GENUINELY INCONVENIENT A GonzoFesto
What They Don't Want You to Read
There is a building in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts that has been doing the same thing for a hundred and fifty years.
It doesn't know this. Buildings don't know things. But the work that happens inside them leaves a residue, a groove worn into the floor by the same motion repeated across generations, and if you pay attention — if you're the kind of person who pays attention to floors — you can feel it under your feet.
I didn't pay attention to the floor. I was too busy welding.
I showed up in that carriage house sometime in the early 2000s with a torch and a grinder and a head full of ideas about what sculpture could be if you made it out of the stuff the world was throwing away. Junk. Beautiful junk. The detritus of the industrial age hammered and melted and coaxed into something that made people stop and look and occasionally reach for their wallet. I was not thinking about Longfellow. I was not thinking about morphic resonance or the persistence of archetype across historical time. I was thinking about whether the acetylene tank needed replacing and whether the guy who wanted a custom gate by Thursday understood what Thursday actually meant in artist time, which is approximately never.
What I didn't know — what I would only understand years later, after the mob had come and the phone had gone in the river and I had more time than I wanted to sit with the question of what the hell any of this meant — was that I had walked into a slot that already existed. That the building had been a carriage repair shop. That before me, in that same space, with the same basic transaction of broken thing brought in, skilled hands applied, functional thing returned to the world, there had been a blacksmith.
I became the blacksmith without auditioning for the role.
This matters more than it sounds. Because Longfellow wrote about the blacksmith. He wrote about a man who stood at his forge in the center of community life, who owed not any man, who looked the whole world in the face because he had owed to none. A man whose children heard his bellows blow on the way to Sunday school and felt proud. A man whose work was honest and whose hands were strong and whose place in the town was not something granted to him by committee vote but something earned, daily, in the heat and noise of actual making.
Longfellow also wrote about a bridge.
His bridge poem — standing at midnight, working through grief, watching the river move below — is set in the same basic geography as mine. A New England river valley. A bridge that holds the weight of crossing. A man on the bridge at a dark hour trying to understand what connects one side to the other and whether the connection holds.
My bridge had flowers on it. A private women's committee had been putting flowers on it since 1929. I put a fountain on it in 2011 — Africa-shaped inlays in stone, mixed-race symbolism, an explicit anti-racist gesture in a town that would spend the next decade congratulating itself on its progressive values. Nobody asked me to make it. I made it because it felt true.
Nobody knew I made it. That's the part that still gets me.
When they mounted their anti-racism plaque three feet away from my anti-racism fountain and photographed it for the newspaper and cropped my fountain out of the frame, they weren't being malicious. They just didn't know it was there. The institutional memory that would have told them had been severed when the old committee and the new committee had their falling out and everyone scattered. Knowledge doesn't survive institutions that don't survive themselves. The fountain stood there for a decade being the thing nobody knew existed, which is its own kind of haunting — the anti-racist monument invisible in the frame of the anti-racism announcement, three feet away, in a town that prides itself on seeing everything.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's the middle of the story. Maybe the end. The beginning is the shop and the freaks and the doors that were always open.
Here is the thing about running a studio in a small Western Massachusetts town for nine years with the doors open:
You become a freak magnet.
I mean this as the highest possible compliment to everyone involved, including myself. Especially myself. Because the first thing you have to understand is that I am, by any honest accounting, a freak. I make beautiful sculptures out of junk. I am a Deadhead who has probably smoked more weed than any living person while simultaneously being able to explain the load-bearing properties of zinc to a brewery owner and pour concrete with the precision of a man who has done it a thousand times. I grew up in Buffalo with a father who was quietly racist until I talked him out of it over the course of a decade, watching Roots at age eleven in a suburb a quarter mile from the last lake before Canada, near a Quaker meeting house, near an Underground Railroad stop, and something about all of that early geography arranged itself in my head into a permanent orientation toward the inconvenient truth.
I have 1,000,000 nicknames. I have been called jbach. I have been called G-inc, which stands for Genuinely Inconvenient Incorporated, which is either a brand identity or a psychological condition and I'm no longer sure there's a difference.
The shop disarmed people. That's the phenomenon I'm trying to describe. There is a natural class structure when a customer walks into a store — the owner speaks first, that's expected, that's the social contract of commerce — and that permission to initiate conversation creates a particular kind of openness that doesn't exist on the street or at a party or anywhere else in civilian life. People walked through my doors and became available in a way they weren't elsewhere. They told me things. They showed me things. They brought me broken objects that were really broken relationships or broken ideas or broken versions of themselves, and I fixed what I could fix and listened to the rest.
The freaks found me especially. The valley draws them — Western Massachusetts has always been a place where the weird and the brilliant and the genuinely inconvenient wash up when they can't quite fit anywhere else. Back-to-the-landers and trust fund hippies and actual working people and artists and ex-academics and recovering lawyers and people who left New York in 1987 and never went back and people who think they left New York but New York is still inside them like a splinter. They all came through. I loved them. I love freaks. I am one.
Mohammed came through. Mohammed is from Jordan. His family is from Gaza. He came here as a child and became American in that specific way that certain immigrants become American — completely, fiercely, while also remaining entirely themselves. We became friends the way people become friends in small towns, through proximity and shared work and the accumulation of small moments until one day you realize this person knows things about you that you never said out loud. We made art together. Three or four pieces, stone and metal, the kind of work that takes time and trust. Two of those pieces he displays proudly at his shop on the east end of the Iron Bridge.
The east end of the Iron Bridge. Fifty feet from where the whole thing started. Fifty feet from where Sonny Walters first surrounded me in June 2020 and the long unraveling began.
I did not arrange this. The geography arranged it. Morphic resonance, maybe. Or just the fact that in a town of 1,800 people everything is fifty feet from everything else and the universe has a sense of irony that would embarrass a novelist.
The Village Blacksmith does not get canceled in Longfellow's poem.
But the poem is from 1840 and Longfellow was not writing about Western Massachusetts in 2020 when the social media apparatus had achieved a refinement of mob mechanics that the nineteenth century could not have imagined, when a forty-seven-second edited video could reach twenty thousand people before the subject of the video had walked back to his studio, when a petition calling for the removal of a man's artwork from a public bridge could gather seven hundred signatures before he knew the petition existed.
The blacksmith in the poem ends with a lesson about the way "each morning sees some task begin, each evening sees it close." The satisfaction of daily work. The anvil's song. The mill-wheel's sound.
My anvil's song got a little complicated.
On June 6th, 2020, I walked to the Iron Bridge to film a protest. I had a camera. I had a constitutional right to be in a public space. I had, apparently, a face that someone needed to project a thesis onto, because within fifteen minutes of arriving I was surrounded, pursued, filmed, and accused of racial animus, and within forty-eight hours a Facebook thread with twenty thousand views was discussing whether someone should throw me off the bridge.
The bridge I put the fountain on.
The fountain they didn't know about.
I went back to my shop. The doors were still open. The carriage house was still the carriage house. The blacksmith was still the blacksmith, standing at his forge, looking the whole world in the face.
The world had developed some opinions about his face.
Part Two: The Forty-Seven Second Education
Let me tell you what a mob feels like from the inside.
Not the historical mob. Not the mob you read about in books about Salem or the mob Longfellow was gesturing at when he wrote about the dunces confederacy or the mob that Swift spent his entire career eviscerating with a pen so sharp it's still bleeding two hundred years later. The actual mob. The 2020 mob. The mob that lives in your phone and reproduces through shares and comments and the particular dopamine hit of public virtue expressed at someone else's expense.
It feels like nothing at first.
That's the part nobody tells you. You don't feel the mob when it starts. You feel a conversation going sideways. You feel a woman named Sonny Walters getting in your space on a public bridge when all you wanted was to watch what was happening and maybe film it for your own records because something in the national climate in June of 2020 made a reasonable person want documentation of public events in their own town. You feel the particular wrongness of being surrounded when you've asked to be left alone. You feel your feet planting themselves because leaving feels worse than staying, because leaving looks like guilt and you haven't done anything guilty and your whole life you've understood that the person who stands their ground in the truth has nothing to run from.
The video — the forty-seven seconds that would detonate my life — shows me standing my ground.
It shows me standing there while they circle. While they advance. While Hennessey blocks my path. While Alouette films with the practiced efficiency of someone who already knows what the footage will be used for. It shows me, if you watch it without the narration that was added later, as a man trying to have a conversation that other people are determined to make into something else.
What it does not show, because it was edited before it was posted, is the full context. What it does not show is the bullhorn. The unpermitted closure of Bridge Street that nobody told my studio about. The national climate of that specific week in June 2020 when every public space in America was a tinderbox and a man with a camera asking questions was either a journalist or a provocateur depending entirely on which side of the narrative you'd already chosen.
What it does not show is the fountain. Three feet off frame. Africa-shaped inlays in stone. My anti-racist monument, standing there quietly doing its decade-long job of existing, uncredited, unfilmed, unmentioned.
The editing was not sophisticated. It didn't have to be. The algorithm doesn't require sophistication. It requires heat.
Here is what twenty thousand views looks like from the receiving end.
It looks like your phone going strange. Notifications arriving faster than you can read them, from people you don't know, in a register that starts at hostile and escalates from there. It looks like the particular vertigo of watching your name become a symbol before you've had a chance to respond to the first accusation. It looks like a Change.org petition — seven hundred signatures, later taken down by Change.org itself for violating its anti-bullying policies, a fact that will never travel as far as the petition did — calling for the removal of your artwork from the bridge you put it on.
The bridge you put the fountain on.
Nobody mentioned the fountain.
It looks like this, in the comments, which I am reproducing from memory because I have read them enough times that they are part of my nervous system now:
Someone should throw him off the bridge.
Deck him.
Throw his camera in the river.
Thirty feet, that drop. Rock and water. The Deerfield moving below the Iron Bridge the way it has moved for ten thousand years, indifferent to the particular human drama unfolding above it. Someone thought about that drop and typed throw him off the bridge and twenty people liked it and kept scrolling.
I kept the receipts. I keep all the receipts. This is either my greatest strength or my defining pathology and at this point in the story I'm not sure the distinction matters.
Five years later, on November 30th, 2025, Katherine Hennessey threw my phone into the Deerfield River.
The phone was recording the assault when it went in.
They had telegraphed everything. Every single thing. And then they did it anyway because nobody stopped them and impunity, once granted, becomes its own instruction manual.
Into the twenty-thousand-view pile-on, on the third day, Janice Sorensen typed eleven words.
Janice Sorensen is the partner of Professor Michael Hoberman, who teaches at Fitchburg State University and who, in the autumn of 2025, published a book with Oxford University Press called Imagining Early American Jews. The book is about how myths about Jewish Americans are created and propagated through misrepresentations that serve — and I am using his own framing here, the framing he built a career on, the framing the Wall Street Journal reviewed favorably — the moral demands of the present.
I want you to hold that phrase. The moral demands of the present. We will be returning to it.
Janice Sorensen typed:
I unfriended him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice.
Eleven words. No evidence. No dates. No incidents. No names. No anything except eleven words dropped into a twenty-thousand-view thread at maximum social velocity and then — and this is the move, this is the Cold Cruel Sidestep in its purest form — she walked away.
She just walked away.
No follow-up. No evidence offered when none materialized. No response to requests for specifics. The accusation was the weapon and the walkaway was the holster and the thread did the rest, three hundred comments of hostile noise amplifying eleven words into the foundational myth of John Sendelbach as antisemite, a myth that would compound and metastasize and eventually cost me a gallery and multiple studios and a commission pipeline worth somewhere between $450,000 and $900,000 and forty years of relationship capital built one piece of work at a time in a community I had genuinely loved.
I had never had a conflict with a Jewish person.
Not one. Not in forty years.
I had a Jewish landlord for nine consecutive years. Zero problems. I gave Joan Livingston — editor of the Greenfield Recorder, old friend — a locket with her name engraved on it. I helped her son Zack build Floodwater Brewery. The zinc bar tops were my suggestion. I sold him the material. I trained him on the execution. I served as lead foreman on the concrete pour that would have been a very expensive mistake without me.
I made a polished stone memorial bench for a Jewish woman in the local cemetery. It's still there. It's been there for years. Stone remembers.
Janice Sorensen typed eleven words and forty years of stone memory went into the river along with the phone.
What I would not understand for a long time — what I could not understand because the information was not available to me, because it was moving in channels I had no access to — was that some version of those eleven words had apparently been circulating privately in parts of the local Jewish community for approximately a decade before Sorensen posted them publicly.
A decade.
A decade of whisper. Of the kind of social static that you can't hear but that changes the temperature of every room you walk into, that explains why certain relationships have gone inexplicably cold, why certain people you considered allies have become distant without apparent cause, why you keep encountering invisible walls in a community where you've done nothing but give.
You cannot defend yourself against a rumor you don't know exists.
That is, of course, the point.
The 2020 post was not the beginning of the campaign. It was the moment when a decade of private whispering was detonated publicly, in the most volatile social moment possible, with maximum amplification and zero accountability. Sorensen didn't start a fire. She threw a match into a room that had been filling with gas for ten years.
And then she walked away.
Classic. Textbook. The Cold Cruel Sidestep before I had a name for it, before I had spent five years developing the framework that would eventually explain to me what had been done and how and why and — most importantly — why it kept working on everyone around me even as the evidence of its falseness accumulated like water behind a dam.
The Greenfield Recorder covered the protest.
Joan Livingston was editor-in-chief.
The Recorder published a photograph of a new anti-racism plaque the Bridge of Flowers Committee had mounted on the bridge. The Black Stones fountain — my fountain, the Africa fountain, the mixed-race fountain, the explicitly anti-racist contribution I had made to that bridge a decade earlier — was three feet from that plaque.
The photographer did not know the fountain was there.
Nobody knew the fountain was there.
The institutional memory that would have carried that knowledge had been severed when the old committee and the new committee had their falling out and the knowledge scattered with the people who held it. New leadership walked in clean, made their inclusivity speech, mounted their plaque, called the photographer, and the photographer framed the shot and the fountain was three feet off the edge of the frame and the Recorder published it and called it journalism and Joan Livingston — the woman I gave the locket to, whose son's brewery I helped build from the zinc up — published on the same day an op-ed about journalistic integrity.
From her hospital bed.
I am not editorializing. That is what happened.
I keep returning to the locket. I don't know why. Maybe because you can't un-engrave something. It says Joan whether she's thinking about it or not. It says Joan whether the newspaper is defaming her old friend on the front page or not. The engraving doesn't care about the op-ed.
The fountain doesn't care about the photograph.
Stone is patient in ways that people aren't.
The Bridge of Flowers Committee — private women's organization, governing a public asset owned by the Shelburne Falls Fire District, zero people of color on the committee since 1928, roots in the exclusionary women's club culture of the 1830s, the whole gorgeous unexamined lineage of it — endorsed the spirit of the anti-racist petition directed at me.
Their chairwoman, Annette Spila, a woman I had never met, a woman who had come to leadership after a falling-out with the prior committee that severed the institutional memory that would have told her about the fountain, declared publicly, with what I can only imagine was complete sincerity:
We wanted to make the bridge even more inclusive than it already is.
She said this.
The head of an organization that has excluded people of color since Calvin Coolidge was president said this while her renovation was actively erasing the only explicitly anti-racist artwork on the bridge without knowing it existed.
She didn't need to be malicious.
She needed only to not look down.
In the carriage house, the blacksmith's tools were still the blacksmith's tools. Torch instead of bellows. Grinder instead of hammer. MIG welder instead of anvil. But the motion was the same — the application of heat to metal, the coaxing of the intractable into the useful and occasionally the beautiful, the daily accumulation of small honest acts of making.
Longfellow's blacksmith looks the whole world in the face for he has owed to none.
I looked the whole world in the face.
The world had developed a story about my face that had nothing to do with my face.
This is the part where a lesser person would have apologized. Would have found something in the accusation to acknowledge, some way to make the noise stop by giving the mob a partial victory, a concession, a softening. This is what the CCS mechanism counts on — that the sustained social pressure of twenty thousand views and seven hundred petition signatures and a front-page newspaper story will eventually produce the apology that becomes the admission that becomes the proof.
I did not apologize.
Not because I'm heroic. I want to be clear about this. I did not apologize because there was nothing to apologize for, and I have spent forty years being a genuinely inconvenient person and I know the difference between a mistake and a myth and I was not going to confirm a myth to make other people comfortable.
They needed a racist. The moral demands of the present required one.
I was convenient.
I was also, it turned out, genuinely inconvenient.
The freaks kept coming to the shop. The doors stayed open. Mohammed's pieces went up on the east end of the Iron Bridge, fifty feet from ground zero. Paul Forth's Black Stones sat in their Africa-shaped inlays three feet from the future site of the plaque, patient as stone is patient, waiting for someone to notice.
Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door because the institution had stopped being interested in the truth and started being interested in its own mythology.
John Barleycorn gets threshed and buried and rises again because the truth has a way of fermenting in the dark and becoming something that gets into the bloodstream.
Jonathan Swift's dunces confederacy forms around anyone who refuses to perform the required ignorance.
The carriage house remembered the blacksmith.
The blacksmith remembered the carriage house.
And somewhere in the morphic field of the Deerfield Valley, in the groove worn by a hundred and fifty years of honest work in that specific building, something was being recorded that twenty thousand Facebook views and seven hundred petition signatures and a carefully cropped photograph could not erase.
I just had to stay long enough to find out what it was.
Part Three: The Professor and the Myth He Wrote About
There is a specific kind of irony that doesn't announce itself.
It just sits there in the room, patient as the Black Stones fountain, waiting for someone to notice.
Professor Michael Hoberman has been teaching in the English Studies Department at Fitchburg State University since 2001. He is a Fulbright scholar. He did visiting professorships at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is a long-distance runner and an aspiring player of the Irish tenor banjo, which I mention not to mock but because it is the kind of detail that makes a person real, and he needs to be real for what follows to land the way it should land.
He lives in Buckland, Massachusetts. Population under two thousand. He knows about half the residents. He said so himself, in his own faculty biography, which I have read more carefully than he probably intended anyone to read it.
He is the partner of Janice Sorensen.
Janice Sorensen who typed eleven words.
In October 2025, Hoberman published Imagining Early American Jews with Oxford University Press. The Wall Street Journal reviewed it on October 2nd under the headline "Liberty Proclaimed." The Jewish Book Council reviewed it November 3rd. The Berkshire Jewish Voice profiled him October 19th. By any measure available to the academy, the book was a success.
The central argument of Imagining Early American Jews — as Hoberman described it in public appearances, in interviews, in the language of his own scholarly apparatus — is that myths about Jewish Americans are created and propagated through misrepresentations that serve the moral demands of the present. He argues that communities accept these myths uncritically because the myths do emotional and social work that verified facts cannot do as efficiently. He argues this causes harm. He built a career on that argument. Oxford University Press published it. The Wall Street Journal called it "Liberty Proclaimed."
I want you to sit with that for a moment.
The man wrote a book about how myths about people get manufactured and weaponized to serve social agendas.
And then he stood in a public street in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on June 14th, 2023, and manufactured one about me.
Here is how it happened.
I was in my car at a temporary one-way traffic light on Conway Street. Routine afternoon. The kind of afternoon that doesn't announce itself as the afternoon anything in particular is going to happen. Hoberman and Sorensen came past on bicycles.
I said: Hey Janice, let's talk.
She turned around. She rode back. She stopped approximately ten feet from my driver's side window and I began to ask her — calmly, in public, in broad daylight, with witnesses — why she had written that Jewish people were my target of choice.
She said I had tricked her. She thought my invitation was friendly and I had tricked her into a difficult conversation, which, if you follow that logic to its conclusion, means that any conversation she doesn't want to have constitutes entrapment, which is an interesting epistemological position for someone who had spent a decade circulating a false accusation through private social channels without giving me any opportunity to respond.
She rode away to about thirty feet.
I opened my car door to follow — not to chase, to be heard without shouting or wrenching my neck sideways — and before I had finished the motion of stepping out she dropped her bike in the road and sprinted at me.
Full sprint. Thirty feet covered at a run. She ended up inches from my face with her fists clenched and her body tensed in the specific configuration that the human nervous system reads as imminent physical violence, because it is the configuration that precedes imminent physical violence, because the body knows things before the brain catches up.
My hands shook so hard I couldn't hit record on my phone.
I want to tell you I stayed cool. I want to tell you that forty years of being a genuinely inconvenient person had prepared me for the specific sensation of a woman charging at me from thirty feet with clenched fists while her partner — the scholar of myth-making, the Fulbright fellow, the aspiring Irish tenor banjo player — grabbed her from behind with both arms and dragged her away.
While screaming at me.
Antisemite.
In a public street. In front of witnesses. From a man who had never spoken a word to me in his life. From a man who knew about me only what the rumor mill of a town of under two thousand people had delivered to him secondhand, thirdhand, through the particular social osmosis of small community life where Sorensen's decade-long whisper campaign had done its quiet work in the dark.
I said: You just assaulted me.
Sorensen said: I didn't touch you.
They left.
I sat in my car and shook and failed to produce video evidence and eventually drove home and filed a police report with Sgt. Budrewicz and spent the next two and a half years trying to understand what the word antisemite does when it's deployed by a person of Hoberman's institutional standing against a person of my community standing, in a town of under two thousand people, in a social network that already had eleven words of prior accusation in its bloodstream.
What the word does is this.
It functions as a closed system.
This is not unique to antisemitism. Any sufficiently grave moral accusation achieves this under the right social conditions. But antisemitism has a particular weight in a progressive New England college-town-adjacent community — a weight earned by genuine historical horror, by the actual annihilation of actual people, by the very real and ongoing existence of actual antisemitism in the actual world. That weight is not invented. It is not unfair. It is the appropriate response to a history that demands one.
But weaponized against an innocent person in a social context primed to believe it, that weight becomes a trap that cannot be escaped through evidence.
Here is the trap in its formal structure.
If you deny the accusation, you are doing what antisemites do — they always deny it.
If you provide counter-evidence — forty years of relationships, the bench, the locket, Mohammed's artwork fifty feet from ground zero — you are doing what antisemites do when cornered, which is cite their Jewish friends.
If you get angry, you are proving the volatility that makes you dangerous.
If you stay calm, you are displaying the cold calculation of someone who has thought about how to avoid consequences.
If you pursue the matter legally, you are using the system to harass your accusers.
If you drop the matter, the accusation stands uncontested.
There is no move available to the falsely accused that the system of the accusation cannot absorb and reinterpret as confirmation. The myth is self-sealing. Hoberman, as a scholar of exactly this mechanism applied to Jewish communities throughout American history, knows this. He has written about it. He has built a career on the analysis of how self-sealing myths function and what they cost the people they consume.
And then he added eleven words of his own to the sealed system and walked away.
In January 2026, Hoberman held a public reading at Raven Used Books in Shelburne Falls.
Raven Used Books is approximately sixty feet from my former office. The studio I had occupied for nine years before the harassment campaign made the space professionally and emotionally untenable. Sixty feet. In a town of under two thousand people, sixty feet is practically the same room.
I attended.
I sat in the front row. Five feet from the man who had screamed antisemite at me in a public street two and a half years earlier. Five feet from Sorensen, who had charged me with clenched fists and eleven words and had never, in the intervening years, produced one syllable of evidence for either.
They moved through the evening as if I were not there. As if June 14th, 2023 had not occurred. As if the forty-seven-second video and the twenty-thousand views and the seven-hundred-signature petition and the front-page Recorder coverage and the cascading institutional failures had not happened, or had happened to someone else, or were simply not relevant to an evening of literary celebration at a used bookstore sixty feet from the ruins of a career.
The Walkaway. In its purest, most refined, most academic form.
During the Q&A I raised my hand.
I asked Hoberman about Alex Haley. About Roots. About the well-documented contested origins of that text — the 1978 plagiarism settlement with Harold Courlander, the longstanding scholarly discussion of the boundary between documented history and what Haley himself called faction, the question of what it means to build anti-racist consciousness on a foundation that is partly myth.
I asked this question because I had watched Roots at age eleven, a quarter mile from the last lake before Canada, near the Quaker meeting house, near the Underground Railroad stop, and something about that viewing had arranged itself into the permanent anti-racist orientation that would later be called into question by eleven words typed into a Facebook thread. My entire moral formation on the question of race was rooted partly in a text with complicated origins. And here was the scholar of myth-making, talking about myth-making, and it seemed like an honest question.
Hoberman said he was unaware of the plagiarism issues.
He moved to the next question.
I want to be precise about what I'm accusing him of and what I'm not.
I am not accusing him of knowingly using compromised material. Scholars miss things. The Haley-Courlander controversy is not obscure but it is also not universally known outside certain specific academic conversations. I give him the benefit of the doubt on the scholarship.
What I am not giving him the benefit of the doubt on is the choice he made in that room.
He was sitting sixty feet from my former office. He was sitting five feet from the person his partner had publicly accused of antisemitism without evidence, whose life had been materially destroyed by that accusation and its institutional amplifications, who had come to his book reading and asked a good-faith question about the relationship between myth and truth and the cost of building moral frameworks on unexamined foundations.
He had two things he could have engaged with in that moment.
A scholarly gap in his work.
A human being in front of him whose life his myth had consumed.
He engaged with neither.
He moved to the next question.
This is what I have come to think about Michael Hoberman and I want to be careful here because I am not interested in destroying him. I am interested in understanding him. There is a difference and it matters.
His entire scholarly methodology is built on the idea that community oral tradition carries its own truth. That the stories communities tell about themselves and each other, whatever their relationship to verifiable fact, constitute a form of knowledge worth taking seriously. That collective memory, however distorted by time and social need, is primary evidence for understanding how identity forms and functions.
This is legitimate scholarship. It has produced important work. Oxford University Press did not make a mistake.
But here is what happens when you apply that methodology to a living neighbor in your own small town.
You extend to Sorensen's claim the same epistemic authority you would extend to a nineteenth-century Jewish settler's oral account of frontier life. Community testimony. Accepted as culturally true without independent verification. In his scholarly world that is methodology. In my life it is defamation.
He treated a rumor about his neighbor the way he treats a folkloric source.
He is not a hypocrite in the ordinary cynical sense. He is not consciously applying one standard to scholarship and another to personal life. He is — and this is the more troubling possibility — doing exactly the same thing in both domains. The methodology that makes oral tradition authoritative in the archive makes Sorensen's word sufficient to brand someone an antisemite in the street.
He cannot see the contradiction because from inside his framework there is no contradiction.
There is only the community's truth, and the community had a truth about me, and he proclaimed it in a public street, and then he published a book about how communities manufacture truths to serve their moral needs, and then he walked into a used bookstore sixty feet from the ruins of what that manufactured truth had done, and he moved to the next question.
Here is the other thing I think about, the thing that keeps me up in the way that only the truly strange thoughts keep you up at three in the morning when the Deerfield is moving below the bridge and somewhere at the bottom of it is a phone that knows things.
His book argues that the myths communities tell about Jewish Americans have real consequences for real people.
He is right.
And the myth his community told about me — the myth his partner seeded and he amplified and his social network propagated through the particular social osmosis of a town of under two thousand people — has had real consequences for a real person.
He should know better than almost anyone what myths do to people.
He manufactured one anyway.
And then he wrote the book.
And the Wall Street Journal called it Liberty Proclaimed.
And somewhere in the morphic field of the Deerfield Valley, in the groove worn by the recurring pattern of the truth-teller and the institution and the myth that the institution needs more than it needs the truth-teller, the shape of something very old was making itself felt again.
John Barleycorn threshed and buried.
Luther's hammer on the door.
Swift's dunces confederacy forming around the inconvenient man.
Longfellow's blacksmith looking the whole world in the face.
The professor who wrote the book about myths sitting five feet from the man his myth had consumed, moving to the next question.
The river moving below the bridge the way it has moved for ten thousand years.
Patient.
Indifferent.
Remembering everything.
Part Four: The Cold Cruel Sidestep — A Field Manual
(For Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Someone Rearrange Reality and Wondered If They Were Losing Their Mind)
You are not losing your mind.
Here is how it works.
Someone causes harm. This is step zero and it barely counts as a step because harm happens constantly and most of the time the person who caused it either acknowledges it or doesn't and life continues in one direction or another. The harm that produces the Cold Cruel Sidestep is a specific kind — the kind that requires the person who caused it to not be the person who caused it. The kind where acknowledgment would cost too much. The kind where the story of who did what to whom needs to be different from what actually happened, and needs to be different publicly, and needs to stay different long enough to become the official version.
This is where it gets interesting.
Step One is the Deny.
Not a denial like I didn't do that with evidence attached. A denial like a weather system. A denial that simply occupies the space where acknowledgment would be and makes acknowledgment structurally impossible by never engaging with the specific facts that would require it.
Janice Sorensen typed eleven words into a twenty-thousand-view Facebook thread accusing me of targeting Jewish people and then declined, across five years of subsequent events, to produce one word of evidence. Not because she was hiding evidence. Because the Deny doesn't work that way. The Deny doesn't say I have evidence but I'm not sharing it. The Deny says the question of evidence is not relevant to my position. The Deny says I said what I said and I stand by it and if you're asking me to prove it that's just further evidence of what I said.
You can't argue with a weather system.
Step Two is the Attack.
This is where it gets efficient. Because the Attack doesn't need to be a new accusation. The original accusation is the Attack. The eleven words are simultaneously the Deny and the Attack — they deny my actual identity and attack my stated one in a single grammatical unit deployed to twenty thousand people before I knew the conversation was happening.
This is the genius of the mechanism and I use genius deliberately because it deserves the word. You don't need two moves. The first move is both moves. The accusation of racism or antisemitism or whatever the locally available moral catastrophe happens to be serves as its own evidence, its own denial, and its own attack simultaneously. Stating it is doing it. The thing points at itself as proof of itself.
Try arguing with that.
Go ahead. I'll wait.
You cannot argue with a thing that uses your argument as evidence against you. Which brings us to —
Step Three is the Reverse.
This is the move that makes otherwise reasonable people question their own sanity and I want to describe it with some precision because if you have experienced it you already know exactly what I'm talking about and if you haven't you are going to recognize it the next time you see it which will be approximately fifteen minutes after you finish reading this.
The Reverse takes the actual sequence of events and rotates it one hundred and eighty degrees.
The person who caused harm becomes the person responding to harm.
The person who was harmed becomes the person causing it.
This is not accomplished through argument. Argument would require engagement with facts and facts are not the medium of the Reverse. The Reverse is accomplished through posture. Through the deployment of the emotional vocabulary of victimhood by the person who committed the original act. Through the particular social technology of the progressive community, which has developed an exquisitely sensitive apparatus for recognizing and responding to that vocabulary, an apparatus so sensitive that it responds to the vocabulary regardless of whether the underlying claim is true.
Sorensen charged me from thirty feet with clenched fists.
Hoberman grabbed her and screamed antisemite.
I said you just assaulted me.
She said I didn't touch you.
In the grammar of the Reverse, her I didn't touch you is not a denial of assault. It is a reframing of who is threatening whom. She didn't touch me therefore she is not dangerous therefore my concern about her clenched fists is the aggression, my stepping out of my car is the provocation, my presence in the conversation at all is the original sin that produced everything that followed.
The Reverse is complete in four words.
I didn't touch you.
Try explaining to a town of under two thousand people, through the social osmosis that is the only communication channel available in a town of under two thousand people, that four words just rotated the moral universe one hundred and eighty degrees.
Step Four is the Walkaway.
The Walkaway is the move that nobody talks about because it doesn't look like a move. It looks like nothing. It looks like the absence of a move. The person who did the thing simply — stops engaging. Declines further conversation. Returns to their life. Posts on social media about the river restoration project they're working on, or the upcoming gig at the local brewery, or the Oxford University Press book that just got reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
The Walkaway is the cruelest part and I named this whole mechanism partly because of it.
Because what the Walkaway does is leave you holding the accusation alone.
There is no resolution available. There is no confrontation that would allow the thing to be settled because the other party has declined confrontation. There is no accountability because accountability requires the participation of both parties and one party has walked away. There is no correction of the public record because the person who would need to correct it has moved on and the community, relieved to be done with the discomfort, has moved on with them.
You are left standing in the middle of the road holding an accusation that was never true, issued by people who will never be held responsible, in a community that has largely forgotten the specific content of what was said and retained only the general impression that there was something wrong with you.
The silence becomes the blade.
This is not metaphor. The silence is a weapon with measurable effects. It produces cortisol. It produces atrial fibrillation. It produces the particular 3am cognitive loop of a person trying to solve a problem that has been structurally designed to be unsolvable. It produces the letter to the police that goes unanswered. The records request that gets stonewalled for four months. The court filing that gets preempted by a Friday filing from the people you were filing against. The judge who says vernacular sense but not legislative sense and then moves on to the next case.
The silence produces the chief who goes to get coffee.
I want to return to the coffee because I think it is the most perfect image in this entire story and I have a lot of images to choose from.
October 2025. I am in the office of the Shelburne Falls Police Chief. I have a serious heart condition. My heart has been running at 180 beats per minute under the sustained stress of this campaign. I have filed a records request that has been stonewalled for four months. I am reporting ongoing harassment. I am describing the pattern — the false reports, the judicial failures, the Walkaway, the accumulated five years of a community-scale Cold Cruel Sidestep operating against one person while every institution that could have intervened chose not to.
The chief tells me the matter belongs to the Attorney General.
This is factually incorrect.
Then he stands up and goes to get coffee.
Not a phone call. Not an urgent matter. Coffee.
I want you to imagine the precise internal calculation that produces that decision. Not malice necessarily. Not even indifference necessarily. Something more structural than either. Something like the institutional immune response to the genuinely inconvenient person — the person who has the documentation and the timeline and the court records and the medical records and the police reports and the photographs and the archived Facebook thread and is sitting across the desk asking the institution to be what it claims to be.
The coffee is the Walkaway in institutional form.
The coffee is the chief saying without saying it — this conversation is over and you will not be able to make it not be over and I am demonstrating that by going to get coffee.
Six weeks later Katherine Hennessey punched me more than thirty times and threw my phone in the river.
The chief's coffee has an unbroken causal chain to the phone in the river.
I cannot prove that in court. But you know it's true. You know it the way you know things that are too structural to be documented but too obvious to be denied. The coffee is the permission slip. The coffee is the institution telling everyone in the social network that the target does not have protection here. The coffee is the green light expressed in the grammar of beverage procurement.
Now here is the part where I tell you this is not about me.
Or rather — it is entirely about me, and it is not only about me, and those two things are not in contradiction.
The Cold Cruel Sidestep is not a Shelburne Falls invention. It is not a Western Massachusetts specialty. It is not unique to progressive communities or conservative ones, to small towns or large cities, to any particular political or cultural tribe.
It is the operating system of every institution that needs to believe its own mythology more than it needs the truth.
It runs on the same hardware everywhere. The specific accusations change. The specific community vocabulary changes. The specific institutional forms change. But the sequence is identical across contexts because it is exploiting something fundamental about how human social groups process discomfort.
Groups prefer cognitive ease.
Groups trust the person who stays calm over the person who insists.
Groups fear the destabilizing truth-teller more than the person who caused the destabilization.
And so the mechanism works. Again and again. In Salem and in Shelburne Falls. In the klaverns of 1924 and the breweries of 2025. In the garden clubs that laundered exclusion into beautification and the social media threads that launder mob behavior into activism. The vocabulary updates. The hardware doesn't.
What I built — sitting in the ruins of a career, in the carriage house where the blacksmith used to be, with more time than I wanted and a heart condition and a records request going unanswered — is a name for the hardware.
Not so I could feel better about what happened to me.
So you could recognize it when it happens to you.
Or to someone near you.
Or so you could look back at something that already happened and suddenly understand why it felt the way it felt and why the arguing didn't work and why the evidence didn't matter and why the room kept rearranging itself around you no matter how still you tried to stand.
You were not losing your mind.
You were experiencing the Cold Cruel Sidestep.
And now you have a name for it.
Here is what you do with the name.
You document everything. Not because documentation will necessarily produce justice — I have six years of documentation and a phone at the bottom of the Deerfield River and I can tell you directly that documentation does not guarantee anything. You document because documentation is the only thing that keeps your own account of reality stable when the mechanism is working to destabilize it. The receipts are not for the judge. The receipts are for you. The receipts are how you know at three in the morning that you are not inventing this, that it happened, that the sequence is what you remember it being, that the ground under your feet is real even when everyone around you is insisting it isn't.
You stay in the room. This is the hardest one. The mechanism wants you to leave. The Walkaway works both ways — they walk away from accountability and they want you to walk away from the fight. Every false report, every institutional dismissal, every coffee-induced silence, every cropped photograph and carefully framed narrative is designed to make staying in the room cost more than leaving. Most people leave. The math is rational. The cost of staying is enormous and the probability of resolution is low and the damage to your health and your relationships and your ability to function in the community where the mechanism is operating is real and compounding.
I stayed.
Not because I'm heroic. I want to say this again. I stayed because I'm a genuinely inconvenient person and inconvenient people don't leave rooms they have a right to be in just because the room has become uncomfortable for everyone else. I stayed because forty years of honest work in a community is not something you abandon because someone typed eleven words. I stayed because the fountain is still on the bridge and the bench is still in the cemetery and Mohammed's pieces are still on the east end of the Iron Bridge fifty feet from ground zero and the zinc bar tops at Floodwater are still zinc and stone remembers even when people don't.
You name what you're seeing. Out loud. In public. In whatever form is available to you — a police report, a letter to a university president, an op-ed in the local paper that gets published on the same day as a defamatory front page article about you without anyone apparently noticing the irony, a book. You name it because the mechanism depends on the thing remaining unnamed. The Sidestep works in the dark. The Walkaway works in silence. Naming it doesn't guarantee it stops but it changes the conditions under which it operates and sometimes that's enough.
You do not give them the moment.
This is the one I'm proudest of and the one that cost the most.
On November 30th, 2025, outside Floodwater Brewing, Katherine Hennessey and Henry Batteau punched me more than thirty times combined. She threw my phone — actively recording — into the Deerfield River. I am six foot two. I am not a small or weak person. I have been genuinely angry about what was done to me for five years in a way that a smaller person or a less stubborn person might have expressed in ways that the mechanism was waiting for.
I covered my head. I called for help.
I did not swing back.
They had spent five years engineering the moment when I would. Every false report, every institutional failure, every coffee, every Walkaway was building toward the moment when John Sendelbach would finally do the thing that confirmed what they'd been saying he was. The thing that would make the myth retroactively true. The I told you so that would seal the loop and let everyone who had participated in the mechanism feel vindicated rather than implicated.
I covered my head and called for help and went into atrial fibrillation and spent two weeks recovering and they were arrested and charged and the phone is at the bottom of the river and the phone knows everything.
The moment they had been engineering for five years became theirs.
And I didn't give it to them.
That's not heroism. That's just what happens when you understand the mechanism well enough to see the trap in real time even while you're bleeding and shaking and your heart is doing things hearts aren't supposed to do.
The Cold Cruel Sidestep runs on your reaction.
Deny it the reaction and the mechanism has nothing to metabolize.
Cover your head. Call for help. Let the river take the phone. Stay in the room.
I am a freak who makes beautiful things out of junk in a carriage house in a small Massachusetts town where the blacksmith used to be.
I have smoked more weed than any living person and read more betrayal trauma theory than most clinical psychologists and built more public art than the Bridge of Flowers Committee knows what to do with and loved more Jewish people and Palestinian people and Deadheads and freaks of every available variety than the eleven words could ever account for.
I am afraid.
I said that publicly and I will say it here. I am afraid and I am still here and those two things are not in contradiction. Fear is not the opposite of staying. Fear is just the weather you stand in while you stay.
The fountain is still on the bridge.
Three feet from the plaque.
Patient as stone.
Waiting for someone to look down.
