Monthly Archives: July 2020

It would be nice to hear live music again. I was reminded of this yet again the other night when my wife and I sat down in my study to “attend” a live dance concert with the Texas swing band “Asleep at the Wheel.” Ray Benson, the band’s tall, bearded greying front man, led the octet in a selection of some of its most recognizable numbers – “Route 66,” “Boogie Back to Texas” – from a ranch resort outside Austin. The show, with virtual access costing $25, was promoted as “live,” though you could feel some of the artifice of the performance. It’s hard to muster the ambiance of a dance hall when, per the rules of social distancing, you are playing only to an audience of cameras, not real people. It will have to do, for now. Which is exactly the problem with all the other efforts at reclaiming lost aspects of our lives. There’s no better symbolism of the forced nature of the simulacrum that passes for returning to a semblance of normalcy than the way Major League Baseball has revived itself this (half)season. Empty ballparks, many of them “populated” with cardboard cutout spectators in the front rows,...Read more

Where do political values come from? That question is more important than ever these days, given the level of polarization and intensity with which people hold views. The extremes to which they vent might be new, but not the depth of those commitments. In my case, those values came early and were deepened through a lot of conversation, engagement and travel. My grandparents all fled Europe – on my father’s side escaping the old shtetl world of rural East European Jewry that straddled what was then the Russian-German border. They left a small town in what is now easternmost Poland, a little dusty village called Orla, and arrived here in the U.S. by 1905. As a boy I sat in their stuffy, un-air conditioned Brooklyn apartment for hours and listened to their stories. My grandmother, Celia, spoke in Yiddish and was not one to relive the past much. My grandfather, Louis, was just the opposite. He talked endlessly. Years later I taped him for hours – cassette recordings I subsequently transcribed and have written up into more narrative form. Another book in waiting. I was mesmerized by his tales – of the Jewish characters in his town, of his family...Read more