Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 60, No. 16, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 20, 2006 Page: 4 of 24
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TJP V60-16, 04-20-13 p04-07 4/18/06 4:06 PM Page 4
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Texas Jewish Post
In Our 60th Year
April 20,2006
Washington Watch
Marriage amendment return
With midterm congressional
elections only seven months away
and polls showing Congress'
standing with voters at historic lows,
Republican leaders on Capitol Hill
are planning to reprise the gay mar-
riage issue in the next few weeks.
While the "Marriage Protection
Amendment" is unlikely to win the
two-thirds majority needed to change
the Constitution when it
comes up in the Senate in
early June, Jewish groups on
both sides believe the mea-
sure, which failed to win
even a simple majority in
2004, is gaining ground in a
more conservative Congress.
The Orthodox Union
and Agudath Israel of By James
America are supporting
the constitutional change, arguing
that Jewish law clearly opposes
same-sex unions.
Abba Cohen, Washington
director for Agudah, said that "the
fact society has consistentlyrejected
same-sex marriage is praiseworthy,
from the point of view of Jewish law,
and should not be changed."
Cohen, who said his group
helped draft the amendment, con-
ceded the amendment is unlikely to
win enough votes, but said the
process is incremental.
"This is an issue that will be won
in stages," he said. "Each stage along
the way, we build more support. That
creates additional momentum both
on Capitol Hill and in the states."
Politics is a factor, as well, he said.
Advocates on both sides of the issue
"view this as an election tool; they
want it to come up during the elec-
tion season to put people on record."
Opponents agree that the anti-
gay marriage effort is cumulative,
which is why they are mobilizing for
a major effort to hold down the vote
count in the Senate.
"You have to take any attempt to
amend the Constitution seriously—
especially when, depending on how
the questions are asked, there
appears to be some public support,"
said Mark Pelavin, associate director
of the Religious Action Center of
Reform Judaism. "As we get closer to
the vote and as people start to under-
stand the consequences, we believe
that support will fade. But it makes it
all the more important for us to get
our work done in educating people."
Pelavin also invoked Jewish law
and values to make his case.
"This is not a new debate," he said.
"To us, the idea that one's status before
the government should depend on
one's sexual orien tation is not consis-
tent with Jewish law and values."
"I don't know what the vote totals
are, but we're going to take it seriously
and advocate seriously against it," said
Richard Foltin, legislative director for
the American Jewish Committee.
"We're greatly concerned that Con-
gress would even consider
institutionalizing a form of discrimi-
nation based on sexual preference."
Sen. Bill Frist has said he wants the
constitutional amendment to come
to the Senate floor in early June. Reli-
gious-right groups have
made it a top priority, and
say they will use the vote as a
political benchmark in this
year's congressional races.
Tightening noose
on Hamas
D. Besser While Congress frets
about exactly how to make a
strong statement about the political
rise of Hamas—and a statement that
will win both praise and campaign
money from pro-Israel givers — the
Bush administration continues
taking steps to increase the pressure
on the terror group, which now is at
the helm of the Palestinian Authority.
Last week the Treasury Depart-
ment, citing existing laws on terrorist
groups, barred U.S. companies from
doing business with the Hamas-led
P.A. Earlier, the administration
announced it was cutting off aid to
the P.A., while shifting some assis-
tance to humanitarian groups that
help the Palestinian people.
At the same time, the administra-
tion has decided not to shut down
the PLO office in Washington, the
PA.'s primary diplomatic outpost in
this country.
Last week the White House issued
another six-month waiver of anti-ter-
rorism legislation restricting the PLO
mission here, saying it was necessary to
keep at least some channels of commu-
nication open with the P. A. Legislation
pending before Congress would close
that office and severely restrict diplo-
matic contacts with the PA.
"On the whole, it's important to
see that Hamas seems to be sweating
a little, judging by their statements
and actions," said Lewis Roth, assis-
tant director of Americans for Peace
Now, which supports the cutoff of
direct aid but opposes legislation that
would limit even indirect aid and
diplomatic contacts with the Hamas-
led P.A. "The collective clampdown
on political and economic ties seems
to be getting their attention."
Hamas' standing in Washington
wasn't helped by its defense of
Monday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
"Given the opportunity, the first
opportunity to denounce an act of
terror — Hamas has decided to con-
done it," said State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack. "We
are now seeing the true nature of
this Hamas-led government. They
would rather encourage 16-year-
olds to go out, strap explosives to
them and go out and try to kill other
16-year-olds, other innocent civil-
ians. That's the kind of government
that you're dealing with."
But help for Hamas could be on
the way; over the weekend Iran's for-
eign minister promised $50 million
to the P.A. to help meet its imme-
diate needs, and Russia has
promised help as well.
A changing museum
A gala dinner next week will cel-
ebrate 20 years of service to the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum by its
director, Sara Bloomfield.
But Bloomfield mostly seems too
busy to celebrate. Between courting
donors, worrying about maintaining
the Jewish community's commitment
to the museum, negotiation for access
to additional Holocaust records and
artifacts and brainstorming new ways
to get out the Holocaust message in a
changing world, celebratory dinners
seem the last thing on her mind.
One thing Bloomfield isn't doing:
fighting with her staff and board.
Working in partnership with Fred
Zeidman, a political appointee who
heads the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council, she has brought stability to
an institution marked in the past by
political controversies and internal
dissension.
"The museum is a more stable,
less contentious place," said a former
member of the Council. "Sara has
shown an ability to work with all fac-
tions withou t diluting the content of
the museum and while expanding its
role."
The changing demographics of
museum visitors are influencing the
choice of exhibitions, she said. When
it opened in 1993 and for the first
few years of operation, about 40 per-
cent of visitors were Jewish; the
number is down to 10 percent.
That means finding ways to lay a
conceptual foundation for visitors
"for whom anti-Semitism is not on
their radar screens," Bloomfield said
in a recent interview.
An example: an exhibit due to
open this month offers a detailed
look at the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, and how that figured into both
traditional anti-Semitism and the
propaganda of the Nazi era — and
how it continues to produce hatred
against Jews in today's world.
The museum, she said, is seeking
contemporary relevance without
injecting itself into politics.
More and more, the museum is
wired to take advantage of fast-
changing technology — computers
connected to the Internet and
internal databases, e-mail lists
linking visitors, Podcasts, a plethora
of ways for visitors to share their
comments and insights.
The museum Web site is a major
priority, with a worldwide reach and
extensive information to spur Holo-
caust knowledge and counter the
claims of the deniers; a Google search
on the word "Holocaust" turns up the
museum site as the first hit.
"We are developing communities
of discourse—people who are inter-
ested in talking about the meaning of
this history, either while they're here
or after they leave," she said. "The Web
site is very much a part of that."
Another element in the museum's
effort to become more "transforma-
tive" for visitors, she said, is its effort
to use the lessons of the Holocaust
to generate interest in preventing
new genocides.
Visiting heads of state — and the
mu seum still hosts many— are now
taken directly from the permanent
exhibition to an exhibit on Darfur.
"There is a growing awareness
that if we just focus on the past and
not deal with contemporary geno-
cide, we would not be living up to
the idea of being a living memorial
envisioned by the museum's
founders," she said. "We can't save
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the lives of the (Holocaust) victims,
but the most meaningful thing we
could do is save other lives."
The museum's Committee on Con-
science, which has spurred much of the
Darfur activism within the Jewish
community, makes active use of Holo-
caust survivors to punctuate the need
for strong world action to stop the
slaughter in the region of Sudan.
The museum is also expanding its
role in Holocaust scholarship and
education in an effort to ensure
those functions do not die out with
the survivor generation.
The museum is playing a greater
role in "setting the standards and
training leaders for Holocaust edu-
cation," she said.
She describes a feeling of urgency
unusual in the museum world.
"Our colleagues across the Mall at
the Museum of American History
know that years from now, Amer-
ican history will be taught, that there
will be professors to teach it. We
don't necessarily know that when it
comes to the Holocaust. So we need
to constantly nurture this field, to
engage new people who will help us
do this work in the future."
That means encouraging more
people to go into Holocaust studies
as a career — and to give academics
in related fields the resources they
need to include Holocaust material
in their own research and teaching.
Texas Jewish Post
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Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 60, No. 16, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 20, 2006, newspaper, April 20, 2006; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth188118/m1/4/: accessed May 6, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .