Perspective Shift: Notes from Africa on What Matters Most
In June, I spent two weeks in Tanzania with my eight-year-old son, Evan, and extended family to celebrate my brother’s sixtieth birthday. In that physically and emotionally demanding environment, I admired sides of Evan’s personality that I hadn’t seen before. And I myself experienced a perspective-shifting reprieve from the toxicity and ugliness of so much…
Read MoreA Father’s Love Knows No Bars
With Father’s Day around the corner, I’ve been thinking about a kind of love familiar to millions of men around the globe—including the nearly eight hundred thousand incarcerated men in America with children on the outside. I am reminded of the power of that bond as I listen to Kory, a 21-year-old Black man with…
Read MoreFearless 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…
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