Hannie Shaft, a resistance fighter in the Netherlands during  World War II. Wikipedia Commons.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times, as part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times, had a piece yesterday on Hannie Shaft, a resistance fighter in the Netherlands during  World War II.  She evolved into an assassin and was known as “the girl with the red hair”  on the Nazi’s most-wanted list.  She worked with two other young women, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who were her close friends and who would survive the war.  The story of these three women is told well in a book entitled, Three Ordinary Girls – The Remarkable Story of Three Dutch Teenagers Who Became Spies, Saboteurs, NAZI Assassins and WW II Heroes, by Tim Brady, that was published last year.  I posted a review on this blog.  I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in the subject.  It is one of the few books which recount the heroic women of World War II.

Tony

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The New York Times

Overlooked No More: Hannie Schaft, Resistance Fighter During World War II

She killed Nazis in the Netherlands and was known as “the girl with the red hair” on their most-wanted list. Then she was executed.

By Claire Moses

Claire Moses reported this story from Amsterdam and The Hague, using documents from the 1940s at the Dutch National Archives.

July 7, 2023

It’s April 17, 1945. Two Nazi officers are making a 24-year-old woman walk ahead of them toward the sandy dunes along the Dutch coast. She’s wearing a blue skirt and a red and blue sweater.

She is the Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, but one might not have recognized her immediately: Her signature red hair has been dyed black.

As she walks, one of the officers fires his gun at the back of her head. The bullet ricochets off her skull and doesn’t kill her. The other officer then shoots her, also in the back of the head, this time at closer range.

That is how Hannie Schaft died, just a few weeks before the end of World War II in Europe. She had been arrested and sent to a prison in Amsterdam about a month earlier, during a random check in Haarlem, her hometown in the Netherlands, when she was found carrying a gun, as well as illegal newspapers and pamphlets from the resistance movement, in her bicycle bag. Initially it wasn’t obvious to the Nazis whom they had arrested, but it soon became evident that it was the woman they had been looking for, the woman known as the “girl with the red hair,” who had shot and killed multiple Nazis and collaborators.

She was born Jannetje Johanna Schaft on Sept. 16, 1920, in a left-wing, middle-class household, to Aafje Talea (Vrijer) Schaft, a homemaker with a progressive streak, and Pieter Schaft, a teacher. Hannie, a name she adopted when she became a resistance fighter, had an older sister, Annie, who had died of diphtheria. As a result, she had a protective childhood, said Liesbeth van der Horst, the director of the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, which has a display about Schaft that includes her glasses, a version of the gun she carried, and a photo of her and a fellow resistance fighter.

“She was a serious, principled girl,” van der Horst said in an interview. “She was a bookworm.”

She added that despite being shy, Schaft “was proud of her red hair” and how it helped her stand out.

After high school in Haarlem, Schaft studied law at the University of Amsterdam, in the hopes of becoming a human rights lawyer. She was a student when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, plunging the country into war and targeting Jewish citizens. Though Schaft was not Jewish, the occupation set her on a path to political activism.

“As the Nazi regime’s policies got harsher against Jews, her own sense of moral outrage grew stronger,” said Buzzy Jackson, the author of “To Die Beautiful” (2023), a novel about Schaft’s life. “She started to want to do more.”

She began volunteering for the Red Cross, rolling bandages and making first aid kits for soldiers and helping German refugees. When the Nazi regime required all students in the Netherlands to pledge their loyalty to the occupiers, Schaft, like many others, refused to do so and was forced to drop out.

She maintained the friendships she had formed with two Jewish girls at the university, helping them obtain fake IDs to evade Nazi checkpoints and hiding them as the Nazis continued stripping Jewish citizens of their basic rights.

By the end of the war, more than 100,000 people — nearly 75 percent of all Dutch Jews, the highest percentage of any Western European country — would be deported to concentration camps and murdered.

The resistance, van der Horst said, was not one organized movement but rather a tangle of overlapping networks.

Schaft joined the Resistance Council, a communist group, where she met two sisters, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who became her close friends and would survive the war. (In March, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation announced that it had found two letters written by Truus Oversteegen to a friend, in which she mentioned Schaft.)

The armed resistance was an extremely dangerous undertaking, with many fighters arrested and executed. It’s unclear how many attacks can be attributed to Schaft, but researchers say there were at least six.

In June 1944, Schaft and a fellow resistance fighter, Jan Bonekamp (with whom she was rumored to have had a romantic relationship), targeted a high-ranking police officer for assassination. As the officer was getting on his bicycle to go to work, Schaft shot him in the back, causing him to fall off the bike. Bonekamp finished the killing but was injured doing so. He died shortly after. Schaft managed to escape on her own bike, which was how she got around doing her resistance work.

Schaft was also involved in killing or wounding a baker who was known for betraying people, a hairdresser who worked for the Nazis’ intelligence agency, and another Nazi police officer.

Before confronting her targets, Schaft put on makeup — including lipstick and mascara — and styled her hair, Jackson said. In one of the few direct quotations that have been attributed to Schaft, she explained her reasoning to Truus Oversteegen: “I’ll die clean and beautiful.”

Dawn Skorczewski, a lecturer at Amsterdam University College, said Schaft’s involvement in the resistance was particularly extraordinary because few women in the movement took up arms.

“It’s unusual that a woman of her age would start killing Nazis in alleyways,” she said in a video call.

Once the Nazis started looking for “the girl with the red hair,” as she was described on their most-wanted list, Schaft disguised herself by dying her hair black and wearing wire-frame glasses.

The Nazis raided Schaft’s parents’ house and arrested them, hoping that she would turn herself in, but they were released nine months later, according to the Resistance Museum.

After Schaft was caught, she admitted her resistance activities. But there is no evidence that she gave the Nazis information about any of her fellow resistance fighters.

After the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945, Schaft’s body was dug up from a mass grave with hundreds of other people the Nazis had executed. She was the only woman among them.

Later that year, she was buried at the Honorary Cemetery in the seaside town of Bloemendaal, alongside hundreds of other resistance fighters. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands attended the service, according to documents in the Dutch National Archives.

Schaft’s name is well known in the Netherlands. There are streets and schools named after her, and in 1981 she was the subject of a scripted movie called “The Girl With the Red Hair.” An Amsterdam-based postproduction company is planning to polish the original film and rerelease it for the Netherlands Film Festival in September.

Her story is still being uncovered by researchers — a challenging task because resistance fighters worked undercover and often left little evidence behind.

As Jackson, the author of “To Die Beautiful,” noted, “The reason we know about Anne Frank is because she left a diary.”

Schaft, on the other hand, made it a point not to put anything in writing. “That’s true for most people in the resistance,” Jackson said. “There are not a lot of records to look at.”

Benno C. Schmidt Jr. in 1999. .Credit…Fred R. Conrad

Dear Commons Community,

Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale University and later chairman of the CUNY Board of Trusteess, died earlier this week at his home in Millbrook, N.Y. He was 81.  Here at CUNY, Schmidt served as a trustee for seventeen years, during which a number of reforms and changes were made to the system especially with regard to open admissions. He worked well with Chancellor Matt Goldstein and whether you agreed with the reforms or not, in  my opinion, CUNY became a better institution.  Student enrollments grew substantially and there were many new faculty hires after several decades of stagnation.  Below is his obituary.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

The New York Times

Benno Schmidt Jr., a Reforming Leader at Yale and CUNY, Dies at 81

By Clay Risen

July 10, 2023

Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a constitutional law scholar who became one of the country’s leading education executives, bringing difficult but necessary reforms to Yale and the City University of New York, died over the weekend at his home in Millbrook, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 81.

His daughter Elizabeth Hun Schmidt confirmed his death but said the cause had not been determined. It was unclear if he died late Saturday or early Sunday.

A child of Manhattan privilege with a perfect academic pedigree, Mr. Schmidt seemed destined to lead a university like Yale. He was president there for six years, during which he fought with the faculty over painful but necessary budget cuts, changes that left many people bitter but the university better off in its finances and academic direction.

He spent much longer turning around the beleaguered City University of New York, a sprawling system of two- and four-year colleges and graduate programs that once competed for the city’s brightest minds. It had fallen into disarray by the time Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani put him in charge of a rescue task force in 1998.

“CUNY was in a very sad state — it had no energy, no ideas,” Matthew Goldstein, the former chancellor of CUNY who worked closely with Mr. Schmidt, said in a phone interview. “We got hardly any students from Bronx Science or Stuyvesant” — two of the city’s most selective public high schools — “or any of the city’s top schools.”

In 1999, Mr. Schmidt and his colleagues presented a plan to gut-renovate the system, and over the next 17 years, first as vice-chairman and then as chairman of its board, he executed that vision.

Mr. Schmidt hired faculty by the hundreds. He created an honors college and several graduate schools. He boosted SAT scores of admitted students and brought up the bar-exam pass rate at CUNY’s law school from about 25 percent to nearly 80 percent.

Most education executives focus on either the K-12 or college level. Mr. Schmidt did both. He left Yale in 1992 to become chief executive of Edison Schools, a new company with a plan to build a nationwide network of 1,000 for-profit private elementary schools.

Edison never achieved its goal. But under Mr. Schmidt and the company’s founder, the entrepreneur Chris Whittle, Edison helped change the landscape of primary and secondary education by opening the door to charter schools and to other for-profit ventures.

Mr. Schmidt had already achieved renown as an expert in constitutional law when Columbia University selected him to be dean of its law school in 1984. Less than two years later, Yale named him, at age 44, as its 20th president.

He inherited a troubled institution, with a ballooning deficit, crumbling buildings and a frosty relationship with the surrounding city of New Haven.

Mr. Schmidt arranged for Yale to invest $50 million in neighborhoods around campus, primarily in affordable housing. He started a $500 million revamp of Yale’s physical plant. And he went on a whirlwind fund-raising campaign, nearly doubling Yale’s endowment during his six-year tenure, to $3 billion from $1.7 billion.

Though he retained the support of Yale’s board and alumni, he clashed repeatedly with parts of the faculty and student body, who found him aloof and imperious. He forced through major changes at Yale’s business school and, later, in its philosophy department, taking over decisions about hiring and tenure that were traditionally left to faculty.

And though he lived during the week in New Haven, he returned to Manhattan on the weekends, leaving the impression among some that he was not fully committed to the university.

In early 1992, Mr. Schmidt announced that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would need to cut its budget significantly both to shrink the school’s deficit and to make way for expansion in the hard sciences. The plan was, for many, the last straw.

Mr. Schmidt met with hundreds of disgruntled faculty members, and he pointed out that a majority of their number supported what he was doing. But the criticism remained that he had begun major changes without doing the hard work of consensus building.

“Benno was a leader who often didn’t take the time to get his troops to understand what he was doing,” Sam Chauncey, the former secretary of Yale, said in a phone interview. “He had a lot of good ideas, but he was impatient.”

Mr. Whittle first approached Mr. Schmidt about joining Edison in 1991, and a year later just before commencement, he announced his departure, shocking the Yale community.

“I began to feel it was responsible for me to consider leaving Yale,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1992, “because while the university may have been in a kind of emotional upset, the basics of the situation had been stabilized.”

Although Mr. Schmidt continued to have his detractors, many people say Yale is a much better place because of him. Today the university is world renowned in the medical and hard science fields, and its endowment is more than $42 billion.

“Benno was president during a really important transition for Yale,” Peter Salovey, the university’s current president, said in a phone interview. “He helped push the university from being a college with strong professional schools into a university with outstanding professional schools and a college at its center.”

Benno Charles Schmidt Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 1942. Benno Sr. was a founding partner at J.H. Whitney and Co., considered the world’s first firm to specialize in venture capital — a term the elder Mr. Schmidt is credited with coining. Mr. Schmidt’s mother, Martha (Chastain) Schmidt, was a homemaker. After his parents’ divorce, she remarried and took the married name Orgain.

Benno grew up among Manhattan’s upper crust, attending St. Bernard’s School on the Upper East Side, then Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

He studied history at Yale and, after graduating in 1963, went directly into its law school, from which he emerged three years later at the head of his class.

He clerked for Earl Warren, the chief justice of the United States, then spent two years working for the Justice Department before joining Columbia Law School in 1969.

His first three marriages, to Kate Russell, Betsy Siggins and Helen Whitney, ended in divorce. Along with his daughter Elizabeth, he is survived by his wife, Anne McMillen; his son, Benno C. Schmidt III; another daughter, Christina Whitney Helburn; his stepdaughters, Leah Ridpath and Alexandra Toles; his brothers, John and Ralph; his stepsister, Ruth Fleischmann; five grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.

At Columbia, Mr. Schmidt established his name as an expert in First Amendment law, both inside the academy and with the general public. Working with the lawyer Floyd Abrams and Fred Friendly, a professor at Columbia’s journalism school, Mr. Schmidt created and hosted a series of televised panel discussions about the Constitution for PBS.

He also took a turn at acting, with brief character roles in two films by Woody Allen, “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986) and “Husbands and Wives” (1992). And Mr. Schmidt became known at small venues around New York as an adept folk musician, playing both solo and in a group.

Mr. Schmidt stepped down from the CUNY board in 2016 and left Avenues soon after. He served for many years on the board of the Kauffman Foundation and the New-York Historical Society.

He never lost his commitment to change in education.

“I’d rather take the risk of being wrong,” he told a group of Yale faculty and administrators in early 1992, “than go down in history as the president who did nothing in the face of the real conviction that there was a problem.”

Dear Commons Community,

NATO leaders convening this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, have every reason to celebrate.

Only four years ago, on the eve of another summit, the organization looked to be in low water; in the words of President Emmanuel Macron of France, it was undergoing nothing short of “brain death.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the situation has been transformed. As NATO plans to welcome Sweden into its ranks — Finland became a full-fledged member in April — and dispatched troops to reinforce its eastern flank, European Union allies are finally making good on long-deferred promises to increase military spending. Public opinion has followed suit. If Russia sought to divide Europe, President Biden  declared last spring that it had instead fully “NATO-ized” the continent.  As commented upon in a New York Times guest essay by Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney,

Dear Commons Community,

For colleges and libraries seeking a big name for a guest lecturer, few come bigger than Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice who rose from poverty in the Bronx to the nation’s highest court.

She has benefited, too — from schools’ purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she has written over the years.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties.

In her case, the documents reveal repeated examples of taxpayer-funded court staff performing tasks for the justice’s book ventures, which workers in other branches of government are barred from doing. But when it comes to promoting her literary career, Sotomayor is free to do what other government officials cannot because the Supreme Court does not have a formal code of conduct, leaving the nine justices to largely write and enforce their own rules.

“This is one of the most basic tenets of ethics laws that protects taxpayer dollars from misuse,” said Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics and current general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington. “The problem at the Supreme Court is there’s no one there to say whether this is wrong.”

Supreme Court staffers have been deeply involved in organizing speaking engagements intended to sell books. That is conduct prohibited for members of Congress and the executive branch, who are barred under ethics rules from using government resources, including staff, for personal financial gain. Lower federal court judges are also instructed to not “lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance” their “private interests.”

In a statement, the Supreme Court said it works with the justices and their staff to ensure they are “complying with judicial ethics guidance for such visits.”

“When (Sotomayor) is invited to participate in a book program, Chambers staff recommends the number of books (for an organization to order) based on the size of the audience so as not to disappoint attendees who may anticipate books being available at an event,” the court said.

The documents obtained by AP show that the justices’ conduct spans their conservative-liberal split. Besides book sales, appearances by the justices were used in hopes of raising money at schools, which often invited major contributors to the events. Justices also lent the allure of their high office to partisan activity.

In 2019, as Sotomayor traveled the country to promote her new children’s book, “Just Ask!,” library and community college officials in Portland, Oregon, jumped at the chance to host an event.

They put in long hours and accommodated the shifting requests of Sotomayor’s court staff. Then, as the public cost of hosting the event soared almost tenfold, a Sotomayor aide emailed with a different, urgent concern: She said the organizers did not buy enough copies of the justice’s book, which attendees had to purchase or have on hand in order to meet Sotomayor after her talk.

“For an event with 1,000 people and they have to have a copy of Just Ask to get into the line, 250 books is definitely not enough,” the aide, Anh Le, wrote staffers at the Multnomah County Library. “Families purchase multiples and people will be upset if they are unable to get in line because the book required is sold out.”

It was not an isolated push. As Sotomayor prepared for commencement weekend at the University of California, Davis law school, her staff pitched officials there on buying copies of books in connection with the event. Before a visit to the University of Wisconsin, the staff suggested a book signing.

At Clemson University in South Carolina, school officials offered to buy 60 signed copies before a 2017 appearance; Sotomayor’s staff noted that most schools order around 400. Michigan State University asked Sotomayor to come to campus and in 2018 spent more than $100,000 on copies of her memoir, “My Beloved World,” to distribute to incoming first-year students. The books were shipped to the Supreme Court, where copies were taken to her chambers by court workers and signed by her before being sent to the school.

Sotomayor, whose annual salary this year is $285,400, is not alone in earning money by writing books. Such income is exempt from the court’s $30,000 restriction on outside yearly pay. But none of the justices has as forcefully leveraged publicly sponsored travel to boost book sales as has Sotomayor, according to emails and other records reviewed by the AP.

Such promotional efforts risk damaging the Supreme Court’s public standing further by placing an individual justice above the institution itself, said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge who has pushed for the justices to adopt a formal code of conduct.

“I have never believed that Supreme Court justices should write books to supplement their judicial incomes,” said Luttig, who was considered for the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush. “The potential for promotion of the individual justices over the Court at the reputational expense of the Court as an institution, as well as the appearance of such, is unavoidable.”

Yet another embarrassment for the highest court in the land.  Thank you Thomas, Alito, and now Sotomayor!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

“This has been a good day for Sweden,” Kristersson told reporters, saying the joint statement on Monday represented “a very big step” toward the final ratification of Sweden’s membership of NATO.

The statement issued by both countries said Sweden had reiterated that it would not provide support to the Kurdish groups and would actively support efforts to reinvigorate Turkey’s EU accession process.

Erdogan on Monday said the European Union should open the way for Ankara’s accession to that bloc before Turkey’s parliament approved Sweden’s bid to join the NATO military alliance.

Stoltenberg said Erdogan had agreed to push ratification in parliament “as soon as possible,” but he could not give a specific calendar. It took two weeks for Turkey’s parliament to ratify Finland’s membership.

After Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Thursday that Budapest would now no longer block Sweden’s NATO membership ratification, Turkish approval would remove the last hurdle for Swedish accession to NATO, applications for which must be approved by all members.

The United States and its allies have sought to pressure Ankara for months. Some NATO partners believe that Turkey, which requested in October 2021 to buy $20 billion of Lockheed Martin Corp F-16 fighters and nearly 80 modernization kits for its existing warplanes, has been using Swedish membership to pressure Washington on the warplanes.

U.S. President Joe Biden, who welcomed the announcement, is due to hold face-to-face talks with Erdogan during the summit.

NATO is stronger than ever with the additions of Finland and Sweden thanks in part to Putin’s war in the Ukraine!

Tony

Donald Trump and Peggy Noonan

Dear Commons Community,

Peggy Noonan, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, had an excellent piece last Friday, entitled, “May Trump Soon Reach His Waterloo”, and compares him to Napoleon Bonaparte.  She posits that the former president isn’t Napoleon, but there are similarities in the cults around both men.  She speculates that Trump may be at the end of his reign as a cult leader among the Maga Republicans and that it is time for the GOP and its base to move on.  She comments:

“Chris Christie could easily defeat Joe Biden. So could several of the GOP candidates now in the field. Donald Trump wouldn’t, for one big reason: His special superpower is that he is the only Republican who will unite and rally the Democratic base and drive independents away. He keeps the Biden coalition together.

A sad thing is that many bright Trump supporters sense this, and the case against him, but can’t concede it and break from him, in some cases because they fear him and his friends. They don’t want to be a target, they don’t want to be outside the in-group, they want to be safely inside. They curry favor.

This weekend at a party, one of Mr. Trump’s New York supporters, a former officeholder, quickly made his way to me to speak of his hero. He referred to the Abraham Accords and the economy and said: “Surely you can admit he was a good president.”

He was all wound up, so I spoke slowly. “I will tell you what he is: He is a bad man. I know it, and if I were a less courteous person I would say that you know it, too.”

He was startled, didn’t reply, and literally took a step back. Because, I think, he does know it. But doesn’t ever expect it to be said.

A journalist in our cluster said, musingly, “That was an excellent example of apophasis,” the rhetorical device of saying something by saying you’re not going to say it.

We all moved on, but that was the authentic sound of a certain political dialogue. “Surely you can admit he made France great again.” “He is a bad man.” Its antecedents stretch back in history.

Political cults are never good, often rise, always pass. May it this time come sooner rather than later.”

Amen!

Tony

Navy Joan Roberts with her mother Lunden Roberts

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd, in her column yesterday, offered advice to President Biden and his wife, Jill, to accept the fact that they have a seventh grandchild, who was fathered by their son, Hunter.  The child is Navy Joan Roberts, a little 4-year-old girl living in Arkansas who none of the Bidens have ever acknowledged.  Her mother,  Lunden Roberts, was a stripper.  Dowd comments:

“I have sympathy for Hunter going into a “dark, bleak hole,” as he called it. I have sympathy for a father coping with a son who was out of control and who may still be fragile. With Hunter, his father can seem paralyzed about the right thing to do.

But the president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl. You can’t punish her for something she had no choice about. The Bidens should embrace the life Hunter brought into the world, even if he didn’t consider her mother “the dating type.”

The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead.”

Excellent advice, Mr. President!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night MSNBC aired a two-hour documentary on the life J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atom bomb” developed in Los Alamos as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. The documentary covered his childhood and  personal life but devoted most of its time to his work at Los Alamos.  It also has good coverage of Oppenheimer’s conflicts and guilt of his achievement in the post-bomb era. He was opposed, for instance, to the development of the far-more lethal hydrogen bomb.  The documentary draws heavily from the book,  American Prometheus:  The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, published in 2005.  Kai Bird, one of the authors, is featured throughout the documentary.  Martin Sherwin died before the documentary was made.  Below is a brief review of American Prometheus… I posted in 2016.

If MSNBC airs the documentary again, I would recommend it.

Tony

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Dear Commons Community,

If you are looking for a biography to read, I would recommend, American Prometheus:  The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.  This Pulitzer Prize winner was published in 2005 but anyone interested in Oppenehimer’s life, the development of the atomic bomb, his emotional struggles with dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the brutal federal investigation of his Communist sympathies, will find this book riveting fare.

The authors trace Oppenheimer’s life from his boyhood in New York City, his academic work at CalTech, his associations with physicists such as Niels Bohr, I.I. Rabi, and Albert Einstein, the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, and his directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  The story is told in the backdrop of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.  There is also a certain amount of titillation from his personal life.  Here is an excerpt from a New York Times book review reflecting on Oppenheimer’s concerns about nuclear weapons:

“Oppenheimer and Bohr understood at the beginning of the nuclear age what the nations of the world, the United States pointedly included, have not yet been willing to act on: that nuclear weapons are not weapons of war but embodiments of a new knowledge of nature, one that in the long run — before or, horribly, after they are used again — must inevitably force nations to find some other way to settle their disputes.  “Two scorpions in a bottle,” Oppenheimer characterized the superpowers sardonically in 1953, “each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” Today nine scorpions crowd the bottle. However tragic his life, Robert Oppenheimer is the single figure who will be remembered when the history of the Manhattan Project has blurred away.”

I have to admit that I had “blurred” knowledge of Oppenheimer.  This book was an illumination.  

Tony

A gay pride rainbow flag flies with the U.S. flag in front of the Asbury United Methodist Church in Prairie Village, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

Dear Commons Community.

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year.

Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.

Many of the departing congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, a denomination created last year by conservatives breaking from the UMC, while others are going independent or joining different denominations.

Some 6,182 congregations have received approval to disaffiliate since 2019, according to an unofficial tally by United Methodist News Service, which has been tracking votes by annual conferences. That figure is 4,172 for this year alone, it reported.

Some annual conferences may approve more departures at special sessions later this year, according to the Rev. Jay Therrell, president of the Wesleyan Covenant Association, a conservative caucus that has advocated for the exiting churches. While most UMC congregations are remaining, many of the departing congregations are large, and denominational officials are bracing for significant budget cuts in 2024.

The numbers of exiting churches are higher than conservatives originally estimated, Therrell said.

Legal wrangles have largely been resolved over how much compensation the departing congregations must pay for their property and other financial obligations.

“For the most part, bishops and other annual conference leaders have been very gracious, and I deeply appreciate that,” Therrell said. “There have been some small exceptions to that, and those are unfortunate, but we’re grateful that cooler and calmer heads have prevailed.”

Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of the UMC’s Council of Bishops, said the departures were disappointing.

“I don’t think any of us want to see any of our churches leave,” he said. “We’re called to be the body of Christ, we’re called to be unified. There’s never been a time when the church has not been without conflict, but there’s been a way we’ve worked through that.”

But for those who want “to go and live out their Christian faith in a new expression, we wish God’s blessings on them,” he said.

The split has been long in the making, mirroring controversies that have led to splits in other mainline Protestant denominations. United Methodist legislative bodies, known as general conferences, have repeatedly reinforced bans on LGBTQ marriage and ordination, on the strength of coalitions of conservatives in U.S. and overseas churches.

But amid increased defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches, many conservatives decided to launch the separate Global Methodist Church, saying they believed the sexuality issues reflected deeper theological differences.

The departures have been particularly large in the South and Midwest, with states such as Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and Ohio each losing hundreds of congregations.

 In Matthew in the New Testament, Jesus said: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” He didn’t say love some neighbors.

Tony

Aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, as seen in the night sky in the early morning hours of Monday, April 24, 2023, near Washtucna, Wash. A(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

Dear Commons Community,

A solar storm forecast for Thursday, July 13^th, is expected to give skygazers in 17 American states a chance to glimpse the Northern Lights, the colorful sky show that happens when solar wind hits the atmosphere.

Northern Lights, also known as aurora borealis, are most often seen in Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia, but an 11-year solar cycle that’s expected to peak in 2024 is making the lights visible in places farther to the south. Three months ago, the light displays were visible in Arizona, marking the third severe geomagnetic storm since the current solar cycle began in 2019.

The Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks has forecast auroral activity on Thursday in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Indiana, Maine and Maryland.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center said people wanting to experience an aurora should get away from city lights and that the best viewing times are between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. local time.

Northern Lights occur when a magnetic solar wind slams into the Earth’s magnetic field and causes atoms in the upper atmosphere to glow. The lights appear suddenly and the intensity varies.

A geomagnetic index known as Kp ranks auroral activity on a scale from zero to nine, with zero being not very active and nine being bright and active. The Geophysical Institute has forecast Kp 6 for Thursday’s storm.

Let’s hope for clear skies!

Tony