Jewish in Australia – a brief update

personby Gillian Polack
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This week the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is a mixed bag, but it’s all very close to home. The Royal Commission is talking about learning and educational resources today, for example, so I have to watch. I need to know how what I do (or did when I had lots of teaching and do on the rare instance I’m back teaching) fits into good practice. I also need to be critical of what everyone else is doing. Not bad-critical, but aware-critical. Today then, is an in-service for education outside the tertiary sector.

Then there are three days of things I know but need to understand better. Learning and education require this, and just because I’ve been excluded from much of the education I used to give, doesn’t absolve me from learning and updating. It’s ironic that I’m updating my understanding of why I’ve been excluded, but that’s only a small slice of a vast pie about education in Australia and how it fits with being Jewish in Australian.

Friday, as I told everyone on Facebook, is my personal hellscape, because it’s about antisemitism in the Arts and Creative sector. It’s not my once-life and hope-to-be life: it’s my current everyday. I say “hope-to-be” but the silencing and how Jewish creatives now live in a different world to most others hasn’t yet been tackled and may not be tackled. The focus here is on the hate, not the side effects of hate. The introduction for this week (by counsel assisting) has already noted how many of us are isolated and drifting thanks to the antisemitism, which is a big advance.

Outside the Royal Commission, people are blaming Jews for all kinds of things still. The new thing they (those who hate) have is an assessment of the Royal Commission while not paying any attention to what everyone says in it. The investigation into antisemitism itself becomes an excuse for antisemitism. I read something that suggests that people who do this enjoy hating. I wish they were wrong.

I asked my Facebook followers to consider. “Anyone who has political opinions on these subjects, listen to the evidence at the RC first and maybe think on how things affect me and other Australian Jews in your vicinity. Is your opinion on my page more important than my safety or emotional stability? Your choice, of course, but I’d rather you made it an educated choice.”

None of this was going to be today’s post. I had completely different ideas. But in the background, I’m hearing a rabbi talking about healing the staff at Bankstown Hospital, which is known to be antisemitic. So many people are taking their religion off their hospital record, for their own safety. There was discussion in Sydney about even finding alternates to hospitals because of safety. The State government is now talking about what to do. Healing is going to take a long time. Safety is still an issue. At least, however, more people are now talking about this.

If you want to learn more about our Royal Commission, you can find it here: Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

The Air We Breathe

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Between heat and wildfire smoke, many people have been driven indoors this summer. Heat is one of the most dangerous conditions; more people die from heat waves than tornadoes and other disasters that make more news.

And the wildfire smoke has pushed the air quality index off the charts in a lot of places that aren’t used to such things. Not that anyone can get used to those levels; human lungs aren’t that good.

So people stay inside, with windows closed and air conditioners cranked up, and hope the power doesn’t go out.

The thing is, indoor air can also be bad for us, if not as immediately bad as heat or as obviously bad as smoke. The pandemic made clear that many viruses are airborne – something that should have been clear to all of us decades ago – so that breathing in places with poor ventilation means diseases spread quickly.

Lots of indoor spaces have lousy ventilation. Even fewer of them have good filtration systems that screen out viruses and particulate matter.

Fires and heat waves have always been with us, though now they are much worse due to climate change and likely to continue getting worse. We are going to have to deal with them for some time to come, likely centuries even if we actually start doing things to repair the damage done to our atmosphere.

Fortunately, we can easily do quite a lot about indoor air quality, and, in fact, engineers have been working on that for quite some time. Our biggest problem is not the technology – it exists and isn’t even particularly expensive – but, as with most of the issues we face right now, the political will to get it done.

Back in 2021, ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) was asked by President Biden to address the issues caused by virus spread indoors. This week I listened to an introductory webinar on the standard conducted by a professor of engineering from Penn State who worked on it.

In four months – incredibly fast for an organization devoted to meticulous study of issues that often takes years to develop standards – they came up with Standard 241 on control of infectious aerosols. The standard addresses such things as amount of ventilation required to reduce the risk as well as filtration devices and other methods of limiting or destroying the viruses.

The original standard was recommended only, since it had not had the usual level of review, but now it is up for certification as an ANSI standard, which means that it can more easily be adopted into building codes and related regulation.

Standard 241 is obviously related to overall indoor air quality, but has been published separately from other ASHRAE standards that govern that. The intent, I think, is to allow those maintaining building systems to ramp up for epidemic conditions, rather than include such standards at all times. I gathered from the webinar that not everyone agrees with keeping them separate.

Given how many viruses are airborne, I think protection against airborne diseases should always be part of the indoor air quality system. While Covid was obvious and devastating, flu happens every year and other respiratory viruses spread regularly.

It seems to me that setting up buildings to minimize spread of disease as well as blocking toxic chemicals and particulate matter leads to healthier indoor spaces for everyone. Continue reading “The Air We Breathe”…

Which Era Are We?

personby Madeleine Robins
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Apologies: I’m up against a deadline that will not budge, and so am posting an essay from about a decade ago. These days I spend more time than is healthy wondering what the era we are currently living through will be called, and how history will judge us. But that’s not what this is about.

We humans love our boundaries. Between nations, between states, between property. So important to know where you end and I begin, not?

But in history, maybe not so useful. When I was taking history classes, there was a tendency to teach historical periods and eras, as if the Plantagenets filed out in an orderly fashion one day, the Tudors clocked in, and everything–clothes, art, technology, politics–changed right then. But history isn’t a single timeline, there are huge overlaps, some of which can take me by surprise.

For instance the dapper fellow in the photo? That’s Wyatt Earp, of the O.K. Corral: major character in the American saga of The Wild West. After Tombstone he moved to California where, among other things, he was a consultant to the film industry; he and western star Tom Mix were great friends. Earp died in 1929, well into the era of electricity, cars, flight.

Sometimes I’m asked when the Regency was. There’s a simple and accurate answer: the Regency began in 1811, when Parliament enacted the Regency Bill and the Prince of Wales became a stand-in for his father George III. It ended in 1820, when George III died and the Prince of Wales became king.

But in discussing the Regency, particularly when talking about fiction, the period is a more squishy, pliable thing. For convenience’s sake, I’d say it was roughly 1795-1825, the era of England’s involvement with Napoleon; the point when the Empire style was at its height; the Romantic movement was in full blast; and technology was beginning to make serious inroads in daily life. But from another vantage point, the Regency is just a subset of the Georgian era, a blip on the way from the Enlightenment to the Victorians. It all depends where you draw the lines. And frankly, the lines didn’t matter as much if you were at the lower end of the economic spectrum: things don’t change as fast when you’re scrabbling for dinner and all your money goes for necessities rather than a new gown.

It’s easy to forget that while some people were living what we would consider a medieval life, others were smack dab in the middle of the Renaissance. To me one of the most arresting scenes in The Return of Martin Guerre (a lovely French film from a few decades ago) is at the trial, when there are the nice medieval peasants and the clergy and lawyers, all in their robes of office–and there in the audience are people who would not look out of place in the court of James I. My initial belief in my own historical knowledge (oh, I know when this is!) was knocked askew. In the same way, I love the film versions of Austen in which women are wearing clothes from several different eras–from the older woman who is still wearing a highly structured gown from 1795 to the young woman whose gown is the latest cry: high waisted, sheer fabric, Romantic draping. It reminds me that many women didn’t toss out the old gowns–they wore them, or tore them apart and remade them–because fabric and labor were not cheap. And that no one was sitting there thinking, “well, I’d better rethink my wardrobe, because we’re transitioning into the Regency, and these old rags will simply look like they belong to another era.”

My daughter has been watching Mad Men from the beginning of the series. I mentioned that (because my father worked on Madison Avenue in the 50s and 60s) it all looked rather familiar to me. And this launched us into a discussion about eras, and how you know when you’re in one. And of course, you don’t. At the time, it just seems like today is an extension of yesterday, and tomorrow will flow right out of today. At the time, even fringed suede vests might seem like the thing to do.

Ranting

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.

My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.

 

There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”

An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?

A Lifetime of Work

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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We saw the exhibit of Mildred Howard’s work at the Oakland Museum of California last week. Called “Poetics of Memory,” it was a wonderful collection of the work of a Bay Area artist — now 80 — who has done everything from making large outdoor installations to creating pictures using copies made on a color Xerox machine as a starting point.

The exhibit even included an elaborate sort of slide show of snapshots she took as a young teenager on a family trip from the Bay Area to Galveston, and some of her work was built on the knowledge she gained from her parents work selling antiques, so it not only incorporated most of the decades of her life thus far, but also her history.

Some pieces directly address racism – three mummified statues of men who were noted in American history (including Francis Scott Key) and also known enslavers made a strong statement. Other pieces implied it, while still others invoked other parts of her life.

She’s well-known in the Bay Area and has shown in galleries and exhibitions around the world, and her work is both highly creative and thought-provoking. Howard has spent her life as an artist and given the world an impressive body of creative work.

It got me to thinking of how wonderful it is to spend one’s life creating art and to have a body of powerful work to show for it. To me that’s so much better than getting rich. Continue reading “A Lifetime of Work”…

[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologist

Ali Jasemi, Wilfrid Laurier University

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 69 per cent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.

Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.

As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Wired for bad news

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

Scanning the whole world

For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.

Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.

Looking away is not the fix

What’s the solution to news fatigue? Well, it’s not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.

Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We’re wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.

The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.

Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.

There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.

Finally, be wary of “rage bait” — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.

The news will not become less “heavy.” But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.The Conversation

Ali Jasemi, Lecturer, Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix”…

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
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I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

Down the Rabbit Hole

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A white rabbit wearing a coat, standing on its hind legs and staring at a watch. Painting by John Tenniel from an early edition of Alice in Wonderland.

It is common, in my circles, to speak of “going down the rabbit hole.” Writers, of course, are notorious for starting to research some minor point and emerging hours later having chased down one idea only to find another sort-of-related point that must also be investigated and so on.

My partner, who only writes when he has to, does the same thing just for the hell of it – and then bemoans the fact that he stayed up too late chasing down ideas on his screen. He complains he spends too much time staring at a screen, but of course what he’s doing there is reading something interesting that leads to something else interesting, which I don’t think is the real problem with too much screen time.

I mean, people like me and my partner and most of the writers I know would be doing the same thing without the internet. We’d just be doing it with dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, various other books around the house and – once we’d exhausted those sources – the nearest library.

Going down rabbit holes is part of what makes life worth living.

Funny, though, when I looked the phrase up online – to determine if, in fact, it does come from Alice in Wonderland (it apparently does) – I saw a few comments that implied that it’s not a positive thing.

For example, the Wikipedia entry says:

It has come to mean that someone has become interested in something, usually by accident; and often the subject does not deserve the amount of attention that a person gives.

I say “bah.”

The reason I am writing about this is because I read a piece in The New York Times by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff entitled “We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask.” (gift link). In this essay, which among other things critiques the use of so-called AI, she observes:

Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting.

That resonated with me deeply. I love undirected exploration. I’m very inefficient at research. And more than anything else, I love connecting things from very different points of view, things that might not seem connected to anyone else. Continue reading “Down the Rabbit Hole”…

A Story They Didn’t Teach Me

personby Madeleine Robins
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When I was 13 my family moved from New York City to a small town in Western Massachusetts: Sheffield.  For those unfamiliar with Western Massachusetts, it is beautiful, green, hilly and pleasant and quaint. Quaint as can be, with houses full of Colonial charm (which they come by honorably, as they date from the 1700s) and a thriving tourist economy that leans into the quaint. Along with skiing in the winter and summering outside the city in the summer, there is an opportunity for what you might call historical tourism, if you’re into that sort of thing.

At the time, I wasn’t. I was enrolled in the local high school, Mt. Everett Regional. I had come from a left-of-center progressive school in New York, which made for some pretty severe culture shock on my part (and possibly on the part of some of my classmates and teachers–but that might just have been because it was the late 60s and culture shock was everywhere) but I got a good, if somewhat less political, education at Mt. Everett, and I have nothing to say in its dispraise.

But there were things they didn’t teach. And last week I learned one of them.

An account on Threads called “History is Punk” posted a long thread about Elizabeth Freeman, who was directly responsible for the state of Massachusetts outlawing slavery. And this happened in Sheffield, and I had never heard of it until last Saturday, July 4th, when the thread posted. The New York Times Magazine had an article about Freeman this week too. Elizabeth Freeman is having a moment.

Freeman–originally known as Bett–was born in Claverack, NY, in the household of a well to do, slave-owning Dutch farmer. When she was young she was sent, along with various other household goods and chattels, to the new home of the farmer’s daughter Hannah. Hannah had married a prosperous gentleman-farmer and lawyer in Sheffield, Massachusetts, John Ashley. (The Ashley house is still there; I think I visited it once, but the emphasis at the time was all on Ashley’s place in the community and in the Revolution. I heard nothing at the time about Elizabeth Freeman). One can assume that, as a household servant, Bett did a lot of waiting on the gentlemen who came to talk with Ashley about politics–particularly about a document called The Sheffield Declaration, which is a forerunner of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was a 1773 anti-British manifesto which Ashley–and another local lawyer, Theodore Sedgewick–were instrumental in drafting.

So there is Bett, in and out of rooms where phrases like “mankind in a state of nature are free, equal, and independent.” It is pretty clear that these ideas took root. Meanwhile, Bett continued to work for the Ashleys (she had no other choice; she was their slave). Anecdotally, it appears that John Ashley was a fairly reasonable guy, but his wife Hannah was not. She was hot-tempered and treated everyone, but particularly the slaves, badly. So badly that when someone in the kitchen (most likely Bett’s daughter) used some scraps to make herself a snack, Hannah tried to hit the girl with a red-hot iron shovel; Bett took the blow on her arm. It went to the bone, and while she was treated for the wound it never really healed well.

In 1781, when the states had ratified the Articles of Confederation, Sheffield held a celebration on July 4th in the town square. Again, if Bett was there, she would have heard that self-evident phrase “All men are created equal.” The next day Bett visited attorney Theodore Sedgewick and asked him to sue for her freedom. He agreed, filing a “writ of replevin,” which demanded that property improperly held by the Ashleys (that would Bett and another slave named Brom) be returned to the rightful owners: themselves. The case was heard in the neighboring town of Great Barrington, and after legal back and forth (offered the chance to simply free the two slaves, Ashley declined; he might have been reasonable compared to his wife, but…) Bett won her case. The case became the scaffolding on which Massachusetts built an affirmative declaration that slavery was “repugnant” to the terms of the State Constitution.

Bett lived a long life: she took the name Elizabeth Freeman. She worked for wages for the Sedgewick family for some years, bought a house, and amassed enough property to leave it, and many other things, to her descendants. When she died, she was buried in the Sedgewick’s burial plot, the only non-family member there.

And it kills me that I only learned about this last weekend.

I went to High School in Sheffield. The library in Great Barrington was one of my preferred hangs. We heard a great deal about the Berkshire’s role in the Revolutionary War. But in the late 1960s I heard nothing about Elizabeth Freeman. Fortunately, things have changed since I was graduated from Mt. Everett in 1971. Freeman’s story is known and embraced in the area; in 2022 a statue was erected to honor her.

My point (aside from my general crankiness about not having heard of this before) is that history is full of stories like this, stories that don’t get told or don’t get remembered. I believe firmly that if I had stumbled over Elizabeth Freeman’s story in high school and written a paper about it, I would have been congratulated for finding it–they weren’t burying anything, it wasn’t sinister. Just… if you don’t know, you don’t go looking.

The Current Powers That Be would likely be happy if we forgot about this sort of story. Which makes it all the more important that we keep looking for them.

 

The Joy in July

personby Gillian Polack
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This week my thoughts are on the worst month of the year in Canberra, because that is the month I am living in right now.

It’s simple. It’s winter. There is no snow. The only holidays are school holidays and most people who take them have headed over the mountains and are currently at the beach, where it’s less cold. Last year I did this for a week and my July as so much better. This year I spent a bit more money and flew to Perth for a science fiction convention.

For northern hemisphere folks, it’s January with the memory of Christmas half a year ago rather than days ago. No snow, but much black ice.

It used to be worse. When I first moved to Canberra the only fruit in winter was stale apples and amazing oranges. The first two weeks of oranges were wonderful but it became very dull very quickly. Now we have new varieties of citrus, plus some clever folks realised that all those farms near the coast have different fruit. I bought dekopon and bananas and finger lime yesterday at the market. I can get through July more easily with dekopon and bananas and one luxury fruit.

Also, Canberrans do dinner parties. I don’t get many of those (some people are worried about disability cooties, some about the cooties that older folks bring, some about the cooties generously distributed by childless women, and far too many about Jew cooties), but those I do get make me very happy and make the month tolerable. And some friends visit me. I am about to make vast amounts of chicken soup to feed myself and those friends.

That chicken soup has a second purpose. I suspect lovage might have been replaced with celery or vice versa in some types of chicken soup. This theory is based on not nearly enough knowledge at this tage. Thanks to some Polish friends I have heaps of lovage and thanks to Fyskwick Market I have celery leaf and enough boiling chicken and etc to make two big pots of soup, one with lovage and one with celery. This is just one step of a path I began to walk when the same friends who sent me the lovage sent me (for my 60th birthday) a 1682 book that clearly and wonderfully walks all the way through Polish court food of that time. I’m pulling together lots of things from this and from other sources and from chats with those same friends. One of my more interesting discoveries is that the antisemitism in Poland in the 1920 and 1930s led to poorer food being labelled as ‘Jewish’ in at least one city and led to some really interesting Jewish cooking techniques that were modified when families reached Australia. This chicken soup is, then, a small step in a long journey.

It’s a handy step, because its really difficult to be entirely miserable when one has excellent chicken soup.