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Showing posts with label Ronald Reagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ronald Reagan. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

HIDDEN HEROES- Book Review

Here's Pamela Braun Cohen at the book launch
 talking about her book. Next to her is
Ilan Greenfield of Gefen Publishing House.
Hidden Heroes: One Woman's Story of Resistance and Rescue in the Soviet Union by Pamela Braun Cohen, Gefen Publishing House is an amazing and inspiring story. Pamela Braun Cohen had been an ordinary suburban Jewish wife and mother in 1970 when by chance she heard a newscast about Soviet Jews unsuccessfully trying to escape the USSR...

For Cohen this news was lifechanging. Blessed with a supportive husband, Pamela Braun Cohen became more than just a Soviet Jewry activist. She visited the USSR meeting the refuseniks, becoming their friends and supplying them with everything from jeans to be sold on the black market to the support of US President Ronald Reagan and other powerful American politicians.

Natan Sharansky
Before long she was National President of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews UCSJ, and by the time she was ready to retire from that position, decades later, she and her family had become Torah observant (Orthodox) Jews. In HIDDEN HEROES Cohen tells how the Soviet Jews' interest in Torah brought it also to her and her family. Also following the the aliyah to Israel of many former refuseniks,  Pamela and her husband Lenny now live in Jerusalem.

My husband and I at the 
book launch
It's no secret that my husband and I met for the first time at a SSSJ Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry demonstration. We were activists until our wedding and subsequent aliyah that same summer of 1970 when Pamela Cohen first got involved. So, obviously, I felt very connected to her story.

HIDDEN HEROES is a real eye-opener, even for me who had been following the struggle of Soviet Jews from the middle 1960s and then welcomed those who made it to Israel, especially Shiloh, over two decades later. I had no firsthand knowledge of the multitude of issues Cohen and her fellow activists dealt with. She and her fellow workers/volunteers/activists were busy on three fronts simultaneously, not just the totalitarian antisemitic USSR but the governments of the United States and Israel, too.

The best I can do is to wholeheartedly recommend HIDDEN HEROES. Buy it. Read it. Give it as gifts to everyone, from teens to retirees.

Dozens of people attended the book launch, so it had to be held outdoors.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gefen Publishing House (July 18, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 965702336X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9657023365

Thursday, September 15, 2016

US 2016 Elections, Ronald Reagan's Legacy

http://media.salon.com/
Unlike Alan Dershowitz, I'm not at all surprised at the unpredicted by people of his ilk success of Donald Trump. As I've blogged many times the past year plus, I feel that Trump's popularity, unpredicted by the usual experts and pundits, and his primaries victories are a continuation of the process begun over half a century ago by Ronald Reagan.

I remember how Reagan was mocked by the media.
"What does an actor known about politics and government?"
That was the theme of many op-eds and political speeches. But the silent, yet voting, majority loved him. In California he was elected Governor in  1966 serving for eight years, and then he was elected President of the United States in 1980 and then for a second term in 1984.

Reagan was a more popular and successful politician than actor, though no matter what he did, he couldn't rid himself of the "actor" label. One of my favorite Reagan stories is from an interview I once read in which he wondered why people thought his acting background wasn't suitable for the US Presidency. He wondered how a non-actor could succeed in the job.

http://www.slate.com/
Ordinary Americans trusted Reagan much more than they trusted the professional politicians who opposed him. And today's Americans seem to trust Donald Trump more than they trust the professional politicians of today. Many have gotten to know him on his tv shows on the small screen, which nowadays is pretty big in most homes. That's very much like how Americans got to know Reagan by watching his old movies on television.

Nowadays everybody knows that JFK, the fairy tale Camelot POTUS, was more Peyton Place, before the censor got to it.  Just like Reagan's marital history broke the anti-divorce "rule," Trump's personal life just makes him more attractive to ordinary Americans who now have "everything" in their families.

There's a good chance that the Electoral College will give Hillary the Presidency, while popular vote will go to Trump. Nobody can predict at this point. It's a rollercoaster of a campaign for sure.

Olympia Looping POV Largest Most INTENSE Traveling Roller Coaster Ever Built

Hold onto your hats! And because the Electoral College can very easily distort the results of a Presidential Election, I'd like to see Congress passing a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate it completely!

Friday, May 31, 2013

Obama's Lucky Timing, Scandals are Discovered in Second Term

Photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite
United States President Barack Hussein Obama is just one of those lucky ones.  He managed to get reelected very easily, and the #$!%$! hit the fan only afterwards.  Eventually history my judge him fairly and accurately, but right now he is totally coated with Teflon, as the saying goes.

Consider Obama's background.  He was raised by a rather unstable extreme Leftist mother who left home young and had a hankering for foreign men of other races.  After schlepping him around the world, she let her parents raise him.  He had to deal with being biracial in a white world.  There are all sorts of scandalous posts you can find on the internet claiming that he became a drug addict, homosexual etc., but whatever the truth he managed to marry a very strong intelligent, stable black woman and get elected President of the United States.  That takes more than luck.  Obviously, he has the smarts to learn how to play the game right and attract the right mentors/supporters.

Obama can't expect his luck to last forever, nor can his mistakes be hidden for all time.

The recent scandals are chipping away at Obama's popularity ratings.
Quinnipiac also shows that the confluence of three scandals (the two listed above and Benghazi) are starting to collectively erode the President's approval rating. At the beginning of May, Obama enjoyed a 48% approval rating with 45% disapproving. A month later he is upside down at 45% - 49%.

I doubt if his ratings will go much further down, because there's a strong element of "worship" in many of his supporters.

What's interesting is that many Democrats, Obama voters, are upset at the revelations, but they just can't blame Obama.
While President Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, faces a possible perjury charge and increased calls for his resignation over the Justice Department's outrageous spying on the media -- elsewhere, another scandal is taking another kind of toll. A new Quinnpiac poll shows that the public is far from satisfied that the IRS matter is settled. A full 76% want a special prosecutor named; that includes 63% of Democrats.

At the recreation of the Truman
Oval Office at the Truman Library
 in 1959, the former President Truman
poses by his old desk which  has
the famous "The Buck Stops Here"
 sign.
Americans on the whole don't see it as a "the buck stops here" issue.  The media loved to call Ronald Reagan the "Teflon president," but Obama is the real one.  It used to bother the Leftist media that people loved and believed Reagan.  They worked hard to chip away at that support.

In America there are voices protesting Obama, such as Charles Krauthammer, who believes that the Obama scandals are worse than most people think.
“I think there is a bigger story here, here’s the one that will in time come out,” Krauthammer said.  ”The biggest scandal of all, the biggest question is: What was the president doing in those eight hours?”
“He had a routine meeting at five o’clock. He never after, during the eight hours when our guys have their lives in danger, he never called the Secretary of Defense, he never calls the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he never calls the CIA Director,” Krauthammer continued. “Who does he call? About five hours in he calls the Secretary of State. And after the phone call she releases a statement essentially about the video and how we denounce any intolerance. It looks as if the only phone call was to construct a cover story at a time when the last two Americans who died were still alive and fighting for their lives. There’s the scandal and that has to be uncovered.”


Considering the power and influence the Obama White House has over the world, there's lots to worry about.