Last night, I finished reading A Difficult Woman, a biography of author Lillian Heller by Alice Kessler-Harris. It is an interesting book about an always interesting, if not always pleasant, woman. The book is somewhat unique in that it does not simply go from birth to death, but rather each chapter deals with a specific aspect of Hellman’s life. This makes the chronology sometimes confusing, but each chapter quite interesting in and of itself.

One of the chapters deals with Hellman’s final works, her three “memoirs”, An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. I have not read any of them, and probably won’t, but it was interesting in that, although they are called memoirs, they may be as much fictional as factual. Hellman herself did not deny this, I don’t think, and claimed that she was always the victim of a poor memory, and always a dramatist and story teller. Many of the individuals named in these three books viewed Hellman differently, and simply called her a liar, telling stories about them that simply were not true. Litigation resulted and was continuing at the time Hellman died at age 79.

I was thinking about this earlier this morning when I had breakfast at Politics and Prose (just coffee and a bagel, if you are interested) with a friend and we were comparing memorable (hmmm…..) moments from the early days of our two law practices. How much is truth, and how much has been imagined as truth to make the story telling better.

For example, take Father John, who appeared in my office one day and introduced himself as the Archimandrite of the Eastern Bulgarian Orthodox Church of America, and said he was looking for legal counsel to help him acquire some property in the name of the church in the D.C. area. I can’t tell you exactly when this happened, but I would guess it was sometime during the late 1980s. I wish I had taken a photo of Father John, but I didn’t. He did look something like this, although he had more gray in his hair and wore an even larger cross.

He told me was the head of the St. John of Rila Monastery in East Setauket, New York.

We agreed to have dinner that night (I don’t remember who paid) at I Ricchi, a trendy (still trendy today) restaurant in downtown Washington, when he could tell me his plans. He was a charismatic guy, tall, robust looking, with long gray hair and twinkly blue eyes (just like Santa Claus and the Lubavitcher Rebbe), and was clearly American born…..no Bulgarian accent. As he told me his plans, I was agog. His idea was to make money for his church (take that with a grain of salt) by buying cheap residential property, cutting off utilities (gas, electricity and water) on a definite schedule, forcing all of the residents out (without alarming authorities, if possible), and then selling the empty properties to high scale developers who would work their magic and create new neighborhoods, more upscale.

(The “monastery” that Father John ran, by the way, seems more modest than its name would imply.

I am told by my phone that Father John’s monastery closed in about 1990 and was turned over to another group and is now the Monastery of the Holy Cross, run by the Russian Orthodox Church.)

I told him his plans were illegal and immoral, and asked him if he was being serious. He was. I told him that I couldn’t represent him, and I think sent him elsewhere, giving him some names of lawyers I knew, so that they could be as astounded as I was. His plans never came to fruition.

But back to I Ricchi. He didn’t seem overly surprised at my reaction, our dinner continued and as we left, we passed a large bowl of fresh strawberries and a large bowl of whipped cream that the restaurant had set out for those who wanted to end their meals these two delicacies, either with or without shortcake. Father John walked by the bowls, raised the index finger of the his right hand and scooped out a dollop of whipped cream, licked it off his finger, and turned to me saying, “When you dress like this, you can get away with almost anything’.

I remember (or do I?) shortly after this researching Father John, and discovering that he was a defrocked Episcopal priest who had sat on the Philadelphia Zoning Board of Adjustment, who had been accused of, and/or convicted of, bribery. Today, even with the help of AI, I have not been able to find him.

Back to Lillian Hellman, and her “memoirs” and her being accused of being a “liar”. What is important, Hellman said, is not whether something was true or not, it was the point being made, that is what made something true, not whether the particular points were “fact” or “fiction”. So here we are with Father John, to me he is and always will be a crook kicked off the Philadelphia zoning board for accepting bribes and a former Episcopal priest who converted to Eastern Bulgarian Orthodoxy and continued his crooked ways.

I think I am right on the facts, but if it turns out I am not, I can hear Father John kissing his cross and saying now from his grave:

Lillian would not agree.

Dyke Marsh is a large wetland on the Potomac River south of Alexandria, Virginia, managed by the National Park Service. You approach off the George Washington Parkway, and can walk the 1.5 mile round trip trail to a boardwalk on the river. Some photos from yesterday.

Then a late lunch at The Haven, a pizzeria plus very near Dyke Marsh. Google gives The Haven a 4.5, and tells you the pizza is less reliable than everything else. Edie had a Greek salad and I had a smoked turkey sandwich. Both excellent. I got a side with my sandwich and our very pleasant waiter suggested, of all things, the green beans. He was right.

On the way back, we stopped at Alexandria’s small Black History Museum, one of a number of Black history cites in the city. The museum is low on “things”, but good on explanatory signage. You are reminded that there were once two slave markets on Duke Street, that by the 1840s there were more free Blacks than enslaved Blacks, and that the city library did not permit Blacks in, leading to a 1939 sit-in (one of the first in history) which in turn led to the construction of a library for Blacks. There is a cute “doll house” reconstruction of that library.

There a number of artifacts found in the homes of former slaves and free Blacks. What interested me was a damaged china cup containing sayings from Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac.

An interesting day.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and we are going to go out and try to take advantage of it. But before we do, I better post something or you will have to have your coffee with MSNBC or the New York Times.

Here is what I am thinking about right now. And I will admit that my thoughts aren’t particularly well formed.

During the buildup to World War II, when Hitler had taken power in Germany and began to grab other parts of Europe that he felt were part of the God-given German world, the Jews in those countries were being marginalized – they were denied certain jobs, kept out of educational institutions, limited in their ability to use public facilities, and so forth. When the war itself began, and before the United States got involved directly, things obviously got much worse for the Jews.

It must be remembered that, before about 1930, it appeared that Jews were being welcomed into mainstream society throughout Europe, that historic barriers to Jewish participation in almost everything had been knocked down, and that the future looked good for the millions of Jewish Europeans, even in those eastern parts of Europe which were still poverty stricken and which World War I had treated so savagely.

During this entire period, there was a great debate among the American Jewish community as to how to react to growing restrictions on the Jews of central Europe. There was a strong difference of opinion as to how strongly American Jews should publicly protest what was going on in Europe. Should they hold rallies, and stage parades? Should they write op-eds or magazine articles? Should there be petitions? Or should they be quiet and lay low, or try to influence politicians without public clamor?

Today, one wonders if louder protests might have increased opposition to Hitler and changed the course of history. In the 1930s, the fear was that increased public protests of any kind might (1) not do any good, and (2) stoke American antisemitism and become not only self-defeating, but downright dangerous. So most of American mainstream Jewry stayed quiet. Of course, no one foresaw the Holocaust as it turned out, but still……

When you look at what is happening in the United States today, it seems to me that much of the same phenomenon is occurring. Just a few years ago, it seemed that Black Americans, just to name one group out of many, was on its way to much better days. There had been so much progress in every aspect of American society regarding Black participation, and much of this progress had been the result of legal protections, stemming from the civil right and fair housing acts of the 1960s, to the more recent DEI movements, to foster (as they say) diversity, equality and inclusion in all aspects of American life.

Of course, every time someone was chosen for some position where there were more than one person who would like to have been chosen, there were to be losers. And if the person chosen was chosen to foster the goals of DEI, the loser was, at least much of the time, to be someone who was not a beneficiary of DEI. And that was a balance that needed to be dealt with, that required some sensitivity.

But like in Germany, where Hitler stirred up the masses to think that Jews were taking their rightful places, Trump and his white supremacist followers stirred up white Americans to think that Blacks, and other DEI beneficiaries, were taking their rightful places. They were invaders, he implied, in a land not fully their own. And we have seen the results.

In fact, we are still seeing the results as DEI, once a positive aspect of American life, was turned into what is almost a treasonous set of letters, what was good became evil or (analogy or pun obviously intended) what was black is now white (or maybe it is what was white is now black).

But where are the Black voices opposing the downfall and destruction of DEI and everything it stood for? Where is Ibram X. Kendi, who in his book on anti-racism, took such an extreme pro-DEI position, saying basically that if Blacks are 15 percent of American citizens, Blacks should not be satisfied until they hold 15% of the positions of every job description in America? Why do we see Black journalists, educators, and pundits on TV giving the “news” without the great emotion that you might expect they would have seeing DEI, which helped many of them obtain their positions, be decimated?

Is this a replay of the America of the 1930s and early 1940s, where now it is the Blacks who are saying, “this too will pass”, and “let’s keep the rhetoric down, or we will make it worse than it is”?

We now see that, with the redistricting going on in the solid South, up to 1/3 of Black members of Congress may not return in the next session. We see the number of Blacks admitted to many universities dropping, and hiring practices across the country changing. But where is the Black outrage? We know it is there, but we don’t really hear it.

It obviously did not help the Jews to remain quiet almost 100 years ago. Will the same reticence and silence help the Blacks now?

We are scheduled to go on an Alaska cruise in July. After the one week cruise, which starts and ends in Seattle, we decided to take another week and see some things we haven’t seen before, so I made return reservations not from Seattle, but from Missoula, Montana. To wander between Seattle and Missoula, of course, we will need a car. I contacted Budget for a car rental, because they have a decent discount arrangement for AARP members. I called their 800 number, and wound up talking with a man who sounded very sure of himself. So the conversation started off somewhat like this:

Me: I want to rent a car in Seattle. I am coming off a cruise ship, and I don’t know where your closest office is to the piers where the ships arrive.

Him: Are you sure?

Me: Sorry, am I sure of what?

Him: Are you coming off a cruise?

Me: Yes.

Him: Well, are you sure you aren’t coming into Florida. I think that almost all cruise ships land in Florida.

Me: Excuse me??

It went on for a while, but we finally got everything straight and then it was time for him to take my credit card and contact information. He asked for my email. I told him, and asked him to spell it back to me, so I was sure he had it correctly. He repeated my name accurately, and then started with A-U-T-H-O-R. Hold on, I told him, it’s A-R-T-H-U-R. I figured he was confusing me with Shakespeare.

Now that we have that all straight, hopefully we will have a car waiting for us in Seattle. Of course, I remember times when we have landed places, expecting to have a car waiting for us, and being surprised and disappointed. I remember once landing late at night in Albuquerque, and being told: sorry, we have no cars left (in spite of our having a reservation). I remember landing in Vilnius, having a reservation for an automatic car, being given a stick shift car (luckily we know how to drive that). This time, I am confident we will be fine.

I should say that, as we didn’t want a luxury car, that he told us we had a choice between a Corona and a Jetta. It went like this:

Me: I don’t really care.

Him: Oh, there is a difference in price.

Me: What are the differences?

Him: One of them is $1 more expensive a day.

Me: Okay, I will take the more expensive one because I know you get what you pay for.

Him: I think you ought to take the Jetta. You know, it’s the one with German engineering.

Thank God, I have a Budget registration agent who wants to make sure we wind up with German engineering.

Next, I have to figure out how we are going to spend that week. I know we will see mountains, and nice farm land, and Grand Coulee Dam. I hope we will get to Glacier National Park, although I know that is the heart of tourist season there. Anyone with ideas, let me know.

That’s it for today. Short. Giving you a break.

We are rarely on Capitol Hill at sundown, but last night we were, and I took this photo as we walked from the Library of Congress to our car. We had been to a concert of Sephardic music by Lily Henley.

Hopefully, today will be quiet. It started with a presentation for my Thursday morning breakfast group on the Nuremberg Trials, always an engaging topic and one I will never fully understand. The day will end with a Haberman  presentation by Rabbi Donald Berlin titled “Judaism and Sports: Conflict, Change and Cultural Integration”. Sounds interesting (www.habermaninstitute.org). Register and watch for free at 7:30 EDT.

In the meantime, the air outside is very fresh today in Washington. It always is when Donald T. is out of town, and when he is almost 7000 miles away in Beijing, it seems especially fresh. I think the clarity of my photo of Capital last night is because he is so far away.

I haven’t heard much about the trip so far, except that Donald made it clear that Xi is an extraordinary leader and an extraordinary friend, and that Xi made it clear to Trump that he should keep his cotton picking hands out of Taiwan. I also heard that Trump said that Xi agreed not to send any more munitions to Iran, so one thing you can be sure of is that China is going to be sending more munitions to Iran. And what does Donald care about that, anyway, since we “have already won the war”?

Xi really didn’t tell Trump anything about his cotton picking hands, but some radio news commentator did tell Hakeem Jeffries to keep his cotton picking hands out of Virginia, and a Republican Congresswoman agreed with him, generating a lot of comment. She said that she did not think the language was appropriate and I guess I give her the benefit of the doubt. And I, for one, no longer equate “cotton picking” (the adjective) with “cotton picking” the noun. But of course there are those who don’t equate “jew” the verb (as in “jew down”) with “Jew” the ethnic/religious noun, and am not sure I give them the same benefit of the doubt. Is that inconsistent of me? Perhaps.

I guess what interested me, and worried me, most yesterday was the report that Senator Rand Paul’s son William, accosted New York Congressman Michael Lawler, at a bar and, apparently inebriated, accused Lawler’s “people”, which he meant as “the Jews” of potentially causing the defeat of Congressman Thomas Massie in Kentucky. Of course, Lawler is not Jewish, and Paul apologized immediately for calling him a Jew. That, of course, is not – in my mind – an appropriate apology, but there you go……

Paul didn’t stop with that and went on accusing the Jews of being more for Israel than for the U.S. From the article I saw on VINnews: “Lawler said Paul also expressed hatred for Jewish and LGBTQ people and did not care if they died.”

Yes, William Paul was drunk, and yes, he has now more fully apologized, and yes, he says he is now going to seek treatment for his use of alcohol, and that is all to the good, I guess, but the worry is that there are a lot of people who, with the help of a little alcohol, would agree with Paul’s statements about Jews, LGBTQ people and other groups. And with antisemitism being permitted to go a bit mainstream these days, with encouragement, perhaps subliminal, from Trump and Netanyahu, anything seems possible.

While Trump seems to countenance antisemitism from the right, Netanyahu is contributing to the increase of antisemitism on the left.

Of course, Netanyahu would either deny this, or say he doesn’t care, that “this too will pass”. He would say that those who are antisemitic because of Israel would be antisemitic no matter what Israel does, because they don’t think Israel should exist, and therefore they should be ignored, while Israel is doing what it has to in order to guarantee its future security. And he certainly would not try to separate anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli feelings because he wants them to be conflated, even though this conflation endangers Jews everywhere.

It creates a conundrum for American Jews for sure. As many Democratic politicians, and Democratic voters, have soured on Israel, does this threaten Democratic victories in some close elections? And, in fact, is this one of the goals of Netanyahu? He has made no secret of his admiration for Donald Trump. Is Netanyahu purposely endangering the position of American Jews by encouraging American antisemitism in order to convince Jewish American Democrats to stay home or vote Republican? I would not put it past him.

It is also true that it is more and more difficult for American Jews to support Israel “right or wrong”. With daily reports of outrages on the West Bank, and continued controversy about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the number and depth of Jewish critics of Israel will grow. I received the following photo of Gaza City, before and after, on Facebook this morning. Assuming its accuracy, it does raise more questions, right?

Talking to a friend this morning, I remarked at how remarkable it is that day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, decade by decade, and even century by century, so much seems to revolve around the Jews. He agreed, but he added something that I hadn’t thought about. The Trump regime, as we know, blames everything on Biden.

Putting aside the choice of Biden, what this tells you, my friend says, is that it is possible to cast the blame for everything in just one direction. Blaming everything on the Jews, in this thinking, is just another version of blaming everything on Biden. At first it seems stupid (which, of course, it is), but then before you know it, it becomes both mainstream and respectable.

Yesterday was one of those picture perfect days in Washington. Yes, we do get four or five of those each year. Edie and I decided to take a stroll, went to Georgetown, and wound up on R Street, near Dumbarton Oaks. We walked east on R Street, and before long wound up at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Oak Hill is a beautiful cemetery which winds down a steep hill into Rock Creek Park, and has been the resting place of Washingtonians since its creation in 1849. It is open to the public, and you could spend all day wandering its trails, but we were not so ambitious, and pretty much stuck to the loop around the James Renwick-designed chapel near the entrance.

But even this short loop enabled us to see much, starting (arbitrarily) with the tomb of Edward Stanton, President Lincoln’s Secretary of War (what? not Secretary of Defense?), who died at only 55, after he was nominated for the Supreme Court, but before he could be installed.

Then we saw the mausoleum built for Ben Bradlee, who served as managing editor of the Post during the Watergate investigation and was a close friend of John F. Kennedy. The mausoleum is quite controversial, I understand, because it was placed in a very central part of the cemetery, with opponents claiming it was wrong aesthetically and historically to place it there.

By the way, Bradlee’s bosses, Katharine and Philip Graham, are also in Oak Hill, and also have a central location, but they took a very different approach to their grave sites.

Of course, not all about the Grahams was so modest. Their house is just down R Street from Oak Hill.

Oak Hill is not without its sense of humor. The photos didn’t turn out but there is a stone for journalist Mark Shields that says “he loved his family, his friends, his country and ice cream”. And there is another stone for a married couple, which says: “We finally found a parking place in Georgetown”.

It is a non-denominational cemetery, and there are a number of Jewish burial sites, including that of our old friend Judy Falk, wife of my friend and ex-law partner David. Weirdly, as we were passing Judy, I received an email from David. Go figure.

And, although I am not sure who the Merricks were, their elaborate monument contains both a cross and a star of David. Again, go figure.

There also a few very modern designs, such as this one, honoring long-time DC architect Arthur Cotton Moore.

Finally, the R Street side of Oak Hill is bordered by a large wrought iron fence. I don’t know if the fence was part of the original 1849 design, but it is very old, and is now being restored to its original condition, piece by piece. It is an extraordinarily slow process, with the fence being dismantled section by section. As a section is dismantled, it is shipped to Baltimore where it is restored and then sent back and re-installed on site. Then another section is sent to go through the same process. Each section takes several months to restore.

The fence, pre-restoration, is black and rusty. Post restoration, it is the original green color (something discovered from looking at paint chips). Before the restoration process began, there was an attempt by the not-for-profit corporation to see what the public would prefer. They solicited opinions as to whether the fence should remain black after it was repaired, or go back to the original green. The result of the solicitation? 50% (exactly) for each. The board of directors then opted for the green.

Good choice.

We get the Washington Post and the New York Times delivered every day. Except for today. There are no newspapers outside.

When this happens, we call the two newspapers and they take our information and tell us that we will get their paper by 10:30. Except for today. Today they tell us (and when I say “they”, I am speaking of the automated “they”) that “delivery today is impossible. Goodbye!”

What are we to make of that? I assume there is a problem with the carrier (same carrier delivers both papers), and that no one in this part of DC is getting a delivery today. Or it could be a problem with the delivery of the newspapers to the carrier, or that when the carrier went to pick up the newspapers, none were there. We will never know the answer.

I will add this to the other questions, whose answers remain unknown to us. Like, what is the meaning of life? Or will the rain ruin the rhubarb, or is this just an old saying? Or who decided to name Finn, Huckleberry? And why hasn’t Huckleberry become a more popular name?

I saw a comic this morning talk about a question he had. His question was “where does the sun go at night?” You might think this is a silly question to be stuck on. After all, there is a scientific answer to this one. But he said he pondered the question all night. Until it dawned upon him.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? That is another question that may have no answer. And speaking of answers and sound, why were there helicopters whirring overhead last night at about midnight? That’s a tough one.

Here is another tough one. If the Supreme Court lets all of the states re-district their districts, so that Democrats don’t have a chance, do Democrats still have a chance?

And another. If Donald Trump goes to China this week, does he have to come back?

From what I have written so far, you might have already guessed that I got up about 5 a.m. today and could not fall back asleep. You may have also guessed that I have not yet had my morning coffee. And here is one that you don’t have to guess, because you already know it: I have not looked at the morning newspapers.

What else? Geraldine Gudefin, a young French born historian, is giving a series of four lectures on Zoom for the Haberman Institute (you remember I am president of Haberman) on how Jews gained citizenship or the rights of citizenship in various countries across the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. In her first talk, she concentrated on countries in western and central Europe, and in her second (last night) on Russia and the Ottoman Empire. They can be found in the archives on the Haberman website (www.habermaninstitute.org), along with a few hundred other presentations. I recommend them; you might want to look. Each (with q and a) runs about 90 minutes.

I say this because she ended her talk last night by showing a painting by Marc Chagall called “Onward”. We may not know where we are, and we may not know where we are going, but we go. Onward.

We drove to Baltimore yesterday to see the Washington National Opera’s production of West Side Story. First, a matter of introduction. We have not been regulars to WNO productions over the years. But when Donald Trump announced the name change for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and announced a potential two year closure for a total rebuild of the facility, the WNO, which had been housed in the Kennedy Center for about 50 years, was one of the first organizations to announce that they were leaving, even though they had yet to find a new venue. This made attending, and supporting, Washington Opera performances an act of political necessity, and we responded first by going to see its version of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, and then buying tickets to see West Side Story.

Treemonisha was performed at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, which seats about 1500, considerably less than the opera house at the performing arts center formerly known as Kennedy, which seats about 2400. But Baltimore’s historic/modern Lyric Theater seats, according to my smart phone, an audience of 2434, virtually the same number as the opera house. West Side Story is being performed at two venues, the Lyric in Baltimore and then the Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda. And perhaps this will be the WNO venue for the next several years, splitting their shows between these three venues.

We had never been in the Lyric, which first opened in 1894. While the theater itself has been basically kept the same, everything else has been modified several times, so from the outside the theater looks like it was built in, I think, the 1980s when it was last remodeled, but the theater itself has not changed.

West Side Story has not changed, either. At least it has not changed since it was first staged in 1957. And, as you probably know, it is the story of star-crossed lovers (a la Romeo and Juliet) who come not only from separate families, but from different ethnic groups, Tony and Maria. Tony is a member of The Jets, an “American” street gang fighting for a bit of turf in New York City’s west side. Maria’s brother is a leader of The Sharks, a “Puerto Rican” street gang, fighting for the same turf. They fall in love at a dance sponsored by a “let’s all be friends” organization, but within 24 hours, there is a “rumble”, and Tony, although trying at first to keep the peace, winds up in a fight and kills Maria’s brother, Bernardo. This leads to vengeance by the PR’s, and Tony is shot and killed towards the end of the show.

The story is a familiar one, as you can see, and perhaps is supposed to have a moral attached, that hate does not pay. On the other hand, it is a brutal musical, even if you know how it will end so that the suspense is gone, and, 60 years after it was written, it is in fact dated. This does not take away from Leonard Bernstein’s music or from the original choreography of Jerome Robbins, but truth be known, I think it does take away from Arthur Laurent’s book and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, filled with “I dig”s, and “daddy-o”s. And, yes, “rumble”s.

And the dating does not only come from the vocabulary, but from the concept of New York City turf-craving street gangs, and from one of those gangs being “Puerto Rican” and the other “American”. Politically correct, it is not.

But the music and the performances were great, especially Ryan McCartan as Tony, but really everyone. The dancers made no mistakes, nor did the 50+ musicians in the pit.

Orihinally, the quartet was going to call it East Side Story, and set the play on that side of Manhattan, not near Gracie Mansion, but on the Lower East Side. There were still going to be two rival street gangs, but neither would be “American” nor “Puerto Rican”. One gang was going to be Jewish, and other gang was going to be Catholic, and their “rumble” was to be exacerbated by competing holidays of Passover and Easter. It is hard for me to conceive of a more dangerous, politically incorrect, and hard to justify, concept. And (maybe this is why it seemed okay to the creative quartet at this time, each of whom was of course Jewish) I don’t think there were Jewish/Catholic street gangs in New York in the 1950s, battling each other. It was clearly a rough time in New York for Puerto Ricans, so maybe the change over brought something closer to reality for the New York City audiences. But maybe, it has never been politically correct, irrespective of the time or the location.

I wonder, in the original, which side was which. I would assume (if I had to guess) that the Jewish Tony would fall in love with the Catholic Maria. After all, from Broadway’s Abie’s Irish Rose to Broadway’s Ragtime, that has been the pattern. Yes, those male Jewish writers/composers never write about the gentile boy and the Jewish girl. Somehow, I guess, that feels uncomfortable.

One other thing. As I said, West Side Story is a brutal play. Turf wars, two murders, knife fights, a gun shot, and more. Movies have ratings based on what are deemed appropriate ages for viewing. Stage plays and musicals do not. Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie, who wrote a very nice piece which was published in the WNO program, said that she was 5 when the play opened its first preview (by the way, at the National Theater in Washington), and she was not allowed to attend. In fact, although she knew all the songs by heart, she was not allowed to attend the show for years after that. But there were a number (not a huge number, but a number) of young children in the audience. In fact, in front of us there was a husband and wife and their two kids, aged 4 and 6. I don’t know what the kids (very well behaved, by the way) understood from the play, but there certainly were many “this is just a play” explanations from the parents as the show went on.

Anything else I want to say about this? Yes…..do you know that you can take popcorn to your seats at the Lyric Theater?

This post is based on the following three items:

(1) I am in the middle of reading A Difficult Woman, Alice Kessler-Harris’ biography of Lillian Hellman. The following quote is from page 138: “As the political climate changed, she sometimes found herself at odds with a divided Jewish community, struggling to reconcile her commitment to larger values with her seeing herself as a Jew, often unable to see why they should be in disagreement.”

(2) In the early 1980s, when we belonged to Temple Sinai here in Washington, I remember being struck by something that then Rabbi Gene Lipman said in a sermon. I don’t remember his exact words, of course, but the gist was that he wanted his congregants to be sufficiently educated in Jewish thinking that they, when needing to make moral or ethical decisions, would be able to rely on Jewish thinking to help them. (I think this is what he said – and who can argue with me now?)

(3) Today, a good friend told me that he was recently engaged in a conversation with two other people that I know (all three with remain nameless in this post), where one of them said that they did not think that there was anything in the Torah that helped one navigate the problems of today, while the second (a rabbi) said that they disagreed with that completely, and that they were paid by a synagogue to teach people the connection.

Now, I am not a rabbi (obviously), and my knowledge of things Jewish does not begin to match the knowledge of even the least knowledgeable rabbi, but I have certainly spent a lot of time in my now long life reading about Jewish things, attending Jewish events, and thinking over what I have learned. And, after all of that, I must conclude that that, at least on the surface, my thinking about things like “right and wrong” have nothing to do with what I have learned while learning about Jews and Judaism. That doesn’t mean that I am anti-Jewish, God-forbid (ha, ha. “that I am anti-Jewish, God-forbid” — that is a funny line). But what is the connection.

There are very learned Jews who think one way, and there are very learned Jews who think the opposite. I am sure that it is the same with adherents of other religions – you know that there are devout Christians (like Pope Leo) who think one way, and equally devout Christians (like Donald Trump) who think differently. (That, by the way is another funny line.)

When Gene Lipman said, way back in 198?, that our ethical decision making should at least in some part be based on our understanding of Jewish thinking, my mind sort of rebelled. I knew that I had my own firm sense of right and wrong, and I wasn’t going to modify what I thought because of something in the Torah or some other Jewish writing. Nor did I think I should.

The quote referring to Lillian Hellman was largely dealing with the differences between 1930s anti-Fascist, Popular-Front thinking, when so many Jewish intellectuals joined the Communist party, thinking that the Communists were anti-national, certainly not antisemitic, and filled with empathy and a sense of social justice. Of course, it didn’t turn out this way, as the evils of the Stalinist USSR became apparent, and people, including Hellman, backed away from party membership or identification. But by the end of World War II, when the breadth of the Holocaust became clear and the pressure for a Jewish state on the land of Mandate Palestine became a possibility, there were changes in the thinking of many Jews. Suddenly, they were not globalists, but Jewish nationalists, and the concept of equality was put on the furthest back of back burners in the minds of people reeling from the tragedies of the war.

Hellman was still interested in social justice, helping the underdog, human equality, all virtues that seem to have been forgotten by a large number of Jews, and certainly by those Jews in Hollywood and New York City, with whom she was in contact. Hellman was certainly not a Jewish thinker. She had no Jewish education per se, and if she ever set foot in a synagogue, it escaped the sharp eyes of her biographers. But she thought of herself as Jewish and she thought that her ethics were the product in part of her background and self-identification. But was it?

It was Voltaire (brilliant man and brilliant antisemite) who said that “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him”. I agree with that – God is needed to comfort people and give them hope for a future, a future on earth and a future after one’s time on earth ends. But…..what or who is God?

I am not going to try to answer that last question for reasons that should be obvious. When asked if I believe in God (since I have no idea what the questioner means by “God”), I answer: That is well above my pay grade. And that is an honest answer, and makes the question itself totally irrelevant. Even if I have, in Voltaire fashion, invented a God to comfort me and give me hope for a future, the question is irrelevant.

It was Ogden Nash who said: How odd of God to Choose the Jews. Do I believe there was a God who chose the Jews? Not at all.

In my experience (and I  am sure in yours), very religious people can turn out to be immoral crooks, but still remain very religious. And fanatical atheists can be some of the most moral people you know. These atheists would not become more moral if they let Jewish thinking influence their ethics, and the immoral portion of the faith community would probably remain immoral even if they lost their belief in a deity.

All I am really saying is that each of us has his/her own sense of ethics, and we test that sense every day as we run into and try to solve real world problems. But you don’t need to know the Ten Commandments to know that you shouldn’t murder someone. And you don’t need the fear of an angry God to convince you that you shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s wife.

Learning about Judaism is important as a study of history, of human thought, of human religion, and as a way to understand your place in greater humanity. But beyond that, as a guide to ethical living or ethical thinking, it is difficult to determine if it causes harm or provides benefits.

This can best be judged by looking at Israel today. There is so much questionable about Israel’s actions today that many Jews who are so supportive of Israel would be just the opposite if they themselves were not Jewish. I don’t have to go into details to demonstrate this. But Israel in 2026 provides the most cogent example of the relationships between religious learning and ethical decision making. Does falling back on religious teaching (whether it is thinking about the centrality of this particular piece of real estate, or the centrality of Jews as constituting a “people” enslaved for centuries in Egypt and just now finding their freedom) help decision making on the topic of Israel or does it distort it?

Lillian Hellman wondered why her Judaism and her larger values should be in conflict. Maybe she should not have had to wonder. She could retain both, on her own terms, without relying on what others (knowledgeable or venerable as they might be) to tell her how to think, or what to think.

I wrote an entire post on the hantavirus cases that have been identified on the Dutch cruise ship, and then I erased it because it scared even me. Let’s just say that this virus may turn out to be more contagious than we are now being told it is, that over 20 passengers exposed to the disease (and a few who had, and/or died from the disease) have already left the ship and that most of them have not been accounted for. And that the remaining 140 on the ship, which is docking in the Canary Islands, are going to be flown on special charters, for the most part, to their home countries (including the U.S.), rather than being quarantined for the up to 8 week incubation period in a controlled location in one place. The Americans are going to be quarantined for a period of time somewhere in Nebraska, but we don’t know where all of the others will be held, or if they will be, or if the quarantines will also affect airline crews and others who will interface without facing possible infection. What else we know is that this is a very serious virus, with a high fatality potential, and with no known vaccine or cure.

The potential is clear, even though we are now being told that the danger of pandemic is low. But we just got through one pandemic – the COVID-19 pandemic. The official death toll from COVID-19 is a bit over 7 million, with the World Health Organization saying that in fact it could be as many as 20 million. In the United States, the death toll approached 1.25 million. We saw what that did to individuals, to families, to health care workers, and of course to the world economy and to the day to day habits and activities of almost everyone. COVID-19 changed our world.

We have pretty much left a dangerous COVID-19 pandemic behind, but we have gone straight into a different kind of pandemic, which I will call TRUMP-25. With the inauguration of Donald Trump for a second, four year term, we have found ourselves in another situation, where the death toll may be much smaller, but the impact on world-wide civilization is probably at least as significant as that which arose from COVID-19. I would hate to see us become entrapped by HANTA-26, while we are still struggling from TRUMP-25, which has at least another 2.5 years to run.

But our future may be pandemic after pandemic, of one or another kind. Transportation from place to place is to easy, and too many people are taking advantage of the possibility of being on the Equator today and in Antarctica tomorrow. And the rise of instant communication, with uncontrollable participants, and now the rise of Artificial Intelligence, give us the potential for Trump-25-like pandemics, one after another.

And, yes, the canaries in the coal mines. The Canary Islands may become the symbol of HANTA-26, just as coal mines are one of the symbols of TRUMP-25.

In the meantime, what happens? Society gets divided into four main segments. First, there are the victims, both the direct victims and those close to them, family and friends. Then, there are the empathizers, those who devote their times to caring for the victims, making their lives as comfortable as possible under bad circumstances. Third, there are the me-firsters, those who are out only for themselves, out to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the world. We know them only too well these days. And fourth, there are the escapists. The escapists encompass a number of different types, but their common characteristic is their need to separate themselves from the greater world. They may be orthodox religious mystics or followers, or they may be hedonists, just out for a good time.

It’s a volatile mix of people, and none of it (either because of motive or circumstance) leads to advance human civilization.

Ten years ago, the world and human society had so much promise. Big differences of the past had receded, prosperity was spreading, as was education and human understanding. Science was showing extraordinary promise. Sure, there were problems, but it looked like they could be largely overcome over a period of time, with human progress the result.

But we were fooling ourselves. We have not really changed since the stone age, since the time we wiped out the neanderthals (if that is what we did). What goes up must come down. And we are on a downward track as we fight the recurrent pandemics we face.

I watched a 30 minute video on YouTube yesterday, made with artificial intelligence (i.e., no real actors), showing what life was like in ancient Greek and Roman Alexandria. It started with Alexander the Great ordering a city to be built on the site of present day Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, with the chief architect drawing out a monumental grid pattern, and with the construction of three areas of the city, the Greek area, the Jewish area, and the Egyptian area. It eventually became a diverse, but segregated city of about 600,000 and thrived for a few hundred years under the Ptolemys, eventually threatening to take away from Rome the title of most important city of the world. It was not only a port and commercial center and a political center, but it became a center of learning, with a library designed to hold all of the world’s knowledge which in effect became the world’s first research institution, and the tallest light house in the world, known as one of the “seven wonders” of the ancient world.

When Cleopatra became Queen and allied herself with Caesar, all seemed well, but Caesar’s death ended that, and although Marc Anthony tried to keep the Roman-Alexandrian alliance alive, there were too many Romans who thought Alexandria was looting Rome’s prominence and determined to stop it, the result being a naval attack and virtual civil war.

Soon, Alexandria was a dependency of Rome, although its commercial activity, particularly in bringing grain to the Italian mainland from North Africa continued. But in the 4th century, tragedy struck, in the person of an underwater earthquake of enormous strength, followed by an equally strong tsunami, which destroyed the portion of the city nearest the sea (as well as all the port facilities), which included the library and the royal palaces. Alexandria was never the same.

But the city existed and prospered for over 300 years – that is 50 years longer than there has been a United States. And undoubtedly those living there assumed that its prosperity would go on and on and possibly last forever. But this was not the case. Politics changed things. The social construct (one of supposed unity) failed. And the earthquake and tsunami sealed its fate. It was never the same.

The film blamed the destruction of Alexandria as a result of the Roman occupation  and the sector of Alexandria hardest hit was its Jewish population, estimated at about 100,000, 9th largely wiped out in Roman inspired pogroms and riots. This was pretty much the same time that the relationship between Romans and Jews in Judea had deteriorated, the Second Temple destroyed, and Jerusalem made Jew-free as a result of Roman massacres there.

I had never seen these two events connected in this way, but – if true – it certainly means that well before Nazi Germany, there was a massive holocaust. Estimates of the total number of Jews killed by the Romans in Judea and North Africa? 1,500,000 to 1,750,000. Sheesh.

What I don’t know about this time is the relationship between the Jews in Judea and the Jews in Alexandria. I understand the troubles that the Romans were having with the Jews in Judea, who were opposed to many aspects of Roman hegemony, but how did this carry over to Alexandria? I doubt that it was Jew-hatred or antisemitism per se, although it could have been. But after all, Rome itself apparently had 50,000 to 75,000 Jews living there, and it was estimated that at one time (this time?), the Roman Empire was about 10% Jewish and had between 4,000,000 and 7,000,000 Jews living there. It seems (based on what little I know) that it was only the Jews of Judea (not even the Jews who lived in today’s north of Israel, such as the Galilee) who were attacked by the Romans.

So, perhaps, the Jews of Alexandria were identified as being close to the Jews in Judea, in Jerusalem. Or perhaps, as a result of the troubles in Jerusalem, the Jews of Alexandria, being 100,000 strong, rioted in protest to what was happening to their co-religionists “back home”. Or perhaps, in Alexandria things were just becoming unstable. The Greek population, for hundreds of years the elite, were losing their elite status to the Roman conquerors, and suddenly saw themselves in competition with the Jews for commercial and other rights as citizens of Alexandria. Or a combination of all of the above.

Whatever happened, it obviously was not good. Rather, it was one more example of a “civilization”, built up over centuries to a high degree of sophistication, being destroyed. We have examples of that not only 2000 years ago, but during the 20th century itself. And more is threatened during the 21st. Donald Trump threatens Iranian/Persian civilization. Muslim groups threaten Israel/Jewish civilization. Certainly Israel threatens Palestinian civilization.

Today, the world population is about 8,300,000,000. What would it be if there had not been major wars? I don’t know that, but I have seen estimates that the world Jewish population today of something over 15 million would be closer to something over 30 million had the Holocaust not occurred. Perhaps a world without wars would have, long ago, seen a population which by far had outstripped the ability of the earth to sustain it.

So, maybe we need wars? Maybe we need to wipe out entire cities, entire civilizations, and being anti-war is a way to make us feel good, but actually would lead to much more tragedy than wiping out a million or more people now and then? Maybe I should go back to bed?

Today is May 7, 2026. Eighty one years ago today, Germany surrendered, ending World War II in Europe. We all know what happened then. Germany was divided into four parts. One was occupied by the USSR, and it eventually became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a part of the Soviet block of Communist Nations, and the other three were each occupied by three other Allied nations, France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. From 1945 to 1949, these three parts of western Germany were separately occupied, but in 1949, they combined to form the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). In October 1990, East Germany and West Germany united to form one nation, also called the Federal Republic (Bundesrepublik), which obviously still exists today.

In addition to that, after the end of the war, Austria was reconstituted as a separate country (also occupied by the Allies at first), the Sudetenland was returned to Czechoslovakia, and Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. On the other hand, the parts of Germany that had been lopped off by Poland remained with Poland, and the parts of Nazi Germany that extended furthest east, the Konigsberg region, became the Kaliningrad Oblast of the Soviet Union. Finally, Berlin, which had been the capital of Nazi Germany, and which was also occupied by the four Allied powers, each in its own quadrant, did not become united until Germany as a whole became reunited in 1990.

I recount all of this because, even though it involved quite a bit of political movement, it was relatively speaking (only relatively) pretty easy. Yes, the Communist east and the capitalist west stayed apart for another 45 years, but within each of these two regions, things were quite peaceable. What had been a vicious Nazi government became peaceful capitalist and communist governments, with old Nazis and old liberals figuring out a way to get along, and more importantly, to leave their warring and, on the one side, abominable pasts behind them. And, after 1990, and the fall of Communism in general, everyone pretty much got along in a primarily capitalist and certainly democratic society.

Although, in 1945, Japan did not surrender for several more months (and after the dropping of two atomic bombs), and although Japan was occupied in 1952, the story there is similar. Within a relatively short period, Japan too joined the world of democratic powers, giving up all semblances of its recent militaristic past.

In other words: there was war……and then there was peace.

Today, I would expect the same thing will happen once the current war, now four years old, between Ukraine and Russia ends. There will be peace, the countries will become friends, and they will most likely jointly prosper. I would bet that, for the next generations of Ukrainians and Russians, today’s war might be unimaginable.

But can you reach the same conclusion in the Middle East? Can you come up with a scenario where Israel and its neighbors will be at peace, will become allies, will develop a way not only to live together, but to respect each other and prosper together? When you add in the rivalry in the Islamic world between Sunnis and Shiites (i.e., between the powers on the Arabian peninsula and Iran), can you imagine that any of these countries will become post-occupation Germany or Japan? It seems to me that we are a long way from that.

But that is what we need to envision. It does little good to imagine an isolated Israel surrounded by neighbors who deny the rightfulness of its existence, even if there can be peace treaties, or border agreements. This is just a way to put off conflict until the next time it erupts. We need to go well beyond that, and of course, we are nowhere on this process, as even the Abrahamic Accords seem unable to move peace forward and in fact may increase rivalry between Shiite and Sunni, which at time seems to equal the differences between Muslim and Jew.

When peace was declared in Europe and Japan, suddenly militarism and Naziism were left behind. Everyone was ready to move ahead. Is that even a vague possibility in the Middle East? In Europe and Japan, there were clear victors and losers, and the victors took political control for 4 years in one case, 7 in the other. None of this will, in the short range, be the case in the Middle East. How will true peace ever come about?

We need the visionaries. They need to be politicians, and religious leaders, and academics, and writers and artists, and they all need to be working together to envision a post-war Middle East, along the lines of a post-war Europe and a post-war Japan. And there needs to be a lot of them.

And when I say there needs to be a lot of them, I mean a lot more than there are today. How many are there today? I count zero. Am I wrong?

Digression: I gave a talk this morning to my Thursday morning group about my relationship to Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (1482-1565), the Chief rabbi of Padua (and Venice). I had written a blog post about him on Jan 14. My friend Milt Shinberg asked if I was going to post about him this morning. I said that I wasn’t. He asked what I was going to write about. I told him I did not know. I told the truth. But when I saw it was V-E Day……

Another strange dream. I was in jail. I had been sentenced to two years, but I was told that I would probably get out in six or seven months. My crime was not a crime of violence; it was some sort of white collar crime, I suppose. But I didn’t really know what it was. On the other hand, I didn’t think I was being unfairly treated.

It was a weird jail. The inmates all wore tan two piece outfits. Cotton drawstring trousers and a loose fitting matching top, not tucked in. Shoes? I didn’t look.

I also didn’t see the sleeping quarters. Did we have individual rooms or cells, or did we have cell mates or roommates? I am not sure.

It didn’t seem like a problem, being in this jail. We could spend the day in the large day-room, talking or doing whatever we wanted, it appeared. I was only told that we had to obey the rules in the manual we had been given to govern our conduct. Unfortunately, no one had given me a manual, and I had no idea what we were supposed to do, and what we were not allowed to do. Except for the few things that I had gathered just from looking and listening.

One thing that we could do, it appears, was leave the jail. We could go outside and wander around. As long as we stayed within the District of Columbia. If we left DC, then we were in trouble. And we had to be back in jail at night. If we were found outside of Washington, we would be severely punished. I have no idea what that punishment would be.

With all this in mind, I decided to leave jail and go get a meal. It seemed that would be easy. There are so many restaurants in Washington. Of course, I was not sure where the jail was in the city, and I was surprised at how barren everything looked outside. Old buildings. Vacant lots. Rocky streets. I saw some people moving in one direction and thought I should follow them. I got to the river (I assumed it was the Potomac) and saw that it was lined with what looked to be factories from the 19th century, mainly built of wood, not brick. I wasn’t sure what went on in these factories (they seemed active), but I certainly had not seen this part of DC before.

I turned in the opposite direction and wandered through sad neighborhoods where there did not appear any place to eat. Finally, I turned a corner and saw a sign over a door that said: SCHWEINHUT RESTAURANT. A German restaurant, I figured, and I went in – it was not what I expected to see.

When you entered, you were faced with another sign, giving you two choices. Go to the right, and you get to the “restaurant”. Go to the left, and you get to the “pit”. A middle aged woman was nearby and she told me that, if I was alone, the pit would be a better place. I followed her advice.

The pit turned out to be an unusual restaurant. There were no tables, just chairs, and they were scattered around. They were mostly filled with customers, and I think all the customers were male. One of them recognized me. He called me out by name and said how surprised he was to see me there, as we hadn’t seen each other for decades. Not since we were jail mates in St. Louis.

I had forgotten all about my time in jail in St. Louis. I still remembered it only vaguely, but had no doubt that his recollections were true. But it led me to think that I hadn’t changed a bit. All these years, and I was still doing things that wound me up in prison.

Getting food in the pit was unique. You sat on a chair, and received a plate, silverware, and something like a lap tray that you put …… on your lap. Then, just from time to time, food was passed around. A plate of chicken. A plate of bread slices. Those are the only two I remember specifically, but there were more. You just took whatever you wanted and passed the serving plate on. Somehow, someone knew what you took and could tally up the bill as you were leaving. I thought the food was okay, but I also thought I wasn’t going to come here again. From now on, I will take my meals in jail.

That was the dream. Until I had that dream, I was planning to write this morning my reaction to Ruth Marcus’ book, Supreme Ambition, the story of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his background and his confirmation hearings. All that raunchy stuff. You remember.

It’s a good book, and I concluded that Kavanaugh had probably been a pretty slimy kid growing up. Both when he was at Georgetown Day School (about which I always have had my suspicions) and Yale (where, when I was there for law school, I actually did not encounter any “Kavanaughs”). But whether the specific allegations were true or accurate (and should have put him in that jail with me), I can’t really say. But should youthful indiscretions, no matter how serious or tasteless, sbe held against someone twenty years later who clearly does not act in that manner? That is another story.

But what I hadn’t realized about Kavanaugh, the wild and alcohol loving kid, is his apparent steel ambition to wind up on the Supreme Court or better, and how his job progression both stoked that ambition, and allowed him to get there. He was not just some young hot-shot attorney who, by dint of fate, wound up a judge and then a Supreme Court Justice. He was a strongly ambitious fellow, whose ambition took him just where he wanted to be. This, of course, is the characteristic of a very dangerous guy.

I liked the book more than I thought I would when I picked it up. But I do need to point out one sentence that Ruth Marcus, in the year 2019, wishes she left out. It is in the acknowledgement section of the book, which comes at the very end (and which she must now hope no one really reads through). She says, in talking about the Washington Post, where she worked, “Thanks to the Graham family, especially Don Graham, for creating such a special institution and having the wisdom to entrust it to Jeff Bezos.”

Okay, so she was buttering up her boss. But, really……

that I am, for today’s blog post, reposting Norm Ornstein’s Contrarian column from yesterday. Truer words have never been spoken.

SCOTUS’s Brazen Power Grab Guts Voting Rights

The renegade Supreme Court exhibits an over-exercise of power, open contempt for the laws Congress passes, and a heavy partisan tilt. It doesn’t have to be this way

Norman Ornstein

May 04, 2026

This week has underscored a brutal reality of our teetering constitutional system: a renegade, partisan Supreme Court ignoring the power and role of Congress, prevaricating about history and the plain language of the Constitution, rewarding Republican presidents while constraining Democrats, its members violating fundamental ethics that apply to every other federal judge. The Roberts Court, led by arguably the worst Chief Justice in history, has engaged in a brazen power grab. Many reforms have been floated if and when the opportunity occurs to rein in the renegades, from term limits to court enlargement. They may not be enough.

The day before the Supreme Court’s Callais dishonest and outrageous decision eviscerating what remained of the Voting Rights Act, the six Republican justices celebrated by attending Trump’s state dinner for King Charles — in what is almost certainly the first state dinner ever with a strictly partisan guest list. In September 2021, standing next to her Senate benefactor Mitch McConnell, who had destroyed Senate norms by jamming through her confirmation eight days before the 2020 election, Amy Coney Barrett said, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” proving the opposite.

Elena Kagan’s dissent, read from the bench, was powerful and gripping. Election law scholar Rick Hasen’s description of the dishonesty of the decision is equally powerful: what is implied in the decision written by Sam Alito, “that Congress cannot do anything to protect minority voting rights short of banning intentional discrimination despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, despite the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on race discrimination in voting, and despite the fact that both amendments explicitly give Congress the power to enforce the measures by ‘appropriate legislation.’”

The Callais decision, of course, is part of a pattern of the Roberts Court blowing up voting rights; destroying a century of campaign finance laws in direct violation of a promise made by John Roberts to respect stare decisis and decide cases on the narrowest basis possible; making independent regulatory agencies direct partisan arms of the president; cosseting the rich and powerful corporations, and unleashing Trump with the ahistorical and bizarre immunity decision that would have left the Framers bewildered that the third branch of government would undermine the first branch of government to create a dictator from the second branch of government.

I have supported term limits for decades, and still do, but actually implementing it is challenging—do you include existing justices? If not, how do you phase in term limits so that ultimately each president has two vacancies to fill—without it taking many years to implement successfully? What about enlarging the Court? The reality is that the packing was done by Mitch McConnell blocking Merrick Garland from even a hearing during the Obama administration (approximately four years before the Barrett debacle). If fundamental norms had been followed, there would be five justices nominated by Democratic presidents.

Supreme Court guru Steve Vladeck has made good points about the dangers of court enlargement — among them, that it could create a likely enlargement war every time there is a change in power — but it is still a powerful idea. When the Court was set at nine, there were nine circuits; now there are thirteen. The need to rebalance the Court as soon as possible makes the risk of future retaliation worth taking.

But there is another, bolder move to consider. When I taught American Government, I would take students to the National Archives to see the actual original Constitution, encased in glass. Looking at it directly, they could see the physical articles. Article I, the Congress, was twice as long as Article II, the Executive, which in turn was twice as long as Article III, the Judiciary. Three equal branches—but it was clear which branch was Number One, in every respect. Congress has the power to declare war and the power of the purse, the two most powerful elements of government. The president can veto bills, but Congress can override. Congress can impeach and remove a president; the president has no power to remove members of Congress.

Now to Article III. The Framers did not expect that the judiciary would usurp the powers of the first branch. They created a Supreme Court and gave Congress power to establish lower courts as well. They gave the Supreme Court limited original jurisdiction: laws affecting Ambassadors and ministers, cases of Admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, between states, between a state and a citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, citizens of the same state claiming lands of different states, and between a state or its citizens and foreign states or their citizens. But here is the key clause: “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all other Cases before I 8 mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations, as the Congress shall make.”

It is true that the power accumulated by the Court goes back to Justice Marshall and Marbury v. Madison, and the other branches, over time, accepted the role of the Court to interpret the Constitution. But that acceptance came with an expectation that that role would not be abused, certainly not the way it has with the Roberts Court. Congress has the power, and should use it. It is time to consider taking back some of the jurisdiction Congress has ceded to the Supreme Court, including its appellate authority in areas like voting, elections, districting, campaign finance, and congressional power, along with such issues as the right to marry and to control one’s own body.

Create a special appeals court, perhaps consisting of the chief judges of the thirteen appeals courts, to act as the final area of appeal in such cases. Even a serious threat to do so would be a strong signal to these renegade Supremes to draw back from their over-exercise of power, their open contempt for the laws Congress passes, and their heavy partisan tilt. No option should be off the table.

Yesterday was a day of good art and good food.

The art was at the Phillips Gallery. We went to see the current exhibit of Joan Miro’s work, which closes in early July. I was reminded of the time that we went to the Fundacio Joan Miro museum on Montjuic in Barcelona.

Digression: I know it is early for a digression, but you might have guessed that Montjuic, that tall hill that overlooks the city and contains the Miro museum is (if you translated it into English) Mount Jew. You may also notice (especially if you have been to Barcelona) that no one seems to care. But did you ever wonder why it is called that? Am I the only one? My guess is that if you guessed why, your guess would be as good as mine, which was pretty good. Yes, there was a Jewish cemetery on Montjuic back in the pre-expulsion days. It was actually destroyed in the 1300s. “Hardly a man is now alive……”. End of digression.

Back to the museum in Barcelona. It was designed by architect Josep Lluis Sert. And, it isn’t a bad building.

Second digression: You wonder why I added that “it isn’t a bad building” to the last paragraph, no doubt. It’s because Sert (who served for a time as dean of the Harvard School of Design) designed Harvard’s married student dorms, called I think Peabody Terrace, or Peabody Something, which was finished just in time (1965) for newly married Jeff and Judy Pass (if I recall correctly) to move in when Jeff started Harvard Law. Judy, correct me if I am wrong. The strange thing about this three tower development (each 22 stories) is that the elevators did not stop at each floor; they stopped between each floor. So, for example, if you lived on the 15th floor, you shared an elevator lobby with either the 14th or the 16th and had to walk up or down several steps to get to your apartment. This is weird (especially, so I assume, if you broke your leg or needed a wheelchair), but it was viewed as more efficient (who cares?) because it only had to stop 50% as often. End of second digression.

My memory is that the museum in Barcelona displays Miro’s work on two floors and the roof, where there is a large display of various pieces of sculpture. In the lower level of the building, there are many pieces not by Miro, but by others who had given their works to Miro for his private collection. My reaction was that Miro’s work was repetitive and corny, but the work of the artists in the basement was worth the trip to the museum.

Interestingly, the exhibit at the Phillips also shows the work with Miro along with the works of others. The other artists featured in this exhibit are artists who were somehow connected to, or influenced by Miro, and all were American, as this is the focus of the exhibit: Miro and the United States.

Yes, I still think that Miro’s work is repetitive and corny. But I had a revelation yesterday. I now think that Miro knew his work was repetitive and corny. And that is how he wanted it.

Why else would he call this painting “Woman with Blond Armpit Combing her Hair by the Light of the Stars”?

Or this one ” On the 13th, the Ladder Touched the Firmament”?

See what I mean? Both of these are part of his “Constellation” series, at the exhibit in full. They are, when seen together, with their seemingly random titles, fun. And corny.

Or take this one, if you don’t believe me.

What you call it? How about “The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers”?

Apparently, Miro was very influential to a large number of well known American artists, whose works are also displayed in this exhibit. As to another artist whom I have a hard time appreciating, Willem de Kooning, two of his works struck me, especially because of his use of light.

De Kooning titled this last painting “Zurich”. No humor there.

There is a lot to see in this exhibition. Don’t go today. The Phillips is closed on Monday.

The food yesterday? Lunch at the Bread Furst Cafe at the Phillips. Highly recommend the Italian vegetable sandwich on a French baguette. A full baguette, so big enough for two, served with excellent home made-ish chips.

Dinner, down the street from us at Thai Pad (not to be confused with pad Thai). Salmon with Panang sauce (okay, not Thai), and basil fried rice with vegetables (very Thai). Highly recommended.

We missed the Kentucky Derby yesterday, because we were on our way home from the baseball game. But we soon learned that the winner was Golden Tempo (not a favored horse), and that he was trained by a woman. I think it was the first time that a female trainer had trained the winning Derby horse. My reaction? Shades of Peaky Blinders.

You may not have watched all 48 episodes of Peak⁸y Blinders, the Netflix show about Gypsy, Italian and Jewish rival gangs in London and Birmingham in the 1920s, but if you did you will probably recall that Tom Shelby’s horse, Grace’s Secret, wins the Epsom Derby after being trained by May Carleton, a widow lady whose house seems at least as large as Buckingham Palace.

Digression: In Peaky Blinders, “derby” is pronounced “darby” and “clerk” is pronounced “clark”. Apparently, before about 1500, the Brits pronounced these words just as we do (let’s call it proto-American English?), but it changed. Apparently, “er” before a consonant is always “ar” in Britain. There is, to my knowledge, only one “er” word pronounced “ar” in the U.S. Can you guess it? (The answer will be given at the end of this post.)

I never bet on the Kentucky Derby (or on anything else, ever), but I always pick a horse. My method, by my gut, is similar to the method Donald Trump uses when he picks a country to attack or to take over. And my record of success is similar to his, as well. This year, I picked Pavlovian. Why Pavolovian? There were two (maybe three) reasons. First, I thought that he would probably respond well to his training. Second, his name was easy for me to remember. And third (the “maybe”), I thought that, through the race, he would be Russian.

Well, let me tell you the truth (why hide it?). Out of a field of 18, Pavlovian came in a strong 18th. The odds for Pavlovian were about 30-1 (but before yesterday, they were 50-1, so I thought things were looking up), while Golden Tempo’s odds were 23-1. Not that different.

As I said, we were at the baseball game yesterday, and the Brewers beat the Nats 4-1. For reasons I will explain, we did not get there until the middle of the second inning, and because the Brewers scored 3 runs in the first, the game we saw was a 1-1 tie. I tried to explain that to the official scorekeeper when I suggested that extra innings would be appropriate, but he told me he had no time to debate with me on the subject, as he had to rush to his TV to see how Pavlovian was doing.

So why did we miss the first inning? The answer is: we really don’t know. We did everything right. We got a good street parking space near the Van Ness Metro, in spite of the enormous crowds visiting various embassy exhibits being put together at UDC. We got on the very, very crowded Metro and got off, as we were supposed to, at Gallery Place. We went downstairs for the Green Line train to the Navy Yard/Ballpark station. A Green Line train pulled into the station; it was moderately crowded, and the crowd waiting to join the train was pretty large. The train stopped. We stood near a door. The doors of the train didn’t open. The train sat there. We waited patiently. Eventually, the train, without ever opening its doors, pulled out and went on.

About 5 more minutes passed, and we saw another Green Line train (this one marked “Anacostia”, rather than “Branch Avenue”, meaning it was a special ballpark train) came into the station; it was empty as if they had just brought it into service to get us to the ballpark. This train went through the station without even slowing down.

Another 5 minutes passed, and finally another Green Line train entered the station. This one did open the doors and the crowd (now larger) entered and stood in the aisles. Almost 10 minutes passed, and this time the doors, now open, did not close. Outside the train, police and members of the National Guard seemed to be engaged in something.

Eventually, the doors closed and the train went on. I think we lost about 20 minutes or more in the trip to Nats Park, and that cost us the first inning, and failure to pick up the annual Star Wars (yesterday was not May the fourth, but still…) bobble head, which our 5 year old grandson is undoubtedly expecting us to bring to him today.

Today, Sunday, looks like a lazy day. We were supposed to go to friends’ for lunch/brunch, but that was postponed, so here we are.

I may just continue reading Ruth Marcus’ Supreme Ambition, the story of Brett Kavanaugh’s unfortunate rise to the Supreme Court. Interesting and readable.

The Supreme Court – the true enemy of the people?

One more thing. The answer is “sergeant”.

“Dear Hannah Slovut-Einertson (author of today’s New York Times crossword puzzle):

You got me! I readily admit that I don’t know everything. Included among the things I don’t know are: The author of “Alice in Zombieland”, the father in “Full House”, Women’s Basketball player Beard’s first name, the first word in a ______ Marzano tomato, the antagonists in “Mulan”, the first name of actress Donovan in “Sabrina the Teen Age Witch”, the 1994 Red Chili Peppers album, or the NBA champs from 2000 to 2002. I don’t even know the 5 letter difference between Asian and African elephants, or an instrument known as a bell-piano. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s a bellpiano or a bell-piano. I know it’s a Saturday morning, but still……”

I looked you up, Hannah S-E. I see that you live in Minnesota and that you created your first crossword puzzle in 2017 for the first annual Giraffe Appreciation Potluck. Maybe that explains 29 across: “Giraffes lack them (they have ossicones)”. Maybe giraffes feature in all of your puzzles.

Okay, ossicones are “horn-like, skin-covered bone protuberances on the heads of giraffes and okapis, formed from ossified cartilage”. “Alice in Zombieland” was written by Gena Showalter, and is one of a series of young adult novels that imagines Alice in a wonderland peopled by zombies. Gee, Hannah, I am sorry I missed that one. Must put it on my list. After all, it did win the 2014 South Carolina Children’s, Junior and Young Adult Book Award. And after I read “Zombieland”, I will go on to the 69 other books that Showalter has written and published. My summer is now accounted for.

It looks like Basketball Beard is Alana Beard, who – I am embarrassed to say – played for seven or eight years for the Washington Mystics. The Mystics have been around now for 27 years and, like most Washington teams, have won their championship only once, in 2019. Alana Beard was gone by that time; she was with the Los Angeles Sparks. I congratulate her on her induction into the Hall of Fame last year. And here is something I find very interesting: she also played for 6 teams outside of America, including (just to pick one), the Wisla Can-Pack, in Krakow. While the Mystics were created in 1999, here is a statistic you might want to remember: the Can-Pack has been playing women’s basketball since 1906 (!!!!!) and has won the Polish title 25 times. Beard is one of 9 Americans who have, at one time or another, play for the team.

Oh, the name Can-Pack? The team (and a related school for basketball and hockey) is the (ta-da!) the name of a company headquartered in Krakow that (ta-da!) makes aluminum cans for beverages. This knowledge may come in handy.

The actress on “Sabrina, the Teen Age Witch” is Elisa Donovan. The reference to this show (apparently a sitcom that ran on ABC and WB for seven years, ending in 2003) proves that Hannah S-E and I watch very different TV shows. This show was apparently focused on a 16 year old girl who discovered she was a witch. Whether at the end of the series, she was still a 16 year old witch or a 23 year old witch, I don’t know, but if my math is correct, today Sabrina would be a 46 year old witch (and probably serving as a Republican Congresswoman from South Carolina). According to my phone, Elisa Donovan was a later addition to the show. She is not listed as one of the four main actors, so to know that Donovan’s first name is Elisa requires that you have paid particular attention to the series. Donovan played the role of Morgan Cavanaugh in the series (and no, Morgan Cavanaugh is not a law firm). You may remember that Morgan was “very shallow, superficial and over-assertive”. Sounds very appealing.

The Red Chili Peppers album from 1994 was “Out in L.A.”. Remember that one? Only 32 years ago; how could you forget? Want to check it out? The critics, so says my phone, gave it very negative reviews. That should be an incentive. Hannah, maybe your tastes are your own, not those of the masses. Guess what? That may be good. No criticism here.

Digression: Help me on this one. The AI write up of Out in L.A. contains the following mysterious sentence: “It was largely seen as a label-driven release capitalizing on the band’s later success.” Hmmmm. _

With a brief reference to “San” Marzano tomatoes (maybe I should have known that one), I will stop here. With my new knowledge, I will try to fill in the blanks.

And I will end with a welcome to our house guests, Simon and Rosie Aronin. Last night, Simon asked if I was going to be writing about Trump or dreams or restaurants. He did not get this one. But he was my inspiration.

May 1 (the universal workers’ holiday), May Day! May Day! May Day! (the universal distress call) and Trump Derangement Syndrome (current universal pandemic). Put ’em together. And what have you got? Let’s see.

Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s not a disease. It’s not an affliction. It’s not a disability. It is a sign of intelligence.

How do you know if you, or someone else, suffers from TDS? One sign is disagreeing with virtually everything Trump does. This does not mean disagreeing with everything he does only because it is Trump who is doing it. People with TDS would disagree with these policies and activities no matter who was the president at the time. But on the other hand, because Trump is the despicable person he clearly is, someone with true TDS would loathe Trump as a man and president even if his policies were more acceptable.

But, while it is incorrect to call TDS a disease, it is not incorrect to say we “suffer” from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Suffering is an important part of having Trump Derangement Syndrome. Without suffering, this condition would not exist.

As the days of the Trump administration add up, it appears more and more that TDS is a chronic condition. The problem with chronic conditions is that you get used to them, they begin to be normalized, you learn to live with them and you stop fighting. Hopefully, this will not be the case this November when the mid-term elections roll around. It does appear that, perhaps for the first time,  TDS is a contagious condition, that it can spread from one person to another, or perhaps from one group of people to another. And it is clear that the only cure for the condition is the removal (some would say the 86 without meaning anything violent) of Trump from public power and public view.

Therefore, fighting TDS does not mean learning to love (or like, or tolerate) Donald Trump and does not mean forgetting that you have it. Fighting it (ironically as it may seem) means working hard to promote the spread of this devastating and contagious condition until it affects the majority of people throughout all 50 states and reaches a critical mass, and then extirpating its cause.

How would I do it? I’d have bumper stickers, and buttons, and hats and t-shirts, all with variations of “I have TDS and I’m proud of it” on it. I’d sponsor ads (if I had the resources) on TV and social media promoting the spread of TDS. I would be relentless.

It would appear that the current spread of TDS should be sufficient to give the House and (hopefully) the Senate to the Democrats in November. But there are dangerous movements on the horizon. The Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding the Louisiana congressional district drawn to gives Blacks representation in Congress has declared the creation of that district null and void, unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. The Voting Rights Act, necessary to prevent exactly what we are seeing now, has been eviscerated, and the certain and quick redrawing of districts not only in Louisiana but undoubtedly in other red states as well, needs to be countered. How do you counter it? Spread TDS – convert the unconverted, and convince those with latent TDS that they have to vote in November.

Today is May 1, May Day. May Day is a universal holiday (official in some 90 countries, unofficial in others such as the USA) celebrating and validating the working class over the financial elite. In the US, under president Trump, the financial elite is more elite than ever, they operate without even a patina of morals or ethics, and the rich not only get richer, but get unbelievably richer, while so many just struggle on. But where are the May Day observances, the parades, the writings, the speeches? The voices seem to be silent.

These two important events: the spread of TDS and the message of May Day should be combined. TDS should be spread through peals of “MAY DAY! MAY DAY! MAY DAY!”, always three times. It is a universal sign of distress. And the entire universe (the entire human universe) is today under great stress.

Digression: May Day and May 1 are not genetically related. May 1 as a workers’ holiday actually stems from the throwing of a bomb into Haymarket Square in Chicago in the middle of a strike demonstration in 1886, the strikers trying to secure an 8 hour working day. May Day (three times) as a distress signal was developed in the 1920s by radio operators as a distress call easier to say than SOS, and it derives× from the French “m’aider”, meaning simply “help me”. Who knew?

No one today in this country today is touting TDS, observing May Day, or shouting May Day three times. We have missed the boat. Our oppositional leadership has failed us. We need to regather our forces.

I did not have a good night last night, and I woke up this morning feeling a bit off. When I say that I woke up, I am using that term a bit imprecisely, because one side of me would tell you that I was up all night. That, for whatever reason (none apparent), I just could not fall asleep. The other part of me, however, would disagree with that first side of me. It would tell me that I must have slept just fine. Otherwise, how could I have had a dream that (at least to that side of me) seemed to go on and on all night?

I know that most dreams disappear as soon as you wake, but I have never heard of remembering a dream that never occurred, so I have to give my second side some credence. On the other hand, if I slept all night, why do I feel that way I do? (A rhetorical question, please.)

What I remember is being in my car, stopped at a red light, somewhere near Dupont Circle. I looked out my window and saw a friend of mine (a youngish man, about 40 or so, which I think was my age) talking to a woman. I was near enough to hear what they were saying, although they did not see me. I was appalled by what I heard.

This friend (a real person – I could tell you who he was if I wanted to) was married to another friend of mine (I could tell you who she was, too, although in real life, they are not only not married, but I am sure they don’t know each other), and they seemed a happy couple, living with their young (3 or 4 year old) son in suburban Virginia. I did not know the woman my friend was speaking to that day, but my first assumption was that she was a lawyer, because they were talking about his plans to get a divorce.

Not only did the subject matter surprise me, but the content of their conversation was horrific. They were talking about how he was going to lie through the divorce process, how he was going to hide assets, what kind of promises he could make and then break without fear of enforcement, how she was going to have to deal with their son by herself. All sorts of things. And I could hear the conversation clearly.

The light turned green and I drove on. Strangely, I could still hear their conversation. It was coming through my car radio (which I had not turned on) loud and clear. I kept listening.

What should I do? I had a moral dilemma. Both of these people were good friends. Do I ignore what I heard? Or, more importantly, do I call up his wife and tell her what I heard? Warn her of what was coming her way so she could be prepared? But what if she was thinking the same way he was? What if neither of them were going to be honest during this process? What if the divorce had been in the works for some time? What would I be getting myself into? What would be the right choice? What would be the better choice?

I drove on and on. Soon, I did not know where I was. Somewhere in Montgomery County, I assumed. A major residential street with a green median strip down the middle. I realized I had better turn around – I was on a drive to nowhere, my mind muddled about my friends’ divorce. There was no place to turn left. I kept driving.

Eventually, I found a street to turn on. I am not sure why I didn’t make a u-turn and go back, but I didn’t. I took the left, and then another left assuming I was going parallel to the main road, but soon I realized I had no idea where I was or how to get back. (There was no GPS in this dream.) I kept going, turning now and then. I remember one street sign. The intersecting streets both started with an “H”. One was a real word – one just a bunch of letters that could not be pronounced. I was lost.

It was a neighborhood of middle class, and somewhat upper middle class, houses. Nothing else. I began to drive slowly up a hill, when I realize that I was having problems with my car. The accelerator did not accelerate the car. It went slower and slower, until it came to a stop. It would go no further.

A digression. In the dream, my reaction to this was “Boy, I have not had this problem with the car for a long time”. Of course, I have never had that problem with my car, have I? It was like, in the dream, I remembered having this problem at one time on a regular basis. In other words, in the dream, was I imagining other dreams that I never had? Or have I had many dreams where my car stopped working, none of which I remember, except that last night, I remembered…..in my dream?

Okay. I must have gotten out of the car, because I remember walking down a street with modest houses. I needed help, but I don’t remember how I went about getting it. I remember looking in windows of houses as I went by (I remember one woman, looking like she was in the 1950s, setting the dinner table).

I don’t remember how I got there, but suddenly I was in one of the houses. I must have let myself in looking for help, but I don’t know, but I hadn’t seen anyone in the house, I was very afraid of being discovered breaking in, and all I wanted to do was to get out. I started looking for a door. I went from room to room to room. This modest house seemed to have an unlimited supply of rooms, none of which had a door to the outside. Finally, I was in a room with a bright red door, leading out. I was very careful opening and closing it, because I didn’t want anyone to hear me. I got out.

I was relieved, walked down the driveway to the sidewalk, but realized I still needed help. A young woman was on the sidewalk; I assumed she lived nearby. She could see, I guess, that I was in some distress and asked me what was wrong. I told her I was lost and told her about my car and my experience presumably having broken into a house. She must have taken pity on me; she offered to help.

She asked where my car was. We looked for it, but I realized I had no idea where it was. And besides that, it couldn’t be driven. It was then I realized that I better call home and tell Edie I was delayed; I didn’t think I would give her all the details yet. I wanted to figure out what was going on first.

But then I realized I did not have my phone. I told my new friend (I never learned her name) that I didn’t have either my pocketbook or my phone. Of course, I don’t carry a pocketbook in real life, but I guess I did in this dream. I told her I never went anywhere without it. There seemed to be two choices. First, I left them in the car. Possible, but that would be very unusual. Second, I left them in the house that I had just escaped from. This seemed more likely, and the question then was how to retrieve them.

We were talking about that, when we turned a corner and found ourselves on a commercial street, a charming street, narrow and pedestrian, filled with shops and restaurants. She led me to the outdoor patio of a restaurant, and we sat at a table with another man, whom I assume she knew.

I grew impatient. I needed my purse and my phone. I wanted my car. I wanted to get home.

The woman who was helping me said that she agreed, but “first, we should have dinner.” I was not interested in dinner (we did not eat in the dream) and interrupted her by telling them the story of my divorcing friends, and asking what I should do. I do not think I got a response. I then asked if someone would come with me to the house I had broken into, because I was afraid to do it myself. They both said “yes”.

Before we could do anything, someone ran into the restaurant saying that my car had been found and was around the corner. I went and saw a car decorated as if for a parade of some sort. The decorations were extensive and brown. I ripped them off, and discovered that it was not my car. Nothing like my car.

The next (and last) thing I remember was seeing the woman who was speaking with my friend about his divorce. She was sitting on a chair on the sidewalk with a microphone in her hand, and I realized she was not a lawyer after all. She was a prophetess. And she, this time, was talking about ……. me!

The last thing I remember is me looking directly at her and mouthing (but not saying out loud): “You got me! You got me!”.

That was it.

(1) Even the good news started with a major frustration, and ended with a minor frustration. A day or two before we drove to St. Louis earlier this week, I received a mail notice from the District that I had been issued a ticket for not stopping at a stop sign. The fine was, because this is the District perhaps, $100, and if I didn’t pay it within a period of time, it would become a fine of $200. It was a photo ticket, and there were no point on my license to be lost, so I decided to pay it. Long experience told me that challenging a ticket, whatever the merits, was usually a waste of time and energy. So I sent in a check the day before we left town.

Yesterday, I received another piece of mail from the DMV. Knowing the news from the DMV was never good, I opened the envelope with a combination of trepidation and resignation. But lo and behold, the DMV was telling me that they had reviewed my citation (even without my having appealed it) and decided that the ticket was issued in error, and that it would be wiped from my record, and the $100 would be returned to me under separate cover. Wow!, I said (to myself), and then I read the fine print where it told me that I could expect the funds to be returned in about …… ten weeks.

(2) We have both a plastic trash bin (green) and a plastic recycling bin (blue) issued by the District and we have taxpayer paid pick up on each once a week. Both of our bins are quite old, and have various tears and rips, and need to be replaced. Even though it is the District that causes the damage to the bins when they throw them on the back of the trucks, it is the homeowner who must pay for the replacement. If you are over 60, the replacement cost (depending a bit on the size) is about $25 for each. I ordered both, but found on the website that only the recycle website said that I had to pay $25 for the bin before they would deliver it, and that I had to prove that I was 60 or older. I put a check, and a picture of my driver license in the mail. I received an email from the DMV that my new blue bin would be delivered on May 26, about 5 weeks from now. I also received a separate note saying that the green bin would be delivered the same day. But I hadn’t yet paid for that one – and the web page had not told me I had to in advance. So I am confused as to whether they will actually deliver the green one. Perhaps they will.

(3) Doctor’s appointment this morning. Set for 11:30. Arrived at 11:15. Sat in the waiting room until 12:50! Staff said several times: “She knows you are here. Nothing we can do.” At 12:50, doctor apologized nicely, and blamed it on an elderly Chinese patient with dementia who spoke only Cantonese, no English, and who had a translator who was trying to help by telephone. Is this a forgivable excuse?

(4) CVS. I should have been suspicious when I went to pick up a prescription and the two people in front of me each had problems with the semi-self serve computer system, slowing them up and resulting in my waiting for much longer than I had ever waited before. I then entered my prescription info and then gave the clerk two packages of probiotics. The probiotics were marked, as they always are, buy one, get the second one free.

The pharmacy is at the back of the store; the other clerks are in the front. The clerk at the pharmacy told me that, to get the 2 for 1 price, I had to buy it in front, rather than in the rear. It surprised me as I had bought the 2 for 1 probiotics at the pharmacy time after time, but I said okay.

I then went to the first. I gave the two boxes to the clerk and he rang them up with a separate payment for both. I explained they were 2 for 1, and he didn’t seem to believe me. So he made me walk back with him across the store so he could read the tag on the shelf. Then we walked back to the front, and asked me my phone number, so he could access the account. I gave him the phone number, he told me there was no such account, and that without an account I could not get the 2 for 1 arrangement. He was very testy, but there was a young woman who was also a clerk, and she was very, very nice (kudos to her parents) and suggested that I call CVS customer service. I told her that was a good idea and thanked her.

After I got home, I actually did call CVS customer service and was perturbed even further when the recorded answer said, on April 28, that service was slower than usual “because of the holiday season”. I guess it’s a pre-May Day rush.

In fact, a live person came on the phone almost immediately and was very, very helpful (kudos to his parents). He told me that the phone number on the account was changed to my cell phone number two months ago. Okay, I said, I will use that number from now on. But the only thing I could think of is that I changed, at the pharmacy, the phone number they should use to inform me about waiting prescriptions. I guess that changed the phone number everywhere in the wonderful world of CVS. Problem solved.

(5) Haberman. We were all set for a program towards the end of May at a large, exclusive residential condominium community filled with potential donors and interesting program participants, only to learn that our speaker had developed a conflict and would be out of the country on the day of the program. This in spite of several emails going back and forth confirming the date, the topic and the compensation. Nothing we can do about that. And it’s too late to arrange and publicize a substitute program. I am not happy about this one.

(6) And then there’s the weather.

(7) And the president

By the way, King Charles gave a very good speech. Did we make a mistake in 1776?

John Wilkes Booth. Charles Hinckley. Lee Harvey Oswald. Even Squeaky Fromme. They sound like assassins. But Cole Allen? Nah. Maybe a relief pitcher for the Dodgers.

Now, I guess it is the assumption of the White House that Allen was sitting in his house in Torrance, California, minding his own business, winding down his day, planning his next teaching assignment, when he decided, on a lark perhaps, to turn on Jimmy Kimmel and heard Kimmel joke about young Melania looking forward to her post-Trump years, after her almost 80 year old husband kicks the bucket. The joke (which none of us consider either tasteful or funny) tickled young Allen, who immediately decided to pack up his weapons, jump on the next Amtrak, check into the Washington Hilton, and attempt to make Melania’s dreams come true. “It’s the eighth inning,” Allen said to himself, “and time for me to show them what I have, to show them that my fastball can get their screwball.” And away he went.

And a beautiful ride it was. From the Pacific Ocean through the desert, the Rockies, the heartland, all the way to the shores of Lake Michigan and then beyond. He and his weaponry check into the Washington Hilton the night before the White House Correspondents Dinner, and he is treated like any not-quite-a-star major league reliever, and takes a room for two nights (that’s a guess) at $356 a night (according to Booking.com), leaving them credit card information to be processed after he departs. Whether he has $712 in his bank account to reimburse Visa or Discovery (used everywhere) or whomever was probably irrelevant to him, because he did not expect to leave the hotel alive. He thought he would more likely leave a martyr to the cause.

His plan to assassinate the leader of an independent (and major, truth be told) country was not well thought out, it appears. Or at least it did not turn out to have been well thought out. If his major target, Donald Trump, had been the assassin, rather than the target, he would have gone about it much differently. He would not have been so personally involved in the actual act itself. He would have stayed watching Jimmy Kimmel (and those other late night show hosts, all at the same time) in his personal quarters, and – say – asked his Pete (that is, Pete Hegseth, not Pete Buttigieg) to “take it from here”. And his Pete would have obliged, just as he did when Donald Trump did decide to assassinate the leader of another independent (and major, truth be told) country, the Ayatollah K.

A digression. Have you noticed that the parents who name their child Pete typically have last names that are hard to pronounce and spell? The Allens named their son Cole, not Pete. Had they named him Pete, history might have been different. No major league team would have called up a relief pitcher named Pete Allen. Not a chance. I asked AI about Major League Petes, and they told me about Pete Incavaglia, and Pete Vuckovich, among others. Who were the others? I am not going to list them because they destroy my theory.

Okay. Back to the main theme. I wouldn’t say that just because Trump himself acted as an assassin (indirectly) that he should be fair game for other assassins. Not at all. I, in fact, have been against assassination my entire life, and see no reason to change my opinion now. But just saying, there is some pot-calling-the-kettle-blackism here.

I immediately knew that the initial reaction of the Trump White House would be: if we had this event in the White House ballroom (to be constructed), this never would have happened. Maybe not. Maybe so. Maybe Cole Allen just would have needed a different approach. He might have been the guy hired to inflate the balloons, you know. So, I think this argument is specious (as if once the ballroom is completed, the president will never leave the White House grounds), and I must say that I am appalled by the letter that the Executive Department still known (to some) as the Department of Justice sent to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, telling the Trust that it is time for them to drop their law suit to stop the despoliation (why isn’t it “despoilation”?) of the White House grounds, telling the Trust that its continuation of the lawsuit puts the First Family at extreme risk. As if this would even be a reason to stop a lawsuit, if true. Think of all the litigation brought by or supported by the DOJ that puts all of us at extreme risk. For shame.

Now, as I said, I do not want to see Donald Trump become another target of assassination. But there are things I would like to see. I would like to see Donald Trump become so fearful of another attempted assassination that he decides that enough is enough and that he resigns the presidency, and moves back to Palm Beach, where he can golf and enjoy Jimmy Kimmel in (relative) peace.

Is that possible? As they say, truth is stranger than satire.

The big news of the day, according to several of the news sources I look at is that the fellow who attempted to break into the correspondents’ dinner and shoot the president was someone who didn’t like Donald Trump. It took the media some time to come to that conclusion, but it seemed pretty likely to me pretty quickly.

Like Donald Trump, I guess I reach conclusions by my gut. So what does my gut tell me about whether it would be less likely that a man such as Cole Allen could have breached security at the Washington Hilton more easily than at a ballroom on the grounds of the White House. Obviously, this is what President Trump would like you to conclude.

I am actually not certain. There certainly have been instances when White House security has been breached, and breaching a White House ball room would certainly create a challenge to potential breachers. A challenge that some perhaps would welcome. It would be unlikely, for certain, that a Cole Allen could get in position to rush a magnetometer, but there would be other opportunities. For example, a dinner such as Saturday night’s, which have several thousands of guests coming in, require all sorts of food and decorator and hospitality staffs, all kinds of equipment and supplies moving in, and so forth. The White House grounds would be open to many more people, and for a longer period of time, and that could lead to all sorts of problems.

Yes, it is easy to say that events like this week’s could not happen on the White House grounds, but don’t be so sure. And, if you are really so concerned about the president’s safety, you would keep the president more under wraps. Political rallies would be a no-no (certainly what happened at the Washington Hilton could happen at any political rally), as would the off-hand trips that presidents take to various parts of the country (and the world), virtually all of which are taken for political reasons. Chaos could erupt anywhere and the surprising thing is how seldom this in fact happens.

And, of course, Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he has to show his fortitude to the world by telling the White House Correspondents’ Association that they have to reschedule their dinner within 30 days. If this is done, it will be a miracle, but so far the WHCA has not told the president that it is impossible. But the only way this dinner could be scheduled at the Hilton would, I am sure, be to bump other activities there. There are very few nights (certainly very few weekend nights) when that hotel is not filled with activities, often involving the same ballroom where the dinner was held last Saturday. You have to book hotels in Washington for major events like this months, sometimes years (yes, years) in advance. I bet the Correspondents have the 2027 dinner already booked, maybe even the 2028.

And then there are the logistics for such a dinner. All of the businesses and organizations involved (to say nothing about WHCA members and their guests) who also have their activities scheduled over the next month. Any reprise of this dinner would involve many fewer people, I would guess. People have other things to do.

And then there is the cost. I don’t know how this dinner is paid for, but can you imagine the cost of putting on a dinner for 2,000 at the Washington Hilton. Especially, this dinner? Would you expect the WHCA (how much money do journalists have these days?) to foot this bill again? Do you expect the Hilton will not only make arrangements for the dinner to occur over the next month and, because all of this was “their fault” (even if you could argue that it was, which would be hard), they should pay for the Second Coming of our president to their midst? Is there insurance that covers cancellation or disruption based on a shooter? I doubt it, but obviously I don’t know.

And then there are the security issues. How would security be handled at a repeat event when the discussions seem to be revolving around security deficiencies at the event that was so abruptly disrupted? It will take time to devise a new security plan, and since the security breach apparently involved the failure of the hotel and the failure of the original security plan to check to make sure that those people staying at the hotel were not bringing in weapons.

So, all of this makes it very unlikely that there will be a second White House Correspondents’ dinner within the next four weeks.

And besides this, what about the general relationship between the president and the correspondence that cover him in the White House. It is obviously not the best, he has distorted the allowable press corps to enable right wing news organizations to take the place of many mainstream or left leaning organizations, and (as recently as the day after the aborted dinner – i.e., yesterday morning) Trump continues to berate the press and individual journalists in vicious and completely unacceptable terms. Yes, just yesterday, after agreeing to be interviewed on Sixty Minutes, Trump treated Nora O’Donnell as a drill sergeant treats a recruit only because she asked him something about the shooter’s purported “manifesto” contained in communications to family members.

In the meantime, there is a war going on the Trump has started but can not stop, there is corruption at the highest levels of our government, the Department of Homeland Security has still not been funded for the current fiscal year, our weaponry has been depleted and our budget deficit is growing precipitously, and we could go on and on.

I am going to stop here. Enough on this subject. You should now that when I sat down this morning, this was not going to be my topic at all (other than a brief mention), but that I was going to talk about the remarkable session yesterday we, at the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, had with Dr. Daniel Matt on aspects of Jewish mysticism and the Zohar. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s Rye Bread (isn’t that the old slogan?), and you don’t have to be a Jewish mystic to enjoy listening to Daniel Matt talk about the Zohar.

Some other time.

Please be advised that this was written before the President’s 10:30 p.m. press conference.

You want a White House Ballroom? The chances have increased tonight, now that there was a shooting at the Washington Hilton where the President was to speak at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Wait and see. Trump couldn’t have organized this better.

The Washington Hilton is the standard venue for very big events like this, whether they involve the government or not. A few thousand people can be served dinner in the Hilton ballroom, and you can’t get that amount of room elsewhere.

But the Washington Hilton can be very problematic. It depends on your age whether you think that 40 years is a long time or not, but 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and almost killed as he left the ballroom. And now this.

There are other problems with the Hilton, and perhaps this would be the case anywhere. When there is a large event at the Hilton involving a president, security sets up a large perimeter around the hotel, blocking streets and cutting off traffic. When this happens at night, this is bad enough. But when it happens during the day, such as it does every year with the National Prayer Breakfast, when the traffic on Connecticut Avenue, a very major commuting street, is brought to a complete halt.

Argument after argument for a White House Ballroom. Clearly, no matter how hard the Hilton tries to protect its guests (and there is an extraordinary amount of attention to security), including when the guest list includes the president of the United States, there can be breaches. Maybe the same would be true if the event were held at the White House; but maybe not.

We don’t yet know what the attacker had in mind. Was he after the president, or was he going to fire randomly? But it does show that, even if the shooter’s final goal was not met, a shooter can cause a lot of damage and create a lot of havoc.

And, because any event like this tends to encourage others to follow suit, you have to worry about other possible attacks. And that would include attacks on synagogues, for example. Today, there were probably 500 or more at Adas Israel, all coming through one door, and everyone having to go through magnetometer. But how sensitive is that magnetometer? It is certainly not set at the level you have at airports or certain government buildings. And if an individual or group decided to storm the entrance, how much resistance could the guards put up? The entrance opens right into the large foyer leading to the various building venues, and people are always wandering back and forth. Clearly, there would be casualties, and evenings and events like tonight make you realize what unfortunately is possible.

Tomorrow (Sunday), we are spending most of the day at another DC area synagogue, B’nai Israel in Rockville at a Haberman Institute Day of Learning featuring scholar Daniel Matt teaching about the Zohar. When you think about how much time we, our family members, and others we know spend in Jewish institutions, it does make you wonder what might happen.

On the other hand (sorry, but this is where my mind is now), tragedy can strike anywhere. We just completed at 2000+ mile road trip with an 83 year old driver. How safe is that? And, just this week, there was a tragedy in St. Louis, when prominent St. Louis journalist and booster, Ray Hartmann was killed when he was simply driving on Highway 64 at the Highway 270 exit, a location about one half mile from where we were staying, and an intersection which we passed while in town last week. How was Hartmann killed? He did nothing wrong, nor did anyone else. He was killed when two tires on a semi-trailer truck exploded and flew at his car. Who would have thunk that possible?

POSTSCRIPT: the shooter was apparently a 31 year old Caltech graduate with no criminal record or known history of instability known to those who knew him as brilliant. You never can tell.

Last night, I wrote my post for this morning and, as is often the case, when I woke up and thought about it, I decided it wasn’t quite right. Not that it didn’t say anything, but it really didn’t say anything the way I wanted to say it. So I am starting over.

I often hear the question asked in the Jewish circles I tend to travel in, usually rhetorically, “are you a Zionist?”. Sometimes it is asked during a speech, or a sermon, and the answer, given by the speaker, is always the same: “of course, I support Israel”. For a long time, I thought that, if that question was asked directly to me, my answer would be: “it depends how you define Zionist”. And, I guess that it still the correct answer, and the word “Zionist” can have many definitions, none of which are ever really spelled out.

As I have said in this blog several times, I think the term “Zionist” should be retired, and relegated to history. One reason is that there really are several possible definitions of the term, and when one claims to be a Zionist, you don’t really know what that means (other than “I support Israel”, whatever that means). And for many, mostly those who do not “support Israel”, the word “Zionist” has become pejorative. “You are a Zionist? Away with you.” Who needs it?

I had to spend a fair amount of time in my car yesterday, driving from home to Wheaton to Union Station to home, and I listened to podcast interviews with two prominent, Israeli-born, Jewish, anti-Zionist academics, Professor Omer Bartov of Brown University, and Professor Emeritus Yakov Rabkin of the University of Montreal. I don’t want to put words into their mouths, but I would say that, while neither of them want to see Israel wiped off the earth or its Jewish citizens harmed, their anti-Zionism goes beyond being against the Netanyahu government’s policies, and goes to the entire concept that led to the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948.

They separate the religious concept of a “return to Zion” (as proclaimed daily in Jewish liturgy) from the concept of political Zionism, as developed in the late 19th century in Europe. They remark that the earliest European Zionists were for the most part not religious at all, often socialist, and that their reconciliation of their own belief systems, and the concept of the Jews having a right to particular real estate given to them by a God that they didn’t really believe in, was always very problematic. They remark that the most religious of Jews have often never supported the concept of political Zionism, believing that the return to the Promised Land would have to await the coming of the Messiah.

They talk about the reaction of most Jews 130 years or so ago to the then new Zionist movement. It was antagonistic and oppositional, often publicly so. In fact, it wasn’t until the end of the World War II and the understanding of the breadth of the Holocaust that the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine became more widely accepted. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Jews were pouring out of the Russian empire (with the approval of the tsars, of course), less than 1% chose Palestine as a destination.

They also talk about who were the allies of the Zionists when the majority of Jews wanted nothing to do with barren Palestine. They were often the antisemites, those who wanted to give the Jews a place to go so that they would voluntarily leave the places where they were living. Lord Balfour, I heard one of them say, pressed for what became known as the Balfour declaration because he wanted to curtail Jewish immigration into England, and that the only cabinet member in Britain who opposed the Balfour Declaration was Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the cabinet, who was afraid of the effect it would have on the Jews of England. They cite Theodor Herzl’s statement that the antisemites are our best allies.

The upshot of all of this is that Zionism and Judaism, or Zionism and the Jewish people, are far from necessary partners. They also recognize, of course, that Zionism as a movement has been radically successful. It went from a fringe movement of Central European intellectuals to a mass movement which ended with the formation of the State of Israel, and the movement to Israel of Jews not only from Europe (mainly survivors of the Holocaust), but from countries in the greater Middle East and North Africa, where there had never been a Zionist movement at all.

But the concept of a state for the Jewish people was to create a state like all others. It was not to make the Jewish people special, but to make the Jewish people a people like all others. And once the State was declared and populated, the Zionist movement had accomplished its political goals, and Israel would have been better off if at that time, it had lost its particular Zionist identity.

But the Jews who came to Israel, these two academics say, were conditioned from their previous homelands to be treated specially (negatively special, of course, for the most part) and to be suspicious of everyone around them, and to resort to violence when necessary to protect themselves. This ethos, which one of them said emanated from the Jews leaving Russia who formed the base of early Israeli political leadership, was carried over to Israel and influenced Israel’s views of neighboring countries. Of course, there was more than a base in reality for the fear of their neighbors, who after all didn’t want the Jews there in the first place. But, for these academics, Israel, after its victory in 1948, could have taken a very different approach to its neighbors than it did, and this could have resulted in something much different from the situation we find ourselves in today.

I am not arguing in support of the overall positions of either Orlov or Rabkin, but I find their arguments very interesting and thought provoking.

And it coincides with my belief that it is time to retire the word “Zionism”.

Throughout history, religion and political control have gone hand in hand. It wasn’t until the end of the 18th century, and the French and American revolutions, that the concept of separating church and state became a reality, spurred by anti-monarchial movements led primarily by Freemasons. This was progress, and became something that we take for granted.

This church- state separation did not take place in most Muslim countries, and – in spite of the lofty ideals in Israel’s Declaration of Independence – in this sense Israel has become more like its Muslim neighbors than its European founders first imagined it would. We have two peoples claiming the same land, as we have had since the Balfour Declaration was issued. The conflict will continue until new leadership arises on both sides willing to drop religious claims to the land. Where are those 18th century Freemasons now that we really need them?