title: Human rights in North Korea

text: The NGO Freedom House has ranked North Korea at the very bottom of its "Freedom in the World" ratings since the survey was first launched in 1973. In Freedom House's 2013 survey, North Korea was one of nine countries that earned a 7 (its lowest rating) for both political rights and civil liberties. Its current report on North Korea categorizes it as "Not Free", and states that there are virtually no organizations independent of state control. North Korea has charged that those who make allegations about human rights in the country are interfering with the country's internal affairs and trying to force down their values.


title: Human rights in North Korea

text: Other international NGOs have been established with the purpose of relieving the human rights abuses faced by North Koreans. The North Korea Strategy Center works to provide people living in North Korea with access to videos, music, and other external media that promotes human rights and democracy. An organization called Liberty in North Korea collects charitable donations in order to perform rescue missions for defectors attempting to escape North Korea through China. Still other organizations focus on assisting defectors after they arrive in Southeast Asia, South Korea, the United States, or other destinations. Saejowi, a Seoul-based NGO, aims to provide medical support to defectors in South Korea, because they are often unable to understand the treatment options available to them.


title: Human rights in North Korea

text: With the exception of the international abductions issue regarding Japanese, Americans, and South Koreans, which it says has been fully resolved, North Korea strongly rejects all reports of human rights violations and accuses the defectors of promoting only an anti-North agenda.


title: Human rights in North Korea

text: On September 9, 2020, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul published a report stating that voices of citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, including women, are being curbed. It urged the United States and South Korea to raise concerns about North Korean human rights abuses, whenever the negotiations with North Korea resumes.


title: Human rights in North Korea

text: Estimates based on the North Korean census suggest that 240,000 to 420,000 people died as a result of the North Korean famine and that excess mortality during the whole period 1993 to 2008 was between 600,000 and 850,000. The famine has been described as the result of the economic policies of the North Korean government or as deliberate "terror-starvation". Co-author of "The Black Book of Communism" Pierre Rigoulot estimates 100,000 executions, 1.5 million deaths in concentration camps and 500,000 deaths from famine, reaching a total of 2.1 million victims (not counting 1.3 million Korean soldiers and civilians killed on both sides during the Korean War). During the Korean War the DPRK "liquidated" 29,000 civilians in the first 3 months of occupying South Korea.


title: AR Murugadoss

text: Murugadoss Arunasalam (born 25 September 1974), commonly known as A. R. Murugadoss, is an Indian film director, producer and screenwriter who predominantly works in the Tamil film industry. He is best known for directing action films mainly on social issues. In addition, he has worked in Telugu films and Hindi films. Murugadoss won the Filmfare Award for Best Director for his 2014 Tamil action drama "Kaththi".


title: AR Murugadoss

text: Murugadoss' first break in the film industry was as an assistant director of "Ratchagan" (1997). He then worked with S. J. Surya for the film "Kushi" (2000) before directing his first film, the Ajith starrer "Dheena" (2001). His first Bollywood film was "Ghajini" (2008), a Hindi remake of his Tamil film of the same name. It became the first Bollywood film to gross over domestically. In 2012, he directed the action thriller "Thuppakki", starring Vijay, which became the third Tamil film to gross 100 crore at the domestic box office alone. He worked with Vijay again with the box office hits "Kaththi" and "Sarkar" (2018).


title: AR Murugadoss

text: Murugadoss was born in Kallakurichi, Tamil Nadu. The initials "AR" refer to his father's name Arunasalam and were added after Murugadoss signed his first film, "Dheena", in 2001. Murugadoss currently resides in Virugambakkam, Chennai. Murugadoss had his schooling at the Government Higher Secondary School and studied BA in Bishop Heber College, Tiruchirapalli. His brother, Dileepan made his acting debut with "Vathikuchi", which is Murugadoss' production venture.


title: AR Murugadoss

text: During his college days, Murugadoss was active in cultural events, particularly in mimicry and drawing. He subsequently became a cinephile watching up to seven films a week in his hometown and started writing jokes as well. After Ananda Vikatan published them, Murugadoss began to think of becoming a story writer. At Bharathidasan University he started to write sketch comedies and acted in them. After college he tried to join the Madras Film Institute, but was rejected. Nevertheless, Murugadoss stayed in Chennai in multiple functions. First he became an assistant writer of P. Kalaimani and wrote dialogues for the Tamil film "Madurai Meenakshi." He became assistant director of "Ratchagan" (1997) for half of the film and continued as assistant script director for the Telugu film "Kalusukundam Ra". Murugadoss then worked with S. J. Surya for the film "Kushi".


title: AR Murugadoss

text: In 2003, he contemplated making a film titled "Varathan" with Vikram in the lead role for producer Oscar Ravichandran, but later moved on to other projects.


title: AR Murugadoss

text: S. J. Suryah recommended Murugadoss to Ajith Kumar for directing his debut film, "Dheena". His next films were "Ramana", "Ghajini", and "Stalin". His fifth film was "Ghajini", which was a Hindi remake of his same-titled 2005 film and marked his Bollywood debut. It released on 25 December 2008 and became the first Bollywood film to gross over 100 crore domestically. His next Tamil film "7aum Arivu", was released on Diwali 2011 and was more successful outside India than in Tamil Nadu. Murugadoss signed a deal with Fox Star Studios to produce two Tamil films.


title: AR Murugadoss

text: In 2012, he directed the action thriller "Thuppakki", starring Vijay and produced by S. Dhanu released on Diwali 2012 to mostly positive reviews and became the fourth Tamil film to enter the 100 crore club after "Enthiran". Thuppakki collected over 180 crores as reported by producer. He also directed the Hindi remake of the film, "". In 2014, he was the writer and producer for the fantasy film "Maan Karate" starring Sivakarthikeyan which was directed by his former assistant Thirukumaran.


title: AR Murugadoss

text: In 2014, he directed the action drama "Kaththi" starring Vijay and produced by Lyca Productions released on Diwali 2014 and emerged as one of the top-grossing films in Kollywood for 2014, collecting an estimated 131 crores. In 2016, he directed "Akira" starring Sonakshi Sinha. It is a remake of Tamil film "Mouna Guru". Then, he directed "Spyder" starring Mahesh Babu and Rakul Preet Singh. He joined with Vijay once again for the movie "Sarkar" which is produced by Sun Pictures Kalanithi Maran which released on 6 November 2018 for the Diwali. It released in over 3000 screens around the world. The next, his film "Darbar" starring Rajinikanth was released on 9 January 2020.


title: Munnar

text: Munnar () is a town and hill station in the Idukki district of the southwestern Indian state of Kerala. Munnar is situated at around above mean sea level, in the Western Ghats mountain range. Munnar is also called the "Kashmir of South India" and is a popular honeymoon destination.


title: Munnar

text: The name Munnar is believed to mean "three rivers", referring to its location at the confluence of the Mudhirapuzha, Nallathanni and Kundali rivers.


title: Munnar

text: The region has been inhabited by hunter-gatherer tribals like the Malayarayan and Muthuvan for thousands of years. Tradition states that Colonel Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, was the first British person to pass through Munnar during Tippu Sultan's campaign in Travancore, but this is unsubstantiated. The first survey of the terrain was undertaken by Benjamin Swayne Ward in 1816–1817, who followed the Periyar into the Western Ghats and established a camp at the confluence of three rivers, from which the name of Munnar is derived.


title: Munnar

text: It was to be nearly 50 years later that Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, instructed Col. Douglas Hamilton to explore the hill country in the western part of the Madras Presidency, requesting special advice on the feasibility of establishing sanatoria for the British in the South and of developing revenue- earning projects without endangering the environment, as had happened in Ceylon where coffee had destroyed not only the rain forest but also paddy cultivation in the north-central rice bowl of ancient Ceylon. Hamilton climbed throughout the Ghats in Munnar region. 15 years later, John Daniel Munro noted that much of Munnar's land was suitable for coffee plantations. Munro, Henry Turn and his half-brother AW Turner obtained ownership of the Cardamom Hills from the Raja of Travancore and began clearing forest around Devikulam in 1879. Soon many other Europeans began establishing tea plantations in the area throughout the 1880s. Early plantations had few facilities and were mainly huts of straw. Most labourers on the tea estates were Dalits from present-day Tamil Nadu.


title: Munnar

text: Eventually roads were opened to the lowlands and in Bodinayakanur in western Madras Presidency, planters got provisions from a local headman - Suppan Chetty. He and his son, Alaganan Chetty (later an MLA) would continue providing supplies to the tea estates in the region. By 1894, 26 estates were established in the hills but all were facing losses. In 1897, a separate company, Kannan Devan Hills Corporation (KDHC) was registered to operate the tea estates which was later taken over by the American Direct Tea Trading Company Ltd., who owned 26 estates, most with coffee and some with cinchona, almost all in the area except for a few in the lower areas.


title: Munnar

text: In 1900, a ropeway was built and eventually monorails were installed for easier transport of goods to the plains. In 1901, P. R. Buchanan took over as General Manager and began the most extensive clearing of jungles for plantations. In 1908, construction started on a new railway which opened in 1909. By 1911, around 16,000 acres of the region was under cultivation.


title: Munnar

text: In 1924, a flood swept through Munnar, damaged the road and destroyed the rail track. In its place it was decided to create a ropeway to transport tea. In 1930, this in turn was replaced by a modern road that made transport much easier. By 1952, almost 28,000 acres of land was under cultivation. After Independence, Indian planters took over. In 1964, the KDHC which owned most tea estates was acquired by Tata and Finlay who started the first instant tea factory in the country. In 1971, the Kerala government wanted to reforest all land in the hills not used for plantations. However negotiations that followed resulted in Tata keeping most of the land, leaving it with 57,000 acres.


title: Munnar

text: To this day, most tea estate labourers are landless. In the early 2000s, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, a Dalit outfit from Tamil Nadu, started demanding land for the labourers, started making inroads into Kerala. In 2009, VS Achuthanandan promised his support for providing land to the mainly Tamil Dalit estate labourers. However, the process became very slow and as of 2018, most families still hand no land.


title: Munnar

text: The former Kunda Valley Railway in Munnar was destroyed by a flood in 1924, but tourism officials are considering reconstructing the railway line to attract tourists.


title: Munnar

text: The region in and around Munnar varies in height from to above mean sea level. The temperature ranges between and in winter and and in summer. Temperatures as low as have been recorded in the Sevenmallay region of Munnar.


title: Munnar

text: Munnar is well connected by both National highways, state highways and rural roads. The town lies in the Kochi - Dhanushkodi National highway (N.H 49), about from Cochin, from Adimali, from Udumalpettu in Tamil Nadu and from Neriyamangalam.


title: Munnar

text: The nearest major railway stations are at Ernakulam (126 km) and Aluva (110 km). Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) bus stand is walking distance from Aluva Railway Station, and buses are available for Munnar every hour. The Nearest functioning Railway station is at Udumalaipettai.


title: Munnar

text: The nearest airport is Cochin International Airport, which is away. The Coimbatore and Madurai airports is from Munnar.


title: Munnar

text: The panchayath of Munnar formed in 1961 January 24 is divided into 21 wards for administrative convenience. Coimbatore district lies in the north, Pallivasal in south, Devikulam and Marayoor in east and Mankulam, Kuttampuzha panchayaths in the west.


title: Munnar

text: As of 2011 Indian census, Munnar Grama Panchayat had a total population of 32,039. 16,061 were males. and 15,968 were females, with 7,968 families total residing therein. Children represented in the age group of 0-6 were 2,916 (9.1% of the total population), which constitutes 1,478 males and 1,438 females. Munnar Panchayat had an overall literacy rate of 84.85%, substantially lower than the Kerala state average of 94.00%. Male literacy stands at 91.05% and Female literacy was 78.64%.


title: Munnar

text: Most of the native flora and fauna of Munnar have disappeared due to severe habitat fragmentation resultant from the creation of the plantations. However, some species continue to survive and thrive in several protected areas nearby, including the new Kurinjimala Sanctuary to the east, the Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Manjampatti Valley and the Amaravati reserve forest of Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary to the north east, the Eravikulam National Park and Anamudi Shola National Park to the north, the Pampadum Shola National Park to the south and the proposed Palani Hills National Park to the east.


title: Munnar

text: These protected areas are especially known for several threatened and endemic species including Nilgiri Thar, the grizzled giant squirrel, the Nilgiri wood-pigeon, elephant, the gaur, the Nilgiri langur, the sambar, and the neelakurinji (that blossoms only once in twelve years).


title: Munnar

text: There has been action to address the problems of property takeovers by the land mafia that have, according to successive governments, plagued the area. In 2011, the government estimated that 20,000 hectares of land had been illegally appropriated and launched a campaign of evictions that had first been mooted in 2007.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Robert Montgomery (; born Henry Montgomery Jr.; May 21, 1904 – September 27, 1981) was an American actor, director, and producer. He began his acting career on the stage, but was soon hired by MGM. Initially assigned roles in comedies, he soon proved he was able to handle dramatic ones as well. He appeared in a wide variety of roles, such as the weak-willed prisoner Kent in "The Big House" (1930), the psychotic Danny in "Night Must Fall" (1937), and Joe, the boxer mistakenly sent to Heaven in "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941). The last two earned him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: During World War II, he drove ambulances in France until the Dunkirk evacuation. When the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, he enlisted in the Navy, and was present at the invasion at Normandy. After the war, he returned to Hollywood, where he worked in both films and, later, in television. He was also the father of actress Elizabeth Montgomery.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Henry Montgomery Jr. was born in Fishkill Landing, New York (now Beacon, New York), to Henry Montgomery and his wife, Mary Weed Montgomery (née Barney), and was of Scottish and Scots-Irish heritage. His father was president of the New York Rubber Company, and committed suicide in 1922 by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, when the family's fortune was gone.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Montgomery settled in New York City to try his hand at writing and acting. He established a stage career, and became popular enough to turn down an offer to appear opposite Vilma Bánky in the film "This Is Heaven" (1929). Sharing a stage with George Cukor gave him an entry to Hollywood and a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he debuted in "So This Is College" (also 1929). One writer claimed that Montgomery was able to establish himself because he "proceeded with confidence, agreeable with everyone, eager and willing to take suggestions". However, author Scott Eyman wrote in 1997 he had an "off-screen reputation as one of the chilliest, most pompous actors ever to find his way to Hollywood."


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: During the production of "So This Is College", Montgomery learned from and questioned crew members from several departments, including sound crew, electricians, set designers, camera crew, and film editors. In a later interview, he confessed, "it showed [him] that making a motion picture is a great co-operative project." "So This Is College" gained him attention as Hollywood's latest newcomer, and he was put in one production after another, his popularity growing steadily.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Montgomery initially played exclusively in comedy roles; his first dramatic role was in "The Big House" (1930). MGM was initially reluctant to assign him the role, until "his earnestness, and his convincing arguments, with demonstrations of how he would play the character" won him the assignment. From "The Big House" on, he was in constant demand. He appeared as Greta Garbo's romantic interest in "Inspiration" (1930).


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Norma Shearer chose him to star opposite her in "The Divorcee" (1930), "Strangers May Kiss" (1931), and "Private Lives" (1931), which led him to stardom. In 1932, Montgomery starred opposite Tallulah Bankhead in "Faithless", though the film was not a success. During this time, Montgomery appeared in the original pre-Code film version of "When Ladies Meet" (1933), which starred Ann Harding and Myrna Loy. In 1935, Montgomery became president of the Screen Actors Guild, and was elected again in 1946. Montgomery played a psychopathic murderer in the thriller "Night Must Fall" (1937), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: After World War II began in Europe in September 1939, and while the United States was still officially neutral, Montgomery enlisted in London for the American Field Service and drove ambulances in France until the Dunkirk evacuation. He then returned to Hollywood and addressed a massive rally on the MGM lot for the American Red Cross in July 1940.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Montgomery returned to playing light comedy roles, such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (1941) with Carole Lombard. He continued his search for dramatic roles. For his role as Joe Pendleton, a boxer and pilot in "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941), Montgomery was nominated for an Oscar a second time. After the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941, he joined the United States Navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander, and served on the staff of the Commander of Destroyer Squadrons (COMDES) 5 and 60; Commanding Officer PT-107; aboard the light cruiser USS Columbia (CL-56); as an assistant naval attache at the U.S. Embassy, London; and as the Executive Officer of Motor Torpedo Boat 5 (PT-5).


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: In 1945, Montgomery returned to Hollywood, co-starring and making his uncredited directing debut in "They Were Expendable", where he directed some of the PT boat scenes when director John Ford was unable to work for health reasons. Montgomery's first credited film as director and his final film for MGM was the film noir "Lady in the Lake" (1947), adapted from Raymond Chandler's detective novel, in which he starred as Chandler's most famous character, Phillip Marlowe. It was filmed entirely from Marlowe's vantage point; Montgomery only appeared on camera a few times, three times in a mirror reflection. He also directed and starred in "Ride the Pink Horse" (1947), also a film noir.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Active in Republican politics and concerned about communist influence in the entertainment industry, Montgomery was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. The next year, 1948, Montgomery hosted the Academy Awards. He hosted an Emmy Award-winning television series, "Robert Montgomery Presents", which ran from 1950 to 1957. "The Gallant Hours" (1960), a film Montgomery directed and co-produced with its star, his friend James Cagney, was the last film or television production with which he was connected in any capacity, as actor, director, or producer. In 1955 Montgomery was awarded a Tony Award for his direction of "The Desperate Hours".


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: In 1954, Montgomery took an unpaid position as consultant and coach to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, advising him on how to look his best in his television appearances before the nation. A pioneering media consultant, Montgomery had an office in the White House beginning in 1954.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: Montgomery has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies at 6440 Hollywood Boulevard, and another for television at 1631 Vine Street.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: On April 14, 1928, Montgomery married actress Elizabeth Bryan Allen (December 26, 1904 – June 28, 1992), sister of Martha-Bryan Allen. The couple had three children: Martha Bryan, who died at 14 months of age in 1931; Elizabeth (April 15, 1933 – May 18, 1995), an actress best known for her 1960s television series, "Bewitched"; and Robert Jr. (January 6, 1936 – February 7, 2000). They divorced on December 5, 1950.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: His second wife was Elizabeth "Buffy" Grant Harkness (1909–2003), whom he married on December 9, 1950, four days after his divorce from Allen was finalized.


title: Robert Montgomery (actor)

text: He died of cancer on September 27, 1981, at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. His body was cremated and the ashes were given to the family. His two surviving children, Elizabeth and Robert Montgomery Jr., both died of cancer, as well.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, written by American author Richard Bach and illustrated with black-and-white photographs shot by Russell Munson, is a fable in novella form about a seagull who is trying to learn about life and flight, and a homily about self-perfection. It was first published in book form in 1970 with little advertising or expectations; by the end of 1972, over a million copies were in print, the book having reached the number one spot on bestseller lists mostly through word of mouth recommendations.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: In 2014 the book was reissued as Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The Complete Edition, which added a 17-page fourth part to the story.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The book tells the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a seagull who is bored with daily squabbles over food. Instead of doing the same as the other gulls he decides to follow what his heart says. Seized by a passion for flight, he pushes himself and learns everything he can about flying. His increasing unwillingness to conform finally results in his expulsion from the flock. Now an outcast, he continues to learn, becoming increasingly pleased with his abilities while leading a peaceful and happy life.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: One day Jonathan meets two gulls who take him to a "higher plane of existence" in which there is no heaven, but a better world found through perfection of knowledge. There he meets another seagull who loves to fly. He discovers that his sheer tenacity and desire to learn have made him "pretty well a one-in-a-million bird." In this new place, Jonathan befriends the wisest gull, Chiang, who takes him beyond his previous self-education, and teaches him how to move instantaneously to anywhere else in the Universe. The secret, Chiang says, is to "begin by knowing that you have already arrived."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: But unsatisfied with his new life, Jonathan returns to Earth to find others like himself to teach them what he has learned and to spread his love for flight. His mission is successful, and Jonathan gathers around himself a flock of other gulls who have been declared outcasts themselves for not conforming. The first of his students, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, ultimately becomes a teacher in his own right, and Jonathan leaves to teach other flocks.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Part One of the book finds young Jonathan Livingston frustrated with the meaningless materialism, conformity, and limitations of the seagull life. He is seized with a passion for flight of all kinds, and his soul soars as he experiments with exhilarating challenges of daring aerial feats. Eventually, his lack of conformity to the limited seagull life leads him into conflict with his flock, and they turn their backs on him, casting him out of their society and exiling him. Not deterred by this, Jonathan continues his efforts to reach higher and higher flight goals, finding he is often successful. But eventually, he can fly no higher. He is then met by two radiant, loving seagulls who explain to him that he has learned much, and that they are there now to help him learn more about himself.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Jonathan transcends into a society where all the gulls enjoy flying. He is only capable of this after practicing hard alone for a long time and the first learning process of linking the highly experienced teacher and the diligent student is raised to almost sacred levels. They, regardless of all their immense differences, are sharing something of great importance that can bind them together: "You've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull." He realizes that you have to be true to yourself: "You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The last words of Chiang, Jonathan's teacher, are, "Keep working on love." Through his teachings, Jonathan understands that the spirit cannot be really free without the ability to forgive, and that the way to progress leads—for him, at least—through becoming a teacher, not just through working hard as a student. Jonathan returns to the Breakfast Flock to share his newly discovered ideals and the recent tremendous experience, ready for the difficult fight against the current rules of that society. The ability to forgive seems to be a mandatory "passing condition."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: In 2013 Richard Bach took up a non-published fourth part of the book which he had written contemporaneously with the original. He edited and polished it, and then sent the result to a publisher. Bach reported that he was inspired to finish the fourth part of the novella by a near-death experience which had occurred in relation to a nearly fatal plane crash in August 2012. In February 2014, the 138-page Bach work "" was published as a booklet by Kindle Direct Publishing. "Illusions II" also contains allusions to and insights regarding the same near-death experience. In October 2014, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The Complete Edition," was published, and this edition includes Part Four of the story.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Part Four focuses on the period several hundred years after Jonathan and his students have left the Flock and their teachings become venerated rather than practiced. The birds spend all their time extolling the virtues of Jonathan and his students and spend no time flying for flying's sake. The seagulls practice strange rituals and use demonstrations of their respect for Jonathan and his students as status symbols. Eventually some birds reject the ceremony and rituals and just start flying. Eventually one bird named Anthony Gull questions the value of living since "...life is pointless and since pointless is by definition meaningless then the only proper act is to dive into the ocean and drown. Better not to exist at all than to exist like a seaweed, without meaning or joy [...] He had to die sooner or later anyway, and he saw no reason to prolong the painful boredom of living." As Anthony makes a dive-bomb to the sea, at a speed and from an altitude which would kill him, a white blur flashes alongside him. Anthony catches up to the blur, which turns out to be a seagull, and asks what the bird was doing:


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: "I'm sorry if I startled you," the stranger said in a voice as clear and friendly as the wind. "I had you in sight all the time. Just playing...I wouldn't have hit you."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: "No! No, that's not it." Anthony was awake and alive for the first time in his life, inspired. "What was that?"


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: "Oh, some fun-flying, I guess. A dive and pullup to a slow roll with a rolling loop off the top. Just messing around. If you really want to do it well it takes a bit of practice, but it's a nice-looking thing, don't you think?"


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: "It's, it's...beautiful, is what it is! But you haven't been around the Flock at all. Who are you, anyway?"


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Bach initially wrote it as a series of short stories that were published in "Flying" magazine in the late 1960s.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Bach, who said the book came to him as "a visionesque spooky thing," stopped after he wrote 10 pages and didn't pick it up again for a few years.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The book was rejected by several publishers before coming to the attention of Eleanor Friede at Macmillan in 1969. "I think it has a chance of growing into a long-lasting standard book for readers of all ages," she wrote presciently in her acquisition memo. She convinced Macmillan to buy it and Bach received a $2,000 advance ($15,000 in 2022 dollars).


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Jonathan Livingston Seagull is named after John H. Livingston, a Waco Aircraft Company test pilot who died of a heart attack in 1974, at the age of 76, just after he had test-flown an acrobatic home-built Pitts Special.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The book was a sleeper hit; the first edition in 1970 was only 3,000 copies and it would take two years before reaching number one on the "New York Times" Bestseller List. "Not a single magazine or newspaper — including "The New York Times Book Review" — so much as mentioned" the book when it first came out, "The Times" reported in 1972. Macmillan failed to secure any advance publicity for Bach, but he personally took out two very small ads in "The New York Times Book Review" and "Publishers Weekly". The first printing sold out by the end of 1970, and in 1971 an additional 140,000 copies were printed. Mostly a word of mouth phenomenon, it entered the NYT Bestseller List on April 20, 1972, where it remained for 37 weeks, and by July 1972 it had 440,000 copies in print. "Reader's Digest" published a condensed version. In 1972 and 1973, the book topped the "Publishers Weekly" list of bestselling novels in the United States.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Book sellers didn't know how to classify it. "Some put it under nature, some under religion, some under photography, some under children’s books." Friede's advice was "Put it next to the cash register."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Several early commentators, emphasizing the first part of the book, see it as part of the US self-help and positive thinking culture, epitomised by Norman Vincent Peale and by the New Thought movement. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the book was "so banal that it had to be sold to adults; kids would have seen through it."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The book is listed as one of fifty "timeless spiritual classics" in a book by Tom Butler-Bowdon, who noted that "it is easy now, thirty-five years on, to overlook the originality of the book's concept, and though some find it rather naïve, in fact it expresses timeless ideas about human potential."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: John Clute, for "The Encyclopedia of Fantasy" (1997), wrote: "an animal fantasy about a philosophical gull who is profoundly affected by flying, but who demands too much of his community and is cast out by it. He becomes an extremely well-behaved accursed wanderer, then dies, and in posthumous "fantasy" sequences--though he is too wise really to question the fact of death, and too calmly confident to have doubts about his continuing upward mobility--he learns greater wisdom. Back on Earth, he continues to preach and heal and finally returns to heaven, where he belongs."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" has been translated into over thirty languages. Here is a partial list of editions and translations:


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: In 1980 a Spanish edition was published by Pomaire (Barcelona) featuring illustrations by photographer Jordi Olavarrieta, translated by Carol and Frederick Howell. In 1981 a French edition was published by Flammarion (Paris) featuring illustrations by photographer Jordi Olavarrieta, translated by Pierre Clostermann.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The novella inspired the production of a film of the same title in 1973. The film was made by Hall Bartlett many years before computer-generated effects were available. In order to make seagulls act on cue and perform aerobatics, Mark Smith of Escondido, California built radio-controlled gliders that looked like real seagulls from a few feet away. This footage was not used in the final cut of the film.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: Bach had written the film's original screenplay, but he sued Paramount Pictures before the film's release because he felt that there were too many discrepancies between the film and the book. Director Bartlett had allegedly violated a term in his contract with Bach which stated that no changes could be made to the film's adaptation without Bach's consent. Bach took offense to scenes Bartlett had filmed which were not present in the book, most notably the sequence in which Jonathan is suddenly attacked by a wild hawk, which was voiced by Bartlett himself. Ultimately, the court ruled that Bach's name would be taken off the screenplay credits, and that the film would be released with a card indicating that Bach disapproved of the final cut. Bach's attorney claimed, "It took tremendous courage to say this motion picture had to come out of theaters unless it was changed. Paramount was stunned."


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The Grammy Award-winning soundtrack album was composed and performed by Neil Diamond and produced by Tom Catalano. It won the 1974 Grammy Award as Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or a Television Special. The album apparently also made more money than the film, selling two million copies in the United States, 400,000 in France, 250,000 in Germany, 200,000 in Canada and 100,000 in the United Kingdom.


title: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

text: The Irish actor Richard Harris won a Grammy in 1973 for the Audiobook LP "Jonathan Livingston Seagull." To date, Harris's reading has not been released on any other format. Versions read by the author, Richard Bach, have been released on LP, cassette, and CD.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: Becker is an American sitcom television series that originally aired on CBS from November 2, 1998, to January 28, 2004, broadcasting 129 episodes. Set in the New York City borough of the Bronx, the show starred Ted Danson as John Becker, a cantankerous doctor who operates a small practice and is constantly annoyed by his patients, co-workers, and friends, and practically everything and everybody else in his world. Despite everything, his patients and friends are loyal because Becker genuinely cares about them. The series was produced by Dave Hackel Productions and Industry Entertainment, in association with Paramount Network Television.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: The show revolved around Becker and the things that annoyed him, although the members of the supporting cast also had their moments. The relationships between Becker and Reggie, and, later, Becker and Chris formed the key plots of many episodes. The show tackled more serious issues as well, such as race, homosexuality, transgender identities, addiction, nymphomania, schizophrenia, cerebral AVM, and political correctness.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: Terry Farrell was written out of "" (where she played Jadzia Dax) after her contract expired without renegotiation. Soon after, Farrell got the role of Reggie. According to Farrell, the original plan was for Reggie and Becker to have a relationship with romantic tension over the course of the show; the show's ending would be them going on their first date. However, the producers became worried that this would be compared to Sam and Diane's relationship on "Cheers", so they backed away from it.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: At the end of season four, Nancy Travis was introduced for a short arc playing Chris, Becker's new neighbor. Chris was a cheerful and optimistic character, the opposite of Becker, and would serve as a rival for Reggie. The season ended with a cliffhanger as Reggie kissed Becker and then left. However, Farrell was dropped at the end of season four, which came as a shock to her. Creator and executive producer David Hackel and Farrell have both stated that it had nothing to do with Farrell supporting the cast in a lawsuit and walkout for a promised pay raise after season three. Hackel said that Chris and Becker's relationship would "shake things up a bit," which the network wanted, and that, instead of having Reggie do the usual thing and return to patch things up, she would just decide to leave.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: The show was offered in syndication between 2003 and 2004, after its network run on CBS ended. In the U.S., the show aired on WGN America until 2010. ReelzChannel added the show in fall 2010. From January 2017 it is on Antenna TV.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: In Australia, "Becker" was originally broadcast on Network Ten. Reruns of the series have been aired weekdays on Foxtel's pay TV network 111 funny and Network Ten's digital channel 10 Peach.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: CBS DVD (distributed by Paramount) has released all six seasons of "Becker" on DVD in Region 1. Season 4-6 are Manufacture-on-Demand (MOD) releases, available exclusively via Amazon.com's CreateSpace program.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: In Region 2, Paramount Home Entertainment released the first season on DVD on April 28, 2008. There were issues with the discs that meant audio and video were out of sync.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: In Region 4, Paramount Home Entertainment released the first three seasons on DVD in 2008/2009. In 2013, Umbrella Entertainment acquired the rights to the series and subsequently re-released the first three seasons. Season 4 was released on February 5, 2014. Season 5 and 6 were released in August 2016.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: "Becker" debuted as part of CBS' highly rated Monday night lineup as a midseason replacement for the cancelled sitcom "The Brian Benben Show", taking over the timeslot at 9:30 PM Eastern time. The show performed well for its first four seasons, piggybacking off the ratings of its lead-in, "Everybody Loves Raymond"; in its first four seasons, "Becker" ranked in the top 20 and peaked at #13.


title: Becker (TV series)

text: Despite the ratings wins they were getting with the series, CBS decided to try to find a new home for "Becker" and relocated the sitcom to lead off its Sunday night lineup. The ratings unexpectedly fell as "Becker" dropped out of the top 50 in the ratings, and CBS was set to cancel the series. The network relented and gave "Becker" a sixth and last season, but was only willing to order thirteen episodes and intended to air it as a midseason replacement. Once again, the network changed its decision and the last season launched in the fall. Moved to Wednesday nights and aired in tandem with former Monday staple "The King of Queens", the 129th and last episode of "Becker" was aired on January 28, 2004.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine – the biblical Land of Israel – was flawed or unjust in some way.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Until World War II, anti-Zionism was widespread among Jews for varying reasons. Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism on religious grounds, as preempting the Messiah, while secular Jews felt uncomfortable with the idea that Jewish peoplehood was a national or ethnic identity. Opposition to Zionism in the Jewish diaspora was surmounted only from the 1930s onward, as conditions for Jews deteriorated radically in Europe and, with the Second World War, the sheer scale of the Holocaust struck home. Thereafter, Jewish anti-Zionist groups generally either disintegrated or transformed into pro-Zionist organizations, though many small groups, and bodies like the American Council for Judaism, conserved an earlier Reform tradition of rejection of Zionism. Non-Jewish anti-Zionism likewise spanned communal and religious groups, with the Arab population of Palestine largely opposed to what it considered the colonial dispossession of its homeland. Opposition to Zionism was, and continues to be, widespread in the Arab world, especially among Palestinians.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Zionism's proponents note its success in establishing the Jewish state of Israel in the region of Palestine, and seek to portray anti-Zionism as broad opposition to Israel and a Jewish presence in the region. Supporters of Zionism often highlight that some antisemites hold anti-Zionist views. The relationship between Zionism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism is debated, with some academics and organizations that study antisemitism taking the view that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic or new antisemitism, while others reject any such linkage as unfounded and a method to stifle criticism of Israel and its policies, including its occupation of the West Bank.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Formal anti-Zionism arose in the late 19th century as a response to Theodor Herzl's proposal in "The Jewish State" (1896) to create an independent country in Palestine for Jews subject to persecution in the "civilized nations" of Europe. But even before Herzl, the idea of Zionism – of Jews as constituting a nation rather than a people constituted by their religion – promoted by Moses Hess (1862) and Leo Pinsker (1882) elicited fierce opposition within European Orthodox Jewry. Samson Raphael Hirsch, for one, considered the active promotion of Jewish emigration to Palestine a sin. The creation of a Jewish state before the appearance of the messiah was widely interpreted in Jewish religious circles as contradicting the divine will, a programme, furthermore, that was visibly driven by Jewish secularists. Until World War I, across Central Europe, Jewish religious leaders largely perceived the Zionist movement's aspirations for Jewish nationhood in a distant "New Judea" as a threat, in that it might encourage paradoxically the very antisemites, with their treatment of Jews in their midst as "aliens", whose fundamental rationale Zionism itself sought to undermine.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: When Herzl began to propound his proposal, many, including, secular Jews, regarded Zionism as a fanciful and unrealistic movement. Some antisemites even dismissed it as a "Jewish trick". Many assimilationist Jewish liberals, heirs of the Enlightenment, had argued that Jews should enjoy full equality in exchange for a pledge of loyalty to their respective nation-states. Those liberal Jews who accepted integration and assimilationist principles saw Zionism as a threat to efforts to facilitate Jewish citizenship and equality within the European nation-state context. Many in the intellectual elite of the Anglo-Jewish community, for example, opposed Zionism because they felt most at home in England, where, in their view, antisemitism was neither a social or cultural norm. The Jewish establishment in Germany, France (and its Alliance Israelite Universelle), and America strongly identified with its respective states, a sentiment that made it regard Zionism negatively. Reform rabbis in German-speaking lands and Hungary advocated the erasure of all mentions of Zion in their prayer books. Herzl's successor, the Zionist atheist Max Nordau, whose views on race coincided with those of the antisemitic Drumont, lambasted Reform Judaism for emptying ancient Jewish prayers of their literal meaning in claiming that the Jewish diaspora was a fact of destiny.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Herzl's proposal initially met with broad, vigorous opposition within Jewish intellectual, social and political movements. A notable exception was the religious Mizrachi movement. Among left-wing currents within diaspora Jewish communities, strong opposition emerged in such formations as the Bundism, Autonomism, Folkism, Jewish Communists, Territorialism, and Jewish-language anarchist movements. Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union created to combat "Jewish bourgeois nationalism", targeted the Zionist movement and managed to close down its offices and place Zionist literature under a ban, but Soviet officials themselves often disapproved of anti-Zionist zeal.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Arabs began paying attention to Zionism in the late Ottoman period. As early as 1905, the Maronite Christian Naguib Azoury, in his "The Awakening of the Arab Nation", warned that the "Jewish people" were engaged in a concerted drive to establish a country in the area they believed was their homeland. Subsequently, the Palestinian Christian-owned and highly influential newspaper Falastin was founded in 1911 in the then Arab-majority city of Jaffa and soon became the area's fiercest and most consistent critic of the Zionist movement. It helped shape Palestinian identity and nationalism.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Zionism took a decisive turn, and became a serious force, with the November 1917 publication of the Balfour Declaration – which arguably emerged from an antisemitic milieu – in the face of strenuous resistance from two anti-Zionists, Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu, then the (Jewish) Secretary of State for India. Other than assuring civil equality for all future Palestinians regardless of creed, it promised diaspora Jews territorial rights to Palestine, where, according to the 1914 Ottoman census of its citizens, 83% were Muslim, 11.2% Christian, and 5% Jewish. The majority Muslim and Christian population constituting 94% of the citizenry only had their "religious rights" recognized.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Given that Arab notables were almost unanimous in repudiating Zionism, and incidents like the massacre at Al-Sarafand stirred deep resentment against the British throughout the area, the British army view, confided to American officers with the King–Crane Commission, was that the provisions for Zionism could only be implemented by military force. To this end, the army calculated that a standing army of at least 50,000 troops would be required to implement the Zionist project on Palestinian soil. According to Henry Laurens, uneasiness over this task by a colonial army that had been accustomed to treat and defend colonial populations in a quasi-feudal/paternalistic manner, accounts for much of the hostility the British army in Palestine was to feel toward Zionists.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: American approval of the Declaration came about through the direct and secret mediation of the antisemitic anti-Zionist Colonel House with President Woodrow Wilson by bypassing Robert Lansing, the United States Secretary of State. The last sentence in the draft proposal passed to Wilson, mentioning Jews "who are fully contented with their existing nationality and citizenship", was struck from the final British version. This recognition by Wilson stirred great anxieties among numerous leaders of the American Jewish community, which had made the adoption of its country a "theological substitution for the return to Zion" and was highly satisfied with its prosperous lives in this "new Zion". 299 prominent rabbis registered their disapproval in a submission to the forthcoming Paris Peace Conference, rebuffing the notion that there could ever be a Jewish Palestine. When he found out, Lansing thought that Zionism contradicted Wilson's own declared principle of self-determination for the peoples of the world. One other effect was that of laying the grounds for an anti-Zionist tradition in the US State Department.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Once the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) began to implement the Balfour Declaration, both sides had reason to accuse the authorities of partisanship. Several contemporary sources credit the notion that English administrators were partial to Arabs, and diffident about, if not outright disliking, Jews. One Zionist complaint was that among the higher functionaries of the British Mandatory administration were several officials who countenanced anti-Zionist and even antisemitic policies. The energetic arguments of Jacob Israël de Haan on behalf of sectors of the Orthodox yishuv who disagreed with Zionism also played an important role in getting Mandate authorities to grasp that Zionists did not represent the entire Palestinian Jewish community. The Haganah assassinated him in 1924.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: The British press during the Mandate period was often critical – the Northcliffe Press was openly anti-Zionist, and the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook was opposed to the Mandate itself – and complaints were made of the heavy burden it was to govern the land with competing national interests. It was claimed that Zionism's promise of a homeland for the Jewish people with civil rights for its Arab citizens was impossible to realize. Much of this anti-Zionist sentiment and diffidence about Jews in the early Mandate years, limited in scope like British antisemitism, was also tinged with anti-Bolshevism, since the Russian revolution had earlier engendered a sharp spike in antisemitism in the British press. Official sponsorship of Zionism, as evidenced by the Balfour Declaration, had been influenced by the communist takeover of Russia, which Anglo-Jewry itself abhorred, in which Jews were alleged to have played a major role. Palestinians raised the spectre of possible communist infiltration in the guise of Zionism before the horrified British administration with some success.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: OETA and the British government took these claims seriously and addressed them in the Palin Commission report in August 1920, an investigation into the reasons behind the subsequent anti-Zionist riots at Nebi Musa. The Commission found that there was a widespread perception among the Arabs, reflected also among British residents and officials, that that the Zionists' attitudes and zealous behaviour exacerbated hostilities, being perceived as "arrogant, insolent and provocative."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Some members of the Jewish-Marxist Poale Zion, which advocated under Ber Borochov a separate Zionist organization for Jewish workers and advocated emigration to Palestine as a solution to antisemitism, found to their surprise on making aliyah that Palestine was a predominantly Arab country. By the early 1920s, the realization that Zionism would be discriminatory had turned Poale militants like Yaakov Meiersohn and Joseph Berger into anti-Zionists. In 1922 the Comintern's disowning of Poale Zion spurred the growth of a Jewish anti-Zionist left in Palestine, culminating with the formation of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which retained some residual Zionist traces. This anti-Zionist Jewish PCP was recognized by the Comintern in 1924, and, that same year, the first Palestinian Arab joined the party.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: The Yiddish-speaking General Jewish Labor Union of Eastern Europe, the largest Jewish left-wing organization in Europe between the two wars, focused on a practice of "doykayt" (hereness) as the key to Jewish identity; that is, it advocated addressing practical issues Jews faced all over the diaspora in their respective national contexts. It dismissed its antagonist Zionism's vision of resolving matters definitively by emigrating to Palestine as marked by a "separatist, chauvinist, clerical and conservative" outlook, values diametrically opposed to Bundism's secular, progressive and internationalist principles.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) was resolutely anti-Zionist throughout this period through to 1947, seeing it as embedded in an imperial British colonialist oppression of the Arab masses. Under its general secretrary Earl Browder, a clear distinction was drawn between pogroms in Europe, which were likened to what hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Black Legion practiced in America, and the Arab resistance to Jewish settlers in Palestine. At the time around half of the CPUSA's membership was Jewish, with perhaps 10% of the American Jewish population joining the movement over a decade. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, members of the American Jewish left and its intelligentsia were almost all anti-Zionists, the exception being Meyer Levin. Mike Gold's 1930 novel "Jews without Money", which depicts a Zionist entrepreneur's fatal extortion of a poor Jew, can be read as a proletarian critique of both American capitalism and, tacitly in its subplot, of Zionist practices in Palestine.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: As well as left-wing critiques of Zionism, many mainstream liberal and conservative communal organisations in the diaspora continued to promote an assimilationist anti-Zionism. In Germany, for example, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) argued that German Jews should be primarily loyal to Germany and identify as Jews only on religious terms. Soon after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933, Jews, and anti-Zionists among them, were galvanized to organize global protests against the new regime's discrimination against their German confreres.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Similarly, as Italian fascism came to identify Zionism with enemies of the country abroad, in 1934 the Italian-Israeli Community Union responded to pressure by solemnly affirming the community's allegiance to their country. Italian anti-Zionists such as Ettore Ovazza reacted by creating their own newspaper, "La Nostra Bandiera" (Our Flag), whose editorial line maintained that the establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine was anachronistic.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In May 1942, before the full revelation of the Holocaust, the Biltmore Program proclaimed a radical departure from traditional Zionist policy by adopting a maximalist position in calling for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth in an unpartitioned Palestine to resolve the issue of Jewish homelessness. At the American Jewish Conference in late August-early September the following year, Zionists received 85% as opposed to 5% for the anti-Zionists. Opposition to official Zionism's firm, unequivocal stand caused some prominent Zionists to establish their own party, Ichud (Unification), which advocated an Arab–Jewish Federation in Palestine. Ichud represented a very small minority of Jewish Palestine; there were only 97 party members in 1943. Opposition to the Biltmore Program also led to the founding of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, which, according to Noam Chomsky was the only Jewish group in America immediately after WW2 to lobby for the immigration of Jewish Holocaust-survivors to the United States, rather than Palestine.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Orthodox Judaism, which stressed civic responsibilities and patriotic feelings in religion, was strongly opposed to Zionism because Zionism espoused nationalism in a secular fashion and used "Zion", "Jerusalem", "Land of Israel", "redemption" and "ingathering of exiles" as literal rather than sacred terms, endeavouring to achieve them in this world. According to Menachem Keren-Kratz, the situation in the United States differed, with most Reform rabbis and laypeople endorsing Zionism. Dina Porat holds the opposite view of Orthodox Jewish opinion generally.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Elaborating on the work of David N. Myers, Jonathan Judaken states that "numerous Jewish traditions have insisted that preservation of what is most precious about Judaism and Jewishness 'demands' a principled anti-Zionism or post-Zionism." This tradition dwindled in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel, but is still alive in religious groups such as Neturei Karta and among many intellectuals of Jewish background in Israel and the diaspora, such as George Steiner, Tony Judt and Baruch Kimmerling.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: There was a shift in the meaning of anti-Zionism after the events of the 1940s. Whereas pre-1948 anti-Zionism was against the hypothetical establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, post-1948 anti-Zionism had to contend with the existence of the State of Israel. This often meant taking a retaliatory position to the new reality of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. The overriding impulse of post-1948 anti-Zionism is to dismantle the current State of Israel and replace it with something else.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: On the eve of the foundation of Israel in 1948, Judah Magnes, president of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, adopted an anti-Zionist position in opposing the imminent estabishment of a Jewish State. His opposition was grounded on a view, anticipated in the 1930s by Arthur Ruppin, that such a state would automatically entail a situation of continuous warfare with the Arab world, an inference Moshe Dayan later endorsed.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: By 1948, when the Soviet Union recognized Israel, Jewish institutional life within its borders had been effectively dismantled. The Soviet Union nonetheless played a leading role in recognizing the state of Israel, was harshly critical of Arab states opposing it and enabled Israel to procure substantial armaments in 1948-1949. However, at roughly the same time, in early 1948, Ilya Ehrenburg had been co-opted to write an article for Pravda which set forth what was later to become the authoritative rationale for Soviet hostility to Zionism, as aspiring to create a dwarfish state of capitalism. Virulent antisemitism, particularly after the fabricated Doctors' plot affair in 1953, and with clear parallels to the content of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, came to the fore, conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism despite the conceptual distinction between the two. A deep-seated antisemitic strain within Russian culture influencing the Soviet state's approach to events in the Middle Easts emerged to intensify the Soviet leadership's anti-Zionist hostility towards Israel as a major threat to the communist world, especially in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, when official documents and party connivance resuscitated antisemitic imagery related to Zionism.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Two waves of mass Russian-Jewish immigration to Israel, the Soviet Union aliyah and 1990s post-Soviet aliyah, took place from the 1970s onwards. According to Anthony Julius, in 1989, "Soviet anti-Zionism was credibly considered the greatest threat to Israel and Jews generally. ... This 'anti-Zionism' survived the collapse of the Soviet system."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In a retrospective analysis of Arab anti-Zionism in 1978, Yehoshafat Harkabi argued, in a view reflected in the works of the anti-Zionist Russian-Jewish orientalist Maxime Rodinson, that Arab hostility to Zionism arose as a rational response in historical context to a genuine threat, and, with the establishment of Israel, their anti-Zionism was shaped as much by Israeli policies and actions as by traditional antisemitic stereotypes, and only later degenerated into an irrational attitude. Anne de Jong asserts that direct resistance to Zionism from inhabitants of historical Palestine "focused less on religious arguments and was instead centered on countering the experience of colonial dispossession and opposing the Zionist enforcement of ethnic division of the indigenous population."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Until 1948, according to Derek Penslar, antisemitism in Palestine "grew directly out of the conflict with the Zionist movement and its gradual yet purposeful settlement of the country," rather than the European model vision of Jews as the cause of all the ills of mankind. According to Anthony Julius, anti-Zionism, a highly heterogeneous phenomenon, and Palestinian nationalism, are separate ideologies; one need not have an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be an anti-Zionist.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: One Arab criticism of Zionism is that Islamic–Jewish relations were entirely peaceful until Zionism conquered Arab lands. Arab delegates to the United Nations also claimed that Zionists had unethically enticed Arab Jews to come to Israel. According to Gil Troy, neither claim is historically accurate as Jews did not have the same rights as Muslims in these lands and had periodically experienced violent riots.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviets and Americans interpreted the Arab-Israeli conflict as a proxy war between the totalitarianism of the Soviet-Arab alliance and the democracies of the Western world. The Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 necessitated a diplomatic response by the Soviet-Arab alliance. The result were resolutions in the Organization for African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement condemning Zionism and equating it with racism and apartheid during the early 1970s.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: This culminated in November 1975 in the United Nations General Assembly's passage of Resolution 3379 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), which declared, "Zionism is a form of racism, and racial discrimination". The passage evoked, in the words of American UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "a long mocking applause." UN representatives from Libya, Syria, and the PLO made speeches claiming that this resolution negated previous resolutions calling for land-for-peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Israel's UN representative Chaim Herzog interpreted the resolution as an attack on Israel's legitimacy. African UN delegates from non-Arab countries also resented the resolution as a distraction from the fight against racism in places like South Africa and Rhodesia.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: The decision was revoked on 16 December 1991, when the General Assembly passed Resolution 4686, repealing resolution 3379, by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions and 17 delegations absent. Thirteen of the 19 Arab countries, including those engaged in negotiations with Israel, voted against the repeal, and another six were absent. All the ex-communist countries and most of the African countries who had supported Resolution 3379 voted to repeal it.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In 1993, philosopher Cornel West wrote: "Jews will not comprehend what the symbolic predicament and literal plight of Palestinians in Israel means to blacks... Blacks often perceive the Jewish defense of the state of Israel as a second instance of naked group interest, and, again, an abandonment of substantive moral deliberation." African-American support of Palestinians is frequently due to the consideration of Palestinians as people of color – political scientist Andrew Hacker writes: "The presence of Israel in the Middle East is perceived as thwarting the rightful status of people of color. Some blacks view Israel as essentially a white and European power, supported from the outside, and occupying space that rightfully belongs to the original inhabitants of Palestine."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In January 2015, the Lausanne movement published an article in its official journal comparing Christian Zionism, the crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, and described Zionism as "apartheid on steroids". The Simon Wiesenthal Center called this last claim "the big lie", and rebutted the "dismissal of the validity of Israel's right to exist as the Jewish State".


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Anti-Zionist Muslims consider the State of Israel as an intrusion into what Shari'a law defines as Dar al-islam, the Islamic counterpart to the Land of Israel in rabbinical law, and a domain they believe to be rightfully, and permanently, ruled only by Muslims as it was historically conquered in the name of Islam.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Palestinian and other Muslim groups, as well as the government of Iran (since the 1979 Islamic Revolution), insist that the State of Israel is illegitimate and refuse to refer to it as "Israel", instead using the locution "the Zionist entity" (see Iran–Israel relations). In an interview with "Time" magazine in December 2006, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "Everyone knows that the Zionist regime is a tool in the hands of the United States and British governments." The anti-Zionism of Hamas is indistinguishable from the group's antipathy for Judaism.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Anti-Zionism has a long history of being supported by various individuals and groups associated with Third Position, right-wing and fascist (or "neo-fascist") political views. A number of militantly racist groups and their leaders are anti-Zionist, such as David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, and various other Aryan/White-supremacist groups. In these instances, anti-Zionism is usually also deeply antisemitic, and often revolves around conspiracy theories discussed below. The opposite phenomenon, of Zionist/pro-Israel antisemites, has also been documented, often associated with American Christian evangelicals.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: According to New York University social and cultural theorist Susie Linfield, one of the most pressing questions facing the New Left following World War II was "How can we maintain our traditional universalist values in light of the nationalist movements sweeping the formerly colonized world?"


title: Anti-Zionism

text: During the late 1960s, anti-Zionism became a part of a collection of sentiments within the far-left politics including anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism. In this environment, Zionism became a representation of Western power. Indeed, philosopher Jean Améry argued that this "Zionism" that the left opposes is merely a straw man redefinition of the term used to mean world Jewry. The far-left Israeli politician Simha Flapan lamented in 1968, "The socialist world approved the 'Holy War' of the Arabs against Israel in the disguise of a struggle against imperialism. ... Having agreed to the devaluation of its own ideals, [it] was ready to enter an alliance with reactionary and chauvinist appeals to genocide."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: The government of East Germany was passionately anti-Zionist. From the 1950s through the 1970s, East Germany supplied Israel's neighboring Arab states with weapons. Immediately after the Six-Day War in 1967, East German Communist Party chairman Walter Ulbricht claimed that Israel had not been threatened by its neighboring Arab states before the war. He continually compared Israel to Nazi Germany. In 1969, West German left-wing anti-Zionists placed a bomb in a Jewish Community Center.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: A series of anti-Zionist aircraft hijackings took place in the 1970s with left-wing groups' support. The most famous of these was the 1976 Air France hijacking perpetrated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in coordination with the Revolutionary Cells. The hijackers released all the non-Jewish hostages, but kept all of the Jewish ones for ransom. The separation of Jews from non-Jews shocked many on the German left. To Joschka Fischer, the way the hijackers treated Jews opened his eyes to the violent, Nazi-like implications of anti-Zionism. A few years later, the Revolutionary Cells and another anti-Zionist group attempted to firebomb two German movie theaters that were showing a movie based on the hijacking.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In his much discussed essay Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, Alvin H. Rosenfeld wrote that a "number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent antisemitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist." Rosenfeld lamented that some left-wing Jews delegitimize Israel "in the name of Judaism" and make false equivalencies between Israel and Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Some Jewish organizations oppose Zionism as an integral part of their anti-imperialism. Today, some secular Jews, particularly socialists and Marxists, continue to oppose the State of Israel on anti-imperialist and human rights grounds. Many oppose it as a form of nationalism, which they argue to be a product of capitalist societies. One secular anti-Zionist group today is the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a socialist, antiwar, anti-imperialist organization that calls for "the dismantling of Israeli apartheid return of Palestinian refugees, and the ending of the Israeli colonization of historic Palestine."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In the 2000s, leaders of the Respect Party and the Socialist Workers Party of the United Kingdom met with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah at the Cairo Anti-war Conference. The result of the 2003 conference was a call to oppose "normalization with the Zionist entity".


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In April 2013 the Church of Scotland published , which rejected the idea of a special right of Jewish people to the Holy Land through analysis of scripture and Jewish theological claims. According to Haaretz the report drew on the writings of anti-Zionist Jews and Christians. It was revised after being harshly criticized by Scottish Jews The revision replaced input from Mark Braverman with material from Marc H. Ellis, both Jewish.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In 2014 a controversy arose when the United States Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) published a study guide, "Zionism Unsettled", quickly withdrawn from sale on its website, which asserted that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was fueled by a "pathology inherent in Zionism." The work and the Church's position was challenged as flawed, anti-Zionist and antisemitic, in an article by Cary Nelson. In 2022, the same denomination's general assembly determined that Israel was an apartheid state.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Most Orthodox religious groups have accepted and actively support the State of Israel, even if they have not adopted the "Zionist" ideology. The World Agudath Israel party (founded in Poland) has, at times, participated in Israeli government coalitions. Most religious Zionists hold pro-Israel views from a right-wing viewpoint. The main exceptions are Hasidic groups such as Satmar Hasidim, which have about 100,000 adherents worldwide and numerous different, smaller Hasidic groups, unified in America in the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada and Israel in the Edah HaChareidis. Many Hasidic rabbis oppose the creation of a Jewish state. The leader of the Satmar Hasidic group, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum's book, "VaYoel Moshe", published in 1959, expounded an Orthodox position for anti-Zionism based a derivation of halacha from an aggadic passage in the Babylonian Talmud's tractate Ketubot 111a. There Teitelbaum states that God and the Jewish people exchanged three oaths at the time of the Jews' exile from ancient Israel, forbidding the Jewish people from massively immigrating to the Land of Israel, and from rebelling against the nations of the world.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Anti-Zionism spans a range of political, social, and religious views. According to Rony Brauman, using antisemitism as a benchmark, one can speak of three kinds of perspective regarding Zionism, pro-and-contra: a non-antisemitic anti-Zionism, an antisemitic anti-Zionism, and an antisemitic pro-Zionism. According to Shany Mor, one may also speak of anti-Zionism in three ways:


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In the early 21st century, it was also claimed that a "new antisemitism" had emerged that was rooted in anti-Zionism. Advocates of this notion argue that much of what purports to be criticism of Israel and Zionism is demonization, and has led to an international resurgence of attacks on Jews and Jewish symbols and an increased acceptance of antisemitic beliefs in public discourse. Critics of the concept have suggested that the characterization of anti-Zionism as antisemitic is inaccurate, sometimes obscures legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and actions and trivializes antisemitism. Professor David Myers says that the equation should not be made without "careful contextualization and delineation".


title: Anti-Zionism

text: As early as 1966, Webster's Third New International Dictionary cited anti-Zionism as one of the core meanings of antisemitism, and Martin Luther King Jr., a year latter, was cited as having made the same equation in a letter. In 1972 Abba Eban said that the task of dialogue with non-Jews is to prove that there is no distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. In 1978, Fred Halliday, rebuffing the asserted equation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, wrote that disavowals were constantly required given the frequency of the accusation. In the early 2000s, it became increasingly commonplace for defenders of Israel to regard criticism of Zionism and Israel as tantamount to, interchangeable with, or closely related to antisemitism. In 2007, Tony Judt considered the merging of the two categories in polemics relatively new. A 2003-04 European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia report aroused intense controversy over aspects of its provisory definition of antisemitism, which many regarded as ambiguous in blurring distinctions to the point that the two concepts became porous.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Scholars who subscribe to this identity between the two include Robert S. Wistrich, former head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who argued that post-1948 anti-Zionism and antisemitism had merged and that much contemporary anti-Zionism, particularly forms that compare Zionism and Jews with Hitler and Nazi Germany, has become a form of antisemitism.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Jean Améry became convinced that anti-Zionism was an updated version of the antisemitism he experienced as a Holocaust survivor. In a 1969 essay, he argued that the anti-Zionists of his time may not have ill intentions against all Jews, but their intentions are irrelevant. The philosophy they engage in has a centuries-old pedigree beginning with the false charge of deicide and culminated in Nazi propaganda. Améry didn't expect anti-Zionists of his time to take an unbending pro-Israel stance in the complex conflict between Israelis and Palestinian. He merely beseeched them to think critically, use common sense, and judge Israel fairly.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a Working Definition of Antisemitism, one which subsequently was officially recognized by various governments, foremost among them, the United States and France, which endorsed the equation of certain manifestations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. 127 Jewish intellectuals in the diaspora and Israel protested formally against the French resolution equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, arguing that the definition was injurious to numerous anti-Zionist Jews.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Deborah E. Lipstadt has documented several cases of individuals who made remarks that were clearly against Jews, but when criticized, those individuals defended themselves by saying that they were against "Zionists".


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Professor Kenneth L. Marcus, former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, identifies four main views on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, at least in North America: Marcus also states: A study of 5,000 people in Europe in 2006 concluded that antisemitic views correlate among respondents the stronger the latters' hostility to Israel, a result which however does not mean one cannot be critical of Israeli policies without being antisemitic.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Dina Porat (head of the Institute for Study of Antisemitism and Racism at Tel-Aviv University) contends that anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it is discriminatory: "if every nation is entitled to a state, then opposing a national movement struggling for the rights of a nation to reach one is discrimination, which, in this case, originates in antisemitism." Emanuele Ottolenghi argued for the same view.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: In 2010, Oxford University Press published "" by Anthony Julius. In that book, Julius claims that the borders between anti-Zionism and antisemitism are porous. However, Julius makes a distinction; though it is possible to be in conflict with a Jewish ideology without discriminating against Jews, anti-Zionists cross the line so often as to make the distinction meaningless.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Professor Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland, College Park wrote, "One distinctive feature of the secular leftist antagonism to Israel ... was its indignant assertion that it had absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism. Yet the eagerness with which Israel's enemies spread lies about Zionism's racist nature and were willing to compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany suggested that an element of antisemitism was indeed at work in the international Left as it responded to Israel's victory in June 1967." Anti-Zionists responded to the war's outcome by describing Israel in terms familiar from antisemitic stereotypes.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Speaking for the Anti-Defamation League, its director Jonathan Greenblatt told Isaac Chotiner of "The New Yorker", "[What] many in the anti-Zionist camp want for Palestinians or would want for other peoples, they would deny to Jewish people. Unless you don't believe in nationalism as a concept and unless you support denying the legitimacy of any national project from France to Ukraine, if you hold the idea that Zionism is the only form of nationalism that's wrong, that's discriminating against Jewish people. That's the anti-Semitism." The American Jewish Committee expressed similar views.: "The belief that the Jews, alone among the people of the world, do not have a right to self-determination — or that the Jewish people's religious and historical connection to Israel is invalid—is inherently bigoted."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Several comparative surveys in Europe and elsewhere have failed to find any statistical correlation between criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism:


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research Antony Lerman argues: The anti-Zionism equals antisemitism argument drains the word antisemitism of any useful meaning. For it means that to count as an antisemite, it is sufficient to hold any view ranging from criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government to denial that Israel has the right to exist as a state, without having to subscribe to any of those things which historians have traditionally regarded as making up an antisemitic worldview: hatred of Jews per se, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, belief that Jews generated communism and control capitalism, belief that Jews are racially inferior and so on. Moreover, while theoretically allowing that criticism of Israeli governments is legitimate, in practice it virtually proscribes any such thing.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Before World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, the debate between Zionists and anti-Zionists was largely an internal Jewish affair; the questions the debate sought to answer involved Jewish self-definition and the proper use of political power in the Jewish diaspora. Once it became clear to most Jews that all of Zionism's alternatives failed to prevent the Holocaust, the debate largely subsided in the Jewish community. Most pre-war Jewish anti-Zionists were either killed in the Holocaust, emigrated to Israel, or became disillusioned by the Soviet Union.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Nevertheless, individual Jews have changed their position on the spectrum broaching pro- and anti-Zionist views:


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Jacob Israël de Haan made aliyah to Palestine in 1919 as a convinced religious Zionist. Deeply troubled by Zionist attitudes towards Arabs, he began to champion their rights and at the same time advocated on behalf of the Orthodox Ashkenazi Agudat Israel/Haredim communities, who maintained excellent relations with Arabs, and with whom he felt more spiritually comfortable. His effectiveness with the Mandatory authorities in protesting Zionist claims to represent all Jews while they ignored dissent from within Jerusalem's anti-Zionist orthodox communities was resented. He was ridiculed by Zionists, who assassinated him in 1924.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Isaac Deutscher decidedly opposed Zionism, then altered his judgment in the wake of the Holocaust, to support the foundation of Israel – the creation of a nation-state precisely when they were becoming anachronistic – even if it was at the Palestinians' expense, and then wavered at the end between contempt for Arab states' antisemitic demagoguery and odium for Israelis' fanatical triumphalism. In "Prussians of the Middle East", at the end of the Six-Day War, he prophesied that the victory would prove to be a disaster for Israel.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Noam Chomsky is often reported to be an anti-Zionist. He himself has said that the word "Zionism" has changed connotations since his youth, with the boundaries of what are considered Zionist and anti-Zionist views shifting. The Zionist groups he led as a youth would now be called anti-Zionist because they mostly opposed the idea of a Jewish state. In 1947, in his youth, Chomsky's support for a socialist binational state, in conjunction with his opposition to any semblance of a theocratic system of governance in Israel, was at the time considered well within the mainstream of secular Zionism; by 1987, it put him solidly in the anti-Zionist camp.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Zionists have on occasion interpreted criticism from pro-Zionists in the fold as evidence that the critics are anti-Zionist. One could be opposed to the central goal of Zionism, the formation of a Jewish national state, and yet not be anti-Zionist. This was the case with some pre-state groups, political heirs of the cultural Zionism tradition founded by Ahad Ha'am, such as Brit Shalom and, later, Ihud. Hannah Arendt, who worked for the Jewish Agency for Palestine in the 1930s and was active in facilitating Jewish migration to Palestine from France, devoted much of her thinking in the 1940s to a critique of political Zionism. The Zionism she advocated had a broader definition: Jewish political agency anywhere. When partition was imminent, she came out strongly against the concept of a Jewish, as opposed to binational, state. While writing "Eichmann in Jerusalem", she clarified her views: "I am not against Israel on principle, I am against certain important Israeli policies." Arendt took Israel's side in the Arab-Israeli conflict and rejoiced at its victory in the Six-Day War.


title: Anti-Zionism

text: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came to be exploited by Arab anti-Zionists, although some have tried to discourage its usage. "The Protocols" itself makes no reference to Zionism, but after World War I, claims that the book is a record of the Zionist Congress became routine. The first Arabic translation of "The Protocols" was published in 1925, contemporaneous with a major wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. A similar conspiracy theory is belief in a powerful, well-financed "Zionist lobby" that clamps down on criticism of Israel and conceals its crimes. Zionists are able to do this in the United Kingdom, according to Shelby Tucker and Tim Llewellyn, because they are in "control of our media" and "suborned Britain's civil structures, including government, parliament, and the press."


title: Anti-Zionism

text: Anti-Zionism is a major component of Holocaust denial. One strain of Holocaust denial states that Zionists cooperated with the Nazis and charges Zionism with guilt for the crimes committed during the Holocaust. Deniers see Israel as having somehow benefitting from what they refer to as "the big lie" that is the Holocaust. Some Holocaust deniers claim that their ideology is motivated by concern for Palestinian rights.


title: El DeBarge

text: Eldra Patrick "El" DeBarge (born June 4, 1961) is an American singer, songwriter and musician. He was the focal point and primary lead singer of the family group DeBarge. Popular songs led by El DeBarge include "Time Will Reveal", "Who's Holding Donna Now", "Stay with Me", "All This Love", and "Rhythm of the Night".


title: El DeBarge

text: As a solo artist, he is best known for his unique high tenor register, strong falsetto and hits like "Who's Johnny" and "Love Always". He has also collaborated with artists such as Dionne Warwick, Al Green, Lalah Hathaway, Tone Loc, Babyface, Faith Evans, Quincy Jones, Fourplay, and DJ Quik. DeBarge is a five-time Grammy Award nominee.


title: El DeBarge

text: A native of Detroit, Michigan, El was the sixth of the children born to Robert Louis DeBarge Sr. (1932–2009) and Etterlene (née Abney) DeBarge. DeBarge sang in his local church choir and played piano as a child. Later, after his family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, he and the rest of his family began performing at their uncle's Pentecostal church. When El was 13, his parents divorced after a difficult and stormy marriage. El is of African American and French descent. Growing up, he was closest to his eldest brother Bobby and began imitating his brother's vocal styling.


title: El DeBarge

text: For several years, El spent time in private study with music educator Ricky Callier. By 1975, El had begun to express a desire to become a performer. He became a father for the first time at 16 and eventually fathered 11 more children. In 1977, he dropped out of high school and began performing with his elder brothers in clubs and venues in Michigan. By 1979, Bernd Lichters was able to secure a deal with Source Records/MCA to release the Pall Mall Groove – Hot Ice album as SMASH for the USA/Canada market and moved El from Michigan to Los Angeles, to have him, his brothers Mark and Randy DeBarge, in addition to their cousin Andre Abney, Elliot Townsend, and Stanley Hood, to back up the release as the SMASH band. His eldest sister Bunny joined her brothers in California. In 1980, because of the success of their brothers Bobby and Tommy DeBarge with the hit group Switch, El was able to perform live at the piano and sing in front of Motown CEO Berry Gordy, who immediately signed the group, then known as The DeBarges, to the label.


title: El DeBarge

text: Motown mentored them, and members later worked with and contributed songwriting, arrangements, and production to the recordings of Switch, including the 1980 albums "This Is My Dream" and "Reaching for Tomorrow". El's first professional recording was as background vocalist to Switch's 1979 hit "I Call Your Name". He later helped to arrange music for several Switch songs including "Love Over and Over Again" and "My Friend in the Sky," which he, Bunny, and Bobby wrote. This song would later be sampled by the likes of Queen Pen and Raheem DeVaughn.


title: El DeBarge

text: In 1981, "The DeBarges" was released after the family had worked in the studio for a year recording it. The album was noted for most of its songs produced and written by all four family members including Bobby DeBarge, who helped end the album track "Queen of My Heart" after El had led the song for most of its tenure. The following album, 1982's "All This Love", featured younger brother James and saw much success with the compositions "I Like It" and the title track. El would remain the producer and arranger for all of the group's Motown albums. In 1983, DeBarge released "In a Special Way", which spawned the hits "Time Will Reveal" and "Love Me in a Special Way", and in 1984, the band became a sensation while touring for Luther Vandross on the singer's "Busy Body" tour. Though the group enjoyed much success and appeared to be a family unit, there were growing tensions between El and his brothers, mainly because of Motown's push to have El become the only noted star of the group, repeating a pattern that began with Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. By the end of the tour, El DeBarge was mainly called to handle the production of DeBarge's next album, "Rhythm of the Night", without much help from his siblings. The DeBarge family had one more album, "Bad Boys", although El and Bunny were not on the album.


title: El DeBarge

text: "Rhythm of the Night" became the group's best-selling album ever, although some contended that El DeBarge was the only member present on the album with the exception of the title track, which became a top five hit in several countries including the US and UK becoming the group's and El's signature song. In late 1985, he appeared on "The Facts of Life" in the Season 7 episode "Doo-Wah" as himself and performed his single "You Wear it Well" with Lisa Whelchel, Kim Fields, Mindy Cohn, and Nancy McKeon singing backup. In 1986, El DeBarge left the group and began his solo career with the release of his self-titled debut album, which spawned the hits "Who's Johnny" and "Love Always". Three years passed, however, until DeBarge released his second album, "Gemini" in 1989. The album had two hits, "Real Love" and "Somebody Loves You". DeBarge's contract with Motown was terminated in 1990, and he signed with Warner Bros. In the meantime, DeBarge was featured on the Quincy Jones single "The Secret Garden", alongside Al B. Sure!, James Ingram, and Barry White, released in 1990.


title: El DeBarge

text: In 1992, DeBarge released his third album, the Maurice White-produced "In the Storm", which featured the Chanté Moore duet "You Know What I Like", which was Moore's first professional recording. Critics noted the album for its Marvin Gaye-styled productions. El DeBarge later admitted that Gaye was a huge influence on his musical style and once commented that he had initially written "All This Love" as a song he imagined Gaye doing; he even imitated Gaye's ad-libs during his "I Want You" era near the end. That same year, El had chart success on the R&B charts with a collaboration with Fourplay on their version of Gaye's "After the Dance". DeBarge's next album, 1994's "Heart, Mind and Soul", co-produced with Babyface, yielded modest charted singles such as "Slide" and "Where is My Love" (which featured Babyface on duet vocals).


title: El DeBarge

text: While DeBarge continued to collaborate on other artists' projects, including those of his brother Chico and rapper DJ Quik (with whom El collaborated on Quik's hit "Hand in Hand"), he did not release any more albums between 1994 and 2009. In 2010, he finally emerged from a 16-year delay with the appropriately titled "Second Chance", released after a series of comeback performances and appearances, including a well received performance at the 2010 BET Awards. The album yielded two singles, "Second Chance" and the Faith Evans duet "Lay With You", and later resulted in three Grammy Award nominations: Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Song and Best R&B Album. El remains the only member of the DeBarges to have Grammy nominations both outside of the group and in the family.


title: El DeBarge

text: In 2020, DeBarge made an unexpected return to pop culture after RuPaul referenced his signature mullet on the television show "RuPaul's Drag Race". Season 12 contestant Crystal Methyd appeared sporting an identical mullet, much to the enjoyment of RuPaul.


title: El DeBarge

text: On February 4, 2022, DeBarge performed a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR Music at his home, playing keyboards and singing. The concert was part of a celebration of Black History Month.


title: El DeBarge

text: DeBarge was raised in Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan as a child. His parents had a tumultuous marriage that involved domestic abuse and child abuse on the part of DeBarge's father Robert. DeBarge has remained silent on his relationship with his father and many other elements of his family life, later documented in books written by his mother Etterlene, sister Bunny, and brother Tommy. In 1978, DeBarge became a father to his first child, a daughter named Adris. He eventually went on to father 12 children altogether. DeBarge was close to his siblings, particularly his brothers Bobby and Chico. Bobby's death in 1995 had a profound effect on DeBarge; family members later said he has never fully recovered from it. Since Bobby's death, he has performed several of Bobby's songs with Switch onstage, sometimes with Chico singing along. DeBarge and several DeBarge brothers reunited in 1998 performing several DeBarge classics.


title: El DeBarge

text: DeBarge has had a history of drug abuse and legal problems. He has stated that his addiction started after he began receiving prescription medication for toothache pain after having a tooth pulled by a dentist.


title: El DeBarge

text: By the mid-1990s, DeBarge's addiction problems resulted in his career faltering after its peaks in the 1980s. In 2001, DeBarge was arrested for cocaine possession and was given probation. In 2006, he was arrested again for possession of a controlled substance and was once again given probation. In 2007, he was arrested in a domestic dispute and was held without bail; the charges were later dropped. Later that year he was arrested yet again, charged with cocaine possession, and given probation. However, he was once again arrested in 2008 for possession of crack and drug paraphernalia, breaking the terms of his probation. For this violation he was immediately sentenced to two years in state prison in California.


title: El DeBarge

text: Following a prison sentence for which he served 13 months, DeBarge announced that he had found sobriety after an addiction that he said had lasted nearly 25 years, stating he had also acknowledged his problems with the law in the past. In February 2011, while promoting his 2010 album "Second Chance", DeBarge's label announced that the singer was canceling all public dates and appearances as he went back to rehab following a relapse. DeBarge later returned to work and made an appearance at the 54th Grammy Awards in February 2012.


title: Syndicalism

text: Syndicalism is a revolutionary current within the left-wing of the labor movement that seeks to unionize workers according to industry and advance their demands through strikes with the eventual goal of gaining control over the means of production and the economy at large. Developed in French labor unions during the late 19th century, syndicalist movements were most predominant amongst the socialist movement during the interwar period which preceded the outbreak of World War II.


title: Syndicalism

text: Major syndicalist organizations included the General Confederation of Labor in France, the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) in Spain, the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI), the Free Workers' Union of Germany, and the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation. Although they did not regard themselves as syndicalists, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Canadian One Big Union are considered by most historians to belong to this current.


title: Syndicalism

text: A number of syndicalist organizations were and still are to this day linked in the International Workers' Association, but some of its member organizations left for the International Confederation of Labor, formed in 2018.


title: Syndicalism

text: The term "syndicalism" has French origins. In French, a is a trade union, usually a local union. The corresponding words in Spanish and Portuguese, , and Italian, , are similar. By extension, the French refers to trade unionism in general. The concept or "revolutionary syndicalism" emerged in French socialist journals in 1903 and the French General Confederation of Labor (, CGT) came to use the term to describe its brand of unionism. "Revolutionary syndicalism", or more commonly "syndicalism" with the "revolutionary" implied, was then adapted to a number of languages by unionists following the French model.