Gary Ashman is an attorney and a friend of this blog — he has a copy of the original EGD poster framed in his lovely, well-stocked home library. We have shared a cigar or two, and he even briefly advertised on the blog when it first went live. We haven't conversed in a few years, so it was good to hear from him again. When I saw what the letter he was sharing was about, I asked if he would mind if I posted it here. He didn't. As a rule, I don't react to the lazy Manicheism and reckless Jews-don't-count rhetoric that sophomores and their equivalent wallow in lately regarding Israel and Gaza — there's too much of it, and I try not to traffick in the obvious. When one side premises its argument on, "First you give your country to someone else and disappear, then everything is solved..." there isn't much room for discussion. Plus you see how effective it is — it has gotten the Palestinians nowhere for the past 57 years; of late, the war continues, lives are lost, Netanyahu, who should have gone to prison long before Oct. 7, maintains his grip on power, and nothing changes.
Happy to see the blog is posted after a 2.5 hour outage.
ReplyDeleteThis guy seems unhinged: first he forgets a space between the open parenthetical mark and the first digit in the facimilie line and he's papering the world because someone else has Free Speech. Typical.
Regarding that outage — that was vaguely terrifying. Google disabled my account for violating some unspecified policy. I softened the headline here in case the ironic German was the problem.
DeleteI briefly Googled your name (to ensure you were okay; I've read your constant daily dedications). And to check if Blogger was out. From the Internet, it seems you're fine and there are ways to "back-up" the entire blog to avoid a wipe-out. It's technical, but seems to exist.
DeleteI support this guy's right to letter write. At tiny baffled he'd include U.S. senators on his own bookstore irritation. By hey, it's summer, the blood and ink seem to be boiling.
That was scary, Mr. S. At first, I thought, "He said the wrong word and he got whacked. Good-bye, EGD, and good-bye 11-year streak." Then I figured it was a glitch. Knew it would be sorted out, one way or the other, by the dawn's early light.
DeleteRidiculous. Went to FB jail for a month, for using the word "skank." Banned from Nextdoor for a year for recounting the tale of an Evanston stickup that could have cost me my life. Recent criminal activity? Hardly. It happened 45 years ago.
The powers-that-be in cyberspace need all those sticks to be surgically removed. Good luck with that. "New Jerusalem" is mild, and fairly innocuous. Now the haters just call it "Jew York."
While I haven't been to Facebook jail in the last few weeks I have had at least four posts removed. At least had one to do with Israel. Maybe it was the head line but the article was ok. Another one was a tweet thread about Trump and Chris Wallace interviewing him. I think it was from 2020. Another was of some Congressman calling migrants garbage. Later it was back up.
DeleteWow, I never thought I’d see such ignorance on open display in this year of 2024. The part about accepting dogs reminds me of a story told to me by a man who happened to be Jewish. We were in Gary, talking about bigotry. A member of an exclusive north shore community, he said that he remembered when the Evanston Country Club had a sign that said, “No Jews, No Dogs, No Colored”. He chuckled and and said at least the Jews got top-billing.
ReplyDeleteI remember, that the Jews bought the Evanston Country Club,
DeleteMany years ago, the Tribune did a long profile of Henry Proesel, the long time mayor of Lincolnwood. In it Proesel said he loves to golf, but he couldn't play at the Bryn Mawr Country Club, which was across the street from his house "because it was the Jewish club" & he wasn't Jewish. Proving that he was not only an anti-Semite running a suburb that was at least 70% Jewish, but also a fool since if he had asked, I guarantee you the club would've given him all the day passes he wanted, just to be in good with the mayor.
DeleteHe of course didn't run for reelection again after that article ran!
Never knew that Evanston Golf Club (its official name) had a sign that said, “No Jews, No Dogs, No Colored”...probably before my time, but the irony of that sign is not lost on me, as the house I grew up in was about a mile from their enormous clubhouse, which was built during WWI, before most of Skokie even existed, and was said to be the largest clubhouse on any golf course west of the Hudson River.
DeleteBy the Fifties and Sixties, the golf club known for banning Jews was literally surrounded by Jews, who lived in countless postwar ranches and split-levels on all four sides. I never set foot on the grounds, except for one time as a teen, when I shlepped across it while taking a shortcut home. It's a huge piece of land, six blocks long by three blocks wide. Not an easy hike in deep snow.
Compounding all this irony, and maybe the most ironic thing of all, is the fact that my father was actually a caddie at EGC as a kid. This would have been roughly around 1930, give or take a year or two. He would take the streetcar to Howard and Western, and then hitchhike another four miles to the clubhouse, through Evanston, and what later became Skokie.
Apparently, it was perfectly okay for young Jewish boys to carry the clubs and the bags of the bigoted members, even though they could never hope to join the club. Go figure. Never understood that way of thinking. Probably no Black caddies, though. That was beyond the pale (sorry, couldn't resist it).
A quarter-century later, my old man, who had learned to love golf, owned a house and raised a Jewish family a mile or so from the main gate of the EGC. But it's for damn sure he never played there. Whatta crazy world..
The extreme left has become even more anti-Semitic than the extreme right ever was!
ReplyDeleteThe most ridiculous leftist group has got to be Queers For Palestine, because is they went there, Hamas would kill them instantly, they really hate gays, far more than any right wing Re Thug Licon does!
good point, Clark
DeleteIn reality it has been going on for 76 years or so. It is interesting to see what what maps of Palestine looks like between 1948 and now.
ReplyDelete