As an immigrant to Israel, a secular former leader of the country’s mostly religious settler movement and a former envoy for the Jewish state, Dani Dayan has spent his life bridging divides between Jewish communities. Appointed chairman of Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Remembrance Center a year and a half ago, Dayan, who spent the prior four years as Israel’s consul general in New York, told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash that while ensuring the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten is not an optimal way of uniting a people, it is a powerful force in overcoming the increasing ideological and religious divisions polarizing world Jewry today.

Unifying force: “One of my mottos is something that I read from a speech given by Menachem Begin in August 1948,” Dayan, 67, told JI in the run-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on Friday. “He said that the Mediterranean shore is not the limit of our people, it’s not the boundary of our people, and I am a great believer in that. I’m very passionate about the Israel-Diaspora relationship,” he continued, “and I intend to bring that passion for Jewish unity to Yad Vashem.” At a time when division both among and between Jews in Israel and in the U.S. appears more rife than ever, Dayan, who also spoke extensively about witnessing the rise in antisemitism in the U.S. during his four years in New York, said that “Holocaust remembrance, Holocaust education, Holocaust awareness, has the potential to be a unifying force.”

M.O.: Recalling his first day on the job in August 2021, the former envoy said he noticed a quote on the wall in the Museum of Art that quickly became his modus operandi. The quote, which Dayan later had etched onto a wall in his office, comes from the last will and testament of a Jewish painter who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. “As I stand on the border between life and death, certain that I will not remain alive, I wish to take leave from my friends and my works…. My works I bequeath to the Jewish museum to be built after the war…,” read Gela Seksztajn’s words, written in August 1942. She is believed to have died the following year, but no official records of her death exist. “When I saw that, I understood she was speaking to me and she was speaking about Yad Vashem – even though she did not know there would be a Yad Vashem – and in that moment I realized the responsibility that lies on our shoulders,” said Dayan.

Multifaceted mission: During his first few months on the job, Dayan commissioned a team of experts to create a single marketing message that would define Yad Vashem’s work and the lessons of the Holocaust, but quickly realized that “it’s impossible to have only one message.” Dayan’s broad approach is reflected in two exhibitions that Yad Vashem is launching this week for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. One of them, set to open in the United Nations headquarters in New York on Thursday in the presence of U.N Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, will feature a gigantic Book of Names containing the names of some 4.8 million victims of the Holocaust — the names of all known victims. Created by Yad Vashem for the permanent exhibition located in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial, placing an additional copy of the book in the halls of the international body, Dayan said, is Yad Vashem’s “contribution to reminding the U.N. why it was founded.”

History lessons: The biggest dangers today, said Dayan, are Holocaust distortion and trivialization, especially from countries in Europe that continue to downplay their roles in the mass genocide of the Jewish people during the war. He also said that while Holocaust education is not the ultimate cure for rising antisemitism worldwide, it is an essential part of tackling the phenomenon. “In the past, they probably thought ‘OK, they burn books [and] that’s bad, they burn synagogues [and] that’s even worse, but they will never burn human beings…’ Today we know that they can,” said Dayan. “Therefore, the lesson world leaders need to know from the Shoah is that when you see antisemitism don’t wait, confront it vigorously, decisively and immediately before it develops into monstrous dimensions that you can’t stop.”

Read the interview here.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) appeared to fire an implicit barb at colleagues Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Betty McCollum (D-MN) on Friday over comments they made earlier in the week about the construction of the planned U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

On the record: “I support the [State Department] as it proceeds to build an embassy where it belongs, in a country’s capital. Israel should be no exception,” Torres said on Twitter. “The [siting] of an embassy in Jerusalem in no way forecloses the possibility of a two state solution, which remains the best path forward for both Israelis and Palestinians.”

Rewind: Tlaib had tweeted earlier in the week that she was “outraged” that the State Department was moving forward on its plans to build the embassy “on land stolen from Palestinians,” adding that in “doing so, the U.S. is complicit in the illegal confiscation of Palestinian property.” 

Context: The Michigan congresswoman followed up the tweet by linking to a New York Times op-ed about the U.S.’s reported plans to build a new embassy in Jerusalem on the Allenby Barracks site — parts of which the op-ed’s author says had been in his family’s possession prior to Israel’s war of independence in 1948. McCollum also tweeted about the op-ed last week, sharing a quote from it.

By the book: Torres noted on Friday that the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 required the U.S. to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem. The current embassy facility was previously used by the U.S. consulate that coordinated relations with the Palestinians.

Read the full story here.

When the author Aidan Levy bought his first jazz album at the age of 11 in the late 1990s, he had no inkling that Sonny Rollins’ breakout 1957 masterpiece, Saxophone Colossus, would set him on a uniquely fortuitous path — the product of which is a major new biography, Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins, released last month to critical acclaim. Seven years in the making, the meticulously researched and exhaustively plotted book is Levy’s second published biography and the first to examine Rollins, the legendary tenor saxophonist and composer, with such granularity, including detailed accounts of his many celebrated recordings, ecstatic live performances and fabled practice regimens, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

Artist’s approval: The biography, at 772 pages, hinges on extensive archival research as well as hundreds of interviews with close associates and family members of Rollins, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest improvisers in jazz. Now 92, Rollins last performed in 2012 and stopped playing the saxophone altogether eight years ago as a result of pulmonary fibrosis. But Levy said he was helpful with the book’s creation and personally approved the idea from the beginning, even as he has still not read it in full. 

Perfectionist traits: “He had a copy of the manuscript, but he was reluctant to read the whole thing,” Levy, 36, said in a recent interview with JI. “It sounded like it might be too uncomfortable to read a book that details your life with all the minutiae — that it might be like, for Sonny, listening to playback from his recordings, which is something he never liked to do.” The musician who recorded with Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Max Roach and other jazz luminaries has long resisted looking back on his own music, according to Levy. “He was always looking to the next gig,” Levy said. “He’s still looking to the next gig, in a sense, and has had just a lifelong quest to to improve.”

Up for an award:Levy, who published a biography of Lou Reed in 2015, lives in Lancaster, Pa., and is now teaching a class on jazz and fiction at Columbia University, where he recently completed his doctorate in English and comparative literature. His new book, published by Hachette, was longlisted on Friday for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, which is given to a “biography of exceptional literary, narrative and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research,” according to the announcement.

Inside the process: Speaking with JI, Levy discussed the painstaking process of writing a biography worthy of its subject and gave insight into some of the lesser-known aspects of Rollins’ artistry, including an apparent interest, detailed in his journals, in the connection between the saxophone and the shofar, or Jewish ram’s horn, as well as a one-off recording with Leonard Cohen captured on video in 1989, among other things.

Read the full interview here.

Less than two years ago, Israeli and European researchers took a Nazi-built naval ship that had been used to place mines, outfitted it with modern scientific equipment and set sail from the Israeli city of Eilat to the Port of Sudan to study coral formations. The journey, which took place just months after Israel and Sudan normalized relations through the Abraham Accords, was among the first instances of formal scientific cooperation between the two countries, Melanie Lidman reports for The Circuit. But in the middle of the night, just a day into the voyage, a huge crash threw the researchers out of bed. The ship had run aground on a coral reef off the coast of Sinai, causing extensive damage and canceling the survey, which was sponsored by the Swiss-founded Transnational Red Sea Center.

Strained relations: “It was scary,” Maoz Fine, a professor of marine ecology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Science in Eilat, told The Circuit. “We were stuck on the reef for a few hours before we were rescued by the Egyptian navy. We lost a lot of equipment and personal stuff, but… the biggest loss was not to continue the cruise to Sudan.” Although Sudan signed onto the normalization agreements in January 2021, and there have been some high-profile visits between the two countries, relations are still strained. While some European researchers flew to Sudan for a coral survey a few months later, Fine has not returned. Next month, the Transnational Red Sea Center, founded by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, plans to carry out the full coral survey that was planned for 2021.

Psychedelic playground: Just below the surface of the Red Sea is a riot of psychedelic color, a Dr. Seuss-like jungle of more than 200 species of corals stretching down to the seafloor. Diving in the Red Sea is like entering a playground of underwater cliffs and caves and narrow canyons filled with corals that look like giant brains the size of a school bus, two-dimensional neon yellow oak trees, and bright orange tubes waving hello to the circulating schools of fish. The water in the Red Sea is exceptionally clear compared to other marine environments, which allows sunlight to penetrate farther down than other areas, so the color is spectacular at every depth. And, most enticing for researchers, the Red Sea’s vibrant corals have been barely perturbed by the rising sea temperature that is bleaching other corals around the world, causing them to lose their color and sometimes die.

Bleaching danger: “We think the northern Red Sea has the best chance of survival, because the corals are farther away from the bleaching threshold than any other locality in the world,” said Fine, who has spent decades studying the corals in the Red Sea. Until recently, he’s only been able to collaborate directly with Jordanian and Egyptian scientists. There are eight countries that border the Red Sea: Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt. Cooperation across the entire Red Sea is essential for understanding why the coral are so resilient, Fine said. “If we don’t have a spread of monitoring and research along the Red Sea, we miss part of the picture,” he said. “There is a latitudinal gradient in temperatures, and of course there are local parameters like overfishing, so to have a full picture, we have to do it all along the gradient.” Since its founding in 2019, the Transnational Red Sea Center has run two research missions to Jordan and Djibouti.

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