“Good morning, Eeyore,” said Pooh.

“Good morning, Pooh Bear,” said Eeyore gloomily. “If it is a good morning, which I doubt,” said he.

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.”

“Can’t all what?” said Pooh, rubbing his nose.

“Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.”

I wish my kids called me Eeyore. There’s something lovable and romantic about the stuffed donkey with the buttoned-on tail that always seems to go missing. I could imagine myself walking through a pleasant wood as a solitary raincloud tracks my every move, my damp ears drooping to the ground…

What’s this next Jewish holiday about? It’s what they’re all about: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.

The upcoming holiday of Purim has an even stronger message of resilience, though. In fact, we begin to anticipate it, practicing our capacity for joy in the face of tragedy…

U.S. capitalist culture prioritizes productivity over presence. This is no more evident than in the ways in which both work and school pressure working parents (especially women and people of color) and children to keep pace during a pandemic.

I saw a recent social media post from a parent of…

It happened the moment those four hundred lamps, representing the 400,000 American lives lost to the COVID-19 virus, illuminated the reflecting pool between the Washington monument and the Lincoln Memorial. I exhaled. I wept. I dropped my shoulders. I closed my eyes. I felt as though I had been received…

Our Sages taught: The Hanukkah lamp — it is a commandment to place it at the door of one’s house, on the outside. And if one lives in an attic, place it in a window adjoining the public area. (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 21a)

Placing a Hanukkah menorah in the front…

Queer Wisdom for Pandemic Holidays

In the beforetimes, we took the subway everywhere, and one day, weary from walking and playing on the HighLine, my child and I sat on a bench beneath the city, waiting for our train. Suddenly, he reached over to me, crying. …

“The future is female.” “The future is Black.” “The future is nonbinary.” “The future is queer.”

These assertions challenge the status quo by insisting that the under-valued and devalued in our society will survive and thrive. These slogans do not preach revenge or represent so-called reverse discrimination. To insist that…

After the elections are over, your neighbors will still be your neighbors.

While I understand the impulse to soothe our election anxiety with the notion of “getting along” with our neighbors, ultimately his vapid, “tolerant middle” sentimentality ignores and erases the real problems our country is facing, and must solve…