Blog

Earlier this week, my middle son and I woke up bright and early in order to beat Chicago rush hour traffic and make it to Champaign, Illinois in time for his orientation/registration day. While our older son is also a student at U of I, the new student process then was entirely online because of the pandemic. So this was a new experience. Having grown up in another Big Ten college town (Ann Arbor) and spent much of my career in higher education, there was something reassuringly familiar about walking on the sleepy quad in the summer, entering the student Union building, and witnessing the beautifully diverse array of students and families on hand. At a time when universities have become...

I will admit that I wasn’t prepared for the emotional response I experienced upon reading President Biden’s letter announcing his decision to turn down renomination this week. I was really moved. Upon reflection, what touched me most was the rarity of witnessing the most politically powerful person in the world acknowledge his limitations and, after some reluctance, ultimately volunteer an act...

A couple of friends sent me David Brooks’s column in the New York Times last Friday. While the headline made it seem that the column was about “Trump’s enduring appeal,” the column itself might more accurately be summarized as a reflection on, as Brooks put it, “the deeper roots of our current dysfunction.” As one of my friends said, they thought I might resonate with Brooks’s analysis, and...

This isn’t a political space and I don’t intend to make it one here. But I also feel a need to talk about politics this week. Wish me luck. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing a deep feeling of unease. I have found it hard to focus. I’m more easily distracted than usual. My sleep hasn’t been as good. And it’s not about anything in my personal life–everyone is more or less okay,...

In the weeks before he left for camp, my youngest son, Toby, and I started watching the sitcom “Modern Family” together. It has been a delight to rediscover this show that I remember being stupendously funny the first time around and to share it with my kid now. (It’s also really interesting to see which parts of the show hold up 15 years later and which ones could use a rewrite.) Like any good...

A memory came up on Facebook the other day: a picture of a note from our youngest child three years ago after he arrived on the bus for his first experience as a camper at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. It was brief, but it made my heart melt: “I’m having so much fun! Toby.” Summer camp is a multigenerational through line in my family history. My grandfather went to Camp Tonkawa with the Boy Scouts in...

Peter Salovey, who is stepping down this month as president of my alma mater, Yale University, was my freshman psychology teacher thirty years ago. The course was popular. Hundreds of students took it. Salovey was always quick with a joke. Before the final, I remember him telling us the story of a huge lecture hall full of students writing their exams, much like the one we were about to take. As...

On my podcast this week, I shared a bit about my recent struggle to walk our dog, Phoebe, in the midst of all the cicadas that now line the sidewalks of our neighborhood. (Folks, the cicada invasion is real, and it's here, at least in Illinois.) While it's okay for her to eat a number of them, too many could cause her to have stomach issues. We've tried a muzzle (she hated it and got it off)....

The last couple of weeks have been one of those moments when I pinch myself and ask, "Really, I get paid to do this?!" Because over the last two weeks, I have spent a total of eight days on IJS retreats--first for our Sustainers Circle and, this week, for our staff, both of which are extraordinary groups of people. My days have been filled with reflection, thoughtful conversation, study, and a...

I want to tell you about my amazing Shabbat last week. It came on the third day of a five-day retreat we held for about 25 members of our IJS Sustainers Circle, a group composed of former board members, alumni of our Kivvun program, and major donors. The retreat was full of meditation sessions, rich and musical prayer tefilah (prayer), mindful movement, mindful eating, and a lot of love. But...

My sons never knew their maternal grandfather. I never knew him either. He died of a brain tumor while my wife Natalie was in college, which was before we met. By all accounts Peter was a wonderful person. He loved chess and theater and active life outdoors. He loved his daughters and, no doubt, would have doted on his grandchildren. He was beloved by his extended family. While all of that is...

In recent days I feel like I've been living in a world suffused with the word camp. The encampments on college campuses, which are themselves reflective of ideological and political camps, have occupied our collective attention. As the parent of one student in college and another about to graduate high school, I have been following events with concern. As a scholar of the history of Jews and...

"All revolutionaries are patricides, one way or another." That's a line from Yuri Slezkine's classic of modern Jewish history, The Jewish Century. The book was published in 2006. A few years later, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, that line became a powerful lens as I reflected on the intergenerational conflict in American Jewish life in the late 1960s and early 70s. My thesis was...