Category Archives: Authors I-Q

ADR Authors by last name I-Q

African American History Month – by Eva Jo (Saddler) Johnson

African American History (AAH) Celebrations for decades have been designated to the month of February, mostly. I remember when invited the very few African American Educators’ staff members and our high school’s English Department Chairperson this was two years after I was hired in the state of Connecticut and after my college graduation.   

 We staff members were well aware that no knowledge or acknowledgement of African American History lessons were being incorporated or extra-curriculum programs into our school’s educational classroom goals and activities. 

“Negro History week” designation began in the year of 1926 and reported because of the lack of our history being included and presented in various and many national activities.  Carter G. Woodson, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard U. along with the NAACP (National Association of Colored People) W.E.B. DuBois, founder in 1909 both were given much credit in most cases.  

 As part of our inspiration and In February of 1977, our formed committee planned an after school assembly program consisting of celebrating students from various grades, organizations also including the high school’s orchestra, and speakers from community civic and religious leadership positions. Afterwards, effort progressed at our town’s high school as annual celebrations with activity and shortly afterwards, students from our school’s student council organization were invited to joined our planning committees.  We, also became proud of their attentive and intensive participation and recommendations. 

After about two more years, these students requested that we entitle our AAH month’s high school celebration each February, “Brotherhood/Sisterhood Month Celebration.” We faculty members did and also included the sub-title as “African American History and Contributions Month” later returning to the first selected topic for our extended activities. The school board of directors, and schools’ systems’ central office staff mandated and incorporated into our entire system’s K-12 curriculum the inclusion of African American History and Contributions.  Some business, civic, and social ethnic group members began to assist and combine with us in some of our planning along with their own students and parents’ projects.

I personally never forget when a newly “rap songs” artist attended and spoke at a high school assembly program, and also when a student group ask me if they could do “break dancing” on stage at our middle school annual assembly program.   My approval brought me much praises and personal gratitude as a result of how much our students appreciated it, from our school ‘s systems and school administrators.  When we invited an “inner-school’s” middle school students’ group to attend this same year and invited them for lunch, afterwards, we all were happy. 

During the month of February, I’ve found throughout the USA that churches began incorporating  African American History and Contributions with informational objectives as well as motivational recommendations.

Our question today in the future decades is, “Will those projects suffice in the improvement of our near and far unity, equality, fairness, class diversity, and inclusion?” Are African American history celebrations provisions are and have been one of our great assets and has it contributed both personal, positive and progressive relationships and some economic growth. In addition, “How fair and intentional are we in the arena of “proportionality”?  Do we quickly judge without knowledge and to categorize the tangible and intangible? 

Personally, I have found “Collaboration and Connections” seriously are key words when we are evaluating and recommending. Visual?  Are we losing the utilization of comprehension with just quick visualization?  How obedient are we toward promotions with affirmations with representations in ethnic locations?  We do not have to be only in a classroom, office or on stage to become role models and mentors.

Fortunately, before my becoming a school’s supervisor and also while being a classroom teacher with summer breaks, I had many global experiences.  One example is when I became a volunteer international missionary in the country of Panama along with me grandson, Kory. (He knew more Spanish words that I did at that time.)  I had volunteered at what was considered and called an “English as a second and language School.”    

This school had the goal and theme known as “Constructionism.”  It soon became my understanding constructionism referred to there were no endings to ideas, conclusions, suggestions to also examples.  I saw this “focus “personally as, “Conclusions were prerequisites.”  When searching Checking the word via Google, the meaning was given “The result is interaction was summaries derived from their knowledge of ‘ISAP” which is defined as Italian in Specific Academic Purposes. 

I now acknowledge obtaining many ethnic similarities and desires sought, enhances closer and acknowledged relationships toward more understandings.  Political divisions require more attention and required and sought the goals toward democracy, both national and international. Those of us in or were especially in administration and leadership positions desperately must reinforce with pride obtained potentiality.

Yes, our elders and ancestors have” opened the door” to almost and many beginnings inspiring our concerns on how we utilize our knowledge and of our results, in other words, “What do we want to do with the knowledge?”  Are we equalized in our results?  “Are the doors open, now for all?

Personally, my career in the area of education, sociology, urbanization as well as my experiences in America and abroad (Internationally) has clarified my energy and interactions to go hand in hand.  Up from age of 18 and only attended segregated Chattanooga, I lived and served and work in the state of Connecticut for about sixty years.  I also raised four children and as you can guess, I was considered always “very active”.

Therefore,  this year and as we highlight African American History during the month of February, 2023. Let us intensify the opportunity to open our hearts as well as our feet and hands to integrate activities also ethnicity emphasizing, economic progress utilizing visualizing our pride, goals, character, spirituality, determination, empathy and inclusion as well as our legacies.

Let us intensify (…hold hands) while intensifying the provided and received opportunities to open our hearts, too along with our feet and hands integrating local and international activities while emphasizing our pride, goals, character, spirituality, sometimes empathy and inclusion also our legacies of both African Americans and others and remember expansive actions speak louder than words as we seek improvement and growth would be my request.

African Americans and others.  GOD MADE US ALL.  

Footprints In Time: Generation Reflections – by Martin Kimeldorf

As my parents exited middle age, they began receiving flyers and seeing ads about retirement living communities. It was as if they had entered a momentary pause in their lifeline. My father, Don, began talking with my mother about the items they should keep and things to get rid of. Then one day my mom, Fay, showed up with a brown paper bag of books by Dr. Spock on child raising. 

After her first vodka gimlet, she told me she was giving me the bag of books she had been saving for me. Then after her second vodka cocktail, she confessed she just couldn’t part with them. 

There was a pause. It was awfully long. We averted our eyes and scanned the room.

Then she quipped, “This was silly. I should be going.” Without comment, she rose and headed for the door. My wife and I were struck mute and motionless. Then my mom got up and wordlessly left. It was so unlike Fay.

I had been having this dream for several days as winter drew to a close in 2023. It turned out this early morning would be the last night I dreamt this story…It has now reached its conclusion…and so I write. 

Continue reading Footprints In Time: Generation Reflections – by Martin Kimeldorf

The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 2) – by Leslie Nelson

“I take two steps forward, I take two steps back…”

The first line of those lyrics to the 1989 hit song, “Opposites Attract,” composed by Oliver Leiber and sung by Paula Abdul, swirled in my head as I thought about how to pick up from part one of this article series. If I apply those lyrics to matters of race, lack of racial progress in particular, what baby steps come to mind and what do two (or more) steps back look like?

Now for those of you that read it, Part 1 was about Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz’ RV journey across the nation, leading discussions about racial healing. That work culminated in their book, “Longing Stories in Racial Healing,” which they talked about during the November meeting of the 26 Tiny Paint Brushes writers’ guild. I ended part one with this challenge and question – “What should we, as individuals, consider doing next to further racial progress?” 

Continue reading The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 2) – by Leslie Nelson

Dialogue to counteract hate – by Simma Lieberman

I’m Jewish. My first personal memory of antisemitism was when I was eight years old. I was in the synagogue with my father on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a day of fasting, praying, and atonement.

We were engaged in silent prayer when all that silence was broken by loud yelling and banging as the door crashed in. A group of young white Christian boys were attacking us. They threw things at us and called us names like “sheeny” and ‘kike.” “Go back to your country. You don’t belong here,” they screamed.

 I was terrified. We knew about the Nazi genocide of over 6 million Jews and other people who did not fit the Aryan “bloodline’. Many in our neighborhood had numbers tattooed on their arms from the Nazi concentration/extermination camps. All of that trauma was passed down to us.

I remember thinking, “How could they hate us so much? They don’t even know us.” At that early age, I wanted to get to know people who were different than me and have them get to know me so we wouldn’t hate each other. I also realized that to end hate, stop violence against us and find safety, Jewish people needed to join other people who had experienced discrimination. That became my mission.

Continue reading Dialogue to counteract hate – by Simma Lieberman

DEI: What’s Old Is New Again – by Susan McCuistion

The last few years seem to have been challenging for many people, myself included. Last year, I had the privilege to take a bit of a sabbatical. Even though I found it difficult to fully pull myself away from my work, I was removed enough that when Deborah Levine, Editor in Chief for this publication, asked the Advisory Council members to write on upcoming trends, I felt a little out of touch. I decided I needed to catch up a bit, and I started my research. Much to my dismay, I felt like the more things changed, the more they remained the same. I wasn’t seeing much different than what colleagues and I talked about over 20 years ago. People were still focused on hiring and attraction and leadership development. Some spoke of developing business cases and strategies around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—or whatever form it’s currently taking.

Frankly, I had hoped we had a lot of this figured out by now.

Continue reading DEI: What’s Old Is New Again – by Susan McCuistion

Living in an Axial Age – by John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, Ph.D

Prominent religious thinkers and activists such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry have defined humanity in recent decades as living in an axial age. In simple terms, an axial period is one in which there are major mutations of our social fabric regarding consciousness and social structures.

I believe we today remain living in an axial period announced by the likes of de Chardin and Berry. Living in such an age that occurs every few hundred years in history is both challenging and uncertain. We cannot easily predict the eventual outcome of the transformative process. The significant changes that are likely to occur may move civilization in directions that are productive and fundamentally enriching for all created life forms or, on the contrary, they may enhance the further deterioration of our social fabric and sustainability foundations. People will come to know and experience the final verdict when the current axial age reaches its conclusion. The new age that dawns will retain some forms of previous creational existence. But the new existence will undergo significant, even radical redefinition. 

Continue reading Living in an Axial Age – by John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, Ph.D

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Trends: 2023 – by Soumaya Khalifa

Whether you traveled or stayed home this past holiday season, you paid attention to the news about Southwest Airlines’ struggles to get  people where they wanted to go.  Bad (really bad) weather, canceled flights, long lines, lost luggage, and exhausted and cranky passengers and airline staff all led to an operational disaster that will take Southwest a while to overcome.  

In a statement on its website, Southwest called its own performance “unacceptable.”  Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said Southwest had not put adequate systems in place to manage operations during the storm. “The fact is: We weren’t prepared,” Murray said.

But some observers weren’t at all surprised: Southwest’s crisis was inevitable after years of prioritizing stock dividends and executive compensation over necessary investments, including improving its outdated IT and crew scheduling systems. Southwest’s own employees issued plenty of warnings about those.

Continue reading Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Trends: 2023 – by Soumaya Khalifa

Bridging the Choice Chasm – by Dr. Shalini Nag and Surya Guduru

A path to a sustainable future

As we get look ahead to 2023, sustainability takes center stage, yet again. Can we really achieve a sustainable future? Today, we posit that we can, if we are able to apply the equity and inclusion lens to the problem and bridge the Choice Chasm – the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the haves and the have-nots, between developed and developing nations, between incumbent practices and emerging norms.

Aftershocks from the Covid19 pandemic exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, combined with climate chaos made 2022 a chronicle of global challenges. These include the intermittent resurgence of Covid variants, the mental health epidemic, continued supply chain disruptions, internal displacement in Ukraine, worsening food crisis in the world’s most vulnerable regions, and a global energy crisis. By October 2022, weather disasters alone cost nearly 20,000 lives and 30 billion dollars, refocusing governments and organizations alike on sustainability. 

Continue reading Bridging the Choice Chasm – by Dr. Shalini Nag and Surya Guduru

The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 1) – by Leslie Nelson

racial healing“What are the typical saboteurs of genuine efforts to have cross-racial dialogues about race?”

That was the opening question posed to Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz, co-authors of Longing Stories in Racial Healing.  They were invited by Terry Howard, co-founder of Douglasville’s 26 Tiny Paint Brushes Writers’ Guild, to speak at our Nov. guild meeting. 

The book is a memoir of the White couple’s immersive journey across the nation exploring the deep, murky, irritable waters of racism. Their mission was to have a candid and honest conversation about racism in a room mostly filled with people of color.

Continue reading The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 1) – by Leslie Nelson

Antisemitic Rhetoric on Chattanooga Campus – by Rabbi Craig Lewis

Of all the times to learn that about antisemitic literature circulating in my city, the news reached me during the intermission of “Fiddler on the Roof.” It is a great show that captures a moment in time, combining the folklore of Sholom Aleichem, the imagery of Marc Chagall, and great music by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick to tell a story from the collective Jewish memory. As with true Jewish history, it includes the good and the bad parts of being Jewish. We love “Tradition,” but much of our tradition has been built under the weight of oppression. “Fiddler” does not ignore this as the Russian constable’s promise of a pogrom, a violent attack against Jewish communities, mostly in the Russian Empire. Like Chekov’s gun, the mention of a pogrom comes to fruition and disrupts the joyous wedding scene. Being that this is still musical comedy, the pogrom is sanitized: a few goose pillows are torn up, a table flipped over, and one wedding guest is beaten. There is just enough to suggest what really would have happened. An informed viewer of the show knows it more likely looked like the description from Chayim Nachman Bialik’s poem, “The City of Slaughter,” written about the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. Here are a few excerpts:

Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead….

A tale unfold horrific to the ear of man:
A tale of cloven belly, feather-filled;
Of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled;
Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,…

And when thou shalt arise upon the morrow
And go upon the highway,
Thou shalt then meet these men destroyed by sorrow.

These are the images brought to mind by the word pogrom, which marks the end of the show’s first act. Walking to the lobby, I opened my phone to discover a text message from a Jewish student at UTC (University of Tennessee- Chattanooga) who had discovered the antisemitic flier. 

As if it were fact, the flier stated:

“At the height of American slavery, 78% of slave owners were ethnic Jews.” It also asserted that “40% of the Jewish population were slave owners, while only 0.35% of white Americans owned slaves.”

Then there were three footnotes, one presumably to The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery by Junis Rodriguez, and the other two to census data posted on websites of legitimate Jewish organizations. There is so much that is wrong with this flier, my head spins trying to unpack it. First, we start with the statistics and the footnotes. The footnotes do not even come close to supporting the figure it claims. Following the first footnote brings you to a statement that Jews comprised about 1.25 percent of all the slaveowners in the antebellum South,” a far cry from the statistic the flier wanted to prove. Then from the census data linked to the other two footnotes, I tried to determine how the 78% figure was contrived, but it is impossible. Secondly, in addition to making unsupported statistical claims, the flier also sets in opposition “ethnic Jews” versus “white Americans,” as if the Jews in America were not true Americans. Thirdly, and this, in my opinion, is the most important consideration, we have to ask what motivates someone to plaster such misinformation around a college campus, which sits within walking distance of three synagogues and a Jewish cemetery?

Forced to rebut falsehoods, we allow everyone to miss the point. There are nefarious forces trying to sow distrust of Jewish people. They advance a conspiracy theory that there is a hidden truth the Jews do not want you to know. They pit “ethnic Jews” against the pure “white Americans,” and they invite African-Americans to believe the Jewish people are singularly responsible for their oppression. It is damaging and painful, in part because of the historical bond between Blacks and Jews during the Civil Rights movement and beyond, and also because it makes the Jewish community, as a vulnerable minority, hounded by outrageous conspiracy theories since the Middle Ages, fearful that words will lead to action. Labeled as “Christ Killers” during the Crusades, Jewish villages were attacked by religious zealots as they made their way toward the Holy Land. Victims of the “Blood Libel,” a false claim that Jews kidnapped and tortured Christian children to use their blood in the making of Passover matzah, many Jews were wrongfully imprisoned and murdered. Viewed as being untrustworthy and greedy, Jews were expelled from Spain, France, and England. And as the subject of a fictional work, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was sold as a historical document, allegations of a Jewish plot to control all the world’s wealth and government led to acts of violence against Jews, first across the Russian Empire and eventually around the world. The accumulation false claims about Jewish people motivated attacks, like the fictional pogrom represented in “Fiddler on the Roof,” or the very real Kishinev pogrom described in “The City of Slaughter,” and ultimately the Holocaust which leveraged baseless hate and propaganda to justify the systematic murder of 6 million Jews.

The real kicker is, even though those who posted the insidious flier want to pin responsibility for American slavery on the Jewish people, and even though a preponderance of Jewish Americans at the time lived in the North supporting and fighting for the Union, the vast majority of the world’s Jewish population prior to and during the Civil war was still in Eastern Europe, living under the oppressive rule of the Czar, fleeing from Cossacks, and enduring vicious attacks. Half a world away, America stood as a beacon of freedom, and waves of immigrants fled burning villages for the promise of equality and security. In 1880, there were roughly 250 thousand Jews living in America. Over the next 50 years, nearly 3 million Jews would cross the ocean to settle in the United States. Therefore, the experience of most current American Jews’ ancestors, at the time of the Civil War, was as an oppressed people. Still, those who posted fliers on the UTC campus, would have you believe a false view of history, motivated by the very same lies and bigotry that led to persecution, pogroms, and to the Holocaust.

All of this weighed on my mind as I returned to my theatre seat for the second act of “Fiddler.” I struggled to focus and enjoy the performance as I realized, in 2022 America, the very same lies and beliefs that led to the oppression of my ancestors in Europe, were very much alive. It is part of a larger pattern that is growing in plain sight. Amid the proliferation of antisemitic rhetoric and the permissive silence from those who know better, Jewish people in Chattanooga and around the world are rightly worried, and becoming increasingly afraid that history is about to repeat itself.

__________________________

1Pogrom is a Russian word meaning ‘to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.’ Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries.” (From the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

2https://faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/NewCity/Slaughter.html

3 Gross overstatement of the Jewish role in the slave trade is a common trope shared by White Supremacist groups as well as the Black Hebrew Israelites (as in the film recently promoted by basketball player Kyrie Irving) and the Nation of Islam. Rather than factual statements about Jewish slave owners in the South, who comprised a small fraction, they attribute blame and responsibility for slavery to the Jewish people as whole. 

4 The flier just says “Rodriquez, p. 385.”

5 “The Jew in the Modern World,” Paul Medes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 528.

6 “The Jew in the Modern World,” Paul Medes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 529.