“I was exorcising, if not the anxiety of influence, then the accusations of the anxiety of influence, and also issuing somewhat of a corrective.”
Tag: Israel
Elvis’s Missing Belt: Tel Aviv, Israel
“As a teenager, I also worked at HaMeshulash for several months. It’s quite possible that I was the worst waiter in the history of the café.”
Gaza: Landscapes of Exclusion and Violence
Design can lift some communities. But it can also subject others to live precariously, often at the same time.
The Netanya-who?s: Gossip and Other Kinds of History
Benzion Netanyahu—father of the former prime minister—is not the protagonist; rather, it is his scholarship and the practice of history itself.
Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
A recent flourishing of Palestinian literature reckons with complications in historical memory caused by settler colonialism.
How Liberal Americans Sustain Israel’s Occupation
Why has the United States historically supported Israel? And should the ...
“They Demolish Our Houses while We Build Theirs”
The West Bank’s central highlands harbor some of the best quality dolomitic ...
“Sharing” the Israeli Occupation
In April of 2014, an Israeli combat soldier from the Nahal Brigade named David Adamov was captured on camera violently threatening a Palestinian teenager in Hebron. After a video of the event posted ...
Walking with the Unconsoled
What can we expect imaginative writing to do in the face of unalleviated grief? If one of fiction’s strengths remains its expression of irreducibly singular minds, what role then might it play in ...
For the Love of Israel
In 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt exchanged a series of tense letters. Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism and himself a critic of ...
Polish Dreams
I often joke that everything I know about Israel I learned from comic books. As a secular Jew with deep ambivalence about Israel, this quip has served as a shield against being engaged on the topic ...
Scientific Semitism: Exceptional or Exemplary?
For at least 1,500 years, the Jewish people have defined themselves through genealogical practices: according to Jewish law, a person is Jewish simply because he or she is born of a Jewish mother. If ...