June Mid-Month Report: Roller Coaster
An update from day 252 and some literary-related things
For new subscribers: On the first of each month, I put out a newsletter with book recommendations, literary events and resources and more. Since October 7th, I’ve also been putting out mid-month updates with some reflections from life in Israel, as well as some literary things. (Scroll down for the literary things).
Dear friends,
It’s been a roller coaster since I sent out my “regular” newsletter at the beginning of June.
Shortly after I sent out my newsletter, the IDF announced the deaths of four hostages, in captivity: Amiram Cooper, 84, a poet from Kibbutz Nir Oz, was killed in Hamas captivity, along with Chaim Peri, 79, Yoram Metzger, 80, and Nadav Popplewell, 51. A little while before that, the body of Dolev Yehud, 35, presumed a hostage, also from Nir Oz, was identified in Israel, and it is now thought that he was killed on October 7th, after he left his home to help (he was a volunteer medic). Each announcement is like a punch in the gut. May all of their memories be a blessing.
And then on Shabbat, we heard the wonderful, miraculous news, of the rescue of four hostages - Andrey Kozlov, Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, and Shlomi Ziv. Andrey was an intern in my department at my last job; we sat in the same room and worked on projects together, so his rescue was especially welcome news. We are all overjoyed for Andrey, Noa, Almog, Shlomi and their families. It took a few more hours before we heard the tragic news about Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, z”l, the head of one of the rescue teams. When Shabbat was over we turned on our phones for more details. The whatsapp group with my former coworkers - most of us no longer with that company - was going crazy (“I can’t believe it. It happened! I’m breathless.” “I thought for certain he wasn’t alive.” “God!!!!”). For much of the next day, I poured over the reports, tears in my eyes, watching the reunions. We knew, of course, that their time in captivity was horrific, but now, as we hear more and more about their experiences (here is a bit about what Andrey went through), we can only pray that they will heal and rebuild and go on to live long and happy lives.
I can’t even contemplate how complex, how risky, this operation was. On the Call Me Back podcast, Dan Senor interviewed Nadav Eyal, one of Israel’s leading journalists, about the operation. It’s a great episode if you want to give it a listen.
Several days later, on erev Shavuot, we heard the sad news of four more soldiers killed, including Eitan Karlsbrun, 20, from Modiin, along with Almog Shalom, 19, Yair Levin, 19, and Tal Pshebilski Shaulov, 24. That morning I was in the supermarket across the street from Eitan’s high school and overheard: “My daughter was good friends with him” “We awoke to screams this morning from my daughter [when she heard the news].” May their memories be a blessing.
And then two days ago, Hezbollah sent huge barrage of 215 rockets and missiles to the north, exactly where we were on Shabbat (by the Kinneret / the Sea of Galilee). Fires are raging, and every day there is speculation on when we’ll go into a full-blown war in the north. (For those following - my daughter’s reserve duty - in the north - was postponed until July 31).
So it goes on. I wish desperately for an end to all of this, for our 120 hostages to return home. I’m writing this from the airport in Marseille, where I am en route to a family vacation in Corsica. Hoping to disconnect a bit…
In the meantime, here are some additional resources and reading:
Jessica Steinberg’s latest dispatch: Four hostages are home, and a funeral
Vivian Cohen-Leisorek’s Day 244: Connect/Disconnect
My friend Sarah Sassoon has a new Substack - please subscribe! Picking Lemons She writes to “spark complex joy, sharing what I can as an Australian born daughter of an Iraqi Jewish refugee, and a married mother of four boys living in Jerusalem.” (Sarah hosted me for an amazing Tu B’shvat seder earlier this year, and has appeared at Literary Modiin).
Literary Matters
On Shavuot, we had our first-ever Tikun Leil Shavuot just with our kids and our friends visiting from America. My husband did most of the teaching, and I brought this poem, “A Prayer for the Farmer on Shavuot” by Iris Ben Zvi which we read in English and in Hebrew. It felt particularly relevant for me this year after my volunteering.
The "History, Prophecy and Art" Conference of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University in early June was amazing! What a pleasure to be in the company of brilliant writers including Ruth Franklin, Iddo Gefen, and Joshua Cohen, who were visiting from abroad, as well as dozens of my writing friends and mentors from Israel. Joshua Cohen and Evan Fallenberg had a terrific session about fiction writing - check out my report here.
The June 9th Literary Modiin event with Joan Leegant, Don Futterman, and Dawn Promislow was also amazing - here’s the recording if you missed it.
I’m thrilled to announce the next two Literary Modiin events:
July 14 with Marcela Sulak (THE FAULT), Maya Arad (THE HEBREW TEACHER), and Mimi Zieman (TAP DANCING ON EVEREST) - Register here
August 4 with Ellis Shuman (RAKIYA), Maxim D. Shrayer (KINSHIP), and Danila Botha (THINGS THAT CAUSE INAPPROPRIATE HAPPINESS) - Register here
What I’m reading: Just finished Hila Blum’s HOW TO LOVE YOUR DAUGHTER, which we discussed last night in my book club. Listening to: Taylor Jenkin Reid’s MALIBU RISING. Brought with me to read in Corsica: Gila Green’s WITH A GOOD EYE, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s RODHAM.
That’s all for now. I’ll leave you with a few pictures from the last few weeks.
B’sorot tovot, my friends. By the time I send out my July 1 newsletter, may all our hostages be home. May our soldiers stay safe or heal quickly, and may there be less suffering all around.
A small way to support my work: Since June 2019, I’ve hosted the monthly Literary Modiin author series, and since April 2020, I’ve been putting out this monthly newsletter. Both represent a significant amount of effort for me, but I love talking about books and promoting other authors, and I’m committed to keeping both of these things FREE for all. I do incur some expenses to keep these up, however, so if you have enjoyed the Literary Modiin events and/or if you enjoy the newsletter or both, and you’d like to support my work in some small, tangible way, I’d be grateful if you’d click on the “Buy Me a Coffee” link below. (If you can’t, that’s fine too)! I appreciate your continued support for these events, book recommendations and my literary musings.
Request: If you’ve read (and liked) The Book of Jeremiah, please help me out by writing a brief review on Amazon or wherever you purchase books online. It can be as simple as one or two lines. Thank you!
Julie Zuckerman's debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah, was published in May 2019 by Press 53. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in CRAFT, Tikkun, Jewish Women’s Archives, Crab Orchard Review, The Coil, The SFWP Quarterly, Ellipsis, MoonPark Review, Sixfold, and The MacGuffin, among others. She is the founder and host of Literary Modiin, a monthly author series celebrating fiction, memoir and poetry with Jewish content. A native of Connecticut, she lives in Israel with her husband and four children. www.juliezuckerman.com
thanks for all this, and for everything you do <3
Your website always contains interesting material. Would you like to see some of the work and research that I have made and seen published about what I regard as a badly confused topic, and how to make it much more satisfactory and easier to understand.?
Macroeconomics badly needs to be properly understood without the confusion of it being a pseudo-science. Here is how it is a true and exact one:
Making Macroeconomics a Much More Exact Science
Today macroeconomics is treated inexactly within the humanities, because it appears to be a very complex and easily confused matter. But this does not give it fair justice, because we should be trying to find a viable approach to the topic and examine it in a way that avoids these problems, and for us to better understand of what it comprises and how it actually works. Suppose we ask ourselves the question: “how many different KINDS of financial (business) transaction occur within our society?”
The simple and direct answer shows that that only a limited number of them are possible or necessary. Although our sociological system comprises of many millions of participants, to properly answer this question we should be ready to consider the averages of the various kinds of activities (no matter who or what organization performs them), and simultaneously to idealize these activities so that they fall into a number of commonly shared operations. This approach uses some general terms for expressing the various types of these transactions, into what becomes a relatively small number. Here, each kind is found to apply between a particular pair of agents, (sectors or entities), each one of which has individual properties. Then to cover the whole sociological system of a country, it requires only 19 kinds of exchanges of the goods, services, access rights, taxes, credits, investments, valuable legal documents, etc., versus the mutual and opposing flows of money.
The argument that led to this initially unexpected result was prepared by the author. It may be found in his working paper (on the internet) as SSRN 2865571 “Einstein’s Criterion Applied to Logical Macroeconomics Modelling”. In this model these double-flows of money versus goods, etc., necessarily pass between only 6 kinds of role-playing entities (or agents). Of course, there are a number of different configurations that are possible for this type of simplification, but if one tries to eliminate all the unnecessary complications and sticks to the more basic activities, then these particular quantities and flows provide the most concise yet fully comprehensive result, which is presentable in a seamless manner, for our whole social system and one that is suitable for its further analysis.
Surprisingly, past representation of our sociological system by this kind of an interpretation model has neither been properly derived nor formally presented before. Previously, other partial versions have been modelled (even using up to 4 agents, as by Professor Hudson), but they are inexact due to their being over-simplified. Alternatively, in the case of econometrics, the representations are far too complicated and almost impossible for students to follow. These two reasons of over-simplification and of complexity are why this pseudo or non-scientific confusion has been created by many economists, and it explains their failure to obtain a good understanding about how the whole system works.
The model being described here in this paper is unique, in being the first to include, along with some additional aspects, all the 3 factors of production, in Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations” book of 1776. These factors are Land, Labour and Capital, along with their returns of Ground-Rent, Wages and Interest/Dividends, respectively. All of them are all included in the model, which as a diagram is included in the paper.
(Economics’ historians will recall, as originally explained by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, that there are prescribed independent functions of the land-owners and the capitalists. The land-owners speculate in the land-values and rent it to tenants, whilst the capitalists are actually the owners/managers of the durable capital goods used in industry. These items may be hired out for use. Regrettably, for political and commercial reasons, the concept of these 2 different functions were combined by John Bates Clark and company, about 1900, resulting in the later neglect of their different influences on our sociological system-- the terms landlord and capitalist becoming virtually synonymous along with the expression for property as real-estate.)
The diagram of this model is in my paper (noted above). A mention of the related teaching process is also provided in my short working paper SSRN 2600103 “A Mechanical Model for Teaching Macroeconomics”. With this model in an alternative form, the various parts and activities of the Big Picture of our sociological system can be properly identified and defined.
Subsequently by analysis, the way our sociological system works can then be properly seen, calculated and illustrated. This analysis is introduced by the mathematics and logic, which was devised by Nobel Laureate Wellesley W. Leontief, when he invented the important "Input-Output" matrix methodology (that he originally applied only to the production sector). This short-hand method of modelling the whole system replaces the above-mentioned block-and-flow diagram. It enables one to really get to grips with what is going-on within our sociological system. It is the topology of the matrix which actually provides the key to this.
The logic and math are not hard and are suitable for high-school students, who have been shown the basic properties of square-matrices and the notation of the calculus. By this technique it is comparatively easy to introduce any change to a pre-set sociological system that is theoretically in equilibrium (even though we know that this ideal is never actually attained--it simply being a convenient way to begin the study). This change creates an imbalance and we need to regain equilibrium again. Thus, sudden changes or policy decisions may be simulated and the effects of them determined, which will point the way to what policy is best. In my book about it, (see below) 3 changes associated with taxation are investigated in hand-worked numerical examples. In fact, when I first worked it out, the irrefutable logical results were a surprise, even to me!
Developments of these ideas about making our subject more truly scientific (thereby avoiding the past pseudo-science being taught at universities), may be found in my recent book: “Consequential Macroeconomics—Rationalizing About How Our Social System Works”.
Please write to me at chestdher@gmail.com for a free e-copy of this 310-page book and for any additional information.