Chanukah begins this evening, and not a moment too soon.
When my daughter was young and the sun rose and set on her every lesson with alphabet and equation, I bemoaned any gap between Christmas and the Festival of Lights. The closer, the better, if you ask me. How better to illustrate the primal lesson of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the pleasure and challenge of a Jew living simultaneously in two civilizations.
A newspaper office is, in some ways, a hot-house world. There are those insistent deadlines every week; copy to edit; layouts to peruse; the telephone and e-mail increasingly the link to a world that\’s outside.\nBut then — thank goodness — there are those forays out of the office. They turn out nearly always to be a surprise; nearly always a learning experience.\n\nI had three such experiences this past week.\n\n
Ever since I moved to Los Angeles, I\’ve been completely lost.
No, I don\’t mean spiritually or emotionally. I mean literally. I\’ve been lost for pretty much two straight years.
Either the apocalypse is coming, or I\’ve been living in Los Angeles too long. Last night, I woke up from the most vivid dream, the kind that feels like it lasted all night, the kind of dream that feels like a journey through every emotion.
When Diane Arieff turned in her cover story on the best-selling \”Kosher Sex,\” I smiled with unquestioned approval. After all, opening doors and windows for Jews of all persuasions — observant as well as secular — seemed healthy and desirable.
You have three goals for your Sunday: wash your car, wash your clothes, wash yourself.
I couldn\’t stop looking at Monica Lewinsky last weekend. Her videotaped deposition played in our house nonstop.
Meet the class of 1998. This month, they leave high school behind and careen toward adult life.
My mother is 87. Or is it 90? As long as I can remember, I thought that she had been born in 1910, was named Miriam Euffa, and brought here from Kievas a 5-year-old by parents who were educated, and who had been part of what must have been a turn-of-the-century minority: the Russian-Ukrainian Jewish professional class. Now Medicare tells methat her Social Security card lists her year of birth as 1907.
Frankly, I\’m all for it.\n\nBut what about sports? Girls? Humvees and washboard abs? This column\’s supposed to parse the experience of a Jewish Guy in the world. But some guys have called, confused. What\’s all this about singing baby boys to sleep? About tender talks and the salve of toddler hugs? It\’s all very sweet, but, guy, hey guy, they ask, where\’s the testosterone?\n\nFunny. My wife\’s been bugging me about the samething.
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