“Mom, cheer up. You’re still here. Cancer is just a word, a scary word, but just a word.”
On her plane ride from California, Miriam had started reading the library books she had brought for me. Neither of us had ever heard of Dr. Bernie Siegel, but we quickly found out that he specializes in helping people who face imminent death from illness to live fully and to die in peace.

As Miriam and I hugged tightly, I took a deep breath and tried to stanch my sobs. A week earlier I had received the definitive cancer diagnosis. Only hours after that phone call we had begun the first Passover Seder. Instead of being in California, as planned, with Miriam and her children, my husband and I were home in Rochester with understanding friends. Throughout, one thought hounded me: this, and tomorrow night’s, could be my last Seders. I hadn’t yet had all the diagnostic tests that would show where the cancer was, how much it had spread, where exactly I was affected. But I was frightened and shaky throughout the supposedly festive meals. read more

Last week a friend and I met for coffee. We haven’t seen each other for a couple of weeks and we talked about the recent killings of black men by police and brought up the 73 year old insurance executive who mistook his gun for a Taser and killed Eric Harris a 44 year old black man on April 2. I said to my friend that I wanted to understand the allure of guns for white men who at that age choose to join a police chase that unnecessarily ended with killing Eric Harris.

The coffee place where we sat was humming with patrons and a man who sat at the next table must have been paying close attention to our conversation since we talked quietly. The man, who was large and looked in his 60s got up came over to us, leaned into our table and said, “You should look at the NFL.” Given that both of us are rather small women this was clearly an intimidating invasion of our space. We were both stunned. We frequently meet at that establishment and it was the first time that anyone invaded our conversation. read more

So, how to describe Dilley? It is a small town, whose main industry is prison. Very few people live there, but Corrections Officers on contract come for 3 and 4 months stints to work in the correctional facilities in and around town, generating a surprising number of motels in the area. About 1.5 hours from San Antonio, it has a number of small, folksy restaurants (The ‘Swamp Shack’ and it’s vaunted ‘crawdad coffee’ come to mind), and one large General store.

How to describe the South Texas Family Residential Facility? A place where desperate, hopeless, women are incarcerated, despite having committed no crime, or the minor regulatory infraction of entering the country outside of a border checkpoint. read more

“Woman in Gold” is an important motion picture, which some reviewers are selling short. A plot driven movie that brings to life aspects of the holocaust ought to survive, to be seen by future generations. Documentaries don’t get much attention when first released, and don’t attract viewers generations later. Creating a movie that will have broad appeal decades from now assures today’s remaining survivors that future generations world-wide will grasp the magnitude of what European Jewry experienced. Directorial skill requires incorporating not only top acting talent but fidelity to the documented history, great visuals of important places not commonly seen, dramatic archival footage skillfully interwoven, and a window into deeply felt emotions by believable protagonists of heroic stature. These are the cinematic elements that create a great movie with broad appeal: an artistic creation. read more

The two greatest American popular singers of the 20th century, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, were both born in 1915. Billie is up first. This week, on April 7th, she would have turned 100. Of course, she got nowhere near that, dying in 1959, aged 44, her body worn out after a life of hard living, and dying miserably, in police custody for a narcotics arrest. There are so many Billie Holidays; the young singer, all effervescence and charm, plucked from obscurity from an already hard life, who before she was twenty was recording with many of the greatest jazz musicians of her time; the tough but incredibly vulnerable Lady Day, with the gardenia in her hair and her lousy choice in men, her addictions, and multiple run-ins with the law; and the singer in her last years, her voice reduced to whispers and shards, her singing haunted and on the outermost limits of sublimity; the woman who has, in many legends, has become as mythological as Zeus. read more

What was the most important thing to happen in the world in the last 50 years or so? There’s a case to be made that it was the Iranian revolution of 1979, a violent and unexpected swerve from which the world has yet to recover.

It is hard to remember back when Iran was America’s closest ally in the Middle East (and the US government was helping Iran build nuclear reactors for the peaceful use of atomic energy.) But the change of Iran from US’s fast friend to its fierce foe set in motion a chain of events that include the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the rise of Al Queda, the rise of Hizbullah, the Iran-Iraq War, the first Gulf War, 9/11, the US Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and its failures, the collapse of Syria, the war in Yemen, and a major reason for the lack of progress in Israel Palestinian peace efforts, and starting with the election of Ronald Reagan, a major boon to the success of right-wing politicians worldwide. read more