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Volume XX • Number 39 • September 19 - 25, 2013 •
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New political feud: It’s Klein vs. Koppell By the RIVERDALE REVIEW STAFF POLITICAL ANALYSIS The huge defeat of Clifford Stanton in last week’s Democratic Primary and the selection of Andrew Cohen as the Democratic nominee, in these parts considered tantamount to final election, marks the end of a political machine that once held sway over important community institutions – despite never having met with any success at the polls. The Democratic party faction led by attorney Anthony Perez Cassino, of which Mr. Stanton was a key member finally seems to have run out of gas – although in truth, the group never won so much as a single election, not presenting candidates even for minor party offices that often control the levers of local political power. The group once controlled the local community board, with the connivance of then borough president Adolfo Carrion. Carrion packed the board with his supporters, who managed to sneak their putative leader, Mr. Cassino in as chair. Cassino doubled as Carrion’s campaign treasurer, leading to charges of possible conflicts of interest, and finally to the resignation of Mr. Cassino from his campaign post. When Carrion left to take a short-lived post with the Obama administration, the Cassino/Stanton group
was left with few political allies. In 2009, Cassino was defeated by incumbent Councilman G. Oliver Koppell. The bid to unseat the fading incumbent failed by an impressive two-to-one margin. Cassino and his loyalists blamed the Riverdale Review for what they alone saw as the inevitability of Cassino’s victory, they started a four-year campaign to put the Riverdale Review out of business. This year, with Clifford Stanton, who headed and financed those efforts to end free speech in this community, running for office against a total unknown candidate, Andrew Cohen, prospects looked bright for the Cassino/Stanton group. But Stanton inexplicably allowed a Manhattan businessman Robert Gans, to make large contributions to his campaign. And once again, it was the independent voice of the Riverdale Review that revealed that Gans was the owner of the infamous Scores strip club chain. This instantly became the top issue in the campaign, exploited by an independent group, Jobs New York, that was backing Cohen in a series of mailings. Hampered by concerns over potential conflicts and by the pro-censorship efforts of the last four years, Stanton did marginally worse at the polls against the neophyte Cohen, than Cassino did against Koppell four years ago.
So conditions would suggest that this group’s political day is done. What appears more likely to dominate news over the coming months is a possible struggle within the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club between Koppell, about to leave public office, and State Senator Jeff Klein, who has former an alliance between a number of breakaway Democrats and Republicans in the State Senate, forming a unique bi-partisan majority faction. Democratic power brokers in Albany are said to be recruiting Koppell as the best – perhaps only hope of defeating the popular Klein, entreaties that Koppell, about to leave office, is only too glad to receive. But this will put club leaders in the hot seat. Klein has emerged as a supporter and ally, while Koppell is clearly at the end of his long career, capping a largely unproductive twelve years in the City Council. Klein supported the club choice for Council, Mr. Cohen, at a crucial time. So as the sun sets on the failed political careers of Anthony Perez Cassino and Clifford Stanton, those who defeated them are now entering a new phase, fighting against each other for control of the local political scene, and huge influence in the state capital of Albany.
Interfaith ‘peacemaker’ launches lectures at Manhattan College By PAULETTE SCHNEIDER Renowned border crosser Ruth Broyde Sharone offered a mantra—strangers are people we haven’t yet met—to set the tone for her interactive lecture last week at Manhattan College. “My job is to encourage and cultivate border crossers around the world because that’s the next stage of where we have to go as a people, as a civilization,” she said. The talk was the first in a series offered by the college’s Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center. “Around 9/11, I usually have a program on interfaith understanding and peace,” said Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, the center’s director. Broyde Sharone, who has travelled the world to implement her message through deeds, has published “Minefields and Miracles: Why God and Allah Need to Talk,” an enjoyable account of her cultural exploration throughout Latin America. The voyage was spurred by her own first exposure to interfaith minefields—a school administrator excluded her from a college dorm, ostensibly “for dietary reasons,” although she had expressed no problem observing
the Jewish dietary laws while living happily with her Christian roommates. She also had a calling to create a documentary, provoked by a roadside billboard in California stating nothing more than “God and Allah Need to Talk.” The 2003 film describes a giant interfaith Passover seder that changed lives. The background music in the film was played by a band led by a Christian Arab violinist from Nazareth. Broyde Sharone first heard him play at a Yom Kippur Kol Nidre service, where he wove the tune of the Muslim call to prayer within the Hebrew liturgical melody. “I understood what he was doing,” she explained. “He was saying, ‘brothers and sisters, we’re not that far apart. The call to prayer is the call to prayer—it doesn’t matter who is being called to pray or what language it’s in. We know what the call to prayer is.” “You did musically what we as people can’t do humanly yet,” she told the musician at the time. “You made it clear to me that it’s possible.” Broyde Sharone’s goal was to Continued on Page 3
A TRIBUTE TO THE VICTIMS OF 9/11 was heard above the Henry Hudson Parkway traffic outside the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale last Wednesday. It was a clear, bright, sunny morning, just as it was on September 11, 2001. A solemn group, led by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbi Asher Lopatin, began chanting a memorial prayer at 9:59 a.m., the same time as the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed as the result of a terrorist attack on our nation twelve years ago. Rabba Sara Hurwitz and YCT staff member Ruthie Simon read biographies from “Portraits: 9/11/01: The Collected ‘Portraits of Grief’ from The New York Times.” Rabbi Steven Exler sang Rabbi Irwin Kula’s heartbreaking commemorative chant—victims’ final voicemail messages to their loved ones set to the cantillations for the Book of Lamentations. “Let love that defies the rule overpower hatred that defies the rule,” Rabbi Avi Weiss said, leading in the singing of “Because of My Brothers and Friends” (Psalm 122) and “God Bless America.”