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sidereaSorry, Nazis are from Germany under Adolf Hitler, what we have here is Sparkling Fascists.
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Affinity. The desire to be part of a group with similar likes and interests. It is one of the ways that we, as humans, come together to meet people and have fun together. Affinity comes from shared beliefs, shared hobbies, shared interests. My synagogue, Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge, has a number of these affinity groups (which we call small groups) to bring people together. One of them is a group of people that love to attend live theatre, which I coordinate.
My belief is that such a group, as it is under synagogue auspices, should attend live performance events that have a Jewish theme. It’s not right for a synagogue group to go see Christian-themed plays (e.g., Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, A Man for All Seasons), nor generally secular plays. I also don’t want it to be all Holocaust, all the time. So I try to find interesting Jewish plays, and along the way, introduce the group to small theatres they may never have seen. So we’ve seen shows such as Sukkot at 6th Street/Skylight Theatre in 2024, Treyf at the Geffen Playhouse in 2022, It Shoulda’ Been You at MTG in 2020; in 2022; It Shoulda’ Been You at MTG in 2020; Eight Nights at Antaeus in 2019; and numerous online things during the pandemic: Shared Legacies at JWT; Stars of David at the Y! I Love Yiddish Fest; Fabulous Fanny Brice; Allan Sherman Unmasked!; and Jews, God, and History (Not Necessarily In That Order). I should also note that, because of these writeups, I’m viewed as a theatre critic by some publicists; as such, I get lots of press release mailings and invitations to shows.
One of those lists is the mailing list for the Santa Monica Playhouse. We were there a long time ago — way back in 2014 — to see Author Author, a play they do on Sholom Aleichem (In fact, they will be doing it again in May 2026). A mailing from them in December 2025 mentioned a play they were doing: Jewish For Dinner:
Santa Monica, CA. December 10, 2025. The Santa Monica Playhouse Jewish Heritage Program is excited to present the WORLD PREMIERE of Lou Borenstein’s play Jewish for Dinner.
Ruth Cohen finally finds the perfect man to love, marry, and above all else, bring home to her Conservative family. But she neglected to ask one, small question: Is he Jewish? Or, can he at least fake it?
The play is based on the short film “Jewish for Lunch,” that won Best Comedy at the Melbourne Independent Filmmakers Festival, Best Comedy and Best Actor (Rylie Decocq) at the Mentone Film Festival, and Best Jewish Short Film at the Anatolian Film Festival in Turkey. Written & directed by Lou Borenstein.
This sounded like a perfect outing for our TAS Live Theatre Group. So I sent out a message, and we ended up with a group of 19-22 people at the show (we have 19 in the group photograph, but my RSVP count was 20, and I was told we had one or two more after that who didn’t tell me they were coming). We had a delightful dinner at Fromins Santa Monica beforehand (it’s no Brents (our local deli in Northridge), but there are few like Brents), which has been in Santa Monica for 47 years under family ownership.
So, on to the show itself.
As the Press Release noted, Jewish for Dinner is an expansion and extension of the 2022 13 minute short film, Jewish for Lunch, featuring much of the original cast. You can see the original film on YouTube. The situation in the film (which is still in the play) was expanded with more backstory and context; there was also a resolution added turning this from a filmed situation into a broader story with some deeper questions. The SM Playhouse did a staged reading of this back in August 2025, and now they have mounted the full play.
The basic story ties back to how I opened this writeup: affinity. Shared interests often lead to the desire, as we form relationships, to bring “like” together: people from the same background, the same religion, the same culture. This often reduces friction and provides common touchpoints and language. So this play’s setup is this: Conservative (as in the Conservative Movement in Judaism; not politically) Jewish family. Father, mother, two adult kids. Regular Shabbat dinner. A friend comes over, and is playing with the dating apps on her phone. The daughter comments how hard it is to find a nice Jewish guy. The friend suggests dating out of the faith. She dismisses the idea, giving numerous examples of how her family wouldn’t accept it or how it is doomed to failure. She also kvetches about the synagogue adding a high-holiday service they for which they are charging … something called Tashlich. The family notes this shouldn’t be a surprise: the synagogue is remodeling and needs more money for the remodel. There’s an argument about how she wouldn’t mind donating the money, but doesn’t like the subterfuge of the added service. She decides to go into the synagogue to complain. When she gets there, the Rabbi is in a meeting with a handsome architect, David Green, over some rolled architecture diagrams (that look like a Torah scroll). Insert a meet cute, and the fact that she doesn’t know that David Green is actually not Jewish. They quickly fall in love, and he proposes. Then, as they say in the sitcom world, hijinks ensue. We have family dinners with the usual confusions and problems. We have meetings with the Rabbi. We have fights, and the inevitable reconciliations. C’mon, you don’t really believe they would stay broken up over this?
If you’ve made it this far into the writeup, you’re probably wondering what I thought of the play. There are two ways to look at this, modulo some quibbles I’ll mention in a few.
First and foremost, this is a very funny play. My wife and I were laughing quite a bit, and our temple group also greatly enjoyed the play. There were situations that we recognized, and it captured much of American Jewish culture today, with all of its stereotypes.
That said, it also felt at times like an episode of The Neighborhood. Now, we love that sitcom and find it very funny, but there are times that it telegraphs the train wreck that is about to occur. You get that feeling here. And, as with The Neighborhood, you find the wreck is averted by some little twist or story point that takes things in a redeeming direction. Still a bit of a train wreck, but still very funny. And the basis of the train wreck is pretty easy to see: Non-Jew trying to blend in as Jewish, and (a) getting everything slightly wrong, and (b) the girlfriend in a panic because of it all.
But even with the gefilte fish out of the bathtub problem, the show has an interesting point to make: What makes someone Jewish? Is it simply an association by birth, even if one doesn’t understand or even know all the rituals (such as how the daughter was unaware of tashlich). Is it belief? Is it a desire to be part of the Jewish people and find meaning, as the boyfriend learns by the end? What is the ultimate problem with intermarriage? It used to be a big issue in the non-Orthodox community (it has always been a shanda in the Orthodox community). Reform started accepting it in the 1980s and it is now very common and accepted. Conservative Judaism used to prohibit such marriages, but even that attitude is changing. So in raising these questions, I think this show can provide some good discussions about belief, Judaism, and interfaith marriage.
I think my biggest quibble is the setup, but that could easily be rectified by some writing fixes. The main problem: Tashlich is a pretty standard part of Jewish High Holyday practice. I know that it has been done at most Reform congregations I’ve been at (TAS does it at either Limekiln Creek or Lake Balboa). Further, as Tashlich is done off premises, there usually is not an extra charge on top of High Holyday tickets. For those who aren’t Jewish, you might be wondering about the practice of charging for services. For most Shabbats, there is no charge to attend services, except possibly a registration access due to security in these antisemitic times. But for the High Holydays, when even the non-observant Jews come to synagogue, there are often tickets used to ensure sufficient seats. These are typically included with membership, although some congregations charge extra for better (i.e., closer to the bimah) seats; there are also charges for additional tickets. Note that there is often an unticketed family service open to the community; and of course in these post-COVID days, there are often live-streamed services. But back to the play: I’ve never known about an extra charge for a tashlich service. This easily could be changed to something else for which there is a charge — perhaps a Sukkot-dinner, perhaps some other event. But using tashlich as an excuse took me out of the story.
There were some directorial quibbles. At times, the projections still had the menu bar at the time and the Apple finder at the bottom. For a Conservative Jewish household, they had some mannerisms that were less than Conservative (but, then again, that’s common in Conservative families). During the High Holyday service, they seemed to do the mourner’s kaddish in the middle of the service. The hatza-kaddish (half-kaddish) I could understand, as that separates segments, but the full mourners kaddish is at the end. Some folks in our group indicated they had to stifle the desire to stand up during some of the prayers. But I think these are all minor quibbles, and ones that would be ironed out in a production that ran longer or had a greater budget.
I do have one more major quibble, and it is a common one these days: I absolutely hate having programs that are only available via QR code. You can’t easily look at them during the show; you don’t have a long term record; and most importantly, they have no archival quality because websites change, are reorganized, or disappear. That online program of today will be gone tomorrow. Shows, at minimum, should have a one pager (which, if you fold it and print double-sided, can give you four “pages”). Give the basics about the show and cast. Even if you have to use a tiny-font (8 pt), and print in black and white, there should be something.
The cast was generally strong, which isn’t a surprise as many came from the short film. There seemed to be a few hesitation points, but I’m willing to write that off to this being a small theatre with a small number of runs. Kate Huffman, as Ruth Cohen (the daughter) was very strong, as was Rylie Decocq as the boyfriend. I also liked Daryl Mendelsohn as the Rabbi, as he had the right gravitas. Some of the mannerisms were a bit exaggerated, but that fits with the overall sitcom style. This is a case where a dramaturg might have helped with some fine tuning.
Jewish for Dinner runs until March 1, 2026 at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Tickets are $25 or less, and are available online through Showclix or by calling the box office at 310-394-9779 ext 1. This isn’t a deep show and is a bit sitcomish, but is very very funny and makes some good points. It was great for our theatre group, and would be a great show for synagogue groups.
The Santa Monica Playhouse is recovering from a water pipe break that damaged / destroyed their stage and dressing rooms. The stage is rebuilt; the backstage less so. They are still looking for donations, and did a plea at the end of the show. We supported them. You should to.
Jewish for Dinner. Written by Lou Stone Boren. Directed by Jeff Jackson.
Cast: Kate Huffman Ruth Cohen; Ryle Decocq Dave Green; Abby Kohl Mollie Green; Gregory Cohen Leo Cohen; Ben Horwitz Gabriel Cohen; Amanda Dolan Sheba; Daryl Mendelsohn Rabbi Rosh.
Production and Creative: Lou Stone Borenstein Playwright; Jeff Jackson Director; George J Vennes III Technical Director; Joseph Perez Playhouse Projects Coordinator; Sandra Zeitzew Public Relations; Chris DeCarlo and Evelyn Rudie Artistic Directors. Surprisingly, the program has no credits for sound (and there was sound), lights (and there were lights), projections (and there were projections), and stage management (because there is always stage management). Given the program is being done via QR code and online, those credits should be added to the program.
I am not a professional critic. I’m a cybersecurity professional, a roadgeek who does a highway site and a podcast about California Highways, and someone who loves live performance. I buy all my own tickets, unless explicitly noted otherwise. I do these writeups to share my thoughts on shows with my friends and the community. I encourage you to go to your local theatres and support them (ideally, by purchasing full price tickets, if you can afford to do so). We currently subscribe or have memberships at: Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre; Broadway in Hollywood/Pantages Theatre; Pasadena Playhouse; The Soraya, Chromolume Theatre NEW, and 5-Star Theatricals. We just added Chromolume Theatre as our intimate theatre subscription — we subscribed there pre-pandemic when they were at their West Adams location, but they died back in 2018. They started back up last year (but we had seen all their shows); this year, their season is particularly interesting: The Color Purple, If/Then, Elegies (during Hollywood Fringe), and Roadshow (nee Bounce) [by Steven Sondheim]. Mind you, these are all in the intimate theatre setting, and this will be the first time Roadshow has been done in Los Angeles, to my knowledge. Information on purchasing their 2026 season is here. Our previous intimate theatre, Actors Co-Op, seems to be on hiatus.
Want to find a show: Check out the Theatre Commons LA show list. Other good lists are the Theatre in LA listings; the TodayTix listings; OnStage 411 (use the “shows” drop down); and Theatermania.
I used to do more detailed writeups; here’s my current approach.
♦ Theatre / ♣ Music / ◊ Other Live Performance – Next 90ish Days (⊕ indicates ticketing is pending).
This entry was originally posted on Observations Along the Road as 🎭 Jewish-ish | "Jewish for Dinner" @ Santa Monica Playhouse by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link to the left. You can sign in with your LJ, DW, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. Note: Subsequent changes made to the post on the blog are not propagated by the SNAP Crossposter; please visit the original post to see the latest version. P.S.: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.
silvercat17 posting in justcreatesidereayourlibrarian posting in everykindofcraft
sidereasidereavvalkyricz_unitcahwyguy
The book and musical and movie of Wicked all start from the simple question: “Are people born evil, or do they have evilness thrust upon them?” Although Patrick Page, in his one man show All The Devils Are Here (which we saw last night at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica), doesn’t mention Wicked, he does address the question through the eyes of perhaps the greatest storyteller of them all, William Shakespeare.
Page’s premise is that Shakespeare invented the villain as we know him: a character with an underlying motivation to do evil. Before Shakespeare, per Page, there were bad guys, but they were very broadly and shallowly drawn. They were the vices in morality plays, existing solely to tempt the good guys and demonstrate why one should follow a particularly moral path. But then came Shakespeare and Richard III.
Page walks the audience chronologically through Shakespeare’s villains, and shows how Shakespeare’s characterization of them changed and deepened over time. In the early days they were often based on physiognomy: if one looks bad, than one must be bad. Richard III was the first with his deformities, but then there were Jews and Moors and others that fits the stereotypes of the time. For each of these, Page not only explains the Shakespeare, but expertly does one-man scenes from the plays in question to demonstrate his point.
He then goes on to show how Shakespeare’s understanding of the villain changed over times, especially after he had his poetry period during the plague. By the time we get to Hamlet, we’re having villains we depth and underlying motivations, who often turn the stereotypes of the time around. As one moves towards the Scottish Play, the exploration of true sociopaths appear. He talked about the traits of a sociopath. He quoted a book, but I had to use Dr. Google, who had something similar: “Sociopath traits, part of Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), include a significant disregard for rules and others’ rights, lack of empathy or remorse, manipulative and deceitful behavior, impulsivity, shallow emotions (like anger), and a tendency towards irresponsibility, often masked by superficial charm. They may exploit others, struggle with relationships, act aggressively, and have a weak conscience, but can differ from psychopaths in being more erratic and less calculating.” He pointed out that in our audience of 500 or so, there should be about 13 sociopaths, and he was sure we knew such people in our lives, or are seeing them in the political news. Here’s a more detailed list I found.
He spent a bunch of time discussing the characters and the motivations in the Scottish Play, doing a number of scenes therefrom. One of the things he pointed out is how Shakespeare did things different than other playwrights: Other authors created characters to make a point or teach morality. Shakespeare created characters that held the mirror up to ourselves, enabling us to see them as the flawed characters we all are. No one is the 100% noble hero or the 100% villain (well, except for the true sociopaths): we all have some heroic aspects, and some villainous aspects. Perhaps that is why Shakespeare’s characters resonate so.
Another thing that Page did was explain why Shakespeare was doing what he was doing. He showed where Shakespeare used conventions of the day, and where he explicitly broke those conventions in a way that Elizabethian audiences would recognize. He showed where the characters were using rhetorical tricks to make particular points. He showed the comparison to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It truly was a master class in understanding a master, and it did make me want to go see some more Shakespeare (I haven’t seen all that much, and what I tend to see are his lighter comedies, vs. the darker plays). That unfamiliarity did hinder me at a few points where I got lost in the language.
Page also made an effort to map Shakespeare’s character archetypes to contemporary dramas. I don’t remember them all (because I don’t watch them all), but I remember him mentioning characters like William White and Tony Soprano as being drawn directly from Shakespearian characters, as well as folks like Scar in the Lion King.
All The Devils Are Here is a show well worth seeing. It will teach you a lot about Shakespeare, as well as helping to identify those sociopaths among us (and those we elect to public office). It runs at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica until January 25. GO SEE IT. Tickets are available through the Broad Stage. There was a talkback after the show, which was also fun.
About my only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to run into Patrick Page’s wife, Paige Davis. I’m a long term fan of hers, and both she and my wife are gluten free, and they would have had fun talking about that.
All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain. Created and performed by Patrick Page. Directed by Simon Godwin.
Production Team: Arnulfo Maldonado Scenic Design; Emily Rebholz Costume Design; Stacey Derosier Lighting Design; Darrow L. West Sound Design; Natalie Hratko Production Stage Manager; Stewert Productions / Bethany Stewert Tour Production Manager; Joe Burt Assoc Scenic Design; Avery Regan Lighting Supervisor; Rayn Matthew Hall Assoc Sound Design; Bryan Hunt Tour Producer; Mara Isaacs Executive Producer.
I am not a professional critic. I’m a cybersecurity professional, a roadgeek who does a highway site and a podcast about California Highways, and someone who loves live performance. I buy all my own tickets, unless explicitly noted otherwise. I do these writeups to share my thoughts on shows with my friends and the community. I encourage you to go to your local theatres and support them (ideally, by purchasing full price tickets, if you can afford to do so). We currently subscribe or have memberships at: Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre; Broadway in Hollywood/Pantages Theatre; Pasadena Playhouse; The Soraya, Chromolume Theatre NEW, and 5-Star Theatricals. We just added Chromolume Theatre as our intimate theatre subscription — we subscribed there pre-pandemic when they were at their West Adams location, but they died back in 2018. They started back up last year (but we had seen all their shows); this year, their season is particularly interesting: The Color Purple, If/Then, Elegies (during Hollywood Fringe), and Roadshow (nee Bounce) [by Steven Sondheim]. Mind you, these are all in the intimate theatre setting, and this will be the first time Roadshow has been done in Los Angeles, to my knowledge. Information on purchasing their 2026 season is here. Our previous intimate theatre, Actors Co-Op, seems to be on hiatus.
Want to find a show: Check out the Theatre Commons LA show list. Other good lists are the Theatre in LA listings; the TodayTix listings; and Theatermania.
I used to do more detailed writeups; here’s my current approach.
♦ Theatre / ♣ Music / ◊ Other Live Performance – Next 90ish Days (⊕ indicates ticketing is pending).
This entry was originally posted on Observations Along the Road as Villainy and Human Natures | "All the Devils Are Here" @ Broad Stage by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link to the left. You can sign in with your LJ, DW, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. Note: Subsequent changes made to the post on the blog are not propagated by the SNAP Crossposter; please visit the original post to see the latest version. P.S.: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.
silvercat17 posting in justcreatesidereahudebnik)“The sight of that many vessels operating in concert is staggering,” said Mark Douglas, an analyst at Starboard, a company with offices in New Zealand and the United States. Mr. Douglas said that he and his colleagues had “never seen a formation of this size and discipline before.”Yeah, so, about that:
“The level of coordination to get that many vessels into a formation like this is significant,” he said.
sidereasidereaAt first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.Click through to read the whole thing.
The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.
In short, I figured—at least back then—that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE’s application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.
[...]
I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.
“Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,” the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: “If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.”
As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.
And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. “Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,” it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) “Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.”
The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn’t smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I’d waste a small piece of ICE’s gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I’d failed.
Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.
Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.
According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”
I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”
By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.
siderea
Renfrew Christie in 1988.
Renfrew Christie, a South African scholar whose undercover work for the African National Congress was critical in hobbling the apartheid government’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Cape Town. He was 76.
The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Camilla Christie said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa paid tribute to Dr. Christie after his death, saying his “relentless and fearless commitment to our freedom demands our appreciation.”
The A.N.C., in a statement, called Dr. Christie’s role “in disrupting and exposing the apartheid state’s clandestine nuclear weapons program” an “act of profound revolutionary significance.”
From the doctoral dissertation he had written at the University of Oxford on the history of electricity in South Africa, Dr. Christie provided the research needed to blow up the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station; the Arnot coal-fired power station; the Sasol oil-from-coal facilities that produced the heavy water critical to producing nuclear weapons; and other critical sites.
The explosions set back South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons program by years and cost the government more than $1 billion, Dr. Christie later estimated.
By the time the bombs began going off, planted by his colleagues in uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the A.N.C., Dr. Christie was already in prison. He was arrested by South African authorities in October 1979 on charges of “terrorism,” three months after completing his studies at Oxford, and spent the next seven years in prison, some of that time on death row and in solitary confinement.
“While I was in prison, everything I had ever researched was blown up,” he said in a speech in 2023.
Terrorism was a capital offense, and Dr. Christie narrowly escaped hanging. But as he later recounted, he was deliberately placed on the death row closest to the gallows at the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. For two and half years, he was forced to listen to the hangings of more than 300 prisoners.
“The whole prison would sing for two or three days before the hanging, to ease the terror of the victims,” Dr. Christie recalled at a 2013 conference at the University of the Western Cape on laws regarding torture.
Then he recited the lyrics of an anti-apartheid folk song that reverberated in the penitentiary: “‘Senzeni-na? Senzeni-na? What have we done? What have we done?’ It was the most beautiful music on earth, sung in a vile place.”
“At zero dark hundred,” he continued, “the hanging party would come through the corridors to the gallows, slamming the gates behind them on the road to death. Once they were at the gallows there was a long pause. Then — crack! — the trapdoors would open, and the neck or necks of the condemned would snap. A bit later came the hammering, presumably of nails into the coffins.”
In an interview years later with the BBC, he said the “gruesome” experience affected him for the rest of his life.
Dr. Christie acquired his fierce antipathy to apartheid at a young age, growing up in an impoverished family in Johannesburg.
Many of his family members fought with the Allied forces against the Germans in World War II, and “I learned from them very early that what one does with Nazis is kill them,” he said at a 2023 conference on antinuclear activism in Johannesburg. “I am not a pacifist.”
At 17, he was drafted into the South African Army. A stint of guard duty at the Lenz ammunition dump south of Johannesburg confirmed his suspicions that the government was building nuclear weapons. “From the age of 17, I was hunting the South African bomb,” he said at the conference.
After attending the University of the Witwatersrand, he received a scholarship to Oxford, which enabled him to further his quest. For his doctoral dissertation, he chose to study South Africa’s history of electrification, “so I could get into the electricity supply commission’s library and archives, and work out how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium,” he told the BBC.
From there, it was possible to calculate how many nuclear bombs could be produced. Six such bombs had reportedly been made by the end of apartheid in the early 1990s; the United States had initially aided the regime’s nuclear program. Thanks to the system of forced labor, South Africa “made the cheapest electricity in the world,” Dr. Christie said, which aided the process of uranium enrichment and made the country’s nuclear program a magnet for Western support. (South Africa also benefited from its status as a Cold War ally against the Soviet Union.)
Dr. Christie turned his findings over to the A.N.C. Instead of opting for the safety of England — there was the possibility of a lecturer position at Oxford — he returned home and was arrested by South Africa’s Security Police. He had been betrayed by Craig Williamson, a fellow student at Witwatersrand, who had become a spy for the security services and was later granted amnesty by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
After 48 hours of torture, Dr. Christie wrote a forced confession — “the best thing I ever wrote,” he later told the BBC, noting that he had made sure the confession included “all my recommendations to the African National Congress” about the best way to sabotage Koeberg and other facilities.
“And, gloriously, the judge read it out in court,” Dr. Christie added. “So my recommendations went from the judge’s mouth” straight to the A.N.C.
Two years later, in December 1982, Koeberg was bombed by white A.N.C. operatives who had gotten jobs at the facility. They followed Dr. Christie’s instructions to the letter.
“Of all the achievements of the armed struggle, the bombing of Koeberg is there,” Dr. Christie said at the 2023 conference, emphasizing its importance. “Frankly, when I got to hearing of it, it made being in prison much, much easier to tolerate.”
Renfrew Leslie Christie was born in Johannesburg on Sept. 11, 1949, the only child of Frederick Christie, an accountant, and Lindsay (Taylor) Christie, who was soon widowed and raised her son alone while working as a secretary.
He attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and was conscripted into the army immediately after graduating. After his discharge, he enrolled at Witwatersrand. He was twice arrested after illegally visiting Black students at the University of the North at Turfloop, and was also arrested during a march on a police station where he said the anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela was being tortured.
He didn’t finish the course at Witwatersrand, instead earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cape Town in the mid-1970s before studying at Oxford. At Cape Town, he was a leader of the National Union of South African Students, an important anti-apartheid organization.
On June 6, 1980, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison under South Africa’s Terrorism Act, with four other sentences of five years each to run concurrently.
“I spent seven months in solitary,” Dr. Christie said in the 2023 speech. “Don’t let anybody kid you: No one comes out of solitary sane. My nightmares are awful.”
After his years in prison, he was granted amnesty in 1986 as the apartheid regime began to crumble. (It officially ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became the country’s first Black president.) He later had a long academic career at the University of the Western Cape, retiring in 2014 as dean of research and senior professor.
In addition to his daughter Camilla, he is survived by his wife, Dr. Menán du Plessis, a linguist and novelist he married in 1990; and another daughter, Aurora.
Asked by the BBC whether he was glad he had spied for the A.N.C., Dr. Christie didn’t hesitate.
“I was working for Nelson Mandela and uMkonto we Sizwe,” he said. “I’m very proud of that. We won. We got a democracy.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
vvalkyri
This is not a dramatic walkout scenario. You are encouraged to take sick leave if that is available to you. Also DC residents may have access to paid sick/safety leave from DC. If leaving your job would put your job at risk you are encouraged *not* to participate. And this event is for all, not just people currently employed."
There's such a mess. Such a mess. Active lying from the administration obviouslying from the administration were obviously trying to lie with implication (. The new bed is announcing that Ross had internal bleeding, announced a full week later anonymously sources say they were told and oh right there's no method of injury consistent with the implications there although oh by the way bruising would technically count maybe because sure as hell the man stayed standing and walking normally and packed out a house the next day.
cahwyguy
In October, I kicked a can down the road, but I’m staring at the end of the road with no further ability to kick it. So I need some advice.
My main laptop is an HP Envy 17 purchased in 2018. Here are the specs:
I’m currently running Windows 10 in Extended Support. I have my documents directory pointing to my D: drive. I absolutely DO NOT want Windows Backup or OneDrive. I don’t want to story my files in the cloud, and I already have a strong backup scheme through Acronis (my D: drive is backed up to the Acronis Cloud daily; I backup to offline USB drives weekly). I have replaced my battery once due to swelling. My current system is suitably fast, and I have loads of software I like. My current system has a CD-ROM (which new systems don’t have), and I have 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C ports (most systems don’t have that many ports these days). I don’t know the health of my current C: drive (SSDs have a fixed lifetime).
Here’s the question: I’m going to have to move to Windows 11. Should I…
The biggest fear in upgrading is Windows Backup. I’ve been told that Windows 11 turns this on by default. I made that mistake once: Windows Backup then changes your %DOCUMENTS% path to a hidden OneDrive directory on your C: drive, which it then mirrors to the cloud. This is bad if you have a small C: drive, and if you do things wrong, you lose files when you turn it off. Luckily, I had a full backup from that day. I want my files locally, on a separate data drive from my C: drive. Supposedly, you can turn off OneDrive, and Windows Backup. I’d like to avoid that mess. I have no idea of the upgrade process tries to turn it on. I’m sure a new setup would turn it on; I’d have to turn it off and change the DOCUMENTS path before loading files and more programs.
So, great Internet brain: Should I upgrade or get a new system?
This entry was originally posted on Observations Along the Road as 💻 Horns of a Dilemma: Upgrade or New / Windows 11 by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link to the left. You can sign in with your LJ, DW, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. Note: Subsequent changes made to the post on the blog are not propagated by the SNAP Crossposter; please visit the original post to see the latest version. P.S.: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.
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