Taking a Stand

“The maddest I’d ever seen him was the day he came to bail me out of jail after a peace rally at UCLA. Driving me home, he was in my face. ‘How can you do this?…

Be Light (After Reading Mary Oliver)

For Lo Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some strengthening throb of amazement—some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know: that…

Timing

“I am totally immersed in my work and cannot, cannot be disturbed.” Anton von Webern [Two days before Nazi troops stormed into Vienna]

The Daily Miracle of Memory

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…

An American Satyagrahi

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…

Remembering/2

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…

A Jewish Vocation

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…

Life under Occupation/95

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…