Depending on how you look at it, Masha Gessen’s “Blood Matters” (Harcourt) is either an unusually philosophical memoir of a cancer diagnosis or an unusually personal account of the complex ethical questions surrounding the issue of genetic testing. What do we want to know, and what don’t we want to know, about our own fates?…
‘So, are they going to do a mezinke at your brother’s wedding?” a Jewish friend asked this past spring, one eyebrow raised quizzically, as we watched our children play on a jungle gym. I shrugged my shoulders and changed the subject. To her, it was a question of tradition. To me, it was a full-fledged…
It was just before Rosh Hashanah when poet Dinah Berland, estranged from her son for 11 years, stumbled upon a book of women’s prayers that she believes led to her reconciliation with him. As Berland tells it, in 1998 she had wandered into a Los Angeles store that sells used books, when a slim book…
Often, words and expressions change meaning by happenstance, or because a secondary meaning gradually becomes a primary one. There’s no wider significance to it. Sometimes, though, the change is indicative of a real cultural shift. I had this thought the other day, as I was reading an article about the current trend in some American…
The idea for best-selling author Hope Edelman’s latest book was born as she sat in bed during the weeks leading up to the birth of her second daughter. With her swollen feet needing some tender loving care, a toddler scrambling around and a husband keeping long hours at the office, Edelman wished she could do…
This Father’s Day will be my second, and I’m feeling a bit conflicted. Last year was wonderful. My son was just four months old, and I shone with that new-parent glow. Strangers were approaching me in the street and cooing over him, and my friends were treating me with a new respect. Father’s Day felt…
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