Click here to see my latest essay for Berfrois:  “How Simple is Simon? Unemployment, Masochism, and Daydreaming in Robert Walser’s “The Tanners.” It takes Robert Walser’s novel, The Tanners as its subject and tests out Walter Benjamin’s reading of poverty and unemployment. As the title suggests, I read Walser through the spectrum of unemployment, daydreaming, and masochism. Since it […]

What is “the witz”? Freud and his friend (and subject) Theodor Reik wrote books on wit(z). For Freud, one can learn about how the unconscious and dreams work (Freud cited many Jewish jokes in his book on this subject) through humor; while Theodor Reik saw the witz as the key to understanding not just masochism, […]

In classic Yiddish literature, we don’t often learn much about the parents of the schlemiel character (whether in the Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third, “Bontshe Shvayg,” or I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”. Shalom Aliechem comes close when he tells us that his Motl character (Motl, the Cantor’s Son) was an orphan and that […]

How can a schlemiel be a prophetic figure?  One could argue, by way of the Talmud (Baba Batra 12B) that after prophesy ended it went to fools.  But how could one argue that a prophet is a schlemiel which is  – as is suggested in an interview with I.B. Singer and in many other places […]

There is a long history of films, books, and plays that depict the assimilation of Jews into America.  Many of these works include scenes that articulate the loss of faith which can lead to either a good or a bad ending.    On the one hand, think of The Jazz Singer (1927), a film that puts […]

Kafka is well known for his fictional machines.   Sometimes the purpose and the meaning of the machine are clearly laid out; sometimes they are vague. The most well-known is “the Harrow” in his short story “The Penal Colony.” The purpose of the machine is to slowly write the sentence on the body of “The Condemned […]

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud asks his readers to think about the relationship of two drives that are completely opposed: Eros (life) and Thanatos (death).   When one thinks of death one does not think of sexuality and vice versa. To be sure, the act of thinking sexuality in terms of violence is disturbing. The […]