Blog

Two decades ago, after leaving the Wall Street Journal, one of my wife Natalie’s first jobs in the Jewish world was working for a nascent project at the Harold Grinspoon Foundation to send Jewish children’s books to families every month. The idea was brilliantly simple: Children want their parents to read to them at bedtime. If they get a book in the mail with their name on it, they’ll run to...

The dramatic high point of Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey comes when, after 20 years, Odysseus speaks to his wife Penelope while disguised as a traveler. He does not reveal himself—not openly, anyway—but, after three hours of movie-watching, he finally opens up about what has kept him from coming home all these years. I was so struck by this scene that I bought the screenplay when I...

Before anything else, I want to say thank you to the many readers who wrote last week to offer their condolences on the loss of my cousin Julian. My family and I have been surrounded in love and support. It means the world to all of us. Thank you. Among the reasons I wish my father was still alive is that I know how much he would delight in observing me coming to appreciate lessons he...

My cousin Julian Newman died tragically last week after a long battle with depression. He was a young 30 years old. Julian and his sibling Rena Yehuda are the two children of my first cousin Heidi and her husband Dave. As a child, I remember my mom talking to her older sister Judy Goldfein, Heidi’s mom, at least once a day—and that was back in the days when you had to pay for long-distance calls...

When folks ask me these days, “How’s your mom?” my answer is still, “She’s the world’s best Alzheimer’s patient.” But her world definitely feels like it’s shrinking. We’re approaching a decade since she was diagnosed. While she has blessedly been spared the kind of major personality change many dementia patients can experience, our conversations don’t have much room to roam. We stay close to...

Years ago, when I was a rabbi on a college campus, I found that one of the most wonderful parts of my job was when a student would come to me with a crisis of faith. “College costs so much,” I would tell them. “If it doesn’t provoke at least one serious crisis of faith, you should ask for your money back.” I said this, in part, because of my own experience as a student. In college, I lived...

Like me, one of my childhood rabbis, Rob Dobrusin, is a baseball fan. In addition to teaching me Torah as a young person, he also taught me to appreciate the writing of Bart Giamatti, the late Commissioner of the MLB. So the other day, when he posted this meme about the Pittsburgh Pirates on Facebook, I was, like him, rather amazed:   The Pirates are, as my kids might say, notoriously “mid” as a...

A few months ago, after I shared that I would be devoting more of these reflections to the topic of home and at-homeness, a package arrived in the mail. I opened it to discover a book I hadn’t ordered, The Longing for Home (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Included was a note from one of the contributors, Werner Gundersheimer, a retired academic and former director of the Folger...

When my youngest child was four years old, our local movie theater had a special showing of the original Lion King movie (not to be confused with the star-studded remake from a few years ago). It started at 7 pm, so I knew we’d be pushing the limits of his bedtime, but this seemed like an important special opportunity, so off we went. The movie was great. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I...

There is a serious debate among knowledgeable people about a very important question: What is the best baseball movie of all time? In my experience the choices often come down to Field of Dreams (starring Kevin Costner and featuring an immortal monologue by James Earl Jones that is guaranteed to bring the hardest-edged person to tears) and Bull Durham (also starring Kevin Costner—I know, I...

The other night I had dinner with a dear old friend and colleague. After catching up about our families and personal lives, the conversation moved, inevitably, to the state of the Jewish people. My friend, an astute observer of history, offered that our generation experienced a unique set of circumstances in the life of the Jews: We were born in America the wake of World War II. Having...