Posts by Anita Diamant
No Kings
June 14 dawned grey, cool and drizzly – not an inviting day for a march and rally. But I had agreed to meet a friend in Gloucester, on Massachusetts’ Cape Ann, to attend one of the 2,100-plus “No Kings” events around the country. And going to the demonstration felt like the least I could do…
Read MoreA snapshot of his culture war
The culture coup at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts was predictable. Trump has repeatedly shown that he’s no fan of the Kennedy Center or the honors it bestows. During his first presidency, he skipped the ceremonies honoring several national cultural icons who weren’t his biggest fans. Trump got his back by exercising his right…
Read MoreThe weaponization of antisemitism
On March 26, Rümeysa Öztürk of Turkey, a 30-year old doctoral student at Tufts, was confronted on a Somerville street, forced into an unmarked car by men and women dressed in black and driven off. I watched the footage again and again, remembering a terrible story I’d been told as a child. In 1945, my mother’s…
Read MoreInstead of watching the inauguration
Everything I saw and read in the lead-up gave me flashbacks to January 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed and trashed in the name of Trump under the banner of the Confederacy. I didn’t want to hear Carrie Underwood sing. Or watch Barack Obama and Joe Biden behaving with decorum while Trump told…
Read MoreSummer Fruit
All too soon, the produce aisles will be full of apples and pears, and while they will get me through the winter – for a few more weeks, I am bingeing on summer fruit – diverse, juicy, and sweet. Fruit is also the most provocative food group. The apple was alluring enough to have caused…
Read MoreMy first “Moth” story…
I was honored to be part of a program benefitting Brookline.news, a non-profit online source of reporting — a crucial service — in the “news deserts” in which so many of us now live. To see the whole program (six https://brookline.news/a-soviet-arrest-crashing-a-bat-mitzvah-and-dropping-out-at-age-14-brookline-storytellers-help-mark-one-year-anniversary-of-brooklines
Read More25 years ago .. Remembering the shooting at Columbine
This column was published 25 years ago in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. A whole generation — or is it two by now? — has grown up with the very real fear and present danger of school shoottings. The massacre at Columbine High School occurred six months before my daughter started high school, and…
Read MoreIris Apfel “Geriatric Starlet”
Iris Apfel — a fashion icon like none other — died on March 1 at the age of 102. The obituaries and testimonials were laudatory, affectionate and larded with more breathless adjectives than raisins in a fruitcake.I never met the woman in the flesh, but I did spend a couple of hours in 2009 with a selection from the contents of her amazing closet. And it changed the way I thought about my own closet
Read More2024: Audiobooks!
Good things happen in threes, right? And so it is that three of my Jewish guidebooks are being released as audiobooks this year. My novels became audiobooks soon after their print publication, but that was not the case for the five non-fiction guidebooks to contemporary Jewish life I wrote. It was no big surprise that…
Read MoreClimate Anxiety: Frogs, Ostriches, Canaries, Meerkats
It was hot on July 5, and I was determined to get into the water at Good Harbor Beach no matter how cold it was. Ocean temperatures on Cape Ann are famously chilly. July averages around 65 (F); in August, its averages 67(F), though it can be a cold as 60. As I walked from…
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