Jeffrey Mehlman’s Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life drew, in 2010, on a series of pivotal readings of texts by major writers as they found themselves traversed by episodes and/or conundrum in the life of their interpreter. The current volume is driven by a principle of reversal in extremis and revisits -while exceeding- several of the key figures of the prior volume, but to new (and newly chiastic) effect. Ultimately, what gives the book its unexpected coherence is a lapidary history of antisemitism, above all in France, as it manifests itself in what has been vilified (in the culture at large) as Jewish «self-hatred» and savored (in psychoanalysis) as «primary masochism.»

George Steiner’s discussion of Jeffrey Mehlman’s writing on Walter Benjamin gives the flavor of Mehlman’s writing in Second Thoughts.

“The arch erudition and playful intelligence of Jeffrey Mehlman’s concise jeu d’esprit, Walter Benjamin for Children, sparkle. Mehlman weaves a sequence of associative arabesques, ‘intertextually imbricated, psychoanalytically informed,’ on the script for two radio programmes for children which Benjamin wrote during 1929-1930. Almost in the style of a magician, Professor Mehlman demonstrates the literally catastrophic substance of Benjamin’s tales for children. With a scholastic acuity and wit resembling that of Benjamin himself, Mehlman teases out in the thematic rootedness of catastrophe and fraud the “phantom presence of the motif of a ‘false messianism’ which flowers, nearly subliminally, in these seemingly innocent broadcasts.”