Four Things To Read

Can Judaism Survive A Messianic Dictatorship In Israel? by Yuval Noah Hariri: “What if this time the Zealots succeeded in creating a messianic state that would destroy Israeli democracy and would persecute Arabs, secular people, women and LGBTQ people? What if that state were to embrace a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy – but thanks to its nuclear weapons and cyber industries, it managed to avoid for some time economic and political destruction? If this were to happen, then Judaism would have to deal with an unprecedented kind of destruction – a spiritual destruction.” A thoughtful, thought-provoking piece about the implications for Jews and Judaism of the autocratic, fascistic direction of the current Israeli government.

When We Are Afraid: On teaching in a red state, the silences in our history lessons, and all I never learned about my hometown, by Anne P. Beatty: “What is taught has always been policed. Though it’s also true the level of scrutiny depends on your state, your school, and your courses — in other words, it depends on which side of the street you stand on. In my experience, people rarely question what’s being taught in the low-performing school, or in the standard classes at the high-performing school. And sometimes teachers police themselves.” A well-wrought, thought-provoking account of one teacher’s experience resisting (and failing to resist) book banning and the ideology behind it while teaching a very, very red state.

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I Finally Found A Name For My Father’s Abuse, by Mia Brett: “My father never once hit me, my brother, or my mother. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I called him abusive and it wasn’t until this year that I found the language to actually describe the abuse my father inflicted on our family: coercive control.” Coercive control is a kind of domestic violence the features of which are generally not considered criminal when perpetrated within a family, but which may be crimes when committed against strangers. The piece was written in support of the Coercive Control and Rape Family Court Act Bill and is well worth reading.

An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class, by Dan Kris: I am going to let the interview speak for itself, but here is one example of an answer the school board chair gave: “We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is. And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.”

Four Things To See

These are photographs by Wilhelm Weimar, from the photographic herbarium he produced for the Hamburg Museum of Art and Design.

Chrysanthemum

Lilie

Sommerhyazinthe

Thistle

Four Things To Listen To

The Trammps - Disco Inferno

Larkin Poe - Black Betty

Sweet Shop Boy - Aaja

Crosby Stills and Nash - Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Four Things About Me

My favorite non-American cuisine is Korean and my favorite Korean food is agujjim.

When I taught English in Korea in 1988-89, I taught myself to read Hangeul and practiced by reading the menus in the Korean restaurants I went to. I would start at one end of the menu, which was usually posted up on the way, and try each food in succession. There were very few I didn’t like. My students told me I must have been Korean in a previous life, since most westerners they encountered wouldn’t even try most of the foods I did and liked.

When I started teaching at Nassau Community College in September of 1989, just a few months after I returned from Seoul, I was the youngest and least senior member of my department. Now, 34 years later, I may not be the oldest member, but I am the most senior. It’s an interesting perspective to have.

In 1994, in a now-defunct journal called The American Voice (#33), I published an essay on pornography called “Inside The Men Inside ‘Inside Christy Canyon.’” In what is still one of the most fulfilling moments in my life as a writer, a colleague told me she’d been at a dinner party and introduced herself as a Nassau Community College professor. Another guest asked her if she knew me. When she said yes, he told her that he’d come across my essay when someone in a group he was part of read it (or maybe just parts of it, I don’t remember exactly) aloud one evening when they were hanging out. He said he thought the essay important enough that he bought a copy of the journal and gave it to his teenage son to read as prelude to a discussion about the politics surrounding porn.

Photo of #4 by Sri Jalasutram on Unsplash.

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