A new documentary asks: Has Brazil’s democracy been merely a passing dream?
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The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude interrogates his country’s antisemitic history and its echoes in the present.
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A new biography of the philosopher misses the shortcomings of the Marxist tradition.
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The new season of the hit Israeli show Fauda continues in its portrayal of brutish Israelis and cowardly Palestinians.
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A new work addresses the long-neglected mass politicide of communists in Indonesia.
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Ex-fascist diplomat Curzio Malaparte's masterpiece blends the real, the improbable, and the impossible in Soviet Russia.
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A new history of the revolutionary criminals who rejected any possibility of revolution coming from the degraded masses—and turned their revolt into an individualistic one.
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Landmark Julius Caesar, edited and translated by Kurt A. Raaflaub. Pantheon, 2017, 793 pages. AS I WAS READING the magnificent new Landmark edition of Julius Caesar’s works, my initial instinct was to relate the Roman leader to the anti-democrats of today, starting — of course — with our […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor OCCASIONALLY DERIDED for being too broad and hasty in its estimation of individual films, Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 study, From Caligari to Hitler, nevertheless stands as a classic of film criticism. Its old-fashioned, Old-World vision of German cinema from its beginnings until the arrival in power of Hitler, and its focus on the unity […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Origin of the Jews, by Steven Weitzman. Princeton University Press, 2017, 408 pages. AT THE END of Steven Weitzman’s Origin of the Jews, a scholarly but eminently accessible account of the search for the origin of the Jews (which we should not confuse with their beginnings), the […]
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