On many a road trip, I've learned The Shangir-Las are the ultimate mix tape. I learned that in the cassette age when, three states into a five state journey, I pulled into a Chevron to gas up and, at the counter where I paid, saw a best-of cassette of the group. Their hit singles, well known, worked well with their other tracks to make for a great road album.
The Shangri-Las were an American girl group of the 1960s, consisting of Mary Weiss, Elizabeth "Betty" Weiss, Marguerite "Marge" Ganser, and Mary Ann Ganser. Between 1964 and 1966 several hit pop songs of theirs documented teen tragedies and melodramas. They continue to be known for their hits "Remember (Walking in the Sand)", "Give Him a Great Big Kiss", and in particular, "Leader of the Pack" which went to #1 in the US in late 1964.
The group was formed at Andrew Jackson High School in Cambria Heights, a neighborhood in Queens, New York City, in 1963. The group was two pairs of sisters: Mary Weiss (lead singer) and Elizabeth "Betty" Weiss, and identical twins Marguerite "Marge"/"Margie" Ganser and Mary Ann Ganser.[1][2]
They began playing school shows, talent shows, and teen hops; Artie Ripp heard about them and arranged the group's first record deal with Kama Sutra. Their first recording in December 1963 was "Simon Says", later issued on the Smash label, on which Betty Weiss sang lead. They also recorded "Wishing Well" / "Hate to Say I Told You So", which became their first release in early 1964 when leased to the small Spokane, Washington label.[3]
Initially the girls performed without a name for their group; however when they signed their first deal, they began calling themselves the Shangri-Las, after a restaurant in Queens.
Some discographies list The Beatle-ettes and The Bon Bons, who both issued singles in 1964, as early versions of the Shangri-Las; however, they are different groups.[4]
Mary Weiss was the main lead singer; Betty, however, took lead on "Maybe" (the LP version), "Shout", "Twist and Shout", "Wishing Well", and a number of B-sides and album tracks.[5] Mary Ann Ganser took lead on most of "I'm Blue",[6] which is a cover of the Ikettes' biggest hit at the time, and was included on their 1965 album Shangri-Las 65!.
They had 11 songs make BILLBOARD's HOT 100, with six going top forty.
Mary Weiss, the former lead singer of the 1960s pop girl group The Shangri-Las, died on Friday. She was reportedly 75 years old.
Her husband, Ed Ryan, confirmed her death to NPR, but offered no further information.
[. . .]
Weiss was just 15 when she recorded the group's first hit, "Remember," in 1964. As she told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2007, Weiss preferred tailored men's slacks to women's high-rise pants and chiffon dresses, but "never thought much about image."
"You saw other groups where they had money and support behind them were extremely well dressed from the beginning — we were out there pretty much in our street clothes," Weiss said. "But then when we started making money, we designed our own clothes and had them made."
By 1968, the group disbanded in the face of litigation — that Weiss has said she was prevented from discussing even decades later — leaving her disillusioned with the industry.
Before Diana Ross and the Supremes emerged as hitmakers in 1964, girl groups were more of a temporary staple. A group had hits but not really a career. The girl groups usually had about two or so years of hit making. The Shirelles, for example, were hit makers from 1960 to 1962 (big hit "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"). The Chiffons had hits in 1963 and then nothing until one more hit in 1966 (big hit "He's So Fine"). From 1961 through 1963, The Crystals would have six hits (and the members singing would be determined by Phil Spector -- Darlene Love, non-Crystal, sings lead on the group's biggest hit "He's A Rebel"). The Ronettes would have five hits between 1963 and 1964 (big hit "Be My Baby"). The Cookies would have three hits from 1962 to 1963 (big hit "Chains"). The Angels had three hits from 1961 to 1963 (big hit "My Boyfriend's Back"). Pioneering group The Marvelettes would be an exception (big hit "Please Mr. Postman"). They had four top forty pop hits from 1961 to 1962 then, from 1964 to 1967, would have five more hits and one more major hit (top ten) "Don't Mess With Bill."
Again, The Marvelettes were an exception (and an exceptional group). Most of the girl groups of the 60s before the British Invasion (1964) had a hit or two and then quickly faded. The Shangri-Las had a three year run of chart hits.
Jem Aswad and Thania Garcia (VARIETY) note:
Along with the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las epitomize the girl group era more than any others. Weiss was at the center of their sound and look, with a tart, youthful, yearning voice that burst out of transistor and car radios, and long blonde hair that made her the object of countless crushes during the era.
With a battery of killer pop songs written by George “Shadow” Morton, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry and produced by Morton, their heyday was brief — just 1964 and ’65 — but their impact was indelible. They pioneered the teen-death epic with “Leader of the Pack” — which spawned countless imitations and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and their songs, often about star-crossed relationships with bad boys, harbored a nuanced but torrid-for-the-time sexuality: During the call-and-answer segment of “Great Big Kiss,” Weiss’ bandmates are asking questions about her squeeze: “Is he tall?,” they inquire; “I have to look up,” she replies.
While the entire girl group sound was crushed by the British Invasion and the ’60s rock movement, the Shangri-Las cast a long shadow: Within just a few years, the New York Dolls — arguably the greatest single influence on punk rock — were covering “Great Big Kiss” and singing the Shangri-Las’ praises. A couple of years after that, Blondie, whose lead singer Deborah Harry based much of her look and sound on girl groups, released their first album (which featured Greenwich on backing vocals).
Alexi Petridis (GUARDIAN) offers:
The arrangements were high camp and the lyrical teen melodramas could become faintly ridiculous – on 1965’s Give Us Your Blessings, a lovestruck couple meet their end in a car crash, so blinded by tears at their parents’ refusal to let them marry that they don’t see a road-closed sign – but they almost always packed an emotional punch regardless. They were, the critic Greil Marcus once noted, “records [that] left wounds in their listeners”: Amy Winehouse called their 1965 single I Can Never Go Home Anymore “the saddest song in the world”.
Certainly, Weiss’s voice was the perfect vehicle for the Shangri-Las’ oeuvre, in which parents were defied, unsuitable boyfriends were relentlessly pursued (“he’s good-bad, but he’s not evil,” shrugged Weiss in response to an inquiry about her sweetheart’s character on Give Him a Great Big Kiss) and people died horribly: usually, although not always, in road accidents. “Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!” screamed Weiss as biker beau Jimmy sped angrily off into the night, and to a grisly fate, on their extraordinary 1964 No 1 Leader of the Pack: should anyone have wondered what exactly became of him, Morton was on hand with his sound effects to underline the point.
They weren’t the first girl group to lust after a wrong’un – the Crystals had a huge hit with He’s a Rebel in 1962 – nor the first to suggest they were rather more steely and tough than the matching outfits suggested: the Angels’ New Jersey-born vocalist Peggy Santiglia sounded not unlike Weiss on 1963’s My Boyfriend’s Back, the perfect fit for a song that essentially spends two minutes warning someone that the titular boyfriend is going to beat the shit out of them. But the Shangri-Las made parent-baiting toughness their raison d’être, shifting the dial of what was permissible from girls in pop in the process.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
+ Only 14% of registered Republicans (99% of whom are white) turned out to vote in the Iowa caucuses. Trump captured 51% of them or a little more than 7% of the state’s Republicans. Yet, some, like Glenn Greenwald are interpreting this as a massive rebuke of the NatSec/deep police state…
+ Yet, only 11% of the 100,000 Iowa GOP voters even cited “foreign policy” as their top issue, while 40% want a harsh crackdown on immigrants and presumably support Trump’s vow to bomb Mexico. Iowa isn’t a border state, though even some of its voters (& GG) may not realize this.
+ None of Iowa’s arch-conservative cohort of voters seems to have cited the threat of gays, trans people or “dirty” books in the library as among their most pressing concerns.
Robert F. Kennedy served as the Attorney General while his brother, John F. Kennedy, presided in the White House. As AG, Robert Kennedy authorized J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to surveil King and other leaders of the Black freedom struggle in the 1960s.
"In the following months, Hoover deployed agents to find subversive material on King, and Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices in October 1963," as Stanford University reports.
“There was good reason for them doing that at the time,” Kennedy, Jr. told POLITICO on Sunday, “because J. Edgar Hoover was out to destroy Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement and Hoover said to them that Martin Luther King’s chief was a communist."
Kennedy's remarks to POLITICO followed an evening where the Independent candidate was joined by a group of Black women panelists– political spokesperson Angela Stanton King, WNBA forward Angel McCoughtry, reality star Alexia Adams, influencer Tatiana Davenport, and on-air personality Shay McCray– for a roundtable to court the Black vote. The roundtable was moderated by Christal Jordan, an Atlanta-based author and journalist, served as the moderator.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began monitoring Martin Luther King, Jr., in December 1955, during his involvement with the Montgomery bus boycott, and engaged in covert operations against him throughout the 1960s. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was personally hostile toward King, believing that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists. This animosity increased after April 1964, when King called the FBI “completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South” (King, 23 April 1964). Under the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) King was subjected to various kinds of FBI surveillance that produced alleged evidence of extramarital affairs, though no evidence of Communist influence.
The FBI was created in 1909 as the Justice Department’s unit to investigate federal crimes. Hoover became FBI director in 1924 and served until his death in 1972. Throughout the 1930s the FBI’s role expanded when President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the FBI to research “subversives” in the United States, and Congress passed a series of laws increasing the types of federal crimes falling under the FBI’s jurisdiction. During World War II, the FBI was further authorized to investigate threats to national security. This loosely defined mission formed the heading under which the FBI began to investigate the civil rights movement.
The FBI initially monitored King under its Racial Matters Program, which focused on individuals and organizations involved in racial politics. Although the FBI raised concerns as early as March 1956, that King was associating with card-carrying members of the Communist Party, King’s alleged ties with communism did not become the focus of FBI investigations under the existing Communist Infiltration Program, designed to investigate groups and individuals subject to Communist infiltration, until 1962. In February 1962, Hoover told Attorney General Robert Kennedy that Stanley Levison, one of King’s closest advisors, was “a secret member of the Communist Party” (Hoover, 14 February 1962). In the following months, Hoover deployed agents to find subversive material on King, and Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices in October 1963.
Hoover responded to King’s criticisms of the Bureau’s performance in civil rights cases by announcing at a press conference in November 1964, that King was the “most notorious liar in the country” (Herbers, “Dr. King Rebuts Hoover”). Surprised by the accusation, King replied that he could only have sympathy for Hoover as he must be “under extreme pressure” to make such a statement (Herbers, “Dr. King Rebuts Hoover”). King asked an intermediary to set up a meeting between himself and Hoover to understand what had led to the comment. Andrew Young, a King aide who was present at the meeting, recalled that there was “not even an attitude of hostility” between the two, but at about this same time, the FBI anonymously sent King a compromising tape recording of him carousing in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, along with an anonymous letter that SCLC staff interpreted as encouraging King to commit suicide to avoid public embarrassment (Senate Select Committee, 167).
Hoover continued to approve investigations of King and covert operations to discredit King’s standing among financial supporters, church leaders, government officials, and the media. When King condemned the Vietnam War in a speech at Riverside Church on 4 April 1967, the FBI “interpreted this position as proof he ‘has been influenced by Communist advisers’” and stepped up their covert operations against him (Senate Select Committee, 180). The FBI considered initiating another formal COINTELPRO against King and fellow anti-war activist Dr. Benjamin Spock in 1967, when the two were rumored to be contemplating a run for the presidency, but ruled it out on the grounds that such a program would be more effective after the pair had officially announced their candidacy.
In August 1967, the FBI created a COINTELPRO against “Black Nationalist–Hate Groups,” which targeted SCLC, King, and other civil rights leaders. King was identified as a target because the FBI believed that he could become a “messiah” who could unify black nationalists “should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism” (Senate Select Committee, 180). In the last few months of King’s life, the FBI intensified its efforts to discredit him and to “neutralize” SCLC (Senate Select Committee, 180).
According to a U.S. Senate Committee convened in the 1970s to investigate the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations, the impact of the FBI’s efforts to discredit SCLC and King on the civil rights movement “is unquestionable” (Senate Select Committee, 183). The committee determined that: “Rather than trying to discredit the alleged Communists it believed were attempting to influence Dr. King, the Bureau adopted the curious tactic of trying to discredit the supposed target of Communist Party interest—Dr. King himself” (Senate Select Committee, 85).
Sudani didn’t set a deadline for the departure of the coalition, which was formed in 2014 to mentor and support Iraqi forces in regaining control of their country after Islamic State militants seized swaths of northern and western Iraq.
Nor did Sudani close the door to a role for U.S. troops advising Iraqi forces to remain in the country under a new bilateral relationship that he said should follow.
But in an interview Tuesday during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Sudani expressed broad dissatisfaction with American policy on the Gaza conflict. The West had turned a blind eye toward the plight of the Palestinians before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, he said, calling for increased pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end what he described as genocide.
Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, to show their support for Palestinians.
Al Jazeera’s Mohammed al-Attab, reporting from the scene of protests, said many in the crowd accused the US of supporting Israel’s war and promised to continue standing by their “brothers in Palestine”.
“They are now saying that, ‘We don’t care about your rage, we don’t care about whatever you do to us, we will continue our support and resilience with Palestinians until Israel stops its war on Palestine’,” he said.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan carried out air-launched rocket and drone-missile strikes on at least seven separate locations inside neighbouring Iran on Thursday, targeting what it said were bases of Balochi secessionist insurgents.
Iran, which vehemently condemned the strikes as a violation of its state sovereignty, said they had killed nine foreign nationals, including four children. The Baloch Liberation Army—which has waged a decades-long cross-border insurgency in Pakistani Balochistan, the country’s poorest, sparsely-populated westernmost province—confirmed that its forces had come under attack.
Although Pakistan did not say so explicitly, Thursday’s strikes were in part retaliation for an attack Iran had mounted some 48 hours before inside Pakistan.
According to Iran, its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) used missile and drone strikes to hit camps of the Jaish al-Adl, a Balochi armed secessionist group that has carried out attacks in Iran’s predominantly Balochi south-east. Following that action, Tehran emphasized it did not want to disrupt “brotherly” relations with Pakistan. But in a message clearly intended for Washington and Israel, Iran said that it reserves the right to take all necessary measures to defend itself.
The tit-for tat attacks between Iran and Pakistan add further combustion in a region already set ablaze by US imperialism and its allies, which are using Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians of Gaza to prepare and provoke a wider war with Iran.
On Wednesday and Thursday evenings, the US carried out its fourth and fifth waves of missile strikes on Yemen in a week, hitting what it claimed were Iranian-backed Houthi positions in disparate areas across the country. Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, US President Joe Biden had vowed the US-British campaign of air strikes against the Houthis would continue.
With the support of broad sections of the Yemeni people, Houthi fighters have disrupted Red Sea shipping to press for an end to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.
Also on Wednesday, the Biden administration labeled the Houthis a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist group,” opening the door to the imposition of sweeping sanctions. Aid groups immediately responded with warnings that the designation threatens to greatly intensify Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. As a result of the almost decade-long war the Saudi regime has waged on Yemen with US arms and logistical support, more than half of the country’s population—over 18 million people—need food and other assistance.
The European Union, meanwhile, is in the advanced planning stage for its own naval operation in the Red Sea that would support the US/British attacks on Yemen, while asserting its own role as a regional policeman. The German government is leading the charge in launching the mission, which it will support by dispatching a frigate to the region in early February, according to a report in the Welt am Sontag newspaper. Underscoring German imperialism’s major military expansion into the Middle East, Berlin is readying a shipment of 10,000 artillery shells to back Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Emboldened by the to-the-hilt support Israel is receiving from the North American and European imperialist powers, Israel’s fascist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu baldly reasserted his goal of a Greater Israel in perpetuity Thursday, saying his government would never agree to ceding sovereignty over any part of the West Bank.
The U.S. has called on Israel to scale back its offensive and said that the establishment of a Palestinian state should be part of the “day after.”
But in a nationally broadcast news conference, Netanyahu vowed to press ahead with the offensive until Israel realizes a “decisive victory over Hamas.” He also rejected the idea of Palestinian statehood. He said he had relayed his positions to the Americans.
“In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control all territory west of the Jordan,” Netanyahu told a nationally broadcast news conference. “This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?”
“The prime minister needs to be capable of saying no to our friends,” he added.
Following Netanyahu's comments, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Thursday that "there is no way to solve [the region's] long-term challenges to provide lasting security and there is no way to solve the short-term challenges of rebuilding Gaza and establishing governance in Gaza and providing security for Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state."
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres responded to Netanyahu's comments in a statement
reiterating his stance that "the only way to stem the suffering" in the
region is "an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza and a process
that leads to sustained peace for Israelis and Palestinians, based on a
two-state solution."
Unnamed sources have told reporters that U.S. frustration with
Netanyahu's far-right government has been increasing along with the
casualty count in Gaza—which Palestinian officials and international
groups say is over 100,000, mostly innocent men, women, and children.
President Joe Biden has accused Israel of "indiscriminate bombing" of civilians in Gaza but continues to back Netanyahu's policy unconditionally and the U.S. has supplied Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic support at the United Nations and beyond.
CNN's Mick Krever, Sana Noor Haq, Eyad Kourdi and Celine Alkhaldi report, "A near-total communications blackout in Gaza, the longest of the war, has now lasted one week with no signs of abating, preventing humanitarian and emergency services from operating effectively in the territory. It is the ninth such outage since Israel’s war on Hamas began following the group’s attacks in Israel on October 7, according to the Internet monitoring site Netblocks." When not censoring and silencing via internet crackdown, you get people doing the same by cancelling events. From yesterday's DEMOCRACY NOW!
AMY GOODMAN: Samia Halaby, we want to bring in another Palestinian American artist into this discussion, the artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir. She was scheduled to speak at any event in Berlin, Germany, in October, but her appearance was canceled. She’s the recipient of prestigious awards, including a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, and most recently she won an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize and received an honorary doctorate from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. She is the founding director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, where she was born.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Emily. It’s very good to have you with us. Can you talk about what’s happened to you, actually, not here in the United States, but in Berlin, Germany?
EMILY JACIR: Thank you, Amy, for having me on your show. It’s really a pleasure to be here. I also just would like to begin by expressing my solidarity for Samia and the loss of her show, but also for the curator, Elliot, because he was in Bethlehem last summer and spoke to me at length about this exhibition, so I was quite excited about it.
I was slated to speak in Berlin as part of a workshop at Potsdam University. And when they canceled the talk, they wrote to me and said they were going to postpone it to a more peaceful time — or, to a more peaceful point in time, which, now listening to Samia speaking about the idea of being a lightning rod, this really resonated with me. And this is one of the methodologies that is being used to actually stop us from being able to speak publicly and share our words and share our work. This is another way of doing it, is by saying, “Oh, we’ll just do this in another peaceful time.” But this is the time. This is the time when we should be speaking and having discourse, across the board, around the world. So I don’t buy that that was the real reason.
Again, we have to also take the curator into consideration and try to imagine what kind of pressure, particularly being in Germany, they must have been under. The situation in Germany, as we all know, is one of the most extreme cases of silencing Palestinians. But it’s part of a larger war effort targeting Palestinian voices and intellectuals, using various methodologies, including harassment, baseless smear campaigns, canceling shows, canceling talks. So, it’s very much part of a coordinated movement.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Emily Jacir, could you talk about some of the — there have been numerous incidents in Germany where people have been canceled, for one reason or another having to do with Gaza. If you could just go through some of those people, in particular, the Palestinian artists and writers?
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the first incidents was Adania Shibli, who was slated to receive an award in Germany. That was within the first week of October, if I remember correctly. The list is quite extensive. My sister’s film, Annemarie Jacir, was canceled within weeks also, I think. Her film was canceled. It’s a film about a wedding, and it was deemed too controversial to show on German television. Candice Breitz, as we all know, is another person. There are so many. The list is endless.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we want to go now to a writer, a highly acclaimed writer and author, the award-winning Masha Gessen, who was also canceled, or her award. She was to receive the Hannah Arendt Award in Bremen. We spoke to her in December, shortly after the publication of their New Yorker piece headlined “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.”
In the essay, Gessen wrote, quote, “For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time — in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany,” they wrote.
Gessen went on to explain why the term “ghetto” is not commonly used to describe Gaza. Gessen said, quote, “Presumably, the more fitting term 'ghetto' would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated,” Gessen wrote.
They had been scheduled to receive the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany, but the ceremony had to be postponed after one of the award’s sponsors, the left-leaning Heinrich Böll Foundation, withdrew its support.
Gessen discussed the New Yorker piece and the controversy that followed on Democracy Now! on the very day they had been originally scheduled to receive the award in Bremen.
MASHA GESSEN: A large part of the article is devoted to, in fact, memory politics in Germany and the vast anti-antisemitism machine, which largely targets people who are critical of Israel and, in fact, are often Jewish. This happens to be a description that fits me, as well. I am Jewish. I come from a family that includes Holocaust survivors. I grew up in the Soviet Union very much in the shadow of the Holocaust. That’s where the phrase in the headline came from, is from the passage in the article itself. And I am critical of Israel.
Now, the part that really offended the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the city of Bremen — and, I would imagine, some German public — is the part that you read out loud, which is where I make the comparison between the besieged Gaza, so Gaza before October 7th, and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. I made that comparison intentionally. It was not what they call here a provocation. It was very much the point of the piece, because I think that the way that memory politics function now in Europe and in the United States, but particularly in Germany, is that their cornerstone is that you can’t compare the Holocaust to anything. It is a singular event that stands outside of history.
My argument is that in order to learn from history, we have to compare. Like, that actually has to be a constant exercise. We are not better people or smarter people or more educated people than the people who lived 90 years ago. The only thing that makes us different from those people is that in their imagination the Holocaust didn’t yet exist and in ours it does. We know that it’s possible. And the way to prevent it is to be vigilant, in the way that Hannah Arendt, in fact, and other Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust were vigilant and were — there was an entire conversation, especially in the first two decades after World War II, in which they really talked about how to recognize the signs of sliding into the darkness.
And I think that we need to — oh, and one other thing that I want to say is that our entire framework of international humanitarian law is essentially based — it all comes out of the Holocaust, as does the concept of genocide. And I argue that that framework is based on the assumption that you’re always looking at war, at conflict, at violence through the prism of the Holocaust. You always have to be asking the question of whether crimes against humanity, the definitions of which came out of the Holocaust, are occurring. And Israel has waged an incredibly successful campaign at setting — not only setting the Holocaust outside of history, but setting itself aside from the optics of international humanitarian law, in part by weaponizing the politics of memory and the politics of the Holocaust.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Masha Gessen. Masha Gessen was speaking to us from Bremen, Germany. The award ceremony went from an auditorium of hundreds — they ultimately got the award in someone’s backyard.
Meanwhile, more than 500 global artists, filmmakers and writers and cultural workers have announced a push against Germany’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, calling on artists to step back from collaborating with German state-funded associations. The campaign is backed by the French author, Nobel Prize for Literature winner Annie Ernaux and the Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed el-Kurd. It alleges Germany has adopted, quote, “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine,” unquote.
We’re speaking with Emily Jacir, whose speech was just canceled in Berlin, Germany. And as we wrap up with you, Emily, I wanted to know if you could comment on what’s happening in your birthplace, in Bethlehem. The last time we went to Bethlehem, we were interviewing two pastors there, one of them who set up Christ in the rubble, a crèche scene that showed the baby Jesus in rubble, signifying Gaza. If you can talk about that and the importance of your art, as you continue?
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, I will talk about that, but just to relate back to what everyone else was talking about and how you started, I think it’s really important to consider the way this attempt at creating a culture of fear amongst the arts community globally and internationally is happening through these baseless smear campaigns and defamation, threatening people’s jobs. And I mention this just because, you know, one of the things that happened to me was that there was a letter-writing campaign in which every university I’ve ever taught at internationally, anyone that’s ever given me an award received literally a five-page PDF claiming that I was an ISIS terrorist that supports the rape of women and the killing of babies. People who signed that Artforum letter, and many, many, many of whom are Jewish and Israeli allies that I have worked with for 25 years, also received that letter. In my case, because people know me — they’ve worked with me for 25 years — the letters come off as just absolutely absurd and ridiculous. But if that is happening to me, it begs the question of what is happening to younger artists, people who don’t — people in museums don’t know receiving letters like that. And it’s very targeted and very systematic, and it’s something to consider also in relationship with the targeted destruction of culture in Gaza, art centers being bombed. Why would an art center be bombed? Because part of genocide is precisely silencing artists and silencing a culture’s cultural production. And I feel that that was very important to say that.
In Bethlehem, the situation is quite difficult — nothing compared to Gaza, of course. But we are witnessing incursions every night. It’s been — you know, Bethlehem is a town that very, very much relies on visitors and tourists for its economy, so that, economically, it’s been a disaster. As an art center, our art center in Bethlehem promotes dance and music and art practices and making and residencies of local artists and international artists. We’re doing our very best to both deal with the situation at hand but also provide a kind of way of working with the children now who live in our neighborhood who are trying to handle the situation, both on the ground in Bethlehem but also witnessing what’s happening to Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Emily Jacir, we want to thank you for being with us, acclaimed artist and filmmaker, born in Bethlehem, goes back and forth between Bethlehem and New York, was scheduled to speak in Berlin, Germany, her talk canceled. And Samia Halaby, renowned Palestinian visual artist, activist, educator and scholar, whose first U.S. retrospective was abruptly canceled by Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art over her support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by a German American Jewish Holocaust survivor. Samia is 87. Marione Ingram is 88. She’s been standing outside the White House for months calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Her talks in her native Hamburg, which she fled from in the Holocaust, have been canceled. Stay with us.
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