Time: 5:52 P.M. June 13, 2023 The Saga of One Man vs. Half of the United States

     Eight years since the awful man rode down an escalator and began spouting hatred, mysogny, and untruths. Seven years ago in November, he won an election by a fluke, due to a quirky national voting system (The Electoral College). 2017--2020 half of the country suffered. We tolerated lies, fake news, embarrassing foreign relations gaffes, consorting with dictators, mishandling of a pandemic, and unqualified appointees. White supremacy, racism, unfair immigration procedures, anti Muslim propaganda, antisemitism, Asian hate--all increased with frightening severity during his presidency. Two impeachments but no ouster from office. 

  And then finally relief--a new president in November 2020, after agonizing days of counting ballots. But that was not enough. 2021 brought accusations of a rigged election and delays in the final  approval of a new president's victory. Then a riot occurred spurred on by this man's words, storming of   our Capitol, unheard of in our history. Actually, all of the above are new lows for the United States.And

we wait. Will he be tried and convicted? The judge randomly (?) selected for the case, she an irrational

Trump supporter. The rioters are tried, convicted, and jailed in a methodical manner. I do not know 

how many political hacks have lost their jobs their jobs and reputations. He throws people out like rotten bananas.

   

   Wait--indictments. After eight years, first in New York and now in Miami--34 plus 36 felonies. Never before say the historians. Is this a happy or sad time for Americans? Are we depressed we have stooped so low or are we jubilant that no one is above the law?

    I do not know about you. But, I am MAD. Justice moves slowly if you are white, male, and rich. The other half of the country will send money to him. There will be a rally and party at a golf course in New Jersey in a few hours. Obscene. What makes these supporters tick? I search for answers, but I cannot find any. The philosophers, psychologists, historians, and political pundits cannot give me suitable reasons.

   I have been thinking. When people I admire break the law, I am very disappointed. I do not condone or overlook their behavior. I acknowledge. I am not speaking about a man who held the highest office in the land but writers, newscasters, politicians, religious leaders who lied or committed a crime.

©2023 Karenlevi

ON THE SPECTRUM

 Nothing provokes my ire more than saying, "he/she/they are on the spectrum," in a casual offhand manner. People use the label to describe awkward social behavior or difficulties in establishing and maintaining relationships. Usually what follows is "but they are really smart." Another statement to make my blood boil. No one wants to be "on the spectrum," the Autism Spectrum. It is not easy, fun, an excuse, or a tit-for-tat diagnosis--odd but smart (so all will be well). 

Did you know that more people diagnosed with Autism have cognitive disabilities than not? And just so you know, average is considered IQ 85 and above. An IQ score of 85-100 is technically average, but it is not super smart. I mention these statistics because "smart" seems to be some kind of a designation that separates disabled people. If one has a learning disability or attention deficit disorder, BUT THAT PERSON IS SMART, people seem to feel vindicated or absolved from a disability label, in other words superior. 

Did you know that Binet who developed the original IQ test wanted the score to be used as a means for helping people not categorizing or classifying human beings? I value academic intelligence, specifically verbal, because that is how my brain operates. But, I have lived long enough to know that intellectual ability encompasses far more: such as artistic, social-emotional, athletic, fine motor, and other non-verbal abilities.

I accept that individuals with normal intelligence can be diagnosed autistic. But, please stop saying they are "high functioning Autistic." What does that actually mean? Their IQ scores were high on an intelligence test? There must be some reason for the diagnosis. As for adults, I find it difficult to believe that the person did not have challenges in school, higher education, social relationships, and in searching for a job. (Of course, if that person was in an educational setting that catered to them, their experience would have been different.)

Adults claim they are diagnosed after childhood and adolescence. That may be, but there would have to be a history of difficulties as a child and a diagnosis by a qualified professional. Autism does not pop up later in life. It is a disorder of early childhood which lasts a lifetime. I daresay anyone alive today--perhaps excluding people who are in their 90's--would know if childhood and school had been problematic. Educational systems may not have been great for people with special needs; however, the 1940's and 1950's were not the dark ages. 

Quirky is not autism, nor is awkward or socially inadept. Mental illness, anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder, or antisocial behavior are not autism. One must meet specific criteria and, to be blunt, it's not pretty. I do not say this to be cruel only realistic! However, all people in our society should be accepted for what they are capable of doing. We need to bend our definitions of normal, be more tolerant, myself included. What we have learned along the way--for example, the saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover," has proven me wrong about people time and again. 

So much progress has been made in the last 50 years, incredible when you think that as late as the 1950's individuals with Down Syndrome were institutionalized at birth. But more change is necessary, especially in job opportunities for people with neuro untypical brains. And I don't mean computer geniuses who are able to get a position at Microsoft and sit in a dark room all day. I mean opportunities in daylight--in stores, offices, libraries, on the streets, farms, in homes wherever work needs to be done. Interviewing and qualifying exams must be tweeked or adjusted. Our schools have accomplished this task, so the wideworld can do the same. Other areas of change should occur in coaching on the job and education of middle managers and supervisors.

So, in conclusion, you answer for me--who is high functioning? A "brilliant" person who works for a company that researches new vistas in virtual reality or artificial intelligence but cannot buy groceries and live in an apartment. Or someone who is not that smart (in the IQ sense of the word) but has friends, lives alone, and takes care of oneself and stocks merchandise at a store.

https://www.verywellmind.com/history-of-intelligence-testing-2795581

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5919599/

©Karen Levi 2023

Lone Wolf for a Good Cause?

 I encountered a small statue in a garden on a walking tour of Konstanz, Germany. Our guide explained the significance; this was a bust of Johann Georg Elser (1903-1945). As she recounted the story, it seemed familiar. Then I remembered--I read about the incident in Agent Sonya by Ben McIntyre.

Georg was a German carpenter and craftsman who valued freedom and rights for the workers in the Third Reich. He sympathized with the needy since he grew up in a family that struggled economically. He worked in Konstanz, Germany, reportedly some of the happiest years of his short life. 

He managed to resist the Nazi party with small acts, such as refusing to listen to radio broadcasts of Hitler's speeches and to salute with arm extended. As a biographer of Hitler, Ian Kershaw said, "he was a single person, an ordinary German, a man from the working class, acting without the help and or knowledge of anyone else." 

Georg Elser's actions remind one of the question of the morality of exposing innocent victims to danger in the cause for good. Are accidental deaths as a result of an assassination of an evil leader justified? Mr. Elser engaged in other forms of protest which obviously were insufficient to counter the rise of Hitler. 

Disgusted by the Nazis, he meticuously planned and nearly executed a bombing on November 8, 1939 that would have killed or seriously injured Hitler and other highly placed Nazi officers. Hitler gave a speech at a beer hall in Munich every November 8 to commemorate his attempted putsch on that date in 1923. Unfortunately, Hitler left the beer hall (one of his favorite) before the bomb detonated, ostensibly to catch a train. Several people were killed, none were the brass of the Nazi regime.

Georg was long gone when the bomb exploded. He was arrested, in Konstanz, for smuggling, while  attempting to cross into Switzerland. When his knapsack was searched, police found tools and a postcard of the beer hall, incriminating evidence. Georg was sent to Munich and then Berlin where he was tortured by high ranking officials. Then shipped off to Sachsenhausen, where he spent years, until he was executed at Dachau in 1945. The Germans kept him alive as a symbol of British intelligence involvement rather than German resistance. Hitler was certain that Esler alone could not have carried out a plot to assassinate him.

Evidently, the Germans remained convinced. Finally, in the 1960's interrogation transcripts were found. Not until the 1980's was Georg Elser memorialized as a hero. Georg himself wrote of his misgivings about the killing of innocent victims for the purposes of freedom and destroying evil. He said, "I wanted to prevent the war!" 

https://www.fritz-bauer-forum.de/en/datenbank/johann-georg-elser-3/

https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/topics/7-georg-elser-and-the-assassination-attempt-of-november-8-1939/

https://www.dw.com/en/hitlers-would-be-assassin-a-lone-wolf-who-acted-on-his-ideals/a-51156209

Note: Any mistakes are my responsibility. It is difficult to ferret out fact from fiction in the numerous accounts of this story.

©Karen Levi 2023

Two Emmas

Emma Lazarus Budge

 When I heard the name Emma Lazarus at a Holocaust remembrance program in Frankfurt, Germany, I immediately thought of the Jewish/American poet whose sonnet is installed on the Statue of Liberty. But I was incorrect. There was another one and probably thousands more. The Emma Lazarus I heard mentioned in Germany married Henry Budge in the latter part of the 19th century, both Jews. 

Henry was born in Frankfurt in 1840. He emigrated to the United States in 1866 and became a successful businessman. He must have returned to Germany to marry Emma. Both moved to the United States and became citizens in 1882. For some reason, they relocated to Hamburg, Germany in 1903, where they were great patrons of the arts and charitable foundations. During World War I, they lived in 

Switzerland to avoid conflicts of loyalty. 

One of the foundations established with their money was named after them--the Frankfurt Henry and Emma Budge Foundation. The purpose of the foundation was the "care of men, women, and children in need of recreation, without distinction of sex, age, and religious confession," a forward thinking mission for the times. The Budges agreed to use capital from their foundation to alleviate a housing shortage in 1928, in Frankfurt, specifically for a "retirement home for the middle class." The residence was built in 10 months and ready for the first inhabitants in 1930. Ernst May, of the Frankfurt building department, selected the Bauhaus style of architecture for the structure. Three avant-garde architects assisted him, most notably Mart Stam.

                                            Example Bauhaus architecture     

The result was a masterpiece of an open light-flooded building with 100 apartments. Each had a private balcony or patio with a view of wooded areas. The common rooms had movable walls for flexibility. Meals were taken in a dining room and prepared in a modern kitchen with a dishwasher and other avant-garde appliances. The founders and architects envisioned a "collectively managed pensioner's hotel" for older middle class individuals of Jewish and Christian religion. Innovative, the interfaith aspect and the free atmosphere of men and women interacting socially proved to be without historical role models. 

Utimately tragedy occurred when the Nazis took over the foundation and home. The Jewish residents were forced out and moved to various sites in Frankfurt. It is unclear how many Jewish residents lived at the Budge Home, but 23 were murdered by the Nazis. The victims have been memoralized at various sites in Frankfurt. 

One of those residents was my great grandmother Elise Hofmann. She was deported at age 70 in 1942 to Theresienstadt and murdered at Treblinka, an ungodly end for a respectable, modern woman. 

Back to our American Emma Lazarus--a Sephardic Jew--who wrote the sonnet "The American Collossus," which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty. At the time, she worked with Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Their plight and the new statue inspired Emma to write her famous lines.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand           
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

                                                         Emma Lazarus

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The poem, written with no notion of Nazis but yet a knowledge of antisemitism, rang true in the 1880's, 1940's, and now. 

Photo of Emma Lazarus from https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/lazarus

Photo of Emma Budge https://www.dasjuedischehamburg.de/bilder/budge-emma

Content from research done by Gudrun Jäger 2023

©Karen Levi 2023

Where Are the Descendents?

 

Nike Shoes

 The front page of today's Washington Post has a picture of a little girl carrying a Nike shoe box out of the rubble of the mobile home that had been her home. Terrible tornadoes ripped through rural southwestern Mississippi, affecting mostly black residents who live below the poverty line. What struck me was the shoe box. 

How often do we buy shoes and open the box at home? The Nike logo is ubiquitous in our lives. But the juxtaposition of a little girl carrying the box as she climbed out of rubble, as bizarre as it seems, was not shocking. We view these images daily. Scientists do not know the relationship between severe tornadoes and climate change. All I know from my lay standpoint is that wind has increased in intensity in recent years. Regardless of any correlation between climate change and tornadoes, we will experience more weather related tragedies and strange occurrences, for example the rain that never stops in California. 

People tend to be oblivious to what goes on around them--be it weather, safety/general awareness, political upheaval. Granted we suffer from bad news fatigue, worn down with earthquakes, fires, floods, dictators, and wars. I am guilty. But, I do not tune out completely. I focus on my immediate environment and the world as best I can. No one is perfect or Mother Theresa (except for her).

 I often ignore homeless people or those begging on traffic islands. I get tired of emails, requests for donations, and legislative reports from local politicians. I am blessed or cursed. I wake up easily and often-- in a metaphoric sense--noticing something that does not seem right--a noice, smell, or person. For example, what is happening in a section of Bethesda, Maryland.

Today, I tried to visit a neighborhood with beautiful cherry blossoms, our beloved delicately flowering trees that show their impermanent beauty for a week at the most. No go--the residents have banned cars which is fine. But massive construction of an unnecessary new shopping area has caused adjacent streets to be blocked off. Thereby making a pleasant Sunday afternoon spring tradition no longer possible. So an affluent neighborhood has decided to be exclusive and unwelcoming. But worse, the rebuilding of a small strip mall in a typical inside-the-beltway community of our county is turning into I-Don't-Know-What. 

Sacred land for our African American neighbors is being built over and desecrated. It was bad enough when a parking lot was placed over the burial grounds of former slaves, but now there will be more and bigger shops, offices, and apartments. 

There is one tiny parcel of land being contested. So far, the county has not seen fit to save that small section for a memorial site. Across the street from the construction site is an adequate, modern shopping area--once a thriving black residential subdivision. Therefore, there is no need to expand the other area.  

Greed is next to impossible to fight even in liberal Montgomery County, Maryland. So I continue to write letters and sign petitions. Stay vigilant. And hope the little girl and her family in Mississippi get a better house. 

©Karen Levi 2023

LIGHT, JOY, WOMEN--IT MUST BE MARCH OR ADAR

 Previously, I gave little thought to Purim. I remember carnivals in the synagogue social hall as a child--groggers, hats, games, prizes. Purim served as a bright spot after the dark months of Tevet and Shevat. Sweet treats and fun foretold of more joy to come. After early childhood, I ignored Purim, except for the Hamentaschen.

When I joined a congregation in the "oughts," I was introduced to the Purim Spiel. First, I thought, that's dumb, and the Yiddish word deterred, being the daughter of a former Berliner who shunned the colorful, useful language (that I have come to appreciate). 

People said, "come, come, it's so fun." I thought, "What, I have no talent?" I had joined the choir because of a lifelong wish to be immersed in song. I was "good enough," could read music, and knew when to sing quietly. An extroverted member of the choir--who was the Spiel director--encouraged me as well. She remarked that "no talent" was exactly the ticket to join the play's cast.

So to rehearsal I went. And thus began about ten seasons of great fun. The small, liberal congregation had been producing plays for about 5-10 years before I joined in the hilarity. Our director--the demonstrative, very talented choir member--had the ability to take a ragtag bunch of "older" Jews and turn us into a somewhat polished group. I remember her saying, "I hate blocking night. I'm herding cats." We were silly and made jokes about nearly everything we could find as fodder. My favorite spiel was "Schmaltz" (Grease) in which I had a solid role.

The productions were sealed into the annals of congregation history. Our rabbi was an actor in his own right. He could act in any comic role, and he sang in a strong, tenor voice. Naturally, our plays were the story of Esther, Mordechai, and Haman set to rock, popular, or Broadway tunes.

 The era of the plays are over, as all good things must come to an end. There was a chemistry and bonding in the cast that cannot be reproduced. So I am back to a less exciting but still happy Purim, the beginning of more light, warmth, and hope. 

Below is a short essay I wrote about Adar and Purim for those who are interested:
     

    Adar is the twelfth month of the Jewish calendar which can be quite confusing since we         find ourselves neither in December nor at the Jewish New Year. When there is a leap             year, there are two Adars. Adar relates to the Hebrew word, Adir, which means strength.     The month is associated with good fortune and joy. Adar corresponds to the zodiac sign of     Pisces, two unidentified fish in the depths of the sea. Like Esther, who revealed herself as     a Jew after being masked or hidden.

    Purim falls on the 14th day of Adar, a holiday for joyful celebration and the only one            which focuse on brave women. We are familiar with the Megillah and the story of Esther     and Mordechai saving the Jews from certain death. The Megillah, or the Book of Esther,        is one of two ancient books named for women. 

    Spiritually and physically, the month represents the shift from darkness to light. We see        the transformation in the increase of daylight hours and in a new month filled with               joy after several months of darkness. The Purim story deals with a shift from death to            life. 

    After Haman and his henchmen were defeated, Esther went to the king and said, “Do            tomorrow what you have done today.” The king was confused--Haman, his ten sons, and     various other evildoers had been hanged. Why does Esther ask for what has been done?        Scholars have found the Hebrew letters, also representing the numbers 5707, within the        Book of Esther. And what is significant about 5707? The Jewish year corresponds to            1946, when 10 Nazis hanged after trials at Nuremberg. So, was Queen Esther asking            for retribution for crimes that had not been yet committed? Curious.
    

    Tradition has us decking out in a guise or mask for Purim. The Ba’al Shem Tov                    said, “It is a mitzvah to dress up for Purim.” Now why would a pious rabbi suggest a            frivolity like costumes? The ancient rabbis instituted the custom of giving                              Tzedakah to the poor on Purim. If everyone masquerades, one cannot discern who is             giving and who receiving. Therefore, in complete anonymity, one offers and accepts,            the truest form of mitzvah.

    

    Back to joy, which is forever in short supply. Toast with your libation of choice to Health     and Happiness as my parents and grandmothers would say. And drown out the evil of the     Hamans with your groggers.

©Karen Levi 2023