After All Things

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Avelo Airlines expands service to Hartford. Former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was honored in D.C. today. Another family files a lawsuit over a fatal bus crash involving Farmingdale students. Get ready to cheer on these local athletes at this year’s Olympics! And a conversation with producer Paula Apsell, whose film will be screened in Huntington this week.

Duration:: 14m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was honored today in Washington, D.C. The service was attended by Lieberman's family, former Vice President's Al Gore and Mike Pence and members of Connecticut's federal delegation. Al Gore chose Lieberman as his running mate back in 2000. He put friendship over anger. He practiced reconciliation as a form of grace. I believe we can all learn from Joe's life some critical lessons about how we might heal the rancor in our nation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also spoke at the service. He's in the United States to give a speech to Congress. U.S. Representative Rosa de Loro says she skipped that speech because she doesn't agree with Netanyahu's handling of the war in Gaza. "You're listening to After All Things, WSHU's Daily News and Culture Update from the Long Island Sound region. A velo expands service to Hartford. Another family files a lawsuit over a fatal bus crash involving farmingdale students. Get ready to cheer on these local athletes at this year's Olympic Games and a conversation with film producer Paula Appsell. Those stories and more are ahead. I'm Sabrina Garon. A velo airlines, the budget airline that's flown out of Tweed, New Haven since 2021, is expanding its service in Connecticut. It's adding nonstop flights to Mexico and Jamaica from Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. WSHU's Abang Udama has more. Andrew Levy is the CEO and founder of A velo. He says his airline is taking advantage of a two-year exemption on aviation fuel tax in Connecticut to provide nonstop flights from Bradley to Cancun, Mexico and Montego Bay, Jamaica. These are long haul flights where the cost of jet fuel is a very big part of the economics and the result is us having a lot more service out of Connecticut. Connecticut House Speaker Matt Ritter says that's what lawmakers were hoping when they passed the aviation fuel tax exemption last year. It's temporary for two years to see that it worked and that it was effective, right? You should revisit public policy every couple of years and we'll do that and it looks like it's been effective. Ritter says the increased volume of jet fuel sold by having the airlines fueled in Connecticut should offset the loss of tax revenue. With the addition of new flights, a velo will serve 33 routes from Connecticut. Abang Udama, WSHU's. A new lawsuit has been filed by the family of a Farmingdale High School student injured in a fatal bus crash last year. WSHU's Shelley Hasman-Caitish reports. The suit names the Farmingdale School District, the transportation company and one of its bus drivers. According to Newsday, the family accuses the District of negligence in vetting the company. They also blame the district for the child's injuries and mental anguish. The family says they want financial compensation for medical treatments and other damages. Nearly 20 lawsuits have been filed so far after a bus carrying members of the Farmingdale High School marching band crashed in upstate New York. Two educators were killed, the National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the crash. Shelley Hasman-Caitish, WSHU News. A new documentary showing on Long Island this week looks to dispel myths about Jewish passivity during World War II. A conversation with the film producer is coming up. Local support comes from Hartford HealthCare, the only health system in the Northeast, with all its hospitals receiving A grades for safety from the LeapFrog Group. The nation's leading independent safety watchdog group, HartfordHealthCare.org. ♪♪ The FBI raided the monacity at home of a former aide to New York Governor Kathy Holkel early yesterday. The crimes under investigation are still unclear according to The New York Times. Linda Sun is one of Holkel's former deputy chiefs of staff and also worked under former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Mosquitoes in Connecticut have tested positive for Eastern, Equine and Cephalitis virus. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station says while the virus rarely infects humans, it does have a 40 percent mortality rate and can cause significant brain damage to survivors. Officials highly recommend residents wear bug spray while outdoors. ♪♪ The Olympics opening ceremony is tomorrow, and Connecticut and Long Island have both sent athletes to Paris. WSHU's Molly Ingram has more. Three Long Island and 11 Connecticut athletes have qualified for the 2024 Olympics and Para Olympics. They include swimmers, rowers, soccer and basketball players, and track athletes. 18-year-old Silas Swords played basketball at Long Island Lutheran in Brookfield. She will be the youngest player to ever represent Canada on the Olympic women's basketball team. And in Connecticut, Ally Truett will represent Team USA in the pool just a year after losing her foot in a shark attack. Coverage of the Olympics will be available on NBC and Peacock. Molly Ingram, WSHU News. ♪♪ Resistance, they fought back. That's the title of a new documentary on the Jewish resistance to Nazi-led pogroms during World War II. Executive producer Paula Appsell says the film corrects a myth. A myth of Jewish passivity during the war. This week the film will be screened at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington on Long Island. WSHU's All Things Considered host Bill Buckner spoke with Paula Appsell about the documentary and what it reveals. Paula Appsell is a senior executive producer emerita of PBS's Nova and Nova Science Now, an American association for the Advancement of Science Fellow and CEO of Leading Edge Productions. Paula Appsell joins us on the phone. Paula, welcome. Thank you so much, Bill. It's so great to be here. There are many films, histories, books about the Holocaust. What makes this documentary different? What secrets do you unveil? Many of the films, I would say most of the films, focus on Jewish victimhood. Two-thirds of European Jewry was wiped out during the Holocaust, so Jews as victims of Nazi oppressions is a very valid topic. However, a myth has grown up for various reasons that Jews went to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter and didn't fight back. And my research yielded the fact that that is completely untrue, that there was resistance in ghettos, in the forest and in death camps. And for that reason, this film is actually quite different because it just simply takes a different angle on the Holocaust and shows the many ways with weapons and without weapons that Jews fought back. And when you say resistance, what did that look like? It took many forms at the very beginning, starting, for example, in Warsaw in 1939 and 1940 when the Nazis imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. And then eventually there were 1200 ghettos throughout Europe, the Jews had no idea that the Nazis' ultimate goal was the extermination of European Jewry. They had absolutely no idea. And so their resistance with the kind of resistance that Jewish communities have always used in their history when under attack. They had open schools for children, they educated children, they took care of the needy, and they kept very careful and meticulous records of German war crimes. But it was unarmed resistance that has a word in Hebrew, amida, which means standing up against. But eventually, when the Jews came to realize, around 1942, what the Germans were really up to and what their ultimate goal was to eliminate all of Judaism in Europe, then especially young people in the ghettos began to arm themselves. And armed resistance began, which eventually spread to the forest and actually went to the death camps themselves. There were seven uprisings in concentration camps, six were led by Jews. That's a fact that very few people know. I certainly did not know it when I began this film. And what was the impact of this resistance on the plight of the Jewish people? Well, of course, the impact was very minor, badly, tragically, because how could, you know, a small number of unarmed Jews, how could they defeat the Germans? A powerful army, the most powerful army in Europe, that we ourselves and all the allies took years for us to defeat them. So it was an impossibility. But it brought pride and honor to the Jewish people. So I think that it was really not a fight to win. Very few people believed that they would actually survive. It is a tragedy that somehow that fight has gotten buried in history. Yes. That's what I was going to ask you. You know, we've been led to believe for so long, most of us that there was no resistance. Why is it that that remained buried? It actually started with the Germans kind of ironically, that the Germans kept meticulous records of the war against the Jews. But they said nothing about resistance. They did not believe that the Jewish people were capable of resistance. So there was nothing in the records. So when the historians after the war came to try to write about and understand exactly what had happened, they saw nothing on resistance. So they didn't write about it. So people thought that it didn't happen. Now, eventually, as there have been more and more scholars and as they came to understand that talking to people, the people who were involved in the Holocaust, the people who were involved in resistance was a legitimate form of history. That changed. And now we actually know a great deal about Jewish resistance. The sad thing is that it has not reached the general public and it has not formed enough of the backbone of Holocaust education to really affect future generations. And that's one thing that this film tries to regret. It's my understanding that the film highlights the importance of women in this resistance. Can you explain that? Absolutely. Because Jewish men are circumcised, they can be very easily identified as Jews. So they could not go outside of the ghetto. So women had to do the main share of the work. They were called couriers and they did the main share of the work of going outside the ghetto, going from ghetto to ghetto to spread news to collect weapons to buy weapons. We tell the story of a woman named Vlad Kameet, she was a youngster really barely out of adolescence who lived as a Christian, even though she was Jewish herself, outside of the Warsaw ghetto to procure weapons for the resistance and then had to bring the weapons into the ghetto. Very dangerous. She could have been caught and killed at any time. Paula Appsell, thank you for joining us today and good luck with the film. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. That was WSHU's Bill Buckner speaking with executive producer Paula Appsell about her new documentary Resistance They Thought Back. Tomorrow Paula will be at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington for a screening of the film. You can get more information about that on our website, WSHU.org. For the latest news from Long Island and Connecticut, you can listen on the radio, stream online at WSHU.org or download the WSHU app after all things is supported by Hartford HealthCare. And whether it's news, classical music or podcasts like this one, they're all made possible with support from our listeners as well. So if you've been listening for a while now and you like what you hear, please consider making a donation to our station. All the info on how to do that is there for you on our website. I'm Sabrina Garon, have a great rest of your day. I'll talk to you tomorrow. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]