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A Silent Crisis: Climate Change and Its Impact on Food Security in the Sahel
No full textThis thesis aims to analyze the complicated relationship between climate change and food security. It specifically focuses on the Sahel region. Food security is defined by four pillars and each section of this thesis does an in-depth analysis of how climate change affects each pillar. Food security is a major humanitarian crisis, and it is compounded by the effects of climate change. This aims to provide evidence of how deep and destructive the impacts can be. The Sahel region is facing the effects of climate change at a faster pace than any other region and the goal is to bring attention to this crisis. Climate change is now pushing millions of people in the Sahel towards food insecurity. By using the Sahel as an example of how extensive the impacts of climate change can be on food security the goal is for the world to understand the complex relationship between climate change and food security and it is also a call to arms to battle this crisis before the situation gets worse
Make It Make Sense: Discourse and Care That Improves Math Outcomes
No full textThe issue of low math performance, particularly in schools serving historically marginalized communities, requires immediate attention. Despite implementing various interventions, including leadership changes, curriculum updates, and hiring consultants, student achievement in math has remained stagnant at Ida B. Wells Academy (Wells). This case study uses organizational and adult learning theories to examine the leadership actions and organizational changes implemented by the principal to improve student learning through improved pedagogy in daily math lessons. The principal engaged math teachers in rapid, iterative inquiry cycles, using an instructional framework to facilitate math conversations that center mathematical thinking and problem-solving. Teachers also engaged in critical reflection to nurture classroom environments conducive to productive conversations, academic risk-taking, and productive struggle. The study identifies key strategies essential for implementing organizational change and facilitating cognitive redefinition in the context of improving math education. These include iterative disconfirmation, nurturing survival anxiety, collaborating to diagnose needs, and operationalizing trial-and-error learning. Furthermore, leadership actions such as normalizing learning anxiety and unpacking unlearning proved crucial in mitigating challenges during the change process. These findings offer valuable insights and practical tools for equity-focused school leaders seeking to enhance students\u27 experiences and outcomes in middle school math classrooms
Hendler, Elliot
No full textElliot Hendler is a lifelong Bronx resident, born during the Great Depression in 1935. He moved to various addresses throughout his childhood, having lived on 172nd Street and Washington Avenue, 169th Street and Washington Avenue, and 170th and Townsend Avenue. Describing his childhood neighborhood as “bad” and marked by crime, he details his experiences with violence and vandalism. When he married his wife, Libby, in 1958, they moved to an apartment on 205th Street, and in 1969 moved to Co-op City, where they have lived ever since. Together, they have two children and two grandchildren.
Hendler details his impressive educational journey from PS 2 to Bronx Science to City College. Having excelled in school, he continued his studies as a chemistry major at City College. Switching majors two years in, he decided to study accounting, kickstarting his public accounting career. He recalls his religious upbringing in a kosher household, attending Orthodox shuls and Hebrew school at the Bronx Y. As an adult, he attended a Conservative synagogue and was active in the Jewish community, serving as treasurer of the Co-op City Jewish Center. Describing his family life, he talks about his family’s struggles growing up, including tensions with his mother and his sister’s developmental challenges. He also reflects on his 66-year marriage, raising his kids Jewish, and celebrating the High Holidays with his daughter.
Anecdotal signs of World War II were present in Hendler’s day-to-day life, recalling foul balls being dedicated to soldiers at baseball games and the headlines about Pearl Harbor hitting the Daily News. He notes the unrest and discomfort in his circles during the Vietnam War, though he was past the drafting age at the time
Dr.Chris Grantham Interview
No full textSummary by Eliza Anderson.
Chris Grantham, M.D., is a critical care attending and director of the ICU at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx.
He grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. He returned to the area after medical school to complete his residency in internal medicine at St. Barnabas and his fellowship in critical care at Montefiore. After years of working as an attending at St. Barnabas, Grantham began his position as the Critical Care Director in December 2019, mere months before the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
In the weeks and months after the virus was first discovered in China, St. Barnabas prepared for the arrival of COVID-19 patients by developing disaster plans for extending the ICU. Grantham recalls, however, that the number of staff and supplies needed to care for the record-high number of patients was underestimated. Within a few weeks of the disease’s spread to the U.S., the ICU had reached maximum capacity, and the ratio of nurses to patients stretched up to 1 to 6. Key issues for Grantham’s ICU at the height of the pandemic included the number of available ventilators, limited hospital staff, and limited space to extend the ICU. For himself and his staff, overworking was an everyday reality. When asked about the hardest days, Grantham recalls that “those days where the volume is so high and the acuity is so high, and there is no – you\u27re not able to stop. Those are the worst in the pandemic.” The most rewarding days for Grantham were when patients were successfully weaned off the ventilator.
Grantham notes that the statistics for COVID patients in the Bronx were especially dire, and that a lack of preventative care for conditions such as diabetes and obesity raised the risk factor for many patients who may have been uninsured or on Medicaid. Speaking on St. Barnabas’ relationship to the Bronx community during the pandemic, he says, “We\u27re a small hospital, but I think we showed how important we are to the community here during that time.
Tajay Ashmeade
No full textTajay Ashmeade
Abstract
INTERVIEWER: Mark Naison, Lisa Betty, Stephanie Robinson Ramirez
INTERVIEWEE: Tajay (TJ) Ashmeade
SUMMARY BY: Christine Rong
Tajay Ashmeade, a Jamaican-born Bronx resident, shared her journey from special education to becoming a professional basketball player and entrepreneur. She discussed her family\u27s immigration story, her educational timeline, and her impactful mentors, Bonnie Henderson and Ann Donovan, who guided her through education and sports. She detailed her struggles with ADD, her time in junior college, and her professional basketball career, including playing for the Jamaican National Team and the WNBA. Tajay emphasized the importance of mentorship and education, leading to her current role as a sports management professor and founder of Nurture Sport, a recruitment and mentorship platform for athletes
Siegel, Helen
No full textHelen Siegel’s family came to the Bronx from Germany in the years leading up to World War Two. Siegel was born in 1945 and grew up in the West Bronx about a mile away from Yankee Stadium, which she remembers as a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. She attended Bronx public schools throughout her education, PS 64, JHS 117, and Taft High School, before going on to City College, receiving what she believes to have been a good education. Siegel would teach at Bronx elementary schools for 25 years and serve as a mentor for new teachers. She recognizes that teaching and education in the Bronx changed a lot over time, but tried to be a good teacher with positive reassurances, writing good notes to parents, and taking students to visit cultural sites in the area.
While she never married or had children, she was very involved as a caretaker for her mother and grandmother for much of her life. Her mother was a waitress and her father worked for the post office. Though he moved to Florida when she was 11, Siegel maintained a good relationship with him. She would spend a lot of time with her Oma, her grandmother as a child, cooking, doing embroidery, and visiting the Cloisters.
Becoming more involved in Jewish life over time, Siegel served as the volunteer principal at her synagogue’s Sunday School, and also volunteered in other capacities by organizing events like Passover outreach. As a child, her family did not keep kosher and would attend Temple Adath Israel on the High Holidays. It was not until after her mother passed away that Siegel began to attend synagogue more regularly and keep kosher. By that point in time, Siegel had left her West Bronx neighborhood because of fires and rioting and moved to Pelham Parkway. She shares that Pelham Parkway has become less Jewish since she moved there in 1979, despite an influx of Russian Jews.
Siegel’s block is multi-ethnic today, and she says that while she recognizes there are few white people still in the area today, people mostly mind their own business. She likes to patronize different ethnic markets and travel around for local events. Thinking back on her time growing up in the Bronx, Siegel says she didn’t realize they were poor at the time, and that children accepted what their parents said and what was in front of them. Today, Siegel believes, is a dangerous time, particularly for the elderly, and one has to be cautious.
Keywords: Germany, Nazis, Holocaust, education, teaching, 1967-1968 Teachers Strikes, West Bronx, Pelham Parkway, Soviet Jewry, race, immigration, religion, observance, Co-op Cit
Shanas, Bert
No full textBert Shanas was born at Hunts Point Hospital in 1944. Having grown up in the Hunts Point neighborhood (residing at 930 Fox Street and attending PS 39, JHS 125, and Morris High School), he spent his childhood writing for the school newspaper, going to the Bronx Zoo and Yankee Stadium, and partaking in street games. In early childhood, Shanas remembers his neighbors and peers all being Jewish, but mentions that around the time of the Great Puerto Rican Migration there were a lot more Spanish speakers in the South Bronx. In high school Shanas recalls observing many interethnic friendships, though he did notice tensions as well, recalling a knife incident at his school.
Shanas pursued journalism at Hunter College in the Bronx (now Lehman College), and for the next 22 years worked at the New York Daily News. During this time, he also became an adjunct journalism professor at New York University and Hunter College, and obtained a Master’s degree in Social Research at the New School. Shanas then began working in public relations as director of communications at the United Federation of Teachers, where he would work for 11 years. He recalls the 1967 teachers’ strike, citing his fair reporting of the Union as a possible reason why he landed the job with them. The next 9 years he was press secretary to the President of the American Federation of Teachers, before opening his own public relations firm (Shanas Communications Inc.) for the final 8 years of his career. Shanas also worked as a freelance magazine writer throughout his career.
Shanas moved to Riverdale to provide his children with better schooling and more space. After his first marriage, he left the Bronx in 1971 and relocated to Rockland County. Later, he moved to Manhattan for work, and decided to stay after marrying his second wife.
Shanas’ grandparents migrated from Ukraine to Canada, where his parents were born. After getting married, his parents moved to the Bronx in 1936. His father was a purchasing agent and his mother was a homemaker. Shanas’ mother obtained a high school diploma, but he is unsure whether his father obtained his, as he joined the Canadian Navy at a young age. His family was very religious – they kept a kosher home (with the exception of going out to eat), lit Shabbos candles on Fridays, and went to shul synagogue on holidays.
Overall, Shanas still feels an appreciation for the Bronx and keeps up with the Back to the Bronx magazine. He is currently working on a 700-page family history tracing his lineage back to the 1600s, examining the effects of antisemitism on his family over time
Schonbrun, Joshua
No full textRabbi Joshua Schonbrun was born in 1930 and grew up on Clinton Avenue in the Bronx, part of a close-knit, heavily Jewish neighborhood. His upbringing was deeply shaped by Jewish education, family tradition, and the presence of immigrant culture. His father was a Polish immigrant who came to the U.S. in the 1920s, and his mother was of Romanian and Hungarian descent. Rabbi Schonbrun attended Jewish day school and later the Yeshiva of the Bronx, eventually pursuing his rabbinical ordination at Yeshiva University.
As a young man, he witnessed the transformation of Jewish life in the Bronx, including the shift of Jewish families moving out of the borough in the post-war years. Rabbi Schonbrun served as the longtime rabbi of the Conservative synagogue Young Israel of Pelham Parkway, where he played a central role in Jewish life, education, and community outreach for decades. He speaks warmly of life-cycle events, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and the communal bonds that defined Jewish religious life during his tenure.
His reflections include memories of anti-Jewish sentiment, the struggle to preserve synagogue membership, and his efforts to make Jewish learning more accessible. He also shares insights into the broader demographic and economic changes that affected the Bronx and the Jewish community over time
An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education [EXCERPT]
No full textA prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolution
Written by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger. With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class history and Whiteness studies. A latecomer to the New Left, a longtime figure in the Chicago Surrealist Group, and part of the collective reviving of the Charles Kerr Company—the world’s oldest socialist publisher—Roediger captures events and characters absent from standard histories of the left as well as such icons of resistance as Studs Terkel, Noel Ignatiev, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and C. L. R. James. A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger’s youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick. Roediger’s knowledge of white advantage came from his personal everyday experiences, but among people ordinary enough to guard against the mistaken notion that poor and working-class whites are uniquely the culprits of white nationalism. Importantly he argues against the characterization of them as intractably racist or incapable of understanding the advantages of whiteness. A teacher in state universities for forty years, Roediger has tirelessly fought against their being hollowed out by corporate values and austerity. In An Ordinary White, he writes movingly of these experiences and what we have lost in our institutions whose soaring rhetoric outstrips any ability to defend education or racial justice