Constructive Criticism

Recent posts

Aug 18, 2026
A Jewish joke at World Spa
Last January I went to World Spa, in Midwood. The clientele is a funny mix. Really people of all kinds. But of course Midwood being what it is, there are enough Jews for a stereotypical Jewish joke to play out …
Aug 4, 2026
Reflections on East Bay DSA’s recent event on Cuba
On the whole I thought the event was excellent. I have a lot of admiration for both Camila Piñeiro Harnecker and Claudia Jimenez. However I have a few criticisms, which I hope can be taken as comradely. First …
May 8, 2026
Lost in Translation (Getting Over AI)
Yesterday, I translated from Yiddish a passage from a yizkor book1 for the shetl of Kapresht. I found the passage by searching Jochre (the Yiddish Book Center OCR’d database, which is totally amazing) for …
Apr 10, 2026
A Haggadah from the Future
Here is one possibility, the one taken up by this haggadah: our Jewishness can be a particular, concrete, socially embodied expression of the idea of abolishing social class which, for convenience, we call …
Mar 26, 2026
How is qualitative change possible?
An important principle in the philosophy of dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality. That is, a system which undergoes a significant enough “quantitative change” which eventually …