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Feb. 8, 2013

Rabbi Berel Wein: Lofty ideals must be followed with grounded applications

Clifford D. May: Letter from the West Bank
Steve Rothaus: Judge OKs plan for gay man, lesbian couple to be on girl's birth certificate
Gloria Goodale: States consider drone bans: Overreaction or crucial for privacy rights?
Environmental Nutrition Editors: Don't buy the aloe vera juice hype
Michael Craig Miller, M.D.: Harvard Experts: Regular exercise pumps up memory, too
Erik Lacitis: Vanity plates: Some take too much license
The Kosher Gourmet by Susie Middleton: Broccoflower, Carrot and Leek Ragout with Thyme, Orange and Tapenade is a delightful and satisfying melange of veggies, herbs and aromatics
Feb. 6, 2013

Nara Schoenberg: The other in-law problem

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. : A see-no-jihadist for the CIA
Kristen Chick: Ahmadinejad visits Cairo: How sect tempers Islamist ties between Egypt, Iran
Roger Simon: Ed Koch's lucky corner
Heron Marquez Estrada: Robot-building sports on a roll
Patrick G. Dean, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: How to restore body's ability to secrete insulin
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: 3 prostate-protecting diet tips
The Kosher Gourmet by Emma Christensen 7 principles for to help you make the best soup ever in a slow cooker
Feb. 4, 2013

Jonathan Tobin: Can Jewish Groups Speak Out on Hagel?

David Wren: Findings of government study, released 3 days before Newtown shooting, at odds with gun-control crusaders
Kristen Chick: Tahrir becomes terrifying, tainted
Curtis Tate and Greg Gordon: US keeps building new highways while letting old ones crumble
David G. Savage: Supreme Court to hear case on arrests, DNA
Harvard Health Letters: Neck and shoulder pain? Know what it means and what to do
Andrea N. Giancoli, M.P.H., R.D.: Eat your way to preventing age-related muscle loss
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington Baked Pears in Red Wine and Port Wine Glaze: A festive winter dessert
Feb. 1, 2013

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb: Redemption

Clifford D. May Home, bloody, home
Christa Case Bryant andNicholas Blanford Why despite Syria's allies warning of retaliation for Israeli airstrikes, the threats are likely hollow
Rick Armon, Ed Meyer and Phil Trexler Ex-police captain cleared by DNA test is freed after nearly 15 years
Harvard Health Letters: Could it by your thyroid?
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: When 'healthy food' isn't
Sue Zeidler: Coke ad racist? Arab-American groups want to yank Super Bowl ad (INCLUDES VIDEO)
The Kosher Gourmet by Nealey Dozier The secret of this soup is the garnish
January 30, 2013

Allan Chernoff: Celebrating 'Back from the Dead Day'

America isn't a religious country? Don't tell Superbowl fans!
Mark Clayton Cybercrime takedown!
Germany remembers Hitler rise to power
Israel salutes U. N. --- with the one finger salute
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: Get cookin' with heart-healthy fats
Ballot riles Guinness World Records
The Kosher Gourmet by Elizabeth Passarella Potato, Squash and Goat Cheese Gratin
January 28, 2013

Nancy Youssef: And Democracy for all? Two years on, Egypt remains in state of chaos

Fred Weir: Putin: West is fomenting jihadi 'blowback'
Meredith Cohn: Implantable pain disk may help those with cancer
Michael Craig Miller, M.D. : Ask the Harvard Experts: Are there drugs to help control binge eating?
David Ovalle Use of controversial 'brain mapping' technology stymied
Jane Stancill: Professor's logic class has 180,000 friends
David Clark Scott Lego Racism?
The Kosher Gourmet by Mario Batali The celebrated chef introduces us to PANZEROTTI PUGLIESI, cheese-stuffed pastry from Italy's south


Jewish World Review January 19, 2009 / 23 Teves 5769

Two Southerners, one holiday

By Paul Greenberg


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | This is one of those years in which Robert E. Lee's actual birthday falls on the date of the official observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s. Ideally, that's the way it ought to be. They belong together. Both, after all, were sons of the South, and came to represent her highest traditions: courage, duty, faith. Even if not all of us may see it that way. For some still insist that a choice must be made: King or Lee, black or white, one or the other.


But why assume the holiday must honor one or the other? Why not both? Because, of course, they are such different figures in American history. They lived in such different times and fought for such different things. Besides, their loudest admirers tend to resent sharing their hero's day with another so different — or maybe just with other, different Americans.


But if these two men were different, and they certainly were, they were different in the way two striking threads might be in the same rich, historical tapestry. There is nothing to prevent their being woven together in American mythology, and much to be gained.


To simple minds, myth is just something not true. To the more thoughtful, myth is something truer than fact. As in the Greek myths.


You can tell a lot about a people by the myths it has chosen to perpetuate, or combine. That we can observe the birthdays of both Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King at the same time is a tribute to more than the curious coincidences of the calendar. When different Americans celebrate the same past, that is the surest sign we share the same


future. The ability of a King to rise above race, like the ability of a Lee to outlast the Lost Cause, is a tribute to the character of each. So long as both are recognized as heroes, there will be no segregated American future. History is powerless to break asunder what myth has joined.


Granted, it would be hard to imagine two more different types: One was a great general (some would say the greatest American general) and the other an apostle of nonviolence. One remains an alabaster knight, so far from the madding crowd as to be almost a political naif, and the other was a mass organizer and preacher, a politician extraordinaire who didn't need public office to mobilize and change a nation; his arena was the national conscience.


Yet these two historical figures have much in common. Both were profoundly Southern each in his own way. For example, both were talented rhetoricians, even if one preferred a stoic brevity and the other was at home in the rolling, repetitive cadences of the black church, which may be as close as our time can come to the spirit of the Psalms. Most telling, and most Southern, each followed a code of his own. Perhaps that is why both could be utterly serene in the midst of whirling confusion.


If one hero exalted duty and the other love, those can both be different names for self-sacrifice. Both knew victory and defeat, and neither defined those words as the world might. It might be said of their styles that one was aristocratic and the other plebeian, one Greek and the other Hebrew, one stoic and the other Christian. What a tribute to the varieties of Southern experience.


General Lee and Dr. King make a striking combination, like two sides of a single coin, but such combinations are not unusual in American history and myth. A country that can celebrate both Jefferson and Hamilton, Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, Lincoln and Lee, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Ronald Reagan ... already has proved that it can absorb the most unlikely combinations of heroes and their qualities.


What was it Jefferson said in his First Inaugural? "We are all Republicans — we are all Federalists." Today we are all admirers of Robert E. Lee and followers of Martin Luther King. Or should be. Their virtues have proven not contradictory but complementary.


From time to unfortunate time, some will try to create a national identity on the basis of only certain, politically acceptable virtues. They cannot tolerate, much less celebrate, any others. Or they may dream of an American nationality on the European model of blood and iron, and exclude those who don't meet some racial test. They will fail because they don't understand that ours is a nation based not on blood but on an idea — or rather a grand, Whitmanesque kaleidoscope of ideas ever changing, forming and combining, like wave after intersecting wave. The way the American language keeps changing.


The observance of King's birthday is still relatively recent, its combination with Lee's still a piquant irony. But when both occasions cease to be official, artificial exercises, and become natural, universally accepted holidays, like Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, or even Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, then another part of the American tapestry will have been completed, another peace made with ourselves. And what once divided will unite. From old discords there will emerge a single resplendent chord. From out of many, one.

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