Apr

17

2026

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Science fiction doesn’t always age well, but Philip K. Dick’s work is an exception. The Penultimate Truth is a good example. Written in 1964 and set in 2025, the novel has its moments of satisfying prescience: Who but Dick would have predicted that our world would contain, for instance, a text-generation machine that tells insipid jokes about genocide?

But Dick is less interested in prophecy than in historical revision. The conceit of The Penultimate Truth is that the masses of humanity live in claustrophobic underground tanks, manufacturing what they think are robotic soldiers to fight an ongoing nuclear war with the Soviets. In fact, the war lasted only two years and has been over for a decade. These “leadies” are actually mechanical serfs in the expansive demesnes of a tiny culture-industry aristocracy dwelling luxuriously on the earth’s surface, which busies itself writing and producing propaganda films of apocalyptic destruction. Their Bible, which they lovingly study and imitate, is a pair of faked, contradictory documentaries about World War II, intended to convince Soviet audiences that Hitler was spying for the United States, and to convince American audiences of the opposite, thus igniting World War III.

As is often the case with Dick’s fiction, serious political ideas are exaggerated into monstrous, paranoid paradoxes: Here, he is literalizing the idea that national conflicts are illusory, ideological superstructures that conceal the real, class war. The joke about “genocide” proves central to the plot, in which a time-traveling Native American man orchestrates the unraveling of this order. Dick often highlights the parallels between the Holocaust and earlier American exterminations, and here he shows his feudal elite rushing to stake settler claims on war-torn land as its radioactivity approaches livable levels, in a kind of suicidal homesteading.

Dave Lontano, the regime’s nemesis, paradoxically has been liberated from the 15th century by mysterious alien artifacts retrojected (by time machine) in a bungled attempt to frame an enemy of the state for violating archeological remains. Lontano is endowed with strange powers and subjected to a fluctuating temporality, so that he oscillates between youth and old age, becoming an uncanny (if a bit cringe) icon of the subaltern’s syncopated vengeance, and of the curious entanglement of modes of production across centuries.

Not all of this ultimately coheres, but it’s fascinating and strange—and not a bit dated. How could one date, after all, a fictional world where feudalism and monopoly capitalism, settler-colonialism and the culture industry are jumbled together in a coeval heap? The novel escapes becoming a Cold War period piece by substituting for the historical period a historical question mark.

Noa Azulai (program coordinator): I’ll be honest: When I joined Jewish Currents last October, I didn’t foresee my first recommendation for the Shabbat Reading List being Justin Bieber’s headline set at Coachella. I figured I’d come up with something more… intellectual. But a couple nights ago, when I found myself up at 1 am rewatching the moment when the pop star’s voice pivots up a few octaves, I felt moved to write about it. (I should note I was not actually at Coachella, the influencer-laden music festival set annually in the California desert, nor have I ever been.)

The performance itself has been, unsurprisingly, divisive. Some critics are calling it “lazy” or “unprofessional,” or raising the perhaps-valid point that if a woman gave nothing the way some think Justin did, their careers wouldn’t survive it. That may be right. But I want to direct you to the last 20 minutes of his set, at which point Justin positions himself in front of his laptop and begins pulling up YouTube videos of his earliest songs, singing along to them. The crowd goes nuts. I am, somehow, in tears, as Justin cycles through hits like “Baby,” “Beauty and a Beat,” “Favorite Girl,” and “Confident.” Songs that soundtracked my middle school dances, my first kisses, my teenage summers drinking smuggled vodka out of plastic water bottles by the beach. I wasn’t a Belieber by any metric, but in the 2010s you didn’t have to be. He was everywhere.

Then, he faced what so many who undergo the meat grinder of childhood fame do: mental health crises, PR crises, other personal crises that we are not, and should not, be privy to. His Coachella performance was his first in over four years, after cancelling the remainder of his Justice World Tour in 2022/2023 due to health issues. It was, in many ways, his great return to the place he’d first arrived when he was just 13 years old: the world stage. In that moment, when his adultish monotone voice reaches back up for the octave of his younger self, he smiles.

We should never underestimate the power of nostalgia to draw up unforeseen connections within, and perhaps also outside, of ourselves. As technology, led by those with the most destructive tendencies, outpaces my own tolerance for change, I find myself tenderized by the most seemingly meaningless things sometimes—in this case, the international pop sensation Justin Bieber, singing songs of a shared youth to his own past self as much as to ours.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As the US increasingly becomes the repressive, imperial state the left always warned we’d become, Punishment Park, the great leftist film from the Nixon era, goes surprisingly unmentioned. I was pleased and surprised to find that Peter Watkins’ chilling warning from 1971 is available on what has become my go-to streaming service, Tubi, a subsidiary of Netflix, which is free and stuffed with an astounding variety of films. If many of the films are totally forgettable direct-to-video junk, Tubi also makes available silent classics (Battleship Potemkin, Greed, Sunrise), American indies (Language Lessons, Slacker) and foreign treasures (Mississippi Mermaid, Godard’s Film Socialisme). It was while scrolling through Tubi that I found Punishment Park, by the director of such left-wing standards as La Commune (Paris, 1871) and the greatest of all artist biopics, Edvard Munch.

In Watkins’ film, the Vietnam War is still raging, and opponents of all stripes—anticapitalist revolutionaries, pacifists, hippies, whatever—are being rounded up and receiving summary trials carried out by right-wing draft boards. Sentences are passed and the guilty—i.e., all of the defendants—are presented with the options of either serving a lengthy prison term or three days and two nights in Punishment Park. Almost all choose the latter. The park is something of a misnomer, for it is a long stretch of the Southern California desert which must be traversed by those who choose that as their sentence. The goal is to reach an American flag planted in the middle of nowhere, 53 miles from the starting point. The obstacles are not just the distance and the baking heat. Also set loose in the desert, shortly after the prisoners begin their trek, are uniformed members of various forces of repression—army, local police, state police, National Guard—all armed, all allowed to shoot to kill.

Here we have the dream scenario of our native aspirant dictator: Leftists penned in and subject to the death penalty, amid the illusion of the ability to regain their freedom. As in all of Watkins’ films, the performers are non-actors, chosen for their resemblance in life to the characters in the film. From the right and the left, they discuss the situation in the park and the nation and react to provocations and threats, not—or not just—as their characters, but as themselves. Punishment Park is thus full of the lucubration of the long-haired radicals many of us were back then: the jargon, the ultra-radicalism, but also the valiant spirit of resistance. Against them are conservatives who are housewives, businessmen, and union leaders, while pursuing them across the desert, armed and ready to wipe them out, are soldiers and cops whose faces and voices haven’t changed in the intervening 55 years.

Watkins at times allowed his films to go on way too long, and they were sometimes buried under self-congratulatory revolutionary boasting and posturing. Punishment Park shows a far more likely scenario: Radicals fenced in in the open with no one or nothing to protect them, and with the press on hand to film the cold-blooded slaughter. Punishment Park is a warning from the past we can still learn from.

The first parshah of this week’s double reading, Tazria-Metzora, outlines the laws surrounding childbirth, among other bodily emissions and irregularities. God tells the Israelites that one who has given birth enters a state of impurity and must wait a set period of time before bringing sacrifices that facilitate their cleansing. In these directives, the length of the birthing parent’s impurity depends on the baby’s assigned sex: For a male child, seven days of impurity are followed by 33 days of “blood purity” (a state of limbo during which one is no longer impure, but not yet permitted to participate in rituals that require purity), while a female child leads to impurity for 14 days and then blood purity for another 66. A parent is thus restricted from sacred activity for double the amount of time after birthing a female baby than a male—a disparity that many commentators have probed, since the Torah itself provides no explanation for the difference.

The Sifra, a third-century midrashic compilation on Vayikra, plays with these verses, testing the limits of the Torah’s binary options and implicitly questioning their inherent hierarchy. What about a case, the text wonders, when a child is born as a “tumtum” or “androgynous”—someone whose sex is not clearly determinable? In a more surprising line of inquiry, the Sifra challenges even the binary between human and non-human, asking about a case in which the parent births something with the appearance of a fish, grasshopper, creeping creature, or reptile. The Mishnah, the earliest anthology of Rabbinic legal teachings, takes up these questions and rules, like the Sifra, that a fetus must be clearly “of human form” in order for the parent to be obligated in the Torah’s relevant purity laws. But Rabbi Meir objects and deems any birth—even of an animal—sufficient to render the birthing parent impure. In his view, one is impure for 40 days for a male and 80 days for a female, regardless of form; if the sex is undetermined, he creates a new ruling that combines the directives for both males and females.

We might reasonably wonder why animal birth is a subject of discussion in the first place. After all, the sages surely encountered actual intersex people, but probably not a lizard born of human flesh. Whatever the concrete explanation, this line of inquiry enabled the Rabbis to subvert normative Biblical categories and test the firm lines between human and non-human existence. In the centuries that followed, the Talmud continued to develop this kind of inter-species imagination, asking dozens of questions about the mixing of species, such as the status of a human fetus found inside an animal or of a fetus “whose body is that of a goat and whose face is that of a human.” In their work on hybridity and reproduction, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, Rafael Rachel Neis describes how in these texts, “species seemingly slip into—or at least out of—the uteruses of other species; even the human is caught up in this web of reproductive and species queerness.” They suggest that this example is but one of a “variety of (perhaps surprising) ideas about creatureliness—including even human creatureliness—and reproduction that do not quite uphold, and even challenge, the rather more hierarchical Priestly binaries embedded in Genesis and Leviticus.”

Ultimately, then, an exemplary moment of Biblical misogyny gives way to a web of inquiries that assert the reality of variance. As with other such moments in our tradition, trans people may find a source of resilience in this Rabbinic recognition of nonbinary existence. But, as the discourse that unfurls from these mentions of “tumtum” and “adrongynus” shows, the queerness of Jewish thought goes much further and deeper. The Rabbis agitated against binary frameworks in all facets of thought, treating gender as merely one sphere in which to trouble the apparent fixity of concepts. (In other words: All Torah is trans.) In this way, the text offers a framework for understanding trans life that goes far beyond mere acknowledgment or tolerance, seeing it instead as a path to reimagining the very terms of existence.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.