Letters to the Editor
stefan nonsense
Published Letters: 75 Editor's Choice: 1
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I don't know whether to laugh or cry...
[Read the article: Irving the Snowchicken is coming to town]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]but I do agree with others that Mr. Noxon is not really a partner in an interfaith marriage, he seems to be an onlooker and an outsider in a thoroughly Jewish family. But he does know whether to laugh or cry, and he has decided to laugh.
I guess I am a product of an interfaith marriage. No, wait, that can't be right, because my fathe" turned out to be just the man who adopted me after he married my mother, and I never learned the religious persuasion of the man who actually begat me, who never married my mother. Mama was raised Jewish (Conservative) but had become "non-practicing" years before I came along. We didn't discuss her love life. I was sent to a protestant church of the variety my adopted father liked, although he was long lapsed as well. This occurred mainly so that the people of the town we had moved to in another state would not know that there was anything remotely Jewish about my mother. These were the days just after World War II and Mama was terrified of bigotry and anti-Semitism and any latent Naziism still around, and our our area had KKK and White Citizens Councils. I wasn't allowed to mention Mama's maiden name in public, and she always made up a different one if someone happened to ask. My faraway uncles, Jacob and Sol, somehow became Jack and Paul in all our conversations. You better believe we had a Christmas tree.
I have been a practicing Christian (protestant) for many years and have never even been inside a synagogue. But then I learned that "if you mother's Jewish, then you're Jewish" and mostly I became very confused. Can there be such a thing as half-Jewish? Especially if you believe Jesus is the Son of God, er, I mean, G-d? What about that new thing that came along, Messianic Judaism, is it valid?
My dilemma about my identity was solved in 1962 when the Air Force in its wisdom decided to transfer me from Florida to Nebraska. Enroute, I visited relatives in Philadelphia. While there, I met a grandmotherly woman, Lydia Buksbazen, who along with her husband Victor headed a Christian missionary group called the Friends of Israel, and she invited me to their home for Sunday dinner. Lydia and Victor were both Jewish and missionaries to the Jews. Talk about confusing. I told her of my dilemma. In addition to giving me, out of the pure goodness of her heart, a hooded parka that had belonged to her son Victor Jr. to take with me to Nebraska's frigid winters, she said, "Hitler would have considered you to be Jewish." Turns out if even one of your great-grandparents was Jewish (making you 1/8th Jewish if my math is correct), off you went in the freight cars to the ovens and the gas chambers. (Historical note: This is actually a more lenient position than the KKK and the White Citizens Councils held to in parts of the Southern U.S., where if you were 1/16th black, you were 100% black.)
So if my begatter was Gentile, then I am 1/2 Jewish and my entire family down through my grandchildren would have been loaded onto freight cars. And if my begatter was Jewish, another generation beyond my grandchildren would also have been exterminated. It wouldn't have mattered that my religious beliefs are Christian, bloodline counted more than religious practice in the minds of the world's exterminators.
So I am both Jewish and I am Christian and all Mr. Noxon can hope for is that is children will be as confused as I am. Alas, I fear that they will not.
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I took the road less traveled by...
[Read the article: Just follow the map ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and that has made all the difference.
Enuf said.
Oh, and @Allie_, just for the record, the road from Memphis to Little Rock (the one you love, at least until the first exit) is just about the most godawful, depressing, God-forsaken strip of real estate I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Experience is the best teacher. I'll never do that again. The only thing worse is the island of Manhattan.
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Hey, Thrasher
[Read the article: The tracks of her tears]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Get your facts straight before you begin attacking, please. Hillary Clinton doesn't have southern roots, she's from Michigan or northern Illinois or some God-forsaken place where they definitely never sang "Dixie." Of course, she did marry a Southerner and ended up in Arkansas as a governor's wife, but that Southerner was a Rhodes scholar who spent time at Oxford University in jolly old England -- hardly your typical tobacco-spitting redneck, eh, what? And since her choice of him may have been with her own future political ambitions in view (if current pundits are to be believed), could you be a little more credible, for crying out loud? Oops, faux pas; make that for Pete's sake.
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Two points, Joan...
[Read the article: Obama and the Kennedy legend]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]First, "vicious right wing talking points" might also be characterized as TRUTH.
Second, I remember reading a while back that Mr. Obama's father was in this country before President Kennedy's package. For Mr. Obama to claim otherwise might be characterized as FICTION.
Carry on...
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One for Mr. Siberio and one for the general readership
[Read the article: We're failing our kids]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mr. Siberio, you say "Standardized testing does little or nothing above what grades tell us about a child's performance and certainly doesn't tell us WHY their unable to perform." Does it tell us why you don't know a pronoun (their) from a whatever-it-is (they're) contraction?
General readership, the No Child Left Behind Act is to a child's education as the Peacekeeper missile is to peace in the Middle East: cleverly named subterfuge that accomplishes just the opposite.
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@hotonoshijin
[Read the article: The battle of the literary endorsements]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Actually, I think you have it just backwards. Maya Angelou spoke at Bill Clinton's first inauguration in 1993, and Miller Williams spoke at the second one in 1997.
In the future, try to get your facts straight. (Or if I'm the one who has them backwards, someone here will surely set me straight.)