Publications
Some publication highlights
Essays
Commentary (December 2025)
An inside account of the disastrous course of the most important campus organization in American Jewish history.
Jewish Review of Books 58 (Summer 2024)
In a concentration camp tucked quietly away in a forest near Amsterdam, David Koker kept a rare diary of life during Nazi internment.
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Jewish Review of Books (November 2023)
A report on Jewish campus life amid rising antisemitism.
Marginalia Review of Books (December 2022)
As I turned the pages of those frail, tattered, overlooked books, I found traces of a familiar desire: the desire for Hebrew.
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Reviews
Missing Anne Frank
Jewish Review of Books 64 (Winter 2026)
A review of Ruth Franklin's The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press, 2025) and Lola Lafon's When You Listen to This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing, trans. Lauren Elkin (Yale University Press, 2025)
Tel Review of Books (Winter 2025)
An otherwise excellent book on the translation of Jewish American and Israeli literature continues the trend of overlooking the American Hebraists.
A review of Omri Asscher's Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation Between Jews (Stanford University Press, 2019)
Jewish Review of Books 54 (Summer 2023)
Does Jewish summer camp give campers an exciting foundation to build active Jewish lives, or just a pair of rose-tinted glasses to remember some childhood escapism?
A review of Sandra Fox's The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America (Stanford University Press, 2023)
Peer-Reviewed Articles
From Jewish Effeminacy to Muslim Masculinity: Muhammad Asad's Road to Mecca
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 40, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 147–51
An analysis of a Jewish intellectual's conversion to Islam through the lens of gender.
Under the Sign of the Middle Passage: Black Solidarity Reimagined
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 65, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 115–39
The Middle Passage wasn't always the central metonym for life and death in US Black arts and cultural criticism. After long being overlooked, the Middle Passage
was brought back into public consciousness in the mid-20th century by academic slave trade studies. Writers turned to this scholarship, I argue, to confront overdetermined intraracial tensions that arose in the post–civil rights era, transforming the ship’s hold into an image of solidarity.
Friendship in the Time of COINTELPRO: Clarence Major and Dingane Joe Goncalves
MELUS 47, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 153–70
Through its surveillance and disinformation campaigns, the FBI became intimately entwined in the production of Black literary culture. The failed friendship of novelist Clarence Major and poet and journal editor Dingane Joe Goncalves offers a look into the atmosphere of mistrust among mid-century Black writers that was created by surveillance and law enforcement.
Translations
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Exchanges (Spring 2023)
“Manual Labor,” published as a prelude to a volume of stories aimed at young readers, reflects both Regelson’s Jewish American immigrant background and his maximalist Hebrew style.
Notable Blogs
Times of Israel, May 22, 2025
The murder of a pair of Israeli Embassy staffers is the outcome of the new antisemitism: peoplehood antisemitism.
The Buckeye Scroll, April 25, 2025
The life and legacy of Rabbi Harry Kaplan the second and longest-serving director of Ohio State Hillel (1934–69), provides a model for how to survive the coming civilizational bottleneck.
The Buckeye Scroll, April 18, 2025
Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver (1893–1963), one of the two or three most important American Zionists of the 20th century, taught an enduring lesson about the meaning of Judaism.
Times of Israel, October 3, 2024
A look at the sources and halakhic basis for the holiday prayers gives insight into how joy and judgment are to be reconciled on Rosh Hashanah.
