at page 446, whence the picture of the amazing notice below was taken). Our friends at the West End Church describe themselves as part of the oldest Protestant church with a continuing organization in America. They trace their origins to communal prayer in a loft above a gristmill in New Amsterdam in 1628. Their complex history is interesting but not my topic here. My topic here is that in the Seventeenth Century, after Shearith Israel began but before we had a synagogue of our own, the West End Church allowed us to use their space in the gristmill. They still have a millstone from that era – and so do we, right outside our main sanctuary. I solicit any other historical facts from that beautiful episode in human kindness.
About nine years ago the then President of Ireland visited our Synagogue to thank us for helping ameliorate the suffering of the Irish by donating food and money – in 1851 (see my email of 6/5/20). Gratitude and thanksgiving have, and certainly should have, a long memory. It is time for us to thank our friends at the West End Church for the use of their space in the Seventeenth Century.
Half-Full Report.
Brilliant New Classes. We have become accustomed to Rabbi Soloveichik’s
lectures mostly via call- and sometimes Zoom-in. They are masterful, world-class opportunities for hundreds and sometimes thousands of us, near and far, to hear and learn and be inspired. At the same time, Rabbi Rohde and Reverend Edinger are also doing weekly lectures online. They are excellent. And, Reverend Edinger just announced two new fantastic offerings: a weekly Wednesday series called A Random Walk Down Mill Street “focusing on an element of our liturgy, music, or minhag”, and a series of short videos entitled Secrets of the Synagogue. In the end, however, as Reverend Edinger rightly says, “it is the in-person services that are truly the core of synagogue life”. So please help us make minyan. But if you cannot for any reason, call/Zoom in, for you and for us.
Paved Paradise Sloganfest. The heavy hitters of words and phrases have returned and have taken control of the challenge. With the help of Steven Smith and Aura Bijou, we have the makings of great and fitting slogans to paste on the huge eastern wall of Paved Paradise. Do you want all of them? Some of them? The best of them? Vote by return email. Better yet, send in 100 more – it’s a BIG wall! Current contenders include:
- If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. (It's an African proverb apparently.)
- Alone we can lead/Together succeed
- Paved Paradise: Where Heaven Meets the Ground.
- Live Slow
- Think fast/live slow
- Life’s a Beach
- Be a part/Not apart.
Additionally, Steve Smith suggests a light show projected on the Eastern Wall. It’s
a great idea. The pictures below, from him, are from a light show that was
projected onto the side of the Polin Museum in Warsaw as part of its opening
celebrations. Or we can try to use the light show at David’s Citadel in Jerusalem.
Or we could do one of our own. Steve’s great idea does remind me of a major
challenge I want to announce: to design murals for our Eastern Wall. Email your
ideas.
Thank you all. Bless us all. Happy Thanksgiving. Shabbat shalom.
Louis Solomon, Parnas
Solomon was intimately involved in the famous Rimonim dispute:
https://www.jta.org/2015/06/01/united-states/trial-begins-in-faceoff-between-historic-synagogues
I have made reference to that red herring in the following two SHU Weekly Items of Note posts:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/0NXYpLlfZzU/m/XsZ0_7nHAwAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rtQd9gE6QOY/m/QPb5Ktu_CQAJ
After his great victory, Solomon wrote a defense in The Jewish Week, making his case against the other side:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/the-touro-synagogue-case-two-views/
In a fight between opposing Ashkenazi factions, Sephardim always lose!
The dispute has nothing to do with the actual Sephardic heritage; rather, it is a sign of the failure of a once-relevant historic community that is left to fighting over its ritual objects, as Ashkenazim take over our history and culture to suit their own purposes.
Solomon’s vigorous praise for the Anti-Maimonidean Tikvah racist Soloveichik thus comes as no surprise at all:
I’ve already told you how you can avoid playing the fool when it comes to
synagogue return. It is by coming back for Friday night services (defining “night”
at this time of year as, well, mid-afternoon on Friday). In just over an hour it will
make you feel safe and warm in the glow of Shabbat lights, our magical minhag,
ethereal choir, and Rabbi Soloveichik’s always inspiring Friday Night Lights talk.
I have not misled you. I certainly have tried not to. Going back to live Friday
Night Lights really has, in Trustee David Sable’s words, returned the resplendent
“majesty of Shabbat to the Upper West Side”.
…
In Friday Night Lights this past Shabbat, Rabbi Soloveichik
addressed how Shabbat has been seen and written about by non-Jews. And the
beautiful words and thoughts, his and theirs, got me thinking.
Solomon keeps extending his praise to the “Master” in a very Da’as Torah vibe:
We have become accustomed to Rabbi Soloveichik’s lectures mostly via call- and sometimes Zoom-in. They are masterful, world-class opportunities for hundreds and sometimes thousands of us, near and far, to hear and learn and be inspired.
It is clear that neither Solomon or his fellow SI members have any concern for how Soloveichik is destroying our heritage, or acknowledging their toxic role in the process.
On the same day that Solomon sent his weekly letter, we received the YU Straus Center e-mail newsletter, which makes the Anti-Sephardi nature of Soloveichik’s work pretty clear:
The first item is, naturally, an attack on the Enlightenment from Rabbi Dov Lerner:
As Enlightenment forces swept through the west in the 18th century, ushering in an age of reason and new civic freedoms, particularistic faith came under threat, and the biblical text was shredded by critics. The age of reason gave way to a surge of romantic feeling, and a cast of novelists and playwrights sought to rehabilitate the Bible—but as they did, they reshaped it, changing how it had been read for centuries. The clash between an Anglo-Irish novelist and a Jewish-Polish commentator—both reacting to the pain of Jacob in the presence of an emperor—exhibits this tension and offers a lesson for this Thanksgiving.
Lerner is a devoted Tikvah member:
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/rabbi-dov-lerner/
He participated in Soloveichik’s “Esther in America” that I discussed in the context of Trumpworld Hobby Lobby radicalism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Gchf5gcWuKw/m/jyOlPqyJAQAJ
While the Ashkenazi Orthodox apparatchiks mark Moses Mendelssohn as the devil incarnate, Shmuel Feiner’s excellent article on Naftali Herz Wessely and the profound Sephardic influence on the Haskalah provides a much-needed corrective:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qRf2_x_zSK8RRQQyvp9SEmCAHQzw07Oa/view?ths=true
As Sephardim have been erased from Soloveichik’s White Jewish intellectual-religious world, such an article would clearly not be relevant to his concerns.
The next item by former corporate risk analyst Dr. Shaina Trapedo provides a very bizarre discussion of the prophet Daniel in the context of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”:
In all of Shakespeare’s works, the name of the Hebrew prophet Daniel only appears in the (in)famous courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice, where it is repeated half a dozen times to great dramatic effect. And yet, a close examination of Daniel’s presence in this climactic vital episode yields a deeper understanding of the play’s thematic exploration of debt and gratitude. Moreover, attending to the Daniel references throughout the play offers renewed (and perhaps revised) reflections on the influence of the Hebrew Bible and its interpretative traditions on what is arguably one of the most impactful works of Western literature.
She should have called it “The Secret Jewish History of ‘Merchant’ Anti-Semitism.”
Indeed, the Ashkenazi mind is very strange thing!
The final item is, of course, Soloveichik’s YU essay on Thanksgiving, which is part of his larger Neo-Con political project of helping to make America a Christian Theocracy:
In 2013, Thanksgiving occurred on the first day of Chanukah, providing much fodder for humorous remarks about "Thanksgivukkah." While the calendar did not fall out exactly the same this year, the two holidays are still only separated by a few days, inspiring us to ponder how the Jewish approach to expressing thanks and gratitude to God may have impacted the founding moments of America. As millions of Americans prepare to observe Thanksgiving, the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought presents this 2013 essay, and the sources that follow, to help provide a framework for reflecting on the American holiday that is upon us and on the Jewish ideas that may have inspired it.
Here is the complete essay:
The fuller context of the article is Soloveichik’s perpetual Straussian Neo-Con “Proclaim Liberty” gambit:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/SvAkVwHpJUU/m/y50PJbkPBAAJ
I have discussed the Trumpworld Religious Freedom scam in the following article, which argues that the New Religious Fascists have actually destroyed that Freedom because they do not believe in Pluralism and Tolerance in our Open Society:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/W2F21yO7Plg/m/DLIuweZaBQAJ
As we saw when Soloveichik, after shamefully dancing with Trump at the White House, proudly stood with MAGA radical Mike Lee at The Hoover Institute:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sUvnfXMeduh00CKAuDD30NiRwbD-5Q147YrMHbGs7Q0/edit
There can be no Religious Freedom without Human Freedom; a Constitutional concept that the Hate America Trumpists do not value.
The YU article discusses Soloveichik’s favorite Jonas Phillips; a matter that I addressed back in the fateful year of 2016, after he published his fatally misconceived Wall Street Journal article “The Jews of the American Revolution”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/2iFyANIXTI8/m/By1U9V96BQAJ
My analysis of the WSJ article focused on the classical Sephardic heritage and its Religious Humanism, in contrast to Soloveichik’s utter disdain for that heritage:
The Iberian Convivencia that is being denied by many, under the rubric of a Zionist anathema against the Arab-Muslim world, was very much a formative part of the early American Jewish experience that can be traced from Gershom Mendes Seixas to Moses Lindo to Jonas Phillips; all figures connected to this vital Sephardic heritage that is never once mentioned by Meir Soloveichik is his pusillanimous Wall Street Journal article.
In support of my position on Convivencia and the Sephardic ties to the Arab-Muslim world, I cited a crucial passage from Rabbi David de Sola Pool’s classic book on the history of Shearith Israel, long out of print, An Old Faith in a New World:
In the year 1654, the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers came possessed of the basic heritage of the Bible and Talmud and the later treasury of the Golden Age of Spain. The appellation Sephardi is derived from the name Sepharad. Whatever place or people this may have designated when the prophet Obadiah mentioned it, later tradition has regarded Sepharad as the Hebrew name for Spain. The first scattered beginnings of the settlement of the Jews in Spain may possibly antedate the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem nearly nineteen centuries ago. Travel, far-reaching overseas trade, maritime exploration, and a spirit of adventure possessed the Hebrew people at a very early time. In Biblical days there were “those who go down to the sea in ships,” and whom trade took to the utter end of the European world, to Tarshish, often identified with Tartessus in ancient Spain. In the first century of the common era, the Jewish diaspora was widespread in lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
In Visigothic Spain the lot of Jews was often not a happy one. But with the conquest by the Arabs in 711 their lot improved. Although the relations between Moslem and Jew were not uniformly a blissful fellowship, there arose beyond the conflicts in both Moslem and Christian Spain an era of epoch-making intellectual interplay and spiritual collaboration which flowered into the Jewish Golden Age of medieval Spain. This linked faith and reason, religion and science. To the world it brought a juncture between East and West. It saw the rise of a spiritually-aspiring neo-Platonist philosopher such as the eleventh-century Solomon ibn Gabirol, who also wrote inspiring hymns and poem and whom the Christian world quoted under the name of Avicebron, and it witnessed the phenomenon of the gigantic intellect of Moses Maimonides whose Guide to the Perplexed still opens up for many modern minds a revealing vision of a transcendent faith that is at one with man’s most rational thinking. It was an age which gave birth to the twelfth-century physician and philosopher Judah Halevi. It was a time that witnessed the activity of the tenth-century Hasdai ibn Shaprut (915-961), Samuel Hanagid (993-1055), Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508), and other Jewish viziers and statesmen who served their country with ability and devotion. From that intellectual soil sprang Jewish geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, and astronomers, whose work helped make possible the daring expedition of Columbus. (pp. 487-488)
We are now living in the age of the New Visigoths, led by the Trumpscum Religious Radicals!
Soloveichik has made a career, ironic given his current position, of ignoring this noble Sephardic tradition and embracing the Shtetl Ashkenazi hermeticism, as we have seen in his abiding love for the neo-Christian Jewish atavist Michael Wyschogrod and his profoundly Anti-Maimonidean ethos:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkNZusv09KazmHUp3BNcBGIe9TEZEMcKsZXfbBFMm4Q/edit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
As has also been the case with his Sephardi-erasing Tikvah Neo-Con allies Jonathan Sarna and Zev Eleff, who I discussed in my article on Thanksgiving:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Co2JWi8CsKsVXc1YTJi2q0cvsz9pvQ88Rhtlz_Uej6Y/edit
All of this Straussianism came together in the third e-mail in the series, The Tikvah Fund’s announcement of a new series on Israeli Conservatism:
The series taught by Dr. Ron Baratz could have been designed by Soloveichik himself:
As we learned from Soloveichik’s repugnant article “Menachem Begin’s Covenantal Zionism,” replete with cloying Brisk nostalgia:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Znm14TFPiK4/m/rwZ6mFqUAAAJ
Here is the Tikvah Baratz course description:
With its high birthrates, its deep sense of nationalism, and its increasingly innovative economy, the State of Israel is, in many ways, one of the most conservative nations in the West. How did a country largely founded by secular Jewish socialists become a family-focused, religiously traditional, start-up nation? Join leading Israeli thinker and editor Ran Baratz for a 5-part online exploration of the past, present, and future of the Israeli Right.
Israeli statehood is an effort to reconcile the Jewish
people's exceptional tensions: the country was built upon socialist principles
for an ancient people returning to their historical homeland; it would
guarantee the Jewish future while keeping religious law separate from national
policy. So it is not surprising that Israel has developed a complex and
fascinating multiplicity of conservative traditions, holding together
innovation with deference to history, modernity with antiquity, realism with
idealism.
In this course, we will discuss the different strands of Israeli conservatism,
their development, how they relate to one another, and how they bear on
contemporary Israeli politics and policy. Along the way, we will meet some of
the most influential figures in the history of the Israeli Right, including
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The success of this form of radical Ashkenazi Right Wing Judaism is brutally confirmed by the 2021 Pew Research report on Jewish Americans, that I discussed in the following article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aumJU1VzaWupahVJvRlpp6iICo48MiETuFDFw0qtUfQ/edit
When it comes to The Tikvah Fund itself, we have learned that it indeed has its own Haredi “division,” led by Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer:
I discussed its ramifications in the following article:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/APYTXhWHNbY/m/LWISkZp0BwAJ
The radical WOKE Ashkenazi Intersectionality is constitutive of a much larger – and very dangerous – trend which brings together the unlikely coupling of Leo Strauss and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein in Trump Tower.
The Orthodox propagandist Rabbi Gil Student posted the following article “Chareidi Zionism” on the same day that I received the three e-mails:
http://www.5tjt.com/chareidi-zionism/
And I had already prepared for the SHU the following Israel Hayom article on the radical Settlers who intrepidly occupied the much-discussed Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and are now complaining about their treatment by the current Israeli government:
https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/11/17/we-feel-the-government-abandoned-us/
These two articles and the information presented in the Pew report confirm that the radical Right Wing Jewish vision now dominates the institutional Jewish world.
That vision, as I have repeatedly and desperately argued, is antithetical to the classical Sephardic heritage.
And it is here that we should look more carefully at Shearith Israel, its current rabbi, and lay leaders like Louis Solomon.
I have discussed the problem in my article “Are There Any Sephardim Left at the Oldest Jewish Congregation in America?”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/2ZAUqDiAT40/m/v4cbBilPAQAJ
It is a true, but lamentable, fact that The Tikvah Fund now fully controls SI:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Gm1W7pJHRYI/m/LArV53KjBQAJ
Sadly, historical processes once set into motion, take on a life – or death – of their own.
Self-reflection and a desire for the preservation of Sephardic identity are clearly not a concern of the members and board of SI, as they have shown a deplorable devotion to one of the most aggressive enemies of the Sephardic heritage and his nihilistic Tikvah allies.
It is not that we do not understand why the SI committee hired Soloveichik in the first place. The lure of having the most prominent bully in the neighborhood as your leader is a very seductive thing. It once again shows us how Might Makes Right, and how the Ashkenazim have continued to wipe us out not just by using their own institutional power, but by using that institutional power to take over the few institutions we have left.
Radicals like Soloveichik and the haters running the Tikvah ASF are especially dangerous because their current means of employment are in no way ideal for them: They are White Jewish Supremacists who have been forced to leave their Ashkenazi peers and work for the lowly Sephardim. There is a resentment in their work that is quite palpable; a contempt towards the classical Sephardic heritage that can be felt.
Even after all I have written – and suffered – in seeking to provide the intelligence and humanity of the Sephardic heritage, this utter lack of concern for the past still continues to both shock and disgust me.
It is not only that the greatness of a noble tradition is being jettisoned, but that the jettisoning is an implicit acknowledgement that the inferior Ashkenazi tradition, dysfunctional and often brutally incoherent, is being adopted as the current Jewish default.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZZLhopNWNnqMb0GW2OQGcripP8SnZojsmxamctBLDzU/edit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjFku-0Z8bD2BD4QuDxv6OWK5Lubd8Uj/view?ths=true
We are indeed all living inside the “Broken Frame” that is contemporary Judaism.
And as we watch the ongoing erosion and possible destruction of American democracy after so many years of passionate attempts at renewal and revision, the parallel death of the Sephardic heritage in places like Shearith Israel is a deeply painful thing to see.
David Shasha