I am a writer, translator, and literary investigator.
Since 2019, I have written about the social echoes of the coronavirus epidemic, the emotional layers of American revolt, literature’s role in daily life, and the cultural, political, and historical implications of life in Israel after October 7.
Among my nonfiction work is a series of personal essays in Public Seminar about growing up on the cultural and ethnic margins of Los Angeles, and a series of speculative essays including, “A Short Inquiry into the End of the World” (The Massachusetts Review), “The Eternal Hope of the Wandering Jew” (The Hedgehog Review) and “To Kill an Intellectual” (The Fortnightly Review). Other essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Hedgehog Review, Dispatches, Speculative Nonfiction, and Literary Matters, among others. I also contribute a column, “Letter from Jerusalem,” to Salmagundi.
As editor of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust, I have published translations of Singer’s writing in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, One Story, The Sewanee Review, Tablet, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. I collected and edited a volume of Singer’s essays, Old Truths and New Clichés (Princeton University Press), a retranslation of his canonical story, Simple Gimpl: The Definitive Bilingual Edition (Restless Books), and translated and edited a three-volume collection of Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt (White Goat Press).
Aside from Singer, I have published translations from Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, including In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times (Delacorte), a collection of children’s stories from the early 20th century.
As a scholar, I have published research in Prooftexts, Soundings, Russian Review, French Forum, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, and The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, among others. My first book-length study was Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer (University of Delaware Press), focusing on narrative technique and moral vision. My second study, Idiot Love and the Elements of Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan), explored the intersection of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
My earliest publications included four collections of single-panel cartoons, the last of which was Baddies (Melville House) and fiction in Ambit, The Account, and The Woven Tale Press.
Born in Ashdod to ex-Soviet parents, I immigrated to Los Angeles as a child, and twenty years later moved to Jerusalem, where I live and work.
