Mira and I have been talking backstage about the themes in the daily Kaddish. Sometimes I ask her, “What should today’s Kaddish be about?” or a variation of that question, because there’s just nobody or nothing specific I have in mind.
Category: essays
Mira and Erin writing on themes of death, dying, grief, ritual, music, listening, Kaddish, Lev Kogan’s “Kaddish,” and so on.
my father’s favorite boys speak up
Did the tzaddik walk into a bar? Did he drink a beer? Did he watch the World Series on that day? So. The answer appears to be (I’ll cut to the chase) — no, he did not. The whole tzaddik walks into a bar story that I told, turns out to be almost completely off….
the religion of labor: remembering a.d. gordon
I can’t seem to let A.D. Gordon go. And yet his is not an ideology that almost anyone seems to care about these days. Isn’t the modern task to seek more leisure and relegate labor to lesser beings — transient workers, illegal immigrants, cheap Arab labor, robots if you’ve got ’em? Aharon David Gordon was…
a tzaddik walks into a bar…
They were driving between X and Y — who knows where they’d been. They were rushing. Last game of the World Series was about to start, and they weren’t anywhere near getting back on time to watch the game.
my father’s favorite boys
Fred and Harold and my dad were like the Marx Brothers. Or the Coen Brothers. Or the Brady Bunch. Or. Or. Or maybe there was nothing like them at all. A team. A pack. A family. A coven. A comedy show. My father loved ‘those boys’ with all his heart, and all his might and…
yahrtzeit for galina
your quizzical smile eyes cocked, waiting you say nothing, save ‘why?‘ and they pour out their secrets and you — you collect them and you do them justice but that’s just our business— that’s just our business your fingertips arranging their tales for the ages their children will read you they’ll wish they could find…
malkah, magnes, and the military police
Malkah was at the Madrid airport, as wholesome as she could be. She had a husband with her and two squeaky clean children with her. And all their camping gear. And all her archives notes. And all her permissions to conduct research. And she got detained anyway trying to leave the country. It wasn’t the…
a kaddish for captain jack sparrow
Okay. So. Another Pirates of the Caribbean came out today. And I had absolutely no plans to see it. But we happened to be in the neighborhood, and there wasn’t a line, and there were plenty of tickets, and the timing was right — There were also plenty of good seats. Bad omen, right? Good…
the red kaddish walking tour
SUNDAY, MAY 15 • 2PM Red Kaddish Walking Tour The stories and voices of past Jewish and Russian radicals come to life on this combination walking tour/performance art piece visiting sites of political radicalism of 19th-century Lower East Side. Fiks maps the Lower East Side of Emma Goldman via writings by Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, Abraham Cahan’s via Russian revolutionary…