Aug

22

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Stepping in to moderate between the divergent movie tastes of me and my husband (me: ’90s buddy comedies; him: long, plotless arthouse films), a friend recommended The Plot Against Harry. Readers, I’ve rarely been so excited to recommend something to this list. The film—a dramedy about a Jewish bookie just out of prison and pushed into a more honest lifestyle by the changing demographics of his New York City turf—was made by Michael Roemer in 1969 but went entirely unrecognized and unreleased in its time. When Roemer retrieved it from the drawer in 1990, it hit its mark. It screened at Cannes that year and was later picked up by the Criterion Collection.

In his 2023 review of the film in the New Yorker, coinciding with a run at Film Forum, Richard Brody praised the swift pacing, the “breathless rush of action . . . brought to life with a teeming cast of clamorous characters who infuse frame after frame with hectic energy.” Though there is always something “happening” on screen, the plot feels somewhat tangential to the core of the film—a quality that reminded me, in some ways, of the Coen brothers’ masterpiece The Big Lebowski. “Roemer unleashes his lurching panoply of dramatic incidents in a rapid succession of scenes with no breathing room between them. The result is like a piece of music with the rests taken out . . . producing a nerve-jangling cluster of dissonances,” Brody writes.

The film’s portrayal of mid-century Jewishness—gleaned as we accompany Harry to weddings, bar mitzvahs, and even a bris, where he attempts to reconnect with his estranged family—is refreshingly straightforward and unsentimental. More significant to the portrait, and to Harry’s bottom line, is the fact that white flight has destroyed his customer base, as Jewish neighborhoods have become largely Black and Latino. This gives Harry’s former henchmen, who better reflect the new demographic, the chance to pull Harry’s business out from under him. That Harry doesn’t want to make good or go straight only makes his definitive turn in that direction more delightful, the product of surrender rather than an attack of conscience.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): When I picked up Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman from my local bookstore, the cashier called it“wacky and fantastic.” I can think of no better way to describe it myself.

I’m tempted to compare it with other, more canonical works of Irish modernism, and The Third Policeman does indeed share the sort of existential bleakness that can only really be captured via metaphor—the taste of black coffee, or maybe gin. The commonalities with Beckett in particular run deep: there’s the delight in absurdly unproductive dialogue (here often between the narrator and Joe, his soul), the eerie flatness of landscapes (a police barracks is described as literally two-dimensional), the obsession with man’s collapse into the mechanical, even the focus on bicycles. While these similarities are striking, to stress them too strongly would be to minimize the book’s most peculiar and interesting elements.

The substance of the story is that the narrator has murdered a rich old man for money, which is plainly stated in the first sentence. The first-person account that follows begins as a typical noir-style telling of the crime and its aftermath, then verges into a surrealist landscape where the narrator—now nameless, having forgotten his own name, must embark on a mostly nonsensical quest to find the black box that contains his victim’s cash.

The narrator is a scholarly disciple of a fictional obscure philosopher, de Selby—the book’s central crime was primarily motivated by a need to secure funds to publish his De Selby Index, a comprehensive commentary on the philosopher’s work. Throughout his travels, the narrator is given to long discourses on de Selby’s arguments against the existence of time, his schemes to replace houses with roofless, tarp-constructed “habitats,” and his conception of a sausage-shaped world. These digressions feature footnotes, often many pages long, addressing nuances, complexities, and even the arguments (and scandalous lives) of other fictional commentators. What becomes clear through these insertions is that de Selby is little more than an eccentric quack, and that the narrator, despite his years of study and singular devotion, is a scholar in the worst possible sense—a pedant.

There’s a pathetic sense of almost getting it which runs throughout the book. The narrator tries, over and over, to manipulate, reason with, and evade the policemen of the story, but despite their apparent ineptitude, they always end up on top. They may seem benign and rather simple to the narrator, but these policemen understand the backwards, unjust, paradoxical governing principles of this fantastical world, and he does not. Even when he “escapes” from them, he ends up right back in their clutches at the story’s conclusion—the obvious implications of which the narrator does not seem to grasp (and which I’ll leave unspoiled).

I don’t mean for my melancholy reading to undersell the playfulness at the core of The Third Policeman. Another shared trait with Beckett’s best work: jokes are the engine of the book, and the tragedy at its core only exists through the unremittingly comic nature of its scenes. Maybe a better comparison here is to Kafka’s novels, where you get the sense that the whole situation is a cruel joke that almost everyone is in on—except the protagonist.

Yet, unlike in Kafka, this protagonist’s crime is real and obvious. He has murdered not just for greed, but for scholarly self-aggrandizement. An interesting development with this in mind: when the black box is rediscovered—having disappeared for much of the plot, despite being the narrative lynchpin—its contents have metamorphosed into “omnium,” a mysterious substance which can, through obscure means, be turned into anything. Money has gone from a material to a quasi-metaphysical motivator.

In a failed bid to publish The Third Policeman during his lifetime, O’Brien proposed a new title: Hell Goes Round and Round. Though the mention of hell may introduce an unwelcome bit of moralizing, I’d argue this would have been a better title. Perhaps the most arresting image in the book is its depiction of “eternity” as a series of long, steel-plated hallways covered with wires and pipes and clocks and dials, going on and on and on, leading only to more machines and more hallways. You’re left with a sense of unending tedium, a feeling that the world is a vast mechanistic system always perceptible, its details always right in front of you, yet its workings floating just beyond your comprehension. You have to hope that your own eternal fate—or, in the broadest sense, your history—is not so bleak.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Julia Loktev’s brilliant, disturbing, depressing, exhilarating documentary on Vladimir Putin’s opponents, My Undesirable Friends, is five hours long. I would hope that length wouldn’t deter Jewish Currents readers from seeing a film about people—mainly Russian women journalists in their twenties working at an opposition TV station—who have dedicated and risked their lives to fight a level of tyranny America has not yet reached, nor even approached. It’s a film that, by the fourth hour, had me shedding tears of rage at the cowards in US media and academia who have bent the knee to Donald Trump and his goonish followers when merely criticized and threatened with fines. Meanwhile, the women Loktev films face arrest at any moment, are followed by the security forces, and see their loved ones locked up for treason just for reporting on Putin’s crimes.

The film begins with the young journalists learning to deal with the fact that they’ve been designated foreign agents and will have to label all of their reports as such. They joke about how hard it will be for them to find romantic partners unless those partners also bear the label. Still, they carry on doing their work, expressing fear alongside optimism that the dictatorship can’t possibly last. Some talk of leaving Russia, but they’re determined to stay and see out the fight as long as possible.

Then comes February 2022 and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. As one of the star journalists, Anya, says just before the invasion, she feels “nausea, shame, and disgust.” She goes even further: “I no longer have a country.” The journalists are detained by the intelligence agencies—the FSB and the GRU—but they continue to criticize Putin. Their isolation within an indifferent country doesn’t prevent one reporter at the station from admitting his feeling of guilt over not having done enough to stop the “monster,” as he says, from ruling for more than 20 years. Putin is the only leader they’ve ever known, as he assumed office when most of them were in kindergarten.

The war makes their continued lives in Russia untenable, and many of them flee. They can’t be faulted—this is the government that murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose martyrdom is referenced several times.

“Nausea, shame, and disgust” is what many of us feel here in America too. Our collective failure to prevent Trump means that we, too, bear responsibility for our country’s descent into authoritarianism and degradation. In a perverse way, My Undesirable Friends is an inspiring film. Watching it, one wants to measure up to the young people on the screen. Normally I hate any film that is inspiring, but I exempt this one from my blanket disdain.

What does one say about Jews committing genocide? The Book of Devarim mandates that “you shall not let a soul remain alive” among “the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.” This week’s parshah, Re’eh, includes a cultural corollary to this campaign of extermination: The Israelites are instructed to “tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site.” What are we to make of these texts now, after Israel has flattened nearly every cultural site in Gaza, while bombing and starving its people for nearly two years, often invoking Devarim’s words as encouragement and justification?

One might start by observing that, by the Bible’s own account, Devarim’s grand vision was never realized. (I bracket here the question of that story’s historicity—about that I don’t have the foggiest idea, though having been to graduate school, I’m pretty sure no one else does either.) Those Jebusites, for instance? According to the Books of Joshua and Judges, the Israelites either could not or simply did not dispossess them; in both accounts, they continued to dwell in Jerusalem “until this very day.” Even after David conquers the city in 2 Samuel, he is so far from displacing—let alone liquidating—its inhabitants that he later buys a threshing-floor from Araunah, a Jebusite man still described as a “king.” As my colleague and friend Rachel Havrelock argues, in such narratives, Israelites and Jebusites permanently, if uneasily, cohabitate—much as Devarim’s eliminationism awkwardly coexists with more realistic, moderate scriptural voices.

In the Bible, such rival traditions are often unreconciled. Like relatives at a Thanksgiving dinner who have agreed to disagree about “settler colonialism,” they just sit grumpily next to each other. Rabbinic midrash, however, often forces them into explosive dialogue. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, for instance, teaches that Abraham swore an oath to the Jebusites not to take over Jerusalem without their permission. When, several hundred years later, the Israelites arrive from Egypt, the Jebusites erect copper statues in the streets of their city, on which is written Abraham’s oath—and which, whether by magic or moral suasion, prevent the Israelites from conquering the city. Only when David has one of his soldiers remove these statues can he capture Jerusalem.

Behind this odd legend lies a second corpus of texts with which the genocidal Deuteronomist is disagreeing. For the midrash imagines Abraham’s oath by synthesizing several biblical antecedents. It first conflates the Jebusites with the Hittites, from whom, back in Breishit, Abraham bought a burial cave for Sarah, emphasizing his status as a “resident alien” in the land, and exemplifying, as my co-panelist at the wonderful Halachic Left forum David Seidenberg argues, how the patriarchs lived peaceably in Canaan, without attempting to dispossess their neighbors. (The midrash is surely motivated by the fact that, in 2 Samuel, David’s acquisition of Araunah’s threshing-floor conspicuously echoes Abraham’s purchase of the cave—as if to underscore that even the Israelite king is still just one more guest in the land.) The midrash also stirs in Abraham’s non-aggression pact with the Philistine king Avimelekh, from which it derives the idea of an oath to dwell peaceably with non-Israelite neighbors. Against the Deuteronomic narrative of conquest, the midrash pits Breishit’s radically different version.

Through the image of the statues inscribed with Abraham’s oath, the midrash sharpens the conflict between Devarim and Breishit into outright warfare. When Re’eh enjoins the Israelites to expunge Canaanite culture, “obliterating their name” from the land, paradoxically, that includes erasing the memory of our forefather Abraham. To be sure, it would be silly to pretend that Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—as we say, yimach sh’mam, may their names be erased—can adduce no prooftexts for their barbarities. Yet in attempting to annihilate the Palestinians, the ethnonationalists in Israel have nonetheless also trampled over our sacred stories of peaceable coexistence. So too, they have spitefully trashed the Jews’ multi-millennial tradition of stateless survival, what George Steiner called “the torment and the mystery of resilience in Judaism,” which “exemplify, enact, an arduous truth: that human beings must learn to be each other’s guests on this small planet.” The choice to negate our irenic inheritance is, of course, the fascists’ repellent prerogative—but as for me, I hold by the oath of Abraham.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.