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Become a patron at Patreon
Help fund my journalism and other content by becoming a patron at Patreon. For $1 a month, you will get access to all political and cultural essays, a regular poem, South Brunswick-related journalism, and extras, including access to early previews of upcoming work, and a digital copy of my chapbook, From the Latin. |
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| A Community on Edge: After Christchurch
Houses of worship are supposed to be open to all — to the congregation, to its neighbors, to the stranger. This is what I was taught as a kid in South Brunswick, N.J., attending Temple Beth Shalom, and it’s what I have heard from religious leaders of other denominations,whether, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Sikh, and so on. We all share the same central ethical obligation: all are welcome.
But houses of worship have been forced to reconsider their openness, the Associated Press reports, with some “question(ing) whether houses of worship have turned into soft targets, losing some of their sense of sacredness.” Should they be as open as they’ve historically been?
This was brought home in a stark way on Friday, when a white supremacist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The massacre — at least 50 have died — led law enforcement around the globe to beef up patrols and security at mosques, with South Brunswick being no exception. Within hours of the attack, the South Brunswick police announced they had “enhanced their presence” as a precaution at the Islamic Society of Central Jersey, the mosque on Route 1.
Read more here.
Other recent work from The Medium:
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The Philosopher’s Stone
An essay on Alzheimer’s, Aging, and Family at Patreon
The fear, always, is that blood is destiny, that the confusion I see in her eyes will be visited upon me. I hear her repeat herself. I watch her obsess — over her phone, her bag, my niece’s baby. I hear her tell the same stories, ask the same questions.
We’re watching television in the den, my dad asleep in my reading chair. Football had been on, but with the big man asleep, I flip the channel, find an old favorite show of hers. “How about this, mom, The Wild, Wild West?” Victor Buono is chewing up the scenery. Robert Conrad is all cool and bad-ass in his waistcoat, a cowboy, a spy, facing off against another surreal sci-fi threat.
“I think I remember this,” she tells me, and she watches.
“That’s Robert Conrad, James West,” I say. “That’s Artemis Gordon. You used to love this.”
She smiles. It goes to a commercial for My Pillow.
“That’s supposed to be the best pillow,” she says. My dad rouses. “They don’t tell you how much it is,” she says.
She’s right. No price. A two-for-one offer but no price. She says it again, tells me again that it is “supposed to be the best pillow for sleeping.”
Dad weighs in, reminds her that it’s just a commercial, that they are hyping the pillow.
“That’s what they always tell you,” he says. “They want you to buy it.”
The show returns. “Who is that?” she asks.
“Jim West. Robert Conrad. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“You loved this show when I was a kid.”
“Yes.”
Back to a commercial, a skating sumo wrestler, a car ad, and the pillow again. “They don’t tell you how much it is,” again and again until West and Gordon defeat Buono’s Count Manzeppi.
Read more here (patronage required). |
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Contribute to Broken Cord
We are looking to raise seed money for an anthology of writing on Alzheimer’s and dementia. The anthology will be the first project from a new small press. All proceeds will go to research and care groups. Contributors who donate $20 or more will get copies of the anthology and a mention on the acknowledgements page. Writers, we are looking for poems, fiction, and essays on dementia and Alzheimer’s. They can be from any perspective — care-givers, family, the person with dementia.
To contribute money to defray publication costs, click on our Go Fund Me campaign.
To submit writing to the project, email me here. |
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| As An Alien in a Land of Promise is the latest work by poet Hank Kalet. Based on more than a year of reporting and research, the book is a hybrid work of journalism and poetry, with breathtaking photos by Sherry Rubel, that tells the story of the men and women who lived in the now-defunct Tent City in Lakewood, NJ. Buy this and other books by Hank Kalet here. |
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Hank Kalet 