Art is 80

There is so much to think about on this, the fifth anniversary of the January 6 riots, the day after President Maduro pleaded not guilty in federal court, and a day after Robert Kennedy, Jr. decided that American kids don’t have to be that healthy, after all. We could talk about any or all of those things, or the other things floating around as we start our daily activities. But, for some reason, and maybe because we need distraction for a few minutes, I am going to talk about my Uncle Al, Isadore Albert Hessel.

Uncle Al (I don’t think I ever just called him Al) was born in 1893, and died in 1983. He was my father’s oldest brother, twelve years older. He was married to my Aunt Nell (Elinor) for 60 years or so. Through most of that time, they lived part time in New York City and the rest of the time in St. Louis. They had no children.

Al was the shortest of the three Hessel brothers, and I don’t think I ever knew him when he wasn’t bald on top, with gray hair on the sides of his head. He had a myopic glance (and frankly, I don’t remember if he wore glasses or not), and reminded me, every time I saw him, of the cartoon character, Mr. Magoo. Picture Mr. Magoo, and you are picturing Al.

Aside: There are always questions that you wished that you had asked people who are no longer alive, and many I wish I had asked Uncle Al. One of those is: Do you know how much you look like Mr. Magoo, and how has that influenced your life? (Now, you may think that the obvious answers would be “yes” and “not at all”, but don’t be so sure about that last one.)

Uncle Al had a sense of humor, although I don’t remember him as a joke teller. I do remember one night at my parents’ house, when he was doubled over with laughter and said “You will never be old as long as you have a sense of humor.” At the time (I was young), I wondered if that was a great philosophical insight. Of course, now I know it just isn’t correct.

I remember something he said that I thought was funny, but he didn’t. When his mother, my grandmother, was in her mid-90s, she lived in the old Delmar Gardens Nursing Home in University City. One evening, 75 year old Al and 25 year old me turned up there to visit at the same time. It was dinner time, my grandmother was in the dining room, and we decided to wait in the corridor until she finished. Al looked at the residents eating, shook his head, and said to me, “I sure hope I don’t have to live here when I get old.” To me, Uncle Al had been old as long as I knew him. The Delmar Gardens residents were old, too, but he would have fit right in. And, for a year or so before he died, that is exactly where he did live, spending his silent days sitting in a chair next to his even older brother-in-law Joe.

One of the most memorable things about Uncle Al is that for the last 10 or so years of his life, he didn’t talk. Obviously, he was suffering from some sort of dementia, but you would never know it looking at him, because he looked fit as a fiddle. Not once in his life did he ever look otherwise.

One night, when he was in his mid-80s, he was obviously not feeling well and Aunt Nell was concerned. She called my parents and they all took him to the emergency room. The intake nurse tried to understand what was bothering him and kept asking him questions, to which of course, since he had stopped talking, he gave no answers. She kept trying, and finally did get a response. The question was, “Mr. Hessel, how old are you?”. The answer was, “I am 40”.

That was apparently one of only two times Uncle Al spoke during those final years. The other time came on the day of my father’s funeral, in 1979. After the funeral, family members came to our house and hung around most of that day. Whether Al knew what was going on, we don’t know. Disaster was avoided when someone saw Al dig his hands into a bowl of decorative marbles that for some reason my mother kept on a living room table, and stick a few of them into his mouth. Other than that, all was smooth.

As the day wore down, Aunt Nell said to her husband, “Al, it’s time to go home. We can’t stay here all night”, or something to that effect. Al paid no attention and Nell repeated herself, again getting no reaction and looking a bit frustrated. Finally, I intervened, and said something like, ” Uncle Al, Aunt Nell says it’s time to go home. Are you going with her, or should we just let her go alone?” Al, looking, as I said, fit as a fiddle, stood up straight, and with a strong booming voice spoke for the first time in several years and for the last time in his life, “LET HER GO!!!”

Uncle Al, not surprisingly, was a salesman. He was a distributor, again not surprisingly, of ladies’ undergarments, and even had his own line of underpants, called Fanny Pants. His St. Louis office was on the first floor of the Merchandise Mart on Washington Street, its windows displaying “I. A. Hessel & Co.” In big, gold letters. I have no idea where his New York office was. He did have his 15 minutes of fame in, I think, 1943, when the Post-Dispatch did a feature article on him. The premise of the article was how World War II was affecting life on the home front. The reporter went to Union Station to interview, I guess, traveling salesmen, and did “Pantyman Hessel” give him an earful about the difficulties of life without elastic!

One last thing. As the oldest of my father’s siblings, I always thought Al was born in Mobile, Alabama, my grandparents’ first home in America. Just after he died, I was with Aunt Nell as she talked to Rabbi Grollman about what he could put in a eulogy. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, but I heard her say, “He was born in Kansas City.”, which I knew was wrong. I asked her why she didn’t say that he was born in Alabama. Her response was harsh, “Shhh, I don’t want anyone to know he was a southerner.”

The joke, though, I guess was on both of us, as Al was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, probably in or near my great-grandmother’s house outside of Lvov (then Lemberg) after my grandfather had come to the U.S., but before my grandmother followed him. Is it possible that Nell did not know this, or was there sometthing else she wanted no one to know?

Thanks for reading to the end.

Thanks to friend Avi Sofer, I read an article this morning on the I-24 News website (I-24 is an Israeli media outlet) that quoted the Acting President of Venezuela, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, as saying yesterday that the American invasion of Venezuela and capture of President Maduro was carried out by the American military, to be sure, but was orchestrated by “the Zionists” and was the result of a “Zionist plot”.

Unfortunately, comments like this are frequently made by Venezuelan leadership, and have been since Hugo Chavez took control of the country in 1998. Now, I know virtually nothing about Venezuelan politics or history, but I do know that Chavez took control by winning an election, not by staging a revolution. Chavez led Venezuela until he died in 2013 (from cancer at 58) and Maduro, then vice-president, took over.

There has been a Jewish presence in present day Venezuela since the 17th century, but the community grew in numbers in the 19th and especially the 20th centuries, reaching about 50,000 when Chavez took power. There were some wealthy elements in the community, and it was identified by the Chavez regime as part of the country’s economic elite. The entire economic upper class became the “enemy of the people”, as businesses were taken over and nationalized, leading to the emigration of much of the country’s wealthier citizens, with most Venezuelan Jews moving over time to Israel or the United States. Today, only about 5,000 Jews remain in Venezuela.

In 2009, Chavez’ Venezuela broke off relations with Israel. Chavez at that time allied himself with Israel’s Arab neighbors, accusing Israel of perpetrating a second Holocaust in the Middle East.

From the beginning, the Chavez regime was proudly anti-American, and Chavez appears to have wanted to create a pan-Latin American anti-United States alliance. Chavez portrayed Israel as an enemy of such an alliance, accusing it of being not only a strong ally of the United Stares, but of performing America’s dirty work through the use of Mossad officers sent to Venezuela. Whether there ever was a Mossad presence in Venezuela and, if there was, what they were doing, I don’t know, but Chavez seemed to think that one of their goals was to assassinate him.

Any chance of a change of Venezuela’s anti-Israel policies under Maduro was lost when Israel refused to recognize Maduro as the legitimate president of the country.

Complicating all of this was a strong relationship that Chavez forged, and Maduro continued, with Iran. They worked together with a number of military and commercial agreements, bolstered by friendships between the leaders of both countries, and by common criticism of Israel. This alliance, along with some raids on Jewish institutions in Caracas have been cited as reasons so many Jews left the country, along with the nationalizations.

An aside: Then Iranian president Ahmadinijad got himself into trouble when, at Hugo Chavez’ funeral, he hugged Chavez’ widow, causing Iran’s religious leaders to go somewhat beserk, seeing a political leader touch a woman to whom he was not married.

Okay, now to Delcy Rodriguez, and what to expect. Assuming she continues in her Acting President role, and is not going to be a victim of another American attack, the United States may find the going a bit rough. President Trump’s initial comment that she was being cooperative seems not very accurate. A lawyer, the daughter of a Marxist revolutionary who “died” after being arrested by the pre-Chavez government, active in Venezuelan politics for over 20 years, she seems very competent,  very, very tough, and extremely anti-American. With her in control, the Trump idea of the U.S. taking control over Venezuela’s oil reserves seems far-fetched. We will see what transpires.

With all of the talk about Venezuela, the controversy over New York City Mayor Mamdani’s revocation of a number of his predecessor’s Executive Orders has been upstaged in the media. So let’s go back to them this morning.

As I understand it, Mamdani revoked about 15 Executive Orders that Mayor Adams had issued over the past year or so. They covered a variety of topics, but two of them (actually three of them) dealt with issues that impact New York City’s Jewish community. One of them, issued last June, adopted the definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the other, issued just one month ago today, forbade certain city officials and appointees from divesting city funds from Israeli related investments or otherwise cooperating with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. The third Executive Order dealt with religious institutions in general and required police to investigate ways to create no-protest zones around them. The third one, for whatever reasons, seems to have not raised the objections that the other two have.

A number of Jewish organizations (I have not actually surveyed them) have spoken in blunt terms against these two actions by the Mamdani administration, saying that they portend problems in the future for the Jewish community and potentially for Israel. That is to be expected and I assume that the reasons given by each organization do vary a bit, and would have to be examined, or at least read, before meaningful comments could be given.

What I am more interested in the reaction of the State of Israel, which issued apoplectic statements, basically saying that this demonstrates that Mamdani is an antisemite who on Day 1 is showing his true colors. Those are the terms used.

I maintain that, in responding with this attack, Israel has made the mistake it always makes, and demonstrates one reason why so many Americans, including many American Jews, describe themselves as anti-Israel, or as opponents of Israel’s government.

New York City has more than 1 million Jews. Of those who voted in the mayoral election, about 1/3 voted for Mamdani. They provided a significant amount of his support, and his leadership team contains a significant number of Jewish appointees. They presumably largely approve of his revocation of the Adams orders.

Talking about this is complicated. I will try to simplify it.

1. Zohran Mamdani is ethnically Indian, born in Uganda, and is religiously Muslim. He identifies with Muslims and particularly with the Palestinian experience in the Middle East. I can’t tell you what his internal feelings about Israel are, but clearly he believes that Israel has engaged in genocidal activities in its treatment of its Muslim neighbors after the October 7, 2022 attack (which he has strongly condemned).
2. As opposed to the majority of Israelis, the majority of American Jews, while not identifying with the Palestinians as Mamdani does (of course, they would if they were Muslim and not Jewish), have also condemned much of what Israel has done, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
3. I myself do believe that the ultimate goal of Israel is to force many Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, and that Israel, and many (but not all, of course) Israelis feel that if this requires violence, so be it. Whether this constitutes acts of genocide is a legal question that, except in legal fora, may not be that important. But I do believe it is happening.
4. Israel (under its current government and perhaps under all of its governments) is a remarkable country with remarkable accomplishments. Some (but certainly not all and perhaps not even the majority) of these accomplishments have been achieved with the help of the United States, and with the help of Jews worldwide. Particularly because of the Holocaust, this is not surprising.–
5. But Israel wants to be treated as something special. It has declared itself a Jewish State in spite of the fact that 20% or more of its citizens are not Jewish, and it has “settled” about 600,000 of its Jewish citizens in the West Bank, on land occupied by Israel, but not a part of Israel. By doing these things, Israel has declared itself special in two ways: first, it wants to be known as the homeland of Jews, no matter where they live, and second, it clearly expresses the right to control lands that are outside of its territorial boundaries. Many Jews support these two positions, and the American government, while sometimes expressing opposition to the second, in fact has supported them as well.
6. In order to further its presumption of special status, Israel has supported the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitic sentiments. Under this definition (I am speaking broadly), opposition to Israel defines you as an antisemite. Of course, Jews who are against Israel’s current government or policies do not view themselves as antisemitic and oppose the IHRA definition. Because so many of these Jews are Mamdani supporters, the adoption of the IHRA definition by the City of New York is problematic, and the revocation of this Executive Order makes sense. And, again in my opinion, it does not make Mamdani an antisemite, no matter how loudly Israel proclaims that it does.
7. As to the Order involving the BDS movement, it is again important to know that has only been in effect for one month. So, it isn’t that Mamdani is overturning a long lasting New York City written policy. I have no idea why Adams thought this Executive Order was necessary less than a month before he was leaving office, except to create controversy for his successor. What its revocation connotes, I do not know. Does it mean that Mamdani is going to sign an Executive Order requiring City agencies to follow the BDS program? Highly doubtful, but we will see. If this does occur, anger is appropriate. And, if it seems like it might occur, the City Council could always pass a law containing the positions set forth in the Adams order.

To make a too long story shorter than if I went on and made it longer, Zohran Mamdani is, for personal and political reasons, separating his position on protecting Jews in the City and his position on whether Israel’s actions should be supported. As the mayor of New York City, his priority has to be protection (in a broad sense) of its residents. He has little to do with Israel in his mayoral capacity. He is entitled to whatever personal thoughts he has on the country and its leaders. As long as he does nothing to set the City of New York on an anti-Israel path, this is not a problem. If he does, it will be, but we have no reason to think that will be the case as of today.

A rational Israel would wish Mamdani luck in his new job, and would communicate and meet with him on a regular basis to attempt to blunt his current feelings towards their country. To simply call him an antisemite, and to say he is showing his true colors is 100% wrong. But it is in character, I am afraid to say, and sets a stage for an ongoing battle that neither side wants to lose, but that each side wants to win big. Winning big won’t happen, and controversy will be the order of the day. It is just too bad.

It is hard to know where to start.

For a month or two, we moved a lot of war power into the southern Caribbean, using a small part of it sink fishing boats that may, or may not, have been transporting drugs, but were apparently certainly not transporting drugs to the United States. Then we began capturing large oil tankers leaving Venezuela and also not directly involving the United States and, so far, holding onto the oil. All evidence to the contrary, our president said that the drugs were heading our way and that the oil was rightfully ours, as Venezuela had stolen our oil fields, although they are in their country.

In 2022, Vladimir Putin moved a large number of Russian troops and a large amount of military equipment towards the Ukrainian border, and there was great debate in this country as to whether it was for show or if he would in fact invade. Obviously, it was not for show.

Vladimir Putin is a mentor to his less experienced BFF Donald Trump, and Donald Trump was obviously anxious to say to his mentor, as he shuffled across the world stage, “Anything you can do, I can do better”.

Putin invaded Ukraine to regain “Russian territory” and Trump invades Venezuela to regain “American oil fields”. Russian is going through a devastating land war that is now in its fourth year. Trump thinks he can do it in four hours. Russia has lost about 1,000,000 Russians, America has so far lost no one.

Of course, Trump has also made Trump a target. With few exceptions, heads of state have not been the personal targets of military invasions, for obvious reasons. Zelenskyy is still the president of Ukraine as that war drags on, for example.

Of course, we did target Saddam Hussein in Iraq and he was deposed, captured, tried and hanged. But all of this was done through Iraqi courts, not American. And the chaos that has resulted from Saddam’s being deposed, tried and killed was extensive, and we wound up occupying the country without success. We certainly can not say that the war in Iraq was an American victory.

Similarly, what is going to happen now in Venezuela? Maduro presumably lost the last presidential election in Venezuela, and the presumed winner, Maria Corina Machado, presumably won. But is she going to waltz in to Caracas and take over? There is an entire government supported, I assume by the Venezuelan military and police forces, running the country. There is a sitting vice president. There is a country with a devastated socialist economy. There are powerful drug gangs. There is a gargantuan amount of oil that Venezuela thinks is theirs.

It looks like the United States thinks the invasion is over and all will be well. Fat chance. We shall see.

The Maduros are now under American control. Somewhere. Guantanamo? Puerto Rico? We don’t know yet. Pam Bondi says he will be tried for drug crimes. This will take some time. He will be well defended. And maybe he won’t be found guilty. Then what?

Or maybe he will be found guilty. Same question. After all, the last time a former Latin American president was found guilty of drug crimes by an American court (and we waited until he was a former president), Juan Hernandez of Honduras, he was pardoned by…….Donald Trump.

I have read that we no longer have a Monroe Doctrine. We now have a Donroe Doctrine. We provide $40 billion to Argentina, we depose the leader of Venezuela through a military invasion, we tear up commercial arrangements with Mexico and Canada, we keep talking about going after cartels in Mexico and incorporating Canada into the United States, taking back the Panama Canal and taking over control of Greenland. Is all of this actually going to happen?

Well, as they say, if a gun appears  on stage in the first act, assume it will be used in the second, third, or fourth. We can modify that to fit a presidency. If a gun appears in the first year, assume…..

Okay, I am going to try to regain my normal equilibrium, if not optimism, when thinking about 2026.  To start that process, I thought it important to figure out what has thrown me off.

Of course, Donald Trump is part of it. But we have been dealing with him a long time now. So that can’t be all of it. What else?

I think it was, first, Rob and Michele Reiner and, second, to top it off, Tatiana Schlossberg. Murdered by your own son. Killed by a virulent and rare version of a deadly disease when you are 35. Three people who deserved so much better. Gone so suddenly. How can one not feel down?

I don’t know if my daughter remembers this, but at the ages of 6 and 7, she had to face the deaths of two grandparents within abput a year and a half, which she handled very well. But a few months after my mother passed away, Fred Astaire’s death was announced, and my daughter (already a theater person) fell apart completely. Perhaps my reaction now is the same.

At any rate, we were able to start out the year at the annual open house of our down the street neighbors, the Cohens, and commiserate with some old friends.

When we came home, I wanted to divert myself (and certainly didn’t want to hear any news), so I decided to pull out my collection of bookmarks. (I know, you say “collection of WHAT?)

So when you spend a lot of time scouring used book stores, you find a lot of old bookmarks. Most people just ignore them, but I tend to put them in my pocket. Then, I bring them home and put them in a box with all my other purloined bookmarks.

Today, I decided to look through some of them. I divided them into categories: American bookstores, foreign book stores, not book stores, and not paper. I went through about half of them.

The foreign ones are of most interest to me, I think. The ones I pulled out come from Canada, England, Scotland, Ecuador, Ireland, Turkey, Australia, Lebanon, Brazil, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, India, Israel, Kenya, Poland, Belgium, El Salvador, Peru, Paraguay, Russia, Thailand, and Chile.

I don’t know exactly how many bookmarks I have. Probably about 1000, although I culled about 100 today that I didn’t feel the need to keep (all from the “not book stores” category). Maybe, one day when I don’t know what else to write, I will show pictures of some of the ones I like the best. Here is one as a sample:

This Strand bookmark is at least 50 years old. You can tell that by the GRamercy phone number. And by the way, except for changing the GR to 47, the Strand phone number remains the same.

Of course, I admit this is a strange collection, and each piece in it is priceless. Yes, priceless. Literally. But put them all together and what do you get? A priceless collection to be sure.

So, with all this in mind, on New Years night, I turned on CNN, and what did I watch? An excellent hour long show on Rob and Michele Reiner.

And to answer your question? No, I don’t think it brought closure. In fact, what is closure, anyway? I have never recognized it as a real thing. Still don’t.

I have to admit that I start 2026 with some trepidation on every level. Also without resolutions and without resolution.

Our New Year’s eve was quiet as is typical for us. We did not watch any of the televised New Year’s eve festivities. We had dinner (I am the normal New Year’s eve chef) and we watched some Netflix offerings on TV.

For the past few weeks, we have been watching a South Korean show titled, in English, The Price of Confession. It is 12 episodes long and it actually has an ending, so I am sure there will not be a second season. The plot is complex, which means there are many times when the TV must be put on hold or backed up a bit to keep everything straight.

A young Korean artist is brutally murdered in his studio. His wife calls the Seoul equivalent of 911 (maybe it is 911), but he is obviously dead and, after being interrogated at the police station, she becomes the suspect, is arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. We, the viewers, did not see the actual murder, but assume there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

In the meantime, there is another murder, a double murder, of a wealthy couple who live in a very fancy modern house. These murders, we witness. The perpetrator is a very young woman, who seems to be a dinner guest who turns violent. She is arrested, convicted, and jailed, as well.

The two women meet in prison and work out a deal. The second woman will confess it was she who killed the husband of the first woman, and if the first woman gets out of jail, she will have a task to complete as payment for her freedom. She has to commit a fourth murder (and obviously get away with it). She must kill the teenage son of the wealthy couple who were murdered by the second woman.

Okay, I know this does not sound very appetizing, but take my word for it. It is better than you think.

The first woman is released from prison, while the authorities investigate the confession of the second, but free on bail, and required to wear an ankle bracelet, which obviously complicates her task.

I am going to stop giving the plot away here (I am still talking about episode 1 or 2), and viewers don’t understand how and why and by whom the artist was murdered until episode 11 or 12.

You do learn earlier why the second woman murdered the wealthy couple and wants their son dead. It is revenge, pure and simple, and you learn why she feels this revenge is both justified and necessary. Her crime is extreme, but understandable.

But who killed the artist (you really aren’t certain it wasn’t the wife), and why? At the end, you see exactly what happened. You learn who the murderer was and why it occurred.

While the murders perpetrated by the second woman were the result of a perceived need for revenge for some serious misdeeds on the part of the victims, the murder of the artist, equally brutal, was the result of a chain of extraordinarily minor events. You see how a seemingly unimportant occurrence leads to this shocking crime. I won’t say more (you wonder why I say this much, I know), but will give you one more clue: the adage about the results of sticks and stones, but not words, breaking one’s back does not seem to hold true in South Korea.

I give you that last clue, because that adage does not seem to hold true in Washington DC, either. We have a president, as we know, whose entire life seems to be based on taking massive amounts of revenge on people based on very insignificant things they do or say that he perceives are interfering with his plans. It’s really just the same emotional immaturity that caused an artist’s death in a South Korean drama and turned many lives upside down. But with Trump, it’s real life.

Happy New Year.

A domestic dictator and an international anarchist. This is how I would describe Donald Trump on this last day of 2025.

Now, let’s move on to something else. Tomorrow, New Year’s Day, ends the Halloween-Hanukkah-Christmas-New Year’s Day holiday season that has disrupted our regular schedules over the past two months. I remember this season as it has appeared to me over the years, and I think it has changed. Maybe it is I who have changed as the years have gone by (I obviously have), but it seems to me more than that. And maybe it’s because where I live, but I have lived in DC now for 56 years, and in the same house for 43.

Let’s start with Halloween. Yes, children still dress up in costume and go door to door and collect candy, but we used to get cookies and candy apples and now everything has to be prepackaged. And a lot of kids used to collect money for UNICEF on Halloween. That doesn’t happen any more.

When I was in junior high and high school, when we were too old to go door to door, it was still a social night. I remember roaming around with a group of kids. We never got into much trouble, although we sure had a lot of ideas how to, and it always ended with a party of some sort. Maybe people still have Halloween parties, but I haven’t heard of any for ages. Instead now, people decorate their houses and lawns extensively with gravestones and blown up creatures and skeletons and all sorts of things. No one did that back then.

And it seems that Christmas lights and decorations are now less prominent than they used to be, and the decorations, if not the lights, are much more elaborate on Halloween. I still see a large number of fancy Christmas trees through windows, so maybe home celebrations haven’t changed much, but where are the municipal decorations, the Christmas trees in front of churches and schools, the stores with their welcoming trees and greenery, the big store window displays, the store Santas? They aren’t there in the same numbers, are they?

And New Year’s Eve! We decided to stay home on New Year’s Eve decades ago, but has everyone else decided that, too? New Year’s Eve used to be a big night. “What are you doing New Year’s Eve?” was a standard question. Certainly, no one asked me that this year

All the restaurants had big New Year celebrations. Special menus (elaborate and expensive), champagne, party hats, noisemakers, and so forth. They advertised their celebrations for weeks. Does that still happen anywhere?

I am not saying the changes are good or bad. Just that there seem to be changes.

2025 was a terrible year for much of the world. It was a terrible year for many in this country, and for this country in general. Sadly, there seems to be no reason for 2026 to be any better. But hope, as the say, springs eternal. So, let us hope. Happy New Year.

I do not generally want to see Donald Trump get any more prizes or rewards, but I will make an exception. I am very happy that he is being awarded the Israel Prize. I have two reaaons for that. First, as complications over the future of Gaza occur and as Israel has further problems with its neighbors over the next few years, it is important to keep Israel allied with the United States. I say this not to evidence my agreement with many actions of the Israeli or American governments with which I don’t agree, but I don’t agree with most of the actions of the other countries of the Middle East either, and I think our alliance with Israel is crucial to keep Israel from experiencing potential catastrophe.

The second reason relates to the increased open antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment coming out of so many supporters of the political right. We don’t know how extensive that might become and we certainly don’t want to take a chance that Trump might succomb to it.

Of course, awarding the Israel Prize to an American president seems weird. Imagine, I said to myself,  if the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom were given to a foreign leader. Then I Googled it and, lo and behold, foreign leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have received the Medal of Freedom. But I don’t think the Israel Prize has ever been given in this manner.

Of course, Donald Trump is very popular in Israel, as is his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner. Two more reasons, by the way, for antisemitism. First, because Jews (in Israel) love Trump. Second, because Jews (in America) hate Trump.

Well, it is now December 30, which means that in two days, 2025 will be history. Now is the time that all branches of media are advertising their reviews of the year. For maybe the first time, I am not looking at any of them.

I did finish a very interesting book last night, The Fight for Jerusalem, by the late Dore Gold, American born Israeli politician and historian. It was published in 2018, so it isn’t too out of date. Gold writes extremely well and is able to put an extraordinary amount of information in a relatively short book in a way that does not overwhelm you. The first part of the book gives a history of Jerusalem starting in biblical times, but concentrating on the years surrounding the Crusades. The second part spends a lot of time on the place of Jerusalem in Muslim thought over the years (perhaps this is the most interesting part of a very interesting book). The last part deals with the position of Jerusalem after its unification in 1967, and the place of Jerusalem in the various negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. If this is a topic that interests you, I highly recommend this book.

I am such a critic and know I have no right to be. We saw Guys and Dolls at the Shakespeare Theatre and, while it was a lot of fun and very good, I sat there and, scene after scene, and said to myself: I would do this differently.

There were a few things that were perfect. No doubt about that. For example, each scene that Hayley Podschun was in (she played Adelaide) was perfect. I didn’t know her, but see she has performed at Arena Stage quite a bit, and will forgive her for also being a sometime host on the Home Shopping Network. Also perfect was Kyle Taylor Parker, who played Nicely Nicely Johnson (“Sit down, sit down, sit down, yer rockin the boat”).

The rest of the cast was very good, but didn’t get to perfection, with the possible exception of the Havana scene, where I thought Julie Benko (Sister Sarah) really shined. She just seemed a lot more natural drinking milk and Bacardi than she did saving souls.

As to the music, you can’t find a better show. 20 songs. Each a classic. As to the book, it is hard to find a script more dated, and jokes more stale. Updating (if that is allowed by the copyright holders) would be helpful.

One more thought. The stage at the Harmon Theatre is very large. Too large, I think, for Guys and Dolls (isn’t a crap game an intimate affair?), and the creators of this production really did nothing much to size it down. They turned the Save-a-Soul Mission  into a thrift shop, with racks of clothing that were totally disconnected from the plot. Why did they do this? I think it was simply because the stage is so big and they didn’t want it to look even bigger. They had to fill it with something.

Guys and Dolls runs until Jan 8 and you will have a lot of fun if you see it. It is one of three main stage classic musicals running this fall and early winter in Washington. Damn Yankees has closed at Arena. People raved about it. We missed it because of a ticket snafu. Fiddler on the Roof is in the middle of a three month run at Signature in Arlington. Everyone loves that, too. We need to buy tickets.

(Of course, I don’t want to forget the upcoming short run  production of Annie by the esteemed Congregation B’nai Tzedek Players coming up in late January, featuring two close family members.)

After the matinee yesterday, we decided to get supper out if we passed a restaurant where there waa an empty parking space. If you are here in Washington, perhaps you can visualize this. We drive north on 14th Street and turn left on Park Road. Our route will then follow Park Road through the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood into and across Rock Creek Park and beyond.

Between 14th and 16th Streets, Park Road is one-lane, one-way, with parking on both sides of the street. There are a number of small restaurants, but street parking is at a premium (there is one large public garage), so we normally just drive on through (slowly, because the street tends to be as busy as it is narrow). But yesterday, at 5:30, there was an open parking space and we took it.

We went to Bombay Street Food, which we have passed 100 times or more since it opened and wondered about it. It turned put to be very pleasant and quite good.

We shared an appetizer made up of “crispy” spinach, yoghurt, crispy noodles, and chutney (pictured), gobi aloo (potato and cauliflower), and a terrific vegetable dish called kholapuri vegetables.

Too bad the parking isn’t always that easy.

We hadn’t been to the Hirshhorn for some time, so we picked that as our go-to museum today.  It is filled with good things and most of what is on display today will be on display through most of 2026, so you have time. The only exhibit closing soon is a small Basquiat and Banksy exhibit on the lower level that is not very significant.

Edie was surprised as we walked by this Picasso and I said, “Oh, that’s Dora Maar.” I am not sure why she was surprised. I’d know that face anywhere. Google said that Picasso painted Maar over 60 different times. Okay, curators, there’s a challenge for you.

The second floor is dedicated to works of art from the Hirshhorn’s own collection. Back to Google: The Hirshhorn’s full collection contains 12,000 pieces. The current large exhibit contains 208, or about 1.7% of the full collection. Many of the pieces are worth a lot of attention. I only photographed a few.

My question here is: why did Marsh choose a subject that must have taken an enormous amount of time both to plan and to execute, while Leger picked something that could be done over a rainy weekend?

A related question relates to Jackson Pollack. I want to know: how did you pick your subjects?

What intrigued me most today was one piece in the third floor exhibit, titled “Big Things for Big Rooms”. Here it is:

It is called “Carrera Line” and is by Richard Long (Sir Richard Long), a British land artist, a sculptor who uses natural objects for the most part, and whose art is primarily based on long solitary walks he takes. (I know, don’t ask.)

This piece, which is 47 feet long, is composed of broken pieces of Carrera marble, the same marble that Michelangelo used in many of his sculptures. Here, the pieces are placed to form a rectangle with very even sides. No stones stick out.

I had a lot of questions for the guide in the room. He could answer some, but not all.

Q. Are the pieces connected to each other at all?

A. No.

Q. Who decided how to place them here?

A. Richard Long came and did the placement.

Q. The sign said the Museum purchased this piece on 2008. Has it been displayed before now?

A. Not here, but in other cities in Europe, including Long’s home town, Bristol, England.

Q. When it isn’t displayed, how is it kept?

A. I don’t really know. I assume in big boxes?

Q. Richard Long is now 80. If he becomes unable to assemble the rocks at a future exhibit, who will?

A. I assume a curator. I don’t really know.

Q. If a curator takes a bunch of rocks from a bunch of boxes, and assembles them, so they sorta look like this, is it still a work by Richard Long?

A. [Blank stare]

It seems that this rock collection was “completed” in 1985 and sold (not sure when) to a Swiss collector. My guess is it was displayed in Europe while owned by the Swiss collector, with assembly by Richard Long.

I am told by the guide that it had never before been displayed here  so my guess is that the Hirshhorn, almost 20 years ago, bought these boxes of rocks and just put them in storage for almost two decades until someone said, ” You know, Richard Long isn’t getting any younger.”

At any rate, I was really intrigued. And I really like the piece(s). Whether it is art, I don’t know. But if it is, and it probably is, it maybe close to the end of its useful life, and will be as ephemeral as so much of Banksy’s work.

I hope the Hirshhorn didn’t pay too much.

I will leave you with one more portrait. Can you guess who this is? Clue: it is not Richard Long.

I have never been to sub-Saharan Africa, and the reality of it is clearly far away from my ingrained image.

Let’s look at some more.

For those who travel back and forth between Africa and America, there is little surprise here. But for me…..

Of course, I have never traveled through most of Asia either, so I am amazed by

and

and

and even

And we haven’t even looked at the great cities of China, such as the infamous Wuhan.

Or Guangzhou

Or Seoul in Korea

That’s all for today. It’s a big, big world.

Robert Reich wrote an interesting column recently about when he was in elementary school (or maybe middle school) and was bullied continually. As you may know, Reich, the former Secretary of the Labor under Bill Clinton, is only 4′ 11″ tall. So, it isn’t surprising that he was a regular target of bullies while he was growing up (so to speak).

He did not go into detail as to how he was bullied, but he said something very interesting in that he did have defenders and protectors. One of them, he said, was a young man named Michael Schwerner.

Reich went on to write that in 1964, as we all may recall, Schwerner was killed (along with two other young men) in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he had gone as a representative of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to help register Blacks to vote. Reich says that Schwerner’s death, because he had memories of his selflessness in helping to protecct him, changed his entire outlook on life, and set him on the path that he is still on today at age 79.

Let me digress a minute: Robert Reich was born in 1946. Schwerner was 7 years older, born in 1939. In reading Reich’s essay, I had assumed that Schwerner was a classmate of Reich’s, which he clearly was not. So, it must have been Schwerner, as a teenager, protecting Reich, not Schwerner as a contemporary. Not that this changes the moral of the story. It just gives it a slightly different slant.

Reich went on and talked about bullying today, and about Donald Trump, as the world’s biggest bully, saying that everything he does as president (and most of the things he did before he became a politician) were based on bullying, on threatening people with dire consequences, and demonstrating that he had both the ability and willingness to bring about these dire consequences, unless they did his bidding. Trump does this with his actions, and he does it with his speech, and so far he has been successful with both.

The concern goes beyond what Trump is doing to the United States by his politics. It goes to what he is doing to the upcoming generations of Americans by making bullying (verbal and otherwise) mainstream and acceptable.

Reich is, of course, 100% correct. And the only way counter Trump’s success, in my opinion, is to crush him with a resounding defeat. The “crime doesn’t pay” argument. And it is not clear that we will, or that we can, do this.

Two examples of Trump’s bullying are just now entering the news. One is the Christmas Day strikes on northern Nigeria (WWJD? was not apparently a question he asked himself). We don’t yet know the actual results of these strikes, which were apparently against ISIS members or “camps” and allegedly (and maybe factually) because of ISIS’ treatment of Christians in Nigeria. In addition, our government has stated that these attacks were made with the approval of, and with the support of, the Nigerian government.

Well, Trump has talked about the treatment of Christians in Nigeria for some time now. Nigeria, believe it or not, about the size of Montana, has almost 250,000,000, making it the 6th most populated country in the world. Its population is split among Muslims and Christians, with the northern part of the country (where ISIS apparently operates) is primarily Muslim. The victims of violence in the north include Christians, for sure, but also Muslims who are not supportive of ISIS. The government of Nigeria, which Trump has for some time accused of being anti-Christian, does not appear to be. Nigeria’s current president is Muslim, but the presidency has had members of both religions over the years. It is officially secular.

A few months ago, Trump threatened to attack Nigeria and threatened to end all financial and other relationships with the country. Now, he has stopped talking about cutting off economic relationships with the country, and claimed that the Nigerian government is supportive of American war planes and drones bombing their country. I can’t believe that Nigerian government would welcome this American intrusion unless it was bullied to do so, and I am sure this is what was done.

Leaving Nigeria aside, another example of Trump’s bullying is in his treatment of those who have migrated to or immigrated to this country (and who are not White, by the way). His direction of and blessing of ICE’s extraordinarily rude and violent ways is a prime example of bullying in action. And his current proposal to purchase a number of large warehouses around the country and turn them into indoor concentration camps for those whom ICE rounds up, is again an example of Trump the bully.

They say that, in order to stop a bully, you must stand up to him. We clearly need more Americans who are willing to do this. The political concentration now seems focused on the economy. The shared wisdom is that if the Trump economy is bad, MAGA is dead, but if the Trump economy turns out to be good, MAGA will be around for some time. This may be true, but economic strength ebbs and flows. If the economy is bad today, it might be good tomorrow.

The moral composition of American citizens is a different story. If it is lowered to the level of Donald Trump, whether or not our economy is strong, we will have failed as a country. To me, our view of the world and of the United States’ place in that world, are more important than the daily condition of the economy.

Now, you can say, I guess: Art, you are retired, you had a successful career; if you had to worry about your rent money or your next meal, you would feel differently.

Maybe so. But, if so, I would be looking at things in a very short sighted manner. We, as a country, cannot afford to do that.

Not sure why I am posting this picture to start my Christmas message, but this is our meal at Ethiopios last Saturday evening. And to let you know that Ethiopian Orthodox Christians use the Julian calendar, which means they aren’t going to celebrate Christmas until January 7. Same with Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians. And it used to be the same with Ukrainian Orthodox Christians but, if I remember correctly, they adopted the Gregorian calendar a few years ago, so today is Christmas in Kiev. They changed the date of their Christmas to show how “western” they are. Am I right about that? I am not going to look that one up.

But that would show that, at least in Ukraine, politics trump (sic and sick) religious doctrine. Of course, it also seems clear both to religious scholars and historians that Jesus was not born on either December 25 or January 7, but rather some time in the spring, and that the winter date was adopted by the Roman empire in the 4th century  to supplant what had been a winter solstice holiday, and the date stuck and spread. What does all this mean? It may mean that “Jesus is the reason for the season” is, historically speaking, fake news. Whatever. Not really important. But interesting.

As for my Christmas, I don’t celebrate it religiously, of course. This makes me a real American, I think, aligning with our true forefathers the Puritans who did not allow it to be celebrated in Massachusetts. And with groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses today.

As I keep reading that Jews often celebrate Christmas with Chinese food, and I don’t do that, I am not mainstream with my own religious community, either. Although, come to think of it, I may get Chinese food on January 7. Do you  think that is what Jews in Ethiopia and Russia do?

I do expect every year to get presents from Santa, of course, and every year I am disappointed. Santa, from what I am told, expects to get cookies and milk from me, and he is equally disappointed. Such is life.

Speaking of disappointment, we were supposed to have lunch at daughter Michelle’s today, but Santa brought 14 year old Ian a temperature of 102, so plans were canceled. We are going for supper to friends Dick and Irene’s this evening for their annual party. How many decades has this been going on? And still no Chinese food!

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate and those who don’t. Do I include Donald Trump in that group? The answer is “no”. His Christmas spirit is limited to offering free flights for immigrants who had come to America so they can spend the holiday and thereafter with friends and family in the countries from which they escaped. Humbug.

I asked Santa Claus if he had made his list of naughty and nice people, and he told me had and that he had checked it twice. I asked him if would mind naming a few of the folks on his naughty list (promising I would not circulate them, but would keep them to myself) and he agreed. This is who he told me had been bad:

Dennis, Nell, Edna, Leon, Nedra, Anita, Rolf, Nora, Alice, Carol, Leo, Jane, Reed, Dena, Dale, Basil, Rae, Penny, Lana, Dave, Denny, Lena, Ida, Bernadette, Ben, Ray, Lila, Nina, Jo, Ira, Mara, Sara, Mario, Jan, Ina, Lily, Arne, Bette, Dan, Reba, Diane, Lynn, Ed, Eva, Dana, Lynne, Pearl, Isabel, Ada, Ned, Dee, Rena, Joel, Lora, Cecil, Aaron, Flora, Tina, Arden, Noel and Ellen sinned.

A PALINDROME, A PALINDROME, A MOST INGENIOUS PALINDROME!! (Apologies to W. S. Gilbert)

If you watch MSNOW, you would conclude that any news that doesn’t involve Jeffrey Epstein has either vanished from the planet, or is so unimportant that it is hardly worth mentioning. I am trying to understand why this is so.

Is it because of the sensationalism of the case? Is it because of his relationship with Donald Trump? Is it because of the perseverance of so many of the survivors? Is it because support for the investigation is somewhat bipartisan, and some look at it as a way to break up GOP support for the president? Or maybe a combination of all of these and more.

The ambiguity of Trump regarding disclosure and the consequent ambiguity of his DOJ complicates the situation by throwing into question whether all documents required to be disclosed are being disclosed, and the reason for the many redactions on documents without, to date, the required explanations for the redactions.

Redactions are authorized to protect the identity of victims and so as not to compromise ongoing investigations. Maybe there are more reasons for redacting, but I don’t know what they are.

We are talking about events that happened 20 to 30 years ago. Most crimes and most civil claims are subject to statutes of limitations long passed. Crimes involving rape, sex trafficking and related matters are not subject to statutes of limitations and may be brought at any time. That means the events involving Epstein are not dead although he is, because there may be others still alive who may be appropriately charged. But, if there is a determination to charge anyone, an exception to disclosure arises and could cut off public dissemination of documentation.

I think the only other crimes could relate to recent incidents of perjury or obstruction of justice. These would also bring up potential limitations on disclosure.

Both Trump and I have brought up the probability that men, innocent of any crime, but somehow involved with Epstein in their past, would wind up named, blamed and unable to cure their tarred reputations, causing pain and expense to them and their families.

And then there are the survivors. Hard as it is to contemplate, there were apparently between 1000 and 1200 girls and women involved. How many were sexually abused, I don’t know. The number of these women who have outed themselves and gone public is a small proportion of these large numbers. Survivors are supposed to be protected and their names redacted from disclosed documents. But apparently in many cases (all by accident?) they were not, and names previously undisclosed are now public.

I obviously can not put myself in the shoes of a survivor. I can not begin to understand how they might feel. Those who had gone public say they are looking for perpetrators to be punished and for “closure”. But my concern is that they will wind up with the opposite of closure, with continuing entanglement, with loss of time and money, with criticism thrown at them, and so forth. All that in addition to exposing those who were not previously publicly identified.

Attention is also being given to the “ten co-conspirators”, all unidentified, yet many identifiable. One (the one I am most interested in) is 88 year old Les Wexner, the “Ohio businessman” (you can Google him). Businessman, philanthropist, and close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. My guess is that you will hear more about him, and that his final years will not be particularly pleasant. We shall see.

In the mean time, I wish a Merry Christmas to all who celebrate (with one notable exception).

I have said many times before that I view left wing antisemitism and right wing antisemitism as two different, if related, phenomena. Left wing antisemitism (if you call it that), in my opinion is largely anti-Israel sentiment based on Israeli policies (which can expand to anti-Zionism if one believes that current Israeli policies are inevitable, either because of the neighborhood in which Israel is located, or because Zionism itself believes in geographic expansion within that neighborhood). Right wing antisemitism, on the other hand, has been more typical antisemitism (whether it has a religious base, or from a belief that Jews want to or actually do control everything or whatever) and has existed along with right wing support of Israel as necessary for the fulfillment of what so many believe to be God’s promise, or God’s map of the future.

I think I have been correct when I have said that, but today, I am going to modify what I have been saying, largely (but not exclusively) because of what happened at last week’s Turning Point conference, the annual meeting of the members and supporters of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point movement. The conference, in Phoenix, attracted about 30,000 (that’s right, 30,000) attendees. The conservative movement in general, whether it is MAGA, or Turning Point, or some other branch, has long maintained that it is not antisemitic because of its support for Israel. If particular conservatives were themselves antisemitic (as many were), that was their business. It just never came up in the meetings or pronouncements of the various conservative movements.

That has now changed. Prominent antisemitic conservatives apparently no longer feel the need to hide, or ignore, their antisemitism. Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others are now telling it like they see it. At the same time, the conservative movement as a whole seems to be moving back from its universal, no questions asked, support for Israel and the Netanyahu policies. They are criticizing Israel more openly, they are describing Jews using various old time-worn antisemitic tropes, and they are conflating their views of Jews and of Israel, using criticism of one to bolster or evidence criticism of the other.

This obviously does not sit well with all of the members of the conservative movements, and did not sit well with all of the attendees at the Turning Point conference. The most prominent of these is Ben Shapiro, who has become very prominent over a period of years, wearing his black kippah, and blending his strong conservative positions with a strong and unquestioning support of Israel. Ben Shapiro is not happy with the falling support of Israel within his movement, and certainly is not happy with the broader evidences of anti-Jewish feelings. He felt it was time to attack these changes to make sure they did not continue and deepen, and he seems to have felt that some of the more prominent activists who seemed to be wavering in their support for Israel needed to be silenced within the conservative movement.

And he said so in his speech at Turning Point. He not only said so, but he said so in fighting terms. He said there was no place for either antisemitic or anti-Israel sentiments in the conservative movement, and no place for Israel related conspiracy theories about the death of Charlie Kirk, and he called out people by name, people really important in the movement, like Carlson and Steve Bannon and Megan Kelly.

I don’t know what Shapiro was expecting, but I know he didn’t get it. His speech led to a number of speakers,  like the Vice President, saying everyone was welcome in the movement, and there should be no “purity” tests. To many, these were talks supporting unity, to others they were talks supporting antisemites. What was clear from audience reactions is that Shapiro’s position had little support. It will be interesting to watch his next moves.

In the meantime, a group called Stop Antisemitism, about which I know nothing, but has been around for decades, has named Tucker Carlson as Antisemite of the Year 2025. This “honor” has been reported all over the Internet, it appears. I saw it first in a Facebook posting of the New York Post, as you know a very conservative newspaper. There were several thousand comments on the post, and I scrolled through the first hundred or so. Every one of them seemed to be supportive of Carlson and felt his new title really was an honor, something to be proud of.

So the conservative movement does have a problem. It is filled with antisemites. And Ben Shapiro didn’t help, at least in the short run. Nor does the apparent break between Israel (over Gaza and the West Bank) and so many conservatives help.

Vance wants a big tent. Of course he does. But big tents do lead to big problems..

Jeff Landry, a middle aged man, is the Governor of Louisiana. Does that sound like a full time job? It does to me, but apparently not to Jeff Landry. He has just taken a second “volunteer” job. Jeff Landry has just been appointed United States Special Envoy for Greenland.

Jeff Landry, if you read his Wikipedia bio, looks like he may never have left Louisiana before. He was born there, was raised there, went to college and law school there, spent a decade in the Louisiana National Guard, and has always worked there. (Oh, yes he was a Congressman for two years, but I sure never saw him here.)

And can you imagine two places as different from each other as Greenland and Louisiana? No? Well, not so fast. Try to answer this question:

What do Louisiana, Venezuela, and Greenland have in common? Want a hint? The answer has three letters, the first one is “o” and the third is “l”.

Now what is the goal of the United States Special Envoy to Greenland? Jeff Landry has given us the answer. He is going to work hard “to make Greenland part of the United States”.

Now, that may sound like a big job to you. But either it doesn’t to Jeff Landry, who says it will “in no way affect” his duties as Louisiana’s chief executive, or the job of governing Louisiana is easier than I assumed. He treats it like  “Hey, Art, how can you have time to write a daily blog? Are you still going to be able to pick up the mail and take out the trash?”

Of course, Trump promised this from the beginning and we all hoped he had forgotten about it. You may remember how essential he said it was. He said he may even use military means, if necessary.

We now see a pattern. Greenland becomes an Inuit speaking Puerto Rico, Venezuela gives us back “our oil”. What could be left?

You got it. The last leg of this three legged stool is left. The Panama Canal. Keep your eyes on this space.

By the way, the Danish government and the Danish people, and the Greenlanders are not the only ones apoplectic about this. All of NATO is. NATO’s Article 5 never contemplated a NATO power invading land belonging to another NATO power.

One person who does understand this is Trump’s buddy, Vladimir Putin. He knows that invading another country to take their land is no problem and often should be praised. And now we see why Trump can’t really criticize Putin. Brothers from different mothers. Putin from Mother Russia, and Trump from Mother Trump, the one and only woman that her son Donald never mentions.

Another understanding friend is Bibi Netanyahu. Of course, Bibi is moving east to the West Bank (yes, a conundrum).

Three years and one month to go. To answer the question once posed by William Yeats: No, the center will not hold.

The road will be rough. Buckle your seat belts before the Trump administration bans them as an effete luxury and a way to cut down on imports from China.

And by the way, if Trump can by fiat rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and shun anyone who uses its other name, can’t he by fiat rename Greenland Trumpland and force everyone to call it by that name?

My morning routine is pretty simple. Wordle. NYT crossword puzzle. Put up a blog post. Get on with my life.

Wordle takes no time at all. Crossword – depends on the day and the puzzle. Blog post – varies, dependent on whether I started (or finished) it the night before, and whether I have any idea what I am going to write about.

This morning, Wordle was easy. But I couldn’t finish the Times puzzle. At all. Why? Because I like a crossword puzzle that has clues and squares and each square gets one letter, and your job is figure out which one letter goes into each square. But some puzzles are not like that. They are more “tricky”. There was a puzzle last week, for example, where the “trick” was that a bunch of words needed to have “qq” written into them in consecutive squares. Now, I don’t know of any words containing two consecutive “qs”, and there were none in the puzzle. The second “q” was the sound “q”. An example? Okay, not in the puzzle, but imagine the definition is “Baghdad beauty”. The answer would be “Iraqqtie”. See what I mean?

Today’s NYT Sunday puzzle was that way. You work and work on it like it’s a normal puzzle and then, after almost an hour, you say “I give up” and then you go and look at the answer. And you are just disgusted. Okay, so maybe you should have figured out sooner that this was not a normal puzzle and either stopped then (cause you don’t like the other kind), or really tried to figure out the trick (which I still don’t understand).

Examples from today: Clue: sailor’s patron. Okay, you know that is St. Elmo, but you only have four letters. So you assume it is Elmo. But, no. It is S T [Elm] O. The famous lawyer in the Scopes trial is C L A R E N [ced] A R R O W. Lemonade and iced tea is A R N O L D [Palm] E R. When you are wet, you say I A M S [oak] E D. And so forth.

All of these crunched squares are trees (or in the [ced] case, part of the name of a tree). And you are supposed to figure this out because 69-down is “Where to find six presents in this puzzle” and the answer is “Under the tree”.

I just don’t get it. And, by the way, there was a lot else in this puzzle I didn’t get. How many of you can name the “2015 chart topping hit for the Weeknd”? It was Can’t Feel My Face! But that would be too easy, so in the puzzle it was C A N T F E [Elm] Y F A C E.

The author of the puzzle is a fellow named David Kwong and he is apparently a professional magician. My guess is that David Kwong and I have never had one common thought.

Enough of that…..

Here’s another mistake (sort of). For the last two weeks, we have gone out to dinner at out of the way restaurants. No reason. Small, hole-in-the-wall places, not near us (maybe 10 miles away) that I might have passed on an excursion and looked up on Yelp and saw that they got good ratings and said, “let’s give it a try”. Last week, it was the Filo Cafe, a Philippine restaurant, and last night we went to Ethiopios, and you can guess what kind of a restaurant that was.

We went to Ethiopios, which is located in small strip center in Rockville, because I had eaten lunch earlier this week at a Yunnan Rice Noodle shop in the same strip, and found it a unique and interesting experience, not like any other Chinese restaurant I had been in, and I saw there was a Jamaican restaurant and an Ethiopian restaurant in the same strip and thought we should give at least one of them a try.

Ethiopios has about a dozen tables, and there was only one other occupied (by a family of four) while we were there, but they were doing a good carry out business. There were six or seven people (mainly Uber Eats types) who came in to pick up orders. The restaurant itself is very plainly decorated. Its menu like most other Ethiopian restaurants (there are many, many in the DC area) and we ordered our usual vegetarian plate. There were seven vegetable concoctions spread out on a large injera. They were all pretty good (if not the best we have ever had). There were two cold dishes, one from beets and one from lentils, two warm bean dishes (one spicy, one not), a cabbage/potato combination, a string bean/carrot combination, and a serving of greens, maybe collards. For the two of us, it was only $20 plus tax and tip.

But, it’s a very informal place. The woman who serves you must also work in the kitchen, because she is never visible unless she is taking an order, serving, etc. To get her, you have to ring the bell on the counter. There was quite a bit of bell ringing last night. When the bell is rung, her standard answer was “Just a minute”, and she would generally come out after the second ringing.

The other interesting facet of the restaurant was that the heating didn’t seem to be working. The thermostat on the wall said that the temperature was 61 degrees. I asked her if she could up the heat and she said something in a combination of Amharic and English that meant “No, I can’t, it’s broken”, or “The thermostat is on the wall. Move it where you want.” One or the other, or maybe something else. I couldn’t tell. And I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t understand her, so I didn’t ring the bell again for that. I pushed up and down buttons, and something called menu and lo and behold I set the temperature at 78, which I knew was too warm, but I couldn’t move it back down for some reason. There was then a message on the thermostat that said “Temperature set at 78 degrees” and another that said “Temporarily on hold” that I couldn’t eliminate.

At any rate, the temperature stayed at 61/62, and we kept our coats on, and that turned out to be okay.

We had gone fairly early, and got home in time to see the last three episodes of Season 3 of The Diplomat. Waiting for Season 4 next September. Hope the country lasts that long (both on The Diplomat and in the Trumposphere).

How did I do? Only mentioned him once today. Pretty good, huh?

As I understand it, the Epstein grand jury transcripts have been permitted to be made public by a federal judge, and ordered to be made public by the law recently passed by Congress and signed by the President. With this in mind, one wonders how the government yesterday could have released a 100 page grand jury document with redactions that included everything single word of the document. In other words, the government released 100 blank pages in this one document alone.

This partial document release is just one other example of how the Trump administration ignores the law. They are bolstered by two beliefs, both of which are well founded. The first is that the President bears no legal responsibility for what he does, as long as what he does is part of his job as President as he sees it. That was the result of that unfortunate Supreme Court case, Trump v. the United States, decided last year before Trump came into office for his second term.

The second belief is that the Supreme Court will support Trump in whatever he does in the future, not in the sense that Trump v. the United States allows him to avoid personal liability, but in the sense that the Court will agree with the administration on it power to set the various administration policies that are challenged by Democrats or others. Although we don’t yet know how the Court will view Trump’s tariffs, for instance, this belief is legitimately based on the reality that most of the administration’s positions have been upheld, usually by 6-3 votes, even though this typically requires the Court to overturn decisions made by lower courts. In other words, the Supreme Court is consistent ignoring precedent and creating what in effect are new legal realities.

For those of us who oppose everything that Trump does (usually because we disagree with his policies or lack of policies, but sometimes simply because he is just a despicable human being), Trump v. the United States was a horrific opinion. But there is a lingering question, which is rarely asked. With this decision in place, if we had a President whom we could respect, who had positions that we generally agreed with, and who had no problem using the power the Court had given him as freely as Trump does, would we object the way we are objecting today? I am not trying to answer that question; I have no idea what the answer really is. My guess is that we would be split in our opinions.

But we know that there has always been a debate between the authority of the President, as executive, and Congress, as the legislative branch of government. This debate, now that Congress has once again proven itself paralytic, and the current President proven himself boundary-less, has moved to new levels. An example of this centers around questions of independent agencies, from the Federal Reserve to the FCC. If we have a constitution which divides legislative and executive functions, can the legislature create institutions, like these two, which do not answer to the executive? Although these independent agencies have functioned in that way for decades and decades, is time to pull them all under the control of the executive, who should have the right to control both personnel and policies of these heretofore “independent” agencies? None of us may want Trump to get control of these agencies, but if the executive was not Trump but anti-Trump, would we feel the same?

And this goes to the even bigger question, that we tend not to discuss, which is whether or not the American form of government works in the 21st century. Our government is based on checks and balances, and on public discussions of policies and potential policy changes, and all tha takes time, and that just may not be sufficient for a major power in our world with its continual technological changes. I read this morning that China is working hard on nuclear fusion – if you look at the front page New York Times articles, you will see what they are doing. We cannot compete with China with that kind of intensity.

We even see in our space policy that NASA no longer is in complete control; our space future is going to wind up in the hands of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or both. The rich get richer; our government becomes more and more dependent on, and under the control of, billionaires, either because they control our industrial production, or because they control the funding that allows our political parties to flourish.

In other words, the Trump phenomenon may not be solely the result of a demented Donald Trump. Whoever winds up as President will face the same problems – need to control all aspects of the government to allow it to function in a competitive manner, yet held back by an unworkable Congress, and beholden to a group of billionaires who, through their control of both industry and the size of their political contributions, wind up as powerful as, or perhaps more powerful than, our elected leaders.

In 2028, Trump is done. Clearly, that does not mean our troubles are over.

I think Bill Kristol has it right. Why waste energy on renaming minor spots like the Kennedy Center? Let’s rename the moon!

I was in fact thinking about what He can do with respect to the nations’s capital, where we live. Why can’t He rename the city Trump? I asked that of one friend, who suggested that not only could He change the name of the city from Washington to Trump, but He could possibly change the name of George Washington himself to Donald Trump, the Father of our Country.

If He did that, He wouldn’t have to make piecemeal changes. The State of Washington would automatically become the State of Trump, the George Washington Bridge the Donald Trump Bridge, and so forth. Once He renamed the City of Washington for himself, he could do the same for the District of Columbia. We would then live in Trump, DT.

And then, of course, there is the country itself. Why not call it the United States of Trump? That’s ridiculous, you say, it’s in North America. One signed Executive Order, though, and North America becomes North Trump, just as South America becomes South Trump, separated by the Gulf of Trump and the Trump Sea.

Now, Art, you say, you are being a little silly, aren’t you? The answer is in fact not that clear. Trump, it appears, can rename anything He wants to rename, and, it further appears, that He wants to rename everything.

Merriam-Webster really missed the boat this year. They selected as their word of the year “slop”, a very sloppy choice, if you ask me. The OED selected “rage bait”, which as I look at it are two words, and also pretty inane. It seems to me that both of these organizations should have selected “trump” or perhaps “Trump” or maybe “He” with a capital “H”.

But, then again, as I look at it more closely, I realize that maybe M-W and the OED were just more clever than I am. Take “slop”, for example. “Slop” could just be a code word for “Trump”, couldn’t it? “Garbage”, “slop”, “detritus”, etc., all synonyms for “Trump”. And then “rage bait”. Yes, those are two words, but so are “Donald Trump”, and what incites more rage than He does? In fact, that’s what He wants to do, because He believes that the way to get the support of 51% of the country is to act as bait to the other 49%, because the rage of the 49% is what excites the 51%.

Trump’s polling seems to keep falling in every category. Yet, this week’s Quinnipiac poll shows that the approval level for Democrats in Congress is at the lowest ever, 18 or 19 percent. And that voters favor a Congress controlled by Republicans, albeit by a very slim majority, 49 to 48 percent. Of course, that is fairly close to where Congress is today, and approval of Congress over the course of 2025 has been in the 20 percents. These inconsistent statistics are hard to grasp.

If there were an election today, would Trump win? There is only one correct answer to that question, and that is “Who will be His opponent?”

And so my question of the day is: Who will be his opponent? And if you think you know the answer to that question…..

Nobody is going to be pleased by this post. My guess is many will tell me it is a mistake to publish it. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t know where it is going to wind up, but here goes.

Trump, at the White House Hanukkah party, said he will always stand up for the Jewish people and that he loves Israel. Okay, he may be serious, he may just saying what he thinks is politically best, he may change his mind tomorow. But that isn’t my focus. My focus is the general reaction to that statement, as set out in comments to various conservative media outlets’ reporting of his remarks in various Facebook posts. I have scrolled through three of the lengthy lists of comments.

Relatively few of these comments are completely antisemitic or anti-Israel rants. There are some, but not a lot. There are about the same number that say “We love Jews and Israel.” What are most common are comments that discuss religion. “Jesus is King.” “We believe in Christ.” And so forth, in many forms.

To me, this shows a more subtle form of antisemitism. We really don’t like the Jews, they should convert, but we support Israel because it is a necessary part of God’s plan, leading to the Second Coming. What surprises me (and I know my sample is too small to even call it a sample) is the number of people who have what to me are very simplistic and literal views of Christian belief. The kind of simplicity that I would hesitate to put my name to on a public forum.

Okay, that is Part One. Part Two is the more controversial part of what I am going to say. Here goes: I really know a lot of Jews. Almost all of my relatives. The majority of my friends, I think from kindergarten to today. Members of synagogues I have belonged to, organizations I have worked with, and so forth. And here is what I am going to say about them: I really do like 95% of them, each of whom I would put in a “good person” category.

I also read books written by and about Jews, I see Jewish actors and performers, Jewish politicians, and so forth, and while I wouldn’t call 95% of them “good people”, I would probably put, say, 75% in that category. And I would bet that none of these people ever cause a breakout of antisemitism. I don’t think anyone looks at any of these people and says to themselves, “No wonder I hate Jews”.

But then I look at the 25% (my % is arbitrary and maybe way off) that I don’t like and regret (and sometimes can not believe) they are Jewish, as their values and mine are so different. People such as Netanyahu and so many members of his governing coalition in Israel for starters. So many high ranking religious leaders of some Orthodox communities are another group. People in Trump’s government (Steven Miller, Les Zeldin, Howard Lutnick, among others). Right wing billionaire donors to political causes for another. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Even Nick Reiner. Right wing purveyors of false news. And more.

What really got to me the other day took plave at the same White House Hanukkah party.  Miriam Adelson, Israeli born American, widow of Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and  the most widely read newspaper in Israel, Israel HaYom, with a net worth of about $35 billion, announced that she was going to give Donald Trump $250 million to finance a run for a third term.

Now, she can do what she wants with her money, I guess. But what upsets me most about this and about what so many of the prominent members of the 25% who are not “good people” do, is that they do it wearing their Judaism so prominently, they do what they do because they say or maybe think it is “good for the Jews”, and therefore, in effect, they do it in my name.

I believe that what they do, because of their wealth and/or their prominence, overshadows the good deeds of 95% of my friends and relatives, and 75% or so of the other Jews of the world, and I would just like them to stop!

I never do this, but this time I did. Not sure why.

I like my eye doctor. It’s too bad I only see him once a year. Of course, seeing him is not easy. His office is in the Barlow Building in Friendship Heights, and you locals know what that means. It means having nine cars backed up on the street waiting to get into the garage with its “valet only” parking system, an ordeal equivalent to a cardiologist’s stress test. And then, when you get to his suite, a branch of a hydra-like ophthamology group, you have to go through their robotic check in system, which asks you many questions (checking your cognitive abilities) and to scan a bevy of documents (checking your coordination). I was called back pretty quickly by a new tech, who introduced himself as “Kelvin, just like the temperature scale”. He then asked me if I was familiar with the Kelvin scale. I lied, “Yes”. Now, that would not have been a lie if he had asked if I ever heard of it. But familiar? I made its acquaintance after my exam, and I think I may use it from now on. It is about 275 degrees outside now. That makes it much more comfortable than if it were either Centigrade or Fahrenheit for sure.

I passed the exam by following all the instructions. Sit straight. Lean back. Blink. Look right. Look down. Open wide. Put your chin here.

You know the drill. I followed each of those instructions without blinking. Except “Blink”. I didn’t get a certificate of merit, but I got another appointment. On December 22, 2026. Luckily my schedule that day still had a few openings.

I drove home with sun glasses on. Luckily, I didn’t hit anybody or anything. That included the trash truck that blocked Livingston Street and made me drive through alleys, and included the workman holding a sign telling me that I couldn’t cross Nebraska on Nevada, and had to drive around and about just to get home.

I don’t normally talk about our used book business on this blog, but I will today because we sold two books I liked to have on our overburdened shelves- a signed copy of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and a signed copy of M. Gessen’s The Future is History. I took them to the Post Office on Northhampton, forgetting the Christmas is acoming, I faced a line oof about a dozen people, each probably mailing a hundred gifts. So I turned around, went back to the car, and went to the small Chevy Chase MD post office, with only three in front of me.

On the way home, I stopped at CVS to pick up a subscription. The pharmacy clerk (who, by the way, is the world’s beat) said to me when he looked at the price of my medicine “Did you drop your insurance?” Huh? It turns out that the cost was more than ever before. Okay, that can happen. But he told me that the cost charged through mu insurance was $12 more than if I bought it without insurance. So I bought it without insurance and will worry about it again in 90 days.

I came home and decided to get on the stationary bike. I drove a little over 8 miles in about 40 minutes, while I watched a documentary on YouTube about current conditions in Kabul under the Taliban. I was surprised the British journalists could film and release as much as they did. Life in Kabul seems just awful and I was thankful I don’t live there. But then I thought about it and realized that for many these days, life in the United States bears some  similarities: people who are afraid to go outside, peoplevwho may be detained because of how they look, uniformed and armed individuals walking the streets and socforth. Obviously, not the same, but….

I also saw a video reel someone put on Facebook where a number (6, 7, 8?) Brits were aaked if they would want to live in Europe or in the U.S. Obviously, the clips were selected to give a message, so all answered “Europe:” and gave their reasons. The thing is that they were all correct. Today, there is no reason to pick the U.S. over Europe aa a place to live and raise a family. Too bad, for sure, but true.

The evening was devoted to more reading about the fate or Gorbachev and the USSR, and watching MSNOW about the extraordinary Susie Wiles interview in Vanity Fair, the looming Venezuelan War, and the tributes that (almost) everyone gave to Rob and Michele Reiner. Trump is speaking to the nation tonight, I understand. Maybe he will charm us all, right? I give him about a 2 percent chance to do that. Yes, I know, I am a generous guy.

There are many things I know very little about. Among those are the history of indigenous Australians and the history of indigenous Australian art. But it is also true that I know a little more about both than I did when I woke up this morning. That’s because Edie and I went to the National Gallery to see the exhibit titled The Star We Do Not See, an exhibit of about 200 works of indigenois Australian art from the National Gallery of Art of Victoria in Melbourne. It will be at the National Gallery until early March, when it travels on.

After it opened a few weeks ago, Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee wrote a highly critical review of the exhibit, saying it contained some masterpieces, to be sure, but largely contained mediocrities, and that the National Gallery should not have brought in a prepackaged show from one museum, but hired a curator to search out only masterpieces and tell a more coherent story. He also said the exhibit is too inclusive, wanting to exhibit works by artists around the continent, sacrificing quality to do so.

Now Smee is a bit more qualified than I am to review this exhibit. For one thing, he is an artist and art critic. For another, he is Australian. But I won’t let that stop me.

You should see this exhibit. Why? Because the mediocre works are as good as the masterpieces. In fact, I have no idea which are which. I don’t think it is possible to tell.

A few things I did not know:  Human history in Australia goes back 65,000 years. When the British came in the 1800s, there were indigenous communities all over the continen, with people speaking over 200 distinct languages. Each area had its own artistic traditions.

More: These communities suffered under the British. Poverty, disease, displacement.

More: the current trends in indigenous art only stems from the second half of the twentieth century, when the country began passing laws to protect it indigenous population. It was after this that the types of painting done on rocks, for example, were moved to more mobile surfaces. And, that modern paints could be used as well as natural dyes. And canvases became available, rathercthan only bark.

The art on display includes work on canvas and on bark, and includes three dimensional work. Here are some examples. These were some of my favorites. Whether they are masterpieces or mediocrities, I don’t know.

In addition, the names of the artists, their specific homelands, or what they are interpreting mean little to me. So I am going to post them with no explanations. If you see the show in person, or see what you can on line, you will undoubtedly learn more. Each piece, each artist, each locale is described.

The oldest art in the show was in fact in a small book from 1875, put together by an indigenous artist for a British settler. Here are two pages from that book.

The last room of the exhibition shows more modern, less traditional works. I am only posting one, which actually contains only text. But each square is profound. I suggest you enlarge and read each of square.

And I repeat: Go see the show. Read his review and absorb what he says, but otherwise pay no attention to Sebastian Smee.

What could be worse than when a child kills his parents? And when the parents are more than just names in a newspaper, even if you had no personal connection with them, the horror of the situation is haunting. The news about Rob Reiner, a familiar face since All in the Family, and whose career as both actor and director, along with his seemingly perfect political activism, made him a model of a successful American citizen. Yet, there was obviously an underside to his success, a son with apparently untreatable addiction and mental illness problems.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I was on the board of a national non-profit with an individual with whom I really did not get along, although our contact was limited. I later learned that, when he was away at college, his parents were murdered in their home by a man hired by his two older brothers. It made me look at him with different eyes, and gave me so much sympathy for him, wondering how he could live with that in his past, and excusing his traits which kept us from being friends.

I won’t identify him, but the Reiner killings brought me right back to these earlier ones. And to stoies like that of the Menendez brothers, which 35 years after the crime continue to make the news now and again.

I said yesterday that I was going to write about slavery today, but I will postpone that once again. I am thinking about families and murder.

I guess it explains why the bible starts as it does. There is creation, there is the discovery that all will not be paradise, and immediately there is one brother murdering another. To quote (in a different context) Rabbi Hillel……”All the rest is commentary.”

Patricide has a long history, of course, through royal families throughout the world, where in a sense, for a long time, it was normalized. Maybe we should not be shocked when it happens today, but rather be shocked that it doesn’t happen more often.

So, patricide and fratricide and whatever you call murder of a spouse, are more common than we would like them to be. And often, while they are crimes that show families which have been torn apart, they also show family binding. The Menendez brothers, the two brothers of my former associate, men not working alone, but in tandem. I am often reminded of Jules Feiffer’s play, Little Murders. I should really look at it again, because I don’t remember the plot at all. I know it was abput family dysfunction and that, at the end, the warring father and son find reconciliation, with the mother/wife remarking how nice it is to have the family together again, as her son and husband sit at adjoining windows in their New York City apartment having the time of their lives shooting at random passers-by below. And it appears that, just yesterday, the horrific murders in Sydney were carried out by a father and son working in tandem.

Finally, my appreciation to William Shakespeare for giving me today’s title. It comes from Hamlet of course. I forget, but maybe you remember. Any intra-family murders in that play?