Back to a touchy subject. Back on my exercise bike.

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I love the women on Substack. They put more emotion in their writing than we men. Margaret Anna Alice wrote this piece about the absurdity, and the tragedy of the promiscuous smearing of people with the term anti-Semite.

She describes how a young German named Clemens Arvay had been driven to suicide by a multiyear deluge of accusations of anti-Semitism. What was his crime? The same as mine – writing critically about the campaign to vaccinate the whole world against Covid. In his case, a book. For that he was an anti-Semite.

He was quite an accomplished young guy. He had several books to his credit. He also had a young family. This was indeed a tragedy.

I wrote a comment complimenting Margaret Anna Alice's on her courage in attacking such a touchy issue and linking to my blog last month on the same subject. Her post got a lot of comments, and my comment on her post got 18 likes, a pretty good number.

Way back in my checkered career, perhaps 25 years ago, I spent a while working as a volunteer for Nadine Epstein, the editor of Moment Magazine, which used to bill itself something like "The Leading Journal of Jewish Opinion, Culture and Accomplishment."

At that time I worked as a substitute teacher for Edmund Burke School in Washington DC. They had a substantial Jewish enrollment and a very aggressive minority recruitment program. The student body was kind of a three layer cake – smart Jewish kids, ordinary white kids, and a substantial number of black kids from the other side of town.  Teaching there was an interesting challenge.

Burke, like just about every school, had minimum expectations of substitute teachers. The goal was to keep things quiet until the classroom teacher came back. Though because I spoke as languages I was often asked to substitute in Spanish and French, they never asked me to actually present curriculum. Instead, they asked me to show Finding Nemo over and over in Spanish and French. The kids had of course seen the movies umpteen times in English and were totally bored.

I had the temerity to actually attempt to speak Spanish with the kids. One of them took me up on it! A kid named Noah Phillips answered back. He more than answered back, he got into an argument in Spanish defending communism in Cuba and Venezuela. My father and I had recently visited Portland on our 1999 swing through the American West, and I had visited Powell Books, then as now the largest independent bookstore in the world.  Coincidentally, I had bought a Spanish language title published in Cuba extolling the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

I had read and reviewed the book – can't find the review now – and I argued the thesis with Noah.  I then loaned him the book to read. Through that I got to know his mother Nadine. She had been long and thoroughly divorced from Mr. Phillips, whoever he was, and was living comfortably with a very blonde, very goyish guy named Larry as she struggled to get Moment Magazine going.

She was not much of a manager. Although she clearly needed some help getting the computer side of her business in hand, she was not good at either understanding a problem or delegating getting it fixed. Though I was a willing volunteer, there wasn't much I could do. I drifted away, but not before introducing her to Eileen Lavine, an elderly Jewish member of our Bethesda Starbucks circle.  She was able to make much better use of Eileen's contributions about Jewish life.

Nadine planned a trip to Ukraine in 2008, shortly after I moved here, and asked if she could save some money by bunking with me. Certainly! My apartment was her pied à terre for her two week trip. She was investigating anti-Semitism at the MAOUP University in Kyiv, among other things. Her travels took her as well to Lviv and Ternopil in Western Ukraine.  She did not ask for my help planning her itinerary, relying instead on a couple of young Jewish kids at Kyiv Mogila Academy.

Things got screwed up. She wound up stranded somewhere in Western Ukraine. Unable to get anybody to help her get a train ticket, she took a taxi (!?) a couple hundred kilometers back to Kyiv to the tune of $300. Which she didn't have. One of the poor students bailed her out. Could I loan it to her to pay the poor kid back? I did.

Nadine went back to Washington and I waited for my money. And waited. And waited. I finally got a bit salty about it and she got salty back at me. Eventually we resolved it. I had an outstanding obligation to St. Patrick's Church. She donated the money to them and took a charitable deduction on her taxes.

That was the last I heard from Nadine. I wondered about Noah, who was the smartest kid I ever taught. A search turned up Noah Travis Phillips, an artist.  The news about him referenced a graphically scandalous article about homosexual bedroom behavior. He and his partner had just adopted a baby boy in Oakland, California.  That's what has become of this budding genius, Nadine's only child.

This Nadine, this Moment Magazine, has an article in the current issue about the anti-Semitism suffered by Peter Hotez, the fanatical Covid vaccine advocate.  I had a strong impression that he was a jerk. I had no idea that he was Jewish. The strongest voices against him – Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson and Jessica Rose are at the top of my mind – are all obviously Jewish. There has to be room in the world for a Jew who is simply wrong without being a victim of anti-Semitism.

In other news, I received a belated invitation to deliver my recollections of Naomi to be read at her memorial service on March 25. Mary Ann's brother John has agreed to read it. It is the first of my communications that he has answered since 2006. I am in a delicate situation, caught between telling it like it is and not wanting to offend John, Mary Ann or the presumably woke attendees at this service. Stay tuned.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man managed 20 minutes on the exercise bicycle yesterday, shooting for my full 30 today. I'm back in the saddle. Equally pleased that Eddie is also pushing for 30 minutes. We got the bigger girl's bike down from the attic, and Zoriana is bicycling to kindergarten every day.

Graham