More in ‘happiness’

Early reviews are in for Todd Solondz’s new film Life During Wartime, a semi-sequel to 1998’s Happiness and, it appears, the director’s most explicitly Jewish work yet. The dysfunctional Jordan family is still grappling with incest, pedophilia, and suicide, and now a bar mitzvah, too. “There’s a strong Jewish subtext in the film, with the ...

My 4-year-old daughter Maxine has been obsessed with a book about Noah’s Ark (which she calls Noah’s Work of Art). The other day, I asked her about the portrayal of God she was picking up from it. “God is the person who makes the laws,” she said confidently. “And if you break them you are in big, big trouble.”

The bad news is I’ve had a good month. As the child of an ever-suffering mother and a member of an ever-suffering people, I am not merely uncomfortable with happiness, I am tortured by it. The worst thing that can happen to me is the best thing that can happen to me, and the best ...