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On Friday, I will celebrate Juneteenth, a holiday that has been part of my maternal family’s collective consciousness for over 155 years. I am a direct descendant of two formerly enslaved Texans, John and Mary Lee and their infant son J.R.E. Lee. My ancestors received word of their freedom on the June 19, 1865, with…

I’m a white woman, and I believe white privilege is real. I’d like to tell you why. Please bear with me, because my explanation is a little roundabout. It starts like this. * * * About five years ago, a long-time friend of mine – a black Jewish woman – posted on Facebook that the…

I’ve been watching the news: the murder of George Floyd, the riots and protests, the continued police brutality. People in the highest positions in the country are openly, blatantly, threatening to harm citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. This isn’t the first police killing of a person of color by a white police officer…

Toronto born and raised, Shirah Fish is still getting used to the presentation of American racism, despite having been on this side of the border for much of her adult life. So when she brought her infant daughter to the emergency room at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, a part of the University of Michigan Hospital…

I recently had a run-in with what I like to call the “fake liberal friend” or FLF. It began with a Facebook discussion of the various conversion crises that spring up from time to time. As part of the exchange, my FLF noted that her mother belonged to the Conservative movement and held generally liberal…

According to a survey conducted by the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) in 2014, nearly three quarters of their 2,500 survey sample population experienced gaslighting in their relationships, and over half of those identified gaslighting as an obstacle to accessing support (Sweet, 2019). Given that the population sampled in this study were those calling a…

Blimi Marcus strikes me as with-the-times Orthodox Jewish woman. She’s educated: a Nurse Practitioner at Memorial Sloan Kettering NYC, an adjunct Professor at Hunter College, and a member of the Editorial Review Board of OJIN (The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing). Her regularly updated social media shows a woman who isn’t afraid to let…

The old saying “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” is one of my favorites. I sometimes sit in amazement and think about how much power adults have over who their children grow to be. Whether our children decide to learn religiously all day or to become explorers of outer space, we have the…

Like clockwork, the passing of Lag B’Omer awakens the telltale harbingers of Shavuot throughout the world of social media. One need only scroll down a few posts before running into a slew of cheesecake recipes, blintz recipes, and all other manner of dairy-centric concoctions. While the die hard carnivores among my group of friends are…