Dear Bella Levenshteyn On Monday, I was talking on the phone with Natasha, and we reminisced about her teacher, M. Y. Golden, a therapist she had respectfully nicknamed the “Wizard,” because he was so skilled…
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of…
Brooke Adams sent me this message: Thought of you when I saw this cause you taught me what it meant. Mohandas Gandhi: “A satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear. She is therefore never afraid of trusting…
Henry invited Tanya and me to join him And his new friend Laura Bronstein For a mid-May commemorative event At the very liberal Reform synagogue Henry and Laura had met At an anti-neo-liberalism conference in…
This week I finished Marcel Reich-Ranicki‘s autobiography, The Author of Himself. He was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the foremost literary critic in post-war Germany. As I read him, I thought of my…
With the passing of every day I feel angrier because I am restricted from walking, from going places in my car, from taking breaks away from the house, from going on with my life, going…
You don’t believe me And why should you anyway I’m twice your age— Don’t trust anyone over 55 You don’t believe me When I tell you What you penned outta your core Ended smack in…
When Allen Ginsberg visited Israel in 1961, he met up with the eminent scholar Gerschom Scholem. Scholem found Ginsberg “A likable fellow. Genuine. Strange, mad, but genuine.” At one point in their getting acquainted,…
Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, 91, died at her home in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, on May 26, 2016. An internationally renowned, respected and admired advocate for human and civil rights, Hedy was encircled by friends…
Dear Bella Levenshteyn I was reading Pierre Hadot’s Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision, and the following passage reminded me of our recent discussion at Café Disponibilidade. Suggestion: read a few pages of Hadot on…