War is always a tragic catastrophe…especially for Jews in the Ukraine.

Scholars estimate about 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 Ukrainian Jews died during the Holocaust.

Most were murdered by Nazi firing squads, often aided and abetted by both Ukrainian paramilitary personnel and civilians. Most of the executions of Jewish mothers, fathers, children, and the elderly were in plain sight of their Christian neighbors.

Like many American Jews, I have family connections to these "blood lands". My maternal grandmother's family fled Odessa around the turn of the 20th century for Chicago. My paternal grandmother's family fled Berdychiv (about 90 miles outside of Kyiv) at around the same time to farm in North Dakota.

None of them ever looked back.

There was no sentimentality about the "Old Country" or what they were leaving. There was no concerted effort by my elders to transmit the Yiddish language or stories of their lives in the Ukraine to their American-born progeny.

When my grandparents occasionally spoke Yiddish (the common  language of Eastern European Jews) in front of the grandchildren, it was to make sure that we did not know what they were saying.

When I see the Ukrainian-Jewish comedian and TV personality Volodymyr Zelensky heroically leading this historically anti-Semitic nation against an unprovoked invasion by a brutal Russian Army, I am astounded and inspired… but not fooled.

Zelensky is a historical fluke. Being a widely popular television celebrity confers political influence that can lead to power—as in case of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

The Ukrainians want advanced American and Israeli military weapons now, as well as so-called "Jewish Influence" on their nation's behalf with both the American and Israeli governments later down the road. 

The mainstream U.S. media estimates about 5.4 million Ukrainians have fled their country since the Russian invasion over two months ago. How many Ukrainians have actually died at the hands of the Russian army is unknowable during a time of active conflict and massive media warfare.

At this point, plausible fatality estimates range from 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 3,000 civilians to several times that. But it appears unlikely that the present combined military and civilian death toll surpasses 30,000 out of a total population of 41,000,000.

A historical perspective is important when looking at the current war.

Approximately 6,850,000 Ukrainians died during WWII (with about 1,650,000 being soldiers). Previously, in 1932-33, an estimated 3,900,000 Ukrainian peasants were intentionally starved to death by Russian dictator Joseph Stalin. He was trying to both collectivize their small family farms and destroy their national identity and culture.

In a televised and digitally dominated 21st century world, the war in Ukraine is made deeply resonant to hundreds of millions people across the globe. We can empathize with the suffering of brave, freedom-loving, and innocent Ukrainians being bombed, shot, raped, and tortured.
In America we are saturated with these horrific images and voices of carnage in a 24/7 news cycle.

War is hell…

But it is a much smaller hell than in times past for both Ukrainian Christians and Jews.

What appears most dangerous and alarming to me is the obvious lesson from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Namely: nations without nukes are at the mercy of nations with nukes.

It is important to remember that the Ukrainians voluntarily gave up their substantial nuclear arsenal about 30 years ago to Russia in exchange for a written non-aggression treaty.

This historical folly is apparent to all—even to a layman like myself.

It motivates countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia to get the bomb no matter what price must be paid. A nuclear “umbrella” is essential for both national sovereignty and survival in today's world. 

And, it motivates both Germany and Japan to seriously re-evaluate their public posture regarding nukes. It is widely assumed that both nations could produce them at a moment's notice if the perceived need arose.

China and Taiwan are getting a stark crash course in the permeability of national boundaries in an era no longer dominated and mediated by an all-mighty American military and economic colossus.

This brief video that I produced on grief and defiance is nominally about Prime Minister Zelensky and Ukraine.

But it is really about human resilience in the face of state-sponsored aggression and oppression.

And the precarious place it leaves all of us.

My last name is Barancik.

I have been told by Polish friends that it means little ram.

It is also a pejorative term for a stubborn "block head."

Many friends would agree that it is an appropriate surname.

According to both family lore and Ancestry.com, I have the DNA of an Ashkenazi Jew from Poland and Eastern Europe. I have always had a deep feeling for their music, graphic art, literature, food, and humor.

No surprise there.

As a young man, the stories of I.B. Singer's prewar Jewish Poland resonated deeply in my subconscious mind. Forty-five years later, I still can clearly recall the master Yiddish storyteller's choice phrases and all-too-human characters from a vanished world.

Likewise, with the photographs of Roman Vishniac.

He documented the prewar Jewish villages, towns, and Jewish sections of cities just before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and the subsequent genocide of around 3,000,000 Polish Jews. 

Vishniac and Singer gave me voices and visions that became seed crystals that grew into a large body of creative work over the decades. This includes paintings, prints, handmade artist's books, and videos.

This online folio contains a video that I produced in 1999 and digital prints that were just finished last week.

Before exploring the online artwork and new media, I suggest that you read the short essays by Dr. Abraham Peck and David Kriebel about the Warsaw Ghetto. It will help you to put the imagery into a historical context.

Dr. Peck is an eminent Jewish scholar, who was born to Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp after the end of World War II. The family emigrated to the United States when he was a small child. In his short piece, Abe looks at what the Warsaw Ghetto could mean to young, contemporary Americans.

Dr. Kriebel is an anthropologist with deep family roots in the mid-Atlantic section of America. He looks at the Warsaw Ghetto largely through the lens of my art.

Here is a web link to both essays: https://www.artnothate.com/gallery/postcards-from-hell/

I would like to end my brief artist's statement with a quote by Matthew Baigell, an art historian who has thought deeply about Post-Holocaust art and artists. 

It came to my attention decades ago and I often refer back to it for understanding my creative journey:

"Making art about the Holocaust is a personal way of witnessing, of commemorating…and questions about how one should or should not proceed are really irrelevant. There is no 'proper" point of entry into any sort of narrative about the Holocaust, no appropriate way to establish a bond between the dead and the living or between the past and present."

Contact Bob Barancik
email: bobcreates@earthlink.net 
cell+text: 215.964.3937

Web Gallery: https://www.artnothate.com/gallery/

This post was written on Memorial Day 2021 (Monday, May 31st, 2021).

On Memorial Day, many Americans remember their relatives who died or were injured defending our democracy and ideals of freedom. They might even visit a cemetery where a fallen family veteran rests or take part in a small patriotic parade.

But most Americans will just be having a backyard barbecue or taking a day trip to the beach or public park. Or watching professional sports on tv. It is a three-day vacation in a time of a receding pandemic and the beginning of summer.

The surreal, violent, and ultimately unsuccessful insurrection by mostly middle aged, middle class, mostly educated, white Americans is back in the news as the Republicans refused to allow a non-partisan investigation of the activities on and around January 6th. The insurrectionists believed that their leader, Donald Trump, was cheated out of a second term in the Oval Office by a deliberate fraudulent miscount of ballots masterminded by the Democratic Party.

And they were going to make spectacle of their grievances for the media.

Read more

In November of 2018, France erupted with a series of unexpected, disruptive, and seemingly spontaneous marches and riots.

It was more a series of flash mobs driven by social media than the typically French political uprising led by a cadre of charismatic leaders and ideologues.

The activists wore bright yellow reflective vests, the kind often worn by both construction and emergency workers.  

There was no visible public relations firm behind this brilliant visual branding. It was ideal for a digital, viral world fixated on smartphones and laptop computers.

Read more

“For me, liberalism simply means, live and let live. However, the nature of liberalism – particularly the Saudi version – needs to be clarified.   ... [The Saudi] faction, controlling and claiming exclusive monopoly of the truth, is so hostile that they are driven to discredit it without discussion or fully understanding what the word actually means. They have succeeded in planting hostility to liberalism in the minds of the public and turning people against it, lest the carpet be pulled out from under their feet. But their hold over people’s minds and society shall vanish like dust carried off in the wind.”  – Raif Badawi, May 2012, shortly before his arrest

Raif Badawi, 31, and his sister Samar, 33, are human rights activists from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Their mother, one of 14 wives, died of cancer when they were 11 and 13. The following year Samar began to run away to her uncles to escape her father’s beatings and verbal abuse. She was repeatedly returned home since her father was her guardian.

Samar married but their father continued to intervene in her life, which contributed to the end of her marriage. She moved in with Raif. The father brought suit against Samar for disobedience and she countersued that he refused to allow her to marry. She was jailed for six months before her guardianship was granted to an uncle. She married Walid Albukhair, her attorney who later represented Raif. Samar continued to fight for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and in 2012 was given an International Woman of Courage award from the U.S. State Department.

In 2002, Raif married Ensaf Haidar. He began a website, Liberal Saudi Network, to encourage social and political discussion on topics such as freedom of religion, free speech and women’s rights.

Raif was detained by Saudi authorities in 2008 on charges of apostasy (renunciation of a religion), which carries the death penalty, but he released after questioning. He left the country after being charged with having a website that insults Islam and returned after charges were dropped. The government then forbade him to leave the country. Ensaf’s parents went to court to try to forcibly have them divorced on the apostasy charges.

His comments questioning the religious establishment continued to drew the attention of authorities:

“As soon as a thinker starts to reveal his ideas, you will find hundreds of fatwas that accused him of being an infidel just because he had the courage to discuss some sacred topics.” - August 2010 

Raif was charged in 2011 with using electronic media to insult Islam and arrested in June 2012. His wife and three children sought political asylum in Quebec, Canada. In July 2013, Raif received a sentence of 7 years and 600 lashes for running a website which "violates Islamic values and propagates liberal thought." The website was closed down. A charge of apostasy was added that December.  The Washington Post wrote:

“He got two extra years in prison for ridiculing Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the religious police. What did he say? According to Amnesty International, one of his articles thanked the morals cops ‘for teaching us virtue and for its eagerness to ensure that all members of the Saudi public are among the people of paradise.’ Satiric, certainly, but worthy of time in prison? Hardly. “

Raif appealed the sentence but lost. In May 2014, he was re-sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes to be administered over 20 weeks, and fined $266,000.

Two months later, his attorney, Walid Albukhair, was sentenced to 15 years for establishing Monitor of Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, a Saudi human rights organization. The court found Walid guilty of "undermining the regime and officials", "inciting public opinion," and "insulting the judiciary.” Samar is prohibited from leaving Saudi Arabia.

Raif’s first flogging was administered on January 9, 2015. Handcuffed and shackled, he was led to the center of a square in front of a mosque after Friday prayers. He was caned across the back and legs 50 times in 5 minutes. In a letter from prison, Raif wrote that he was “surrounded by a cheering crowd who cried incessantly ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great)’” during the whipping. He added, “All this cruel suffering happened to me because I expressed my opinion.”

Raif has not been flogged since because medical teams have said that he has not healed from the flogging. His wife said, “He’s in a poor condition. He suffers from high blood pressure but above all he is mentally very stressed.”  Ensaf added that Raif said the international solidarity gives him renewed strength. 

The United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Britain, the United Nations, and Amnesty International have all condemned the flogging. Saudi Arabia responded that it "does not accept any interference in its internal affairs." It said that its judiciary is impartial and independent, and the kingdom's constitution, based in Islamic law, ensures human rights.

It is possible that Raif may be tried for apostasy. While the criminal court lacks jurisdiction in capital cases, a new ruling by the Supreme Court now allows such jurisdiction. The case would be referred to the same judge who sentenced him.

Raif’s current legal representative is not a lawyer. In March 2015, at the request of his family, Lawyers Without Borders Canada and the Quebec Bar announced they would work to obtain Raif’s release. Lawyers Without Borders said, ”We will act based on Saudi law and applicable international law” in collaboration with his legal representative in Saudi Arabia.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post in April 2015, Ensaf wrote:

“Before his arrest, my husband wrote: ‘We want life for those who wish death to us; and we want rationality for those who want ignorance for us.’ I carry his words and his courage with me on the darkest and most hopeless days. Raif inspires me and compels me to keep raising my voice. I will not stop until my husband is free.”

Journalist Matti Friedman has seen firsthand the way the international press gets the story of Israel wrong. In his Aug. 2014 piece for Tablet, Friedman explains the problems he has seen in his years working as a reporter in Israel and other countries in the Middle East.

Friedman has worked as a reporter in Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, Moscow and Washington, DC, and has covered conflicts in Israel and the Caucasus. He has lived in Israel since 1995, and has reported on it since 1997. His arguments come from observation.

Friedman first explains what he sees are the “central tropes” the international media depends upon in telling the so-called story of Israel. It’s a story mainstream outlets stick to, even when evidence would point to an entirely different reality.

In short, it’s a story that is “largely fiction,” he says.

The mainstream media has made it clear it sees Israel as an important story by how it staffs bureaus covering Israel and Palestinian territories, he says. While he was at the Associated Press, the AP had more than 40 staffers covering it. It was “significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.”

Furthermore, the AP had one “regime-approved” stringer covering Syria before the outbreak of civil war. Friedman says:

“Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.”

Israel therefore remains the prominent story though, for example, 42 people died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2013 – a number which Friedman points out is just about the monthly homicide rate in Chicago.

Friedman uses several examples from his own experience to outline the problems that arise with press coverage of Israel. While working as a reporter in Israel, Friedman found corruption to be a major concern for many Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority. But reporters pitching coverage of the issue were met with the response from an editor that Palestinian corruption was “not the story,” he says.

Supposed Israeli corruption, however, was covered ad nauseum. Friedman counts 27 stories in a seven-week period about problems in Israeli society – far more than his bureau had published in the three years prior on “Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas.”

Some other major lies Friedman explains:

Palestinians are presented by the media as “passive victims of the party that matters” – that party being Israel. Mainstream coverage includes no analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, Friedman says. Palestinians aren’t “taken seriously as agents of their own fate.”

He continues:

“The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated.”

The mainstream media also fails to report on the fact that the Hamas charter calls for Israel’s destruction and the murder of Jews, and also blames Jews for being the true manipulators of the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars.

Despite Hamas winning a Palestinian national election and becoming “one of the region’s most important players,” the charter was never written about in print while Friedman was at the Associated Press is Israel, he says.

While Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters are real, Friedman says, there are also low-risk ways they could report on Hamas: “under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources.”

But they don’t because, as he says, “Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story.”

Mainstream media consistently portrays Palestinians as moderate, while Israelis are portrayed as “increasingly extreme,” he says. It went unreported in early 2009 that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a “significant” peace offer to the Palestinian Authority, but that the Palestinian Authority had declared it insufficient. The story wouldn’t have fit the ongoing mainstream narrative of the passive Palestinians and aggressive Israelis, so it was ignored, he says.

Friedman says these examples taught him something important about the way Israel is covered by the press:

Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.

Here, a few other notable points from Friedman’s piece:

“The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the ‘Israel’ of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.”

As Friedman explains, that something else is the way people in other parts of the world continue to treat Jews as a “blank screen” upon which to vent all their frustrations:

“The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.”

Read Friedman’s piece in Tablet for his full, nuanced view on the problems plaguing international coverage of Israel. He follows it with a piece from November 2014 for The Atlantic, arguing that reports on Israel tell us more about the reporters than they do about Israel.

The Times of Israel - A survivor of terror, Israel’s first Arab news presenter is done being a victim, by Elhanan Miller

Lucy Aharish was just 5 years old when she survived a terrorist attack while shopping with her family in Gaza. She told the Times of Israel:

“It was April 1987, a very hot day, and my dad opened the window,” she recalled. “I remember a traffic jam on the main road and I saw someone approach us with something in his hand. I looked at him and he looked back at me, and I automatically started sliding down on my seat in fear. My mother shouted ‘Lucy, sit up straight,’ and when she finished her sentence we heard a bang in the car.”

Now Aharish is the first Arab prime-time news presenter in Israel. This year she was given the honor of lighting a torch at the national Independence Day ceremony on Mount Herzl. The theme of this year’s ceremony was “groundbreaking Israelis.” Aharish was recognized as a “trailblazing Muslim journalist, who brings a discourse of tolerance and interdenominational openness to Israel’s public agenda” by the Ministerial Committee for Symbols and Ceremonies, the Times reports.

She spoke of growing up in a secular household, learning both Hewbrew and Arabic, and becoming close to her neighbor, a Holocaust Survivor. But at school, she was bullied, and other students would call her a “dirty Arab.” But her high school principal, she said, never accepted racism or intolerance in his school:

“He would stand in front of the entire grade and say, ‘This will not happen in my school. Racism is something that no decent society, and especially not Jewish society, can tolerate.’ I don’t know if such principals exist in today’s education system.”

On her role as a journalist who sees the many facets of the issues she covers, Aharish says she can offer a new perspective to viewers:

“Bringing a different voice from Israel to the world is the biggest influence I could wish to have,” she told the Times. “I try to explain to our viewers that life in Israel is almost impossible, yet we live it nonetheless.”

Happy Birthday, Israel, by Israeli military historian and theorist Martin Van Creveld

On the 67th birthday of Israel, Martin Van Creveld explores the impressive gains Israel has made not only since its inception, but also since 1984, when the country was on the brink of bankruptcy.

The country has grown from 4.1 million inhabitants in 1984, to 8.2 million today. The post-2008 recession and anti-Semitism in many countries has led to increased immigration. The GDP, he notes, has increased markedly, and Israel has a 21st century workforce attracting top companies.

Van Creveld quotes American businessman and philanthropist Warren Buffett: “ ‘Israel has a disproportionate amount of brains and energy,’ said Buffett (who, putting his pocket where his mouth was, by spent some $ 2 billion buying some Israeli companies).”

Buffett is not the only one to recognize the strength of Israel: “300 leading international companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Apple, HP, Cisco, Motorola, Philipps, and Siemens either already have R&D centers in Israel or are building them now.”