Fearless Woman Warrior Stands Up to Putin’s Oppression
On March 8, to mark International Women’s Day, Putin gave a speech extolling the virtues of women: “You cope with a great pile of problems and worries while all the while remaining charming and beautiful,” he gushed to his mostly female audience. “How can one not simply admire this?” Promising government support to those who…
Read MoreThe Critical Importance Of Celebrating The Indomitable Immigrant Spirit
There’s a line from Leviticus that Jews repeat each year at Passover: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Whatever your position on the current immigrant crisis, these words are a humbling…
Read MoreUnleashing the Power of Mandela’s Inspiration: Paving a New Way
Remembering Nelson Mandela’s Message Ten years ago this month the world lost one of its greatest moral leaders. As we close out what has been a traumatic year for so many across the globe, I’d like to pause and remember the example of Mandela, who reminds us that people can change, human beings have the…
Read MoreThe Art of Swimming in the Great Sea of Sadness
Words have failed me in recent months. As a Jew and a human, I experience the horrific bloodshed in Israel as a firehose of tragedy so overwhelming that I can’t seem to catch my breath long enough to say anything meaningful at all. Then there’s the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, tame by comparison, as if…
Read MoreGive Change A Chance: How To Grow From Life’s Challenges
Time For Change When I was in the theater world, we used to perform this improv game where, in the middle of a scene, the director would shout from the side of the stage: “Make a new choice!” If I’d been a lumberjack chopping down a tree, now I was a terrorist felling a television…
Read MoreThe Graduation Speech You Need to Hear: A Message of Hope and Inspiration
If I were giving this year’s commencement speech, here’s what I would say: Dear graduating class of 2023, You live in a perilous world. You know that as well as anybody. Your generation has lived through COVID, a broken political culture, the terror of gun violence, and the specter of nuclear war once again rearing its ugly…
Read MoreMost “Great” Russian Writers Were Men. Here’s How We Need To Change That Today
Russian Writers In History I’ll never forget the uncomfortable conversation I had years ago with my good friend, writer, and philosopher Marietta McCarty. She was sharing with me her struggles to get men in her field to take seriously the notion that women could be philosophers, too. Surely I was more enlightened than that? she…
Read MoreThe Humane Russia I Love, The Brutal Russia I Hate
As someone who’s dedicated much of my professional life to studying Russian literature and culture, I’m following the tragic war in Ukraine with great interest and sadness. It is teaching me lessons both personal and political: how dictatorships work, how bullies maintain their grip on power, how leaders’ deep inferiority complexes often masquerade as superiority…
Read MoreHow Loss And Struggle Can Lead To New Insights
Loss and Struggle At the beginning of December, I finally got the total hip replacement I’d been avoiding. All that was left of my right hip for the past few years was a pile of jagged spurs and dead bone rubbing excruciatingly against one another like a constant, throbbing toothache in my leg that a…
Read MoreThis is How Gratitude in a Broken World Looks
Tragedy Strikes A few weeks ago, on Monday, November 14, I woke up to the news that three students at the University of Virginia, where I teach–Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr., and D’Sean Perry–had been murdered and two others wounded the night before by another UVa student who opened fire inside a charter bus…
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