Aug

15

2025

We are seeking questions for a special mailbag episode of On the Nose. What would you like to ask the staff of Jewish Currents? You can send your questions—either written or recorded—to editor@jewishcurrents.org with the subject: Mailbag.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): Public opinion polling over the past 60 years shows a relatively steady erosion of Americans’ trust in government. In 1958, 73% of Americans said they “trust the government to do what is right.” As of last May, the number of Americans who say the same is at 22%. But somehow, the Central Intelligence Agency—the subject of Tim Weiner’s excellent 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA—has fared better. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 52% of Americans held a positive view of the CIA. But if more Americans read Weiner’s book, their views would likely change.

In 600 pages of matter-of-fact prose, Weiner convincingly shows that the CIA’s history is one of failure after failure after failure. This poor record stretches all the way back to the CIA’s earliest years—in the 1950s, the agency tried to penetrate the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, and instead wound up sending hundreds of men to their deaths. The CIA’s spies repeatedly failed to pass themselves off as locals, imperiling their ability to collect intelligence. The CIA has also never been able to predict, or even make educated guesses about, future events: The agency was repeatedly caught off guard by developments such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Even when the CIA has nominally succeeded in fomenting a coup, the consequences have been bloody. These overthrows have often ended in results not to the CIA’s liking, such as when the CIA helped oust Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as Shah, only for the Shah’s murderous and corrupt rule to lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic revolution.

My one frustration is that Weiner appears to be a believer in the basic legitimacy of the CIA. He urges the US government to invest billions of dollars in making the CIA better. “If we want American fortunes to prosper in the future, we will need the best intelligence. Teaching a new generation how to know the enemy is the place to begin,” he writes. Weiner’s book does not stop to consider that the CIA is a core part of a rapacious empire that has immiserated millions of people around the world, and thus should perhaps be abolished, rather than reformed to be made more efficient. Still, the details of Weiner’s book remain important to learn. They provide more than enough reason to reconsider the hallowed place of the CIA in the American imagination.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Many of you have no doubt already seen Ari Aster’s Eddington. Why I went to see it is partly a mystery to me, since longtime readers may have noticed that popular American films are foreign to me. I think it’s because I have come to doubt many of the precautionary measures of the time of Covid. I thought Eddington would give me much to think about along these lines. It didn’t. I didn’t know what the hell was going on in the last quarter of the film, though I thought it a magnificent portrayal of what Philip Roth called in another context “the American Berserk.”

All of this is a lead-in to another film about the lockdown that does allow us to reflect on that period, Olivier Assayas’ lovely and elegiac Suspended Time. It is a very French film, set in a very French old house, in a very French countryside. The house is inhabited by two very French couples—Paul, a filmmaker, his filmmaker girlfriend Morgane, his rock critic brother Etienne, and Etienne’s partner Carole. The latter couple is newly established after years as lovers during Etienne’s marriage. The story is, as Assayas told me when I interviewed him last week, all true. The disputes and the conversations were all taken from life. Suspended Time was shot in Assayas’ family’s country home, with its book-lined walls featuring the library of his father, a screenwriter. The situations in the film and the activities of the character are exactly how Assayas and his brother—a filmmaker and a rock critic, like the male characters—acted as they lived through what Assayas told me was the first real historical event of his life.

There were many of us who had a good lockdown, my wife and I among those fortunate. Paul, Carole, Morgane, and Etienne are having a very good lockdown as well. They are finally removed from the world and are able to concentrate on those they are with and whom they love. They can read, play tennis, discuss Abelard and Heloise, play “name that tune,” and lament the deaths of musicians they love, like John Prine (this is, after all, a very French film, and the love of American musicians is very French).

Paul is more than a bit of a maniac when it comes to Covid mitigation measures. He insists, for example, that groceries be left outdoors for four hours before being brought into the house. This exasperates Etienne, who, for his part, believes in respecting the recommended measures, but only those he considers reasonable. Paul, along with his mania that leads him to watch videos on handwashing, is also obsessed with scraping the bottom of a newly purchased pot in which he has burned fresh strawberries. All of this, Assayas assured me, was what happened, and he admitted to me that at the time he was surprised to see his neuroses manifest themselves in his obsession with the ruined pot. In the closed-in circumstances of the lockdown, it is all utterly plausible.

But the film is ultimately about the many ways in which life went on. The housemates are in touch with their work, continue to write, and see their psychiatrists via Zoom in the woods. Their love for each other deepens.

France went through much torment during the pandemic, but none of it appears in Suspended Time. Assayas told me he thought people would change their lives as a result of the pandemic, but they didn’t. As Michel Houellebecq predicted, after Covid life is the same, only worse. But as Suspended Times shows us, for some, perhaps many, Covid forced us to live within ourselves and with those we love. For the characters here, it was a good pandemic, indeed.

Dick Flacks (JC Council member): Soon after October 7, Josh Waletzky, a key figure in the decades-long project to nurture Yiddish culture, led a Yiddish songwriting workshop at the Yiddish New York Festival. Many of the songs were emotional responses to Israeli actions in Gaza and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. That creative outburst has culminated in a remarkable, multi-layered collection of 17 songs, called Lider mit Palestine: New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love. The work is available for digital streaming and downloading at Bandcamp, with proceeds going to Gaza Birds Singing—a musical, educational, and therapeutic project in Gaza.

Waletzky wrote and performed one of the songs in the collection and helped shape several of the others. His co-producers are Isabel Frey, a noted performer and scholar of Yiddish song based in Vienna, and Joe Dobkin, a Brooklyn-based audio producer and poet. Frey and Dobkin perform as well. They’re joined by other seminal figures in the Yiddish song movement, including Michael Alpert, Daniel Kahn, and Jordan Wax.

Many of the songs are politically and artistically bold. Frey co-created the remarkable Goles-Himen (diaspora hymn) which sets bluntly anti-nationalistic lyrics to the melody of the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah. The lyrics, which quote the Labor Bund slogan, “here where we live is our homeland,” reject the need for a state and armies—“out of the prison of all the nation-states, all around is Yerusholaim.”

There are songs that agonizingly lament genocide, that call on the Jewish history of resistance to urge protest against apartheid and genocide, and that are addressed to friends and brothers who deny Palestinian humanity in the name of Jewish survival. All of this is expressed in Yiddish, and while my Yiddish is quite minimal, I was much moved by each of the songs before reading the translations.

The intent of this project is, of course, to present a strong Jewish denunciation of the Israeli assault on the Palestinian people—and it does so with force. It’s also a remarkable work of art: a fusion of several song traditions—tkhine and hasidic chants, partisan and labor anthems, folk ballads—to make new Yiddish songs that I find transformative.

Parshat Eikev, like the Book of Devarim as a whole, repeatedly articulates a vision of the Israelites settling the land of Canaan through force. At the beginning of our parshah, we are told: “You will eat up all the peoples which the Lord your God will deliver to you,” and in its conclusion, we are promised: “Every place where the sole of your foot treads will be yours.” This focus on the exclusivity of the Jewish claim to the land—and the sanctioning of the violent dispossession of the local population—bitterly calls to mind central strands of Zionist thought, from Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall to an insistence by many contemporary Religious Zionist thinkers that settling the land of Israel is the Torah’s central commandment.

And yet, in the 12th century, when Maimonides wrote a comprehensive list of every commandment in the Torah, he omitted conquest and settlement of the land. One reason for this is an ambiguous point in Hebrew grammar, in which the imperfect future tense can accommodate instruction (“you must”), prediction (“you will”), permission (“you may”), and even warning (“you may well”). Thus, a verse that is commonly translated as “you will inherit the land” could indeed be an eternal imperative, but it could also be a contingent, circumstantial description that applies only in a limited context.

Beneath this grammatical issue lies a fundamental theological question about when terrible bloodshed is morally permissible. The Sifrei is clear that it requires God’s active authorization, going so far as to frame violent dispossession solely in terms of divine agency: “God shall dispossess; flesh and blood shall not dispossess,” the text states. At another point, the Sifrei notes: “You do what is yours to do [cleave to God]; God will do what is God’s to do [conquest].” But even this doesn’t necessarily clarify matters. The medieval commentator Nachmanides (whose list of commandments does include settlement of the land) makes the general point that Devarim moves freely, without signposting, between the simple future tense, describing what will come to be, and the subjunctive mood that indicates words of caution. Thus, when Moses states that the conquest will proceed gradually to avoid a profusion of wild beasts, Nachmanides suggests that the language of the text is at once a promise of safety and a warning that Israel may sin and lose divine protection.

Perhaps because statements about conquering the land are ambiguous within the Torah itself, the Israelites are prone to misinterpreting the extent of divine support for these endeavors. In the Book of Bamidbar, for example, when God postpones the conquest of the land of Israel until the next generation due to the Israelites’ reservations, the people belatedly try to fulfill what they understood as a command by storming the hill country. But without God’s backing, they are soundly rebuffed. God’s support is elusive even once the invasion is in full swing in the Book of Joshua. After one member of the tribe of Judah secretly steals sacred property, the people lose a bloody skirmish. Only once expiation has been made can they continue their campaign. So perhaps it is no surprise that Joshua’s conquest is partial, and despite the stern warnings of Devarim about the importance of conquering the land, the Israelites settle down with Canaanite peoples in their midst. The second half of the Book of Joshua is sprinkled with such concessions: “The people of Israel did not dispossess the Gashurite or the Maacite. Gashur and Maacat live among Israel until this day.”

While thirst for total conquest animates the Torah’s designs for Canaan, it seems that the text’s fundamental logic—rooted in the Israelites’ chosenness—fatally undermines that goal. The election of this people as the vehicle for God’s purpose in the world, regardless of their capability or virtue, is essentially paradoxical: Despite the alignment between God’s and the Israelites’ goals, the people’s sinfulness makes it impossible for the divine directive, in all its horror, to be achieved. The totalizing impulse ascribed to God is saved from its monstrous expression only by the feebleness of the chosen mortal agents. But if God elected a people who could only ever fall short, perhaps the Torah’s lesson, lost on advocates of Zionist conquest, is ultimately that no people is perfect enough to commit slaughter with divine support. So what fate awaits a people that confidently claims such sanction, and seeks to accomplish by its own power what God’s involvement never could?

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