Archive for February, 2009
The following essay first appeared in the Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle on January 22, 2017, two days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
The question my 9-year-old grandson brought home from school just after the election was all the evidence I needed that the members of my vibrant, multiracial family have become canaries in Donald Trump’s toxic new America. We are foremost a family, in law and in fact; that we are also a multiracial family had been merely a footnote — until Trump.
I don’t mean to suggest that our individual backgrounds are immaterial. We and an increasing number of other families in this country are nourished by the emotional resiliency our varied heritages give us. And yet the most meaningful differences among us are the variations of personality, generation and social experience, not externally imposed distinctions of ethnicity or religion.
made life in Poland intolerable. The world they were raised in defined and treated them by only one measure: Jewish or not-Jewish.
During World War II, my grandparents, by then proud American citizens, were forced again — this time by the
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