Israel Reflections 2015: Masada & the Dead Sea

For a little different start to our trip, I decided this year to fit in a visit to Masada and the Dead Sea.  This was both for getting over jet lag purposes and because the history and geology of both places are a great frame for the rest of the week.  From student Jillian Igl-Dickson, here is a description:

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“Upon arriving in Israel and getting a few hours of sleep we were off on our first adventure to go see and explore the Dead Sea and Masada. We left our hotel in Jerusalem late in the morning to head toward Masada where we spent the first half of our day. Thankfully, Professor Schneider took pity on our exhausted group and refrained from making us hike to the top of Masada via the Snake Trail (45 min-1 hour hike), but instead let us take the cable car to the top. Given that this was our first real experience in Israel, it was an amazing way to start off our trip. The views from the cable car of Masada and the surrounding landscape were absolutely breathtaking. We were fortunate enough to have lots of time to explore Masada and learn more about the history of the site [and the story of the Roman siege.]

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Israel Reflections 2015: Vienna to Israel and the Lady in Gold

adele-bloch-bauerWell, I had very high hopes for being able to blog while in Israel and those were quickly dashed between the total lack of sleep and need to reflect on what we were seeing!  So finally, now that we have been back for a week, I will start posting about the sights and visits that we had.  We stopped over on the way and spent about 8 hours running around Vienna.  This proved to be a terrific stop because we were able to link two different visits in Israel to what we saw in Vienna.  We started at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna where the famous Klimt painting, The Kiss, is shown.  Up until very recently, the Belvedere also housed a painting known as the Lady in Gold (seen above).  And you can still see t-shirts and mugs bearing the likeness of this painting through downtown Vienna.  But this painting is now longer there.

It turns out the Lady in Gold is actually The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a well-known society woman in Vienna who commissioned the portrait at the turn of the century.  Unfortunately for her and her heirs, Adele was Jewish.  The painting was looted during the Holocaust, the name changed to hide its original identity, and it took a U.S. Supreme Court case in 2004 (Republic of Austria v. Altmann)  to get this painting back to the family — a niece by the name of Maria Altmann.

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Peace Be With You … And With You?

Exclamation_markUnder the heading of hard bargaining tactics gone bad (and bad lawyer advice), we can now add this story.  When a group of eight faculty members at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan decided to stop working in order to protest their newly hired dean and president, Rev. Kurt H. Dunkle, all purgatory broke loose. Under advice of their counsel, the faculty wrote a rather strongly worded letter outlining their demands regarding the dean.  (See the nasty details of the dean’s behavior here.)

Unimpressed with the tone of the letter, the Board of Trustees for the Seminary considered the letter, instead of the opening bid that the faculty intended, as a mass resignation.  They dismissed the eight faculty members (leaving the students at the Seminary with only two instructors.) In this case, the eight faculty members’ hard bargaining tactic to have their foul-mouthed, micromanaging (in their descriptions) dean dismissed ended up focusing attention on their perceived “bad” behavior rather than that of their dean.

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