I had a dream last night. Not a nightmare - there was no threat of imminent danger, but nonetheless I woke up feeling a kind of dread. I've had dreams like this before - dreams about which I may only remember a particular image - a set of broken ceremonial swords lying on a snow bank, a 'boom box' perched precariously on a high shelf, seeming to defy gravity; a motor-scooter, a luminous green, parked on the wrong side of the street. None of these images suggest danger or are even menacing, yet I wake up from them feeling they might mean something terrible and important that I very much want - or is it that I don't want? - to know.

Our sages tell us that a dream is one-sixtieth part prophesy; after all, G-d speaks to his prophets through dreams. 'Whoever sleeps without dreaming for seven days is wicked' - another suggestion that dreaming shows a connection to the divine.  The other parts of dreams, the sages say,...

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Identity is Out! In the past twenty-four hours, I've been told several times: 'no more identity!' Yesterday I was sent a review of the book I co-edited on the eighteenth century British proto-feminist, Mary Astell. The reviewer in the English Historical Review laments that my co-editor and I treated Astell as--get ready for this--a woman. Go figure! But to our reviewer, Astell is just a writer, and to call her a woman writer is to make 'invidious distinctions' showing our failure to move into a 'post-modern framework for discussing gender.' For postmodernists, apparently, androgyny is in. Gender is out!

It also turns out that my recent reference to Woody Allen's Jewish...

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