Hopefully some of you will have noticed that I have not written a blog post since the last week of August. This seems like a good time to explain why.

First, the good. I successfully defended my dissertation this morning, so I am now officially no longer a Ph.D candidate but an actual Ph.D. Finishing the writing and editing took some time, as did making sure I actually knew what I had written, and so in the interests of not getting distracted by outside stuff, I figured it would be good to lay off blogging until the process was behind me. Getting a Ph.D. is a funny thing, since nothing is substantively different now than it was a few hours ago; I am no more or less knowledgeable, no better or worse a writer, no sharper or duller an analyst, yet somehow those three letters confer an added level of credibility. Whether that means that some will take me more seriously or that some will expect a higher level of analysis I can’t say, but I am certainly glad to have it behind me.

Next, the bad. On the afternoon of September 4, just a few hours before the beginning of Rosh Hashanah and the onset of the Jewish new year, my mother passed away after a far too brief eight month battle with a brain tumor. Her diagnosis came out of the blue and was a death sentence, and she hung on valiantly for as long as she could but ultimately succumbed. My blogging had been a lot lighter in 2013 for that reason, as my mom was diagnosed in early January and my family and I logged a lot of hours going back and forth to NY every two weeks to visit her. Since she passed away, I have not been in the frame of mind to devote the time and attention to the blog as it requires, and so despite all of the things going on in Turkey, Israel, and the wider world, I have kept the blog dark.

This is all to say that it is time to get back into things, and I plan on picking things back up next week. I hope that my readers forgive me for the time away, and that I actually have some readers left.

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