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The good news is that the New York Times broke the story about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps of people in the United States, part of the National Security Agency’s “War on Civil Liberties”—er, I mean “War on Terror.” The bad news is they waited more than a year to do it, whether out of …

Q: What do Jews do on Christmas eve? A: See first-run movies without standing in line. We went to see Brokeback Mountain last night under my favorite film-viewing conditions: three times as many empty seats as full ones. I woke up this morning thinking about how a film that portrays the persecution of the Other …

One of my greatest challenges is balancing the big world of beings and events with the little world in my own head and heart. Mostly, life consists of toggling back and forth between them, like someone switching between two TV channels. Reading this morning’s headlines about the president’s domestic spying and the prevalence of sexual …

The signs of cultural change can be subtle and hard to read, but now, an unmistakable signifier has emerged from the muddle: the United States has become a recipient of charity from other nations. This fall, Senators from both parties urged oil executives to take part in winter fuel assistance programs by donating a percentage …

Yesterday was the 57th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the first article reads as follows: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Here is what I have …

I saw my first lit-up house on Wednesday, rather lovely with swathes and swags of white light draped like crystals on a chandelier and the shape of a sleigh picked out in white and red on the front lawn. I saw my first lit-up house and my heart sank as I thought, “Oh, no, it’s going to be bad this year.”

So this is a cathartic essay, written in hopes of purging my expectation of seasonal despair. You see, I’m not a Scrooge. I’m a disappointed product of twentieth century American culture, and Christmas is for me the supreme symbol and expression of my alienation from that culture. Some years, it really pinches.

I grew up in an optimistic fifties suburb populated with the white ethnic veterans of World War II and their young families. The school I attended was one of those California Bauhaus bastards, thrown up without niceties to accommodate the fast-multiplying products of the Baby Boom. There were just a few other Jewish kids whose parents, like mine, were recent immigrants from the east coast, who’d taken advantage of the GI Bill to muster out in California and become proud owners of a tract home with its own little scrap of lawn, its scrawny sapling, its picture window looking out on more of the same. I could identify each and every one of those kids because we met up every December in the library, where we were sent while the rest of the class practiced Christmas carols.