O-Bits: Anti-Siemiatycze Edition

O-Bits has not been a regular at shul for quite some time. If we’re being honest, not since my Bar Mitzvah. I still have the inscribed Union of American Hebrew Congregations Bible, and even pick it up and read it now and then, but I’m a cultural Jew. I can tell a good joke, know a few words of Yiddish, can probably tell you where to get a good bagel (and  counting down the days until the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery on Beverly Boulevard reopens—their water bagels are for real). And I am writing this on Shabbos. I know that for the anti-Semites in this world, I’m making a distinction without a difference, so this story off the Fox News wire is disturbing. A Jewish cemetery in Siemiatycze, Poland was dug up, the bodies dumped in an empty lot. The reason for this desecration? A Supermarket. You’d think someone in the town of 15,000—which was once 60% Jewish—might have understood how terrible this looks, that the remains of Jews piled on empty lot in a Polish town might echo past events the country is trying to live down. On top of the usual disrespect.  Then you read that not a Jew remains in Siemiatycze.

Steven Mirkin

Steven Mirkin’s diverse career has taken him from politics to pop culture to high art, offering him a front row seat to some of the most fascinating events and personalities of our time: writing speeches, fundraising appeals and campaign materials for Ed Koch, John Heinz and independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson; chronicling the punk/new wave scenes in New York and London; interviewing musicians such as Elton John, John Lydon and Buck Owens; profiling modern masters Julian Schnabel, Paul Schrader and Jonathan Safran Foer; and writing for TV shows including 21, The Chamber, Let's Make A Deal, and Rock Star: INXS.