Jewish Thought Research Articles

Gehenna Reexamined: Annihilation and Final Punishment in Intertestamental Jewish Thought

Intertestamental Jewish writings often vaguely yet sometimes specifically address the nature and duration of final punishment of the ‘wicked.’ What constituted the ‘wicked’ in the extrabiblical Jewish literature—similarly to the Hebrew Bible—was consistently defined as those who broke God’s moral law intentionally and persistently. For these wrath-appointed persons, their final judgement lay in the commonly recognized and dreaded place (or state) of punishment called Gehenna. This paper will argue that upon examination of intertestamental Jewish writings there is considerable support for the view of Gehenna judgment as a terminable period of suffering leading to complete destruction (annihilation) of the wicked. The approach of this paper will be to analyze intertestamental Jewish writings and the teachings of Jesus in relation to the Gehenna. While the views on death and judgement in the afterlife were as varied in the intertestamental period as they are today, the intertestamental authors’ use language which depicts the final judgment as something which may at times be interpreted as analogous with the traditional—more accurately “Hellenistic”—Christian view of hell, or at times prevents resurrection of the wicked entirely (Maccabees), or majoritively as a punishment which ends in a fiery conflagration spawning an eternal consequence of destruction in its most non-figurative and complete sense.

Escape to Judaism: Levinas’s First Steps toward Becoming a Jewish Thinker

Abstract This paper recontextualizes Emmanuel Levinas’s intellectual journey of the 1930s, focusing on his first philosophical and Jewish writings and his initial criticism of Martin Heidegger. It demonstrates Levinas’s philosophical transformation using newly discovered texts alongside published writings. These texts illustrate the early stage of his philosophical development and its connection to his first involvements with Jewish thought. An English translation of a newly discovered radio talk Levinas gave in 1937 is appended. This lecture enables a glimpse into the historical and philosophical context of the journey taken by a young immigrant Jewish philosopher in the intellectual scene of 1930s Paris.

"The Soul Seeks Its Melodies": Music in Jewish Thought by Dov Schwartz (review)

"The Soul Seeks Its Melodies": Music in Jewish Thought by Dov Schwartz (review)

Laurie Zoloth, Ethics for the Coming Storm: Global Warming and Jewish Thought

Laurie Zoloth, Ethics for the Coming Storm: Global Warming and Jewish Thought

Freedom, Creativity, the Self, and God: Between Rabbi Kook and Bergson’s Lebensphilosophie

AbstractIn this essay, I examine the intersection between the concepts of freedom, the self, God, and creativity in the works of one of the most prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (1865–1935), exploring his use of these concepts through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I first draw a historical and thematic parallel between Bergson’s and Kook’s philosophies that to date has not been considered extensively. I then argue that five different interpretative puzzles related to the topic of freedom in Kook’s teachings can be explained against the background of Bergson’s thought. This Bergsonian interpretation enables the reader to appreciate in what way different aspects of Kook’s thought—the metaphysical, ethical, epistemological, and theological—are interconnected and can be understood as an organic whole. I thereby show that the Bergsonian philosophical and systematic models are an important, and yet unexplored, interpretative tool for the study of Kook’s theological and philosophical thought.

Gendering Modern Jewish Thought by Andrea Dara Cooper (review)

Gendering Modern Jewish Thought by Andrea Dara Cooper (review)

Jewish Environmentalism in the United States: Achievements, Characteristics, and Challenges

Abstract Concern for the environment is recognizably present in contemporary Judaism, especially in the United States. Along with practitioners of other world religions, Jews have responded to the eco-crisis by reinterpreting canonic texts, articulating eco-theologies, and reenvisioning traditional Jewish rituals. Today there are Jewish environmental organizations and Jewish thinkers who inspire Jews to appreciate the agricultural roots of Judaism, cultivate an environmentally concerned lifestyle, green the practices of Jewish institutions, and advocate the ethics of creation care. Together these activities constitute a Jewish environmental sensibility that allows us to generalize about “Jewish environmentalism,” although it falls short of constituting a cohesive “environmental movement.” Focusing exclusively on Jewish environmentalism in the U.S., this essay features the academic discourse on Judaism and ecology, the official resolutions of Jewish denominations about environmental matters, and the main activities of Jewish environmental organizations. Judaism is a highly variegated religious tradition that speaks in many voices. Nonetheless, there are shared canonic texts, foundational beliefs, ethical values, and literary tropes that characterize a distinctive Judaic perspective. From that vantage point, development of the physical world is religiously permissible, but it must cohere with the ethical values and legal principles of Judaism. It is not surprising, therefore, that socially progressive Jewish environmentalists have been vocal critics of the extraction industries, transnational capitalism, and wasteful consumerism that have greatly contributed to the eco-crisis. Highlighting the biblical commandment to pursue justice (tzedek), some Jewish environmentalists have applied social justice to ecological matters and promoted the ideal of tikkun olam (“repair of the world”). The essay surveys the achievements of Jewish environmentalism and notes persistent challenges.

Back to Exile: Current Jewish Critiques of the Jewish State

This article reviews recent books by Jewish thinkers that critique the idea of a Jewish state from the perspective of Jewish exile. It outlines two main approaches. The first, secular approach, rejects the Jewish state in favor of a secular state, seeing Judaism itself as the problem, whether arising from biblical violence or collective identity. The second, post-secular approach, rejects the Jewish state as secular, and finds resources in Jewish tradition for an alternative political vision centered on exile, understood as resistance to sovereignty and violence. This article argues that Jewish opposition to the Jewish state aims to limit sovereignty, integrate Jews into the Middle East space, and recover an exilic Jewish tradition of social ethics and pluralism. The idea of exile thus provides resources for envisioning decolonization and coexistence in Israel–Palestine.

“Some are guilty but all are responsible” – A.J. Heschel’s opposition to all forms of persecution

The main purpose of this article is to analyze racial persecution in the light of Heschel’s religious concept of equality. The Jewish thinker analyzes this problem based on the phenomenon of persecution of black people by the followers of monotheism in the United States, both by Jews and Christians. Heschel asks a fundamental question: How can a religious man persecute another man because of the color of his skin?

“In Love and War”: The Question of Halakhic Controversy in the Tikune Zohar Literature

Abstract: Jewish thinkers in the Middle Ages have developed various approaches to account for the existence of unresolved controversies in the Mishnah and Talmud: a question that touches on fundamental issues, from the nature of truth to the ways to deal with religious and political dissent within Jewish societies. This article presents a seldom-studied approach to controversy that appears in the Tikune Zohar literature, a collection of kabbalistic compositions dated to the early fourteenth century. The product of a secondary elite, and connected with the influential zoharic movement in kabbalah, these texts present a unique approach to the question of halakhic controversy. The Tikunim ’s approach distinguishes three types of controversy: “lower,” evil controversies that are driven by pride and resentment; “middle” controversies that adorn and protect the divine; and “higher” controversies, where the disputants participate in the sexual dynamic of the sefirot, the divine emanations. These types of controversy are arranged metaphysically and are distinguished not by content but by the disposition of the disputants. The higher type of controversy is depicted as existing even in the ideal, messianic state of the Torah and must remain unresolved, for to resolve it would mean to collapse the godhead itself. The Tikunim ’s unique model of halakhic controversy can also be viewed as part of a larger trend in kabbalah at the turn of the thirteenth century to organize and harmonize various Jewish approaches according to a new (kabbalistic) key.

The Leibowitzer Rebbe: Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Hasidism

Abstract The controversial Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) has jokingly been called “the Leibowitzer Rebbe.” The humor is in the obvious incongruity of associating Leibowitz with anything Hasidic. He was the most rationalist of religious thinkers and said disparaging things about Hasidism and its leaders. Yet Leibowitz and Hasidism are closer than they appear. Building on insights from other scholars, I will show the affinities between Leibowitz and some of the Hasidic masters. Drawing on his writings, interviews, and correspondence, I will demonstrate that Leibowitz read and cited Hasidic books; he engaged with Hasidic teachings, and acknowledged learning from them. I argue that a full understanding of his challenging thinking must take Hasidic sources into account. This paper makes a contribution to scholarship on Leibowitz, one of the most interesting modern Jewish thinkers, and to our understanding of the relationship of Hasidism with modern Judaism as a whole.

Meyer Schapiro, the Jewish Museum, and Living Artists: A Scholar’s Overlooked Activism

Abstract Meyer Schapiro was among a handful of New York’s most prominent Jewish thinkers writing about modern art during the post-Second World War period, just as the international center of new art had shifted there from Paris. Unlike his contemporaries Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, however, Schapiro is thought to have “seldom” or only “subliminally” addressed questions of Jewish identity, suggesting that he avoided or suppressed the matter. Yet his nearly four-decade-long relationship with the Jewish Museum of New York tells a different story. Schapiro’s unpublished correspondence, memoranda, and addresses reveal his role in transforming the Jewish Museum into a venue for avant-garde art and his urging Jewish acceptance of modern art, including works that were not visibly Jewish or that were created by non-Jews. These efforts reflect the ways his kinship with the Jewish community prompted his articulation of universal values of humanitarianism and social justice that he associated with Judaism, values that coincided with his social activism. The archival materials also show how Schapiro engaged with questions of Jewish identity as he drew on his scholarly knowledge and his affinity with the Jewish community to further the appreciation of modern art for the benefit of Jewish and non-Jewish artists and audiences.

The Numinous and the Art of Social Justice

In Das Heilige, Rudolf Otto discusses not only conceptual, but artistic parallels to the idea of the "numinous". The artistic styles and periods that he mentions are those admired by European literati and intellectuals of his time. They include the spare Chinese landscapes "of emptiness", made in the classical period of the Tang and Sung dynasties, as well as the gothic art that inspired the movement towards abstraction in the early twentieth century. Related ideas continue to pervade the discourse of champions of abstract art well into the twentieth century, as in in Michael Fried's exegesis of "presentness", in his essay "Art and Objecthood". Seemingly counterintuitively, ideas associated with the numinous also infiltrate discourses of the art of social justice. Some Jewish thinkers who referenced or absorbed Otto's ideas, translated them into relational notions or ethical ideas of responsibility. When these ideas seep into the contemporary discourse of social justice art, concepts of the numinous cling to them. An investigation of a significant work of art in the service of social justice reveals a connection between conceptual art, the numinous, and social justice that extends from the era of the early 1980s into our own time.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought by Ethan Kleinberg

Reviewed by: Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought by Ethan Kleinberg Annabel Herzog Ethan Kleinberg. Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 220 pp. Levinas’s essays on the Talmud and other texts of the Jewish tradition (his “talmudic readings”) have been studied from various perspectives. Some consider them a mere illustration of Levinas’s phenomenology. Some try to fathom their philosophical meaning. Some read them in a purely Jewish context, as examples of modern midrash. Some emphasize their historical impact on the Jewish renewal that took place in intellectual circles in Paris in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. In his excellent book, Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn, Ethan Kleinberg proposes a truly original twist: his historical account focuses on Levinas’s teaching and transmission of Talmud. In emphasizing primarily neither the French Jewish scene of the time, nor the midrashic relevance of Levinas’s endeavor, but the passages between them, Kleinberg asks how Levinas came to teach the Talmud and what this move meant. The answer is presented in two parallel discussions: one classically historical and one that delves into the arguments of some specific talmudic readings. This double strategy, appearing visually on the page as two columns of text, is influenced by Derrida’s writing in Glas and in Margins of Philosophy—which [End Page 213] is in its turn influenced by the Talmud’s page layout—and aims at opening the text and challenging the process of reading. Kleinberg’s project starts with the realization that, contrary to what is too often believed, Levinas never had formal talmudic training. While he was born and grew up in Lithuania, he did not study in a traditional yeshiva. This point is important and Kleinberg comes back to it several times, to emphasize that the centrality of Talmud in Levinas’s thinking is not the result of religious upbringing but of choice. The discussion that Kleinberg elaborates from this point forward, however, goes beyond the simple exposition of a biographical fact. Indeed, it is now well known that for many Jewish secular scholars and intellectuals in France and in other countries, Levinas’s idiosyncratic interpretations of the Talmud opened a way back to the Jewish tradition. This, I must add, is not a unique phenomenon. Buber, Rosenzweig, and Heschel also gave Jewish intellectuals a new taste for Jewish texts and sometimes Jewish practice. Yet, the question that Kleinberg asks is about the meaning and composition of tradition: If we acknowledge that Levinas began his talmudic investigations at quite a late moment of his life, can his teaching be considered tradition? Can a tradition whose thread has been broken be reconstructed? Is a talmudic commentary that includes insights taken from other realms of thinking (such as Western philosophy or French humanism) still talmudic, still Jewish? What did Levinas exactly do in suggesting that his universalist understanding of the Jewish tradition is the Jewish tradition? Should his endeavor affect our presumptions about that tradition? These are fascinating questions. Some of them have already been raised in Levinas’s scholarship, but not as the basis for such a far-reaching discussion. In addition, Kleinberg shows that Levinas himself formulated versions of these questions in his talmudic readings, which deal with the meaning of tradition and transmission beyond their specific topics. The argument of the book, therefore, is that Levinas “inserted himself” into the Jewish tradition (99). And this implies two things. The first is that he opened that tradition to make room for himself. This was made possible by the fact that tradition had already been transformed, shaken, or even broken by a series of processes and events: the Jewish emancipation, secularism and assimilation, Nazi rule, and the decolonization wars that brought Sephardic Jews to Paris and created a new Jewish conversation. In other words, Levinas used the crises of his time to find his way into the talmudic chain of transmission. The second is that entering tradition from outside, he would almost necessarily start a new tradition or reformulate the tradition in a new language reflecting that outside realm, and dialoguing with it. This is what Levinas meant when...

L’École de pensée juive de Paris and the Idea of Fraternité: Re-reading the Stories of Brothers in Genesis

Abstract This essay will present an analysis of the idea of ‘fraternity’ in the writings of two of the most dynamic Jewish thinkers of the Parisian School of Jewish Thought: Manitou (Rabbi Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi) and André Neher. They both examined the concept of “fraternity” in the book of Genesis. Apparently, the concept was borrowed from the motto of the French revolution: liberté, egalité and fraternité. However, they approached it from the perspective of a Jewish reading of the Bible. For them, the extensive development of the concept of fraternity in Genesis produced a wealth of profound ideas. Regretfully, however, it becomes clear that the concept includes varied connotations of enmity as well. In order to sharpen the focus of our study, this essay will deal solely with the relationship of the first set of brothers: Cain and Abel, perhaps the archetype for all other sets of brothers of Genesis.

Exploring spiritual eco-humanism

This paper is a philosophical discussion about the link between utopianism and responsibility. It argues that our time demands a strong practice of political responsibility in both organizations and society based on what has been called ‘real utopianism’. It takes as a starting point Hans Jonas’ critique of utopianism. Keeping in mind the horrors of the Second World War this Jewish thinker disconnected the principle of responsibility from the idea of utopianism, and connected it to a ‘heuristics of fear’ – we should be careful with ‘wild’ new technologies, but also with new utopian perspectives. In a second step Jonas’ predecessors and utopian thinkers Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch and Ernest Callenbach are revisited. They show that a fully conceptualized idea of utopianism includes at least three dimensions of responsibility: subsistence, justice and spirituality. I then argue that if one digs deeper into the work of Jonas, it seems that the concept of responsibility in fact implies the courage to overcome a heuristics of fear. This paper therefore argues that there is no need to radically disjunct responsibility from utopianism and that the concept of responsibility actually opens a path to ‘real utopianism’. Such a concept of responsibility can best be supported by a confessionally neutral but nonetheless spiritual eco-humanist worldview that develops a new attitude towards nature, in which (eco)asceticism, morality and spirituality become intertwined.

Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II by Karma Ben-Johanan

Reviewed by: Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II by Karma Ben-Johanan Michael Skaggs Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II. By Karma Ben-Johanan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2022. 352pp. $35.00. Among the more vivid anecdotes recalled by historians of Catholic-Jewish relations is the 1959 Good Friday liturgy celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as relayed by Michael Phayer in The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965. When the prescribed prayer for the conversion of “the perfidious Jews” [perfidis Judaeis] was chanted, the pope halted the liturgy. He told the deacon to say the prayer again, without perfidis. Six years later, an ecumenical council proclaimed joyfully—specifically in regard to Jews—that “the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder’” (Nostra Aetate, 4). From one perspective, and as often reported in the secular media, the promulgation of Nostra Aetate heralded the end of Catholic-Jewish enmity. Yet accepting this neat bookend to centuries of antisemitism, argues Karma Ben-Johanan, requires overlooking an intricately nuanced development of thought among both Catholic and Jewish thinkers before the council and since. In Jacob’s Younger Brother, Ben-Johanan explores “the relation to the Other as a key component in the consolidation of religious identities in the second half of the twentieth century” (2). The book is not a narrative history of Christian-Jewish dialogue. Instead, Ben-Johanan focuses closely on internal dialogue within each tradition, about the other. Significantly, Ben-Johanan has not offered an uplifting story of ever-approaching unity: “this book is about the problems of rapprochement and not about its successes” (4). Finally, she restricts her well-argued analysis to the thinking and writing of the intellectual elite of each tradition, acknowledging that what she calls “unresolvable tensions” between the two are “confined to specific realms of writing and thinking, to the doctrinal and halakhic cores of the respective traditions” (8). My own work and that of others has demonstrated the [End Page 83] remarkably fraternal relations that have characterized Catholic-Jewish collaboration on several concrete, societal problems. While the book’s main contribution reveals the deeply problematic relationship between Catholicism and Judaism after Vatican II, which ostensibly put an end to the difficulties between Catholics and Jews, Ben-Johanan necessarily guides the reader through the histories of Catholic and Jewish thought. The book is helpfully divided into two main parts, “Judaism in Catholic Theology” and “Christianity in Orthodox Jewish Thought.” Ben-Johanan brilliantly synthesizes centuries of debate within Catholicism and Judaism while maintaining an ultimate focus on thinkers and leaders closer to our own day, including Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, as well as leading rabbinical authorities such as David Rosen of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (sometimes mistakenly perceived as something like a “Jewish Vatican”) and Eugene Korn of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation. Ben-Johanan offers a lucid narrative of Catholicism and European Judaism metaphorically switching places: while the Catholic Church’s landmark statement on Jews in Nostra Aetate in 1965 appeared as the church’s influence on state power waned, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 meant Judaism now held an amount of sovereign authority not seen for millennia. Pretensions to fraternity could be lowered in intra-Jewish (particularly intra-Orthodox) discussions of Christianity. In this way, Ben-Johanan argues, public, Orthodox rejections of Catholic-Jewish dialogue became possible precisely because of modern conceptions of religious liberty that the church itself had come to advance. An extreme example is Zvi Yehudah Kook’s full embrace of the charge of “deicide” that had been leveled at Jews for centuries: rather than ascribing the crucifixion of Jesus to the Romans, Kook cited Maimonides: “If it was a rabbinical court, then it was a rabbinical court! A Jewish court . . . not an instance of the gentiles” (203). Ben-Johanan describes Kook’s writing as a thoroughly modern stance for a Jew to take precisely because it rejects the need to placate a majority Christian society. Perhaps the single notable...

A Jewish Reclaiming of German-Jewish Women Thinkers

Abstract: The following essay describes a typical uneasiness with regard to the reception of the intellectual legacy of German-Jewish women thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Bertha Pappenheim, Regina Jonas and Margarete Susman. The material reality of the large role played by such Jewish women thinkers may have vanished in the Shoah. Their Jewish intellectual descendants in Germany today have built upon their work, but that work takes place in contested territory, where other, non-Jewish scholars also lay claim to this legacy. In this personal reflection, I analyze the different motivations of non-Jewish and Jewish feminists in post-Shoah Germany to engage with Jewish thinkers. Certainly, the conflicts are also about academic power and the control of interpretation. Yet, they have a political quality that is interesting in and of itself, one that underlines the far-reaching impact of the intellectual legacy of Jewish women thinkers in societal discourse in Germany today.

A Jewish Reclaiming of German-Jewish Women Thinkers

Abstract: The following essay describes a typical uneasiness with regard to the reception of the intellectual legacy of German-Jewish women thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Bertha Pappenheim, Regina Jonas and Margarete Susman. The material reality of the large role played by such Jewish women thinkers may have vanished in the Shoah. Their Jewish intellectual descendants in Germany today have built upon their work, but that work takes place in contested territory, where other, non-Jewish scholars also lay claim to this legacy. In this personal reflection, I analyze the different motivations of non-Jewish and Jewish feminists in post-Shoah Germany to engage with Jewish thinkers. Certainly, the conflicts are also about academic power and the control of interpretation. Yet, they have a political quality that is interesting in and of itself, one that underlines the far-reaching impact of the intellectual legacy of Jewish women thinkers in societal discourse in Germany today.

A Review of Textual Rivalries: Jesus, Midrash, and Kabbalah

A Review of Textual Rivalries: Jesus, Midrash, and Kabbalah Sharon Carson (bio) and Gilad Elbom Elbom, Gilad. Textual Rivalries: Jesus, Midrash, and Kabbalah. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022. Pp. 210, $39.00, hb. This isn't a book review in the usual sense, but rather an exchange between Gilad Elbom, the author of Textual Rivalries: Jesus, Midrash, and Kabbalah, and myself. Both Gilad and I serve as editors for NDQ. We are friends and colleagues, and we have talked about textual and cultural interpretation of religious and other texts for many years. Gilad brings his considerable talent as a literary scholar, a translator, a comparativist in religious studies, and a fiction writer to this beautifully written book, and we at NDQ are delighted to see Textual Rivalries in print. No doubt like others among his readers, I lack some of the deep-dive experience in linguistics—and all of the deep-dive experience in the Hebrew language and Kabbalah studies—that a full critique would require. But happily, Textual Rivalries is interdisciplinary, comparative, and accessibly grounded in questions central to the humanities and central to pluralistic communities of interpreters. In fact, a key strength in Gilad's work is that he opens and sustains the reality of interpretive multiplicity. He does this in Textual Rivalries across diverse interpretive traditions and texts within Judaism and Christianity. He very successfully opens this world of "multiples" for serious readers across a spectrum of interests and backgrounds. Gilad's prose is philosophically, artistically, and existentially engaging, whether one has a theological stake in the narratives of the Torah, the Talmud, the New Testament texts, the Kabbalah textual traditions (and the endlessly unfolding commentaries on all of these), and/or a literary or interpretive stake in the same texts, or some other stake altogether. Readers should also be prepared to embark on their own tangential interpretive adventures sparked by the remarkably sharp conceptual and textual detail in every chapter. Just one example: Gilad has me off again reading the late and indefatigable Jewish studies scholar Jacob Neusner, especially his work on the life and thought of Yohanan ben Zakkai, a key [End Page 34] Jewish thinker of the first century. Textual Rivalries is especially successful in bringing some of the cultural and interpretive issues of the past into a clear dialogue with concerns of our present. It's a truly generative book on many levels. I asked Gilad a series of questions, and our exchange is reproduced below. Hopefully the questions I tossed to Gilad will indicate some of the range in the book itself and his thoughtful responses will offer a collaborative invitation for readers to head off and find their own way along the many interpretive paths he created in Textual Rivalries. sharon carson (sc): Your book unfolds as a multilayered call for interpretive openness: a resistance to making texts or meaning static and closed. It's clear that this call has a particular context for you in the realms of human interpretations of scripture, but you also talk about metafiction. I'm curious: to whom are you speaking via this rhetoric of "call to openness"? How is your book an engagement with particular audiences (emphasis on the plural), with particular agents in culture, and with particular historical stresses? What contemporary concerns moved you to craft such an intricate engagement with the problems created by interpretive closure? gilad elbom (ge): I'm very suspicious of people who know, people who hold opinions, people who look for answers. I'm even more suspicious of people who know the answers. I prefer questions. If I can read a text, any text, and come up with five different interpretations, I'm happy. If I can come up with ten different interpretations, I'm happier. I'm fascinated by possibilities, new combinations, multiple perspectives, clashing points of view. But I don't think we live in a society that values this kind of openness. We live in a society that teaches persuasive argumentation: how to formulate a clear thesis, how to support a personal opinion, how to defend a main argument, how to win a debate. In this context, metafiction offers a good alternative. It rejects the idea...