Apr

10

2026

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! has been on my reading list since it debuted two years ago. I will follow in the footsteps of our former publisher Jacob Plitman’s famously brief reading recommendations to say: If this has been on your list, now is the time to read it. Covering addiction and recovery, global empire, art, and friendship, Martyr! moves between past and present, spanning the perspectives of its compelling, imperfect characters. Cyrus Sham’s story and Akbar’s lyrical prose are unlike anything else I’ve read, and have stayed with me. 18/10.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): A few weeks ago in this newsletter, Raphael Magarik recommended Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, soon before it was predictably and tragically snubbed at the Oscars. Allow me to re-recommend this film for your viewing and save it from the oblivion of a mere nominee.

The Secret Agent takes place at the tail end of the internationally lauded “Brazilian Miracle,” a time of, well, miraculous economic expansion and urbanization. What enabled this growth was, in part, a military dictatorship that took power in a coup and subsequently used state terror to brutally crush popular dissent. The global celebrations of Brazil’s entry as a player on the world economic stage belied a domestic atmosphere of violence and fear, and it is this disconnect––disturbing to the point of comedy––that Filho deploys as the film’s central theme.

Depicting a dark underbelly out of view of the general public is typical enough of film noir, and The Secret Agent’s plot fits that familiar template: Marcelo, our protagonist, is on the run from a ruthless killer-for-hire while most of Brazil is busy partying during Carnaval. What sets The Secret Agent apart is how self-conscious, almost Brechtian, it is. Films themselves play a major role in it, displacing the public’s paranoia around very real political violence onto entertaining fantasies––yet this divide between film and reality unravels when a police coverup of a murder manifests into The Secret Agent’s own depiction of a disembodied leg attacking nighttime park-cruisers, with the lighting, soundtrack, and cinematography you’d expect from a classic horror movie.

This gesture against realism becomes all the more compelling in tandem with the film’s framing device: An archival researcher is discovering Marcelo’s story in parallel to the main plotline. I must respectfully disagree with Magarik’s comment that, in “celebrating the archival work of those who cling to, reconstruct, and honor the past of a battered and fragmented resistance,” The Secret Agent is “somehow a hopeful movie.” I would argue, rather, that we’re left wondering how much of what we see is “real,” and how much of it is the archivist’s interpretation of scattered recordings. If anything, this is the film at its most disorienting––the archivist’s work does less to uncover a past than to retroactively distort it into the shape of a thriller.

To call the film’s ending anticlimactic is to massively understate the point. It is anticlimactic in the way revolutionary struggle––the bare struggle to survive in an unjust world without betraying one’s own principles––is almost always anticlimactic. Most stories of resistance are stories of loss, in every sense; power is brutal, and history is forgetful. If there is no satisfying ending here, let alone a happy one, it is because, beyond the magic of film and of Carnaval, this is how life in this broken world is.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Fiume o morte! by the Croatian director Igor Bezinovic—which will be screened this week at Metrograph on the Lower East Side and then will be showing around the country—presents a unique model for making historical films. Though for much of the film, the characters dress in period costumes, they do so not to lend verisimilitude but as an integral part of the mockery of an event in Italian and Croatian history that was at one and the same time opera buffa and tragedy: the 1919 “conquest” of the city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) by the proto-fascist army of the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. It is a warning and a reminder that even the most absurd events can have aftershocks of great terror. In this case, D’Annunzio attempted to undo the Treaty of Rapallo and to see to it that Fiume, which had been granted city-state status, would be annexed to Italy. A year after the occupation ended in bloodshed, the actual fascists took over not just a small city, but all of Italy.

In order to tell the story, Bezinovic makes use of the period, documented in some 10,000 photos and kilometers of film. The “actors” in the film are all locals from Rijeka, many of whom were convinced to participate when casually approached by the director to recount what they knew of D’Annunzio and his invasion. The factitious quality of the events is made clear by the actors’ being posed, in stills and in moving picture footage, exactly like the participants in the actual event. This mock verisimilitude allows us to see that in many cases even the original players were playing the part of a conquering army. The conquest of Fiume was, we see, proof positive of the dangers of putting a poet or poseur in power, granting him some special right to do whatever he wishes. D’Annunzio, famous for his amorous adventures, his cocaine use, and also as Italy’s most famous writer of the period, was in fact a tiny man, bald and (literally) toothless. The notion of him as a conqueror should have been seen by all concerned as a joke. But he showed, as so many have since, that a clown and a buffoon can, by force of character and will and through his persuasive powers, inflict great harm.

For a second recommendation this week—what François Ozon gets especially right in his film of Camus’ The Stranger is the physicality of this supposedly philosophical novel. Along with the protagonist, Meursault, his lover Marie, his neighbor Salamano, and his friend Sintès, whose personal troubles lead to a fateful encounter on the beach, the sun and the heat of summertime Algiers are central characters. Sweat, glare, and the desire to escape the stifling air are constant, as the characters attempt to live their lives. It is not only Sintès and his dispute with the brother of his Algerian mistress that impel Meursault to the murder by the springs, but, as he says at his trial, the sun. Ozon’s film, shot in crisp black and white, makes the heated air palpable.

Meursault, played by Benjamin Voisin, is virtually expressionless and emotionless throughout the tale, as he is in the novel. Camus’ neutral prose is translated skillfully by Ozon, though a flat affect is far easier and more acceptable in a reader’s imagination than on the screen. Meursault shows no emotion when killing, an essential element in Camus’ tale; he is equally emotionless at his trial, when he refuses to say anything exculpatory. He is honesty incarnate, quietly so. It is only when the prison chaplain comes to see him and calls him to accept God in his final moments that he explodes. It is a stunning reminder of the heart of the existentialism of Camus: There is no God, and we are all guilty of something and can expect no forgiveness.

Living in a post-Temple world, we are used to treating the idea of animal sacrifice metaphorically rather than literally. Indeed, our tradition understands the very pillars of Jewish practice since the Temple’s destruction as symbolic stand-ins for ritual slaughter. According to the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi, each of the thrice-daily prayer services is a substitution for a sacrifice that had been offered daily at that particular time in the Temple, while the Talmudic tractate of Menachot engages in an extended discussion of how various ways of studying Torah are equivalent to particular Temple rites. But according to the medieval commentator Ramban, the Jewish metaphorization of sacrifice goes back much further, to the practice’s very origins: He teaches that the animal is presented in place of the true offering—the sacrificer’s own body. The goal of the process is, Ramban writes, for the penitent to realize “that his blood should really be spilled and his body burned, were it not for the loving-kindness of the Creator, who took from him a substitute and a ransom—namely, this offering—so that its blood should be in place of his blood, its life in place of his life, and that the chief limbs of the offering should be in place of the chief parts of his body.”

This tendency toward understanding sacrifice symbolically makes the visceral violence of the story at the opening of our parshah, Shemini, all the more shocking. Last week’s reading ends with Moses telling Aaron and his sons that they must wait within the entrance of the Tent of Meeting for seven days as an “ordination period,” after which the Mishkan will be officially inaugurated; our parshah opens “on the eighth day” following this wait. At first, everything seems to be going well. Moses gives Aaron meticulous instructions, which he and his sons fulfill faithfully, and then, the Torah tells us, “the Presence of God appeared to all the people.” But immediately after the finally successful establishment of the Mishkan, tragedy strikes: “Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu each took a fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; they offered before God a strange fire, which had not been enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from God and consumed them; they died before God.” The Torah’s tersely opaque account raises the question: What was so wrong in what Nadav and Avihu did that they deserved death? A midrash in Vayikra Rabba offers a dizzying list of possibilities. Perhaps they arrogantly offered a halachic ruling in the presence of their teacher, Moses; or they entered the innermost sanctum of the Mishkan; or they offered a sacrifice that had not been commanded. Maybe they brought the wrong fire, or didn’t properly consult with one another. Or else they were drunk, were not wearing the right vestments, had not performed the proper ablutions, were unmarried, didn’t have children—and so on. While each suggestion is exegetically grounded in some detail in the Biblical text, none seem to explain the severity of the punishment.

But when one closely examines the verses themselves, there is the hint of a startlingly different reading: that Nadav and Avihu—rather than being punished for some impropriety, ritual or otherwise—are themselves the sacrifice. In the verse immediately before Nadav and Avihu bring their offering, the Torah tells of the first successful sacrifice by Aaron and his sons: “Fire came forth from before God and consumed” the offerings. Just two verses later, we read that “fire came forth from before God and consumed” Nadav and Avihu. Since the exact same words are used to describe the consumption of the animal sacrifices and of Aaron’s two sons, we might venture that the very same mechanism takes them both. More evidence for this interpretation emerges from scrutinizing key terms in the verses that follow. When Moses attempts to comfort Aaron (“This is what God meant by saying: ‘Through those near to Me [b’korvai] I show Myself holy’”), he uses a word to refer to Nadav and Avihu that shares a root with “korban,” meaning “sacrifice.” Later, Aaron’s two surviving sons are referred to as “ha’notarim” (“those who remain”); “notar” is also a technical term in the laws of sacrifice to refer to meat that has passed the prescribed period during which it can be consumed. Lastly, Nadav’s name itself shares a root with “nedava,” the term for a type of sacrifice offered voluntarily. Here, it seems, we have the literalization of what was once metaphor: If for Ramban, animal sacrifices stand in for human sacrifices, in this instance, human sacrifices instead stand in for animal ones.

Rereading the story of Nadav and Avihu in this moment of global conflagration, I found it impossible not to consider it in the context of the precious lives lost to warplanes raining fire from the sky in Jabaliya, Beirut, Tehran, Haifa, and beyond—and also of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself aflame to protest the genocide in Gaza. Even as Bushnell made the most painfully literal of sacrifices, giving up his own life, wasn’t his act—like its many antecedents, from the self-immolations of those protesting the Vietnam War, to those advocating for a free Tibet, to those calling attention to climate catastrophe—still in some sense fundamentally symbolic? And yet it has, or could have, a material meaning. As Erik Baker writes of Bushnell, “The purpose of lighting yourself on fire . . . is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.”

As I reflect on all this, I think of the prophetic tradition, in which God’s messengers repeatedly have visions of a future divine reckoning coming in the form of fire. “The Sovereign God of Hosts will send a wasting away of [the Jewish people’s] fatness,” prophesies Isaiah, “and under its body shall burn a burning like that of fire, destroying frame and flesh.” “I am putting My words into your mouth as fire, and this people shall be firewood, which it will consume,” God says through Jeremiah, who later describes “a raging fire in my heart, shut up in my bones; I could not hold it in.” I imagine Bushnell identifying with Jeremiah’s feeling, and that many of us might as well. For indeed, “the fire is coming,” the desperation and urgency are real. But still, the prophets’ words are also metaphors, and perhaps metaphor—which comes from the Greek term, via Latin and Old French, for “to carry across”—is exactly the work we are summoned to: bridging the literal and the symbolic, connecting abstract ideals to what we must do in this world.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.