Assad Meeting
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus. Hoenlein said Jan. 3 that the meeting late last month was at the invitation of Syria and not, as reported by the Israeli media, at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “All I can say is that I did not go as a negotiator or mediator or with messages,” Hoenlein told JTA. “I addressed humanitarian concerns.” He wouldn’t elaborate except to say the trip involved restoration of shuls and was “for the good of the Jewish people.”
Mickey in Haifa?
HAIFA — Haifa will be the next home to a Disney amusement park. A 20-acre, $168-million complex, including a 25-screen multiplex and an amusement park, is set to be built near the Carmel Tunnel. The Walt Disney Company’s investment arm, Shamrock Holdings, and Israel’s New Lineo cinema chain announced the plans Jan. 4. The complex is slated to open in 2013.
Letters For Pollard
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote U.S. President Barack Obama urging clemency for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Netanyahu read his letter Jan. 4 to a Knesset plenum discussion. His letter, Israel’s first formal request for Pollard’s release, came a day after similar urgings from more than 500 clergy – including rabbis representing all streams, as well as a number of leading Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy – in a letter to Obama. The letters are the latest in a surge of pleas to free Pollard, a U.S. Navy analyst who spied for Israel and who has been in prison since 1985.
Cuts At Book Centre
BOSTON — The National Yiddish Book Center, amid a change in focus, laid off four employees and closed its bookstore. The Amherst, Mass., centre made the layoffs last month as part of a strategic change from saving and restoring Yiddish texts to educating people about them. The cuts include the director’s assistant, a gifts officer, the bookstore manager and a designer of the centre’s magazine. The vice-president and program director also resigned, leaving the centre with 16 workers. The centre, open since 1980, has collected more than one million Yiddish volumes.
Group Mulls Thomas Award Name Change
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Helen Thomas’ decision to take her disparagement of Zionists from off the cuff (last May) to on the record (last month) has led a journalists’ group to consider dropping her name from a lifetime achievement award.
The Society of Professional Journalists is revisiting its decision last summer not to change the name of its Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award after Thomas, 90, told an Arab-American group in Dearborn, Mich., last month that Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street “are owned by the Zionists.”
Thomas, a 67-year-veteran of Washington reporting, resigned from her job as a columnist at Hearst last June after remarking to a video blogger that Jews “should get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany and the United States. She later apologized, but her remarks in Michigan on Dec. 2 have raised fresh concerns about the sincerity of the apology.
Wayne State University, her alma mater, withdrew its Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in the Media Award after her most recent remarks. Under deluge again, the Society for Professional Journalists said it would reconsider. Thomas, born to Lebanese immigrants, for decades was the White House correspondent for United Press International.