I am a writer, translator, and literary scholar. 

I have written about the cultural implications of the coronavirus epidemic, the emotional layers of American revolt, literature's role in daily life, and the cultural and emotional implications of life in Israel since October 7. Among my works are a series of personal essays in Public Seminar about growing up on the social margins of Los Angeles, and a series of speculative essays including, "A Short Inquiry into the End of the World" (The Massachusetts Review), "The Eternal Hope of the Wandering Jew" (The Hedgehog Review) and "To Kill an Intellectual" (The Fortnightly Review). I contribute a column, "Letter from Jerusalem," to Salmagundi. 

I am also editor of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust, and in this role have published translations of his writing in The New Yorker, Tablet, One Story, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Conjunctions, among others. I have also published a collection of Singer's essays, Old Truths and New Clichés (Princeton University Press), a retranslation of his canonical story, Simple Gimpl: The Definitive Bilingual Edition (Restless Books), and translated and edited a three-volume collection of his Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt (White Goat Press). Aside from Singer, I have published translations from Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, including In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times (Delacorte), a collection of children's stories from the early 20th century. 

I have published scholarly research in Prooftexts, Soundings, Journal of Narrative Theory, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, among others. My first book-length study was  Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer (University of Delaware Press), focusing on narrative technique and moral vision. My second, Idiot Love and the Elements of Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan), explored the intersection of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

My earliest publications included four collections of single-panel cartoons, the last of which was Baddies, with a Foreword by Aimee Bender (Melville House). I also published fiction in Ambit, The Account, and The Woven Tale Press; and essays in The American Scholar, Hedgehog Review, Dispatches Magazine, Speculative Nonfiction, and Literary Matters, among others.

Born in Ashdod to ex-Soviet parents, I immigrated to Los Angeles as a child to and twenty years later moved to Jerusalem, where I live and work.