In episode 24, I speak with Judith Levine, journalist activist, and author of five books. Judith and I (who go way back!) discuss our shared experience of losing parents to Alzheimer’s, asking what makes a self if not language, if not the mind, asking how we can value one another, even when the “self” seems to be gone. We then discuss Judith’s co-authored book (with Erica L. Meiners), The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence. Judith talks about the intense backlash to her earlier book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, and about her sustained and ethical critique of the sex offender registry and of the carceral/surveillance/police state writ large. We reflect on #MeToo and various kinds of liberation, noting together that liberation is a central Jewish value (one that I’d oddly neglected to include in this podcast’s list of Jewish themes). We end with a nod to Orwell’s roses and Rebecca Solnit’s book of that title, affirming that we must continue to live and find moments of joy even now, especially now.

A note: in this episode, we discuss sexual violence.

Books, essays, movements and ideas discussed:

Margaret Atwood, “We are double-plus unfree”

Elizabeth Bernstein on “Carceral Feminism”

Tarana Burke and #MeToo

adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Angela Davis, Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, No More Police: A Case for Abolition

Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy

Judith Levine, Do You Remember Me: A Father, a Daughter and the Search for the Self

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex

Judith Levine, “Remy Charlip’s Postmodernism for Kids”

Judith Levine, Today in Fascism (substack)

Judith Levine and Erica Meiners, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

George Orwell, 1984

Stephen Post, The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer’s Disease: Ethical Issues from Diagnosis to Dying

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

Judith Levine is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and author, whose work resides in the territory where the body meets the body politic and intimate relations meet public life. She explores the intersections of sex, gender, race, reproduction, and dis/ability; the law, the economy, and consumer desire; social movements and public emotion. Levine is an anti-racist feminist activist and restorative justice volunteer, a forever intermediate cross-country skier, forever amateur pianist, and a lover of French and cats.