January 13, 2016::End of the day round-up

I am watching from afar pondering the questions of "how can these individuals afford this" and "what of their families."  Robert Baty, in his dogged pursuit of the Sovereign Citizen angle concerning Kent Hovind, noted this:

Well, some of them might actually be better off by going and camping out with the demonstrators in such situations, but I was impressed by the number of $50,000 pick-up trucks and other vehicles many of them seemed to be driving in from out of state.

It might be interesting to learn more of the financial details behind some of those individuals.

Yes, it would indeed "be interesting to learn more of the financial details behind some of those individuals."  Especially those rumored to be collecting Social Security Disability.

Militants in Oregon standoff persist with small donations, spaghetti dinners and financial sacrifice

Hunkering down for days, weeks or months in a building in rural Oregon is unlikely to be a lucrative occupation.

So how can the people that make up the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, a newly-formed group of about 20 self-styled militia that have occupied the federal headquarters at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, afford to do it?

The answer, most likely, is that not many can.

"These guys are broke," said Mark Pitcavage, who has been researching far-right movements for 22 years and has studied the Harney County occupiers. "Right-wing extremists, generally speaking, have very little money."
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That kind of devotion to a cause is what fuels most militia and anti-government groups, said Daryl Johnson, a former domestic terrorism analyst for the Department of Homeland Security.

"They'll think nothing about taking half their paycheck and using half of it to buy ammunition and guns," Johnson said.
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Although it's impossible to know for certain whether major financial sources are funneling cash to the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, Pitcavage said it is very unlikely.

"There's no large organization to give them money," Pitcavage said. "The right-wing extremist movement is broke."

Pitcavage, who has been researching the occupiers for the Anti-Defamation League, determined that two-thirds of the occupiers are part of the Patriot movement, and a third are part of the Wise Use Movement. The Patriot movement is an umbrella term for groups with antigovernment beliefs. People part of the Wise Use Movement take issue specifically with federal land ownership.

The two Patriot-movement groups that are relatively well-organized, the Oath Keepers and the III%, don't have money to donate to such causes, Pitcavage said. And even if they did, both have released statements opposing the occupation of Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

Neither is it likely the group is getting money from any religious organization, Johnson said.

I am by no means a fan of FAUX News nor Megyn Kelly. But every now and again, she actually does her job. I foresee a rabbit-hole.

Fox News host utterly demolishes antigay marriage guest

Brown’s appearance started off on the wrong foot when he claimed that the Supreme Court’s decision wasn’t binding on state courts, Host Megyn Kelly tried to explain the legal concepts already decided in Marbury vs Madison, but Brown refused to listen to reason.

Watch as Brown attempts to tell Kelly, a former attorney turned talking head, that she doesn’t understand one of America’s most basic legal concepts.

Two comments that stuck out in regards to Secular Coalition for America's FB posting concerning this situation.

1] There is no doubt that putting religious phrases or symbols on publicly funded property, including police cars, is absolutely a violation of the Constitution. Not only that, but it is a slap in the face of every Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist, Deist, Muslim, and non-Christian that pays taxes. It is is a belligerent gesture that tells 30% of America that they don't matter. The government was meant to be neutral to religion, not promote one above all the others.

Of course, what else would I expect from the Governor who bought the Jade Helm conspiracy hook, line, and sinker?

2] Of course Abbott backs them. It's another Dover trap. He can support his religion (rejecting others) and not face any consequences when they get sued. The Sherrif's office will be sued and they will lose. The precedents are clear.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott backs crosses on police cars

Gov. Greg Abbott, continuing his plunge into a range of religious debates, is backing the display of crosses on sheriff’s department vehicles in a West Texas county.

In this instance, Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson has allowed his deputies to put the outline of a small cross on their patrol vehicles’ rear windows, according to the district attorney for the area including the county.

The sheriff’s move was criticized by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Its attorney, Sam Grover, called it “inappropriate and unconstitutional for a government entity to display a Latin cross on its property because it conveys a preference by the Sheriff's Office—and by extension, Brewster County—for religion over nonreligion and Christianity over all minority faiths.”

The foundation called on Dodson to “abandon his plan for the religious decals.”
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The governor, who had supported the “In God We Trust” motto, also backs the crosses in Brewster County, said Abbott spokesman John Wittman.

“The Constitution demands respect for religious expression rather than hostility towards it and Governor Abbott fully supports Sheriff Dodson’s decision to allow his deputies to display the Cross on their patrol vehicles,” Wittman said by email Tuesday.

Abbott has successfully pushed to remove from the Texas Capitol underground extension a takeoff on a Nativity that came from the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It featured the Bill of Rights in a manger, surrounded by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and the Statue of Liberty. The display promoted the separation of church and state while praising “reason and the Bill of Rights.”

The significance of Sarah Baartman

Reports of Beyonce planning to write and star in a film about Baartman have been denied by the singer's representatives. But the rumours were enough to generate concern.

Jean Burgess, a chief from the Khoikhoi group that Baartman was from, argued that Beyonce lacked "the basic human dignity to be worthy of writing Sarah's story, let alone playing the part". But Jack Devnarain, chairman of the South African Guild of Actors, said filmmakers had the ""right to tell the stories of people you find fascinating and that's what we must be careful not to object to".

Even in denying any link to a film, Beyonce's representative said: "This is an important story that should be told."
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In October 1810, although illiterate, Baartman allegedly signed a contract with English ship surgeon William Dunlop and mixed-race entrepreneur Hendrik Cesars, in whose household she worked, saying she would travel to England to take part in shows.

The reason was that Baartman, also known as Sara or Saartjie, had steatopygia, a genetic condition resulting in extremely protuberant buttocks due to a build-up of fat.

These made her a cause of fascination when she was exhibited at a venue in London's Piccadilly Circus after her arrival. "You have to remember that, at the time, it was highly fashionable and desirable for women to have large bottoms, so lots of people envied what she had naturally, without having to accentuate her figure," says Rachel Holmes, author of The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman.

The Carter Center announces only 22 cases of flesh-eating Guinea worm disease left—from 3.5 million

On Thursday, The Carter Center announced that only 22 cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in 2015— a reduction of 83% from 2014. This quite remarkable, as when The Carter Center began leading the international campaign to eradicate the parasitic disease in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million Guinea worm cases occurring annually in Africa and Asia.

"As we get closer to zero, each case takes on increasing importance. Full surveillance must continue in the few remaining endemic nations and neighboring countries until no cases remain to ensure the disease does not return," said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. "The Carter Center and our partners are committed to seeing that this horrible parasitic disease never afflicts future generations."

H/T to Warren Throckmorton,,,

So it seems the King of lying for Jeebus has a "new" venture "[w]ith the help of special guests like conservative television host Glenn Beck, former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, law professor Dr. Carol Swain, and others,,,"

Great, "The three B's of knowledge: Bachmann: Politics; Barton: History; Beck: Theology."

American Historian David Barton's "Foundations of Freedom" Premieres January 8th -- Only on TBN

What are the foundations that made America one of the greatest nations on the face of the earth? Are those foundations still relevant to our society? Do the Judeo-Christian principles that guided our Founding Fathers as they prayerfully launched the American Republic matter today? Is America still "One Nation Under God"?

Noted historian and best-selling author David Barton addresses these crucial questions and many more as he returns to Christian television leader Trinity Broadcasting Network with a new weekly series, Foundations of Freedom, premiering on TBN Friday, January 8th.

Fort Wayne woman marries God | WANE

So, prior to Sheila Ryan's wedding in June, this ritual rite of becoming a consecrated virgin was foreign.  Now we have a second one.  From Sarah Rasher, 

To hear Hayes talk about her marriage to Christ — which differs from becoming a nun because Hayes remains a layperson — her decision is in line with contemporary ideas about sexual diversity and acceptance of differences.

“I think that in some sense, we’re all called to be married. It’s just a matter of discerning how. So, my marriage is to Christ and someone else’s marriage is to their spouse. A priest’s marriage is to the church. That’s a good desire that’s planted in us by God. The real question is how, how is this lived most joyfully in me,” Hayes said. “I do think that not everybody has the same path. To be able to look at all of these different ways of life and to see people living them out joyfully is an invitation to consider a little bit more deeply what those things mean.”

That’s perfectly fine, but when Hayes talks about her goal of convincing more girls to marry Jesus, she’s probably going to want a more convincing argument than the pure joy of perpetual abstinence:

“I think, especially with the young women I’ve worked with in my teaching so far, the religious life isn’t something that many of them consider because we don’t have women religious teaching with us in our schools like we used to years ago. So, many of them don’t consider that as an option anymore because they don’t see young women their own age considering it and joining it. That’s really something I try to expose my female students a little bit more to,” Hayes said.

It’s hard to imagine many American teenagers finding this option appealing.

Fort Wayne woman marries God | WANE

America's Justice System Sure Doesn't Know Much Science | WIRED

James Holmes walked into a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 carrying three guns including a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring 70 more. Nobody, not even his defense attorneys, denied that. But those attorneys still told a jury and a judge that Holmes was not guilty of those crimes—because he was insane. Last month, that jury rejected that assertion, finding Holmes guilty on all counts.

Holmes’ plea didn’t get him off, but it did get people talking about the insanity defense again. It’s a rare move for defense attorneys these days, even quaint sounding. Psychiatrists no longer call patients “insane.” It’s not a clinical diagnosis. Yet the term persists in the courtroom—along with many other practices unsupported by modern psychology and neuroscience.

Americans inherited a legal system shaped by history, not by science. “The legal system is resistant to change and resistant to paying attention to scientific research,” says Adam Benforado, a law professor at Drexel University and author of the recent book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. The system assumes that innocent people don’t confess to crimes they didn’t commit. It presumes that eyewitness testimonies are reliable. It counts on the impartiality of jurors.

None of those things are borne out by evidence.


America's Justice System Sure Doesn't Know Much Science | WIRED

Will the residents of Kivalina, Alaska be the first climate change refugees in the US?

Scientists estimate that due to climate change, the village of Kivalina, in northwestern Alaska, will be underwater by the year 2025.

In 2008, the Inupiat village sued 24 of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies for damages. In 2013, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the village has declared it will not file a new claim in state court.

Meanwhile, nature, heedless of humankind’s eternal squabbles, goes about its business: the sea around Kivalina continues to rise, the storms get stronger, the ice gets thinner — and Kivalina's 400 residents must grapple with how to relocate in the decade they're estimated to have left.
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Interior Secretary Sally Jewell visited Kivalina earlier this year and Colleen Swan sees some hope in that. Jewell’s visit was intended to raise awareness of Kivalina’s plight and to highlight that in the coming decades numerous other towns along US coastlines may face the same problem.


“More communities, more cities, more states, more tribes are going to have to deal with trying to help people who are being affected by climate change,” Christine Shearer says. “I think more lawsuits will be filed, and I think it might get to a point where fossil fuel companies might find it's less costly to settle than to keep fighting these lawsuits.”

Will the residents of Kivalina, Alaska be the first climate change refugees in the US?

See also:

Legal Battle Ends, But Seas Continue to Rise in Kivalina, Alaska

Notorious inmate's lawyer says officials knew he was target - Yahoo News

Hugo Pinell, a notorious killer with ties to the 1960s and 1970s black revolutionary movement, spent the last 45 years in California's prison isolation units partly for his own protection. Just days after he was moved into the general prison population, fellow inmates stabbed him to death in an exercise yard.

Now family members are demanding answers, arguing that authorities at the state prison east of Sacramento should have known he would be a marked man. Pinell, 71, became infamous a generation ago for his role as one of the San Quentin 6, helping to slit the throat of San Quentin prison guards during a failed 1971 escape attempt that killed six.

"He has been a target from just about every group in prison because of his notoriety and what he did years ago," Keith Wattley, his attorney, said a day after the killing on Wednesday. "This was foreseeable, which is what makes it so much worse and why the family is looking for answers as to why prison officials let this happen."

Notorious inmate's lawyer says officials knew he was target - Yahoo News

WWII 70 years later: Preserving the truth at Auschwitz

Among the artifacts at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, at the site of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps of World War II, are 110,000 shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 246 tallits (Jewish prayer shawls), 8,000 letters from prisoners and reams of documents from the SS, Adolf Hitler’s terrifying paramilitary force.

The sheer size of the archive that documents how 1.1 million people perished there during the Holocaust forces the museum’s keepers to at least try to distance themselves emotionally from their work.

“We usually treat these buildings or blocks just like we would treat any other preservation objects,” says Agnieszka Tanistra, acting head of the museum’s preservation department. “It’s a job to be done.”

Yet even seven decades after the camps were liberated by Soviet troops, it’s still impossible to fully maintain that distance.
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Within the worldwide community of Holocaust scholars, some wonder whether the preservation efforts are worth it. At great expense and effort, the museum has transformed a horrible place into a popular tourist destination. They question whether visitors can understand the depth of the suffering that occurred there.

“Is there a case for abandoning the site and letting nature take its course?” says Robert Jan Van Pelt, an architectural historian and Holocaust scholar at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “There is, and there isn’t. I continue to argue with myself on that.”


Museum officials believe the effort to remember is what matters. As the last survivors of Auschwitz and Birkenau die, the museum recounts their experiences for the tens of thousands of visitors who pass through the camps every week.

WWII 70 years later: Preserving the truth at Auschwitz

A Manhattan Project Veteran Had a Unique View of Atomic Bomb Work - The New York Times

Benjamin Bederson turned past the page in the diary from long ago, the page he had burned a hole through, and mentioned things he had done since that summer of 1945.

“Was an experimental atomic physicist,” he said. “Worked as a professor at New York University, taught almost every course in physics, was editor in chief of the American Physical Society and helped usher physics journals into the electronic age.”

He left out the part about helping to usher in the atomic age — the part about testing the ignition switches for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. The part about having been one of the lowest-ranking soldiers assigned to the Manhattan Project, the huge research-and-development effort that delivered the first atomic devices, and as a corporal or a private in his early 20s, one of the youngest. The part about having been one of the few soldiers sent to key spots at key moments as the work progressed.

“That makes it sound a little grandiose,” Dr. Bederson, now 93, said modestly.

A Manhattan Project Veteran Had a Unique View of Atomic Bomb Work - The New York Times

I Am an Adjunct Professor Who Teaches Five Classes -- and I Earn Less Than a Pet-Sitter | Alternet

Like most university teachers today, I am a low-paid contract worker. Now and then, a friend will ask: “Have you tried dog-walking on the side?” I have. Pet care, I can reveal, takes massive attention, energy and driving time. I’m friends with a full-time, professionally employed pet-sitter who’s done it for years, never topping $26,000 annually and never receiving health or other benefits.

The reason I field such questions is that, as an adjunct professor, whether teaching undergraduate or law-school courses, I make much less than a pet-sitter earns. This year I’m teaching five classes (15 credit hours, roughly comparable to the teaching loads of some tenure-track law or business school instructors). At $3,000 per course, I’ll pull in $15,000 for the year. I work year-round, 20 to 30 hours weekly – teaching, developing courses and drafting syllabi, offering academic advice, recommendation letters and course extensions for students who need them. As I write, in late June, my students are wrapping up their final week of the first summer term, and the second summer term will begin next week.

I receive no benefits, no office, no phone or stipend for the basic communication demands of teaching. I keep constant tabs on the media I use in my classes; if I exhaust my own 10GB monthly data plan early, I lose vital time for online discussions with my students. This, although the university requires my students to engage in discussions about legal issues and ethics six days a week, and I must guide as well as grade these discussions.

Three of my Philadelphia-area friends are adjuncts with doctorate degrees. One keeps moving to other states for temporary teaching posts. The others teach at multiple sites to keep afloat financially – one at no less than seven colleges and universities.

I Am an Adjunct Professor Who Teaches Five Classes -- and I Earn Less Than a Pet-Sitter | Alternet

Someone Has to Sort Your Recycling and It’s a Disgusting and Dangerous Job | The Nation

The industries that pride themselves on being friends of the earth are often hostile to workers, according to new research on the safety conditions in recycling plants. Published by Massachusetts Council for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH), National COSH, and other advocacy groups, the analysis of the industry shows that despite the green sector’s clean, progressive image, workers remain imperiled by old-school industrial hazards. Workers face intense stress, dangerous machinery and inadequate safeguards, while toiling in strenuous positions amid constant toxic exposures.

Often the sorting of recyclables requires directly handling hazardous materials and improperly disposed waste, such as plastic bags that accumulate and cause potentially deadly clogs in machines. Some cities allow dumping of “mixed” trash, leaving workers to separate metal cans from organic waste, or battery fluid from old meatloaf (cities could prevent such dangers through the slight inconvenience of simply requiring people to separate garbage beforehand).
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Just as sanitation workers have historically suffered both extreme labor abuses and job hazards, recycling workers’ physical insecurity is aggravated by economic vulnerability, as workplaces often lack labor protections and adequate staffing. One worker told researchers, “When I started working a sorter over 10 years ago, they had eight people on a sorting line, now there are only four, but the company expects us to work as if there are eight people on the line.” Some workers have reported “constant pressure from supervisors to work fast so as to not get fired.”

Someone Has to Sort Your Recycling and It’s a Disgusting and Dangerous Job | The Nation

Pittsburgh-area woman receives special rite from Diocese of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I will be honest, I do not understand how this can be considered a good thing.  Although by appearance Miss Ryan has led a fulfilling life, I still don't get it,,,

Sheila Ryan said she sensed she has had an unusual call from God from the time of her upbringing in McKeesport.

It wasn’t until recently, though, that she learned the Catholic Church had a name for it and an official liturgy to formalize it.

Early Sunday morning at St. Richard Church in Richland, the retired school teacher and administrator became the first woman in the Diocese of Pittsburgh to receive the Rite of Consecration of a Virgin Living in the World.

With Bishop David Zubik presiding at the ceremony, she wore a white dress and received a ring and veil to symbolize her marriage to Christ alone. She also received an edition of the Liturgy of the Hours, a set of daily prayers she has committed to offering.

“I knew as a teenager that I was not called to the married state,” said Ms. Ryan, who now lives in Valencia and is active at St. Richard. “It’s listening to God and being open to his workings of grace within us. Nobody would seek this life, which is counter-cultural, unless it were a gift from God. And I consider it a gift.”

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The rite traces its origins to Jesus’ words in the gospel of Matthew that some people renounce marriage for the sake of the kingdom of God. The ancient church had a liturgy for women making such a commitment, but it fell into disuse in the Middle Ages when unmarried women committed to chastity were steered to religious orders.

Pittsburgh-area woman receives special rite from Diocese of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Guy Carawan Dies at 87; Taught a Generation to Overcome, in Song - NYTimes.com

On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song. With that single stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa, in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond.

The song was “We Shall Overcome.”

Mr. Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on Saturday at 87, did not write “We Shall Overcome,” nor did he claim to. The song, variously a religious piece, a labor anthem and a hymn of protest, had woven in and out of American oral tradition for centuries, embodying the country’s twinned history of faith and struggle. Over time, it was further polished by professional songwriters.

But in teaching it to hundreds of delegates at the inaugural meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — held in Raleigh on April 15, 1960 — Mr. Carawan fathered the musical manifesto that, more than any other, became “the ‘Marseillaise’ of the integration movement,” as The New York Times described it in 1963.

Guy Carawan Dies at 87; Taught a Generation to Overcome, in Song - NYTimes.com

Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’

Most people know about the Nazi Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million others: Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, disabled people and LGBT people.

Alongside the big narrative of the Holocaust there are a myriad of small, individual stories and testimonies that help illustrate and shed light on the cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi regime.

One such account is the story of what happened to Germany’s tiny black population.

Primo Levi once wrote, “this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns”. Some may know their story, I certainly didn’t.

Tucked away inside Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribe, Mein Kampf, there is the following passage:

It was, and is, the Jew who brought negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend them as its masters.

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An organisation named “Commission Number 3″ was created by the Nazis to deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised under Dr Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. It was decided that the African-German children would be sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.

All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilised. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilisation and abortion programme.

What happened to these Afro-Germans is very complex – their experiences were not uniform. Some of these children were subjected to medical experiments and others mysteriously “disappeared”.

Hans Hauck, a black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler’s mandatory sterilisation programme, explained in the film Hitler’s Forgotten Victims that when he was forced to undergo sterilisation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilisation certificate, he was “free to go”, so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.
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From the comments:

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the photograph taken in 1933 of a brown-skinned boy wearing a swastika in a schoolyard in Hamburg, Germany, does not begin to tell the story of the remarkable life of Hans J. Massaquoi. Mr. Massaquoi, former managing editor of Ebony magazine, has now told the story himself in his new book, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0003/black_nazi.html



Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’

Baby used in notorious fear experiment is lost no more - health - 01 October 2014 - New Scientist

You'll have heard of Pavlov's dogs, conditioned to expect food at the sound of a bell. You might not have heard that a scarier experiment – arguably one of psychology's most unethical – was once performed on a baby.

In it, a 9-month-old, at first unfazed by the presence of animals, was conditioned to feel fear at the sight of a rat. The infant was presented with the animal as someone struck a metal pole with a hammer above his head. This was repeated until he cried at merely the sight of any furry object – animate or inanimate.

The "Little Albert" experiment, performed in 1919 by John Watson of Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, was the first to show that a human could be classically conditioned. The fate of Albert B has intrigued researchers ever since.

Hall Beck at the Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, has been one of the most tenacious researchers on the case. Watson's papers stated that Albert B was the son of a wet nurse who worked at the hospital. Beck spent seven years exploring potential candidates and used facial analysis to conclude in 2009 that Little Albert was Douglas Merritte, son of hospital employee Arvilla.

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Powell and his colleagues decided to reinvestigate the case. They focused on another woman who had worked at the hospital – teenager Pearl Barger, who, they claim, Beck had discounted after finding no evidence that she'd had a baby while there.

Powell's team uncovered new genealogical documentation, of a Pearl Barger, married and known as Pearl Martin. A US census later revealed that Pearl Martin had three children with her husband – however, one was delivered in 1919, before they married. That child's name was William Albert Barger, but hospital records showed he went by his middle name. "Albert B," says Powell, "it all added up."


Baby used in notorious fear experiment is lost no more - health - 01 October 2014 - New Scientist

Regina Jonas was Ordained in 1935 and Died at Auschwitz. Now, Her Memory is Finally Being Honored. – Tablet Magazine

Born in Berlin in 1902 into a poor Orthodox Jewish family, Jonas was influenced by her rabbi, Dr. Max Weil, who, though Orthodox, allowed girls to become bat mitzvah. At his urging, Jonas continued her studies at the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin from 1924 to 1930. All the other women in her classes were there to become teachers; Jonas, like the men she studied with, wanted to become a rabbi. Her primary supporter was Rabbi Eduard Baneth, who was determined to ordain her, but died just before she finished her training. Though her thesis—“Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?”—received praise from her teachers, none of them agreed to ordain her, including Rabbi Leo Baeck, the leader of the Jews in Germany, who wasn’t willing to jeopardize the unity of the Jewish community as the Nazi threat was intensifying.

Jonas was ultimately ordained, in a private ceremony, by Rabbi Max Dienemann, the president of the General Association of Rabbis in Germany, on December 27, 1935. She struggled to be accepted. A 1936 article in Der Israelit cites a comment describing Jonas’ ordination as a form of “treason and a caricature of Judaism.”

At first, she worked in hospitals, homes for the elderly, and schools, but as more rabbis emigrated she began to preach in synagogues around Germany. In November 1942, she and her mother were deported to Terezin, where she worked with the famous psychiatrist Victor Frankl to care for new prisoners.

Though some survivors, including Baeck, who had also been imprisoned at Terezin, certainly knew Jonas, they didn’t refer to her by name in their writings. The reason in part may found in the forward to Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning. He wrote that he erased from his memory everything that happened before he entered Auschwitz. Part of what he erased was the legacy of Regina Jonas.

Regina Jonas was Ordained in 1935 and Died at Auschwitz. Now, Her Memory is Finally Being Honored. – Tablet Magazine

BBC News - The people who want their language to disappear

Three hours drive from Silicon Valley, we reach the railway. The orange rusting tracks follow the curve of the river through the mountains, disappearing into rough-cut tunnels, deeper into the heart of north-eastern California. This is the road to Taylorsville, a frontier town in the Genesee Valley.

We pull over at the general store. Apart from the hairdressers, it is the only shop in this town of 140 inhabitants - a pointed timber building painted in deep red. The shelves are piled with tins, dried jerky and black and white postcards of pioneers, leaning on wagons or puffing on pipes. Trina, a distant relative and my guide, points to the old mechanical cash register, its brass buttons polished by more than a century of use.

"That was probably one of the first pieces of technology to be brought from the city to the mountains," she says, tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear. "Your great uncle John might have seen it arrive."

Our forefathers were brothers living on a Welsh farm, when in 1850, John Davies travelled to the west coast of America in search of gold. As with many miners during the gold rush, he travelled to California on a wagon train eventually arriving in Genessee Valley where he married Mary Yatkin, a Native American woman from the Maidu people (above).

"There weren't any other women around from Europe," says Trina. "And many of the Maidu men had died at the hands of the early settlers."

We take her jeep through the pine forests to John Davies's farm, a feather, tied delicately to some beads with a leather strap, dangling from the mirror.

"Is Welsh taught in the UK?" Trina asks. "Do you speak it?"
Continue reading the main story

It is, I explain, but I can't. I stutter a couple of badly pronounced phrases and nursery rhymes that my grandmother taught me, which proves the point. She nods.

"I'm the same with Maidu," she says. "But here we are losing our language. There are only five speakers left and they are all aged between 87 and 93."

"Is someone taping it?" I ask. "It needs to be recorded, written down phonetically."

Trina smiles, a little pained. "It isn't quite that simple."

BBC News - The people who want their language to disappear

Secular Jewish filmmaker challenges rabbis to 'Kabbalah Me' | The Times of Israel

Steven Bram was a secular Jew who enjoyed Grateful Dead concerts, sky diving and Rangers games, when a midlife crisis descended on him full throttle.

With his 50th birthday looming, he began to feel his own mortality. He had watched his nest egg disappear during the financial crisis of 2009, and lost a brother-in-law in the 9/11 attacks.

“I was asking myself, ‘Why am I here? Where am I going? What have I accomplished?” A deeper connection to his faith, he thought wistfully, would have given him some answers.

Bram revealed his existential crisis to a friend, who gave him the name of a rabbi. After learning with the rabbi for a year, he became intrigued with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. He was determined to learn more about this ancient work that promised to reveal “the spiritual secrets of the universe.” Though his goal was knowledge and not self-transformation, his life was profoundly altered by the experience.

As a producer of sports films, Bram couldn’t quell the urge to film and share his path to enlightenment. It was a concept he picked up from Kabbalah.

“It’s this idea that you can’t just sit around: you have to act upon what you know and do something for the world,” he said. And so he created “Kabbalah Me,” which has so far been shown in LA and New York. Bram expects to bring it to Israel in the coming months.

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Though he has stopped eating his beloved lobster, Miriam continues to eat it in front of him. His children express disappointment that he will no longer have bacon for breakfast and don’t understand why he won’t have it anymore. Clearly, his greatest obstacle will be convincing his family and friends that he hasn’t gone nuts.

Even some rabbis aren’t happy about his passion: They warn him that studying Kabbalah for someone without a foundation in Jewish text is like eating dessert before the main dish, meaning that Bram ought to spend his time on learning the basics first. In truth, many Jews believe that Kabbalah is intended to be kept esoteric and reserved only for scholars over the age of 40.

Secular Jewish filmmaker challenges rabbis to 'Kabbalah Me' | The Times of Israel

A Weighty Inheritance: An Excerpt from 'God, Faith, and Identity From the Ashes' – Tablet Magazine

I grew up in a Jewish home in a predominately Jewish town in a predominately Jewish suburb. I spent two hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday at Hebrew School, and attended High Holiday services with my family at our local Conservative synagogue. I was Jewish, of course, just as everyone around me seemed to be, but I could sense early on that the world of Judaism in which I existed was just a bit different from everyone else’s.

None of my friends, after all, had great aunts and uncles and grandparents with inky numbers scrawled on their forearms. I understood it from a young age as something that set my family apart—set me apart—and somehow marked us, too. We were a family of Holocaust survivors, and that was the lens through which, unbeknownst to me at first, every Biblical account I read and every prayer I learned was filtered. From a young age, my faith was bound to my family’s legacy; their stories my ritual text, their sorrows my liturgy.

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I realized then that I had missed out on years of questions, stories, and, more acutely, years of a real relationship with my grandparents. All I had were my pieced-together memories, grainy home movie footage, and second-hand accounts of their experiences during the Holocaust. The lore I had been consumed by when I was younger had been largely cobbled together from what I knew about them at the time, snippets of stories of my grandmother surviving because of her skill as a seamstress, of cousins and uncles looking out for each other during the war and after. It wasn’t fair, my 17-year-old self angrily thought. There were so many more things I needed to know.

A Weighty Inheritance: An Excerpt from 'God, Faith, and Identity From the Ashes' – Tablet Magazine

Mentally ill people found chained by families and left to die after typhoon Haiyan – video | World news | The Guardian

I will be interested to see if they do any type of follow-up reporting on this story in the future.

"[F]ilmed and directed by Simon Rawles and produced by Vishva Samani, shows mentally ill people shackled in cages by their families in the Philippines. Their situation was revealed by local organisations searching for vulnerable survivors in the aftermath of typhoon Haiyan. They were shocked to find one man who had been trapped by his family for 16 years; he had been left to die. Another six people were found in the town of San Remigio, northern Cebu, where this film is shot "

Mentally ill people found chained by families and left to die after typhoon Haiyan – video | World news | The Guardian

What Happens When Hasidic Jews Go Secular -- Science of Us

The first time Lynn Davidman bit into a cheeseburger, she was worried for her life. “I was afraid some punishment by God might be imminent,” she recalls. She wasn’t sure what form his retribution for eating a non-kosher burger would take; she probably wouldn’t be hit by lighting in a restaurant, she figured, but perhaps she would be struck to the ground.

A junior at Ramaz, a modern Orthodox Jewish day school in New York, Davidman had begun questioning the strict laws she’d been raised with years earlier. Davidman, now a (secular) professor of sociology at the University of Kansas, has spent much of her career studying communities like the one she grew up in. In her first book, Tradition in a Rootless World, she profiled American Jewish women who grew up irreligious and chose Orthodoxy as adults. For her latest book, Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews, Davidman got to know a very different group of people: 40 men and women born into ultra-Orthodox Hasidic communities who had, against all odds, broken away and joined the secular world.

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How unusual it is for people to leave these communities?
Very. It takes an enormous amount of guts, savvy, and bravery. The general idea in the community is to keep people as far away from the secular world as possible — it’s seen as polluting. They are taught that the outside world is dangerous, that they have to stick together because God chose them, and if they don’t follow God’s commandments, they will be punished terribly. They grow up with a tremendous fear.

What Happens When Hasidic Jews Go Secular -- Science of Us

The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit' : NPR

One of Billie Holiday's most iconic songs is "Strange Fruit," a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he's also tied to another watershed moment in America's history.

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In the late 1930s, Pellison says, Meeropol "was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge."

Meeropol once said the photograph "haunted" him "for days." So he wrote a poem about it, which was then printed in a teachers union publication. An amateur composer, Meeropol also set his words to music. He played it for a New York club owner — who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.

When Holiday decided to sing "Strange Fruit," the song reached millions of people. While the lyrics never mention lynching, the metaphor is painfully clear,,,

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And that's where the second part of Meeropol's story begins. The link is the pseudonym he used when writing poetry and music: Lewis Allan.

"Abel Meeropol's pen name 'Lewis Allan' were the names of their children who were stillborn, who never lived," says his son, Robert Meeropol. He and his older brother, Michael, were raised by Abel and his wife, Anne Meeropol, after the boys' parents — Ethel and Julius Rosenberg — were executed for espionage in 1953.


The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit' : NPR