My new book, A Jewish Appendix, will be published on March 15, 2025, by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. A Jewish Appendix is a memoir and travel adventure, a story of epigenetic inheritance, a search for home and belonging, and a reckoning with the power and paradox of Jewish identity. It’s an exploration of roots, and it’s for anyone who has ever explored their own. You can read more about A Jewish Appendix here, and preorder it here.

Where to find me:

• In the Los Angeles Review of Books, where I recently published an essay about the new film A Real Pain and its resonances with my own search for Jewish roots.
• Also recently in the Los Angeles Review of Books (not related to my book!): on the occasion of the reissue of the Rain Parade’s 1983 debut album, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip — one of the great psychedelic pop albums — an essay about the Paisley Underground, an indie pop music scene that flourished in Los Angeles in the early 1980s.
• Jewish Book Festival, Durham, NC, March 21 — time changed, 12 noon! — where I will read from A Jewish Appendix and lead a Q&A afterwards. The event is at the Levin Jewish Community Center.
• Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, April 10, 6:00 PM: reading, Q&A, book signing.
• Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC, April 17, 5:30 PM, in conversation with Rabbi Hannah Bender of Judea Reform Congregation: reading, discussion, Q&A, book signing.

Advance praise for my book:

Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, calls A Jewish Appendix “unique, thrilling, and epically weird, in the very best sense.” Sam Stephenson, author of Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, calls my memoir “unusual, understated, and brilliant […] a journey into geographic roots of [the author]’s family tree overseas and the inner evidence of his own past,” and “the most variable and memorable use of the metaphor of the appendix since Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices.”