I woke up on Monday morning to the news that Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Australia were killed—15 as I write—and more than 40 wounded by a father-and-son team of gunmen who festooned their car with homemade ISIS flags. The youngest victim was 10; the oldest an 87 year-old Holocaust survivor. The older …
Life imitates art sometimes. The Intercessor, my new book, is a novel made of linked stories, each narrated by a different person. They all have one thing in common: the desire for spiritual community in challenging times. I did not set out to write another book. In the early days of the MAGA regime, I …
Back in February, when I wrote about the first few deranged actions the MAGA regime took against cultural agencies—”Il Duce Redux: Art Under Trump“—I focused specifically on art, as my title said. One of the things that tends to convince artists of the significance of our work is autocrats’ reliable tendency to go after it …
Twenty years ago, my friend Daniel Burstyn introduced me to an exercise created for Passover, the Jewish holiday which this year begins on the evening of 12 April. The holiday commemorates the exodus from slavery in Egypt (“Mitzrayim” in Hebrew, which also means “straits” or “narrow places”). The tradition is to retell the story as …
What class do you belong to? When I was young, “working class” was a commonsense term. It referred to wage workers, to miners and carpenters and secretaries and waitresses, people who were paid by the hour and mostly lived within modest means. Working class people were the primary constituency for union organizing. They almost all …
This is the second of two essays about a new book that I love (yes, love!): We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. The first one derives a lesson strongly related to the upcoming election from Musa al-Gharbi’s sweeping analysis of “symbolic capitalists.” If you know anyone who has decided …
This is the first of two essays I am writing about a new book that I love (yes, love!): We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. This one derives a lesson strongly related to the upcoming election from Musa al-Gharbi’s sweeping analysis of “symbolic capitalists.” My dream is that some …
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan “The law of unintended consequences is never broken.” I thought I would find many citations when I googled this, but since I found none, I’ll attribute it to myself. Quite a few people I know have been expressing …
On May 25th, I joined a group of artists and activists at Bluestockings Cooperative Bookstore in Manhattan for a panel discussion entitled, “Sustaining Arts Labor: Past and Present,” organized by City Lore and Artists Alliance Inc., and sponsored by Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY). This was one event in a years-long project of research, dialogue, …
I’m suspicious of nostalgia, even though I’m not immune to it. A glancing reference to the Sixties and I’m off on a magic carpet ride of reminiscence. Despite all of our youthful excesses and errors, I’m as imprinted with that era as a baby duck is with its mama. The flavor of nostalgia that especially …