Shalom! I’m Ber (they/them), a disgruntled agricultural scientist by day and a webmaster by night. And yes, it’s pronounced B-E-A-R—like the 500-pound yellow killing machine with an eating disorder. Wondering what happened to the A? My name, "Ber" ( בער), is a cognate of “bear,” derived from the German word Bär. In Yiddish, umlauts like ä are transliterated to e, so Bär becomes Ber.

Oh, bother... Still reading? The Hebrew word for bear is dov ( דוב). As a result, you’ll often see both versions used together—take, for example, Dov Ber ben Avraham of Mezeritch, also known as the Maggid of Mezeritch, a disciple of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the breaker of chains and mother of dragons founder of Hasidic Judaism.

Perhaps I buried the lede. In Judaism, names are upcycled like the timeless graphics on this page. Typically, Ashkenazi (tummy ache) Jews name their children after their most recently deceased relative. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews follow a similar tradition, though they’re a bit less patient. Jewish children who grew up with access to spices must instead earn their namesake through ritual combat with the elderly. Lastly—and to my limited knowledge—Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) and other minority communities within the global Jewry follow their own rich naming traditions, of which I am woefully underqualified to detail. Regardless, the purpose of these practices is to preserve the spirit of one’s ancestors and, ideally, embody their best traits.

For the most part, this is a lovely tradition. Alas, when your family tree is more of a burning bush, liberties must be taken to prevent overlap. Every schmuck knows a Shlomo, and every nerd knows of Saruman—but tragically Christopher Lee was a goy and not the 'penultimate ruler of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.'... One Solomon to rule them all! That’s why Jewish names often take on pet forms. Behrs, Berls, and Beryls—oh my!

So how did a Reform diaspora Jew born in 1997 (5757 for my fellow Ingregorius Bastards) end up with their third great-grandfather’s name?

Traditions—the antithesis of our newly minted "Anthropocene." My parents yielded to the pressures of assimilation, breaking a naming tradition our family had upheld for millennia by giving me a more "Americanized" name. Shortly thereafter, I followed suit, breaking with Jewish tradition to instead choose an inheritance for myself. It was my fascination with agriculture that first drew me back to Judaism, unearthing a deeply rooted desire to till the soil and compost the wounds of intergenerational trauma in the process. This journey landed me in a game of ancestral musical chairs—and when the Klezmer ceased, I became the unlikely heir to a 19th-century kibbutznik: someone whose finer traits align almost too perfectly with my deepest desires, a spirit I am proud to preserve.

The Ber whose name my Hancock borrows from didn’t inherit the Hasidic movement, though he did grow up next door to the Maggid of Mezeritch in what was known as the Pale of Settlement: a region of the Russian Empire, existing from 1791 to 1915, where permanent Jewish settlement was reluctantly tolerated. Here, in a small rural shtetl named Pechora (Ukrainian for "cave"), Ber and his agrarian compatriots milked cows and fiddled on roofs—either until their hearts were content or—far more frequently—until they were forced to flee into the aforementioned caves, hunted by Cossacks for sport.

Everything I’ve ever read about Pechora during this period suggests it was a living hell, though what followed would prove far, far worse. In 1908, at the age of 64, Ber and his wife Molly immigrated to Brooklyn to live with their children, who had arrived several years prior to work as tailors—no doubt fleeing the endless pogroms and, I assume, the relentless mosquitoes. My family’s decision to escape the Pale proved wise, as 34 years later, Romania—a member of the Axis powers—would occupy Ukraine and turn Pechora into one of the most infamous sites of the Shoah. The Pechora concentration camp was created "exclusively" for the purpose of killing its prisoners. According to Romanian wartime documentation, a sign that read "death camp" was installed at the main gate, ensuring there would be no misunderstanding among its prisoners. An estimated 11,000 Jews were brought to the Pechora camp, of whom approximately 9,500 perished, along with any trace of the old village.

One of the few small comforts I find in this tragic story is the knowledge that Ber and Molly were both spared the horror and burden of this period. Ber died in 1918, and Molly followed in 1933. Most of their children, all of whom were born in Pechora, lived through this time—as did all Jews—bearing the full weight of survivor’s guilt.

Still, despite everything, the legacy of Pechora managed to endure through these dark years. From a world away, the children of a humble agrarian society in the Pale cultivated one of humanity’s finest crops, right in the heart of Brooklyn. Ber and Molly’s son Samuel raised a mensch in Sol, and in turn, Sol and Gertrude—during the height of the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews—rejected humanity’s capacity for evil. Instead, on May 30th, 1942, they pulled from the earth my grandfather Steve, the very definition of Jewish joy.

I’ve had the privilege of visiting Ber and Molly—as well as some of their children—in the Pechora Society of Mt. Judah Cemetery. It is a beautiful time capsule that, especially in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, is now all that remains of this slice of the old world. Well, all except for the infinite history embedded in a single, awkwardly spelled Jewish name.

The gentleman with the bushy beard and oversized suit is Ber. His wife, Molly, is the one rocking a shmata.

Fast forward a century, and the family tailor shop is now a couple of NYU graduating classes away from becoming a Blue Bottle. As for me? I’m a few crashouts away from starting my own shtetl and a bit too queer to join the renfaire over in Crown Heights. So, out of consideration for baristas everywhere, a simple Bear on my coffee cup will suffice.

When I’m not writing hasbara or controlling the weather, I’m focused on tikkun olam—repairing the world. Academically, I’m tackling soil degradation, with a dream of starting an AgLab dedicated to rain-fed outdoor hydroponics as a supplement to our over-strained and deeply broken monoculture food systems. Professionally, I was once a programmer, but let’s be honest: that industry is beyond repair. My soul needed an escape, and environmental science (later refined to agriculture) became my vice. Still, I’ve kept my knack for digital tinkering, hacking away at projects like this site or an old MacBook 2,1, which has seen more repairs than the Ship of Theseus. I’ve also found a peculiar joy in preservation—data hoarding has become a specialty of mine, with an old LTO6 tape drive tucked in my parents’ closet as I gallivant around the globe. Otherwise, it’s just me, a good sci-fi book, and a cup of black coffee, wherever I go.