It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades. (This is a topic I’ve written about a lot.) You see it in the political elite. Where once upon a time Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock destroyed his presidential campaign (in 1988), politicians, even Supreme Court justices (paging Neal Gorsuch), routinely get exposed for plagiarism, and it doesn’t affect them at all. Same goes for journalists. For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have […]
However crazy you think the Germans are about the Jews, they run at best a distant second to how German-speaking Jews think of the Jews. I’m reading two amazing books on this topic: one is S.S. Prawer’s book on Heine, the other is Paul Reitter’s book on Karl Kraus. These are old-style intellectual histories, the kind where a single author and their texts give you the largest possible window on the larger culture and society of which they are a part. No one writes intellectual history like this anymore, which is a shame. (Prawer, by the way, you might know as the author of that excellent book on Marx’s literary references and culture. His Heine book, if you can believe […]
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll once again be working with my friend and co-author Alex Gourevitch on a new writing project: an introduction to a new edition of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. The translation will be done by the excellent Paul Reitter, who did that new translation of Capital, and will be published by NYRB Classics, which has issued so many wonderful translations since its founding. It’s hard for me to think of a more timely text than On the Jewish Question. Despite his traffic in antisemitism, Marx is trying here to get us to think about religion, identity, and politics outside the framework of culture war, which had engulfed so many intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Instead of […]