When I decided to thumb through Ireland, I got busy putting all the fear-laced warnings about hitch-hiking out of my head. I hadn’t contemplated the also-fearful-and-more-likely reality that I’d be expected to converse with perfect strangers for hours.
Rudy: (Carole’s father, musing in 1937, Germany) Is a land in your blood, your bones, is it the safe feeling under your feet? Or is it the place your family has lived for generations—even after it strips away your rights and treats you hatefully? What identifies a person with a country? Is it the culture, [...]
A song of Passover. Taste the Bread… On Passover we welcome the stranger and we become the stranger wandering to find our spiritual home. WWe recommit to our most audacious dreams–those of peace and freedom.
When I was younger and busier, as Christmas became more and more commercial, as retail crushed harder upon us and Christmas became the most important measure of the economy, as downtown begat malls begat catalogues begat the internet, begat the cassette-CD-MP3-blaring soft-core soul whine of so-called music, it became easy to be increasingly annoyed by the hype and nonsense that confused Christmas.
It was a hopeful sign of family Sunday mornings to come: mornings filled with many kinds of stinky fish; mornings of love.
Don’t we Jews love Passover the best? Our Seder celebrates our departure from Egypt, our journey in the desert for forty years before we could enter the promised land of Israel. We mark this event not as some distant anniversary, but as if we were led personally from slavery to become free men, women and [...]
What is Chanukah all about? Chanukah, my children, Chanukah is the festival of socks. Each year the great Bubbe comes to the foot of each child’s bed and takes a sniff. “Och, gotenyu. What a smell. I can tell you need new socks, you little stinker.” And so, all over the world, at Chanukah, children [...]
After the guinea pigs featured in Special Delivery there were more critters–of course. This is the journey through reptiles and that most unbelievable pet–the rat. Can you imagine inviting rats into your house–ON PURPOSE? I’ve always loved animals but I’m timid with them. I wrote endless reports on animals in second grade. I learned my [...]
There is no understanding Auschwitz and Birkenau—that is the point of coming here. That is what drives us along the corridors so we can get out in time. That is what saves us, as we push inside the taxi. If you could contain Auschwitz, if you could grasp it, perhaps you would become a part of it. It is permissible, essential even, to leave portions unread, moments uncontemplated.
I traveled thousands of miles to stand here in the snow and the cold where my Grandmother and her younger daughter, Eva, found one another in 1944, after eighteen months of heartbreaking separation, amongst thousands of women penned by barbed wire into two groups, awaiting role call.