Commentary

Tanea Renee, the star of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” says she had some guiding principles in preparing for the role of Billie Holiday, who’s life and career is the subject of the play. “I decided not to focus on the fact that she was an icon,” Renee told me. “I focused on what we have in common as a woman and an artist,” said the Baltimore native, who has moved back after more than a decade living in New York.

Ashkelon, the Baltimore Jewish community’s sister city in Israel, sits just 8 miles north of the Gaza Strip, and the relentless rocket attacks of Hamas’ latest and deadliest terror campaign are far from the first to hit the coastal community. Two years ago, a rocket landed in Sigal Ariely’s living room and destroyed her home while she took cover in a bomb shelter.

It is one of the hardest decisions that elected officials charged with running an historic city must make: when to protect an old building and when to let an owner destroy it. The calls are almost always close ones. Perfectly preserved buildings are easy to protect. The ones that have been badly damaged and no longer being used for their original purpose, which now may be unneeded and unwanted by the owner, present a tougher question.

Every so often we’re confronted with the stark realization of all that the COVID pandemic deprived us of — the experiences we were denied, the friendships that were deferred, the opportunities to connect with others in meaningful ways to share mutual interests and passions. The inability to revel in the enjoyment of our Baltimore’s rich artistic and cultural assets was a particular burden for our community, and those local creatives, artists and cultural institutions that make our lives so much better, so much fuller.

The Annapolis Sailboat Show takes place this week on City Dock, and I’ll make an assumption about most of the people who plan to attend: They will not expect to see a boat that comes in a couple of bags. They will expect something conventional — boats that weigh 8,000 pounds or more, that come on trailers and sit in marinas. Most show-goers will not expect to see a sailboat that inflates and assembles in less than an hour — actually, less than half an hour, once you get the hang of it and don’t waste time gabbing with a newspaper columnist.

Benjamin Cardin, Maryland’s senior U.S. senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he expects aggressive retaliation by Israel against Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip following the deadly surprise attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis over the weekend. In an interview Monday, the Democratic senator, long engaged in foreign affairs and U.S.-Israel relations, expressed outrage at the killing of civilians and predicted Israeli solidarity in response to the attacks.

Whatever our differences with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and they are considerable — there was no reasonable justification for the surprise attack launched Saturday from the Gaza Strip against the Jewish homeland. More than 700 Israelis have been confirmed dead, and thousands more have been wounded in the brutal and coordinated strike by the Islamist militant group Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory wedged between Israel and Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea.

With the slavery debate raging, Thomas Smallwood, a free Black shoemaker living in the 19th-century borderlands between the North and South, had a mission: free as many enslaved people as possible and rub their former enslavers’ faces in his success. In an 1842 dispatch to a New York newspaper, he noted that a slaveholder’s “walking property walked off.”