Blake Smith, a contributing writer at Tablet, lives in Chicago.
How the queer theorist went from celebrating ironic distance and deconstructing drag shows to straight-faced gender totalitarianism
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody is the most original French-to-English translator of his generation and a hugely talented poet. But unlike Richard Howard, he has yet to make Baudelaire his own.
The avant-garde Jewish lesbian essayist was a forerunner of petty 1990s observational comedy. But she is also something deeper.
Julia Kristeva on Céline
Larry Kramer, Richie Bronstein, and the question of whether homosexuality is a heritage that should be handed down from generation to generation by scandalous Jew daddies, or proper, self-respecting homos
‘The Volcano Lover,’ published in 1992, celebrates ideas of excellence and intellectual seriousness that today feel ancient
Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature
The rediscovery of Susan Taubes risks trapping her work within the prison of contemporary autofiction
A critique of the COVID regime exposes the limits of conservative political theory
The pioneering gay writer and editor Michael Denneny, who died on April 12, learned from his teacher Arendt that an individual can be free only as part of a free community
How Andrea Long Chu became a latter-day Saul of Tarsus in her journey from guilty white man to taboo-breaking Asian woman
An exchange of letters
Can old, dead, gay, white French males save us from the West’s latest moral crusade?
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
