"Max-Ann's," as we called it then, was a Jewish deli located on Blue Hill Avenue in close proximity to the Nation of Islam's Temple No. 11, whose minister at one time, Louis Farrakhan, graduated from the school I later attended Boston English, the nation's oldest public high school.
At that time, even if out of sheer ignorance I accepted a crass, stereotypical description of what Jews looked like -- white people with large noses --I was far more clueless as to what a Jew actually is. Perhaps not surprisingly, in that context, Jewish-ness, if you will, sort of flew under the radar. It held little, if any relevancy to me. That is, until Carl Zidel helped make it relevant. But more about that later
Right now, in light of the recent Israeli flotilla attack, and on the heels of our nation's own Independence Day celebrations, the issue at hand is my ever-increasing frustration at coming to terms with the seemingly casual disregard much of the American public and the world at large has for the lives and future of nearly 4 million of its fellow human beings.
Of course, I'm referring to the Palestinians, that itinerant tribe, indigenous to the territory we now call Israel, which for decades has existed as an essentially despised and dispersed nation of homeless squatters. Awash in the largely synthetic concern to those nations that matter, they've been shuttled from country to country like a nomadic Fourth World outsider class, incongruously infringing upon territories that are about as much their own as those areas of Palestine are to the Israeli settlers who now occupy them. They've undergone a soulless and incalculable disregard generally reserved for the world's un-saintly pariahs, apparently for committing the intolerable sin of fighting to reclaim territories from which they were forcibly removed generations ago.
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"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." --Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 1998.
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