During the past several weeks I’ve been busy getting my new book out to the public. It’s a personal memoir about my father’s family titled “A Century in Charleston – The Wetherhorn Family 1840-1940”. I spent many hours correcting some items that the spelling checker doesn’t recognize. Among them; apostrophes showing ownership in various contexts, periods after abbreviations like Jr and St. and it doesn’t make any difference if the St was to signify ‘street’ or ‘saint’. I included a lot of illustrations located within the text. When the illustration was placed with text running alongside the text was often hyphenated, and made reading difficult. When I omitted them the lines ended up uneven in length. Many names, including my own family name, have had several alternate spellings. Each occurrence had to be verified for accuracy.
My younger daughter and her family currently reside in the USA. Their second son decided it was time to return to Israel. He is doing it on his own by joining a program that includes joining the Israel Defense Forces. He is now beginning basic training, But he spent time with us, and his other relatives, before being sworn in, It was actually a lot of fun for us to have him here.
Israel, in general, is going through a difficult time. It’s not the worldwide economic crisis or Corona. We had elections in November and the largest party has been striving to form a new government. The results include a lot of situations that are, at best, unhealthy for the country. Three of the partners in the coalition are strongly identified with religious movements. This means legislation that grants them powers of things like military service for the ultra-orthodox, financial aid for their institutions, exemptions for the students in ultra-orthodox schools from secular studies like English and math that are required of students in other schools. Some of the party leaders of the smaller coalition partners have made highly discriminatory remarks in the past about various other groups including women, LGBTQ groups, Arabs, and even other Jews who are not ultra-orthodox. It wouldn’t be so troublesome but for the fact that they are trying to introduce legislation to limit some freedoms with regard to the groups in question. An additional problem is that some individuals who are being put forward for ministerial positions have been convicted in the past of crimes like bribery, tax evasion, and what would be considered libel in the US. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is promising he will keep his coalition partners in line. But he, himself, is currently on trial for similar offenses.
There are a lot of other countries who have jumped on the bandwagon of Neo-antisemitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism. This has serious implications because they have asked the International Criminal Court to look into the treatment of Arabs in the “Occupied Territories”. From my point of view, that;s ridiculous. The former mandate territory of Palestine became a Jewish State in 1948..There was not a Palestinian state at that time because the local Arabs were not prepared to have one (Thanks to their other Arab neighboring nations). The attitude of the current Palestinian Authority government (set up under Israeli auspices) is still one that calls for the elimination of Israel. They think they are being generous by allowing Israel to exist until they are ready to step in and take over.
All of this recalls that old Chinese curse “May you live in Interesting times”. I live in an interesting neighborhood (and, I might add, one that is overall, much safer than much of the United States).
Wetherhorn 