Coming soon (as in tomorrow): the January 2020 issue of The Practicing Writer. While I’m busy finalizing it, there will be no markets/jobs post today. Thanks for your patience—and maybe give the December issue one last look for opportunities that remain open.
Every weekend I participate in David Abrams’s “#SundaySentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
I wanted to return to the time when we were just ordering in a restaurant, when we were organizing the Purim carnival or deciding which dessert to split, before the end of love, before death, before we were assigned to write this report on how to stay alive in our own synagogue.
Source: Karen E. Bender, “Where to Hide in a Synagogue” (The New Order: Stories)
Most Fridays the Practicing Writing blog shares writing and publishing resources, news, and reflections to peruse over the weekend. But it’s been an excruciating week for so many of us. And frankly, I’ve paid next-to-no attention to garden-variety news from the writing and publishing spheres.
On Wednesday, however, I received an email from Facing History and Ourselves, a Boston-based global nonprofit organization that I’ve admired for many years. The email introduced a “mini-lesson” titled “Processing Attacks in Israel and the Outbreak of War in the Region.”
The resource isn’t perfect. (What resource is?) But one of its segments impressed me as something that, though intended for educators and students, could be clarifying for writers as well, in our work and in the rest of our lives. It’s a section titled “Avoiding Antisemitic and Islamophobic Tropes in Discussing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
“The facts show that American Jews are mostly safe in this country, New York City included. But recent violent events also show that we cannot take this safety for granted. We can be grateful that anti-Semitism in America today is primarily nonviolent — and all Americans should work hard to make sure that doesn’t change.”
Source: Laura E. Adkins, “Anti-Semitism in the U.S. Isn’t Usually Violent. What If That’s Changing?” (Washington Post)
