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

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…

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…

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…

This essay appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine a few decades ago. I thought it deserved a reprise this May, when big companies spend millions on smarmy tributes to nurses.    When I drive past the hospital where my daughter was born, I look up to the 11th floor and wonder if the new moms…

According to the calendar, winter doesn’t begin until the solstice, December 21, but everyone knows it’s been underway since November, when the hours of darkness began to edge out the hours of light. ‘Tis the season of sad, sadder, saddest — no clinical diagnosis of Seasonal Affect Disorder necessary. Of course, it’s worse this year…

January 15, 2017. It was a few days before the Trump inauguration and my worst nightmare was about to become the worst 24-hour reality show in history. I finally understood what it meant to be “beside myself.” Which is why I decided to go – with two dear friends – to a “counter-inaugural demonstration” at…

The cruelty of the global pandemic seems limitless. So many broken promises, broken connections, broken hearts. News that the sympathy card sections at the drug store are as bare as the toilet paper aisle at the supermarket might seem like a small detail in the current landscape. But it is a loss layered upon the…