Pausing Subscriptions and Future Thoughts

I’ve paused paid subscriptions on this Substack, as I don’t have much time for writing at the moment with a young baby (no longer ill, thankfully, but still demanding, especially as I’m five-sevenths of a stay-at-home father at the moment) and I feel it’s wrong to keep taking money when writing at a much slower rate. I am still keeping the ‘buy me a book’ boilerplate, as I see that as a gratuity for what I’ve already written, not a payment for a promise of future writing, so if you like a post and want to show your appreciation, I’ll be very grateful.

I started this Substack for political thought about Israel, antisemitism and antizionism during the Gaza War without thinking much about what I would do when it was over. I don’t think any of us could even think of it being over back in the bad days of 2024 (and, yes, I know it’s not really over even now, but it’s less intense). I do still have things to say about antisemitism and antizionism, but I don’t really want to write only about antisemitism and antizionism, nor do I want to write about everyday party politics in Israel, Britain or anywhere else.

I have a (non-literal) stack of posts to write in various stages: some with pages and pages of research and planning already done, others in earlier stages of scribbled notes and some at the “Wouldn’t it be interesting/insightful/fun to write about X?” stage. My thoughts are moving towards general cultural and ‘deep’ socio-political critique i.e. not party political posts, but posts about how society as a whole is functioning, or malfunctioning in the West at the moment. I am doing this doing in a post I’m currently working on about the clash between technocracy and populism, which I think has replaced the left/right dichotomy in the West (and perhaps also feeds into Western perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict on a deep level). I also want to bring insights from Jewish thought into my “secular” critiques.

I want to continue my Theology After the Pogrom series reading classic works of Jewish religious thought in the aftermath of 7 October to find a way forward for Jewish life today. My next two texts will be Future Tense by Rabbi Lord Sacks and The Body of Faith by Michael Wyschogrod.

I’d also like to write about are the real forms of cultural hegemony in the West (which could also feed into Israel-Palestine writing), but lately I have purely cultural thoughts too, about old and overlooked books, films, TV programmes and music that I think have meaningful things to say today and I’m curious to see if I can write about them in a way that’s congruent with what I’ve written here previously and meaningful to my readers. It is a gamble, of course, as I might not be able to do it or might alienate people with new topics.

I have also mentioned over on the notes section that I started writing a comedy/science fiction satirical dystopian novel a while back. Although I’ve abandoned it (for now?) and although I’m more than a little wary of posting first draft material here, I’m thinking of posting some extracts here, if I think they stand alone and are amusing enough. (The acid test will be whether my wife thinks it’s funny enough when she reads it.)

If all else fails, I have a pile of non-fiction books on antisemitism, the Holocaust, Israel and the USSR to read, which I’m sure will inspire more posts when I get the time for more serious reading, baby-permitting.

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Thanks!