Art is 80

I watched the Republican debate last night, minus the several candidates who didn’t make the cut, and minus the elephant in the room, Donald Trunk. Oops, I meant Trump, I was thinking about elephants.

Wait a minute – aren’t they all elephants?

I thought that the three NBC moderators did a good job – they asked meaningful questions, they tried their best to keep the answers within the allotted lengths of time, and they controlled responses when a candidate could respond to being targeted by one of the other candidates. Often the candidate was not permitted to respond – but when Ramaswammy meentioned Haley’s daughter, all bets were off. That’s when Haley called Ramaswammy “scum”.

I thought they could, though, have asked more pointed questions in a couple of ways. First, it was almost like Donald Trump didn’t exist. Yes, they did ask why each candidate felt himself more qualified than Trump to be president. But they didn’t ask what they thought about the aftermath of the 2020 election, or about the 91 felony indictments, or about some of the very controversial things Trump has said. And they didn’t ask anything about what has been going on in the House of Representatives or whether or not they supported some of the antics of the Republican crazies in the house, such as the Biden impeachment or even tying Israeli aid to cuts in IRS personnel.

They did ask about Israel and Hamas, and about the growth of antisemitism, though. That was the first set of questions – and here you got what appeared to be unanimity. The Republicans were all strongly pro-Israel – the U.S. should give them everything they ask for (and more, perhaps) and let them use it any way they want. The U.S. should only give advice to Israel when asked for it, not gratuitously. The responsibility of Israel and its prime minister (who the candidates wanted to appear close to – so several of them called him Bibi) is not only to secure Israel, but to wipe out Hamas. Wipe Them Out!!

And as to antisemitism in American universities? Cut off the funding of all universities that don’t cut off the activity of campus antisemites.

What about anti-Muslim activities? Meh. “Not interested”, seemed to be their response.

As to Ukraine, their responses were more nuanced – four of the five were in favor of more support for Ukraine, although the support for Ukraine was to be sending them war materiel that would be made in America and help our economy (no such conditions seemed to be put on Israel aid). Nikki Haley was probably the most pro-Ukraine. If we back down on Ukraine, she thought, not only would Russia be emboldened, but China and Iran would be as well. Ramaswamy, however, disagreed with his fellow Republicans and would pull out of Ukraine tomorrow, it seems. He thinks we have no national interest there – and that to look at it as Russia = bad guys, and Ukraine = good guys is just wrong. And then he went full Russian-like attack on Ukraine, its corruption, its lack of free speech and democracy and the fact that is run by a “Nazi”, a “clown in cargo pants” named Zelensky. Wow!

Of course, there was some Biden bashing. His environmental policies led to the increase in gas prices (wrong). The border should be closed so fentanyl won’t come in from Mexico (not coming in that way). Negotiating with Iran and releasing resources to them is a sign of weakness and appeasement (who cares about the four American hostages who were released?). And so forth.

On abortion, each of the Republican candidates considers themselves to be pro-life. But they are not all in agreement that abortion should be up to the states, although Christie and Haley are comfortable with that. Scott claims that he can, in week one, sign a something that will restrict abortions to situations where a pregnancy is under 15 weeks. Just like that. Don’t remember if Ramaswammy said anything on that one.

Every thing else is as expected. Our national debt is too big, we must build up our Navy, the border should be closed, entitlements must be amended (but not for current oldsters like me, and so forth. This part was pretty much as expected.

But Ramaswammy had more to say:

First, he thinks that Haley is just an old fashioned liar, while she thinks that Putin and Xi would love to see him become president. Second, Ramaswammy would like the Democrats to stop the charade that Joe Biden is going to be their presidential candidate. Biden isn’t even in charge of the presidency now, he says. He is just a puppet of the elite classes. Why don’t the Dems go straight with the people: “Just tell us who your candidate will be. Will it be Michele Obama? Or that guy from California?”

Finally, we learned the Christie hates Tiktok. It gives China all the info it wants about us, it spreads antisemitism, it corrupts minors. He is probably right. And it’s addictive (even I know that).

What did we learn? Scott is outclassed, Ramaswammy is a nutcase, DeSantis is a non-personality (I didn’t even mention him yet, did I?). Christie is a viable candidate in another era. Haley is probably the most likely of the bunch to be able to do the job – although how relevant will any of this be?

What a whacko Ramaswammy is. Really.

But we know, don’t we, that Donald will be the candidate, campaigning either from Mar-a-Lago, or from jail. Lawrence O’Donnell said it best on the MSNBC after-debate panel: These guys are just hanging around in case Trump chokes on a cheeseburger.

Amen.

I really like watching election results. Generally, I go back and forth between Steve Kornacki on MSNBC and John King on CNN, each operating their magic boards, with the latest state by state, county by county, district by district, precinct by precinct results. I like listening to their analysis – when one candidate looks to be heading for an easy victory, until they say something like “But we haven’t heard from the city of _____, where we expect a big margin for _________”.

Alas, this year I couldn’t do that because of a problem we are having with the cable box in our family room. We are unable to pick up any of the cable channels, so I had to walk back and forth from the family room (where we were doing some other things) and my office (where the cable is fine) to try to keep up to speed.

By and large, the results were positive for the good guys. I think it does show how important female reproductive health is and will continue to be. In Ohio, for example, the right to abortion will now be a constitutional right (as I understand it, abortion will be permissible up to 23 weeks, and then – if the legislature wants to – later abortions can be banned, but not if the woman’s physician declares that the continuation of the pregnancy would be harmful to her life or health – something like that), but 1,675,728 Ohioans voted against this provision – that was 43.4% of those voting, and they were voting in a state where the Republicans (who control all aspects of state government) were toying with a 6 week ban.

There was also, on the Ohio ballot, a provision to legalize marijuana. This also passed. Interestingly, 2,186,962 voted for the constitutionality of abortion, and 2, 183,734 for the legalization of marijuana. You have to wonder if these were all the same people. In any event, a “red” state voted “blue” on these policy issues. Whether it is meaningful beyond these two issues – that’s another question. There was no Trump on this election, and no Biden. Could it be that the existence of these two controversial politician distorts what would otherwise be very different voting patterns? I don’t know.

There were two other “red” states where there were governor races. In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Beshear won a second term. I find him an impressive fellow (I watched his victory speech last night), and clearly even the red blue-grass state can vote blue on an ad hominum basis. In Mississippi, on the other hand, there was some hope that the Democratic contender could upset the Republican incumbent. No such luck there.

Virginia is the other state of interest – where the State Senate remained under Democratic control, and the State General Assembly flipped out of Republican control into Democratic control. The state Republicans had hoped, and maybe expected, that both houses would wind up Republican and Governor Youngkin, who has had some success in his first two years and who may have presidential ambitions, was hoping that a friendly legislature would help his program, which includes a 15 week abortion ban, would go forward. No such luck.

Not that the Democratic victory in Virginia was overwhelming. It looks like there will only be a one seat majority in each house. I decided to do a little calculating. I took the 40 member State Senate, where there will be 21 Democrats and (it appears) 19 Republicans. I looked at the results in each of the 40 districts – some were very close, and some where won by up to 80-20 differences. I counted the overall state vote and (if my numbers were correct), I came up with 1,196,000 Democratic votes and 1,167,000 Republican votes. Boy, that’s close, and mirrors the 21-19 party split. But there were three Senate districts where the Democrats didn’t run a candidate – so the vote there was all Republican. Had the Democrats run a candidate, the Democratic vote would have been somewhat higher – based on contested very red districts, maybe a total of 30,000 Democratic votes would be added to the list. All I was doing was seeing if I could foretell the likely winner of the 2024 Presidential vote in this purple state. Not surprisingly, I can’t.

OK, let’s switch to Saddam Hussein and Israel. I just finished reading a book called Saddam’s Secrets, by Major General Georges Sada of the Iraqi Army. Sada was a high ranking officer in the Iraqi army, and someone who was often in close contact with Saddam, but also an outsider, because he is an Assyrian Christian, not a Muslim, and not a Baath Party member. He has been a very dedicated patriot of his country, a talented pilot trained both in the USSR and the United States, and he wrote a scathing book about Saddam, published in 2006. I have no reason to doubt that he is speaking honestly – he is well respected and the books highly regarded.

His career is very interesting, and his telling of Saddam’s upbringing and reign is frightening, but one thing he said, I had not heard before (obviously, it isn’t a secret today, since the book has been out over 15 years). He said that when Iraq entered Kuwait (which Sada said had basically to do with oil resources, shipping networks, and supply and pricing), Saddam did not expect the United States or the rest of the west (which Saddam thought weak) to do anything about it. When it became clear that George H.W. Bush was putting together a coalition to force Iraq out of Kuwait, that Saddam decided that if the West attacked, he was going to respond by having an all-out attack on Israel. He wasn’t even going to tell Jordan that he was about to use their airspace to fly over (illegal to do without permission); he was just going to do it. And he got his military to prepare for the invasion, until he was talked out of it by Sada and others.

One more thing, I didn’t know. And one more thing that puts an emphasis on the fragility of Israel’s security. There was a lot of interest in this book and the proposed attack on Israel only takes up about two pages, but it certainly is memorable. Does anyone else remember hearing about this over the past 30 years?

On Sunday, I wrote about the first half of my trip to the Soviet Union 50 years ago. Today, I complete that journey. If you didn’t read Sunday’s post, you may want to start there.

We took an overnight train to Moscow. I don’t remember much about it. It was, of course, dark the entire trip, so I didn’t get to see anything and I remember regretting that. But I don’t remember if we sat up in our seats all night, or if we were able to lie down or lie back. I don’t remember the food on the train. I remember nothing.

I do recall that one of the men on the trip had in the past worked for Sol Hurok. Remember him? He was a promoter of entertainment shows and one of the first to bring Soviet performers to the United States. And my companion had been to Moscow several times before (but never to Leningrad). I remember he was met at the station by a woman with whom he had worked when he was a Hurok representative, who first greeted him warmly and the began balling him out – for not having a hat on. I don’t know if any of us Americans had hats on, but as I looked around from then on, I don’t think that I had seen any Russian men on the streets with a bare head.

I do have a lot of memories about Soviet Moscow. Let me just list some of them.

1. It was very cold out, but the streets were still filled with pedestrians, and all of them seemed well dressed for the winter. Heavy and attractive coats, both cloth and fur, scarves, and of course fur hats. The men’s hats were the round ones, with chin straps on the bottom. If you expected to see poor, struggling people in rag-tag outfits, you’d be disappointed. Every one looked OK.
2. Even though it was cold, there were a lot of food vendors on the streets. Vareniki and blini, to be sure, but more surprisingly, ice cream, and people in their winter outfits walking around eating ice cream.
3. There was plenty of this type of street food, but the restaurants, including the hotel restaurant, were very limited in what they had to serve, and the food lacked taste as well. On the other hand, there were various ethnic restaurants that catered to tourists only, and they had more than enough food. I remember we went to a Georgian restaurant as a group – the food and liquor were plentiful, and everyone who worked there wanted you to have a really good time.
4. When you went into a restaurant on a theater, etc., you had to take off your winter outerwear and check it in the cloak room. This wasn’t an option – it was a requirement. All the buildings in winter Moscow and Leningrad were steam heated, and if it was too cold outside, it was always much too hot inside, so it was fine to get rid of your hat and coat. But, it sure slowed things down. After the performance, or meal, you had to stand in very long lines to retrieve your coats and hats. There was no tipping of course, and the cloak room workers were always older, perhaps pensioners.
5. Clearly, everyone had a job. That included the older (and generally heavy) women who swept each street clean before the crack of dawn. Of course, the crack of dawn was about 9 a.m.
6. We went to a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet. The building was quite elegant. I wish a remember what we saw, but I don’t. I know it was a classic ballet, but I don’t know which one.
7. We also went to the Moscow Circus. This surprised me for three reasons. First, because it was a one-ring circus, and the venue was completely round. Secondly, because there really were dancing bears. Third, because there was a lengthy clown skit in the middle (between the animal and acrobatic acts), where the setting was a remote village with happy villagers, and a clergyman entered the village to try to convince the villagers to attend church. This led to a massive display of anti-religious feelings among the villagers, who chased the priest out of town. I was amazed, because it was so blatant, and so upside down from what you would see the America.
8. Red Square at night, with St. Basil’s multi-onion domed cathedral was beautiful with a light snow cover. Lenin’s tomb on the right as you looked at the cathedral and the big department store (GUM) on the left. Behind you, at the other end of Red Square was/is an attractive red brick building that housed the historical museum of the USSR. It featured much about Lenin’s life, and it had an exhibit of pre-Communist Russia, which made fun of – among other things – early 20th century advertisements (from newspapers and magazines) which were said to show the corruption of capitalism; again, topsy turvy.
9. It was in Red Square that I met Edward Okepnik (I do remember his name; I think I do). Edward was a Jewish medical student. This was the time when being outwardly Jewish in the Soviet Union was dangerous, if you were at all associated with the Refuseniks, or with pro-Zionist feelings. None of this seemed to bother Edward – he introduced himself to me (and my dentist friend and her daughter) at night in Red Square by marking in the snow a Jewish star and the words, in Hebrew letters, “am Yisroel chai”, which he quickly rubbed out. He then offered to be my guide the next day, and I accepted.
10. Edward told me that one day the Jews would be allowed to leave and that, somehow, his sister had already left and was a nurse in Los Angeles. He told me about Jewish life in Moscow, and then did some (to me) really stupid things, but they all worked out fine. I had told him that, at home, I thought I could generally tell who was Jewish and who wasn’t, but that in Moscow, I had no clue. He told me he could tell, and he started pointing out people, and going up to them and asking them if they were Jewish. I didn’t know what to think, but he was always right. Everyone said “da”. When we went into a restaurant to get some lunch, Edward even asked the Jewish maitre d’.
11. Edward also took me to the offices of Yiddish Homeland – the official Soviet Jewish publication, although I told him that didn’t seem wise. We went to the office of the editor and he told the editor’s secretary that he was with a guest from the United States who reads each edition of this magazine (I think it was published in Russian and in English for export) cover to cover and thought it a remarkable publication. I was sure we would be thrown in jail, but no, we had a short, but civil, meeting with an elderly man, who presumably ran the place. I also remember Edward pointing out to me a 5 or 6 story building in Dzerzhinsky Square and telling me that if I went to the top floor, I would see Siberia. I looked at him puzzled and he told me that was because it was the home of the KGB. A little Soviet humor. What has happened to Edward since, I don’t know.
12. I remember visiting the Tretyakov Gallery, which I liked more than the Hermitage. I have always liked 19th century Russian realistic art, and this gallery was filled with it. And of course, we visited the limited parts of the Kremlin that were open to tourists. I also remember the parks, which were filled with winter activities, including outside swimming pools, again heated by steam heat, so that smoke arose from them – not only was the water apparently warm enough to swim in, but the pool decks too were warmed by teh steam heat coming up from the vents in the ground.
13. I remember going into a small grocery to buy some souvenirs – I bought a tube of toothpaste, a bar of soap, a box of toothpicks – that may be it. I was adding up the cost as I went along, and I thought the clerk had overcharged me and asked her if her addition was correct. Sure, she told me, and pulled out her abacus from below the counter, did some very fast tricks with the strings and beads, and said “See”? I said I saw. Who knows?
14. I also went into a bakery. That was a big surprise. It looked just like a Jewish bakery here. The same rye and pumpernickel breads, the same strudels and other pastries. I thought I was home. You didn’t see a bakery like this anywhere else in Europe.
15. And speaking of Europe, I had expected my trip to the USSR to be a trip to Europe. But no, it wasn’t. Leningrad is sui generis – nothing like any other place – certainly not like your typical European city; it’s too new and too majestic. And Moscow? Not Europe either. Certainly not America. A third world – a type of place I had not been to before. Lacking European charm, and featuring a heaviness and feeling of power that reminded me then, for some reason, more of Chicago than of London or Vienna.
16. Finally, the plane ride back. We took off from the Moscow airport on Pan American once again. We were served dinner. After ten or twelve days of Soviet food, I must say that this was the tastiest dinner I have ever had.

For some time, as you may know, I have been hoping that Biden bows out of the 2024 presidential race in favor of a younger candidate. I still have that hope, and perhaps the recent showing of his general current unpopularity will push him in that direction. According to this morning’s New York Times, a recent NYT/Siena College poll shows him trailing Donald Trump among likely voters in 5 of the 6 battleground states.

Many of us find this hard to believe since Donald Trump is Donald Trump and nobody in their right mind could possibly vote for him, but there you have it. They say they will.

There are those who say that the election is a year away and that presidents in general at this time during their terms are unpopular. They cite Barack Obama, who apparently had similar popularity ratings to Biden’s at this point in his first term. But it’s hard to rely on that, especially since certain groups necessary for a Democratic win (at least in the battleground states) are falling short – Blacks, Hispanics, young voters and so forth.

When asked why they are not going to vote for Biden, many cite his age and supposed mental decline. I don’t sense a mental decline, but you can’t deny his age. As I have often said, he is a week older than I am, and there is no way that I think I would be able to function as president for the next 5 years.

They also cite the economy, which is a mystery, to be sure, considering the numbers, which – as they say – do not lie. But many people say that they are in worse shape now than when Biden came into office. This, I assume, is the result of inflation, which influences their thinking more than the job and wage growth, the low unemployment, the rise in manufacturing and the other things we have been seeing. And, the fact that inflation is now down to a 3.5% or so level doesn’t change the perception. After all, the price base is now higher (and won’t be declining materially), and there are still surges in specific sectors, like some grocery products. Put this together with the always visible gas prices and with the high interest rates that the Fed has created in its fight against inflation, as well as the continual Republican talking points, and you can see how some people can be fooled all of the time.

I have also often said that the one thing that Trump has said that I tend to agree with is that the “American people are stupid”. This is not, however, to be taken as an assertion that Americans are more stupid than other peoples. No, not at all. They just are not any smarter.

There are many reasons Trump should never again be president. First, his record as president over his four year term. Second, his being indicted on 91 felony accounts, and the legal attacks on his businesses. But the Republicans will nominate him, and even though he is 78, he does give the impression of being able to go on for a long time.

That brings me to the late Madeleine Albright, someone who always impressed me in her various high level public positions (UN Representative, Secretary of State). I just finished reading her lasts book Fascism: a Warning, published in 2018, two years into the Trump presidency. I’d give this book at A, and suggest you look at it. It is not a difficult read.

Albright acknowledges that the word “fascism” is not always defined in the same way. She defines it basically as being a system of government led by a strong man, who brooks no opposition, is willing to use violence when he feels appropriate, who has disregard for existing governmental institutions, and who relies on nationalist feelings and demeaning of outsiders. And, to be a successful strong man, you need one other characteristic. You need charisma, or at least sufficient charisma to attract wide spread support.

While Albright has chapters devoted to 20th century fascists, such as Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, she also has chapters dealing with those who have come to power in the 21st century. She talks of Putin, and Erdogan, and Orban, and Kaczynski. She talks of Chavez and Madura. She even identifies the three generation leadership of North Korea (Communist though it is) as fascist. (For some reason, she does not discuss China at all, nor any Arab or Iranian leaders in the Middle East – only so much space, I guess).

And, yes, she talk about Donald Trump.

None of these fascist or semi-fascist leaders are clones of each other, but clearly and publicly none of them are sui generis, and all show where they have been influenced by others of the same strain. Even Trump, of course, seems to glorify strong fascistic leaders, whether it be Putin or the Kims or Erdogan or Orban.

Showing how Trump fits into her definition of a fascist (or as he was called by New School Professor Finchelstein in the recent JBS panel show, a fascist-wannabe), she shows how the American public can be attracted to him, to his confidence, to his supposed nationalism, to his strong man persona, just as Germans were attracted to Hitler, Italians to Mussolini, Turks to Erdogan and Hungarians to Orban. And how, in each case, even if the first years seem encouraging to their supporters, things inevitably turn out bad.

Will the United States re-elect a fascist-wannabe over an serious minded, but perceived mentally declining, 82 year old? I would like to think we would never have the chance to find out.

You know, there isn’t any index on this blog. So, in my 350 or so posts to date, I really don’t know what I have said and what I have left unsaid. When I started, I assumed that I would concentrate mostly on events from my past. But it hasn’t turned out that way, has it? The present has stolen the thunder from the past and most of what I have been writing has been material which could come from an amateur op-ed writer. In fact, I guess that is what I have become for better or for worse.

Today, for some reason, though, I thought about my first trip to Russia in the early 1970s. Maybe I have written about it here before? I don’t recall, but if I did and you are alert enough to remember, you can fact check me against myself and tell me how I did.

I was a young lawyer in my first year or two at my first law firm – that means that this must have been 1972 or 1973 or so. The firm was small then, so I knew everyone who wandered the hall (note: the hall, not the halls), including the fellow who sold us our insurance policies. We were chatting and he told me that he had just come from another of his clients, a travel agency that specialized in trips behind the Iron Curtain (such trips being then a big deal), and that they had a trip going to Leningrad and Moscow in ten days, and they were holding a “fire sale” because it was far from filled. It was being sponsored, he said, by the Georgetown University Alumni, but that wasn’t important and that they were offering the ten day (?) trip for $250 all included. My phone tells me that $250 in 1972 is about $1800 today – but I will tell you that $250 in 1972 sounded like a bargain basement price for a trip to the Soviet Union. All I needed to do, he said, was to get the agency my money, and get myself a visa. But I was told that Soviet visas usually took about six weeks, so it would probably be impossible.
I decided to give it a try. I don’t remember the details, but I remember I had to contact an expediter, and lo and behold, two days or so before the trip was to start, I had in hand a very fancy visa for the Soviet Union.

I was very excited. I had studied Russian in college and knew quite a bit about the country, but had never been there. I didn’t know what to expect from my tour. All I knew is that I better pack for cold weather – I didn’t say this above, but it was January.

As our group got on the Pan American plane at Dulles, one thing was clear: no one seemed to have gone to Georgetown. So, my fear of being an outsider faded away. I sat on the plane next to a young (as I recall – maybe my age, maybe a bit older) African American woman who was a recent graduate of the Howard University Dental School, and who came across this trip much as I did at the last minute, and decided to take it with her very cute 7 year old daughter.

We flew to Leningrad. Leningrad looked cold and gray, the airport and the first area we bused through looked quite unpleasant, with tall Soviet-style (surprise?) apartment blocks. But then – all of a sudden – we were in a fairly land. Still cold and gray, but beautiful buildings, water everywhere you turned. Magical.

We stayed a big tourist hotel – the Moskva. On each floor, there was a concierge lady who sat at a desk near the elevators. Like a house mother, I guess, she knew who came in and who went out. We had been warned in advance that hotel rooms were all bugged, and that we should be careful what we said inside them. This lady added to our paranoia.

On the one hand. On the other, she made you feel secure, because she had everything under control. Until one night, she didn’t and I had someone banging on my door, yelling and yelling at me in Russian that I couldn’t understand at all. I assume it was someone drunk and at the wrong room (or maybe in the wrong hotel), but it was frightening, and it made me realize that our lady was more for show than for action.

I also saw that everyone couldn’t come into our hotel. You had to be a foreigner or have special permission. There was one group of Russians who did seem to have special permission. They were a group of very attractive young women who were allowed in and allowed to hang around the bar. It became clear to us that they were there to hang around with us, and that our hanging around would them would be a first class mistake. So they were ignored.

Because it was winter and cold in Leningrad, it wasn’t ideal touring weather. In addition, because Leningrad is pretty far north, the sun came up about 10 a.m., and it began to get dark by about 3 p.m. A short day, to be sure, and even during the day, there was a heavy cloud cover while we were there.
On the first morning, I got up early, and decided to take a walk. Seemed safe enough. I really didn’t know where to go, and I decided to stick near the water. Not one of the canals of the city, but the Neva, the river, and I wandered into an area that was filled with small buildings, seeming more like warehouses or workshops or something. It was dark, there were no people, I was a bit concerned that I was being stupid, but it was all so interesting. It was very cold, the ground was snow covered. I felt like I was in Russia.

Then all of a sudden I heard people talking and laughing. I got concerned. Who were they? What would they do if they saw me? It sounded like a large group of people.

All of a sudden I saw them. They ran in front of me, from my left to my right. They paid to attention to me. Had other things on their minds. They were all dressed in bathing suits, men and women, all ages, all running, many laughing. Then, all was quiet again.

This was the last sight I expected to see that morning. I decided to try to see where they ran to. I left the road I was on (all small roads) and found that they had run up a road that led, on the next block, to a small wooden building with a simple sign that said: “Winter Swimming Club”. Welcome to Russia.

Interestingly, I remember little about what we saw in Leningrad. I remember we went to the Hermitage, but little about the art. The Hermitage is in what had been the tsarist Winter Palace, and there is a lot of history on that spot, and I found that interesting. I remember seeing the statue of Peter the Great as the sun set mid-afternoon. I remember walking on the Nevsky Prospekt, the main shopping street of Leningrad, going into a beautiful building that had been (and now again is) the Kazan Cathedral, which had been repurposed as a Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. It was a fancy museum and, albeit in derogatory terms, taught about religion in the pre-Bolshevik country. And I remember the part of the museum that dealt with Judaism. The Judaism exhibit, itself interesting with a lot of exhibits, was not called an exhibit of the Jewish religion, but rather (and unlike anything else in the building) an exhibit of the Cult of Judaism.

Nearby on Nevsky Prospekt, I went into a very large (no, a very, very, very large) bookstore (it too is still there), and I was surprised at the variety and the amount of available reading material. I did my part – bought a few small books showing the progress of Communist Russia and a Victory Calendar and of course a print of Lenin – and went on my way.

My other memory of Leningrad is visiting Vasilevsky Island, of course. But what struck me on this trip was not the high steepled church or the other famous landmark buildings, but the inside of the Museum of Anthropology (I think that’s what it is called) and the preserved woolly mammoths, which are still there on display.

What I don’t remember is the food – that’s because it was so bad. Meat you couldn’t chew, the only vegetables being cabbage and potatoes. Good tea. Pepsi Cola. Paper napkins at each restaurant torn in quarters – you only got one quarter. Maybe that’s all you needed.

And I only remember one restaurant visit. There was a single woman on the trip, about my age, who also could speak pigeon Russian, and she and I (her name was Joan) went off on our own several times, leaving the group and missing out on some of the official tours. We did that one day for lunch in Leningrad and stepped into a restaurant on one of the canals. As in most European restaurants in those days, if there were two of you, and there was a table for four with two others sitting at the table, you would be seated there, as well. No privacy of tables in the Soviet Union.

So we were shown to a table that had a woman in her 30s or so, and her young son – maybe he was 9 or 10. After a while, we started talking, and the woman became nervous, rather than excited, when she learned that we were American and not from England, which she had first assumed. Why became clear when her son said “My father is in America!” Thinking he was joking, I asked what he was doing there. He then told us that he was in a submarine going up and down the American coast!! With that, and with no words, his mother grabbed the boy, and they were out of that restaurant as quick as can be.

After four days or so in Leningrad, we got on an overnight train to Moscow.

To be continued.

I am preparing a presentation about Christopher Columbus, which I need to complete by the end of the month. Yesterday, I was reading about his death, which happened in the city of Valladolid. I am happy that he died in Valladolid, because I always thought it a weird name for a Spanish city (still do) and I never really knew how to pronounce it. I guess I never cared enough, but now I know that it is pronounced Vei-ya-do-LEED. Once you know, it seems obvious.

He was only 54. Did a lot in a few years. Also wrote a lot, as you probably know. If he were alive today, he might have a blog “Chrisis54.blog”. Possible.

Speaking of Spain, do you know that 500,000 people were killed in the Spanish Civil War? Quite a large number, right? But remember that over 600,000 were killed during our Civil War, and about 700,000 died in the Battle of Stalingrad (USSR v Nazi Germany in WWII) alone. And of course, close to 100,000,000 in World War II (yes, you read that right).

In fact, if you go to the wonderfully titled Wikipedia article “List of Anthropogenic Disasters by Death Toll” (and by the way, my computer does not recognize “anthropogenic’ as a word), you will find listed 116 wars in which more than 100,000 people were killed. You can break this down and find that in over 20 of these wars, more than 100,000 civilians were killed. You will also find that over 170,000,000 people have been killed by major outbreaks of disease or famines that humans have caused or failed to stop when they could have. And you will find a listing of over 4,000,000 people in China alone who have died by human caused floods.

Gee, Art, you say. You must be in a good mood this morning.

Well, I go through this listing for a number of reasons. First, to imagine the large scale horrors that human beings have brought on each other throughout recorded history. Second, to put today’s tragedies into perspective. For every death we see today is no more tragic than each of the deaths, say, in Chinese floods or Russian famines, or Spanish Civil Wars, or European wars of aggression. Each of these deaths is an equal tragedy – whoever they are, wherever they lived, whenever they were killed. And of course, I am talking about deaths here; I am not talking about injuries, or dislocations, or property destruction, or anything else. We could repeat these numbers in other categories (if we had the data, which we might) and see the numbers grow so much higher. For example, the United Nations estimates that there are over 115,000,000 today worldwide, who have been displaced by war.

Yes, war is an awful thing. And every war is started by human beings, and carried on by human beings. This includes, of course, the war today in Gaza.

Will there ever be a time with no wars being fought? My guess is that that time will never come. But there will always be striving for such a time. Remember, in Vietnam, where you had to destroy a village in order to save it? Remember World War I, the war to end all wars? And I am sure there were other wars where such sentiments have been expressed. Even today, Prime Minister Netanyahu says that the Gaza war is to ensure that an invasion such as occurred on October 7 will never occur again. And that the way to do this is to obliterate Hamas, whatever the cost.

Well, guess what, Prime Minister Netanyahu. You may win this war, but your ultimate goal will not be met. Hamas will sprout up again, maybe as Hamas, maybe under a different name, and will continue to threaten Israel as long as Israel exists. And to ensure its continued existence, Israel will be required to respond, and each response will polarize the world – for or against the Israelis, and for or against the Jews. And each time Israel has to defend itself, it will in effect lose each war that it wins.

And of course Israel, by ever increasing West Bank settlement for the most part, simply attracts more of these wars. If Israel wants the land to be Jewish “from the river to the sea”, it invites the Arabs to want the land to be Muslim “from the river to the sea”. The only way to stop this from continuing recurrence is to set boundaries for Israel and say “no further” – and that of course may mean telling some settlers to leave the land they have settled, or to tell them (per some sort of agreement) that they can stay, but that they will be governed by Palestinians, not by Israelis.

We have seen, more and more over the years, how impossible this is. So what is to be done?

Years ago (decades ago), we went to a lecture given by the late George Washington University professor Howard Sachar, a scholar of modern Jewish history. The subject was, of course, the Palestinian-Israeli problem. He boldly declared that the two populations were unable to solved the problem on their own, and that they would never be, and that there would be a never ending cycle of violence, time and time again.

He said, and I really disagreed with him at the time, although now I think he was probably 100% right, that the solution would have to be designed by parties other than the two parties to the dispute. That the United States, Europe, the Muslim middle east – all would have to work together to come up with a solution to the problem and then would have to inform the parties : This is the solution and this is what each of you have to do. Full stop.

Now, can this be done? Probably not. But maybe. And it is time to give it a try. Let’s have conversations regarding solutions, leaving Israel and the Palestinians outside of those talks. Maybe we can actually get somewhere.

Yesterday – Thursday, November 2

(1) So I’m driving home from deepest Fairfax County. I come east on Highway 50 (Arlington Road) and decide to go north on the George Washington Parkway and come over Route 120 to Chain Bridge. But I forget that I had read that part of the GW Parkway was under reconstruction. Innocently, I start to drive north-ish, toward 120. It’s rush hour, the traffic is fairly heavy, but moving. All of a sudden, I see some equipment, and then I see a sign that says “divided road ahead”, and I have to make a choice. It seems I can take the left lane or the right lane – the left lane being normally coming south, but I assume changed at rush hour to accommodate traffic heading for McLean. I take the left lane (I am already in that lane) and am separated from the other lane going north by a barrier – in fact the three open lanes on the Parkway are each separated from each other.

I continue, moving at a respectable Parkway speed of about 40 mph sufficiently behind the car in front of me. Slowly, I begin to realize something. I realize I am stuck in this lane – how will I get off. My plan, of course, is to get off the Parkway and cross Chain Bridge into the District. But how am I going to get there? I can’t cross into the other lane; I see no way out. I think of Sartre (as I often do): No Exit.

And then I see it. The exit to Route 120. But I can’t get there. I know what that means – I have to go all the way to the end of the Parkway, at the Beltway. The Beltway at rush hour.

Let me end it this way. I was driving home from the Virginia Jewish Community Center. When I had driven to the JCC from home about two or three hours earlier, the trip took 32 minutes. My return trip took one hour and 35 minutes. I drove an extra 14 miles.

Was I supposed to know not to get into the left lane? Did I miss a sign? I really don’t think so.

(2) Why was I at the Virginia JCC? In my role with the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington, I was meeting with a funeral director from Texas who is thinking of opening (actually more than thinking – he seems intent on opening) a funeral parlor in Northern Virginia serving the Jewish community. I liked him, and it appears that he has two very nice funeral homes in Dallas and Houston. I think he would be a fine addition to the local community here.

Now, there are five funeral homes in the DC area serving the approximately 300,000 Jews in the area. Two of these funeral homes are in Virginia (both, it happens, in Alexandria), two in Maryland (one in Silver Spring and one in Rockville), and one in the District of Columbia.

So let’s say a sixth funeral home serving the Jewish community is opened. Who will be its customers? Its customers will be families who would otherwise use one of the five existing funeral homes. If it has any degree of. success, it will hurt the financial stability of one or more of the others (each of which provides very good service). There won’t be any other customers – in other words, more people aren’t going to die just because there’s another funeral home.

I know I don’t have a vote – but should I be for it? Or against it?

(3) The presenter this morning at my breakfast group was a retired physician – very well respected, very bright, very well spoken. His topic was the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, 18 months later. And he presented a dire picture, bemoaning the poor women living in the “pro-life” states, wondering why legislators are allowed to practice medicine without a license, and bemoaning the impossible positions that so many doctors now find themselves in, or potentially in.

He talked about the doctors leaving the conservative states, the students choosing their medical schools and internships elsewhere, and the hospitals which are finding it hard to hire. Then he added something that I hadn’t thought of. He said that he had been talking to someone at M.D. Anderson in Houston, who told him that oncologists in Texas were afraid to treat women of child bearing age who have cancer. The fear is that they might get pregnant during their treatment, and they might be in a condition where having a child would be dangerous to their health, or perhaps their condition would threaten the viability of the fetus.

This was a brand new thought for me. But, by coincidence, next week Edie and I are having supper with an oncologist from Anderson. He is coming to town for an NIH conference, and staying in Bethesda. The last time we saw him was at his wedding. Probably over 20 years ago. He is the son of people we know. Now, we will have something to talk to him about.

(4) Last night, we attended a benefit concert sponsored by the Jewish Federation, and several synagogues (including ours), to raise funds for Israel relief. The concert was promoted as having 15 local cantors, and one local Jewish choir. But – in fact – there were only 14 cantors. False advertising it was. And – what was interesting – is that 10 of the 14 cantors were women. Maybe that’s the way it is generally now in the non-Orthodox world? Beautiful voices – every one of them.

Some of you know that on Thursday mornings, I meet (sometimes in person and sometimes on Zoom) with about 30 old Jewish men (also known as friends), one of whom gives a 40 minute or so presentation on a subject of their choice, followed by a question, answer and comment period. A number of people ask me: So what kind of things do you talk about?

I thought today would be a good day to answer that question. Why? Because I can do it without thinking, and some days you just don’t want to have to think.

So, I will open my Daily Planner, and see how many of these I remember. I don’t take notes, so sometimes my memory fails. But for most, after the session, either a textual copy or a Power Point presentation is shared, so I can always go back and look at what was said.

Of course, I am not at every session – conflicts, vacations, etc. But here is a list of those which I attended in 2023.

Here goes.

1. Martin Luther and the Jews.
2. Ranked Choice Voting
3. Perfection/Imperfection
4. Felix Frankfurter
5. Stuyvesant Town
6. Mushrooms
7. Trip to Ukraine
8. Evil
9. Chicago
10. Israel and its Supreme Court
11. Joseph Heinrich
12. Do plants feel?
13. Joseph McCarthy and the Planned City of Greenbelt
14. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean
15. J.P. Morgan
16. Artificial Intelligence
17. “The Angel of Death”
18. The Jewish Music of Leonard Bernstein
19. Saul Alinsky
20. Ethical Wills
21. Jewish Humor
22. National Service
23. Jewish Farmers
24. Holocaust Reparations
25. Generation Z
26. The Capital Jewish Museum (field trip)
27. The 1973 War
28. The Dobbs Decision and the Downfall of Roe v Wade.

Now you have it. Want info on any of these? Let me know, and if there is Power Point that I have, and if the speaker says “sure”, I am happy to share it. But only if.

To start with a diversion: how can it already be November? 26 more days, and Art will no longer be 80.

Last night, once again, we turned on Jewish Broadcasting Service and watched another panel discussion. This time, the subject was fascism, and the panel members were Professors Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University, Helmut Walser Smith of Vanderbilt, and Federico Finchelstein of the New School of Social Research, each professors of history specializing in fascist regimes. Ben-Ghiat is a specialist in Italian fascism, although her fairly recent book Strong Men is more broad. Smith is a specialist in German fascism, and Finchelstein, originally from Argentina, specializes in Latin American fascism.

Where to start……

The general questions under discussion were, first, the proper definition of fascism, and second – are we moving in that direction today?

One of the panelists said that fascism has four elements – Violence, Racism, Lies, and Dictatorship. Violence not the way other governments look at violence – a means to an end – but violence for the sake of violence itself, showing strength, machismo, and solidarity. Racism, because you need someone to hate in order to bring everyone else together. Lies – not the kind of lies that most politicians tell – but big lies, lies that can change history. And lies that the fascist politicians actually believe to be the truth, or would become the truth under a fascist regime. Dictatorship – the ultimate, and the only way to move history forward and for an indefinite period of time. He stated that these four elements must come together to create a fascist government.

And how does a country become fascist? There can some sort of a coup (military or otherwise), or there can simply be an election. Some fascists may pose as populists, representatives and defenders of the people, and use populism to gain power through a democratic election. But once elected, their true colors show.

European fascism developed after the First World War. The war had torn society apart, turned everything upside down. New countries, new ideas of ethnic or national separatism replacing large, multi-ethnic empires, men returned from the war used to violence, trained in weaponry, uncertainty how to move forward, looking for a new beginning, ready to create a new society from chaos, a society which would avoid more chaos.

Mussolini was the first – and he did something that was totally foreign to prewar European thinking. Mussolini was originally, and for a while remained, a socialist. And Italy was filled with socialists. But socialism was a universalist, cosmopolitan ideology, out of sync with the emphasis on ethnicity which was one of the main points of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points. So, Mussolini took socialism and combined it with Wilsonian nationalism, a first. And Italian socialists, in the new post-war world, abandoned universalism and swung over to Mussolini and Italian socialism, which morphed into fascism. Hitler, who came to power later than Mussolini, wasn’t an old style socialist. Yet, following Mussolini, he called his movement National Socialism (Nazi), demonstrating the combination born in Italy. Take one national group, and make it one for all and all for one. Certainly, the “socialism” part never resembled traditional European socialism, just as the “national” part was limited to status at birth, never to a cosmopolitan nationalism.

Each of the panelists thought that the Trump phenomenon was reminiscent of the early twentieth century fascists. But they thought similarly about Netanyahu and a number of other current world leaders, including Berlusconi in Italy, Orban in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil.

It is easy to place Trump into the mainstream of fascism, using the four elements described above. But one of the panelists said that Trump wasn’t really a fascist – yet – but that he was fascist wannabe, and who knows what another term in office would do. (There were some brief references to whether or not the United States was too strong and diverse to really become a fascist country, or whether – on the other hand – democracy here was weak enough that it would be possible.)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat was the most outspoken of the three panelists. In addition to the above, she talked about how fascist leaders tend to think that they will be the leader forever, or that they are starting a forever movement. That they all have a degree of charisma. That often they are crooks and need to take power to keep themselves out of jail – the lawless controlling the laws, is the way she put it. She talked about Trump and Netanyahu as two contemparies in this position, and mentioned several others. She talked about how fascism in many places started as decentralized, localized movements – local militias, groups taking over individual communities or states, etc. She talked about Steve Bannon’s political approach of starting locally and moving upward as being emblematic of this. She talked about how fascist leaders need to portray the enemies of the leader as representing pure evil, enemies of the people. Dissent cannot be tolerated.

She also said that she thought that the United States might be considered to be in particular danger because we weren’t a parliamentary country, where a number of parties create a coalition to help ensure that a fascist party’s influence would be limited (I wondered if this were true). She thought that because we had only two parties, and because one of those parties was no longer a democratic party, our situation was subject to rapid change if an election went the wrong way and we would find that we lacked sufficient protection within the government. On the other hand, Finchelstein said the opposite – he thought that because we were such a politically divided country, even a fascist-wannabe president could not succeed in exerting sufficient control to turn the country against democracy in the long run. But he thought that charismatic fascist leaders do become very popular. For example, he believes that in Germany, if you had had an election at virtually any time before 1941, Hitler would have easily won that election.

So……is Donald Trump, or others in the MAGA movement, fascist wannabes? Trump is 78 years old, so he can’t see himself in control for long (or can he?), but are there others ready to fly the MAGA flag and lead another “thousand year Reich”?

What is clear is that we all must be careful. Very careful.

(It was hard to select a topic for today – what about the absolute danger of our new House Speaker? what about Israeli overreach and the influence on American antisemitism? Or its influence on the 2024 elections? Many topics. Including: Was Chicken Little right, and did she just not speak out at the right time?)

I hate to keep writing about the same things, but for now…….

There are a lot of folks bashing Israel today, bashing Israel for its current tactics in Gaza, bashing Israel for its general treatment of neighboring Arabs since the 1967 Six Day War, and bashing Israel for its very existence. As to the first two of these three items, I may agree or disagree with particular commentators. As to the third, I have no tolerance. I refuse to give any respect to, or credence to other thoughts of, those who claim Israel is an illegitimate state. Full stop.

I do not base this on religious claims, or ethnic claims. I have little tolerance for those, too. I base it on hard facts.

These are those hard facts.

1. The land of what now comprises Israel was part of the Ottoman Empire, dismantled at the end of World War I.
2. The League of Nations gave the land comprising Israel and the Palestinian Territories to Great Britain under a Mandate, which included respect to the then current mixed population of Jews and Arabs, and to those Jews coming into the land under the Balfour Letter.
3. During the British Mandate period, there were times when relations between Jews and Arabs was quite bad.
4. After World War II, Britain determined to end its Mandate, and the United Nations proposed a partition of the land between Arabs and Jews, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs did not.
5. The Jews then declared the State of Israel, which the United Nations blessed and seven Arab countries invaded.
6. After the fighting ended in 1948, the Arab nations refused to sign a peace treaty or recognize Israel. The United Nations did recognize the State.
7. During the 1948 war, many Arabs left the land of Israel, assuming they would return after an Arab victory, or were forced out of Israel during the war. When the war ended, many Arabs remained in Israel and today, 75 years later, comprise about 20% of the Israel’s population.
8. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, approximately 700,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries (most going to Israel), and there were virtually no Jews left in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia or Yemen. Talk about ethnic cleansing.
9. Only Jordan and Egypt eventually signed treaties with Israel and recognized the State. The remainder of the neighboring Arab countries still have not done so, and have maintained “a state of war” with Israel for 75 years.
10. Israel took over territory, including Gaza which had been governed by Egypt, after the 1967 War, and Egypt refused to take it back when it took back Sinai in the 1970s. In 2005, Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza, although it retained some control over entry to Gaza for security reasons; Egypt also had control over entry to Gaza.
11. In 2007, a radical group, Hamas, founded by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and supported by Iran, took control of Gaza, maintaining through its charter the right to attack Jews and destroy the illegitimate state of Israel, creating a Palestine from the Sea (the Mediterranean) to the River (the Jordan).
12. After 2007, there has been sporadic fighting between Israel and Hamas/Gaza, but nothing the like the attack of October 7, which was an invasion of sovereign Israeli territory, and which included the murder of approximately 1400 Israelis (including children and the elderly) in a brutal, inhumane fashion, and the taking over between 200 and 250 Israelis as hostages.
13. The ultimate fact is, had the Arab states accepted Israel in accordance with the United Nations resolutions in 1948, the entire Middle East could have remained at peace, and both Jews and Arabs could have prospered. Again…..full stop.

Any one who wants to criticize Israel after accepting these facts I will accept and, as I said, either agree with or disagree with on specific points. Any one who doesn’t accept these facts is, as Samuel Goldwyn once remarked about someone else, not even worth ignoring. And of course sometimes cannot be ignored. But what they say is worth nothing. At all.

Did you read the article on the relationship between Kanye West and Adidas on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times? If not, I suggest you do, and read it through, although it runs about five pages. Why? Because I think it shows a lot of what’s wrong with the world today.

Now, I guess Kanye West is or was some sort of a rap star or something. From this, you can assume that I have never (consciously at least) listened to any of his music. And don’t want to. But I guess is must be good at what he does, because Wikipedia says that he has sold 160,000,000 records (not sure what a “record” is these days) and won 24 Grammys.

He also is in the shoe business, having had some sort of an arrangement with Adidas for the last ten years. Now, I don’t know really what this means, except that his name on a large number of shoe designs has made Adidas Adidas (or at least allowed Adidas to remain Adidas) and – along with his music royalties – has made Kanye West a billionaire.

He is also someone who suffers from mental illness. And it appears his mental illness – perhaps a serious form of a bi-polar condition – along with his ego, and presumably emboldened by his success, has made him a rather dangerous figure, subject to personal outbursts and acts of irrational behavior, but also someone expressing strong antisemitic feelings (he is a Holocaust denier) and and someone engaged in an apparent bromance with Adolf Hitler, and another with Donald Trump.

It’s all too much, for sure. But one thing it has not seemed to have done is slow down his sale of shoes. And it hasn’t hurt Adidas.

You can go to azlyrics.com, and look at the lyrics to hundreds of his songs. I sampled a few, and they are not the kind of lyrics I would recommend for people under or over 18. They promote all the wrong things, they use the infamous “n-word” over and over, but they must hit a chord in a lot of people. Shouldn’t society be discouraging this, rather than encouraging it?

And, as the article points out, Adidas is a German company, and West (I guess his name is now Ye, which is hardly even a syllable, much less a name, IMOH) confronts them with swastika imagines, antisemitism, and Holocaust denial (all of which is illegal in Germany)” and they turn aside and sing “My God, how the money rolls in”.

“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Remember that? Remember when Twitter suspended him for posting a picture of a swastika? Did you see where the Times says West told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a picture of Hitler daily?

We are clearly facing an antisemitism problem in the United States and the western world today. As I have said before, I think this is mainly a result of Israel bashing by those who believe that the entire Middle East is God-ordained Muslim country, and by those who have strong anti-colonial feelings and believe that Israel is a European colonial outpost in someone else’s land. Were it not for this, we would still be facing traditional antisemitism to be sure, but not to the extent we see it now. By letting uber influences like Kanye West double down on antisemitic tropes and images, we only make the problem worse.

A few days ago, when I wrote a post about campus antisemitism, I talked about the influence of anti-colonial thinking on “progressive” or “left wing” academics, and how this has now spilled over to feelings about Israel, forming the basis of antisemitism activities on campuses, along with expected Muslim anti-Israel feelings and how, as Jews generally oppose this overall, the anti-Israel feelings morph into general antisemitism. Some thought I was overplaying the anti-colonial aspect of the problem. I was gratified, therefore, because when Edie and I watched David Harris interview Charles Asher Small, the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, on TV last night, on the subject of campus antisemitism, Dr. Small immediately talked about anti-colonialism studies at major universities.

He then added something that I know nothing about and said that ISGAP was soon to issue a major piece on the subject: large amounts of money coming in (some illegally) from Arab countries – he cited Qatar particularly – to American Universities to set up programs to study anti-colonialism and other subjects, controlling much of the curriculum development in ways to lean to anti-Israel support. We will see what this is when it is released.

Where did we see the interview? On JBS, the Jewish Broadcasting Service, which you receive in Washington on FIOS on channel 798. Worth looking at their schedule and picking what interests you.

Until tomorrow….where I will try to pick a more uplifting subject.

It’s been a tough month for everyone, and the lawn decorations which you see all around town (skeletons, vampires, witches, graveyards, and all the rest) seem appropriate for reasons other than the original one.
In addition to all of the news out of the Middle East, six people that I have known have passed away in October – including two high school classmates, the mother of Hannah’s best high school friend, a member of my Thursday morning breakfast group and – only a few days ago – a long time member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Funeral Practice Committee of Greater Washington, Inc, an organization of which for the last six years I have been the president. He died very unexpectedly of a presumed heart attack – I had spoken with him about a week before he died, and he was fine.

Thursday night, as Edie and I sat around watching still more depressing news on the MSNBC, I was scrolling through Facebook, and saw an ad pop up telling me that there was going to be a one-night only concert of Edith Piaf music at the Strathmore Music Center. “Maybe we should go?”, I asked, and got a answer that surprised me (since we haven’t gone to this type of event within recent memory): “Sure”. So, spur of the moment, I bought two tickets.

For those who have never been to Strathmore, it is located in North Bethesda on Rockville Pike, about six miles from our house. It’s a large facility, built years ago now (but I still consider it new) by Montgomery County MD, which was trying to provide an alternative to the downtown DC venues. The main auditorium, which has very good acoustics, seats about 2,000 (to be precise, 1976 – I wonder how they came up with that number).

Because a Piaf music concert was primarily just that – music – and because the acoustics would not be a problem (and because I am – as they say in older English novels – parsimonious), I bought the cheapest seats possible. Which of course does not mean that they were cheap. It just means the we were in the fourth and last row in the second balcony of the theater, truly the stratosphere. Of course there was no one behind us, and our row was relatively sparsely settled (I am not sure why, since the house generally looked pretty much filled), and I must say – we could not have had better seats.

Now Edith Piaf is someone we both identify with. Edie, for obvious reasons, and me, because Edith Piaf was known as the Little Sparrow, and my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Wrobel, Polish for sparrow. OK, it’s a stretch, I know. But there you go.

We didn’t really know what to expect. I hadn’t looked at anything about the program. It turned out it was basically a one woman show, with four backup musicians – a piano, a base, a percussionist (drums, xylophone and more) and an accordionist. The singer and central figure on stage was a French vocalist named Nathalie Lermitte, and we had never heard of her (nor, I imagine, had any – or many – of you).

Lermitte is 10 years older than Piaf is when she died. The performance went on for about two hours (with an intermission), so was quite vocally demanding, and it was really wonderful. The backup musicians were just right (there was one terrific accordion solo), and Lermitte’s voice is very rich, very powerful, and – to my ear – pitch perfect. It’s a richer voice than Piaf’s was, and may lack a bit of Piaf’s drama, but so what? She was not an impersonator; she was a performer. And she performed perfectly.

All the well known Piaf songs were there, there were some historic visuals on a screen projected behind the stage, there was a tribute to Piaf’s one time boy friend, prize fighter Marcel Cerdan, who died in a commercial airplane crash in 1949 at a young age, and there was minimal dialogue – and virtually all of that in French.

The audience lapped it up. I am certain that it was filled with French speakers, and the crowd’s version of La Vie en Rose (with the original words projected on the screen) also seemed pretty much pitch perfect.

And Padam, Padam, Padam? Watch or listen to the Piaf version. Here is the URL: I hope it works. https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-trp-001&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=trp&p=edith+piaf+padam&type=Y143_F163_201897_123021#id=0&vid=b385fd7869f11bef94e1fcf3772c2f76&action=click

Now back to my regularly scheduled activities……

It’s hard to know what book to read next when you have a house filled with books you have never read, and sometimes your choices surprise even you.

A few days ago, I finished reading a Penguin called “The Archeology of Palestine”, written in the late 1940s by William Albright. Albright was both a biblical scholar and an archeologist, teaching for years at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and leading digs in Palestine/Israel. He was deeply involved in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls (found in 1947), and in the relationship between history as told in the Bible (Hebrew Bible and New Testament) and as found on the ground. This included, to some extent, the validation of some Biblical passages, and the relationship between ancient Judaism and pre-existing Canaanite religions.

The book was very well written and, even though somewhat dated, was well worth reading. He covered a lot of ground in a few hundred pages. For example – what you needed in order to mount an archeological expedition when they were first organized in the 19th century, everything from clothes, to tools, to personnel, to permissions, to money, and where you went to obtain them. Then there were the political issues – how much easier it was for European and American archeologists to undertake digs during the period prior to the times that countries began to become independent and you could no longer rely on easy approvals from colonial powers and had to deal with indigenous governments, and their demands. He did not state this in a way to favor the good old days…..just stating the facts.

Then he dealt with the problems stemming from expeditions before the appropriate tools were available for careful excavation and preservation of materials. And the problems with dating and identifying sites. It was interesting to me how many sites in the 19th and early 20th centuries were misidentified and incorrectly dated, and how this didn’t seem to Albright to detract from the skill of the archeologists involved, or the value of their work. It was all just part of a long learning curve, and to me seem like the work of many scientists – just because a conclusion is reversed after subsequent experiments, don’t degrade the original conclusion. Had it not been made, the reversal may never have been made.

As to dating, until carbon dating was developed in the 1920s, there was no way to really date many items found. And when you are looking at, say, pottery, sometimes the only way to determine appropriate dates is to look for similar pottery elsewhere where a date is more certain. For example, he said that archeology in Egypt was more advanced than in Palestine, and because there was so much (friendly and unfriendly) contact between the two, that you often found pottery in Palestine that you could date, because you knew that similar pottery had been found and dated in Egypt. He also talked about languages, and how they could be used as dating tools.

When I finished reading “The Archeology of Palestine”, I had to decide on my next book. I’m not finished reading it yet – in fact I am only about a quarter through the book, but there was enough of interest to mention it now.

The book is called “Both/And”, and it is the memoir of Huma Abedin, who has always interested me. Why? I knew she worked closely with Hillary Clinton, I knew (I thought I knew) that she was from Saudi Arabia, and I certainly knew she was married to the infamous Congressman Anthony Wiener, whose pictures of his private parts created quite a scandal. I have seen her subsequent to that on MSNBC (or it is CNN, or both?) and she has always impressed me. Such a strange combination of things. Who is she anyway?

Let me sketch what I have learned so far. Her parents were from India and were Muslim; both came from prominent families. They were both very well educated, thanks to her grandparents, who were also well educated for their time, especially her grandmothers, who were very progressive for Muslim women in India. Reaching back on their family tree, her ancestors on both sides came to India from the Middle East, from the Arabian peninsula and from Iraq. This was a surprise to me, because I had never connected Arabian Muslims so closely with Indian Muslims before, and I hadn’t thought much about Indian Muslims at all.

After the partition of India in 1948, educated Muslim families in India had a choice to make. Do they stay in India, their homeland, or do they move to Pakistan, a new Muslim country? Both her father’s and her mother’s parents decided to stay in India, perhaps the better choice, but a difficult one to make and to live with.

Coincidentally, both her mother and her father won Fulbright scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania and that is where they met. After a few years, they married and – when her father got an academic position at Western Michigan University – they moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was in Kalamazoo that Huma was born. I did not know that – I thought she was from Saudi Arabia.

Why did I think that? I thought that because, when Huma was two years old, her father got a one year position in Jedda, and the family moved there for a short stay, which lengthened into a much, much longer stay. Huma grew up and went to school in Jedda, and didn’t leave until after high school graduation. Reading about her time in Saudi Arabia was fascinating. Her father and, eventually, her mother both had teaching jobs. Her father’s field as a sociologist was studying the treatment of minority populations in countries around the world, and he founded an institute headquartered in Jedda and London. Her father was also ill, having suffered from chronic kidney disease, which seemed to increase his determination to make the most of every minute.

Life in Saudi Arabia for a Muslim family clearly had its routines and limitations but, like everything else, they became the norm. But the Abedin family didn’t spend 12 months a year in Saudi Arabia; they traveled the world. Every year, apparently, her father would take the family to some exotic place for most of the summer – it might be England, it might be Japan, it might be somewhere in Asia. In addition, every year, they returned to the United States for a period of time, visiting relatives. (By the way, among non-Saudis in Jedda, this was not unusual – she tells of all of her friends who lived half of their lives in a very traditional and restricted Muslim society, and half playing on beaches in bikinis – they found the mix perfectly normal, apparently.)

Huma’s father died when she was a senior in high school. This was very difficult for the family but her mother insisted that Huma not give up her desire to attend college in the United States (her two older siblings had pursued their education in England), and brought her to this country to visit colleges. They didn’t visit many because Huma immediately decided she wanted to be in Washington and that George Washington University was her place. And so it was to be.

Her college time (a devout Muslim, she didn’t drink, didn’t date, and studied hard) was interesting, as it contrasted to so many of her classmates and, when she was a junior, she was selected for an internship in the White House working for someone in Hillary Clinton’s office.

She started as an assistant to an assistant to an assistant, but – presumably by competence – worked her way up to being the advance person for First Lady Clinton’s various speaking engagement around the world, a remarkable accomplishment for someone young, who had grown up thousands of miles away in a totally different society.

More to come

In my 4 college years and 3 law school years, I never heard of any anti-Jewish activity on campus. That was from 1960 through 1967.

Something else happened in 1967. Israel defeated its neighbors in a 6 day war, and found itself in control of the East Jerusalem and the West Bank (formerly controlled by Jordan), Golan Heights (formerly part of Syria), Sinai (formerly part of Egypt), and Gaza (formerly controlled by Egypt).

If you had told anyone back then that 56 years later, Israel would still have virtual control over all that territory (aside from Sinai, returned to Egypt in 1973), and that American campuses would be wracked by antisemitism, you would been hard put to find many who agreed with you. But that is where we are today.

There are many reasons for this, including many (mainly but not exclusively Muslims) who believed from the beginning that Israel was an illegitimate country, an outpost of European colonialism, approved by a United Nations with no authority to do approve. They believe that the entirety of Israel is Muslim land, as it has largely been for about 1500 years. To them, Europe simply had no right divide up the Middle East as it did, and that – in this post colonial era – only Israel remains as a vestige of colonialism.

And in general, scholarship has been treating colonialism as an evil past practice. As a way for “developed” countries to effectively enslave indigenous populations, extracting their wealth, their potential and their self-respect. In most colonial empires, there have been colonial (i. e., white) populations who have moved into the colonized territory, creating wealthy, elite societies at the expense of native populations.

Of course, Israel is not a traditional colonial enterprise for one obvious reason – it is self governing and not an outpost of a more powerful country. In addition, Israeli citizens are in a different position from colonial ex-pat populations in that they have no citizenship other than Israeli.

But to the extent Israel is a society of immigrants, living in a land that been populated by others for centuries, one can argue that at least it may be considered quasi-colonialist, particularly that the part of the population that is not from somewhere else does not treat the more indigenous society with true equality. In fact, Israel’s Arab and Jewish societies are by and large two separate societies, living in a reality of different levels of rights and privileges.

And I am talking about Israel proper. In the lands added in1967, the situation is worse. East Jerusalem has been added to Israel proper for “historic” reasons, the Golan has been annexed for security reasons, and large parts of the West Bank have been effectively annexed to accommodate approximately 600,000 Israelis who have moved there.

For scholars and students who are steeped in the study of colonialism, the many parallels cannot be ignored. And the apprent lack of recognition of this by Israelis, who are reputed to be quite intelligent, is hard for these anti-colonialists to swallow.

When you add to this volatile mix, tens of millions of Muslims who have ingrown belief in the rightfulness of their religion and religious destiny and their collective rights to Ottoman lands lost in World War I, when you provoke them further when Israelis claim that the land was divinely given to the Jews in perpetuity, and when you see that Israeli leadership wants either to continue the status quo, or change it in ways to Arab disadvantage, the volatility is multiplied, which many scholars deem not only inevitable but appropriate.

Add to that the isolating and overcrowded situation of Gaza and the multiplication itself is subject to more multiplication.

For these reasons, many on campuses have sympathy with the Arabs who lack their conception of freedom to breathe and advance. You then have the added, and of course obvious, but not reallymentioned yet in this post that most Israelis are Jewish, that they are supported by those nations with colonial pasts, and that they are supported by Jews world wide, and the anti-Israel feels quickly and easily become anti-Jewish.

This is not to say that there wasn’t antisemitism before in Arab countries. Of course there was. But on a different level, and without the support of so many others, across the world, who now are saying Israel=Colonialism=Jews.

Untangling this will take some work. And bombing and moving troops into Gaza with apparent disregard for its population is probably not the way.

As a Jew not living in Israel, I really don’t want to be collateral damage. That hasn’t happened, for sure, but there increasing number of antisemitic incidents being reported around the world (and admittedly, more outside of this country than inside it) is worrisome. And I am not one usually worried about such things.

And that brings me to the old discussion of what is antisemitism after all. I know that there is now a somewhat universally accepted definition of antisemitism, drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the IHRA gives eleven examples of antisemitism, of which seven which refer to the State of Israel. These include (1) comparing Israeli actions to Nazi actions, (2) claiming that Israel is a racist “endeavor”, and (3) holding all Jews responsible for the actions of Israel. There has been a lot of pressure for the adoption of the IHRA definition by national governments, and it has been adopted by about a dozen countries, including Israel and many European countries, but not yet by the United States as I understand it. The advocates of this definition tend to favor equating the bashing of Israel or Israeli policy with antisemitism.

The definition itself is rather straightforward: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Nothing there about Israel – but the interpretation of the definition, both by its creators and its advocates bring in Israel and, to me, confuse the issue. If Israel bashing is to be considered antisemitic, shouldn’t this have been clearly stated in the definition, rather than handled so obliquely? As it is, I think it creates problems, rather than promoting solutions. Let me explain….

There are at least three types of critics of Israel. First, there are those who criticize Israel without meaning to criticize Jews in general. After all, there are Jews who criticize Israel, and there are certainly those who might criticize the actions of Israel without holding any animosities towards Jews who live outside of Israel, or those who live inside of Israel but are not supporting or implementing governmental polices. Then, there are those who criticize Israeli policies and have an animus towards Israeli citizens or more specifically Jewish Israeli citizens, but do not have any animus towards Jews who live in the United States, or elsewhere outside of Israel. And finally, of course, there are those who equate Israel and Israelis with Jews in general and hate them both.

The IHRA definition does not distinguish between these groups, just as it does not distinguish between those who absolutely hate Jews, and those who find Jews a bit distasteful and would just as soon not be intimate with them, but who tolerate them by and large.

Look at the wording of this definition: “….a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews….” What does that even mean? It reminds me more of Justice Potter Stewart’s comment about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” And that is just not very helpful.

But the problem goes beyond the IHRA’s definition and examples. The State of Israel, by and large, wants to identify itself with all Jews of the world. It has legislated itself to be a “Jewish” nation, and, through the “right of return” allows all Jews (with very few exceptions) to live and become citizens of the State. And so many Jews around the world give large amounts of money to Israeli institutions, have relatives in Israel, and travel to and from Israel, that they seem to sometimes equate themselves with Israel. When they talk about the actions of the state of Israel, for example, they talk about “we” do this or that, not that “they” are doing this or that.

So, like everything else, it becomes complicated. And it becomes especially complicated when there is a war going on. Or, even when there is no war, when the conversation goes to the relationship between Israel and the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip or the Golan Heights.

And, as we see more and more, this complexity spills over into, or sometimes seems centered in, American institutions of higher learning. Here, much more than anywhere else in this country, Jews and Israel are equated.

How should we react to this? What should we do to relax the tension that exists in so many places, not just within student bodies, but within faculty groups as well?

Ah……we have a long (and important) post already and…….as opposed to my usual situation….I think I know about what I will write tomorrow.

See you then.

OK, this format is bit irregular, but so is the world today

Israel

I read that Hamas fighters who came into Israel were told they would get $10,000 and an apartment if they brought back and Israeli hostage, and that they were supposed to concentrate on young people. Is this true?

In any event, why doesn’t Hamas say “We will give you our 200+ hostages back, if you stop fighting us?” (Or “if you stop fighting us” is not enough, why don’t they come up with something that would be?) It would certainly put pressure on Israel to get back their citizens. But Hamas does not say this – they would rather hold on to the hostages and let Gaza be completely bulldozed, and Gazans deprived of life, safety, possessions and everything else. They would rather dribble out hostages 2 at a time, in hope that this will forestall the ground war.

And why don’t so many Arab (and other) supporters of Hamas (or of Palestinian rights in general) condemn the October 7 invasion, even if they support the aims of the Palestinians for a future Gaza?

And why doesn’t Israel work even harder to avoid civilian deaths in Gaza? Why does Israel tell people to move south, and then bomb the south?

And how does Egypt get away with not opening the Rafah border crossing? Seriously!

And if Hamas leadership is comfortable in Qatar and Beirut, what is Israel planning to do about that?

And if the hostages are being held in tunnels under Gaza City, how does Israel plan to get them out before Hamas kills them?

And are the tunnels so deep or so well protected that Israel bombs don’t get to them?

And why can’t the hospitals be evacuated to safety with the agreement of all parties?

I just have so many questions. These don’t even touch the surface.

And when does Israel reach the limit of what it can do to civilians in Gaza?????

House of Representatives

Mike Johnson? Election denier, pro-life absolutist, homophobe, opponent of medical marijuana, against allowing Muslim immigrants into the country, supporter of Christian prayer in public schools, admirer of Donald Trump. Just what this country needs.

How long will he last as the candidate for Speaker? Who will be next?

Donald Trump

Here are some of the things Donald has promised in term #2, according to a posting from the Meidas Touch Network. Each has a date and citation.

1. He will pardon and apologize to all those convicted in connection with Jan 6 at Capitol
2. Anyone convicted of a drug crime will get death penalty
3. He will arrest all homeless people, round them up and relocate them in tent cities where they can be rehabilitated
4. All federal employees will have to take a patriot test and, if they refuse or fail it, they will be fired.
5. He will build ten “freedom cities” around the country free of any government regulation
6. He will appoint federal judges who are like Clarence Thomas.
7. If he doesn’t like the way a DA is doing their job, he will remove them from office. (May)
8. He will fire all college accreditation boards, since they are dominated by Marxists and lunatics.
9. He will take over university endowments of any school dominated by Marxists or discriminating against white people
10. General Milley will be prosecuted for treason by DOJ
11. He will end the Ukraine War 24 hours after his inauguration by cutting off all Ukraine aid if they don’t reach immediate agreement with Russia
12. Principals of schools will be elected every year by parents (June)
13. He will remove Comcast, MSNBC and NBC from the pubic airwaves and have them investigated for treason by DOJ (Sep)
14. He will appoint Michael Flynn to a top position
15. He will end all diversity training programs in civilian agencies and the military
16. He will bring back the originator of the child separation program to run ICE
17. If he finds fraud in an election, he will override the Constitution
18. He will eliminate absentee and absentee voting.
19. He will form a commission to determine if vaccines cause autism.
20. He will end birthright citizenship by executive order.
21. He will fire 40,000 career civil servants and replace them with people loyal to him.
22. He will set up a commission to study whether marijuana causes mass shootings
23. He will abolish the Department of Education
24. He will ban transgender people from the military
25. He will bring back God into the public school system
26. He will impose a 10% tariff on all goods brought into the United States
27. He will restore the ban on immigrants from certain Muslim countries.

I have a college friend who is now a Libertarian (don’t ask) in Florida, and active in Libertarian groups. He sometimes asks for help for his unusual activities, and I help when I can. Yesterday, he said that he wanted to rewrite the words to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General” to reflect a Libertarian leader. I suggested the following (and if any of you have more ideas, pass them on to me, and I will forward them – unless he is reading this now):

“I am a very, very modern Libertarian
I’m positive I’m negative and also quite contrarian,

I criticize the government in manners quite formidable,

I trash with glee the programs that I think are just goodridable.”

Does anybody but me (now and again) listen to Gilbert and Sullivan these days? My guess is that no one does, and G&S Societies seem to have pretty much disappeared, but I find Gilbert to be perhaps the most clever librettist in the history of the world, and his satirical approach to world politics and world society may be just what we need today.

“Modern Major General” is from “Pirates of Penzance” – the story of poor Frederick who has been mistakenly bound to a pirate king until his 21st birthday (his nursemaid thought she was apprenticing him to a “pilot”), and whose future is further garbled by the question of when someone born on February 29 celebrates his 21st.

We went to Penzance (it’s a port in English Cornwall) years ago, and didn’t see any pirates. But it turns out that Penzance has quite a pirate history. Here is the way I remember the story (not from our visit, but from reading various things); I can’t vouch for it being 100% true (or even 10%) true, but I like the story so much that I am going to repeat it with the request that you repeat it over and over again, the goal being to turn it into historic truth whether or not it ever happened. Here goes:

Portugal, at the insistence of Spain, expels its Jews in 1497. Many go to Holland, the one place in Europe that they have a modicum of religious freedom. Holland, a powerful seafaring nation at the time, colonizes portions of northern Brazil, and some Portuguese/Dutch Jews settle there, especially in and around Recife.

The Portuguese capture the entire of Brazil, and the Dutch are out. The coming of the Portuguese means the coming of the Inquisition, so most Jews leave (think of those who were blown off course to New Amsterdam in 1654), but some stay having converted to Christianity, at least outwardly.

Brazil is the largest source of diamonds for Europe in those days. The Portuguese/Dutch/Christian Jews who stayed in Brazil include very wealthy families involved in the diamond and the shipping industries. Their job is to ship diamonds back to Portugal.

But, in those days, shipping was very risky, and sometimes the winds or the ocean currents blew the ships off course. When the ships were blown too far north, the “pirates” of Penzance would sometimes seize the ships and their valuable cargo and off-load it in Penzance. When they did, they would first stash the diamonds in secret places (such as Jamaica Inn, not far from Cornwall and still there – think Daphne Du Maurier), and then transport them to London (which is where the Portuguese/English/Christian Jewish financiers lived, who made money off this whole business, and who then further transported the diamonds (perhaps legally; this I don’t remember) back to Holland, where the diamond cutters of Antwerp went to work to turn them into jewels, to be distributed throughout Central Europe through a network of financial advisors to kings and counts, often known as Court Jews.

End of story. Fact? Fiction? You tell me.

At any rate, back to Gilbert and Sullivan (who, as you know, didn’t really get along at all) and who had very different visions for their futures.

What other shows do I recommend? “The Mikado” which makes fun of Japan in a way that one of my daughters disapproves of, but which I find very cute. “The Gondoliers”, showing what happens when Spanish “royalty” comes to Venice. “H.M.S. Pinafore” – the Lord High Admiral who has never been to sea. “Trial by Jury”. “Ruddigore”.

Want to know what else I like? “I have a little list.”

By the way, think what Gilbert and Sullivan could do to Donald Trump and the Republican Party. They could do an entire play based on Trump’s performance yesterday, when he told his supporters not to vote, just to watch others vote, because he has plenty of votes, and where he said that Victor Orban (Hungary’s semi-fascist leader) was a great, strong leader of Turkey. Can you imagine what would happen if Biden and his dementia had said these things?

One more thing to think about. Do you think that Recife has changed at all since 1654? Look at this photo.

We have owned a condo in Montgomery County for a number of years and we are finally selling it this week. The settlement day is Wednesday, but we were given the option of signing everything virtually beforehand, so that we won’t have to travel to the title company. So, that happened today.

It would have been so much simpler to go to the title company. I think we each had to sign our name and initials about 30 times (yes, sometimes I exaggerate, but not this time) to various documents. Except that I had to sign about 90 times. You ask “why?” The answer is that, as the documents scrolled by you would see a yellow arrow that said “sign”, and next to it a pink colored space over where the signature was to go on the document. I assumed (none of this fancy stuff existed for the Yale Law class of 1967) that all I had to do was to click on “sign”, but in fact I had to click on the pink space. All “sign” did was get me to the next signing place on the next document, so I went through all 30 documents twice before I realized I was signing documents I had already signed, but that in fact I hadn’t signed any of them.

As the documents flashed on the screen, we were in a video conference with a Notary Public. The Notary Public was in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and we were in Washington, DC, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Now, I am used to notaries being in the same room, and the fact that we weren’t even in the same state (although we were electronically being connected through a data center in, who knows, maybe Bangladesh) was strange in my mind.

Now, you ask, how did the Notary know that I was I? (I think that is proper English, even though it doesn’t seem to be, and maybe shouldn’t be) Well, the answer, I thought, is that we had to upload our IDs (in our case drivers’ licenses which have our photo on them). When you upload them you have to make sure that your computer’s camera has focused on them clearly enough so that everything can be read. So I asked our Notary (who went by the name of Ryan) whether the photo was clear enough. His response: “I don’t know – we don’t see the photos.” Figure that out.

The system (called pandadoc) also asks us five questions as it verifies us. They are multiple choice questions, and sort of easy (i.e., which zip code have you been associated with?), but Edie did almost fail. One of the questions they asked me was to pick an address I had an association with and (somehow) that included my office address from 1991-1993. I picked it and passed. They asked Edie the same question, and this address (1 Thomas Circle) was one of her choices, as well. She answered “none of the above” (that was an option on each question), because she never had a connection with 1 Thomas Circle. Wrong! They also asked her if she was related to any of the following Hessels, giving her a bunch of strange names (the oddest was Herschel Hessel, I think), including Lindsey Hessel. We do have a cousin Lindsey Hessel in Portland OR, so that was Edie’s answer. Wrong again! The correct answer was “none of the above”. Shows the limits of AI, I guess.

At any rate, we were finally allowed to push a button that said “Finish”. The buyer will have to do the same thing, and then hopefully that will be that.

So that is how we started this week. We ended last week with two very busy days: first, an exploratory drive to see fall colors through Frederick MD to Thurmont (where we had lunch at the Kountry Kitchen – “just like home, but we do the dishes”), and on unexplored roads leading to two covered bridges (one in Utica MD, and one in unnamed territory, as far as we can see – we just followed the signs that pointed us to “Covered Bridges” – we also followed a sign that led (we thought) to “Old Main Streets”, but all we saw were fields and hills). We saw two interesting and new (to us) towns, Graceham (the biggest building, an old Moravian Church – do I know any Moravians – with nice old and modest wooden houses and a minimum of Halloween decorations, and the other Woodsboro, where everyone looked like they lived better than the average American. We then saw a newer town and that wasn’t at all interesting, called Eldersburg, which apparently has 30,000 people and no core, like a suburb in search of a city to attach itself to. From Eldersburg, we found our way to Route 97/Georgia Avenue, and made our way home.

Rural Maryland is beautiful almost anywhere you go, but its beauty is marred in most places by a general adoration for Donald Trump and extreme hatred for Joe Biden. I remember two weeks ago, in Boonsboro, which is west of our house, and not north like Thurmont and Eldersburg, seeing a sign that said “Biden”, rather than “F–k Biden” on a front lawn. I was so excited, I went around the block to see it again, and saw that I had missed the bottom and that the sign actually said “Biden Sucks”. But that was child play to what we saw this weekend. This weekend we saw at least six houses which had both large Trump signs and Confederate flags.

This might remind you of that old saying that everything in the United States outside of big cities in Alabama. And I think this might be an exaggeration (but not by a lot), but there is something else that is the opposite. [What is the opposite of an exaggeration, anyway? English language, you have failed me.]

This is because I have just finished reading Jeanne Theoharis’ book “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks”, which traces her brave and somewhat interesting life from Montgomery, Alabama, where she refused to give up her seat on the bus, to Detroit, Michigan, where she lived most of the rest of her life. It became clear to her that racism was different, perhaps, but just as bad in Detroit as it was in Montgomery, much worse than you might imagine it to have been. It reminded me of another book I read several years ago entitled “Arc of Justice” by Kevin Boyle, also about Detroit’s racism, when a black family tried to move into a white neighborhood. I know Detroit has good Greek food, but after reading these two books, you will have to work hard to prove to me that it isn’t a racist cesspool. (On Friday, I joined a group having breakfast with our Councilman Matt Frumin. Matt is from Detroit (or better a suburb thereof) and we had a lot of questions for him. But I didn’t get a chance to ask him that one I wanted to ask: Is Detroit a racist cesspool?).

There was more to our weekend. Grandson Izzy turned a very happy 3 and, while we didn’t have a traditional birthday party for him with kids or entertainment – I leave that to his parents – we did have a Mickey Mouse cake and dinner for his immediate family and three of OUR friends. Izzy was really happy with his Spiderman pillow, his large model Metro bus, his big tractor which you can take apart and screw together again, and his soccer ball. And really ecstatic when everyone sang happy birthday to him – he blew out the candles before we got beyond “Happy”. He is the youngest in his pre-school class, and we figure he finally felt he caught up with everyone else.

Other than that? We saw Edie’s old college friends, Little Red and the Renegades, at El Golfo Restaurant Saturday night. A lot of fun and good food. This was our third time at El Golfo – it’s a traditional Tex-Mex restaurant that calls itself Mexican, with good food and even better margaritas.

And last night (Sunday), we saw Aviva Kempner’s new documentary, “Pocketful of Miracles”, about her mother’s hiding in plain sight through the Holocaust and her uncle’s time in Auschwitz among other places – both had several narrow escapes and were separated during the war, finding each other in Berlin in 1945. Their pre-war and wartime story of spellbinding, and their experiences in America, where they lived for more than two thirds of their lives (her uncle, for example, was only 17 when he came here, having been living in prison camps when he was 15 and 16), which were as successful as their early years were painful. The film itself is extraordinary, blending perfectly their recorded testimonies to the Shoah Foundation (Stephen Spielberg’s project), with perfectly curated Holocaust footage, family photographs and video footage, and even excerpts from well known feature films. A “must” whenever you can get to see it.

[Edie hasn’t read this one yet – but boy will she think it is too long]

I am trying to sort out my thoughts on the pickle Israel finds itself in today. As you read this, keep in mind that this is a moving target. Tomorrow, I might look at this differently. But today……

I think you have to start with two completely unbelievable things. First, that Hamas has been working for a year or two on a plan to break through the Israeli border with the presumed object to kill and to capture, as well as to create havoc. Second, that Israel’s touted security capacity failed so completely, as did the strength of its border installations, which were expected to keep out any and all ground excursions. Of course, these things are tied together: if Israel had discovered what Hamas had been doing, and if the border wall had performed as promised, it didn’t make any difference what Hamas was planning, or what Hamas had started to plan. The scheme would have been nipped in the bud. And if Israel’s security system missed this, what else may they have missed?

Obviously, you can’t turn the clock back. But you can plan for the future, and I am sure this is being and will be done. But how deep was this failure? And what will it take for the security apparatus to regain the expertise and the confidence of the nation? And can it happen at all with the current coalition government in place, a government that has divided the country as much as this government has. Sure, the war has brought the country back together, they say, but this is only for one reason: to win the war. Once that has been accomplished, the problems leading to the uprisings will not only return to the fore, but will be exacerbated. These are all problems for the future, but the future is not that far off, and the problems are very serious.

Now, the war itself. So much has already been said about the brutality of the “troops” (if indeed they were troops, as opposed to youngsters who just decided to join the fun) and the brutality of the killings and the kidnappings. I don’t have to repeat any of that. But there is a related point: all of those who are commenting on this brutality as unheard of, as inhuman, with the possible exception of the ISIS beheadings, which were done as much for theater as for anything else. The killings in Israel were not done for theater; they were done out of hatred. But are they really that unique? In addition to ISIS, am I wrong in saying that this type of brutality has been seen in many parts of central and western Africa, where Islamic mobs have attacked villages, beheading and killing anyone they could find, and certainly have attacked schools, where tens (hundreds?) of young children have been kidnapped, some returned, and some not?

People say that these activities are in violation of the rules of war. I beg to differ. They may be in violation of the rules of war as propagated by western nations, but the rules of war as propagated by virulent Islamic jihadists everywhere have not been violated here. They have been upheld. And we need to be cognizant of that in working with, or against, fundamentalist Islamic groups. Including those groups headquartered in the West Bank, in Lebanon and elsewhere. Nothing may be beyond them.

That then leads to what is an appropriate Israeli response. There are a number of things to be considered. First, there are the 210 or so Israelis who have been kidnapped – how many are still held, who is holding them, and where they are held, I don’t know. Two have, for some reason, been released. And apparently, the prisoners fall into categories: those who are not Israeli citizens, those who hold dual nationalities, and those who hold only Israeli citizenship. They stand to be treated differently – and prospective “deals” to release hostages possibly will not include those hostages who hold only Israeli citizenship, whom Hamas refers to as opposition soldiers, regardless of age, disability, or health. Here again, there may be difficult decisions ahead – I don’t envy the Israelis who have to make them.

And then there are the Gaza Palestinians themselves. Over 2 million of them and, yes, half are under 18. They may not live in a prison camp, as their supporters like to say, but they live under very circumscribed conditions, where they need to be reliant on themselves, since so little comes in from the outside world and their ability to visit the outside world is so limited. And, as we see, they are reliant on their enemy, Israel, for certain basic supplies and utility flows.

Who are they? Who is innocent and who is not? What about their schools which teach hatred of Jews, and promise that one day the Zionists will be chased out of the territory they now control, and everything will be handed back to the Palestinians? And what about the mullahs, who teach the same things? And do the majority of the adult Palestinians really want peace? I assume they do, but at what cost? Do they want peace living next to the Zionists, or do they want peace after they eliminate the Zionists. It obviously makes a difference.

At any rate, the question is how the Israelis should treat the Gaza Palestinians? Israel wants to eliminate Hamas and says it will do anything possible to eliminate the threat from Hamas. Is that even possible? And what are the limits of what Israel should do? They obviously are dropping unbelievable numbers of bombs on Gaza. They continue to threaten a land invasion. They have asked those in the north of Gaza to move to the south. Most, but far from all, have done so, but resources are fast dwindling. A hospital in Gaza City was struck and hundreds (maybe not the 500 Hamas claims, but hundreds) were killed. It appears that this tragedy was not the fault of Israel, but came from a Palestinian rocket that misfired. Well and good, but nobody in the Arab world believes it – and won’t for a long time.

What should Israel do about the half of Gaza that is under 18? If Israeli air strikes or ground forces wind up causing the death of young Gazans, is that really any different than the Gazans causing the death of young Israelis? If young Gazans die because insufficient food, water and power are allowed into their country, is that equally an Israeli problem?

Remember (as I have said before), the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States totally firebombed Tokyo, and Dresden and Berlin. As Germans or Japanese were starving during the last stages of the war, no one even suggested that the United States or its allies send food into Berlin or Hamburg to feed the Nazis or their starving children. There was a war and it had to be won.

And when you are in a war, you don’t want to be shown as weak, or as nice guys. You want to be seen as more powerful than you are, and – if truth be told, and why not? – you want to be seen as ruthless and a bit crazy.

And then there is the question of publicity. For true believers (either side), the publicity simply confirms your feelings. For others, those who may be influenced, Israel and the Palestinians have differing strategies. For Israel, it’s all about the individual – the young children just starting out, the hard working mothers and fathers who are struggling to make a life for themselves and their children, the elders, who have already been through so much. We know, or can find out, so much about each individual who has been murdered or kidnapped, just by tapping on our phones. On the Palestinian side, it is the opposite. We know that buildings have been leveled, that hundreds of thousands are now homeless, and so forth, but we know nothing about the individual families. Would it make a difference if we did? Perhaps.

One day the war will be over. Tomorrow, probably not. But a month from tomorrow, perhaps. Then the region will be changed. There will be no going back. Two peoples will have to learn to live together, and will have to agree to give up some of their belief of their “God-given rights” to live in this land, and cooperate more closely with other. If not, the next peace will simply again be a waiting time before the next war. How will they be able to do this?

Final note: Edie tells me my blog posts are too long. I am sure she is correct (as usual). But, I am afraid to say, they are what they are.

By the way, I have not proofed this post. Why? Because it is so, so long.

So long….

The people who comment on C-Span’s morning call-in shows share two characteristics: (1) clearly they are all a bit crazy (and some are totally out of their minds) and (2) they vote. Those who call in as Republicans share an additional characteristic: they are scared to death of Democrats because of what they believe is an open border. This is their most consistent point.

They are convinced that there are no controls at the border for many reasons: (1) The Democrats won’t complete Trump’s magic border wall, (2) the Democrats want to change the face of America, (3) among those coming into the country are murderers, rapists and terrorists, (4) those coming into the country are given benefits beyond those of citizens, (5) once they come into the country, they simply “disappear” and avoid legal proceedings, (6) they are coming into the country to vote Democratic, (7) we cannot afford to take care of them, and so forth.

It doesn’t make any difference as to whether there are factual arguments against any of these points. It doesn’t make any difference that this country’s immigration laws are out of date, but are still our laws. What’s happening in the rest of the world to cause this migration surge is unimportant.

This is the most serious danger to the United States today, they say, and, yes, only Trump can fix it.

It is my fear that the Republicans, disorganized as they clearly are, will win the presidency in 2024 with their candidate Donald Trump as a result of the border issues, and no others.

I told this to a friend last night and she said “No, there’s a counter balance – abortion. The Democrats will win because of abortion.” Maybe, I don’t think so.

When you look at current polls, as I tend to do on Realclearpolitics.com, you see that the presidential race is 50-50, and when it is not 50-50, you normally see Trump leading by 2 to 4 points. For most of us, this is unthinkable and incomprehensible. How can this be after we see what four years of Trump brought us, and after Trump has been indicted in 91 felony counts? Well, unthinkable or not, this is where we are.

Sure the polls could change (and probably will, many say), sure serving presidents often poll poorly at this time (many say), sure the pollsters may not be talking to a representative selection of people, sure, sure, sure. But what else is sure is that all of this polling, done by many national polling organizations, does show remarkable consistency.

The border situation may be important, but it isn’t the only point brought up by the C-Span callers. The next in order seems to be the economy generally – inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. To me, this should be easier to answer than the border. Grocery and gas prices have risen world wide – a lot of this the result of the war in Ukraine, which has greatly affected agricultural production around the world, and led to strange machinations in oil prices – and the United States looks better than virtually any other country. In addition, some of the policy issues promoted by these callers would have the opposite effect than what the promoters think would be the result. You would think that these arguments could be blunted, although the Democrats have not yet figured out the right words. Similarly, the national debt – it can be shown that the Republicans tend to increase the debt more than the Democrats, even though this is hard for some to believe. And again the Democrats don’t know how to put their case forward.

But it all comes back to the border. And here, I don’t think that the Democrats really have any talking points that could work, no matter how well they might be presented. The fact is not that the border is “open” (it clearly is not), but we do have many too many people coming across it. The Democrats need to admit this, to agree with their critics on this point. And they need to have a plan to deal with it. What should the plan include? Better border security (it’s ok, if part of that includes fence improvements or additions), more border personnel, more immigration judges and court personnel, more shelters, better ways to track migrants who are subject to court proceedings, and so forth. And it’s insufficient to say that our current laws are outmoded – what are the changes that should be made? And perhaps there has been too much energy expended on saving the job of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Mayorkas may be doing the best job possible. I don’t know. But he has become a target, and okay, let’s remove him as a target. The Democrats should have an active program that they can put forth.

The Republicans can’t fix themselves, but they know how to convince people that they can fix everything else. The Democrats need to be able to be just as convincing – they won’t convince the majority of Republicans, to be sure……but they don’t have to. They just need to convince, say, 10% of those who today say they will vote again for Trump rather than Biden.

And then there’s the question of whether Biden should be the candidate – there’s no polling on a race between Trump and anyone else. But the results of polls like that may be surprising.

When I was a college junior, I went on a Spring Break trip to Washington with the Harvard Young Democrats. There were maybe a dozen or so of us, and as this was 1963 and the Kennedy years, we were given the royal treatment.

I remember that one of our meetings was with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in his dark wood paneled office in the Department of Justice, with refrigerator quality art work by his many young children taped to all the walls. I don’t remember what the topics of our conversation were, but I do remember Kennedy making it very clear at the beginning of our session that everything he was saying, he was saying “off the record”.

One of the students on our trip was a Harvard Crimson writer. I remember, after we got back to Cambridge, opening the paper one morning and seeing an article about our trip. The article referred to our meeting with Bobby Kennedy and started off with the words “Speaking off the record, Kennedy said ……..” And then it went on to detail everything he told us.

Well, this morning I attended a breakfast session with DC Ward 3 Councilman Matt Frumin, and about 15 others. Frumin’s remarks were all “off the record”. So, there you are. Had they been on the record, I would tell you that the biggest and best surprises that Frumin had after being elected were that the Council members all get along with each other so well, and that the Council is really made up of talented people. If this gets out and is attributable to me, I will deny every word of it.

It was an interesting conversation about many Ward 3 interests – interestingly, little was raised that affected DC outside of this ward. No one asked about crime, or whether the Commanders should have a new stadium built at the current RFK (speaking of Bobby Kennedy) site, or why there weren’t sufficient groceries in Ward 8, or how to bring back downtown. I guess it’s true — all politics are local.

So we spoke about traffic cameras, and school expansions, and development sites, and the proposed Connecticut Avenue bicycle lanes, and the redevelopment of the Chevy Chase Library and Community Center, and the role of Metro buses in revitalizing the neighborhood, and the future of the Intelsat building, the status of Metro garage and turnaround sites, the Massachusetts Avenue Safeway and more. We really stayed within the ‘hood.

Yesterday, on the other hand, politics was not involved in the visit we made to the new Capital Jewish Museum. We were there before it opened for the day for a special tour for my Thursday morning breakfast group and their presumably significant others.

The Museum is very well done. We visited the large exhibit rooms on the first and second floors which tell the story of Jewish Washington quite well from the days of the Isaac Polock, the first recorded evidence of a Jew in Washington. His residency dated from 1795, just 5 years after the founding of the city by Congress. Then, Polock was alone – now there are about 300,000 Jews in the greater DC area.

The museum is built around the oldest synagogue building in Washington, the Adas Israel congregation building that dates from 1876, and served the congregation about 25 years when it was sold and replaced by the building at 6th and I Streets NW that now serves as a community center, the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. The current Adas building dates from early 1950s. The second floor sanctuary of the original building has been restored, and as you sit on original benches, you see a three sided film about the history of the building and the history of the Washington Jewish Community. Edie and I went with our 8 year old granddaughter, who liked the film and the exhibits and I think got quite a bit out of the 90 minutes or so we were there.

On the second floor, among many other things, there is a wall which shows photographs of 100 (I think that’s the number) of prominent Jews in Washington through the years. Interestingly, I could probably identify and tell you at least something about 75 or so of them. I was happy to see included was my great uncle Moshe Rubin Yoelson, my paternal grandfather’s older brother, who presided over the Talmud Torah congregation in Southwest Washington for decades. He died in 1945, well before I moved to town. But his tomb in Southeast Washington is very impressive.

The third floor contains a temporary exhibit on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which will be there until, I think, November 30. We told our granddaughter we would come back to see it. Edie and I saw it several years ago at the Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It was quite well done, and now – after Justice Ginsburg has passed away – we understand it has been somewhat expanded.

That’s it for today. Getting ready to celebrate grandson Izzy’s 3rd birthday this evening.

It was the best of cities, it was the worst of cities. Dickens never said that, but he could have, and one of the cities he could have described that way was Vienna during the first half of the 20th century. Last night, Professor Marsha Rozenblit of the University of Maryland gave a Zoom presentation about the 20th century Jewish history of Vienna for the Haberman Institute of Jewish Studies. I introduced Marsha, whom I have know for quite some time, to our audience of about 300.

The Haberman Institute is celebrating its 40th year of providing adult educational programs, but Marsha has us beat. She is now in her 45th year of teaching at Maryland; she joined the faculty in 1978. (That last clause was redundant.)

Vienna was, of course, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, a large entity that included today’s Austria and Hungary, as well as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, parts of Poland and Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, the entire former Yugoslavia and, I am sure, places I am forgetting. It was a multi-ethnic, and multi-linguistic as you can get. When my father’s mother lived in Lviv (Lvov, Lemberg), she lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When my mother’s maternal grandparents, with their Polish last name, lived in Vienna, they obviously did the same.

There were many Jews in this Hapsburg Empire and from the 1860s, they had full and equal rights, including the rights to move anywhere they wanted within the Empire. Many chose to move to Vienna, which had, prior to some time in the mid-19th century been off limits to all Jews, but for the very wealthy.

By the time the 20th century arrived, there were about 200,000 Jews living in Vienna, having moved there from all parts of the Empire. Similar, even larger migrations, had occurred to Budapest and to the Prussian capital of Berlin. It was in cities like these that many Jews became “Europeans” – soaking up and contributing to general European culture and life. So different from the Jews of the Russian empire, who were by and large isolated from the larger urban concentrations of that society.

The Jews were by and large in different occupations than the non-Jewish Viennese. They were much more concentrated in mercantile and clerical activities than the others, who were more engaged in factory jobs and other jobs that required physical exertion. A minority of Jews were factory owners or wealthy businessmen, and relatively few were in the civil service.

There was a lot of antisemitism in Vienna, with the largest party, the Christian [Somethings] being quite antisemitic, as was the long time mayor, Karl Lueger. But, Marsha said, this really didn’t affect the Jews much, because the authority of the city government was limited, and the government of the Empire, led by Franz Josef II for over [ ] years made sure that all minorities in the Empire were protected. The Jews loved the Emperor, she said, and that reminded me of what I heard a number of times from my grandmother – “Franz Josef – he was a good emperor”.

Everything changed after World War I, when Austria, being on the losing side, lost its empire and was suddenly a much smaller country with a much too big capital. Economic conditions were not good through the 1920s, and were even worse in the 1930s, and the Jews suffered along with others. Antisemitism grew during this period, and when Hitler and the Nazis finally moved into Austria in 1938, he was greeted by about one million cheering Austrians, and the Jews were soon the target of everything bad in the Nazi quiver.

But in advance of, and for a time after, the Anschluss (as the incorporation of Austria into Germany is termed), the Jews could leave Vienna, and almost 2/3 of them did. Some of them escaped to places where they were beyond Nazi reach (Great Britain, the U.S., etc.), but others flew to Holland, France, Belgium and other countries, where they soon caught in the Nazi web. In all, about 1/2 of the Jews who were or had been living in Vienna were killed, and about 1/2 su

And, as to the one-two-three, last night the name Richard Strauss did not come up. But it’s in the back of my mind (one-two-three) whenever I think (one-two-three) of (one-two-three) Vienna. Sing along with me: The Blue Danube Waltz, by Strauss, by Strauss…..

Murphy’s Law. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. That pretty much sums it up so far in the current dispute between Hamas and Israel. But, of course, there’s a difference. Murphy might be saved because he had the luck of the Irish. Neither the Israeli Jews nor the Palestinian Arabs have anything like that working for them.

What am I thinking about? The bombing of the hospital in Gaza which apparently killed somewhere between 200 and 500 patients and personnel. The Arab world, and the world-wide supporters of the enemies of Israel, have concluded that (1) Israel bombed the hospital, (2) Israel purposely bombed the hospital, and (3) the more killed in the hospital, the happier Israelis must be. Israel says (1) we don’t bomb hospitals, (2) we didn’t bomb this hospital, and (3) Islamic Jihad destroyed the hospital when one of their rockets launched to strike in Israel failed and landed on the hospital instead. Israel said it can prove it in at least two ways: (1) it can track every one of its bombs, (2) it has photos that show that Islamic Jihad fired a few rockets at the time of the hospital blast and the photos show that one of these rockets failed and dropped almost immediately, and (3) it has an Arabic language recording of two Palestinians in Gaza talking about the Islamic Jihad misfire.

The Israelis have apparently turned this material over to U.S. security personnel for analysis, and we will see what comes of this. My guess is that they will agree with the Israelis. But, as we have learned domestically as well as more broadly, facts don’t matter, especially when there are alternative facts that have been developed. Even if it becomes clear to independent observers that the hospital tragedy was the result of an Islamic Jihad misfire, the Arab world will continue to blame Israel – either because they will stick with their alternative facts, or because the facts don’t matter and what does matter is the primal cause of all of their problems, the existence of the State of Israel. So it goes.

And as we already know, it isn’t just the Arabs on the street that have jumped to this conclusion, it’s also the Arab leaders. Starting with PA chief Abbas, who has blamed the Israelis for the strike publicly and without qualification and who has cancelled his planned meeting with President Biden, scheduled for this afternoon. And after Abbas made this announcement, Egyptian President El-Sisi, and Jordanian King Abdullah followed suit, canceling the mini-summit that was to be held in Amman.

I don’t know that I can blame them for the cancellation, and in fact I think it’s a good thing. In the current circumstances, there is no reason why President Biden should travel to an Arab capital. In fact, in my opinion, he shouldn’t be traveling to Tel Aviv either. Remember my friend Murphy.

It was Sartre who wrote the play “No Exit”. I think I may have seen in somewhere in another universe, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what it’s about. But the title would make a great title for the national anthem of Gaza.

With all of the tragedy that has unfolded and continues to unfold, one of the saddest interviews I heard was this evening, when Anderson Cooper interviewed a young architecture student in Gaza. I guess I actually didn’t “hear” the interview – I read the subtitles (I was listening to something else at the same time), and they were very touching. This young woman was in her last year of architecture studies and just thinking about and beginning to create her “senior project” when the war began. She seemed like such a nice young woman, and she said that now, her plans had to change, her studies seemed to be over. It wasn’t that her classes were going to be put on hold for a while, she said that “the entire university has been destroyed”. And, she went on to say (and I wasn’t concentrating on every word) something about now staying in a house that was sheltering 57 people. And that there was no place where you can feel safe. And when you go to bed at night, you know that – at some point during the night – the ceiling might fall right down on you, and you will be killed. She, by the way, said nothing political, nothing vicious, showed no directed anger; she said, she just wanted to be able to live her life, having the same rights as everyone else.

All this is obviously true. And somehow, it can’t be right.

It does look like Israel’s plans might have been changed a bit; certainly they have slowed down. There might not be the extensive ground attack that had been promised, but rather something smaller and more targeted. And this must be because of the extensive damage done through the Israeli air strikes. From the pictures I have seen, much (most?) of Gaza, even if the war ended today, would not be habitable.

So what are the residents of Gaza going to do after this war ends? How will the rubble be cleared and their cities be rebuilt? How will their utilities (power, electricity, water) be turned back on? Who will pay for all of this, and how will they live in the meantime? In other situations, you would think that a large number of these residents would migrate elsewhere. This is what happened, for example, in nearby Syria (admittedly a bigger country), 6,700,000 people emigrated from Syria, as of the end of 2022. (My source is of course Wikipedia: “Refugees of the Syrian Civil War”). They went to neighboring countries, and they went to Europe.

But it does not look like the Gazans will have that choice. Where can they go? Who will take them in? King Abdullah of Jordan today said (or so I heard) that there will be no refugees from Gaza let into either Jordan or Egypt; he called it a “red line”. Yes, the Gazans have “No Exit”. Once again, the Palestinians will be ignored by their fellow Arabs. Mark my words.

Now in a perfect world (not the perfect world so named by Dr. Pangloss), everyone would pitch in once the war was over (or even during it) and – even assuming Hamas is out of the way – work for a perfect Gaza. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and there won’t be a perfect Gaza, and there will remain a Gaza with 2 million people (and more as time goes by) trapped there. They will have no exit, and they will continue to be a powder keg ready to explode and, as is often the case in wars to end all wars, the result will be a slow march to the status quo ante. And that only if we are lucky.

One more thing before I forget. Who was Murphy? It turns out that Edward Murphy was an American aeronautical engineer, and that the first reference to Murphy’s law came at a press conference in 1948 where they were trying to explain what happened…….in a failed rocket test.

So it goes.

Perhaps, I am just on a quest for normalcy. Yesterday, I decided I should go to a museum. I haven’t really done that on my own in years – we have been to a lot of museums on our various trips, but just to get up and say “I think I will go to a museum today”….hasn’t happened for a long time.

So, about noon, I left the house, walked the 2/3 of a mile to the Van Ness Metro Station, paid by $1.20, was happy to see a train waiting for me, and rode to Gallery Place, 6 stops away. I must admit to getting a bit sad every time I go downtown, because it looks far from what it used to look like, with fewer than half the workforce that used to be there, and especially now that the tourist season is basically over. At Gallery Place, which is the stop for DC’s Chinatown, there are a number of Chinese restaurants that have not made it and whose sites stand empty. In addition, G Street particularly is dirty and generally unpleasant, something that it was not a few years ago. That doesn’t mean that it’s more dangerous (although it might be), just more unpleasant.

On the other hand, the building that houses the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Gallery of American Art, recently having been redone, looks to be in very good shape.

My reaction to the museum was strange. My usual museum visit is thorough. I start in the first room and visit every other room before I leave. Today, I went through the first floor and a small part of the second, and decided I had seen enough. Maybe I was a bit tired, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that my mind was full. I could absorb no more.

So what did I see? I saw a dozen or so new pieces of art, shown in groups of two describing the relationship between the artists. I saw a massive exhibit of art of the American West, concentrating on views not normally seen, those of Latino, Indian and Black artists. I saw the folk art galleries, which now have a number of new pieces on display. I saw a display of the work of Washington artist Alma Thomas. And I saw the work hanging the hallways between these galleries.

From the exhibit on the West. The first is a portrait of novelist Sandra Cisneros by Angel Rodriguez Dias, the second by Hung Liu, and the third by Jacob Lawrence who lived in Seattle for decades.

So let’s look at Alma Thomas. You may not like these. I do. Thomas was a DCPS teacher and prominent artist, the first art graduate of Howard University. Apparently her reputation has been growing and growing.

So, a question from the folk art exhibition. Can you tell which of these I like and which I don’t?

One more thing. It’s always interesting to see two famous people come together when you didn’t know they had had any contact. You may remember, for example, when I learned that Horatio Alger, Jr. was the live in tutor for the children of New York Jewish financier Joseph Seligman. Today, I learned that Jackson Pollock’s primary art teacher was Thomas Hart Benton and that they remained close until Pollock’s early death. Hard for me to imagine.

I came home mid-afternoon. Turned on the so depressing news. Turned it off and realized why I decided to go to a museum.