by Aliyah Baruchin
Who among us made it through childhood without hearing about The Starving Children? “There are children starving in India,” our parents—often our mothers —would intone, casting a cold eye on whatever remained on our plates. It seemed a universal American ritual. But for therapist Catherine Steiner-Adair, Ed.D., the mantra in American-Jewish households had another, hidden meaning: the starving children stood for the aunt who never knew her niece, the brother killed in Russia, the mother who didn’t escape Buchenwald.