David Mikics

David Mikics is Professor of English at New College of Florida. He recently edited The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain, and is also author of Stanley Kubrick.

Streaming Kafka
On the centennial of the great Jewish, 20th-century storyteller’s death comes a six-part miniseries about his life. Spoiler: It’s not bad!
byDavid Mikics
What Nellie Saw
Good progressives are tossing the heady days of wine and wokeness down the memory hole. Lucky for us, there was a witness.
byDavid Mikics
God, How We Miss Saul Bellow
Nearly 20 years after the great Jewish and American novelist’s death, we have never been more in need of his thirst for life
byDavid Mikics
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Tantalizing, Unsentimental Prophet, Is Miles More American Than Maya Angelou
Just don’t ask him about sex
byDavid Mikics
Harvard’s Derek Penslar Helps Make the World Safer for Antisemitism
A cultural studies professor who makes excuses for bigoted anti-Zionism is appointed to lead the university’s disingenuous ‘Task Force on Combating Antisemitism’
byDavid Mikics
More ‘Anti-Zionist’ Insanity Your Kid Will Learn at NYU
Sonali Thakkar’s grotesque new book about Jewish ‘whiteness’ shows that the oldest hatred is also the most plastic
byDavid Mikics
The Last Jewish Intellectuals
Susan Sontag and George Steiner star in ‘Maestros & Monsters’
byDavid Mikics
The Hollow Men
Olivier Assayas’ filmed essay about the icon of 1970s terrorist chic shows us a man who needs to kill in order to prove he exists
byDavid Mikics
Norman Manea’s Exiled Shadow
Freed from the dreary, nauseating oppression of Ceausescu’s communist surveillance state, the great Romanian author is thrown back on himself, books, and the Jews
byDavid Mikics
August Beach Reads
Don’t let your iPhones overheat in the sun. Read a book instead.
byMarco Roth,David Mikics,andPark MacDougald
The Ambivalent Destroyer
Christopher Nolan’s new biopic shows J. Robert Oppenheimer as he really was—an American Prometheus divided at his core
byDavid Mikics
The Horrible and Enlightening Life of Jean Améry
In an age of easy antisemitism, the Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivor’s work remains bitter, resentful, and hauntingly pro-Zionist
byDavid Mikics
Commie Chic Invades American Grade Schools
Angela Davis was a dedicated fangirl of Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev and cult leader Jim Jones. So why is she presented to children as a hero?
byDavid Mikics
The Odd Knight of the Cinnamon Shops
A new book explores the life and tragic death of Bruno Schulz, the great Polish Jewish magical realist writer and artist murdered by the Nazis
byDavid Mikics
Mel Brooks Kicks Larry David’s Skinny Ass
Part II in a continuing series on the decline of Jewish vulgarity
byDavid Mikics
Let’s All Celebrate Norman Mailer
The most swaggering and macho of Jewish writers illuminated postwar America like no one else
byDavid Mikics
On Jewish Vulgarity
With John Murray Cuddihy’s ‘The Ordeal of Civility’ and Yuri Slezkine’s ‘The Jewish Century,’ Tablet begins a three-part look at the once-vibrant Jewish trait of not caring what the goyim think
byDavid Mikics
Even Richard Nixon Has Got Soul
Hunter S. Thompson’s classic ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972’ demonstrates a human empathy and political savvy that today’s hack political propagandists lack
byDavid Mikics