Members of the Scribe

Zi kholmt – she dreams.In Irena Klepfisz’s remarkable poem, “Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn / A few words in the mother tongue,” the speaker ...

The three of us waited expectantly and somewhat nervously in the seminar room, wondering why we had been summoned by ...

When I first began studying Yiddish, I felt like I was remembering something I already knew.It was a lovely sensation, this ...

A few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times ran an article about the death of Eddie Goldstein, “the last Jewish man of ...

Sometime back in my childhood, I got the idea that it was “nicer” to say “I’m Jewish” than “I’m a ...

Although I live in California, I don’t share the New Age belief that there are no coincidences. I think many ...

I thought I had entered completely into the world of my novel: Boyle Heights in the 1920s and 30s, when ...

I always begin like this, with Irv, my grandfather, and then I describe him, An angel on Earth, never another like him. ...

One of the things that I find most compelling about Judaism is the idea of b’shert. It fills me with joy ...

In my blog posts this week I have written about the Kodachrome slides that Bill Manbo took while imprisoned with ...

The question that I am exploring in this series of blog posts is what a “concentration camp” looks like. In ...

My new book  Colors of Confinement  presents dozens of stunning Kodachrome photographs of everyday life inside the barbed wire confines ...