Blake Smith, a contributing writer at Tablet, lives in Chicago.
Should aristocrats of the spirit have sex with each other or seize power in a military coup?
The queen of queer theory sought to relieve the persecution complex that haunted the West. Instead, her work has intensified it.
Rescuing the pioneering literary and social critic from the clutches of boring right-wingers and ‘Jews of culture’ on the 100th anniversary of his birth
Judith Shklar’s minority liberalism offers both an escape hatch from the Hobbesian tyranny of democratic majorities and a pathway to becoming the freest and most authentic versions of ourselves
An appreciation of Laura Riding, the great Jewish modernist poet who abandoned her genius to grow oranges in Florida
The abortion debate has been irreversibly altered by the partisan biopolitics of COVID
The controversial Jewish thinker leads us to see ourselves as we are
Today’s refugees face a new pressure to narrativize and commodify their experience
The poet, who died last month, understood that American tradition is broken—but knew it was possible to begin again
Without an elite capable of making good decisions, rights and laws aren’t worth the paper they are printed on
Jacob Taubes’ deeply penetrating and profoundly mischievous thoughts on the evasions of liberalism and the irreconcilable nature of Messianic expectation strike a chord in the present moment
The little-known Romanian writer Abraham Zissu espoused a conception of Judaism rooted in a deep love for one’s community, and a simultaneous willingness to challenge its fundamentals
The medical fear and moral judgment that once surrounded HIV have reemerged in the contemptuous debate over how to manage COVID
A sane alternative exists to liberalism’s imagined rights to personal privacy and bodily autonomy—and to the invasive and totalizing biopolitics that is now sweeping the West
Henri Bergson’s original heuristic of open and closed societies emphasizes that liberalism is a religion born out of moments of mystical perception and faith
The French literary theorist urges us to resist being enlisted in the army of the good in favor of preserving our sanity and spending quality time with friends
What began as a way to bring Nazi murderers to justice has become the model for a new kind of memory politics whose falsehoods and contradictions threaten to undo the framework of our civic life
A new biography of the art critic Dave Hickey argues that his fierce defense of aesthetic autonomy is more important, and more difficult, than ever before