Culturewatch

Omar and the Magic Jew

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Is Ilhan Omar an anti-Semite? I don’t know. I can tell you that some of the things she’s written and said resonate with anti-Semitic tropes, and those who deny it should know that very well. But Omar may not have understood why images of Jews as disloyal, unjustly wealthy, or vested with magic powers that can “hypnotize the world” are bigoted. After all, she spent the formative years of her youth in Somalia, where such ideas linger below the surface of awareness.

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Against “Affirmation”

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Nathan Osborne’s empathetic angles on yearnings of this generation of “teentwenties” reminded your editor to check 4thWaveNow–a website that provides a forum for parents and other allies who resist the credo of “affirmation” that pushes young people with gender trouble to pursue medical “solutions” to their problems. 

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Preface: What I Want to Be

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The summer of 1957, when I was sixteen, I had entered the 18-and-unders, at the USTA sponsored Clay Court Championships at the Newton Tennis & Squash Club, in hopes of ending a four tournament out-in-the-first-round losing streak.

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Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving was Joel DeMott’s first movie. It was screened at Tom DeMott’s Memorial on Dec. 1 (nearly 50 years after she made it). Tommy–Jo’s first roommate/fan–would be beaming now if he revisited her visions of him and the DeMott fam. Click on “Read More” to watch Thanksgiving. Use the following password:  Amherst

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Homegoing & Tom DeMott’s Hidden Obit

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I gave the following talk and reading from my brother Tom’s prose at his Memorial after we screened Thanksgiving—our sister Joel’s movie (unsynched but fully in the flow) of a DeMott family celebration ca. 1970. I jumped off from the rapturous sequence in the movie where Jo used a great Motown track “Truly Yours” to soundtrack images of little sister Megan dancing and Tom listening/looking like a rock dream—saved (barely) from male model fineness by his broken nose…

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