tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11850330.post1278335266454252835..comments2023-08-03T04:54:54.068-04:00Comments on Abacaxi Mamão: REFUSENIKAbacaxi Mamaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06604184268628243496noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11850330.post-76474860744914993932008-05-13T18:20:00.000-04:002008-05-13T18:20:00.000-04:00You wrote, "I am only afraid that I have totally f...You wrote, "I am only afraid that I have totally failed to live up to these childhood sentiments in my adult life." This isn't true at all. You shouldn't just count political things. Anything you do to help other people counts, whether they are people around you, or half a world away. You regularly visited people in nursing homes when you were in high school, for example. And you have long had an interest in improving the Jewish community's attitude toward mental illness, an area that, unlike Soviet Jewry in the 1970s and 1980s, does not already have a mass movement behind it, which means it is more difficult to make visible progress, but one person can make more difference. It is more like Soviet Jewry was in the early and mid 1960s, in that respect, when there were only a few activists like Jacob Birnbaum.<BR/><BR/>Looking back on those years of the Soviet Jewry movement, I don't know where I got the energy to do what I did, though I always felt I wasn't doing enough. It seems like everything else in my life is more complicated and takes more of my time and energy now, so I have less to devote to such things. I am very proud that my children, each in their own way, continue to do what they can to make the world a better place.<BR/><BR/>I met Ida Nudel in person, for the first time, a few years ago, and she remembered my letters, and the pictures you drew for her. I'll bet it was the pictures that made her remember my letters, since she got letters from thousands of people.<BR/><BR/>One thing I still do, and anyone can do if they don't have time to do more, is respond to action alerts from a human rights mailing list. I do this through Human Rights First, but there are other organizations too. I used to do this through Amnesty International (in the pre-internet days when it meant typing up and mailing letters), but eventually I got too annoyed at them for their anti-Israel bias, though I still think that, globally, they do more good than harm.<BR/><BR/>I don't know if the film went into this, but I think that the main reason Jews were so active then is that they didn't want to repeat the mistake they made in the Holocaust, of not doing enough. They were also better off economically in the 1970s and 1980s than they had been in the 1930s and 1940s, so could afford to devote their time to this, and, perhaps the biggest difference, they were much more self-confident about being accepted by American society, than they had been in the 1930s and 1940s.<BR/><BR/>It's an interesting question why diaspora Armenians were so much less active than Jews. Many of the considerations I listed above also would apply to Armenians, but perhaps not as much. It's not that Armenians weren't politically active--they were, but were mostly focused on opposition to Turkey. The Russians were the good guys during the Armenian massacre of 1915, which may explain the reluctance of Armenians to criticize the USSR. But then again, the Russians were also the good guys during the Holocaust, so that doesn't explain the difference.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com