by Joe Jordan-Berenis | Aug 19, 2020 | Uncategorized
As the novel coronavirus was reaching critical mass last spring, I gave a radio interview to Rabbi Neil from Temple Beth Shalom on KSFR-FM. When he asked me about the pandemic and its increasing punch, I replied that I had a fantasy that maybe COVID-19 would just skip...
by Joe Jordan-Berenis | Jun 19, 2020 | Uncategorized
Recently, I was doing some spring cleaning and came across a newspaper article with a photograph of me in the now defunct Long Island Press from the 1970s. I was working at Creedmoor State Hospital, one of those state mental institutions in New York with a horrific...
by Joe Jordan-Berenis | Jun 2, 2020 | Uncategorized
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time When I was a young man, I had the good fortune of hanging out with James...
by Joe Jordan-Berenis | May 22, 2020 | Uncategorized
I recently read about a student once asking anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” Mead replied, “A healed femur,” which was about 15,000 years old. Turns out that the femur is the longest bone in the body and, if broken, takes...
by Joe Jordan-Berenis | Feb 24, 2020 | Uncategorized
Last Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California used his State of the State address to highlight the homelessness crisis. “Let’s call it what it is: a disgrace, that the richest state in the richest nation — succeeding across so many sectors — is failing to...
by Joe Jordan-Berenis | Jan 17, 2020 | Uncategorized
Runaway and homeless youth make up the third leg of the three-legged stool I’ve been describing. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, young people who were part of the hippie generation started crisscrossing the country — often in protest of their parents’...
