I don’t have a single thought in my head so I am just going to start writing and see if maybe something emerges. My book-in-progress is calling because my subject is a 90 -year-old civil rights attorney who has had a stroke and we don’t know how much time he has, and I am really close to finishing. Do you think I am possibly afraid to finish? As long as I am not finishing, I have control, but once I stop, it’s gone. I never thought about that before. Wonder if that is a “thing” when you are creating stuff. Anybody else ever get FDS—Foot Dragging Syndrome —near the end? Or maybe it is that I really want to be finished NOW yet I also want to take the time for it to be the best and most polished it can be. (Obviously, unlike this post.) So, maybe it is PPS (Ping-ponging Syndrome). And what about the dozen-plus other things I need to do? Including writing a blog post that is interesting and deep. Uh oh. 😳 …And I keep starting things and not finishing and the house is a mess and I am seeing the dreaded DUST BUNNIES and oh lord, if the TV was on, that would gravitational-well me down rabbit holes of mixed metaphors and freeze my brain into a state of Holy-Sh—!-Is-this-really-happening? I don’t want to go there today. Please, can I just have a day without the world hovering and threatening? How do I just breathe and focus and not start in one direction and jerk to another? Am I waiting for AI to tell me what to do? That might be simpler. This is retirement? Isn’t it against the rules to feel overwhelmed in retirement? That just seems wrong. Am I going to have to punctuate this? Oh no, it’s going to be late. How do I prioritize? Oh, wait— What?
My dog wants to me to throw her ball.
Bye ya’ll.
T.K. Thorne is a retired police captain (Birmingham, Alabama), former director of City Action Partnership, and an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction.
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Feel free to explore my website and books while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.
What happened in the minds of the men who sprayed bullets into the group celebrating Hanukkah on a beach (2025)? Or the Tree of Life synagogue (2018)? Or the man who walked into a church bible study and killed nine people (2015)? How did things get so twisted in those minds? Does society have any role or responsibility? Do I?
The tragedy in Australia, Pennsylvania, or in Charleston is sadly not unprecedented. From the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, to the beating of parishioners in a Mississippi church, to multiple arsons from Louisiana to Michigan (both past and current), acts of racial violence and terrorism have not been strangers on sacred ground or anywhere else.
As a retired law enforcement professional, I’ve encountered the dark side of humanity up close and on more occasions than I could have ever imagined. Here is what I have learned: the line between good and evil, citizenship and chaos, sanity and insanity is far thinner and more fragile than we imagine.
Two things motivate the human mind: 1) what we need and 2) what we believe. What we need is fundamental and universal. Beyond food, water, and shelter, we need to feel that our life has meaning and significance. People who have a mental break from reality and hear voices, do not hear the mundane grocer down the street in their head—they hear “God’s voice.” The paranoid believe they are the object of focused governmental attention, the center of a dark conspiracy.
Our earliest motivators are to have our parents’ approval at best and, at the least, their attention. We need to feel that we matter.
What we believe and remember is shaped by many factors and subject to change over time. Reality is a subjective function of the mind that takes input, reorganizes, and interprets it. For example, the actual visual image that enters our eyes is upside down, but our brain flips it, so we “see” it right side up. How often do we “flip” ideas and information so that they fit into our worldview?
We don’t perceive the atoms in the chair on which we sit or the vast spaces between them; it all appears solid, though, in reality, it is not. But it works to see it that way; therefore, as far as our minds are concerned, it is solid and we can sit in it. How often do we ignore ideas and information that don’t fit into our worldview?
To external eyes, the shooter at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church had quit his job and was living a pretty aimless existence, but what was churning in his mind? At some point, he began to filter reality, forming, seeing, and hearing only what fit into his worldview.
“‘Y’all are raping our women and taking over the country,” he said to the people at the Bible study. “This [killing] must be done.” In his mind, he was acting logically, even heroically, in accordance with what he believed and what he needed, i.e., to feel that his life was meaningful and significant. And that required incorporating a concept of “other.”
The distinction between “us” and “them” is a fundamental human value, perhaps shaped by evolution, certainly by culture. “Us” is first our family, then our clan, our tribe, our region, our nation. “Other” is whatever is not “us.”
This word, this belief is the foundation of prejudice, hate, and radicalism, as well as the foundation of love. “They” are not “us.” “They” might not even be human. In WWII, the Allies’ enemies were “Japs” and “Krauts,” not human beings. Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan defined Jews, Catholics, and Blacks with words (“subhuman,” “vermin,” and “parasites”) to make them less than human. Once that is believed, it is not a long jump to justifying anything, from snobbery to bullying to genocide. It is a thin line that can be crossed with a mental step.
On the other hand, when compassion and wisdom make “them” a part of “us,” interesting things happen. Kindness and respect born of embracing otherness is a language understood across the world and across worlds. So how do we keep our children and ourselves wary of strangers (“There is a time for war and a time for peace. . . .”) and yet open to strangeness?
It is neither possible nor desirable to do away with distinctions or diversity. The bonds of family will always be unique. We naturally tend to spend time with those we perceive share our values, culture, or history. There is nothing wrong with that, but the more positive contact we have with “others,” the less real their otherness becomes and the more possibilities there are to connect and include differences within the “us.”
We cannot be held hostage by awful acts of hatred. Positive contact is our responsibility. We must seek it and teach it to our children—by traveling, by reading, by reaching out to “others,” by listening, by cultivating an openness of mind that is also critical and questioning. We must make conscious choices whether to remain in our conclaves of “us vs. them” or to expand our world.
T.K. Thorne is a retired police captain (Birmingham, Alabama), director of City Action Partnership, and an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction.
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Feel free to explore my website and books while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.
“Struggle” is not a word I naturally embrace. I recently posted this:
My housekeeping style can be summed up in 7 words:
“There appears to have been a struggle.”
Okay, I stole that from a dish towel in a gift shop somewhere.
I like order around me, but housekeeping is, indeed, a struggle. The effort involved in making order happen seems like a waste of time. Why make the beds when we’re just going to get in them in a few hours? Why clean the floor we are constantly walking on?
Cleaning the house is a process on a spectrum. If you are too far on one end, you can eat off the floor, but you are a neurotic mess or a zombie. Too far on the other end, and the mice are eating off the floor. But the more interesting question is, why do we need order?
“Studies” say that an ordered environment brings a sense of control, reducing stress and distraction, and makes you “feel more grounded in your own environment.” I like that word, “grounded.” Makes me think of being connected to Mother Earth —the source of life (at least on this planet) —a place where I have a sense of belonging, where I can relax.
It seems like a contradiction, but an ordered environment somehow “allows” me to be creative. That process itself is often messy, be it paint (often as much on me as the canvas), strewn garden implements (it is a mystery why I always need the tool that I did not get out), or words running about on their own (as they appear to be doing for this post).
Sorry, I will try to rein the words into order.
Back to “struggle,” defined as to try very hard to do, achieve, or deal with something that is difficult or that causes problems.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that word. I’m reading a book with a group (To Be A Jew Today by Noah Feldman) in which the word has taken on a new meaning for me. The word “Israel” means “one who struggles with God.” Jews are defined by that word (Israel) in the Bible, based on Jacob’s literal or metaphoric wrestling with God or with an angel. Some religions are about accepting (faith) or obedience, but Judaism is about struggling. And that includes questioning, discussing, even arguing—with each other and with (or about) God. You might recall the story of Abraham challenging and negotiating with God about God’s intentions to destroy everyone in the city of Sodom, including Abraham’s uncle, Lot. (Book plug: Angels at the Gate is my award-winning story of Lot’s wife.)
Click to Order
Where am I going with this? Back to the future . . . I mean, back to creativity. A thought-provoking article in The Atlanticpostulated that AI is threatening to take the humanness out of our creativity.
Have you noticed all the incredible, seemingly realistic or surreal video reels suddenly appearing on social media? AI-generated art programs can now make your imagination come to life in a realistic video with solely the input of your description. No cameras, no people involved—art on demand. It’s given rise to endless reels.
I am struggling with the concept of art without struggle, without craft. No hours and hours of learning. What does it mean? It is simultaneously wonderful and frightening. Is it comparable to the introduction of the photograph that some feared would make painting extinct? (What artist could rival the light captured in a photograph?) Or will the effect be more dire?
We writers have been watching AI get better and better…very fast. I now regularly receive emails from marketers gushing about my books (with AI-generated descriptions that would make me cry if they were from actual readers) and offering to represent my unappreciated, outstanding books. The emails are so good, I’m saving them in a file!
What is going to happen? Is this just an iteration of new technology shaking things up, or something on an entirely different level? Are we looking at the end of art that requires struggling to master the medium, or just a new set of tools to express our basic human drive to create?
I don’t know. I’m struggling with that.
Personal Note:
Speaking of art, thought I’d share my most recent piece made with real, messy watercolor paint. I love the intersection of reality and fantasy. AI might do it better (as could many more experienced artists, I’m sure), but it can’t take the process away from me. I loved getting there.
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Feel free to explore my website and books while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.
“People are a lot more than their political inclination.”
I read that statement today in a Washington Post article about an older man who found happiness in a wildly diverse group of coffee drinkers at a local café. People came there every day to sit and talk about everything, including politics, bringing pointedly different views. But they were respectful of each other, and they cared about each other.
I belong to a group sort of like that. We worked as policewomen in the same department…umm…decades ago. We’ve discussed enough politics to know we have differing perspectives. Our backgrounds are different. Our lives have taken us down different paths, but we find a way to meet about once a month, and we’re important to each other.
To keep the peace, we don’t talk politics when we are together. In that way, we are something like families who navigate the perils of divisive politics by not going there. But one thing I know beyond a shadow of a doubt: If one of us is in need, others will step up. One friend fell and had to have a hip replacement. She was single and had no one to stay with her through her early recovery. Another member moved in with her and took care of her. Sometimes we reach out to share stuff. Or just help each other laugh. We are there for each other. No matter our differences.
Living in the deep, politically conservative South in a county, shall we say, “sparse,” as far as my current party of choice, I have to remind myself that my neighbors are good people. They would not hesitate to help me fix a tire or a fence or feed my animals, should I ask. And I have, and they have.
I have many fears about the world we live in—fear for our freedoms, for the system of law, for the health of our planet. Sometimes I wonder if this experiment of humanity might just fail. Other evolutionary lines of humans did. Sometimes I wonder if we are worth saving.
And then, despite the sky-is-falling rhetoric that rains daily on my head, I read about the actual progress the world has made in key respects, such as extreme poverty, child mortality, improved water accessibility, and education levels. Or someone just does something utterly and randomly kind, and I want to do everything I can to make sure we are still here for the next generations, to give them a shot at doing it better.
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Feel free to explore my website and books while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.
Yes, I’ve been obsessed with this question. I totally understand if you are rolling your eyes. But I think it is the key to unlocking a door that has been locked for a long time, maybe since humanity’s first glimmers of consciousness stirred. The story we tell ourselves is that we are the same from moment to moment, but that only feels true because we are the weavers of the story, just as we are the weavers of the tale about reality outside ourselves. The world we perceive is just a fiction.
What about inside ourselves? Memories are the stitches that hold the weaving together. They are actually reconstituted every time we recall them. And they often change over time. Can you blame them? Getting assembled and reassembled over and over is bound to shake things up in there.
Then I read this:
Recently, research that has been steadily accumulating is challenging the assumptions about when life on Earth began. Our planet is 4.4 billion years old. New genetic DNA research suggests that the last universal common ancestor of all life (LUCA) existed approximately 3.9-4.2 billion years ago. That is significantly older than previously thought and is getting really close to the early Earth formation period. (Get into the weeds here.) Not only that, but it appears to have started out much more complex than expected, meaning, as Michael Moreman suggests, “our ideas [about the beginning of life on Earth] cannot rely on the power of chance at all.” For some, this may bring validation to the idea of a Creator, while for others, it conjures the speculation that the basics of life may have arrived from extraterrestrial sources, such as meteorites.
What does that mean for the notion of who we are?
It is stunning that we don’t think much about who we are. Like a newborn, we walk around accepting that we just are. Our awareness of ourselves is so very limited. As philosopher Alan Watts noted, our consciousness is like a flashlight in a dark room, only illuminating a small area at a time. It’s our perception that “we” (our conscious minds) generate our thoughts, but science tells us that we only become conscious of a thought after it has coalesced, and different thoughts can emerge from various parts of the brain simultaneously. It’s like having popcorn peppering your brain!
What is the value of all this meandering thinking?
It casts a light on everything. Looking at ourselves as evolved creatures with multiple layers of nervous system (brains) allows us to see that we make decisions based on what gave us a survival edge, rather than on rationality. We are prone to taking mental shortcuts, such as groupthink or cognitive biases, to make emotional assumptions and judgements, and to follow leaders instead of critical thinking (which is perhaps why we “mistake” movie stars, football stars, and TV personalities for leaders). Critical thinking takes an expenditure of time/energy. The world is so complex, the task of critical thinking is ever more challenging. I don’t know about you, but I have little time to think about who I am. I am daily marking off hundreds of emails that I haven’t looked at as “Read.”
It’s much easier to ask AI for an answer, to let it be creative for us. And we are just at the beginning of that genie waiting to burst out of the bottle. Of course, the same concern existed when the internet sprang to being, and the world opened up to us. Search engines produced websites. Now, AI summarizes it, and we don’t even have to read the articles.
What is next?
Back to the Who am I question: I have a persistent fiction that the same person (me) lives from moment to moment through all the experiences I encounter. But that isn’t real. I just reconstitute that “person” based on memories (which are also reconstituted). This is a bit scary and disorienting to think about, as is the fact that we consist of biomes of bacteria, viruses, and fungi and bits of other people’s cells, and that our thoughts arise out of the midnight darkness of something that is “us” in every meaningful way but feels alien.
But in a strange way, this also means we (whoever/whatever that is) have an extraordinary power and freedom. We don’t have to accept that we “are” a certain way just because we recall having been that way in the past. We have the power and freedom in this very moment to create and recreate ourselves.
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Feel free to explore my website and books (fiction and nonfiction) while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.
“Everything is true but false, all at once,” Jim Reed wrote in his tiny treasure of random thoughts, “What More Can I Say?”
The serendipity and resonance of the Universe are startling.
Or, Dang, I’ve been thinking about that!
Resonance is when when an unseen web catches a thought and vibrates it throughout the structure of reality.
Or, when an idea you thought was unique pops up everywhere like a whack-a-mole game.
Have you ever experienced a conversation where you suddenly can’t remember a mutually known name, and the other person “catches” the memory lapse from you (like a yawn) and suddenly can’t remember it either, even though they would have sworn two seconds ago that they knew it.
The second thought . . . I can’t remember what it was.
But here’s a third one: We can never perceive the entirety of reality about anything. First of all, our brains have developed to screen out a lot of it. Can you imagine what it would be like if we saw all the frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, instead of just what we call “light”? Or what if we heard everything that was making a sound within 50 miles or perceived all the millions of smell molecules floating around, in other words, be like dogs. (I’d be in catatonic overload. I can’t even read with the television on.)
But there is another level to that thought. There are layers to reality. My desktop is flat. It is wood. It is molecules. It is atoms. It is subatomic particles, quarks, and whatnot, and it is only itself in relation to all that and the rest of everything. It sits on a structure that sits on a floor, which is part of a house that rests on the ground, and so on.
So, two opposite truths can coexist (as I mused about previously). The desk is still, but it is moving. In relation to me, it is unmoving. From another perspective, it is spinning at 1,000 mph due to the Earth’s rotation and moving through space at 67,000 mph, orbiting a star that is moving at 450,000 mph through the Milky Way galaxy, which itself is moving at 1.3 million mph through space. Not to mention, it is in constant motion internally on a subatomic and quantum level.
I raise an eyebrow at my desk. Nope. Not moving.
So, can I believe in peace and war at the same time? Can I want the air condition blasting while I curl up with my heating pad? Can I hold love and loss together?
“But,” my sister insists, “some things really happen, and some things are lies.”
Yes, very true, especially, it seems, in the moment.
My desk is just my desk, but it is equally a desk only in relation to everything else, including time. At some point (long after I have already done so), it will break down into elementary particles, and its energy will be rearranged into something else.
Every truth is but a shadow of reality. And multiple truths exist about the same thing. If you don’t believe this, read two history books on the same subject. As a writer, it is disheartening to hear “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), but at the same time, there are unlimited ways to tell the same stories. There are likewise often truths within lies. They say, the “best” lies contain elements of truth.
No wonder I’m confused.
There are paths through the ethics jungle, but although it may seem (or we may choose to believe) they are simple paths, they are never pure ones. Unforeseen consequences lurk, ready to pounce. Trails split, then split again, some ending in nowhere; some ending on the edge of a cliff. One, or more than one, may arrive at your destination, but probably more likely at a destination you never intended or imagined. Think about where you ended up in life compared to where you thought you were going.
My dear friend, Ruthie Landis, who is a body therapist/sherpa/actor, etc., says that within each of us are primary and secondary tendencies in how we perceive/react /behave. Simultaneously, there are what she calls “shadow qualities”—darker behaviors and emotions we are not fully aware of or deny are part of us. We are more, of course, but those patterns are part of the multiple and often conflicting truths of who we are.
I carry around an understanding of “me” as a unique human being. But what is that exactly? To my astonishment, I now have to make room in my “me” for a host of bacteria, a microbiome that helps call the shots on my moods, needs, and multiple details of my health. And I am not alone in here. I carry in my body cells from my mother—not just genetics, but actual cells. So do you, as well as cells from older siblings and, if you have given birth, you contain literal parts of your children (microchimerism). How do these cells influence us?
Life and truth are complex, multi-layered, sometimes contradictory. Two different things can be true simultaneously. Or false at the same time. Or both. We are less than and simultaneously far more than we think we are.
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Feel free to explore my website and books while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.
At times, the need arises to hold two concepts in opposition as true. This is discombobulating.
My mind craves order and simplicity. I blame that on evolutionary biology. Our most basic level of brain development is reptilian—edible/not edible; fight/flight, sleep/wake, the red team/the blue team. It doesn’t get simpler than that. So, the brain fights the notion of something as difficult to resolve as contradictory truths.
For example, I am studying traditionalists who believe their way is the true and only way. My values include the belief that diversity of thought and culture enriches the world, so I am (theoretically) tolerant of those who disagree with my ideas about that (and other things).
But what happens when traditionalists become the majority? What happens when they have and use the power to enforce their own beliefs on others? History informs us that this has happened before, and not that long ago, people who didn’t conform were tortured and killed as “heretics,” “witches,” or “vermin.”
May I also reference Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale?
One of the jobs of writers is to document what has happened and to explore what might happen. Writing can entertain, but it can also make us consider unintended consequences, difficult decisions, and truths that contradict.
Recently, a man expressed surprise at the fact that I had written Last Chance for Justice, which chronicles the criminal investigation and trials of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing case. He thought it was useless to write books about history.
I’d never encountered that particular perspective and was momentarily (and uncharacteristically) at a loss for words.
But as we talked, he shared that his grandmother had fled a German concentration camp during the Holocaust, finding safety in marrying a man in a country that was part of the Soviet Union at the time. She told her grandson not to look back, that what had happened in the past was not important, only the future mattered.
I could understand her desire for him to make his own life without the horrors of the past haunting him. However, not knowing and understanding history handicaps us in recognizing patterns, making life choices, and impacting our world. He was unable to reconcile those two truths.
Can I love my country and hate some of the decisions it has made? Can I disagree with people without compromising my value of welcoming diverse thoughts? Is war ever the answer?
In both writing and life, paths and issues are sometimes clear and straightforward; at other times, they are complex and nuanced. Sometimes, we get just to be present, to create, to love, and to embrace our gift of life. But other times, we have the responsibility to struggle with difficult questions, and that can involve holding disparate truths together and making the best difficult decisions we can.
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Feel free to explore my website and books while you are here, but if you arrived by way of my blog on Substack, here’s the way back.
I’m just back from a long trip to Japan. Many wonderful experiences. Enjoyed very much the people we were with and the new people we met. Much to admire about the culture, but my favorite part was the incredible gardens. Part of me was gobsmacked and just wanted more; the other part was thinking about my little garden and pond and wanting to get back to it!
Rabbi Jonathan Miller wrote a piece titled “Do Anti-Zionists Hate Jews.” It was not a statement or position about Israeli policy but rather about an important principle. I found it made a lot of sense and helped clarify my own thoughts, so I am sharing it, with his permission, precisely as he penned it in his own newsletter.
Feel free to sign up for his newsletter and check out his novel, and I will return next month (after a trip to Japan!) with my own thoughts about who knows what.
~T.K.
Backwards and Forwards
Friends and Readers,
I initially penned this newsletter to go out on June 1. In light of the horrific murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, I am sending this out today. I was unfortunately prescient. My heart is broken today. Pray for the souls of these two young people. This crime is an affront to every American and to Jews everywhere. May God protect us all.
Jonathan
Do Anti-Zionists Hate Jews?
As we were puttering around in the kitchen, Judi asked me a question. “I am confused by all the noise out there. Do you believe that anti-Zionism is automatically antisemitism?” (A gloss—Jew hatred is a better term to describe antipathy against Jews –another blog, another time.)
“The answers are obvious,” I replied.
Judi suggested, “You should write this up. Others will want to know.”
Blame her for this essay.
Let’s start with definitions before I delve into Latin and before I examine some claims and counterclaims.
Definition: Zionism is the Jewish people’s national movement to restore Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish people’s historic homeland, the land of Israel.
If you take my definition at face value, you will notice that Bibi Netanyahu is not mentioned. Nor is this Israeli government. Nor is the war in Gaza. Nor are the settlements. Nor is the high-tech society that Israel has produced. Nor is the right of the Palestinians to self-determination.
Zionism is simply the Jewish people’s national movement to restore Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish people’s historic homeland, the land of Israel. Not hard. No need for nuance.
And therefore, anti-Zionism is its opposite, the denial of the just cause of the Jewish people to live and govern themselves in their historic homeland.
Now for the Latin.
If you compare Jews to the world population at large, we comprise a rounding error in the Farmer’s Almanac. How many of us are there? I don’t know. Maybe 14 million, maybe 17 million? Count us as you please.
A priori, it is silly today to criticize Zionism’s project, the State of Israel, as though history did not happen. Israel was founded in 1948 from a multitude of complex reasons. Today, Israel is the de facto home of half the world’s Jews. Ex post facto, Israel has been in existence for 77 years.
Anti-Zionists demand that the world’s only Jewish state disappear. You can be a non-Zionist, though I would disagree with you. But an anti-Zionist stands in opposition to the achievements my people made these past 77 years.
Question for the anti-Zionists. Where should the nine million Jews whose families hailed from Leningrad or Baghdad or Bucharest or Cairo or Casablanca or Gandar, Ethiopia go? And what about those Israelis born in Tiberias who have one grandparent from Iran and another from France? Split her in half and send her back. Let’s not be silly.
After 1948, we are in the world of ex post facto (Israel exists) and not a priori (before the fact). Generations of Jews have been born in Israel. Nine million Jews living in Israel need to live someplace. They are going to stay where they are, regardless of the chants and slogans of the Jew haters. “Go back where you came from!” is a non-starter. In the 1890s or 1910s, this could have been a possible discussion. But as we say colloquially that train has left the station with the horse that fled the barn on the way to the ship that has sailed. Anti-Zionists may just as well rant against the State of Alabama. But the Cherokee nation is not returning to Huntsville.
The Algonquian nation will not retake ownership of Manhattan. The Greeks are not going back to Turkey and the Pakistanis are not welcome in India. Rants aside, let’s be real, not foolish.
Furthermore, as a Zionist, I support the Palestinian people with Zionist principles.
But first the facts—which ultimately don’t matter. According to the internet, the earliest mention of the term Palestine is in fifth century BCE Greek documents. It lived alongside the term Judea, which was used by Romans and Jews throughout the Levant. The Greeks called the area Syria-Palestina.
After the 135 CE Jewish rebellion against Rome, the Romans dropped references to Judea. Note. There never was an indigenous Palestinian identity with a history, literature and polity. Note. The Palestinians were not Arab. The Arabs traveled northward from Arabia and conquered Palestine in 638 from the Byzantine Christians, who then joined the Jews as a religious minority.
This history stuff is good to know, but I believe that it does not matter today. Non-Jews living in Israel call themselves Palestinians and have created a national identity from their historical experience. They have a cohesive diaspora. As a Zionist, I encourage them even though their methods for pursuing their national aspirations have led them down a cul-de-sac. I want the Palestinians to be happy and successful in their nation building, so long as they are willing to leave the Jewish inhabitants of Israel to live in peace in the State of Israel.
A major criticism leveled by the anti-Zionists is that Jews are simply a religious group like the other religions of the world and religions are not entitled to have countries. (Please don’t look behind the curtain at Vatican City, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, Norway, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand and a slew of other countries which have a formal connection between their national identity and nationally supported religions.) If the Palestinians can consider themselves a people in 2025, it is certainly kosher (not Latin) for us Jews to embrace our own peoplehood. We have done this since we had our first Israelite cousins’ club reunion with Joseph in Egypt. (See Genesis. The English translation is adequate.)
We Jews are not a religion. We are, instead, a tribe with beliefs and practices. To be a Jew, you first need to belong to the Jewish people. God made God’s covenant with my people. The land of Israel was God’s promise for our fidelity. My people stood at Sina and affirmed God’s voice.
Peoplehood does not define Catholics or Protestants or Sunnis or Shias, but it is the singular definition of being Jewish. When Ruth the Moabite agreed to join her mother-in-law on return Naomi, she said, in this order, “Your people shall be my people, your God my God.”
Anti-Zionists claim that Jews today are not indigenous to the land of Israel. Reference the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish prayerbook, walk the stones of the Promised Land and gaze at the Temple Mount—the claims that Jews are not an indigenous people returning home is a willful denial of an indisputable historic fact. If it is good for indigenous people, for the first nations to return home, how marvelous is the miracle of the Jewish people’s return to Zion!
Anti-Zionists claim that Israel has no right to exist, and they wish it away. Nations do not exist by any kind of right. They form out of sweat and blood, out of human striving. The United States of America does not exist because some monarch across the ocean signed a proclamation, or a makeshift assembly endorsed a declaration of independence. America exists because the colonies fought for their independence from Britain and later established institutions of governance that they agreed to support.
We no longer live in a world of empire. Germany and Italy and Hungary and the Ukraine exist because they persevered against their overlords in Vienna. Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia exist because they overthrew first the Ottomans and then the Austro-Hungarians and then the Communists and created polities with institutions of governance. Algeria, India, Kenya, and the Congo exist because they cast off their emperors and created governments to provide rules and structure for their people (not always that successfully, but no matter). Nations exist, and it is pointless to argue their existence pro or con.
To be an anti-Zionist today is to deny to Jews the same rights we champion in others. This double standard is antisemitism, plain and simple.
I have worked with Jews and for Jews my entire life. We are no better and no worse than anyone else. If other groups of people can define themselves, then we Jews can also define ourselves. If other indigenous people are entitled to return home, then Jews are entitled to our homeland. If other people are encouraged to wrest a national identity from their overlords, then Jews should be applauded for the State of Israel, a singular achievement.
Zionism is an achievement in human history that should be celebrated.
It is clear to me that those people who pillory the Jewish nation’s very being and proudly claim to be anti-Zionists have a particular bug against Jews and only Jews. That is a double standard, an impossible standard at this point in time.
As far as I am concerned, it is not unreasonable to call out that bug. anti-Zionism, for what it is: antisemitism.
If I have been able to entice you to obtain my novel, Take My Dog, A Southern Detour Through the Apocalypse, thank you for giving the book a try. The response has been very positive. A little Stephen King, a little Flannery O’Conner and a little religious Southern slice of life comedy. Nobody has had a problem turning the pages.
Isn’t the cover by editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis just the best?!
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Whether we are going backwards or forwards, none of us is standing still. And successful people can move both forwards and backwards at the same time.
It was a headline. It was subtle and chilling, and I couldn’t help wondering if I was complicit.
In 2021, a book I’d labored on for eight years came out. Someone recently referred to it as an “alternative history.” Those words chilled me, too.
Let me back up. A few weeks ago, the National Park Service for the Highway 80 National Memorial held an educational symposium in Selma, Alabama. I’d agreed to speak on a panel about findings from my book. A few days before the event, the park ranger notified me that the event funding had not been approved in Washington, D.C. (a new requirement). It was no mystery why that happened.
The Highway 80 Memorial preserves the history of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, where protestors wanting the freedom to register and vote attempted to march across a bridge in Selma. In front of news cameras and reporters, state troopers and a local posse beat them. The shock and horror of what America saw helped pass the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965.
Despite the lack of funding, I attended the symposium, as did other panelists.
The talk was well-received, and I learned a lot from the other panelists. Quite worth the trip, even without the honorarium. I considered it a donation to the National Park Service.
The National Park Service website, “What was the Underground Railroad?” had been modified. The first line of the original webpage was “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.”
It was changed (grammar issues aside) to: “The Underground Railroad—flourished from the end of the 18th century to the end of the Civil War, was one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement during its evolution over more than three centuries.”
Photographs of vintage stamps of five abolitionists, two of whom are White, replaced the central figure of Harriet Tubman.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it is important and helpful to understand and recognize that non-Black people played a role in civil rights, as long it does not occlude or diminish the harsh truths of slavery and Jim Crow and the struggles of the people who endured them.
My book, Behind the Magic Curtain, was about unveiling the forgotten stories of White allies that existed alongside the civil rights movement. It was meant not as an “alternate” history but as an enrichment of our understanding of what happened. If I may quote myself:
“Standing up matters, and stories matter. Both show us what is possible, even in times of darkness.”
Although the photos that replaced Harriet Tubman’s did include her, other than the tiny inscription on the stamp, there was now no mention of her on the entire page.
Screenshot
Harriet Tubman was known as the “conductor” and “Moses” of the Underground Railroad. An escaped slave herself, severely injured in childhood by an irate “master,” she repeatedly risked her life by returning to the South, personally rescuing up to seventy enslaved Black people and guiding them to freedom through forests and swamps. Her amazing and inspiring story is linked unalterably to the Underground Railroad.
Or maybe not. . . .
History has as many truths as there are perspectives. I’m a writer. I get that. But I am from Alabama. I was in my forties before I ever heard of Harriet Tubman. Shame on me. But shame, also, on the educational system that taught me slaves were “happy on the plantations.”
A Park Service employee told The Washington Post that “staff members received only vague guidance and that the selections were made amid a ‘frenzy of fear,’ at a time when thousands of federal workers were losing their jobs.”
I do know that is not the way to write—or rewrite—history.
P.S. Like the previous removal of the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) from the U.S Airforce training materials, the Underground Railroad web page (and Harriet Tubman’s picture) has been restored to its original state after protests. The National Park Service said the changes were made without their leaderships’ approval. The national parks and history, for that matter, belong to all of us. Our voices can make a difference.
Wow! This is something that doesn’t happen every day!
My brother just had a “small planet” (asteroid) named after him! (I know I’m not supposed to overuse exclamation points, but I can’t help it.)
He earned this honor through his work on the New Horizons project—a NASA mission to study the dwarf planet Pluto, its moons, and other objects in the Kuiper Belt.
I am thrilled to announce [drum roll, please] the minor planet: Danielkatz!
I have a special appreciation of Pluto because many years ago, my first published short story (a big deal for a writer) was about an astronaut who crashed on Pluto. Here is a snippet from “Chrysalis.”
Eternity is subjective. I’m spending mine clawing into nitrogen-methane snow and dragging my body by painful centimeters from the ship’s wreckage. My helmet monitor lists internal bleeding, spinal injury, and two fractured ribs. Legs don’t work. Breathing hurts. Easier to just let the cold take me or for a piece of the ship to fall on my head and end it, but I’m a stubborn woman, as my father would attest . . . were he not three billion miles away.
Shallow gasps fracture the profound silence inside my helmet as I crawl through twisted metal toward the faint light, hoping the suit won’t tear on anything before I have a chance to see the stars again. Beneath me, the ground trembles. Is Pluto trying to live up to his ancient title as god of the underworld?
Over the years, I’ve been obsessed with making sure I got the science in the story right. I sent it to Pluto expert, Marc Buie, who was kind and generous enough to read it and answer my questions. New revelations about the dwarf planet have been fast-incoming. They’ve included data and speculation from the New Horizons’ mission, which is still ongoing, long past it’s expected lifespan. The little-probe-that-could is now far beyond Pluto but still sending data about the Kuiper Belt, where giant asteroids that qualify as “small planets” orbit our sun!
Screenshot
Whoops, there I go with the exclamation points again. Can you handle one more?
Now, I need to put the small planet, Danielkatz, in a story!
I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
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