CAROL ASCHER

1/13/21

I doubt that most of us will remember 2020 as joyful, or even particularly happy. But some like me, cushioned by social security and savings, found contentment in solitary pursuits, and some, again like me, were riveted almost daily by the news. In a year of massive deprivation, bad news was one of the things that 2020 gave us more than enough of. Although we ended 2020 with the optimism of a poorly-funded vaccine rollout, the year we finally got through offers some important lessons we shouldn't forget... [Continue Reading]

12/9/20

I know I'm not the only one who feels an exhausted malaise at the interminable days between the presidential election, just over a month ago, and the inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, each day featuring its own nutty and disheartening drama. Donald Trump's refusal to concede to Joe Biden, and his ongoing insistence on "widespread voter fraud," seems unlikely to end, especially since it has already enabled him to raise $200 million in contributions, supposedly to pursue his legal case, but in actuality with few constraints on his spending. Today, as I write, we have 47 more days until the inauguration — [Continue Reading]

11/4/20

I was taking a walk amidst falling golden leaves with a friend I'll call Lisa. Since we were outside and there was a nice breeze, we weren't wearing masks. But we were trying to keep 6 feet between us, which meant each time we neared each other as we talked, one of us cautiously moved away. I'd brought a mask, thinking Lisa might want us to wear them, but she'd brushed the idea aside. Still, she had hung a mask around her neck to put on if we encountered someone on the road. So I folded mine and put it in the pocket of my down vest. [Continue Reading...]

10/14/20

Trump emerged from his three-day stay in Walter Reed's Presidential Suite "feeling great." Offering no real information on the symptoms that had brought him to the hospital, he also showed no new appreciation of (or compassion for) the suffering, loss and anxiety Americans are feeling nine months into the pandemic. [Continue Reading...]

9/16/20
I've been lucky enough to feel the peace of a long COVID-19 summer spent mostly in the safety of my own home and garden. But this peace is increasingly threatened by my agitation about the upcoming election. Can I trust that problems with voting and misinformation about the candidates conveyed by Russians as well as Americans, including President Trump, will not distort the outcome? [Continue Reading...]

8/19/20

The good news is that I successfully voted in our primary using what Connecticut calls an absentee ballot. I sent the town of Sharon a note that I couldn't come to the polls because of the coronavirus, and they mailed me a ballot, which I filled out, placed in two envelopes, signing the outer envelope. Because of the mail slow-down, which President Trump and his postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, hope to worsen by requiring that all ballots go "bulk mail," a locked ballot box stands by the back door of our Town Hall, which is where I dropped my envelope. Dropping off my absentee ballot before Nov. 3 is exactly how I intend to vote in the presidential election. [Continue Reading...]

7/15/20

You may have seen the PBS podcast that featured Frederick Douglass' great-great-great grandchildren reading from his speech to abolitionists on Independence Day in 1852. He made clear his bitterness about a day for which almost 80 years later he and his enslaved brothers and sisters still had no reason to celebrate. Poignantly read by his current kin, the speech made palpable a history noticeably harsher than the one I'd learned in public school, where heroic names guarded a history that was seemingly valiant and unchanging. [Continue Reading...]

7/1/20 

A long with chokeholds, no-knock entries and other violent police tactics, there is growing consensus among both protesters and groups across the political spectrum that "qualified immunity" must be ended or rethought. As it stands, qualified immunity protects local law enforcement from being sued and prevents citizens whose constitutional rights have been violated by law enforcement from having their day in court. [Continue Reading...]

6/17/20

The demand by protesters across America to "defund the police" is bold, and probably intended to sound serious, if not scary. Though I'm sure some protesters want our 911 calls to ring to no response, most are asking for two things: an end to the violence that has plagued interactions between local police and African-Americans; and the shifting of some police department funds that currently pay for functions police handle poorly to social service and health agencies that may handle them more effectively and peaceably. [Continue Reading...]

6/10/20

Watching the largely peaceful and increasingly good-spirited protests and marches by black, brown and white young people since the terrible death of George Floyd, I have been tempted to imagine that the pandemic had given way to the long-standing challenge of police brutality. But then, seeing a group of masked protesters, my illusion quickly ended, as it becomes clear that the marchers have come together both despite and because of the virus. Many of these marchers are probably unemployed or out of school because of the coronavirus, and their anger at police violence — as well as their kind and good spirited wish to be useful — arises out of this unique period of uncertainty, worry and enforced leisure. [Continue Reading...]

5/13/20

I've been uneasy about the "balance" that our President and a number of governors are expressing between saving people's livelihoods and rescuing our economy, on one side, and keeping down the terrible illness and death caused by coronavirus, on the other. This two-way balance was complicated by warm weather, which brought young people to parks and beaches, and so added springtime exuberance to the economic side, while increasing the illness and death side of the scale. 

I began to wonder: How much is a life worth?  Are some lives more valuable than others? [Continue Reading...]

4/29/20

I would wager that uncertainty is the main cause of stress most of us are feeling during this coronavirus pandemic. We are uncertain how long we will be forced to live largely inside our own homes, conducting business and friendships on Zoom or Facetime, and seeing only family members face-to-face. We are unsure of whether the precautions we are taking, from social isolation to hand-washing and wiping down surfaces, are what is actually called for. We have no way to know whether we'll get sick, and, if we do, whether we'll recover. And we hear different stories of what life will be like when we finally emerge on the other side of this odd and uncomfortable period. Will the world we step back into be recognizable? [Continue Reading...]

4/17/20

Wisconsinites wearing face masks as they stood in the rain to vote might have illustrated the commitment of Americans to our democracy — except that there could have been safer ways to cast their ballots. Amidst that state's rise in coronavirus cases, so many poll workers had refused to participate that the number of open polls in Milwaukee was reduced from 180 to 5 — thus the long wait in the rain. While Wisconsin had tried simultaneously to postpone in-person voting and to allow for more time for voters to return absentee ballots, the Republican-dominated state court in Wisconsin, followed by the conservative U.S. Supreme court, denied both measures, forcing Wisconsinites to risk their lives and the lives of others as they waited to cast their ballot. [Continue Reading]

4/1/20

I would wager that uncertainty is the main cause of stress most of us are feeling during this corona virus pandemic. We are uncertain how long we will be forced to live largely inside our own homes, conducting business and friendships on Zoom or Facetime, and seeing only family members face-to-face. We are unsure of whether the precautions we are taking, from social isolation to hand-washing and wiping down surfaces, are what is actually called for. We have no way to know whether we'll get sick, and, if we do, whether we'll recover. And we hear different stories of what life will be like when we finally emerge on the other side of this odd and uncomfortable period. Will the world we step back into be recognizable? [Continue Reading]

"The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances,

uncertainty is all we truly have." ~ Pema Chodrin

12/11/19

The First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, has long been the lifeblood of our democracy. Yet free speech is based on two expectations: that, even when people are biased, their facts are generally truthful; and that the opinions and ideas that circulate, however disturbing or discriminatory, are attributable to identifiable individuals.

During the past three years, President Trump's use of Twitter to attack the news media for "fake news" has occurred alongside an exponential growth in social media, [Continue Reading]

12/4/19

 The Department of Justice's proposal to collect DNA samples from hundreds of thousands of immigrants in detention centers without their consent has made me rethink the saliva sample I happily sent Ancestry a couple of months ago. Though Ancestry confirmed that my DNA reflects my family's European heritage, I don't know what other information Ancestry gleaned, or could glean, from my sample. Nor do I know how this organization that so charmingly celebrates our human diversity plans to protect its information from a government that sees DNA as a tool for its national forensic database linking crimes and potential criminals [Continue Reading]

9/4/19

 A few years ago, during a project on Russian Jewish immigrants, I came upon Malka Chavanowa, who in 1905 had arrived at Ellis Island with her 10-year-old son. Beside her name were initials, LPC, which turned out to stand for, "likely to become a public charge." Although Malka was allowed to pass through Ellis Island (she would become matriarch of Arnoff's Moving and Storage), women who arrived without a husband either at their side or waiting on the pier were labeled LPC, and many were put back on steerage to be returned to Europe.  

At the time, I was outraged at U.S. Immigration's assumption that a woman was incapable of sustaining herself. It never occurred to me that becoming a "public charge," was part of the web of obstacles that immigrants still face — that is, until President Trump's recent executive decision to deny green cards to any immigrant who has applied for one of a range of federal public assistance programs. [Continue Reading]

7/17/19

The fierce interchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden during the second Democratic debate arose from opposing perspectives. Harris called Biden's stance against busing in 1975 "personally hurtful," and she wanted him to admit that he had been wrong. She remembered that 20 years after the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court case had mandated desegregation, her class had been only the second in Berkeley to be bused to a white school, without which she would likely not have gone to law school, become California's attorney general, and a senator. Shocked by her personal story...  [Continue Reading...]

6/26/19

Immigrant children have become the collateral damage of the Trump administration's Zero Tolerance policies aimed at their parents, as well as "bargaining chips" in the administration's negotiations with Congress. In addition, our current administration probably hopes that its disdainful treatment of children at the border will be a deterrent to Central American families contemplating life in the U.S. [Continue Reading...]

10/18/2016
I had been living in the hills above Sharon, CT, for some time when I heard that a Russian Jewish family had once lived about a mile away. Then a neighbor mentioned that his father had bought their several-hundred-acre farm from “a Jew” in 1926. The mention of a third Russian Jewish farmer... [continue reading]

2/4/16

I have come to the Newtown Congregational Church, less than a half mile from Sandy Hook Elementary School, to attend an interfaith discourse about guns in our society. The program opens with a showing of The Armor of Light, a film documenting... [continue reading]

12/14/15

The many thousands of Syrian refugees seeking a safe haven on our shores are being twice victimized – first by the bloody civil war that caused them to flee their homeland, and a second time by the prejudice and fear making us indifferent to their suffering and squeezing their chance of asylum to a shameful trickle. [continue reading]

6/21/16

In American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (HarperCollins), award-winning author Hannah Nordhaus treats us to a genealogical detective story that combines memoir, cultural history, and ghost hunting in her quest to discover the truth about her great great-great-grandmother... [continue reading]

October 26, 2015

With Israel armed against its occupied territories and surrounding Arab nations, I often think longingly of Martin Buber's vision of neighborly relationships between Jews and Arabs. Most Americans know Buber, who died fifty years ago, for his moving renderings of Hasidic tales and his great philosophical treatise, I and Thou. Yet for more than six decades... [continue reading]

August/September 2015

A king quarrels with his son, according to a Hasidic parable, and in a fit of rage exiles him from the kingdom.

After a number of years, the king's heart softens and he sends his ministers to find his son and ask him to come home. But the young man resists the invitation: He feels too bitter and hurt to return. When the ministers present the sad news to the king, he sends them out again with a new message for his son: "Return as far as you can, and I will come the rest of the way to meet you." [continue reading...]

February 2015

At ninety-four, Lilli Zimet, my mother's cousin, lives alone in a two-story home near Temple Beth El in Poughkeepsie, New York, where in 1946 her husband, Rabbi Erwin Zimet, another refugee from the Nazis, assumed leadership. With her memory still keen, she talks easily of her experiences in the Jewish schools created by Martin Buber to give German Jews... [continue reading]