May

30

2025

Josh Lambert (contributor): Sharp-eyed viewers of the season finale of The Last of Us, which aired on HBO Max this past Sunday, will have caught something I was waiting for all season. When Dina gives Ellie a bracelet for good luck, we catch just a glimpse of the charm on it, a hamsa.

Those of us who have played the original video game understand why Dina would wear a symbol beloved by North African Jews and Muslims, and by Sephardic Jews more generally. The game takes pains to let us know that Dina is Jewish—a descendant, she explains to Ellie, of Jews who survived the Inquisition and the Holocaust before also surviving a zombie apocalypse. For whatever reason, the show entirely skipped the scene in the game in which the two young women wander through a ruined synagogue, chatting about belief and prayer, the Jewish calendar, the Torah, and the tradition of eating apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah.

As the On the Nose podcast mentioned a couple years ago, the game has occasioned some intense arguments online about its politics. I have quibbles both with the idea that The Last of Us, Part 2 offers “the most fleshed out direct Jewish representation in a AAA [i.e., blockbuster video] game,” and with the argument that the whole game can be boiled down to an “allegory about Israel-Palestine.” But the moment in Sunday’s finale when Dina’s dreamboat baby-daddy, Jesse, pronounces “This is not our war” offers some sense of why I’ve read the game as reflecting the tendency of liberal American Jews in the mid-2010s to take the position that mounting fascism in Israel, Netanyahu’s empowerment of Hamas, and the immiseration of Gaza were just not their problem. “Everything’s a moral if only you can find it,” the show tells us, in a slogan you might have also caught on a bookstore wall in the finale.

There’s plenty more to say about this, let alone about dozens of other changes, many of them unaccountable, that the show has made in adapting the game for television. But if you’re interested specifically in the backstory to Dina’s character that has been left out of the series you’ve watched, and if you can put up with, or skip over, a smattering of critical theory, please keep your eyes out for an article I’ve written for the summer issue of the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies, which should be available online in the next couple of weeks.

Devin E. Naar (advisory board): For a beautifully illustrated and historically rooted tale about the relationship between a Sephardic Jew from the Ottoman Empire and his Japanese friend in Seattle during the World War II-era incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry, check out Josh Tuininga’s graphic novel, We Are Not Strangers. Inspired by stories Tuininga heard about his great uncle’s unusual efforts to support his Japanese friend during Incarceration, the graphic novel not only reveals a little-known but much-needed story of allyship, but also highlights the vulnerabilities that the Sephardic characters face along the way—whether difficulties at Ellis Island, being targeted by white men in Seattle, or a side plot about a charming Nona (grandmother) who smuggles her way across the US border to circumvent immigration quotas. (Full disclosure: I wrote the afterward!)

If you are interested in a deeper dive into the politics and ideologies of Sepharadim and Mizrahim, peruse the recordings of the 2025 Sephardi Modernity Seminar Series: “Partners, Outsiders, and Others: Sephardi Jews and the Global Left.” Organized by Angy Cohen of the Spanish National Research Council and Yuval Ivry of Brandeis University, the series features leading scholars who delve into themes as diverse as Iraqi Jewish feminist leftists, Mizrahi feminist politics, Jewish communists in Egypt, and Sepharadim and leftist activism in Argentina and Brazil, among other topics. The opening session, “Colonized Outsiders; Arabised Jews,” begins with Moshe Behar of the University of Manchester exploring a critique of the Balfour Declaration by Yosef Castel, a local, Ottoman-born, self-described Palestinian Jew in 1921. Inspired by an ethos stemming from his upbringing in the multinational world of the Ottoman Empire, Castel posited a binational solution to the question of Palestine before the better-known Ashkenazi advocates of this vision, associated with Brit Shalom, entered the scene. We need more exposure to and knowledge of the array of Jewish political expressions on the left engaging with and critiquing Zionism.

In terms of contemporary cultural representation, if you haven’t seen the second season of the Netflix series Mo, you must do so. While Alisa Solomon encouraged JC readers to watch the series a few months ago, it’s also worth considering from the perspective of Sepharadim and Mizrahim. A tremendously necessary, humanizing, and funny portrait of a Palestinian family based in the US—with a detour to Mexico due to draconian US immigration laws—the show misses an opportunity to convey an equally nuanced dynamic with regard to Jewishness. Jewishness is presented largely through Fiddler on he Roof-style caricatures and a hyper-white representation and ongoing commentary about the blue eyes of the character of Guy, an Israeli restaurateur and the new love interest of Mo’s ex-girlfriend. What stories that move beyond the Israeli/Palestinian or Jew/Arab binaries could Mo have told if one of the characters were Mizrahi or Sepharadi—Middle Eastern, of Arabic- and/or Ladino-speaking heritage? Perhaps an heir of the kind of figures featured in the Sephardic Modernity Seminar Series mentioned above? Rather than accepting the Ashkenormativity of American Jewish culture, what if Mo had taken a cue from the work of Palestinian musician Jowan Safadi, whose provocative and must-watch bilingual music video, “To be an Arab,” delves into questions of Arabophobia and self-hatred among Sepharadim and Mizrahim?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Anyone old enough to have lived through the Reagan years can’t help but be horrified by the cult that has formed around his falsified memory. When even Democrats cite him positively, we know the degradation of American life is pretty much complete. This is, after all, the man who financed and armed the murderous contras in Nicaragua, who ignored AIDS, who was the benignant face of unfettered greed—and who brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction. It is this last element of the Reagan nightmare that resides at the heart of Jeff Daniels’s new documentary Television Event. The titular phenomenon is the three-hour, made-for-TV movie The Day After that first aired on November 20th, 1983, when it was seen by 100 million Americans. The Day After was not only effective cinematically, but had an impact on the real world, by showing the American populace what it would look like if we descended into the nuclear war that Reagan was so casually courting.

In Television Event, the story is told by the main driving forces behind the making of the movie, including cocky director Nick Meyer, network suits Brandon Stoddard and Stu Samuels, producer Robert Papazian, and writer Ed Hume. Their narration brings to life the world of 1983, in which the threat of an atomic apocalypse was in the air; Daniels adds in the context of the massive anti-nuclear demonstration in the spring of 1982, when a million people marched in Manhattan against Reagan’s seeming rush to war. As we learn, the production faced an uphill battle: The White House mounted a campaign against the film, network censors tried to soften it, and advertisers were almost impossible to find. (The Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn brand took advantage of the situation and seized promotional spots across the three hours for only $11,000.)

The genius of The Day After was the choice to have it set right in the heart of middle America (Lawrence, Kansas) amidst the daily doings of a group of its residents. It was the bucolic America of Reagan’s ads—the “Real America” of Republican fantasy—that we saw literally obliterated. (No one who has seen the film needs reminding of just how graphic it was: the people incinerated, the flames engulfing everything, skeletal systems made visible before the bodies vanished in the nuclear storm.) The movie was intended as a warning, and it worked. After it made the prospect of nuclear devastation cinematically real, the American public made their feelings felt and finally had a sensible conversation about Reagan’s disastrous policies. Two months later at his State of the Union address, the president had to sound like a peacenik.

It may be true that we’re living in a Golden Age of television, but the splintering of media consumption means that no such shared spectacle will be possible again. If the 1980s were no aesthetic high point for the medium, Television Event makes a compelling case that these three hours justified its existence.

The Book of Numbers starts with, well, numbers. While the book’s Hebrew name of Bamidbar, “in the wilderness,” refers to the Israelites’ travels through the desert, the English title aptly captures the main activity of our parshah: a census. This census does not, as we might expect, count every Israelite embarking on the journey through the wilderness, but rather “every male, head by head . . . from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms.” This is only the first of many censuses taken in the book—a phenomenon that Rashi attributes to divine love: God cares about each person and so checks in on them, one by one. But while Rashi’s reading explains the repeated censuses in Bamidbar, it opens up another question about our parshah: Why are only able-bodied men the subjects of God’s love?

While Rashi himself doesn’t wrestle with the implications of counting only this portion of the population, some of his heirs show more sensitivity to the problem in their response to an interpretation he offers elsewhere. In his commentary on the Talmud, Rashi suggests that an area qualifies as “reshut harabim”—the public domain, in which carrying is prohibited on Shabbat according to biblical law—if it contains at least 600,000 people, more or less the final count in our parshah, because this is the approximate count of “flags of the desert,” or the number of Israelites who traveled through the wilderness. (This move exemplifies the way that this figure became paradigmatic for denoting a significant quantity of people in halachah.) The medieval interpreters known as the Tosafot, who were Rashi’s students and grandchildren, raise a perhaps proto-feminist objection about Rashi’s comment: If the number of people required to qualify a space as reshut harabim is equivalent to the number of Israelites who wandered through the desert, that number included women and children, and 600,000 is thus a dramatic undercount! Still, the Tosafot resolve their quandary about defining a reshut harabim, somewhat unsatisfyingly, by saying that halachah must simply be based on the exact numbers provided in the Torah, and so we do not count more than the number of people the Torah explicitly offers.

But I wonder if we can read more deeply into this insistence that a full public is equivalent to the number of men who are able to fight. In his recent book, Perfect Victims, the Palestinian poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd explores “humanization,” writing powerfully about how only some Palestinian people are considered mournable by the West. “We are women and children, always,” he writes, “and if we are men, then we are frail and elderly, reiterating our nonviolence, gesturing at each other’s amputated limbs, the branches cut from our trees, more crosses to carry.” In other words, in order to be mourned, Palestinians must be, per the book’s title, “perfect victims.”

El-Kurd notes that “when eulogizing a Palestinian man . . . the colonizer’s language commands that we . . . exclude him from the ranks of our fighters . . . Obituaries like these demand that we sew the wings of angels on the Palestinian’s back, so that he will then, and only then, become mournable.” Read in the present political context, Bamidbar offers a corrective to this mode of thinking: By counting the people who might seem to be the least vulnerable, able-bodied men of fighting age, our parshah challenges us to see every person as beloved, valuable, and mournable, insisting that our care should not only be for the idealized “women and children.” Bamidbar thus gestures at something seemingly simple yet nevertheless broadly contested: God cares about every life. God is not only the God of the perfectly weak, the angelic, the photogenic sufferers. God treasures—and mourns—each one of God’s precious children, wings or not.

I wrote the first draft of this dvar Torah the day before two Israeli embassy employees were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum, a relatively new community museum that highlights the vibrant history and present of Jewish life in Washington, DC, which just opened an exhibit on local queer Jewish history that I have been excited to see. Since then, I have struggled with what to say here about this act of violence. The event is too present in my mind and in my community to omit these deaths from a conversation about mournability. And yet it seems disingenuous at best to apply El-Kurd’s words about the mournability of Palestinian life to Israeli diplomats—especially after Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and as the US and Israel begin to weaponize my community’s mourning and fear to continue the killing. I can only pray that when we grieve or feel afraid, it pushes us toward hurting more deeply and turning the world upside-down—until it is unrecognizable because ongoing catastrophe is made impossible.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.