The ten best things I wrote in the past year

In 2018, I had the good fortune to publish a number of shorter pieces in various places on topics in Judaism, bioethics, translation, and other areas. Here are my favorites from the year. 

1. I wrote a piece connecting the terrorist acts in Louisville and Pittsburgh, arguing that intersectionality elides important differences in identity of targeted groups.

2. I aired my internal conflicts about my 8th-grader’s trip to Israel.

3. Together with Len Rubenstein and Matt DeCamp, I wrote in BMJ about how the CIA perverted clinicians’ normal processes of care in the context of torture, even outside the act of torture itself.

4. I wrote a review in The Lehrhaus of a guide to practical medical halachah (Jewish law).

5. I translated a poem by Avrom Sutzkever for the Flatbush Review about the self-consuming altar set up in your brain. Yes, your brain! (BRAINS)

6. More translation of Sutzkever: one of his weird/poetic short stories in the Yiddish Book Center’s journal Pakn Treger. “Now to the substance of your letter, Munke. You’re about to die, and you want me to forgive you.”

7. Of course, I’m grateful to publish regular research reviews in the BMJ. Here’s the latest of them.

8. Can prior authorization ever coexist with patient-centered care? Leah Rand and I examined this bioethics question in the journal The Patient.

9. What does the classic code of Jewish law, in its understanding of what one can do on the Sabbath for a sick person, tell us about its medical cosmology? I wrote a piece about this in the journal Studies in Judaism, Humanities and Social Sciences.

10. I promised I’d limit this to 10. I published a lot in the Yiddish Forward past year (really a great publication!). My favorite recent piece was about a nascent group to promote health in the Charedi community.

Take a look at all or some of these, and let me know what you think in the comments or your other favorite forum!