Blog

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 vanquished Germany and Japan, the United States made them and much of the rest of the world into markets and trading partners, leading to an unprecedently long economic boom. And, in the shadow of the Shoah, antisemitism was banished from polite society. American Jews flooded into universities and rapidly...

In a casual conversation the other day with my dear friend Marvin Israelow, our board chair at IJS and someone nearly 30 years my senior, I shared with him that one of the many blessings of my job is being in the presence of so many people who are "doing aging well." He asked what I considered aging well. I considered his question and responded that I thought it included a...

For the last decade or so, my family's winter vacation has been a time to get together with my wife's sister and her husband. She's a diplomat, so they're often stationed in interesting places (and have free housing to offer us). And when they're not in a foreign country, we have a chance to go to other interesting places together: skiing, warm weather places, places where...

When I first started at IJS just about four years ago, one of the good pieces of advice I received was to hire an executive coach. Robin Bernstein, who had served as our interim executive director before I started, stood out to me as a perfect person to support me in that way, and thankfully she agreed to do so.During our weekly sessions, I would share my latest ideas on...

I finally watched "Barbie" this week. I was on the plane, heading home after an intensive four days of work, too exhausted to do much of anything else. So, the movies. If you haven't seen "Barbie" yet, here's my encouragement to do so. And if you have seen it, here's my encouragement to see it again. It's a smart, funny, and incisive two hours of social commentary on...

The other night our middle son, Micah, had a basketball game. We always try to light Hannukah candles together as a family, so we waited for him to come home. We wound up lighting the hanukkiah after 9 pm. (They won the game, btw--and he even had a three-pointer.) Natalie and I take fire safety seriously, so we wanted to make sure the flames were out before going to bed....

This coming Saturday night marks the fifth yahrtzeit, or death anniversary, of my father, Lou Feigelson z"l (pictured above with my mother during the dancing at our wedding; it's a favorite picture.)While professionally my Dad made his living in real estate and property management in our hometown of Ann Arbor, at his core he was a teacher. Like so many children of Jewish...

Like so many others, I've been struggling for words since October 7. "Ein milim," "There are no words," is the phrase many Israelis have used to greet one another. For me, it feels like this time has tested the limits of my ability to formulate words, that language is insufficient to reflect and express all the thoughts and emotions I've been having.Regular readers will...

I recently heard a podcast interview with Benjamin Wittes, the editor of a blog called Lawfare that I read every now and then. Wittes was talking about the role of context in determining the meaning of speech acts according to the law. He cited the following example: If an insurance salesman says to me, “You have a beautiful house, it would be a shame if something happened...

My oldest son, Jonah, was the first to introduce me to the contemporary idea of the "multiverse." While the concept, and even the term, have been around for centuries (Wikipedia tells me William James used it in 1895), the notion has gained particular traction in today's media. The TV show "Rick and Morty," which Jonah loves, is built on the idea of "infinite timelines,...

Twenty-five years ago, right out of college, I lived in Jerusalem for a year. While I grew up with a very strong Jewish identity, I didn't receive the kind of Jewish education that would allow me to study Talmud in the original Hebrew/Aramaic or to walk into a beit midrash and know what all the books on the shelf were, much less how to open them up and study from them. In...

When I was little, I remember I would usually wake up and come out to the kitchen to find my mother sitting there with her coffee, reading a book or the newspaper. She would often have a notebook beside her, and whatever she was reading was marked up with sticky notes. In later years, the books and sticky notes weren't there as much, and I would find her with just the...

On Monday morning a headline crossed my newsfeed: A six-year old boy in suburban Chicago had been brutally stabbed to death by his family's landlord. His mother was severely injured while trying to protect him. The story was tragic. What made it even more significant was that the boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, was, like his mother, from the Palestinian community. While the...