May 21, 2022 Dear Mendel, Israel has been a difficult issue between us for a long time. Recent news is very disturbing. Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known Palestinian-American television reporter, was shot to death while covering an Israeli raid against Palestinians on the occupied West Bank. When she was shot…

May 14, 2022 Dear Mendel, The big move to Co-op City changed your life and mother’s life in a number of ways. I don’t remember the exact date you moved but I know it was after Thanksgiving 1971 and before the end of the 1971–1972 school year because I stayed…

May 7, 2022 Dear Mendel, You bought me a sleek red bicycle for my tenth birthday. Mommy was already very sick and looking back that is probably why you bought it for me. I remember racing Georgie X and smashing the front wheel into the side of a building because…

April 30, 2022 Dear Mendel, It wasn’t until I was an activist and a historian myself before I understood your evolution from silence to caution to being on the front line. While I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, you never discussed your politics, even which political party…

April 23, 2022 Dear Mendel, Donnie Brasco was a movie about former FBI agent Joseph Pistone who went undercover in a Brooklyn Mafia family as the mobster Donnie Brasco. I wasn’t in the movie, but I “shoulda been.” I don’t think I ever told you this story. I was laid-off…

April 16, 2022 Dear Mendel, In my last letter I think was a little too negative about Camp Hurley and so in this letter I want to discuss some of the really terrific things that we did with kids that make me proud to be a teacher and to have…

April 9, 2022 Dear Mendel, I became a teacher because of you so this letter is another big thank you. I’ve now been teaching for about fifty years. At City College in the 1960s I really thought there was going to be a revolution, not necessarily a violent one, but…

April 2, 2022 Dear Mendel, Once when my teenaged son Solomon was driving me particularly nuts we were talking and I tried to get some advice on what you thought I should do. You didn’t have any immediate solutions other than giving me someone to complain to, but you did…

March 26, 2022 Dear Mendel, After Straubenmuller Textile High School closed in 1954, its building on West 18th Street in Chelsea became home to Charles Evans Hughes High School. I taught at Hughes from 1978 until it started being phased out after the 1980–1981 school year. One day, while exploring…