YEHUDIT
FEINSTEIN
MENTESH

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

There are moments in my life when all I’m longing for is quiet. Not the kind that comes from the outside, but the one that slowly opens from within,  somewhere between the heart and the breath, between the body and old memories, between fear and tenderness. I think a lot about this shift: How the body and mind move from vigilance, that place where the muscles tighten and the senses scan for danger, into presence. Into a moment where it’s allowed to simply be. Quiet isn’t alwa

Every year, winter arrives in New York all at once. Not with hesitation or grace, but like a heavy curtain dropping from the sky, closing in on the street, freezing the breath. The cold here doesn’t fall from the air; it rises from the ground, seeps through shoes, and blurs the sense of time and place. When I was growing up in Israel, the cold was different. It never pierced, it caressed. It came in gentle ripples, through showers of rain and winds that carried the scent of

For quite some time, I’ve found myself drawn to hidden places, the quiet places that exist behind the city’s polished storefronts and...

It’s been a few days since we returned from Paris. These days, after the jet lag, the dizziness, the strange awakenings between night and...

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about time maybe it’s because I turned fifty this year maybe it’s because this summer marks half my life...

My mother was always busy. She was a mother to four children, a full-time nurse, the wife of a man who came back from war, injured, broken inside. She carried so much. She was always there, yet not there. Still, she always found ways to make our world beautiful. She cooked the best meals, cut flowers from the yard, and placed them in small vases throughout the house. Handmade tablecloths, scarves, old bags, and curtains filled our home, woven, sewn, and stitched by her hands.

Lately, I find myself gasping for air in moments I don’t expect. The weight on my chest doesn’t leave, and sleep feels like a distant memory. The world around me is in chaos, and my deepest fears, fears I have carried long before now, are surfacing with every news item. The hostages. The unimaginable suffering. The images of people returning, broken but home. And those still left behind. And then there is my father, 52 years ago, a POW. His face, his story, suddenly merged in

“Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. In 3rd grade, my parents took us on a trip across the United States, coast to coast. It was part of my father’s research journey in education. The year was 1984, my first time leaving Israel, and that experience imprinted itself on me in ways I’m still discovering. I remember being captivated, almost in shock, by the American landscape. The architecture, the houses with their

Our memories are a collection of moments and items that shape us, often in ways we don’t fully understand until we meet them again, sometimes as gentle waves, other times as rushing storms that flood our consciousness. Memory stores fragments of time, pieces of experiences that build the very cells of our being, the structure of our souls, and the foundations of who we are. But what determines what stays with us? What makes certain moments or objects so significant that they

What is it about time that is so painful? I feel its cycles deeply, from within and from without. Each season, each turn carries its own weight. Some intimate longings and untold stories linger in the air. They are all that I know and miss, all that I cannot reach. And in between are the hours: the mornings and nights, the winds and the sun, the smell of cold air that signals a coming change. There are the longings for warm summer nights, for connection, for moments that feel

Why is it so hard to find and listen to our own inner voice? What happened along the way that we learned not to hear it? These questions have stayed with me for years, often surfacing when I’m faced with life’s quietest yet most profound moments. A Childhood of Silence and Strength I was born just over a year after my father returned home as a POW from Egypt. It was the mid-seventies, and no one truly understood post-trauma or the ripple effects it had on families. My father

For many years, my relationship with art was like an engine carefully hidden under layers. That space of quiet distance allowed me to...

The older I get, the more I realize that there are dreams we’ve carried with us for a long time—sometimes for so long that we almost...

Late afternoon on a Sunday, the end of a weekend, and almost the beginning of a long week at the studio. I just finished my last Sunday...

There’s food in the fridge, the house is tidy, the laundry is folded The closet is organized. Everything is alright. The kids are at...

Now I’m writing about the yearning. About those dreams. About our lake. Chairs standing in the wind. Snow that piles up on trees. There’s...