Adam Zachary Newton is currently University Professor at Yeshiva University where he holds the Ronald P. Stanton Chair in Literature and the Humanities.

"To Make the Hands Impure": Art and Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy proposes a wholly original model for the ethics of reading. With the image of the book lying in the hands of its readers as insistent refrain, this innovative and ambitious work explores "ethics" as a matter of readerly tact-in the sense of both touch and regard.