On Tour

Saturday, March 15, 2025

Turning the tables on us Jewish gourmands, China is experiencing a bagel boom.  https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/14/travel/video/bagel-expensive-beijing-china-digvid?cid=ios_app

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Old Town Albuquerque encompasses about 10 blocks of adobe buildings, dating from 1706. Today, most of them seem to be either souvenir shops, cafés or jewelry stores, but, externally, they reflect their historic origins. The area is less than half a mile from our hotel, an easy walk. The Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain Road NW, is also immediately adjacent to it. I sat very comfortably in the museum's lobby while madam visited the collection.

Also adjacent to Old Town is Sawmill Market, 1909 Bellamah Avenue NW, formerly a lumberyard founded in 1903. It was repurposed as an urban marketplace in 2019, now containing more than two dozen food and beverage establishments, sushi, pizza, hamburgers, churros, beers, fish & chips, pastries, coffee, falafel, smoothies, poke, soft serve, tacos, chicken wings — you get it. It was hard for me to leave the premises.

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For dinner, we walked less than two blocks to D.H. Lescombes Winery & Bistro, 901 Rio Grande Boulevard NW, an enterprise rooted in a family winemaking business that moved from Algeria to Burgundy to New Mexico. The big room has a semi-rustic feel, oak casks are scattered throughout and cabinets of wine and large photographs of vineyards are on the walls.

The food was particularly good and well-priced. We shared a large roasted beet salad, “mixed greens + red & golden beets + goat cheese + mesilla valley sweet & spicy pecans + crispy parsnip shavings + pecan vinaigrette” ($14). Madam had grilled Norwegian salmon with “seasonal vegetables + jasmine rice + grilled lemon” ($22). I had steak frites, “8 oz sirloin + certified angus beef + lescombes seasoning + thin-cut fries + roasted garlic aioli + ketchup” ($25). We enjoyed the wines as well, she a hefty 9 oz. pour of Chardonnay ($18) and me a flight of Lescombes sparkling wines, Heritage Brut, Heritage Imperial Kit, Heritage Bellissimo ($12, a steal). Dessert was unnecessary.

Sunday, March 16, 2025

This morning, we visited the New M***** Museum of Natural History & Science, 1801 Mountain Road NW, which houses a formidable collection of fossils, making me feel right at home. This is a major league operation, probably threatened by the winds of political change. Evolution and climate change are emphasized in many of the exhibits and text is usually bilingual. 

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We returned to Sawmill Market for lunch. I had a Bang Bang Chicken Sandwich from Outlaw Chicken, big chunks of pretzel-coated fried chicken with lettuce, tomato, pickles and Bang Bang Sauce (otherwise undefined) on a garlic rubbed pretzel bun, a substantial concoction ($15). 

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Our program started this afternoon with an introductory talk and dinner with our congenial group of fellow travelers.

Monday, March 17, 2025

When Donald Trump’s father got a podiatrist tenant to claim that Donald suffered from bone spurs, disqualifying him from military service during the Vietnam War (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/12/27/trump-vietnam-war-bone-spur-diagnosis/2420475002/) and I was taking Mickey Mouse teaching jobs for the same purpose, Charles Calvin Rogers was seeing action in the war zone. He was wounded three times and eventually awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by Richard Nixon. He was an African American and rose to the rank of major general. However, none of that was adequate for the current crop of Washington clowns. He has been removed from the Department of Defense website, because he was Black or because he was brave?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/16/defense-department-black-medal-of-honor-veteran?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

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So, Grandpa Alan, what are you doing in Albuquerque? We have joined a group of about two dozen people on a five-day tour of “New Mexico’s Conversos and Crypto-Jews.” As we learned in a lecture this afternoon, Jews who came to Mexico after the Inquisition and expulsion from Spain late in the 15th century as Conversos (Christian converts), Crypto-Jews (Conversos practicing Judaism secretly) or remained in Jewish faced a brutal Mexican inquisition in the middle of the 16th century and beyond. A Jewish woman was reputedly burned at the stake in Mexico City as late as 1831.

Many of these Jews then migrated north on an established trade route into what became New Mexico. Recent DNA testing has uncovered the Jewish roots of many local residents, some of them recounting family tales of customs unaligned with those of their fellow Catholics friends and neighbors.

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The group had dinner at D.H. Lescombes Winery & Bistro from a limited menu, but still offering good food. I had a Wagyu beef meatloaf with “hatch green chile + mango-chipotle glaze + shoestring onions + Yukon gold mash + seasonal vegetables” and a wine flight of Heritage label Pinot Gris (best wine I've tasted in a long time), rosé and Cabernet Sauvignon ($12, a bigger steal). Madam kindly gave me a forkful of her delicious pistachio pesto pasta, “local heart of the desert pistachios + cream sauce + linguini + sun-dried tomato + parmesan + toasted panko.”

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

"Our culture is dominated by people with epic levels of historical, economic and scientific ignorance." Gerard Baker, Editor-at-Large Wall Street Journal.

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This morning, we had a lecture on Jewish ethnicity, DNA and genetics. There were two presenters, the first a scientific investigator. Almost everything that she had to say was news to me. In spite of Stuyvesant High School’s preeminence in math and science, I failed to develop quantitative analytic skills.

The other speaker was a woman whose family has been in New Mexico for well over 300 years. Growing up, her father indicated that some aspects of their family were to be kept quiet, even as his wife berated him for not going to church. Finally, as a teenager, she learned that the family was Jewish, a fact that her siblings still refuse to accept 60 or so years later. Her story was extremely moving, to think that members of her family preserved their vilified identity for hundreds of years.

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On Saturday, at Sawmill Marketplace, we fell into conversation with Kathe and Terry O., a charming local retired couple. We had such a good time that we made a date for dinner tonight. Kathe came down with something, but Terry showed us around some startlingly lavish properties near our hotel. He is a very special guy, retired from two 20-year careers, including the U.S. Navy in submarines and submersibles.

We ate at Flying Star Cafe, 4026 Rio Grande Boulevard NW, one of a half-dozen of its locations. I kept it simple, because we had to return to our group for an evening program. I concentrated on a piece of carrot cake and a pot of jasmine tea.

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Cantor Beth Cohen, accompanied by her husband Randy, performed a set of mostly Ladino (Spanish Hebrew) songs for our group this evening. Many of the melodies were familiar, a reminder of the common threads of Judaism even after millennia of dispersion.

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Our program this morning included a thoughtful talk on “Genes and Memes: The Hidden Jewish Legacy in New Mexico” given by a local rabbi. Her message, in sum, Jews are the same and different.

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We went to the National Hispanic Cultural Center, 1701 Fourth Street SW, to see Mundos de Mestizaje by Frederico Vigil, a 4,000 square foot mural housed in the Torreón (tower building). A stunning work, it depicts thousands of years of Hispanic history, illustrating the (God forbid) diverse cultural connections between people and places from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas. 

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We concluded the day at the New Mexico Holocaust & Intolerance Museum, 616 Central Avenue SW. It has an extensive collection housed in very small premises. It has a relatively broad focus, including the Armenian genocide, Chinese exclusionary policy and modern American civil rights. Sadly, it gets only about 3,000 visitors a year. 

Thursday, March 20, 2025

Our group drove up to Santa Fe this morning, a one-hour trip. We started on museum hill, with two major attractions, the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture and the Museum of International Folk Art, which offered some of the most exciting visual experiences that I have ever had. For instance, these are ammunition shell casings recently painted by Ukrainians.

The museum's collection of miniatures is fantastic. 

And there was much more. Kudos to the curators.

Friday, March 21, 2025

We returned home today. However, the often awful national news was never far away. The headline reads: Law Firm Bends in Face of Trump Demands. The firm in question is Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the firm Adlai Stevenson joined when he came to New York. "Members of the legal profession said in interviews that they were surprised by the deal, as it appears as if the firm — which is dominated by Democrats and has long prided itself in being at the forefront of the fight against the government for civil rights — was capitulating to Mr. Trump over an executive order that is likely illegal."  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/paul-weiss-deal-trump-executive-order-withdrawn.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I've always admired this firm for the quality of its lawyers and lawyering. There is also a sentimental attraction. In 1982, I came within a whisker of becoming its first manager of computing, back when that was my racket. The quality of the interviewing and the whole deliberative process was so impressive that I felt almost honored in being rejected.