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Expansion of Bike Lanes in City Brings Backlash
Over the last four years, the streets of New York City have undergone a transformation: More than 250 miles of traffic lanes dedicated for bicycles have been created, and several laws intended to promote cycling have been passed.
The efforts by the Bloomberg administration have placed the city at the forefront of a national trend to make bicycling viable and safe even in the most urban of settings. Yet over the last year, a backlash has taken hold.
Bowing to vocal opposition from drivers and elected officials, the city last week began removing a 2.35-mile painted bike lane along Father Capodanno Boulevard on Staten Island. In Manhattan, a community board held a special hearing this month for business owners to vent about problems posed by a new protected bicycle lane on Columbus Avenue — in particular, the removal of parking spaces and the difficulty of getting truck deliveries.
In Brooklyn, new bicycle lanes have led to unusual scenes of friction. Along Prospect Park West, opponents protested last month alongside supporters of the lanes. And last year, painted paths along Bedford and Kent Avenues in Williamsburg caused disagreement between cyclists and Hasidim. The lane on Bedford Avenue was later removed.
So far, the opposition to the city’s agenda on bicycles has far less organization and passion than the bicycling advocates, but it is gaining increased attention.
The City Council will hold a hearing on bicycling on Dec. 9 to address balancing the needs of cyclists with those of other road users, said Councilman James Vacca, the chairman of the Transportation Committee. The hearing will also look at how well the Transportation Department has worked with community boards to review large-scale road changes.
Police and transportation officials, meanwhile, have begun a crackdown on bicycle-related traffic violations amid complaints from some pedestrians.
Surging bike ridership has created a simmering cultural conflict between competing notions of urban transportation. Many New Yorkers object to bicycle lanes as sudden, drastic changes to their coveted concrete front yards.
“He’s taking away my rights as a driver,” Leslie Sicklick, 45, said of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Ms. Sicklick, a dog walker and substitute teacher, grew up driving with her father around the Lower East Side, where she still lives.
She organized a protest in the East Village last month, and she and at least two groups of opponents are planning new rallies against local bicycle lanes. They have discussed joining up for one large protest, though none has been planned.
Cycling advocates have taken notice. They have begun to mobilize more — seeking to undercut any antibicycle rally by their own presence — and have increased pressure on city officials to continue the pro-bicycle agenda. On Nov. 10, for example, advocates and bike riders massed in front of City Hall to protest the Transportation Department’s decision to scale back on parking-protected lanes along First and Second Avenues.
“It’s easy to focus on some of the conflict and friction,” said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group that has seen its influence grow under the Bloomberg administration. “But that’s always going to happen when you’re changing the geometry of something as dear as the asphalt. It takes some adjustment, and we’re definitely in that adjustment phase.”
There have been no independent polls of New Yorkers’ attitudes on bicycle lanes, though online surveys have proliferated in recent weeks. One such survey, focused on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn and sponsored by the City Council members representing Park Slope, has received thousands of submissions. “It’s a study period — that’s how D.O.T. put it,” one of those members, Councilman Brad Lander, said. Results should be ready before January, when the department is likely to reach a conclusion on whether the Prospect Park West lane has been a success.
New York has a long relationship with the bicycle, with the first bike path in the country running along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn as early as 1894.
Interest in better bike infrastructure was revived under Mayor John V. Lindsay in the 1970s. The first separated bike lanes, similar to those that now exist on sections of Eighth and Ninth Avenues in Manhattan, were installed by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1980 on Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue — though they were quickly removed amid fierce opposition.
“What we did was on such a small scale,” Mr. Koch said recently. “What’s being done now is on such a large scale.”
Along with pedestrian plazas and new express bus service lanes, improved bicycle infrastructure is part of a city effort to rebalance the mix of cyclists, pedestrians and cars on the streets. Slowed motor traffic — “traffic calming” — is one of the department’s goals for new bike lanes, to the annoyance of many drivers.
The Transportation Department has responded to criticism by pointing to accident data showing a correlation between new lanes and increased pedestrian safety. Fatal crashes have decreased on streets with new lanes, according to the department.
“The record speaks for itself: Injuries have dropped, dramatically, for everyone on streets where bike lanes have been installed,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner.
The department pointed to the support lanes have found from community boards across the city, many of which have explicitly requested new bike lanes — along Prospect Park West, for example — in part because of safety concerns.
Outside the city, bikes have begun creeping into political battles this year. The Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, Dan Maes, wondered during the primary whether bicycles were part of a plot to ruin cities.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who lost his bid for re-election in Washington, found himself painted as out of touch with residents, in part because of his connection to new bike paths.
In New York, the biggest challenge yet could come along Prospect Park West, where some residents are fighting to eliminate the 1.8-mile, two-way strip of green paint delineating a new bike lane.
Norman Steisel, a former sanitation commissioner and deputy mayor, admitted that he never noticed the proliferation of bicycle lanes, until he got stuck in traffic near his Brooklyn home over the summer.
“I was shocked; I thought there had been a big accident,” Mr. Steisel said of a back-up on Carroll Street that he later attributed to a new bike lane. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
Mr. Steisel was among opponents who staged a protest on Oct. 21, but they were outnumbered more than three to one by supporters.
“We don’t want to be out here having to advocate for something that’s already done,” said Eric McClure, who lives in Park Slope. “But here we are.”
New York City Crime Dips but Violent Crime Is Up
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, within six weeks of the year’s end, faced questions about the state of crime in New York City with what has become a familiar and welcome answer: Overall crime in the city is down again in 2010.
“Crime is down this year,” Mr. Kelly told reporters on Tuesday after a promotion ceremony in Lower Manhattan. “Down about a percent and a half, citywide, the index crimes.”
But the reason the Police Department can make that claim is not that murders are down. Or rapes. Or robberies. All of those crimes are up, as are shootings, driving an overall 3.5 percent increase in violent crime through mid-November, compared with last year.
Rather, because of the way major crimes are counted in New York — lumping violent crimes in with far larger numbers of property theft complaints, including the largest category, grand larceny — police officials could say that overall crime was down 1.3 percent. Without a substantial decrease in grand larcenies this year, however, the city would show an increase in overall crime.
When pressed, Mr. Kelly, to be fair, does not dodge the truth of the more disturbing numbers. “We have seen a spike in murders, rapes and robberies,” he acknowledged.
But he cautioned against compartmentalizing crimes or analyzing data from too short a period, seeking to put those spikes in historical context. Homicides are up, he said, but only over the record low last year, 471. They are still on track to be “probably the third-lowest year for murders that we’ve had since we started to record them accurately,” Mr. Kelly noted.
He added: “Every year of the Bloomberg administration, we’ve had murders below the 600 level. It never happened before. Prior to 2002, we’ve never had a year where we had less than 600 murders.”
But murder counts have not been the issue talked about the most in connection with New York crime statistics this year. Instead, much debate has centered on a fresh set of concerns over the integrity of the crime statistics and suspicions about whether crime complaints were being manipulated.
A first note sounded in February when, in an academic survey, retired police captains and higher-ranking officers said pressure to reduce crime had led some managers to alter crime data to show annual decreases in the index crimes measured in the department’s CompStat program.
Police officials disputed the methodology of the survey.
Later, a whistleblower officer made public his allegations that crime complaints in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were manipulated. In October the department brought internal charges against the precinct’s former commander and four others, accusing them of failing to record a grand-larceny auto theft and a robbery complaint.
Notably, grand larceny is one crime category that draws scrutiny from those who suspect numbers-fudging. In their survey of retired captains and others, the two academic researchers said some respondents told them that commanders and supervisors had combed Web sites to find lower values for items stolen from victims, enabling them to downgrade reported grand larcenies to misdemeanors from felonies.
Richard M. Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, which monitors crime and police policies, said it was “hard to know” if the crime numbers, particularly on grand larceny, were being manipulated. But he said, “There are certainly serious questions out there that need to be resolved about the police data.”
An analysis by The New York Times of crime tallies through Nov. 14, downloaded from the Web site of the Police Department, provided no clear confirmation or rebuttal of statistical manipulations.
Robbery is driving the citywide rise in violence. On a precinct level, the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn, was one of three in the city showing the highest increases in robberies. The others were the 103rd in Jamaica, Queens, and the 79th in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Citywide, robbery was up in four of the five boroughs, and in pockets of all of them.
The police say teenager-on-teenager robbery is up in many places. It is hitting hardest in the Bronx, where an increase of 383 robberies, compared with the same period in 2009, accounted for almost half the citywide jump.
Rapes were up 15 percent citywide and rose in every borough but Queens. Already, with 1,207 rapes on the books through mid-November, there have been more rapes recorded than in all of 2009. If the pace continues, the city will log more than 1,300 rapes this year, a higher number than for any year since 2006.
The highest rape rates — those double or more the citywide per capita rate — cut two distinct swaths through the city, one across Harlem and into the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and the other running southeast in Brooklyn from Bedford-Stuyvesant into East New York.
Homicides hit 470 by Nov. 14, which was 67 more than in the same period last year. Their numbers increased the most in traditional danger zones, in the Bronx and northern Brooklyn, and new concentrations appeared in eastern Queens, where two precincts accounted for 20 percent of the city’s overall increase.
A look at homicides per precinct shows that the 75th led the way, with 29. Next door in Brooklyn, the 73rd Precinct was on pace to log the highest rate of homicides per capita, for the fourth year running, with 2.6 homicides per 10,000 residents. The 25th Precinct, in East Harlem, saw the biggest raw number increase, to 10 from 2 last year. By contrast, eight precincts made it through mid-November with no homicides.
Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said each category had to be seen in context. Robberies were still 13 percent lower than two years ago. More than 90 percent of rapes this year involved acquaintances or relatives, which “would seem to indicate that the past reluctance of victims to report relatives or date rapes is giving way to willingness of victims to report,” he said.
Violent assault was fairly flat, because there were 111 fewer assaults on police officers, traffic agents and other peace officers than in 2009. With murders, Mr. Browne said, the police are simply “fighting our own success.”
On the flip side, major property crimes, and most notably grand larcenies, which are defined as felony thefts with losses valued at more than $1,000, declined by a combined 4 percent. Property crimes were down by 2,348, to 57,737 cases from 60,085 in the first 10 1/2 months of last year. Burglary dropped to 16,113 from 16,508, and auto thefts dropped to 9,096 from 9,276, the police statistics show. The drop in grand larcenies, to 32,528 from 34,301, represented 76 percent of the net decrease.
And the biggest drop in grand larcenies happened in the geographically confined area of Manhattan south of 59th Street, which logged 560 fewer larcenies through Nov. 14, representing nearly a third of the total citywide decrease in that category. Statistics from the two Midtown precincts were responsible for most of that decline, combining for 318 fewer larcenies.
Mr. Browne said southern Manhattan always dwarfs other areas of the city in generating complaints of grand larceny, “so it should not come as a surprise that a decrease there would have a major effect, as would an increase.” He said Deputy Chief Michael J. McEnroy led several initiatives this year to reduce grand larcenies and property crimes in southern Manhattan, including running burglary and larceny apprehension and surveillance teams.
In the end, Mr. Aborn of the Citizens Crime Commission said, the story of crime this year is complicated. “New York remains an incredibly safe city,” said Mr. Aborn, who ran unsuccessfully last year for Manhattan district attorney. “The one thing cutting against that is this is the first year where we have seen a steady uptick in violent crime. And that is something that we really need to keep our eye on.”
In Los Angeles, Big Step Ahead for Mass Transit
This auto-obsessed city — a place where people love their cars almost as much as they hate the traffic — has embarked on the biggest expansion of its mass transit system in decades, an effort to change the way people navigate its sprawling and clogged streets and freeways.
Los Angeles transit officials, after years of debate, have approved an 8.6-mile extension of the Purple Line subway, from Koreatown through a crowded corridor of offices, homes, museums, schools and shopping centers in Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood.
What once seemed a quixotic vision — the “Subway to the Sea,” connecting Union Station in downtown to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica — no longer seems quite so quixotic.
At the same time, Los Angeles received $546 million from the federal government to build, over the next 10 years, an 8.5-mile above-ground light-rail line from the Crenshaw district to Los Angeles International Airport.
An 11-mile extension of the Metro Gold Line, which starts in East Los Angeles and will eventually go out to Montclair, began in June, and construction is set to begin this year extending the Exposition Light Rail Line from Culver City to Santa Monica.
Taken together, these developments have emboldened mass transit enthusiasts here and lent credibility to what has become something of a legacy project for Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who ran for office pledging to build a transit system that would upend long-established commuting habits and ease what has long been a bane of life in Los Angeles.
“This put to rest all this talk of, ‘Will we ever build a subway?’ ” Mr. Villaraigosa said, somewhat triumphantly, in an interview. “This is a big deal. People have been talking about it for years. And they were making fun of me: ‘Where is the subway?!’ ”
Los Angeles once had a large, intricate and thriving public transportation system, with so-called Yellow Car trolleys that ran on downtown streets and a vast network of Red Cars, operated by the Pacific Electric Railroad, that ran throughout the region. This was dismantled amid the city’s fervent embrace of the automobile (encouraged, in no small part, by oil interests in Los Angeles that realized the economic potential of the car).
But with a vote by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority’s board last month to approve the Purple Line expansion, there is a consensus that these projects are going to be built, even among those who describe them as a waste of money in a region that will never embrace mass transit. The projects are being financed by a half-cent sales tax surcharge approved by Los Angeles voters two years ago and expected to raise $40 billion over the next 30 years.
Not to say that there aren’t battles left to be fought.
Beverly Hills officials oppose a proposed stretch of the Purple Line because it would burrow under a public high school; they want the line moved a few blocks north. That has its own complications: skirting the high school would put the subway cheek by jowl against an earthquake fault that runs down Santa Monica Boulevard.
“We very much want the Subway to the Sea, but we are very strongly against the high school route,” said Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Beverly Hills.
Most immediately, the Republican takeover of the United States House this month threatens to undermine a fiscal maneuver pressed by Mr. Villaraigosa in Washington to accelerate construction of the projects. The mayor had asked the federal government to give an advance loan against those sales tax revenues, allowing the work to be done in 10 years, an idea that seemed to be gaining steam until Election Day.
“Let’s face it, after the midterm election we’re in a new world,” said Joel Epstein, a mass transit advocate.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, the Democrat who represents the area, said he hoped Republicans would not block a plan that, he argued, would create jobs, improve the transit system and not cost the federal government a significant sum of money.
“This is the kind of idea that some Republicans may even find attractive,” Mr. Waxman said. “It’s tremendously important. I see that whenever I’m at home and in my car: it’s just terrible traffic.”
Still, the most intriguing question may be whether a place that has so embraced the culture of cars — and, with its sprawl, could not be more different from subway-friendly cities like New York, London and Paris — will make the kind of lifestyle adjustment envisioned by mass transit enthusiasts. There were an average of 295,000 daily riders on the 79 miles of subway and light-rail lines in October, and 1.2 million on city buses.
Tom Rubin, a mass transit consultant in Oakland, called the subway project fiscal folly that would serve only to take resources away from the widely used, if less efficient, network of buses.
“They have been pushing rail expansion for decades now,” Mr. Rubin said, “and it has not had much of an impact in terms of increasing transit ridership. The big problem is that these are very, very expensive, and we wind up spending so much money on building these rail lines that there is not enough to operate bus service. So we wind up cutting back on bus operations and then raising fares, which drives the riders away.”
Robert B. Cervero, the director of the University of California Transportation Center in Berkeley, said that if the subway expansion cut commuting time as promised, it would indeed change ridership habits. Transit officials said the ride from Koreatown to Westwood by subway would take 24 minutes, compared with 50 minutes during the rush in a car or on a bus.
“The science of public transit is not too complicated,” Mr. Cervero said in an e-mail message. “It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.”
Mr. Epstein said that changing demographics and population patterns — and ever-rising frustration over traffic — would inevitably drive people from cars underground.
“There’s a whole new type of Angeleno who has no cultural opposition to riding,” he said. “The whole old-school L.A. thinking that people don’t ride subways, that’s a thing of the past.”
No Need to Kvetch, Yiddish Lives On in Catskills
In a chilled and snow-shrouded Catskills landscape, hundreds of people get together every December to try to breathe some warmth into a dying culture.
For almost a week at a hotel here, organizers immerse the group, which calls itself KlezKamp, in Yiddish and the folkways of the Eastern Europeans who spoke that language until Hitler extinguished their communities. Classes are offered in Yiddish conversation, humor and literature; in klezmer — the sometimes plaintive, sometimes mischievous folk music that has experienced an astonishing comeback — and in the snaking, coiling, hand-clapping dances animated by those melodies.
To some the enterprise could seem pointlessly nostalgic, since Yiddish is flourishing only among the Hasidim, for whom it is the lingua franca, and virtually vanishing elsewhere with the passing of Jews who came to the United States from Poland and Russia before and after World War II.
But a visitor last December to the hotel, the Hudson Valley Resort and Spa, formerly the schmaltzy classic the Granit, would hardly use moribund to describe the goings-on. (This year’s KlezKamp runs from Dec. 26-31.) Yiddish, as a cherished expression goes, still tickles the participants’ hearts.
Not only were the evening music and dance programs a tribute to vigorous life, but those who took part in the courses — more than 50 were offered, with six sessions apiece — also seemed to revel in the chance to reacquaint themselves with the unmatched expressions they had heard from their bubbes (grandmothers) and zaydes (grandfathers) and the dance steps they had not done since a cousin’s bar mitzvah long ago.
Words tossed about during the week included not just those like kvetch and kibitz, which have entered American idiom, but also fresher candidates like shreklekh (terrible or frightening), naches (prideful joy), farblondget (mixed up) and luftmensch (an impractical person with no apparent income).
Henry Sapoznik, a Ukrainian cantor’s son who helped found KlezKamp in 1984, calls it a “Yiddish Brigadoon,” a gathering, like the Scottish village in that 1947 musical, that comes to life once in a long while after a lengthy snooze. His co-founder, Adrienne Cooper, calls it “a flying shtetl.” But both say that over 25 years the thousands who have taken part have knitted together into a group that stays in touch year round.
“If I were to say to you we’re attempting to reactivate Yiddish culture in its full form, I’d be kidding you,” Mr. Sapoznik said. “But what we’re doing here is creating a parallel universe, our own free-standing reality.”
Those who attend — and they include families and singles, children and octogenarians — hail mostly from the East Coast, but some come from much farther afield, like Germany, Denmark, England, Russia and the Netherlands. Mr. Sapoznik estimated that 15 to 20 percent of participants were not Jewish. About half are musicians hankering to hone skills with human artifacts like Pete Sokolow, 69, who as a professional musician in the fading klezmer days of the 1950s played piano with legends like the four Epstein brothers and Dave Tarras.
Still others engage in anthropology, interviewing a handful of old-timers about the children’s games they played, the curses they uttered (“You should grow like an onion with your head in the ground!”) or homespun remedies (urinate on a cut finger and wrap it in a spider web). In one class Susan Leviton introduced a lesser-known song about a mother grieving for her daughter, killed in the Triangle Waist Company factory fire of 1911, who is “wearing shrouds instead of a wedding dress.”
The dance teacher, Steve Weintraub, 55, of Oak Park, Ill., has interviewed aging immigrant dancers and studied grainy films. At KlezKamp classes and parties he has re-enacted the flashtanz — performed with a bottle on the head, to entertain a bride and groom — the merry freylekhs and the sher, an 18th-century square dance.
Everyone seems on a mission to recapture and resurrect, but the work is not just about mining the past. The musicians, for example, are inventing new melodies with a klezmer lilt but flavored with jazz, rock and even salsa.
On the first evening after dinner, Alan Sisselman, 56, a biologist from Buffalo, leaned back on a lobby sofa and played a sweetly fluttering tune on clarinet. He was joined by Jordan Abraham, 39, on accordion, and Rick Black, 57, on soprano saxophone — both play for a Canadian group called Touch of Klez — as well as two young violinists, Abigale Reisman, 22, of Manhattan, and Keryn Kleiman, 19, of New City, N.Y. Sophie Kreutz, 21, a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., piped in on another clarinet, and Zack Mayer, 20, of Manhattan, harmonized on baritone saxophone. Before long 12 people were embellishing Mr. Sisselman’s melody in a full-blown jam session.
KlezKamp has been around long enough that some younger adults have spent part of almost every year of their lives there. Sarah Gordon, 30, a Brooklyn teacher, started coming at 6 because her mother, Ms. Cooper, was an organizer, and she is now teaching newcomers to sing in a language they may never have used before.
Elaine Hoffman Watts, 77, a third-generation klezmer musician who plays drums, was attending with her daughter, Susan, 43, a trumpeter, and her grandson, Douglas Siegel, 15, a trombonist, making a line of five generations. “It never died in my house,” she said of klezmer.
David Ferleger, a 61-year-old Philadelphia lawyer, has come here for four years with his twins, Anat and Avram, now 10. He worked to rekindle the Yiddish he grew up with as a child of Holocaust survivors while giving his kids the run of a resort hotel with an indoor pool and a game room.
“I could study Yiddish in New York,” he said. “Here I can study Yiddish and have the kids happy as well.”
Despite recent operations on both hips, Claire Salant, 82, of Old Bethpage on Long Island, sashayed and spun to klezmer for almost an hour on the first evening. She came to KlezKamp five years ago to take intermediate Yiddish and soon was fluent enough to teach the language at her synagogue.
“I grew up speaking Yiddish, but had not spoken it for 60 years because, like good Americans, my Austro-Hungarian parents went to night school to learn English,” she said with a shrug of regret.
The resurgence of klezmer gives everyone a sliver of hope. Mr. Sapoznik recalled that when he started a band called Kapelye in the 1970s, there were a handful of bands. Now he estimates that there are 1,000 around the world — with names like the Klezmatics, a band with an album titled “Jews With Horns.”
As in a university, some teachers are particular draws. Michael Wex, a Canadian author and philologist, taught one group about the derivation of the term bubbe mayse — literally “a grandmother’s fable” but an expression used for any implausible tale. It was, he revealed, based on a 16th-century chivalric story about a Christian knight named Bovo who improbably marries a princess under a chupah — a Jewish wedding canopy — and arranges a circumcision for twin sons. Over time, few Jews were familiar with Bovo, so the expression morphed into something said by a bubbe.
Mr. Wex took pride that he drew much of his book “Born to Kvetch” from lectures that he gave at KlezKamp.
“I got more things than most people out of coming here,” he said. “I got an entire career.”
Daily Pill Greatly Lowers AIDS Risk, Study Finds
Healthy gay men who took an anti-AIDS pill every day were well protected against contracting H.I.V. in a study suggesting that a new weapon against the epidemic has emerged.
In the study, published Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that the men taking Truvada, a common combination of two antiretroviral drugs, were 44 percent less likely to get infected with the virus that causes AIDS than an equal number taking a placebo.
But when only the men whose blood tests showed that they had taken their pill faithfully every day were considered, the pill was more than 90 percent effective, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, head of the infectious diseases division of the National Institutes of Health, which paid for the study along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“That’s huge,” Dr. Fauci said. “That says it all for me.”
The large study, nicknamed iPrEx, included nearly 2,500 men and was coordinated by the Gladstone Institutes of the University of California, San Francisco.
The results are the best news in the AIDS field in years, even better than this summer’s revelation that a vaginal microbicide protected 39 percent of all the women testing it and 54 percent of those who used it faithfully.
Also, Truvada, a combination of tenofovir and emtricitabine that prevents the virus from replicating, is available by prescription in many countries right now, while the microbicide gel is made in only small amounts for clinical trials.
The protection, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, is also the first new form available to men, especially men who cannot use condoms because they sell sex, are in danger of prison rape, are under pressure from partners or lose their inhibitions when drunk or high.
It “does not involve getting permission from the other partner, and that’s important,” said Phill Wilson, president of the Black AIDS Institute, which focuses on the epidemic among blacks.
Michel Sidibé, the head of the United Nations agency that fights AIDS, called it “a breakthrough that will accelerate the prevention revolution.”
AIDS experts and the researchers issued several caveats about the study’s limitations, emphasizing that it looked only at gay men and Truvada. More studies, now under way, are needed to see whether the results can be duplicated, whether other antiretroviral drugs will work and whether they will protect heterosexual men and women, prostitutes and drug users who share needles.
There is no medical reason to think the pill would not work in other groups, since it attacks the virus in the blood, not in the vaginal wall as a microbicide does. Pre-exposure prophylaxis became possible only in recent years as newer, less-toxic antiretroviral drugs were developed.
Some scientists fear that putting more people on the drugs will speed the evolution of drug-resistant strains, though that did not occur in the study.
Because Truvada is available now, some clinicians already prescribe it for prophylaxis, Dr. Fauci said, but whether doing so becomes official policy will depend on discussions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, medical societies and others, which could take months.
Although the C.D.C. would prefer that doctors wait for further studies, more will probably prescribe the drugs now that this study is out, said Dr. Kevin Fenton, chief of the agency’s AIDS division, so the C.D.C. will soon release suggested guidelines.
The agency will suggest that the drug be prescribed only with close medical supervision and used only with other safe-sex practices.
“The results are encouraging, but it’s not time for gay men to throw away their condoms,” Dr. Fenton said.
AIDS advocacy groups were very excited by the results.
“If you comply with it, this works really well,” said Chris Collins, policy director of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. “This is too big to walk away from.”
Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, an organization that lobbies for AIDS prevention, called the study “a great day for the fight against AIDS” and said gay men and others at risk needed to be consulted on the next steps.
In the study, 2,499 men in six countries — Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and the United States — were randomly assigned to take either Truvada or a placebo and were followed for up to three years. For ethical reasons, they were also given condoms, treatment for venereal diseases and advice on safe sex. There were 64 infections in the placebo group and 36 in the group that took Truvada, a 44 percent risk reduction.
Two in the Truvada group turned out to have been infected before the study began. When the remaining 34 were tested, only 3 had any drug in their blood — suggesting that the other 31 had not taken their pills.
Different regimens, like taking the pills not daily but only when sex is anticipated, also need testing.
Also, many men in the study failed to take all of their pills, and some clearly lied about it. For example, some who claimed to take them 50 percent or 90 percent of the time had little or no drug in their bloodstreams.
The pills caused no major side effects, though men who began to show signs of liver problems were taken off them quickly. Some men stopped taking the pills because they disliked relatively minor side effects like nausea and headaches. Also, some stopped bothering once they suspected that they might be taking a placebo.
“People have their own reasons,” Mr. Collins said. “People don’t take their Lipitor every day either.”
A major question now is who will pay for the drug.
In the United States, Truvada, made by Gilead Sciences, costs $12,000 to $14,000 a year. In very poor countries, generic versions cost as little as 40 cents a pill.
Globally, only about 5 million of the 33 million people infected with the AIDS virus are on antiretroviral drugs, and in an era of tight foreign-aid budgets, that number is not expected to rise quickly.
Hundreds of millions of Africans, Eastern Europeans and Asians are at risk and could benefit from prophylaxis, but that would cost tens of billions of dollars.
In this country, insurers and Medicare normally pay for the drugs, and the Ryan White Act covers the cost for the poor, but none of these payers yet have policies on supplying the drugs to healthy people.
No participant in the study developed resistance to tenofovir. Three were found to have strains resistant to emtricitabine, but investigators believe that all three were infected before the study began at levels low enough to have been missed by their first H.I.V. tests.
Another concern was that the participants would become so fearless that they would stop using condoms, but the opposite effect was seen — they used condoms more often and had fewer sex partners. But that can also be a result of simply being enrolled in a study and getting a steady diet of advice on safe sex and free condoms, the investigators said.
Other trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis have about 20,000 volunteers enrolled around the world. Their results are expected over the next two years.
Eviction of Palestinian Family, After a Legal Battle, Underlines Tensions Over Jerusalem
Israeli police officers evicted a Palestinian family from their home in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Tuesday morning, and a group of Jewish settlers moved into the property at night.
The episode struck one of the more sensitive nerves in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship at a time of increasing tension and as the Obama administration is working to restart stalled peace negotiations. Such evictions have drawn international condemnation in the past.
The Palestinian family, the Karains, lost a legal battle for ownership of the house. They said it had been sold to settlers illegally and without their knowledge by a relative, Ali Karain, who was a part-owner of the house, and who has since died.
The Israeli courts upheld the sale about six months ago.
After the eviction, family members milled about in the street and on a neighboring rooftop, while Israelis protected by armed police officers went about installing security cameras and sealing the windows and balconies of the building with boards and wire mesh.
“My uncle died almost two years ago,” said Fadi Karain, 21, who is studying to be a teacher at an Israeli college in predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem. “A month after he died, we heard from the bailiffs that the house had been sold.” He said that the new owners were associated with Elad, a group that promotes Jewish settlement in Arab areas of Jerusalem, and particularly in Silwan.
The settler takeover of the Karain house will represent a new point of Jewish settlement in this contested city. The three-story stone building is wedged among other houses on a steep slope in the Farouk section of the Jebel Mukaber neighborhood, with a panoramic view of the Old City, the Aksa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock. Those shrines sit atop the plateau revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, and by Jews as the Temple Mount.
A stone slab set into the wall of the house is engraved with an image of the Dome of the Rock and the words “Al mulk lillah,” Arabic for “Everything belongs to God.”
A Jewish volunteer who was helping to prepare the house for its new inhabitants said he was acting out of “Zionism.” Israelis have the right to live and buy property anywhere in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, he said.
The issue of Israeli construction in Jewish sections of East Jerusalem has been a source of tension in recent months between Israel, the Palestinians and the United States. Jewish settlers are increasingly moving into predominantly Arab neighborhoods, deepening confusion about the future shape of the city.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem shortly after capturing it and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. The annexation was never internationally recognized, and the Palestinians claim the territory as the capital of a future independent state. But many Israelis maintain that Jerusalem belongs entirely to Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently had a sharp exchange with the Obama administration in which his office released a statement defending Jewish construction in Jerusalem, saying, “Jerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.”
In recent years, settlers have evicted Palestinians and taken over several houses in Sheikh Jarrah, a coveted area near the Old City, after the Israeli courts, including the Supreme Court, upheld rulings from the 1970s that the properties had originally belonged to Jews.
Activists of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity group were in Jebel Mukaber on Tuesday, helping the Karain family remove boxes of food and some last belongings from the house.
The group issued a statement saying that the objective of the new settlement was “without doubt to undercut the rationale of the 2000 Clinton Proposal, namely the division of Jerusalem into two capitals,” referring to an idea put forward by President Bill Clinton.
On the upper edge of Jebel Mukaber, dozens of Jewish families now live in a private Jewish development, Nof Zion, built on land that was purchased by an Israeli developer.
Udi Ragones, a spokesman for Elad, said the Karain home was purchased a few years ago by a foreign-registered company called Lowell.
Mr. Ragones did not acknowledge any direct Elad role in buying the property, but he said that there had been contacts between the group and the purchasers.
But groups like Elad, also known as the City of David, are known to use foreign-registered straw companies to buy properties in East Jerusalem. They say that they have to work discreetly in order to protect the Palestinian sellers whose lives are threatened by other Palestinians who oppose such deals.
In Sliver of Indonesia, Public Embrace of Judaism
A new, 62-foot-tall menorah, possibly the world’s largest, rises from a mountain overlooking this Indonesian city, courtesy of the local government. Flags of Israel can be spotted on motorcycle taxi stands, one near a six-year-old synagogue that has received a face-lift, including a ceiling with a large Star of David, paid for by local officials.
Long known as a Christian stronghold and more recently as home to evangelical and charismatic Christian groups, this area on the fringes of northern Indonesia has become the unlikely setting for increasingly public displays of pro-Jewish sentiments as some people have embraced the faith of their Dutch Jewish ancestors. With the local governments’ blessing, they are carving out a small space for themselves in the sometimes strangely shifting religious landscape of Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population.
The trend comes as extremist Islamic groups have grown bolder in assailing Christian and other religious minorities elsewhere in Indonesia, with the central government, fearful of offending Muslim groups, doing little to prevent the attacks. Last November, extremists protesting the 2008-9 war in Gaza shut down what had been the most prominent remnant of Indonesia’s historic but little-known Jewish community, a century-old synagogue in Surabaya, the country’s second-largest city.
That left the synagogue in a town just outside Manado — founded by Indonesians still struggling to learn about Judaism and now attended by about 10 people — as Indonesia’s sole surviving Jewish house of worship. Before reaching out for help to sometimes suspicious Jewish communities outside Indonesia, they researched Judaism at an Internet cafe here. They turned, they said jokingly, to Rabbi Google for answers. They compiled a Torah by printing pages off the Internet. They sought the finer points of davening on YouTube.
“We’re just trying to be good Jews,” said Toar Palilingan, 27, who, wearing a black coat and a broad-brimmed hat in the ultra-Orthodox style, led a Sabbath dinner at his family home recently with two regulars.
“But if you compare us to Jews in Jerusalem or Brooklyn,” added Mr. Palilingan, now also known as Yaakov Baruch, “we’re not there yet.”
Indonesia and Israel do not have diplomatic relations but have discreetly shared military and economic ties over the decades. In recent years, Jewish businessmen from Israel and elsewhere have quietly traveled here seeking business opportunities.
Moshe Kotel, 47, who was born in El Salvador and has Israeli and American citizenship, has been coming to Manado every year since 2003 and owns a business in organic eggs. Mr. Kotel, whose wife is from the area, said he felt nervous landing at the airport here for the first time.
“It was 11 p.m. already, and I always carry tefillin with me,” Mr. Kotel said, referring to the small leather boxes housing Scriptural passages. “But ever since I saw the Israeli flags on the taxis at the airport, I’ve always felt welcome here.”
The government of North Minahasa, a mostly Christian district here, erected the giant menorah last year at a cost of $150,000, said Margarita Rumokoy, the head of the district’s tourism department.
Denny Wowiling, a local legislator, said he proposed building the menorah after learning about the one in front of Israel’s Knesset. He hoped to attract tourists and businessmen from Europe.
“It is also for the Jewish people to see that there is this sacred symbol, their sacred symbol, outside their country,” he said.
Mr. Wowiling, a Pentecostal Christian, emphasized that Christians and Muslims lived peacefully in the province here, North Sulawesi, but acknowledged that “there are worries that we might be targeted by people from outside.”
Increasingly strong pro-Jewish sentiments also appear to be an outgrowth of an evangelical and charismatic Christian movement that with the help of American and European missionaries has taken root here in the past decade. Some experts regard this movement as a reaction against the growing role of orthodox Islam in much of the rest of Indonesia.
“In Manado, Christianity has always had a strong identity mark in the belief that it’s opposed to the surrounding sea of Islam,” said Theo Kamsma, a scholar at The Hague University who has studied Manado’s Jewish legacy. Christianity and a reemerging Judaism share a “rebellious” nature, he added.
Two years before the menorah was built, a Christian real estate developer raised a 98-foot-tall statue of Jesus on top of a hill here; the statue is about three-quarters the size of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. In the town center, churches belonging to a multitude of denominations now sit a few hundred yards apart.
During Dutch colonial rule, Jewish communities were established in major trading cities where they often dealt in real estate, acting as mediators between colonial rulers and locals, said Anthony Reid, a scholar on Southeast Asia at the Australian National University. Given Indonesia’s traditionally moderate Islam, anti-Jewish sentiments were never strong.
“The anti-Jewish feelings really came in the 1980s and 1990s, all because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Mr. Reid said.
In Surabaya, in a Jewish cemetery now overgrown with weeds, gravestones indicate that people were buried there as recently as 2007. The synagogue, located on a major street, had been inactive for the past decade but was still being used for funeral services.
“We’d never had any problems until last year,” said Sunarmi Karti, 46, an Indonesian woman in Surabaya who still lives in a house inside the synagogue’s compound and whose stepfather was Jewish.
Here in Manado, families of Dutch Jewish ancestry had practiced their faith openly before Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands in 1949. After that, they converted to Christianity or Islam for safety.
“We told our children never to talk about our Jewish origins,” said Leo van Beugen, 70, who was raised as a Roman Catholic. “So our grandchildren do not even know.”
Mr. van Beugen is the great-uncle of Mr. Palilingan, who was leading the Sabbath dinner.
It was just over a decade ago, during a heated exchange over the Bible and Moses, that Mr. Palilingan’s maternal great-aunt let slip the family’s Jewish roots. Mr. Palilingan — a lecturer in law at Sam Ratulangi University here, where his father, a Christian, and mother, a Muslim, also teach in the same department — learned that his relatives on his mother’s side descended from a 19th-century Dutch Jewish immigrant, Elias van Beugen.
His great-aunt suggested that he meet the Bollegrafs, once the most prominent Jewish family in Manado. Oral Bollegraf, now 50, had been a Pentecostal Christian all his life but knew that his grandfather had maintained Manado’s only synagogue in the family home.
“We never acknowledged that we were Jewish,” Mr. Bollegraf, who recently went to Israel with Mr. Palilingan, said during the Sabbath dinner. “But everybody in town knew us as a Jewish family.”
Mr. Palilingan made contact with the rabbi who was physically closest, Mordechai Abergel, an emissary in Singapore of the Brooklyn-based Chabad Lubavitch movement. Rabbi Abergel said that Mr. Palilingan had done a “great job” in trying to reconnect with his Jewish roots, though he had yet to undergo a full conversion.
Committed to what he calls the “purity” of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Mr. Palilingan sometimes wears its adherents’ telltale black and white clothing in public here and even in Jakarta.
“Most Indonesians have never met any Jews, so they think I’m from Iran or somewhere,” Mr. Palilingan said. “One time, a group of Islamic demonstrators came over and said, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ ” peace be upon you.
Poles Seek to Overcome Gap in Math and Sciences
The newly opened science and technology center here was conceived not only as a place to excite young minds about science and discovery, but also as a chance for Poland to overcome at least one piece of its tragic past, to set aside one legacy of war and occupation — the decline of math and science education.
“I see this as a vanguard in a revolution in education,” said Prof. Lukasz Turski, a physicist with the Polish Academy of Sciences who lobbied the government to build the Copernicus Science Center, which opened in November.
The idea is to overcome a view of the hard sciences as inferior to the arts and humanities, a lingering perception that is today hampering Poland’s efforts to advance. It is a concrete reminder of just how much history shapes and defines the present.
Many nations have struggled to excite their children about math and science. But in Poland, it is different. In a nation that struggled to remain a nation even while it did not exist, geographically wiped off the map for more than a century, the arts proved to be a thread that bound generations of Poles together, preserving an identity and a rich language.
“The only form to create national identity was literature,” said Janusz Reiter, a former ambassador to Germany and the United States, who now lives and works here in the capital.
So the humanities were important to Poland’s survival, while math and the sciences languished.
“The reason we had a poor mathematical tradition is rather clear,” wrote Wieslaw Zelazko, a mathematics professor with the Polish Academy of Sciences. “In the 19th century, a period of great development of mathematics in Western Europe, Poland was not an independent country.”
Poland, Professor Zelazko continued, did have a period of math excellence that began after World War I, though in the sweep of history it was a relatively brief period, cut off by World War II, when the Nazis silenced, drove out or killed Poland’s intellectuals. Schools and universities were shut down. (In Nazi ideology, Poles were “subhumans,” fit only to work as slaves on the farms that Germans would establish after the war on Polish territory.)
Later, after 40 years of Soviet domination, when the Iron Curtain fell, Poland moved quickly to overhaul its school system. But it failed to change the mind-set toward math. In 2001, the Education Ministry ruled that math was not an obligatory part of the series of tests needed to graduate from high school, Professor Turski said.
So lots of people just skipped math — a legacy that Poland’s fledgling high-tech sector is struggling with today. Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, a Polish daily newspaper, recently reported that job opportunities in these areas outnumbered applicants by 10 to 1.
Economists say that Poland lags far behind other nations of comparable resources in patent applications, and that in 2012 Poland will probably lose out on European Union financing for research and development.
“I am not qualified to be considered intelligentsia in this country,” Professor Turski said, shouting with the enthusiasm of a man on a mission. “It is more important to sit and discuss Plato than to know how the chip in the computer works.”
The decision to make math studies optional was finally reversed this past May, Professor Turski said, part of a long, slow process of trying to persuade Poles to forge values relevant to the modern world, and to get past values that evolved in very different times.
But that struggle is not just relevant to math, because it is essentially about reconstructing an identity free from suffering, free from occupation, free from the moral certainty that resistance is always the moral choice.
“The traditional assumptions of who we are no longer are useful,” said Mr. Reiter, the former ambassador. “Who are we? What is our mission in this world? What holds us together?”
These questions are a constant undercurrent in politics here, in attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church and its role in society, and in how people view patriotism, in addition to attitudes toward learning.
The undercurrent is not the focus of debate, but it is often the context of the debate, said many academics and political scientists. The main difference between the two primary political parties is less about policy than about how to incorporate the past into the present: whether to continue searching for Communist collaborators, for example, or how closely linked national identity should be with religious identity and allegiance to the Catholic Church.
“One of the main divisions between political parties in Poland is not connected with the economy,” said Pawel Spiewak, a sociologist at the University of Warsaw. “Much more important is the attitude toward the sphere of culture, toward church, toward morality, toward the past.”
It is not even clear, Professor Turski said, that there is a general understanding and agreement on the need to improve education in science and math, if for no other reason than to help propel Poland’s already successful post-cold-war economy.
“The only way for this country to move forward is for it to educate its own people, and our politicians don’t understand this,” Professor Turski said. “You cannot move a country without great ideas.”
He is hoping that the Copernicus Center can at least inspire people, if not the system itself, to embrace science and math. The center has been open only a few weeks, but it has sparked a glimmer of optimism. It is always filled, with families on weekends and schoolchildren during the week.
“I think we see now there is a great need to learn mathematics and science,” said Maja Topolnicka, a schoolteacher who was visiting the Copernicus Center with her students recently. “I don’t know why we did not see that before.”
Ms. Topolnicka watched as her 12-year-old students ran from exhibit to exhibit, pushing buttons, cranking handles and having a grand time even if they seemed to be missing the science behind what made the pistons go up and down, or the balloon shoot into the air. But that did not necessarily matter, because in the end, the science center might just find that it has a head start with a generation weaned not just on history and tradition but on video games and the Internet.
“I like math and science,” said one student, Borys Kozdak, using English he said he learned from playing online video games.
Ilona Rusin was watching as her son, Sebastian, 10, dropped marbles into a long maze. She said he had made her promise to take him to the museum as soon as it opened, and they made it within the first week.
“No,” she said, “when I did my studies, I did not take math.” Her son looked up from his activity and said with a shy smile that he loved computers and added, “Everything in the world has something to do with math.”
Art’s Survivors of Hitler’s War
The past still thrusts itself back into the headlines here, occasionally as an unexploded bomb turning up somewhere. Now it has reappeared as art.
In January workers digging for a new subway station near City Hall unearthed a bronze bust of a woman, rusted, filthy and almost unrecognizable. It tumbled off the shovel of their front-loader.
Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by Edwin Scharff, a nearly forgotten German modernist, from around 1920. It seemed anomalous until August, when more sculpture emerged nearby: “Standing Girl” by Otto Baum, “Dancer” by Marg Moll and the remains of a head by Otto Freundlich. Excavators also rescued another fragment, a different head, belonging to Emy Roeder’s “Pregnant Woman.” October produced yet a further batch.
The 11 sculptures proved to be survivors of Hitler’s campaign against what the Nazis notoriously called “degenerate art.” Several works, records showed, were seized from German museums in the 1930s, paraded in the fateful “Degenerate Art” show, and in a couple of cases also exploited for a 1941 Nazi film, an anti-Semitic comedy lambasting modern art. They were last known to have been stored in the depot of the Reichspropagandaministerium, which organized the “Degenerate” show.
Then the sculptures vanished.
How they ended up underground near City Hall is still a mystery; it seems to involve an Oskar Schindler-like hero. Meanwhile a modest exhibition of the discoveries has been organized and recently opened at the Neues Museum, Berlin’s archaeological collection, the perfect site for these works.
Like the sculptures, the museum lately rose, all these years later, from the ruins of war. In the architect David Chipperfield’s ingenious, Humpty Dumpty-like reconstruction of the building, it has become a popular palimpsest of German history, bearing witness, via the evidence of the damage done to it, to a violence that not even time and several generations have been able to erase.
I can hardly express how moving this little show is, unexpectedly so. Its effect ends up being all out of proportion to the objects discovered, which are, in strictly aesthetic terms, fine but not remarkable. They are works of quasi-Cubism or Expressionism, mostly not much more than a foot high, several newly cleaned but still scarred, inspiring the obvious human analogy.
The poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan came up, in a different context, with the metaphor of bottles tossed into the ocean “at the shoreline of the heart,” now finally washed ashore. They’re like the dead, these sculptures, ever coming back to us, radiant ghosts.
In a country that for decades has been profoundly diligent at disclosing its own crimes and framing them in the context of history, it makes sense that the exhibition was installed to share a courtyard with Assyrian friezes from a long-ago regime that made an art of totalitarian rule and with an ancient frieze describing the eruption of Vesuvius, which preserved priceless objects, buried in the ash, that have found sanctuary in institutions like the Neues Museum.
Archeologists have so far determined that the recovered works must have come from 50 Königstrasse, across the street from City Hall. The building belonged to a Jewish woman, Edith Steinitz; several Jewish lawyers are listed as her tenants in 1939, but their names disappear from the record by 1942, when the house became property of the Reich. Among its subsequent occupants, German investigators now believe, the likeliest candidate to have hidden the art was Erhard Oewerdieck, a tax lawyer and escrow agent.
Oewerdieck is not widely known, but he is remembered at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. In 1939, he and his wife gave money to a Jewish family to escape to Shanghai. He also hid an employee, Martin Lange, in his apartment. In 1941 he helped the historian Eugen Täubler and his wife flee to America, preserving part of Täubler’s library. And he stood by Wolfgang Abendroth too, a leftist and Nazi opponent, by writing him a job recommendation when that risked his own life.
The current theory is that when fire from Allied air raids in 1944 consumed 50 Königstrasse, the contents of Oewerdieck’s office fell through the floor, and then the building collapsed on top. Tests are being done on ash from the site for remains of incinerated paintings and wood sculptures. How the lost art came into Oewerdieck’s possession in the first place still isn’t clear.
But at least it’s now back on view. Scharff’s bust, of an actress named Anni Mewes, brings to mind Egyptian works in the Neues Museum. Karl Knappe’s “Hagar,” a bronze from 1923, twisted like knotted rope, has been left with its green patina of rust and rubble, making it almost impossible to decipher, save as evidence of its fate. On the other hand, Freundlich’s “Head,” from 1925, a work made of glazed terra cotta, gnarled like an old olive tree, loses little of its power for being broken. The Nazis seized the Freundlich from a museum in Hamburg in 1937, then six years later, in France, seized the artist and sent him to Majdanek, the concentration camp in Poland, where he was murdered on the day he arrived.
Across the street from the Neues Museum contemporary galleries showcase the sort of work the Nazis hoped to eradicate but that instead give Berlin its current identity as a capital of cool. This is a city that resembles the young masses who gravitate here: forever in a state of becoming, wary, unsure and unresolved, generally broke, but optimistic about the future, with the difference that Germany can’t escape its past.
Farther down the block the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s Hitler exhibition, today’s version of a “Degenerate” show, means to warn viewers about succumbing to what present German law declares morally reprehensible. How could any decent German have ever been taken in? the show asks.
That happens to be the question the Nazis’ “Degenerate” show posed about modern art. Many more Germans visited that exhibition than the concurrent one of approved German art. Maybe Oewerdieck was among those who went to the modern show and saw these sculptures in it. In any case, today’s Germany has salvaged them and has organized this display. Redemption sometimes comes late and in small measures.
Pentagon Sees Little Risk in Allowing Gay Men and Women to Serve Openly
The Pentagon has concluded that allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the United States armed forces presents a low risk to the military’s effectiveness, even at a time of war, and that 70 percent of surveyed service members believe that the impact on their units would be positive, mixed or of no consequence at all.
In an exhaustive nine-month study on the effects of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 17-year-old policy that requires gay service members to keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge, the authors concluded that repeal would in the short run most likely bring about “some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention.” But they said those effects could be mitigated by effective leadership.
The report, by Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s chief legal counsel, and Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe, also found that much of the concern in the armed forces about openly gay service members was driven by misperceptions and stereotypes. Leaving aside those with moral and religious objections to homosexuality, the authors said the concerns were “exaggerated and not consistent with the reported experiences of many service members.”
At a news conference on Tuesday announcing the release of the report, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said repeal “would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted.” He said it was a “matter of urgency” that the lame-duck Senate vote in the next weeks to repeal the law.
If not, Mr. Gates predicted fights in the courts and the possibility that the repeal would be “imposed immediately by judicial fiat.”
In a survey of 115,000 active-duty and reserve service members, the report found distinct differences among the branches of the military, particularly in the Marine Corps, whose leaders have been the most publicly opposed to allowing gay and bisexual men and women to serve openly. While 30 percent of those surveyed over all predicted that repeal would have some negative effects, 40 percent to 60 percent of the Marine Corps and those in various combat specialties said it would be negative.
Mr. Johnson and General Ham, who briefed reporters on the report, did not offer a specific explanation for why Marines were more opposed to repeal, although General Ham said that among Marine Corps respondents, a lower percentage had served alongside someone they believed to be gay or lesbian. This summer, when the Marine commandant at the time, Gen. James T. Conway, was asked for an explanation about Marine resistance to repeal, he responded that it was difficult to answer, but “we recruit a certain type of young American, a pretty macho guy or gal.”
In his remarks to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Gates acknowledged the higher levels of “discomfort” about repealing the law among those in the combat branches of the military. He said that those findings remained a concern to him as well as to the chiefs of the service branches, but that the concerns were not insurmountable as long as any repeal was carried out carefully and with what he said was “sufficient time and preparation to get the job done right.”
Mr. Gates refused to offer a timetable for how long that might be, and neither Mr. Johnson nor General Ham would say whether the process could take months or years. As the bill before the Senate now stands, any repeal would not be carried out until President Obama, Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, certified that the military was ready to end the ban.
Mr. Gates said much of the preparation would involve educating and training service members and their leaders.
Mr. Obama, who campaigned for president on a promise to repeal the law, hailed the study. “Today’s report confirms that a strong majority of our military men and women and their families — more than two-thirds — are prepared to serve alongside Americans who are openly gay and lesbian,” he said in a statement.
Democrats in the Senate also applauded the study, but Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has vowed to block the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” was largely silent, at least by early evening.
“Senator McCain and his staff are currently in the process of carefully reviewing the Pentagon’s report regarding the repeal of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law,” Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Mr. McCain has said in the past that he would consider authorizing a repeal of the law once the Pentagon review was complete, but he has also cited the concerns of the service chiefs for his resistance to ending the ban.
The House passed its version of a repeal of the law this past summer, but prospects for passage in the Senate remain uncertain, with time running out this year. Mr. Gates, Admiral Mullen, Mr. Johnson and General Ham are scheduled to testify on the report to the Senate on Thursday, but a more important session will come on Friday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee is to hear testimony from the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the commandants of the Marines and the Coast Guard.
The service chiefs have all expressed reluctance in the recent past about repeal, and it is unclear how they will present themselves on Friday. Mr. Obama summoned them to the White House on Monday to talk exclusively about “don’t ask, don’t tell” and afterward told aides he would not discuss the specifics of what was said.
The Pentagon report on “don’t ask, don’t tell” also found that 69 percent of those surveyed believed they had already worked with a gay man or woman. Of those, 92 percent reported that the unit’s ability to work together was very good, good or “neither good nor poor.”
In the most strongly worded section of the report, the authors concluded that while their mandate was to assess the impact of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — and not to determine whether it should be repealed — they had done just that.
“We are both convinced that our military can do this, even during this time of war,” Mr. Johnson and General Ham wrote. “We do not underestimate the challenges in implementing a change in the law, but neither should we underestimate the ability of our extraordinarily dedicated service men and women to adapt to such change and continue to provide our nation with the military capability to accomplish any mission.”
The study recommended no housing or living changes as a result of any repeal, and the authors also quashed any suggestion that there should be separate bathroom facilities.
They called separate bathrooms “a logistical nightmare, expensive and impossible to administer.”
Over the last four years, the streets of New York City have undergone a transformation: More than 250 miles of traffic lanes dedicated for bicycles have been created, and several laws intended to promote cycling have been passed.
The efforts by the Bloomberg administration have placed the city at the forefront of a national trend to make bicycling viable and safe even in the most urban of settings. Yet over the last year, a backlash has taken hold.
Bowing to vocal opposition from drivers and elected officials, the city last week began removing a 2.35-mile painted bike lane along Father Capodanno Boulevard on Staten Island. In Manhattan, a community board held a special hearing this month for business owners to vent about problems posed by a new protected bicycle lane on Columbus Avenue — in particular, the removal of parking spaces and the difficulty of getting truck deliveries.
In Brooklyn, new bicycle lanes have led to unusual scenes of friction. Along Prospect Park West, opponents protested last month alongside supporters of the lanes. And last year, painted paths along Bedford and Kent Avenues in Williamsburg caused disagreement between cyclists and Hasidim. The lane on Bedford Avenue was later removed.
So far, the opposition to the city’s agenda on bicycles has far less organization and passion than the bicycling advocates, but it is gaining increased attention.
The City Council will hold a hearing on bicycling on Dec. 9 to address balancing the needs of cyclists with those of other road users, said Councilman James Vacca, the chairman of the Transportation Committee. The hearing will also look at how well the Transportation Department has worked with community boards to review large-scale road changes.
Police and transportation officials, meanwhile, have begun a crackdown on bicycle-related traffic violations amid complaints from some pedestrians.
Surging bike ridership has created a simmering cultural conflict between competing notions of urban transportation. Many New Yorkers object to bicycle lanes as sudden, drastic changes to their coveted concrete front yards.
“He’s taking away my rights as a driver,” Leslie Sicklick, 45, said of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Ms. Sicklick, a dog walker and substitute teacher, grew up driving with her father around the Lower East Side, where she still lives.
She organized a protest in the East Village last month, and she and at least two groups of opponents are planning new rallies against local bicycle lanes. They have discussed joining up for one large protest, though none has been planned.
Cycling advocates have taken notice. They have begun to mobilize more — seeking to undercut any antibicycle rally by their own presence — and have increased pressure on city officials to continue the pro-bicycle agenda. On Nov. 10, for example, advocates and bike riders massed in front of City Hall to protest the Transportation Department’s decision to scale back on parking-protected lanes along First and Second Avenues.
“It’s easy to focus on some of the conflict and friction,” said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group that has seen its influence grow under the Bloomberg administration. “But that’s always going to happen when you’re changing the geometry of something as dear as the asphalt. It takes some adjustment, and we’re definitely in that adjustment phase.”
There have been no independent polls of New Yorkers’ attitudes on bicycle lanes, though online surveys have proliferated in recent weeks. One such survey, focused on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn and sponsored by the City Council members representing Park Slope, has received thousands of submissions. “It’s a study period — that’s how D.O.T. put it,” one of those members, Councilman Brad Lander, said. Results should be ready before January, when the department is likely to reach a conclusion on whether the Prospect Park West lane has been a success.
New York has a long relationship with the bicycle, with the first bike path in the country running along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn as early as 1894.
Interest in better bike infrastructure was revived under Mayor John V. Lindsay in the 1970s. The first separated bike lanes, similar to those that now exist on sections of Eighth and Ninth Avenues in Manhattan, were installed by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1980 on Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue — though they were quickly removed amid fierce opposition.
“What we did was on such a small scale,” Mr. Koch said recently. “What’s being done now is on such a large scale.”
Along with pedestrian plazas and new express bus service lanes, improved bicycle infrastructure is part of a city effort to rebalance the mix of cyclists, pedestrians and cars on the streets. Slowed motor traffic — “traffic calming” — is one of the department’s goals for new bike lanes, to the annoyance of many drivers.
The Transportation Department has responded to criticism by pointing to accident data showing a correlation between new lanes and increased pedestrian safety. Fatal crashes have decreased on streets with new lanes, according to the department.
“The record speaks for itself: Injuries have dropped, dramatically, for everyone on streets where bike lanes have been installed,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner.
The department pointed to the support lanes have found from community boards across the city, many of which have explicitly requested new bike lanes — along Prospect Park West, for example — in part because of safety concerns.
Outside the city, bikes have begun creeping into political battles this year. The Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, Dan Maes, wondered during the primary whether bicycles were part of a plot to ruin cities.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who lost his bid for re-election in Washington, found himself painted as out of touch with residents, in part because of his connection to new bike paths.
In New York, the biggest challenge yet could come along Prospect Park West, where some residents are fighting to eliminate the 1.8-mile, two-way strip of green paint delineating a new bike lane.
Norman Steisel, a former sanitation commissioner and deputy mayor, admitted that he never noticed the proliferation of bicycle lanes, until he got stuck in traffic near his Brooklyn home over the summer.
“I was shocked; I thought there had been a big accident,” Mr. Steisel said of a back-up on Carroll Street that he later attributed to a new bike lane. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
Mr. Steisel was among opponents who staged a protest on Oct. 21, but they were outnumbered more than three to one by supporters.
“We don’t want to be out here having to advocate for something that’s already done,” said Eric McClure, who lives in Park Slope. “But here we are.”
New York City Crime Dips but Violent Crime Is Up
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, within six weeks of the year’s end, faced questions about the state of crime in New York City with what has become a familiar and welcome answer: Overall crime in the city is down again in 2010.
“Crime is down this year,” Mr. Kelly told reporters on Tuesday after a promotion ceremony in Lower Manhattan. “Down about a percent and a half, citywide, the index crimes.”
But the reason the Police Department can make that claim is not that murders are down. Or rapes. Or robberies. All of those crimes are up, as are shootings, driving an overall 3.5 percent increase in violent crime through mid-November, compared with last year.
Rather, because of the way major crimes are counted in New York — lumping violent crimes in with far larger numbers of property theft complaints, including the largest category, grand larceny — police officials could say that overall crime was down 1.3 percent. Without a substantial decrease in grand larcenies this year, however, the city would show an increase in overall crime.
When pressed, Mr. Kelly, to be fair, does not dodge the truth of the more disturbing numbers. “We have seen a spike in murders, rapes and robberies,” he acknowledged.
But he cautioned against compartmentalizing crimes or analyzing data from too short a period, seeking to put those spikes in historical context. Homicides are up, he said, but only over the record low last year, 471. They are still on track to be “probably the third-lowest year for murders that we’ve had since we started to record them accurately,” Mr. Kelly noted.
He added: “Every year of the Bloomberg administration, we’ve had murders below the 600 level. It never happened before. Prior to 2002, we’ve never had a year where we had less than 600 murders.”
But murder counts have not been the issue talked about the most in connection with New York crime statistics this year. Instead, much debate has centered on a fresh set of concerns over the integrity of the crime statistics and suspicions about whether crime complaints were being manipulated.
A first note sounded in February when, in an academic survey, retired police captains and higher-ranking officers said pressure to reduce crime had led some managers to alter crime data to show annual decreases in the index crimes measured in the department’s CompStat program.
Police officials disputed the methodology of the survey.
Later, a whistleblower officer made public his allegations that crime complaints in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were manipulated. In October the department brought internal charges against the precinct’s former commander and four others, accusing them of failing to record a grand-larceny auto theft and a robbery complaint.
Notably, grand larceny is one crime category that draws scrutiny from those who suspect numbers-fudging. In their survey of retired captains and others, the two academic researchers said some respondents told them that commanders and supervisors had combed Web sites to find lower values for items stolen from victims, enabling them to downgrade reported grand larcenies to misdemeanors from felonies.
Richard M. Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, which monitors crime and police policies, said it was “hard to know” if the crime numbers, particularly on grand larceny, were being manipulated. But he said, “There are certainly serious questions out there that need to be resolved about the police data.”
An analysis by The New York Times of crime tallies through Nov. 14, downloaded from the Web site of the Police Department, provided no clear confirmation or rebuttal of statistical manipulations.
Robbery is driving the citywide rise in violence. On a precinct level, the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn, was one of three in the city showing the highest increases in robberies. The others were the 103rd in Jamaica, Queens, and the 79th in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Citywide, robbery was up in four of the five boroughs, and in pockets of all of them.
The police say teenager-on-teenager robbery is up in many places. It is hitting hardest in the Bronx, where an increase of 383 robberies, compared with the same period in 2009, accounted for almost half the citywide jump.
Rapes were up 15 percent citywide and rose in every borough but Queens. Already, with 1,207 rapes on the books through mid-November, there have been more rapes recorded than in all of 2009. If the pace continues, the city will log more than 1,300 rapes this year, a higher number than for any year since 2006.
The highest rape rates — those double or more the citywide per capita rate — cut two distinct swaths through the city, one across Harlem and into the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and the other running southeast in Brooklyn from Bedford-Stuyvesant into East New York.
Homicides hit 470 by Nov. 14, which was 67 more than in the same period last year. Their numbers increased the most in traditional danger zones, in the Bronx and northern Brooklyn, and new concentrations appeared in eastern Queens, where two precincts accounted for 20 percent of the city’s overall increase.
A look at homicides per precinct shows that the 75th led the way, with 29. Next door in Brooklyn, the 73rd Precinct was on pace to log the highest rate of homicides per capita, for the fourth year running, with 2.6 homicides per 10,000 residents. The 25th Precinct, in East Harlem, saw the biggest raw number increase, to 10 from 2 last year. By contrast, eight precincts made it through mid-November with no homicides.
Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said each category had to be seen in context. Robberies were still 13 percent lower than two years ago. More than 90 percent of rapes this year involved acquaintances or relatives, which “would seem to indicate that the past reluctance of victims to report relatives or date rapes is giving way to willingness of victims to report,” he said.
Violent assault was fairly flat, because there were 111 fewer assaults on police officers, traffic agents and other peace officers than in 2009. With murders, Mr. Browne said, the police are simply “fighting our own success.”
On the flip side, major property crimes, and most notably grand larcenies, which are defined as felony thefts with losses valued at more than $1,000, declined by a combined 4 percent. Property crimes were down by 2,348, to 57,737 cases from 60,085 in the first 10 1/2 months of last year. Burglary dropped to 16,113 from 16,508, and auto thefts dropped to 9,096 from 9,276, the police statistics show. The drop in grand larcenies, to 32,528 from 34,301, represented 76 percent of the net decrease.
And the biggest drop in grand larcenies happened in the geographically confined area of Manhattan south of 59th Street, which logged 560 fewer larcenies through Nov. 14, representing nearly a third of the total citywide decrease in that category. Statistics from the two Midtown precincts were responsible for most of that decline, combining for 318 fewer larcenies.
Mr. Browne said southern Manhattan always dwarfs other areas of the city in generating complaints of grand larceny, “so it should not come as a surprise that a decrease there would have a major effect, as would an increase.” He said Deputy Chief Michael J. McEnroy led several initiatives this year to reduce grand larcenies and property crimes in southern Manhattan, including running burglary and larceny apprehension and surveillance teams.
In the end, Mr. Aborn of the Citizens Crime Commission said, the story of crime this year is complicated. “New York remains an incredibly safe city,” said Mr. Aborn, who ran unsuccessfully last year for Manhattan district attorney. “The one thing cutting against that is this is the first year where we have seen a steady uptick in violent crime. And that is something that we really need to keep our eye on.”
In Los Angeles, Big Step Ahead for Mass Transit
This auto-obsessed city — a place where people love their cars almost as much as they hate the traffic — has embarked on the biggest expansion of its mass transit system in decades, an effort to change the way people navigate its sprawling and clogged streets and freeways.
Los Angeles transit officials, after years of debate, have approved an 8.6-mile extension of the Purple Line subway, from Koreatown through a crowded corridor of offices, homes, museums, schools and shopping centers in Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood.
What once seemed a quixotic vision — the “Subway to the Sea,” connecting Union Station in downtown to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica — no longer seems quite so quixotic.
At the same time, Los Angeles received $546 million from the federal government to build, over the next 10 years, an 8.5-mile above-ground light-rail line from the Crenshaw district to Los Angeles International Airport.
An 11-mile extension of the Metro Gold Line, which starts in East Los Angeles and will eventually go out to Montclair, began in June, and construction is set to begin this year extending the Exposition Light Rail Line from Culver City to Santa Monica.
Taken together, these developments have emboldened mass transit enthusiasts here and lent credibility to what has become something of a legacy project for Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who ran for office pledging to build a transit system that would upend long-established commuting habits and ease what has long been a bane of life in Los Angeles.
“This put to rest all this talk of, ‘Will we ever build a subway?’ ” Mr. Villaraigosa said, somewhat triumphantly, in an interview. “This is a big deal. People have been talking about it for years. And they were making fun of me: ‘Where is the subway?!’ ”
Los Angeles once had a large, intricate and thriving public transportation system, with so-called Yellow Car trolleys that ran on downtown streets and a vast network of Red Cars, operated by the Pacific Electric Railroad, that ran throughout the region. This was dismantled amid the city’s fervent embrace of the automobile (encouraged, in no small part, by oil interests in Los Angeles that realized the economic potential of the car).
But with a vote by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority’s board last month to approve the Purple Line expansion, there is a consensus that these projects are going to be built, even among those who describe them as a waste of money in a region that will never embrace mass transit. The projects are being financed by a half-cent sales tax surcharge approved by Los Angeles voters two years ago and expected to raise $40 billion over the next 30 years.
Not to say that there aren’t battles left to be fought.
Beverly Hills officials oppose a proposed stretch of the Purple Line because it would burrow under a public high school; they want the line moved a few blocks north. That has its own complications: skirting the high school would put the subway cheek by jowl against an earthquake fault that runs down Santa Monica Boulevard.
“We very much want the Subway to the Sea, but we are very strongly against the high school route,” said Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Beverly Hills.
Most immediately, the Republican takeover of the United States House this month threatens to undermine a fiscal maneuver pressed by Mr. Villaraigosa in Washington to accelerate construction of the projects. The mayor had asked the federal government to give an advance loan against those sales tax revenues, allowing the work to be done in 10 years, an idea that seemed to be gaining steam until Election Day.
“Let’s face it, after the midterm election we’re in a new world,” said Joel Epstein, a mass transit advocate.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, the Democrat who represents the area, said he hoped Republicans would not block a plan that, he argued, would create jobs, improve the transit system and not cost the federal government a significant sum of money.
“This is the kind of idea that some Republicans may even find attractive,” Mr. Waxman said. “It’s tremendously important. I see that whenever I’m at home and in my car: it’s just terrible traffic.”
Still, the most intriguing question may be whether a place that has so embraced the culture of cars — and, with its sprawl, could not be more different from subway-friendly cities like New York, London and Paris — will make the kind of lifestyle adjustment envisioned by mass transit enthusiasts. There were an average of 295,000 daily riders on the 79 miles of subway and light-rail lines in October, and 1.2 million on city buses.
Tom Rubin, a mass transit consultant in Oakland, called the subway project fiscal folly that would serve only to take resources away from the widely used, if less efficient, network of buses.
“They have been pushing rail expansion for decades now,” Mr. Rubin said, “and it has not had much of an impact in terms of increasing transit ridership. The big problem is that these are very, very expensive, and we wind up spending so much money on building these rail lines that there is not enough to operate bus service. So we wind up cutting back on bus operations and then raising fares, which drives the riders away.”
Robert B. Cervero, the director of the University of California Transportation Center in Berkeley, said that if the subway expansion cut commuting time as promised, it would indeed change ridership habits. Transit officials said the ride from Koreatown to Westwood by subway would take 24 minutes, compared with 50 minutes during the rush in a car or on a bus.
“The science of public transit is not too complicated,” Mr. Cervero said in an e-mail message. “It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.”
Mr. Epstein said that changing demographics and population patterns — and ever-rising frustration over traffic — would inevitably drive people from cars underground.
“There’s a whole new type of Angeleno who has no cultural opposition to riding,” he said. “The whole old-school L.A. thinking that people don’t ride subways, that’s a thing of the past.”
No Need to Kvetch, Yiddish Lives On in Catskills
In a chilled and snow-shrouded Catskills landscape, hundreds of people get together every December to try to breathe some warmth into a dying culture.
For almost a week at a hotel here, organizers immerse the group, which calls itself KlezKamp, in Yiddish and the folkways of the Eastern Europeans who spoke that language until Hitler extinguished their communities. Classes are offered in Yiddish conversation, humor and literature; in klezmer — the sometimes plaintive, sometimes mischievous folk music that has experienced an astonishing comeback — and in the snaking, coiling, hand-clapping dances animated by those melodies.
To some the enterprise could seem pointlessly nostalgic, since Yiddish is flourishing only among the Hasidim, for whom it is the lingua franca, and virtually vanishing elsewhere with the passing of Jews who came to the United States from Poland and Russia before and after World War II.
But a visitor last December to the hotel, the Hudson Valley Resort and Spa, formerly the schmaltzy classic the Granit, would hardly use moribund to describe the goings-on. (This year’s KlezKamp runs from Dec. 26-31.) Yiddish, as a cherished expression goes, still tickles the participants’ hearts.
Not only were the evening music and dance programs a tribute to vigorous life, but those who took part in the courses — more than 50 were offered, with six sessions apiece — also seemed to revel in the chance to reacquaint themselves with the unmatched expressions they had heard from their bubbes (grandmothers) and zaydes (grandfathers) and the dance steps they had not done since a cousin’s bar mitzvah long ago.
Words tossed about during the week included not just those like kvetch and kibitz, which have entered American idiom, but also fresher candidates like shreklekh (terrible or frightening), naches (prideful joy), farblondget (mixed up) and luftmensch (an impractical person with no apparent income).
Henry Sapoznik, a Ukrainian cantor’s son who helped found KlezKamp in 1984, calls it a “Yiddish Brigadoon,” a gathering, like the Scottish village in that 1947 musical, that comes to life once in a long while after a lengthy snooze. His co-founder, Adrienne Cooper, calls it “a flying shtetl.” But both say that over 25 years the thousands who have taken part have knitted together into a group that stays in touch year round.
“If I were to say to you we’re attempting to reactivate Yiddish culture in its full form, I’d be kidding you,” Mr. Sapoznik said. “But what we’re doing here is creating a parallel universe, our own free-standing reality.”
Those who attend — and they include families and singles, children and octogenarians — hail mostly from the East Coast, but some come from much farther afield, like Germany, Denmark, England, Russia and the Netherlands. Mr. Sapoznik estimated that 15 to 20 percent of participants were not Jewish. About half are musicians hankering to hone skills with human artifacts like Pete Sokolow, 69, who as a professional musician in the fading klezmer days of the 1950s played piano with legends like the four Epstein brothers and Dave Tarras.
Still others engage in anthropology, interviewing a handful of old-timers about the children’s games they played, the curses they uttered (“You should grow like an onion with your head in the ground!”) or homespun remedies (urinate on a cut finger and wrap it in a spider web). In one class Susan Leviton introduced a lesser-known song about a mother grieving for her daughter, killed in the Triangle Waist Company factory fire of 1911, who is “wearing shrouds instead of a wedding dress.”
The dance teacher, Steve Weintraub, 55, of Oak Park, Ill., has interviewed aging immigrant dancers and studied grainy films. At KlezKamp classes and parties he has re-enacted the flashtanz — performed with a bottle on the head, to entertain a bride and groom — the merry freylekhs and the sher, an 18th-century square dance.
Everyone seems on a mission to recapture and resurrect, but the work is not just about mining the past. The musicians, for example, are inventing new melodies with a klezmer lilt but flavored with jazz, rock and even salsa.
On the first evening after dinner, Alan Sisselman, 56, a biologist from Buffalo, leaned back on a lobby sofa and played a sweetly fluttering tune on clarinet. He was joined by Jordan Abraham, 39, on accordion, and Rick Black, 57, on soprano saxophone — both play for a Canadian group called Touch of Klez — as well as two young violinists, Abigale Reisman, 22, of Manhattan, and Keryn Kleiman, 19, of New City, N.Y. Sophie Kreutz, 21, a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., piped in on another clarinet, and Zack Mayer, 20, of Manhattan, harmonized on baritone saxophone. Before long 12 people were embellishing Mr. Sisselman’s melody in a full-blown jam session.
KlezKamp has been around long enough that some younger adults have spent part of almost every year of their lives there. Sarah Gordon, 30, a Brooklyn teacher, started coming at 6 because her mother, Ms. Cooper, was an organizer, and she is now teaching newcomers to sing in a language they may never have used before.
Elaine Hoffman Watts, 77, a third-generation klezmer musician who plays drums, was attending with her daughter, Susan, 43, a trumpeter, and her grandson, Douglas Siegel, 15, a trombonist, making a line of five generations. “It never died in my house,” she said of klezmer.
David Ferleger, a 61-year-old Philadelphia lawyer, has come here for four years with his twins, Anat and Avram, now 10. He worked to rekindle the Yiddish he grew up with as a child of Holocaust survivors while giving his kids the run of a resort hotel with an indoor pool and a game room.
“I could study Yiddish in New York,” he said. “Here I can study Yiddish and have the kids happy as well.”
Despite recent operations on both hips, Claire Salant, 82, of Old Bethpage on Long Island, sashayed and spun to klezmer for almost an hour on the first evening. She came to KlezKamp five years ago to take intermediate Yiddish and soon was fluent enough to teach the language at her synagogue.
“I grew up speaking Yiddish, but had not spoken it for 60 years because, like good Americans, my Austro-Hungarian parents went to night school to learn English,” she said with a shrug of regret.
The resurgence of klezmer gives everyone a sliver of hope. Mr. Sapoznik recalled that when he started a band called Kapelye in the 1970s, there were a handful of bands. Now he estimates that there are 1,000 around the world — with names like the Klezmatics, a band with an album titled “Jews With Horns.”
As in a university, some teachers are particular draws. Michael Wex, a Canadian author and philologist, taught one group about the derivation of the term bubbe mayse — literally “a grandmother’s fable” but an expression used for any implausible tale. It was, he revealed, based on a 16th-century chivalric story about a Christian knight named Bovo who improbably marries a princess under a chupah — a Jewish wedding canopy — and arranges a circumcision for twin sons. Over time, few Jews were familiar with Bovo, so the expression morphed into something said by a bubbe.
Mr. Wex took pride that he drew much of his book “Born to Kvetch” from lectures that he gave at KlezKamp.
“I got more things than most people out of coming here,” he said. “I got an entire career.”
Daily Pill Greatly Lowers AIDS Risk, Study Finds
Healthy gay men who took an anti-AIDS pill every day were well protected against contracting H.I.V. in a study suggesting that a new weapon against the epidemic has emerged.
In the study, published Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that the men taking Truvada, a common combination of two antiretroviral drugs, were 44 percent less likely to get infected with the virus that causes AIDS than an equal number taking a placebo.
But when only the men whose blood tests showed that they had taken their pill faithfully every day were considered, the pill was more than 90 percent effective, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, head of the infectious diseases division of the National Institutes of Health, which paid for the study along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“That’s huge,” Dr. Fauci said. “That says it all for me.”
The large study, nicknamed iPrEx, included nearly 2,500 men and was coordinated by the Gladstone Institutes of the University of California, San Francisco.
The results are the best news in the AIDS field in years, even better than this summer’s revelation that a vaginal microbicide protected 39 percent of all the women testing it and 54 percent of those who used it faithfully.
Also, Truvada, a combination of tenofovir and emtricitabine that prevents the virus from replicating, is available by prescription in many countries right now, while the microbicide gel is made in only small amounts for clinical trials.
The protection, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, is also the first new form available to men, especially men who cannot use condoms because they sell sex, are in danger of prison rape, are under pressure from partners or lose their inhibitions when drunk or high.
It “does not involve getting permission from the other partner, and that’s important,” said Phill Wilson, president of the Black AIDS Institute, which focuses on the epidemic among blacks.
Michel Sidibé, the head of the United Nations agency that fights AIDS, called it “a breakthrough that will accelerate the prevention revolution.”
AIDS experts and the researchers issued several caveats about the study’s limitations, emphasizing that it looked only at gay men and Truvada. More studies, now under way, are needed to see whether the results can be duplicated, whether other antiretroviral drugs will work and whether they will protect heterosexual men and women, prostitutes and drug users who share needles.
There is no medical reason to think the pill would not work in other groups, since it attacks the virus in the blood, not in the vaginal wall as a microbicide does. Pre-exposure prophylaxis became possible only in recent years as newer, less-toxic antiretroviral drugs were developed.
Some scientists fear that putting more people on the drugs will speed the evolution of drug-resistant strains, though that did not occur in the study.
Because Truvada is available now, some clinicians already prescribe it for prophylaxis, Dr. Fauci said, but whether doing so becomes official policy will depend on discussions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, medical societies and others, which could take months.
Although the C.D.C. would prefer that doctors wait for further studies, more will probably prescribe the drugs now that this study is out, said Dr. Kevin Fenton, chief of the agency’s AIDS division, so the C.D.C. will soon release suggested guidelines.
The agency will suggest that the drug be prescribed only with close medical supervision and used only with other safe-sex practices.
“The results are encouraging, but it’s not time for gay men to throw away their condoms,” Dr. Fenton said.
AIDS advocacy groups were very excited by the results.
“If you comply with it, this works really well,” said Chris Collins, policy director of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. “This is too big to walk away from.”
Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, an organization that lobbies for AIDS prevention, called the study “a great day for the fight against AIDS” and said gay men and others at risk needed to be consulted on the next steps.
In the study, 2,499 men in six countries — Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and the United States — were randomly assigned to take either Truvada or a placebo and were followed for up to three years. For ethical reasons, they were also given condoms, treatment for venereal diseases and advice on safe sex. There were 64 infections in the placebo group and 36 in the group that took Truvada, a 44 percent risk reduction.
Two in the Truvada group turned out to have been infected before the study began. When the remaining 34 were tested, only 3 had any drug in their blood — suggesting that the other 31 had not taken their pills.
Different regimens, like taking the pills not daily but only when sex is anticipated, also need testing.
Also, many men in the study failed to take all of their pills, and some clearly lied about it. For example, some who claimed to take them 50 percent or 90 percent of the time had little or no drug in their bloodstreams.
The pills caused no major side effects, though men who began to show signs of liver problems were taken off them quickly. Some men stopped taking the pills because they disliked relatively minor side effects like nausea and headaches. Also, some stopped bothering once they suspected that they might be taking a placebo.
“People have their own reasons,” Mr. Collins said. “People don’t take their Lipitor every day either.”
A major question now is who will pay for the drug.
In the United States, Truvada, made by Gilead Sciences, costs $12,000 to $14,000 a year. In very poor countries, generic versions cost as little as 40 cents a pill.
Globally, only about 5 million of the 33 million people infected with the AIDS virus are on antiretroviral drugs, and in an era of tight foreign-aid budgets, that number is not expected to rise quickly.
Hundreds of millions of Africans, Eastern Europeans and Asians are at risk and could benefit from prophylaxis, but that would cost tens of billions of dollars.
In this country, insurers and Medicare normally pay for the drugs, and the Ryan White Act covers the cost for the poor, but none of these payers yet have policies on supplying the drugs to healthy people.
No participant in the study developed resistance to tenofovir. Three were found to have strains resistant to emtricitabine, but investigators believe that all three were infected before the study began at levels low enough to have been missed by their first H.I.V. tests.
Another concern was that the participants would become so fearless that they would stop using condoms, but the opposite effect was seen — they used condoms more often and had fewer sex partners. But that can also be a result of simply being enrolled in a study and getting a steady diet of advice on safe sex and free condoms, the investigators said.
Other trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis have about 20,000 volunteers enrolled around the world. Their results are expected over the next two years.
Eviction of Palestinian Family, After a Legal Battle, Underlines Tensions Over Jerusalem
Israeli police officers evicted a Palestinian family from their home in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Tuesday morning, and a group of Jewish settlers moved into the property at night.
The episode struck one of the more sensitive nerves in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship at a time of increasing tension and as the Obama administration is working to restart stalled peace negotiations. Such evictions have drawn international condemnation in the past.
The Palestinian family, the Karains, lost a legal battle for ownership of the house. They said it had been sold to settlers illegally and without their knowledge by a relative, Ali Karain, who was a part-owner of the house, and who has since died.
The Israeli courts upheld the sale about six months ago.
After the eviction, family members milled about in the street and on a neighboring rooftop, while Israelis protected by armed police officers went about installing security cameras and sealing the windows and balconies of the building with boards and wire mesh.
“My uncle died almost two years ago,” said Fadi Karain, 21, who is studying to be a teacher at an Israeli college in predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem. “A month after he died, we heard from the bailiffs that the house had been sold.” He said that the new owners were associated with Elad, a group that promotes Jewish settlement in Arab areas of Jerusalem, and particularly in Silwan.
The settler takeover of the Karain house will represent a new point of Jewish settlement in this contested city. The three-story stone building is wedged among other houses on a steep slope in the Farouk section of the Jebel Mukaber neighborhood, with a panoramic view of the Old City, the Aksa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock. Those shrines sit atop the plateau revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, and by Jews as the Temple Mount.
A stone slab set into the wall of the house is engraved with an image of the Dome of the Rock and the words “Al mulk lillah,” Arabic for “Everything belongs to God.”
A Jewish volunteer who was helping to prepare the house for its new inhabitants said he was acting out of “Zionism.” Israelis have the right to live and buy property anywhere in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, he said.
The issue of Israeli construction in Jewish sections of East Jerusalem has been a source of tension in recent months between Israel, the Palestinians and the United States. Jewish settlers are increasingly moving into predominantly Arab neighborhoods, deepening confusion about the future shape of the city.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem shortly after capturing it and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. The annexation was never internationally recognized, and the Palestinians claim the territory as the capital of a future independent state. But many Israelis maintain that Jerusalem belongs entirely to Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently had a sharp exchange with the Obama administration in which his office released a statement defending Jewish construction in Jerusalem, saying, “Jerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.”
In recent years, settlers have evicted Palestinians and taken over several houses in Sheikh Jarrah, a coveted area near the Old City, after the Israeli courts, including the Supreme Court, upheld rulings from the 1970s that the properties had originally belonged to Jews.
Activists of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity group were in Jebel Mukaber on Tuesday, helping the Karain family remove boxes of food and some last belongings from the house.
The group issued a statement saying that the objective of the new settlement was “without doubt to undercut the rationale of the 2000 Clinton Proposal, namely the division of Jerusalem into two capitals,” referring to an idea put forward by President Bill Clinton.
On the upper edge of Jebel Mukaber, dozens of Jewish families now live in a private Jewish development, Nof Zion, built on land that was purchased by an Israeli developer.
Udi Ragones, a spokesman for Elad, said the Karain home was purchased a few years ago by a foreign-registered company called Lowell.
Mr. Ragones did not acknowledge any direct Elad role in buying the property, but he said that there had been contacts between the group and the purchasers.
But groups like Elad, also known as the City of David, are known to use foreign-registered straw companies to buy properties in East Jerusalem. They say that they have to work discreetly in order to protect the Palestinian sellers whose lives are threatened by other Palestinians who oppose such deals.
In Sliver of Indonesia, Public Embrace of Judaism
A new, 62-foot-tall menorah, possibly the world’s largest, rises from a mountain overlooking this Indonesian city, courtesy of the local government. Flags of Israel can be spotted on motorcycle taxi stands, one near a six-year-old synagogue that has received a face-lift, including a ceiling with a large Star of David, paid for by local officials.
Long known as a Christian stronghold and more recently as home to evangelical and charismatic Christian groups, this area on the fringes of northern Indonesia has become the unlikely setting for increasingly public displays of pro-Jewish sentiments as some people have embraced the faith of their Dutch Jewish ancestors. With the local governments’ blessing, they are carving out a small space for themselves in the sometimes strangely shifting religious landscape of Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population.
The trend comes as extremist Islamic groups have grown bolder in assailing Christian and other religious minorities elsewhere in Indonesia, with the central government, fearful of offending Muslim groups, doing little to prevent the attacks. Last November, extremists protesting the 2008-9 war in Gaza shut down what had been the most prominent remnant of Indonesia’s historic but little-known Jewish community, a century-old synagogue in Surabaya, the country’s second-largest city.
That left the synagogue in a town just outside Manado — founded by Indonesians still struggling to learn about Judaism and now attended by about 10 people — as Indonesia’s sole surviving Jewish house of worship. Before reaching out for help to sometimes suspicious Jewish communities outside Indonesia, they researched Judaism at an Internet cafe here. They turned, they said jokingly, to Rabbi Google for answers. They compiled a Torah by printing pages off the Internet. They sought the finer points of davening on YouTube.
“We’re just trying to be good Jews,” said Toar Palilingan, 27, who, wearing a black coat and a broad-brimmed hat in the ultra-Orthodox style, led a Sabbath dinner at his family home recently with two regulars.
“But if you compare us to Jews in Jerusalem or Brooklyn,” added Mr. Palilingan, now also known as Yaakov Baruch, “we’re not there yet.”
Indonesia and Israel do not have diplomatic relations but have discreetly shared military and economic ties over the decades. In recent years, Jewish businessmen from Israel and elsewhere have quietly traveled here seeking business opportunities.
Moshe Kotel, 47, who was born in El Salvador and has Israeli and American citizenship, has been coming to Manado every year since 2003 and owns a business in organic eggs. Mr. Kotel, whose wife is from the area, said he felt nervous landing at the airport here for the first time.
“It was 11 p.m. already, and I always carry tefillin with me,” Mr. Kotel said, referring to the small leather boxes housing Scriptural passages. “But ever since I saw the Israeli flags on the taxis at the airport, I’ve always felt welcome here.”
The government of North Minahasa, a mostly Christian district here, erected the giant menorah last year at a cost of $150,000, said Margarita Rumokoy, the head of the district’s tourism department.
Denny Wowiling, a local legislator, said he proposed building the menorah after learning about the one in front of Israel’s Knesset. He hoped to attract tourists and businessmen from Europe.
“It is also for the Jewish people to see that there is this sacred symbol, their sacred symbol, outside their country,” he said.
Mr. Wowiling, a Pentecostal Christian, emphasized that Christians and Muslims lived peacefully in the province here, North Sulawesi, but acknowledged that “there are worries that we might be targeted by people from outside.”
Increasingly strong pro-Jewish sentiments also appear to be an outgrowth of an evangelical and charismatic Christian movement that with the help of American and European missionaries has taken root here in the past decade. Some experts regard this movement as a reaction against the growing role of orthodox Islam in much of the rest of Indonesia.
“In Manado, Christianity has always had a strong identity mark in the belief that it’s opposed to the surrounding sea of Islam,” said Theo Kamsma, a scholar at The Hague University who has studied Manado’s Jewish legacy. Christianity and a reemerging Judaism share a “rebellious” nature, he added.
Two years before the menorah was built, a Christian real estate developer raised a 98-foot-tall statue of Jesus on top of a hill here; the statue is about three-quarters the size of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. In the town center, churches belonging to a multitude of denominations now sit a few hundred yards apart.
During Dutch colonial rule, Jewish communities were established in major trading cities where they often dealt in real estate, acting as mediators between colonial rulers and locals, said Anthony Reid, a scholar on Southeast Asia at the Australian National University. Given Indonesia’s traditionally moderate Islam, anti-Jewish sentiments were never strong.
“The anti-Jewish feelings really came in the 1980s and 1990s, all because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Mr. Reid said.
In Surabaya, in a Jewish cemetery now overgrown with weeds, gravestones indicate that people were buried there as recently as 2007. The synagogue, located on a major street, had been inactive for the past decade but was still being used for funeral services.
“We’d never had any problems until last year,” said Sunarmi Karti, 46, an Indonesian woman in Surabaya who still lives in a house inside the synagogue’s compound and whose stepfather was Jewish.
Here in Manado, families of Dutch Jewish ancestry had practiced their faith openly before Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands in 1949. After that, they converted to Christianity or Islam for safety.
“We told our children never to talk about our Jewish origins,” said Leo van Beugen, 70, who was raised as a Roman Catholic. “So our grandchildren do not even know.”
Mr. van Beugen is the great-uncle of Mr. Palilingan, who was leading the Sabbath dinner.
It was just over a decade ago, during a heated exchange over the Bible and Moses, that Mr. Palilingan’s maternal great-aunt let slip the family’s Jewish roots. Mr. Palilingan — a lecturer in law at Sam Ratulangi University here, where his father, a Christian, and mother, a Muslim, also teach in the same department — learned that his relatives on his mother’s side descended from a 19th-century Dutch Jewish immigrant, Elias van Beugen.
His great-aunt suggested that he meet the Bollegrafs, once the most prominent Jewish family in Manado. Oral Bollegraf, now 50, had been a Pentecostal Christian all his life but knew that his grandfather had maintained Manado’s only synagogue in the family home.
“We never acknowledged that we were Jewish,” Mr. Bollegraf, who recently went to Israel with Mr. Palilingan, said during the Sabbath dinner. “But everybody in town knew us as a Jewish family.”
Mr. Palilingan made contact with the rabbi who was physically closest, Mordechai Abergel, an emissary in Singapore of the Brooklyn-based Chabad Lubavitch movement. Rabbi Abergel said that Mr. Palilingan had done a “great job” in trying to reconnect with his Jewish roots, though he had yet to undergo a full conversion.
Committed to what he calls the “purity” of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Mr. Palilingan sometimes wears its adherents’ telltale black and white clothing in public here and even in Jakarta.
“Most Indonesians have never met any Jews, so they think I’m from Iran or somewhere,” Mr. Palilingan said. “One time, a group of Islamic demonstrators came over and said, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ ” peace be upon you.
Poles Seek to Overcome Gap in Math and Sciences
The newly opened science and technology center here was conceived not only as a place to excite young minds about science and discovery, but also as a chance for Poland to overcome at least one piece of its tragic past, to set aside one legacy of war and occupation — the decline of math and science education.
“I see this as a vanguard in a revolution in education,” said Prof. Lukasz Turski, a physicist with the Polish Academy of Sciences who lobbied the government to build the Copernicus Science Center, which opened in November.
The idea is to overcome a view of the hard sciences as inferior to the arts and humanities, a lingering perception that is today hampering Poland’s efforts to advance. It is a concrete reminder of just how much history shapes and defines the present.
Many nations have struggled to excite their children about math and science. But in Poland, it is different. In a nation that struggled to remain a nation even while it did not exist, geographically wiped off the map for more than a century, the arts proved to be a thread that bound generations of Poles together, preserving an identity and a rich language.
“The only form to create national identity was literature,” said Janusz Reiter, a former ambassador to Germany and the United States, who now lives and works here in the capital.
So the humanities were important to Poland’s survival, while math and the sciences languished.
“The reason we had a poor mathematical tradition is rather clear,” wrote Wieslaw Zelazko, a mathematics professor with the Polish Academy of Sciences. “In the 19th century, a period of great development of mathematics in Western Europe, Poland was not an independent country.”
Poland, Professor Zelazko continued, did have a period of math excellence that began after World War I, though in the sweep of history it was a relatively brief period, cut off by World War II, when the Nazis silenced, drove out or killed Poland’s intellectuals. Schools and universities were shut down. (In Nazi ideology, Poles were “subhumans,” fit only to work as slaves on the farms that Germans would establish after the war on Polish territory.)
Later, after 40 years of Soviet domination, when the Iron Curtain fell, Poland moved quickly to overhaul its school system. But it failed to change the mind-set toward math. In 2001, the Education Ministry ruled that math was not an obligatory part of the series of tests needed to graduate from high school, Professor Turski said.
So lots of people just skipped math — a legacy that Poland’s fledgling high-tech sector is struggling with today. Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, a Polish daily newspaper, recently reported that job opportunities in these areas outnumbered applicants by 10 to 1.
Economists say that Poland lags far behind other nations of comparable resources in patent applications, and that in 2012 Poland will probably lose out on European Union financing for research and development.
“I am not qualified to be considered intelligentsia in this country,” Professor Turski said, shouting with the enthusiasm of a man on a mission. “It is more important to sit and discuss Plato than to know how the chip in the computer works.”
The decision to make math studies optional was finally reversed this past May, Professor Turski said, part of a long, slow process of trying to persuade Poles to forge values relevant to the modern world, and to get past values that evolved in very different times.
But that struggle is not just relevant to math, because it is essentially about reconstructing an identity free from suffering, free from occupation, free from the moral certainty that resistance is always the moral choice.
“The traditional assumptions of who we are no longer are useful,” said Mr. Reiter, the former ambassador. “Who are we? What is our mission in this world? What holds us together?”
These questions are a constant undercurrent in politics here, in attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church and its role in society, and in how people view patriotism, in addition to attitudes toward learning.
The undercurrent is not the focus of debate, but it is often the context of the debate, said many academics and political scientists. The main difference between the two primary political parties is less about policy than about how to incorporate the past into the present: whether to continue searching for Communist collaborators, for example, or how closely linked national identity should be with religious identity and allegiance to the Catholic Church.
“One of the main divisions between political parties in Poland is not connected with the economy,” said Pawel Spiewak, a sociologist at the University of Warsaw. “Much more important is the attitude toward the sphere of culture, toward church, toward morality, toward the past.”
It is not even clear, Professor Turski said, that there is a general understanding and agreement on the need to improve education in science and math, if for no other reason than to help propel Poland’s already successful post-cold-war economy.
“The only way for this country to move forward is for it to educate its own people, and our politicians don’t understand this,” Professor Turski said. “You cannot move a country without great ideas.”
He is hoping that the Copernicus Center can at least inspire people, if not the system itself, to embrace science and math. The center has been open only a few weeks, but it has sparked a glimmer of optimism. It is always filled, with families on weekends and schoolchildren during the week.
“I think we see now there is a great need to learn mathematics and science,” said Maja Topolnicka, a schoolteacher who was visiting the Copernicus Center with her students recently. “I don’t know why we did not see that before.”
Ms. Topolnicka watched as her 12-year-old students ran from exhibit to exhibit, pushing buttons, cranking handles and having a grand time even if they seemed to be missing the science behind what made the pistons go up and down, or the balloon shoot into the air. But that did not necessarily matter, because in the end, the science center might just find that it has a head start with a generation weaned not just on history and tradition but on video games and the Internet.
“I like math and science,” said one student, Borys Kozdak, using English he said he learned from playing online video games.
Ilona Rusin was watching as her son, Sebastian, 10, dropped marbles into a long maze. She said he had made her promise to take him to the museum as soon as it opened, and they made it within the first week.
“No,” she said, “when I did my studies, I did not take math.” Her son looked up from his activity and said with a shy smile that he loved computers and added, “Everything in the world has something to do with math.”
Art’s Survivors of Hitler’s War
The past still thrusts itself back into the headlines here, occasionally as an unexploded bomb turning up somewhere. Now it has reappeared as art.
In January workers digging for a new subway station near City Hall unearthed a bronze bust of a woman, rusted, filthy and almost unrecognizable. It tumbled off the shovel of their front-loader.
Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by Edwin Scharff, a nearly forgotten German modernist, from around 1920. It seemed anomalous until August, when more sculpture emerged nearby: “Standing Girl” by Otto Baum, “Dancer” by Marg Moll and the remains of a head by Otto Freundlich. Excavators also rescued another fragment, a different head, belonging to Emy Roeder’s “Pregnant Woman.” October produced yet a further batch.
The 11 sculptures proved to be survivors of Hitler’s campaign against what the Nazis notoriously called “degenerate art.” Several works, records showed, were seized from German museums in the 1930s, paraded in the fateful “Degenerate Art” show, and in a couple of cases also exploited for a 1941 Nazi film, an anti-Semitic comedy lambasting modern art. They were last known to have been stored in the depot of the Reichspropagandaministerium, which organized the “Degenerate” show.
Then the sculptures vanished.
How they ended up underground near City Hall is still a mystery; it seems to involve an Oskar Schindler-like hero. Meanwhile a modest exhibition of the discoveries has been organized and recently opened at the Neues Museum, Berlin’s archaeological collection, the perfect site for these works.
Like the sculptures, the museum lately rose, all these years later, from the ruins of war. In the architect David Chipperfield’s ingenious, Humpty Dumpty-like reconstruction of the building, it has become a popular palimpsest of German history, bearing witness, via the evidence of the damage done to it, to a violence that not even time and several generations have been able to erase.
I can hardly express how moving this little show is, unexpectedly so. Its effect ends up being all out of proportion to the objects discovered, which are, in strictly aesthetic terms, fine but not remarkable. They are works of quasi-Cubism or Expressionism, mostly not much more than a foot high, several newly cleaned but still scarred, inspiring the obvious human analogy.
The poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan came up, in a different context, with the metaphor of bottles tossed into the ocean “at the shoreline of the heart,” now finally washed ashore. They’re like the dead, these sculptures, ever coming back to us, radiant ghosts.
In a country that for decades has been profoundly diligent at disclosing its own crimes and framing them in the context of history, it makes sense that the exhibition was installed to share a courtyard with Assyrian friezes from a long-ago regime that made an art of totalitarian rule and with an ancient frieze describing the eruption of Vesuvius, which preserved priceless objects, buried in the ash, that have found sanctuary in institutions like the Neues Museum.
Archeologists have so far determined that the recovered works must have come from 50 Königstrasse, across the street from City Hall. The building belonged to a Jewish woman, Edith Steinitz; several Jewish lawyers are listed as her tenants in 1939, but their names disappear from the record by 1942, when the house became property of the Reich. Among its subsequent occupants, German investigators now believe, the likeliest candidate to have hidden the art was Erhard Oewerdieck, a tax lawyer and escrow agent.
Oewerdieck is not widely known, but he is remembered at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. In 1939, he and his wife gave money to a Jewish family to escape to Shanghai. He also hid an employee, Martin Lange, in his apartment. In 1941 he helped the historian Eugen Täubler and his wife flee to America, preserving part of Täubler’s library. And he stood by Wolfgang Abendroth too, a leftist and Nazi opponent, by writing him a job recommendation when that risked his own life.
The current theory is that when fire from Allied air raids in 1944 consumed 50 Königstrasse, the contents of Oewerdieck’s office fell through the floor, and then the building collapsed on top. Tests are being done on ash from the site for remains of incinerated paintings and wood sculptures. How the lost art came into Oewerdieck’s possession in the first place still isn’t clear.
But at least it’s now back on view. Scharff’s bust, of an actress named Anni Mewes, brings to mind Egyptian works in the Neues Museum. Karl Knappe’s “Hagar,” a bronze from 1923, twisted like knotted rope, has been left with its green patina of rust and rubble, making it almost impossible to decipher, save as evidence of its fate. On the other hand, Freundlich’s “Head,” from 1925, a work made of glazed terra cotta, gnarled like an old olive tree, loses little of its power for being broken. The Nazis seized the Freundlich from a museum in Hamburg in 1937, then six years later, in France, seized the artist and sent him to Majdanek, the concentration camp in Poland, where he was murdered on the day he arrived.
Across the street from the Neues Museum contemporary galleries showcase the sort of work the Nazis hoped to eradicate but that instead give Berlin its current identity as a capital of cool. This is a city that resembles the young masses who gravitate here: forever in a state of becoming, wary, unsure and unresolved, generally broke, but optimistic about the future, with the difference that Germany can’t escape its past.
Farther down the block the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s Hitler exhibition, today’s version of a “Degenerate” show, means to warn viewers about succumbing to what present German law declares morally reprehensible. How could any decent German have ever been taken in? the show asks.
That happens to be the question the Nazis’ “Degenerate” show posed about modern art. Many more Germans visited that exhibition than the concurrent one of approved German art. Maybe Oewerdieck was among those who went to the modern show and saw these sculptures in it. In any case, today’s Germany has salvaged them and has organized this display. Redemption sometimes comes late and in small measures.
Pentagon Sees Little Risk in Allowing Gay Men and Women to Serve Openly
The Pentagon has concluded that allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the United States armed forces presents a low risk to the military’s effectiveness, even at a time of war, and that 70 percent of surveyed service members believe that the impact on their units would be positive, mixed or of no consequence at all.
In an exhaustive nine-month study on the effects of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 17-year-old policy that requires gay service members to keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge, the authors concluded that repeal would in the short run most likely bring about “some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention.” But they said those effects could be mitigated by effective leadership.
The report, by Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s chief legal counsel, and Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe, also found that much of the concern in the armed forces about openly gay service members was driven by misperceptions and stereotypes. Leaving aside those with moral and religious objections to homosexuality, the authors said the concerns were “exaggerated and not consistent with the reported experiences of many service members.”
At a news conference on Tuesday announcing the release of the report, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said repeal “would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted.” He said it was a “matter of urgency” that the lame-duck Senate vote in the next weeks to repeal the law.
If not, Mr. Gates predicted fights in the courts and the possibility that the repeal would be “imposed immediately by judicial fiat.”
In a survey of 115,000 active-duty and reserve service members, the report found distinct differences among the branches of the military, particularly in the Marine Corps, whose leaders have been the most publicly opposed to allowing gay and bisexual men and women to serve openly. While 30 percent of those surveyed over all predicted that repeal would have some negative effects, 40 percent to 60 percent of the Marine Corps and those in various combat specialties said it would be negative.
Mr. Johnson and General Ham, who briefed reporters on the report, did not offer a specific explanation for why Marines were more opposed to repeal, although General Ham said that among Marine Corps respondents, a lower percentage had served alongside someone they believed to be gay or lesbian. This summer, when the Marine commandant at the time, Gen. James T. Conway, was asked for an explanation about Marine resistance to repeal, he responded that it was difficult to answer, but “we recruit a certain type of young American, a pretty macho guy or gal.”
In his remarks to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Gates acknowledged the higher levels of “discomfort” about repealing the law among those in the combat branches of the military. He said that those findings remained a concern to him as well as to the chiefs of the service branches, but that the concerns were not insurmountable as long as any repeal was carried out carefully and with what he said was “sufficient time and preparation to get the job done right.”
Mr. Gates refused to offer a timetable for how long that might be, and neither Mr. Johnson nor General Ham would say whether the process could take months or years. As the bill before the Senate now stands, any repeal would not be carried out until President Obama, Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, certified that the military was ready to end the ban.
Mr. Gates said much of the preparation would involve educating and training service members and their leaders.
Mr. Obama, who campaigned for president on a promise to repeal the law, hailed the study. “Today’s report confirms that a strong majority of our military men and women and their families — more than two-thirds — are prepared to serve alongside Americans who are openly gay and lesbian,” he said in a statement.
Democrats in the Senate also applauded the study, but Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has vowed to block the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” was largely silent, at least by early evening.
“Senator McCain and his staff are currently in the process of carefully reviewing the Pentagon’s report regarding the repeal of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law,” Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Mr. McCain has said in the past that he would consider authorizing a repeal of the law once the Pentagon review was complete, but he has also cited the concerns of the service chiefs for his resistance to ending the ban.
The House passed its version of a repeal of the law this past summer, but prospects for passage in the Senate remain uncertain, with time running out this year. Mr. Gates, Admiral Mullen, Mr. Johnson and General Ham are scheduled to testify on the report to the Senate on Thursday, but a more important session will come on Friday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee is to hear testimony from the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the commandants of the Marines and the Coast Guard.
The service chiefs have all expressed reluctance in the recent past about repeal, and it is unclear how they will present themselves on Friday. Mr. Obama summoned them to the White House on Monday to talk exclusively about “don’t ask, don’t tell” and afterward told aides he would not discuss the specifics of what was said.
The Pentagon report on “don’t ask, don’t tell” also found that 69 percent of those surveyed believed they had already worked with a gay man or woman. Of those, 92 percent reported that the unit’s ability to work together was very good, good or “neither good nor poor.”
In the most strongly worded section of the report, the authors concluded that while their mandate was to assess the impact of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — and not to determine whether it should be repealed — they had done just that.
“We are both convinced that our military can do this, even during this time of war,” Mr. Johnson and General Ham wrote. “We do not underestimate the challenges in implementing a change in the law, but neither should we underestimate the ability of our extraordinarily dedicated service men and women to adapt to such change and continue to provide our nation with the military capability to accomplish any mission.”
The study recommended no housing or living changes as a result of any repeal, and the authors also quashed any suggestion that there should be separate bathroom facilities.
They called separate bathrooms “a logistical nightmare, expensive and impossible to administer.”
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Date: 2010-12-03 06:36 pm (UTC)And who the hell would rather drive in NYC over anything else, at least in the downtown area? I'm admittedly not familiar with the outer areas (Brooklyn, Staten Island, etc), but when I was there a few years ago, Manhattan was bumper-to-bumper pretty much all the time. and from what I could tell, not much in the way of parking. We could get places faster (and with less headache) by walking or taking the wonderful train system (not sarcastic, I envy your mass transit infrastructure, we're lucky to have buses in most areas here).
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Date: 2010-12-03 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 06:47 pm (UTC)