My interests are varied and on occasion even intersect, though my main focus continues to be early modern Sephardic Jewish culture and history.  My first book, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2004), presents a cultural history of early modern Black-Jewish relations. The book was honored with the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize from the American Academy for Jewish Research.  My next book, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth-Century (Brill, 2009), delves further into the nexus of religion and race in the formation of early modern identity and intergroup relations.

In between these books I published “Jewish Ghosts in Germany” (Jewish Social Studies 9,3 [Spring/Summer 2003]), “Disappearing Origins: Sephardic Autobiography Today” (Prooftexts 27,1 [2007]) and “Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva: An Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish Merchant Abroad in the Seventeenthth Century,” (in The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, ed. Yosef Kaplan [Leiden: Brill, 2008]). 

My current project is a book-length study of angels in visual and plastic arts since the Enlightenment, a stimulating break from my usual topics.  I hope to turn next to a number of  works-in-progress that touch on Judaism and “ecological” matters, a long-standing focus of mine: an eco-phenomenology of the ritual of anointing with olive oil; a comparative analysis of biblical and rabbinic socio-agricultural laws; an exploration of a number of commentaries to Perek Shira, a tana’itic text that delineates the songs sung to God by various animal species and natural entities.

My more general-interest writing includes pieces on politics, socially responsible investing, environmental issues, Judaism and ecology, and contemporary Jewish music and culture.  Pieces have appeared in publications such as Eretz Acheret, European Judaism, Sh’ma, Tikkun, The Jerusalem Post and Zeek. 

In an earlier life I had time and energy to be an avid capoeirista.  I live in Riverdale, in the Bronx, a block from where I grew up, with my wife, Gail, and our five children, who keep me honest (or try).