Aug

2

2024

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): If I can’t exactly recommend Miranda July’s All Fours—her much-heralded “perimenopause novel”—what I can recommend is talking about it with your friends. Nominally about middle age, the novel follows a 45-year-old artist who leaves her husband and child for a solo cross-country road trip but ends up spending three weeks in a motel room half an hour from home having a meet-cute and then an all-consuming affair with a hot and hung 31-year-old. With a little ingenuity, a spare $20K, and a spouse willing to open up the relationship, the book seems to promise, your creative and erotic dreams can come true.

When I showed up in Chicago with the novel in my hand, one friend explained to his wife, “It’s Fifty Shades of Gray for the cultural elite.” He hadn’t read the book but was already familiar with an intimate, much-discussed scene involving a tampon. Another friend said the plot sounded suspiciously like Eat, Pray, Love: a well-resourced white woman takes a journey to an exotic place (here, a working-class suburb) to find herself. A third texted that he’d loved it because “She has a journey of experience at the age when you feel like nothing can happen for the first time anymore.” (The narrator also sleeps with the 31-year-old’s first-ever lover, a woman old enough to be his mother.) “You = married people with kids,” I had to retort.

The truth is that I found the book depressing. July is a masterful storyteller with a deliciously particular sensibility—for her narrator, the future is “another lover, reaching backward in time to cup my balls,” such that “instead of dangling in the present I was held […] and aroused by my never-ending preparations.” But I felt like the author of this psychological breakdown wasn’t quite aware of its gravity, instead pitching her narrator’s despair, again and again, as a quirky joke. When I shared my dismay with a friend, he answered, “It’s The Yellow Wallpaper for 2024,” a comparison made all the more apt for the attention given the Victorian-era wallpaper in the motel room where we spend the bulk of the story. I agreed. In July’s hands, today’s straight white woman is queer, non-monogamous, and still miserable.

The book I’ve actually been recommending to friends all year also happens to be about so-called women’s desire. Laura’s Desires, however, has no allegiance to contemporary fiction’s relentlessly plotted variations on the American dream. Laura Henriksen’s book consists of two long poem-essays, one on dreams and the other—harder to describe—loosely oriented around Variety, Bette Gordon’s 1983 film about a fictionalized version of New York City’s Variety Photoplays porn theater. Part of the excitement of reading poetry that flirts with prose is the way that, within lines and stanzas, images and ideas press themselves against one another. This feels, I think, something like desire and something like sex, a topic of interest and experience that moves through Henriksen’s book in surprising and pleasurable ways. In one instance, a discussion of Gordon’s earlier film Anybody’s Woman opens into a discussion of feminist theory (is it possible that “narrative functions to fix the objectified image of a woman within a male fantasy”?). Soon enough, we’re talking about the categories of “good girl” and “bad girl,” and then we’re reading Simone Weil.

Maybe I appreciate Laura’s Desires so much because it dwells not in the short-lived freedoms of the road trip but in the “kind of freedom we could pursue for each other in waking life.” Maybe because it plumbs the many ways “It is not possible / to be at home in this world, and there’s / nowhere else to go.” Maybe because it takes this position not as a problem to be undone or a reason to flee, but as an opportunity to delight in what life actually is.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Back in May, I extolled the virtues of some of the great Parisian cemeteries, Père Lachaise and Montparnasse. But New York has burial grounds just as full of the fascinating dead. Any lover of Jewish history, literature, or culture owes themselves a trip to, of all damn places, Glendale, Queens, which I recently visited with former Jewish Currents editor Larry Bush. There, in Machpelah Cemetery, Mount Judah Cemetery, and especially Mount Carmel Cemetery, you’ll traverse 20th-century American Jewish history. Entertainers, writers, revolutionaries, martyrs, labor organizers, politicians, gangsters—the full gamut of Jewish life, the glory and the tragedy, can be found in this corner of New York just yards away from the Jackie Robinson Parkway.

The most easily accessible of them—at least by car; on the subway, the M, J, and Z will get you there—is Machpelah Cemetery. As soon as you pull into the front gate on Cypress Hills Street, there before you is the monument marking the plot of Harry Houdini and his family. A large sculpture of a weeping woman leans against the broad stone bearing both this name and Weiss, his real last name, and above them a bust of the great escape artist, one of the most famous Jews in American history; he’s joined by his wife, his rabbi father, and his brother Hardeen, who was also a magician. (By the way, Houdini didn’t die from a punch to the stomach, as is commonly believed. He died more than a week after the punch from a ruptured appendix, but correlation is not causation.) Then you can travel a few minutes to Mount Judah, for the stone bearing the name Andrew Goodman—of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the three civil rights activists murdered by the KKK during Freedom Summer. Fittingly, the stone is decorated by a number of hands reaching out toward one another.

Mount Carmel, back across the road from Machpelah, is where you’ll hit the jackpot. (Stop in the office and ask for the locations of some of these people so you can easily find them.) Not far from the gate are the stone markings the remains of Leo Max Frank—the most well-known Jewish victim of lynching in America, killed by a Georgia mob fired up by the Populist leader Tom Watson—and the great progressive congresswoman Bella Abzug. Further in you can find mobster Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, who died mysteriously after falling or being pushed from a hotel window in Coney Island, where he was being hidden after he squealed to the DA on his fellow members of the criminal gang Murder, Inc. In the second and third sections of the cemetery you’ll come upon the amazing Otto “Abbadabba” Biederman, the mathematical genius who worked with gangster Dutch Schultz in the numbers racket. Comedian Henny Youngman has a modest stone, which notes that he was the husband of Sadie, the woman of whom he famously quipped, “Take my wife—please.” And then there’s Mendel Beilis, described on his stone as “martyr,” who was tried for blood libel in Russia. Exonerated, he later moved to America.

Most moving for me was the section for members of the Workmen’s Circle. Here, lined up along the road, are the graves of the heroes of Yiddish labor and literature: the revered writer Sholem Aleichem; poet Morris Rosenfeld; Saul Yanovsky, anarchist and editor of the movement’s paper the Fraye Arbiter Shtime; Aaron Samuel Liebermann, whose stone declares him the “founder of Jewish socialism” (in Yiddish, of course); Abraham Cahan, editor of the Forverts; Socialist Party congressman Meyer London; and Bund leader Szmul Zygielbojm, who committed suicide in 1943 to draw attention to the murder of European Jewry. I found the graves of these men inexpressibly sad. All of them are three times dead—not only are they themselves deceased, but so is the cause they fought for and the language they used in that fight. To most visitors many of these stones, with nary a word in English, are now totally illegible.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): As soon as I read Ziwe’s New Yorker essay about finding out that her feet are on Wikifeet—and rated only as “okay”—I knew I wanted to read her book of essays, Black Friend. Across the collection, the comedian and writer expertly wields her distinctive humor and directness—which propelled her into the mainstream with her Instagram Live interviews asking celebrities if they’re racist—to guide readers through her personal experiences and existential reflections on Blackness in America.

In the eponymous essay, “how many black friends do you have,” Ziwe observes that nearly every white celebrity responds that they have “four or five” Black friends. The bizarre recurrence of this exact answer, she concludes, is a golden mean that allows white liberals to not appear racist. If someone says that they have three Black friends or fewer, they will elicit criticism or raised eyebrows for living a segregated life; if they answer with a specific number higher than five (imagine, “I have nine Black friends”) then the question becomes a more concerning one: why are you counting your Black friends? Of course, the question is a trap, and she talks about why famous people still feel compelled to sit for interviews even while knowing of her approach.

Ziwe’s essays cover topics like pet adoption, affirmative action, imposter syndrome, and reality TV. Her comedy always hits, which speaks to her knowledge of the issues she writes about and the people she’s talking to. (The footnotes are the best part. When she writes about the widespread revelations of famous people wearing blackface—from “Canada’s sexiest prime minister, [REDACTED], to America’s sweetheart [REDACTED]”—she includes a footnote: “This would explain why my shade of Fenty is always sold out.”)

And yet, underneath these stories, she is writing about the more profound: safety and risk, class and labor, belonging and loneliness. While the book is fun to read, something sad tugged at me: It harkens back to the height of racial justice uprisings and the Movement for Black Lives organizing, when the United States seemed to be collectively consumed with reckoning with our history of racial oppression and taking steps towards inculcating anti-racist practices at an institutional level. Since then, the horizon of possibility has narrowed dramatically, even as many continue to agitate for justice, improved conditions, and a more hopeful future. I don’t know if Ziwe would identify herself as being on the front lines of that fight, but her work can arm readers with nuanced perspectives, insights, or at least a laugh.

***

Weekly Parshah Commentary

Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Parshat Matot-Masei

The Torah, according to a well-known midrashic aphorism, “has seventy faces.” This is usually taken to mean that any passage can be interpreted in numerous ways. But it also indicates that there are many different methods by which we can derive meaning from the Torah’s words. Most Torah commentary tends to focus on specific verses or passages, probing the word choice or grammar and analyzing the narrative progression or characters’ motivations. A more idiosyncratic technique—often used by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson (1902–1994)—comments on the meaning of an entire parshah, in all of its diversity, through an analysis of the name by which it has come to be known. This approach has its roots in the readings of the Kabbalists, who ascribed particular significance to all names, but found those of the parshiyot especially meaningful. This week we have a double portion, Matot-Masei, and thus two names to interpret.

“Matot” is generally translated as “tribes,” but can also mean “staffs” or “branches.” It is a close synonym of the word “shevatim,” which shares the same meanings, and which is the more common term for the Israelite clans in the Torah. So why does our parshah use the word “matot” rather than “shevatim”? The Lubavitcher Rebbe suggests that the difference between the words is a matter of emphasis: “Matot” is more often used to refer to things cut off from their origins, like dried and hardened staffs, while “shevatim” is more often used to refer to things still connected to their living source, like branches. The Israelite tribes, the Rebbe suggests, are sometimes referred to as “shevatim” and sometimes as “matot” because all people have two existential modes. At times, we feel more attached to something larger than our own selves; we feel like branches of God, or of our communities, from whose living sap we draw spiritual vitality and moral direction. But often we feel cut off, dried out, and hardened by life’s travails and tragedies. Reading our parshah through this lens, we can find various possible experiences of staff-like spiritual alienation even where the text does not explicitly frame them as such, like in the laws regulating vows and oaths. According to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, these elective prohibitions—which an individual may choose to take on in addition to the mandated mitzvot—allow for the possibility of extracting oneself from a parched rut of numbing materialism and moving toward spiritual rejuvenation.

The name of the second parshah of this week’s double portion, “Masei,” stands in complementary contrast with the first, evoking not spiritual detachment but spiritual growth. “Masei” means “journeys” and refers specifically to the 42 stages of the Jewish people’s journey from Egypt to the Land of Israel. The early Hasidic masters taught that these journeys are reflected in each person’s own voyage through life: “From the day a person is born and leaves the mother’s womb—which, as it is known, is analogous to the exodus from Egypt—one then travels from journey to journey, until one arrives at the supernal land of life.” Furthermore, the Lubavitcher Rebbe added, it is the very quality of journeying from one stage to another that distinguishes humanity from angels: While angels are always already their most perfect selves, humans can always become more perfect. To leave the constraints of Egypt behind is not to immediately arrive at the Holy Land, or at the supernal land of life. Progress is nothing more than a step from which we can make yet more progress, so long as our eyes remain fixed on our ultimate goal.

For some, this hermeneutic approach may seem to carry us away from the flesh-and-blood narrative of the text, into a world of detached abstraction. But as these cases show, it can actually help us find more personal meaning in the text by linking the weekly Torah portion with the narratives of our own spiritual lives. This, as the Kabbalists understood, is the power of names: the apparently arbitrary reveals something intimate and profound.

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Before you go: Our friends at the New Jewish Culture Fellowship are accepting applications until August 5th. Apply now!