Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Jul 30, 2024
Chronicles of an Elder
I’m old now. I didn’t take that in until my latest February birthday. Reaching it, I’m three years older than my mother who died at...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Mar 19, 2024
Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down
Seeing photos of dead Palestinian children no longer shocks me. But if we had a wall chart measuring years on earth, my line would reach the
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Oct 18, 2023
‘...where ignorant armies clash by night…
I don’t really want to be part of the conversation around what’s happening in the Middle East. I don’t have to, actually. I’m not a...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Jul 5, 2023
A Letter to My Non-Jewish Friends
We Jews were often lauded for our cosmopolitanism. In today’s Israel, the desire of those in power is to assert Jewish supremacy.
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Mar 27, 2023
Open Closed Open
Recently, three people close to me opened--or closed-- depending on how you see it. One was my brother-in-law Jim.
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Dec 14, 2022
Chronicles of an Elder: Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe, August, 2022 Zimbabwe is a beautiful, distressed, struggling country of 15 million. Its government is corrupt, its social...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Sep 20, 2022
To Autumn
‘Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness’... From John Keats, 'To Autumn' This time of year, September, has always had an aspect of...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Sep 20, 2022
Conversations: Continuations and New Dialogue
In June, Emerging Voices presented a three part series on Zoom: Examining Palestine/Israel. This series will continue in October.
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
May 24, 2022
I Died in Hell. They Called it Passchendaele
From a poem by Siegfried Sassoon SQUIRE nagged and bullied till I went to fight, …. I died in hell— (They called it Passchendaele). My...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
May 24, 2022
Oh, What a Lovely War (Not)...
Part I This is my fifth war when I'm counting as an American. There was the Cold War; then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Those are...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Feb 1, 2022
A Mother is a Sometime Thing
I have outlived my mother. Our February birthdays were two days apart. She died twenty minutes before another year would have begun....
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Oct 27, 2021
On Lamentation and on My Father
by Rose Levinson Photo by Julia Yee From William Carlos Williams Tract “I will teach you my townspeople How to perform a funeral. Or do...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Jun 29, 2021
Tough Times
...the old is dying and the new cannot be born Antonio Gramsci, circa 1930 Emerging from the latest round of Covid-19 lockdown feels like...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Mar 23, 2021
Chronicles of an Elder: Rivers of Time
“And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Little Gidding. T.S. Eliot I measure time by my years on earth. I measure time by the...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Dec 7, 2020
Chronicles of an Elder: Teach Us to Number Our Days
If I live to my next birthday, I’ll be the age my mother died, forty minutes short of hers. My mother’s memory looms over me, as it has...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Aug 17, 2020
Chronicles of an Elder: Post Lockdown Blues
During the lockdown, even ageing was suspended. Everything stopped. No visits to doctors, dentists. No worries that my pains were heart...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
May 10, 2020
April 2020 Poem
Birthday party through a window Waving, singing, hands and lips on glass. The New Normal. On the sidewalk, I outstretch my arm Warning...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
May 10, 2020
An Old Woman and the Virus
I am that woman. And I hate being old. It’s not just because my seventies inevitably means death is closer. It’s because I hate being...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Dec 17, 2019
Post Election Thoughts from a Londoner
It’s no longer a ‘crisis’. It’s reality. Remain is dead. Brexit is the world we live in, normalizing fear and destroying ties that bound...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Oct 22, 2019
Geographica
"Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion." Directive, Robert Frost, 1946 Harsh,...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Jul 3, 2019
A Song of the South
The road is never straight, the way is seldom clear. I went to Savannah, Georgia, to take part in a Jewish wedding. I ended making a...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Jul 3, 2019
Ruminations on Exhaustion
.".. in the centre of our lives, this time, this day... this spring among the politicians playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Apr 9, 2019
Remembering Things Past
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy; Anna Karenina Family: Oxford English Dictionary: A...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Feb 18, 2019
This is the way the world ends...
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. -- T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men 1925 Choking on Brexit, Trump, climate...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Jan 13, 2019
Outside Looking In
Outsider, definition: one not involved with a particular group of people or organization, one who does not live in a particular place; in...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Dec 22, 2018
Climate Breakdown
These pictures are from a demonstration at London's British Broadcasting Corporation headquarters organized by Extinction Rebellion which...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Nov 26, 2018
The Days of Our Years
I've gone through life implicitly believing in key notions of the Enlightenment: reason, knowledge, freedom, skepticism. Sure there were...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Nov 14, 2018
Three Cheers for the Home Team
The US midterm election is over. Democrats now control the House of Representatives. Republicans have a majority in the Senate. And a...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Oct 28, 2018
100 Year Old Poem, For Today
"It is difficult to get the news from poems, but people die everyday for lack of what is found there" - William Carlos Williams
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Oct 9, 2018
American Rhino
Check the online definition. You learn a rhinocerous is a large, heavily built mammal with one or two horns on its nose and thick folded...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Oct 9, 2018
Brexit Blues
I’m weary beyond words at the ongoing disaster that is Brexit. Yes, I'm an American citizen who cannot vote in the UK. Fundamentally, I’m...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Sep 17, 2018
Lament for My Mother, Florence
‘When I was a child, I spake as a child. …. My mother was angry when I came home from secondary school with a grade D in maths class....
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Jun 7, 2018
Identity and its Discontents
The recent furore over anti-semitism in political circles in the UK pushes me back again into that circle of identity: Jew. When asked...
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Rose Levinson, Ph.D
Mar 5, 2018
Beginnings
A traditional Jewish saying cautions "all beginnings are difficult." It's an apt reminder for my first blog post. I've written a book, ...
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