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    Seder Is About Family, Food, Freedom. And Now, It’s Also About the War.

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    At Passover Seders, many families addressed the war in Gaza. In some cases, generations clashed and tensions arose. “That’s the Jewish way,” said one host.Bonnie Rosenfeld had 38 people crowded into her home in Rockaway, N.J., on Monday night. She has hosted Passover Seders for years, but none that felt quite like this. She wanted to address “the elephant in the room” up front.So as they lit candles to mark the start of the holiday, they also recited a set of prayers alluding to the war in Gaza — for the remaining Israeli hostages, for peace, for the horrors unfolding, she said, on both sides.It was, in her eyes, a recognition of the obvious:“This night is different,” said Ms. Rosenfeld, invoking the Four Questions traditionally recited on the holiday. “This Seder is different.”That sentiment echoed around the country this week, as families and groups of friends gathered for the start of Passover amid the complicated swirl of emotions and fiery political debates stirred by the monthslong Israel-Hamas war.The festive holiday, for many, has instead felt solemn. And its familiar rituals, this year, have seemed anything but routine.Dining chairs were left empty in symbolic remembrance of the remaining hostages. Guest lists were trimmed to avert interpersonal disharmony. Old stories and prayers took on new meaning. Timeworn rituals were tweaked to accommodate the off-kilter mood of the moment. Swords were crossed over generational lines.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Tell an Older Person It’s Time to Stop Driving

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      The “car key conversation” can be painful for families to navigate. Experts say there are ways to have it with empathy and care.Sherrie Waugh has been yelled at, insulted and wept upon in the course of her job administering driving tests. Typically these extreme reactions happen when she is forced to render an upsetting verdict: It’s time to hang up the car keys.Ms. Waugh, a certified driving rehabilitation specialist with The Brain Center, a private neuropsychology practice in Indiana, often works with older drivers, putting them through an assessment that measures things like visual skills, reaction time and processing speed.“I had one gentleman, who had early onset dementia, who was just sitting here crying,” Ms. Waugh said. “His wife was out in the car and she was crying. And we all came back, and we were all crying. Because it’s so hard.”Decisions about when an older person (or someone whose physical or mental circumstances make operating a vehicle dangerous) should stop driving are often agonizing. They can rock the driver’s sense of independence and identity, and add to the responsibilities that many family caregivers shoulder.“It’s a major, major loss for older people,” said Lauren Massimo, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing. “It’s been described to me as dehumanizing.”But it is important to raise concerns as soon as you have them, experts said, and there are ways to make the car key conversation less painful for older drivers and their loved ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Eldest Daughter Syndrome’ and Sibling Birth Order: Does it Matter?

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      “Eldest daughter syndrome” assumes that birth order shapes who we are and how we interact. Does it?In a TikTok video that has been watched more than 6 million times, Kati Morton, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Santa Monica, Calif., lists signs that she says can be indicative of “eldest daughter syndrome.”Among them: an intense feeling of familial responsibility, people-pleasing tendencies and resentment toward your siblings and parents.On X, a viral post asks: “are u happy or are u the oldest sibling and also a girl”?Firstborn daughters are having a moment in the spotlight, at least online, with memes and think pieces offering a sense of gratification to responsible, put-upon big sisters everywhere. But even mental health professionals like Ms. Morton — herself the youngest in her family — caution against putting too much stock in the psychology of sibling birth order, and the idea that it shapes personality or long term outcomes.“People will say, ‘It means everything!’ Other people will say, ‘There’s no proof,’” she said, noting that eldest daughter syndrome (which isn’t an actual mental health diagnosis) may have as much to do with gender norms as it does with birth order. “Everybody’s seeking to understand themselves, and to feel understood. And this is just another page in that book.”What the research says about birth orderThe stereotypes are familiar to many of us: Firstborn children are reliable and high-achieving; middle children are sociable and rebellious (and overlooked); and youngest children are charming and manipulative.Studies have indeed found ties between a person’s role in the family lineup and various outcomes, including educational attainment and I.Q. (though those scores are not necessarily reliable measures of intelligence), financial risk tolerance and even participation in dangerous sports. But many studies have focused on a single point in time, cautioned Rodica Damian, a social-personality psychologist at the University of Houston. That means older siblings may have appeared more responsible or even more intelligent simply because they were more mature than their siblings, she said, adding that the sample sizes in most birth order studies have also been relatively small.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is There a Political Divide in Your Family?

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      We want to hear from readers about how they approach different opinions over various social issues.As the 2024 election nears, parents and their teenage children and young adults are sometimes finding themselves divided on how they think about social issues, even if they identify with the same political party.In some cases, immediate families are split in their views across age and gender lines. According to a recent Gallup poll, fewer men in each age group today identify as liberal than do their female counterparts — but the gap is widest among those ages 18 to 29.The New York Times is looking to hear from readers about how they are approaching family conflicts over questions of gender, climate, equality, abortion and gun control, among other topics. If you are a young adult, do you share your parents’ political values or the values of your partner?We will not publish any part of your response without talking with you first. We will not share your contact information outside of the Times newsroom, and we will use it only to reach out to you.Your Family Dynamic More

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      Family Settles in Battle for Ancestral Land in South Carolina

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      Josephine Wright, who died this year at 94, had been fighting to save family property. The developer, Bailey Point Investments, agreed to end the dispute, the family’s lawyer said.The family of a woman who fought a developer to keep their ancestral land in Hilton Head, S.C., has reached a settlement in the legal battle that recognized her ownership, a family lawyer said this week.Josephine Wright, who died in January at 94, had been leading the fight to retain rights to the land that had been in her husband’s family since the Civil War. Her quest had drawn support from celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Kyrie Irving.The company that owns the development neighboring her property, Bailey Point Investment, had sued Ms. Wright in February 2023, claiming encroachment. The company said that her satellite dish, shed and screened porch trespassed on its land, which had “significantly delayed and hindered” development.The two parties had agreed on the terms of a settlement before Ms. Wright died in January, but the documents were not signed, so they had to wait until it was determined who would be authorized to sign on behalf of her estate, Roberts Vaux, the family’s lawyer said in an email.Mr. Vaux declined to provide details of the settlement, but said that the land that Ms. Wright claimed is “confirmed as hers.”A lawyer representing Bailey Point Investment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.A family spokeswoman, Altimese Nichole, told South Carolina Public Radio that the settlement requires that Bailey Point Investment stop contacting the family about acquiring the land and that it fix a roof on the property, put up a privacy fence and provide landscaping.Ms. Wright had previously told The New York Times that her husband inherited the 1.8-acre property from his parents, and that it was put in her name after he died in 1998.The property has been a gathering spot for Ms. Wright’s seven children, 40 grandchildren, 50 great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-grandchildren, she had said.Ms. Wright’s predicament, however, wasn’t all that unique among residents of Hilton Head, S.C., an island 100 miles from Charleston, S.C.Land in the area was owned by many Black families who had settled there long before developers arrived in the 1950s and made it a tourist destination, Mel Campbell, 75, a community elder previously told the Times. Many of the Black families were descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and worked on rice, indigo and cotton plantations.Many families were offered large checks from developers for their land, Ms Wright said. She said that she had refused when she was offered $39,000 for the land years ago.Ms. Wright told The Times in August that the land’s value was not only monetary. “It’s a family thing,” she said then, “and we want to keep it that way forever.” More

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      My father, the Pakistani Elvis

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      Elvis personified everything American, what my dad wished to embody: charisma, rebellion and sex appeal.This article is also a weekly newsletter. Sign up for Race/Related here.Graceland was one of my father’s first stops in America. He had always been a fanatic, performing his first Elvis impersonation at a talent show in Port Harcourt, Nigeria — a way for expats working on oil refineries to let loose. My mother is his enabler, sewing the sequins onto his blue satin capes, bedazzling the ivory jumpsuit with the deep V-neck. When he rumbles, “Thank you, thank you very much, especially to my Priscilla,” with a wink flung at my mom, she still beams.Growing up in Karachi, my father and his friends would pile into the cinema, erupting in song and dance whenever Elvis graced the screen. My dad always carried a comb in his pocket to perfect his Presley-esque hairstyle: smooth sides, floppy front. Elvis personified everything American, what my dad wished to embody: charisma, rebellion and sex appeal.My father, Airaj Jilani, immigrated to the U.S. in March 1979 and worked for an oil-and-gas company in Texas in the days when South Asian men were not welcome. To this day, he wears cowboy boots and his Southern drawl is deeply ingrained. His identity, unlike mine, has never been a question mark.His Elvis impersonations began in Pakistan with performances for family, which quickly catapulted him into becoming a local rock star. As a kid, I watched him shake his hips in local talent shows with utter wonder. Women chased him off the stage, grabbing his scarves. He embraced every aspect of newfound celebrity. Since then, he has performed at benefits, at office parties, throughout Venezuela, on a boat in Istanbul and in a Beirut night club, where an Instagram account streamed his performance live.When he moved to the U.S., he rejected his ethnicity. After we were born, we were to follow suit. An American flag hung outside our home; he took it down when it rained to protect it. We were forbidden to speak Urdu, but my mother still taught us on the sly. Bollywood movies were smuggled in and watched secretly. When my little sister wore a hijab to ground her in spirituality, it was incomprehensible to my father. Instead of living in the suburbs as my parents had envisioned, I became a pediatrician and aid worker who returned to the very same places that they had risked their lives to leave behind.When I worked as a doctor aboard refugee-rescue boats off the coast of Libya, I recognized the strangers as shadows of my family. As a child, my father had boarded a ship in India and sailed north to a newly created Pakistan. He and his siblings used to play in the ship’s boiler room, hopping between turbines. It was warm but deafeningly loud, which spared him from hearing women crying above. Women wept on the vessel I worked on, too. The kids on our ship scaled ladders as their laughter ricocheted off the surf, and I imagined my father doing the same so many years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Did My Birth Son Invite Me to a Wedding and Then Seat Me in Siberia?

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      Reunited with her son after half a century, a reader feels slighted by her seat at a family wedding, where her son’s wife had already made her feel less than welcome.I am a birth mother whose son found me seven years ago, when I was 70 and he was 49. I gave him up for adoption as an infant; his adoptive mother is deceased. He called me Mom from Day 1, and we felt an immediate heart connection. It has been a roller coaster of intense emotions. Unfortunately, his wife wrote me a letter saying she does not recognize me as his mother and wants nothing to do with me. Still, my son and I have developed a loving relationship over texts and phone calls. (We live 3,000 miles apart.) So, I was thrilled to be invited to his stepson’s wedding — though also nervous, given his wife’s letter. My son assured me I would be seated with his siblings, but I was placed at a distant table with his friend. I was also excluded from a family outing and the photos posted on Facebook. It felt like a punch to the heart. But my son doesn’t acknowledge any responsibility for my hurt. Did he gaslight me?BIRTH MOMI feel compassion for you and your birth son as you try to navigate a delicate reunion across 3,000 miles and five decades. I have no doubt that this wedding episode was painful for you (and possibly for him, too, if he had to haggle with his disapproving wife over your place at her son’s wedding). Still, I suspect that seating is not the central issue here.From my vantage — at a safe distance from the emotional roller coaster, as you call it — I see productive takeaways for both of you: Work on your relationship one on one, for now, and avoid engaging with people in each other’s lives who don’t support your reunion. I can’t imagine why his wife has taken such an unkind position toward you, but she has, and she is a major figure in his life.Adoption often brings up powerful feelings of abandonment and guilt. It may be helpful to arrange for some therapy for you and your son on video calls. I don’t minimize the “heart connection” you feel, but there may be other strong emotions at play, too. You should air all of them in the safety of your private relationship — or with the help of a counselor, if you like the idea.Miguel PorlanFuming That Her Treat Was Not Their TreatToday, my sister-in-law sent me a Venmo request for $19.18 for frozen yogurt that she and my brother offered to pick up for us when they picked up their own orders. They are wealthy, with expensive habits like designer sneakers, and they never offer to pay for anything when they come home because our parents are so generous. My partner and I routinely buy them presents when we visit them. This year, they didn’t even thank us for our holiday gifts. Am I unreasonable for being incensed about this Venmo request?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      My Sister Chose the Day She Wanted to Die

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      Should terminally ill people be able to choose how they die? Six years after being diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer, Julie Petrow-Cohen decided to use medical aid in dying — or MAID, as it is often called — to end her life. But for many Americans in similar circumstances, this is not an option. In this audio essay, the writer Steven Petrow shares the story of his sister’s last day and why MAID should be a right for everyone.Read Steven’s guest essay on Julie’s decision here.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available by Monday.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Steven PetrowThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Joanna Pearlstein, Hans Buetow and the “Modern Love” podcast team. More

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      A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights

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      As 2023 slouches to an ignominious end, some news came Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching with horror and trying to document an unrelenting legal assault on queer and trans people. Around 20 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people, and several have barred transgender and nonbinary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists — parents’ rights — was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.I did not agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a belly gunner in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse, and she believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a crucial element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed the government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as humanly possible. This last belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the bedrock of their politics.And so I am not surprised that defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the ballot box, hard-right candidates in swing states have tried to persuade voters with lurid messaging about children being subjected to grisly surgeries and pumped full of unnecessary medications. But in race after race, the tactic has failed.Legally, the verdict has been more mixed, which is unsurprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary ruling that a ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated the children’s 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.In June, a federal court blocked an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the ruling said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing” of protecting children and safeguarding medical ethics. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor, had vetoed the ban for reasons similar to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (The Ohio Legislature also has a supermajority of Republicans and may decide to override DeWine’s veto.)In other states, like Texas and Missouri, courts have permitted bans to go into effect, forcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or move to a different state altogether. The issue seems destined to reach the Supreme Court soon. The A.C.L.U. has asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the care ban in Tennessee on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how swiftly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems quite possible that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely restrict access to transgender health care for children or even adults.But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply unsettled the country, unleashing a backlash that has delivered unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion-rights advocates. Ohio voters just chose by a wide margin to enshrine the right to end a pregnancy in the state Constitution.This is why I think DeWine’s veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply do not want the government making decisions about families’ private medical care. Polling on abortion finds a wide array of views on the morality of ending a pregnancy at various points up to viability, but one thing is crystal clear: Large majorities of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business.Rapidly changing norms around gender have many people’s heads spinning, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and even though gender variations of many kinds have been with us for millenniums, the way these changes are being lived out feel, to some people, like a huge disruption to their way of life. Even among people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, there has been a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible, and that impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.It has become a throwaway line in some media coverage of transgender care in the United States that even liberal European countries are restricting care for transgender children. But this is a misleading notion. No democracy in Europe has banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states have done in the United States. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and has always placed limits on what types are available. In those systems, budgetary considerations have always determined how many people will be able to get access to treatments.But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents being charged with child abuse for supporting their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with felony convictions. These statutes have no analog in free Europe, but they have strong echoes of laws in Russia, which is increasingly criminalizing every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.Which brings me back to my Midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican candidate. But she did not vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate she declined to name to me. Like a lot of Republicans, she really didn’t like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn’t want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Transgender people are no different. They don’t want government bureaucrats in their private business.“I’ve been saying for years that trans people are a priority for enemies and an afterthought to our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a strategist who works on transgender issues at the A.C.L.U., told me. “I’ve made it my job to try and help people understand that transgender rights are human rights, not just because transgender people are human people, but because the rights we’re fighting for are grounded in really core democratic principles, like individualism and self-determination.”Those are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proved to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine has me hoping that some Republicans will remember what was once a core principle of their party, and embrace the simple plain-spoken truth of my heartland forebears: Keep the government out of my life, and let me be free to live as I choose.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More