Elizabeth Taylor and Zionism

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Elizabeth Taylor and Zionism

    Posted by Gary Freedman on March 26, 2011 at 12:28pm
    View Gary Freedman's blog

Elizabeth Taylor was born and lived her early years at her parents' home, at 8 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a northwestern suburb of London; the second child of Francis Lenn Taylor (1897–1968) and Sara Viola Warmbrodt (1895–1994), who were Americans residing in England. Taylor's older brother, Howard Taylor, was born in 1929. Her parents were originally from Arkansas City, Kansas. Francis Taylor was an art dealer, and Sara was a former actress whose stage name was "Sara Sothern." Sothern retired from the stage when she and Francis married in 1926 in New York City. Taylor's two first names are in honor of her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Mary (Rosemond) Taylor.

One of their closest friends in England, Colonel Victor Cazalet, was an important influence on the family. As a rich and well-connected bachelor, a Member of Parliament and close friend of Winston Churchill, he was both a passionate lover of art and theater, and encouraged the Taylor family to think of England as their permanent home. As a Christian Scientist and lay preacher, his links with the family were also spiritual. He also became Elizabeth's godfather. As a young child, suffering from a severe infection that kept her in bed for weeks, she "begged" for his company: "Mother, please call Victor and ask him to come and sit with me."

Biographer Alexander Walker suggests that "it is likely that Elizabeth's later conversion to the Jewish faith, and her life-long support for Israel, owes something to the sympathetic views she heard being expressed at home in these formative years." Walker notes that Cazalet was an active campaigner for a Jewish homeland, and her mother also worked actively in various charities, which included sponsoring fundraisers for Zionism. Her mother recalls the influence that Cazalet had on Elizabeth:

"Victor sat on the bed and held Elizabeth in his arms and talked to her about God. Her great dark eyes searched his face, drinking in every word, believing and understanding."

http://teebeedee.ning.com/profiles/blog ... nd-zionism

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A goddess revealed: Intimate portrait of Liz Taylor at 24 seen for the first time

By Liz Thomas
Last updated at 2:23 PM on 2nd April 2011

Countless photographs have paid homage to Liz Taylor's fabulous figure. But none has been so revealing as this.

A private collector has released the only known picture of the star – then aged 24 – posing nude. It is understood to be the first time the photo has been shown publicly.

It was an engagement gift from Miss Taylor to producer Michael Todd, who was her third husband.
Elizabeth Taylor aged 24 in the photograph she gave to third husband Michael Todd. The picture was taken by one of her closest friends, actor and photographer Roddy McDowall

Fabulous: Elizabeth Taylor aged 24 in the photograph she gave to third husband Michael Todd. The picture was taken by one of her closest friends, actor and photographer Roddy McDowall

The picture was taken by one of her closest friends, actor and photographer Roddy McDowall. He persuaded her to pose naked by promising her it would be done tastefully.

She then gave it to Todd as a present after he proposed in 1956 – the pair married a few months later but the relationship was tragically short-lived.

Todd was killed 13 months after their wedding day when his private plane crashed during a storm over New Mexico.
Elizabeth Taylor with third husband Michael Todd and her sons Christopher and Michael

Elizabeth Taylor with third husband Michael Todd and her sons Christopher and Michael
Old friends: Roddy McDowall and Liz Taylor, years after her nude picture was taken

Old friends: Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor, years after her nude picture was taken

A devastated Miss Taylor is believed to have given the nude photograph to her assistant and make-up artist Penny Taylor.

It was bought by private collector Jim Shaudis in 1980 and had been thought lost. But after her death from heart failure last week aged 79, he decided to show the image publicly for fans of the star.

Since her death there have been a string of revelations and allegations about Dame Elizabeth's past.
 
Most recently it has been claimed that she was born at a 'swingers' party' in a Cheshire village, rather than London, which is what is written on her birth certificate.

It was said that her father, the art dealer Francis Taylor, and his actress wife Sara regularly attended disreputable gatherings in the village and were said to be 'the swingers of their day'.


Sexual chemistry: Elizabeth Taylor with Paul Newman in 1958's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof


Elizabeth Taylor as a child star in 1940 (left) and with future husband Richard Burton in Cleopatra (right)

Hollywood great: Elizabeth Taylor in her 1950s prime

It has also been claimed that she was the product of an affair and her real father was actually the millionaire Conservative MP Victor Cazalet, who became her godfather.

And in recently revealed love letters, a 17-year-old Elizabeth shared her dreams with her fiance before later agonising about returning an engagement ring when the relationship soured.

The handwritten letters are from 1949, when Taylor was engaged to William Pawley Jr, who was in his 20s and the son of a wealthy American businessman and ambassador.
Elizabeth Taylor's handwritten love letters

Young love: One of Elizabeth Taylor's handwritten love letters to her fiance William Pawley in 1949

'I received your wire this morning about sending the ring and bracelet to New York,' Taylor wrote to Pawley in a letter dated September 20, 1949, when their relationship was ending.

'I have the ring on now. It is sparkling so beautifully in the sunshine. I suppose this will be the last time I have it on - for a while at least. Take good care of it, Darling, for my heart is embedded right there in the center of it.'

The actress was buried earlier this week on a quiet hill outside Los Angeles in a small private ceremony.
ElizabethTaylor, aged 17 in this picture, with fiance William Pawley - son of a wealthy American businessman and ambassador - in Miami, Florida in 1949

Brief romance: ElizabethTaylor, aged 17 in this picture, with fiance William Pawley - son of a wealthy American businessman and ambassador - in Miami, Florida in 1949

She spent the last six weeks of her life in hospital and died of heart failure.

One of her last Twitter messages read simply: 'I'll let you know when it is all over. Love you, Elizabeth.'

The star had been plagued by health problems all her life. She estimated she had almost died four times.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... -time.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

PEACE IN THE MIDDLE WEST

How Israel Almost Ended Up In The Kimberleys

Published May, 2008
When you think about it, there's got to be a better place for Israel than the Middle East. It's one of the worst neighborhoods on earth. Crowded, violent, dusty, and hated by pretty much every-one on the block. Holy sites aside, wouldn't it be better if it was situated somewhere miles removed from care, some-where with a decent coastline, unsullied by ruins, and with some seriously exotic birds? How about Uganda? Even worse neighbors. How about Argentina? Crawling with ex-Nazis. How about North Western Australia? How about that? Now that might not be so bad after all.

In mid-1939 Dr Isaac Steinberg, who had for a few short months in 1917 been Minister for Justice in Lenin's first Soviet government, arrived in Australia on a mission for the Jewish Freeland League. His task was to investigate the last fertile and more-or-less uninhabited place on earth, a tropical savannah known as the Kimberley, to see if it could be proposed as an alternative to Palestine as a home for Jewish refugees. What he saw left him not only convinced, but entirely obsessed that this was where the Holy Land should be located, and for the following decade he ran a full time campaign to establish another Israel. What you probably don't know is that he damn near succeeded.

Steinberg arrived in Perth with nothing more than a few letters of recommendation in his pocket, but they were good ones. One from an Anglican Archbishop, one from a British Labour MP, and another from a Tory MP called Victor Cazalet, who referred to him as "a very fine type of Jew" and encouraged all who met him to be helpful. He also had a contact in the Durack family, who happened to own a farm. The farm in question, a typical family property of the time, stretched from the Indian Ocean to the border of the next state, running between the ocean and the Great Sandy Desert. It was roughly ten times the size of Belgium, and fifteen times the size of the current state of Israel, and had been properly mapped only a generation before.

Except for a few European cattle and some scattered tribes (a few hundred people), it was Terra Nullius, pristine and uninhabited. He immediately started roaming around taking soil samples, measuring rainfall, examining the rainfall, and writing up a report of his trip with the geologist George Melville. The plans were ambitious: sheep, cattle and goats could all be adapted to the countryside. Steinberg even toyed with the idea of a large pork industry. Then there was the soil, that looked like Russian chernozem, or black earth, the farmer's friend (let alone the volume of gold and diamonds beneath it, about which he couldn't have had a clue). Cereal crops, pasture, oil seeds. Anything would grow in it. The massive Ord River could provide hydroelectric power and more than adequate water. The Israeli settlers had to ruin the water table to 'make the desert bloom' in Palestine, but all farming in the Kimberleys required would be a couple of virgins to scatter seed in the moonlight before heading home for bible studies. Steinberg already had the financial connections to raise funding, and people were ready and willing to move. All he needed was permission. His first target was the Western Australian Premier Willcock, who was initially highly unsympathetic. He was concerned that a bunch of pasty Eastern Europeans wouldn't survive in the tropics and would end up on welfare in Perth. Steinberg addressed Willcock's objections, gave him right of veto over "undesirable settlers", and he was in. Soon afterwards, the main Perth newspaper, The West Australian, came on board, and started aggressively promoting the scheme. The two biggest Australian dailies, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, followed suit. The Anglican and Catholic Archbishops declared their support for the scheme on humanitarian grounds, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions passed a resolution too. All of a sudden Steinberg looked unstoppable. In 1939, the new Israel in the North West was one of the most popular topics in the Australian press. The papers were full of encouragement, arguing that as no one else wanted to go there and the Jews were so oppressed at home, they might as well have it. Sir Walter Murdoch wrote: "It would be tragic if Australia were to miss this opportunity of a piece of really constructive statesmanship."

For Zionist Jews however, the project was a distraction from the main goal, Palestine. They also didn't like the idea of a bunch of fresh-off-the-boat Jews ruining their standing in the local overwhelmingly anglo-saxon community. So while the Jewish Freeland League did everything they could to help Steinberg from New York and London (with the support of the Guggenheims and the Warburgs, no less), the Jewish Welfare Society did everything it could to stymie him in Sydney and Canberra. And in the meantime, World War II broke out. Curtin used this as an excuse to freeze the topic. In January 1941, he wrote to Steinberg that it was "not a suitable time to give favorable consideration to such a proposal". Pretty soon it would be too late, and Steinberg would be forced to watch the Holocaust from a virtual exile in Australia.

It was a golden opportunity. A state big enough for the entire Diaspora, far enough from Europe and the Middle East to have avoided almost every event of the whole miserable twentieth century. Imagine all those German Jewish physicists, musicians and psychotherapists sitting in open air cafes arguing about theology and penis envy from morning till night. How have we done without them? We've been bored stupid, and it's our own fault. And the rest of the world? The holocaust might never have happened, Palestine would not consist of a ring of refugee camps, and the entire historical basis of Islamic fundamentalism would never have appeared. No holocaust, no Gaza-strip, no Arab-Israeli conflict, no September 11.

So why not do it now, you might ask? The settlement of Kununurra, easily the largest town in the Kimberley today, has a population of slightly more than 5,000 people, and was planted very close to where Steinberg envisaged a New Tel Aviv. How hard would it be to buy out 5,000 bored Australian agricultural workers? A hell of a lot easier than buying out 5 million angry Palestinians. As the West Australian said in 1939: "In its present condition the Kimberley is worth next to nothing to WA or to Australia. If it is capable of successful development by an energetic race which has, what we lack, the incentive to cope with acknowledged difficulties in order to win a new home free from restrictions and persecution... they should be allowed to do so."

ADAM JASPER


http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n5/htdoc ... st-107.php