Missing Time: Essays, by Ari M. Brostoff

Over the past few years, in essays published in n+1, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere, Ari M. Brostoff has grappled with the intellectual upheavals and political contradictions that surfaced during the Trump era. After the breaking point of the 2016 election, Brostoff writes, “the world came back into hideous focus” and they began to feel, for the first time, “like a long-term inhabitant of the present. ” Missing Time collects five remarkable essays and a new introduction that trace the return of the 20th century’s political and cultural repressed in personal and collective terms. In prose that is simultaneously sharp and soulful, mournful and ecstatic, Brostoff offers lucid considerations of the reemergent millennial left, the enigmas of the X-Files, the complexities of Philip Roth’s (anti-)Zionism, and other novelties, atavisms, and atavisms newly reborn as novelties. From the communist ardor of the Bronx circa 1940 to the ’90s haze of the San Fernando Valley to a Brooklyn apartment building’s tenants’ association in the midst of a global pandemic, Missing Time collapses past and present into a revelatory encounter with very recent history. Praise for Missing Time “Few books come close to relaying the sense of ruptured time and lost dreams that have haunted the American Left—queer and feminist, Jewish and critical. This one chronicles with exactitude falling in love and with politics, the oscillations of enchantment and hope. Luckily for us, the dream keeps emerging for a Jewish displacement of the Zionist ideal, the reanimation of communism, and the compelling promise of the Bernie burn for socialism among feminist allies. Even when we have lost hope altogether, there is apparently still a way to canvass popular culture, collect the arcana, read Philip Roth and Vivian Gornick again, tell the story of one’s childhood friendships to bring about flashes of improbable hope, pressing upon the traces of the holy to emit their light. Ari M. Brostoff gives us a lucid sense of the arc of hope and despair as it passes through popular culture, electoral politics, and the endless repetitions of family romances gone sour. The radical hope never shakes its despair, but neither does it succumb. The writing moves in and against despair to find the promise of diaspora and the prospect of living well outside the...