When this Column Gets Personal

I appreciate hearing from readers when one of my columns resonates with them.

The following excerpts are from my 2025 favorites.

Jan. 21: “He was as kind a man as I have known.” I wrote that about Rabbi Alvin Sugarman, rabbi emeritus at The Temple, who died on Jan. 17 at age 86.
My introduction to Sugarman came in the late 1980s, at a suburban Chicago synagogue. “Several years ago, I told him: ‘Rabbi, you co-officiated at Roberta’s wedding. I confess that until that occasion, I had never heard Hebrew spoken with a Southern accent. So, if you recall anyone snickering, it was me, and I apologize,’” drawing a laugh from the Atlanta native.

Feb. 26: The column headline read, “I’m Happy & Relieved for My Extended Family.” Before Oct. 7, 2023, I knew relatively little about the Israeli side of my family tree. After three family members were murdered and seven kidnapped, my daily routine included checking for posts and messages from the Israeli cousins.
Many of my columns since Oct. 7 were motivated by this personal connection. The last of the seven kidnapped was released on Feb. 22, after 505 days in captivity, returning to his wife and two children, who themselves had suffered 50 days as hostages.

May 28: The news was the demise of my garden nemesis, the “kiwi plant from hell.”
Planted 25-plus years ago by a young horticulturist, “The kiwi plant went forth and multiplied. I say without exaggeration that had it never been trimmed, the kiwi vines would have reached across the roof of our house,” I wrote.
The kiwi shaded the raspberries and blueberries — and wrapped itself around a basketball hoop, ever so slowly tilting its base.
On May 15, “I found the formerly vertical basketball hoop lying horizontal on the ground. The force of its fall had dragged most of the massive plant to the ground, even tearing away some of the thicker vines extending from the roots . . . [the kiwi] fell victim to its own appetite, taken down by the basketball hoop that it tried to swallow.”

July 16: In October 1991, when I was CNN’s national weekend editor, Chabad Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, arranged for the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson to speak with our reporter.
I stayed in touch with Shmotkin, the director of chabad.org and Chabad’s director of public relations. At the 2004 American Jewish Press Association meeting in Atlanta, I declined his invitation to wrap tefillin.
This summer, Shmotkin called, urging me to meet his son, Rabbi Levi Shmotkin, who was in Atlanta to promote, “Letters for Life: Guidance for Emotional Wellness from the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” a book drawn from Schneerson’s letters to people seeking his counsel.
Levi and I sent his father a photo of me wrapping tefillin. “My attitude had mellowed, and I was willing to do with the son what I might have regretted not doing two decades earlier with the father,” I wrote.

July 30: “Bru was lying on a towel on the floor of an examining room at the veterinary clinic, clearly exhausted by physical infirmities that increasingly had plagued him for months, a sad look in those big brown eyes. That we knew this day would come made it no easier, perhaps even more difficult. The vet explained that an aging dog wants to please its humans and will hang on as best it can. At 15-plus years old, Bru surely had tried,” I wrote.
“Bru was my confidant for conversation (albeit one-sided), snarky comments, and rants . . . I miss talking to him. He was a good dog and a good friend, and I loved him.”’

Aug. 13: “This is the story of two men and how the grandson of one returned a keepsake to the grandson of the other,” I wrote.
During a visit to “Camp Schechter,” the cabins in the woods by a lake in Maine, I met up with Michael Socolow, the grandson of Melvin Krulewitch, a close friend of my grandfather, Frank Isaac Schechter. Socolow, a professor at the University of Maine, gave me a wooden humidor bearing the initials, “FIS.”
Frank’s friendship with Krulewitch probably began in the 1910s in New York. Both graduated from Columbia University, survived World War I combat in France, and had noteworthy legal careers.
Frank died when my father was 11 years old, from respiratory problems exacerbated by poison gas inhaled during the war. The humidor that my grandmother gave Krulewitch as a remembrance is now displayed in my home office.

Oct. 1: “I have been rummaging through the corner of our basement storage room that I refer to as my genizah,” I wrote.
“As I handle decades-old documents, photographs, and newspapers, in a room with adequate light and a dehumidifier, I think of my great-grandfather, who spent months sifting through — and breathing the dust of — the centuries-old contents of the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in the Fustat section of Old Cairo.”
I kept a notice from my high school journalism teacher, informing me that I was failing her class; something about not turning in assignments. I eventually passed.
I disposed of rejection letters from newspapers where I sought work after a layoff, the incident that precipitated my spending three decades in television news.
“In the end, the journalism thing worked out OK, I think.”