Blog

If you’re a full-fledged grownup in a relationship with a younger member of GenZ (born mid-1990s to early 2010s) or GenAlpha (born since then), you may find yourself, like me, sometimes at a loss when it comes to language. Some of this is normal generational churn: words like “rizz” and “sus,” phrases like “no cap,” are just as foreign to me as the incessant interjection of “like,” or the casual use of “awesome” that characterized my childhood, were to my parents. (I have regular conversations with my kids about the correct linguistic deployment of “low key.” Alas, I fear I’m a hopeless case.) But some of the intergenerational language barrier feels like it’s bigger than the normal way the...

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...

One of my favorite parts of Shabbat is reading the New Yorker. It's the only time during the week I can sit for an hour or two and just read, uninterrupted by demands of work or family. And as I told my eldest son recently, while college certainly helped with my own writing, it was in reading the New Yorker that I really learned how to write. So I find those Shabbat mornings when I'm sitting at...

Nearly twenty years ago my family and I moved to Evanston, Illinois. I had just been ordained a month earlier, our son Micah had just been born two weeks prior, and we moved into an empty condo apartment two blocks from the Northwestern University Hillel, where I had taken a job as the campus rabbi. Natalie and I had rented apartments in New York up until then, and this was the first place we...

The other day I listened to a talk by one of my favorite teachers of mindfulness, Gil Fronsdal, about the war in Israel and Gaza. I listen to Gil's meditations and short talks several times a week. I'm drawn to the clarity, simplicity, and depth of his teaching. I find that practicing with him early in the morning, or while I'm walking the dog, is helpful. Like his previous talk on the war last...

When my son Toby was seven or eight years old, we watched the Revenge of the Sith, the third of the Star Wars "prequel" movies—the one that tells the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader (spoiler alert, I guess—but, really?). In the climactic scene, as Anakin is about to battle his master Obi-Wan Kenobi, his eyes are yellow with rage. He has been overtaken by anger. He shouts at...

One of the main reasons Natalie and I moved to Skokie eleven years ago was so that our children would have other kids to play with on Shabbat afternoon. We had previously lived in Evanston, which had a wonderful but very small shomer Shabbat community. There were basically the same few kids, and no one else at our children's grade levels. When Toby came along, we realized we wanted a different...

I travel frequently for work. My checklist of things to do before I leave home includes not only packing undershirts and a toothbrush, but also emptying the compost bin that sits next to our sink. I seem to be the member of my family who can stand the smell the easiest. So before I get in the taxi to the airport, I dump the compost into the larger bin outside. I therefore think about the compost...

On Monday night, for the first time since before I had children (meaning at least 21 years ago), I went to the opera. Not just any opera, but the premiere of a new production of Verdi's La Forza del Destino at the Met--a production that lasts four hours and involves a huge cast and elaborate sets. And, because it was opening night, there were a lot of people decked out in their finery. It was a...

I was boarding an airplane recently when the man in front of me, who looked to be about 20 years my senior, turned and asked, "How long have you worn a kippah?" He was not wearing a kippah, so I was a little startled by this very direct question. But my mind picked up on other cues and quickly filled in a story that he was Jewish and was asking this question out of a sense of solidarity.  ...

The other night I pulled off our bookshelf a thick volume from my childhood, "The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents." I was into politics and government as a kid, and at some point (before the presidency of Bill Clinton, to judge by the men profiled in the book) I had acquired this one. I'm still something of a government nerd--my kids sometimes get out the almanac on...