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Tag Archives: Orthodox feminism
Shelo Asani Isha
It was mid-August and the air conditioning was broken in the café on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Across from me sat a woman I was about to interview. Her hairline, concealed by a dark brown wig, emanated sweat. Every so often she would raise her arm and, using the long-sleeve of her blue shirt, wipe the perspiration away.
I apologized for the heat and pulled at my slightly-too-short skirt so that it covered my knees. She should feel comfortable, I thought, knowing that I, too, was a modest Jewish woman suffering through the humidity.
But this was not entirely true. I am not an Orthodox woman who adheres to the modesty laws—not in the strictest sense. I was there to talk to her, and, over the course of the summer, I would speak with twenty-one other Orthodox men and women, about their understanding of the morning blessing "she lo asani isha," Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who has not made me a woman. My hope was to uncover how Jews from different branches of Orthodoxy grapple with—or ignore—the implications of sexual hierarchy established by this blessing.
I was masked by my role as a detached academic, researching my senior thesis topic. More honestly, it was a personal project laden with frustration, pain and a longing to find my place within the Jewish tradition that I love.
Why do I want to be a part of a religion that values this blessing? The question has plagued me for the last few years as I find myself yearning more and more for traditional Jewish ritual and community.
I was not raised Jewish. My mother is a practicing Unitarian Universalist and my father is a non-practicing Jew. While our family celebrated Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover, we never went to a Shabbat service or spoke the words of Hebrew prayer. Until I was fourteen, I attended a Unitarian church in Manhattan every Sunday. I participated in the youth group, Christmas pageant, and children's choir. I identified both as a Unitarian Universalist and as a Jew. But at the start of high school, a major shift occurred.
I began to wonder if my Unitarian practice was the right fit. I convinced my father to join me for our first Kabbalat Shabbat service at a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn. The awe I experienced that evening changed my life. It was like returning to something I had not known and yet understood somewhere in the recesses of my body. The Hebrew sounds were foreign, the music was mysterious, and I felt simultaneously at home and like an outsider. I fell in love that night, and I became determined to immerse myself in Judaism and to work towards feeling like an insider.
Since that evening I have struggled to learn about my Jewish tradition. I studied for two years to become a bat mitzvah at the age of sixteen, majored in Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, spent a year in Israel studying at Hebrew University, and, most recently, went to the mikvah for an official conversion and a re-commitment to Judaism and my practice.
But the deeper I have traveled into the body of Jewish text and ritual and the more I crave a rigorous faith, the more I run into the wall of what it means to be a woman inside a traditional community. I am constantly battling the side of me that wants to be enveloped in an Orthodox community and the side of me that is accustomed to, and believes in, contemporary norms of gender equality.
I set out to spend two years researching and wrestling with the blessing "she lo asani isha." I looked to the blessing as the site of a struggle between tradition and modernity. I believed that through engaging with this blessing, I could resolve a tension within myself and a tension that I imagined many other men and women feel.
Each time I sat across from my interviewees I hoped that they would provide me with an answer. I saw them as guides—individuals filled with wisdom and spirituality who might share my sentiments. Did they wrestle with the blessing too? Could they give me a persuasive answer about why it is said and why it is important to say? How did they bridge the divide between tradition and change? Their words had the potential to counsel and revive my spirituality.
What I learned through the process of my research was that there was no resolution to be found—no answer that would quiet my battles and the tension that many of my Orthodox interviewees experienced. What I found were a variety of rationalizations that often seemed to evade the insulting nature of the blessing. Nearly everyone I interviewed applied multiple explanations even if one line of logic contradicted another.
This tangle of answers, combined with my own daily struggle with the words "she lo asani isha," has enabled me to become more comfortable with my religiosity and with spiritual tension. At the start of my interviews I was uncomfortable critiquing women's roles within Jewish tradition and within many forms of Orthodoxy. I was uncomfortable because I felt the weight of being an outsider. How could I critique what I did not know—a world that I was not raised in? I did not feel that I had the right.
Immersing myself in the interpretations, both historical and contemporary, that surround "she lo asani isha," I began to feel more at home with critique. I could listen, contest and judge from a place of greater knowledge and understanding. While I am without a resolution, and while I am still deeply troubled by this blessing, I am more at ease in my Jewish body. I can embrace my critiques of Judaism because I am battling with my faith, my Jewish tradition and my Jewish forbearers from a place of immense love.
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Finding a Place at the JOFA UK Conference
"You're thinking of going to a conference on Orthodox Feminism? But that can't exist. Besides, you don't hate men or burn your bras!" I was getting this reaction a lot. Okay, maybe not in those exact words, but that was the implication. I am a feminist, and I'm Jewish but I myself was surprised when I came across those two words used together. I decided to attend the JOFA Conference in London, partly out of curiosity, partly to reassure myself that not all feminists were bra-burning man-haters.
The JOFA Conference was a fantastic experience. Speakers of all ages and backgrounds shared their stories, ideas, plans, and opinions with passion and enthusiasm. One of the best things about it was that the audience was actively engaged, taking advantage of the opportunities to ask questions and share their thoughts after each speaker. The amount of planning and effort that had gone into organising the day was evident from the collection of speakers. Topics ranged from why it's important we hear women's voices, to women's voices in lifecycle events to women's voices in the community. The speeches were accessible, personal and interesting. I particularly admired the courage of the women who shared emotional and personal experiences in order to emphasize the need for Orthodox Feminism.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg's speech was about men and women being equally created in the image of God and the covenantal approach for men and women. I remembered the Biblical story about how Eve, a woman, was only created second to Adam, a man, from his ribs. This seems to imply that women are second place creations and are dependent on the existence of men. I asked Rabbi Greenberg: How could this story show God's intentions of gender equality when the message of this story seems to contradict this? Rabbi Greenberg explained that there are two versions of the story in Bereishit, the first one being that originally there was only one gender, only one being. This symbolises that God wanted every person created after to be equal in value, despite race, intelligence, ability, and of course gender. The second story, the "ribs" story, illustrates how this image of equality was broken when one human was separated from the other, and foreshadowed how this idea of equality would be broken, showing the need for us to work towards the original equality that God intended. I found that this linked to feminism because it is an ideology that advocates equality.
The main idea I took away from the conference was the uniqueness of Orthodox Feminism. Orthodox Feminism recognises that halakha is a dynamic process that adapts to the changing realities of the Jewish people. Living in the 21st century when gender equality is now accepted in the West, Orthodox feminists call for the halakhic interpretations to reflect this new reality.
I think I can speak on behalf of everyone that attended the conference when I thank JOFA for organising an amazing conference that left my head buzzing with new ideas and my eyes opened to challenges faced by Orthodox Feminists.
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An Open Letter to Everyone Who Asks Me Why I'm Still Here
This is the second post in a two-part series of blog posts written by high school students. We encourage you to engage in constructive conversation with the authors around these posts. Read the first post here.
Each morning, my first destination is my living room. I take out my siddur and tefillin (unless it's Shabbat, of course) and I pray the Shacharit service as my family bustles around. As I finish, I swap out my tefillin and siddur for a gemara to study. My day continues on, and between my chavrutas—studying with friends—and teaching at Hebrew school, my Jewish practices are hardly put aside. Meals are symbolized in both start and finish with blessings, and the chunks of the day are split up by my recitation of Mincha and Ma'ariv.
Somehow, because of these practices, I am "not Orthodox."
The fact is: I am Orthodox.
Yet, I'm living in a paradox. When I say I want to daven (pray) more, I'm considered less religious. I take on more practices, suddenly, I'm less religious. I want a leadership role in my community's prayer, I'm less worthy of actually being in my community. This attempt to purify the Orthodox community from people who practice differently—or rather, different people who practice—isn't going to work. When we do this, we're simply shutting doors on people who are committed to and in love with Judaism. Pushing me out won't fix the problems, won't stop the questions; it will merely slow down the process of change.
The problem is that the Orthodox community no longer defines itself as a group of people who are committed to Judaism. Rather, it is a group of people who are committed to a particular version of Judaism—a gendered Judaism. I believe it is time for a new paradigm of commitment to mitzvot, and a new paradigm for Orthodox Judaism.
Mitzvot are Mitzvot
Gender is not prescriptive of the ways that a person connects to religion. There is no such thing as male spirituality or female spirituality. Some women want to lay tefillin while some men don't; some women want to be religious leaders while some men don't. As an Orthodox community, we can either push away the women deeply committed to mitzvot on account of gender roles, or push away the gender roles on account of a deep commitment to mitzvot. I recommend the latter.
Mitzvot are mitzvot, and people who keep them are observant Jews. Do I believe that everyone (who takes on halakhic obligation) is equally obligated in tefillin regardless of their gender identity? Yes. But we shouldn't try to build a community based on forcing people to perform mitzvot out of obligation; we should build a community of people who perform mitzvot out of commitment—out of acceptance of obligation. Of the male peers I know that pray every day, an absurdly low percentage care about it—yet they do it because they are told they must. Forcing all boys to keep mitzvot and coercing all girls not to generally results in resentment on both ends.
But somehow, that's what it has come to. We've decided it's better—for the sake of tradition—to build our foundations on boys who wish they didn't have to go to minyan and girls who wished someone would ask them to. If, instead, we didn't ask anyone to come to minyan, and merely counted on having enough interested members of our community commit to be there, I believe we would not only be able to maintain a minyan but it would be a happier one than ours is now.
Bringing In, Not Pushing Away
For those of you who are thinking, "But we have communities that are egalitarian and halakhic, why does Orthodoxy need to budge?" I have a simple question. What would happen if halakhic egalitarian communities started calling themselves Orthodox? If they simply pointed out that they are observant in every way that observance matters to us—merely disregarding gender and gender roles—and they are therefore still Orthodox, we would be a larger Orthodox community. If every time someone interprets halakha—not disregarding, but understanding it in a new light—we bring in rather than push away, the vibrancy of the Orthodox community can remain strong.
It would be simpler for me to stop calling myself Orthodox because it would mean I could do what I want. I could have an easy pass to interpret halakha any way I want. To anyone who argues with me I would simply say "I'm not one of you." But I am. I'm an involved, committed, interested Jew and that's about as you, Orthodoxy, as I can get. Even though it would be easier to take myself out—away from a place that judges and resents me—I don't. If I let Orthodoxy's inertia win, then in ten years, when my sister struggles with the same feelings of religious pride and fear of abandonment, I will have done her no good. I will have opened a door that closes right behind me as soon as I walk out through it. I have told her that she must either blend in or bow out, but she cannot be a red flower in a field of white. There is no value for the Orthodox to keep pushing away those who care about it—so I'm going to take the fact that I don't budge easily and use it to keep having hard conversations. I'm going to keep bringing up difficult subjects, and I'm going to keep looking for answers. And every time I am pushed aside, my questions ignored or my answers rejected, I will still be just as much of an Orthodox Jew. It's not just about affiliation, it's about community. I am halakhically egalitarian and communally Orthodox—that needs to be a legitimate option.
I'm not going to stop praying. I'm not going to stop observing halakha. I'm not going to stop having pride in my religion. The question is whether or not you're going to support me.
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A Controversial Clarification
This is the first post in a two-part series of blog posts written by high school students. We encourage you to engage in constructive conversation with the authors around these posts. Read the second post here.
Apparently I'm right-wing now. Conservative, closed-minded, and a traditionalist. This is all very new to me given my highly liberal politics, feminist identification, reverence for human rights and idealism. You may be wondering what changed. Well, nothing really. You see, as I understand it, there's a new movement forming between Conservative and Modern Orthodox Judaism. This is evidenced through the rise of partnership minyanim, the Maharat movement and the very existence of organizations like JOFA, Mechon Hadar, Drisha, Women of the Wall, etc. However, there is a vital distinction that very few people are making: the difference between Orthodox feminism and halakhic egalitarianism.
The best way I can describe this difference is that Orthodox feminists see partnership minyanim as a good solution to women's ritual exclusion, rather than a stepping-stone to full egalitarianism. Orthodox feminists might not wear tefillin themselves, but they support the right of all women to wear it if they choose. Now pause. You may be offended, outraged, hurt or confused.
Here's the thing: I will never believe that I am obligated to wear tefillin, or attend morning minyan, or wear tzitzit. However, I do want people to admit that women are still permitted to do these things and to make space for those who wish to do so. I will never try to eradicate all gendered aspects of Judaism. I simply want people of all gender identities to be recognized and respected in our history and communities. I will not stop identifying as Orthodox, rather I will balance my desire for inclusion and respect with my adherence and loyalty to tradition.
I have had the privilege of basically never encountering explicit anti-women, misogynist religious Jews (though I have encountered many harmful implicit messages and offensive statements). Frum (traditionally observant) life has always seemed positive and rich to me; something of which I wanted to be a part. Perhaps that is why I am far less bitter or hurt than some of my sisters. While these women need to be heard, respected, and involved, I do not think that their pain should be the primary focus of Orthodox feminism.
Now pause again. I promise I'm not a super-privileged victim blamer. Rather, I am someone who feels misrepresented. I view gender problems in Orthodoxy slightly differently than some in the JOFA community. First of all, I think we must be more conscious of the fact that women who follow normative halakha can absolutely feel fulfilled, respected and empowered. This fact does not invalidate the feelings of those of us who pursue egalitarianism, but rather emphasizes 1) that every woman is different and has the right to choose her lifestyle, even if it's non-liberal (a fundamentally feminist value) and 2) that Judaism does have richness (even in areas that may feel restricting). The Torah is not broken, Jewish communities are.
I'm also a bit different from the mainstream halakhic feminist discourse in how and where I place the blame of exclusion. Yes, I have felt ritually excluded and ignored. I wonder, though, how much of this may be my own issue to work out, or truly an institutional injustice. Judaism's richness lies in its history and tradition, and throwing that away or altering it to our fancy may not really be legitimate halakhic practice and could even be cheapening the power behind the rituals. That being said, put a Miriam's cup on your seder table, let a woman say the mishaberach for Israeli soldiers or hold a women's Megillah reading. I'm not saying that women who are unhappy in Orthodoxy are creating something out of nothing (I've certainly felt unhappy with Orthodoxy at times in my life), but I am saying not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I believe that halakhic activism cannot be the same as secular activism. Jewish culture and law is based on exegesis and commentary. If you do not have the proper sources and psak (halakhic decisions), your argument simply cannot hold water. There are red lines in normative halakha, and we must fit our feminism into our Judaism and not the other way around. Let us not lie to ourselves and our children and pretend that everything is halakhically perfect when we are stretching concepts (even if for the admittedly noble cause of uniting Jews). I still want there to be rabbis who think that the concept of female ordination is absolutely against halakha. Not because I am a masochist, but because I am intellectually honest. I fully support female clergy members (and aspire to possibly be one). However, if we do not know our sources, we cannot properly apply them to our lives. This goes both for those who say women could never be rabbis and those who say that women are obligated in tefillin. We don't need one uniform hashkafa (halakhic outlook), we need intellectual honesty.
I know that people feel real suffering and want change. I do not intend to blame them or make them feel guilty. I also do not mean to say that halakhic egalitarianism is wrong or illegitimate; in fact, this movement creates a vital space for many people. However, I am not sure it is Orthodox, and am frustrated with the blending of what I see as parallel but distinct agendas.
I am trying to convey that Orthodox Judaism and feminism are both inextricable parts of my being, and therefore, they should strengthen rather than dilute one another. I know I am privileged. As a straight, feminine woman who wants a family, the normative role of a frum woman is not an insurmountable leap. But, I also know that Judaism is the best thing in my life and I will protect it fiercely from unwarranted harm and slander. Jewish communities are far, far from perfect, but let us act together, conscious of our differences, into the future. Here's to intellectual honesty and ahavat yisrael.
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Is there a MOFA (Muslim Orthodox Feminist Alliance)?
This past week, I listened to a Public Radio interview with Humaira Awais Shahid, a Muslim woman who is a Pakistani journalist and activist. I was amazed yet again by her reply when she was asked about the status of women in Islam. She said the problem was not the Koran, which respects the role of women, but rather the empowerment of the clergy who are fixated on the ankles and elbows of women, and whether there is a hair escaping their head covering. Sound familiar?
Whenever I hear these kind of comments, my first reaction is that MOFA (Muslim Orthodox Feminist Alliance) is just waiting to be established. Our reasoning is the same, our problems are alike, and our clergy definitely behave in a similar manner. More and more often, given the weakened nature of our rabbinic establishment in America, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel is exerting increasing control over the lives of American women. As a direct result, the Chief Rabbinate continues to make Israeli society more secular, angry, and disgusted with the religious hegemony over their lives.
These Muslim women have my sympathy as I hope we have theirs. As this despotism continues, more Israelis and Americans have come to believe that the role of a chief rabbi is unnecessary and outdated. We need religious freedom and systemic change in our halakhic system to create a fair and just Jewish life—not only for women, but for the entire Jewish community.
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A Mixed Mob at Mount Sinai?
When I think about Shavuot, the first image that pops into my head is a mob of Israelites gathered at the base of Mt. Sinai, impatiently waiting to receive the Torah amidst shofar blasts, smoke, and lightning. This image inevitably triggers Merle Feld's poignant poem, "We All Stood Together," and Judith Plaskow's iconic book, Standing Again at Sinai. Both of these feminist texts explore women's absence from Jewish tradition and from the moment of revelation and explore the ways that Judaism can transform itself to become more inclusive. I am well aware that feminism and gender are essential lenses for my Jewish experience (after all, I do work at JOFA) but I was a bit surprised that my subconscious had designated Shavuot as a holiday of exclusion. The Torah tells us that women, along with men, were present at Mt. Sinai, and the Midrash, rabbinic commentary, teaches that all of the souls of future generations of Jews were present at Sinai. That seems relatively egalitarian. Upon further thought, I realized that Ruth, the protagonist of our Shavuot narrative, embodied the marginalization that I was sensing and that Shavuot is an appropriate time to engage with the topic of exclusion.
Ruth is a woman, a widow, a convert, a penniless immigrant, and a Moabite (a different, hated race forbidden from entering the Jewish people). She is an outsider in every sense of the word. And yet, she is at the center of our Shavuot story, and at the core of the narrative of the Jewish people, as the great-grandmother of King David.
On many holidays, we focus on the ways that Jews were excluded, marginalized, and victimized by other cultures. On Hanukkah, we were oppressed by the Greeks. On Passover, we were enslaved by the Egyptians. On Tisha B'Av, we were victimized by the Babylonians and the Romans. All of these holidays memorialize times when Jews were marginalized as a nation. Ruth is notable because she was marginalized by the Jewish people. She was an outsider in the Jewish community. Yes, Ruth was ultimately a "success story." She converted to Judaism, married Boaz, a wealthy and prominent land owner in the community, and gave birth to Oved, the grandfather of King David. She ultimately overcame these disadvantages and was accepted into our Jewish narrative as the great-grandmother of King David and the paradigm of chesed, loving kindness, and selflessness. However, we should not focus solely on the end of the story, to the exclusion of her other identity markers. The story of Ruth should remind us of the ways that the Jewish community is still segmented, and should serve as an opportunity for us to explore the way that our community treats other individuals within the Jewish community, those who are "Other" because of their gender, their race, their socioeconomic or religious background.
On Shavuot, we have the rare opportunity to sit with our communities and study texts into the wee hours of the night until daybreak. Tikkun Leil Shavuot is an alternate reality with ebbing and flowing cycles of intensity—caffeine buzzes, catnaps, sugar rushes, crashes after the first few cups of coffee and pieces of cheesecake wear off. It can be a dreamy time, learning underneath the stars, finishing up that final chevrutah as the birds start chirping and the sun rises, eagerly anticipating receiving the Torah anew, and imagining what our ideal Jewish community should look like.
We have the opportunity to examine the big questions: What does it mean to receive the Torah? How does the Torah impact us all differently? How do we engage with the more difficult, exclusionary aspects of the Torah and halakhah? How can we build a more inclusive community? A more committed community? How can we create a community that would welcome and accept Ruth, a community that values and encourages the equal contributions of women to our ritual community? How will the Torah help us build the Jewish world that we are craving?
This Shavuot, let's embrace the opportunity to discuss those big questions, and explore ways to build the more equitable Jewish community that we crave. We could start by inviting more women to teach classes and address the congregation from the bima, including mothers' names in ketubot and aliyot, offering more childcare options during prayers and classes, or simply welcoming everyone with a warm smile, and the question, "How would you like to participate in our community?"
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Facts from the Field
Some big issues for orthodox feminism have come up in the news lately. Did you see that women will soon be allowed to monitor kashrut in institutional kitchens in Israel? JOFA Board member Carol Newman wonders how new this actually is.
I wonder who the rabbis thought was in the kitchen all these years. I have been married for over fifty years and have made more meals than I could possibly count. I've cooked for my family, for extended family, for guests, and even for organizations that asked me to host events. No one ever came into my kitchen asking to see the mashgiach.
So what is this all about? My brother-in-law, Marcel Lindenbaum, says the rabbis are afraid of change and therefore what we are seeing in so many instances is a rabbinate that wants to keep things exactly as they are. I maintain that change has already happened. The rabbis simply fear change that has to do with empowering women in Judaism.
In her new book, "The Kind Mama," Alicia Silverstone explains her refusal to give her son a brit milah. Her rationale suggests a lack of God's omnipotence: "my thinking was: If little boys were supposed to have their penises 'fixed,' did that mean we were saying that God made the body imperfect?"
JOFA Board member Belda Lindenbaum responds with a popular midrash.
I believe that we were not born "perfect" for a reason, sometimes difficult to understand. I do believe that there are instances, and this is one of them, where we are asked to complete the work of "perfecting." It began with Adam naming the animals and culminates in the act of procreation where men and women create new life. Bread, a staple of life, is given to us in the form of wheat, but it is humans who harvest, grind, knead, and bake the wheat flour to make the bread. We are partners and perfectors in the act of creation.
Sounds like there's more than one way to be a "kind mama."
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A Young Woman's Passion for Feminism
Her name can be found in most American history books, and her accomplishments are part of every U.S. history curriculum. This recognition is not undeserved, as she revived interest in feminism with her book The Feminine Mystique and facilitated change in women's roles by establishing the National Organization for Women (NOW). Although most high school students treat Betty Friedan as another name to memorize for a history test, she is so much more than a removed figure in a textbook for me. She is the reason that I am a feminist.
My middle school history teacher developed my interest in First Wave Feminism, encouraging me to write papers for class and National History Day (NHD) about the suffrage movement. I loved learning about these long-ago crusaders for women's equality, people who battled for rights I took for granted. My interest in the history of feminist activism led me to learn about Second Wave Feminism on my own during the summer before ninth grade. While researching this era, I read most of the major feminist classics, all of which really resonated with me. I identified most with 1960s and 70s feminism largely because the issues relevant then, from LGBT rights to equal pay, are still pertinent today.
However, it was not until I read The Feminine Mystique that I had my "feminist click moment." I was shocked by the blatant sexism that society had condoned and the prevalence of discriminatory attitudes towards women, all in such a recent time period. Friedan's exposé was so powerful that it rallied me to action and made me want to battle for women's rights. It was official: I became a feminist.
Ever since reading The Feminine Mystique, I have gotten involved in numerous feminist activities. I am particularly proud of my work with Star of Davida, the Orthodox Jewish feminist blog where I have posted biweekly articles on women's issues since summer 2010. As someone who enjoys writing and believes strongly in feminism, blogging has allowed me to combine these passions and engage with both of them on a deeper level. It has also compelled me to follow other bloggers and read their thoughts on the issues, which has broadened my horizons, introduced me to new ideas, and given me the opportunity to examine my own opinions in order to change them or reaffirm them.
Betty Friedan influenced my current actions as well as my future aspirations: I hope to pursue gender studies in college and become a labor lawyer specializing in women's issues. These goals were solidified when I attended the 2012 NOW conference as part of the NOW Young Feminist Task Force, an exclusive group that unites young feminists and gives them a greater voice. Hearing motivating speeches and meeting dedicated feminists showed me that this is what I want to do with my life. Although I never met Friedan, who died in 2006, I know that she would be proud to have inspired me to carry on the torch of feminism.
This was Talia's college admissions essay for Harvard University, where she is now finishing her first year. If you discussed your Orthodox feminism in your college application, or in an essay for high school, college, or graduate school, tell us about it! Send your essay to firstname.lastname@example.com.
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Take Back the Night (and the Day)
Rushing into a conference midway through a speech, I scanned the room for a seat then stopped, startled. Had I entered the Gentlemen's Gallery of an Orthodox synagogue? But this wasn't a synagogue – it was a colloquium on derivatives at an Ivy League university! Why was I the lone woman?
I sat down. My mind wandered from derivatives back to another era. It was my first year at Sydney University in Australia and upon entering my maiden Economics tutorial I was confronted with a boys' football huddle in formation. Prying apart the interlaced arms to make a place for myself, I asked the female tutor, "Where are our money-minded sisters?"
"You'll get used to it," the tutor comforted me. But she was wrong. I entered university as women were flooding the disciplines and quickly taking up half the medical and law schools and I usually had plenty of female company in class. Those football physiques provided no advantage in competing for academic awards, which in my year were swept up by women.
Today, responsibility for the tax policy of the United States of America rests with my team. It is the highest honor to be invited to join and log the grueling hours expected of us. Work has a sacred quality: the more you do, the holier you are. Leaving before 7pm is like sneaking out of synagogue midway through the sermon. Extracurriculars such as family or aiding the poor are commendable in small doses; but the core of an American's identity and the bulk of her or his time must be devoted to paid labor.
Kim and I are the only women on the team with young children. Whenever we catch a moment to chat, Kim dwells on how deficient she feels. "I only come in three days a week, and I just can't give it my all," she moans. "If I'm battling the mess at home, I'm thinking about the pile on my desk; and when I sit behind the pile, I'm imagining the volcano smoldering at home." She laments that she cannot throw herself into the job with enough gusto to command respect from our colleagues.
Kim is wrong. She is a Harvard Law graduate with elite law firm experience and we all vie for the excellent judgment she rations out to our office. But because suffering servitude is the sanctified life, an employee who gives obeisance to a god other than work feels dismissed to the B League.
At a recent staff meeting, our boss announced that superstar Eva will not be returning to work after maternity leave. "Poor thing, she couldn't bear to leave her baby," the boss said. Kim and I made eyes. Neither she nor I could bear to leave our babies either, but it happens I am a single mom and she is married to a man who toils for the poor and underrepresented. This means that we must work for the rich and overrepresented. Eva's husband is so fabulously busy at his place of business that he didn't make it quite in time for the birth of his first child.
So Eva defects to the other side and Kim and I walk into rooms full of men like Eva's husband.
But why did I feel so awkward at the conference on derivatives? How exalted was my position there, a peer amongst the most august thinkers in my field! Because I'm a lawmaker, all were deferential to me and there was only one dirty joke the whole day! Altogether, I was welcomed into the boys' club.
On Shabbat morning, I skipped the conference and attended Orthodox services with my brother, where an opaque curtain separates men and women. Surrounded by flowing skirts, I was anonymous, blessedly shut out from the men. This community of women is my community; here I am invisible. And when I go out to play in the working world, the world of men, I must leave behind the fields of flowing skirts and the dividing screen. Even in games I practice every day, the rules remain unnatural, unfamiliar. Even when invited to join the A League, I remain an outlier.
As Shabbat was ending, my brother and I joined the campus gathering of "Take Back the Night," an international movement to end violence against women. As the speeches began, my brother pointed out the simultaneous translation into American Sign Language. For him, a hearing-impaired social worker battling for those discarded into the Z League, this was a profound symbol of inclusion.
As we walked through the darkening streets and the ASL signs were lost, I mused, "How many and varied are the hierarchies of man and how glorious must be the view from the top."
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Let's Spread Some GOOD News
Dr. Monique Katz, a member of JOFA's Board of Directors, once shared a d'var Torah that has stuck with me for many years since.
She pointed out that we spend most of our time trying to initiate changes in our Orthodox community where we see injustice to women vis-à-vis the agunah issue, leadership roles in synagogues and on boards of Jewish institutions, and women's participation in Jewish rituals. Human nature causes people to dwell on the bad things that happen rather than the good, so our news is just like the newspapers—when something good happens, we forget to include it in our report. But, Nicky said, when a rabbi makes a change that has a positive effect on women, we must remember to practice hakarat ha'tov—recognizing the good.
I was recently reminded of Nicky's charge shortly before Passover when I was at Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue for my granddaughter's bat mitzvah. To my great surprise, a woman carried the Torah scroll through the women's section. It was very moving to watch women kiss the Torah—some for the very first time, and to see their reactions. Once the Torah had been put away, Rabbi Lookstein announced that the woman who had carried the Torah was the vice president of the synagogue and had petitioned him to permit the women to bring this ritual, and kavod (honor), to the women's section.
I saw Rabbi Lookstein that evening and made a point of going over to him and thanking him for making this change. He told me I was the only one to offer him praise, though he had received numerous negative comments from others.
I think it would make a huge difference if we all remembered to give thanks where and when it is due.
Thank you, Nicky.
We encourage you to give public recognition for good that has been done in your community. Please share your stories here, on JOFA's Facebook page, or submit a blog entry to email@example.com. Most importantly, be sure to thank the change-maker directly.
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Domestic orders placed Monday - Friday by 6 p.m. Eastern Time will be packed and shipped the same day, pending verification of billing information and the shipping method selected. International orders and orders containing gift cards, out-of-stock items or refrigerated items will be processed as quickly as possible, but won't necessarily be shipped out the same day.
Excludes all orders placed on major US holidays (Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year's Day).
The study, which is due to be published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, included 89 people over age 60 with mild to moderate chronic health problems that are common to seniors, such as osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes. They were randomly assigned to receive either an herbal combination or placebo for six months.
The herbal formula was made up of eight herbs, all widely used in Ayurvedic medicine: licorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra), turmeric (Curcuma longa), gotu kola (Centella asiatica), caper bush (Capparis spinosa), ashwagandha (Withania somnifera), shatavari (Asparagus racemosus), Terminalia chebula, and Terminalia arjuna.
The people receiving the herbal combination showed signs of increased antioxidant activity and reduced oxidation at the end of the trial. There were no changes in antioxidant status in the placebo group.
Although no one knows for sure whether taking this herbal formula could lead to better health and a longer life, the study's authors suggest that reversing the decline in antioxidant status that occurs with age might slow the aging process.
"The results showed [a] significant rejuvenation of the total antioxidant capacity...in the geriatric patients treated with the polyherbal formulation," they said. "Antioxidants are intimately involved in the prevention of cellular damage, the common pathway for cancer, aging, and a variety of diseases."
The results from this study begin to shed light on the ways that herbal combinations might promote better health. Below are a few plant antioxidants that have been studied for their effects on aging:
(J Ethnopharmacol 2010; doi:10.1016/j.jep.2010.12.044)
Maureen Williams, ND, received her bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University in Seattle, WA. She has a private practice on Cortes Island in British Columbia, Canada, and has done extensive work with traditional herbal medicine in Guatemala and Honduras. Dr. Williams is a regular contributor to Healthnotes Newswire.
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Unfortunately this eyeshadow quad did not work out for me. The shadows feel dry and flaky and they swatch very poorly in the back of the hands. White shade is super sparkly and can cause fall out if not careful. Purple looks crumbly on swatch although it's workable on your eyes (blends okay). The green may look deceivingly good on swatch but on the eyes it doesn't blend well and it may look patchy even with a primer. You may have to reappy the green and purple several times as main lid color since the color just disappears even with little blending. The dark blue works terribly as crease color since it's hard to blend...may work in the outer v. All of these eyeshadows do better wet.
I do enjoy the color combination they presented here...but it's not a look you can pull off during the day time. Overall I would not repurchase this item.
Autumn dream is a nice eye shadow palette that contains:a dark matte charcoal with purple,green,cobalt blue shimmers,a metallic shimmery mossy green,a metallic shimmery purple, a shimmery pale gold. It goes well on the application,it last fairly long. It brings a nice luminosity to the eyes! Love it!


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Junk Food® Men's Steel Grey Bengals Throwback Tee
Web exclusive! Get into the game in this casual, vintage-inspired throwback tee, and show your love for those boys in orange, the Bengals!
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- Short-sleeve, crewneck tee with straight-cut hem
- Vintage team name and helmet screen on front
- Throwback tee features sleeve stripes
- Machine washable
- Polyester/cotton/rayon
- Imported
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No Fix No Fee Computer & Laptop Repairs, Newcastle City Centre - Free Estimates & Guaranteed Work!
Based in Haymarket, in the heart of Newcastle upon Tyne City Centre, we have been providing computer support and repair services to customers across the North East for over 10 years. We offer a walk-in service where we can provide a free estimate


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The Global Intelligence Files,
files released so far...
Index pages
by Date of Document
Our Partners
Al Akhbar - Lebanon
Al Masry Al Youm - Egypt
Asia Sentinel - Hong Kong
Bivol - Bulgaria
Carta Capital - Brazil
CIPER - Chile
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La Repubblica - Italy
La Jornada - Mexico
La Nacion - Costa Rica
Malaysia Today - Malaysia
McClatchy - United States
Nawaat - Tunisia
NDR/ARD - Germany
Owni - France
Pagina 12 - Argentina
Philip Dorling - Fairfax media contributor - Australia
Plaza Publica - Guatemala
Publica - Brazil
Publico.es - Spain
Rolling Stone - United States
Russian Reporter - Russia
Ta Nea - Greece
Taraf - Turkey
The Hindu - India
The Yes Men - Bhopal Activists
Sunday Star-Times - New Zealand
Community resources
courage is contagious
The Global Intelligence Files
On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.
Fwd: [OS] BRAZIL/MIL - Brazilian navy plans a fleet of 20 subs, six nuclear powered
Released on 2013-02-13 00:00 GMT
Email-ID | 2054569 |
Date | unspecified |
From | email@example.com |
To | email@example.com |
Monday, November 22nd 2010 - 00:12 UTC
The navya**s three decade procurement plan and its program to develop
submarines estimates the cost of building the first nuclear powered
submarine in 2 billion Euros which already have been earmarked.
The first is always the dearest because of technology transfer and other
capacities costs that must be paid to the French DCNS shipyard. However
the costs of the following subs to be built in Brazil are estimated by the
Brazilian Navy in 550 million US dollars.
President Lula da Silva is scheduled to visit in December the new
facilities at the expanded ItaguA shipyard in Rio do Janeiro that will
become home of the Brazilian submersibles industry, close to the new
submarines base.
Conventional submarines will be built in two lots with a first batch of 15
new ones, of which four of them will be a reformed version of the French
Scorpion with an additional 100 tons displacement and five metres longer.
The other five includes the current five submersibles that will be
The five include four of the so called Tupi class based on German
technology and a Tikuna class, which was developed by the Brazilian navy.
Currently the subs program has an order for four Scoroion under
construction in France, a deal closed in 2008. The first one is scheduled
to be delivered in the second half of 2016 and the rest in the period
extending to 2021.
The Brazilian navy also reported that the Subs Development program means
the integration of different branches.
One of them refers to having control over the whole uranium enrichment
process to be used in the nuclear reactors: the uranium gas apparently is
ready and has begun trials in the town of IperA^3.
An estimated 40 tons annually can be produced once the plant begins full
production next December. Total investment in the plant so far has been
declared at 130 million USD.
Since discovering massive oil deposits offshore making Brazil a global oil
and gas power, the country has been obsessed with protecting its
President Lula da Silva launched an ambitious program to update and equip
the three services, particularly the navy.
Paulo Gregoire


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A trained-architect-turned-photographer-pilot turns his camera on the rooftop lives of New York City, to find pools, gardens, restaurants, and more.
Gardening becomes a way of life for residents of the newly opened Via Verde, a Bronx, N.Y., community built around sustainable principles.
New York-based Dennis Wedlick Architect [DWA] used to be known for crafting finely detailed custom homes in rural locations and creative loft conversions in the urban environment.
Rogers Marvel Architects rehabilitation of McCarren Park Pool sees one of New York's favorite summer institutions open again—and just in time.
Denver, Milan, New York, Norfolk, Tallahassee, Scarborough
As water levels and the risk profiles of major coastal cities rise, new experts are meeting the challenge.
New photos of the winning entrant in the Museum of Modern Art's Young Architects Program show the final details being applied before the public opening this Sunday.
While recent news about The Cooper Union has swirled around the controversy of its new Morphosis building's cost, Dean Tony Vidler maintains that students are much more focused on problems other than that of the school's financial straits.
An ambitious New York firm continues to evolve.
The evolution of Brooklyn, N.Y., design/build firm MADE.


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K945 Is Putting You On The Front Row At The Kelly Clarkson Show [VIDEO]
Keep it on K945 because coming soon, we'll have your chance to be front row at Kelly Clarkson's show
Keep it on K945 because coming soon, we'll have your chance to be front row at Kelly Clarkson's show
The first batch of performers revealed for the 2012 Grammy Awards includes superstars Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson and Nicki Minaj. The Recording Academy announced today that Bruno Mars, Foo Fighters and Jason Aldean will also be taking the stage.
Not a football fan? No worries! This year's Super Bowl has something for everyone, including a performance by Kelly Clarkson!
Keep it on K945 because coming soon, we'll have your chance to be front row at Kelly Clarkson's show
After 'The Voice' mentors shared their choice words about the music industry, their biggest competition voiced their opinions as well. The 'American Idol' team took a dig at the NBC show — while simultaneously saying Kelly Clarkson's guest mentor stint was flattering for their own series.
The gloves are off. With the debut season of 'X Factor' in the rear view, nabbing significantly less viewers than 'American Idol' expat Simon Cowell had hoped, and the 11th season of 'Idol' kicking off Jan. 18 (only to be tailed by 'The Voice'), producers are taking a few verbal swipes at the competition. And why not? 'Idol' has nearly double the viewers of 'X Factor,' due to an 11-year brand.
She's coming to town February 4th at the Horseshoe Riverdome and is stuck in a car with 3 old guys...one with no hair, one with a creepy beard and one that apparently can balance a football on one finger
Remember the sales spike Kelly Clarkson had following her Ron Paul endorsement? It turns out the Republican candidate may not make for 'Stronger' sales. According to Billboard, Clarkson's sales declined following her political tweets.
A demo of the song "Bullet", written by Katy Perry for country songstress Jessie James has been leaked, voiced by Perry herself.
Former "American Idol" champ Kelly Clarkson is taking a lot of flak after announcing her endorsement of Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Monday night, there were plenty of powerhouse artists shining bright as day as VH1′s 'Divas Celebrate Soul' was broadcast on the music network. The event featured the likes of many of today's hottest female vocalists, including Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, Kelly Clarkson and Jessie J, among others.
"SNL"'s hosts for January are set.


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It is already 1:00 a.m. and I have to get up extra early in the morning so this will be short and sweet. Tonight was our last t-ball game of the year. We did not win, but we worked pretty well as a team throughout the game. My Livie will miss her favorite part which is the line where everyone shakes everyone's hand. I love that kid. My Autie will miss her new friends (the younger siblings of other teammates) too. Tom and I are exhausted, relieved and already talking about next year. We work all of the time and t-ball while at times difficult to juggle in terms of scheduling, gave us an escape. We need to find a new one. As a family we spend a lot of time together already, but with t-ball we spent a portion of that time socializing with other families and making new friends... something we do not do enough of.
In the morning I hope to see you at the Old Cheney Road
Farmers Market in Lincoln, NE from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. The weather should be much cooler and I think
that is worth a celebration in itself. I
will have a ton of stuff available: SWEET
CORN, green beans, snap peas, okra, slicing tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and an entire
rainbow of heirloom slicers. I will also
have some eggplant, peppers, onions, Tabouli kits, potatoes and lots of
cucumbers, zucchini, and yellow squash. I
will also have a few blackberries.
If you have not yet said your prayers, pray for rain. As much as I am counting on selling what I bring, we need the rain MORE.
The produce is fresh and ready for you. I hope to see you there!!! Good night...Good morning


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"Why New Construction" Brookwood Estates - FREE! 3 Hour CECathy McDanielWednesday, February 27, 2013 from 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM (EST) |
Who's Going
San Francisco, California
London, United Kingdom
Florence, Italy
Event Details
"Why New Construction"
3 Hour CE Class - FREE!
February 27, 2013
Brookwood Estates - Alpharetta, GA
9:30p.m. - 12:30p.m.
Real estate professionals serve as a trusted advisor to buyers seeking to purchase a home and empower them with information and resources to make the best decision for long term home ownership. Buyers today will examine, score and know the dynamics of their home selection.
The course illustrates over 30 reasons why a consumer should choose new construction over a resale, short sale or a bank owned REO property. In addition we will review the dynamics of financing the new home, builder concessions, down payment assistance, take a preview of the "Home of the Future" and much much more. You will have an opportunity preview the new home model and meet the sales representatives of Brookwood Estates.
Tamra Wade
Team Leader and Sales Manager
Cell 678-859-8671
Allison Cape
Hometown Lenders
1755 North Brown Road, Suite 200
Lawrenceville, GA 30043
Cell 404-444-5375
Office 678-325-2622
Email Event Organizer: email@example.com
When & Where
Bookwood Estates Community
Estates Circle
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 from 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM (EST)
Add to my calendar
Cathy McDaniel
Cathy McDaniel is the author of "A Road Map To Saving Your Home" which is available at the National Association of REALTORS bookshelf. Being in the real estate and mortgage industry since 1993 she opened "My CE Class, LLC" in 2007, a real estate school approved by the Georgia and South Carolina Real Estate Commission. Cathy has conducted over 800 continuing education courses, authored over 75 training manuals and has met and trained over 50,000 real estate professionals throughout 23 states over the last seven years. She is licensed as a continuing education instructor at many real estate boards and associations across the country.
Cathy is recognized as an industry expert in homeownership and received the 2008 Educator of the Year from GREEA, Georgia Real Estate Educators Association. Today she serves and an Real Estate Instructor, Qualifying Broker for Owners 1st Property Management Company, Education Director for Georgia Realty School and has a partnership with Synovus Mortgage Corp. which allows her to offer free classes and community events.
To predict the future you must create it ...Cathy McDaniel
Cathy's Motto: "Autograph Your Work With Excellence!"


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Empire of Exceptions: The Making of Modern Brazil
Brazil may be one of the 21st century's emerging superpowers, but its history is a mystery to many. Gabriel Paquette tells the story of its early years as an independent state.
The Age of Revolutions largely bypassed the Portuguese empire. By 1783 Britain's 13 North American colonies had broken definitively with the mother country; France's wealthy, sugar-producing stronghold of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) descended into political turmoil in 1791; even Spanish America was engulfed by civil unrest after 1808, the year in which Napoleon's armies flooded across the Pyrenees and occupied Spain.
The situation in the Portuguese Atlantic world was different. Portugal's alliance with Great Britain enabled its royal family to escape the French armies and flee to the New World aboard British ships. Portuguese America, modern Brazil, was thus spared the crisis of authority that caused the unravelling of Spain's dominions in the New World. The future João VI (1767-1826), who ruled Portugal as prince regent in place of his mentally infirm mother, Queen Maria, was the first European monarch to set foot in the Americas, in 1808. He quickly endowed Rio de Janeiro with the institutions befitting its new status as interim capital of a global empire, setting up a parallel administration, as well as theatres, royal palaces, a botanical garden and a bevy of government buildings. The Rio of the time was dubbed a 'Tropical Versailles' by the early 20th-century historian Oliveira Lima.
When the royal family disembarked in Brazil they encountered a colonial society in the throes of a great transformation. The extraction of precious metals and diamonds, which had buoyed the economy in the first half of the 18th century, was giving way to a slave-dependent plantation economy based on the culti-vation and export of commodities, particularly sugar, tobacco and cotton. The number of sugar mills in Bahia doubled between 1760 and 1800, while an annual average of 23,500 Africans were brought to Brazil as slaves between 1790 and 1810. Coffee cultivation, still in its infancy, would come to dominate the economy of Brazil's south-east only later.
Before the royal family's arrival there was little vocalised discontent with Brazil's colonial status, let alone open resistance to Portuguese rule. This is perhaps chiefly attributable to the cohesiveness of the ruling elite, conscious of the perils of living in a slave society and fearful of a Haitian-style insurrection. In 1800 Brazil's population was made up of 37 per cent slaves of African origin; 30 per cent free persons of African ancestry or those of mixed racial background (categorised as 'mulatto'); 30 per cent 'white'; and three per cent Amerindian. In such a combustible society elite dissent could produce unintended, revolutionary consequences. It was therefore scrupulously avoided.
But there was also a second reason for the absence of revolution: with the notable exception of the period 1750-80, dominated by Portugal's iron-fisted first minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal, there had been little effort to centralise authority, thus leaving local elites with ample autonomy, considerable leeway to conduct their own affairs and few reasons to resent metropolitan meddling. The Brazilian viceroy, for example, wielded much less power than his Spanish counterpart. Furthermore the vast physical distances between population centres, hostile topography and climate and sparse infrastructure made local autonomy inevitable. There were also conscious attempts, especially in the final third of the 18th century, to create a transatlantic governing elite. Unlike in Spanish America, where American-born creoles were systematically excluded from consideration for the plum official appointments, Brazilian elites were consciously co-opted by the Portuguese metropole. They routinely sent their children to study at the University of Coimbra in Portugal to be groomed for positions in the imperial bureaucracy, from Goa to Luanda to São Paulo. Discontent was not altogether absent, but the combination of geography, fear of slave revolts and conciliatory policy defused tensions.
Yet the political ideas that inflamed the rest of the Atlantic world eventually reached Brazil's shores and permeated its political culture. The most famous conspiracy, which was nipped in the bud, took place in the south-western province of Minas Gerais in the late 1780s. This Inconfidência Mineira (Minas Conspiracy) was animated by republican ideas. More alarming was the 1798 Tailors' Revolt in Bahia in the north-east, when mulatto soldiers and artisans conspired according to the principles of the Haitian and French revolutions. They called for independence, the declaration of a republic based on electoral democracy, the abolition of slavery and full equality between blacks and whites. But neither the Minas Conspiracy nor the Tailors' Revolt produced widespread upheaval.
In such a dangerous world the presence of the royal family in Rio de Janeiro came to be viewed as a powerful buttress to the existing social, economic and political order, a defence against the chaos enveloping Brazil's Spanish-American neighbours. Political stability was deemed the indispensable precondition of economic prosperity. Brazil exploited the dislocation caused by imperial crisis elsewhere. The collapse of Haitian sugar exports, for example, breathed fresh life into the Brazilian sugar industry. By 1805 Brazilian sugar accounted for 15 per cent of world output, well above its earlier level.
The transfer of the court was supposed to be a war-time measure, but with the defeat of Napoleon, the restoration of deposed kings to their old thrones and the coming of a general peace in 1815 João showed little inclination to return to Portugal, which had been ravaged by war. Its size and prosperity were vastly inferior compared to Brazil. Some argued that the court should reside permanently in the Americas, with Rio de Janeiro as the new centre of a revamped empire. Such an arrangement would have reflected not only Brazil's economic might and Portugal's strategic vulnerability (as the French invasion had shown), but also the burgeoning slave trade, conducted between Brazil and Portuguese coastal enclaves in West Africa, chiefly though not exclusively from what is now Angola.
Dispassionate analysis was not the only consideration in play. Self-interest was intimately involved in such counsel, as the return of the court would have dissipated the parallel capital in Rio de Janeiro and reduced Brazil again to the status of a colony. Yet not everyone was enamoured of the crown's decision to tarry. Many resented the maintenance of a large, opulent court, for both fiscal and ideological reasons. Provincial elites, long-accustomed to a modicum of self-government (or at least benign neglect), became increasingly alarmed by the unabashedly centralising tendencies of Rio de Janeiro. In 1817 a revolt imbued with republican ideas broke out in Recife, Pernambuco. But it was soon crushed and the court showed few signs of returning to the Old World.
The worst fears of Portugal's elite, eagerly awaiting the return of Lisbon's pre-eminence, were confirmed when João raised Brazil to the status of a kingdom, not merely an overseas dominion or colony, co-equal with Portugal. In 1808, as prince regent, he had thrown open the ports and markets of Brazil to merchants of all nations. These free trade decrees had deprived Portuguese merchants of their long-held, lucrative monopoly over Brazilian commerce. It stripped Lisbon and Porto of their cherished position as entrepôts for the re-export of Brazilian commodities to the markets of northern Europe.
In 1820 a liberal revolution erupted in Portugal that sought to establish a constitutional monarchy with Lisbon at its centre. Though João, by then king, was compelled to return to Europe, he left his son and heir, Pedro (1798-1834) behind to serve as a counterweight to any political conspiracies. When the liberal Cortes (parliament) demanded the prince's return as well, Pedro refused and, following a complicated series of events, declared Brazil independent, an act that probably had his father's blessing. Pedro thus fashioned himself into the monarch of an independent Brazilian empire. His swift action was prompted not only by disdain for the insolent demands of the Portuguese liberals, but in order to pre-empt revolution. By opting for monarchy, retaining the same European dynasty on the throne and calling their new polity an 'empire', Pedro and his supporters guaranteed that Brazil's future would diverge sharply from that of its republican neighbours.
Not all regions were satisfied with Pedro's solution. Throughout the colonial period, the northern provinces of Maranhão and Pará had maintained closer relations with Lisbon than with the rest of Brazil due to their greater geographical proximity and their large Portuguese-born merchant communities. Moreover, in northeastern provinces like Pernambuco and Bahia, whose economic halcyon days were long over, the political ascendancy of Rio de Janeiro, where its centralising pretensions combined with the economic efflorescence of the south-eastern provinces in general, caused consternation. There were half-hearted attempts to resist a union with Rio de Janeiro and instead retain a link with Portugal. But the derelict former metropole was in no position to pursue such a course of action with conviction and a vague desire for independence gathered momentum.
Even those Brazilians who welcomed independence were unenthused by its high price: the survival of monarchy and the retention of the ruling Braganza dynasty proved distasteful. The recent precedent of the republican revolutions, from Boston to Buenos Aires, was their preferred model for political change. The stage was set for a showdown between Pedro and the provincial elites of Brazil's north and north-east. The suspicions of republicans, liberals and proponents of regional autonomy were confirmed when Pedro dissolved the assembly convened to draft a new constitution and issued one of his own in 1824. This 'gift from the throne' was explicitly anti-federalist and put in place the legal architecture of the central government's dominance over the provinces.
The period between 1824 and 1840 was one in which the political settlement of Brazilian independence was incessantly challenged. That settlement was marked by the apparent (though tenuous) triumph of monarchism over republicanism, of territorial integrity and a centralised administration over dispersed power and provincial autonomy and of the expansion of a slave-reliant economy over free (or at least less coercive) labour regimes. When Brazilian independence was declared the destruction of the old regime was incomplete, perhaps not even yet underway. Independence became decoupled from the dismemberment of the colonial system. In fact independence, with its illusion of change, neutralised such efforts, depriving Brazil of the opportunity to convert the transition from colony to nation into a revolutionary overhaul of politics, society and economy.
The first reaction against Pedro's high-handed tactics came from Pernambuco, where a segment of its elite rejected the swapping of one master in Lisbon for another in Rio de Janeiro. In 1824 they formed a 'Confederation of the Equator'. Often depicted as a secessionist movement seeking to establish an independent republic, the Confederation's aims were at once more moderate and more radical than that. Its president called for the obliteration of the oligarchical institutions of old Europe and for the creation of a federal Brazil, one in which the provinces retained autonomy. They wanted local control over taxation, education and public works. In short they wanted devolution in the context of a moderate revolution. Decentralised constitutional government was their goal.
Perhaps the Confederation's most influential voice belonged to Frei Caneca (1779-1825), the editor of the newspaper Typhis Pernambucano. He argued that Pedro had usurped Brazil's independence, implanting tyranny where freedom should have prevailed. He contended that each former province of Portugal's empire retained and exercised sovereignty until it submitted voluntarily to a mutually beneficial union with the other provinces. He rejected the notion of a primordial union and disputed Rio de Janeiro's claim to be its natural centre. He regarded it as merely one among many equal and independent states, none of which possessed the right to dictate to any other. Though the Confederation controlled the north-eastern city of Recife and inspired copy-cat, sympathetic and loosely allied rebel governments in other neighbouring provinces, the imperial armed forces soon prevailed. Most of the local elite were pardoned for their insurrection, though little clemency was displayed toward less-connected, more pugnacious, unapologetically outspoken men like Frei Caneca, who was executed.
Pedro's imperial system escaped relatively unscathed from the Confederation's direct challenge to his authority, but the remainder of his reign was beset by difficulties. Pedro's Portuguese heritage and that of his coterie of advisers fanned the flames of nativist disgust. But his problems went deeper than that. Drought devastated the north-east in 1824-25 (and for four years in a row from 1830). Such natural scarcity was compounded by inflation, as price levels rose precipitously, hurting urban wage-earners. Furthermore the Brazilian army was bogged down in an ultimately futile and bloody war with Argentina, a struggle that culminated in the creation of the independent buffer-state Uruguay in 1825. The financial strain of this war was serious: it exhausted the treasury and forced the nascent imperial government to assume a sizeable external debt.
In 1831 Pedro was forced to abdicate in favour of his five-year-old son, also named Pedro, and embarked for exile in Europe. The child-emperor was not ready, of course, to assume the reins of state. The remaining senators and government ministers filled the power vacuum. They created a three-man Regency to govern on an interim basis until Pedro II (1825-91) reached majority. The Regency's executive power, however, was severely diminished, as the legislature exploited the crisis to appropriate power for itself. But Brazil did not become a republic. There were many reasons why Brazil remained a monarchy in 1831, in spite of pervasive disapproval of the new monarch; perhaps the most important factor was the fear that a slave-based society could not survive without a unifying institution of sufficient stature.
Pedro I's abdication in 1831 was greeted with anti-Portuguese riots; Portuguese-owned inns, houses and stores were attacked, accompanied by the ubiquitous cry of 'mata-marotos' (kill the rascals!). Yet the new political leadership wanted a different sort of monarchy, not just indiscriminate blood-letting. They amended the constitution significantly in order to decentralise power and involve more of the citizenry in the political process. An 'Additional Act' of the constitution was passed. It replaced the weak provincial councils decried by Frei Caneca and others with provincial assemblies endowed with substantial prerogatives, including municipal policing and the right to levy as well as to collect certain taxes. Perhaps the most important change was the decision taken in 1831 to weaken the national army, long considered a retrograde bastion of Portuguese power, and create instead a national guard under the control of provincial authorities.
The Regency that lasted from 1831 until 1840 was one of the most turbulent periods of Brazilian history, characterised by rebellions, revolts and conspiracies of all kinds. Though they were exceptionally numerous, it may be argued that it was the major ones of the early and mid-1830s that most decisively shaped Brazil's future trajectory. Until recently these movements of defiance were either dismissed as an inconsequential provincial affair, depicted as a political struggle between regional elites and Rio de Janeiro, or as bickering among the regional elites themselves. Now historians call attention to their social aspects, especially to the active participation of slaves, lower classes, free people of colour and Indians. This last aspect deserves emphasis, but the regional-central government dynamic of these conflicts also merits detailed consideration.
Ignominious abdication aside, Pedro did not lack friends in Brazil, many of whom, until his premature death in 1834, entertained far-fetched fantasies of a restoration. Such support percolated not only at the elite level but also among the more modest classes. As news of his abdication spread and the military reforms gathered pace there were urban uprisings led by disgruntled troops in Bahia, Pernambuco and Minas Gerais. In rural Pernambuco planters fomented a rebellion, mobilising peasants who were uneasy with the land encroachment of the period. Even when elites withdrew their support, frightened by the revolt's social revolutionary turn, the peasant movement continued. This latter group of people became known as Cabanos, after the humble forest huts or shacks in which they lived. Cabanos, of course, was a derogatory term, with negative connotations of backwardness and poverty. By 1832 the War of the Cabanos, or Cabanada, was raging. A force composed of Indians, runaway slaves and other discontents coalesced around the charismatic figure of Vicente de Paula (1792-1840), a former sergeant in the now-disbanded colonial militia, who assumed the rather grandiose title of General of the Royalist Forces. Paula claimed that the Regency had 'usurped' young Pedro's throne, thus legitimising its struggle against the 'Jacobins' of Rio de Janeiro, manipulating the constitution to pursue their personal ambitions and advance their material interests.
The attachment of the rural poor to royalism, it must be emphasised, was not due to any sentimental or ideological feeling. Rather their interests had suffered a severe blow following Pedro's abdication. The royal monopoly over the forests was repealed, effectively removing their legal protection and facilitating the seizure of vast swathes of land by the local gentry. The frontier zone between the provinces of Pernambuco and Alagoas became the centre of the struggle. It was here that land ideal for sugar cane cultivation remained relatively untapped. Local landlords raised and commanded troops with which to evict peasants and Jacuípe Indians from the coveted lands. These then joined together to oppose the landlords. At the height of the conflict (1833-34) this unlikely multi-ethnic alliance of slaves, peasants and Indians formed a formidable fighting force. With the blessing of the central government, however, a 'scorched earth' policy was adopted, as landlords utilised the newly-formed national guard to conduct counter-insurgency operations to starve the Cabanos out of the forests. This tactic worked, with tragic consequences.
The brutal repression of Pernambuco's Cabanos presaged not the end
of popular resistance but its beginning. Far from Rio de Janeiro, where the state's tentacles were weakest, discontent continued to boil. Around the northern city of Belém in the province of Pará a serious threat to the integrity of the empire erupted from the ranks of poor, cabana-dwelling people eking out a precarious existence on the margins of urban life. The revolt is known as the Cabanagem, not a term that was used by its participants.
The Cabanagem is unique because the rebels (twice) seized the provincial capital. It began in January 1835 with an amphibious invasion of Belém. The Cabanos emptied the prisons and fomented native violence. They executed the provincial president and held the city for several months before they retreated as imperial troops, despatched from Rio de Janeiro, advanced. When they retook Belém under the leadership of a 19-year-old landowner, Eduardo Angelim, the fifth Cabano president, they controlled the city for nine months. Angelim contended that 'the Paraenses are not rebels'; rather, he argued, 'they sought to become citizens', to be 'governed by the rule of law and not arbitrary judgments'. The leaders of the Cabanagem were members of the regional elite who believed that provincial presidents should be nominated from within Pará rather than imposed by fiat from Rio de Janeiro. They did not push for the disintegration of Brazil but sought the end of government by a distant power. The political language they used was that of mainstream liberalism.
As the Cabanagem's most recent historian, Mark Harris, has noted, it is curious that a movement guided by such principles came to be represented in Brazilian history as one inspired chiefly by 'race hate', bent on smashing Brazil's territorial integrity. Harris argues that the propaganda techniques deployed to discredit the Cabanagem and justify its brutal suppression played a role. To crush it the Regency sent Marshal Francisco José de Soares de Andréa, a brutal specialist in counter-insurgency who led regular troops as well as those recruited heavily from the prisons, pardoning crimes in exchange for enlistment. The Cabanos eventually ran out of gunpowder and again were forced to abandon Belém. They were hounded by Andrea's army. Suspending all constitutional guarantees, Andrea assumed the post of provincial president. He made no secret of his ambitions, declaring that 'the state of war gives us the authority to attack the enemy on all fronts until we have annihilated them'. The toll on civilians was ghastly: up to 30,000 deaths from a population of 120,000.
As the Cabanagem raged unabated, a further revolt occurred in Salvador da Bahia in the north-east. A rebellion of African-born Muslim slaves, or Malês, began in January 1835. The perceived danger was plain in the context of Salvador's demography, where slaves made up 42 per cent of the population. The revolt was not unprecedented: various slave uprisings had flared up periodically across Brazil in the three previous decades. Yet all of these were snuffed out before igniting a larger conflagration. These uprisings, however, had prompted a renewed tightening of the restrictions on slave behaviour: for example, non-Christian religious practice had been made illegal. For this reason, as the historian João José Reis has noted, religion and rebellion were inseparable. Still, though Islam played an instrumental role in the revolt, Reis rejects the notion that the rebellion of the Malês was a jihad in any meaningful sense. One interesting aspect of the revolt, however, was that it was envisaged solely for the benefit of African-born slaves. Not only were whites, whether slave-owners and impoverished labourers, marked for slaughter, but 'mulattos' and Brazilian-born blacks, both enslaved and free, were also to be put to the sword.
The repression of the Malês was spectacularly brutal: beyond the 70 participants killed during the revolt itself, in the aftermath 500 were sentenced either to death, severe corporal punishment (whipping), new forms of forced labour (chain gangs), prison or deportation. Brutal suppression, intended as a deterrent, did not bring the tumult afflicting the regency to a close. There was further large-scale defiance of central authority throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s: the 1837 Sabinada in Bahia; the Balaiada, which convulsed the northern provinces of Maranhão and Piauí between 1838 and 1841; and in the provinces of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, the war of the Farroupos (Ragamuffins), the so-called Farroupilha, raged from 1835 until 1845.
But the political tide had turned irreversibly against rebellion and 'disorder'. Conservatives, weary of the incessant tumult threatening social revolution, believed that robust, centralised authority was the sole antidote to it. They convinced the electorate of their views in the late 1830s in a political movement known as the Regresso. As Jeffrey Mosher has argued: 'The upheavals of the Regency discredited the liberal reforms that decentralised power and provided for greater popular participation.' Conservatives would aim to insulate power from local politics. Much of the 'Additional Act', which had given the provinces greater autonomy, was nullified, suspended or repealed. The imperial army was expanded and improved, no longer playing second fiddle to the national guard. Thereafter local officials were not representatives of the local population, but rather servants of the imperial government. The criminal procedure code was overhauled and local judicial officials (judges and prosecutors) were henceforth appointed from Rio de Janeiro. The central government's oversight now extended to every municipality and province of the empire.
Support for these new policies gained further momentum when Pedro II's majority was acclaimed in 1840, when he was not yet 15 years old, three years before it had been scheduled. The young emperor made several conciliatory gestures at the outset of his reign, including the unconditional pardon of all rebels who surrendered within 60 days. To the unrestrained might of the imperial army was now joined the symbolic soft power of monarchy to pacify Brazil. Traditional rituals of court ceremony were revived, including the Beija-Mão, or hand-kissing ceremony, which had fallen into abeyance. Larger-than-life-sized portraits of the young emperor were installed in all of the presidential palaces, assemblies and town halls in the provinces. The Regresso had seen off the threat of social revolution: more Africans were imported into Brazil as slaves in the 1840s than in any previous decade save the 1820s. There would be several revolts in the 1840s, but these were largely elite-led affairs. Brazil's future trajectory, at least until the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the toppling of the monarchy a year later, had been determined by the repression of the provincial rebellions, slave revolts and political conspiracies of the Regency.


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fright; fear, the twenty-fifth station of the Israelites in their wanderings ( Numbers 33:24 ).
well of great fear
(fear ), a desert station of the Israelites, ( Numbers 33:24 Numbers 33:25 ) its position is uncertain.
ha-ra'-da, har'-a-da (charadhah, "fearful"):
A desert station of the Israelites between Mt. Shepher and Makheloth (Numbers 33:24:25).
See WANDERINGS OF ISRAEL.
Copyright Statement These files are public domain. Bibliography Information |


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Beaver Lake's top 10 patterns
ROGERS, Ark. - All week long, North Carolina pro Matt Arey has been dialed in on Beaver Lake's first wave of bass transitioning from prespawn to the spawn. And in the end, no one could keep up with his consistency. Arey won the Walmart FLW Tour Beaver Lake event presented by Rayovac and hosted by Visit Arkansas with a four-day total of 59 pounds, 3 ounces.
You can read the full story of Arey's win here.
Here's a rundown of how the rest of the top 10 found success at Beaver Lake.
2nd place – Andy Morgan – 57 pounds, 10 ounces
This week, reigning Kellogg's Angler of the Year Andy Morgan notched his 27th top-10 finish in Walmart FLW Tour competition – tied for the most ever. He did it in typical Andy Morgan fashion: by fishing by the seat of his pants and adapting to the conditions each day. Morgan brought in a day-four limit that weighed 16 pounds, 8 ounces.
According to Morgan, the unique skillset he possesses that allows him to consistently stay on the tail of bass when conditions are in flux comes from his early days of FLW competition at the BFL level, when he often fished one-day tournaments without any practice.
This week, Morgan more or less treated each day as a separate mini-tournament.
"It's all about the conditions, no doubt," he said. "I just covered a lot of water. They kept loading up on my spots. Each day a few would pull up, and they were catchable."
Morgan fished everything from straight "nothing banks" to pea-gravel points to isolated rock and wood cover. The best spots were being pounded by the wind so hard that the waves splashing over the bow soaked Morgan's shoes.
"Everything I caught was in less than 7 feet of water," he said. "A Wiggle Wart was my main lure."
Currently, Morgan leads the 2014 Walmart FLW Tour Kellogg's Angler of the Year race. He's got a solid shot at being the back-to-back AOY champion.
"It's just flowing well," Morgan said about his recent success. "I don't know how to explain it. Today I had like 9 pounds with 20 minutes left and I caught two big ones."
3rd place – David Dudley – 54 pounds, 14 ounces
Castrol pro David Dudley brought in the biggest limit of the week on the final day – 16 pounds, 9 ounces – thanks to a freak 5-pounder that he somehow managed to catch after pitching over a boat dock chain with spinning tackle.
Dudley relied on typical Ozark staples: a jerkbait, Wiggle Wart and shaky head. He was targeting a particular type of rocky bank on the main lake but also caught a few fish the final day from boat docks. He stayed within the 8- to 10-foot-deep range.
The keys for Dudley this week were fishing the wind and adjusting to the conditions each day.
"The great thing about this lake is it's so full of fish," Dudley said. "It's funny how much the weather can affect them. Andy [Morgan] and I were talking about it earlier. I feel like there are fish down there seeing the bait on every cast, and then the wind blows and they start biting.
"My adjustment today was staying in the area longer," Dudley added. "I was running around too much [earlier in the week]."
4th place – Travis Fox – 54 pounds, 8 ounces
Local pro Travis Fox made a lot of noise on the final two days at Beaver Lake. He fought into the top 10 on day three with a solid limit anchored by a 6-pounder. Then on Sunday, Fox caught 15 pounds, 15 ounces. Unfortunately, a few of his bites today were light, and the fish failed to hook up.
"I lost three really good fish, and it probably cost me the tournament," Fox said. "But there was nothing I could do about any of those fish. It wasn't my fault."
Fox weighed almost all largemouths, and every one came from the dirty water up the White River. Each day he got five to seven keeper bites.
Fox targeted subtle underwater structure, though he was a bit tight-lipped about the specifics. He did say that there was gravel up shallow in each area, and many of his fish were caught around brush and logs. His best spot today reached out into a river bend where it was swept by current.
The key was in the approach. Fox combed long stretches of wood cover with a white spinnerbait. When he came to the best spots, he made repeated casts with the spinnerbait and a Reaction Innovations Sweet Beaver. Some of his fish required seven or eight casts, suggesting that they might be setting up on beds.
5th place – Casey Ashley – 53 pounds, 2 ounces
It's been a strong season for South Carolina pro Casey Ashley and his bid to qualify for both the 2014 Forrest Wood Cup and 2015 Bassmaster Classic, which will both be held in his home state. Ashley won stop No. 2 at Lake Hartwell, and this week in his first-ever tournament on Beaver Lake, Ashley finished fifth. His final-day limit weighed 16 pounds.
Ashley spent most of his week at the far upper end of Beaver Lake in the reservoir's clearest water by fishing a Keitech 3.8 swimbait rigged on a 5/16-ounce jighead and a Zoom Trick Worm rigged on a shaky head.
"[Today] I went down to the clear water and threw a swimbait," Ashley said. "I caught a 3-pound smallmouth but only caught a small limit. I had that by 12:30.
"Then I came back up the lake and started covering water," he added. "I tied on that silly Wiggle Wart that everybody catches them on, and I tell you what, they love it. I caught a 5, a 3 and another about 2 1/2. I should have done that all day. Those fish in that clear water just wouldn't bite."
This week, Ashley targeted "flatter" banks with scattered rock that tapered out and ran into steep drop-offs. He caught his fish by holding the boat in 15 to 20 feet and bombing the swimbait toward the bank. A slow-rolled presentation near bottom but not on bottom was a spotted bass and smallmouth killer.
6th place – Micah Frazier – 52 pounds, 7 ounces
Micah Frazier bet on Beaver Lake's smallmouth bass this week, and they came up just a bit short for the 25-year-old Georgia pro. He brought in 14 pounds, 4 ounces today for his first top-10 finish of the year and the second of his career.
Frazier caught most of his fish – including all five of his keeper smallmouths on Sunday – with a Keitech swimbait fished on a 1/4-ounce jighead with light spinning tackle.
"I was fishing it really slow, but keeping it moving," Frazier said.
The technique is similar to what Casey Ashley was doing, as well as several other pros who made the top-20 cut this week. His other tool was a soft-plastic grub, which produced several keepers earlier in the week.
Frazier applied the subtle moving lures to water ranging from 5 to 30 feet deep. All were transitional areas, but that included a variety of structural targets: 45-degree banks, transitions from bluffs to flat banks, pea gravel and chunk rock.
He stayed in clearer parts of Beaver spanning from the dam at the north end back to the middle part of the lake.
"I said this morning that I was going to go catch some big smallmouths," Frazier said. "I went down to the dam where I'd caught them before, but it didn't happen. I gave up at about 11 and came back to where I'd been catching some spots. The big smallmouths had shown up."
7th place – Troy Morrow – 52 pounds, 0 ounces
Georgia pro Troy Morrow cranked his way into the top 10 by relying almost exclusively on a Storm Original Wiggle Wart – the vintage model only, of course – to target bass preying heavily on crawfish. His go-to Wiggle Wart was custom-painted in green pumpkin phantom by Xtreme Lure Creations. Morrow caught a day-four limit of 12 pounds, 11 ounces.
"I mainly fished two creeks," Morrow said. "They're the only two that are in slightly colored water that are flat. All the others that are slightly flat don't have that same color of water, except Prairie Creek [a common community hole that was heavily pressured this week]."
Today, Morrow culled so often that he threw back three limits of fish. He experienced two flurries – one in the morning and a second in the afternoon. In between, he realized that he had a minor equipment malfunction. He'd cranked his favorite Wiggle Wart so hard and fast into the rocks that the bill wore down and the lure wasn't reaching bottom. When he changed to a new one, the fish started snapping.
Throughout the tournament, Morrow learned more and more about his go-to creeks and eventually was able to narrow them down to the best individual points. This allowed him to fish the areas more efficiently during the weekend.
8th place – Scott Martin – 48 pounds, 14 ounces
Evinrude pro Scott Martin was in on the clear-water bite in the lower end of Beaver Lake this week. He made adjustments each day by running new water and fishing based on the wind. According to Martin, it was "first-class junk-fishing."
"I was looking for those transitional areas leading into spawning pockets, especially for largemouths," he said. "The largemouths were setting up on ledge rock leading back into the creeks. Each creek was good for one largemouth. I probably should have made an adjustment and run up the river. I knew some of those guys [fishing up the river] were going to catch them, but in conditions like we had today you can catch big ones down in that clear water."
Martin's best banks had a mix of pea gravel and chunk rock. They were connected to steep drop-offs – the ledge rock he referenced – and sweetened with laydowns.
Four lures produced for the Florida pro this week: a River2Sea square-bill crankbait, a Keitech swimbait, a Bruiser Baits finesse worm and a football jig rigged with a Bruiser Baits twin-tail trailer.
9th place – Cody Meyer – 48 pounds, 13 ounces
Repel pro Cody Meyer was a favorite coming into this event because of his world-class skills at catching spotted bass. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to track down a big bite all week and couldn't keep up with the pros bringing in kicker smallmouths and largemouths. Meyer's weights decreased each day, culminating in a final limit of 10 pounds, 11 ounces.
"I caught a lot of fish today – a ton of fish – but no size," Meyer said. "I never missed one, but I never caught one. I tried to fish a lot of areas."
Meyer lived up to his reputation as a finesse fisherman this week by catching most of his fish with a drop-shot Jackall Flick Shake worm. Today, however, he tried to capitalize on the windy conditions by changing to a swimbait, jerkbait and crankbait.
He fished from the Rocky Branch area to the dam all week. On the qualifying days, Meyer targeted pea gravel points on the main lake where smallmouths and spotted bass were staging near spawning areas. He moved to the backs of creeks on the weekend due to the continually rising water temperature, which he believed was pulling his fish out of the deep water.
"It seemed like the fish were moving back, but it was just little ones," Meyer added.
10th place – Mark Rose – 46 pounds, 11 ounces
Walmart pro Mark Rose accomplished two important goals this week: He cashed an impressive paycheck on Beaver Lake, and he moved into fourth place in the Walmart FLW Tour Angler of the Year standings heading into a two-tournament stretch on the Tennessee River, where Rose has won more money in the last five or so seasons than anyone else in professional fishing.
This week, Rose worked his way to the top 10 by fishing Beaver Lake's clear lower end with a small swimbait, grubs and a Strike King shaky head.
"I was fishing points with deep water close to them," he said. "The smallmouths were starting to pull up on a flat down there, and I had a few spots where they were moving up. I caught a lot of fish, but nothing over 3 pounds."
In a final-day quest for 4-pounders that could help Rose climb out of 10th place, he grabbed a quick early limit in Prairie Creek then ran upriver to dirty water and flipped wood cover with a jig. He never got the big bite and finished the day with 10 pounds, 7 ounces.
"That's competition. Sometimes you have got to change it up and try something different if you want to win," Rose said. "But honestly, I think I should have stuck with what I had been doing."
Full Results
For the full results, click here.


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