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Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Pittsburgh Honors Two Brothers, ‘Gentle Giants’ of the Community
PITTSBURGH—Cecil and David Rosenthal were buried in matching caskets made of wood, each adorned with a single Jewish star. The brothers, 59 and 54, were two of the 11 Jews killed in Pittsburgh on Saturday, remembered by all as irrepressibly friendly synagogue regulars. But they were also vulnerable in a different way from the other victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue: The brothers lived with mental disabilities. Cecil, for example, could neither read nor write.
The Tree of Life building is still closed, so other synagogues in the area have opened their doors to host funerals. A letter from a friend of the family’s was read at the brothers’ funeral on Tuesday at Rodef Shalom, a historic reform synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was from a Catholic priest. Addressing Cecil and David’s parents, he wrote that God had “created your sons in his image,” a sentiment that captured the core theme of the funeral. Pittsburgh turned out en masse to pay its respects to two men whose family referred to them throughout their adult lives as “the boys.” In the face of a dehumanizing shooting, the community resolutely reaffirmed the dignity of every individual.
[Read: The Jews of Pittsburgh bury their dead].
David Rosenthal loved everything about police forces and fire departments. His brother-in-law, Michael Hirt, said that David’s favorite “toy” was a scanner radio, which he carried with him everywhere; when it broke recently, he insisted on getting it fixed quickly. He loved to get new sunglasses as a present, and always wanted the same kind of pair: severe and reflective, just like what a state highway patrolman would wear.
At the funeral, Pittsburgh’s police repaid David’s admiration. After the room quieted down and everyone took their seats, the ceremony began with a procession of officers in full uniform, each carrying his hat in his left hand. One by one, they approached the two caskets at the front of the synagogue and saluted. The last man in line wore a Jewish skullcap, or kippah.
Cecil Rosenthal was different from his younger brother, said their sister Diane Hirt. Cecil would have loved seeing himself all over the television, she joked; her husband described Cecil as sociable in the way of a small-town mayor. For years before the Hirts’ daughters had their bat mitzvahs, the ceremony that marks entrance into Jewish adulthood, Cecil spoke of his anticipation of the big events, Michael said. He loved a good party, Diane said.
His funeral was nothing like a party, but it was a testament to how much his community cared about him. Hundreds of people filled the sanctuary of Rodef Shalom, which is cavernous and lush. Light poured in through stained-glass windows that stretched high up to the ceilings. Community members greeted one another with long hugs and red eyes. Perhaps they exchanged some of the benign gossip that Cecil apparently loved so much: updates on births or engagements or recent recoveries from illness, the local news that runs a community.
[Read: A prayer for Squirrel Hill—and for American Jewry]
Jews across the country have been deeply shaken by the shooting in Pittsburgh. But many people seem to have connected to Cecil and David’s story in a particularly visceral way. One group of about three dozen people from the Washington, D.C., area set out for Pittsburgh on a bus Tuesday morning after their daily prayers to come to this funeral—specifically this one. People who have children with special needs told me they were deeply affected by the thought of these two men being attacked in synagogue, one of the few spaces where they might be fully welcomed. Diane described her brothers as “gentle giants” who embraced joy and love and happiness. It was awful to have to eulogize them, she said, but especially when they died in such a horrific way.
Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who leads the Tree of Life–Or L’Simcha congregation, said it often seemed like the brothers were always there, no matter how long he stayed at the synagogue some days. They were the community’s greeters and straighteners, always tidying up the stacks of prayer books and shawls. Myers said he wasn’t sure what he was more proud of: who the Rosenthals were, or how his congregants treated them. “They just loved being in the building,” he said. “And they were loved by everyone in the building.”
There were all kinds of people at the funeral on Tuesday, each with differences that may or may not have been visible to the eye. Elderly attendees were escorted to their seats by their elbows. A baby cried in the back. People wore clergy collars and hijabs and kippot of every color, in black and white and patterned and green.
What they shared was a common reason for being in that room, at one of the first of many funerals to come in this city. As the community prepared to say goodbye to Cecil and David, a man slowly sang “Mizmor L’David,” Psalm 23, which famously begins: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” The melody was haunting and longing, an expression of both faith and deep vulnerability. The room was silent, except for the quiet sounds of people’s gasps and tears.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2ziAY6Q
The Echoes of Kristallnacht
Just before midnight on November 9, 1938, the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, sent a telegram to every police unit in Nazi Germany. “In shortest order,” it read, “actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Firefighters stood by as synagogues and Jewish-owned homes, schools, and businesses burned to the ground. Within a day, 91 Jews had been murdered, and between 20,000 and 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps.
“Kristallnacht changed everything,” says Dr. Ruth Weistheimer, one the nonagenarian Holocaust survivors interviewed in a new short documentary from the Leo Baeck Institute. Indeed, the pogrom—which occurred 80 years ago next week—is widely considered by historians to be the inflection point of the Third Reich, when persecution of German Jews sharply escalated to violence, incarceration, and murder.
In the film, the interview subjects recall their experiences in Weimar Germany and the early days of the Nazi regime. Many escaped by the Kindertransportprogram; others were lucky enough to obtain visas through well-connected family members or friends in America.
“America did not exactly make it easy,” remembers one woman interviewed in the film. “That’s a myth—the open arms of the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now.”
Despite the efforts made by emigrants and international-aid organizations through 1938, said William H. Weitzer, the executive director of the Leo Baeck Institute, “nobody wanted to accept the German Jewish refugees.”
Weitzer said his organization is attuned to “similarities and differences” between historical events, such as the Night of Broken Glass and now. “For those we interviewed, Germany of the early 1930s was a model for rule of law,” he said. “In spite of that, they saw the collapse of the democratic system.” He views firsthand narratives, such as this 1938Projekt short film, to be powerful tools. “They teach us that we—like the generations before—do not know what will happen next.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2P06tNW
An Ode to the Spacecraft That Filled the Galaxy With Planets
In 2009, a NASA spacecraft, fresh off the launchpad, drifted into an orbit high above Earth. The Kepler telescope would circle the sun, but its attention would be focused elsewhere, far beyond the edges of our solar system, on the Milky Way’s other stars. As Kepler settled into its perch, engineers on the ground commanded the spacecraft to overheat one of its wires until it snapped apart. The maneuver freed the oval-shaped lid they had placed over Kepler’s mirrors to protect them during the launch. The cover floated away.
Kepler, at last, could see. The light of thousands of stars flooded its mirrors.
But the telescope wasn’t designed to study the stars themselves. It was built to find the planets around them. Astronomers had predicted that there were many other planets in our galaxy, and they had already discovered about 300 exoplanets by the time Kepler launched, using a mix of terrestrial and space telescopes. They expected that the telescope would add more to the catalog.
“We were cautiously optimistic we would find planets,” Jessie Dotson, Kepler’s project scientist, recalled in a recent interview. “We really had no idea we were going to find so many.”
Kepler delivered a bounty: 2,681 exoplanets, with several thousand others awaiting confirmation. Some are massive and gaseous, like Jupiter. Others orbit in a solar system that has two stars, a scenario that astrophysicists had predicted couldn’t exist. Some are rocky and familiar; about 30 planets are the size of Earth and orbit in their star’s habitable zone, a region where temperatures are not too hot or too cold, but just right for liquid water to exist.
Of all the exoplanets known to astronomers today, about 70 percent were found by Kepler. In less than a decade, a mission that cost $600 million in taxpayer money—an incredible bargain for a space mission—became NASA’s most significant astrophysics mission of the 21st century.
[Read: An ode to Kepler, the planet hunter]
That mission has now come to an end. On Tuesday, NASA announced that the telescope had run out of fuel. “This marks the end of science operations for Kepler,” Paul Hertz, the head of NASA’s astrophysics division, said in a press conference.
Like all spacecraft, Kepler launched with a limited amount of fuel. Scientists and engineers knew that the spacecraft would someday deplete its supply and lose the ability to orient itself in space, which means it would no longer be able to watch the stars. They predicted that would happen sometime this year, but they weren’t sure exactly when; the spacecraft wasn’t equipped with a gas gauge. In July, Kepler began to show the first real signs of running very low on fuel. Engineers shifted Kepler between awake and sleep modes several times in the last month, holding their breath each time they tried to rouse it, wondering if this time it wouldn’t work.
Dotson didn’t mind the torment. “I am more than happy to live through this uncertainty, given how fantastic of an instrument it is,” she said. “A small price to pay for the science we’re getting out of it.”
On October 19, Kepler slipped into another sleep mode, this time on its own, and for good.
The Kepler mission was named for Johannes Kepler, the 17th-century German astronomer who proposed three laws that govern the motion of planets around the sun. Kepler’s work relied on the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century Polish astronomer who determined, much to the chagrin of religious leaders, that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but orbited the sun. Centuries later, the Kepler mission continued in these scientists’ footsteps in its own way. With each discovery of a planet around a distant star, the telescope seemed to scream, Here’s yet another reminder that we’re not the center of the universe, not even a little.
“Kepler has really nailed down how ubiquitous planets are,” Dotson said. “We knew they were out there, and now we know they’re everywhere.”
Kepler was the brainchild of Bill Borucki, a scientist who started out at NASA’s Ames Research Center in the 1960s, designing and testing materials for the heat shields of Apollo spacecraft, according to Universal Life, by Carnegie astronomer Alan Boss, a longtime friend of Borucki. Borucki took issue with a 1971 paper in a planetary science journal that proposed detecting exoplanets by measuring tiny changes in the color of a star’s light as a planet passed in front of it. The Earth’s atmosphere, he said, would warp and distort these observations. Plus, there were no telescopes strong enough to detect such minuscule fluctuations. But a space telescope, one that observed changes in the luminosity of a star, and not its color, would do the trick, he said.
Borucki’s idea had to wait for technology to catch up. The Nobel Prize–winning hardware that his particular telescope would require was invented by Bell Labs in 1969, but it didn’t reach the commercial sector until the 1980s.
Borucki eventually proposed his telescope to NASA in 1992. It was shot down, multiple times. It wasn’t until 2001 that the space agency formally approved the mission. On Tuesday, Hertz, the NASA official, praised Borucki for pushing the space agency for decades. “Boy, are we glad he did,” Hertz said.
The Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on a humid day in March 2009. When the lid came off, the telescope stared continuously at about 150,000 stars, waiting for a hint of wobbling in the light.
Kepler searched for exoplanets using a technique known as the transit method. When a planet passes, or transits, its star, it blocks a tiny fraction of the star’s light. Kepler spent years staring at hundreds of thousands of stars, looking for this slight dimming in their brightness. If an alien telescope were aimed at our solar system from somewhere else in the Milky Way, it would observe the same effect as one of the big planets moved in front of the sun.
Three years into the mission, something went wrong. One of Kepler’s four reaction wheels, rapidly spinning devices that keep it oriented in space, failed. Within a year, a second followed. The spacecraft could no longer remain focused on its targets.
[Read: Hubble’s hardware woes and the painful era of aging spacecraft]
But NASA spacecraft are resilient, and their stewards are a creative bunch. When hardware breaks, engineers find ways to keep the mission going. Kepler’s engineers decided to take advantage of the spacecraft’s instability. Instead of staying focused on one part of the sky, the spacecraft would swing around every few months. In this new mode, Kepler could scan only 20,000 to 40,000 stars at a time, much fewer than before. But it was better than nothing.
The plan worked. The Kepler team announced batch after batch of new exoplanet discoveries. When it launched, the mission was supposed to run for about three-and-a-half years. Even with two broken reaction wheels, it lasted for more than nine.
There are many things that Kepler couldn’t tell us. While it could detect the size of an exoplanet and how long it takes to complete one trip around its star, it couldn’t reveal the planet’s mass, density, or composition. These properties are the ones that can help astronomers determine more closely the look of the planet and whether it possesses the conditions known to be conducive for life.
Kepler struggled to find rocky planets the size of our own, which would be the best candidates for this search. “These are really at the limit of what we can find with Kepler,” Dotson said, “but we still found some.” This means, she said, that there are likely many more Earth-sized rocky planets—which means many more chances of alien life. In its final moments, Kepler was trained on a star known to host seven Earth-sized planets.
The loss of Kepler is not the end of NASA’s exoplanet search. In April, NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, into space. Like Kepler, TESS will deploy the transit method in its scan of the skies, surveilling more than 200,000 stars. The mission is expected to last two years. But if it’s anything like its hardy predecessor, it will operate for much longer.
It wasn’t so long ago that there were no known exoplanets, that the only planets we knew of were our own; it’s been only 30 years since the first planet outside our solar system was detected. Dotson, Kepler’s project scientist, remembers this earlier era, which feels both recent and distant. She remembers peering through a telescope during a school outing in second grade and seeing Saturn, one of the nine planets anyone knew about.
“I think back to that little girl on that night,” Dotson said. “I can imagine just standing there next to her and saying, ‘You see all those other stars out there? They have planets around them, too.’”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2CRhlGA
A Giant Midterms Spending Gulf on Facebook
If a blue wave does not materialize in the upcoming midterm elections, it won’t be for Democrats’ lack of spending on Facebook.
According to an Atlantic analysis of the top 100 spenders, left-leaning candidates and causes spent $9.43 million from October 21 to October 27 alone, the most recent period for which Facebook data is available. The big spenders on the right spent only $2.65 million.
The top 100 ad buyers on Facebook included 55 left-leaning organizations and candidates, compared to just 22 from the right wing. The remaining 23 big spenders focused on state propositions or corporate campaigns.
Some of the Facebook ads were fundraising appeals. Others helped candidates generate lists of interested voters through calls to fill out forms or quizzes. But given that the week in question aligns with early voting, most of the ads were targeted get-out-the-vote messages.
[Read: The biggest story of the midterms is one the Democrats aren’t telling]
In the postmortems of the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s political advertising on Facebook—among other things—was seen as a key part of his victory. Trump continues to be the largest Republican spender on ads. In many statewide races, Facebook ads still play a tiny role, with TV continuing to soak up the lion’s share of political dollars. Meanwhile, among commercial advertisers, digital spending has now surpassed television. If the history of commercial and political advertising is any indication, campaigns are likely to follow the digital pivot sooner or later.
This time around, the biggest spenders are all on the left. News for Democracy, a project of MotiveAI and outside backers, spent $1.16 million. Beto O’Rourke, the Senate candidate from Texas trying to unseat Ted Cruz, spent $939,000. Priorities USA and Senate Majority PAC, both liberal groups, combined to spend $807,000. MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group, spent $541,000. And Tom Steyer’s Need to Impeach campaign spent $378,000.
The only conservatives who appear among the top 25 spenders are Donald Trump and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.
While paid media on Facebook slants Democratic, the conservative-news infrastructure continues to dominate organic Facebook views, with Fox News, Breitbart News, and a host of shadier sites routinely at the top of the most shared lists on the social network.
It’s just one more set of crosscurrents that make this midterm election so difficult to forecast.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2yFpBX1
Instagram Is Teeming With Anti-Semitism
On Saturday afternoon, as the media descended upon the alleged Pittsburgh shooter’s long trail of anti-Semitic social-media posts, Kate Friedman Siegel began to feel frustrated. To her, it all felt familiar. In fact, she had reported similar messages to Instagram just last month, and watched the platform do nothing about them.
Siegel shared screenshots of two anti-Semitic memes she had received via Instagram direct message in September, both of which the platform failed to take action on. One featured an oven with the phrase Jewish stroller plastered on top. The other was a Dr. Seuss parody book cover titled “Horton Hears a Jew,” by “Dr. Goebbels.”
Are we sure this doesn’t “violate community guidelines,” @instagram? I’m rarely able see follow up on the (many) reports I submit on the anti-Semitism we receive, bc I get too many notifications. I did catch this one, & it worries me that this is the response to all my reports ... pic.twitter.com/WsO5jSMsue
— Crazy Jewish Mom (@crazyjewishmom) October 27, 2018
Update! @instagram just deleted MY post asking why they allow Nazi propaganda on their platform, saying that MY post violated community guidelines. Guess complaining about community guidelines is against community guidelines. Swastikas are cool though. pic.twitter.com/oiREkRYsgt
— Crazy Jewish Mom (@crazyjewishmom) October 27, 2018
Siegel initially joined Instagram under the handle crazyjewishmom in 2014 to share funny text messages from her “crazy Jewish mother.” The account went viral; she now has nearly 800,000 followers, has written a book based off her Instagram account, and hosts a weekly podcast advice show.
Siegel has received anti-Semitic messages since she started the account. But recently, they’ve reached a fever pitch. Siegel said she’s been tagged in memes that depict Adolf Hitler doing the Nazi salute, people desecrating the Israeli flag, people Photoshopping her as Anne Frank, people joking about putting her into a gas chamber, and worse. She reports the ones she sees to Instagram, but she gets so many notifications that there’s no easy way for her to keep track of which reports Instagram has taken action on and which it hasn’t.
In some instances, like the one she tweeted, Instagram has claimed that the content doesn’t violate community guidelines. One account that previously tagged her in a post joking about Jews going into a gas chamber is still active. Another appears to have simply changed usernames. “Sunday [after the shooting], I did a live-stream and someone came on and commented ‘Hitler rules,’” she said. “I reported them, but who knows what happened.”
While many users see Instagram as a bastion of lifestyle, entertainment, and humor content, the platform is also rife with anti-Semitism. Before it was removed, a search for the word Jews revealed 11,696 posts with the hashtag “jewsdid911,” The New York Times reported on Monday. It took me only three clicks to find a slew of anti-Semitic memes on Tuesday morning, including one where a person debates killing all Jews, one with a SpongeBob SquarePants character doing the Nazi salute, one that has a German cartoon character singing the tune “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” several featuring Hitler, and screenshots of anti-Semitic propaganda.
[Read: Instagram has a massive harassment problem.]
“We are actively reviewing hashtags and content … and removing content that violates our policies, including hate speech,” a spokesperson for Instagram said over email. “We do not allow content that attacks people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, or their sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability. We will continue to remove this content as soon as we’re aware.”
As The Daily Beast reported Tuesday, Instagram also hosts anti-Semitic content posted by prominent members of the alt-right. The right-wing comedian Owen Benjamin, for example, regularly posts anti-Semitic memes to his more than 50,000 followers. And despite being banned from Twitter, the right-wing extremist Milo Yiannopoulos and the white supremacist Gavin McInnes both have an active presence on Instagram, where they espouse racist ideas.
Meanwhile, Siegel is terrified for her own safety. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without these platforms,” Siegel said. “But I feel the need to talk about this, because we all have to figure this out. There’s real-world implications that go beyond harassment and trolling.”
Before the Pittsburgh shooting suspect Robert D. Bowers shot up the Tree of Life synagogue, he regularly shared the type of anti-Semitic memes that Siegel encounters on Instagram. “It’s not only anti-Semitism, which itself is horrifying; it’s the intersection of what happened in the lead-up on social media,” Siegel said. “Just the hateful rhetoric that slips by or seems to slip by, in the case of the shooter.”
What’s even more frustrating to Siegel is that she’s called this all out before. In August 2017, following the attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, Siegel posted screenshots of the type of anti-Semitic harassment she received on Instagram. “With this post, I just want to share a small slice of what my Mother and I have been receiving (in especially high volume) since January 20th, 2017 because we are proudly and publicly Jewish,” she wrote.
Still, Siegel said she’s wary of attacking Instagram too aggressively. “It’s a little bit intimidating,” she said. “My entire livelihood is wrapped up in the platform. It’s scary to talk about this stuff.”
Liora Rez, who runs the Instagram account Jewish Chick, which has nearly 50,000 followers, said she’s also frequently tagged in anti-Semitic imagery. “I’m tagged in lots of Holocaust-denial posts. ‘Holohoax’ is a huge one,” she said. Rez has comment filters on her posts, but comments are only one small way a user can harass you on Instagram. Rez reports all the anti-Semitic posts she sees, but sometimes the memes will be left up.
Part of the issue, she suspects, is that the Holocaust itself has become just a joke to many online communities. “There’s some type of sick obsession with the Holocaust,” she says. “There’s so many memes and cartoons I see of Holocaust-themed memes.”
“This has been an ongoing problem,” Siegel says. “You can get away with it for a long time, but when you’re in a moment where so much violence is happening, and the precursor to that violence is being explicitly verbalized on your platforms, you have to do better.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2zeAUoU