The Banality of Antisemitism
The Hedgehog Review (August 12, 2026)
In 1963, political theorist and German-Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt forever bound the word “banality” to every sort of malevolence by using the phrase “the banality of evil” in the final paragraph of her book-length study on the Eichmann trial. This explosively ambivalent idea has been both borrowed and examined repeatedly in scholarly, literary, and popular publications. Then in 2015, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy did what no one had yet done—used the phrase to explore a topic related directly to Arendt’s own life.
A Jew in Israel
Salmagundi 230–231 (Spring–Summer 2026)
In October, the fighting with Hamas largely stopped. Gaza was demolished and its people were thrown back into the claws of its indigenous overlords. Israel was reeling from two years of war and a government that prepared for its continuing assault on civil society long before the ceasefire was signed. This is what occupied my mind at the time. But my body had its own response. It sensed relief. Some of the anxiety lessened.
WhatsApp Nation
Dispatches (March 30, 2026)
During Hanukkah of 2023, just two months after the October 7 attacks, my wife and I were invited to a small gathering of friends who live near us in Jerusalem. Educated professionals who worked in law, medicine, tech, and academia, we sat in a room, feeling rather lost and, as far as I was concerned, also pretty dumb. We had no idea how the war would play out, what level of destruction would fall upon Gaza, or how deep and total the corruption in Israel would become.
On Jewish Evil
Salmagundi 228–229 (Fall 2025–Winter 2026)
Evil has been on my mind a lot over the past two and a half years—really since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in December 2022 and began his assault on Israeli civil society. The October 7, 2023, attacks were—and continue to be—a horrific shock to everyone in the region and the world, bringing Hamas into focus as an evil organization in its own right. But the attacks did not obviate the fact that Bibi, as Netanyahu is called in Israel, was at the head of an apparatus that strengthened and misread Hamas for many years.
Doing Dishes During War
The Hedgehog Review (July 15, 2025)
In the pre-morning hours of June 13, 2025, we were all awakened by a siren that led us straight to our phones. It was not yet another missile from Yemen—the kind to which we’d grown accustomed if not immune over the past twenty months. It was an announcement of Israel’s attack on Iran.
46,000 is the New 6,000,000
Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 2025
On Monday, December 9, 2024 — on the evening before he took the witness stand in a trial accusing him of fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes in three separate cases — Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the nation for a press conference on prime time television. Ostensibly, he’d convened the press to discuss the historic fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But his true motive was soon revealed.
To Georgia and Back
Foreign Notebook: Ajara
Dispatches Magazine, March 4, 2025
With the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah looming—the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks on the Hebrew calendar—my wife and I decided to take our three girls to Georgia, where my father and grandfather were born and raised. Our eldest’s eyes lit up, until, eyebrows furrowed, she asked, “Is it a dangerous place?” I said, “We wouldn’t take you to a dangerous place.” Again she thought and asked, “But didn’t they put your grandpa in jail?”
The Creative Mind in Captive Times
Thinking under oppression
The Hedgehog Review, February 4, 2025
When Czesław Miłosz’s book about the enslavement of consciousness by totalitarian powers was published in 1953, translator Jane Zielonko, working closely with Miłosz, rendered its English title as The Captive Mind. One way of appreciating what makes his book unique—and relevant to historical periods beyond his own—is looking at the semantic nuances of its original Polish title.
War, Death, and Intellectualism
The Hedgehog Review, November 13, 2024
The role of intellectualism in times of war has become increasingly urgent as the conflict in the Middle East enters its second year and the war in Ukraine is heading straight into its third. . . .
Bibi the Collaborationist
Salmagundi, Fall-Winter 2024-2025
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, we were all lost and terrified—spending a majority of our time indoors. Bibi seemed shaken for a day or two after the initial attack. But it didn’t take long for him to get back in the driver’s seat. Things didn’t need to go well, either for him or for the country, they just had to be under his control.
Inside Out and Outside In
The Hedgehog Review, April 23, 2024
A friend said to me recently, “Wars function in different ways. They’re strategic. They’re diplomatic. But they also expose things about what was already happening before we knew it happened.” . . .
A War of Words
Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 2024
A war of words has exploded since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel set out on its fiercest response yet to the terrorist group—unleashing aerial bombings and a ground campaign Hamas has said it explicitly expected as a response. . .
The Enemy Within
Dispatches, January 19, 2024
Hamas achieved one of the most sophisticated campaigns of our time using a simple, time-tested method. They used the primary character weakness of the person who has led our country for the past generation against him: corruption. . . .
Return of the False Messiah
The Hedgehog Review, January 18, 2024
On October 7, 2023, the extent of the destructive power that has reigned over our nation’s political life for a decade and a half came fully to light. By most accounts, even before the massacre, this year had been the most devastating that Israel’s society had ever experienced. . . .
Whose Terror?
The Hedgehog Review, November 2, 2023
When my first daughter was born, as I held her in the dark rocking her to sleep, my mind would involuntarily conjure up the image of a photograph I’d seen five years earlier, that of a father from Gaza holding his lifeless infant after an Israeli aerial bombardment. . .
The Czechoslovakia Effect
The Hopkins Review, September 2023
How was I imprisoned? It’s a natural question—one that I am now asking myself—but since none of the crimes were committed by me, I don’t have the answer. I don’t believe I was framed. Yet it seems I am guilty of something—perhaps being caught off guard. I’m guilty of not seeing the prison walls being built around me. . .
Lamentations
Dispatches Magazine, August 25, 2023
This year, we experienced an unprecedented event at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, just a few days before Tisha B’Av. One of the most significant fast days of the Jewish calendar, Tisha B’Av—the ninth day of the month of Av—mourns the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem as well as a series of other tragedies that have befallen the People of Israel. . .
The Almost Unbearable Burden of Belonging
Whether to stay or leave when one’s country is at a frightening crossroads.
The Hedgehog Review, March 6, 2023
By the time my dad settled in Los Angeles at the age of thirty-nine, he had lived in four countries: Georgia, Russia, Israel, and the United States. My mom had been unable to cope with the last emigration, and after six months, made her way back to Israel—with me in tow. I was six. Two years later, it became clear that my mother was unable to raise me, and I returned to Los Angeles to live with my dad. I was eight and had lived in two countries. . .
To Kill an Intellectual
On Anti-Intellectualism
The Fortnightly Review, February 23, 2023
I was more taken by the notion that, despite stating that the heart had no role in politics, Arendt could still express grief over the wrongdoing of her own people, including in the political realm—and its implications for life and death. . .
When Antisemitism Happens to Good People
The Jew-hate of ignorance, naivety, or even goodwill
The Smart Set, October 24, 2022
One of the most powerful films I’ve seen about anti-Jewish hate during the Second World War isn’t a period piece depicting the ferocious brutality of Nazi death camps. It’s a picturesque French film called The Two of Us about a Jewish boy who is sent, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, to the countryside to live with the elderly parents of his parents’ French-Catholic friends. . .
The Eternal Hope of the Wandering Jew
Which came first: the wandering or the Jew?
The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2022
Missing persons cases are seldom about finding someone. Too often, people who have disappeared are not missing at all. They are either hiding or long dead, possibly victims of murders waiting to be solved. Such cases, in short, are best to avoid. But when I heard that there had been recent sightings of the long-lost Wandering Jew, I knew I had to investigate. . .
We Tell Stories in Order to Die
Word to Death
The Smart Set, September 1, 2022
I turned thirty-nine not long after my first daughter was born. When she was about five months old, I saw the big four-oh on the horizon, and started to think about what I was going to leave behind when I was gone, at least from a literary perspective. . .
Once Upon Another Fraught Time
The power of Yiddish children’s literature
The American Scholar, June 2, 2022
Democracy is not the only thing that dies in darkness. Together with democracy—which enshrines into a governing system the capacity to disagree and compromise—other parts of civil life are threatened, including deceptively basic values like honesty and respect. It doesn’t take much to pronounce these words, but it takes a lot to internalize them, and a whole lot more to express them in action. . . .
Lacan’s Mistake
The Desire of the Unconscious
The Smart Set, March 14, 2022
The truth is that I never thought I’d get through an entire book by Jacques Lacan. But then the pandemic broke out, and I found myself at home with time to read The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. . .
Abstract Writing
On the Visual and Literary Arts
The Gravity of the Thing, Winter 2022
I wanted to be a writer – and it became clear that, to do so, I would have to actively decide to pursue such a life. The only problem was that I had a degree in math and had worked as an accountant – none of which really prepared me for a master’s program in a literature department.
Remaking a Killing
On Kevin Birmingham’s The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece
The American Scholar, November 1, 2021
Long before I read Crime and Punishment, I walked the same streets Raskolnikov had walked before and after he committed murder. I went up the stairs to his attic room, stared at his door, and counted the 730 steps to the pawnbroker’s home. . .
Melanie Klein Reconsidered
On the Creative Power of Lonliness
Avidly, October 14, 2021
Often, when I mention Melanie Klein’s name, people roll their eyes and recite the only thing they’ve heard about her – “good breast, bad breast, it’s all the mother’s fault” – without giving this towering intellectual figure the slightest benefit of the doubt. In the most distilled terms, complaints against her work rest on the centrality of death and aggression in her approach to the human psyche. . . .
Writing in Jerusalem
On Living a Jewish Literary Life
Jerusalism, September 29, 2021
In December 2007, I visited Jerusalem for three weeks to collect material for Zeek: Russified, a volume of works by contemporary Russian-Jewish writers, poets, and artists. During that time, I was introduced to a wide circle of individuals. In a way, I was given access to the heart of one of the city’s cultural milieus. . .
Historical Consciousness
And why it’s important in pandemic times
EastWest Literary Forum, September 2021
Growing up, I’d always felt averse to politics and it took me years to realize that my difficulty had a lot to do with the role of Soviet history in my family’s history. The shift came while I was at the CalArts School of Critical Studies, studying writing and philosophy. . .
The Need to Talk
On Marguerite Duras’s “The Darkroom”
Los Angeles Review of Books, July 20, 2021
I first encountered Marguerite Duras as a teenager, not on the page but on the screen. I stayed up late one night to watch on cable television the infamously graphic sex scenes in The Lover, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 film adaptation of her 1984 novel. . .
Night Train to Riga
Two stories of love, heartbreak, and escape
The American Scholar, June 17, 2021
Most people think of Ayn Rand as a philosopher and novelist of ideas—a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism and a theory she named Objectivism. But she was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish pharmacist who grew up in St. Petersburg and who might have stayed in Russia had she not been disappointed by love. . . .
If Kirillov Had Drunk Coffee Instead of Tea
Kirillov, Hitler, the Capitol riot – and the potential link between tea and suicide
Liberal Currents, May 25, 2021
I first encountered Fyodor Dostoevsky through Alexei Nilych Kirillov, one of his characters in Demons—not in the novel itself, but in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, much of which grapples with the philosophical reasoning behind Kirillov’s decision to shoot himself.
Russim
On Russian Culture and Immigration in Israel
Jerusalism, May 23, 2021
What follows is not an academic report, but rather a kind of story based on my journalist work covering a very specific niche of Russian-Israeli cultural producers, as well as my experience within a particular ex-Soviet Jewish community. . .
The Real Reality Principle
Our actions, or inactions, have consequences that we can never truly know
The American Scholar, February 27, 2021
It started with a flood. In early December, my wife and I were awakened in the middle of the night by the faint sound of clacking on our window. We got out of bed to investigate and found ourselves in three inches of water—at which point I opened the window and saw my downstairs neighbor outside.
Grilled Bananafish
On separating the sources of our pain from the reality in which we live now
Speculative Nonfiction, December 15, 2020
It happened to be that I reread Salinger’s “Perfect Day for Bananafish” – which I remembered as being a story about a couple’s trip to a hotel on the beach at the end of which the man kills himself – on the very same day that my wife and I went to spend a weekend at a seaside hotel.
The Brutality of Reality
On the Role of the Imagination in Coping with Crisis
Literary Matters, Fall 2020
As covid ravaged the world outside our homes, I sat down at my desk and thought of Erich Auerbach writing his masterwork, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, while waiting out the Second World War in Istanbul. As the rest of the world tore itself apart, he sat and analyzed the Western canon.
Coronavirus in the Shadow of the Holocaust
When we look at the pandemic raging around us, do we really know what it is we’re witnessing?
The American Scholar, August 29, 2020
This year, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day fell on April 21, 2020. Since the Jewish calendar is lunar and observance starts on the evening before, the remembrance happened to fall—in a bitter irony too weird to be invented—on Hitler’s birthday. As the memorial siren wailed across Israel at 11 a.m., and many people all across the country stood up in silence to commemorate the millions of Jews exterminated during the Holocaust, the sense of mourning was diffuse. . .
A Nation Wrongs Itself
On American Pain and the Puritan Ethic
Los Angeles Review of Books, August 19, 2020
For weeks, America burned again. For some of us, who grew up in urban Los Angeles, the memory of fires down the block, or buildings on the way to school still smoking, remained exceedingly fresh. I remember that, during the L.A. Riots, people who’d lived through the Watts Riots recalling their earlier experiences and lamenting that America had not sufficiently changed. . .
“You Mean I’m Gonna Stay this Color?!”
An Homage to My Black Mom
Forward, June 19, 2020
Black lives don’t just matter. For some of us, their influence is profound, shaping our understanding of ourselves as individuals -– and our place in American society. When I came to Los Angeles from Israel at the age of seven, reuniting with my dad after my parents separated, I also met my stepmom Pasha for the first time. . .
There’s no Such Thing as Nonfiction
A Literacy Narrative
Entropy Magazine, May 2020
There’s no such thing as nonfiction. This might seem like the title of yet another essay on the merits of essayistic writing as its own genre and not just a negation of another. Dinty W. Moore has explained how essayists have responded to their genre’s moniker. His bottom line is, understandably, realpolitikisch: we’re stuck with the term. But I’d like to take another tack. . .
A Search for Belonging
A Child Immigrates to America
ROOM: A sketchbook for Analytic Action, February 2020
Growing up in America with immigrant parents, you’re often on your own navigating your future, and so institutions like elementary school become more than just places of study. They become agents of social advancement. . .
A Dose of Forever Feelings
On Sex, Emotion, and Translating What You Feel Into Reality
Public Seminar, February 2020
Being young sometimes feels like being an amateur translator. You have little life experience, but you read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies, and so you try to transfer what you see on the screen or the page to your experiences. You don’t know yet that translators don’t transfer, they reconvey. So the result is often clunky. . .
On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism
When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability
Public Seminar, October 2019
It’s a confusing year when you find the Anti-Defamation League calling out both Rashida Tlaib and Donald Trump for using the same anti-Semitic trope. In terms of political power, there is no parity between Tlaib and Trump, and while some in the press have defended Trump and his positions, others have defended Tlaib. But it’s the condemnations that stand out. . .
On Hate and Boycotts
How We Choose What We Believe
Public Seminar, September 2019
The first day I got to Grant High School, after being bussed out of Echo Park into the Valley, I met a girl named Meital. I was almost fourteen and she was the first Israeli I’d met since leaving the neighborhood of Jaffa D at the age of nine. She invited me to sit with her friends on the quad. I said I’d rather not. She asked why. . .
On Race and Repair
A Güero Reads Plato in Jerusalem
Public Seminar, August 2019
I moved to Los Angeles at the age of eight and a half and went into fourth grade, where I was asked to check off my ethnicity. I read the choices: Caucasian / Anglo-Saxon, African-American, Hispanic, Asian / Pacific-Islander. I had no idea what any of those meant, so I went over to the world map and looked for Israel, the country where I was born. . .
A Different Way of Reading
Samuel Beckett, Melanie Klein, and the Voices of Intuition
Public Seminar, June 2019
One of the first things I did after first buying Samuel Beckett’s so-called Trilogy—which consists of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953)—was to take a box cutter and slice the spine into three separate novels. I read the first two in New York in 2007, where I lived at the time, and brought the last part with me to Jerusalem in 2008. . .
Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt
On Rethinking Our Thoughts
Public Seminar, April 2019
As political camps grow increasingly extreme in their messaging – with Democrat and Republican views both turning less nuanced, with the Right and Left seeming to need each other in order to justify their political survival—it may be helpful to recall a person who tried to make a case for what he called the voices of silence. . .
Appelfeld’s Funeral
A Triptych
Los Angeles Review of Books, January 2019
Watching the men of the Burial Society drop the compact body of Aharon Appelfeld into its grave just weeks ago, I kept thinking of the satisfaction that was denied to all the murderers who had wanted to kill this man while he was still a child. . .
Faith in Place
Isaac Bashevis Singer in Israel
Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2018
Isaac Bashevis Singer—the famed Yiddish writer and 1978 laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature—made his first trip to Israel in the fall of 1955. His relationship to Israel was complicated to say the least. He had been born into a strictly religious family of rabbis and rebetzins in Poland, for whom the land of Israel was the holiest of religious symbols. . .
How We Review Translations
In Defense of an Endless Task
Public Seminar, April 2018
It is often said that the work of a translator is thankless. What is less often recalled is that the work is endless. The written word, unlike the printed one, is never finished, at no point complete. When we look at the manuscripts of literary masters, we see the degree to which they made changes until the very last moment. . .
Was Isaac Bashevis Singer Religious?
Public Seminar, July 2017
At a time of wholesale equivocation across social fronts—political, moral, religious—it is difficult to find a voice that is clear, knowledgeable, authentic, or complex. The chorus of shouts resounding from all corners of the cultural spectrum makes it hard to ground our convictions in solid perspectives not undermined by the severity of discourse rising around us. . .
Translation
The Problem of Literature and Art
Asymptote, July 2014
In the early throes of composing The Plague—as the Second World War cut him off from his wife in Algeria and exiled him in France—Albert Camus jotted down in his notebook that “the problem of art is a problem of translation.” In this way he suggested that literary composition, like translation, involves the transformation of source material into target material. . .
Translating Silence
Cardinal Points, May 2011
We often hear and speak of all that is lost in translation — the turns of phrase that can’t be replicated, literal meanings in one language that have no relevance in another, words that migrate from one language to another and on the way mutate or change their meaning. . .
Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles
What Happens in the Seasons the Calendar Omits?
The Believer, May 2008
Bruno Schulz has sustained a premier yet often unrecognized position in the mythology of twentieth-century literature, famously inspiring authors and artists from Philip Roth to the Brothers Quay despite the fact that, since his mainstream English introduction in 1977, only his first publication has been consistently available. . .
The Forgotten Warhol
Throwing People’s Words Back at Them
Haaretz, March 2008
When the exhibit “Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” opened at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1980, critics asked where Warhol’s sudden interest in Jews had come from, with some even suggesting that this “random” choice of subject was “exploitative”. . .
