à la carte spirit by ilona fried
Family
It’s Possible to Drown Out Marching Nazis. What About the Ones in Our Heads?
That 40,000 people marched peacefully in Boston on Saturday against hate groups, including Nazis, gave me hope that civilization would survive, at least for the weekend. While it’s important to starkly delineate what is, and what is not, acceptable in a modern democratic nation, it would be a foolish mistake to believe that everyone on … Continue reading
Why It’s OK, Even Imperative, to Laugh at the Tiki Torch Troglodytes
My late father, a survivor of Auschwitz, periodically told variations of the following joke when I was a kid: “Did you know that Jews and bicyclists caused World War II?” “Why the bicyclists?” I naively asked the first time. “Why the Jews?” After delivering the punchline, my dad chuckled. I either rolled my eyes, groaned … Continue reading
Convoluted Kaddish for a Complicated Relation
[note: this post is 2-3 times longer than usual] “Oy, es iz shver tsu zayn a Yid!” — Oy, it’s hard to be a Jew The world changed in large and subtle ways in early November. The day before the U.S. election I received a short e-mail from a distant cousin in Munich. She told me that her … Continue reading
Has Feldenkrais Unleashed My Inner Fashionista?!
We act in accordance with our self-image – Moshe Feldenkrais Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant – Moshe Feldenkrais At times, my relationship with clothing has felt impossible, like an ongoing unsolvable puzzle, a perpetual riddle whose answer is always one accessory out of reach. Perhaps the conundrum began with my grandmother, who … Continue reading
Oh, the Places You’ll Go! HuffPo?!
As some of you know, my recent piece, An Open Letter to Ivanka Trump from One Daughter to Another, was published on The Huffington Post. It first appeared in the unindexed, unsearchable contributors’ section, sort of a virtual slush pile. Then an editor highlighted some quotes and posted it on the political blog, a place I never expected to see … Continue reading
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