This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Tetzaveh Exodus 27:20 – 30:10 New Haven, CT Dear readers, Across the south Indian state of Kerala, Hindu devotees often bring lamps…
Archive for 2020
Exodus: Terumah: Carina, August 11
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Terumah Exodus 25:1 – 27:19 New York, NY Dear People of the Book, I can’t keep track of Moses and it’s making…
“Who Gets to Speak in Our Intellectual Traditions?” – An Interview with Edgar Garcia
Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas (University of Chicago, 2020) ranges across disciplines in pursuit of a startling thesis: Nonalphabetic sign systems, such as petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and even the still-undecoded Incan knot-writing…
Exodus: Yitro: Jacob, June 23
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.” —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and…
Exodus: Mishpatim: Sarah, June 23
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Mishpatim Exodus 21 – 24 Brooklyn, NY Dear fellow subjects of the law, As I confessed in the introduction to this series,…
Conversations with Friends about Normal People
I read Conversations with Friends alone and loved it; reading Normal People with friends was an unrelieved frustration. I’d picked it for a book club soon after finishing Sally Rooney’s…
Race and Romantic Realism
Midway through Sally Rooney’s Normal People, we encounter this conversation among friends: At the table they’re talking about their day trip to Venice…. Marianne tells Connell he would like the…
Wet Newspaper
Getting punched went with the territory. Between adolescence and adulthood, I got hit hard a couple of times a year. One day, I walked through the doors of my school…
What Are Feelings For?
If you read Sally Rooney, I wish you would read her as I did: bent into the seat of an airplane, flying from the city where I live as a…
Victoria Falls
Near the end of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, our twenty-one-year-old narrator, Frances, reads George Eliot in a gynecologist’s waiting room: “I sat there tapping my pen against the front…