Rabbi Eitan Webb, when I come to interview him early last Wednesday in his Nassau Street apartment, is juggling with ease five things at once. The sun rages to highlight red flourishes in his beard and the car beeps become louder as the Princeton Borough awakens, but he is preparing to have some thirty students over for Passover seder, arranging to have a Matzah Ball party with a middle weight boxing champion, balancing his son on his lap, updating the Chabad website, and fingering an official letter from President Shirley Tilghman.
“Granny began losing her memory. Last spring, she mailed me a ripped-out page of an English course catalogue for Middlebury College. I couldn’t tell if she had forgotten that I go to Princeton.”
I opened my eyes. I saw hints of a cloudless sky through the canopy, and the sounds of tropical birds filtered into my ears. I was drawing a blank. I tried to stand up, but the world was spinning. Somewhere behind me an engine sputtered and died. Gradually I started remembering what happened. I remembered swerving to miss a strange jungle creature that had darted out into the dirt road, going off the track, thinking damn, I am about to hit this tree, then squeezing my eyes shut a split second before the collision.
Welcome ladies and gentlemen. I know what you guys have been thinking –- since it’s been so long since we’ve had a Prince Watch, that must be because the Daily Princetonian has finally achieved a journalistic integrity which puts it beyond our childish jabs.
At the awkward gathering of New York area students who had been accepted to Princeton, the father of another black student approached me as I poured myself a glass of ginger ale. “You know, we have to stick together,” he … Read More
There are mannequins coming out of the ceiling. That is the first thing you notice when you walk into the Paper Moon diner. There are mannequins tangled in ceiling fans with garlands of ivy. There are Barbie dolls and action … Read More
I started home for Thanksgiving Tuesday afternoon, willingly cutting shorter my half-week of classes to add a full day to my debutante preparations. It hadn’t taken me long to pack and add a few necessary additions to cover every possible situation and temperature that four and a half days in Jackson, Mississippi on a debutante and holiday week could throw at me.
Slavoj Žižek seems like he is on the brink of a nervous breakdown when he lectures. He waves his arms wildly. He pulls at the front of his unassuming gray T-shirt. He grabs at the hair on his forehead. He … Read More
