Apr

25

2025

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Some years back, the Brooklyn-based dancer and choreographer Hadar Ahuvia needed to renew her Israeli passport, so she headed to the embassy in New York. (Born to kibbutzniks whose own parents were Zionist “pioneers” from Europe, Ahuvia lived in Israel from ages five to ten.) The Hebrew-speaking guard asked her a standard security question about any items she carried: “Kol ma she’yesh lach, hu shelach?”—“Everything you have is yours?”

For Ahuvia, the query landed as nothing short of ontological. As part of a project investigating the folk dances that Jews living in Palestine invented beginning in the 1930s, Ahuvia had been asking herself that very question: Do the steps and movements she had been performing since childhood belong to her when they have been appropriated from other cultures? She has them, in her body—passed down from her mother, who led an Israeli folk dance troupe—but can she claim them as hers?

Ahuvia shrewdly addressed this question through performing the dances themselves in a series of live shows. (I saw and admired versions in 2018 and 2019.) In these performances, she unpacked the troubling origins and propagation of dances like “Hineh Ma Tov” and “Dodi Li” among others that any of us who went to Jewish summer camp grapevine-stepped and bounced our knees to. Now, the director Tatyana Tenenbaum has extended Ahuvia’s exploration in a multi-layered documentary film, Everything You Have Is Yours, showing at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Manhattan from May 2nd to May 8th. (The May 6th screening is co-hosted by Jewish Currents and will feature a conversation afterwards between editor-in-chief Arielle Angel and Tenenbaum.)

The documentary traces and expands upon Ahuvia’s research—often incorporating archival film of dance performances in pre-State Israel and throughout the decades that followed—and digs further into the paradox the choreographer confronts as she detaches from the Zionism that was her family creed while struggling to decide if she also wants to, or even can, let go of the embodied memory of the dances. We see Ahuvia rehearsing and performing her live shows with her assembled troupe of dancers and designers, and we also hear from some of those colleagues—American Jews, non-Jews, and Israelis with a range of relationships to Zionism.

Folklore, of course, is always a construction that does identitarian work. (One astonishing scene shows footage of Ahuvia’s mom teaching Israeli folk dances to “Messianic Jews”—doctrinal Christians who practice some Jewish rituals—who seem to seek a cultural hekhsher from these lessons.) The concept of authenticity is also always constructed: Culture constantly adapts as it encounters new stimuli; Israeli dance is hardly unique among folk traditions, which liberally incorporate what they come into contact with. But the deliberateness with which Israeli folk dances were assembled by agglomerating and modifying bits of Rumanian horas, Yemenite steps, and Palestinian dabka—while seeking to supplant these origins—enacted a violent form of appropriation, especially, Ahuvia suggests, when their accompanying songs celebrated Zionist military victories or boasted that Jewish settlers had made an empty desert bloom.

Meanwhile, the film also highlights the profound joy of connecting corporally to a cultural legacy. For example, the renowned dancer and choreographer Ze’eva Cohen, who came to New York from Israel in the early 1960s, speaks movingly in an interview in the film of the revelatory moment in her career when she began delving into and reclaiming dances of her Yemenite heritage. Nowhere is the vitality of this process stronger than in scenes featuring the Freedom Dabka Group, a Palestinian troupe based in Staten Island. Co-founder Amer Abdelrasoul notes —in a comment that is striking in part because of how it expresses the same underlying idea but with the opposite emotional valence as Ahuvia’s quandary—that dancing dabka is “not only fun and cool, it helps Palestinians form an identity.”

As the film continued, I felt myself yearning for a direct encounter between the Freedom Dabka Group and Ahuvia and her collaborators. But such a meeting never materializes on screen. Because it can’t—at least not until the two groups are on equal footing. For now, we hear the stomps of both troupes as the camera cuts between them toward the film’s end. And then, amid a crowd in Prospect Park to whom FDG is teaching some dabka steps, Ahuvia bobs along, smiling.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): When an acquaintance recently asked me about my favorite novels, I was surprised to realize that the shelf where I keep my most beloved books holds only one work of fiction: Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. The 1964 “novel”—it’s more a collection of linked stories—details life in and around working-class Brooklyn in the 1950s. I first encountered it in a creative writing class almost two decades ago, where it was presented as a notable example of “voice”: The text is full of idiosyncratic attempts to capture its characters’ speech, often barreling past respected conventions of punctuation and spelling to leave the impression of a manuscript whose typewritten pages are still hot from a feverish typing spree.

I do love the book’s voice—it’s angry and musical and shakes loose rhythms of syntax so ingrained I rarely perceive them at all—even if I now find the creative writing totem of “voice” a ridiculous way to approach such a rich, complicated, and unsettling social portrait. As with many of the books I loved early in life, though, I feel compelled to cast a suspicious eye on Last Exit and my affection for it: Can I really go around recommending this violent, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, racist set of stories to readers in 2025? “Last Exit to Brooklyn is not a book one ‘recommends,’” reads a 1964 review that also calls the book “repulsive,” its characters “more animals or ‘things’ really than people.” The book sparked a landmark English trial for obscenity violations, if not for these very reasons, then for the fact that it dared to depict the illicit underbelly of Brooklyn life at all. (Today’s Brooklynites, meanwhile, can find a signed post-trial edition at The Word Is Change for $500.)

The book’s most memorable story, “Strike,” takes us into the pained and desperate inner world of Harry Black, the “worst lathe operator” of a 1,000-man factory. As the union’s shop steward, Harry loves to spend a workday bossing around his rank-and-file coworkers, just as his overseer bosses him. When the union goes on strike and he’s put in charge of strike headquarters, he grows drunk on his own flimsy power, guzzling booze purchased with union funds while his co-workers plod the picket line. Meanwhile, Harry becomes an unwitting token of strike negotiations: The company is so intent on firing him that it is willing to extend the strike for that alone, and union officials see him as a useful diversion from their other asks, their “builtin patsy.” On strike myself two years ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about that uneasy story; when I revisited it, I found a searing critique not only of union dynamics, but of the machinations of capitalism under which those dynamics are forged.

In a review of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake from Jewish Currents’s recent Winter issue, executive editor Nora Caplan-Bricker identifies in that novel a “nihilism . . . too airless to support the flicker of a counterreality.” The description gave language to a quality I’ve observed in a number of recent works, notably Tony Tulathimutte’s brilliantly grim Rejection. That book, like Last Exit, compels us into the language and psyches of a series of characters whose fates nosedive ever more bleakly. While Selby’s book would seem to traffic in an equally grim perspective, Last Exit manages to avoid feeling airless. Instead, what’s so memorable about a story like “Strike” is the compassion it demands we feel for its sociopathic protagonist. In Caplan-Bricker’s words, Selby’s Last Exit offers us a “generative ambivalence,” the kind that might inaugurate the possibility of exit, even from an abject world.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): For some reason I can’t explain, I avoided Amalia Ulman’s 2021 debut film, El Planeta, for a couple of years. But the other day, uninspired by all the options on the many streaming services I subscribe to, I decided to give it a shot. Within minutes I was smitten with the main characters, the movie, and the director. It’s a quirky—but not too quirky—little film about an impoverished mom and daughter who refuse to let the world see their actual state, living entirely false and stylish lives. (The film stars Ulman and her actual mother, and contains more than a few directly autobiographical elements; like their real-life analogues, the central duo are Argentines who moved to Gijon, Spain, during one of Argentina’s many financial crises.) Having finally seen this marvelous first effort by Ulman, I was overjoyed to learn about the follow-up, Magic Farm, which opens in US theaters today.

It does not disappoint. Before she started directing, Ulman was a visual artist, and her keen aesthetic sense is evident from the striking first image—a weird, distorted overhead shot of what looks like someone on a bike on a furry ball, but is soon revealed to show a person on a motor scooter riding on a dirt road. We’re almost immediately transported to a street in New York, where a young crew (which includes Ulman herself, as well as Chloë Sevigny) is shooting a film about the latest fashion in Mexico—men wearing long, pointed shoes—as part of a series on strange trends around the world. The project soon takes them to San Cristobal, Argentina, to capture the craze for Big Carlito, a singer who wears bunny ears and whose videos are supposedly all the rage. But it turns out that the crew member who set up the shoot has screwed up: There are San Cristobals all over South America, and no one in this one, out in the dusty countryside, knows anything about the legendary Carlito. Undeterred by this fatal flaw in their plan—or the fact that only Ulman’s character speaks Spanish—the crew decides to stay and invent a fad to film instead.

Along the way, they encounter locals loaded with eccentricities, like the woman whose house is decorated with French phrases and drawings of the Eiffel Tower (a tribute, she claims, to a long-ago affair with Gérard Depardieu). But as in El Planeta, Ulman doesn’t allow the characters’ peculiarities to overshadow their real human qualities, as they wrestle with failed love and other personal crises. As the absurd but touching drama unfolds, Ulman makes fabulous and eccentric use of color and patterns, transforming this drab town in the middle of nowhere into a vibrant, captivating somewhere.

The first seven chapters of the Book of Vayikra catalog a meticulous inventory of sacrifices—which combination of animals to bring on which occasions and the specific actions the priests must take in each case. But these rituals don’t move from theory to practice until the events that culminate in our parshah, Shemini, which begins with the words: “And it was, on the eighth day.” The day in question follows a week-long process to turn Aaron and his four sons into the priestly caste known as the Kohanim. This extended coronation was mandated back in Parshat Tetzaveh in the Book of Shemot, when Moses detailed the design of Aaron’s clothing and the sacrificial ceremony that would grant him and his male progeny the priesthood for all time. But while in Shemot the purpose of the sacrifices is trumpeted repeatedly (“to make them priests for Me,” or a similar phrase, appears six times in two chapters), here the end goal goes conspicuously unmentioned. Over the course of the four chapters detailing the performance of the ritual, the word “priest” isn’t mentioned even once. Instead, the neutral rationale “as God commanded,” or other variants, is repeated a total of 11 times. Do as God commanded, and, as grimly noted, you will not die. Thus, ironically, during the very week when Aaron inaugurates the priesthood, he seems the furthest from it; no mention is made of who he is about to become.

Perhaps this shift reflects the fact that, in the time since these instructions were delivered, a cataclysm has unfolded on Aaron’s watch: The Israelites worshipped a Golden Calf fashioned for them by Aaron himself, his debut as ritual leader ending in grotesque parody. Though Aaron was spared from immediate punishment, treated more like an overwhelmed substitute teacher than an idolatrous mastermind, he must have been profoundly shaken by his misjudgment. In the fallout from the incident, how could he not have wondered: Is God angry with me? Will I get past this failure of leadership, or am I the intended target of God’s post-Calf pronouncement that “he who has sinned against Me, him only will I erase from My book”?

And so, with no reassurance that the ritual’s original purpose would be fulfilled, Aaron and his sons are left to carry out commandments given in a better time. On each of the seven days, they help Moses slaughter three animals: a bull as a cleansing offering, a ram as a gift offering, and a second ram as an installation offering. But despite this sacrificial rite, Aaron must have still felt considerable trepidation. As an early rabbinic midrash imagines it, when the seven days concluded and the divine fire still had not descended to consume the sacrifices, Aaron “was upset and said: ‘I know that the Holy Blessed One is angry with me and that it is because of me that the Shechinah has not descended for Israel.’”

Thus, when our parshah opens on the eighth day of seven, we are in a high-stakes overtime. This day was not part of the plan in Tetzaveh, but, Moses explains, God has commanded it, and, this time, God’s glory would appear. The order and scope of this day is very different from the previous week. The sacrificial protocol zooms out from Aaron and his sons and includes sacrifices on behalf of the broader community as well. At first, everything goes well: After offering the sacrifices, Moses and Aaron “blessed the people and the presence of God appeared to all the people”; when divine fire then descends to consume the offerings, the people are awed.

But it soon appears that the forgiveness the people thought had been attained when God accepted the sacrifices was fleeting. Soon after, tragedy strikes as two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, are abruptly killed and consumed by God’s fire. Terrified, we may imagine, that the people’s atonement has come to an end, Moses responds with rapid action, forbidding Aaron and his remaining two sons from mourning and insisting instead that they finish the atonement ritual. In this moment of tragic uncertainty, Moses cannot allow for the derailment of a sacrifice meant to bring about collective forgiveness. He soon discovers, though, that Aaron and his sons have disobeyed his instructions: Rather than burning part of the cleansing offering and eating the remainder themselves, the priests have thrown the entire animal into the fire, consuming none of it. Moses flies into a rage. “Why did you not eat the cleansing offering in the sacred area?” he asks them. “For it is most holy, and it is what was given to you to remove the guilt of the community and to make expiation for them before God.” In other words, without Aaron and his sons consuming the cleansing offering, Moses is worried there will be no way to obtain communal atonement for the sin of the Golden Calf. Aaron, however, knows that atonement is not within his reach at that moment: “Look, today they brought their cleansing offering and their gift offering before God, and these things have happened to me. Had I eaten a cleansing offering today, would it be good in the eyes of God?” Aaron asks. Moses knows the laws of the ritual order and he knows the stakes—more people could die if the sacrifice is messed up! But Aaron understands the ritual’s soul and knows that, stricken with grief and spurned by God, he and his remaining sons cannot cleanse the people of their sin by eating the sacred meal. In refusing to bear the sin of his people, Aaron, for the first time, obtains a level of ritual authority that his brother cannot challenge. He refuses to pretend he can make things better. By failing, and reckoning with his failure, Aaron becomes a true leader, assuming the moral and ritual stature of the High Priest.

Today, as we confront the profound failures of our institutions, it’s clear we will need new leaders to guide us through the wilderness of this moment of grief and guilt, of doubt about the future and fear of what we have become. Our new leaders must be people who can acknowledge the spiritual precarity of our situation while also honestly recognizing the limits that constrain us in our search for expiation or transformation. The crimes committed in our name have consequences, and whatever ways we might find to reckon with and atone for them, there is nothing we can do to erase them.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.