Divestment Vetoed

SAN FRANCISCO — The student government president at the University of California, Berkeley, vetoed a bill urging divestment from two firms doing business with Israel. Will Smelko vetoed the measure March 24. The bill, which passed by a 16-4 vote, singled out United Technologies and General Electric for supplying Israel with technology used to perpetrate “war crimes” and was widely condemned by Jewish campus groups. Smelko said that while students don’t want “to fund weapons, war crimes or human rights violations, this veto has to do with… building peace and goodwill in a way that avoids the shortcomings of the bill [such as a]… selective, one-sided focus on a specific country that lacks important historical context.” He added that it was seen “as a symbolic attack on a specific community of our fellow students.”

Shoah List For Sale

NEW YORK — The only privately held original copy of Oskar Schindler’s Shoah-era list of Jews he saved is on sale for $2.2 million. A historical document sales specialist in upstate New York is selling the list on behalf of an anonymous seller on a “first come, first serve” basis on the website MomentsInTime. com. The 13-page list, dated April 18, 1945, contains 801 names. It was made famous in the Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List. There are four other surviving copies: one each in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the German federal archives, and two at Yad Vashem.