ExcerptThere might have been no need to theorize “October 7” in southern Israel and its ghoulish afterlife, far away, on the American college campus, but for the bitter irony that receptions of the Hamas pogrom were already laden, from the start, with what academics these days are calling “critical theory.” It ought to have been sufficient unto the day (דיה לצרה בשעתה, as the rabbis say) that such horrors be rendered straightforwardly in journalistic accounts, scientifically in forensic studies, colloquially in (...) survivors’ testimonies, defiantly in all that graffiti all over Tel Aviv protesting “7/10,” mournfully in all those obituaries all over Israeli media, heartbreakingly at public gatherings week after week in Hostages Square (כיכר החטופים) and obscenely in the murderers’ own self-made GoPro videos. (shrink)