A complete portfolio of the 56 images in the book in 16×20 prints is in the collection of the Chicago History Museum, purchase gift of Miriam Schmidt. For the 16×20 prints, only three complete sets were made, and one image, The Drake Hotel Lobby, was also printed in a special edition included in the portfolio, “NAKED.”
Prints were made by photographer Diane Schmidt c. 1985 and earlier. Vintage selenium toned on Portriga Rapid Agfa Geveart paper, some signed on front by both Michele and Diane, all with photographer’s mark on back, printed by the photographer prior to book publication in 1985. Prints are very limited edition, never made more than a few of each. Inquire to Diane Joy Schmidt, print list.
The photos have been exhibited internationally. Copies of the book are in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Center for Creative Photography, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and other museums. Articles appeared in Japan STUDIO, France PHOTO, American Photographer, Popular Photography, Photo District News, Pictureweek, Chicago Magazine, and tv and radio appearances, and included in the book “Das Akfoto.” First exhibited Paul Waggoner Gallery, 1981. The project was done at over 60 locations over six years, 1979-1984. At least one roll of 36 exposures of film shot at most locations, taking up to an hour, Tri-X and later some Pan-X. Later some 35mm color slides shot in Kodachrome. Concept, modeling and text by Michele Fitzsimmons, Photography by Diane Schmidt. Top Ten best seller list, Chicago Tribune, 1985.
The hardcover book with dustcover, limited edition, 2,500 copies printed in heliogravure in Alsace Lorraine, Nancy, France by Melrose Publishing, 1985 under the direction of publisher Jeff Dunas. An additional limited edition of 1,500 was printed in soft cover by Braus, Germany. Michele passed away December 17, 2015. The image “Looking Down on the Wrigley” was chosen to be included in “100 Classic Chicago Photos” City Files Press/Chicago, 2017, photographs of Chicago taken by its top photographers.
Once upon a time there was a rock squirrel named Jacqueline that lived in the desert and was very happy. Jacqueline collected seeds and mesquite beans and cactus fruit and before the winter came she stored Pinon nuts. She was always busy foraging and on the lookout for food. Her senses were sharp, and she jumped and skittered over the rocks all day. Still, there were times when she would go without eating for a day or two. Then, when she came upon a late blooming cactus, she would gorge on the fruit. She drank from the clear stream in the mornings. The regularity of the seasons provided for all her needs.
Then one morning she saw something glinting on the trail ahead of her. It was a collection of unusually tasty seeds inside a strange-looking contraption. She tiptoed very quietly inside to taste the seeds when suddenly the trap door shut. She had been captured by Nora, a young research scientist on her first field assignment. Nora brought her back to the trailer where her lab was set up. Nora was very gentle with Jacqueline and did her best to make her feel comfortable. She taught her to go through a maze to find her kibble and treats, and carefully fed her with great regularity twice a day on what she thought was a balanced diet. Nora gave her lots of computer games to play to keep her mind active, and she had a wheel for exercise.
Jacqueline’s rough fur became glossy and she filled out. But then Jacqueline kept filling out, and getting bigger and bigger. She was not used to eating regularly and staying inside in a box. Also, the food was too salty and very low protein. She grew and grew until she couldn’t fit on her wheel anymore and then she didn’t exercise. She just sat in her corner playing the computer games. Nora thought Jacqueline was one really smart squirrel.
But then one day Nora checked on her and was surprised to find that Jacqueline, the sturdy little rock squirrel, now had really high blood pressure. She also was exhibiting symptoms of diabetes, including fatigue, constant urination, and constant hunger. Then came a day when she noticed that Jacqueline had stopped even playing her computer games and was just watching soap operas. Soon she was having a hard time even following the maze to her kibble and was crying and angry about it because she was so hungry, and even bit Nora.
Nora realized that Jacqueline’s high blood pressure was causing inflammation in her brain, that she was developing vascular dementia.
Nora felt very bad. She said, “If I had known better, I would never have allowed this to happen to you.”
Nora learned there was a neurologist in Albuquerque who for many years has been studying hypertensive rats and has found a drug that stops the inflammation. She was very glad that he has developed a drug to stop the progression of dementia in hypertensive rats and would be able to help her squirrel. And, Nora was very relieved to learn that this was not just a fairy tale, and that in time, there might also be drugs that could help people too.
Gary Rosenberg, MD, is one of the leading researchers in vascular dementia. With his primary research focused on hypertension as a cause of dementia, Dr. Rosenberg says that treating hypertension early on is very important. His research has also focused on early identification of different types of dementia.
Rosenberg, former chair of the neurology department at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, at the request of UNM Chancellor for Health Sciences Paul Roth, MD, is now heading up the new UNM Memory and Aging Center. The center will work to serve the growing population, currently estimated to be 43,000, of people in New Mexico who have some form of dementia. The center has Dr. Rosenberg, Dr. Janice Knoepfel, who is an expert on Alzheimer’s disease, and Dr. John Adair, trained in behavioral neurology, to see patients.
Rosenberg is also looking in New Mexico for those people—referred by their doctors—who might be good candidates for his continuing research, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where they will receive free MRIs and other tests and possibly be enrolled future drug trials.
And that is good news for Jacqueline the squirrel – and for people too.
The natural foods that we gather on Sukkot may serve to remind us that our diets have changed radically in a very short time over the last century and that we are wise to be eating more unprocessed foods.
A special nod also to ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, author of “The Desert Smells Like Rain,” and to historian and Franciscan friar Kiernan F. McCarthy, for their dedicated work with the Tohono O’odham, Native Americans who reside in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona and who suffer some of the highest rates of diabetes in the world since adopting Western foods and discontinuing their practices of food gathering in the desert.
“A Story for a happier ending,” was first published in the Gallup Independent Oct. 15, 2016, and is based on an article Diane Joy Schmidt wrote for the Fall 2016 New Mexico Jewish Link, “Studies in Dementia Q&A with Dr. Gary Rosenberg,” with support from the Journalists in Aging Fellowships, a program of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America, sponsored by the Retirement Research Foundation.
Story and illustration by Diane Joy Schmidt. Winner, Personal Columns (3), Society Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, 2nd Place, 2017 and Single Poem, NM Press Women, 2nd place, 2017.
The first time I realized that I wasn’t giving myself permission to be here I was 12. I read a line in a poem and practically burst into tears of relief: “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” It’s from “Desiderata,” a prose poem written by Max Ehrmann in 1927.
It also feels a little bit like what I recently was instructed is said in Navajo prayers: “I am your child, I am your grandchild, I am one that you made sacrosanct,” said in morning prayers as white corn is being offered to everything that is sacred and divine within the dawn light.
Almost daily I seem to forget to receive unconditional love from the universe — and tense up again. So, this week I was taken aback when a raft of papers fell down from the back of the bookcase I was cleaning. When I bent to pick them up, I found a poem I had written almost a decade ago.
The poem, about a woman who can’t stop apologizing, reminded me that if as children we don’t develop strong self-esteem, we will blame ourselves overmuch for things, and in order not to be punished, or to get a jump on agreeing that we’re wrong, we may apologize too much. Both men and women have these feelings, though studies have shown women tend to feel them more, and verbalize them more often, and then of course apologize for doing so.
In the Jewish tradition we have to feel remorse and find ways to make real heart-felt, satisfying apologies to those we have wronged. During the High Holidays that mark the beginning of the New Year, on Yom Kippur we are required to apologize to God for our sins, and to say “I’m sorry” to those we have hurt and to ask for their forgiveness.
I asked Albuquerque Rabbi Paul Citrin if this was an accurate statement about Jewish tradition, he said yes and added, “There are times we need to make amends and to repair relationships. Then, apologizing makes us better.”
Here is the poem I had written, forgotten about, and found again, which tells me what I can do to find a clearer, more genuine, and more powerful place from which to act in the coming New Year.
There Once Was A Woman Who Was Apologetic
There once was a woman who was apologetic.
She apologized to herself.
She apologized to her husband.
She apologized to her two dogs and to her three cats.
When she went to the market she apologized.
She apologized to the grocer.
She apologized to the baker.
She apologized to the butcher.
When the Sun rose before she did, she tried to apologize to it but it didn’t hear her, while it warmed her face.
When the tide rose and the waves rushed in, she apologized for allowing them to wet her sandals, while her toes delighted in the bubbling froth.
When the moon rose high in the sky, she apologized for not noticing it sooner, but it ignored her, while its beams entered her dreams. And when the stars came out, she tried to apologize to them.
Suddenly a star figure appeared before her, it was Diana, the warrior woman.
“Stop apologizing!” shouted the Star Woman. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re doing everything right.”
The woman tried to apologize for apologizing.
“Stop apologizing!” shouted the Star Woman again, and then beside her appeared Orion, the male warrior constellation, who shouted alongside the Star Woman warrior.
The woman once again tried to apologize, for apologizing for apologizing.
Next the constellation Leo the Lion roared alongside them, and then the Big Dipper joined in, who danced joy and wisdom. The woman finally heard them, and,
giving a short slightly sheepish apologetic smile, closed her mouth, didn’t apologize,
didn’t thank them,
didn’t bow, and walked home.
The next day she didn’t apologize to her husband, to her two dogs or to her three cats.
The second day she didn’t apologize to the grocer, the butcher, or the baker,
And at dawn on the third morning she didn’t apologize to the Sun,
At noon she didn’t apologize to the waves,
That evening she didn’t apologize to the moon,
And on the fourth night she certainly didn’t apologize to the stars, and then she finally realized
The Sun still came up, the waves rolled in, the moon came out, and the stars rose and set, whether or not she said anything.
And, as she had nothing left to apologize for, she finally gave a deep sigh, for she was at peace,
and went home and went to bed, as she was quite exhausted,
and she apologized to no one on the way home,
nor when she climbed into bed,
and not even when she went to sleep.
***
This poem was written Publication record:
Poem written and first published, 1997 The Crystal Cave/International Womens’ Writing Guild, Saratoga Springs, NY, during a workshop, “Writing in the Mythological Voice: Elevating the Mundane into Myth,” led by Natalie Reid, author of The Spiritual Alchemist Poem Matter and Light, Grant County Beat, Aug. 20, 2016 (Illus. “Breeze” photo.
Poem & intro, Spiritual Perspectives, Gallup Independent 9/10/16
Poem, revised & Intro revised, NM Jewish Link, Fall 2016 10/1/16 Poem revised, Intro & Big Dipper Star Woman illustration, Times of Israel Blog, featured for Yom Kippur, 10/8/16
Interview by Diane Joy Schmidt Published NM Jewish Link Fall, 2016 and New America Media, Oct. 10, 2016 Studies on Dementia – Q&A with Dr. Gary Rosenberg
1st place -Health articles New Mexico Press Women, 2017 and HM, National Federation of Press Women, 2017, together with along with Albuquerque: Is it a place where Jews can retire? for NM Link
Gary Rosenberg, MD, one of the country’s leading researchers in vascular dementia and former chair of the neurology department at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, took time after a busy day to sit down and explain for the Link’s readers his latest research in dementia, his work in early identification of types of dementia, the important role of high blood pressure, and other risk factors in vascular disease, the promise of treatments for slowing the disease, and how, at the request of UNM Chancellor for Health Sciences Paul Roth, MD, he is now heading up the new UNM Memory and Aging Center that will work to serve the growing population, currently estimated to be 43,000, of people in New Mexico who have some form of dementia.
Link:What do you do to stay healthy? I think this is something everyone wants to know. Dr. Rosenberg: I try to watch what I eat and to exercise regularly.
Link: First I want to ask you about your research. Dr. R: I have been fortunate to have almost steady funding for research by the National Institutes of Health. My work has focused on diseases that damage blood vessels in the brain, such as strokes and vascular dementia. With the new Center, our group will expand into research and drug studies in Alzheimer’s disease. For the past 10 years the research has been focused on vascular dementia with the goal of developing better ways to diagnose the illness earlier when treatments would be more effective. We are following about 100 patients for multiple years. We use a number of tests to figure out their diagnosis.
Dementia is a general term, like fever, that is related to many different types of problems with thinking, and there is a lot of different things that cause it.
Our research is focused on vascular causes, such as multiple strokes, which is one large group of patients. Another group of patients has a gradual worsening, which we feel is related to reaction by the brain to the blood vessels damaged by hypertension, diabetes, and elevated lipids. We use the term “inflammation” to denote this type of reaction in the brain. The challenge has been to find the group with this gradually worsening inflammatory process.
There are no specific treatments for vascular dementia so we try to control vascular risk factors by lowering elevated blood pressure and treating diabetes, and also by encouraging people to lose weight and take up exercise. For the research studies, we rely on what some call “biomarkers” that suggest an inflammatory process. These come from MRIs, psychological testing, and cerebrospinal fluid studies. Since no one test is diagnostic, we use all of the test results for diagnosis. It takes a long time to collect all this information, by following the patients for several years to make sure the diagnosis is correct. We then can look back at the test results to predict the outcome for a new patient.
So, we can start people on treatment trials before extensive damage to the brain has occurred. Our goal is to find drugs that slow the normal course of the disease.
We are also working in the laboratory with animal models to test new drugs, particularly to block the damage done by high blood pressure. To do this we have a rat that develops hypertension, which we make progress faster by feeding it an awful diet – low protein, high salt – which causes damage to the brain’s blood vessels, and they have the same types of changes in the brain that I see in my patients. And we can give that animal anti-inflammatory drugs and block these changes.
Link: So are these drugs in the animal study ones that are readily available or are they highly specialized? Dr. R: We don’t have a drug yet that we think we can easily translate into people. We have a drug that’s actually an old antibiotic that’s used for acne and it’s an anti-inflammatory and it works well in the animals. There are other drugs being developed at NIH and by drug companies. So although there are some things that are promising, we don’t have a treatment yet.
Link:My family is very long-lived. They probably have this longevity gene that is found among some populations including Ashkenazi Jews. One uncle lived to be 101 with no cognitive issues. Another relative however in their 90’s had strokes and then developed memory loss.
Dr. R: That’s exactly the kind of patient we’re interested in.
Link: So, there are new drugs being developed for this group?
Dr. R: Drug are being developed to block this kind of inflammation. We have a population of patients that could participate in clinical trials when there are drugs available. These gradually worsening patients have a disease called Binswanger’s disease, or sub-cortical ischemic vascular disease. We use biomarkers to select this group of patients.
Link: So how do you go about identifying these biomarkers?
Dr. R: First, we use special tests with MRIs to show that the white matter is damaged. We can visualize the regions of inflammation with a contrast agent that leaks out of the inflamed blood vessels. Then we use cerebrospinal fluid test for two purposes. One is to look for inflammatory factors – things that show the brain is having inflammation, and the other is to separate out those with Alzheimer’s disease. That is very important, because we can’t do that so well clinically. So, we can measure the Alzheimer type proteins in the cerebrospinal fluid and we can say this is an Alzheimer patient. Then we measure the inflammatory factors, and if we say this is an inflammatory process and there’s no Alzheimer factors here, then that suggests that it is a vascular process, which is the patient we are looking for.
Link: So you can separate out the Alzheimer’s patients?
Dr. R: Alzheimer’s patients have a protein called amyloid in the brain and cerebrospinal fluid. It accumulates in the brain in so-called “plaques” and another substance called phosphoTau. Patients with low amyloid and high phosphoTau are likely to have Alzheimer’s disease. To make the diagnoses, we use information from multiple sources, including clinical, cerebrospinal fluid tests, and MRI findings, in addition to neuropsychological testing. With that amount of information, and following the patient for a couple of years, we know which patients we want for different types of treatment.
Link: People whose parents are now losing their memory, they want to know, of course, am I going to be like that too, is it genetic or is it from strokes?
Dr. R: Alzheimer’s disease can be genetic in some patients with early onset of the disease. Vascular causes of dementia are not clearly genetic, but some families have a tendency for blood vessel disease of the heart and brain.
Link: What led to the development of a new center?
Dr. R: This January, Paul Roth, the medical center chancellor asked me to start a center, which we named the UNM Memory and Aging Center. The purpose was to improve care for the large number of patients in the state with thinking problems. In addition to myself, Janice Knoefel, who is an expert on Alzheimer’s disease, and John Adair, who’s trained in behavioral neurology, see patients in the Center. He is at the VA and at the university.
This is the first center for treatment of people with cognitive disorders in New Mexico. We estimate that there are almost 40,000 people with dementia and we will be the only place with dementia specialists in the state.
And it’s even worse than that when you look at it geographically; right now in the United States there are 31 Alzheimer’s centers funded by the National Institute of Aging and these centers are mainly on the coasts with none in the Rocky Mountain states. It was clear that there was a need for such a center and Chancellor Roth recognized that this was important for the state. Now we’ll be able to see a lot more patients, we’ll be able to expand our clinics and research programs and improve teaching.
Link: What about costs to the patient?
Dr. R: Medicare and Medicaid covers most of the costs. When they come into one of our studies, the MRIs, the blood tests, the spinal fluid analysis, is paid for by NIH
Link: Would somebody with Parkinson’s be a patient you would see?
Dr. R: Approximately 50% of people with Parkinson’s have some kind of mental impairment. Some people who have Parkinson’s have behavioral problems, such as agitation and hallucinations. A new drug has been approved by the FDA to treat those symptoms. So a trial will be started with that drug to treat those sort of symptoms in Alzheimer’s patients.
Link: If I want to go online and see, well, am I losing my mind, is there a website test I can take?
Dr. R: I think more trouble is caused by the worry created by these searches. It is best if you are concerned to start with your family doctor. They can help rule out thyroid disease, B12 deficiency, congestive heart failure, and a number of other diseases that could cause memory problems. Once they have eliminated those, then we can see them for further evaluation.
Link: For the Jewish community here, many people moved here from the coasts or the Midwest.
Dr. R: It’s a price you pay for that early decision. By moving you often loss your support team.
Link: Is it measurable, having a social network?
Dr. R: Yes, there are studies that show that card playing, regular exercise, using the computer, reading, a good social network, all slow memory loss. You don’t necessarily need to have an intimate family, but a group of supportive friends can compensate. The ideal thing would be for people who live alone to build communities, to build houses close to each other, apartment complexes.
Link: What direction would you like to see the research go?
Dr. R: The focus for most of the dementia research has been Alzheimer’s disease for the last 25 years, and particularly what’s called the amyloid theory, but the recent studies have not supported that. So NIH now is looking at the connection between vascular disease and the Alzheimer-type process.
If you have vascular disease it accelerates the Alzheimer process and that’s been pretty well shown in a large number studies. So they’re focusing more on reducing vascular risk factors. We know that if you have hypertension at age 40, by the time you are 60, your brain is seven years older than someone who doesn’t have hypertension. All those years of hypertension have damaged the small blood vessels in the brain…
Link: So what about people with diabetes?
Dr. R: Diabetes is a major vascular risk factor, similar to hypertension. If you have diabetes it can interfere with kidney function, which causes blood pressure to go up, so it’s rare to have one and not the other.
Link: And a growing percentage of the population is obese.
Dr. R.: It’s an epidemic. The connection between obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease is not so clear. There seems to be a connection, but it is not as straightforward as hypertension.
Link: I know doctors say one of the biggest problems they have is, how do you change people’s behaviors?
Dr. R: Treatment for hypertension has greatly improved, but not enough people are being treated.
Link: Where is the UNM Memory and Aging Center located and how can a patient be referred?
Dr. R: We are part of the Clinical Neuroscience Center at the University of New Mexico Hospital. Patients can be referred by making an appointment in the Memory and Aging Center in the Clinical Neuroscience Center. Our research center is in the Domenici Hall north of the medical school on Yale next to the golf course. We will soon have a Web site that will allow a patient to make an appointment directly.
Diane Joy Schmidt wrote this article with support from the Journalists in Aging Fellowships, a program of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America, sponsored by the Retirement Research Foundation.
EVELYN ROSENBERG AND HER EXPLOSIVE ART
Humankind saw the power of the intricate forces of nature unleashed when scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Trinity, New Mexico. Sometimes it takes an artist to wake us from the mundane to see this miracle of existence constantly unfolding all around us. Many of the large scale metal sculptures in public spaces in New Mexico were made by such an artist, a force of nature unto herself, internationally known Albuquerque artist Evelyn Rosenberg. Her husband, Gary Rosenberg, MD, directs the University of New Mexico’s Memory and Aging Center. Read his Q&A, Studies on Dementia, here. A petite woman with a beauty that radiates from an internal confidence and with looks reminiscent of Barbara Streisand, Rosenberg makes art using plastic explosives. The technique, “detonography,” which she developed in the desert at Socorro’s NM Tech lab for explosives after meeting an Israeli explosives engineer, melds the force of the detonation with the principles of print-making to bring forth, in a thunderous micro-second, works of surprisingly delicate beauty and strength.
As she explained on ABC’s Nightline series “American Originals” a while back to Cokie Roberts, she said, “The explosive is acting like a giant stamping press, and it’s stamping the metal into the mold. The metal forms over the mold, and gives it this three dimensional effect. Any object that’s laid on the top of the metal plate and between the explosive and the plate will transfer its image to the plate, so anything even as delicate as a feather will transfer its image onto the plate. That’s very magical.”
Now, in our interview, she discusses the fifty-year arc of her work, which has led to the enormous metal sculptures in Albuquerque in front of the Metro Courthouse, at the Sunport, at Valencia and Roswell university campuses, in Santa Fe at the planetarium, and at many other public spaces around the country and the world.
Approaching the studio doors, one feels about to enter a temple. The intimate self-portraits that hang in her home and spacious studio in the North Valley strongly emanate the power and intensity of this explosive process through this most personal image of the female. They sparked a discussion of mythology, feminism, Judaism and the challenges of aging as a sculptor.
Link: Was blowing things up a logical progression from what you were doing? ER: I was studying Comparative Religion at Hebrew University. I used to like to draw when I was a kid, so I started going to drawing classes, and then I said, ‘This is all so much better than sitting in the library!’ so I decided that I wanted to study art.
I went back to the U.S., got married, went to Columbia for a year, and then to RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology, where I was doing printmaking. This was during the Vietnam war. They were drafting all the doctors, and Gary got drafted. (see companion profile of neurologist Gary Rosenberg, MD). He had just finished his internship at Rochester, and he was sent to Sandia Base here, which was tremendously lucky. So, I went to UNM to study printmaking and I got a masters in lithography.
Link: Do you think that you would have been able to have the success that you have had, if you were starting out today? ER: When I started out, they didn’t want to let me into the graduate program in lithography here, they told me, “You’d better take some economics and business courses because you’ll never get a job as a printmaker. You’ll probably have to work in a gallery.” You wouldn’t be able to say that today.
Link: So did you go home and cry? ER: No, I just said, “I want to do it. I’m stronger than some of those skinny boys there.” Those [lithography] stones – you pick them up on a lift, and then you push them – but everything I do is heavy – twice a week I do weightlifting.
Evelyn explained that from New Mexico they went to Israel, where she taught art at the University of Haifa, and then to New York. While Gary finished his residency in neurology at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, she taught art at Montclair University in New Jersey. They liked New Mexico and when Gary was offered a position in the neurology department at the University of New Mexico with a lab and technician, they returned and have been here ever since, since about 1979.
Link: Does your detonography work have something to do with being Jewish? ER: I did a series of 18 prints of the story of Joseph and his brothers, and Rabbi Paul Citrin wrote a commentary for it. It was sent in a traveling show to all the Jewish museums in the country. So I did pursue Jewish themes, I did paintings with Jewish themes, because I was interested in mythology, comparative religion, and biblical stories. But, the work that I’m doing now on commission doesn’t, it has mythological content, though it probably reflects Jewish themes.
I worked for two years as an artist in the schools and I made murals. That was a great National Endowment for the Arts program they don’t have anymore, and so I got excited about making big things, but then I went back to making prints. With the money I earned from that I bought a press, I was doing etchings.
Link: Then something changed? ER: Gideon Sivan came to New Mexico in 1985. He was an explosives engineer who worked at the explosives center in Haifa, Israel where he designed special tank armor for the Israeli army that exploded on contact. He came here to the EMRTC, the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at New Mexico Tech, on a sabbatical and he wanted to do something fun with a phenomenon known as the “Munroe effect.”
He had this idea you could make art using explosives but he needed an artist to work with. Through what you’d call Jewish geography, he heard there was a similarity between the way the things he was doing with the explosives looked and my etching plates. He came over one night, and we started talking. He asked if I wanted to blow something up, I said ‘Sure, sounds great!’
I started to work with him. After about three months he went back to Israel, but the head of the center was a very innovative guy from the Nitro-Nobel Institute in Sweden. He asked if I wanted to keep working on this. So, I taught a class on the history of the technology of art, because it was an engineering school. It was a pretty interesting class. I taught for a couple of semesters while I was developing this process. Once I had the process developed, then I started to make pieces and I stopped teaching.
In her recently published book “Detonography, The Explosive Art of Evelyn Rosenberg” (University of New Mexico Press, 2013) Evelyn writes about that class, “I wanted them to understand that it was only the romanticism of the 19th century that had transformed the image of the artist into a kind of mad genius who works alone. [. . .] I started the class by asking the students to carve a stone with a stone. . .”
In addition to the explosion itself, is there a kind of alchemical process that happens? ER: Yes. I think it’s a very feminine technique because it’s like having a child. You have these messy, destructive, painful, horrible things happening, and then you get these beautiful delicate objects, I think these things, they look very delicate. They don’t look like they’ve been blown up. They’re refined. So it’s like life. (she gives a light, ironic laugh)
Gemini
Ezekiel’s Vision
Link: Looking at the self-portraits that are here, which came first?ER: The earliest is “Gemini”. The lion with wings came next. That was done as part of a four-part series which is now at the university campus in Roswell.
Then this one here (hanging in the studio), “The Sorceress’s Dream,” I did about three years ago. The last one (on the outside wall), which has a religious theme, is called “The Goddess Hides Herself.” It’s the goddess posing as male gods, God the father, Buddha, until she can reveal herself in the universe.
Link: “The Sorceress’s Dream” seems the most daring somehow to me, the most powerful in the way that it’s not literal, it’s not obvious. Do you see that one as different? ER: No. I’m repeating the same themes over and over again, these mythological themes, and the search for some kind of spiritual meaning outside of nontraditional religious forms. I consider myself very Jewish in the sense that both my kids had Jewish weddings. Even though they married non-Jews, they’re bringing up their children Jewish.
Link: I see something different in “The Sorceress’s Dream.” ER: I like this idea of disguise, hidden identities. She has a mask like a butterfly mask.
L: Rabbi Gershon Winkler once said if you look at, the commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me,” that in the early Aramaic, it was, ‘put no other face on my face, a deeper way of saying ‘don’t make a graven image of what I am.’
ER: He was very good, he was amazing, I still get his newsletters.(www.walkingstick.org).
Link: Another thing about “The Sorceress’s Dream” – you’re not making yourself beautiful, there’s an aging issue. You’re looking at yourself in a different way then you did in the lioness picture. And you are wearing some sort of dress? ER- it’s a sequined dress that I got from a thrift shop because I’m always looking for materials.
The Sorceress’ Dream
Link: Your power is different than in the lioness one, don’t you think there’s a change?
ER: I like the idea — I have not thought about it at all. That is true that the lioness is a much more sexual creature than this sorceress. “The Goddess Hides Herself” was a kind of comment on religion. The female principle has been suppressed by the male gods of the world, but the female principle is waiting to reemerge and to be the controlling factor in the world. If the world is to survive, I think, if the earth is going to survive, we’ve got to get rid of all those male suppressors of nature [side discussion of upcoming presidential election].
The Goddess Hides Herself
Link: So you are saying the explosives part is masculine, but the result is very feminine? ER: No, no, it’s not masculine, I don’t see it as a masculine thing. I see it as the forces of nature, which can be terrible and devastating, but can also create a flower or a butterfly, or a piece of art.
Link: Now that you been an artist as long as you have, some fifty years — ER: What I do is physically demanding, so that who knows, maybe [eventually] I’ll have to work with watercolors. But watercolors are the hardest thing of all because you can’t make mistakes. I assume that I will always continue to be an artist and that if I have to, I will have more assistants. Louise Nevelson worked into her 80s on very large sculptural pieces.
I worked with the last assistant for 12 years, and he’s now starting to go out on his own, he’s very good. I just got a new assistant six months ago. She just graduated from CNM as a certified welder, and she’s also good.
Link: You think somebody in their 60s could decide to become an artist?
ER: You know Michaela Karni? She was a writer. Then she started painting, very late, just in the last five years or so. She wrote romance novels and some mysteries and then she just started painting. Now she’s really good, she works all day at it, and she’s very serious about her work. She’s in her mid-70s. Artists get better with age. Titian got better in his 80s, he was doing great stuff. It’s a skill, maybe your inspiration is not as fresh, but your skill level increases.
Two of Rosenberg’s works, including the lioness with wings, titled as “Ezekiel’s Vision,” will be in a special exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum of Art, “Jews in Twentieth Century Albuquerque: Building Community Along the Rio Grande,” November 19 through April 2, 2017. View more at her website www.evelynrosenberg.com, including photos of Rosenberg’s large scale public works with a map of their locations, films of her and her explosive technique, further explanation of it, and a link to her book.
Diane Joy Schmidt wrote this article with support from the Journalists in Aging Fellowships, a program of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America, sponsored by the Retirement Research Foundation.
New Mexico Jewish Link Fall, 2016 v. 46 no. 3
Interview and Photographs by Diane Joy Schmidt First Place, 2017 Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, Arts & Entertainment Profile. Judge’s comment: “Fascinating subject, fascinating subject matter. This was an excellent interview that went down so many paths, took so many twists and turns, and ultimately led to a truly memorable profile.” First Place, 2017 New Mexico Press Women Communications Contest, Two Arts Previews, along with “Fractured Faiths: Ground-breaking and controversial exhibit.” 3rd Place, 2017 National Federation of Press Women, Two Arts previews Diane Joy Schmidt wrote this article with support from the Journalists in Aging Fellowships, a program of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America, sponsored by the Retirement Research Foundation. Also published at
Frankly, the whole idea of a messiah feels a little, well, foreign to me. “By the waters of Babylon we lay down and wept for Thee O Zion.”
Tisha B’av. the Ninth of Av, 5776 in the Hebrew lunar calendar, begins this year on August 13, 2016 in the Gregorian Calendar. It marks the day of greatest mourning for the Jewish people, the date when both the First and Second Temple were destroyed, and is also associated with the final date of expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and with critical events of the Holocaust.
Yet sometime in the future on this day, it is also said in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the Messiah will be born and it will be our day of greatest joy.
I can understand this in a metaphorical sense, that hope is born out of tragedy, but it just simply was never a part of my consciousness growing up in the Reform tradition.
But now, with the Christian right’s evangelical focus these days on looking for signs of end times in danger of being self-fulfilling, not to mention the exacerbation of tensions around the Temple Mount, the second-guessing of the Iran nuclear deal, talk of the Mahdi, and Donald Trump’s choice of a born-again Christian for a running mate, I have to pay attention to the concept. And, I’d like to look at this from a different perspective.
“Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today,” the American Vedantist Alan Watts pointed out, in TheBook on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.
This day can be our day of greatest joy as we remember all we have lost.
How could that be?
Through acknowledgement of what we have lost, we find what we value, who we are, what we need to recover, what mistake we need not make again, what goal we can reset our sights on.
We never seem to be able to see the present as clearly as we do when we look back, and thereby sometimes we see better what we are dealing with today.
So how then can today be a day of joy? Because the tragedies of the past can be averted, they can be prevented, not repeated. The world community can stop the environmental destruction of its resources. The arc of civilization need not devolve into chaos and nations into dictatorships.
While Tisha B’av may be a day of remembrance – it does not then necessarily follow that it is destined to repeat a day of tragedy.
We can find this day to be of greatest joy right now, in honoring the day itself; because to live only for the past is futile, and to live only for the future is to invite tragedy: the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the coming of the Moslem Mahdi, the return of the Christian Christ – like a bad Western, all three gangs are converging on the same town at high noon, gunning for Armageddon. Messianic fervor is rising, and with it, fanaticism.
So, remember, on this day of greatest sorrow for the Jewish people, to also Let it Be, and to Be Here Now.
–
Let It Be is a song written and sung by Paul McCartney with the Beatles.Be Here Now is a book written by Ram Dass, aka Dr. Richard Alpert, inspired in part by Hindu thinking.
“Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today,” is quoted by Watts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass.
“Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities,” an exhibit of more than 175 artifacts from Spain, Mexico and the U.S. that charts the history of Sephardic Jews from Spain who went to Mexico and then further north into what is now New Mexico in flight from the Inquisition, is on exhibit at the History Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico through December 31, 2016.
“Waters of Babylon” was first published in my bylined site on the Albuquerque Judaism Examiner website on July 20, 2010 (the Examiner went defunct and off the web on July 15, 2016). It appeared in the July 13, 2013 Gallup IndependentSpiritual Perspectives column as “Prophecy and The Ninth of Av,”, and then in the August, 2013 New Mexico Jewish Link where it was published with a black and white photo of El Cabezon mountain on the road from Cuba to Albuquerque, NM. It was reposted, updated, in the online newspaper, Grant County Beat, in my bylined column Matter and Light, on July 15, 2016, and then substantially revised with mention of Trump’s candidacy and posted in the Times of Israel in my bylined blog there, July 19, 2016, both with the Rainbow near Canyon de Chelly photo. That version appears here.
Sephardic Torah Scroll Spain, 1501-1600 Unidentified artist Vellum, wound around two wood guides Museo Sefardí, (0070/001), Spain
Purim Grogger Mexico, 17th century Private Collection Photo by Jorge Pérez de Lara These Mexican noise makers, which are miniature and would make almost no noise at all, are curious because they appear to be dual purpose. First, Sephardic Jews who secretly practiced Judaism in Catholic Mexico may have created our Mexican noisemakers as a cultural artifact and tool for memory purposes. As they are so small, they seem to be an expression of faith, but very impractical. Proper noise makers are quite large. These Mexican noisemakers could have easily been passed as Catholic “matracas” and thus not an artifact that could be used as evidence against a secret Jew. Purim is a festive Jewish holiday that celebrates the deliverance of the Jews from their enemies in the biblical Book of Esther. Purim is celebrated on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Adar, which usually falls sometime in February or March. It is a joyous holiday.
Shackles Mexico, 17th century Private Collection Photo by Jorge Pérez de Lara These Shackles are from the inquisition prison in Mexico City.
Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities, ground-breaking and controversial exhibit at the New Mexico History Museum
Story by Diane Joy Schmidt
During the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain that spanned 500 years, Jews, Muslims and Christians collaborated in astronomy, medicine, philosophy, poetry and letters, and many Jews from other parts of Europe were drawn to Spain, adding to those who had arrived after the destruction of the 2nd Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. Then the Black Death, which killed up to a half of the population of Europe in the mid-1300’s, struck. It created a social and political upheaval during which Jews were especially scapegoated, accused of poisoning wells.
At the time no one knew the cause of the plague. Historians now believe that fleas, brought by rats on ships from Asia, were the repeated source of the virus. And because Jews were slower to be affected – they lived in isolation and washed and changed their straw bedding on Fridays – they became the object of suspicion, and anti-Semitism spread throughout Europe along with the plague. The Jews of Germany were wiped out. The plague decimated the population of Spain, and in 1391 pograms against Jews, starting in Seville, killed thousands. Many Jews then left Spain or converted to Catholicism under duress.A hundred years later, the Edict of Expulsion of 1492 forced the entire remaining Jewish population of Spain, an estimated quarter of a million Jews, to leave or else be forcibly converted. The Muslims there soon met a similar fate. Showing that one had limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, proof of family ancestry going back two or sometimes even four generations to show no taint of Jewish ancestry, was a requirement to board boats for the New World from Spain, but forgeries were common. When the Inquisition reached New Spain in full force, Jews were persecuted and burned at the stake in autos-da-fé in Mexico City for Judaizing, for being conversos who secretly practiced Judaism.
Being burned at the stake was called being “relaxed.”
There were Jews who fled north to the farthest ends of New Spain, (now northern New Mexico and southern Colorado), where persecution might be diminished, and maintained Jewish customs in hiding. The threat of persecution and the need to blend in with Catholicism made the secret practices take on different mixtures of Judaism and Christianity, unique to each family. In some families, the secrecy became so great that the secret was only passed on, principally through the women, by one family member to another of the next generation. However, as author and lecturer Norma Libman, who has interviewed over fifty conversos in the last twenty years, points out, each of the practices vary widely from family to family.
The communities in New Mexico were remote and insular and intermarriages within the small communities of converso families was common. Cancer clusters have been identified in these communities today, caused by the deadly BRCA-1 gene. A number of other rare genetic diseases are being found within this population, which have been associated with Sephardic or Ashkenazic Jews.
This history is told in the ground-breaking exhibition, “Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities,” at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico through December 31st. More than 175 items are included that document Jewish heritage and persecution, including centuries-old objects, books, documents, and paintings from museums and private collections in Spain, Mexico and the United States, and an exhibit of the 20th century photographs by Cary Herz, who documented the present-day conversos and cemetery markings.
A full-color, bi-lingual hard-cover catalog brings details of the story to life through essays and stories told by an international group of seven scholars and historians, including historian and former New Mexico State Historian Stanley M. Hordes, author of “To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico,” Fran Levine, the museum’s former director, now president of the Missouri History Museum at St. Louis, and cultural anthropologist Ron D. Hart.
Five years ago, Seymour and Helene Singer Merrin initiated the idea of this unique exhibit that would trace the Sephardic journey from Spain through Mexico to New Mexico, and their generous seminal gift and additional donations from the Jewish community made it possible. The hunt began across two continents to search out these hidden Jewish relics and documents, and to make this vision a reality.
The challenges posed by this exhibit are unusual.
Historian and co-curator Roger L. Martínez-Dávila, assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, and Josef Díaz, curator of Spanish colonial arts and history at the museum, continued the search for artifacts. Díaz said the museum had to prove it could provide climate controlled cases, regulated by temperature, light and humidity. Certain pieces on vellum require a different special level of humidity be maintained in their cases. A library in Spain is sending a collections specialist to turn the page of a document after three months, because the paper can only be exposed to light for a limited amount of time. Martínez-Dávila, in Spain this last year on a research grant, in communicating with Libman (Legacy, Winter 2015) about the importance of the exhibit, said, “We are not only able to highlight Sephardic Jewish history and culture, but also able to explore the creation of Jewish converts to Catholicism in the Americas, and present intriguing evidence that suggests the crypto-Jews of New Mexico hail from a Sephardic past.”
In the blood-red cloth-covered catalog, co-authored by Martínez-Dávila, Díaz and Hart, and underwritten by Stephen and Jane Hochberg, Levine’s essay tells the story of what befell a new governor of New Mexico in 1659, Bernardo López de Mendizábal, and more particularly, his wife, Doña Teresa Aguilera y Rocha. The governor’s ‘arrogance’ ran afoul of local politics and church officials: he prohibited the Franciscan priests from forcing the Native Americans to work if they were not paid a salary and he recognized their right to practice their ceremonial dances and religion. Within a few years, he was arrested, accused of Judaizing and brought in shackles from Santa Fe to the dark Palace of the Inquisition in Mexico City. His wife, Doña Teresa, soon was also taken from her airy rooms in the Palace of the Governors on the plaza in Santa Fe, and brought to the prison. Highly literate, there Doña Teresa asked for paper and pen, and in her cell in 1664 wrote a testimony of the corruption in the new colony, which saved her life at trial. Her husband would not be so lucky—he had already died at age 43 in the dank prison. Levine said that “what makes Doña Teresa’s story so outstanding is that it is complete, real and rare because it is in the voice and the pen of a woman.” It is also one of the few surviving documents describing life prior to the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico in 1680. Her viewpoint differed freshly from the other few testimonials of the time, such as the “Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides” in 1630, who painted a rosy picture for Spain of happy, dutiful Indians.When the Pueblos drove the Spanish colonizers completely out of New Mexico for twelve years, they destroyed virtually all traces of their oppressors, a piece of history that is often overlooked. Levine has written a book, “Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A Seventeenth-Century New Mexico Drama” (University of Oklahoma Press) and will give a talk and book signing at the museum July 24.
Doña Teresa’s remarkable case documents have been housed in Mexico City at the Archivo General de la Nación, itself a former prison that dominates the landscape and where many documents are stored in temperature-controlled former cells. Curator Josef Díaz had photographed the manuscripts there, along with some of the highly important Carvajal Inquisition records (ten members of the Carvajal family were burned at the stake in Mexico City on December 8, 1596), but until almost the last moment, he didn’t know whether he could secure permission to take them out of the country.
On a Tuesday morning, three weeks before the exhibition opening on May 22, I was interviewing Díaz over ice tea at a coffee house in Corrales, New Mexico when he was interrupted by an important call. He became animated – the Inquisition trial records of Doña Teresa and Governor Mendizábal had finally been approved for travel and would arrive in Santa Fe just in time for the exhibit.
Díaz said that there are three copies of the Edict of Expulsion in museums in Spain. One, he explained, would soon be coming from the Archivo General de Simancas north of Madrid, arriving, he noted drily, “on Friday the 13th.” An illuminated manuscript of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed would arrive the next day. On September 9th and 10th a symposium will be presented at the museum featuring all the essayists in the catalogue.
The exhibit, along with the recent announcement of Spain’s offer of citizenship to Sephardim who were expelled 500 years ago (After 523 years, Spain offers citizenship to descendants of those who fled Inquisition NM Jewish Link, Winter 2016), has stirred a lot of new activity. Ron D. Hart has written Sephardic Jews (Gaon Books), which traces their complex history and contributions from their origins in Spain to the many places throughout the world where they settled after the Expulsion; and Martínez-Dávila is completing Blood, Faith, and Fate: Jews, Conversos, and Old Christian in Early Modern Spain and Colonial Spanish America, to be published by Notre Dame Press. Stan Hordes is continuing his research with further Inquisition trial documents from Mexico and elsewhere.
Three different Jewish historical societies will hold their annual conferences in Santa Fe in conjunction with the exhibit during the year. There will be a special exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum about 20th century Jews in New Mexico that is opening November 19th. A mini documentary is being shot by author and lecturer Daniel Díaz-Huerta, celebrating the Festival of Saint Esther, patron saint of the crypto-Jewish community whose Fiesta of St. Esther has been celebrated in churches in New Mexico around Purim. A documentary about the Jews of New Mexico which begins with the converso story, “Challah Rising in the Desert” produced by Paula Amar Schwartz with director Isaac Artenstein, is well under way (see The Challah Will Rise eLink Spring).
2017 3rd Place, National Federation of Press Women, Arts previews.
I was down in this part of town I’m not usually in, because I was spending a couple days in an out-of-the-way motel down by the airport that I had just enough points to stay at, to write and chill out.
Getting very little work done, I went for a drive and spotted a Starbucks. I missed the entrance and instead drove around a corner entering the shopping strip behind it, which it turned out was not connected to it, but where there now appeared a large and mysterious Asian grocery store with red and gold lettering emblazoned across the store front, 999 Seafood Supermarket.
I wandered in and stared at bottles of specially brewed umami fish sauce, and packets of dried hermit crabs with many little legs. There was a huge selection of fresh fish in long glass cases, and fresh vegetables along the eastern wall. Then there was an entire aisle of dried noodles in wild little rolls and flat strips and long loops – and as I walked up this aisle I thought of my acupuncturist, Dr. Wei Zhou, who is a Chinese man close to sixty but who seems to be about 34, and who always greets me with a great smile. He walks with great buoyancy, with such a lightness of being, that I, feeling heavy and leaden, thought I might imagine what he feels like as he walks. Suddenly I felt light and energetic and also immediately had the impression that he was walking alongside me.
I then dimly recalled that he had said he sometimes shopped here. About twenty minutes later, at the end of another aisle there he is, pushing his grocery cart with some vegetables. He said he had arrived about 20 minutes earlier.
So how do I even describe this event? How was it that I happened to quite by accident leave my room when I did, accidentally find this store that magnetically drew me in, and then walk in there at the same time when he would be there, in an out of the way part of town and at an odd time. And I had just been talking to him about coincidences at my last appointment. I had read that the I Ching is based on 64 hexagrams, and I had the vague notion that these numerical combinations underpin and can foretell existence.
And was it precognition, or did I sense his spirit in the store, that I would have thought about him so distinctly, and then, seemingly by coincidence, bump into him?
Ten days later. It is Thursday afternoon. I am traveling with my partner Frank Morgan. We are having a meal in Window Rock on the way back from Dine College, where Frank has just given a talk about the similarities and differences in Navajo and Western healing, about symptoms and diagnosis and treatment. He talked a lot about the power of the brain to be positive, and that you must put your belief in the healing, that it is going to work, and not doubt it, because the mind is so powerful.
At this time, I ask him if he can explain this unexpected meeting I’d had with my acupuncturist, from the perspective of Navajo philosophy. And he says, in more words and more eloquently than I can recall, that wind is a spirit and it is conscious and it goes everywhere and our thoughts travel with it.
The restaurant has very few customers, it is still quite early. Over at one table along the window is a medicine woman we know well and greet.
Across the room is Dr. Larry Emerson, and he comes over to say hello to Frank. Frank tells me that Larry talks a lot about the power of the brain. He says that Larry Emerson is a specialist in Navajo thought whose words are cherished – they are poetic and convey meaning. After polishing off a bowl of mutton stew, Frank encourages me to go over and ask Larry if he can explain precognition, coincidences and synchronicity.
First Larry says, “No, I can’t.”
I say that Frank was saying that wind is a spirit and is conscious and goes everywhere and it carries our thoughts.
Then Larry says, “In the traditional Navajo way of knowing, everything is related. No Exceptions.” He says “No Exceptions” with such emphasis that the words almost appear in the air, underlined and capitalized.
“There’s no separation between anything and it’s all cooperation, a blessing. It’s all synced up. Even chaos is accounted for.”
I describe to him some of the recent coincidences that have been happening, (meeting up with him at this moment probably being one of them), and that my “Western mind,” as I think Frank would call it, doesn’t know what to make of them. Frank really is always in indigenous mind, always connected with spirit.
Larry says, “So in that kind of existence, with precognition and coincidence, it’s very likely that those kinds of incidents are synced up, rather than being oddities or abnormalities. Everything’s related. There’s no exceptions.”
I said, “So you mean, that coincidence is more the rule than the exception?”
He concluded, “It’s an illusion, illusory, to assume that things are separated. If they think that separation is true — that’s an illusion.”
Grant County Beat Silver City, NM
New column Matter and Light, July 1, 2016 first column: Spirit and Coincidence. Noted: First published Gallup Independent.
Due to the generosity of an anonymous donor, I was selected to receive a scholarship to attend the four-day joint Jewish Federation of North America General Assembly and American Jewish Press Association conference in Washington, D.C. in November as one of ten journalists who had won Rockower awards.
After riding the metro from Reagan International Airport, I walked into the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue.
It was Sunday afternoon. Security was tight. There were body scanners and guards with bored looking guard dogs and plain clothed men on stairwells sporting plastic earbuds with muscles tight under their suits. At registration I was handed a cleverly humorous booklet of events with snazzy graphics. Then it hit me. The combined experience of 5,000 years of bar mitzvah, wedding, and more recently, Washington D.C. political event directors, had not gone to waste.
Then into the first hall. Riotous splashes of color were achieved through 20 foot high banners, and this intensive planning included a sophisticated cell phone app that would regularly buzz to remind me of all the events I had chosen to partake of.
On the press stage, an intense conversation between Ambassador Dennis Ross and Gary Rosenblatt, editor of The Jewish Week of New York was being closely followed by a rapt audience. Every hour different luminaries of public office and journalists interviewed each other discussing all the pressing issues from every angle imaginable. In the background a TV news monitor broadcasted news of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrival. He would be meeting with Obama at the White House the next morning. The complete program of the general assembly, including videos of speakers, can still be viewed online at http://www.generalassembly.org/
40 booths around the main hall included Nefesh B’Nefesh, the organization that helps Jews to make aliyah to Israel, the Harold Grinspoon Foundation with the latest PJ Library books, J Street, the Jerusalem Post, the Ethiopian National Project, students of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, and many more.
That night, buses shuttled to the National Portrait Gallery; it was a unique opportunity to wander the museum, opened privately to the party-goers, and also gorge on tables heaping with pastries and be deafened by a live band in the central hall.
The real unexpected highlight came the next day – a private briefing Monday afternoon at the White House for the Jewish press following Netanyahu’s meeting with President Obama. As a line of shiny black taxi limos pulled up outside the Hilton to ferry us there, a person from our crowd hopped into the front seat of the first one and called out, room for more! I jumped in, and was joined by St. Louis Jewish Light editor Ellen Futterman and publisher Larry Levin. Our host in the front seat turned out to be Steve Rabinowitz, president of Bluelight Strategies, the organizer of the entire event. Traffic came to a standstill as we approached the White House, and we got out and walked, just in time to see the presidential motorcade leaving. Rabinowitz, who has worked closely on nine national presidential campaigns and served as Bill Clinton’s White House director of design and production, pointed out the two separate limousines for the president, so that no one could be sure which one he was riding in. As the motorcade passed out of the gates, I captured a silhouette of a tall person on the phone in the second limo. It was followed by heavy black vans that contained sophisticated communications and security details.
Private briefing at the White House with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel B. Shapiro for members of the Jewish press on November 9, 2015 following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with President Obama that morning.
We entered the president’s executive offices in the Eisenhower building next to the West Wing and wound our way up a staircase to a diplomatic receiving room to receive an off-the-record briefing from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro and two other high level White House staff. This following the anxiously anticipated meeting earlier in the day between Obama and Netanyahu. Able to speak freely, they each gave a clearer picture of what really was on their minds, and these career officials and their insights greatly impressed me with their integrity and that of the Obama White House.
I asked if tensions were less this time at the meeting between Obama and Netanyahu, and got a picture of the actual sophisticated working relationship that goes on day by day with Israel that has nothing to do with the exaggerated emphasis on personality clashes featured in the press, covered like so much celebrity gossip. As this smoke cleared away, I saw the enormous efforts being made to keep this country, and Israel, on a democratic course.
And that morning had marked the successful outcome of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. The U.S. and Israel announced a renewed commitment to, and further agreements being made for, the next ten years of strategic cooperation and support by the U.S. for Israel. And as Netanyahu pointed out that morning, Obama has met with him more than with any other foreign minister. The Obama administration has also given Israel more military aid than any previous administration, which notably helped build the advanced Iron Dome missile defense system that kept most of the more than 4000 rockets launched at Israel from Gaza from reaching populated areas in 2014, and is now funding the more advanced David’s Sling and further iterations of missile defense systems.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu addressed the final plenary of the General Assembly. Before his entrance, the entire assembly rose and sang Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel. There were an estimated 4,000 in the hall. It was an electrifying, life-changing moment, and in standing together with my colleagues from across the U.S.A., Canada, and Israel, including correspondents, editors and publishers of every major Jewish news publication, it felt like a reunion of compatriots. I felt, finally, at home. When Netanyahu entered, the applause lasted for a brief five seconds after he reached the podium.
The next two days included two tracks of trainings with the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA) conference, one track for reporting and one for the increasingly difficult business of keeping Jewish publications alive. Tuesday night the 34th annual Rockower Awards banquet was held at Adas Israel, Washington’s largest conservative synagogue and the one most often frequented by U.S. presidents. It was also the first synagogue to have Martin Luther King speak, in 1963.
The keynote speech given Alan Cooperman from the Pew Research Center was titled “The Tao of Pew: Putting Jewish population trends in comparative perspective,”about their recent survey of American Jews. On a positive if relative note, he said that while half of Jewish children today are from intermarried couples, they seem to be choosing to remain Jewish into adulthood longer and in larger numbers than the children from intermarried couples did in the past. Apparently it’s “cooler” to be Jewish nowadays. (see Pew Powerpoint slides 21 and 22).
As the Rockower awards were handed out, this reporter received two first-place awards, one for reporting in publications with a circulation under 15,000, and one for photography across all media. This was not just a first for the New Mexico Jewish Link, it was a recognition of the significance of the news made by the Jewish community here. The awards were for two articles in 2014 about how the anti-Israel BDS resolutions put forth in both the undergraduate and graduate student senates were successfully repelled by UNM’s Hillel students under the direction of Hillel Director Sara Koplik, and their Lobos for Israel student group founded by student Sarah Abonyi. To view these articles, published in the May and June/July 2014 print issues, as well as all print Link issues going back to 2011, you can download the issues as .pdfs at the Federation Jewish Link print archive webpage, http://www.jewishnewmexico.org/the_link . The students repeated this success again in 2015 (read at nmjewishelink.com “Anti-Israel Boycott Resolution Hits UNM; Student Senate Pushes Back, May, 2015.)
Senior Rabbi Gil Steinlauf of Adas Israel came the next morning to the AJPA conference being held at the Churchill, a boutique hotel across the street from the Hilton, to talk about his personal experience of being the object of the Jewish press last year, when he came out to the congregation that he was gay, after raising a family. He said that he and his wife remain best friends and talk daily, and he seemed to have been particularly hurt that one media outlet published of a photo of one of his children, which they had pilfered through a ‘friend of friend’off Facebook.
His talk was followed by a panel presentation led by Alan Abbey of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem on meeting high journalistic ethical standards and maintaining a responsibility to report on issues in the Jewish community. Abbey announced a joint project initiative of the Hartman Institute and the AJPA for developing journalist guidelines with a Jewish component. The moral challenges of doing so, of practicing tikkun olam while also taking into account the prohibitions against lashon hara, an ‘evil tongue,’ which might defame a person, are issues that Jewish journalists particularly struggle with.
At the final show-and-tell event for the journalists, The Cleveland Jewish News showed off an impressive array of special editions and activities, including their recent forays into hosting conferences. I showed the AJPA international press members the New Mexico Jewish Link’s print editions that featured the demographic survey (February 2015, online) and the BDS issues, and spoke directly about the enormous challenges being faced on the UNM campus by Hillel students here because of the virulent anti-Israel BDS movement, which has also had the effect of increasing an anti-Semitic climate. On a lighter note, I mentioned how the demographic study uncovered that we have twice as many Jews in New Mexico as we thought, 24,000.
Four days of meetings have since blurred together, but I came away most importantly having had the visceral experience and sense of being connected to the larger Jewish community, and being a part of something greater than myself.
And from this experience I can also see that, just as Jews in New Mexico may be a tiny fraction of the population here but have an outsized imprint, New Mexico itself, because of its uniquely diverse ethnicities, spiritual strengths, flavors and talents, also can hold an outsized voice in the national conversation this election year and in the shape of things to come.
Judge’s comment “Thoughtful, analytical commentary on current events that educate and edify readers.”
Serendipity and the Power of Daydreams
I knew I was angry and instead I decided to be creative as a kind of escape. We were going on a long drive up to Chinle, Arizona, where Frank was to deliver a training to Navajo health care professionals just before New Year’s. It was 11 a.m. when we started out from Albuquerque, and I started daydreaming that the car we were in was a floating ship and horses and flying coyotes and birds were accompanying us on our journey – and sure enough, I forgot very quickly about our argument and fell asleep.
Later when I woke up I couldn’t stop taking photos of the fantastic blue sky dotted with improbable puffs of cloud that we seemed to be flying and floating through as we gained elevation into the evergreens and snow and headed up toward Ganado and I thought – this is enough to sustain me, this beauty.
It wasn’t so hard to daydream, I found out. How fun! Why didn’t I ever think of this before? I’d always felt it was my duty to be as aware as I could as a photographer, seeing what was going on around me, although now and then coincidences would crop up in my photos.
As we approached Chinle, passing the turn-off for Pinon about four p.m., I asked Frank if he’d heard from Jerome Bernstein lately. Jerome is a prominent Jungian psychologist from Santa Fe who seeks parallels with Navajo understandings. He is the author of Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma. We’ll be staying at the Holiday Inn in Chinle near Canyon de Chelly, where three years earlier Frank had participated in a Jungian conference that Jerome had organized.
We’re having dinner now in the hotel restaurant, it’s about seven p.m. and I keep thinking Jerome is going to walk through the door. Then, Jerome walks through the door. It’s a Sunday, it’s Dec. 28, it’s 12 degrees outside, and here is Jerome, walking in with his two canes—“like a deer dancer,” he says, beaming. Jerome looks like Christopher Lloyd but with a gentler laugh. He has a great halo of white hair surrounding an otherwise bald pate. He has a friend in tow, who he introduces as Christophe, a French quantum mechanics theorist who is also a Jungian.
Christophe wanted to hear stories. They’d gone for a jeep tour in Canyon de Chelly that afternoon but were disappointed the tour guide didn’t know the stories. So, Frank tells him the creation story about the Twins going to meet their Father the Sun – the short version, which goes on for at least an hour. I ask Christophe, what are you looking for? He says “I wants to go beyond my quantum mechanics view through my dreams,” and that he wants to hear others, that they may have the answer for him.
I say, “Look right here, you have an answer, you saw something very magical, very serendipitous. What are the odds that in the dead of winter you will run into someone Jerome knows here? We’re over 300 miles from Santa Fe. The last time the three of us, Jerome and Frank and I, have been here was in spring of 2011, almost three years ago.” The quantum mechanics physicist says, “The odds actually are not too difficult to calculate.”
“But what are the odds,” I say, “that you will visit New Mexico this one week of the year, come on this trip, and run in to a Navajo friend of Jerome’s, who also doesn’t live here either, and hasn’t been up here for a year or more, but who had to arrive here tonight, and is not only a storyteller, but is willing to tell you the creation stories that you wanted to hear.” He laughs and says, “When you put it that way the odds are not so easy to calculate.”
Christophe then wants to know, is there another world beyond the Fourth World the Navajo say we are in now? Frank says, “They say there are seven.”
For each of us this unexpected meeting was a meaningful surprise. I know that Jungians and quantum mechanics theorists are especially interested in synchronicity. I imagine that Jerome and Christophe will be discussing what it means and work on putting it into a context that rubs up against Western knowledge.
For me, it’s nothing I can put into words. I can only tell the story. But this surprising experience, this out of the ordinary surprise, has renewed my faith in the magical, spiritual nature of things.
There is a reality that does transcend the normal, the everyday.
We know we are worried that mankind will not survive all this crap we have created in the world and that the world is now putting us through. Some believe that if we are faithful, and true, that somehow we will survive some sort of transition.
I say that I usually think that is just wishful thinking, and not being ‘real’ about fixing the world’s problems. Jerome then says, “Well what is real?”
Indeed. Maybe in these moments when we pray, or meditate, or daydream, or otherwise find a way to take ourselves out of an angry or negative or humdrum frame of mind, we really are creating something better in the universe. I think I will daydream more about flying animals surrounding the space bubble vehicle that I travel across this earth in, my personal merkabah.
Up to here, as published in the Gallup Independent – next section included in NMJewishelink.com and with photos:
A few connections we later made
I had asked Frank what this coincidental meeting meant to him, as a Navajo. At the time, he said, with something of the same amazement I was feeling, “I can’t explain it.” However, some days later back in Albuquerque he said, “We always, the elders say, that our thoughts and feelings have powers of creation. The four of us, there was this need that we all had, that we thought about, and then we met. When I got to the hotel and saw the sign for the restaurant on the stone building, Garcia’s, I remembered Jerome and all those Jungian analysts, and I had a certain feeling that their spirits were there, and then I thought–it’s probably just a memory. So, it’s not coincidence after all, we all in our minds got there first.”
One question in my mind is, did we create or foresee the event or both? How malleable is time and space and how much can our consciousness affect what is to be? Jerome later said that earlier that day in the canyon he had actually told Christophe he wished Frank was there to tell him the stories. Also, sometimes there is unseen help at work. Jerome was bringing Christophe to meet a medicine man the next day who knew he would be bringing an important guest.
I learned later also that Christophe Le Mouël is the executive director of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, and I later wrote and asked him to tell me something of himself. He wrote back that “I left France (and physics) eight years ago to follow an American woman I met in Paris and we now are parents of 1-year old twin boys. My passion is the connection of psyche and matter and I have published a few papers on this topic. This is how Jerome and I got to know each other.”
And, he was in New Mexico during the holidays visiting his wife’s family. He had felt very close to his wife’s grandmother, Ruth Seligman, and had written about her in a paper “A Necklace of Numbers,”* for a Jungian journal. In the paper he wrote about this closeness he felt to this remarkable woman, in part because she too had come from Europe to America – sent ahead of her parents, she escaped Nazi Germany and came as a young woman of 17 to Albuquerque. Christophe writes in the journal article that, in a dream, Ruth Seligman gives him a precious gift, a “necklace of numbers” that has great meaning and that configures greatly in his integration into American life.
*Christophe Le Mouël (2014) The Necklace of Numbers,
Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought, 57:4, 357-383
The exhibition hall for the Fractured Faiths exhibit is designed to evoke the interior of the Santa Maria La Blanca Synagogue, built under Christian rule by Islamic architects for Jewish use in Toledo, Spain in 1180 and is the oldest synagogue in Europe still standing. [photo © Diane Joy Schmidt]
L to R standing Roger L. Martínez-Dávila, Josef Díaz; front row, Stanley M. Hordes, Ron D. Hart, Frances Levine, Alicia Gojman Goldberg de Backal. Essayists in the book
Earlier that day during their tour of Canyon de Chelly, the one person Jerome had told Christophe he wanted him to meet was Frank. Frank Morgan and Christophe Le Mouël meet again at breakfast. The bubbles of light, known to photographers by their technical term ‘circles of confusion,’ seem to be sharing in the mirth, a happy accident at that moment of laughter. Photo © 2014 Diane Joy Schmidt www.dianejoyschmidt.com
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