Note: Sections of this entry were written in 1969, a time when “Negro” was considered a respectful means of address for Black people. I’ve chosen to leave the word as is. Doing otherwise would be anachronistic. The center is way out in the country, many miles down a red dirt road over which the trees arch in a way that must make it invisible from the air. There is a clearing with a white wooden...

It’s sad that we don’t plan as many Shabbat dinners with friends as we used to. We’re not alone in this. Our friend Bob Putnam in his ground-breaking book Bowling Alone has the numbers to show that the frequency of dinner parties has decreased steadily since the 60’s, part of a larger trend of declining social capital in our society. But we bucked the trend on a recent weekend and invited some...

Two weeks ago, I posted on my blog a statement by my son-in-law Peter Cole and his Yale colleague Feisal G. Mohamed, a Canadian-Egyptian member of the English faculty, about the Israel/Gaza War. The statement resonated with a lot of you – a measured cry of pain for all the victims of this nightmare. The reaction was similar at Yale and in the wider academic community. As a result, The Yale Review...

In a few weeks I will be celebrating the 4th anniversary of this blog. If my numbers are correct, this is my 200th entry. I never imagined this activity would have such durable legs. I started it as a repository for writings that were languishing in my computer. They were too long, too short or too odd to find a home in any existing medium, so I built my own. But once that back log was depleted...

Our daughter Adina and son-in-law Peter divide their time between Israel and the U.S. They were in Jerusalem on Saturday, October 7th when Hamas carried out its horrific massacre of innocent Israelis. Independent of that, they were scheduled to fly back to the U.S. two days later to fulfill various professional obligations. With all the flight cancelations, except for Israel’s own carrier, El Al...