In my backlog of unfinished posts, this one -- started in November 2019 -- seemed the most timely for this pandemic Passover. It's partly elegiac, which fits the current mood, but it's also about finding new family. And about endurance. A deli-denying newscaster plays a part in the narrative too. Fake news! Rolled Beef, Redux In my dual roles of amateur family
Passover
Dayenu: A Kornmehl Reunion in Vienna
Dayenu: It would have been enough. That phrase, repeated as a refrain in a Passover song that offers a litany of thanks for blessings piled upon blessings, has been going through my head sporadically since last October, when I gave a talk at the Freud Museum in Vienna. It's been an amazing journey, albeit one that's taken a rather meandering, bumpy path, from the inception of
The Jews, the Pyramids & the Importance of Questioning
I consider myself a Jewish rationalist, someone who identifies culturally with Judaism without buying the biblical myths. The Exodus story of the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, told every Passover? Just one of the many overwrought episodes in the Old Testament, akin to the stories of Noah's ark and Jonah's stint inside a whale (strange, given the desert locale, how