Today is Sunday, June 1, 2025. I was indeed missing in action yesterday, as I was watching some films that I started a day earlier but never finished. One of those films was Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, released in 2024. Leigh is noted for a number of films like Secrets and Lies exploring the human condition through nuanced, naturalistic characters. This latest from him is not any different. It stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a woman experiencing bouts of depression and fits of anger, directed toward loved ones as well as complete strangers. It’s not too clear as to why Pansy, played by Jean-Baptiste, is that way other than her making an admission that her mother favored her younger sister, Chantelle, and that she feels that everyone hates her.

The second film I finished yesterday was from 2023: To Catch a Killer starring Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn as two people brought together in an FBI investigation of a shocking New Year’s Eve rash of killings in Baltimore. Under the explosive booms of fireworks on that night, 29 people are shot and killed, without pattern, leaving the investigative team in the dark, grasping at paper-thin straws of evidence. Woodley plays Eleanor Falco, a police officer who is at the scene of the horrible killings. Mendelsohn plays FBI investigator Geoffrey Lammark who recruits Falco as his teammate on the burgeoning investigation of the mass murders. This movie was quite different from the earlier one that didn’t rely on sensational violence to tell its tale of human misery.

Today a violent antisemitic attack occurred in Boulder, Colorado, in which a man set at least six elderly Jewish people on fire during a Boulder Run for Their Lives event, a weekly gathering of Jewish community members meant to support the hostages taken during the October 7 attacks in Israel in 2023. The suspect, an Egyptian, allegedly used a flamethrower and yelled “Free Palestine” moments before launching the terrible attack. This incident came less than two weeks after two Israeli Embassy staffers were shot and killed in Washington, D.C., by a lone gunman who yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis condemned the attack in Boulder that left at least six injured today. He was interviewed for an online CNN article by Michelle Watson entitled “Gov. Polis condemns the ‘heinous’ attack in Boulder that left six injured.” Polis said, “As the Jewish community reels from the recent antisemitic murders in Washington, D.C., it is unfathomable that the community is facing another antisemitic attack here in Boulder, on the eve of the holiday of Shavuot.”

What’s interesting about Polis is that he’s Jewish and got married to his longtime partner in a traditional Jewish ceremony in 2021.

It’s incidents such as this one and the one in Washington, D.C., that has frazzled many Jewish Americans who feel that they are being unfairly targeted for these abominable terroristic attacks just because of their Jewish faith. There are many residents of Israel who do not support the current prime minister’s war in Gaza. However, this reality is lost on these assailants who mistakenly lump everyone together just because they identify themselves as being Jewish. It’s a very unsettling time to be living here after the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel more than two years ago. Let’s see if this president actually comes out and condemns the violence without hesitation witnessed in Boulder, Colorado, today. I wouldn’t hold my breath!

Have a good week.

By the way, tomorrow I’m going for my first shingles vaccine at 2:30 at a local CVS. This is a two-shot dosage series, with the second shot administered 2 to 6 months after the first shot. Let’s hope there are no side effects to this inoculation.

And so it went!

This is Saint Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church, located on 6th Avenue, in Park Slope. I drove myself to a new bookstore in Park Slope called Troubled Sleep, located on 6th Avenue, and this is the church standing across from the bookstore.

Here is another view of that dazzling structure.