Sher moves to Michelle’s chief of staff
The new chief of staff for the first lady will continue to work on Jewish engagement for the White House.
Susan Sher, who was appointed to her new position on Thursday, has been one of two White House staffers working on Jewish outreach for the Obama administration, along with Danielle Borrin. She will continue in that role, along with her new duties. Sher had been serving as associate counsel to the president and counsel to the first lady.
The full White House announcement is after the jump:
The White House announced today that the First Lady’s Chief of Staff Jackie Norris has been appointed as Senior Advisor to the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). Susan Sher, a longtime colleague and friend of the First Lady’s, has been promoted to Chief of Staff. The First Lady, Mrs. Norris and Ms. Sher all released statements on the moves, included below:
Statement from Mrs. Obama:
Jackie Norris has been a colleague and friend since the earliest days of the Iowa campaign. She has built a strong organization in the East Wing and made tremendous progress on issues that are important to me and the President, particularly in the area of national service. In assuming the role as Senior Advisor to the Corporation for National and Community Service, Jackie will work closely with my office and the Administration as we move forward to implement the new Serve America Act and we will continue to count on Jackie’s leadership and passion for this cause.
Susan Sher is a trusted advisor, longtime mentor and friend dating back to my work at the City of Chicago and later the University of Chicago. Since the beginning of this Administration, Susan has served as a senior member of the East Wing and West Wing teams providing legal counsel, working as a member of the health care reform task force and leading Jewish outreach, and her transition to chief of staff will be seamless.
Statement from Jackie Norris:
I am grateful to President and Mrs. Obama for the opportunities and friendship they have given me over the last few years and I am looking forward to becoming an integral part of this Administration’s efforts to advance the cause of national and community service.
Statement from Susan Sher:
Mrs. Obama and I have worked together for many years on issues that we both care deeply about and I appreciate the opportunity to be of greater service to her and this Administration.
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Steele: U.S. should stand by its friends
Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele says President Obama's speech was problematic because he appears to be backing away from the traditional U.S. relationship with Israel. Here's his statement:
America must reach out to people throughout the Middle East, however we cannot think our dialogue is a zero sum game in which we gain new support only at the expense of our long-standing friendships. The U.S.-Israel relationship is tremendously important to both countries. Israel is a stable democracy in an unstable region, and is our strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East.
“True respect is gained when America stands by its friends. When leaders in the Middle East see America distancing itself from its closest friends, it sends the wrong signal.”
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Anne Frank, Emmett Till and the abuse of history
An age and more ago, Robert Fisk wrote a book about Israel's misbegotten Lebanon war. It was the kind of book that, starting with its title, "Pity the Nation," is so fraught with its own importance it overwhelms its cause, however righteous.
In it, I recall (I don't have it here with me) Fisk describes asking Bruce Kashdan, an Israeli diplomat, what Anne Frank might have thought of Sabra and Chatila.
Kashdan is well known in Jerusalem for the rewards his incremental, insistent diplomacy has reaped in the Arab world (and for turning up in the unlikeliest corners of the planet), but whatever berth is reserved for him in diplomat heaven was earned for resisting what must have been a mighty urge to deck Fisk. (To his credit, Fisk more recently has demonstrated a sensitivity to the misuse of Holocaust imagery.)
Now we have an imagined dialogue between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, the African American teenager whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 galvanized the civil rights movement.
The play, by Janet Langhart Cohen, is to be performed next week at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and at George Washington University.
From the excerpts in this Courtland Milloy column in the Washington Post, it sounds just awful. The two teenagers meet each other in "Memory" and Frank (who died a decade earlier) explains it all to Till:
Anne: We're all here together in the darkness, yet alone at the same time until we're pulled into the light, until we're remembered.
Emmett: Remembered? By whom?
Teenagers, apparently, are blessed with elegant, writerly speaking skills when they die.
Ugh. Anne and Emmett were murdered, but now they have a reward. We remember them.
That makes us the heroes.
It's been said that Washington is Hollywood, but with less beautiful people. And certainly, there is a propensity in both towns for appropriating grief and turning it into sentimental, self-loving swill.
What makes the prospect of this performance even less promising is that Milloy - in apparent collusion with Langhart Cohen, who is married to William Cohen, the former defense secretary - uses it as a stick with which to beat a Jewish acquaintance of the playwright. This is how it starts:
During a high-society luncheon in Washington a few years ago, Janet Langhart Cohen mentioned that she was writing a book about "growing up in apartheid America." Langhart Cohen is black. Another luncheon guest, who is Jewish, was taken aback.
"Oh, Janet, you don't want to go discussing that," Langhart Cohen recalled the woman saying. "You live in a penthouse. You're married to the secretary of defense. Why do you want to talk about those days?"
And this is how Milloy ends it:
Among those expected to attend the play at the Holocaust Museum is the woman from the luncheon who unwittingly inspired it.
Surely, she'll remember.
The woman's remarks, while awful, were also expressed in private, and she is now being humiliated in public. (Believe me, the way DC works, a lot of people will know exacly who this woman is.)
And the thing about bullying, is that it is abhorrent whatever the character of the bullied.
More than that, that exchange is the product of Langhart Cohen's memory; shift a word or two in what was said and the Jewish acquaintance might simply have been warning the budding playwright that she did not have the chops to pull this one off.
That would sound about right.
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