Archives for 2021

I have a feeling that this is going to be the crummiest semester of my teaching career.  We’re tired here at my small undergraduate Catholic college outside of Boston.  I’ve toggled back and forth between classes on Zoom and in person.  As a result of all that, we’...

Vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris is known for wearing Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers and pearls that are emblematic of her historical significance as the first African American and South Asian woman to assume this high office. Girls and women everywhere donned the shoes and pearls to celebrate “...

As the Jewish Studies Professor for my department, I teach an undergraduate course in the Holocaust (Sho’ah) every other school year. The remote format of the course now consists of weekly assigned readings and the edited version of class lectures gleaned from earlier years of in-class instruction. Students submit ...

During the past year, two of my favorite Brazilian writers and educators, Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino collaborated on yet another book: Encantamento: Sobre a Política da Vida (Incantation: On the Politics of Life).  One of the central affirmations of their work (which follows their previous co-authored publications: ...

I am familiar with what liminality means, but I have never put the Israelite’s journey in the wilderness and liminality together until recently. Liminality was first used in the discipline of anthropology and then applied to ritual and other areas of research. It is a term to describe being ...