Over the past year, I’ve written about many things. About language and listening. About bridges that don’t quite meet in the middle. About courage and legacy. About generosity and grief. About community and belonging. Some of those essays were light and personal; others heavier, more searching. A few made me laugh as I wrote them. […]
Try as I might, I do not have an ear for language. It always irked me that my dad — fluent in three languages and close to fluent in several more — never spoke to us in Hungarian (or Romanian, for that matter) when I was growing up. It felt like something essential had skipped […]
There’s an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to go together. In a world that celebrates individual choice and personal branding, it is almost counter-cultural to think about philanthropy in a group […]
I just returned from the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly (GA), and I’m still thinking about it — less about the (really inspiring) sessions and more about the people, the ones I’ve known across so many different chapters of my life. There were the Federation colleagues from the earliest days of my career, when […]
I often share two jokes when deflecting a compliment.
The first: If I had the confidence in myself that others have in me, I’d be unstoppable.
The second: I only surround myself with people wracked with self-doubt — they’re the only ones I trust.
What Are You Feeling, Really? We like to think of feelings as simple — clear, distinct, neatly named. Joy. Sadness. Gratitude. Anxiety. But emotions rarely show up one at a time, and almost never in tidy boxes. They overlap. They masquerade. They arrive in clusters — tangled, intertwined, and often confusing. I remember telling my […]
