What Happened Today: May 9, 2022
Palestinian terror wave; Abortion protests heat up; Lockdown’s devastating impact on poor kids
The Big Story
With 18 people killed in the past six weeks, the current wave of Palestinian terrorism targeting Israelis is expected to continue for the forseeable future, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and other senior Israel officials said on Sunday night. That doesn’t mean, however, that they know exactly what’s driving the violence. While Hamas has claimed credit for the attacks and encouraged more of them, Israeli officials deny that the terrorist group, which governs the Gaza Strip on Israel’s southern border, is orchestrating the violence. Bennett’s remarks came after the arrest Sunday morning of two Palestinian men who are accused of killing three Israeli civillians last Thursday in a stabbing attack carried out as Israel’s Independence Day celebrations were coming to a close. Both suspects, 19 and 20 years old, are from the village of Rumana, which is near the city of Jenin, a hub for Palestinians involved in the recent terror attacks. Also on Sunday, two Palestinians were killed in the West Bank: one while attempting to sneak across a security barrier near a military checkpoint and another, identified as 17-year-old Mutassim Atallah, while trying to infiltrate the West Bank settlement of Tekoa while carrying a knife. The Associated Press chose to cover those incidents with a headline that buries the details about Palestinian terrorist attacks—“Two Palestinians shot dead by Israelis in occupied West Bank”—and instead seems to evoke cases in the United States where unarmed civilians were killed by police officers. No mention until the fourth paragraph in the story that one of the people killed had a knife. In a separate incident earlier on Sunday, at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, a Palestinian man who had entered Israel illegally stabbed an Israeli police officer in the neck. Many of the recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by Palestinians who illegally entered Israel through breaches in the country’s security fence or by posing as workers—thousands of whom enter Israel daily—and getting rides into the country from Israelis. In response, the Israel Defense Forces has surged 26 forces into the West Bank, allowing it to continue offensive operations and reinforce border security. On Monday in the West Bank, Israeli security forces arrested at least 15 Palestinians who are accused of being connected to recent terrorist attacks.
Read it here: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1bibxli9
In The Back Pages: I Went Looking for a Jewish Street
The Rest
→ The headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action, an anti-abortion group, was vandalized and set on fire on Sunday morning. “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either,” was spray-painted across the wall—a clear reference to the Supreme Court’s looming possible overturn of the Roe vs. Wade decision that established a nationwide legal right to abortion. No one was injured in the building, which was empty at the time of the incident. Also over the weekend, large crowds of protestors gathered outside the private homes of conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. Demonstrations at private residences are legally protected but are a departure from the established norms of the United States’ democratic procedural politics, which have generally observed a wall between public figures’ official actions and family lives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the actions of protestors, saying she was “moved by how so many have channeled their righteous anger into meaningful action: planning to march and mobilize to make their voices heard.” The home of Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the draft opinion in the leaked case that suggested the court will vote to overturn Roe, is expected to be picketed Monday night by protestors affiliated with ShutDownDC, a liberal group that was formerly associated with climate activism.
→ Remote learning had a deleterious impact on all K-12 students and a devastating impact on students in high-poverty schools, according to a new report conducted by researchers from Harvard University and several nonprofit educational organizations. In “high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2021,” the report concluded, “the loss was about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth,” suggesting that remote learning was as effective as not learning at all. “Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted,” said Thomas Kane, one of the report’s authors. Year 2021’s widening achievement gap between rich and poor students—a development the report sees as entirely tied to which schools shifted to remote learning and which did not—reverses the past 30 years of progress in closing the achievement gap between white students and their classmates of color, which had consistently been narrowing until last year.
Read it here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/remote-learning-likely-widened-racial-economic-achievement-gap/
→ Ukrainian missiles sank a sophisticated Russian warship over the weekend, the Admiral Makarov, less than a month after destroying Russia’s Moskva warship—the most powerful ship in Russia’s navy. When the Mosvka was downed, it was widely reported (despite Pentagon denials) that the United States had provided crucial intelligence to Ukraine, leading to speculation that the United States had done the same in targeting Admiral Makarov. If true, this would mark another high-profile example of the United States’ growing involvement in Ukraine—involvement that Putin recently suggested could trigger a nuclear response. “If someone intends to interfere in what is going on from the outside, they must know that constitutes an unacceptable strategic threat to Russia,” Putin said on April 29. “We have all the weapons we need for this.” Russia has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world.
→ Elon Musk could fire up to 1,000 Twitter employees as part of his plan to overhaul the social media company, according to leaks published this weekend in The New York Times. While a clique of current Twitter employees has loudly protested Musk’s takeover of the company, which it fears could weaken the ability of unaccountable censors to silence public speech, there are no mentions of revenge or ideology as a motivation for the layoffs in Musk’s plans. Rather, the Tesla CEO appears to be driven by the bottom line, and he projects that he can quadruple Twitter’s annual revenue to $26 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year. After the initial layoffs, Musk proposes to grow the Twitter workforce over the next three years, mostly by adding engineers as he attempts to improve the site’s design and lessen its dependence on advertising revenue by moving toward a subscription model.
→ In an interview last week at New York’s 92nd Street Y, Microsoft founder and 800-pound gorilla of global health, Bill Gates, casually acknowledged that he and other public health experts were wrong in some of their key initial assumptions about COVID-19 and now understand that the virus has a “fairly low fatality rate” and is a disease “mainly of the elderly kind of like flu is.” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with revising one’s opinions as new evidence comes in, but Gates never acknowledges that there were other public figures who had already reached these conclusions in 2020—in time to adopt more targeted public health measures that wouldn’t have required shutting down schools and forcing children to wear masks. Unlike Gates, those people were routinely denounced and censored instead of invited to speak at the Y.
→ The United States is facing potential widespread power outages as traditional power sources are phased out faster than renewable energy sources are being built and added to our power grids. California predicted a supply shortage come summer, while Texas is currently nearing its capacity as it weathers a heat wave that is expected to last until next week. Part of the challenge is the slow pace of battery production, a market dominated by China. Wind and solar farms provide the cheapest source of energy on the market, but they require large batteries for storing that easily and inexpensively capture wind and solar power—batteries that, at present, are not being produced fast enough. Speeding up production, meanwhile, is not possible at present, with widespread pandemic-related supply-chain issues hindering the solar energy market’s ability to source essential parts from China. Delaying production further, a U.S. Commerce Department probe looking into whether China has been circumventing tariffs on solar panels has all but barred the import of solar panels since the investigation began in March 2021.
→ Michael Bivins, a freelance journalist who made his reputation covering political extremism and the far right in Portland, Oregon, committed a cardinal sin of journalism over the weekend—on top of what appear to be some actual sins, if you count the hate crimes charges: Never become the story. Bivins was arrested by the Portland police on Saturday and charged with vandalizing two synagogues and trying to set fire to a mosque. In articles for the Willamette Week, Bivins often covered clashes in Portland between right-wing protestors and Antifa activists, with some of his footage from these street brawls getting purchased by national news outlets. Over the span of a single week, Bivins spray-painted the wall of one synagogue with antisemitic graffiti, threw a rock through the window of a second, and committed arson at a Muslim community center before being apprehended. No motivation has yet been established for the hate crimes.
→ More news from the world of fascists, real and imagined: In 1938, when Nazi-sympathizers paraded down the Upper East Side of Manhattan to celebrate Hitler’s 49th birthday, they were met by gangs of Jewish toughs who—in the courtly words of the Honorable Judge Nathan David Perlman, who organized the ragtag resistance team—were there to deliver a “good ass-whipping.” (The judge, it should be noted, had shown some restraint; upon asking Meyer Lensky, the city’s most famous Jewish mobster, to help deliver the “ass-whipping,” Meyer proposed murdering the brown shirts outright—a proposal the judge rejected.) According to Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in World War II, a new book by Michael Benson just published by Citadel, a group of Jewish gangsters waited inside and around the casino where the parade was set to end (a large hall decorated, to honor the occasion, with pictures of the Fuhrer and large Nazi flags). After the first few speeches, with the crowd packed in, Lansky’s crew set to work with bats and clubs, leaving dozens of injured men in the casino—and tossing some out a second-story window—before fleeing the scene. The following year, when the Nazis met in White Plains to mark the Fuhrer’s 50th, the previous year’s crowd of 3,000 had turned to 250.
Read More: https://nypost.com/2022/05/07/jewish-gangsters-once-took-on-nazis-in-the-streets-of-nyc/
→ Here’s a cool visual model showing how far into the past NASA’s new Webb telescope will be able to see compared to the older Hubble telescope.
In Out of the Fog, historical detective Brian Berger digs through newspaper columns, clippings, and other clues to bring readers the fascinating, scandalous, and forgotten tales of the past. In this installment: WHERE ARE NEW YORK’S JEWISH STREET NAMES?
Sometimes the simplest questions provide the strangest answers. For example, until recently, when I discovered there used to be a Kaplan Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, I couldn’t think of another New York City thoroughfare with such a strongly Jewish name. How could that be?
“What about Hillel Place?” one might ask, referring to that block-long street connecting the Brooklyn College campus to the junction of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues. “Isn’t that a Jewish name?” Why, yes, it’s very Jewish—and the longer answer will help define the parameters of our inquiry.
While the great Talmudic scholar Hillel goes back to the first century BCE, it wasn’t until the opening of Brooklyn College’s new Hillel building in 1959 that the street was renamed in his honor.
So, Hillel doesn’t count. Nor do the city’s hundreds of other honorary street co-namings, some of them Jewish—Bella Abzug Way, Sholem Aleichem Place, Joey Ramone Place, etc.—since none are officially designated by the city government or surveyors. Which leaves us with very little. The reasons aren’t too mysterious. New York’s street names reflect the heritage of the city—first a Dutch colony, then English—with few deviations.
There was, in old Manhattan, one notable exception: Jews Alley, the colloquial name for Mill Street (later South William), where the city’s first synagogue, Shearith Israel, was built in 1730.
As for street names reflecting the success of mid-19th-century German immigrants—Havemeyer (sugar refining) and Schaefer (beer) Streets in Brooklyn being two prominent examples—while one can never be completely certain which Austro-German surnames are Jewish, history says it’s safe to presume them gentile.
Indeed, there may be only three streets that have always been Jewish—Adler Place, Asch Loop, and Einstein Loop—all in the Co-op City section of the northeast Bronx, home to such notables as the novelist Richard Price, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and rapper turned actress Queen Latifah. Previously home to the short-lived amusement park Freedomland (1960-1964), when it was subsequently developed as lower-middle income co-operative housing, its streets would reflect the ideals of the radical Jewish labor movement that helped birth the project
I found it, completely by accident, in a newspaper: Public School 82, Kaplan Avenue, Jamaica, Queens. What?! I’m a Kaplan! My maternal grandfather, Mordko (later Max) Kaplan, was born in Kozienice, Poland, in 1912. A concentration camp survivor and partisan, after the war, Max married another survivor, my grandmother Frida, born in Daugavpils, Latvia, in 1916. They met in a Displaced Persons Camp in Linz, Austria, where my mother, Reva, and my uncle Isidore were born. In 1948, the family emigrated to Memphis, Tennessee, where their sponsor, Max’s cousin, a real estate man named Jack Kaplan, lived. On November 11, 1954, they became naturalized U.S. citizens.
So, this one was personal. Who was this Kaplan, and what happened to this street that no longer existed?
Answering the latter question was easy, because P.S. 82 is exactly where it was, only instead of being at the corner of Kaplan and Hammond Avenues, today it stands at 144th Street and 88th Avenue.
After the 1898 consolidation of New York, Queens initiated a new street-naming system to eliminate the duplicate street names of its constituent towns and villages and to simplify, somewhat, the borough’s geography. Henceforth—with myriad exceptions and anomalies—thoroughfares running east to west became “avenues,” with their numbers increasing from north to south. Those running north to south became “streets,” with their numbers increasing from west to east.
Such changes took a few decades to fully come into effect, however, and through the mid-1920s, newspaper ads still referred to Kaplan Avenue, not 144th Street. It was a nice and convenient place to live, with many neat, detached houses. The Jamaica Avenue elevated was a block away; the Long Island Rail Road terminal, a little further.
As for Kaplan, his name was Nathan. He was a prominent real estate speculator in Greenport, Long Island, then in Jamaica, since the 1870s. Later that decade, he and his family moved to Brooklyn, where he seemingly led a life of quiet prosperity. In 1892, his 19-year-old daughter, named Lena, died. Subsequently, Kaplan had an apartment at 385 Clinton Avenue in Clinton Hill and an office downtown on Court Street. Otherwise, his life is outlined by decades of real estate transactions and blurred by the affairs of those who shared his name, including Jewish gangster Nathan “Kid Dropper” Kaplan (or Caplin), spectacularly shot to death—in front of his wife and while under police guard—outside the Essex Market Courthouse on August 23, 1923, by one Louis Cohen. But that’s a story for another time.
Though I’ve been unable to find a detailed obituary for our Nathan Kaplan, evidence suggests he died on January 30, 1923, and is buried in Brooklyn’s Jewish Washington Cemetery.