Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Wickedness

Posted on November 3, 2026 by Abigail

Majas on a Balcony by a follower of Francisco Goya, c. 1835.

When I talk about “wickedness,” I have in view the sustained intent to do as much damage – physical, material, emotional, social, work-related and spiritual – as can safely be done by the person who acts wickedly.

Oddly enough, the philosophers I’ve read on this topic had no useful insights to offer. Instead, they were inclined to discount it, as a displacement from legitimate desires that had been frustrated. For the philosophers, it seemed that wickedness was never fully sincere: at worst, it was compensatory, a mere Plan B.

However, that had not been my experience. “Displacements” would seem to have a certain clumsiness about them. Those who do wrong under that head can’t see clearly why they couldn’t get to Plan A. The good therapist, if they go to one, can show them how to recover Plan A – by recognizing it when it comes round again – or else by getting to its closest replacement.

The wickedness I had encountered had not been like that. Instead, it had been cool, level-headed and astonishingly accurate about how to attain what it wanted: the most harm to its target achievable with the least discomfort to itself.

The first time this distinction – between clumsy displacements and targeted wickedness – occurred to me, I’d been driving north – from my home town of New York City to my late parents’ house on the coast of Maine. In my car, I’d packed as many items belonging to my parents as could be fitted into it. The books and furniture would arrive later, with the moving van. But this would be a long drive, and it would give me time to think.

Something had occurred in New York, just before I got behind the wheel. The person who was co-responsible for the disposition of my parents’ effects had precipitated a scene with me that was unsettling and upsetting. I no longer remember just how that scene was framed, but I do recall reminding my co-legatee that I had a very long drive ahead and that, if it were undertaken in an upset frame of mind, there was a greater chance that the driver – that I – might get into an accident and crash the car.

In that case, said my co-legatee rapidly – without missing a beat – the lawyer, the moving company and other concerned parties could be contacted to cover any and all remaining chores from that point going forward.

As I thought that one over, on the long drive north, it did not echo in my consciousness like a “displacement.” It was more cool, practiced and deliberate than that. Instead, hey! it had the smell, the look and the feel – of wickedness.

*. *. *

When I got to our small town on the Maine coast, and settled into the mixture of heavy chores and consoling reunions, I asked a couple of our friends if they themselves had ever encountered something or someone whom they would describe as “evil.” As it happens, these friends had. Perhaps I’d sensed which friends to ask.

In the first case, a friend whom I’d known as a kind and entirely normal wife and mother took the opportunity to portray her late mother-in-law as someone who seemed to have been unusually malignant. Her husband, the son of the woman in question, showed no discomfort and voiced no dissent from any part of his wife’s portrait of his seemingly scary mother.

In the second case, a local friend, an attractive German-American woman, had come to America as a G.I. bride. Now, in response to my question, she described her ex-husband. He’d had a history of intimidation along with frightening violence. Finally, she’d resolved to face his wholly credible threats when, for the sake of her children, she took the risk of initiating divorce proceedings.

If I hadn’t asked, and had my own reason for asking, I would never have known about either of these situations, although they had framed the lives of these friends. So it seemed that ordinary people did sometimes encounter scary wickedness, but deemed it something not quite socially permissible to talk about.

It was these and other experiences, plus my discovery that the philosophers whom I’d read on moral topics did not shed the hoped-for light on the topic of wickedness, that led me finally to write A Good Look at Evil. What I say in that book is that each one of us has, potentially, a nonfiction life story of our own to live. What the wicked person does is (1) discern that story – sometimes understanding it better than the one whose story it is – and then (2) set out deliberately to spoil one’s story.

Did I gain anything from my sometime encounters with evil? Yes, the gain included a reorganizing shift in my psyche. Before the shift, I had considered myself a Spinozist, someone who viewed the divine as a highly refined and constructive extension of the natural order.

So if one person harmed another, I had viewed that harmdoing as the agent’s Plan B, a displacement of the doer’s first, more sincere and authentic desire that had been frustrated. I would have thought it a mistake for me to be incensed or angry when I encountered a harmdoer. Literally and sadly, the world’s unfortunate bad actors just didn’t know any better.

But finally, in adult life – after encountering intelligent, well-aimed, steadily purposive malice that really intended to do me harm – the impersonal divinity with its intricate architectonic proved simply irrelevant. So I had to revise my earlier Spinozism, and – since real life didn’t wait – I had to do it pretty quickly.

I needed a God who could contend with wickedness. A God who could see and direct me in my real – sometimes desperate – dilemmas. I needed a God you could talk to. Not a metaphor, not an analogy but someone to whom you could address your cries for help. In sum, a personal God who wouldn’t be fooled by anyone’s efforts to translate personal predicaments into lofty abstractions.

It was wickedness that forced me –

to take my personal life –

more seriously.

____________________

Related Content: A Good Look At Evil | Understanding Evil | The Story

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Being Oneself

Posted on October 27, 2026 by Abigail

Final Illustration from Confessions of a Young Philosopher by Abigail L. Rosenthal

Normally, by the time I sit down to write this column, the topic has clearly presented itself. Today is no different, except that what wants to be written about here and now are two topics – and they are extreme opposites!

The first is a novel about life in today’s France, Submission by Michel Houellebecq. The second is a recent talk by an educated, intelligent young American woman named Dr. Chava Green, whose unlikely title was “The Hasidic Feminist.”

I’ll go to the French topic first. Judging from the raves from top reviewers that cover the opening pages of my translation, everyone-who-is-anyone thinks well of this book! It looks to be a novel at the cutting edge of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of our times.

So what story does it tell? Its fictional hero is a literature professor at a Left Bank branch of the University of Paris – almost the cutting edge. And he finds nothing to live for. In his life there is no romance, and even the occasional sex is starting to pall. His specialty, Huysmans, was himself a nineteenth-century decadent. So here we have a case of one maturing French decadent losing his fascination with a predecessor from an earlier time.

Aside from one wake-up night of pleasure with a Jewish ex-girlfriend, nothing – and aside from good French dinners – nothing now awakens our hero’s flagging, sagging appetites. His love-interest is leaving. She accompanies her family as it departs for Israel (along with a record number of French Jews, as anti-semitic violence is now going unpunished in France).

Meanwhile, it’s time for France to hold national elections. And, as the electoral bargaining between the parties plays out, an Islamist party gets control of the government. What follows are swift changes in national style and substance. Our hero’s professorship is abolished. Women are even worse off. They cannot continue as students, professors or administrators. And finally he finds himself converting to Islam in order to secure a coveted job in the newly-Islamicized French bureaucracy.

And the worst is, it’s so credibly written that the reader can’t easily feel sure it’s fiction! This is, after all, the way empires and civilizations actually do fall. In the lines of W. B. Yeats,

The best lack all conviction

And the worst are full of passionate intensity.

So much for Submission, the dismaying novel. I skipped parts of it, but you get the idea.

Turning now to the talk I attended last Friday at the local Chabad – with the intriguing title “The Hasidic Feminist” – how did that go? Since Hasidism is one species of ultra-orthodoxy, and one thinks of orthodox Jewish women as subordinate to their men, the title alone was sufficiently paradoxical to draw my interest.

Sure enough, the speaker, Chava Green, stood at the podium innocent of makeup, in a dress only slightly open at the neck, long-sleeved.

Her thesis was that women – and women’s work – provide the foundation that makes possible the achievements of men in the world. When the messiah arrives (that is, when the true nature of things is revealed) the contributions of women will gain the universal recognition that is fairly theirs. But, publicly recognized or not, women’s contribution to the well-being and good order of the world remains vital and irreplaceable.

Since the speaker was careful to qualify these claims by acknowledging all the nuances and degrees of difference between her abstract prototypes and actual women and men, her claims did not feel coercive. More like unfashionably thought-provoking. Also, her remarks about ideal men/women relations were further qualified by her own conversion story.

Although counting as Jewish because she has a Jewish mother, she was raised in a secular family. As a young woman, she experienced a crisis of meaning and – looking for an answer – she tried one system of belief and practice after another. Till she found herself unexpectedly comfortable with orthodox practices at campus Chabad centers. Experimentally, she decided to live under their life-system for one year, just to find out whether or not this could be a good fit for her.

The emotional, intellectual and romantic fulfillment to which that decision led her was all quite concrete – not merely a case of finding a winning hypothesis. A religion that converted one’s time so that the necessary chores of the day become oriented toward the Transcendent within the day’s very groundedness – such a religion would allow meaning and purpose to merge with a person’s real life in her real time.

Chava Green was tough. And at the same time, clearly living from her own center – not living at second hand. So the contrast with the protagonist of Submission could not have been more stark.

*. *. *

The decadence portrayed in that novel lies in the protagonist’s inability to entertain any but the crudest desires – which are not necessarily his own but could be anybody’s – whether human or animal – whether of man or beast.

If desires are tied to beliefs about what is feasible in the real world, he seems to be a man without beliefs of his own. It follows that he cannot evaluate his own everyday doings by comparing them with his beliefs about anything – whether personal memories, previous hopes, disillusionments, or adaptive revisions. The question of whether such beliefs as he does hold are true simply does not and cannot arise. And this means that any desires he might hold are similarly becalmed – at standstill.

As a result, he’s presently unable to do what Chava Green has done, which is look for a life system or belief system that would be a good fit. To be motivated for a comparable investigation, our anti-hero would first need to find the desires that are actually his own. His search might have to proceed by trial and error. Even if he set forth on such a project, it would be unlikely to be resolved as definitively as Chava Green’s was. He would need to do some digging – some protracted private archaeology – to recover the person beneath the personae.

But isn’t all that too much to ask? Not really, though it might take a while to shrug off the fashionable despairs, layer by layer, and get around –

to the basics.

_____________

Related Content: Rachel at the Well | Authenticity Adios

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The Dark Side

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Abigail

Don Quixote followed by Sancho Panza.
Honoré Daumier c. 1860s.

When someone speaks of satanic attacks, there are of course two questions: (1) Do such events or actions ever actually occur? And, if yes, then (2) was what occurred an event or action of that kind?

The answer may depend on one’s initial worldview – or else on some particular experience that one has had. My own initial worldview would have excluded such happenings. But then certain things occurred within my experience for which the term “satanic” seemed – not exactly clarifying – but more in tune with the actual experience than were the more acceptable labels. One does want to go back to the experience, and keep it in view, to make sure that the purported explanation fits what actually happened.

No sophisticated philosopher I know believes in satanic attacks. Or at least none who might entertain such a belief would be likely to say so publicly. Which is too bad when one remembers the precedent of Galileo. After he was condemned by the Inquisition for holding the then-heretical Copernican view that the earth moved around the sun – and after he had recanted and publicly renounced that view – he is reported to have muttered, under his breath,

All the same, it does move.

Anyway, that’s how I feel about satanic attacks.

*. *. *

We spent last week in California where we go periodically for an innovative treatment that we hope will mitigate my neuropathy. Some patients who go to that clinic report dramatic results in one session. The clinic’s director, the creative innovator – the “genius” of the treatment offered there – has had results that have persuaded the well-regarded hospital hosting his treatments to expand the facilities made available for his work.

With me so far, improvements have been modest at best. But such improvements are better than the predictions of a wheelchair-bound future proffered by the neuropathy specialists whom we’d consulted previously. All this is background to the concerns of the present column.

Among the director’s capable and growing staff is one member who has been with him from the start of the clinic and whom he treats as a quasi-partner – sharing with him ideas and techniques as they evolve. He is also the one member of the team who treats me when the director is unavailable. Let’s call him Ned. Unhappily, Ned often shares his more downbeat view of my prospects, in contrast to the optimistic view taken by his boss. As Ned tells it, the creative director lives in his own world, has his head in the clouds, gets carried away by his own speculative ideas to the point that sometimes he can’t or won’t see the ground underfoot. And Ned’s put-down view had at least been consistent with the outcome of my August treatment – from which I came home more at risk of falling than I’d been before.

However, this time the creative director had a credible explanation for what had gone wrong the previous time. As a result, he had revised the treatment process, was taking before-and-after measurements that were confirmatory of his present approach, and now gave me a detailed explanation of the newly-revised process.

So I had only the final Friday to get through with Ned – and that was the day reserved for teaching me the newly-revised homework. How much harm could Ned do?

Well, I had underestimated him. For most of the two hours he held off teaching me the rather complex new homework – instead going on with ordinary treatment as if teaching the new stuff had not been the main assignment on his agenda. Along with the ordinary treatment, Ned delivered his views on a medley of topics – views that were uniformly depressive. Since I don’t like to regard human life in a discouraging way, I found myself working to mitigate each of his gloom-and-doom descriptions-with-attached-predictions.

Finally, for the last quarter hour, Ned began to teach me the new home exercises. They turned out to be of an unprecedented complexity. When I expressed worry and surprise at the unexpected difficulty of them, Ned was curt, telling me in effect to shape up and do so in a hurry if I wanted any help from him.

However, Ned the drill sergeant simply disappeared toward the end of the session – when Jerry showed up to collect me. With Jerry looking on, one saw a new Ned – compassionate, reassuring, soothing, gentle and sensitive. Golly gosh. Turns out everyone finds the new homework difficult! Normally a number of sessions get devoted just to learning its complex components. I should just do as much as I can. I shouldn’t worry. In time, it will all come together.

No one I know – no ordinary person who is not an actor – can switch bodily posture, style of language, tone of voice and facial expression – all in less than one minute.

The contrast between the devilish nobody-can-see-me Ned and the angelically patient-and-benevolent-healer Ned was too stark for anybody who had seen both versions to miss. So it’s likely that Ned never expected me to share with my husband my experience of the two Neds.

*. *. *

Of course, once we were alone, I did tell Jerry what I’d just experienced. Although less likely than most people I know to rush to dramatic conclusions, Jerry volunteered that Ned may yet try to undermine his boss by going to higher ups in the organization with a report of some manufactured malfeasance made up out of whole cloth by Ned.

Supposing Jerry’s conjecture to be at least credible, I would very much like to warn the creative director. But a warning based on conjecture of this kind would be likely to have no effect except to harm me. A patient’s intuition is not evidence and suspicious changes of tone and conduct can easily be explained away.

What conclusion can I draw? As of now, if I’m right about the co-worker in whom the creative director has placed his trust, there is nothing I can reasonably do about it. That is, nothing but wait. In time perhaps, an opportunity to prevent mischief might present itself or else – unfortunately –

it might not.

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Book Matters

Posted on October 13, 2026 by Abigail

“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

__________

Abbie is away this week getting treatments in California. This column was originally posted on November 14, 2023, and continues to be timely.

__________

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

By Simon Wiesenthal

The author was a young Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, in conditions of near starvation, slated for death by heavy labor. Other, mostly Jewish prisoners had been separated from the work details at the outset and immediately murdered.

One day, an unusual incident interrupted the ghastly routine. A nurse appeared, ordering Wiesenthal out of the line of workers and leading him to the bedside of a dying SS man. The dying man wanted to confess to a Jew one atrocity that weighed on his conscience. His unit had forced a large number of Jews, young and old, into a building to which the SS then set fire, killing them all. Among those who perished, he especially remembered a father and his very young son.

If the dying man expected Wiesenthal to express forgiveness, his wish must have been frustrated. Our author heard him out reluctantly, kept silent and left the room as soon as the man finished his confession. Once back in the camp, Wiesenthal shared the same scene with his emaciated, doomed friends. When, having by chance survived the war, he wrote this memoir, he invited thoughtful comments from ten contributors.

In my previous week’s column, “The Color of the Sky,” I volunteered my own comments on the deathbed confession scene. Now, I’ll share some of the invited comments reproduced in the 1997 Schocken edition. In all, the book has 42 comments, 10 from the 1969 (in English 1970) original edition and 32 from this expanded second edition. Since most of the assembled comments are of the greatest interest, the three I describe here have been picked out nearly at random.

First, we hear from Primo Levi, a notable writer and Auschwitz survivor. Wiesenthal’s tale unfolded, Levi comments, “in an atmosphere impregnated with crime.” All questions of right and wrong were obscured in the concentration camp, deeply and deliberately. In that context above all, Levi is emphatic in his conviction that Wiesenthal did right to refrain from bestowing any verbal absolution. It would have given the illusion of salvation to the dying SS man but burdened Wiesenthal with “an empty formula and consequently a lie.” Like other Jewish contributors, Primo Levi doesn’t miss the fact that Wiesenthal is being used to stand in for all Jews, thus replicating in another guise the Jew of Nazi propaganda: “an abnormal being – half-devil, half-miracle worker, capable in any case of supernatural deeds.” For Levi, what’s at risk in this deathbed test is truth. As he sees it, Wiesenthal has passed the test.

Next we hear from Cynthia Ozick, award-wining novelist, essayist and writer of short stories. Her central point concerns pity. Here I quote it in full. “Every idol is a shadow of [Biblical idol] Moloch, demanding human flesh to feed on. The deeper the devotion to the idol, the more pitiless in tossing it its meal will be the devotee. The Commandment against idols is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity.” The quick forgiver, in haste to wash the murderer clean, has washed away the victim. By contrast, the person who steadily seeks the Law’s just retribution keeps the victims constantly in view and gives them back their forgotten faces. Some might reproach Cynthia Ozick for her refusal to accept a dying murderer’s remorse, but to me she seems rather tender.

Our last comment comes from award-winning writer Harry Wu, a witness of an entirely different kind. Wu spent nineteen years in one of China’s prison labor camps, sent there for “rightist tendencies.” In plain words, he committed the crime of voicing his personal opinion in the midst of a group indoctrination session. What stands out in Hu’s account of brutal imprisonment is that no one who enforced that punishment ever took the slightest personal responsibility for it. Not even later, after his condemnation had been retroactively lifted! The Party Line giveth and the Party Line taketh away.

So we learn that there’s one thing even worse – more erasing of the human face – than evil.

Even worse

is pretending that

evil does not exist.

Posted in book reviews | Tagged book matters, Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness | Leave a comment

A Subtle Earthquake

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Abigail

The ‘Great Western’ Riding a Tidal Wave, 11 December 1844 by Joseph Walter, 1845.

In yesterday morning’s meditation, the message that came through was unprecedented. It was a large image of me, lying flat on my back, neither going anywhere nor trying to. Usually, when I get an image, I try to discern the words into which the image can be translated. As near as I could figure, they were these:

Any and all attempts at transcendence

or even vision with regard to the future –

any future, long or short –

should not be indulged.

Don’t rise above it,

and don’t try to.

I don’t think I’ve ever got a message of that sort in my whole life. Like most people, I’ve been in the becalmed doldrums before, of course. But I’ve never gotten guidance to be there! Plus this further word of advice:

Try staying there.

It’s alogon. It defies the logos – the light-shedding power of reasonable speech. At earlier times in my life, there have usually been people, human or institutional relationships, or treatment protocols to whom (or to which) I could turn when the inner springs of motivation failed.

Looking at the human resources “in principle” available to me from three of the directions accessible where I live now: there’s (a) Israel, where the most interesting members of my mother’s family have been native since Ottoman times and were part of the founding generation; there’s (b) my Reform Temple, where I continue to attend zoom meetings of Torah Study and pay dues; there’s (c) my California neuropathy specialist, with whom I have a patient/healer relationship.

I put to one side my loving bond with Jerry. Not even true love, not even friendship, can, by itself, fill up the void in personal motivation. Such a void constitutes a crisis in a person’s life, and there’s no point buttering it up to make it taste better.

So, what’s happened to each of these relationships?

Re (a) Israel: a consequential misdeed affecting personal relationships, committed by a close family member, came to my attention and – since there was no one else to do it – I pointed out the woeful wrongness to the person responsible and what he must do to repair it. Whether or not my letter to that person had the hoped-for effect, one consequence would be clear from the outset. Were I to visit Israel and not stay with these relatives, questions would be raised. Why not? So I would not visit, the letter would break my ties with that part of my family and barr any harmonious future visits to family in Israel.

Re (b) my Temple: I was alone in pressing the then temple leadership to banish a certain predator who’d been approaching the women “inappropriately.” As happens all too often with whistle-blowers, I was the one initially blamed. Though the bad actor was eventually ousted, and the failed leadership replaced, at the time, no one stepped forward to repair the broken trust between me and the temple leadership. By now, most of the players have moved on, but my sad indignation hasn’t moved on.

Re (c) my neuropathy practitioner: at last visit, he initiated a new approach, but failed to set aside the requisite time to bring my balance feature into line with the new approach. As a result, I’ve never been at so high a risk of falling and have been virtually house-bound for the past two months. Meanwhile, I’ve naturally wondered whether he can repair my skewed balance, my impaired safety – and with these the trust required for the continued therapeutic relationship.

*. *. *

So what’s brought me to full stop now? Except for the last, neither of the first two events happened recently. Yet the call to stop-in-my-tracks came only yesterday. And it doesn’t seem right to try to pole-vault over the felt impasse that resulted, in order just to “forget it” and get on with new projects. Instead, I might have to take a further look at events #1 through #3.

What about Israel, which was #1 on my psychical list – where “psyche” means soul? What I sense, just now, is an intimation, or dimly moving invitation to connect with God’s people and country (I didn’t say divinity’s only people or country) on a deeper level. To leave the blockage where it lies, uncured, but dig down to a level more fundamental.

What level would that be? I think of what I saw the first time, looking down from my El Al flight, as it circled the Promised Land for a landing:

There it is again.

How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time!

Actually, without knowing how or why, I had just moved to another level. Now for the first time I saw that the turgid torments of my family belonged to the suffering, the blood and the waste, of the birth and rebirth pangs of The Promised Land. So, when I wrote my relative so fatefully, perhaps I helped cauterize some of such wounds and minimize their attendant soul damage.

Now what about #2, my temple? By now at last, the temple has wholesome leadership and can go ahead – wedded to our era, to modernity. What I contributed was to help prevent irreversible harm, and prevent scandal, thereby helping to cauterize the wounds of earlier misdirection. That was my assignment and I have carried it through. Had my efforts received proper credit (which typically such efforts do not receive) – that very credit might have interfered with the completion of the righteous assignment.

Finally, #3, about my neuropathy treatments: what I did today (before setting out to write this column) was to email my practitioner, bringing the whole of my impaired present condition to his attention – I think tactfully but accurately – and doing that prior to seeing him in California next week. It’s all I can now do. But that will give him time to think in advance about my case. Now I’ll see what, if anything, he can do about it. *

With that – the two sets of reflections and the email – it seemed that the subtle earthquake was over. In its place came the inner message that –

I can move on now.

*In an email received this morning, he’s chagrined and eager to repair the damage.

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Revisited: Abigail’s Brilliant Career

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Abigail

The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 17th, 1997: Saving the Core

Early this afternoon – just when I was about to take that rueful look in the rearview mirror promised in the title of this column – Jerry called my attention to something on the Internet that surprised me a whole lot. “Stunned” would be nearer the mark.

Jerry had put on the Internet this question: “What is Abigail L Rosenthal known for?” On a number of sites, the answers (quoting people I greatly respect) were positive and overwhelmingly so – in their seriousness, contentful density, absence of hype or padding, and credibility.

Was I surprised? Yeah. I was pretty much knocked flat, open-mouthed, speechless and not-at-all-geared-for-this.

Mind, when I was a New Yorker, the urban skill that I prized most was my ability to walk the crowded city streets and not be seen! Only one woman I knew was superior in this regard: a Muslim student of mine to whom I was very close, who told me that – if she were raped – her brothers would make her marry the rapist! Okay, so she was better than I was at the Craft of Invisibility. But I was pretty good at it – maybe second best. So now, to find myself portrayed as intellectually accomplished and influential was – let me assure you – no part of my self-image.

To see more clearly the context in which so inconvenient a truth comes to my attention, consider my most recent life review. I’d been calling to mind “my brilliant career” (publications and public talks aside) on three of its former fronts:

Brooklyn College from which, some years back, I had retired as Professor Emerita;
My local Reform temple, from which I had also withdrawn, save for Saturday morning Torah Study;
Manhattan, where I had lived – in the same upper east side neighborhood – almost continuously since shortly after I was born.

In Brooklyn College (1), I had had a string of improbable victories. First – after being fired repeatedly, I mean for seven consecutive years, following my vote for the losing candidate in an election for Head of the Philosophy Department – finally and improbably, I won reinstatement with tenure.

Next I, together with two colleagues in the History Department, successfully defended the college’s much-praised, wide-ranging core curriculum. We defeated the attempt, by the college’s new president, to replace it with “Brooklyn Connections,” a curriculum he wanted to introduce that was narrowly centered on the borough of Brooklyn.

The story of our fight – and eventual win – made the front pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education (see above) and The Jewish Daily Forward, as well as a full-page favorable editorial in the New York Post.

At the time of that fight, I was advised to contact Jerry Martin who headed an organization in D.C. that defended excellence in higher education. Since he gave us important guidance, I called him frequently and we talked at length. (A year later, as New York papers also reported, our conversations got more private and personal and we got married!)

So far, all I’ve recounted about Brooklyn College are some of my fights and the victories at their finales. However, when presently I look back at the college I loved, one defeat looms, and it was not a small one. Having heard, from a source we all respected, that Jewish students and faculty at the College were starting to suffer from an unprecedented upsurge of anti-semitism, I met with my two closest allies from the “Brooklyn Connections” fight. What I hoped was that, together, the three of us might figure out what could be done to roll back this strange new tide of bigotry.

Much to my surprise, my two non-Jewish colleagues responded to my concern with – ridicule! The following day, each woman sent emails crafted to be personally and professionally respectful, but not touching the reason I’d met with them. Though we did not quarrel – what for? – I never wanted to see them again.

Moving on now, what do I remember about (2) my local Reform temple – from the days when I was a much more active member than I am now? The present Board and new rabbinic leadership looks to me fine and dedicated. But in former times the relations that I had with my temple were closer. I pass over the struggles – there was one after another – with regard to early signs of the new anti-semitism. By now – after the atrocities of October 7 and 8 of 2023 – and the celebration of them by universities and other respectable types worldwide, the days of trying-not-to-notice are finally over. But then, all degrees and types of eye-avertings were deemed normal. I fought that.

My present distance from the temple has to do with a different issue – the ousting of a predator. He was not a temple member, therefore had no business to be ubiquitous in our environs, but had managed to win over the most influential member of the temple leadership. He was behaving “inappropriately,” as they say, with the women, even including female Board members, and was, as I saw it, a bad guy as well as a public scandal waiting to happen.

Eventually, the predator was kicked out, and the leader who’d defended him ousted. But not before the whistle-blower (that’s me) had first to refute false accusations and anti-social rudeness – at the leader’s behest but with the acquiescence of the Board.

Since nobody who played any part in all that ever apologized, and most of those directly involved have since left the temple, the wound it left in me remains uncured.

Of course, in the real world, not every wound gets cured. In this case, it might be that my pain keeps the record. After all, Jewish memory has the task – the historical assignment – of preserving the record!

And then there is (3) Manhattan. What part did my old neighborhood – once my home town – play in my recent life review? What I cherished in the neighborhood was not only the museums, the cafes and the well-known streets. It felt easier to face my philosophic frontiers, whatever they were, just because the streets retained their ever-welcoming familiarity.

So, did something change? Yes, something did. Someone connected to me by ties of family – whose effort to bring me under her control I had resisted successfully – then took the extraordinary step of meeting with collegial friends of mine and inherited family friends to spread credible-sounding defamatory fictions about me.

Was she believed? Why yes! In her astutely-targeted effort at vengeance, she was almost entirely successful! Regarding the interesting question of how to fight defamatory lies when they are believed by former close friends, I did not – and do not – know the answer. It’s best to have many friends who will believe you. My mother might have known. She had more friends and was tougher than I was. But my structure is permeable and there’s not much I can do about that.

So, my defeat would have had no obvious remedy – had I not just then happened to fall in love with Jerry and had we not then decided, as a couple, to leave our previous environs, his in Washington and mine in Manhattan, to move to our new home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

So, what’s the moral of these three “defeats”? Well, there was one thing I did keep intact:

personal integrity.

And it might be that – without fanfare – that is life’s essential victory.

_________________

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Women in Real Life

Posted on September 22, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie’s talk at Stony Brook.

“I hesitated for a long time before writing a book on women. … Are there even women?”

So begins Simone de Beauvoir’s culture-upending book, The Second Sex, in French Le Deuxième Sexe, published in 1949 by Gallimard. Some years later – but years before it was translated – and before “second wave” feminism burst on the American landscape, I read Beauvoir along with other Fulbright fellowship young women in my circle of friends in Paris. Her two-volume book fascinated us. We argued about it. If she won us over, if we took the fateful step and became ourselves “feminists,” would we be risking something – our femininity perhaps? We weren’t sure how to define femininity, but in those days the culture assured us that it was always at risk!

The 1963 launching of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, generally gets the credit for launching “second wave” feminism as a twentieth century American social and political movement. It went beyond women’s earlier-secured right to vote, now targeting the social assumptions, codes, values and boundaries that still affected the lives of women.

I was friends with some of the players in that movement: the late and dear Barbara Seaman, the earnest and devoted Fran Klagsbrun – and feel now honored to count Phyllis Chesler as my friend. She’s the heroine of the battle for women’s rights in psychiatric settings, author of Women and Madness, also An American Bride in Kabul and many other well-documented reports from the frontiers of women’s continued suffering. So the best of the “second wave” goes on.

But where exactly is “the woman question” to be found today? Are young women getting good advice nowadays? What do courtship patterns look like now? Does anyone know? What do women’s hopes, daydreams and disappointments look like at present? Where are women situated in the culture’s imagination – say, its courtship dance – today?

Recently I’ve been devoting several columns to a volume of essays by philosophers, collected under the title, The Philosophy of Sex. By and large, they seem to me to write less astutely about human desire – and to take eros less seriously – than Plato did. I applaud their social courage in trying to think about it, but doubt they’ve got much deeper than the surface.

Also, now that feminism per se is no longer controversial, what recent contributions can be credited to the “public feminists” of today?

Well, where real-life flesh and blood women are concerned, they – the majority of recent public feminists – look to me unprotective. So for example, where in many Muslim-majority countries women lack the legal and social rights taken for granted in the secular West, the typical Western feminists are not even expressing concern. (As usual, the ever-fearless Phyllis Chesler remains the exception to this generalization.) Closer to home, most public feminists haven’t tried to protect women athletes from having to compete against – and naturally losing to – biologically male competitors claiming to be women in tennis matches, foot races, wrestling matches and other such contests! Admittedly, it’s harder to articulate the problem if you’re publicly committed to the view that womanhood has nothing much to do with biology!

Similarly, if you can’t keep curious or predatory men out of women’s bathrooms because you believe that “womanhood is a social construct,” maybe you ought to revisit your belief. And that goes double for men-claiming-to-be-women being housed in prison cells with women made vulnerable to rape thereby. Or the latest horror I’ve read about: men-claiming-to-be-women allowed to strip search newly imprisoned women.

Gosh,

feminists –

if you care about women –

stop these abuses!

You can fix your concepts later!

In sum, “feminism,” in its more recent public appearances, has seemed to lack both the conceptual tools and the sympathy required for the protection of actual women who find themselves vulnerable.

If one doesn’t fix clearly in one’s mind the biological and social vulnerability of women, one’s public “feminism” won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

A question comes to mind: What kinds of acculturation are girls and young women getting nowadays? (Alongside women, the same question goes to young men.)

If, for reasons of collective guilt, or guilt-tripping, the culture does not honor itself or celebrate its better angels, it becomes that much harder to find the plotline – the romance – in one’s own personal life story.

These concerns may have gone out of style. However, the motivating realities have not been superceded. In women’s or men’s personal stories, the romantic destiny, lived, unlived, attained or missed is – still and always –

the main event.

__________

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The Ins and Outs of Sex

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Abigail

Today I’m getting back to The Philosophy of Sex, the collection of essays we’ve visited before. It’s the volume where philosophers wade hip deep into the dark waters of sex and how to think about it. This time I’ll start with the essay by Thomas A. Mappes, “Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person.”

His question is, When is sex wrong? What kinds of moral restrictions should operate in sexual relations? Referencing Kant, he assumes that any human interaction that uses other persons without at the same time recognizing their “authority … to conduct their individual lives as they see fit” must be morally wrong. So, on the face of it, it’s wrong to interact sexually with people who are drugged or drunk or to interact sexually with children. The drugged, the drunk and children all lack the requisite authority. They are not and cannot be making the choice to be intimate.

When else is sex wrong? It’s wrong to engage in sex under false pretenses. For instance, it’s wrong to pretend love to get sexual advantage when you don’t love. Pretending you’re not married when you are is wrong. Likewise pretending that you don’t have herpes when you do. Also pretending you’ve had a vasectomy and can’t get a woman pregnant, when you haven’t (had one) and you can (impregnate her). And it’s wrong to withhold information that‘s relevant to intimacy (such as not telling the desired woman that you’ve already slept with her sister).

Well, no pun intended but Mappes is here helping to map the rocks and shoals of our current, not-so-free “free love.”

And of course coercion is wrong. Here he goes into degrees and types of coercion – also look-alikes that aren’t clear cases. Obviously, rape that uses or threatens force, is coercive – “occurrent” if force is used and “dispositional” if it’s only threatened. But coercion can occur in more subtle ways, via overt or implied threats to reputation, or the withholding of benefits to which the targeted person would be otherwise entitled.

Mappes also provides some fine distinctions that further illuminate the terrain of sexual wrongdoing. Offers of benefits in return for sex, like an undeserved higher grade or a chance to star in a film, don’t qualify as threats if they can be safely refused – however unprofessional or morally questionable such offers may otherwise be. At the same time, Mappes is aware of subtleties such as implied threats.

Finally, Mappes adds that it is wrong to coerce sex (or any human response) by taking advantage of people who find themselves in desperate situations where choice is still available but almost-prohibitively costly.

This essay is modestly instructive in that it describes the don’ts of sexual activity – without pretending to offer any more encompassing theory of the do’s.

*. *. *

Now on to the essay by Seiriol Morgan, which bears the ominous title of “Dark Desires.” His rather arresting (and perhaps atypical) view is that mere noncoerciveness or mutual consent is (while necessary) not sufficient to establish the moral permissibility of a sexual act. Desires themselves can be “dark.” That it feels good is not reason enough to do it. A trait he terms “ethical sensitivity” is also required.

Sexual desire cannot be adequately seen as a simple, unadorned animal appetite. (Morgan doesn’t go into it, but in fact many animal species engage in elaborate courtship rituals prior to their physical consummations.) In our human lives, “mental operations” involving both “self-consciousness and … immersion in society” affect “the character of the pleasure …” And, when the sex is “meaningful … pleasure is taken in an act experienced as being pleasurable for both partners.”

Morgan’s emphasis on the pleasure of the person you care about (which he offers as the corrective to egocentric, me-centered pleasure), still strikes me as abstract and irrelevant to the main event. So what main event am I thinking about?

Passionate merging.

Morgan’s main point is not just that sex is not motivated by pleasurable sensations abstracted from context, but also that sex life admits of a wide range of motivations, including “dark desires.” Thus Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century novel of cynicism, portrays the aristocratic Vicomte de Valmont seducing a virtuous matron, Madame de Tourvel, for the satisfaction he gets from defeating her virtue!

In addition, Morgan traces some of the subtleties that shadow the new erotic freedoms. Thus it can be a moral mistake to give in to another’s love and desire if that love is unrequited. Or, in a different case: “Sometimes it can be perfectly obvious that someone’s ignorance or inexperience … is leading them to ruin, and that aiding them in their self-destructive project is not the kind thing to do.”

At the close of his essay, we find a change of tone. Morgan is suddenly at pains to counter any impression he may have inadvertently given of himself as a narrow-minded puritan. By way of underscoring this last concern, he lists “consensual practices and relationships” which “demonstrate [his] liberal credentials.” By my count, he lists twenty-four of them, some quite unknown to me.

If it’s not pornographic to ask, isn’t he bending over backwards?

*. *. *

Last, I looked at an essay with a completely different theme: “Asexuality” by Luke Brunning and Natasha McKeever. Their points seem worth making, though the essay’s tortuous struggles over definitions, with charts, shed little light on what look to me to be the actual concerns of these authors.

What do they want to point out? I guess it’s that asexuality is not per se a pathology, sexuality is not necessarily “central to human life,” nor is sexuality “the only respect in which we can be attracted to people.” Nor should asexuality be mistaken for “lack of concern for others.”

So it follows that, whether or not one’s life energies find sexual expression,

an erotic life –

the life of desire –

remains available.

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The Three-Tiered Real World

Posted on September 8, 2026 by Abigail

The Three Tiers: The Everyday, The Moral and The Spiritual

As of last night, we’re back from the Eric Voegelin Society meetings in Boston, where Jerry and I each gave talks. The late Eric Voegelin is not widely known among philosophers, religionists or political scientists, though he worked in all three sectors of those contemporary thought-worlds. Among contemporary thinkers about political reality, he may be unique in that (1) he takes in everyday experience, (2) he does not pretend neutrality about the moral dimensions of human experience, and (3) he recognizes that there are spiritual dimensions embedded in human reality.

Of course, anthropologists, sociologists and other academically respectable students of the human panorama do in fact observe and record the styles of life considered good or bad in the cultures they study – which is where those practices do get rewarded or punished. But Western academics would feel obligated by their respective disciplines to steer clear of any evaluative judgment of their own that could be considered “moral.” And the same goes for any rating of a practice within a society in terms of criteria purportedly “spiritual.” The tendency would be to treat any such judgment as an intercultural usurpation where the standards of the observer’s culture were being applied – disrespectfully and out of context – to the culture of the people being observed.

Well, aside from the present requirements of academic protocol, what’s the fact of the matter? Are the moral/spiritual dimensions of human life in society entirely relative – culturally and personally? Is there no fact of the matter? Do the relativists, cultural and subjective, have the last word?

I don’t think so. Here’s a case study from Abigail’s life. Having been originally endorsed by my senior colleagues for promotion, I was fired – then fired again and yet again over seven consecutive years – by the same senior colleagues who had originally voted for my promotion. These firings began at the first opportunity to do so, right after my dissenting vote in a Departmental election for the post of Philosophy Department Head.

In the course of my fight to get my job back, an Arbitration hearing was held. There I testified under oath for five hours. The senior professors who had fired me also testified under oath. When you’re telling the truth, you’re unlikely to get floored by leading questions. By contrast, when you’ve fired a colleague whom previously you had found meritorious – acting not on the merits but because of the way that colleague had voted – you just have to lie more. At some point, one lie under oath or another can get exposed. And that’s why I won the Arbitration.

So the moral dimension is not merely a “matter of opinion.” But what about the spiritual dimension? Certainly academic inquirers into cultures around the world have discovered that there are many approaches to the divine – approaches that differ in accordance with the tastes and talents of different cultures.

So, does it follow that – with regard to the spiritual dimension of human existence – “who is to say” who is right about God, or about whatever really is divine?

Well, that can follow, but only up to a point. Up to what point? Look, life on the spiritual level is not life in one-big-single-happy-but-blurry dimension. Spirituality contains and includes a scale with – I’m sorry but let’s face it – the demonic at the lower end of the spiritual scale and the saintly at the upper end.

All this is background framing our several days at the Boston meetings of the Eric Voegelin Society – Voegelin being the bold modern thinker who did recognize the moral and the spiritual dimensions in his studies of different civilizations in history. I found it refreshing – soothing even – to be in the company of people who were intellectually trained, highly intelligent and honest – whose thinking about human life took in all three dimensions of reality: (1) the ground-level experiential, but also (2) the moral and (3) the spiritual dimensions.

Eric Voegelin

I won’t try to recap the conference papers, which took in many areas of contemporary life – such as the American Bill of Rights, theology in relation to political life, concepts of leadership in ancient and modern life, academic freedom, the political insights available in literature, political trauma, and so on. But I will share a couple of personal anecdotes.

Two of the speakers at the EVS meetings were young Lithuanians, Simas Čelutka and Aistė Noreikaitė, both from Vilnius University. After their session, “Person and Play as the Path of Literature,” I got into conversation with them and mentioned that I had an 18th century ancestor on my mother’s side who was a rabbi known in the more rationalist (as opposed to Hassidic) school of rabbinic study as the Gaon (or Sage) of Vilna.

The Gaon of Vilna

Of course, had he lived and taught in the twentieth century, my ancestor would have been murdered along with the other Jews of Lithuania. But much to my surprise, not only had these two young academics heard of the Gaon, they told me that today – in post-Nazi, post-Soviet Lithuania – he is celebrated! I’m not sure, but I think they said that there is a statue of him in Vilna. Or at least something commemorative. So my ancestor is well known! Anyway, these two young contemporary academics wanted their pictures taken with me, to show their friends that they had met a real-life descendant of the Vilna Gaon!

There were other, meaningful encounters, but the one I’ll share was with James Greenaway. He gave a fine paper but here I’ll single out the brief conversation we had after his session. He told me that, for him, the whole world changed after October 7 and 8, 2023.

As you may recall, that year on October 7th, jihadi invaders of peaceful kibbutzim and a music festival attended by young people, came over the border of Israel – on hang gliders and other unexpected conveyances – to torture, rape and murder the old, the young, the pregnant, babes in utero, grandparents – using modes of torture new even in the long history of atrocity. They photographed these nightmares-they-had-made-actual, bragging about them to their families and to the world at large. Whereas the Nazis and the Soviets hid their crimes, showing some sense of shame or else aware that their public might not like what they did, these jihadis publicized their atrocities.

But there was more. By October 8th, the demonic villainies of Hamas were being celebrated all over our planet, but most saliently by faculty and students in universities worldwide!

These two-fold events assaulted the fundaments of meaning in my world. Their effects, physical and psychological, won’t be described here. Despite what some people claim to believe, atrocities are not interesting.

By contrast real life is interesting. And by real life, I mean the kind of human life that is not demonic. However, I have not typically met with academics – people who live on the intellectual, moral and spiritual proceeds of The House that Plato Built – taking me aside to volunteer that they shared my sense of unassimilable shock. For Greenaway, as for me, the events of those days have divided the knowable world into the contours that it had prior to October 7th and 8th on the one side and, on the other side, an unrecognizable world thereafter.

*. *. *

Such unexpected and varied moments – each characterized by its own empirical, moral or spiritual accuracy – combined to make this Voegelin conference well worth our long drive to Boston.

_________

Related Content: How Can We Know If It’s God?

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Authenticity Adios

Posted on September 1, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week giving a talk at the Eric Voegelin Society. This column was originally posted on Aril 11, 2023, and continues to be timely. She’ll be back at her post next week.

______________________

The philosopher who first brought “authenticity” to public notice was, I believe, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). According to a recent book, Tyranny and Revolution by Waller Newell, Heidegger’s notion went like this: you and I are to be grasped as localizations of Being – hence Heidegger’s term for us, Dasein – being there. In case you expected that so vast a foundation would give us depth and stability, think again! Being itself is shot through and through with temporality (time’s passage).

To get to the point about authenticity: it’s only reached when our very fleetingness is faced square on, along with awareness that we’re headed toward the end of ourselves (Being-Toward-Death).

So what’s inauthentic, for Heidegger? It would be any assumption that we live in an environment that’s stable and solid. Gossip relies on such an assumption. So do conventional opinions. Ordinary obituaries and condolences carry that implication. They convert the uncanniness at the bottom of human existence into “news” – something seeming familiar and commonplace.

All this sounds pretty deep, does it not? Many people take it that way. Whether or not they like him, Heidegger is widely conceded to be gifted, original and – in his own special way – authentic.

The fact that he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – telling all the students in his class who were Jewish to get out, sending a termination of status notice to Edmund Husserl (his former teacher who’d got him the professorship at Freiburg) and backing Nazi policies that would have got Husserl murdered together with Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s former student and lover (if the first had not died and the second escaped) – did not strike him as deleting anything from his authenticity.

I recall mentioning some of these awkward details during a seminar I taught on existentialism and being scolded by a student for my “judgmentalism.” Judgmentalism? Since I’d never slept with any student, nor with my professors, nor tried to get any murdered, this student had a point. Don’t judge someone if you haven’t walked a mile in his moccasins. Or his lederhosen.

Be that as it may, we still have to reckon with the notion of authenticity. Ideas travel. This one crosses into France, where Jean-Paul Sartre makes it his own. Sartre puts more emphasis on its contrary: bad faith (mauvaise foi). Though each of us has recognizable traits of character and style, for Sartre these depend entirely on our own free choice, which we can change at any time. So the waiter who brings our coffee, at our usual hangout on St. Germain des Pres, is in bad faith insofar as he believes he really is – the waiter – at which he plays.

Likewise, in another example from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the appealing young woman who has joined someone like Sartre at his café table – he having meanwhile placed his hand on hers – will be in bad faith if she pretends to ignore this little transaction rather than frankly admit her own lusts.

Hmm. I’ve never waited tables but the other incident is as recognizable as it is embarrassing. I can tell you that her main concern will focus on how to slide her hand out from under the hand of a celebrated French intellectual without showing up in a book about bad faith.

Wait a minute! Anecdotes like these can’t possibly add up to all there is to say about authenticity, can they?

Lionel Trilling, one of the leading opinion-shapers of the twentieth century, wrote a book called Sincerity and Authenticity. In it he describes authenticity as a power to resist the opinions of others and instead steer one’s own singular course in life. Citing Sartre’s play, No Exit (Huis Clos), in which a character says, “Hell is other people,” Trilling finds “the infernal outcome of modern social existence” to lie in the fact that “the sentiment of individual being depends upon other people.”

Hey, get real! Without other people, we can’t learn to walk on two legs, we can’t acquire language, we’ll fail to acquire the use of the prehensile thumb and … need I go on? At some point along the road of adulthood, we might well find that our integrity requires us to go against the grain of other peoples’ opinions. We’d prefer to do it quietly and not have to pay too much for it. It’s not fun or enviable to have to do it. Inevitably, it’s a choice between greater and lesser evils.

Back to “authenticity.” In my experience, it doesn’t wear well. At one time, the counter-culture descended on the little town in Maine where my parents had a summer home. It was the era of authenticity. The young men worked on their great, abstract, metal sculptures; the young women taught school to pay for the raw materials. One time, visiting one of these rather beautiful young couples, I asked, feeling thirsty, “Do you have running water?”

“Charge you a nickel if I run,” came the wry response, which to me had the very sound – alike dashing and earthy – of authenticity!

A few decades later, I ran into the same couple at a summer art fair. His pony tail had turned grey, the art was no better, and they were looking remarkably like the bourgeois types that long ago they had so attractively repudiated.

I can’t remember ever wanting to be authentic. I just wanted to find out what belonged to me to do in life,

whether or not

it resembled

what other people did.

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By Simon Wiesenthal

The Three Tiers: The Everyday, The Moral and The Spiritual

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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