I Stand with the Jews. Part Two of Two Parts

 

"I Stand with the Jews"

What does that mean?

Second of two parts

A canopy of oaks and maples rose overhead. Green understory surrounded me: pinxter azaleas and thorny Japanese barberry. Bluets – tiny wildflowers – blossomed underfoot. Up ahead, Marc approached me with his typically hale and hearty, "Hello, Danusha!"

I shoved my rosary in my pocket and removed my headphones. I had been cheating. I should have been focusing, with the binoculars around my neck, on the migrating spring warblers that make Garret Mountain famous among birders. Instead I was listening to Gregorian chant and praying the rosary as I hiked. "Hello, Marc," I said, as I migrated from internal contemplation of the eternal to external society and the ingeniously plumaged sprites zipping around us.

"Look at that color!" Marc exclaimed.

I pointed my binoculars in the direction Marc indicated. He had spotted a purple finch.

"I can see," I said, "Why Roger Tory Peterson called them 'a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.'"

Marc is, by many estimates, the best birder in the state. Of course we are all, in our own ways, the "best" birdwatcher in compliance with our own needs and desires, but Marc racks up awesome numbers of the species he sees annually.

Marc's surname harkens back to Chelm, a city in Poland once famous among Jews as a site of folkloric fools. My favorite Chelm story: the local wise men declared that if you drop a buttered slice of bread, it will always fall on the buttered side. This conclusion reflects the pessimistic worldview typical of both Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe. Of course, eventually, someone dropped a buttered piece of bread and it fell buttered side up. The wise men of Chelm debated this astounding event and determined that the slice had been buttered on the wrong side. Chelm stories arose from a culture that valued scholarship enough that it could spoof scholarly folly.

Mindful of Marc's identity as someone other than our state's best birdwatcher, I wondered if I should say something.

I had told myself, if the opportunity arises, I will say something.

Was this the moment, though, to say something?

I felt timid, but also determined. If we keep waiting for the perfect moment, we never say anything.

"Marc," I ventured. "I want to say something about something other than birds."

"Yes?" Marc said, turning his attention from the purple finch to a streamlet that might be playing host to a Louisiana waterthrush.

"There's been a rise in antisemitism."

"You think?" Marc said, his voice rising, in an atypical, for him, sarcastic comment.

"Yes, and I just want you to know that I'm not Jewish…" said the woman who had been praying the rosary and listening to Gregorian chant. "But I want to be an ally. I'm on your side."

I'm glad I said something. If the moment arises when Marc could use some support from someone like me, he knows I'm here.

I Stand with the Jews / Part One of Two Parts

 "I Stand with the Jews"

 

What does that mean?

 

First of two parts

 

The other day, an antisemitic comment came through my social media feed. I didn't want to debate the poster. People who say abysmally stupid things do not deserve the respect implied by debate, nor do they deserve the attention that debate generates. But I did not want his comment to go unanswered. All I said was, "I stand with the Jews."

 

"What does that mean?" the antisemite challenged.

 

This essay offers my response to his question.

Pressure Movie Review. Yes, we do need another D-Day Movie

 

Pressure 2026

Yes, we do need another D-Day movie

I walk a lot. I check NOAA's forecast five times before heading out. If there's a ten percent chance of rain, I have a Gore-Tex slicker in my daypack. I'm always over-prepared for weather. One day I was walking down Ratzer Road, a road I've walked hundreds of times. I passed wide lawns and suburban McMansions, some of them costing a million dollars. I felt carefree. That did not last.

Boom. In the time it took me to type the word "boom," everything changed. The sky turned black. Forty-foot evergreens swayed so drunkenly I feared they'd lash me like the tail of a lunging tiger. Pelting hail obscured my vision. With every step I pushed against a locked door – the wind was that determined to prevent me from moving. I recognized that this is the kind of weather that kills. I frantically sought a nook where I could take shelter in this, not my neighborhood, and, again, that fast, it was all over. The sky was suddenly dove-gray. The hail relaxed to a light drizzle. The Apocalypse was canceled.

My best guess is that I was stuck in a dangerous phenomenon called a "microburst." Microbursts damage structures, cause car accidents and plane crashes, and they do kill. Ultimately, though, what it was, was weather.

In Indiana, after a tornado, I heard of a grandfather trying to hold back his grandson, to no avail. The tornado pulled the tyke out the window. In 2011, in Paterson, NJ, I was evacuated during Hurricane Irene. The Passaic River was coming up through the floorboards. Within hours the entire neighborhood, for a mile around, was under water. In 2012, after Hurricane Sandy, for most of two weeks, we had no electricity and substandard tap water. In 2021, thirty New Jerseyans died during Hurricane Ida. One victim drowned on the very non-aquatic Lackawanna Avenue, near a Best Buy and a Barnes and Noble. Two people tried to rescue her, but these Good Samaritans had to themselves be rescued by fire department crews. Her body was never found.

Weather.

We humans have dominated much of nature. We have extended average lifespans, conquered smallpox, and manipulated the landscape to our whim. But we are still mere playthings in the hands of weather. A new film, Pressure, examines the impact of weather on a history-making event: D-Day.

Perhaps no human accomplishment supersedes D-Day as an expression of humanity's power. D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history. On June 6, 1944, almost 160,000 Allied troops landed on Normandy's beaches. These included troops from the United Kingdom, Canada, and twelve other Allied nations. Over 7,000 naval vessels and 12,000 aircraft participated. An estimated 100,000 French resistance fighters coordinated, via coded messages, with overseas planners and carried out crucial and meticulous preparatory operations behind enemy lines. For example, the French derailed Nazi supply trains inside tunnels. Repairing a train derailment inside a tunnel is much harder than doing so in an open field. By the end of June, Allies had delivered 570,000 tons of supplies. By the end of August, two million Allied troops were in France.

The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck: The Oldsquaw

 

The Left Demonizes the Name of a Duck

A word becomes a thought crime

 

Part I: Why Birdwatching, Beauty, Words, & History Matter

 

My mother was a foreigner and at the drop of a hat she and my dad would speak with totally different words. The Italians across the street, the Ukrainians across from them, the Spaniards next door to them, the Filipinos down the block – our town was crowded with words and the worlds that came with those words. I understood, young, that words are as diverse as the people who speak them. I felt an overwhelming craving to master all these words, and these various worlds.

 

We ate oskvarky. We visited with tetka. When swimming in the river, we had to resist the hastrman, lest he drag us down and drown us. My mother had words in English, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and German. When neighbors commented on how smart my mother was – and they did and still do so – I feel proud. This immigrant woman who had to work to support her five siblings and therefore could not go to school commanded words and the worlds that came with those words.

 

One day I was five – maybe – maybe four, or even three. The age when you have imaginary friends. When you talk to the family dog and understand his replies. My mom and I were kneeling on a bed and looking out a window facing east and the green hills that were a minute's barefoot walk from our front door. I gazed at pink, purple, and white blobs that I'd recently learned to name, or would soon learn to name: rose-of-Sharon, bridal veil, Oswego tea, peach blossom, mountain laurel. How did my mother fit all those fruits and flowers into our tiny plot? With her strong hands she worked her dreams-deferred of streets-paved-with-gold into dirt crowded with flowers.

 

Brown blobs scattered before us.

 

"Sparrows," my mother said.

 

I knew the word "bird." She knew the word "sparrow." She could take a big general class of things – "birds," – and divide it into a more specific sub-class – "sparrows." I resolved to master magical power like hers.

 

"Sparrow:" the sound fed me. The sibilant "s" sliding sensuously into the earthbound, explosive "p;" "arrow" providing a liquid-vowel soft place to land. "Sparrow:" sensuous and yet authoritative. "Sparrow," according to one online source, comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning "flutterer." In Slovak, "vrabec" is onomatopoetic, that is, an attempt to imitate the sound sparrows make when they chatter together. Germans saw sparrows. Slavs heard them.

 

I know so little about my Slavic ancestors. Peasants and serfs don't leave much in the way of written records. To know that they named sparrows vrabec in an attempt to recapitulate the bird's sound touches me deeply. I get a hint of how they made sense of their world.

The Story of Everything 2026 Movie Review

 

The Story of Everything 2026

 

A new documentary argues that science supports the concept of a creator God

 

The Story of Everything is a 2026 documentary addressing the question of whether or not science supports the possible existence of a creator God. Before I get too deep in the weeds of this review, let me say, I loved The Story of Everything. The Story of Everything is a polished, professional, engrossing documentary that any thinking person, including high school students, could enjoy. Please go see it in a theater if you can, and if you can't, grab it up as soon as it appears in other formats. Its run is limited, and in the theater where I saw it, there was only one showing. Otherwise, I would have happily sat through this film three times. I was on the edge of my seat. I want a miniseries continuing the work of the documentary, complete with supplemental materials, including question-and-answer notebooks viewers can fill in to review, test, and reinforce all they've learned.

 

The Story of Everything is not just a series of scientific talking heads, utterly fascinating and authoritative though these talking heads might be. It includes animations so unique, so valuable, and so engrossing I cannot wait to purchase the DVD of this film so that I can watch these animations repeatedly. The inner workings of the cell are depicted in minute detail. All lifeforms are made up of cells; those complicated little factories constitute our physical forms. Thanks to these animations, we can see ourselves as never before.

 

The Story of Everything travels from the microcosm to the macrocosm. The film includes gorgeous footage of life on planet Earth, from tiny hummingbirds to majestic blue whales. The film adjures the viewer to again take up the previously discarded awe of a child, and to be bowled over by the powerful mystery that is life. We are made up of billions of miracles occurring every second. We are part of a larger miracle we can never fully understand but can always be inspired by. This movie gave me chills and it caused me to tear up.

 

I love engrossing discussions of big ideas, and that's what you get in The Story of Everything. I love finishing a film determined to do some research on ideas presented therein. Since watching The Story of Everything, I've been gorging on science podcasts. I've been asking questions I didn't ask before, questions about why the carbon molecule shook Fred Hoyle's worldview, and how the Hubble telescope does or does not support the Big Bang.

Mark Fuhrman. A Remembrance

 

Mark Fuhrman Dies at Age 74
A Remembrance
 

On the morning of Tuesday, May 19, 2026, I was listening to NPR. Reporter Steve Futterman announced that Mark Fuhrman had died. Fuhrman was a media anti-hero during the trial of O.J. Simpson. LAPD Detective Fuhrman found a bloody glove at the crime scene. Simpson's defense attorneys sought to render Fuhrman's testimony unreliable. They accused Fuhrman of being a bad cop, a racist, who planted fake evidence because he hated black people. To prove their point, they produced audiotape of Fuhrman using the N-word. NPR's report of Fuhrman's death reduced Fuhrman's entire life to these bare facts. Fuhrman was an alleged bad cop, a white supremacist, who allegedly "planted" the bloody glove to frame an innocent black man of the stabbing murder of his white ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

 

On October 3, 1995, I was shopping in a hippie store in Bloomington, Indiana. An announcement came over the intercom. O.J. Simpson had been found not guilty. A thin, very pretty, very well dressed white girl, maybe twenty or so years old, jumped up, clapped her hands, and began hugging shoppers and dancing around the store. She was celebrating the verdict. I was astounded. O. J. Simpson had a documented history of beating Nicole Brown. There were photos of her bruised face. There was a chilling 911 call of Nicole crying and begging for help and O.J. screaming and threatening her. Evidence suggested that he stabbed her to death, possibly because she was in the company of Goldman, a handsome young man. This college-town white girl was dancing around a hippie store to celebrate Simpson's exoneration. What I understood as feminism had utterly failed, at least in the mind of that white girl. A very different ideology had parasitized her brain.

 

In 1997, Mark Fuhrman made the rounds of talk shows. He appeared with Larry King and Oprah Winfrey. As a grad student, I had to focus on my own work. I thought of myself as a committed leftist and I had no inkling that that would ever change. But something really bugged me about that dancing white girl. Something really bugged me about how we were treating Mark Fuhrman. By "we" I mean Americans, my friends, my fellow grad students, and popular culture figures and mass media. I felt like I was in the middle of a cognitive traffic jam. Of course white supremacy was bad. No argument. Of course the N-word was offensive. Of course, as a leftist feminist, I found it easy to make ugly comments about police officers, about macho masculinity, and about former Marines like Fuhrman. Fuhrman was a virtual poster boy for the white male power figure we all assumed was our ultimate enemy. So far, so clear.

 

And yet. And yet.

 

I remember the day I sat down at a campus computer – computers were expensive in those grad school days and I didn't own my own computer – and typed up the essay, below.

 

With every word, I was thinking of cherished friends who were participating in the national show trial of Fuhrman. I was thinking of how my words violated our unspoken social contract. We applauded each other for being righteous, and we never questioned the approved narrative. If we did, we would accuse ourselves of the crimes of racism or sexism or merely wrong think, and we would be cast out.

 

And yet I was thinking things I shouldn't be thinking, feeling discomfort, even outrage, I shouldn't be feeling. I felt compelled to write the essay, below, partly to clarify to myself why the treatment of Fuhrman bugged me so much. I had to struggle for words, because none of my friends and no mainstream media were saying anything like this. I had to struggle for words because I didn't want to lose friends or paint a target on myself.

 

I finished the essay and sent it off to potential publishers. I never found a publisher and the essay has been sitting in my files ever since. I reread it today, the day that Fuhrman's death has been announced.

 

Since I wrote this, the prediction I made in the final sentences has come true. There have been many show trials, many narratives that one dare not question, at the risk of losing friends and accusing oneself. In 2013, Justine Sacco made an unfunny and harmless attempt at humor on Twitter. She made a clumsy comment about AIDS and Africa. Within hours, the tweet went viral, and Sacco was hated, and threatened, around the world. People rushed to hate Sacco. Hating Sacco somehow was a righteous thing to do.

 

These internet show trials have happened to many others. There's nothing righteous about them. They don't help anyone. Hating Mark Fuhrman or Justine Sacco did nothing to help black people.

 

Below is my 1997 essay about Mark Fuhrman.

 

***

 

We knew everything we needed to know about Mark Fuhrman. Even those of us too pure, too intellectual, to follow the trial knew that Mark Fuhrman was not a man. Like a fairy tale ogre, he was our bête noir personified, without individuality or motivation. He was racist, if not racism itself. David Letterman joked about racism using the name as shorthand; a reporter equated him with Hitler. Forces usually in opposition, like the iconoclast Bill Maher and conservative pundits, were united in their vilification of Mark Fuhrman.

Defiance A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria Book Review

 

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria

A must-read book by a Syrian heroine

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria was published by Viking on February 24, 2026. It is 432 pages long.

Syrian photojournalist Loubna Mrie was born in 1991. Mrie's father was an assassin for the Assad regime. Mrie describes a relatively privileged childhood followed by more straitened circumstances after her parents' divorce. She witnessed, and then participated in, the Syrian civil war (2011 - 2024). Her participation alienated her father. Eventually Mrie moved to the United States where she remains.

Defiance is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. The writing is exquisite. Sensuous vignettes engage the reader's sight, hearing, scent, taste, and touch. Descriptions initially evoke a privileged girl's Syria: the smell of the bills in cash gifts from daddy, and the smell of hairspray on date night as girls stroll along a seaside corniche. The book progresses, and we enter a courageous journalist's Syria at war. We visit an apartment that Loubna has never bothered to clean, until a date with a sexy American aid worker inspires her to tidy up before his arrival. We witness protesters, shot by government thugs, bleed to death on Syria's streets. We cringe as ulcers pock the faces of victims of leishmaniasis, caused by sand-fly bites.

Defiance is intimate, written with an unflinching courage and profound insight found only in the highest literature. Too many other authors, recounting their adventures in danger zones, depict themselves as purely heroic. Mrie is humble enough, and values truth enough, to expose the good, the bad, and the ugly in her own character. I suspect that she is far more admirable than she herself realizes. In her writing, she reveals her own admiration for others who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their ideals. I hope she overcomes whatever survivor guilt that may haunt her.

Carl Rogers' dictum "the more personal, the more universal," applies to Mrie's writing. As Mrie explores her own motivations, reactions, and perceptions, she increases our own insight into ourselves. Yes, if we had been raised as she was raised, we, too, would find it hard to voice a protest against even a monster like Hafez al-Assad. Yes, if we had lived through what she had lived through, we, too, might succumb to alcoholism, one-night stands, and blackouts.