Y’all come! I’m reading from my most recent historical novel, A Meteor Shower, at Two Rivers Bookstore, 8836 N Lombard St, Portland OR. The action starts on Sunday, September 8, from 2-4 pm: love and chariot warfare in the ancient Middle East, kings and queens, peasants and prophets. Below are some comments from reviewers, and […]
A Tale of Two Armbands
…and how they came to be made. This year, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, I traveled from Portland OR to New York to celebrate. In addition to my Gay Liberation Front t-shirt, I brought two homemade armbands with me, with pink triangles and Jewish stars, in order to make a statement about anti-Semitism. […]
Lies, Myths, and Stonewall
Eyewitnesses often can’t agree on events that happened yesterday, let alone 50 years ago—like the Stonewall Riots. Inevitably, some nations, interest groups, and individuals attempt to shape the narrative to promote their own agendas. They glorify their achievements, gloss over their misdeeds, and disparage or even omit the real achievements of others. When […]
The Trilogy is Complete!
At long last, the third book is in print. You can now buy all three novels—The Throne in the Heart of the Sea, The Stars in Their Courses, and A Meteor Shower—on the Ebisu Publications website at http://ebisupublications.com/books/. Forty-one years ago I was reading the history of my people, and it seemed clear to me […]
50 Years of Fighting for Justice
When I think about life before Stonewall the anger wells up in me. I think about my mother offering to spend the money she’d been saving for my wedding on a psychologist who would fix me. Or offering to pay for a nose job—the theory being that I would look less Jewish and boys would […]
Must Big Thugs Always Rule?
Trump kids shoot exotic & endangered animals “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” –Wm. Shakespeare The fault we have to contend with in trying to establish democracy is that a huge percentage of the population—of any population—wants a gorilla in charge. A Big Daddy […]
Siege Warfare, Then and Now
By Martha Shelley on March 27, 2019 in Assyria, Empire, The Stars in their Courses, The Throne in the Heart of the Sea
Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a book titled A Distant Mirror, about how we can see ourselves in 14th Century politics. I found the same is true when looking at the 9th Century BCE. For example, we’re still engaged in siege warfare. From ancient Assyria to modern Iraq, now to Venezuela, and probably next to Iran, […]
More War on the Horizon
Last week I wrote about how the U.S. helped create an organization of fanatical Islamists in Afghanistan—the Taliban. Later we engaged in a long and fruitless war against them, and now we’re going to turn the country back to them. What I find most intriguing, and saddest, about this turn of events is that we’ve […]
A War to Help Women?
Women in Burkas in Afghanistan Two weeks ago I posted on hate crimes against women in the U.S. Today I’m going to look at our system of male domination, and how it plays out in our foreign policy. To recap, I asserted that these hate crimes are ubiquitous, yet mostly unseen. Women swim in a […]
The Peak of Empire
A trolley car in Brooklyn, 1948 Brooklyn, New York, 1948: There was always a big Memorial Day parade on Eastern Parkway. I was four, old enough to enjoy the spectacle, so Dad took me while my baby sister stayed home with Mom. I’d squeeze through a forest of adult legs and sit on the curb, […]