A friend recently recommended I read God is Here: Reimagining the Divine by Rabbi Toba Spitzer. It was a gift. Truly. Rabbi Spitzer provides beautiful, rich metaphors for the divine. Images that don’t chafe the way the God is a giant sky-man does. Things like God is water; God is fire; God is a whisper; God is a place; God is a cloud etc. I loved trying on the different metaphors with Rabbi Spitzer and testing how they feel with my experience of the divine. Even before thos

Somehow these reflections ended up unpublished for nearly a year. 😮 I uncovered the essay when looking for something else in my Google Drive, and decided I might as well share now. Enjoy! February 22, 2022 I can’t remember how I learned about this title, but I know I purchased it (from a brick and mortar bookstore no less) only a few days after it’s official publication date. Michael Schur’s television series, The Good Place , was one of my favorites of the past several year

I usually try to write my reflections on a book within a week of my finishing reading it. That way my recollection of the arguments and my reactions to it are fresh. Sadly, that did not happen for Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America , which I actually finished reading on the last day of 2021 (before I read How Do you Live? even). I think part of the procrastination has been that I don’t know how to do this work justice. Ambivalent Embrace is a fasc

I often begin my reflections on a given book with a brief explanation of how that title came to be on my TBR shelf. So far, I’ve only shared reflections here on non-fiction titles. With this offering, I’m going to break both conventions. Back in 2016, I was yearning for a story that portrayed a healthy mother-daughter relationship. With a four-year-old at home, the unending march of children’s stories–from Disney princesses to PJ Library picture books–painted a pretty clear p

I was unfamiliar with Rachel Ricketts before I picked up her book Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing White Supremacy . I moved the book up on my TBR shelf because I so appreciated the title’s allusion to the Maya Angelou quote: “Do the best that you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Along with the Pirkei Avot wisdom “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither may you desist from it,” this pithy offering from Ang

We Will Not Cancel Us reads to me as a love letter to justice-focused folks. In this slim volume, adrienne maree brown explores what she calls “unthinkable thoughts.” She grapples with hopelessness, with harm and mistakes, and the reality that harm is often caused by those who were themselves harmed. On its surface, We Will Not Cancel Us is a direct response to so-called call out/cancel culture that sometimes divides folks on the left from our allies. Deeper than that, it is

Though my reading is broader than the category of antiracism / anti-oppression, for this blog, I usually forgo writing about the fiction (often young adult or sci-fi/fantasy), productivity, and Jewish-spirituality texts I read. I decided to make an exception for Everyday Holiness by Alan Morinis, not because I expect you to take on Mussar (Jewish ethics), but because there were some key learnings about the importance and adoption of regular practices in this book. Mussar, ul

Several months ago, I wrote about the young adult title, Stamped , noting that “sometimes you’re just not the target consumer of a particular [resource].” The opposite is true of Richard V. Reeve’s Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, And What to Do About it. In the very beginning of this text, after referring to the upper middle class in the first person plural, Reeves writes, “You may have noticed

Note: This essay was originally published on the blog of JoyousJustice.com I picked up We Do This ‘Til We Free Us because I wanted to better understand the principles of the Abolitionist movement (and because the good folks at Anti-Racism Daily recommended it!). The prison abolition movement, as envisioned and articulated by Mariame Kaba in this collection of essays and interviews, is as radical as it is beautiful. When I say “radical” I don’t mean “irrational” or “impossi

Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America was a foundational work on my personal antiracist path. It gave me language and ideas to describe what I was waking up to in myself and in the world. When people ask me to share the short list of antiracist resources I think they ought to consume Stamped from the Beginning is among the first that comes to mind. (For what it’s worth, I really dislike making such a list. I worry it

I honestly don’t recall how A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law came to be on my to-be-read shelf. It was probably a “you might like” recommendation from bookshop.org . If so, bookshop.org was right! This slim volume is the transcript of a conversation that took place in 2017 between Sherrilyn Ifill (President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc), Loretta Lynch (former Attorney General of the U.S.), Anthony C. Thompson

Jonathan Metzl is one of the many amazing authors I heard speak at the 2018 Anti-racism book festival. His book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland has been on my TBR shelf since I heard him that day. Perhaps it was beshert (intended), though, that I finally got to it after I’d finished Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste . Wilkerson provided the hypothesis that “many people … . align themselves not with those whose plight they m

When I finished reading So You Want to Talk about Race on December 31, the response I had drafted in my head was something about how I wish that the book had been available years ago when I first experienced my moment of awakening about race in 2015. I figured I would write about Oluo’s clear and compelling prose and how downright likable I find her. I expected to tell you that I dislike identifying a single or even a handful of resources to send people to, because I don’t

When I finished reading Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste a few days ago, I considered writing a very brief response for this blog: This book is amazing. You should read it. I stand by my initial impulse. Isabel Wilkerson’s work is beautiful and nuanced and insightful and important. Still, I find it useful for my own learning to write these responses to what I read, so here goes. Wilkerson compellingly argues that America operates with a caste system akin to the Indian Hindu ca

Jose Antonio Vargas' memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen , left me with a discomfiture akin to my reaction to reading Kafka. Vargas tells his story of being an undocumented immigrant with "radical transparency." As he weaves his personal story with that of U.S. immigration history and policy, I was left with a picture of an expensive, dehumanizing system that traps some Americans-by-choice (or by circumstance in Vargas' case) in an absurdist bureaucracy. V

I am so thrilled to announce that I am launching a 5-day Racial Justice Challenge with the incomparable April Baskin of Joyous Justice . April and I are using this 5-day challenge to build up to the launch of our new podcast and video series, Jews Talk Racial Justice with April and Tracie. We're launching the show with a live (Zoom) event on September 10 at 1 pm Eastern. What are you waiting for? Sign up for the challenge!

I had very high hopes for this 28-day challenge, and it (mostly) delivered. After I read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility I was left wishing she’d given me more concrete steps to work on. Around the same time, I saw an article about Layla F. Saad’s project, Me and White Supremacy , which started as an Instagram challenge and turned into a best-selling book. (It was validating to see DiAngelo herself had written the foreword. This 28-day challenge is DiAngelo’s new answer to

Last week, a friend I know through my advocacy and activism work forwarded this Atlantic article by Mychal Denzel Smith, “ Incremental change is a moral failing .” As the writer of B’more Incremental , my response to the title? Ouch . Several days after reading the Atlantic article, I was talking with another activist and advocate friend about my work. She told me, “the name of your blog is kind of problematic. We need to be less incremental, not more.” I admit it, I was sh

In the midst of this pandemic and quarantine and all that has accompanied them, we need to talk about working mothers. [Steps onto soapbox] There is no lack of evidence that the current reality is taking a huge toll on women, especially working moms. The Washington Post , the Today Show , the New York Times , and NBC News have all featured stories about the undue burden the “new normal” is placing on working moms. As a working mom myself, I can tell you anecdotally, the s

Recognizing that you are behaving according to a documented pattern can be exciting. I recently hired an executive coach to support me in my day job. She had me take some assessments when we first got started. When, in our first call together, she started telling me about what the assessments said, she was reading through a number of the findings, and then she said, “according to this, you’re the kind of person who might be found at a protest.” I laughed out loud. No really,