Being Pro-Semitic

Mendelssohn and Waze

By Jerry Brodsky

Felix Mendelssohn

You deserve 3 minutes to relax – right now! Click on this link and enjoy the Berlin Philharmonic performing German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, a piece from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Yes, you’ve heard it many times, because it’s the recessional music at weddings.

Felix Mendelssohn was born to Jewish parents in Hamburg, Germany, but as a child he was converted to Christianity, along with his siblings and his parents, as was somewhat popular in the area during the early 19^th century as a way to emancipate themselves from the Jewish ghetto community. While young, among his many musical compositions, he wrote five operas and 11 symphonies for string orchestras, his first public appearance being at age nine. He wrote Wedding March within his work of accompaniment for performances of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Very active musically throughout his life, Mendelssohn was 38 years old when he died from a series of strokes.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Felix-Mendelssohn#ref4798 for content and YouTube for the audio file. Photo is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Do you use the mobile phone app “Waze” to find your way from one place to another?

You can thank three Israelis who developed it in 2008 to offer real-time traffic updates for drivers in Israel, to avoid congestion, accidents and other activity that results in slow-downs or detours.

At the time, Uri Levin, Ehud Shabtai and Amir Shinar produced FreeMap Israel and sought local advertising for funding. As they built the product to be more robust and marketable, they changed the product name to “Waze,” and in 2013, their software was sold to Google for over $1 billion. It was then globalized and commercialized, making it of use to over 250 million drivers around the world, as well as television news outlets and governmental operations centers.

“Waze” is one of many products in our daily lives created and developed in Israel. Laser hair removal, thumb-drive memory sticks, drip irrigation, robotic surgical software and many other medical devices and software commonly used around the world today, including the pill-sized camera that provides gastroenterologists with more options for detecting disease in their patients without invasive procedures – all were developed in Israel for use around the world.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/11/google-buys-waze-maps-billion

https://web.archive.org/web/20090205040332/http://waze.co.il/about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze#cite_note-10

https://aish.com/israels-top-45-inventions/?utm_source=googlegrants&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=19561819333&utm_term=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19561819333&gbraid=0AAAAADnzuTPyrP3xq_PS88IHHwUikR5E6&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_IXQBhCkARIsADqELbLmxxHG_nv7uRzXikWU459ibP4XrD4419Qd3t80W5mTVKTmbou5WqEaAg5xEALw_wcB

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waze_logo_2022.png

Jerry Brodsky is former chair of FJMC’s Inclusion Initiative and president of FJMC’s International Region.