On the False Accusation of Antisemitism, the Evidence That Refutes It, and the Institutional Silence That Followed

The Statement That Should Not Have Been Necessary

On the Unsupported Accusation of Antisemitism, the Evidence That Refutes It, and the Institutional Silence That Followed

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

There is a polished stone bench on the hill above Buckland, in the cemetery that looks out over the Deerfield River valley. I made it. A local Jewish woman named Susan Garfield Wright had commissioned stone sculptures from me when I first arrived in this area, pieces for her husband Michael that stayed in the home they shared throughout her life. After Susan died, her husband and daughters came to me with an intimate request: would I move large stones from their property to the cemetery on the hill, and polish one into a bench in her memory? They wanted it designed to receive a bronze plaque that would tell her story. A permanent marker, in the place where she rested. I did it. The bench is there. Anyone can go see it.

Baby "chose" the pliers so mommy could have a podcast with 3 views

The Spiritual Coach, the Receipts, and the Politics of Selective Compassion: A Palimpsest of Erasure in She'lburne Balls

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

Before we dive in, let me be clear: I am not calling for a boycott of Amanda Star Kingsley’s book.

The Unforgiving Town Was Real

SIX YEARS: THE COMPLETE RECORD

The Unforgiving Town Was Real

By John F. Sendelbach Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

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PART I: THE FRAME

Chapter 1: The Book Review as Mirror

On May 15, 2026, the Greenfield Recorder published a book review.

That is not unusual. The Recorder publishes book reviews, community announcements, features on beloved local residents. It is a newspaper of record for Franklin County and the North Quabbin, serving — as its masthead says — the people of this region since 1792. It has served some of them better than others.

The review was of a novel called The Unforgiving Town, written by Joan Livingston, who served as editor-in-chief of the Greenfield Recorder — and the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Athol Daily News — from December 2018 through January 2022. The reviewer was Tinky Weisblat, a food writer and local historian, self-described "Diva of Deliciousness," and her admiration for Livingston was total. Five books since leaving the paper. An audiobook. Two screenplay projects in development. "Talk about a work ethic!" Weisblat wrote. "I admit I'm a little jealous."

Here is the plot of The Unforgiving Town, as described in the review. A man named Al Kitchen returns to the fictional Massachusetts hilltown of Holden after serving seventeen years in prison for manslaughter. He killed the owner of the local bar while attempting to rob it. He and the bar owner had a longstanding feud. Most people in town believe the killing was deliberate, not the lesser charge he was convicted on. He has nowhere to go except the house he inherited from his grandmother. Prison changed him — he read, he worked hard, he came to regret what he did. All he wants is to fix up the house, find a job, live quietly. To become, in the reviewer's words, "a useful member of society."

The town won't have it.

It treats him as a permanent pariah. It refuses to accept that a man can change. It harasses him, freezes him out, blocks every path toward ordinary life. When he ends up dead on a back road — in what the police chief suspects was not an accident — his cousin is the only mourner.

The Greenfield Distorter ~ our local corporatized monopoly rag

HERE’S A PIECE THEY’LL NEVER PUBLISH. THEY’D RATHER RUN FLUFF PIECES FOR INCOMPETENT “LEADERS” TO SAVE FACE THAN ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG. IT’S INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA AT ITS WORST — POLLUTING THE VERY DEMOCRACY THEY CONSTANTLY CLAIM TO BE SAVING.

Submitted with My Turn: "The Soil, the Silence, and Six Years"

To: Dan Crowley, Editor, Greenfield Recorder

From: John F. Sendelbach, Shelburne FallsDate: May 2026

Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting & Village Greenway

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook

A Daylighting, Greenway, Watershed Learning, and Community Repair Proposal

Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

© 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

NOTE: This document evolves as field investigation continues. Current version: May 2026.

OVERVIEW

Core Project Vision: Restore baseflow to historic Mechanic Street Brook. Primary location: Ghost Hollow, a steep-sided, ten-foot-deep former stream channel behind the historic barn at the town-owned 49 Mechanic Street parcel. Three main technical interventions: install a Dutch-Door Weir (self-regulating passive flow-control structure) at the existing diversion; decommission and physically remove the 1961 Rat Tunnel (the diagonal 3-by-4-foot box culvert that is the root cause of sixty years of flooding); and daylight the brook through the restored Otter Way corridor on the town parcel.

Expected Results: Natural meandering channel with pools, riffles, and bioengineered banks. Primary construction material: approximately 200 tons of local glacial stone sourced from Beaver Picchu™ property less than a mile away. New public greenway and watershed learning corridor connecting Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School to the Deerfield River waterfront. Elimination of stagnant mosquito-breeding ditch, replaced by continuously moving water and a functional natural predatory ecosystem. First accurate stormwater map of the Mechanic Street corridor — solving a documented DPW infrastructure crisis that recently produced a drilling incident when a contractor struck an unmapped concrete pipe on Bridge Street.

The Geographic Loop: The restored brook physically reopens the historic water corridor that once connected the Arms Cemetery — now the Beaver Picchu™ upper watershed — to the Pratt Memorial (Arms) Library, whose foundation sits within twenty feet of where the brook once cascaded to the Deerfield River below Salmon Falls. One block south of that cascade point, at the corner of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue, is the Pocumtuck State Park heart site at Salmon Crossing, where the Sachem Salmon sculpture and the Sixty Square Sphere will be installed above the glacial potholes where Shelly still waits. The brook restoration and the PSP heart site are not adjacent proposals. They are one connected argument, written in the landscape by two centuries of erasure and now being corrected in the same generation.

Immediate Municipal Actions Required:

• Direct DPW and Conservation Commission to cease and remediate illegal brush/leaf dumping in Ghost Hollow
• Authorize Water Department and DPW to release all available drainage records
• Retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel permanently in public ownership
• Approve submission of the MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant

Key Partners: Shelburne Conservation Commission · Shelburne Water Department · Shelburne DPW · Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School · Connecticut River Watershed Council · Mass Audubon · Franklin Land Trust · UMass Amherst LARP Department · Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association

fish tour

The Fish Tour

The Culinary Institute of America ~ Hyde Park, New York

A Culinary Sculpture Series for the Hudson River Watershed Proposal ~ May 2026

John F. Sendelbach  Sculptor & Landscape Designer. Shelburne Falls, MA 

The Idea in Plain TermsOne sculpture already lives on the CIA campus: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon made entirely from salvaged culinary cutlery. “Old Diamondsides” stands near the entrance plaza, overlooking the Hudson River that once teemed with its living namesakes. It was installed in 2015 as the first node of a larger idea. The Fish Tour completes that idea.
Eight site-specific sculptures, each fabricated primarily from recycled stainless steel kitchen tools and equipment, trace a deliberate pedestrian route across the Hyde Park campus. Each piece represents a signature species of the Hudson River estuary — ecologically, historically, and culinarily significant. Interpretive signage at every stop weaves together river science, watershed restoration, culinary tradition, and the deeper interdependence of healthy waters and healthy kitchens. The tour begins at the academic core and descends toward the riverside, turning underutilized spaces into moments of surprise, recognition, reflection, and quiet delight.It is a walking conversation between the kitchen and the river.

20 song autobiography

©2026 John F Sendelbach

7 AM Knock

The 7 AM Knock: A Ledger of Silence and Revelation

Thinking about Omi’s life on the day of her birth got me reflecting on the rest of the bloodline. If Omi’s deafness created the "inherited acoustics" of our house—the need to project and launch words across weather—then my father’s silence created the deeper infrastructure of our history.
By the fall before COVID hit, the family rhythm had shifted to a hospice rotation. My brother, my sister, and I—the three of us left after losing our brother Alan—took turns traveling from Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to sit vigil in Lancaster, New York. My parents were in their final landing place: a modest apartment at Greenfields. Three weeks prior, during our last real conversation, my mother had drifted into a hallucination, calling me Jeff, my childhood best friend. My father and I didn’t correct her; we just shared a quiet glance of acceptance, watching the blurred lines of a long life softening at the edges. When I arrived that final Friday, she was unconscious in the medical wing—just hours from death.
Everyone knows you don’t knock on a door at seven in the morning unless the world has shifted. I was kneeling on the white carpet of that small living room, surrounded by the vintage transit schedules and victorian papers I had brought to photograph for my eBay shop, trying to keep my hands busy while my heart waited. When the knock finally came, my father and I shared a look of absolute knowing. I opened the door to a Black nurse who had come to tell us that Nancy Ann (Sahs) Sendelbach born in 1929, was gone.
Later that afternoon, in the strange hollow quiet that follows a death, I drew one final entry out of my father’s internal ledger. I brought up the derogatory language I had pushed back against in my teens. At 94, he finally explained the root of it. He told me about the late 1930s in Buffalo—walking to technical high school through neighborhoods carved up by redlining, where he and his friends were regularly chased and harassed by Black kids. That unspoken trauma became the silent engine behind the “white flight” that carried my parents to the rural safety of Orchard Park in the 1960s.
The irony is layered and thick. They had moved us onto land founded in the early 1800s by Quakers like David Eddy (who arrived from Vermont in 1804 and claimed hundreds of acres around what became the Four Corners) and Obadiah Baker (who settled in 1807 and opened his home for the first sanctioned Quaker meetings). This was ground soaked in reformist ideals: a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Quaker families helped fugitives heading north to Canada. The Baker homestead on East Quaker Road still carries that marker today.
Yet that same Quaker “plainness” and moral clarity rested on prior displacement. The Haudenosaunee—particularly the Seneca Nation—had long stewarded this territory. By the 1820s–1830s, through treaties, pressure, and the gradual sale of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the Seneca presence was largely removed from the immediate area, even as Quaker settlers built meeting houses, aided escaped slaves, and championed the oppressed. We grew up running through fields and playing in Smokes Creek, a landscape shaped by both the Friends’ quiet testimony and the later hand-crafted integrity of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft movement nearby. We were products of a retreat from urban friction, raised in a cradle built on layered displacements.
Sitting there at 94, my father didn’t need to be forced into reconciliation—he was ready. I coaxed the story out, and he spoke clearly: he had no problem with Black people. He had reached a place of transcendence, cared for in his final years by a diverse staff at Greenfields and delivered the hardest news of his life by a Black woman. He didn’t die carrying the secret or the old fear. When he handed me my mother’s gold wedding band that afternoon, the inherited acoustics of our house finally harmonized.
The fields of Orchard Park are mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions now. But on that white carpet in Lancaster, a much older and more complicated landscape was finally cleared.

Happy Birthday to Omi: Erna Anna Marta

Today we light one up for Omi—Erna Anna Marta Knoop Sendelbach—born somewhere in the fog of 1900 Germany, back when the ground itself was starting to shake under the coming madness of the Weimar years. The family did the math and shipped three kids stateside—triage by ocean liner—because staying put was a losing equation. Omi lands here and the whole bloodline reroutes.

The notes on this photo are from my father, Frederick—three years old, already in the frame like a witness who doesn’t yet know what he’s witnessing. He’d grow up carrying the story in fragments. We never met our grandfather; heart gave out the day after Christmas in the 1940s—holiday lights still up, system offline.

Omi was partially deaf, which meant you didn’t talk to her, you projected. You leaned in and launched your words like they had to cross weather. So yes—if we’re loud, that’s not personality, that’s infrastructure. That’s inherited acoustics.

“Omi” just means grandmother in German. But in this house it meant: speak up, stay alive, cross oceans when you have to, and don’t expect the world to lower its volume for you.

Sixteen Paws Eighty Claws

Sixteen Paws Eighty Claws: George, Seamus, Ripple, And Totem

I. GEORGIE GIRL (circa 1967–1980?)

The kid with the transgender dog never really left the fields, even after the fields were gone.

Orchard Park back then — late 1960s, early 1970s — was still half-wild. No fences in the neighborhood. Just open land rolling out behind the houses, creeks cutting through, hayfields that hadn't been subdivided yet into quarter-acre dreams and driveways. A boy, second-generation German-Polish on his father's side, third on his mother's, spent most of his daylight out there, barefoot, grass to the knees, chasing whatever moved.

He was four or five when the dog showed up. His older sister had already claimed the name months earlier: if we ever get a dog, it's George. No vote, no debate. The name was waiting. When their mother came home with the toy collie–German shepherd mix — small, white-and-tan, bright-eyed — the name landed like it had always been hers. George was a girl. Nobody blinked. George was George.

She locked onto the boy like he was the center of her universe. Wherever he ran, she ran. If he slipped out the back door and sprinted across the yard, she would nose the gap or squeeze through whatever opening existed — no fences meant no real barriers — and catch him before he hit the tree line. He tested it on purpose sometimes: slam the screen door, bolt hard, duck behind the garage. Ten minutes later there she was, tongue out, tail whipping, looking at him like the chase had been the best part of her day. She never got lost. She never quit.

But George had another life nobody in the family mapped. Routes she took alone, destinations only she knew. One afternoon in high school biology class — first-floor room, big windows looking out over the campus — the boy glanced up and saw her: George, trotting across the high school lawn with calm purpose. No leash, no human, just a small dog cutting a straight line toward whatever pulled her. She crossed a busy road to get there. Cars slowed. Drivers stared. George didn't flinch. Later he learned she had a spot three streets over — someone slipping her treats, or a garbage can she raided, or both. She had secrets. Loyal to her people, loyal to her hidden paths. Both true at once.

The most vivid memory came during one of those western New York snow-belt storms that bury everything under two or three feet overnight. The creek behind the houses froze into a perfect toboggan run — steep drop, long flat at the bottom, kids from every house hauling sleds down the hill. The boy was there with George, who bounded through the drifts like she was born in them. She loved snow. Begged to go out in blizzards, curled up on the sidewalk, let the flakes pile over her until only a small mound remained. Call her name and her head would pop up, snow flying off her ears, eyes bright, as though she'd been waiting for the cue.

That day the kids played until fingers burned and cheeks stung, then started the slow trek home as the wind kicked up and visibility dropped. Nobody noticed George wasn't with them. The storm thickened. Hours passed. She was gone.

Parker Berg — three years older, same age as the boy's brother Alan — was the one who went back out. Parker was tall, long-legged, strange in the best way: read books nobody else touched, listened to records nobody else had, talked about things nobody else mentioned. He'd already turned the boy on to Pink Floyd at age ten or so, sitting in Parker's room with the lights off while "Echoes" filled the space like fog. Parker walked into the whiteout, found Georgie Girl curled in a snowdrift, half-buried, shivering but alive. She would have frozen if he hadn't gone looking. He carried her home, snow caked on his coat, set her down by the radiator. She shook once, hard, then curled up again like nothing had happened.

Parker shows up in the boy's stories again and again. The strange kid with long legs and deeper thoughts who walked into hell and came back with a dog. He didn't make a big deal of it. He just did it. Years later the boy would understand that was the model: see the need, move toward it, don't wait for permission or applause.

George wasn't panicking when Parker found her. She was doing what she always did: settling in, waiting, certain someone would call her name. Loyal without possession, independent within bond, keeper of unseen paths who always returned. She lived her whole life that way — girl and George at once, public devotion and private routes, disappearing into snow and trusting the world would dig her out.

Georgie Girl was the first. She set the template. Every dog that followed would be measured against her without knowing it.