On the Gregorian calendar, today is the yahrtzeit (the anniversary) of the passing in 1976 of Rene Cassin, a French human rights activist and an author of the UN’s masterpiece, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That noble document contains a single line articulating the right to culture: “Everyone has the right freely to participate …
Read more »What does it take to heal social trauma? Like a lot of Jews of her generation, my maternal grandmother (may she rest in peace) was so repelled by all things German that she refused even to ride in a Volkswagen. She’d emigrated to this country long before World War II, but when that war was …
Read more »Life brings me many opportunities to talk with people who are serious about their work in the world, work that almost always involves some form of healing. Their lives are very different, but their dilemmas are often the same. Almost all of the teachers, therapists, community artists and activists I meet torture themselves about whether …
Read more »More and more, the things I care about seem to turn on a single question: can we human beings choose our actions, or are we in some very real sense controlled by other forces (whether our own brain chemicals or the commands of those in authority)? The oft-cited behavorial studies of Stanley Milgram in the …
Read more »My husband is a dedicated world-fixer. He is constantly aware of new ways our given reality could be improved. Take a ten-minute drive with him, for instance. I guarantee that before time is up, he will have articulated a need and supplied a proposal to fill it. “What were they thinking,” he’ll ask, “when they …
Read more »What holds us to the past? Being on vacation has given me the perfect laboratory to investigate that question. It’s perfect because for me, vacation time is free space. None of the figures who populate my past are present. My mementoes and reminders are all at home. No one is making demands. Except for my …
Read more »Words are my treasure and my pleasure, so it is surprising to find myself newly amazed at the power which can be packed into a single word. Case in point: “Apartheid.” Supporters of Israel’s current policies are up in arms over Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. They find it too critical of …
Read more »If only there were a futures market in the arrogance of foundation presidents, I would have broken the bank this week. On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article about the changes major foundations are making to keep up with Bill Gates’ mega-philanthropy. In it, the Rockefeller Foundation’s new president dismisses all that came …
Read more »The vacation trip I’m on was planned to coincide with my birthday on the 16th, but I’m not going to tell you which one it is. I guess vanity is the typical reason for withholding one’s age, but in truth, it’s vanity that usually makes me volunteer my age. That’s been my most effective way …
Read more »“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates 1500 years ago, and I’m inclined to agree. Paul Gauguin’s enigmatic 1897 painting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” has always seemed to me to embody the essence of the quest for meaning that gives value to our own lives—that …
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