Day: June 23, 2024

1. FBI offers reward for information about deadly southern New Mexico wildfires  9News.com KUSA
2. Full-time residents of Ruidoso are set to return home; FBI to assist in the investigation of the fires  KOAT New Mexico
3. FBI offering reward for information about cause of Ruidoso fires  KTSM 9 News

It was 90 years ago that the querulous, sputtering Donald Duck first appeared in a movie short. The Russian Jewish director Sergei Eisenstein adored Donald and his Disney confrères, despite their lack of social significance; Eisenstein deemed Donald “beyond good and evil.”

Yet other Jewish talents specifically used Donald Duck as a vehicle for teaching morality propaganda lessons, like the comedian Sid Caesar, of Polish Jewish origin, who according to historian Jeremy Dauber got his start in showbiz by doing a routine in which Donald Duck debated Adolf Hitler.

Mimicking the two voices in a Coast Guard entertainment for the troops in 1944, Caesar was doubtless inspired by the 1943 Disney propaganda cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” an Oscar winner for best animated short film. It depicts Donald Duck as a beleaguered denizen of Nazi Germany who is terrorized by a shadow that looks like a character giving the Sieg Heil salute. To the duck’s relief, it turns out to be a shadow cast by a replica of the Statue of Liberty, raising its arm to carry the torch of liberty over the poem “The New Colossus” by Jewish author Emma Lazarus.

This ambiguity of an American symbol mistaken for the threat of Nazi dictatorship reflects complex opinions of Donald Duck by Jews and others before, during, and after World War II.

An earlier Donald Duck cartoon from 1938, “Donald’s Better Self,” juxtaposes good and evil, as if preparing the American mindset for the struggle that would ensue between Fascism and freedom. “Donald’s Better Self” justified military action after provocation.

Author Colin Shindler points to a document drafted in 1942 by Disney employee Robert Spencer Carr, specifically mentioning music, narration, celebrity casting, moral supremacy, and ridiculing the Nazi state as ways to win a propaganda war with Fascist Europe.

A Disney animator works on a sketch of Donald Duck circa 1936. Photo by Getty Images

Yet historian Yehuda Moraly notes that the American Jewish producer Leon Schlesinger, head of Warner Bros. Cartoons, preceded Disney with Looney Tunes shorts like “The Ducktators” (1942), a barnyard allegory about the rise of fascism, starring Daffy Duck, the Warners’ rival for Donald Duck. In “The Ducktators,” a baby duckling is hatched who grows up to be Hitler, voiced by the American Jewish radio personality Mel Blanc.

Nevertheless, Disney’s Donald Duck was considered symbolic of Americans internationally, as in “Nimbus Liberated” (1944), an antisemitic French cartoon funded by the Nazis. In it, a caricatured Jewish announcer for Free French broadcasts in London announces the Allied air invasion of France, with planes piloted by Donald Duck and fellow US cartoon stars slaying French civilians.

Even before the war was over, Donald’s status as the quintessential American offended some Jewish thinkers. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by the German Jewish social theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer trashed the Jewish popular author Mortimer Adler’s view of Disney cartoons as great art.

Horkheimer and Adorno likened Germany’s “generation that allowed Hitler to become great” to American audiences, those “pure, childish souls who applaud with innocent approval when Donald Duck gets walloped.”

In their analysis of American culture, Betty Boop, created by the Jewish cartoonist Max Fleischer, is presented as vastly preferable to the noisy victim Donald. It is even posited that Donald Duck receives his beatings in cartoons so that the spectators can accustom themselves to their own punishment in American capitalist society.

As described by researchers Thomas Andrae and Esther Leslie, Horkheimer and Adorno saw Donald Duck-olatry as a form of masochism, the “misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them” through “the breaking down of individual resistance.”

This type of kvetching about Donald Duck and US failings was echoed a few decades later in How to Read Donald Duck, (1971) coauthored by the Chilean Jewish writer Ariel Dorfman.

In a preface to the 1975 English edition of the book, Dorfman addressed Donald’s creator: “Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well roasted… Donald, Go Home!”

No allusion was apparently intended to roast duck with plums, a Rosh Hashanah delicacy in some Jewish kitchens.

Instead, Dorfman trashed Donald and his fellow Disney characters as capitalist propaganda for American corporate and cultural imperialism.

At times the Disney corporation has behaved in ways that seem to confirm these accusations. Israel: A History in 100 Cartoons recalls a 1991 tzimmes when the House of Mouse sued the Israeli cartoonist Dudu Geva for copyright violation. Geva’s purported crime was drawing a duck character which resembled Donald Duck too closely.

In a Tel Aviv newspaper, Geva had published the comic strip “Moby Duck,” an excerpt from his Duck Book. Rather than just change the image, which he ultimately had to do anyway, Geva chose to fight the case, going all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court.

Historian Shaul Mitelpunkt explains how Disney’s lawyers terrorized Geva by waking him with a phone call at 7:00 am to announce that he was being sued by the corporate behemoth. Instead of hiring an intellectual property attorney to defend him, Geva relied on Avigdor Feldman, a human rights specialist.

Humanity, represented by the Israeli artistic and literary world, was offended by the heavy-handed US corporate sanctions against small-scale Jewish creativity.

In courtroom testimony, Geva explained his addition of a Tembel hat, a national symbol of hardworking Israelis, to create a kind of “Srulik Duck,” as an ironic takeoff on the optimistic, diligent, outgoing 1950s cartoon character symbolizing Israel. Shaul Mitelpunkt claimed that Geva had expatriated Donald Duck, “turning him into a dirty Sabra trickster.”

However, the Supreme Court dismissed Geva’s claim that he was using the image of Donald Duck as a societal critique. They cited a deposition in which Geva himself admitted that rather than criticizing Donald, he admired him and included him in his book “out of respect to Disney’s duck character, that is one of my childhood heroes, one of the standing pillars of the duck nation in particular and Comics culture in general.”

Geva added to an interviewer from “Ma’ariv” in January 1992 that Donald Duck “is the king of ducks as far as I’m concerned. I thought I showed him respect here, until [Disney] forgot his place and jumped a small Israeli duckling.” Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Geva saw Donald as a loser to be championed.

Whether the stress of this episode took an exceptional physical toll on the cartoonist is unknown, but Dudu Geva died prematurely of a heart attack at age 54.

The possible dangers for Jews of loving, or hating, Donald Duck excessively was echoed in an odd episode from 2012 in Ohio, when Governor John Kasich sought to install a Holocaust memorial at the Statehouse.

A local Republican politician complained that it was only necessary for someone to say “I want a statue of Donald Duck on the Statehouse grounds” and if the governor agreed, the statue would duly be raised.

This trivializing right-wing juxtaposition of Donald Duck/Holocaust was as unsettling as the Statue of Liberty/Hitler salute confusion in “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” perhaps saying much about Donald Duck’s at times uneasy ongoing link to Jewish history.

The post Duck Everlasting — The secret Jewish history of Donald Duck appeared first on The Forward.

The Supreme Court is set for an enormous week.

With just days left until the justices’ self-imposed deadline of finishing their opinions by the end of June, they have yet to release decisions in 14 argued cases this term. 

The court’s remaining opinions are set to have profound impacts but chief among them is a decision on whether former President Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution.

Cases implicating Jan. 6 defendants, social media regulation and the power of federal agencies are among the litany of issues that remain. The court expects to release the next batch of opinions on Wednesday. 

Here are the five biggest decisions still unresolved as the Supreme Court’s opinion season reaches its peak: 

Trump’s immunity claims 

Do former presidents have criminal immunity for official acts while in the White House? 

For months, Trump has delayed his criminal trial in Washington, D.C. on charges he conspired to subvert the 2020 election by appealing his claims that he is protected by presidential immunity. 

Lower courts have rejected his assertion, but the Supreme Court at oral arguments appeared inclined to carve out some immunity for former presidents, though perhaps a shield less extensive than Trump’s lawyers desire. 

That outcome would send the immunity battle back to a lower court. No matter how it shakes out, it would likely aid Trump in delaying his trial until after the election, when he hopes to win the presidency and halt his prosecutions. 

Even if the justices completely reject Trump’s presidential immunity theory, it remains unclear if his case will proceed to trial before November. 

With the clock ticking, some observers have criticized the justices for not further expediting their decision, though the court did schedule Trump’s appeal faster than a normal case. 

With no decision yet, the court’s final potential days of opinions overlap with the first presidential debate, scheduled for Thursday night. 

Jan. 6 obstruction charge 

Was the Justice Department proper in charging more than 300 Jan. 6 defendants with an obstruction charge? 

Another case stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot stands to disrupt the Justice Department’s prosecution of rioters who stormed the Capitol where the certification of the 2020 presidential election was underway. 

One rioter, Joseph Fischer, challenged an obstruction law used against him and hundreds of others in the attack’s aftermath. Fischer argued that the charge – which criminalizes “corruptly” obstructing, impeding or interfering with an official government proceeding – was improperly applied to the rioters given its origin: the Enron accounting scandal. 

The justices appeared wary of the government’s use of the charge during oral arguments. 

Siding with Fischer could upend many rioters’ already-established sentences. Though most also faced other felony counts, 50 rioters were sentenced with the obstruction law as their only felony, according to U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.  

A ruling in favor of the rioters could also lend credence to claims by Trump and his allies that the Justice Department overreached in its prosecution of the attack. Trump has vowed to consider pardoning some rioters.    

And, it could undermine the Justice Department’s narrative that the Capitol riot was an attack on American democracy.  

Biden social media contacts 

Did the Biden administration coerce social media companies to remove false or misleading content in violation of the Constitution? 

A challenge to the Biden administration’s efforts to curb misinformation in the wake of the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic could upend how the federal government communicates with social media platforms about false and misleading content.  

Two Republican attorneys general contend that federal officials violated the First Amendment by “coercing” social media companies to remove content that the government deemed potentially dangerous.  

The Justice Department has warned that, if the justices side with the states, it could limit their ability to address matters of public concern, prevent national security threats and relay information.  But during oral arguments, the high court seemed to lean toward siding with the government. 

Florida, Texas social media laws 

Can the government tell social media platforms how to moderate content without running afoul of the First Amendment? 

Laws in Texas and Florida regulating social media bans have placed the rights of social media companies on the line. 

At the heart of each case are efforts to prevent social media platforms from banning users for their political views, even if they violated platform policies. Detractors of the laws, like the tech industry groups challenging them, say they step on private companies’ First Amendment right to editorial discretion.  

If allowed to stand, the laws would transform online speech by essentially eliminating unique content moderation decisions that set platforms apart, potentially chilling competition between small and medium-sized companies. 

It could also increase the amount of hateful, inappropriate or incorrect content online, over hesitance to moderate material on their platforms.  

Federal agency power 

Should courts defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous laws?
 
On Tuesday, a Supreme Court precedent bolstering federal agencies’ ability to regulate wide aspects of American life will mark its 40th anniversary. 

When the justices return to the bench on Wednesday, they may put it on its death bed. 

The doctrine, known as Chevron deference, requires courts to accept agencies’ reasonable interpretations of federal laws when they are ambiguous.  

Presidential administrations have invoked it to uphold regulations from fishing boats to cryptocurrency to environmental protections. 

Anti-regulatory interests, who deplore the growth of the “administrative state” in recent decades, are hoping the conservative-leaning Supreme Court will use two of its current cases to claw back the executive branch’s power by overruling Chevron. 

The cases have also attracted attention from advocacy groups on many issues who support Chevron and anxiously hope the justices will not question the legal basis for their favored government regulations.