Terrorist who killed Esther Horgan, mother of six, is convicted and National Library of Israel Releases Photos from Johnny Cash’s ‘Holy Land’ Visit By JNS News Service and Mort Sahl, a satirist who brought politics to comedy, dies at 94 and Johnny Carson - Dancing after a joke bombs! and covid cases continue to drop and a Plugger is on a first-name basis with his pharmacist and the secular holiday of Halloween today
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
Terrorist who killed Esther Horgan, mother of six, is convicted
Military court convicts terrorist who murdered Esther Horgan, mother of six, as she jogged near her home last year.
Esther HorganCourtesy of the family
Muhammad Maruh Kabha, the terrorist who killed Esther Horgan last year, was convicted Wednesday by the Salam Camp military court.
Esther Horgan, 52, was murdered on December 20, 2020, while jogging near her home in Tal Menashe in Samaria. She is survived by her husband and six children - two daughters and four sons. The youngest of them, 13 years old, celebrated a bar mitzvah a few months ago before Esther was killed.
Kabha was arrested four days after he killed Horgan and was indicted on February 4, 2021. He has confessed to the murder.
According to the indictment, Kabha decided to carry out a terror attack to avenge the death - from cancer - of his friend in an Israeli prison.
Responding to the conviction, the Horgan family said, "We are happy that the terrorist was convicted by his own confession today in court. This step greatly advances us towards the end of the legal process, which has already gone on for too long."
"The terrorist must be punished to the fullest extent of the law, and to rot behind bars until the end of his life."
They added, "We are sorry that those who sent the murderer are not sitting next to him on the bench for the convicted. We are referring to the Palestinian Authority and the person who heads it, who encourage terror with their blood libels and education to hatred and murder, and who pay enormous sums to terrorists and their families after the act."
"Placing the Palestinian Authority leaders personally on trial, for sending and paying assassins to murder Jews may possibly serve as a more significant deterrent, and prevent, or at least reduce, the chances of the next murder."
Attorney Morris Hirsch, who is representing the Horgan family, said, "The lowlife terrorist who murdered Esther did not act in a vacuum. The incitement expressed by the Palestinian Authority and the compensation which it pays to every terrorist have significantly and existentially contributed to the act of this horrific murder."
"We call on the Prime Minister and Defense Minister to change their policies and to act with force against Palestinian Authority officials who incite the murder of Jews and to eliminate the Palestinian Authority's policy of paying compensation to terrorists. The legal infrastructure already exists. All that's left now is the desire to act."
Number of new COVID cases continues to drop
Fewer coronavirus patients as infection rate and number of new COVID cases continue to decline
A total of 727 new cases of the coronavirus were diagnosed across Israel Tuesday, according to data released by the Health Ministry Wednesday morning, down from 929 new cases reported a day earlier.
The percentage of COVID tests combing back positive also fell Tuesday, declining from 0.93% a day earlier to 0.85%. That is the lowest level recorded since July 10th.
The number of known active cases of the virus across Israel dropped to 10,914, down from 10,709 a day earlier. The number of hospitalized COVID patients also fell Wednesday, declining to 342, down from 367 on Tuesday.
Since the pandemic began, 1,325,267 confirmed cases of the virus have been reported.
The number of seriously ill patients continued to fall Wednesday, sinking from 249 on Tuesday to 237. That is the fewest seriously ill COVID patients since August 3rd.
Of those 360 seriously ill patients, 154 are in critical condition, down from 156 on Tuesday. Currently, there are 137 patients on respirators, down from 139 Tuesday.
The infection coefficient, which measures the decline or expansion of the pandemic, held steady at 0.73 on October 16th, the latest day for which data is available. The reproduction coefficient (R) has remained below 1.0 since September 6th, marking a decline in the pandemic.
Thus far, a total of 8,063 coronavirus-related fatalities have been recorded across Israel, including three deaths on Tuesday. Two of the victims had received two doses of the COVID vaccine, while the third had received three shots, including the booster jab.
Mort Sahl, satirist who brought politics to comedy, dies at 94
Credited as the first to give stand-up acts an iconoclastic edge, Sahl skewered presidents from Eisenhower to Trump, paving the way for comics like George Carlin and Jon Stewart
Mort Sahl, comedian, during taping at WRC studios in Washington December 6, 1978. (AP)
NEW YORK — Satirist Mort Sahl, who helped revolutionize stand-up comedy during the Cold War with his running commentary on politicians and current events and became a favorite of a new, restive generation of Americans, died Tuesday. He was 94.
His friend Lucy Mercer said that he died "peacefully" at his home in Mill Valley, California. The cause was "old age," she said.
During an era when many comedians dressed in tuxedos and told mother-in-law jokes, Sahl faced his audiences in the '50s and '60s wearing slacks, a sweater and an unbuttoned collar and carrying a rolled-up newspaper on which he had pasted notes for his act. Reading news items as if seated across from you at the kitchen table, he made his inevitably cutting comments, often joining the laughter with a horsey bellow of his own and ending his routines by inquiring: "Is there any group I haven't offended yet?"
"Every comedian who is not doing wife jokes has to thank him for that," actor-comedian Albert Brooks told The Associated Press in 2007. "He really was the first, even before Lenny Bruce, in terms of talking about stuff, not just doing punch lines."
Sahl took pride in having mocked every US president from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump, although he acknowledged he privately admired Democrat John F. Kennedy and counted Republican Ronald Reagan among his closest friends. Of President George W. Bush, he observed: "He's born again, you know. Which would raise the inevitable question: If you were given the unusual opportunity to be born again, why would you come back as George Bush?"
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Sahl became famous in 1953 at San Francisco's hungry i nightclub (the i stood for intellectual), the perfect place for a comedian of his type. The city was a meeting ground for beatniks and college activists, and they crowded into the tiny club to hear someone who spoke to their disdain for the status quo.
Comedian Mort Sahl, based in Chicago, Ill., poses on Sept. 17, 1957. (AP)
Word spread quickly about the young comedian with the distinctive style. Soon Sahl was earning $7,500 a week at nightclubs across the nation and appearing on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar. He made the cover of Time magazine in 1960 and was profiled in The New Yorker.
A new generation of comedians, including Bill Cosby, George Carlin and the team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, was inspired by Sahl. David Letterman continued the iconoclastic tradition, and more recently Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. Woody Allen would liken his work to the jazz of Charlie Parker and reviewers compared him to Will Rogers, who had tweaked politicians in a gentler manner.
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"I don't have the image of myself as a comedian," Sahl himself said. "I never said I was one. I just sort of tell the truth and everybody breaks up along the way."
Sahl was cast as a wisecracking GI in two war movies, "In Love and War" (1958) and "All the Young Men" (1960). He starred in his own TV special. His comedy albums became best sellers. At the Academy Awards in 1959, he was co-host along with Bob Hope, Laurence Olivier, Jerry Lewis and others. Fearing he would seem to be joining the establishment, Sahl cracked: "We've just lost the college crowd; all across the country they're yelling, 'Sellout!'"
In the 1980s he frequently ridiculed his friend Reagan, but he said the president was never offended.
"If you're his friend, it doesn't matter if you're an escaped con," Sahl once said of Reagan. Democrats, he added, were often not as forgiving. In the 1990s, Sahl had fallen out of favor with them when he complained that President Bill Clinton's only lasting legacy would be his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
"A lot of people I have met in the Democratic Party are extremely expedient," he said. "Once it's over, they don't want to know you. Of course, that's not generic to the Democrats."
Sahl thought so highly of Kennedy, however, that he even wrote jokes for him on the campaign trail, including one which inspired JFK's quip at his own expense — about a telegram from his wealthy father. "Don't buy a single more vote than is necessary. I'll be d—ed if I'm going to pay for a landslide."
Advertisement Comedian Mort Sahl, perched on a stool, reads prepared statement from the stage of San Francisco's hungry i, December 4, 1967. (AP/Robert W. Klein)
But when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sahl was devastated and the tragedy foreshadowed a decline in the comedian's fortunes that lasted for years. He quickly became convinced that Kennedy had been killed as part of a CIA plot and he accused the government of staging a massive cover-up. He devoted much of his monologues to reading long passages from the report by the government's Warren Commission, which had been appointed to investigate the assassination. Audiences stopped laughing and his bookings plummeted.
Sahl also suffered a personal tragedy in 1996 when his only child, Morton Jr., died at age 19. Ten years later, the subject was so raw that mention of his son's name could bring him to tears.
"My kid was like a more human version of me," he once said.
Through the tough times, he continued to work the college circuit and small clubs. Although he never regained his former stature, he eventually returned to making a comfortable living with comedy
He continued to carry his newspaper on stage with him, although as the 21st century dawned he joked that he should probably have replaced it with a laptop.
At age 80 he also began teaching a class in critical thinking at Southern California's prestigious Claremont McKenna College.
It was a return to the academic life Sahl had known decades earlier when he earned a degree in urban planning from the University of Southern California in 1950.
Putting plans for graduate study on hold, he decided to make money writing jokes for comedians. He took to the stage himself, he once said, when he discovered the ones he was writing for were "too dumb" to get the material.
Morton Lyon Sahl was born on May 11, 1927, in Montreal, to a Canadian mother and a New York father who managed a tobacco shop. The family moved to the United States where Sahl's father, Harry, worked for the Department of Justice in various cities.
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They eventually settled in Los Angeles, where young Morton joined his high school ROTC program and excelled at speech. His mother said he had started to talk at 7 months and by age 10 already spoke like a man of 30.
Mort Sahl as a Marine in "All the Young Men," Nov. 14, 1959. (AP)
After high school, Sahl joined the Air Force, spending 31 months at a remote Alaskan airfield where he edited the post newspaper, Poop from the Group. Discharged in 1947, he entered college.
He took on a number of jobs before his girlfriend, Sue Berber, persuaded him to audition for the hungry i in 1953.
The couple married two years later but divorced in 1957. Sahl married his second wife, former Playboy Playmate China Lee, in 1967. They also divorced.
National Library of Israel Releases Photos from Johnny Cash's 'Holy Land' Visit
Photo Credit: The Dan Hadani Archive, Pritzker Family National Photography Collection at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem/IPPA staff.
American singer and songwriter Johnny Cash accepts a give from a fan on his third visit to Israel, November 1971.
The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem has released rare photographs from a November 1971 visit by legendary musician Johnny Cash to Israel. It took place during a professional and spiritual resurgence for the star after years in which he famously struggled with alcohol and drug abuse.
As opposed to his previous two trips, his arrival in 1971 was accompanied by more fanfare, including a fancy reception arranged in Jerusalem documented in the newly released images.
The reason for the trip was the filming of a movie, narrated by Cash, about the life of Jesus. "Gospel Road: A Story of Jesus," would be released the following year.
In it, Cash can be seen singing from atop Mount Arbel in the Galilee, his country-tinged gospel music accompanying a swerving helicopter camera shot of the Jordan River. Though the film did not perform well at the box office, it would eventually become something of a cult hit with evangelical Christian audiences.
Cash first came to Israel in 1966 for a religious pilgrimage, visiting Christian sites across the country. Two years later, he returned, accompanied by his new wife, June Carter Cash.
This second trip inspired an entire Christian-themed concept album, "The Holy Land." The 1969 record featured songs with titles like "Land of Israel, "The Ten Commandments" and "Come to the Wailing Wall." Cash even mentioned the visit during his legendary "Live at San Quentin" performance that same year, explaining that the song "He Turned the Water Into Wine" was written "on the way to Tiberias, in the car."
The photos come from the Dan Hadani Archive, which includes nearly a million images capturing Israeli life and historical events from 1965 until 2000. In 2016, Hadani transferred the entire archive, including the negatives, to the library with the transfer made possible through the generous support of the William Davidson Foundation.
American singer and songwriter Johnny Cash at a lavish meal in Jerusalem held in his honor on his third visit to Israel, November 1971.
See you tomorrow bli neder
And of course, today is Halloween in America. An innocent holiday for children when I was growing up. Today it has become commercialized and a date holiday for singles in America.
