When you move to Boston there are three things that you must accept: You are forever a member of Red Sox Nation; you'll never get used to someone passing you in the breakdown lane on Route 128; and the Boston Marathon is what we really celebrate on Patriots' Day.

Last week, 15 narrow-minded, hard-hearted men tried to outlaw women saying the Kaddish at the Western Wall. There was so much blowback for these dubious caretakers of the Western Wall that they rescinded their ban on women gathering to mourn their dead at Judaism's holiest site.

I cannot imagine,...

There is no one fiercer or scarier or more real in this world than a dragon mother. Dragon mothers are mothers who grieve for children who have died or are terminally ill. Dragon mothers breathe fire and scorch everything in their path.

Emily Rapp is a dragon mother, a...

With the rise of the digital age and parents caught between raising children and trying to help their own parents, best-selling author and New York Times columnist on contemporary families Bruce Feiler decided that it was time to write a new playbook for the 21st century family. The...

523-0765.

Until last month, the phone number was in my family for almost half a century. But call the number today and you'll hear a terse message that it has been disconnected. It took 15 years for 523-0765 to become a non-working number. The drawn-out campaign that my sister,...

Dear Anna,

I watch you carry on with your dream of going to medical school and I'm already worried about the work-life balance issues you will inevitably face. Having a profession will present you with a unique set of challenges that men don't encounter. We are socialized to be the...

Help, thanks, wow. Those are the touchstones of prayer identified by the writer Anne Lamott. Lamott is a person of faith, a Christian who has something to say to everyone. The word "inclusive" comes to mind when I think about Lamott. She's a church-going equal opportunity ecumenist, which is why...

I've passed the sign for Newtown, Conn. hundreds of times. Just 60 miles northeast of New York City, Newtown is one letter away from my hometown of Newton. That near coincidence always made me smile. And now I cry because it is just one letter away from Newton. That's how...

If you have travelled the stretch of Interstate 84 through Hartford, Connecticut, you might have done a double take when you saw an exit for Asylum Street. I grew up about three miles up the road from that exit where the street unfurls into a suburban avenue.

My ancestral...

My mother and I have been organizing memories and addresses. By the time this column is on your screen I will have gone to Cuba and returned. It will be a short trip -- my first -- in which I cram a lifetime of my bright tropical curiosity about the...

Michael Lowenthal's fourth novel, The Paternity Test, is a beautifully told story that brings myriad social issues to the forefront and also manages to be a literary page-turner.

Lowenthal's work is hard to categorize. His first book, The Same Embrace, told the story of identical twins, one of whom...

Boom goes my generation with all of the energy and chaos of an atomic blast. Born between 1945 and 1964, there are 76 million of us in the United States. Boom goes my generation as we take our places on a historical continuum of social and political revolutions....

I know mothers like Diana Gold, the beautiful, narcissistic, and ultimately tragic mother at the center of Ilie Ruby's poetic new novel, The Salt God's Daughter. They're the anti-mother -- women constantly testing a child's loyalty by threatening abandonment and demanding the unconditional love of which they themselves are incapable....

A day on which a life changes forever always begins as ordinary -- so ordinary that thereafter, daily life is a deliberate celebration. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein writes about an ordinary day gone awry in her new memoir Crash: A Mother, a Son, and the Journey From Grief to Gratitude. In her...

It's been five years since your bat mitzvah. In your bat mitzvah state of mind you read trope cues as easily as ABCs. You teased out meaning from your Torah portion, which recorded the life and death of Sarah. And your wore a tallit or a prayer shawl you picked...

My children knew to speed ahead of me the other day when I spotted a scoutmaster and his troop at a rest stop on the Massachusetts Turnpike. They knew I had been building up a head of steam about the Boy Scouts of America all weekend.

Before I tell you...

With much anticipation and a shot of dread, it's time for some families of high school juniors and seniors to enter the college sweepstakes. Once a kid is knee-deep into her junior year of high school, the mostly self-imposed requirements to apply to colleges come fast and furious: SATs, SAT...

Here's a joke that I recently heard. An optimist sees the glass half-full. A pessimist sees the glass half-empty. An opportunist drinks the water. Not all that coincidentally, these describe the various emotional states of my half-occupied nest. Sometimes it's half-full; sometimes it's half-empty. Although there is more time and...

I am a feminist Jew because I am the mother of a daughter and a son.

I am a feminist Jew because the God of my foremothers doesn't recognize a caste system. When my God blessed Jacob's children, he also blessed Jacob's concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah. Yet it astounds that...

Sukkot is here and my guests are on the way. Like Chagall's lovers they fly over the silver moon; their white gauzy clothing double as wings. I greet them in the sukkah -- a makeshift structure akin to a hut that we build from a kit. The sukkah also has...