Faculty Writing: Capitalism and the Family, Immigration and “Merit,” and Torah as Palimpsest

On The Dig podcast with Daniel Denvir, Sophie Lewis discusses her new book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, the problem of commercialized surrogacy, and the abuses that follow from bourgeois notions of the family: “While we’re calling this situation that people are making a lot of noise about and feeling a lot of revulsion about “new”—as in new reproductive technologies—in fact there is nothing new at all about a relationship in which proletarian, often racialized, feminized laborers are bringing their bodies and labors into the service of a white household.”

In the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, Danielle Drori relates her experience navigating U.S. immigration bureaucracy to the writing of Valeria Luiselli and the threat of Jared Kushner’s proposed “merit”-based immigration policy. Drori reflects, “Waiting for the coveted card, I learned, however, that immigration to the United States had little to do with merit and everything to do with luck, privilege, and money.”

For TheTorah.com, Angela Roskop Erisman investigates the complex relationship between narrative and geography in the journey of the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land. Writes Erisman, “The narrative terrain is as bumpy for us as readers as we might imagine the physical terrain to have been for the Israelites. But navigating this challenging landscape yields rich results.”