BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

by Joseph A. Rehyansky I write as someone who regularly got shot at, rocketed, and mortared by people I didn’t even know who wanted to kill me. I mention this matter only to establish my bona fides to hold forth on such a weighty matter. My guess is that we have eleven too many “memorial days” of one sort or another, some of which you’ve never heard of and two of which are mercifully defunct, although I know from personal experience among the inhabitants of the holiday catacombs who dedicate way too much time to such things, that the officially defunct ones live on, at some debilitated level. April 6 Army Day: The date was chosen because on that date in 1917 the United States entered World War I. Last officially observed in 1949. Last Monday in May, our official Memorial Day: Its history is murky. Confederate veterans and the survivors of those who fell in battle seem to have come up with the idea first. They called it “Decoration Day.” Why? Recall the scene in G...

by Renee Martin The personal narrative is something I have avoided, because the naked honesty also leaves one extremely vulnerable to attack. Living in a marginalized body is difficult enough without showing one’s war wounds, but when it becomes clear that hiding is only enabling the complete erasure of people who look and function like me, then it is time to speak out . You see, I am fat, Black, female and differently-abled. I can never completely be at home with any one of the labels that best describe me. In the media, I can see Black women, or even fat black women, but fat and differently abled are definitely categories that are understood to be mutually exclusive. A body like mine contradicts the mainstream social discourse. Fat activist groups like NAAFA (The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) have worked hard to promote HAES (Health at any size). NAAFA’s goal is to build “a society in which people of every size are accepted with dignity and equality in all a...

Taylor Caldwell was always one of my favorite authors - through high school and beyond. From 6th grade to 12th grade I developed a serious handicap - TELLING THE TRUTH. Caldwell's writing was descriptive and honest, and I appreciated it deeply. My Nana, of blessed memory, always told me - "Barbara, no one likes a truth teller. Just remember that." It was not an admonition to lie but to be aware of the consequences. My father, of blessed memory, told me the same - "Sweetie, you have my disease - that telling the truth disease." In fact, my father who had been in sales and on the road for many years, stopped and joined the State Troopers around 1971-72 because he got sick of "twisting the facts", as he put it. He even said 'it was wearing him down.' Unfortunately, in my 53 years on the planet I have been villanized, lied to and about , called crazy, psycho, obsessed, insane and a variety of other mean-spirited labels by people who have bl...

This is no surprise to me. Any group that constantly bloviates on about ethics, correctness (some of them in the religious sense by quoting scripture to you...) and how awful anyone who isn't them... always seems to do so to hide the 800-pound gorilla standing right behind them. Hi there, Mr. Gorilla! I've seen you for a while now. And Mr. Gorilla - zip it up. Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography. A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states. "When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conser...

JUDAISM & ABUSE: EXPECTING BETTER This was written a few years back. Despite strides in educating leading rabbinic authorities it seems that nothing much has changed… not yet. Some are truly working on the problem and I beg them to keep working on it. Sometimes preserving a marriage AT ALL COSTS or allowing a manipulative man to make a woman an AGUNAH and then looking the other way - is NOT the way to go. Allowing the verbal & emotional abuse of children in the name of Torah and keeping it hush-hush for appearances is enabling the abuse! Loshen Hara can be a mitzvah if it stops an abuser from taking advantage of his family, his friends and the world at large. If You Beat Him He Will Not Die by Richard Silverstein A personal and theological meditation on child abuse As spiritual communities, it is enormously important that we provide grief work as part of the process of healing [from the effects of abuse]. At the same time, we have to take that lesson of choosing to...