April/May books and life update

Today I celebrate my life and all the beautiful people in it. I’m 47 years on this earth and enjoying (mostly) every minute. I’d say my classes have been transformational and I am definitely being challenged to grow in parenting my daughter. Mr. B is an even better husband than before and I love that he is “my person.” I am grateful for the wonder and joy in the everyday.

Earlier this month, I finished two courses, one of which was very intense. The only reading I did in April was for these classes… in the carpool line, before bed at night, at my desk during the day, along with writing quite a few papers. I enjoyed picking up some new titles this month now that they are over.

I will not be taking summer courses besides my weekly Hebrew and Torah study classes. I have a VERY long list of books that were recommended by professors and fellow students and I am excited to get going on those! (A photo of some of them is at the end of this post.)

I got a super nice desktop computer but have been flummoxed as to how to organize my photos. My laptop had the ancient program Picasa, which I adore, but it stopped being updated years ago. Anyway, I’m researching and will probably use Photoshop Organizer and Editor in Elements. I’d like to make a scrapbook of SG’s Bat Mitzvah and I’ll need lots of folders for that.

I’m also back to diamond painting after taking a couple months off. I missed it very much!

On the race to the bottom that is our country and our world at the moment: I am disheartened and disappointed. As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. It was also the highest amount of guns sold in our history. On Monday of last week in a class on Trust in God, I offhandedly claimed that I thought I’d continue trusting that I’d be ok should (G-d forbid) something happen to SG. By that, I meant that maintaining a belief structure that helps to make sense of our existence and the reasons why things occur can help sustain us. Then, Tuesday’s murder of 21 people inside an elementary school happened. (And this was mere days after three other horrific and hate-motivated shootings.) Wednesday and Thursday were pretty much lost in a deep funk. Let me just say now that I don’t even want to think about any random harm to my precious daughter.

I don’t know why any average citizen would need to have access to a semiautomatic weapon. I don’t know why Congress needs the filibuster in most circumstances. I don’t understand why the abortion debate is back again. I personally wouldn’t end a life, but I would never dictate what someone else does. I also have not been in that situation, so how could I judge? Maybe it’s really become a religious issue or a class issue. I don’t know why a group who puts antisemitic fliers in our neighborhood mailboxes is protected by Free Speech. I don’t know when vaccines and science became something to doubt. And I don’t know why we are stuck in these situations where we are killing each other and all it seems that we can do is vote in November.

I’ll refer you to these words by Bari Weiss:

The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties—and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands—has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth famously called “the indigenous American berserk.” It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages, it was possible to ignore or compartmentalize. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

So much unnecessary pain is beyond disheartening. Our policies do not generally reflect what the majority of the country wants, and with gerrymandering and redlining and redistricting, representative democracy feels false. I personally think that our government is quickly losing its legitimacy and I’m not sure how this dismantling of democracy has become normalized. With so much distress, turbulence, anxiety, and injustice eating away at our foundation, I feel like all we can do is sit back and watch our race to the bottom.

I obviously want to be able to do some good in the world, but besides being positive and loving within my small circle, I’m not sure how I can help.

I like this quote from Ann Patchett’s book (reviewed below):

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Robert F. Kennedy

Other news: SG has been able to spend time with good friends, which we feel so grateful for. She is growing up and is much more confident. I do wish she cared more about school and less about shopping, but I know we are not alone in that.

She and I volunteered at an affordable housing space for the homeless to be able to recover from health issues or navigate the legal system. It was a wonderful opportunity to talk with people in a very different life situation than we are and to find that we can have things in common. I’m looking for more places like this that we can volunteer and open SG’s mind a little bit.

We also helped to host a mini family reunion of sorts. My 96-year-old grandpa’s “little” brother visited from New Jersey, which brought together family we hadn’t seen in ages. My grandparents will celebrate 75 years of marriage next month. Amazing.

In less than 2 weeks, SG will be off to camp again and Mr. B and I will enjoy time alone. I look forward to this every year because it feels like such a treat.

Reading for my Antisemitism and Racism course

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

Lavin reports on “the ways in which social media enables networks of true believers to find and recruit one another; the humanity of those enmeshed in hate movements; and the way the small human choices they make do not absolve them of culpability in their hatred but continue to condemn them.” From the book description: “Talia Lavin is every skinhead’s worst nightmare: a loud and unapologetic Jewish woman, acerbic, smart, and profoundly antiracist, with the investigative chops to expose the tactics and ideologies of online hatemongers.” She infiltrates many online groups and reports on her experience. It’s fascinating!

If the past few years of radicalism and racially motivated terrorism have taught us anything, it’s that caution is still warranted—and it has become more important than ever to understand the human motivations behind extremism in this country. Around the United States and the world, an international white nationalism—the desire for white dominance in every country, whose toll will be paid in blood—still percolates with all its venom. The vehicles of misinformation hum along, radicalizing thousands as they go. And the price of hate for those who inflict it, endure it, and even study it is still too high.

and

Studying them as deeply as I have has made me realize no amount of such rhetoric is acceptable in the country’s discourse, just as there is no acceptable amount of poisonous gas to let seep into a room. To assert otherwise is an argument born of self-congratulation, the argument that being tolerant of violent racism is just another form of tolerance, and not a capitulation to the far right’s own view of their legitimacy.

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

Conspiracy theories give events that may seem inexplicable to some people an intentional explanation. If we were to provide these conspiracy theorists with evidence that proves the landing was indeed on the moon, they will a priori dismiss what we say and assume we are part of the conspiracy. To try to defeat an irrational supposition—especially when it is firmly held by its proponents—with a rational explanation is virtually impossible. Any information that does not correspond with the conspiracy theorists’ preferred social, political, or ethnic narrative is ipso facto false.

(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump by Jonathan Weisman

The American Jewish obsession with Israel has taken our eyes off not only the politics of our own country, the growing gulf between rich and poor, and the rising tide of nationalism but also our own grounding in faith. As one rabbi told me, Jewish life should grow out of belief, faith, and history, not today’s New York Times. We have grown reactive, responding to events or provocations rather than pursuing a spiritually driven mission to do as the Torah tells us: Welcome the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Most Americans, including many American Jews, understand Judaism as a religion or as an ethnicity because these are the modern categories by which we understand much of the world. Christianity is a faith. Latino is an ethnicity. And so forth. But Judaism (and the force that opposes it, which today we call anti-Semitism) greatly predates and thus does not fit any of these far more recently constructed categories, despite how aggressively some try to shoehorn it into them. Judaism is not merely a religion, and it is not merely an ethnicity. Judaism is a people. More specifically, it is a people with a language, a culture, a literature, and a particular set of ideas, beliefs, texts, and legal practices. One word for that is a civilization. Another is a tribe.

Pleasure Reading

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin

I think I got this audiobook on Chirp because it was on sale, and I’m so glad I did. The way the stories capture everyday moments and interconnect with one another is remarkable.

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea D. Butler

Evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders. It sanctified and justified segregation, violence, and racial proscription. Slavery and racism permeate evangelicalism, and as much as evangelicals like to protest that they are color-blind, their theologies, cultures, and beliefs are anything but.

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Andrea Elliott

So so good. This is a nonfiction account by a journalist who followed a family with 8 kids through their stressful journey in and out of shelters, rehab centers, and jail. She wanted to write about a child growing up in this life, with her exposure to violence, hunger, and adult responsibilities. It is insightful and reads like a novel.

Yet home ownership was key to accruing wealth. White American families would eventually amass a median net worth nearly ten times that of Black families. Put another way, the exclusion of African Americans from real estate—not to mention college, white-collar jobs, and the ability to vote—laid the foundations of a lasting poverty that Dasani would inherit.

This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

I heard about this one on a podcast I listen to called Pod Save America. Here, two New York Times correspondents chronicle the 2020 election, the events of January 6, and the first year of the Biden presidency. It doesn’t sound optimistic, but I found it reassuring.

In less than a third of an average American lifetime, the country endured a contested presidential race in 2000; the terror attacks of September 11, 2001; the long and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession; the election of Donald Trump in 2016; and the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. That is a catalog of failure and failure and failure.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

This one appealed to my love of studying the interplay between language and meaning. From common groups like Peloton to extreme cults like Heaven’s Gate, and everything in between, Montell describes how the specific language used helps to create a sense of community, shared ideology, and even an us/them mindset.

These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett

I really can’t say enough good things about An Patchett or this book. She talks about family and friends health crises, living in Covid times, the writing process, and friendship.

“All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past. Despite his own experiences with unfairness, this is what Charlie has accomplished.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

I read this on the day it came out and cried my way through it. It’s a little bit of a time-travel story, but really it’s about learning to live life to the fullest.

To be read pile: I’m most excited about my professor’s book about Houston during the Civil Rights Era (Changing Perspectives by Allison Schottenstein) and Rabbi Wolbe’s Upon a Ten-Stringed Harp.