As we approach Spring semester I wanted to take a moment and respond to “The Arts in Transition,” an article by Andrew Sondern that ran in the Nassau Weekly last term.
When unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot by white police officer Darren Wilson this past August, Americans of all colors raised their voices in sorrow and outrage.
2 AM, Tuesday, halfway done with my senior year of college. I was anxiously contemplating what I would do tomorrow, and then this summer, and then next year, and then for the rest of my life. Then came panic, and, shortly following that, a flashback.
It was half past midnight. The snow was soft and crisp from the other side of the glass. The radiator spluttered, rousing from its hour-long slumber. Like adding cotton to an over- stuffed pillow, it seeped a heat into the tired room that stirred our restless desire to descend.
Sitting down to watch last week’s Super Bowl XLIX, I thought I knew what to expect from an event the 49th of its kind: footballs on the field, fantasies in the commercials. From advertisements aimed at male audiences, I was accustomed to
hot babes, racecars and rock stars. What I found, instead, unsettled me.
When rockets fired from the Gaza Strip hit Tel Aviv for the first time since 1991, I was studying at an army preparato- ry program in one of the city’s southernmost neighborhoods.