Aug

8

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.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): A few years ago, some friends and I decided to watch all the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. We convened for Blood Simple (1984) and Raising Arizona (1987) before life got in the way, and the project languished. So when the podcast Blank Check, which explores directors’ complete filmographies, began covering the Coens, I took the opportunity to dive back in with my first-ever viewings of Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991). They’re wildly different films: the former a gangster pastiche mixing manners and mania, energy and elegy; the latter a slow-burning, surrealist buddy comedy whose black humor gradually flickers into horror. But one thing they share, besides the Coens’ trademark verbose wit and cinematographic precision, is Italian American John Turturro brilliantly portraying an insufferable Jew.

In the delightful Blank Check episode about Miller’s Crossing—on which co-hosts Griffin Newman and David Sims are joined by director Ari Aster, whose uproarious new film Eddington undoubtedly owes a debt to the Coens—Aster reflects on the famed fraternal team’s early reception, noting that “Jewish critics like J. Hoberman accused them of being antisemitic.” That was news to me! Sure enough, Hoberman, a titan at The Village Voice, accused Barton Fink of choreographing a “sadomasochistic embrace” of “America’s two most potent Jewish stereotypes . . . the vulgar Hollywood mogul and the idealistic New York communist”; he repeated the charge nearly verbatim in a 2009 letter to The New York Times, in which he wrote that the Coens give no “hint that their minstrel-show battle royale was occurring at the acme of worldwide anti-Semitism.” (He also affirmed his interpretation of the pivotal scene in Miller’s Crossing, in which Turturro’s character begs for his life, as “disturbing” for its portrait of “a whimpering Jew down on his knees.”)

I actually appreciated Hoberman’s ridiculous disdain, which made me reflect on the films’ use of Jewishness. Miller’s Crossing certainly turns on the fate of the pitiable Bernie Bernbaum, yet the scene in question finds Turturro imbuing the irritating character with wrenching pathos—and on his designated executioner, along with the viewer, not relishing but longing to prevent his demise. Barton Fink, meanwhile, repeatedly highlights how antisemitism shapes perceptions of the characters Hoberman decries as mere stereotypes. When the titular playwright—who, like his real-life inspiration Clifford Odets, is struggling to achieve a new high art for the common man within the constraints of the studio system—is interviewed by a pair of homicide detectives (one German, one Italian) at the rundown hotel where he’s living, they ask if his name is Jewish. Barton confirms it, and one of the cops replies, “I didn’t think this dump was restricted.” Earlier, in his rambling introductory monologue, studio exec Jack Lipnick (played by Michael Lerner) alludes to what he and Barton share. “I mean I’m from New York myself—well, Minsk if you wanna go all the way back,” he rambles, “which we won’t if you don’t mind, and I ain’t askin’.” The urge to connect over a traumatic inheritance, to express it, suppress it, escape it—all stashed into a single evanescent aside. In that same scene, Jack grandly dubs himself “bigger and meaner and louder than any other kike in this town,” lording over Barton, bonding with him, and rejoicing in the fact of his alterity all at once. By the end of the film, when Barton has failed him, Jack strips the slur of affection and turns it on the writer: “You think the whole world revolves around whatever rattles inside that little kike head of yours.” It’s no coincidence that this indictment, which marks the end of any ethnic solidarity, comes just as Jack has donned a fake military uniform and announced his intention to enlist after the attack on Pearl Harbor; now he’s the brave, virile American, Barton the lowly, cerebral Jew.

This is not to say that it’s wrong to call Jack or Barton stereotypes—or, as The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum put it, “broad, comic-book style Jewish caricatures.” The point is that there’s nothing inherently noxious about Jews playing with those paradigms. But Jewish accusations of irresponsible representation have long dogged Jewish artists—most memorably Philip Roth, whose Alexander Portnoy was described by Gershom Scholem as “the loathsome figure whom the anti-Semites have conjured in their imagination and portrayed in their literature.” In the Blank Check episode, Aster remarks that he himself is “a Jewish filmmaker who has seen that tradition playing out before his very eyes.” Perhaps he had in mind PJ Grisar’s review of his messy masterpiece Beau Is Afraid (2023) in The Forward. “To accept this film as Jewish,” Grisar wrote, “is to buy into the most strained tropes about overbearing Jewish mothers.” I’d counter that Aster self-consciously heightens that archetype—and the corresponding figure of the anxious, impotent son—to a nearly theological extreme, conjuring a thrillingly absurd secular Jewish mythology. If the basic material is superficial and familiar, its manipulation into an ambiguous and irreverent engagement with Jewishness is anything but.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Roman Polanski had to know that in making An Officer and a Spy, his 2019 account of the Dreyfus Affair—which is screening at Film Forum in Manhattan for the next two weeks—people all over the world would assume that a film about a Jew unjustly accused of a heinous crime was intended as a barely veiled attempt at its director’s exculpation. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who in 1894 was found guilty of espionage both by a court martial and by a large section of the French public, was sentenced to prison on Devil’s Island; Polanski, of course, never stood trial for allegedly raping a minor, and far from spending years on a dreadful isle, he has lived a fairly good life in Parisian exile since fleeing the United States in 1978, aside from his 2009 arrest and brief incarceration in Switzerland.

Polanski made an interesting choice not to focus the film on Dreyfus, who is played with steely stoicism by Louis Garrel, but who is all but absent. We see his degradation—the stripping of his rank—as the film opens; there are occasional shots of him in his island prison, suffering from malign and unnecessary supplementary punishments, like being forced to sleep while chained. He appears at his trials and asserts his innocence, but Dreyfus was not the main actor in his own cause. Those who were formed a diverse group, and the most militant of them were left-wing Jewish intellectuals. Dreyfus’ brother Matthieu immediately set out to spread the word of the injustice of his brother’s condemnation, and the first Dreyfusard was the anarchist Bernard Lazare. The three wealthy Reinach brothers were especially tireless in their support of Dreyfus. There is mention in the film of a shadowy “Jewish syndicate” that is alleged to be financing the Dreyfusard cause. In fact, there was such a syndicate, wealthy Jews who remained silent in public so as not to attract the ire of French antisemites, but who contributed large sums to propaganda in support of the cause. Socialists defended Dreyfus, as did Catholics like Charles Péguy.

Polanski concentrates above all on one figure: Colonel Georges Picquart, a high-ranking officer in the French military’s intelligence bureau and a ferocious Jew-hater, who nevertheless placed his career on the line to defend Dreyfus and uncover the true spy. Polanski’s focus on Picquart, who had no ethno-religious dog in the fight, turns the case into one where the only concerns are truth, justice, and equity. Picquart, aside from his antisemitism, is the image of probity. The cause he defends is just because what has been done to Dreyfus, regardless of his background, is unjust.

An Officer and a Spy is a still, somber, sober film, with occasional outbursts of rage. Music seldom intervenes to heighten the mood. Polanski guides us through the events with a firm hand. Antisemitic riots did, as is shown in the film, occur throughout France at the time. Polanski models them on similar riots in Hitler’s Germany, an experience he knows in his flesh. Less than half a century after the Dreyfus Affair, France’s Jews would suffer their terrible fate, but only when French antisemites were empowered by the occupying Germans to act.

Polanski, in focusing on Picquart and not the active Dreyfusard movement, both simplifies the case and makes it more comprehensible to less historically savvy viewers. Dreyfus, when we see him at the end of the film demanding his due from Picquart—the latter now minister of war, while Dreyfus still holds the same rank he held at the time of his degradation—is what he was in life: rigid and not entirely sympathetic. Polanski has given us a stirring film about the affair, and a reminder, in these days of regnant, bogus anti-antisemitism, of what real Jew-hatred looks like.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl, deputy publisher: I’m not gonna lie: I think I may have willed the most recent iteration of Morgan Bassichis’s show, Can I Be Frank?, into being. I missed the show’s first run at La MaMa (recommended in this very newsletter a little over a year ago by Alisa Solomon), but I wanted to see it so badly that when my mother’s birthday rolled around a few months ago, I gave her an IOU for tickets, hoping for no logical reason that Bassichis would reprise their show. It worked! And while I suspect that this won’t be Can I Be Frank?’s final run (especially if director Sam Pinkleton’s other work—including that once-tiny Off-Broadway show Oh, Mary—is any indication), my suggestion is that you catch it at the SoHo Playhouse while you can.

Can I Be Frank? is Bassichis’s exploration of their obsession with Frank Maya, a gay comic and performance artist who died of AIDS in 1995, just months before the introduction of the AIDS cocktail that likely would have saved his life. When Bassichis first learns about Maya at an artist residency (i.e., “when you go to a different place to have sex with people,” and that’s the only zinger I’ll spoil from the show, I promise), they’re struck by the similarities between their work, and troubled by the fact that Maya is largely unknown today. What, they wonder, would Maya have gone on to create if they had lived?

It’s an angst that resonates with me—my uncle David died of AIDS in 1993, and I spent much of my teens and twenties wondering how my life would have been different if I’d known him. Like Bassichis, I’ve tried to grapple with that question in my work. It’s hardly a unique subject (there’s a great joke in the show that, as promised, I won’t ruin for you)—but I’d argue that what’s impressive about Can I Be Frank? is the ambition with which Bassichis tackles it. Dark humor about horrifying events is the bread and butter of Jewish queer artists. So, too, are sincere and moving elegies. A piece of art that boomerangs from Grindr to the Holocaust, from cum puddles to genuinely felt rage about genocide, seems to me a far greater risk. There were many moments in Can I Be Frank? when I couldn’t tell whether Bassichis was about to deliver a line that would make me choke on my own laughter or sit back in devastated shock. Which is, again, a risk! But it’s also making a point: Frank Maya wasn’t a symbol. He was—like all of us—at times self-involved and at times brilliant. Resisting the erasure not just of his work, but of his messiness, is the radical act.

Parshat Va’etchanan begins with Moses imploring the Israelites to obey God’s commandments and warning them of the punishments they will face after they enter the Promised Land if they do not. Early in the parshah, Moses introduces two different terms to describe the precepts the Israelites must follow: “chukim” (ordinances) and “misphatim” (statutes). “Listen to the chukim and mishpatim that I am instructing you to observe,” Moses warns, “in order that you may live to enter and inherit the land that Adonai, the God of your ancestors, is giving to you.” This pair recurs again and again throughout the reading. So what’s its significance?

Early rabbinic commentators, noticing the seeming redundancy of the terms, teach that there is meaning to be gleaned from the difference between them. “Mishpatim,” they explain, are the laws that “even if they had not been written, it would have been logical that they be written.” In other words, these are generally accepted norms that clearly make society better, such as the prohibitions against murder or stealing. “Chukim,” by contrast, have no known rationale. When considering laws such as the prohibition against mixing wool and linen, regulations around purity and impurity, and various dietary prohibitions, it is impossible to articulate why we are instructed to abide by these rules. As commandments without any clear justification, chukim seem to typify uncritical obedience and conformity, demanding the arbitrary surrender of logic. They are, as Rashi describes them, decrees of the King, and we, as God’s subjects, have no right to criticize them.

But the 20th-century philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz offers us another framework for understanding chukim, arguing that the irrationality of devotion can act as a check on the perceived self-interest of the human collective. He describes Judaism as “a particular way of serving God and not any particular conception of man, of the world, or of history, . . . a system of halakhic praxis, a program fixing detailed arrangements of the every day.” In this view, “love of God is but the observance of the mitzvot. Their justification is not ‘national’ and not ‘moral’ and not social. Their sole point is the service of God. Had the rationale of the mitzvot been national welfare, fulfilling them would express love of Israel. Had it been moral, their observance would indicate the love of mankind. Had it been social, observing them would serve important human needs.” For Leibowitz—a harsh critic of Zionism and the State of Israel—the transcendence inscribed in the chukim guards against the impulses and priorities that can produce the earthly ills of ethnonationalism and Jewish supremacy.

Thus, while mishpatim help us create a just and moral society in a more explicit way, chukim also serve such a goal. This is because we must be invested in building a society that is not simply an expression of our already-held, personal moral instincts. In other words, our tradition cannot be rendered subservient to any person or group—crucially, including the nation itself. This is why Moses emphasizes the dyad of chukim and mishpatim at the very moment the Israelites stand at the threshold of the Land of Israel. Without chukim alongside mishpatim, Moses prophesies that we will surely defile the land. Because in a world of conquest, chukim reflect a posture of self-abnegation and surrender before the unknown. By embracing what defies our comprehension, we can cultivate humility and devotion to something beyond ourselves.

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