The Stroke of Lightning

Posted on December 30, 2025 by amanda horgan

Henry Holiday (1839–1927), Sketch for “Dante and Beatrice”, c. 1880.
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Tonight I want to revisit an experience whose status in modern culture is typically regarded with skepticism. The French call it the stroke of lightning (le coup de foudre). It’s the sudden descent/visitation of romantic love.

It’s not the same as getting into a meaningful relationship charged up by mutual attraction. It’s more like a change that “changes everything.”

Such a syndrome enjoyed recognition in medieval Europe. The whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy was apparently inspired by a wordless encounter with his one irreplaceable Beatrice. The doomed lovers, Tristan and Iseult, exemplified the coup de foudre. In both of these cases, there was no question or realistic possibility of marriage. The lovers were either already married or already affianced to someone else.

Within the medieval frame, the demands of the stroke of lightning and the requirements of actual life in the space-and-time world could not safely intersect. Some scholars have maintained that these stories of lovers-outside-of-history were not so much romantic tales as encoded representations of secret gnostic cults subversive of the doctrines and practices of official Christendom.

When I first read about it in college and later sensed its influence in the erotic dance of Parisian street life, I had no objection to the coup de foudre as such – only to the gnostic features that I sensed must be putting it into conflict with societal norms. If such a conflict were believed to inhere in romantic love, then that very belief would make it virtually impossible to find or retain in real life.

I knew that it wasn’t impossible. But the gnostic features of the literary exemplars made it seem impossible.

*. *. *

Jerry and I had been talking for months by phone, he in D.C. and I in Manhattan, before we met face to face. At that time, he ran an organization in Washington dedicated to the defense of high standards in higher ed, while I and another professor at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York were trying to save the college’s exemplary core curriculum from a novel plan – by which the new college president hoped to make his mark – to focus the curriculum on the borough of Brooklyn! The students knew more about Brooklyn than their professors did. They hadn’t come to Brooklyn College – some from all over the world – to learn about Brooklyn.

Jerry had been a philosophy department chairman, had served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he knew what kind of advice to give. I’d been in fights of my own and knew how to act on good advice. That we actually won our fight secured it a front-page story in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It also made several of the New York papers. The New York Post devoted a full-page editorial to the victory.

We had not yet met, but Jerry knew he was in love before I noticed that I was. But when – after an afternoon spent trading life stories over lunch at the Metropolitan Museum – he gave me the briefest goodbye kiss on his way to a taxi – I thought 

uh oh.

It was not just a kiss. The balance I had struck in my life at that point might actually be at risk!

Philosophers have techniques for getting above the down-rush of feeling and instead looking at life – even their own lives – through a contemplative lens. Back home, sitting cross-legged on my meditation pad, I drew on a technique developed by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl for facilitating detachment. You observe your own consciousness without identifying with any of the elements observed in it. You just look – at the whole panorama. I’d done what Husserl called the “phenomenological reduction” before and generally found it instructive. Now, in my present situation, I was prepared to do it again.

But the oddest thing happened. Instead of maintaining the detachment of the observer, I seemed to myself to be falling into what I observed! The way one might tumble into a pit that opens beneath you while you’ve prepared yourself merely to look at it. I tried mentally to hold on to the rim of what seemed to be a cavernous downslide. But my mental grip was not powerful enough to pull me back up.

I was in it. Not above it. Not in any mode of detachment. The world was being repositioned around me, and I was being reconfigured within the new reality.

For better or worse, I have no habit of lying to myself. The question was, now what? I was inside an experience that I could not stand outside of. To what was it calling me?

By stages, I understood – Jerry and I would be realizing – that this love actually had the character of a summons. Whatever we did in response – the changes it might eventually require – would reshape our lives, separately and together.

Had we been deluded – had we mistaken infatuation for love – the result could have been tragic. Had we, on the other hand, decided it would be safer to override the summons of love, we would have mistaken depth for surface, bungled our lives and flattened our future horizons. 

We took what had befallen us as leading us aright.

And we weren’t mistaken.

Related Content: Press Coverage of Victory at Brooklyn College | Love Stories

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Book Matters

Posted on December 23, 2025 by amanda horgan
Book Matters
“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Israel, Jews And The World: An Opportunity for Repair and Redemption in the 21st Century

By Gina Ross

The above title is not quite a book, but is a little longer than a pamphlet. And this present column is not quite a book report either. More like my reflections on a pamphlet.

First, to set the scene, let me tell you about the dream I had last night. In my dream, I was arguing with an anti-semite. He was youngish, looked something like that Fuentes character, and endlessly voluble. Articulate. Never at a loss for words. And I wasn’t nearly so voluble as he was. All I had were … values. Good values. I didn’t want to say anything unless I had sufficient grounds for thinking it was true. But my values and my words seemed weightless. My replies seemed totally without heft in my dream face-off with this character who had got hold of something that worked for him and made him sound important. 

*. *. *

Gina Ross, whose small book I’ve just finished reading, is a specialist in the healing of trauma. She has her own method for repairing trauma’s effects, has written books that approach the subject of trauma-healing from different angles, and has founded institutions in Israel and in the United States where her methods are applied. The back pages of the booklet or pamphlet give links to sites where one can get hold of her videos and other materials.

What interested me is that she has (in a way that seems plausible) identified the special character of the astonishing wave of hatred-for-the-victims that swept over the planet in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity-packed massacres of October 7th and 8th, 2023! 

Here’s her thesis: the Nazi Holocaust that murdered six million Jews was not the start of this brand of hatred: because of its efficiency and scope, it only brought to a climax the ideologies of contempt and rationales for persecution that had been respectably endorsed and openly operative for almost two thousand years. Since most of the countries where Jews had lived had put up no effective resistance to the Nazi roundup – for the purpose of mass murder – of their fellow citizens, a certain degree of shame or moral uneasiness had officially settled over the topic of Jews. However, by and large, the needed moral self-review did not take place. 

Instead, the feelings that had quietly acquiesced in the Holocaust were repressed in the decades following World War II. Repressed, and neither acknowledged nor worked through. So the bizarre, global outbreaks of gleeful atrocity-approval can be understood as cases of the Return of the Repressed (though Ross does not use that Freudian terminology).

That said, our present disheartening situation does offer another chance to revisit the collective bad conscience and, finally, to transcend the past. First, by acknowledging it and next by conscientiously refusing to repeat it. With this hopeful possibility in view, Ross offers eight steps to take, if the therapeutic potential of this moment is to be actualized. 

Since the “steps” are not rote-like but explicated in accompanying discussions, I’ll try to summarize some of them to give an idea of the entire list of eight.

  1. Jews who in Israel have acquired effective military skill in defending themselves, now need to acquire equivalent communicative skill in defending their right of self-defense.
  2. Moderate Arab nations, having recognized their common interest with Israel in modernizing the Middle East, now need to be joined by forces in the West that recognize the common threat to civilization presented by radical Islam.
  3. – 8. The West needs to face its long history of anti-semitism, regain the moral clarity that’s been missing with reference to its past, and shut down the menacing activities that target Jewish students and faculty on university grounds and other public places – activities not permitted against any other group. Liberation movements in Iran need to be supported, the ambivalence of Eastern Europe confronted and the support for Israel from 19 Latin American leaders foregrounded. Israel’s effective self-defense and unusual achievements as a nation are not a byproduct of European guilt but rather the expression of Judaism’s sacred vocation of unbroken chronological memory – beginning in Biblical times and going forward into the present and future. Israel lives in history. That’s what it does. That’s why we have a Bible.

At first, I read her eight steps with impatience at what looked to me like a utopian fantasy. But finally I decided that she’s unlikely to be putting forth these eight steps out of naivete. Her Sephardic family was forced out of two Middle Eastern countries. She’s watched the gradual buildup of anti-semitism in our country, and other Western countries, without surprise or denial. She’s not a fool.

What is she doing, really? She’s identifying a collective displacement without taking instant recourse to empty generalities. She’s giving it the relevant name or category: 

Antisemitism, 

repressed and never faced.

She’s resisting collective delusions, such as the ones that blame the victims or propose abstract remedies that predictably lead to future victims. She’s looking at the constructive forces in the situation and placing her hopes where they have some chance of being realized.

As someone who is still in some degree traumatized by the events of October 7th & 8th, 2023, I’ve tried out one of her healing techniques. I didn’t do it for as long or as carefully as she recommends. I didn’t give it much time. But it did seem to do me some good.

Now we need – 

to get the rest of the world

to try to face 

what it has repressed.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Chosen People

Posted on December 16, 2025 by amanda horgan
The Chosen People

Chaim Tchernowitz (Rav Tzair)
Hebrew: חיים טשרנוביץ (רב צעיר)

I don’t remember what I’d been intending to write about today. Perhaps no topic had as yet occurred to me. Earlier this afternoon I’d been talking to an Israeli cousin – about life and love and family lore – and savoring a felt closeness, though we hadn’t seen each other for years.

Then, I got off the phone, and looked reflexively at the news. It was Sunday. There was the massacre of the Jewish Chanuka celebrants at Bondi Beach, which is the beach near the city of Sydney in Australia.

As it happens, I’d spent meaningful professional time at one of the philosophy departments of Sydney University. Although once or twice there’d been glancing incidents of a prejudicial type – to me these had the character of trailing streamers from the old country (England) and stopped well short of concerted bigotry.

Just offhand, this feels to me as if the “anti-Zionist” cover story (if that ever served as a credible cover) has broken down and the admitted target is now Jews. Quite simply. Quite openly.

In consequence:

     1. it’s hard for Jews to gather if they’re going to be picked off at a gathering;

     2. it’s hard for Jews to fight this thing alone.

Since I don’t have Big Answers to these interesting strategic questions, it might be illuminating provisionally just to review my own relation to my identity insofar as it is specifically Jewish. I realize that murderous anti-semites don’t care what kind of a Jew one is – but I do care.

First of all, I am the granddaughter of a rabbi who has two streets named after him (Rehov Rav Tzair) in Israel, who’d walked through bullets to stop a pogrom, who held a German doctorate in Judaica, and looked a lot like God in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. I was his favorite grandchild. We loved each other. He rooted my life in this ancient lineage, although he was a modernizer and a Zionist.

My father had been a rabbi in his younger years, though the profession did not suit him and he later became a professor of philosophy. He and my mother brought over ten families whom they did not know, rescuing them from the Holocaust, while rescue was still possible.

During the War, my mother uncovered a Nazi spy ring in the basement of the building where we lived, in Manhattan’s Yorkville. The building’s superintendent had a shortwave radio and related equipment in the basement, which probably kept him in contact with enemy ships off the New York shore. It seems likely that he was part of the Duquesne Spy Ring that was rounded up on June 28, 1941. Alerted by my mother, the FBI added a raid on our building and hustled him off to … what I always think of as “volleyball camp” … where he remained at least until the War in Europe was won. My mother saw him in the neighborhood after the Allied Victory and reported that he gave her “a very sour look.” 

Those, so far as I now recall, were the broad lines of immediate connection to my Jewish inheritance, though the spaces between the broad lines were quite interestingly filled in too.

On my mother’s side, I have family whose connections and influence at one time might have provided a partial map of Israel’s political interrelations. Or so an Israeli colleague – who hadn’t known that all these people were related – told me.

One instance: during the year when I was in Paris on a Fulbright, my mother’s cousin was the Israeli ambassador to France.

These relations, though dear to me, I gave up as the price of defending a young Israeli cousin whose parents had wronged her quite consequentially. I did it for the sake of her parents whom I loved, as much as for her, but I knew it would cost me the entire Israel connection. An irreparable loss.

*     *     *

Meanwhile, I had not been raised in the surround of Jewish observance or synagogue affiliation. So my Jewish aspect – which ran deep but along idiosyncratic lines – remained “Jewish in the head.” As one ritually observant Jewish friend told me, I had “the Jewish essence but not Jewish existence.”

So what is it, the Jewish essence, now that the wolves are back on the prowl for Jewish existence? What is it that I have – besides a target on my back?

It’s the great privilege of being in the ever-renewed and ever-renewable paradigmatic relation to God in history.

I wouldn’t change that for the world.

Related Content: Tales of Rav Tsair | Tales of My Mother

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Does Life Have Meaning?

Posted on December 9, 2025 by amanda horgan
Does Life Have Meaning?

Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 470 BCE
Vatican Museum
Photographer Andy Montgomery

Books by Viktor Frankl had been lying around the house for years, but I had never opened one. Their titles in translation (e.g. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything) – seeming to capture banality pure, unalloyed and fully platitudinous – did not attract me. 

One time I had in fact been advised, by a well-intentioned therapist, to “say yes to life.” The advice came at a time when all the vectors that to me carried meaning were colliding and cancelling each other out. What vectors – what motivations – were those? The study of philosophy, the preservation of femininity, and the then-prevailing concept of women as essentially dependent on and secondary to men. As a result, there was nothing in my life that I could say yes to – without at the same time and in the same respect saying “no.”

So I associated Frankl with the kind of advice-giving that would be upbeat but shallow and of no earthly use to a person in despair.

That being the background, it was a great surprise to me when recently I happened to pick up a book by Viktor Frankl and found it dense with insights! His views, derived from professional psychiatric practice, predated the Second World War but got toughened and honed by his experience as a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi death camp. Contrary to the more well-known views of Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism prisoners – in the deepest hell that had yet been devised in human history – were not inwardly dehumanized. Nor were they rendered incapable of moral choice. 

Right after the War, Frankl described the effect on his fellow prisoners of being deliberately dehumanized. These were the people who hadn’t been selected for immediate murder but instead deemed well enough to be worked to death on meagre rations, while guarded on all sides by Nazis of terrifying brutality. This life, under a dark sky, with no end foreseeable, tested the sufferers. Pushed to limits none could have imagined, some rose to inner heights; others despaired and collapsed utterly.

Frankl emerged from his own trial-by-fire clearly ennobled and determined to do good. Being trained in psychiatry, he remained in his native Vienna and devised a novel type of psychotherapy which he called logotherapy. It differed from the Freudian therapy, then still dominant, which he deemed incomplete since its delvings into the unconscious retrieved only those repressed drives found at the most primitive psychic levels. As to the rival Jungian therapy, with its collective unconscious: that seemed to Frankl to take in higher levels but also to rest on a mistake. Jung was wrong to hold that the contents of a person’s unconscious are collective – shared by the generality of humankind. The truth is subtler than that. It’s rather that, in each man or woman, the contents of his or her unconscious are unique.

In addition to instinctual drives and emotional contents, there is one further level to the psyche: the spiritual unconscious. In each of us, this would be a part of the psyche that cannot be mapped because it’s the source of all the mappings of our lives, that we devise and draw, for all our complex purposes. 

What specific work does the spiritual unconscious do? It tells us what, on the highest level, we are called to do in our lives.

Here is Frankl, in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, writing on the topic of “conscience.” What is conscience for him? Not the recourse to a general rule as certain recent philosophers – like Kant (with his universalizability), or the Utilitarians (with their greatest happiness for the greatest number) – would have it. Not even the Ten Commandments suffice to tell each of us, personally, what must be done or not done in the unique case that we confront.

“Only conscience is capable of adjusting the ‘eternal,’ generally agreed-upon moral law to the specific situation in which a concrete person is engaged. Living one’s conscience always means living on a highly personalized level, aware of the full concreteness of each situation.”

I recall describing to Hannah Arendt the precise circumstances that led to my firing and subsequent seven-year fight (ultimately successful) to be reinstated in the Philosophy Department of the college where I taught. 

Here’s what I told her: The senior professor who had just observed my teaching hour – and had yet to write the Teaching Observation Report that would decide my professional fate – had just asked me why I thought he was supporting a candidate for Department chairman whom I believed unqualified for that leadership position. 

This gave me a consequential choice between two paths: the first path, to tactfully evade the senior professor’s question or the second path, to reply candidly. 

I replied candidly: 

I believe you back him

because he’s weak –

and you think you can use him.

When I retold that story to Arendt, instantly she reproached my impolitic and gratuitous tactlessness!

But no. Precisely in that consequential context, tactful dodging, harmless in other contexts, would have been – for me then and there – dishonest and cowardly.

To teach philosophy is both a privilege and a job. But in this case the two were in conflict. Teaching philosophy required truth-telling. And truth-telling would cost me my job.

I would say that I “knew it.” But how did I know it? The way one knows such things.

It was the price of remaining myself.

Related Content: The Puzzle of Hannah Arendt

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The Photographic Negative of the Zeitgeist

Posted on December 2, 2025 by Abigail
The Photographic Negative of the Zeitgeist

Cain and Abel
Bas-relief: Orvieto Cathedral
ca. 1310-31

On the night of Passover, during the dinner celebrated in commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, a cup of wine is set on the table for Elijah – the herald of the messianic age – to drink when he stops in to join the gathering. The door is left unlocked.

If you ask me, it’s about time he showed up. Here’s evidence. A familiar feature of nondenominational meetings of theologians that I’ve attended – here the most recent one looked to be just a bit of an exception – is the absence of Jews and Judaism from discussions of world religions! Jews seem to be “present” mainly in the form of absence – as the empty chair at the table. I have no way of knowing how typical this is. Here I only report what I have noticed.

It’s pretty odd, when you come to think of it. Theologians who would rather be crucified-near-an-anthill than disparage any heretofore marginalized group show no qualm at leaving unmentioned the one group known to have suffered nearly two thousand years of calumny, which culminated in what may be the greatest single crime against humanity in recorded history: the Holocaust.

Calumny? False accusations? What calumnies? Thank you for asking. I’ll be happy to list them. Whatever the spirit of the age – Jews are projected as its antithesis. Like a photo negative of the Zeitgeist.

1. In the Christian era, God was universally held to have taken on human form (incarnated) as Jesus, the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth. He attracted a significant popular following as the messiah at a time when that title was associated with an anticipated figure who would overthrow Roman rule in Roman-occupied Judea. The four records we have of the life of Jesus have the Jewish authorities fearing Roman reprisal and turning him over to Roman authorities for crucifixion, a method that had already blackened the Judean hills with crosses.

     1a. The calumny: all Jews, morning, noon and night, crucify Jesus.

Crazy, no?

2. Enlightened Europeans, emerging from the combats between Christian denominations that had wracked Europe, welcomed the triumph of Newtonian Laws of Nature presided over by an impartial, universal Providence. 

      2a. The calumny: Jews are merely particularistic, without concern for the universal – only for other Jews. Suggestion:

Give Jews the same opportunities,

and see how they do,

on charity, shared social concerns,

and universal human rights.

3. Romanticism privileges passionate intensity, reacts against Enlightenment rationalism, and stresses native lands and native spirit.

       3a. The calumny: Jews are rootless, homeless cosmopolitans, never at home, always wandering.

Jews don’t “wander.”

They are forced out!

Once again – whatever the currently accepted worldview is – Jews are imagined as its antithesis.

4. Darwinian principles view all of life, including human life, as a struggle for survival, where only the fittest prevail. 

      4a. The Nazi calumny: Jews are a “race” unlike any other, in that it’s the only toxic race.

Jews are a people, not a race. 

They are not defined biologically but covenantally.

One can join this people and then be understood 

to have stood with them at Mt Sinai and 

with them accepted their covenant with God.

5. Post-colonialism: Each people has its own traditions – to be respected on its own terms – without subordinating its way of seeing, saying and being to any purported “universalism” that actually masks Western hegemony.

       5a. The calumny: The nation of Israel is regarded as a colonial imposition even though it’s the ancient homeland of the Jews. It’s accorded no right to exist, much less prevail in battle against enemies unashamedly determined to destroy it utterly, from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.

When I first saw the Land of Israel

looking down from the El Al plane

circling for a landing –

what came to mind unbidden was –

‘There it is again. How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time.’

*. *. *

In the Hebrew Bible, the human story begins with a fratricide. One brother fears that the other brother has the inside track with God. So Cain kills Abel in the somewhat doltish belief that God will then transfer the divine affection to Cain. Why? Because God will then have no alternative. 

However, Cain’s calculation fails. It seems God is not so easily fooled.

Here’s an idea! How about people, inclined to blame Jews alone – uniquely and repetitively from age to age – try this alternative: thanking the Jews for making the Creator better known to humankind! The Jews did this by conscientiously keeping the historical record of their own relationship with God – even when it did not flatter them!

Just a simple “thanks” would do.

Related Content: When the Stones Speak

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Book Matters

Posted on November 25, 2025 by amanda horgan
Book Matters
“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Abbie is away this week at the AAR conference, so we’re revisiting a favorite column originally published on July 18, 2023—one that remains as timely now as when it first appeared.

Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers

by David Edmonds & John Eidinow

Like many American kids, I’d always wanted to grow up to be a cowboy, or at least (being a girl) a cowboy’s sweetheart. Till one day, riding herd in Montana as an inept, vacationing adult cowgirl, I realized that my job back home in New York, where I was a philosophy professor, was actually more dramatic to me than sweating it out here in Big Sky country.

Wittgenstein’s Poker deals with one such dramatic encounter between philosophers who held opposing views. It took place in the U.K., at Cambridge University, on October 25, 1946. One of the two (Ludwig Wittgenstein) was swinging a poker as he articulated his views; the other (Karl Popper, the invited lecturer) suggested that his opponent was acting in a threatening manner with that poker. At some point, Wittgenstein either stormed out of the lecture room or else (depending on which bystander’s account you believed) merely left the room as he typically did.

For philosophers, 

the incident became legendary – 

like the shootout at the OK Corral.

This book was published in 2001, which was when I first read it. It made no special impression on me at that time. But rereading it recently, I found it full of drama.

Both Wittgenstein and Popper were Viennese Jews, assimilated participants in the densely cultivated Vienna of the time between the world wars. Neither considered themselves Jews, except – as de Maupassant wrote in a different context – “by an error of fortune.” Wittgenstein was heir to an immense fortune – being at one time perhaps the wealthiest man in Austria. He was accustomed to homes (the family had a number of them) where leading lights of the time met to converse and display their talents. 

Though he renounced his wealth, lived ascetically, and displayed manly heroism on the side of the Austro-Hungarian coalition in the first World War – and selfless service on England’s side in World War II – the family fortune enabled him and his brother Paul to buy safety for his partly-Jewish sisters with a sum “big enough to interest the Nazi government at the highest levels.” By 1939, Wittgenstein had drawn the respectful interest of leading British philosophers, secured a British passport and accepted a professorship in philosophy at Cambridge. 

Popper inherited no such advantages. Due to the Austrian inflation after the first world war, his lawyer father lost whatever financial protection his middle-class family had enjoyed up till then. Unable to dodge the category of “alien” in Britain during the second world war, Popper could only get a philosophical post in New Zealand, at Canterbury University College. Not until 1946, after the war, was he able to secure British citizenship as well as a Readership at the London School of Economics. By then he had written The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, both works that drew acclaim and interest in influential circles. 

Aside from what they had in common as serious Viennese thinkers, assimilated Jews and refugees – and aside from their class differences – what was the philosophic showdown about?

Philosophically, Wittgenstein had moved from a view he held in Vienna, as the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which “offers a picture theory of meaning” – where “facts and propositions, such as ‘the fireplace is in the center of the room,’ somehow present a picture of the way the world is” – to the entirely different view for which he is better known today, which was set forth in his Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953.

The question that divided the two men was whether philosophy dealt with genuine problems that only philosophy could resolve (Popper’s view), or else dealt with mere puzzles arising from habitual misunderstandings fostered by misuses of language. In the latter case, as Wittgenstein saw it, the real problem would be philosophy itself and the cure would allow us to see through philosophy’s pseudo-problems in order to get back to the way real people experience their lives and actually talk about their experiences.

In their life work, Popper came up with a criterion (falsifiability) that helped thinkers see through spurious claims to scientific status (like those in Marx or Freud), while Wittgenstein helped philosophers to see that certain problems (such as radical skepticism about other minds) were merely puzzles due to the misleading way they had been framed.

So each was wrong in hoping to banish his opponent from the field. But each was right in his certainty that – by following his own track without swerving – illuminating insights could be uncovered. 

Or, to simplify the story with the poker –

 we can just say – 

they were both right.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged | 1 Comment

When Your Enemy Is Another Woman

Posted on November 18, 2025 by amanda horgan
When Your Enemy Is Another Woman
Illustration by Caroline Church 
Confessions of a Young Philosopher by Abigail L. Rosenthal

“Sisterhood is powerful.”

Well, often it is, but that power is not always protective. After all, in Genesis, the first Book of the Hebrew Bible, the first recorded relation between siblings is that of murderer (Cain) to murderee (Abel). Despite what is implied by the feminist motto quoted above, it’s not that different with women. 

In this connection, let me thumb through the pages of personal memory.

  1. After finally winning my seven-year struggle to get back my professorial job at Brooklyn College, I was enjoying my first lunch at the faculty dining room. A woman colleague approached me who had fought my reinstatement tooth and nail. She had a wide reputation as a feminist, a champion of women’s rights. I looked up expectantly to hear what she would say.

               “You deserve tenure in hell,” she said. “You’re garbage!”

               “Meredith [not her real name] that’s a terrible thing to say!”

Okay. Not a snappy comeback. But sincere.

  1. The husband of a well-known feminist friend had decided to celebrate his wife’s birthday by treating a large number of guests to a magnificent dinner in her honor at Manhattan’s Top of the Sixes restaurant. At my table, the empty seat next to mine was tardily filled by Betty Friedan, a woman I knew by reputation only. She was the author of The Feminine Mystique and a founding mother of Second Wave feminism. By the time she arrived, the dinner plates had been cleared away. I got up and went into the kitchen, coming back with a plate loaded with all the good things we’d been served earlier. She did not thank me, but by then we had both turned to hear the speeches honoring my friend. 

It was a pleasure to take in the speeches. At that moment, it seemed as if my deserving friend had won it all: a roomful of appreciative friends, a devoted husband, and an historic place in the feminist movement.

               “It’s really ‘feminism without contradictions’!” I exclaimed to my equally celebrated neighbor. I was actually citing the title of an article of mine, published in a well-regarded philosophic journal.

                “You don’t know what a contradiction is! You live

                  your whole life in cliches!”

I found my feet and started walking dazedly around the restaurant. Crossing paths with an editor who was a good friend, I told her what the famous feminist had just said to me.

                “You are the last person of whom it could be said

                 that she lives her life in cliches!” 

Her sympathetic look and kind words stayed with me, outweighing the insult – which over time came to seem merely comical. But it was certainly meant to wound!

  1.  One time the temple to which I belong invited a speaker who claimed to have an original approach – really a winning ticket – to our ancient religion. Not to disclose the brand name he had given to his new approach, I’ll just call it Bonanza Judaism. 

I forget what-all went into his concoction, but he wound up making a pitch for the ground-level leadership displayed by Aaron, the brother of Moses. In the mind of this speaker, Aaron’s leadership showed up particularly well at the time of the mass demoralization that developed while Moses was away on Mt. Sinai, getting the Ten Commandments from God. 

What Aaron had done, according to the speaker, was cleverly distract the murmuring children of Israel by encouraging them to fashion that golden calf so that they’d have something concrete to worship in the interim.

Hey, Mr. Invited Speaker,

what a great idea!

At the windup, our speaker asked for a show of hands. How many would endorse Aaron’s brand of leadership on that occasion? To my chagrin, every hand went up – except for mine and our Rabbi’s. I might have missed some but, from where I sat that’s what it looked like to me.

One of the raised hands belonged to a woman who had sole access to the safe that held important budgetary information concerning the temple. She was sitting close enough to me to see that, exceptionally, my hand had stayed down. She glared at me quite balefully, which I thought peculiar. Why did she care how I voted on the matter of the golden calf? 

Some years later, it was discovered that the temple had fewer assets in the safe than had been assumed. Eventually the situation would be repaired, with mortgage extensions and bank loans, but that repair would require a long and rocky return trip to solvency.

*. *. *

In these three cases, what ought to have occurred, instead of what did happen? 

In the first case, my woman colleague should have put the past behind her and started over in her relations with me, now that we were going to be in the same academic department – thus on the same team in a common effort.

In the second case, the famous feminist ought to have been willing to honor another hero, who had shared with her the effort to elevate the condition of women. With that mindset, she could never have gratuitously insulted another woman who was there to do precisely that.

In the third case, the woman with access to the safe ought to have reconsidered transferring her allegiance to the golden calf – rather than glare at a woman congregant who declined to endorse the worship of an idol.

There are many asymmetries between men and women, some of which can be corrected and rebalanced. In one respect, however, the sexes are already equal. Women, as well as men, can use their power –

against women.

Related Content: Feminism with Something to Hide | Feminism without Contradictions

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I Stopped Trying to Get Above It

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Abigail
I Stopped Trying to Get Above It

“The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” – Caspar David Friedrich (1818)

Reading Jeff Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom brought the topic of mysticism to the front of my mind. At earlier junctures of my life journey, mysticism had clearly been a concern. It seemed to offer a way out of the dilemmas and double binds of experience – impasses that I wasn’t breaking through and were making me sick. (I mean literally. I mean cancer. That’s not a metaphor.)

Of my most sustained experiment with a mystical path, I’ve told the story in these columns. A person had been recommended to me as a Realized Master in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. She was a young Indian woman – almost transcendently beautiful – like no one I’d ever seen. Over time, I noticed a change in her, both in her appearance and in her speeches. Some kind of corrupting process was at work. She was dispirited – disillusioned with herself perhaps – and her swamis were taking control of the project of the ashram, possibly of her, in a way that smelled to me unhealthy. It looked like an organization on a downward slope, with mind control or brainwashing lurking at the bottom of it.

So I took one last long look, and went back to the common sense world, which has its own occasional, never-predictable near-miracles. Anyway, with or without miracles, I stopped trying to get “above it.”

Kripal’s book brought the topic – of an individual merging with the divine – to my mind in a new form. His discussion foregrounds the erotic component of such mergers. He finds it in the mystics themselves and in the historians who study them. His book has five chapters in which this two-level journey is investigated. Each of the chapters is followed by a discussion, labeled “Secret Talk,” in which Kripal’s own analogous experiences are brought out of the closet and set before the reader. So it’s pretty enticing stuff I guess.

There’s only so much I can read about other people’s sex life – no matter how transcendently effulgent it’s been. But his initial chapter, about the only woman historian of mysticism, got my attention. It told a story I didn’t know.

Her poetic name, Evelyn Underhill, is familiar to students of mysticism. Her book, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, was first published in 1911 and has stayed in print ever since! She practically created and catalogued mysticism as a topic in its own right, requiring serious, specialized study.

According to Kripal, her work suffers from some serious shortcomings. For example, she smooths over the conflicts, conceptual and ideological, between mystics, neglects the Asian contributions, foregrounds Christianity overmuch, and scants the erotic components of the experiences that she does discuss.

Okay okay. Of course I don’t know as much about it as Kripal does, but I’m not “shocked, shocked” that the effort to climb close to God might incorporate, betimes in an unruly manner, the energies of human desire. After all, loving intercourse itself has a divine trajectory … .

What interests me about Underhill is, first of all, what an entrancing stylist she is! Here she is reflecting on a parchment with some writing on it that Blaise Pascal wore “sewn up his doublet,” which was discovered by a servant after his death.

“I know of few things in the history of mysticism at once more convincing, more poignant than this hidden talisman; upon which the brilliant scholar and stylist, the merciless disputant, has jotted down in hard, crude words, which yet seem charged with passion—a memorial of the certitude, the peace, the joy, above all the reiterated, all-surpassing joy, which accompanied his ecstatic apprehension of God (p. 229).”

Her book concludes with her own assignment of highest rank to the mystic as “the pioneer of Life on its age-long voyage to the One … [which] flames out, had we eyes to see, from every department of existence (p. 535).”

*     *     *

We each have to find our unique path in life – what we are called to. The better I have known myself, the more evident it has been to me that I’m not summoned to climb toward ecstatic union with the divine All.

So what is my actual assignment? So far as I can tell, it’s to live out my life on the timeline where one has ever and always to choose between the crackingly consequential alternatives – in the domains of 

what to say, how to think,

and what to do.

Related Content: God and the Care for One’s Story Talk

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Here Be Dragons

Posted on November 4, 2025 by Abigail

St. George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello c.1456

These days, I’m taking in the impact of two recent books: Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature and Jeffrey Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism.

Hey, sex and mysticism! That pretty much covers it all, one might say. But no, it doesn’t. Not exactly. Not quite.

About Leaf’s book, I’ve already written about its present implications for those who are still dancing the dance of courtship between men and women. What he tells is that the Darwinian story of our ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors on the evolutionary tree were not apes. We share with apes a common ancestor – but our branch diverged from the primate branch several million years back – and our social patterns exhibit more traits common to other intelligent herd animals like dolphins than they do to the way apes and chimps behave.

What are the implications for our love life? Homo sapiens and its earlier forebears traveled widely in fairly small hunter/gatherer groups where sexual adventuring would have been disruptive and impractical. So it’s likely (as Leaf reads the evidence) that they settled into monogamous, child-rearing pairs, sharing both the joint responsibilities and the erotic rewards.

If Leaf’s reading of the evidence is right, it would go directly against the grain of what intelligent, well-read men and women have believed for at least the last hundred years. Women (let’s start with women) were urged to be super-confident, “out there” in the wide world and – above all – “healthy.” Healthy meant uninhibited.

What exactly was wrong with being inhibited? And from what were the inhibitions supposed to restrain one?

Sex, of course. Sex as self-sufficient – its own reward – as good in itself. In practice, in my youth, there was a tightrope which only the canniest could walk and keep their balance. “Uninhibited” did not, of course, include getting pregnant. Or getting the “slut” reputation. Ergo, as a rule, girls of that time tried to stop short of intercourse, especially since not many had independent access to contraceptives.

These dangers – biological and social – put one in a tricky, inbetween territory, which each of us negotiated well or badly, but without a map or reliable set of instructions. The whole territory would have been better mapped by the medieval cartographers as follows:

Here be dragons.

Meanwhile, the most talented and influential novelists came down on the side of the uninhibited women of their novels. As D. H. Lawrence put it in Lady Chatterley’s (corrected) Lover:

You’d think that a woman

Would have died of shame.

Instead of which,

shame died.

Well, it either died or became inarticulate.

Now what does Leaf’s new evidences of the differences – archeological, neurological, biochemical and behavioral (between primates and homo sapiens) – imply for women? Although sexual adventuring is still à la mode and culturally promoted, it’s still “problematic” (i.e. erotically disadvantageous) for women. As Simone de Beauvoir observes in The Second Sex, “people have trouble distinguishing the free woman (la femme libre) from the easy woman (la femme facile). Yeah.

I don’t claim expertise about what other women actually want, but – by the millions – they are still reading romance novels. Why? Because millions of women still want to experience … romance!

Hey! Here’s a philosophical insight! It’s unlikely to get me any new lecture invitations. But it’s still true.

*. *. *

Now what about Jeffrey Kripal’s book? As I’ve mentioned in an earlier column, as a teenager I had two great ambitions: to be a great lover or a famous saint. According to Kripal’s research – both into mysticism and into the lives of historians of mysticism – certain highly regarded mystics experienced union with the divine sexually as well as spiritually. The erotic language they used to describe their mergings with the divine weren’t just metaphors.

What’s more, recent historians of mysticism, who studied those paradigmatic mystics, found themselves also enjoying (or suffering) such compound mystical/erotic unions. Finally, to crown all, Kripal himself reports something analogous happening to him as he immersed himself both in the mystical texts and in the private letters and journals of the historians of mysticism!

So, insofar as one believes Kripal’s reports, it seems that my teenage ambitions – great lover or famous saint – might have been achieved simultaneously. I wouldn’t have had to choose!

What do I make of Kripal’s findings?

For me, at this point, the good life, the great ambition, the summum bonum, doesn’t now consist in the liberated orgasm – nor in mystical merging with the divine – however orgasmic that might be.

Hey, I’m Jewish. And not the kabbalistic kind, not one of those who live in the atemporal realms of universal mysticism. For me, the good life consists in staying on the timeline, one foot in front of the other, and knowing the difference between life’s before and after. It’s knowing when you learned what, why you had to learn it, and what difference that made.

In my experience, the God of Biblical and post-Biblical history keeps the distance from us that’s needed in order that the before and after of our moral lives can be retained. Because in real life not everything blends. 

My grandfather knew Simon Dubnow, the Jewish national historian who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941. They tell about him, as he and his students were being rounded up for the intended slaughter, that he instructed his followers to observe everything that they were enduring.

“It may be that some of us will survive –

and tell what happened.”

Related Content: Civilization’s Erotic Discontents | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions Video (Preface)

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Under the Chariot Wheels

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Abigail
Under the Chariot Wheels

Sylvia Plath, 1963
Under the Chariot Wheels

Joan Didion, 1970

Of late, I’ve begun to read certain well-regarded women writers. I started with Sylvia Plath and now it’s Joan Didion.

Earlier in my reading life, I had stayed away from these writers, fearing that they were whiners after all – whose complaints would be symptomatic rather than diagnostic. I suspected that they wouldn’t help me discover the root of the problem.

On the other hand, if we think of women on the model of dance partners, they’ve got a good chance of discovering by experience – direct and intimate – the awkward missteps of their lead partners. (Here “lead partner” would be my metaphor, either for the culture itself, or else for the men whom the culture might assess more impersonally and generically than the women do who know them best.) 

So what women discover about men – and the culture we share with men – is not the only reason to find women writers interesting. But it is one reason.

The collection of Joan Didion essays that I’ve just finished reading is titled The White Album. I have no idea why it bears that title. Didion herself may be seen on the back cover – a slender, pretty woman, standing in a fashionable slouch, right elbow crooked and cigarette poised between the fingers of her right hand. In her essays, whatever scene she’s reporting appears through the lens of a world-weary anomie that perfectly matches her photo. (Since I want to know what motivates people, I can make nothing of world-weary anomie.) 

There are, however, two essays in this Didion collection which do deliver a straight message, coming to you direct from the writer’s motivational system. “In Hollywood” (1973) tells about the process of producing a movie, a process to which Didion and John Gregory Dunn, her late husband, contributed as writers. She had a lot more interest and respect for the movie-making process – apparently always a gamble – and knew more about it than was known by the pretentiously high-brow movie reviewers. In that world, she was an expert.

The second essay that feels real to me is titled “The Women’s Movement.” It’s about the feminist movement as Didion encountered it in 1972. It was just going mainstream, with feminist pioneers of the time being invited to appear on TV talk shows.

 “Attention was finally being paid, and yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue (p. 113).” 

And here is Didion’s scornfully sincere assessment of these women’ s complaints. “All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it – that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death – could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all (p. 116).”

Her essay brought back to my mind certain shocks and disappointments that I experienced back in the days when I was writing “Feminism Without Contradictions.” That article was published in The Monist, a well-regarded philosophical journal that broke precedent by devoting an entire issue to feminism.

What were the shocks and disappointments that I remember?

*. *. *

Item: a lovely woman I knew who worked on MS magazine during its inaugural year attributed her mastectomy to the infighting of the women on the editorial board of that trail-blazing magazine!

Item: a not-so-lovely woman, whom I knew from an Upper East Side consciousness-raising group, was writing a book about the year when her husband was dying – of cancer I think. She was writing it during that year! Whenever, during her sacrosanct working hours, the phone rang, her dying husband would pick up the phone, take the message for her and explain to the caller that his wife couldn’t come to the phone just then because she was busy – writing her book!

Item: when I tried to interest the feminists I knew in the case of Juanita Broaddrick – who, in a credible interview, had described being raped by Bill Clinton in the time before he ran for President – I was the only feminist I talked to who had actually listened to the interview! The feminists I called gave different reasons for their reluctance to sign the petition I proposed, demanding accountability from Clinton. I can’t sign because Clinton supports abortion rights. I’m sorry but my feminist book is just coming out and I need jacket endorsements.

My real list of these experiences is far longer, but I guess we can stop here. 

Despite their all-too-human inconsistencies, bad faith, cattiness and malice, Second Wave feminists did manage to change in some measure the legal and social culture for women. Some features improved, while other cultural features got discernibly worse. 

As Hegel has pointed out, those world-historical figures who drive the chariot whose purpose is to change the culture in world history, typically end up under the chariot wheels – either in the sense of personal suffering or (much more costly) moral distortion. And the public feminists I knew at the time turned out to offer no exception to the Hegelian generalization.

What about feminists and me? On the one hand, they have helped me and, on the other hand, they have hurt me.

And they have done that

for all women.

Related Content: Feminism Without Contradictions | Among the Feminists 

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