Joanne Palmer
A Jewish world through a camera’s eye
Guler Ugur puts her heart into her photography — to awesome results
Successful photographers need clarity of vision. Their eyes have to be open to the joy, sorrow, magnificence, poetry, or just plain weirdness that surrounds all of us all the time.
Guler Ugur is blessed with that vision, but that is not the only one of her gifts. She also has an open heart, and that has guided her on her unlikely path to Jewish life.
As she tells her story, she speaks with passion at breakneck speed, in barely accented English. Her energy is cracklingly and tangibly evident.
‘Steaming toward Palestine’
Nathan Nadler of Rutherford, Exodus veteran, dies
This story first ran in June 2003, when Nat Nadler was among 70 American veterans of Israel honored at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum on Manhattan’s West Side. Nadler, who is believed to be one of the last survivors of the Exodus, died at home in Rutherford on July 25. His wife, Ann, died in 2002; he is survived by their two sons, Mark and Aaron, and two grandsons.
Nathan Nadler was born in Browns-ville, Brooklyn, in 1927 and was drafted into the U.S. Army when he was 18, right at the war’s end. “When I was raised in Brownsville, nobody ever called me a Jew bastard,” he said. He encountered such name-calling for the first time in basic training in Alabama, when he was put together with young men from the Deep South. “Those 18-year-olds I was in the Army with — I just recently realized that they were the grandchildren of Civil War veterans.
On spending a day in the cemetery
Green-Wood’s charms are deeply American — and somehow that’s also Jewish
It was a steamy Sunday a few weeks ago, the kind of day that covers your skin in greasy slime the second you walk out into it. The kind of day that’s made for sitting inside, curled up by your air conditioner with your iPad, gobbling content. Living in the twenty-first century.
But my sister is a Civil War buff — our mother, a librarian, gave her Rifles for Watie to read when she was in elementary school, and that was it for her. She was casting around for something to do and came up with a guided tour of Green-Wood cemetery. Her persuasiveness overcame our sloth, so her husband, my husband, and I went to Brooklyn to join her in a tour of the 1860s.
