Aug

23

2024

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): For several years, the director Nathan Silver has worked in a quiet corner of the cinema world, making small, sometimes intense DIY-style films like The Great Pretender (2018). His new film, Between the Temples, takes him in another direction. Even if this sweet comedy—a kind of Harold and Maude Have Shabbos Dinner—ends exactly where I could tell it would after the first ten minutes, it still provides a knowing and kindly mocking picture of the life of a Jewish cleric.

Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwarzman), the chazan at a shul in the Hudson Valley, is going through a crisis of faith following the accidental death of his wife (who, he never fails to point out, was an alcoholic). His despair is so profound that he can no longer sing. Schwartzman looks perfectly awful in the role, a total schlub, and his usually unpleasant edge is blunted just enough to make him sympathetic—but not sympathetic enough to avoid being socked in the face in a bar on a Friday night while wearing a yarmulke and carrying a tallis. He is rescued by Ms. Carla O’Sullivan (Carol Kane), his former music teacher, who visits him at shul the next week and announces that she wants to have a bas mitzvah. He’s resistant, but Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) tells him to prepare his new student.

I’ve not stepped foot in a shul in over 50 years (Baruch Hashem), but apparently nothing has changed in synagogue life. Smigel, who is brilliant in the role, has a ball with his portrayal of the sweet but sometimes silly rabbi and his entire modus operandi—aimed, as he says, at “putting Jews in the pews.” We see him carrying out his congregational responsibilities, which include running a bake sale to support the dedication of a Torah honoring victims of the Holocaust. (“Where bake sales meet the Holocaust is my sweet spot,” he quips.) He loves and is absolutely terrible at golf, at which he cheats. Early in the film we see him practicing putting in his office, sending the ball into a shofar placed on the floor; he warns Ben to tell anyone who opens the door that it’s not a kosher one. He tells terrible jokes and has a wife with heavily botoxed lips and a beautiful daughter, Gabrielle (Madeline Weinstein), whom he describes as “a mess.” In good Jewish parent fashion, he tries to make a shidduch between Ben and Gabrielle—it doesn’t go well. And of course, he must bend to the will of one of Ben’s two mothers (Dolly De Leon), a wealthy realtor and Filipina convert to Judaism who is more strict in her observance than anyone in the film born Jewish.

Silver shows himself to be a master at inserting brilliantly funny lines into unexpected places, none of them underlined and all of them much funnier for that. In a magnificent touch, the always excellent Keith Poulson gives a deadpan performance as a sneering bartender who also shows up as a waiter. Even the most over-the-top physical bit—Ben’s reaction when he learns that the burger he’s eating with Carla has cheese on it—is handled with great comedic flair.

So deft is Between the Temples that we don’t even realize that by the film’s end, Ben’s crises have only worsened. Maybe that’s what’s most Jewish about it.

Josh Lambert (contributing writer): 2024 has turned out to be a banner year for graphic narratives about the Holocaust. These texts take a wide variety of approaches to a familiar form, some more successful than others.

Replay—a graphic memoir by Jordan Mechner, who created the classic video games Karateka and The Prince of Persia—tells an intergenerational family tale but focuses on the author’s father, Francis, who fled Nazi-occupied Europe as a child in the 1940s. The book offers a sharply drawn and effective story, but there’s something jarring about the juxtaposition of Francis’s escape from a racist government and Jordan’s lack of self-consciousness about having gotten rich off the martial Orientalism of his video game narratives. While Replay doesn’t consider the link between trauma and the urge to violence, Leela Corman’s beautiful graphic novel Victory Parade is dazzlingly, distressingly attentive to this entanglement. In huge pages and gorgeous watercolors, the book slips between the Berlin of 1936 and the Brooklyn of 1943—and between dreams and reality—vividly evoking the pain of living through those nightmarish times. For its part, the long-awaited second volume of Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters interweaves this awful era with terrors of another kind. Like the acclaimed first book, it presents itself as the sketchbook of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old Latina girl growing up in late-1960s Chicago who is fascinated by horror comics (and always draws herself as a werewolf). The novel’s backbone is the more worldly horror of Holocaust testimony, recorded onto tape by Karen’s recently deceased neighbor, Anka Silverberg. While Ferris’s visual style is grotesquely exquisite, the book somewhat sensationalizes Anka’s experiences, raising urgent, difficult questions about pop culture’s fetishization of monstrous violence.

The two most recent entries in this genre are also the ones most interested in directly addressing the premises that underlie it. Heavyweight—the debut graphic memoir by Jewish Currents director of community engagement Sol Brager—delves into their German Jewish family’s dispossession by the Nazis and suffering during the war. But more than any Holocaust memoir I can recall, it also attends to the ways in which wealthy German Jews enriched themselves through complicity with European racism and colonialism. In Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz, out this week, CUNY professor Ari Richter likewise troubles oversimplified narratives of victimhood. The memoir explores his family’s Holocaust experiences and his own growing obsession with them. Richter’s aggressively unpleasant style—characterized by scratchy, dark drawings—conveys his visceral shame and anxiety, whose many causes include his own “internalized German supremacy” and his family’s “racial blind spots.” Like Brager, as Richter tells his family’s stories, he also grapples with an uncomfortable truth: that Jews’ suffering is more legible, legally recognized, and marketable than that of other people who’ve suffered brutal violence.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Some of my favorite TV and film over the last several years have been from Ireland (special shoutout to Normal People, which has a completely different kind of magic than the book). The North of Ireland in particular has had some hits, first with Derry Girls, an irreverent sitcom about the lives of a misfit clique of high school girls in the waning years of the Troubles, and now with Kneecap, a heavily fictionalized biopic about the real-life Irish language rap group of the same name, starring its actual members: Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí. I live with a Hibernophile who has a specific interest in the North and the history of the Troubles, so I was somewhat familiar with Kneecap’s music and story before going to see the film. As much as this movie is pure fun for everyone—Mo and Móglaí are two hard-partying, drug-dealing lads of the ceasefire generation and their debauchery makes up some of the most enjoyable extended sequences of the film—it is the politics of the indigenous Irish language that provides the heart of Kneecap. In the film (though not in real life), Móglaí’s IRA father instills in the boys a love of the language by drilling them on their irregular verbs in their youth, often repeating the maxim, “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.” Throughout the course of the film, proponents of the Irish language argue over whether Kneecap’s use of it to talk, for the most part, about sex, drugs, and FTP is a perversion of the language, or an assertion of its aliveness in the face of extinction. Detractors—mostly the police (or, as they say, “the peelers”), media figures, and local authorities—simply want it gone. These debates never play out didactically; if anything, the web of characters and their motivations sometimes feel overly contrived to make sure any such conversation is firmly in service of narrative.

This made me think of a conversation I had with a Yiddishist at a party a number of years ago, who said, essentially, that she got over her worry that she wasn’t speaking “properly” when she realized that almost no one else was. All Yiddish spoken today, after all, had been severed from a “pure, authentic” source, and was in development in a new context. I also found myself thinking of Sephardic studies professor Devin Naar, perhaps one of the only people on earth raising his young children entirely in Ladino—my father’s first language, and one he promptly abandoned. Though I have long been suspicious of revivalist projects, the film helped me to think differently about what changes politically when you embrace a language, however idiosyncratically, instead of letting it die. Indeed, as the band performs today in Irish at a major English music festival, backed by a message about the UK’s complicity in genocide, they are proving that such political commitments provide a firm basis for real global solidarity. And though the loss of language in my own family—as well as the genocide that abetted it—is more distant, they have succeeded in making me ask: What could Ladino mean to me, politically?

Reading Deuteronomy, I often think of the climate activists who throw mashed potatoes at a Monet or tomato soup at a Van Gogh, because the book contains many directives to destroy art. Throughout the text, Moses seems preoccupied with the prohibition on idolatry, returning to it over and over. Our parshah, Eikev, is bookended by such orders: In last week’s reading, Moses tells the Israelites that, when they conquer Canaan, they must “tear down [the Canaanites’] altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts, and consign their images to the fire.” Several chapters later, in next week’s parshah, he repeats these instructions nearly verbatim. So why the obsession?

Perhaps our parshah contains a hint. In this reading, Moses recounts the story of the Golden Calf, the paradigmatic idol, which we first encountered in Exodus. He frames his narrative by admonishing the Israelites that it is “not for any virtue of yours that your God is giving you this good land to possess; for you are a stiffnecked people.” But an odd moment in Maimonides’s medieval law code recasts the familiar tale of Israelite stubbornness—and helped me see that Moses’s iconoclasm has even more in common with those painting-defacing climate protesters than I’d initially realized.

Maimonides, in discussing the biblical commandment to cover the blood of a bird or wild animal one has killed for food with earth (‘afar), notes that one may not use “coarse sand, flour, bran, grain fiber, or filings from metal utensils.” Strangely, though, one may use gold filings, since in two verses in the Bible, gold is called “‘afar.” One of these instances appears in Moses’s recounting of the story of the Calf, when he says, “I broke it to bits and ground it thoroughly until it was fine as dust [le‘afar],” while the other comes from the sublime 28th chapter of Job, which mentions the “gold dust [‘afrot]” hidden in the earth. This chapter begins by describing mining for metals as a supreme act of human exploration (“An end man has set to darkness / and each limit has he probed / the stone of deep gloom and death’s shadow”) but soon shifts to a meditation on the limits of resource extraction. “Wisdom, where is it found, / and where is the place of discernment?” the text asks, then answers: “the Deep has said, ‘it is not in me . . . it cannot be got for fine gold / nor can silver be paid as its price.” Wisdom names the place where both technological discovery and the market’s valuation fail.

Maimonides gets the citation from Job 28—and the ruling about blood burial that arises from it—from the Talmud, but he himself adds the verse from our parshah; the pairing suggests that an environmentalist theme is relevant here too. Indeed, when Moses destroys the Calf, he reverses not only its manufacture, but also the process by which it was prospected, quarried, and refined: “I threw its dust [‘afaro] into the brook that comes down from the mountain,” he declares. Where everyone else gathers and hoards gold, Moses disperses it; he is thus warning the community of the idolatry specific to extraction. If the Israelites, who are about to enter Canaan, where they will acquire “great and flourishing cities that [they] did not build, houses full of all good things that [they] did not fill,” anticipate moderns, who stumble upon a world unfathomably rich in exploitable oil, Moses is showing both them and us how and why one must sometimes, so to speak, blow up a pipeline.

Fittingly, the commandment that occasions Maimonides’s citation of these two verses is also concerned with ecological consciousness. According to Leviticus, one covers the animal’s blood, understood to be its life force, as an act of deference; God prohibits eating blood to limit the human domination of the animal world, teaching us to regard nature with humility. The dust with which we perform this rite reminds us of our own humble origins: “dust [‘afar] you are, and to dust you shall return.” In symbolically burying the animal’s soul with our own flesh, we are attempting to dispel the illusion of human separateness and recognize our implication in a web of biophysical relations.

The command to cover the blood, in other words, guards against the idolatry of discrete consumables, stripped of their messy and contentious histories—the social and environmental relationships that capitalist economists dismissively term “externalities.” Similarly, Moses is warning the soon-to-be-affluent Israelites about resources and commodities that seem to present themselves magically and inexhaustibly, as if without cost or consequence. In destroying the Calf, he is smashing not just an idol but also an ideology; he is directing our attention away from the polished craft object, toward the hidden reciprocalities between human beings, and between us and our earth.

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