Audacious Book Club's April selection is Black. Single. Mother by Jamilah Lemieux. On May 2nd, she's hosting a one-day memoir writing conference called Writing a Life. On June 18th, she'll join Hope for Haiti in a fundraiser for their capital campaign to build a new medical campus in Haiti. Debbie Millman is going to make her off-Broadway debut in The Menopause Monologues.
In 2021, in her first article for EdSurge, she wrote about being demoralized as an educator. Five years later, in 2026, she is revitalized and committed to her role as educator, instructional coach and teacher advocate. Since participating in the inaugural cohort of the Voices of Change fellowship, she has contributed essays to The California Educator, Edutopia and Edsurge and joined podcast panels.
The Urgency of Indigenous Values is available via JSTOR’s Path to Open program. It's one of 100 recently opened books that are now freely available to readers worldwide. Philip P. Arnold is the founding director of the Skä•noñh—Great Law of Peace Center, which explores the history of the Haudenosaunee from an exclusively Indigenous perspective.
Robert Butler stopped a toddler from running into heavy traffic in downtown Phoenix on 19 March. His employer, Arizona Public Service (APS), published a statement in which he expressed gratitude for being "in the right place at the right time" to defuse a potentially deadly situation. Butler got emotional thinking about his two-year-old son.
The Rana Choir performed at the joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony in Tel Aviv on Monday evening. They sang "Chad Gadya" which is an ancient Aramaic Passover song reimagined as a song of protest. The audience gave them a standing ovation. After the event, a member of the crowd invited other attendees for evening prayers.
In Hans Fallada's 1947 novel, "Every Man Dies Alone," a mother and father are reduced to stupefaction by the combat death of their son, Otto. They decide to write postcards against the regime and leave them anonymously in public places. Since then, graffiti art, guerrilla art, street art, mail art, flash mobs and other spontaneous public happenings that spill out onto social media have grown in importance. In America under Donald Trump, artists are using these techniques in a battle for the survival of open and dynamic public space.
After the war with Iran and Lebanon, Israelis celebrated Independence Day with barbecues, beaches and beer on Wednesday. The boardwalk was packed with people. Max, a yeshiva student planning to immigrate to Israel, was handing out cold drinks and candy from a makeshift stand.
This Editor's Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor's Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here. This year's transition from Memorial Day to Independence Day is less acute. Israel's enemies are seeking to destroy it. Israel is being ripped asunder and morally compromised from within under a leader who has brought Jewish supremacists and violent racists into the heart of government.
This week is National Crime Victims Week. The Trump administration re-opened the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office to help American victims and their families. The office has fielded nearly 900 calls seeking assistance in the past year. Victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants include: Megan Bos, Joshua Wilkerson, Katie Abraham, Dalilah Coleman, Anya Varolay Osokin and Nicholay Vodolay.