I’ve always envied people who have access to their family histories going back to the proverbial Charlemagne. That is not the case for me for several reasons. First, I didn’t know any of my grandparents. My paternal grandparents died before I was born and my maternal grandparents emigrated directly from Poland to what was then Palestine, where they died when I was very young. They would have been...
One way to clear your head of obsessive thoughts – unfulfilled tasks, a sequence of events that need unscrambling – is to grab a pen and pad and write them down. That’s what I did yesterday when travel was front and center in my thoughts, as it has been through much of this pandemic time. I’ve been feeling particularly hemmed in lately and was seeking relief by cataloging the places we’ve been...
Confessions of a Philosophical Neophyte This is a piece I wrote pre-pandemic. I was reminded of it by my friend Bruce Thomas who was responsible for introducing me to the reading that inspired it. He wanted to know why I hadn’t used it in my blog. I wasn’t really sure, but in this time of existential crisis in education it seemed out of step with the basic survival mode in which s schools and...
A couple of months ago a package arrived that was large enough to fill almost all the available space in our small mailbox. I had a premonition of what it contained and the prospect of opening it made me uncomfortable, but open it I did to find, as I suspected, a copy of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and The Decline of New York by Robert Caro. It was from my friend Peter who had told me a while...
Several months ago, I told the story of reconnecting with Professor Thomas Pettigrew whose passion for racial equality influenced me deeply during my years at Harvard, eventually leading me to the decision to work in Mississippi when I finished my degree. Last week he wrote to ask if I could give the piece below some space. When I read it, I realized that it was far more important than what I was...