After learning the basics of Judaism, graduate student Judd Lewis wanted to learn more. He dropped out of graduate school and enrolled full-time in an Israeli yeshiva. Now four years have passed and Judd is disillusioned. He confronts his former teacher and mentor, a Syrian Jew knowledgeable in Judaism, with a barrage of questions: Why do so many things in the Talmud seem to be just clever arguments? Doesn't anyone care about what is really true? Did Moses really write the Torah? Why doesn't yeshiva study ever face up to the challenges of science, of biblical criticism, and other aspects of...

"The Assemblyman," title poem of the present collection, is an extended meditation on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes.