Tea at Trianon: Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 6, 2019

Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald

From The Times of Israel:

The philanthropy Rosenwald invested in African-American causes in the early 1900s changed the course of education for thousands of children in the rural South and helped foster the careers of prominent artists, including writer Langston Hughes, opera singer Marion Anderson and painter Jacob Lawrence.

Rosenwald, who made his fortune at the helm of Sears, Roebuck and Co., also provided seed money to build YMCAs for blacks in cities around the country. In addition, he developed a huge apartment complex in Chicago to help improve the living conditions for the masses who had migrated from the Jim Crow South.

“It’s a wonderful story of cooperation between this philanthropist who did not have to care about black people, but who did, and who expended his considerable wealth in ensuring that they got their fair shake in America,” Julian Bond, the renowned civil rights leader, says in the documentary.

Kempner told JTA that her new film on Rosenwald “celebrates the affinity between African-Americans and Jews” that started long before the civil rights movement and speaks to the powerful Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, or repairing the world.

Kempner joined Bond and Rabbi David Saperstein, the former head of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center who now serves as U.S. ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom, for a discussion after the screening at the NAACP conference. It was while attending a public program 12 years ago on Martha’s Vineyard at which Bond and Saperstein discussed black-Jewish relations that Kempner first learned of Rosenwald’s work with African-Americans.

She calls this film the last of a trilogy documenting the lives of “under-known Jewish heroes.” The first two were about baseball legend Hank Greenberg and radio and TV personality Gertrude Berg. (Read more.)