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...
When the wedding invitation arrived in my email box among all the junk destined for quick erasure, it immediately caught my attention. The daughter of one of our dearest friends from our Houston years was getting married. Even though we hadn’t seen Leah for many years, the opportunity to reconnect with her and her whole family was very attractive. But there was another draw that clinched the deal...