Peoplehood: Just Metal
A prelude in two parts. 1. Nathan Rapoport’s Scroll of Fire sculpture was the first sight I visited on my first trip to Israel in 1989. The part of the sculpture that resonated with me was the menorah representing the reunification of Jerusalem, the converse of the Arch of Titus in which Roman soldiers are [...]
Peoplehood: Carmel
It was windy on the mountain, windy enough that a small scrap of black plastic tarp was blown through the air, into my field of view, and over the top of the memorial. What a shame, I thought to myself, that the quiet, simple scene intended by the memorial’s artist was intruded on by construction [...]
Peoplehood III: Long Tail
Part of our pre-reading for the Peoplehood Project is Erica Brown and Misha Galperin’s Case For Jewish Peoplehood. While it reads at times like the condensed reading room syllabus for a survey course in sociology and religion, the authors make several forays into topics that remind me of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail view of disperse [...]
Peoplehood II: Alliteration
Anglicization does strange things to non-English alphabets. My father’s family name (in the Ukraine) was “Shtechter”, probably with a hard “ch” in the middle (like Bach), but it turned into both “Stern” and “Shtier” when the two halves of the family arrived on Ellis Island. Hailing from a rural town – a “mudhole”, in the [...]
Peoplehood I: Red Sector A
My wife and I have been accepted into the Jewish Federation’s “Peoplehood Project” of MetroWest NJ for 2012-2013. With our 50th birthdays and 25th wedding anniversary coming up, we thought this would be an appropriate way to celebrate (the trip back to Italy for the prosciutto visit is another story, and decidedly along a different [...]