Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death
Nearly 40 years have passed since Dan White, a disgruntled political rival, shot and killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and Mayor George Moscone in their City Hall offices
I, Sarah Steinway
The specter of a flood-swept future is all too easy to envision. In the past two years alone, catastrophic floods have inundated parts of Maryland, Texas, and Louisiana
The Comedown
There is pleasure to be had in a work of fiction whose scope spans two generations. Characters are introduced or shown in flashbacks as children, and we see how they fulfill – or don’t – the expectations placed on them by their parents, or how traumas they experience later come to bear. In The Comedown (Henry Holt) – as in Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s recent epic of the African diaspora, or Amy Tan’s classic The Joy Luck Club – Rebekah Frumkin explores the ways in which choices made by parents echo through children and grandchildren for decades
Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling
In Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), literary critic and poet Adam Kirsch presents us with a collection of 270 letters spanning the period from 1924 to 1975, the year of literary critic Lionel Trilling’s death at the age of 70. The letters are organized in chronological order rather than thematically, juxtaposing love letters to his wife Diana (an important literary critic in her own right) to discourses on his favorite British authors, to dealings with his psychoanalysts.
An American Reflects on Independence Day from Israel
July 4th in Israel is a day sandwiched between July 3rd and July 5th. Nonetheless, after work we’ll heat the grill and invite other Americans to celebrate with us.
How to "Restring Your Beads" When Your Narrative Changes
When I first learned about stringing and restringing our beads based on life experiences, I began to see my relationship with Torah as an ongoing, nonlinear process.
What Moses Could’ve Learned from Starbucks
Knowing when to let go is a most difficult decisions many of us will face as we age. If we hold on to people or things too long, we risk harm to them and to ourselves.
Why Did You Deceive Me, Distant Lights?
Visiting Kuchinate, I experienced overwhelming kindness from the women, Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers who had escaped horrible torture and persecution in Africa.
It's Up to Us to Keep the Mishpachah (Family) Together
Imagine being forcibly separated from your loved one. This scenario may evoke thoughts of one of the darkest times in Jewish history. Yet, this is happening today, in America.
Recapping the URJ President's Whirlwind Visit to Israel
“It’s time for there to be a new way to give peace and justice to the people of Gaza, an end to the destructive policies and dangerous leadership of Hamas, and security to the Israelis who live nearby the Gaza border.”