Like many writers, I enjoy crafting articles. It's fun to explore different topics and, after all this time, I still get a kick out of seeing my byline in different outlets. But publishing has changed in recent years, largely for the worse. Magazines and newspapers are constantly folding or getting bought out by large corporations, with a concomitant shift of staff and
antisemitism
Butcher Power! The Vienna Meat Clique
I've been trying to imagine what the life of a butcher was like in Vienna in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when my mother's uncles, the Kornmehl brothers, were in the meat business. On the one hand, it seems that being a butcher was not a respectable enough profession to allow a Jewish member of the trade into the Vienna lodge of the B'nai B'rith. But here's another
Freud to Gestapo: Drop Dead!
Almost everything Sigmund Freud did has been analyzed endlessly -- and why wouldn't the Analyzer-in-Chief be subjected to such scrutiny? But the diverging opinions on Freud's behavior say as much about the analyzer as they do about analysand. I was particularly intrigued by the different responses to one incident: Freud's metaphorical finger to the Gestapo upon his departure