Bonnie Berkovits

October 2026:A free society depends upon people who can make judgments, but it also depends upon people who understand that judgment is not the same as certainty, that conviction is not the same as knowledge, and that being morally serious does not require pretending to know what we do not yet know.

August 2026:What happens when a painting stolen from a Jewish family during the Holocaust resurfaces eighty years later and a descendant discovers it?

August 2026:When I finished the novel, I realized that the mystery itself had become almost secondary. What stayed with me was not the explanation of the ring, but the image of the circus itself, a place usually associated with spectacle transformed, in Ron’s imagination, into a sanctuary.

August 2026:Violent extremism is neither the inevitable product of circumstance nor the unconstrained exercise of individual choice. It emerges where human vulnerability, social context, and ideological narratives intersect.

July 2026:Justice requires decisiveness, but it also requires the humility to recognize that every human judgment is necessarily incomplete.

May 2026:I am writing to you as a New Yorker and as a Jew who feels increasingly abandoned by leaders who claim to stand for human rights while applying those principles selectively. What makes this especially painful is your willingness to distort or dismiss Israel’s reality and even the right to exist in service of your political ideology.

April 2026:In the days following Yom ha-Shoah, remembrance risks becoming ritual. People pause, mourn, repeat the phrase “never again.” Then, almost imperceptibly, daily life resumes, unchallenged by the question remembrance is meant to provoke.

April 2026:There is a particular kind of grief that rarely announces itself as grief. It does not arrive with ceremony or sympathy. It comes quietly, through a failed login, a blank screen, a terse notification that an account has been disabled.

March 2026:Conversations that once encouraged exploration begin to feel like tests of moral alignment.

February 2026:We must restore a fact-driven culture and embrace critical thinking, fostering the next Galileo rather than cancelling him.

June 2026:Every society contains grievances, fear, and anger. These alone do not explain why conflict becomes violence.