Despite the fact that I was a Holocaust baby, antisemitism was never at the center of my identity as a Jew. In fact, I was often impatient with Jews who saw antisemitism lurking in every dark corner of public and private life. Growing up in an almost entirely Jewish world, I was insulated from Christian hostility to my kind, at least until much deeper into my adult years, and those few incidents...
If you’re of the right generations, just the mention of a blue book is capable of triggering waves of anxiety. For the uninitiated, it’s the bound, soft-covered notebook that college instructors distributed in which students wrote their answers to final exam questions. To kick the anxiety level up several notches for me, one professor told me that because he didn’t know me well, he would base his...
With November just over the horizon, we’re approaching the third anniversary of this blog. When you’ve done a buck and a half of entries, it’s inevitable that a bit of repetition will occur, partly a function of living a blessedly undramatic life and partly the result of age-related factors. So, forgive me if I write again about my garden. You may remember that Rosellen and I have two 10X10 plots...
There was a stretch of time during my classroom teaching years when I was running on a track parallel to my daughters’ school lives. There’s a three-grade difference between them so, for example, when Adina was in the fourth grade, Elana was in first grade. Because of my own changes of schools and teaching assignments, I wound up teaching children in grades that matched the grade that one of them...
Shortly after I awoke yesterday, I witnessed a glorious moment. From our east windows, I could see the sun just bursting over the horizon, throwing a dazzling yellow/orange glow on the walls of our bedroom. At the same moment, from an adjoining room I could see from a west window the full moon heading toward the opposite horizon. This juxtaposition is hardly as rare as a solar eclipse, but I felt...