#yehuda koren

[derangedrhythms]

You know, in bed he smells like a butcher.

Assia Wevill, on Ted Hughes, from ‘A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill’ by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

[hairtusk]

D.H. Lawrence, 'He-Goat' / Assia Wevill, quoted in Eliat Negrev & Yehuda Koren, 'A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill'

[aprettyjewishyear]

אֶלָּא חֲמִשָּׁה עָשָׂר בְּאָב מַאי הִיא? אָמַר רַב יְהוּדָה אָמַר שְׁמוּאֵל: יוֹם שֶׁהוּתְּרוּ שְׁבָטִים לָבוֹא זֶה בָּזֶה.

However, what is the special joy of the fifteenth of Av? Rav Yehuda said that Shmuel said: This was the day on which the members of different tribes were permitted to enter one another’s tribe, by intermarriage.

translation courtesy of Sefaria, Koren-Steinsaltz. Taanit 30b:9.

photo credit to Amy & Stuart photography.

[pastedpast]

I didn't buy this book, but took a photo of the blurb in the inside cover. I've typed it out here:

Rachel Beer [1858 - 1927] was a rebel and a pioneer. In the late nineteenth century, at a time when women were still denied the vote, she became the first and only woman ever to edit not one but two national British newspapers - the Sunday Times and The Observer - and to do it simultaneously. It was to be over 80 years before another woman took the helm of a Fleet Street paper. [ Rosie Boycott?]

As a woman she was barred not only from frequenting the London Clubs that fed her rival male editors with political gossip, but also from the Press Gallery of the House of Commons. However, whilst other female journalists were restricted to frocks, frills and frippery, Rachel managed to raise her formidable voice on national and foreign political issues, including the Dreyfus affair, as well as on social and women's issues, often controversially. Rachel was a member of the Sassoon family, who had made their fortune in Indian opium and cotton, and she was aunt of the poet Siegfried Sassoon [war poet, writer, and soldier]. Her marriage to Frederick Beer brought together two wealthy dynasties. Julius Beer, Frederick's father, came from Germany and made his fortune on the London Sock Exchange and as an entrepreneur of railroads and telegraphy. But the loving union of the two heirs also brought Rachel strife and heartbreak - for while the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, attended the wedding, Julius Beer's decision to abandon the Jewish religion and baptize his son led to Rachel being disowned by many of her proudly Jewish family. Rachel anticipated her family's rage, but ultimately followed her heart, only for tragedy to strike when her beloved husband died and she was certified as a person of unsound mind.

Indeed, until three years ago, her grave in Tunbridge Wells laid untended and simply described her as "daughter of David Sassoon'', with no reference to her remarkable achievements. Thanks to the campaigning work of the former Observer journalist Ann Treneman, and donations from the Guardian and the Sunday Times, her grave was cleaned up and decorated with a commemorative plaque. Tunbridge Wells Borough Council also erected a plaque on the building that now stands on the site of her former home, thus finally affording her the recognition that her family failed to offer during her lifetime or in the nearly ninety intervening years.* 

The doctor who judged Rachel to have become mentally unstable was Sir George Savage, who also diagnosed Virginia Woolf as insane a few years later (he is among the figures lampooned in the character of Sir William Bradshaw in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway). Beer had been committed for psychiatric treatment after the death of her husband. (Acc. to Wikipedia, he died of syphilis, which he [possibly] passed on to his wife).

She spent the last two decades of her life living in Tunbridge Wells, but was as good as "erased from history". This book by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren appears to have been the first attempt at shining a light on this forgotten story.

*Info from a blog called Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship ('The Sad Story of Auntie Rachel' here), which is an interesting read about Sassoon's apparent disregard for his aunt, despite the fact that it was her money which enabled him to buy the comfortable residence where he would spend the last thirty years of his life.

[lovingsylvia]

93 years ago today, on 15 May 1927, Assia Esther Gutmann was born in Berlin, Germany to her Jewish father Lew (Lonya) Gutmann from Latvia (with roots in the Ukraine) and to her  Lutheran German mother Elizabetha (Lisa) Bertha Margarete (née Gaedecke). Her siter Celia was born on 22 September 1929.

At the time of Assia’s birth, her parents were living in Berlin Charlottenburg in Germany and Celia later remembered that “We were brought up like any German girl, without a trace of Jewishness. The house rules and manners were German, but the backbone was Russian”.

After Hitler was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933 and living in Germany became too dangerous, her parents decided to leave Germany for Pisa, Italy and to subsequently move to Tel-Aviv in the British-mandated territory of Palestine.

In 1943, Assia met the British soldier John Steele, whom she followed to England in September 1946 and they married on 17 May 1947. As her biographers Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev wrote in an article in The Telegraph in 2006 "she had entered an essentially loveless marriage with an Englishman at the age of 20 – largely to enable her family to emigrate to England." In April 1948, the couple emigrated to Vancouver, Canada and divorced one year later. In the meantime, her family also moved to Canada and they were all living together again.

Assia enrolled at the University of British Columbia where she studied art. She met her second husband Richard Lipsey on 21 October 1952 and moved to London, England with him one year later and back to Canada in 1956.

In the same year, Assia met the Canadian poet Davil Wevill whom she instantly began an affair with. In 1959, Assia and Richard Lipsey decided to separate and Assia went with David to Burma, now Myanmar. When the divorce was through in early 1960, Assia and David married on 16 May 1960 in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma.

After coming back in London the same year, they were apartment hunting in the summer of 1961, when they came across the apartment ad for 3 Chalcot Square, near Primrose Hill; the apartment Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wanted to sublet. Sylvia and Ted immediately liked the couple and became friends with Assia and David. In May 1962, they invited to visit them at Court Green in Devon. Numerous sources and Hughes’ own poem “Dreamers”, published in Birthday Letters in 1998, claim that it was during the visit that Ted fell under Assia’s spell. A few weeks later, they started an affair.

After Sylvia Plath’s death, Assia moved to Court Green where she lived with Ted and his children Frieda and Nicholas. On 3 March 1965, she gave birth to her daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed Shura, while still being married to David. 

However, she was not happy in Devon; she felt haunted by Sylvia’s memory and her relationship with Ted began to crumble because he refused to commit to her and was having various affairs. In 1968, Assia moved with Shura to London. In February 1969, her divorce from David was finalized. And just one month later, she killed herself and her daughter on 23 March 1969 in the same manner Sylvia Plath committed suicide.

Source: “Lover of Unreason. Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love” by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, 2006

[punkrockandreticence]

Ted Huge Asshole.

On the reading list:

Lover of Unreason by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne

[autumnbell32]

*Trigger Warning- suicide discussed

Current reading ^

...for some reason I feel this ache deep in my heart, like I’m betraying Sylvia Plath by reading about the destruction of her marriage (and possibly the unraveling of her life) from an angle closer to the other woman- Assia Wevill. The entries written days before Plath ended her life were never released, and I feel like maybe the book will help me fill in the gap? I’ve never experienced the kind of loss she did- when her husband left her and her two small children (literal babies) for a mutual friend. Out of this some of her greatest poetry was born...maybe at a price, I’m not sure.

**omg

omg assia wevill committed suicide as well after a fight with hughes. she also took the life her of four year old daughter. i had no idea.

[jewishbookworld]

The Prince and the Emperors: The Life and Times of Rabbi Judah the Prince by Dov Zakheim

The Prince and the Emperors: The Life and Times of Rabbi Judah the Prince by Dov Zakheim

A biographical account of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (Rabbi Judah the Prince), also known as Rebbe, and the human and historical context that shaped the Mishna and Gemara. Drawing upon both Jewish and Roman sources, it provides a portrait of this important rabbinic sage, as well as insight into the Jewish encounter with Rome.

[nevinslibrary]

Totally Random Non-Fiction Tuesday

This book is horrific. I mean, it’s an amazing book, but, since it’s the story of Elie Wiesel’s time as a teenager when he was in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during World War II it's not an easy read.

It doesn’t shy away from anything, and, if you haven’t read it during the school years, I highly recommend reading it now. It’s intense, but also moving. And, I’m a little stunned that I haven’t recommended it until now.

You may like this book If you Liked: The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya, Wrestling With Life by George Reinitz, or In Our Hearts We Were Giants by Yehuda Koren

Night by Elie Wiesel

[derangedrhythms]

[…] she was alarmed by his voracious sexual appetite, his superstitions about marriage and his black moods.

Assia Wevill on Ted Hughes, from ‘A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill’ by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

[nas-asas-do-tempoo]

A incrível história dos sete anões de Auschwitz

A família Ovitz, que sobreviveu inteira ao nazismo graças a um dos homens mais perversos da história: Mengele.

De todas as histórias absurdas desse período, poucas são mais incríveis que a dos sete anões de Auschwitz: uma família romena, de nome Ovitz, que conseguiu passar pelo célebre campo de concentração por causa de sua deficiência. Eles são o tema de um novo livro: Giants: The Seven Dwarfs Of Auschwitz, de Yehuda Koren e Eilat Negev. Eram do vilarejo de Rozavlea, na Transilvânia. O pai, anão, teve dez filhos, sete deles verticalmente prejudicados. A mãe, preocupada com o futuro deles, vendo que tinham talento artístico, fez com que montassem um grupo, a Trupe Lilipute. Nos anos 30, fizeram sucesso na Europa Central, cantando, dançando e estrelando esquetes. Os maridos e mulheres deles entravam imediatamente no time para ajudar no que fosse necessário. Moravam todos juntos, numa comunidade.

Quando Hitler tomou o poder, eles estavam duplamente condenados: primeiro, por ser anões (os nazistas tinham um programa de eutanásia para deficientes físicos e mentais, de modo a preservar o arianismo); depois, por serem judeus.

Em maio de 1944, os Ovitz foram mandados para Auschwitz – os sete anões e os cinco normais. Ao vê-los, os soldados imediatamente identificaram uma oportunidade de agradar o médico que estava coleccionando o que chamava de aberrações – gémeos, corcundas, gigantes, hermafroditas, obesos etc. Não pensaram duas vezes. Apesar de ser noite, sabiam que ele gostaria de ver aquelas pessoas.

Josef Mengele, o médico, adoptou-os para seu circo de horrores. “Eu fui salva pela graça do demónio”, disse Perla Ovitz.

Os soldados da SS eram brutais com os prisioneiros, mas não com os Ovitz. Como não havia outra família de anões, Mengele era um pouco mais cuidadoso com a trupe. Os Ovitz dispunham de rações mais fartas, podiam usar as próprias roupas, não raspavam o cabelo. Alguns dos prisioneiros que os viram no campo achavam que estavam tendo alucinações.

Viraram uma atracção dos encontros nocturnos dos chefes de Auschwitz (os kapos). Um cantora lembra que o programa dessas saturnálias incluía foxtrote, casais do mesmo sexo dançando, homens e mulheres bêbados rindo, contando piadas sujas. Os anões eram parte do cenário, acompanhando a orquestra batendo as mãos e os pés.

Os Ovitz viraram uma lenda. Livros de sobreviventes diziam que eles foram executados todos juntos ao lado de uma vala; que o bebê do grupo teve sua cabeça esmagada na parede por um oficial (um expediente comum); que fugiram.

Na verdade, a família escapou com vida. Em 1949, foram para Israel. Lá fizeram seu último show, em 1955. Perla morreu aos 98 anos. Tudo graças à sorte, ao imponderável, às suas características físicas – e, principalmente, à curiosidade doentia de um dos homens mais perversos da história.

[jewishandmore]

Judaism in "Do it ourselves"

Yom Kippur Morning 5781 Monday, September 28, 2020 Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

What a year.

2020, 5780 the year just past going into 5781.

It doesn’t look like it will let up any time soon.

Look at our world, our country, our city, our community, our Temple family.

You have risen to the occasion. You called everyone in our community multiple times when we first started this shut down journey on Friday, March 13. Do you remember? You organized yourselves in making sure that every TBZ member heard from someone more than once.

Knowing that we entered uncharted territory the people of our Temple Beth Zion family have over and over again come together to support the synagogue and each other. Just listen to a few of the amazing volunteer-initiated efforts that have started during this time, and this list is in no way exhaustive:

Chiavetta’s chicken fundraisers; a new initiative this year.

The innovation of lending out prayer books for the High Holy Days.

Special gifts for every member in honor of the High Holy Days.

The whole Sunday Palooza, including food drive and recycling drive.

Distributing individual Religious School packages to each and every religious school student and family.

Feast Before the Fast just yesterday.

A High Holy Days brought to you through an amazing production team led by our volunteers, and coordinated by the Ritual Committee of volunteers who manage every aspect of honors and service lay out and came here in advance to record Torah and Haftarah readings and blessings and English readings and the Kol Nidrei message and announcements.

Creating and participating in a whole new way of worshiping and connecting, many of us are now more connected than ever before because we have overcome mobility obstacles and figured out how to Zoom across generations and distances.

Broadcasting Jewish music today on WNED Classical - again led by the efforts of volunteers.

Joyful occasions and commemorations, B’nei Mitzvah and celebrations of life, ways to build community and family that we had never explored before, all while navigating the challenges facing all of us as individuals and a world, supported by all of you who continue to show up with kindness and compassion and support TBZ more enthusiastically than ever. This past Shabbat was our first Saturday morning since August 1 without a Bat or Bar Mitzvah or Rosh Hashanah - all of you have been participating to support all of these celebrations.

Sisterhood, Brotherhood, Gift Shop, Sukkah, Task Forces and our constantly devoted Board of Trustees, committees overseeing our finances, and always innovating on how we will enter a new future as an organization in our Jewish community, preserving and improving our wonderful buildings, seeking new models of collaboration, and so much more - most of you have no idea how many hours our volunteer leaders devote to TBZ and there’s no way to list all of them or all that they do.

Generosity in these difficult times - all of you continue to figure out ways to give of your time, talent, and treasure to make TBZ into the warm, welcoming, and hamishe place that so many depend upon.

Patience and enthusiasm with our team as we figure out technology and remote gathering and innovate and improvise, building the plane as we fly it - thank you all so much for sticking with us. You have comforted each other and found new ways of “being there” for each other even when we can’t actually share space and time and hugs.

In all these ways and so many more, you have shown every member of Temple Beth Zion that we are first and foremost a community of caring people, compassionately engaged with each other to build and maintain the fabric of interconnectedness that is Judaism, that improves and maintains our lives through all the principles of our ancestors applied with love and care.

In all of this, you volunteers and leaders of Temple Beth Zion, you embody the teachings of our tradition. The way we behave at Temple Beth Zion follows the first teaching of the Torah about building community - we model ourselves after Abraham, the first of our ancestors, who demonstrated that caring and compassion are expressed first of all through hospitality. When all of you have led through welcome, you have followed Abraham’s model.

Here is a story emphatically showing just this from the Talmud, discussing what we are allowed to do for the sake of hospitality.

The Talmud starts:

One may move baskets of produce on Shabbat for guests and in order to prevent the suspension of Torah study in the academy. Rabbi Yocĥanan said: Hospitality towards guests is as great as rising early to go to study. And Rabbi Dimi from Neharde’a says: Hospitality towards guests is greater than rising early to study, as it teaches: For guests, and only afterward: to prevent suspension of Torah study. Rabbi Yehuda said that Rav said on a related note: Hospitality towards guests is greater than receiving the Presence of God, as when Abraham invited his guests it is written…

And here is the full story from Genesis, chapter 18: 1 Now God was seen by [Abraham] by the oaks of Mamre as he was sitting at the entrance to his tent at the heat of the day.  2 [Abraham] lifted up his eyes and saw: here, three men standing over against him. When he saw them, he ran to meet them from the entrance of his tent and bowed to the earth 3 and said: My lords, pray if I have found favor in your eyes, pray do not pass by your servant!

The Torah uses very few words, so let’s expand them a little. God is seen by Abraham while Abraham is sitting at the entrance to his tent. Then, Abraham looks up and sees three men, and leaves God’s presence in order to greet the new visitors and offer them hospitality.

This is the interpretation that the rabbis of the Talmud use as they continue: Abraham requested that God, the Divine Presence, wait for him while he tended to his guests appropriately. Rabbi Elazar said: Come and see that the attribute of the Holy One, Blessed be God, is not like that of flesh and blood. The attribute of flesh and blood people is such that a less significant person is unable to say to a more significant person: Wait until I come to you. While with regard to the Holy One, Blessed be God, it is written: “And Abraham said: Adonai, if now I have found favor in Your sight, please pass not from Your servant.” Abraham requested that God wait for him due to his guests. [BT Shabbat 127a, Koren Talmud Bavli, The Noe Edition, Shabbat Part Two, Commentary by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, page 249]

When we are dealing with people, it is difficult to ask a more important person to wait while we go and attend to the needs of a less important person. It’s the right thing to do, but it is difficult. With God it is different. When hospitality and taking care of the needs of others arise, even if God is right there talking to us, then God will wait while we take care of other people.

The Talmud tells this story about Abraham to make sure that we understand just how important it is to welcome the stranger and attend to the needs of those around us.

And all of you at Temple Beth Zion understood this even before I brought forward this story. You understand that the life of a community is about the people in our community. You understand that we don’t communicate that by telling people how important all of you are, we communicate that by showing up for each other, by making it clear that we know that caring actions speak clearly. You have spoken clearly this year. The plans you continue to make for the months to come, with all the uncertainty around us show that you will continue to speak clearly through your actions that the people of Temple Beth Zion, the Jews of our community, and the people of Western New York are so important, that sometimes we have to ask others to hold on while we welcome and care for one another.

Thank you.

And of course, thank you to our whole TBZ team.

The whole team of us who work with and for you so appreciate the Temple Beth Zion mission. When we partner like we have, we become so much more than the sum of our parts. We accomplish something truly holy - we build a community that cares.

In the early 1970’s “Do it yourself” Judaism was made a big thing by the publication of “The Jewish Catalog” by the founders of the Havurah movement - empowered Jews who felt that formal Jewish life was lacking for participation and doing by Jews. The 2020 update, nearly fifty years later is that Judaism is “Do it ourselves”. Each and every one of you has taken up the banner of doing Jewishly together, taking an action that makes a difference for more than an individual, putting our community’s well-being first.

We may speak of the number of families who belong to Temple Beth Zion, but we don’t really act like we are multiple families. We are one Temple Beth Zion family, and we have been doing Judaism for ourselves for a long time. The crisis our society has encountered over the last six months has only brought forward the spirit that has inspired Temple Beth Zion for generations: we build a “do it ourselves” Judaism every day of the year.

On this day, as we are re-energized and reminded by the words of our sages and our prophets, that empty fasts and rote rituals are not what God demands of us. All of you at Temple Beth Zion can be inspired by your “do it ourselves” energy that you have already exerted - you are the people who will help make 5781 a better year. You are the community that will continue to care for each other. We do for ourselves because, in these words inspired by Hillel the Sage:

“If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?

If we are only for ourselves, what are we?

If not now, when?”

We are the ones who will make the improvements we need.

We will confess and atone, remember and re-energize, and take up the task again as we enter a new year ready to continue caring for one another and doing Judaism for ourselves.

May we all inscribe ourselves for a better year in the Book of Life that we all write together.

L’shanah tovah.

[panburger-partner]

I recently read this biography about the Ovits family who were dwarves who performed a traveling show during this time and it brought up a lot of these points; women were aware of what was happening and they were able to "stay ahead" of some of the trouble by traveling away from the area. They ended up in the camps and were able to save people by adding them to their "family" which was being used for experiments instead of just killed outright.

https://www.amazon.com/Giants-Dwarfs-Auschwitz-Extraordinary-Lilliput/dp/1849544646

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

[yahooresearch]

Adapting to the Evolution of Email with Machine-Generated Mail Mining

By Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek

The mail experience has not evolved much in the last few decades as compared to other communication channels. At the same time, personal communications have exploded  with the advent and growth of numerous new communication and social networking apps. This might lead you to believe mail is on its way to a slow death. We beg to differ.

As messaging, video chatting, and other social networking methods have reached adolescence, mail has entered its mid-life (without the crisis) while its traffic has significantly changed and evolved. A new type of mail traffic has emerged with the rise of online transactions, including online purchases, financial transactions, travel plans, event notifications, and many others. As a result, the Web mail domain has become dominated by what we call “machine-generated” messages; that is, emails that are generated (usually by companies) via scripts rather than by humans. Following this essential observation, it makes sense that you might want to be able to distinguish traffic generated by machines from that generated by humans. The use cases are numerous: from being able to provide views gathering similar types of messages (personal, travel, purchases, etc.) as surfaced recently in Yahoo Mail (see Figure 1) and Gmail, to being able to provide a user experience tailored to the type of email you are looking at (e.g., you wouldn’t want to provide a “reply” option to a “noreply@” machine-generated address).

Figure 1: Yahoo Mail “Smart Views” – here users can explore emails that are automatically categorized by topic

At Yahoo Research, we have developed a new classifying technology that distinguishes between human- and machine-generated mail. This “Human/Machine” classifier is based on a wide range of features, such as:

sender and traffic characteristics – a machine can generate large traffic bursts sent to a large number of recipients, while a human cannot

semantic attributes – various keywords repeating in machine-generated traffic of all types

structural attributes – messages generated by machines typically have complex HTML structures, while those composed by human are rather flat

Our classifier now achieves a performance of 90% precision and 90% recall for both categories. This means that 90% of the messages actually composed by human beings are indeed classified as “human,” and out of those classified as “human,” we are correct in 90% of the cases. The same goes for machines.

Given the high degree of accuracy with which we can distinguish between the two types of email traffic, we felt confident launching people-only notifications in Yahoo Mail across all platforms. This new feature (see Figure 2) allows you to get “people-only” notifications. In other words, you can turn on the option to receive a notification only when a person emails you, or you can turn it off and receive a notification for any new incoming message.

Figure 2: “People only” notifications settings enabled

While our users have said they enjoy the "people only" feature, what really excites us on the Yahoo Mail Mining team in Haifa, is the opportunity presented by machine-generated emails. We know that machines account for 90% of all mail traffic [4]. These machine-generated messages, whether they are purchase receipts, flight reservations, or something else, contain loads of personal information. So in many ways, the mailbox serves as a personal data store. Unpacking that data in a meaningful way presents an incredible opportunity to advance the mail experience for our users.

Machine-Generated Mail Mining

This line of research, based on the difference between human- and machine-generated mail traffic, was initiated when we investigated better means of mail classification [4][6] and has served different use cases in recent years [3][5], including mail anonymization [2]. Today, it mainly serves automatic mail extraction [1]. With mail extraction, what we attempt to achieve is an automated way of extracting the “personalized” (and thus more meaningful to the user) parts of messages created by automated scripts; more specifically, those parts that are either of high interest to you (the items you purchased, their date of delivery, the details of your trip, etc.), or those that have a business value (e.g., the advertisements we surface). Anonymization techniques that we developed precisely for machine-generated traffic (see Figure 3) allow us to preserve a user’s privacy [2] and adhere to formal PII terms of service.

Figure 3: Anonymized mail sample showing extraction fields

Mail extraction is a process composed of two main phases: clustering the messages and extracting the data. Why do we cluster before extracting? Because if clustered correctly, a single extraction rule can be applied over an entire cluster, and therefore needs to be defined only once per cluster.

Clustering

Clustering mail messages is performed horizontally, exploiting the similarities of machine-generated messages sent en masse with (usually) complex HTML structures. Using the recurrent characteristics of these messages, clusters are created, optimally matching the scripts generating the messages. Previous clustering techniques relied only on the message header [5] and mainly looked for similarities in the messages’ subjects. Today, the state-of-the-art clustering techniques rely on the body of messages (i.e., their structures) [1][2]. These techniques detect similarities in the HTML structure of the messages and allow for flexible matching, including some small differences in the structure. More flexible clustering results in fewer clusters and ease processes that require some maintenance or human intervention.

Figure 4: Cluster of Amazon purchase confirmations

Figure 5: A chart representing the distribution of clusters between different categories

Figure 6: Level of structural flexibility that can be allowed, while still guaranteeing high extraction quality (flexibility represented by edit distance)

Extractions

Once the clusters have been created, and we have guaranteed that all messages within a cluster are similar with regard to structure, we can move on to our next phase: mail extraction. Currently at Yahoo, some manual work is involved in defining extraction rules for interpreting some pieces of messages and for validating parts of the process. Extraction rules are defined per cluster and are applied online for each message entering the system after identifying the cluster to which it belongs.

The fact that mail extraction requires some interpretability during intermediate phases of its cycle is a bottleneck, which prevents scalability and coverage of the long tail. A fully-automated method for creating extraction rules that cover all machine-generated traffic is in the advance stages of development. Our process is based on the similarity of messages guaranteed by the cluster, which is a crucial attribute used for identifying and annotating the pieces of information we want to extract. Figure 7 below is an example of a rule created automatically. It is defined over an Xpath [7], where an Xpath is simply a pointer to a specific location in the message. This rule defines the fields of interest to be extracted from this location and provides their full annotations.

Figure 7: An extraction rule

As we continue to develop our machine-generated mail mining techniques, we hope to broaden our approach and share this research in an effort to encourage others to do the same. As a domain that has significantly changed its nature in recent years, mail deserves a reexamination of its scientific foundation and more attention within the research community.

Acknowledgements:

This multiple-year work has been published at several top conferences in the last few years and we are grateful to all our co-authors who not only invested so much effort in this research, but also published about it: Nir Ailon, Noa Avigdor-Elgrabli, Marc Cwalinski, Dotan DiCastro, Iftah Gamzu, Ira Grabovitch-Zuyev, Mihajlo Grbovic, Guy Halawi, Yehuda Koren, Zohar Karnin, Edo Liberty, Roman Sandler, David Wajc, Ran Wolff, and Eyal Zohar.

A huge thanks to the entire Yahoo Mail engineering and product team. The list of our friends and colleagues there is too long to be fully listed here but this couldn't have happened without their extraordinary support and partnership.

References:

[1] Noa Avigdor-Elgrabli, Mark Cwalinskiy, Dotan Di Castro, Iftah Gamzu, Irena Grabovitch-Zuyev, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek. Structural Clustering of Machine-Generated Mail. CIKM 2016.

[2] Dotan Di Castro, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek, Ran Wolff and Eyal Zohar, Enforcing k-anonymity in Web mail auditing. WSDM'2016, San Francisco, CA, Feb 2016.

[3] Iftah Gamzu, Zohar Shay Karnin, Yoelle Maarek and David Wajc. You Will Get Mail! Predicting the Arrival of Future Email. TempWeb 2105, Florence Italy, May 2015.

[4] Mihajlo Grbovic, Guy Halawi, Zohar Karnin and Yoelle Maarek. How many folders do you really need? Classifying email into a handful of categories. CIKM’2014, Shanghai, China, Nov 2014.

[5] Nir Ailon, Zohar Karnin, Edo Liberty and Yoelle Maarek. Threading Machine Generated Email. WSDM 2013.

[6] Y. Koren, E. Liberty, Y. Maarek, and R. Sandler. Automatically tagging email by leveraging other users' folders. KDD, 2011.

[7] W3C. XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/, November 1999

[lovingsylvia]

Today marks the 51st anniversary of Assia and Shura Wevill’s deaths. RIP!

Assia Wevill, born Assia Esther Gutmann (15 May 1927 – 23 March 1969)

Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed Shura (3 March 1965 - 23 March 1969)

Assia committed suicide  and killed her daughter Shura in her London home at 3 Okeover Manor, Clapham Common, UK.

***

“Assia wrote in her diary: “’It’s Sylvia---it’s because of her’ […] “It says die---die, soon. But execute yourself and your little self efficiently,” [...] “I can’t believe it---any more that I could believe hearing my own death.” […]

On Sunday, 23 March 1969, around 8:30 p.m., a neighbor in Assia’s building smelled gas, but since her apartment was all dark, she assumed there was no one there, but decided to stay by the door and warn Assia of the gas leak upon her return.

“As he [another neighbor] entered Assia’s flat, it became clear to him that the source of the smell was behind the shut kitchen door. Pushing it open, he turned the kitchen light on and saw the two bodies. […] “Mrs. Wevill was lying on some blankets on the floor on her left side, and her daughter was lying on her back, with her face inclined toward her mother,”  […] She [the nurse] took her pulses, but there weren’t any. She looked at their pupils, discovering to her horror that they were fixed, dilated. “The little girl was much colder than her mother.” […] the nurse did some cardiac massage on the mother and on the little girl, but it was hopeless. The police doctor who had just arrived declared them both dead. The post-mortem examination report stated that the cause of the mother and daughter’s death was carbon monoxide poisoning; there were no external marks of recent injury on Shura’s body and, unlike her mother, there were no signs of barbiturates and no evidence of alcohol. The pathologist […] remarked, “The child bears every evidence of proper care and attention.”

In a suicide note to her father found on her bedside table, Assia wrote two months earlier, in January 1969: “I have lived on the dream of living with Ted---and this has gone kaput. The reasons are immaterial. There could never be another man. Never.” […]

“It is clear that by January, Assia had made up her mind to take her own life and not to leave her child behind. […] Assia knew that she had no more than three hours in which to execute it all: to prepare the letters, clear the kitchen, lay the blankets, close the windows, swallow a package of pills gulping whiskey, carry Shura from her bed, and turn on the gas taps. The use of multiple methods indicates that she was past the point of no return, and did not wish to be saved.”

– Excerpt from Chapter Twenty, “The Die is Cast” - London winter 1969 in “Lover of Unreason. Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love” by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, 2006

Picture: Assia nd Shura at Court Green, Devon, UK

[rpsabetto]

The Cakemaker [Der Kuchenmacher]

The Cakemaker [Der Kuchenmacher]

(Israel / Germany 2017)

During a post screening Q and A, writer and director Ofir Raul Graizer said he “love[s] question marks in cinema.” Well, that shows: with his first feature film The Cakemaker [Der Kuchenmacher], he excels in raising questions that he lets his audience answer. Many people don’t appreciate this approach. I’m not one of them.

Tomas (Tim Kalkhof) is a thirty-something baker…