Meanwhile, speaking of policy, of which Trump has none, J.D.
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @lolonurse I know. This turning on their neighbors is a big part of the horror of it all, don't you think? If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere.
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
You and I are probably distantly related too! My mother's father came from an old pre-war plantation family in Georgia. But those grandparents got divorced. I have a geneology he did, but there are few family stories from that quadrant. My mother never forgave him for leaving the family for another woman - his university student, Marion! They had a son who I never even knew about until mom let it slip, then growled, " He's no brother of mine."
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Often they definitely aren't. And then they surprise you and can show amazing compassion.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse We're all related in fascinating ways, aren't we? I've loved the reaction of white supremacists to the well-substantiated finding that we all stem from an African Ur-mother. Couldn't happen to nicer people! Sounds as if there could be interesting stories on that Georgia branch of your family. It's always fascinating when the "hidden" relative suddenly emerges through a little revelatory comment like your mother's.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse Yes, that's the horror, to live next to and with people for years — for centuries! — living in relative amicability. And then to discover people can be made to hate by ugly propaganda and can turn on a dime…. And, of course, the ground was fertile for that hateful propaganda due to centuries of antisemitic lies, the blood libel stories, etc., all rooted in distorted versions of Christianity that needed to demonize the Jewish people.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse I made a trip there this spring to see my brother, who lives in Brooklyn — his niece and former wife are in Connecticut, and I stayed with both my niece and my brother. My brother took us to his favorite Jewish deli in NYC and we had pastrami sandwiches. For years when my husband and I would go to NYC, Katz's iconic deli on the lower east side was our go-to place. NYC has so amazing much to offer in terms of Jewish cuisine and every other cuisine imaginable.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Yes, that's right. And when the pressure has been so intense — a matter of life and death at some points in European history — this is understandable. One of my mystery family lines that emigrated, probably, from Great Britain to Maryland has a really uncommon surname that I find only in a Jewish family that left Spain as Spain expelled its Jewish population, with branches going to Belgium, Germany, and what's now Poland — and possibly the British Isles?
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Yes, this is a point that Claudia Roden often makes in her magisterial survey of Jewish foodways globablly. So many of us Americans tend to think of Jewish food as synonymous with Ashkenazi cooking, which is in so many ways Germanic-central European without the pork, and not very exciting. But the Jewish cooking of Egypt, for instance, or of Ladino communities: exotic and very unlike that central European Jewish food.
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lolonursereplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm
I have an acquaintance who is from Brooklyn. In his youth, he worked for an iconic knish maker. I asked him one day, what the recipe was for potato knishes, my favorite. He began "Well, first you have to wash & peel 300 pounds of potatoes." I just said "never mind..." -
lolonursereplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm
Some of the surnames from Spain & Portugal are definitely eye-catching. In Germany, & Austria, Jews didn't have actual surnames until they were finally mandated, in the late 18th-early 19th century. Sephardim had surnames by the 16th century. Before that, it was common to see "David ben Abram". Ben means son of. And many people who went to Israel, much like African Americans did, ditched their Euro names for traditional/cultural names. -
Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @lolonurse Plus the economy sucked, and a good scapegoat was needed. My PT once told me he believes we are not far evolved from territorial primates throwing poop at each other. But then we see the flip side in the animal kingdom, don't we... The compassion of a tribe for a compromised member, the communal caring for the young (ex. whales), teamwork hunting.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse Yes, when people are dealing with economic reversals, it's always so easy to get them to scapegoat a vulnerably community, and the movers and shakers of various societies have long manipulated that shameful tendency of humans to scapegoat some vulnerable group — rather than the economic elites that have made pawns of their lives. We see this so strongly in the propensity of many Americans right now to blame immigrants for their often imaginary economic woes.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Yes, really eye-catching and often unique. My first inkling that this surname — it's Brazelton/Braselton — might be Jewish came when I was a grad student in Toronto and noticed a local attorney with the surname Braseliten. Any variation of Brazelton/Braselton is very uncommon. All spellings of the name are just rare. And that makes me think, of course, that perhaps all variations point back to one family.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm I contacted this attorney and she kindly invited me to come to her office and share information about my family. When I brought her my charts for the first generation of this family in the US (in Maryland by the early 1700s), she asked, "Did it ever occur to you that your family might have Jewish roots?" She pointed out that the immigrant ancestor had named children Jacob, Isaac, and Esther, in addition to other more Anglo names.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Then she told me that her family was Jewish, had been expelled from Spain, and had trekked to what is now Poland. I subsequently discovered branches of that same family in Belgium, and the one person with the surname Brazelton I find by the 1700s in English records is a woman named Judith — again, this makes me wonder about Jewish ancestry. I find people with this surname in lists of those murdered in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Potatoes are such an iconic middle- and eastern-European vegetable, aren't they? People think of them as quintessentially Irish, and that's true, of course, but people in central and eastern Europe also adopted them with great relish and made them central to their cuisine. Some years ago, my husband and I went to Bolsano where he has some family roots going back to the period when this was Austria.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm We stayed in a little hotel owned by a German-speaking family with deep roots there — spent a number of days, in fact, speaking German all over Bolsano and eating quintessentially Austrian food. The last day we were there, as we packed early in the day to catch the train to Florence, I could smell wafting from the kitchen the smell of lots of potatoes boiling for that day's knödels, and I thought to myself what a German-Austrian smell that was.
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lolonursereplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm
When we were growing this country, we captured & imported Africans to do the hard labor in the fields, imported Chinese laborers who would risk their lives for a pittance blasting paths for our railroads... we are too soft to do the grueling work, but would rather it not get done than welcome in Spanish speaking people - the language many of the "explorers" spoke... Ponce de Leon, Balboa, de Soto, de Gama, Coronado, Pizarro... -
Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @lolonurse Yes! Yes yes yes! That is THE place, and hot pastrami is THE sandwich!! Did you have the cheesecake? And try matzo ball soup there too. And bagels with lox. Get rugala to go! Just OMG. You can't get this food out here, sadly. I try to make it myself with ingredients from the grocery store but it's not the same.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse I think the hot pastrami sandwiches are the only thing we've ever ordered at Katz's — but we do love the cheesecake at Jewish delis, and the bagels, though I forego the lox, which my spouse relishes. Love rugala, too. I'm embarrassed to say I have never had matzo ball soup. His family makes knödels using a recipe that came from a Bohemian great-grandmother, and I think in some ways, those are very much like matzo balls.