June 18, 2022 Dear Mendel, I am in my seventies and a grandfather and want to acknowledge important life lessons I’ve learned from you that hopefully I can pass down to future generations. From you I learned to work hard at a job, no matter what it is. Do an…

The other day I was moving some furniture for my son Solomon who does not appreciate how old and decrepit I’ve become. …

June 4, 2022 Dear Mendel, At your grandson Steven Jackson’s son’s Bar Mitzvah, my stepbrother Lennie and I were joking, morbidly and probably not funny, about volunteering to fight in Ukraine. The only thing holding us back was that we didn’t know which side to shoot at. The Russian invasion…

May 28, 2022 Dear Mendel, Just wanted to give you an update on my grandkids, two of your large horde of great-grandchildren from the Jackson-Singer tribe. Sadia and Gideon are my stepdaughter Heidi’s seventeen-year-old twins and they are graduating from high school this year. Sadia will attend the University of…

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…