YEHUDIT
FEINSTEIN
MENTESH

There are moments when you don’t fully understand what happened until you’re already driving home. Last Saturday morning we drove to Assaf’s bar mitzvah at the summer camp where he has spent every summer since he was seven. Uri and Itay grew up there too. They started when they were eight. The drive to camp winds through forests, mountains, lakes, and little streams. Every year, somewhere along that road, I feel myself slow down. Uri and Itay were waiting for us at the entran

There is a lake in Pennsylvania that has been calling me back for years. It sits inside a state park called Promised Land. I always knew the name. It just took years for the meaning to catch up with it. This time it was early. Cool. The rain had stopped only hours before. I was back by the lake, in the quiet corner that has somehow become my place. The birds were loud that morning, closer than usual. The sky was doing that thing it does over water, wide and low at the same ti

Some summers stay with you long after they end. I have a feeling this will be one of them. Not because of where I went. But because of the way I learned to see. It was almost ten-thirty at night, and the light still refused to disappear. I was sitting outside in a small restaurant in Paris. The table was covered with a white tablecloth. Around me, conversations lingered. Nobody seemed in a hurry to finish the evening. Every few minutes, the sky changed again. Blue softened in

There is a city that has quietly accompanied me for most of my adult life. I first arrived in Paris when I was twenty-three, just out of the army, my heart broken in the way only a first great heartbreak can break it, completely, with no idea who you are on the other side. I didn’t come looking for healing. But one afternoon I stood near the Louvre, looking up at all that stone and history, and something in me went still. I understood, without yet having words for it, that I

There is a piece of desert in me that has been there for as long as I can remember. Since the first time I stood in that silence and felt, inexplicably, at home. In the desert I have loved. I have healed a broken heart. I have learned what longing really means. This trip to Israel was just the boys and me. Three teenagers, suitcases, endless opinions, and 10 days together. When you travel alone with kids, every decision feels a little heavier. Where to go. What matters. What

Two days after returning home, and I still don’t quite know where I am when I wake up. There is the jet lag, that particular disorientation of crossing an ocean, of moving between universes, and then there is something slower, harder to name. The sense that you were somewhere so completely, and now you are here, just as completely, and the two cannot quite coexist. As though the other place is already becoming a dream. Every trip back to Israel feels like returning home to a

In a few days, I will step outside an airport terminal, and the light will hit me. I know it’s coming, and still I am never ready. There is a quality of light in Israel that exists nowhere else I have been to. It doesn’t just fall on you. It enters you. Bright and ancient and almost violent in its familiarity. My eyes will struggle. My chest will open. I will feel something I don’t have a word for in English, and I’m not sure I have it in Hebrew, either. And then the air. Eve

I’m waiting to feel it on my skin. The warmth. The softness that comes when summer finally arrives. But it hasn’t reached me yet. New York is still cold, and maybe I am too, still waiting for something to open. Something is shifting. I feel it in the body before I have words for it. In the way I sleep now, lighter than before, waking at hours I didn’t use to know. In a new sensitivity to things, light, sound, and the weight of a conversation. In the way I see the world, and i

Monday arrives the way it always does. Without asking if you're ready. The list is already there, before the coffee cools. Children. Clients. Studio. Business. Home. And you, somewhere inside all of it, looking for the breath that will let you begin. This kind of tiredness doesn't always have a name. It doesn't come after a bad night. It comes after years of holding. Of giving. Of loving a home in a city you didn't grow up in, far from the family that might have helped. Far f

I came back to the studio tired. Not the kind of tired that asks for rest. The kind that comes after something real has happened. After something you worked toward for a long time, nights and days, finally, actually, happened. The truth is, I never really stopped, not before the opening, not during, not after. The morning of the opening, I was still working. I got ready and went to the gallery. The next morning, sessions. The weekend, the exhibition, people, presence, giving.

“The body says what words cannot.” Martha Graham I don’t always know what my hands know. There are moments I look at them and something surprises me. Not what they look like. But what they remember. What they carry without being asked. They have held children. Small bodies, heavy with sleep, that asked for nothing except to be close. And the hands knew exactly what to do. Without instructions. Without preparation. They just knew. They have learned to make beauty out of ordin

Some lines begin long before the hand learns how to draw them. Sometimes I think about the long journey that began in a small house many years ago, beside my grandmother. I was a little girl then. I used to sit next to her for hours and hours. She sewed, embroidered, turned the soft fabrics in her hands. I watched the small movements of her fingers, the threads passing slowly through cloth, the quiet rhythm of making. At the time, I didn’t know that these hours were shaping s

At a very young age, I made a quiet decision about which parts of my life I would share and which I would keep to myself. No one taught me to do this, and no one asked me to carry that responsibility. It was simply an instinct, a way to protect myself from the world. In the small town where I grew up, it was well known that my father had been a POW during the Yom Kippur War. That part of our story was never a secret. What remained hidden were the parts that surrounded it, the

I grew up in a house filled with the presence of war. Not war itself, but its echoes. Memories that were rarely spoken yet lived everywhere, in the silences, in sudden changes of mood, in the quiet weight that settled into the rooms. As a child, I did not fully understand what I was sensing, but I learned to move carefully around it. Without realizing it, I learned to make myself smaller around what already felt too heavy. I learned to be quiet where quiet was needed and not

Three years ago, I felt pressure in my chest, and I truly thought I was dying. I remember everything about that day: the hour, the light, what I was wearing, where I was standing, who I called first, and what I did in the hours that followed. It became clear, very quickly, that what I was experiencing was a panic attack, an anxiety eruption, sudden, terrifying, disorienting. Since that moment, anxiety has entered my life as something that stays. Not always loudly, not always

Lately, I find myself thinking a lot about time. About sadness. About joy. About my ability to hold both ends of the same rope and keep moving. The days keep passing. College visits are being planned. February has already begun. There are mornings when the snow starts to melt and the temperature rises just enough to remind me that nothing stays frozen forever. Uri is traveling to Spain. Itay is visiting colleges. Assaf walks the streets of Brooklyn as if he is no longer the l

Longing lives inside me as a full presence. Not as a lack or something missing, but as a living state. It breathes quietly, moves gently, and insists in its own time. It stretches across words and years, across distances and different versions of myself, and keeps returning to the same questions. Who am I? Where do I belong? Where am I going? I long for the feeling of being close to family and for the simplicity that comes with it: walking into a home without preparation or e

2026 arrived wrapped in deep cold. Snow on the ground and a sudden, unmistakable winter. The kind you do not just see outside the window, but feel in your bones, in your breath, in the way the body instinctively slows down. Around me, everything is moving fast. Plans, goals, resolutions. Articles telling us who to become this year, what to build, what to conquer, how to arrive somewhere new. But inside me, something else is echoing. This moment feels like the end of somethin

Lately, I’ve been feeling the weight of the journey. Maybe it’s turning fifty, that moment when looking back becomes unavoidable. Maybe it’s the emotional density that surrounds me right now. But something has shifted. I feel how much I am carrying and how long I’ve been carrying it. There are the emotional complexities of raising children. They are deep, layered, and demanding in ways no one prepares you for. When my child goes through heartbreak, I carry it in my own body.

Winter always arrives quietly, almost shyly, and yet it rearranges everything. The days shorten, the light shifts, and suddenly the body needs a new kind of preparation, something that begins in the cells before it ever reaches the surface. I feel it in the light: not just sunlight, but the light inside. The way my skin responds to the cold, the way my hair behaves on early mornings, how my sleep changes, how I choose what to wear, what to drink, what to eat. Slowly, every sy