Kassandra Jo Tomaras's Blog

The following was written as a letter to the New Yorker. Since they elected not to print it, I am posting it here, for anyone interested in what I have to say about Yiddish literature.

As a translator of Yiddish fiction, I read Adam Kirsch's profile of I.J. Singer with delight. Yet I finished it concerned that, since so much of it refracts the elder Singer's work through the prism of the works of his younger, more widely lauded brother, it would leave English-language readers with a limited s...

A former comrade of mine recently shared with me a note that he had sent to a long-time leader of the small Trotskyist organization we had both been part of (the League for the Revolutionary Party, or LRP for short; those unfamiliar are welcome to Google them, but I am not providing a direct link so as to spare you the temptation of seeing evidence of their severe political and organizational degeneration, or their ca. 1999 web design), on the subject of Leninism, Trotskyism, and their political...

I gave up on Mastodon, but you can find me on Bluesky (bsky.app) as @raconteuse.

The fact that I am more consistently referring to myself in public as Joseph-Kass, or just Kass for short when in person, and the fact that my handle, while still French, takes a feminine ending, has implications that are consistent with my overall sense of identity.

If I don't blog often these days, it is partially because I microblog too much. My preferred locus for that latter mode of expression, Twitter, has however been getting less and less congenial.

If you would like to discuss a publishing opportunity, either for my own writing or for my translations of Der Nister, you are welcome to reach out to me at first-name-dot-last-name-at-Google's-commercial-email-utility. For the purposes of email, just the first, given part of my name (Joseph) is needed; my...

Let's get the positivity out of the way: I loved Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed. There is a different, related essay (perhaps a book?) to be written about what it is like to be a "feminist killjoy" when one's femininity is not universally recognized, when it runs orthogonal to the assignations that have been put on a person. But that is not the essay I have time for.

What strikes me as a weak point of the book is Ahmed's "citational policy" of not quoting white men. It ends up undermining h...

Before Anne Boyer deleted her Twitter account, she was my favorite mutual. We never met in person, but I admired her poems, and one of our interchanges on there contributed some inspiration and ideas that found their way into my story "Ruins of a Future Empire". However I hesitated to read her breakout success book, The Undying, as it seemed voyeuristic for a "man", as I still believed myself to be, to seek out a book about breast cancer.

As it happens, though, we are all implicated in breast can...

This post takes some scattered comments made recently in various formats on social media and attempts to synthesize them into something resembling a coherent argument. I should begin with a necessary disclaimer: It has been a decade since I made a point of routinely keeping up to date on Israel's social statistics and political events. I no longer pretend to be a researcher on Israeli society and the role therein of Palestinian workers. So this post will not contain any detailed quantitative ana...

A difference between political parties in (most) European countries and in the United States: In Europe, political parties are power apparatuses formed with the intentionality of exercising authority within the separate power apparatus of the State. In the United States, however, with State-controlled party registration and regulation, political parties function in effect as part of the State apparatus already. Using the Foucauldian diagram of the panopticon: In Europe, party leaders function as...

The Foucauldian equation of Power/Knowledge only works when those with power take responsibility. (Foucault would quibble with the idea of any identifiable grouping “having” power, so let us say, pedantically, those constituted by power as authoritative.) Ignorance can be a tool of heedless authority, a means by which it retains stability. Ignorance can be cultivated, preserved, guarded jealously.

From this it follows that the smooth circuit of power, knowledge, and pleasure which he postulates i...

I want to emphasize structural here, because I am discussing how the methodology apparently used in formulation of these maps would have resulted in disparate outcomes that are detrimental to Haredi Jewish communities in ways that do not benefit public health independently of whether or not there was any intention, on the part of Governor Cuomo or others, to do so. (I have reasons to believe that there was a combination of spite, arrogance, and political pandering to antisemites at play, adding ...