Art is 80

(1) With the collapse of the Kennedy Center, I decided that we should increase our support of both the Washington Opera and the National Symphony, each of which lost their long time homes and some of their financial support. We started last year when we went to see Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. In fact, as the Opera is playing at a number of different venues, we went to see it at the Lyric Theater in Baltimore (an experience in and of itself almost worth the price of admission), and I have just completed ordering tickets for the Washington Opera’s production of Madame Butterfly in November. This one will be more convenient in that it is at Constitution Hall, which GPS says is only 4.2 miles from our house (Lyric Theater is 34 miles away).

Do you remember the days when getting tickets to anywhere was easy? When all you had to do was (a) walk up to a window and buy a ticket, or (b) make a phone call and order a ticket? Now, it seems that buying a ticket to anything is an ordeal. I started to buy our Butterfly tickets a month or so ago, but they weren’t on sale yet. Then I tried again a few weeks ago, and was unsuccessful. I don’t remember why, but I remember making a few attempts online, none of which went through for reasons beyond human understanding, and when I tried a third time, a note popped up that said that there was something wrong with your account information and to please call the box office. It gave me the Opera office hours, which were not particularly convenient (I think all this happened on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day and the box office was going to be closed for 3 days and then open from 10-4, or something like that). At any rate, by the time Tuesday came, I forgot about getting the tickets.

Until yesterday, when I remembered. I went back on line, the website didn’t even look the same, and I think that is because I was on the Ticketmaster site, not the Washington Opera site (now that I am thinking about it). At any rate, I ordered the tickets (Nov 15 matinee if you are interested in joining us), told them I had read the fine print, which I hadn’t, and told them I did not need ticket insurance or $22 parking on a Sunday afternoon. I then had to put it my email and my Ticketmaster password (you would think that this would have been a sufficient hint that I was on the Ticketmaster website, right?) and, of course, it told me my password was wrong. I tried again – still wrong. Then “Forgot your password?”.

I then received a code by email to reset my password. I decided to use the same password that it declined and inserted it, only to be told “you cannot use your previous password as a new password”. Makes sense, but if they knew that was my previous password, why did I need a new one? At any rate, I changed my password.

Okay, all done? No, not quite. They then told me they needed to do a double security check and asked me for my phone number, which I inserted, and then I opened my phone to get whatever message they were going to text me. Nothing came, and meanwhile my phone started ringing; I was getting a call from an unknown number, which I didn’t take. Then, a second call from the same number, which I took at the last minute, and it turned out it was a computer call (not a text, a call) from Citibank giving me orally a code for me to put into a box which was now open on the Ticketmaster screen. I went to put the code in the box, and suddenly got a message from Ticketmaster that said: “Time is up. We must give others a chance. Try again later.” The only thing missing from that note was the “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha”.

Jeez. I decided that later should be right now, but I quickly learned that I had to start from scratch. When did I want to come, where did I want to sit, how did I want to pay, did I want to insure my purchase, did I want parking, etc., etc. I went through it all again, this time being on to their tricks, I used a new password for Ticketmaster and they took my money and sent me a confirmation.

Now, I will admit that I am rather cheap (it appears) when it comes to buying tickets, so that when we go to an event in a large venue, we tend to sit far enough away that we might as well be listening on the radio. That may be the way it will be at Madame Butterfly. We are paying only about $60 per ticket, so we will be sitting near the ceiling. But the seats that I saw (which do not include the really good seats, apparently) come in three prices, $59, $127, and $256. Opera is enjoyable, to be sure, put paying $512 for two tickets seems like a bit much, although plenty of folks must do it without blinking an eye.

I went back on the Ticketmaster site, by the way, to see what ticket prices looked like for other performances. I started with Steve Wonder, who is playing at the Capital Center, which has approximately 20,000 seats for a concert. The show is apparently basically sold out, but there are over 1,000 left, and the cheapest of these seats are a little over $1,000 (and in the Capital Center that means that all you can see is the Jumbotron), and if you want a second row floor seat, you will have to shell out just under $15,000.

Olivia Rodrigo is a 23 year old singer about whom I know little (and have never, to my knowledge, heard). She is also playing the Capital Center next month on two separate nights. What does it cost to hear 23 year old Olivia Rodrigo? As little as $700 or so, and as much as about $5000, if you want close-in seats.

I know the price of shows is a matter under a lot of discussion. And I know it has little to do with me. But who can afford these tickets to fill up one 20,000 seat venue after another again and again?

(2) How about some good news? I am generally not a fan of Moti’s Kosher Market, where we get most of the meat (that means 99% chicken) that we eat our house. I am not going to get into why I find shopping at Moti’s less than a great experience. Instead, I am going to say something very positive about Moti’s. They have a section that sells sushi and nigiri. On a whim (and because it looked good), I bought salmon nigiri this morning and brought it home for lunch. You get six large pieces of salmon on rice, along with wasabi, ginger and soy sauce for $13. It was absolutely first rate. Absolutely.

(3) There is so much in the news that you may have missed something. Like all official US government documents will now call Artificial Intelligence by the name of Super Intelligence. SI, not AI. This is a major change that could not have been initiated until the other SI, the Smithsonian Institution could also be renamed. It will now be the Artificial Institution, or AI. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Although I was not there, I understand that my grandson and a young girl who has been a close friend of his have decided they are going to get married. We like her a lot and think that they would make a fine couple. But before you congratulate me, I think you should know that my grandson is 5 and his girl friend is 4. My wife said that it will be a fun wedding. I told her that maybe it will but that if, for example, they marry when our grandson is 25, I will be 103 and she will be 99. Maybe not so fun.

That was probably the most interesting thing that happened during our Yom Kippur. Well, maybe equally interesting were my parking spaces. During the High Holidays, Adas Israel sets up an enormous tent in the parking lot to hold one of its three simultaneous services outdoors. When I say an enormous tent, there are apparently about 3000 seats inside the tent, and usually the crowd is overflowing. I am not sure why they do this every year, and I don’t find services in a tent very appealing, with potential temperature, precipitation and humidity issues, but it does put a lot less strain on the building itself; there are usually another 2,000 or so attending services inside. Adas always says that there are about 5,000 at the High Holiday services.

One thing that is obvious is that when they put this large tent on the parking lot, plus another tent for children to play in, and a lot of security apparatus, there is no room for cars. This means that the surrounding streets become clogged and parking hard to come by. One advantage Adas has it that is on the Metro Red Line, which is just about 2 blocks away (you only have to cross one street). But most people do find a place to park, although that place may be 1/2 mile away or more.

For Kol Nidre services, my daughter Michelle had a brilliant idea. Let’s go down early and have dinner at a Cleveland Park restaurant, rather than eating at home. Not only will it avoid cooking and rushing, but we should be able to get a good parking space. And she was right. I made 5:30 reservations at Dakshin Indique, on Connecticut Avenue just across from the Metro stop, and we got the parking space on Connecticut Ave closest (and I mean closest, I think – okay maybe there is one across the street a little closer) to Adas Israel. Mission accomplished.

Yesterday morning was trickier. We wanted to be there for the Torah service that began at 10:30. I dropped Edie off at the door, and then started my hunt. This would not be easy. I first realized that we had forgotten to bring her handicap parking placard, so I drove home to get it (we live less than 10 minutes away), and I then saw that that there were no parking places available on Connecticut Avenue south of Tilden Street, which is just about 1/2 mile from the synagogue. Not good enough, I decided.

I knew that daughter Hannah had parked on a street that looped behind the shops on the east side of Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park, which would probably be about a quarter of a mile. I tried there, but there was nothing. So I decided to go for broke, and drove back to the entry door at the synagogue.

Now Adas Israel is at a strange intersection where Porter and Quebec Streets sort of meet together just east of Connecticut Avenue, almost like at a fork in the road. While Porter Street is a major east-west street, Quebec Street actually reaches a dead end a little beyond Adas Israel and a large apartment development. There is parking on both sides of the street, but obviously, between Adas Israel and the apartments, it is very hard to find.

I drove to the dead end. Nothing. I made a u-turn and as I was coming back, lo and behold, right across the street from the entrance door to the synagogue, a parking space had opened up. Wow, I said, how is this possible. There were two security guards (two of a larger number serving Adas yesterday) there and one of them told me that I couldn’t park there. Someone had beat me to it, and was down the block making a u-turn (they wanted him to let traffic move) and they were holding it for him.

It was a large parking space (not sure what had been there), and I thought there might have been room for two (there probably wasn’t), and I asked if I could wait and see. They said “no”, again because of traffic, but if I went to the apartment entry ahead on the right and waited, they would hold the space if it looked like there would be room.

In the meantime, the car they were holding the original space for didn’t come back, and now the space was mine, but I had to wait until traffic cleared, back out of the apartment drive way, drive back to the open space, make a u-turn, and park. All handled smoothly. And I was the second car from the synagogue door – while there were 5000 people attending services.

I really appreciated the help the security guards gave me. As I walked to thevdoor, I heard one tell the other, “It’s nice when you can make someone happy.”

With this, you would probably think that I missed the Torah service. But no. When I entered, they were only on the third aliyah.

Mid-day, we left Adas and went home, joined by children and grand children. The plan was to leave home about 5:30 and trek back for the final neilah service that started at 6 and ended about 7:45. This would be one more search for parking. But at about 4, the rains started (the rains that were scheduled to fall for almost the next 36 hours) and it seemed like too much to try my luck again. Hannah and her family did return for neilah, but Edie, Michelle and I streamed the service from home (first time).

Because of this, we were not present when Izzy and his young friend announced their planned marriage. His 11 year old sister, Joan, I am told, said that – when he got older and really interested in girls – she would remind him that he already had made a commitment. Joan, by the way, for I think the first time, fasted the entire day, her own decision and without complaint.

It is autumn in Washington, 60 degrees and raining, and not expected to get much warmer today. Some of the leaves are beginning to turn. The High Holidays are behind us and Sukkot doesn’t start for another 4 days.

By the way (and to close), I thought the three sermons I heard at Adas Israel were fine, but not earth shattering. I didn’t read much more online, but I do want to call your attention to the Yom Kippur message of Congressman-to-be Brad Lander that he mailed out to his followers. I thought it was extremely thoughtful and well written. I am sure that there is some way that I can paste it on the blog, but I can not figure out how to do it. But it is wroth looking at, so if you want to see it, let me know and I will send it to you by email. Or you can look for it yourself.

Lander, as you probably know, is running for Congress on Manhattan and will probably (i.e., definitely) be elected in November. He is the former comptroller of New York City and a progressive, with carefully delineated views on Israel and its neighbors. He is also St. Louis born. His father was a friend, and his uncle my college roommate. When he first moved to Brooklyn about 35 (?) years ago, to take a job with a housing non-profit, his father had him call me up for advice (as that was my field). I remember telling him that he was going to work for a respectable organization, as far as I knew, and that the job sounded like a good one, but…..I told him if the job involved New York City or New York State politics, he would probably find himself a permanent outsider, young Midwesterner that he was. Shows what my advice is worth.

On Yom Kippur, as always, a day with no formal post.

I am writing this from American Legion Post 41 in Silver Spring MD where we are listening to Little Red and the Renegades, featuring Tom Coradino (a/k/a Little Red) and Harry Rado, both college classmates of Edie’s. They have been playing together for over 50 years. Almost 60, I guess. I have knowm for 50.

They still sound good (look them up on YouTube), but feel their age. The ability to play for 3 or 4 hours as they are almost ready to turn 80 is not something everyone can do.

We didn’t know what we were going to do today. The weather was very nice and we thought we would take a walk. But you know how it is. I thought we shouldn’t walk on an empty stomach, so we decided to look for a parking space, and found one on Mintwood Place NW. And, lo and behold, right next to our car was a restaurant with a large outdoor seating section and a lot of people eating. It turned out the restaurant, Lapis, was Afghan. And it turned out that we were the oldest customers by……at least 50 years. A very nice lunch, capped off by a shared piece of “pista”, a pistachio cream cake.

Following lunch, we took our walk. Well, you can’t really call it a walk. More like a very short half stroll. Three blocks down Columbia Road and 18th Street in Adams-Morgan.

But even a half stroll is interesting. We found a really good gift shop, Urban Dwell which had, among other nice items, a great selection of DC tagged gifts, much better than you get at the airport.

It’s right next to Washington’s tried and true athletic shoe store, Fleet Feet, and Adams-Morgan’s only kosher restaurant, Oh Mamma (closed for Shabbat and Yom Kippur).

But then to remind us we are in the inner city.

And then we saw this across the street:

A line of about 40 people patiently waiting notvfor a Taylor Swift concert or a Donald Trump rally, but for a sale at the Garlic Girl consignment shop. One out, one in. Go figure.

I know that many people have stopped using Facebook, often for good reason. I still put this blog on it every day, and scroll through it, responding to friends when they post some accomplishment or disappointment. I also have taken to look at much of what is put on Facebook, whether by bots or real people, to showcase political or sociological positions. In particular, I have trained the Facebook algorithm to think that I must be a right winger or Christian nationalist, so that I can see what the other side is thinking, or what the other side wants you to think they are thinking.

While my Facebook posts only go to my “friends”, the posts that I look at go out to the entire world, and get hundreds or thousands of likes or comments. Here is my own polling analysis: a year ago, these posts would receive overwhelmingly positive comments, agreeing with the post. Now, the comments seem to be by and large the opposite. If my analysis is correct, the right wing has clearly lost its mojo and this should be reflected in November election results.

The current postings seem to emphasize two different trends. One, of course, is to call the Democrats communists and socialists, and radical leftists. We see this not only from Facebook bot posts, but also in the speeches of leading Republican politicians, such as the President and the Speaker of the House. Bizarre, but true.

The other trend is more troubling. That is the declaration that Islam is the cult of Satan, that every Muslim is a terrorist waiting to perform a homicidal act, that Islam is not a religion but a political movement and that the Constitutional protection of the freedom of religion simply does not apply to Islam. That Muslims should not be allowed into the country, that those here should not be allowed to run for public office, that each of those already in public office should not only be impeached and thrown of out their positions, that they all should be deported, that mosques in the United States should all be demolished. That anyone who does not agree with the dangers that all Muslims create for real Americans is just kidding himself.

I do see a lot of posts which purport to praise the Christian religion. They might talk about Jesus as the only route to heaven, or about how you should live by the Bible and ignore anything else. And of course how the United States is a Christian nation. I don’t see many of the pro-Christian posts which are directed against Jews, but in the comments, you tend to see a lot of comments from people who are clearly antisemitic and/or anti-Israel. Some of these comments can be vicious, others just plain silly. But within the comments on these Christian nationalist posts, you also see a lot of philo-semitism from people who just love Jews, or just love Israel. Most leave it at that; I don’t see posts that talk about Israel as a necessary step on the path to the rapture. But when comments mention Muslims, they are all one-sided. No one seems to be philo-Islam; no one that I see.

We live in a country where free speech is considered a right, at least by those who are not rabid supporters of Donald Trump. We also live in a country where some regulation of free speech has long been approved by our Courts, whether it is the false yelling of “Fire!!” in a crowded theater, or putting “obscene” material in front of children. We also live at a time when the question of regulation or self-regulation of sites such as Facebook are continually on the political agenda. There is obviously no easy answer as to what type of speech should be permitted, and what types should be banned. This argument will continue, and go back and forth, probably forever.

Another, related issue is the question of the Constitutional rights of a free press, and whether Donald Trump has violated the rights of MSNOW, CNN and Politico (and the major networks in the recent past as well) by denying them White House access. His actions are presumably unconstitutional, but we will see what our courts, and our biased Supreme Court has to say about this, I am sure.

Trump doesn’t like these venues because they publish “fake news”, which they don’t, and because they don’t agree with virtually anything he says or does. They are the opposition press, and in totalitarian countries, the opposition press is banned, and a free press disregarded. Trump has not banned the opposition press, he has just banned them from access to certain places and has made it impossible for them to ask questions like other outlets can.

The question keeps arising whether news outlets have a responsibility to be balanced, to put forth the position, say, of Trump as well as the position of his opponents without editorializing. But relocate this argument to Nazi Germany: this theory in Nazi Germany would have told a news outlet that it had to say that Hitler says that Jews are vermin, and the local rabbis say they disagree, so you decide, we take no position.

There is no question that MS NOW is anti-Trump. So am I, and I wish that all news organizations were. I don’t want MS NOW to become neutral. CNN tried to become neutral by bringing on Republican apologists like Scott Jennings, to rebut what more liberal pundits were saying, and accomplished two things: in effect, putting on “conservatives” who were backed into corners but felt obliged to spout nonsense, and at the time, convincing me not to watch CNN in order to avoid Scott Jennings (and others, but mainly Scott Jennings). Fox News did it another way, by saying that they were “balanced”, but then ignoring what they were saying, and remaining very pro-GOP; eventually, they solved this conundrum by dropping the word “balanced” from their self-description. Newsmax, the most right wing source with its own cable channel, decided to become the MS NOW of the right. But the only way to do this was to bad mouth and try to make fun of everything that Trump’s opponents said, and glorifying everything that Trump himself said. No objectivity, no attempts to reach truth, just a try to make money off polarization.

Obviously, I look at this with my own political bias. But, guess what. My political bias is based on objectivity – so perhaps it doesn’t even qualify as a bias. Often in today’s America, there is political right and political wrong. And the Trump opposition is virtually always on the side of the political right. That isn’t my opinion; that is fact. But how to make it clear that it is fact, and not opinion?

As Shakespeare would say (and in fact did say) “Aye, there’s the rub”. (Didn’t he?)

(1) Voting. Close friends from Israel are visiting us and staying with us. Husband and wife, and their two younger sons, who are both in their 20s. The families have no generational connection with the United States – both of our friends were born in Israel; their parents were from Germany, Poland, Greece and Iraq. But for about three years around the year 2000, they lived in the United States, coincidentally in St. Louis, while our friend Yoram, who works for Israel Aerospace Industries, was working on a joint project with Boeing (don’t hold me to the details). During this time, their third son Amir was born, making him a birthright United States citizen.

As a United States citizen living abroad, Amir is entitled to vote in the American jurisdiction that he last lived in, subject to the laws of that jurisdiction. Amir left the State of Missouri when he was 2 and 1/2 to move with his family back to Israel. He has since been this country a number of times on vacations, but has never lived here again. Missouri law does not have a minimum age limit for ex pat voting. In other words, even though Amir left St. Louis County 24 years ago, he is entitled to vote as a resident of Missouri. The only trick is that he can only vote in federal elections (President, Senators and Congressperson). He can do that by absentee ballot from the comfort of his Israeli home.

I, on the other hand, was a resident of Missouri until I was 27, when I moved to the District of Columbia in 1969. The minute I switched my residence to DC, I lost the right to vote for a Senator, could only vote for a non-voting Congressional representative, and retained only the right to vote for president (a right DC voters received first in 1961 with the passage of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution). I could not even vote for a mayor or other local officials until the passage of DC home rule in 1973.

Today, 67 years later, I still can not vote for a voting Congressperson or a Senator, while Amir can vote for both.

(2) In-store Purchasing. About ten years ago (don’t hold me to the details), something happened to the watch that Edie wore every day and she needed a new one. Just something simple. I remember going to Walmart on Georgia Ave (which opened in late 2013) and buying a Timex watch for her. I had worn a Timex for years (I bought mine years earlier at Dulles Airport when I had forgot to take a watch with me on a business trip, and stopped wearing it only when I decided to count my steps). She wore it until one day it disappeared. She and I both searched throughout the house; neither could find it.

The day before yesterday, I decided I would go to Walmart and buy her a replacement. I knew what her other one was like, and was certain I would find one she would find appropriate. We had talked before about going and buying a replacement (as we continued to look for the lost one), and she said (and I quote), “You know, if we buy another one, I will find the one I lost”. Close quote.

I drove to Walmart (I have to admit it; I like Walmart, even with all its sins), a 15 minute drive, parked in their cavernous garage, went through the door and up the escalator and found myself in the store, which always looks to me like it’s about the size of the King Ranch. I walked in the direction of where I remembered the watches should have been, but they were not there. I didn’t see them anywhere in the vicinity and asked a woman who was stocking things in the women’s department. Her response was (and I sort of quote), “Oh, we don’t have any watches on the floor right now. We’re remodeling, you know.” End sort of quote.

I did not know that they were remodeling, and although I looked in all directions to find evidence that they were remodeling, no such evidence appeared. And, I said to myself, “If I were remodeling, would I keep everything in its place, but remove the wristwatches?” It made no sense. But there was no reason to continue the conversation with the sweater stocker, so I left the store, rode down the escalator, found my car, and decided that I would go to Target, where I assumed there would be no remodeling in process.

I went to the Columbia Heights Target, on 14th Street, not really out of my way very much, drove into its cavernous garage, went up the elevator to the second level, where Target has its entrance. It’s a two level store, so does not quite have the Kings Ranch aura, but it is big nevertheless, and I had no idea where to go. So I asked a young man who stood near the door and had a sign hanging around his neck which said something like “Customer Assistance” or “Can I help you?” or something to that effect.

I asked him where the watches would be. His response was (and I quote), “On the second floor……if you’re lucky”. If I’m lucky? Well, he told me that they might have them and they might not, and if they did, they might only be smart watches, but you never can tell what they might have up there. Okay, I said, when I get up to the next floor, where do I go?

“Oh, yeah”, he said, and pointed me towards the elevators in the center of the store. “Go up the elevator and just do a U-turn.” That stopped me, because I knew that if I went up the elevator, exited the elevator and just did a U-turn, I would wind up back in the elevator. But I decided not to say anything. As I walked towards the elevator, he said “Look for the electronics section”.

I got off the elevator, and U-turned around its back, and went to the back wall. The sections of the store are marked on signs that hang down and I did not see one that said “Electronics”, so I began walking around the periphery of the store, until I got back to where I started, and there was no electronics section. I then looked at the listing of sections on a pillar somewhere in the store and saw that there was a listing of an “Entertainment and Electronics” section (which I admit did not sound promising), so I went back to the Entertainment section (which I had passed) and saw that there was no sign it was also an electronics section. All it had were video games and the like and things to play them on.

To add ____ to the mix (I forget the idiom), as I left the store, I asked a clerk where I could get my parking ticket stamped. “Oh, we stopped doing that”, she said (exact quote). So, my Target venture cost me $2 to retrieve my car.

Later that night I went online and ordered Edie a watch from Amazon. They told me it would be delivered tomorrow. I felt accomplished, if frustrated, because I like to give real stores (even if Walmart and Target) my money. (Maybe I should have tried Rodman’s – just thought of that now.) But at least she would have a watch.

Edie was upstairs. As I was about to tell her that she would have a new watch the next day, she said (and I quote) “Guess what? I found my watch”.

(3) Only in the USSR. This is a cute joke I heard, having nothing to do with America (yet), but with the Soviet Union. A dissident lived by himself in a Moscow apartment with only his parrot for company. One day his parrot, who wore an ID tag, disappeared. The man walked into KGB headquarters and reported the parrot must have been stolen. “Go the police, not the KGB”, said the official. The man responded, “I have. But I just want to report to you that I don’t agree with any opinions that that parrot has.” One day…..only in America?

From the Nationals FanCam, an invasion of our privacy. To Edie’s right, Nancy Kopf (Ed was out of the picture), to my left, Charlie Whitehead and his son-in-law Jordan, behind us Ken and Marlene Markison, all there to celebrate Edie’s birthday (although they didn’t know it until they arrived). The Nats beat the Phillies 6-3. It was our last game in Section 205. New seats next year.

Sorry to hear that Peter Max has passed away at age 88. His guru looks over our breakfast room table, pointing up for reasons unknown.

Speaking of works of art, here is The Bar, a visual double entendre by an artist whose name I can’t make out. I found this at the Montgomery County Library Store and splurged. Paid $4. Thought it was cute.

Then, here’s one of the truest statements ever made:

Every day something new. I hears this morning that Trump told his NC rally last night than FEMA relief would depend on the results of the governor race in November. Did he really say that? Another election bribe, another crime?

I did get this yesterday. Pretty good description. Better than I could do.

(1) We went to the Nationals/Phillies game last night. The weather was perfect – about 70 degrees, no real humidity, a nice breeze. Perfect. It makes you realize how rare perfect evenings are in Washington during the summer. We have a number of them in the fall and spring, but in the summer? Very rare. It also helped that the Nats (fighting to stay out of last place in the National League East) beat the Phillies (fighting to sneak into first place in the National League East), 6-3. For once, the three relief pitchers held the opposite team scoreless, while as usual the Nats out hit the Phillies. All was good. We were there with four close friends, and that added to the fun. And the fact that it was Edie’s birthday helped.

(2) Our 50th anniversary is coming up at the end of October. We obviously want to celebrate in style. By style, I mean the style that Donald Trump, Jr. is accustomed to. In other words, we are looking for a Russian oligarch to fund our celebration. Someone with imaginative taste and for whom money is no object. Anybody have ideas?

(3) It is really tragic that the Kennedy Center is shutting down, and the fact that it is not shutting down for immediately starting renovations, but is shutting down until Congress or the next administration does something about it, is even more tragic. For those not following this story, the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, appointed largely by Donald J. Trump and led by Donald J. Trump, has said that unless the courts allow Donald J. Trump to put Donald J. Trump’s name on the building along with John F. Kennedy’s, he will not authorize any renovations, and not spend the almost $300 million that Congress has allocated for the job. The legal argument against renaming is that the Kennedy Center was authorized by Congress, and only Congress can permit a second name on the building, something that Congress has refused to do. When Congress allocated money to upgrade the 50 year old building, it was never anticipated that it would be fully shut down during the renovations, and it was never anticipated that a president would fire all of the professionals who were successfully running the operation and replace them by sycophants who would do his bidding, including canceling programming that he didn’t like, putting his name on the exterior of the building, and shutting it down.

Just one more Trump era tragedy. I am waiting for the next renaming scandal. What will it be? My guess is that Trump will tell Mark Carney, Canadian prime minister, that unless Canada recognizes the name change from Lake Ontario to Lake America, Trump will order the lake drained dry. I also expect that the St. Lawrence River will be renamed the St. Donald, and am interested in the various proposals to rename Lake Erie – I know that Lake Pennsylvania has been proposed, as has Lake Cleveland. We will see who wins. Lake Donald, anyone?

(4) I got a text from daughter Michelle this morning. She told me it was “talk to text” – I guess I know what that is. Probably, it is talk to text. In any event, she asked me a question about this Sunday evening. A question about
“call knee dry”.

(5) I seem to have adopted the habit of writing a little something about interesting books I am reading before I finish reading them. At a time when I have no idea how they will turn out. Here is another one. Absolutely fascinating. The book is called The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, and it was written by American scientist Ralph E. Lapp, and published in 1957. I had never heard of it, but I have a Penguin paperback copy, and as you may know, I am reading as many of those as I can fit in.

The Lucky Dragon was a Japanese tuna fishing boat that set sail in early 1954 to catch some fish. The first part of this relatively short book is devoted to a description of the boat, brief bios of some of the men on the boat and their families, and then a remarkably interesting description of how the Japanese fished for tuna in 1954. I have no idea how different it is in 2026, although I assume it is considerably different. Now, you might not think a description of a two month tuna fishing expedition in the Pacific in 1954 would be very interesting, but you would be wrong. And a lot of this is thanks to the very descriptive writing of Ralph Lapp. These ships carried 50 miles (!) of fishing wire, hundreds of buoys to keep the wire afloat, hundreds of weights which sent off shoot wires as deep as 200 feet, each with hooks and fresh mackerel for bait. How all this was set out and more important reeled in and stored so it could be used again is just plain fascinating. And how they handled fish that was caught.

Fishing was poor when the boat stopped about 2000 miles from port and they decided to move south where they assumed the fishing would be better (the book also talks about the economics of tuna fishing, equally interesting, by the way), and they came near the coral atolls where the U.S. had conducted atomic testing. A part of that area was off-limits to fishing vessels and they kept clear of the restricted areas. But not clear enough, as one morning an enormous flash lit up the sky, following several minutes later by an enormous boom and shock waves. Clearly, it appears, it was an American bomb test, a test which had not been announced. And it was not nearby, but distant, as evidenced by the time it took for the sound to follow the flash. But close enough.

Soon the ship was covered in a white ash which had to be cleaned up, but was too extensive to clean thoroughly, and the crew members began to get sick. They turned the boat around and headed back to Japan, burnt, blistered, with secretions from eyes and ears, with stomach and bowel problems.

This was 9 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they obviously knew something about the effects of radioactive fallout. Their doctor in the port city of Yaizu sent two of the returned sailors to a radiation specialist in Tokyo……..

And that is where I am in the book.

To be continued.

Hakuna Matata is the name of a song from The Lion King. It is also a Swahili saying that means something like: “It’s okay, don’t worry. Chill.” It’s (often, but not always) a nice sentiment, and it’s a nice phrase. And it caught on.

Today, I was reading NYU Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s daily blog (it’s on Substack, and maybe that makes it a Substack and not a blog), and I am going to quote her. Actually that is not exactly correct, I am going to quote Kristof Szombati, whose wrote an essay that she published yesterday morning. (An aside: who is Szombati? I am not sure, but I bet he is somebody. That is my first Hungarian/English pun).

She describes Szombati as a “political anthropologist based in Berlin”, formerly involved in Hungarian politics. His interesting article concerns how Hungary is trying to recover from the Victor Orban era, and that is both interesting itself, but is perhaps more interesting as we know that we will have to figure out how to recover from the Donald Trump era, which will end in January 2029, or hopefully before. The description involves both a calling those who broke the law into account, and trying to recover billions of dollars which in various improper ways wound up in the bank accounts of Orban’s friends, as well as a restructuring of various government systems. It is a very complicated process, as you can imagine.

And the process needed a name. It seems to be being referred to as the “elszamoltatas”, which is Hungarian for something like “a calling to account”, and it is being used to refer to the entire process. Well, the process of elszamoltatas in Hungary, population approximately 10,000,000, is complicated, as somebody (or was it Szombati?) recently explained. And, if so, imagine how much more complicated it is going to be in the United States, population 350,000,000. I am not joking when I say that we should call this the American elszamoltatas. If hakuna matata can catch on, so can elszamoltatas. That should be obvious. And using the word provides us with three benefits: (1) we have a name to refer to when we are talking about detrumpification, (2) it gives the Hungarians, who beat us to the punch when they voted to deorbanize, and (3) it is really fun to say. Say it six times – three times out loud and three times to yourself and you will see what I mean.

But it is not time for elszamotatas yet. Instead, we wait to see how Donald responds to the refusal of the Supreme Court to allow him to interfere in state rules that allow for voting by mail. You know he will have something iup his sleeve. As of now, it appears there will be a Democratic wave. What more will he do to try to thwart that? There is talk about his supporters challenging every Democratic victory, and Speaker Mike refusing to swear in any Democrat whose victory is being challenged. Lawyers, be prepared. I guess I can worry about that. My bigger worry – I will lay it out here – is for the personal safety of Democratic candidates whose appear to be on the cusp of victory. I hope each of them is using common sense, and not taking unnecessary risks. I think them all in danger.

I don’t expect anyone who reads my blog posts to remember what I say, since even I don’t. After all, I started this blog on November 15, 2022, almost four years ago, which makes this blog post #1,398.

But I got a number of comments on my recent posting about those who conflate Israel, Zionism and Jews, and the dangers this conflation brings about, and I appreciate them, as I always do. But in addition, I got one question from my old friend and consistent reader, whom I will refer to as Charles from Charleston (both because that is his name, and that is where he lives), who has been wondering about why so many otherwise seemingly intelligent people are so quick to say that Israel has been and still is engaged in genocide and, in the usual conflation, anyone who supports Israel, or is Jewish, somehow becomes complicit in that genocide. He cannot conclude that Israel is committing genocide, although he says that perhaps Israel is engaging in, or have engaged in, war crimes. And then he says if any group is committing genocide, isn’t it the Palestinians?

He thinks that I have written about this subject and asked me if I could say something more. I probably have written about the subject, and could guess what I said but, without looking back to figure out what I have said previously, let’s give the topic a quick look.

Let’s start with my conclusion. My conclusion is that I don’t really know. And the reason I don’t know is that I don’t really know what the definition of he word genocide is. After all, it is just a word. And I don’t know what the definition of genocide is because it started with one loose definition, has been refined by international convention, and seems to be changing constantly, often to fit the viewpoints of the individuals or groups throwing the term about.

Just like I believe that the word “Zionist” should be discarded because it has become a flashpoint and everyone defines it differently, I think the same about “genocide”. I think that the word should be dropped for the most part in discussing the current situation.

Raphael Lemkin coined the term in a 1944 book, talking about the Nazis and their continuing extermination of the Jews. He gave previous examples from ancient and medieval history, and referred to the treatment of Armenians by Turkey during World War I. Scholars have fought over the proper definition of the word since Lemkin’s first use of the term.

The Palestinians maintain that everything they are doing is defensive, even when they are starting what might seem to be a new attack on Israel, they say is it just the next element of a fight that started during the British occupation before Israel was created, and that they are just trying to get back the land that was taken from them. The most violent of the Palestinian groups, such as Hamas, have as part of their charters and programs, the extermination of the State of Israel, which they deem to be an illegitimate body. You may (and probably do) disagree with Hamas on this point, but Hamas’ belief that Israel should disappear as an entity and that Palestinians should have the right of return to what is now Israel is not a statement of genocide unless it also includes killing the Israeli Jews, or destroying their culture. It isn’t good, but it isn’t genocide. Even the attack of October 7, 2023, evil as it was, is not genocide, unless it was the start of a program to exterminate all the Jews of Israel, rather than a despicable act of war.  Even if Hamas succeeded in taking Israel over and expelling the Jews, I don’t think that would fit the definition (at least the original definition) of genocide.

To me, genocide involves having an intentional program to kill a defined group of people and/or to completely destroy their culture. And the program has to be put into action.

What about the Israelis? I think that the actual position of the current Israeli government is hard to discern, and maybe there is no actual position, but you can make the argument that the plan is to vastly limit the Arab populations of Gaza and the West Bank and put both areas under Israeli control. That, too, bad as it may be, probably does not constitute genocide. If on the other hand, the Israeli position is to kill Palestinians and wipe out Palestinian culture, that may be a different story. A lot of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and some are still being killed today, most of those being civilian and many being children. But if the intent is to get the Palestinians to move elsewhere to reduce the numbers in Gaza, but not to kill them outright, I think you have a terrible policy, but I don’t think you have genocide.

Clearly, however, both among Israeli Jews and Palestinians, you have high level officials who would appear to welcome genocide, but it was from Pal Joey that I learned that “you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking”.

There is of course a pending case in the International Court of Justice where Israel has been accused of genocide. The Court has not reached a final conclusion, and may never be able to, but said that there is imminent danger of extreme harm to Palestinians, and instructed Israel, in several separate paragraphs, to make sure that genocide does not occur (those paragraphs have little, if any, authority; they are statements of the obvious). The Court relies on the 1948 Genocide Convention in defining genocide. The problem here is that the convention’s definition of genocide is itself hard to understand; the elements of genocide under the convention may be clear, but their limits or extent are not, because all of the precise definitions (including killing members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members, destoying a society, and so forth) only become genocide if “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. So you have to first describe the group, you have to decide what “destroy” means, what “in whole or in part” means, you have to find “intent”, and you have to find that individuals are not being attacked or killed because of anything they have done, but randomly, because they are members of this group. Not easy to do this.

As I understand it, in Turkey, the Armenians (old, young, men, women, children) were killed just because they were Armenians. That was a genocide, as was the killing of Jews (and members of other groups such as the Roma) simply because they were members of a particular group. You could say the same about the Tutsi in Rwanda and, on a smaller scale, perhaps Muslims in Srebenica. Perhaps.

But, under the definition written in the Genocide Convention, I don’t think you could in good faith find Israel of its enemies guilty of genocide.  That is perhaps why the ICJ wrote their interim decision the way they did. But I should add that proponents of finding Israel guilty of genocide, recognizing the difficulty of tailoring a guilty verdict to meet that definition, are proposing that the Court drop the requirement of “intent” in the definition of genocide and move to a weaker standard.

I am going to stop here with the following disclaimer. People have devoted their lives to defining genocide and deciding whether particular activities relate to genocide, they have written briefs to courts and judicial decisions, they have written erudite law review articles and treatises, and books, and PhD dissertations. I have done none of that. Nor have the great majority of folks who are throwing the term around to define the actions of people or groups they strongly disagree with.

So my particular responses, like almost everyone else, are not to be relied on. And this is why, just as Zionism, it is hard to grasp the meaning of the word genocide as used in casual conversation. They are both inflammatory terms that only cause trouble and invite more conflict. They should both be discarded.

Yesterday, on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I sort of cheated (not in the way I celebrated or didn’t celebrate the holiday, but in the way I treated the blog). Instead of writing something new, I reposted something I had previously put on the blog, something having to do with Israel and Jews, and how some conflate the two and the dangers which, in my opinion, that conflation increases.

I thought (and still think) that it was an appropriate post to re-issue on Rosh Hashanah. And, in fact, it was more appropriate than I thought. For two reasons – one having to do with the sermon I heard at services yesterday morning, the other having to do with a conversation that I had yesterday with one of our Israeli house guests and close friends, who are spending the week with us.

In order to explain this, we have to start with one group of facts with which everyone agrees. The governments of both Israel and the United States are far from what we wish they would be, and Jews in both places are facing unsettling, and dangerous (or potentially dangerous) circumstances.

Let’s start with Rabbi Alexander’s (Aaron Alexander, Adas Israel Synagogue) sermon. I can’t say that I understand exactly what he was trying to say, but in general I can describe in this way: if you are a Jew, you are a Jew, you are part of a historical community and a special one, you are proud of what Jews have accomplished, and you are sometimes embarrassed by how Jews act. And this description is an apt one, whether you are a Jew living in Israel or a Jew living in the United States. But, he said, describing a conversation he had with another rabbi, an activist rabbi, in Jerusalem in June, It may be possible to conclude, as the Israeli rabbi did, that, with all of the problems facing Jews in Israel these days (those caused by neighboring enemies, and those caused by misguided Israelis), it is more wrenching to be a Jew in the United States than in Israel. The reason, he was told, is that Jews in Israel know they are home, and the many Jews in America today wonder if they really are accepted American insiders, or if at some point, like Jews so many times in earlier eras, they will have one day pack up and move out and on. And Rabbi Alexander, I think, thought the Israeli rabbi might be right.

Well, if I heard Rabbi Alexander correctly (as I describe it above), I have to say that everything that he said was foreign to my way of thinking. I have been to Israel nine or ten times (something like that), I have many friends there, I have worked for and contributed to Israeli non-profits and institutions, I feel comfortable there, but I don’t feel “at home” there, and I don’t feel it is my country. On the other hand, having been born in America and lived here my entire life, with my entire family here, I feel as American as Donald Trump does or Charlie Kirk did, and I don’t feel insecure, even as I see the rising antisemitism. It is just one of the many problems in the Trumpian America that must be addressed.

And yes, the possibility of deciding to move elsewhere has been a topic of occasional conversation with friends for several years, and obtaining foreign passports, and especially passports which would give you EU citizenship, is a prized activity. And, yes, I have known many Jews over the years who have moved to Israel, or who have had children move to Israel, but I don’t see those moves as affecting my own thinking about my future and my family’s future.

Our houseguest friends, like most people I know in Israel, are politically to the left and have no warm feelings for Bibi Netanyahu or his government. They are an uncomfortable minority in Israel; they recognize that. And, as one told me, the actions of the Israeli government these days are often extremely embarrassing. This, by the way, is the same thing that Aaron Alexander said in his sermon.

I told one of our Israeli friends about Rabbi Alexander’s sermon. About his conversation with the rabbi in Israel who said that he thought it would be harder to be a Jew in America these days than to be a Jew in Israel, in spite of drones and rockets. She looked at me quite askance, I think in disbelief. Her reaction was the same as mine, although she had one additional reaction because she was an Israeli.

She told me that many Israelis now look at Israel the way Rabbi Alexander’s Israeli rabbi friend believes American Jews look at America. They, in the Zionist homeland, look at Israel as if it, with all of its changes, is no longer “their country”. It has changed so much. And they wonder how long they, or their children, will be able comfortably to stay there. And she pointed out the large number of Israelis (largely young, and largely well educated) who have left the country in recent years, either (in their own minds) temporarily or permanently. What worries some American Jews about their future in America is also worrying some Israeli Jews about their future in Israel. And she told me this as someone whose family has been in Israel long before Israel was a state.

I am not going to draw any conclusions here, or even hint at any. I am just reporting what I have heard, and how I feel. You can draw your own conclusions if you wish. Or you can wait and just see what happens,

Here I am, speaking once more out of ignorance.

I just heard a portion of Dara Horn’s appearance on Morning Joe. Dara Horn, a multi-award novelist and Harvard literature professor, has just published a book titled The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: a Love Story for the Living, her second book on antisemitism, following her People Love Dead Jews, published five years ago in 2021. I have not read either of these books (although I should), nor any of her other books. Hence, I am speaking out of ignorance.

I am also focusing on a topic I have focused on several times before, and it is the conflating of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. From what I gathered this morning, Horn is one of those many Jews (perhaps a strong majority of them), who believe that if one is anti-Zionist, one is antisemitic, and that calling yourself anti-Zionist is only a cover, because really you just hate Jews. If this is what she believes, and if this is what you believe, I disagree with you. Completely.

I say this as a supporter of Israel, and as someone who has played an active role in Israeli institutional support. And as someone who is Jewish and active in several domestic Jewish institutions. I have been a board member and officer of two synagogues, I have been a board member of a Jewish day school, I have led an organization dedicated to traditional Jewish burial practices, I have been a board member and officer of an organization that provides support to a major Israeli university, and I am currently the president of the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, as you know at least from yesterday’s post. I have also been a student of Jewish history and Jewish culture. And I have been doing all of this for many decades.

Many Jews can be very sensitive. This should not be surprising because of the tragedies of Jewish history, including the Holocaust. There are still several hundred thousand Holocaust survivors and there are millions who had parents, grandparents or great grandparents caught up in those terrible events. Many American (and European) Jews have relatives and friends in Israel, travel regularly to Israel, support Israeli institutions. Some of even lost friends or relatives in Israel’s many wars with its neighbors.

Some Jews have a very expansive view of what constitutes antisemitism. For some, if a gentile criticizes a Jew for any reason, that shows that that person is an antisemite, full stop. For some, if a gentile criticizes or questions any aspect of Jewish ritual or theology, that is enough to show that that person is antisemitic. For some, obviously, any criticism of anything Israel does, or any Israeli politician says, is another manifestation of antisemitism.

And, of course, many of these people don’t recognize degrees of antisemitism. For them, if a gentile criticizes anything about Israel (or about anything Jewish), it is a sign not only that that person is antisemitic, but a sign that that person wishes all Jews were dead and, if given a chance, would gladly participate in activities designed to bring about the death of Jews.

That is just the way some people think. And, as an aside, I used the term “gentile” in the description above, because while some of those sensitive Jews would ascribe the same description to Jews who fit into any of those categories (calling them, perhaps, self-hating Jews, a term I have never understood), others think that it is fair game for Jews to be critical of Israel, but not gentiles. An analogy, of course, to “I can yell at my relatives, but don’t YOU dare to.”

I should add that those who conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism are not only Jews living in the diaspora. Jews living in Israel often feel the same way. But, and more importantly, Israeli political leaders, as a matter of strategy and policy, conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and this is a significant part of the problem. From their point of view, if anyone who talks against Zionism is defined as an antisemite, it is a guarantee that Jews worldwide will be more likely to take anti-Zionist statements personally. And, to the extent that Jews abroad can identify with Israel, it is that much more likely that Jews will support Israel, no matter what.

The problem is that once you call someone antisemitic, you cut off all argument. You even cut off discussion. You just set that person out as your enemy, today and forever. How can anyone prove that they are not antisemitic? They can’t. The tag will stick on them throughout their life.

It goes beyond that, once you conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, you not only cut off discussion about antisemitism, but you obviously cut off discussion about Zionism. If someone confesses to be anti-Zionist, they are in effect demonstrating their antisemitism, and they aren’t worth even acknowledging them except as human scum.

There is an old saying attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, who said about some one: “He’s not even worth ignoring”. But the fact is, if you are Jewish and if you have feelings for the Jewish people (and there are about 8 million of them in Israel), you can not just ignore them.

Of course, there is one subject that this entire discussion has ignored. I am here talking about the definition of Zionism. What is it? What is it that anti-Zionists are against? Is everyone who is anti-Israel also anti-Zionist (as well as antisemitic)?

I am not going into the many possible definition of Zionism here; it would take up too much space. But, if someone says that they don’t like Zionists or Zionism, my reaction is: “What do you mean by that?” And I would expect that they would tell me what they mean, or they would express their own confusion about the definition of that term if they couldn’t precisely tell me. And then there could be a conversation. I would learn more about what they are thinking; they would learn more about what I was thinking.

Of course, you can’t do this with everyone. Many who are opposed to Zionism find it beneath themselves to have any one on one communication with a Zionist, or maybe even with a Jew. But with many, you certainly could, and maybe you could discover that on some topics regarding what is happening in the Middle East today, you actually agree. But once you call them an antisemite, the conversation ends.

One last thing. Does everyone who is anti-Zionist also define themselves as antisemitic? I think the answer to this is clearly “no”. And if “no” is the answer, but you think they are antisemitic but they don’t, what does that mean? That they are antisemitic, but don’t know it? Is that even possible? Or that those who think they are antisemitic are making assumptions that just aren’t accurate?

Are there red lines? Maybe. Maybe if someone says that Israel is illegitimate, for whatever reason, that is a red line. But even that is subject to discussion. What do they mean? Do they mean there should be one state “from the river to the sea” and the state should be democratic and perhaps be constructed to ensure that different types of its citizens are represented equally and not subject to discrimination? Or do they mean that the one state should be an “Islamic Republic”, where Jews are an underclass, or are forced out, or are annihilated? If they believe that the Jews have to leave the Middle East, that too may end the discussion, except for the inevitable “Where are they to go?”

One day, someone will come up with an answer to the Middle East. Calling everyone who might not agree with your thoughts on the subject an antisemite will simply put off that day. It’s a complicated problem to be sure. Why complicate it even further?

Perhaps the Republicans got something out of their convention this week, but I am not sure what it was. We didn’t watch most of it, and what did watch consisted of a bunch of second rate candidates all saying the same thing: Trump is God, I am his acolyte, beware the heathen Democrats. Over and over.

We didn’t watch Trump’s 2 hour speech (his definition of a speech that was 1 3/4 hours long), where he promised every adult American (and that would include you, Jared Kushner and you, Elon Musk) $5000. Now, I assume he means “citizens” when he says “adults”, and Google tells me there are approximately 245 million adult citizens in the country. So that would be about $1,250,000,000,000, or 1 1/4 trillion dollars. Our national debt is now about $32 trillion. Donald Trump has been president for a little less than 6 years of the 250 years of the United States; the national debt has grown $11.6 trillion during these fewer than 6 years. In other words, the Trump years have (so far!, two plus to go) been responsible for 36% of the national debt! And the payment of $5000 to each adult citizen would bring that 36% almost to 40%.

Conservatives and even MAGA conservatives (as well as most liberals and others) do believe that servicing the national debt is harmful and growing more harmful day by day. This has long been a complicated issue for conservatives because history shows that the debt has grown more under Republican presidents than under Democratic presidents, and conservatives have refused to believe this. But it is getting to the point that it is hard to them to call it fake news.

Shouldn’t this be a big talking point of the Democrats? Answer: yes. But is it? Answer: not really, yet.

Of course, one of the items that has increased the national debt is the Iran War, and as it now will be important to rebuild our stockpile of weaponry, our defense expenditures will grow, increasing the debt further. The entire convention seemed to ignore the Iran War, except for occasional statements by Trump that “Iran will never have a nuclear bomb” and if he hadn’t started this war (excuse me, military action – just like Putin in Ukraine), Iran would already have such a bomb and, even more important, we would have been blown to bits by now.

And, oh yes, there was at least one mention of the war by Vance, who seemed to say, as I understand it, something like: “You may disagree with us on the war, and on all of our other policies, but just imagine how many worse things the Democrats would do to you.”

Vance’s talk (the part of it we heard) was interesting. Vance’s wife is of Indian ancestry, as you know, and Michigan’s Democratic Senator candidate Abdul El-Sayed, made an unnecessary comment some time ago about how Vance’s Papaw (that’s what J.D. calls his grandfather) would not have approved of J.D.’s marriage. He shouldn’t have said it because he obviously did not really know what Papaw would have said, but it gave Vance a talking point, who ended up lauding his grandfather and saying that he was a much better person than El-Sayed would ever be. That is all fine and good, but when you look at what Vance wrote about his grandfather in Hillbilly Elegy, you get the picture of an out and out, uncontrollable drunk who was both verbally and physically very abusive to his grandmother until he cleaned up his act later in life. He seems to have been, for most of his life, someone that Vance would have wanted off the streets and locked up away from society. My guess (only a guess) is that El-Sayed was probably right about what Papaw would have thought about Usha, but do you think there was ever anyone of Indian descent in Middletown, Ohio for him to meet?

Of course, there was a lot of bad mouthing of the Democrats. By each of the candidates, and especially by Vance (whose talk was particularly nasty) and by Trump (as would be expected). The Democrats are going to take all of your property (that is what Communists do and, as Trump, said, Democrats may call themselves socialists, but we know they are really Communists), they are going to tell you what you are allowed to think and what you are not allowed to think, they are going to open the borders with no checks on who is coming in, they are going to raise your taxes more than anyone ever has thought possible, and they are going to make your life extremely expensive. No, this is no longer FDR’s Democratic party, they said, over and over again. Left wing. Radical. They are Communists!

So, we will see if the GOP gets a boost from anything that happened this week in Dallas. I doubt it.

This morning, I heard that the government is bringing another lawsuit against a university, this one against – of all schools – the University of the District of Columbia. I would not have assumed UDC a likely target, but – hey – why not? This issue here is not DEI per se, and certainly not antisemitism, but is the fact that UDC allows non-citizen residents of the District of Columbia (or maybe it is just DC residents who are not in the country with the proper papers) to attend the university at in-state rates, which the DOJ has determined is discriminatory as to citizens from other states.

Okay, read that again. A new theory. Not that these people can’t be educated, but that they can’t be charged the same amount as their neighbors who may be citizens if the school charges citizens who live in other states a higher tuition. What could possibly be the basis for this lawsuit? What could possibly convince the federal government that it needed to intrude to this extent on decisions made by the university?

UDC is not your normal school. It is (except in a few areas where it does have national recognition) a school primarily for DC residents who are short on cash and want to improve their positions in life. Google tells me that only about 25% of UDC students are right out of high school, about 45% are adult learners, and the remainder are senior citizens. And by the way, students who live in Montgomery or Prince George’s County MD, or Washington’s Virginia suburbs, are treated as DC residents for tuition purposes. Only about 10% of UDC students are from outside the DC metropolitan area, and most of those are older adults, not typical undergraduates.

So, I ask you: what is the purpose of this law suit?

Okay, today’s conclusion: Happy New Year/l’shana tovah, whether you celebrate or not. No one need be excluded.

I recently watched two online lectures that I recommend highly and, although they were about very different historical topics, they converged on one point that I found particularly interesting.

The first lecture was by Jonathan Sarna, professor emeritus at Brandeis, and its topic was the role played by American Jews in the American Revolution. It is one of what will be almost 30 individual lectures, each by a different scholar or authority, on the relationship between Jews and the United States, and is being organized in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of the country. As a whole, the lectures comprise a credit course for Brandeis students, but is being made available to everyone, either in person or on YouTube. The Sarna lecture, the third in the series, was given on September 1, and can be watched on YouTube.

The second lecture was by Scottish/British scholar William Dalrymple, who focuses on Asian history for the most part, and the subject of this lecture (now about a year old) focused on events in the history of India which were very important for today’s world, but which aren’t taught in western schools and are virtually unknown in the western world, except by scholars of the area. I found that on YouTube as well – I am afraid I could not identify the forum, but the talk was given somewhere in England. I am sure you can find it. One thing you will learn from this talk is the Dalrymple is very, very smart.

Where these two talks came together was on their equally surprising descriptions of the rise and fall of nations and the importance of trade.

Sarna pointed out that, at the time of the American revolution, the small Jewish population of the North American British colonies was concentrated in the port cities of Savannah, Charleston, New York, Newport and Boston, and that this concentration was in part because these communities were highly involved in trade, and particularly trade with various Caribbean islands, where there was a much larger Jewish population at the time. He pointed to Barbados, Jamaica, Curacao (which had the largest Jewish population in the Western Hemisphere and today is home to the oldest synagogue, which is still in use), and Sint Eustatius. This latter island, still a Dutch colony (a “special municipality”), is relatively unknown today, but apparently in the late 18th century was home to over a hundred Jewish-owned business and trading establishments.

This trade was very important to the Jewish communities here and there, but after the Revolution, the trade unexpectedly was forced to stop. This is because the British, although they lost the war to their former colonies in what is now the United States, maintained control over much of the Caribbean and would not allow American ships to trade in the Caribbean. The North American Jewish population wound up having to focus elsewhere, but they had a new nation and in particular a new nation moving westward for their focus, while the Caribbean Jews were, in effect, left in the open sea without a paddle. Once their trade with the United States was cut off, they really had nowhere to go. The Jewish population of the trading islands decreased significantly, and the economy of those island, says Sarna, were destroyed and never, to this day, have fully been able to recover from the American Revolution. I had never thought about this before.

Digression: Although I had never thought about that before, it did remind me of a conversation I had with a Jamaican government official on our trip to Jamaica some years ago. The Jamaican economy is far from strong today, and he told me that things were quite different in the 19??s (I don’t remember the dates) when Jamaica was providing Great Britain with bananas. This was before Jamaica was an independent country, and when it was a British colony. The UK had determined that Jamaica was to be its main colonial banana source, and the thousands of banana plantations across the island prospered. Then, at some time, Britain decided it was no longer going to rely on Jamaica for its bananas, and was no longer going to give preference to its colonies. Bananas would now be sourced on the open market. Immediately, Jamaica lost is main export item and, the official told me, Jamaica’s economy has never recovered. End of digression.

Dalrymple spoke about a very different part of the world and a very different period of time. He first discounted the “Silk Road” (a term he said did not even exit until the 1930s) as the ancient road of commerce between the Far East and the West, saying that lengthy overland commerce through this route did not occur until the Middle Ages. But, he said, there was an enormous amount of trade by sea from the western shore of the Indian subcontinent to the Roman Empire, boosted by regular heavy “trade” winds, which allowed ships to leave India and reach the Red Sea in six weeks. The imports into Rome were “luxury” items, especially silk, cotton, spices, and ivory. And at times it accounted for 25% of the imports of the Roman Empire. The Indian ports, Dalrymple said, were very wealthy, and the trade was constant, and even a question of significant political discussion in the Roman Empire.

But when the Empire fell in the 5th century C.E., the trade with India abruptly stopped. Just like the Jews in the Caribbean, the Indian traders suddenly found themselves without a market, but they were in a somewhat better situation that the Caribbean islanders. They could turn east, toward what is now Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and so forth, and while that market was not as strong as the lost Roman market, it did allow India to keep much of its trade economy going, and allowed Indian culture to spread in a new direction.

So, the lesson? Well, I don’t know if it is a lesson, but these two stories do show the power of trade, how trade can be immediately cut off, and how economies can be destroyed. As our president plays with trade restrictions as if they were his private domain (and maybe they are), it teaches me that we may just be more fragile than we think we are.

There is a lot more of course in each of these presentations. Dalrymple shows how the Indians also influenced the Arabs through trade, and how Arabic numerals are in fact Hindi numerals (as, he says, they are called in Arabic), that the words algebra and algorithim both come from Arabic/Hindi roots, and on and on. Sarna talks about things more widely known, perhaps, at least to me, when he talks about the role Jews played in the American revolution, but he astounded me with his detailed analysis of the correspondence between Newport’s Touro synagogue (the Touros, by the way, were from Barbados) and newly inaugurated President George Washington.

Washington’s letter to the Newport congregation is well known – “the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance…..”. It is rightly viewed as a declaration of religious liberty and equality of treatment. But Sarna takes it well beyond that, examining the congregation’s petition to the president, as well as his response, in illuminating detail. You should watch the presentation just for that alone. Sarna is apparently writing a book focusing on these documents.

Questions: (1) will the Democrats win at least one House of Congress in November, or am I safe spending my $5000 (and Edie’s $5000) in advance? (2) will the Nationals lose all of their remaining games? (3) now that the Supreme Court rules this morning that Missouri has to carry out the November primary using its 2022 districts, how will they carry this out?

Any other questions?

Usually, I do strive for a semblance of accuracy, but this time, I am ignoring the trees and aiming for the forest. If I miss one or two details, it isn’t really important, because you will get the big picture. And my goal is the big picture.

The subject? Chaos. Election chaos.

The place? Missouri.

The time? Right now.

The reason to lay this out is that many of us are fearful that Mr. Trump and his party’s antics are threatening the integrity of the American election system, and might throw some of the November midterms, and perhaps the 2028 presidential election, into disarray. There are others who say that the state run election systems by which this country operates are strong enough to withstand Trump’s and Republican tampering. Missouri is the first place where real potential chaos may play out.

Missouri is a state with a lot of experience in public referenda which have the ability to overturn legislative law making. It is also a state where those who tend to vote in such referenda are more liberal than the population as a whole might be, or at least more liberal than the Republican controlled houses of the state legislature.

An example is abortion, where the strict anti-abortion legislation was overturned by a public referendum.

Some time over the past year, the state legislature redrew the Congressional districts in the Kansas City area with the goal of eliminating one Democratic/black district, by spreading that district’s voters into several red districts. Obviously, this made a lot of people unhappy, and there was a campaign to put the question of redistricting to a statewide vote.

In order to put a referendum on a ballot, you need to submit petitions with a large number of citizen signatures. There is no question but that this was accomplished.

But the state officials kept preparing for the election primary vote with the new Congressional plan and did not respond to the request for the referendum until immediately before the primary, where they said that there was not enough time for a referendum, and that redistricting was something not subject to a referendum. The opponents took to court.

While the case was working its way through the courts, the state held primary elections using the new districts, and Republican and Democratic candidates were selected for the November general election.

The case worked its way to the Missouri State Supreme Court, which ruled a few days ago that the law was clear, that there needs to be a statewide vote and, until that vote is held and the results determined, the state is not allowed to use the new Congressional districts. And the 2026 elections must be held under the old (2022, so not very old) post-census districts. The vote of the Court was 9-0. It was unanimous.

This put the state in a quandry. They have to hold elections in less than two months using districts for which there were no primaries, and no candidates. How will that happen?

So the state appealed to the United States Supreme Court, asking the Court reinstate the new Congressional districts, in effect over ruling the State Supreme Court. Perhaps surprisingly (considering everything else), the Court said that they were not going to take the case, leaving the State court’s ruling intact.

The Missouri officials weren’t going to take that sitting down, so they went to a local federal court presumably using the same arguments they made to the Supreme Court, under the theory that the refusal of the Supreme Court to get involved did not mean that lower federal courts couldn’t take the case, which then could go back up to the U.S. Supreme Court under the regular order of business. A federal judge agreed with the state and said that Missouri could conduct the November elections using the newly drawn districts, and relying on the results of this summer primaries to select candidates.

Missouri now had two conflicting rulings, one from the Missouri Supreme Court and one from a federal District Court which ruled after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take the case.

The last I heard last night was that the backers of the proposed referendum were going to appeal the decision of the District Court to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. We will see what they say.

Missouri , when I lived there, was the Show Me State. Now it seems to be the Show Me Again and Again and Again State.

This particular scenario is unique to this particular case, of course. But wait until there are other challenges to the November voting and even more after the November voting.

We ain’t see nothin’ yet.

The Washington Nationals season, which will end when September ends, has been very weird. They started the season in the middle of their perpetual rebuild, and with no expectations whatsoever. But they also started with a new manager, and new front office personnel, so there was some form of hope in the air that something was going to change for the better.

And so it did, as going into July, the team flirted with a .500 record and even a potential shot at a potential playoff position. The team, the youngest in the majors and filled with likely future stars had incredible energy and spirit, as they were one of, if not THE, leading offensive team in all sorts of batting statistics. Their pitching, however, was a problem, and needed help because, although the Nats were out-hitting and out-scoring their opponents on a fairly regular basis, they were also letting many too many runs cross the plate.

It was that spread between batting and pitching that led the team to trade away two of their better hitters in the hope of obtaining some quality, young pitching help. Of course, time will tell, but to date the pitching help has failed to appear, and the two bats (Curtis Mead and Luis Garcia, Jr.) are being missed as players and as people, and the team’s spirit and energy have vanished, and their losses now greatly exceed their wins and they have a good chance of fulfilling the original thoughts about this season – a last place finish. They now stand 12 games below .500, and are tied with Mets in last place in their 5 team division.

Yet (and this is where the bizarre gets more bizarre), if you look at the hitting statistics of all 30 major league teams, even today, the Nats stand 2nd in runs scored, 2nd in runs batted in, 2nd in home runs, 4th in doubles, 4th in triples, 1st in stolen bases, and 2nd in slugging. And, to make things even more difficult to understand, the Nats, 12 games below .500, have scored more runs during the year than their opponents have. And of the games they have lost, 20 have been lost by only one run.

And the bigger statistic is how many “blown saves” the Nats have had this year. What is a blown save, you ask? It is any time a pitcher enters a game with a lead of three or fewer runs, typically in the late innings, and let’s the other team score enough runs to turn the potential victory into a loss. So far, the Nats have played 146 games, and have had 37 blown saves. In other words, in 37 of their games, the Nats were ahead in late innings only to have the other team score more than needed to win.

Well, you ask, is 37 a big number or a small number of blown saves. Let me put it this way. It is a major league record, and there are 15 games to go. And it isn’t that the Nats have not tried out different relief pitchers. The blown saves have been the result of runs scored against 16 different relief pitchers over the course of the year. And obviously, things have not got better in this regard since the trades of Mead and Garcia. If anything, they are worse.

So, what looked mid-season to be heading towards the end of a seemingly successful rebuild now looks like the Nats will have to start from scratch to rebuild their relief pitching staff. I would expect a primarily new crop of folk next season. Will any of them be those who the Nats traded Garcia and Mead for? We shall have to see. I wouldn’t count on it.

That’s it for baseball. Now, a little more.

From my reading odd things yesterday:

(1) Meir of Rothenberg, a 13th century rabbi, from Worms who spent most of his life in Rothenberg on the Tauber, and who was a very influential fellow. You may have heard of him; you probably don’t know why. That’s okay, I don’t either. But what I learned was that when he was 71 years old in the 1280s, he was traveling with family members, presumably to Palestine, although apparently no one knows for sure, when he was captured in the Italian Alps and held for ransom, for surely the wealthy Jewish population would ransom its most famous rabbi. But Meir refused to even think about the possibility of ransom, as he was afraid it would simply encourage the capture of more rabbis or other prominent Jews. So he just stayed a prisoner for seven years until he died! Who knew?

(2) You read and hear a lot (I know that isn’t true unless your interests are the same as mine) about Jews in earlier centuries in parts of the Caribbean, such as Jamaica and Curacao, to name two. But I heard to night that Jews were also prominent in Suriname, the former Dutch Guiana, on the South American coast. Wikipedia says: In Suriname, “Jews were granted freedom of religion in 1665 and the right to have their own courts and civil guard. They continued to enjoy autonomy after the colony was turned over to the Netherlands [from the English]. Over half of the sugar cane plantations in Suriname were owned by Jews, who received a permit to work areas that were pure jungle into agriculture. In 1825, these special rights were rescinded.” Apparently, there are about 200 Jews in the capital, Paramaribo, today and they operate a synagogue in a building constructed in 1842 (sand floors and all). Who knew?

As am aside, the synagogue shares a parking lot with a mosque next door.

You gotta love it. The United Nations, by a General Assembly vote of 164 to 1, adopted the use of a new projection for world maps, replacing the Mercator projection with one that more accurately compares the sizes of various land masses. No longer will Greenland, for example, look to be similar in size to Africa, which is 14 times larger in reality.

The single dissenting vote, believe it or not, was that of the United States. Quoted in the Washington Post, an American representative at the UN said that the change was just only part of a “radical ideological project” of the United Nations and that “resolutions like this, and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.”

Take that, Lake America!

But it doesn’t end with the attempted renaming of Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, it may not end at all until President Trump is out of office. Just yesterday, he suggested that he may rename the State of New Mexico and call it New America. Now, I don’t think even the Trump Court would permit the president to rename a state by executive order, but the Trump Court does many thinks that I would not think they would do. So, if I were Donald Trump, I would plow ahead and start calling the state by its new name, instruct the Executive Branch or maybe the entire federal government to use New America, the Court be damned. What is there to lose, especially since the Court has already said that the President can hardly be called into account for anything, outside of the ballot box?

Trump clearly likes to put his name on everything, not only buildings, but also on vodka, a university, steaks…..everything. Maybe, rather than fighting this, we should play along. Our prisons, the ICE detention centers, garbage dumps, super fund sites, forests after the fires and before significant regrowth, all of these things could be named after Trump. For example, everyone calls it the DC Jail, but it is really the Central Detention Facility of the DC Department of Corrections, and no one uses that name. Why not rename it Trump Jail – DC? It has a ring to it (unless it turns out that you can’t name a prison facility after a potential future resident).

There will be some who would object to such renaming. For example, I am sure that there is a wide swath of the American population who think that naming these types of facilities after Trump would simply feed into his ego, in the “no publicity is bad publicity” sense. They would rather we go with Drumpf, the beautiful name his grandfather abandoned so that Donald could accede to the presidency. I think that is something to be considered.

We have to remember that the Supreme Court’s rulings on presidential power do not only relate to Don Drumpf, but to all future presidents (until there is a Court willing to overturn them). So I am thinking about what I would do if I were elected president.

Some time during Drumpf’s first term, when I was posting letters to him on Facebook (which he never acknowledged), I pointed out how lucky he was to have so many English words which rhymed with his last name – making it easy to wax poetic about him (not that anyone yet has chosen to do that). I recall that I must have suggested the following words, none of which one would necessarily want to be associated with: bump, chump, clump, dump, frump, grump, hump, jump, lump, pump, plump, rump, and thump. And probably others. (Seriously, can you just imagine a worse group of words to be rhymed with?)

So I am thinking that I might rename the Palm Beach Airport (just to pick an example at random) the Trump Bump Chump Clump Dump Frump Grump Hump Lump Pump Plump Rump Thump Trump International Airport. I may use a similar name to rename all of the golf clubs, plus his Palm Beach get-away club. I know that they aren’t “public” properties, but I would argue to the Court that his conflation of what was his and what was ours was so complete that, in effect, he had converted all of his properties into public properties. Of course, the present Trump Bump Chump Clump etc Court would never entertain such a thought, but when the Democrats expand the Court to 13 (and why stop there?), they might just agree with me.

What about the Pledge of Allegiance, you ask? I know I am getting carried away, but I think that our fair Donald may be considering altering the words “under God” to “under God and Trump” or maybe even “under Trump”. I don’t think that, as president, I would suggest changing it to “One nation, under God and Trump Bump Chump Clump etc”, but I might for a transition period, and then suggest a celebration when we get rid of the umps, and go back to plain old God. I would suggest that be on June 14, Trump Bump Chump’s birthday. We will see how that works out.

Well, today is Labor Day. And of the 350 million or so Americans, how many are thinking of the centrality of the American labor movement to what this country has become (prior to the Trump Bump Chump era)? Not many, but we should. This should be a day where we praise the labor movement for all the things that they have brought about regarding ending child labor, limiting hours and adding overtime pay, paid holidays, occupational safety and all the rest. We should be having a true conversation about the effect of ICE on American labor, about the increasing divisions between the haves and have nots, about the future effect of AI on the labor market, and about the 25% of Americans who are not even looking for work. But we won’t. 

And that “we” includes me. I am going to get a haircut.

We took a trip to IKEA yesterday to buy a new lamp and a new tea kettle. Somehow, we found what we wanted easily. The trip was a success.

Because it is IKEA, the lamp requires a bit of putting-together. Here are the only instructions for the lamp.

I now understand why the Egyptians gave up hieroglyphics.

The teapot, on the other hand, requires no construction. But it came with a piece of paper instructing you to clean it with boiling water and vinegar before use. The paper does not tell you what kind of vinegar to use, or how much vinegar to use, or how long to let it boil. But it does give you instructions in 24 (exactly 24) languages, including Latvian, Lithuanian, Bulgarian and Greek. No Russia, Ukrainian, Hebrew or Arabic. No African or Asian languages. I assume there is a second version of this sheet for purchases made in those countries. Maybe even a third.

Putting that aside, I do love IKEA. Brilliant store. And I hope you all know what IKEA stands for: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. Seems obvious, once you know.

Speaking of questions (were we?), I took a brief test this morning in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Its purpose was to show that young and old Americans view the country differently. They divide their readership into four age segments. The youngest is 18-35, and the oldest is 65 and beyond. I learned that my views put me squarely in the 18-35 group. I am not sure what to do with that information.

We also went by Jim Coleman Toyota to pick up our license plates for the new car. Undistinguished: JW 2884. Or something close to that. Maybe I should break down and get vanity plates. What would I put on them? ARTIS80? That does have a nice ring to it.

One last random thought. On the way to Ingvar Kamprad etc, we needed lunch and stopped at a little free standing restaurant called El Catrachito in Beltsville. Some trepidation after we parked because Yelp gave the restaurant only 3.3. But it is worthy of a 4, because of the quality of the food, the variety,  and the friendly service. The food is Honduran, and it turns out that El Catracho is slang for a Honduran, and El Catrachito, therefore, for “little Honduran”. It’s also a name for a Honduran dish that Nicaraguans would not be caught dead eating. So Nicaraguans began using this as a derogatory term for Hondurans, but it turned out that the Hondurans liked the term and adopted it. Who knew? Or, as the Catrochos would say, “Quien supo?”. (And, no, that is not a form of chowder.)

This will probably be a bit shorter than Part 1. Maybe I should have combined them.

We will start with American Associates, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. BGU is one of Israel’s largest universities, with its main campus in Beersheva (in the northern Negev Desert), and smaller campuses in Eilat (on the Red Sea) and Sde Boker (about 40 miles south of Beersheva), near the retirement home of David Ben-Gurion. It is supported in part by contributions arranged by a series of “friends of” organizations, the largest of which is here in the United States, headquartered in New York City, with a branch in the DC/Baltimore area.

Somewhat over 40 years ago, we joined a seven couple study group composed of Adas Israel families with children of comparable ages, and we met with that group on a regular basis for about 15 or 20 years, when we all decided that it would be nice to take a trip together. We decided to go to Israel on an archeological tour, and spent a year or so preparing for the trip through various readings, etc. One of the seven families had been involved with BGU and suggested that BGU in Beersheva might be able to recommend a guide for us and also offer us a tour of the campus. That sounded good.

When the recommendations came for the tour (which was to be 12 days long), the suggested beginning was 3 days at BGU and only 9 days on the road. This seemed absurd to be, but the group approved the agenda and we were off. Although the idea of spending 3 days at BGU struck me as 2 days too long, in fact, all three of those days were remarkable. We met with faculty and with students, we toured both the Beersheva and Sde Boker campuses, we attended classes, we toured laboratories, we went into the field and saw agricultural experimentation and a fish hatchery, a little of everything.

When we got back home, Edie and I made a contribution to the school, and we got involved in the local supporting group in Washington. Soon, our friends who had led that group for years decided it was time for them to step aside, and we became the local co-chairs and, as a result of that, I think, I was asked to be on the national board of what was then called American Associates, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. The work of that group was obviously important and, more than that, I found that I really enjoyed being with the permanent staff and with the other supporters that I met from around the country.

A few years after that, I remember we were on a road trip (surprise!) and the car phone rang (those were car phone days, not cell phone days) and it was the president of the board of directors asking if I would be interested in “running” for the Treasurer position. It intrigued me, and I said I would think it over. I liked the idea of getting more involved, but I was neither ever going to be a million-dollar supporter, as some were, and I really had no financial background to be a Treasurer. I remembered my assistant treasurer position at Temple Sinai, where I was totally out of my league, and shivered a bit.

It is true that since then my law practice had me looking at a lot of financial data, and I knew how to understand what I looked at, and my days as a board member and officer at Adas Israel had given some experience in working on budgets, but still…..the BGU world was filled with sophisticated businessmen with MBAs and more, and with prominent CPAs. But it was also true that AABGU had a Chief Financial Officer, whom I knew from by board work and whom I thought I could work with. At any event, I said “yes” and started me on a six year spell as national treasurer of AABGU.

Of course, I approached my work as much as a lawyer as I did as a treasurer and when I discovered that the financial structure of AABGU at that time did not seem to comply with IRS rules for organizations that were “friends” organizations of foreign institutions (compliance was necessary so that contributions would be deductible for U.S. income tax purposes), I went about arranging for legal representation to put us into compliance. That’s a long story in and of itself, but it was a successful restructuring and I can only assume that the organization is still in compliance today.

Other than that, being treasurer meant working on the annual budget of an organization that brought in about $40 million in contributions annually, and presenting that budget to the board at biannual board meetings, getting involved in board executive committee meetings which involved any number of issues, and taking nine or ten trips to Israel for meetings at the university itself (and one fascinating meeting in London where I represented the US organization and the other participants represented the fund raising organizations from Canada, South Africa, Latin America and various European countries – what a fascinating group of people).

At any rate, I remained treasurer and a board member until about 5 years ago, when I resigned.  Leadership at the organization was changing, and leadership at the university was changing and it seemed that the 20 years or so that I spent helping BGU was sufficient.  I am still in touch with the organization and make an annual contribution, but am no longer a board member.

While all this was going on, Edie was leading the Bereavement Committee at Adas Israel. Without going into details, this committee helped families whose loved ones passed away by, among other things, arranging the funerals in order to let the families concentrate on other things, and in order to minimize the decisions that families would have to make when they were in a state of grief or shock or both. I was a committee member; it was a very dedicated group of people.

In conjunction with her work as Bereavement Committee chair, Edie was a member of the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington, a not-for-profit that was created in the 1980s to promote simple and traditional Jewish funeral practices and to keep the cost of funerals under control (in DC, there was a Jewish funeral duopoly that was charging high prices, and trying to up-sell fancy caskets, etc). The JFPC was led by a DC lawyer who had been chair of the committee for over 30 years, and had members from all of the Jewish denominations.

The Committee held evening meetings four times a year, and there were times when Edie couldn’t go and I went in her place, and really appreciated what the Committee was doing and the people doing it. It was a new world for me. At some point, and I don’t remember exactly when, Edie and I decided that I would take her place as a Committee member. The group, although a legal non-profit, was run informally, so that this transfer was as easy as could be.

Some years later, Bob Hausman, the Committee chair, who was then in his early 80s, called me up and said that he thought he needed to resign, that it was becoming too much responsibility for him, and that I was the logical (he said the “only”) board member he would be comfortable turning it over to. I told him that I was interested, but unsure what it might amount to, so that I would like to shadow him for a year before reaching a final agreement. This is what I did. It was an interesting year, when we were negotiating an arrangement with a suburban Virginia funeral home to offer funerals in compliance with our standards (including financial standards) and, again, I found it interesting, worthwhile and something I felt competent to do.

This started a 10 year presidency that ended in the summer of 2025, when I too, now in my 80s, thought it time for me to step aside, and I resigned the presidency, stayed on the board for a year, and just a few months ago resigned my board position. The organization continues to thrive with arrangements with three local funeral homes, with helping congregations create and sustain bereavement or chevra kadisha committees, and with monitoring what happens generally with Jewish funerals in the area and acting as a model for groups in other cities across the country.

Finally, there is the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, of which I am currently president. By coincidence the Haberman Institute (then called the Foundation for Jewish Studies) and the JFPC were established at about the same time, in the early 1980s. The Institute was established by Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman when he retired as Rabbi at Washington Hebrew Congregation, and over the course of several decades brought scholars to the DC area to share their expertise in Jewish religious and cultural thought. For years, he operated the “foundation” as a solo-practitioner, maybe with the help of one or two assistants, but it became too much for him as he aged (he lived to 97), and the organization began to operate with an independent board of directors and a professional, part time, executive director. I attended Foundation programs from time to time (I am obviously interested in such things) and had several friends who were board members. One of those friends, Arnie Hammer, who was then about to become the president of the board, suggested that I might want to join the board, and I did. It was a small board, so it didn’t take too long before I was a vice-president/treasurer, and became quite active.

Arnie was having health problems, and felt he could not keep up with his presidency, and he called me and my friend Elaine Amir together and said that he was going to resign and that one of us had to become president. He also suggested that it would be good to have a woman president, something that had not yet been the case. Elaine agreed to become president if I would be vice president and we would in effect act together as co-presidents, which we did, as we worked together well and our strengths complimented each other rather than causing competition between us.

This was about the time that I took over the Funeral Practices Committee, and I told Elaine that I could manage both, but not as president of both, so that she was stuck with the title as long as I was leading the other group. I am not sure that either of us thought that this would be a ten year stretch, but it was. When I left the presidency of the funeral committee in 2025, I also replaced Elaine as president of Haberman (we had renamed the organization after Rabbi Haberman passed away, a more than fitting renaming), and she continues to work along side me as past-president and board member.

As those who follow this blog know, I will be turning 84 this year, and don’t know how long my Haberman service will continue. But so far, so good, and we have added some board members who are younger (like in their 70s) and who are more than qualified to take over once my time ends.

That’s it. No more about me.

Yesterday, we did not have a presenter at our Thursday morning breakfast group meeting, but rather we sat at tables of eight (actually we each sat at two tables of a different eight) and each of us talked a little about ourselves.

Once again, I realized that all of my “extra-curricular” activities, with the exception of professional activities related to my 40+ year law practice, have been with organizations connected with the Jewish community. I remarked that, looking back, this is surprising to me; I would not have expected that to have been the case if you asked me, say, 60 years ago. So how did it happen?

Growing up in suburban St. Louis, my family belonged to a large Reform congregation, and basically only attended religious services on the High Holidays. Other than that, and Passover seders, there was nothing related to Jewish religion that occurred in our house. I did not start going to Sunday School until the third grade, although I think most of my school friends started earlier. I decided to have a bar mitzvah (looking back, I am not sure why this was important to me then; most of my Jewish friends were not then having bar mitzvahs, and my father hadn’t), somewhat to the surprise of my parents, who neither encouraged nor discouraged it. I went to a secular summer camp, and I was not involved in any Jewish teen organizations. I viewed the Reform Judaism I grew up in as the norm, and was very surprised when I went to college and discovered that, among the many Jews I met there, the majority probably had Conservative or Orthodox backgrounds. At least, that was my impression.

The college was Harvard, and it had an active Hillel that I ignored after going to a few events, thinking that I didn’t belong there. I think that was because Hillel was then filled with Conservative and Orthodox Jews, and that just was not me. I went to High Holiday services while I was in college, I think each year, and I did take a few Jewish history courses, which I found interesting. I took Russian language courses and studied a lot about Russian history and literature, and was clearly interested in the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement. When it came to writing a college thesis, I chose to write about a Jewish anti-Zionist, socialist organization, the Bund, and its relationship to the Russian Communist Party (the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) in the early 20th century, during the last years of tsardom.

When I got to law school at Yale, I was involved in no Jewish activity, except for high holiday services, which I remember attending at a suburban Reform temple.

When Edie and I married in 1976, we joined Temple Sinai, a Reform congregation down the street from our house. We were members of Sinai for about seven years, and our children started religious school there. Edie became involved as a member of Rabbi Gene Lipman’s “kitchen cabinet” that met on Sunday mornings to give him feedback on whatever was happening at the temple. I was recruited by my law partner Ed Berkowitz to run for the Board of Directors and before I knew it I was not only running for the Board but for the position of Assistant Treasurer, and I was elected.

I dutifully attended board meetings, but I don’t remember ever communicating with the actual Treasurer (I don’t remember even who he was), and I was completely at a loss as to everything that was going on. Had the Treasurer resigned (or worse) and had I found myself in that position, I had no idea what I would have done. I don’t remember ever seeing a budget, and I don’t think I knew anything about the congregation’s financial position.

During my few years as an officer of Temple Sinai, there were a few traumatic events. There was an election to the board of a very active, well liked, and well respected woman who, it turned out, was not Jewish (not born Jewish, never converted), and that caused ridiculous trauma, and there was a big to-do about whether to renew the contract of a part time assistant rabbi, who had violated his contract by performing a mixed marriage of a young congregant off-campus.

In 1983, Edie’s father passed away, and she wanted a congregation where she could say kaddish on a regular basis, and that was not Temple Sinai. So we went south instead of east and joined Adas Israel, a large Conservative congregation. This was terra incognita for me. It was quite different from Sinai, and at that time Conservative services and practices were different from Reform. I think I had only been to one Conservative service in my life, and I was 40 years old. (The Conservative service was for a bar mitzvah of a cousin of Edie’s.)

A few years after we joined Adas Israel, the congregation fell into crisis, because it started a major renovation project and discovered it did not have the funds to complete. I had vowed, after my Sinai experience, to stay very anonymous at Adas, but a good friend there who was far from anonymous asked me if I would join a small group of men (all men, it was) to figure out how to get the congregation out of the mess it was in. This took a good part of a year and much of my time. I was no longer anonymous.

Because I was now a known quantity, I was asked if I would run for the board and I said “yes”, and did, and then a few years later, I was asked to run for one of the vice presidential slots and I did that. I was not an officer of my second congregation.

I took this job seriously, which meant that I was away from home several evenings each week, leaving Edie with two young daughters. This wasn’t fair, and I announced that I was not going to serve a second term as an officer, although I stayed on the board. As opposed to my time at Sinai, I now knew what I was doing. I knew how the congregation functioned.

One of my board tasks was to be liaison to the elementary school that the Congregation ran (separate from its pre-school), that started as a K-3 school and was then expanded to K-6. Soon it was apparent that the building could not house a school of this size (and a growing school at that), and that the school would have to move to another site. The school was a part of the Congregation, with no separate legal identity, but was operated as a community school, and the majority of parents were not Adas members. The parent council decided not only to move to a new location, but to separate from the synagogue and create its own legal identity.

This led to more turmoil, especially as it turned out that finding a site to move a functioning school was not going to be easy and the school wanted to stay at Adas until a location was found where it could move comfortably. This set up more conflict.

During this period, as I was identified with the school by many Adas board members, it was suggested that it was time for me to step down from the board, and I did. When the school, now known as the Milton School, temporarily relocated to an empty public school building in Silver Spring, I was asked to join the board of the school, which I did and which I served for five years, helping the school to find, and to finance, its current location on 16th Street NW.

NOTE: I realize that this post is long enough. I will do Part 2 tomorrow – how I got to Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington, and the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies.

I was so rushed this morning and there was one more thing I wanted to say.

I was talking to a cousin this morning about something that she recently witnessed, and she said, “It was just like that scene in E.T., where…….”.

And I had to tell her I never saw E.T.

Last week, there was some news event that a commentator compared to a scene in Godfather II.

I have never seen any Godfather movie. Nor have I ever seen a Star Wars movie. And I could go on and on.

The same is true with TV shows. I have never seen the Sopranos or Breaking Bad or The Simpsons or Seinfeld or …..

And music. Can I name one Taylor Swift song, or a song  Bruce Springsteen, or Fleetwood Mac, or Elton John, or Dolly Parton? No.

So maybe I am deluding myself when I think that I understand this country. Maybe I am just a cultural outsider who does not understand it at all. Maybe the United States that I know so well is just a place that does not really exist. And the U.S. that exists is a place I don’t know at all.

That’s it. Just wanted to get that out.

Yesterday, we spent a delightful afternoon with our friends Mel and Barbara, looking at Barbara’s sculpture. Here is one of her pieces, guarding the door to their house.

Last night, the Haberman program was on the protests in Brooklyn in 1906 when an elementary school with almost all Jewish students not only had a religious Christmas program, but had a principal who told the children that they should try to be more like Jesus. An interesting event, but a limited one, perhaps only of interest to the historian or sociologist? Think again. It’s a repetitive issue, as evidenced by the push in Texas and elsewhere to have the Ten Commandments (the King James version) visible in all classrooms.

Is it an important issue? What about Christmas as a national holiday? What about “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Or on American money? Or standing when they play “God Bless America”?

Does any of thiscreally make a difference? I have my doubts.

It was an interesting program. Available to watch on the Haberman website.

Not much time to write this morning. Had my Thursday breakfast meeting, and have a noon meeting to sign new wills and trusts.

Then….free time.

More, tomorrow.

The Supreme Court ruling on the White House ballroom didn’t really surprise me. From the start, it was unclear to me that the National Trust for Historic Preservation had standing to bring this lawsuit, and the current Supreme Court, which had also questioned the standing of about two dozen States to bring a suit against the Trump restrictions on mail-in ballots prematurely, did what I thought and feared they would do. And it brought up a real dilemma.

As Chief Justice Roberts said in his dissent, the construction of the ball room with the approval of Congress is most likely illegal without approval of Congress. But if Congress won’t act, if no one can show sufficient harm to satisfy a Court that they have standing to sue, and if the courts themselves have no authority to stop illegal actions of the President without a case or controversy brought by someone with standing, what can be done to stop a president from doing something illegal?  If the answer is “nothing”, do we still have a democracy?

And if we do still have a democracy, is it only a democracy because every two or four years we can elect political leaders who can do whatever they want during their term of office? Is this now the American definition of democracy?

But it goes even beyond that. Do the political leaders who now seem to have untrammeled rights to do whatever they want, have the right to manipulate elections so that even those will no longer be democratic? After all, if Congress won’t act and the Courts say that they can not act, what will stop the current administration from making sure that their opponents can’t win elections? After all, isn’t this what happens in much of the world, and isn’t it usually successful?

Moving on to the Antichrist….

It’s hard for me to believe that J.D. Vance will be the 2028 Republican nominee, but I guess it is a possibility. He clearly is not very likeable, he is quite young and (in spite of all his experience) inexperienced, and he says really, really dumb things. Two really, really dumb things in the last two days. Thing One: Abdul El-Sayed, an extraordinarily accomplished ex-Rhodes Scholar now the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan, is “very, very evil” and un-American, and out to foster the interests of only one very small group of American citizens at the expense of all the others. Thing Two: that he would not be surprised if the Antichrist (I guess people capitalize that word) is walking among us now, and that he is not certain whether or not we are living in the end days.

Now my knowledge of Radical Christianism (new word, thank you) may be relatively limited, but when I put together Thing One and Thing Two, I get a bit nervous. For after all, don’t Radical Christists (another new word) look forward to the end days? Don’t the end days mean that Jesus will return (a shocked Jesus he will certainly be) to Earth, and either rapture up to Heaven his followers or inaugurate the 1000 year kingdom of God on Earth? If this is what J.D. is looking forward to, I would think that all he has to do as president is (1) make sure that his wife converts from her current state of paganism, and (2) make sure that all the preconditions for Jesus’ Second Coming have been satisfied.

These preconditions would include the appearance of the Antichrist, who presumably can not be stopped by J.D., and by the Antichrist sewing chaos in the world, leading to the final battle. Now, all of us unbelievers (unbelievers in the Radical Christian sense) will be killed in this final battle – you can deny the Holocaust, but if you are lucky enough to survive Armageddon, you won’t dare deny the reality of the final Holocaust. That would include Abdul El-Sayed and it would include me. These are events that J.D. Vance, who criticizes El-Sayed for favoring one group of Americans only, would presumably welcome. His one group of Americans would be saved.

Of course, Vance is a born again Catholic, so I asked my religious source, Google, to tell me specifically how the Catholic church interpreted the end days, if they do at all. Basically, according to Google AI, there will be a human Antichrist, he will cause great turmoil and a harsh challenge to the Church and its believers, but then: Jesus will return to earth, evil will have been defeated, and although there will be no Rapture,  there will be a final judgement. Every human being who ever lived will be bodily resurrected, and will individually be judged, some being assigned to Hell, while the others will remain on earth where society will be perfected and evil will disappear and death will be no more.

And yes, none of this can happen without the appearance of the Antichrist to get the ball rolling, and, yes and very importantly, Vance said he would be okay if his doing God’s work (as he thinks he is) leads to the end times. (By the way, when asked if he was certain on a scale of 1 to 10 that he was a 10 who would avoid Hell, he said – no, not a 10, but a 7 or an 8. Weird, weird, weird.)

If he weren’t his vice-president, perhaps Vance would identify Trump as the Antichrist. Or Netanyahu, I guess. Or some Iranian leader. Or Putin. Perhaps, there is no single Antichrist, but we are living in an era of multiple Antichrists, all unknowingly working together to fulfill God’s bizarre purpose? Unlikely, yes, but as possible as anything else.

But I will tell you this: I do not want a president who things he is going to be the catalyst for the end times. And that is because, without knowing it, that president himself would be an Antichrist.

Walt Kelly: we have met the Antichrist, and it is us. Perhaps, it is all of us. But I doubt it is only Abdul El-Sayed.