Author Archives: Howard Lisnoff

The leaked draft of the Supreme Court case against abortion rights authored by Justice Samuel Alito (Politico, May 2, 2022) spread across the US like a destructive forest fire. The case originated in Mississippi and had the potential of returning one half of the women in the US to the days before abortion became legal in New York in 1970 and across the US by way of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Continue reading →

I often travel between the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts and Albany, New York. The part of I-90 that I drive on is called the Berkshire connector. Forty-nine years ago three friends and I traveled on the same road on the way to visit a US expatriate in Ontario, Canada, who had left the US during the Vietnam War era, looking for a different life as tens of thousands of others did amid the upheavals of that historic epoch. Sam left the US soon after his enlistment in the US Navy ended. Like tens of thousands of others who had left the US, Sam had traveled to different countries trying to find a semblance of peace amid all the insanity of that era. Continue reading →

Near the end of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund, Goldmund returns to the abbey for the last time where he had begun his education decades earlier. The setting is medieval Europe, in what is now the south of Germany. Hesse’s novel, a coming of age story about the battle between the spirit and the senses does not fit neatly into today’s assessment of plot and character development. Goldmund is the artist in search of what it means to live a full life, however, critics will immediately take offense at the way in which women are portrayed in this writing: They are not developed as characters and generally serve the needs of the protagonist Goldmund on his many trips of wanderlust. Continue reading →

The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut recounts the horrors of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in both the fictional work Slaughterhouse Five and his book of nonfictional essays, Armageddon In Retrospect. Vonnegut was a World War II veteran who had his boots on the ground, so he pretty much knew his subject. He makes a point that the death toll from firebombing cities was not too much different from the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped over Japan in August 1945. But with the advent of the hydrogen bomb, mass annihilation is a safe bet today. Continue reading →

Visiting the FDR Library and Museum is like journeying to a place where time has stopped and a world much different from the one we now inhabit exists. I hadn’t been to the FDR Presidential Library in several years and eagerly anticipated seeing the newly renovated museum at the library. Here there are no disappointments. FDR’s New Deal and progressive/left politics jump out from every nook and cranny of the exhibit, and the interactive displays of his presidency are so well done that they immediately catch museum goers’ attention and interest. Continue reading →

Reading the memo in which the U.S. government rationalizes the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki is something akin to reading the melding of “Alice In Wonderland: and “1984.” Continue reading →

The flyer for the giveaway of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle at Grace Baptist Church in Troy, New York, on March 23, reads “Does the Bible defend my right to keep and bear arms?” With the donation of the rifle from a local gun shop, the church’s pastor, the Reverend John Koletas said he was “honoring hunters and gun owners” by holding the raffle at the church (“Troy pastor’s AR-15 rifle giveaway creates controversy,” Times Union, March 7, 2014). Continue reading →

Norman Rockwell seemed to me to be an artist and illustrator who would appeal to members of a group like the Daughters of the American Revolution. Ignorance is difficult to dislodge. Preconceived notions sometimes fill the mind with blinding misconceptions. Continue reading →

The Ferncliff Mausoleum is remarkable for the serenity of the grounds that surround it and the imposing granite of its construction. Two great gold doors mark its entrance. It was May 2nd, two days before the forty-third anniversary of the Kent State killings. The day was warm and the sky a crystalline blue, both hallmarks of the season and much too beautiful and enticing for a journey to pay respects to one of the many fallen on that horrific day of so long ago. But history has its claims and marking that tragedy is necessary. Continue reading →

There is a cemetery in rural Massachusetts where the U.S. flag flew at half-mast on Saturday. Cemeteries in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts have both a haunting and historical character. Their graves are often stained from centuries of wear and mark the places where people often lie long ago forgotten. Continue reading →

Children are innocent and often the innocent victims of U.S. warfare. Despite protections, most written after the carnage of masses of civilians during World War II, the U.S. quickly jettisoned its commitment to the protection of civilians and children by the rules of international and U.S. law as soon as the burning embers of war cooled. Continue reading →

The brilliant scholar and spiritual leader Hillel, who lived 100 years before the Christian era, summed up the central thrust of Judaism in his most famous pronouncement of Jewish values: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah (The first five books of the Old Testament), the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” Continue reading →

I never came face to face with the reality of poverty in the U.S. until I took a train from Augusta, Georgia to New York for the holidays, following completing basic training in the military. Continue reading →

In the 1999 film A Walk on the Moon, set in a Catskills, New York, bungalow colony in the summer of 1969, the characters Pearl and Walker develop a relationship over the course of that momentous summer that saw the Woodstock music festival staged in nearby Bethel and the iconic actual walk on the moon by Neil Armstrong just weeks earlier on July 20. Pearl and Walker make love for the first time in Walker’s RV/retail “blouse shop” while an unwatched portable TV documents the first steps that Armstrong took on the lunar surface. Continue reading →

If you’re old enough, the image of the 50s and 60s pop singer Chubby Checker encouraging dancers to scurry under the limbo stick is a picture that stuck in the mind, with Chubby singing the lyrics “How low can you go?*” When I think of the housing debacle that has gripped this nation since 2006, that is the image I have. How low will the equity and prices that sellers get for their homes go? How low will we all go? Continue reading →

The Democratic Party will never rescue this nation from over three decades of unbridled corporate power and militarism! How could they; they’re behind it. Neither will groups like MoveOn, a group that tinkers at the edges of reform while Rome burns. Continue reading →

I wasn’t ready for the intensity of ridicule from the comments in a class that I teach dealing with reading skills and strategies at a community college in upstate New York! The class was working on making inferences from a sociology article about sex and gender when the issue of homosexuality was raised by a student. I thought for a moment, given the meanness of responses from five of the students in a class of 20, that the class had been transported in a time warp back to the 1950s! Continue reading →

Hiring adjuncts to teach university courses is big business. In the 1970s, adjunct instructors made up a tiny fraction of university and college faculties, mostly teaching specialty courses or teaching as guest lecturers (including filling in for professors on sabbatical). By the 1980s, according to Elaine McArdle in “The Adjunct Explosion” (University Business, 2006), adjuncts made up 20 percent of all courses. By 1998, according to the US Department of Education, as cited in McArdle’s article, adjuncts made up 43 percent of faculties across the nation. From 1970 to 1998, the article cites an increase in community college adjuncts from a low of 20 percent to a high of 60 percent. At New York University, adjuncts fill a whopping 70 percent of core courses. Continue reading →

Last month, both Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before the United Nations’ General Assembly. Both the leader of the US and the leader of Israel spoke against the impending bid by Mahmoud Abbas for the recognition of a Palestinian state. Almost as if out of the realm of the surreal, Barack Obama’s speech before the UN was to the right of Netanyahu’s. The cheers must have been deafening at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Continue reading →

My saga with the Federal Bureau of Investigation began in 1971. Over the course of the previous year, I had fought the Army’s attempt to order me to active duty. During the previous two years I had been a member of both the National Guard and a Reserve unit. Following the murders at Kent State and Jackson State, and the increasing brutality of the Vietnam War, I stopped attending Reserve meetings and petitioned the military for a discharge. Continue reading →

Standing by the side of the road, the passage of the past four decades can almost seem palpable: some days it seems like only a moment has passed, and other days the journey seems like it happened eons ago. It was the July 4th weekend of 1971. Joe and Judy and Dawn and I were on the road. More accurately, as Judy likes to say now, it was “our” road trip. How magical to be coursing up through the middle of Connecticut, out through the Berkshires of Massachusetts, along the turnpike snaking up into the higher Taconics of New York, and then finally out onto the open rural highway that cuts along the backbone of New York between the Adirondack and the Green Mountains of Vermont toward the Canadian border. Continue reading →