I’ve been living in New Hampshire for more than a year now, but until recently, I’d never heard of Mont Vernon, N.H. When the small, rural town made its way into national headlines this week, it wasn’t for positive reasons: This week, controversy arose surrounding the name of a Mont Vernon skating and fishing pond, which has long been referred to as Jew Pond. Yep, you read that right: Jew Pond.

The significance of meeting a Holocaust survivor while on my way to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, is not lost on me – but that’s what happened to me two weeks ago. While leading a trip in Israel, I made a quick stop off to visit a friend who was in a Jerusalem hospital just down the road from Yad Vashem, and when raindrops started to fall, I decided to hop a cab to meet up with the rest of my group.

Last week, Talkin’ Reckless (my personal blog) was the subject of a blog post on a Neo-Nazi website. Ever since then, I’ve been getting a lot of shockingly graphic, anti-semitic, hatemail.

Two threads on my Facebook news feed have gotten me thinking about the impact of advertising in the last couple of days. The first is this video, a really beautiful trailer for a Seattle-based group that educates about gender and sexuality. The trailer features a diverse group of young people talking about what we should be teaching when we teach gender and sexuality in schools. It challenges assumptions, makes connections between issues of identity and daily life, and charges viewers with the responsibility to take action.

As I embark on my final days of high school, I am working feverishly hard (well, let’s face it – senioritis makes me say I’m going to do so) on my senior project. My project, a collection of interviews with New York Jewish women on the intersection of Judaism and feminism (how appropriate!), is an exploration of how personal identity can be shaped by external forces/movements.

By now everyone must have heard about the Henry Louis Gates/Officer Crowley debacle in which an African-American Harvard professor was arrested for disorderly conduct after being questioned by police when a neighbor saw him trying to break into his own house.  Now, both Gates and Officer Crowley are headed to the White House to "have a beer" with Obama and chat it out.