Greetings, Class of 1968,
We have news from several classmates, and both Katherine “Ducky” Blair Salant and Jill Vickers included fascinating travel descriptions posted in greater detail on our class web page.
Ellen Genat Hoffman and her husband escaped the Northeast’s late winter weather with travel to Florida, California, and Arizona to visit friends and relatives. In California they visited Marriott Small Clark and her artist husband Tim, whose latest paintings they saw at a museum in Laguna Beach.
They also visited Cindy Hetsko Rainey and her husband Bill outside Tucson, where they all attended an interesting lecture at the Astronomy Department at the U. of Arizona and toured its Mirror Lab. Ellen fell in love with Cindy’s beloved dog Chewy but says she has to settle for visitation privileges.
Former classmate Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who transferred to Radcliffe to study anthropology, wrote about her forthcoming book Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. It explores the history of male nurturing and how men are biologically transformed when they care for babies.
During the pandemic, Santa Cruz resident Rosalind Greenberg Shorenstein began studying Hebrew online and preparing for an adult Bat Mitzvah. Meanwhile California, was holding public hearings on its proposed Ethnic Studies Curriculum after the initial draft was rejected for overt antisemitism. In early 2023, Roz started a committee to provide community education and combat antisemitism.
Roz wrote, “I could not have imagined how much hate has exploded since then, especially after October 7. I never expected that my experience with American Legion public speaking contests in sixth grade would come in so handy, as I have now spoken before many school boards and city councils, arguing against very angry, poorly informed organized mobs as well as some viciously anti-Zionist University of California Santa Cruz faculty.
Fortunately, we have a group of people in our county committed to keeping K-12 education and our cities safe from antisemitic hate crimes. The entrenched zero- sum oppressor-oppressed power ideology is a strong adversary. I did celebrate my Bat Mitzvah in February and had a successful hip replacement three days later.”
As mentioned earlier, Katherine Blair Salant and Jill Vickers both wrote in about travel experiences. Katherine’s pilgrimage this year to Cambridge, MA, was made to donate materials from her Fulbright fellowship in Nepal in the 1970s to the archives of her second alma mater, Harvard Graduate School of Design .Her road trip included lunch with Carla Pollack Lane in Boston. The travel in Nepal was to study rural architecture, already then disappearing; Katherine’s description of that powerful experience is on our web page.
Jill Vickers and her husband traveled in March to Havana, Cuba, making travel arrangements themselves and using privately owned hotels, people directly. Her travel description on our class web page tells how to arrange such a trip so that it is approved by our own government.
Judy Siskind
Magazine Correspondent, Class of 1968
Please send news to jsiskind@yahoo.com
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