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And then I heard the singing. Chanting, prayer, live voices, not from the transistor. It wasn’t yet light, just the first flutterings of dawn. Shivering with cold, wrapped in our blankets, wet with…
[…] the Madison Left experience, at least in the early and mid-1960s, was never simply an American experience. It was more jumbled, at least more composite—like America itself? In my own not untypical…
There are contradictions and ambivalences in our celebrating Thanksgiving. We are recent Americans. It wasn’t the Mayflower that brought our people over here. We know too much about what the coming of…
Leehee woke me up at a quarter of four in the afternoon and asked me to come with them to Ein Hod for the Seder, despite everything.
“Don’t do this to me,” I said. “You know I’m not…
To be in exile, with a religious or historical sense that one is exiled, is to have already a mission and purpose in life. One’s clear project then is to end the exile and to return to…
Over the past ten years, the American Jewish community has undergone a radical inner shift in mood, from buoyant optimism to deep anxiety about its future. […]
The present anxiety can be dated to the…
[…] Must we conclude that Israeli society is doomed to experience a Kulturkampf, and that the Zionist synthesis is marching ineluctably toward its undoing? Before answering that question, let us…
“Eretz Israel.” There is not one. We already grew up on one sublime Eretz Israel which is almost the be-all-and-end-all of everything. The place of the Jewish people. Its homeland, its right, its…
For Elie Wiesel
Not literally. Due to my father’s foresight (he had shown it when leaving Vienna in 1924), I came to America in January 1940, during the phony war. We left France, where I was born and…
God, Robin and me had the funniest time trying to decide. I mean it was bizarre. I suppose we had always assumed we would do it, but then, well, when you actually think…