who am I?

me to tell you that I’ve always wanted to be an ethicist, I fear I’ll have to disappoint you, since when I was a small, dinosaur-obsessed child, I dearly wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. (Header image by renowned paleontologist Dr. Robert Bakker, btw.)

Eventually my interests shifted from dinosaurs to horses, which led both to an abiding love of horseback riding, and to a series of career aspirations including jockey, veterinarian, and ethologist (not to be confused with “ethicist”--an ethologist is someone who studies animal behavior). This last ambition I carried into college, where it shattered on impact with the cold, cruel reality of first-year chemistry and biology. It was then that I found myself increasingly at home in the religion department, where I started my path toward my current career.

My interest in sexual ethics solidified in graduate school, where I was often frustrated to realize I knew more about the basics of safer sex and the diversity of human sexual expression than many of my peers, simply by virtue of, too often, being the only queer person in the room. I also saw this lack of familiarity reflected in far too much Jewish literature on sexual ethics–academic and confessional alike. At the same time, I was developing a genuine love for the surprising, infuriating, and often just plain weird world of rabbinic literature, and I was equally frustrated with the way I saw this wonderfully bizarre material flattened in the service of simple claims about what “Judaism teaches about sex.”