Sanders Isaac Bernstein is an academic and writer in Berlin. His work has appeared most recently in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Conversation, and London Magazine.
Sanders Isaac Bernstein
Articles by Sanders Isaac Bernstein:
This Time It’s Personal?
in Issue 101 | Facing the Thing (Jul 2023)The core of revenge is wild; rather than resolve into a set of specific instances, it wants to radiate outward and contaminate other actions with its significance. Just as an act of revenge can spiral out of control, reproducing itself endlessly—René Girard calls it “an interminable, infinitely repetitive process”—so too can the concept of revenge describe a wide range of actions: living well, looking good, killing someone, writing a book. The specific action is less important than the structuring dynamic.
Stories of Bubby’s Teeth
in Issue 98 | Teeth (Jul 2021)Havana, Cuba. 1925. A dentist peers into the mouth of a young Jewish woman from Dolchinov, Poland. Malas dientes, he says, grimacing. The only fix is to remove them all. The dentist pulls her teeth from her gums, one by one, just as this woman will later, in the Great Depression, pick out all the stones of her single bracelet to pay for her husband’s emergency appendectomy.