Dec

12

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In the Q&A after the screening I saw of All That’s Left of You—Cherien Dabis’s intergenerational epic following a single Palestinian family from 1948 to the present day—the moderator, actor Morgan Spector, remarked on the film’s Hollywoodification of the Nakba: gorgeous actors, classic dramatic cinematography, big emotional storytelling. He meant it as a compliment, and Dabis excitedly received it as such. Indeed, this was exactly what she intended. Open Netflix and you cannot help but be overwhelmed by slick dramas dedicated to the Holocaust or World War II. That history has become a shared American cultural touchstone largely through film. Why hasn’t the Nakba, and the Palestinian story writ large, with all its inherent drama, ever gotten the big-budget Hollywood treatment? (A largely rhetorical question, considering the lengths that American media, especially Hollywood, has gone to suppress that story for decades, and the current maneuvering at networks and studios to make sure it stays that way.) Dabis wanted to correct for that lacuna, to make a film about the Palestinian experience whose formal conventions (confections?) might help it enter the cultural bloodstream before rousing the antibodies.

There is no caveat coming; it’s a beautiful film. Perhaps in a lesser director’s hands, these aims might have come with egregious compromises; the tragedy might have been reduced to melodrama, the broadly humanist messaging might have landed a little too pat. One might quibble with the convenience of leaving Palestinian armed resistance out of frame. But Dabis’s investment in character helps each beat feel earned. It is a testament to her craft that a great many elements of Palestinians’ oppression—from the seizing of property, farmland, and valuables in the Nakba, to the medical apartheid, permit regime, and military violence and humiliation that characterize the occupation of the West Bank—are dramatized for the audience without ever feeling heavy-handed or didactic. The film does not tell a single story about the affective strategies that Palestinians have employed to ensure their survival, on and off the land; a defeated quietism sits uneasily within families alongside strident nationalism and a will to confrontation. And though the plot builds toward a stunning act of generosity on the part of a Palestinian family toward Israelis, there is no feel-good coexistence narrative on offer. At a time when it seems that the horizon of American politics is linked to our ability to face the Nakba alongside other imperial catastrophes, Dabis has given us a tool wrapped in a work of art wrapped in a Hollywood movie.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Talene Monahon’s Meet the Cartozians—equal parts historical family drama and spiky contemporary satire—begins in a sumptuous living room in Portland, Oregon in the fall of 1923. An immigrant family is going through papers with an expensive lawyer, who is helping them defend their status in the United States. “Asīga īnč əsél é, ‘white person’?” asks the increasingly confused grandmother, speaking un-subtitled Armenian. The line drew boisterous laughter at the performance I saw, thanks in large measure to Andrea Martin’s masterful delivery: Spitting out those two English words with a sharply enunciated ‘t’ and ’p,’ she expressed the character’s innocent frustration even as she knowingly poked a 21st Century audience’s tender ribs.

You didn’t have to know that the first part of the line translates to “What does this mean?” nor recognize the words that follow—“As parə hokīs hanét͜s. Īnč əsél é?”—to sympathize with the grandmother’s bafflement and exasperation. (Translation, thanks to the playscript: “I am exhausted from this term. What does it mean?”) The shifting, shady, and often absurd concept of whiteness in the United States—one’s weariness of debating it and terror over its deployment—pounds at the heart of this hilarious and harrowing play.

The family in the first act are the Cartozians, and the case they are preparing for is based on the real-life United States v. Cartozian of 1925, a challenge to the US government’s effort to revoke the citizenship of a successful carpet dealer from Armenia named Tatos Cartozian (played by Nael Nacer with heartrending delicateness.) The back story is this: Congressional statutes revised after the Civil War allowed for the naturalization only of “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity” and “of African descent.” As early 20th Century immigration from Asia began to produce a wave of applicants for citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled in 1922 and 1923 respectively that people from Japan and from India were not white, and hence not fit for naturalization.

These cases paved the way for the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which barred even from entry to the US anyone who was ineligible for citizenship—a law that was not fully repealed until 1965 (and one for which Stephen Miller sounds maniacally nostalgic.) Though Armenians had been absorbed legally and culturally into America for decades, in this new climate—and in the wake of the Armenian genocide—the Cartozian suit was a high-stakes test case that hinged entirely on the question of whether Armenians are white. (It’s not just Jews who had been—as Eric Goldstein put it in The Price of Whiteness—“a racial conundrum.” Although, as far as I know, we never had to pull up our sleeves to show our skin to a judge, as Cartozian did.)

In beautifully paced domestic scenes, the family’s lawyer, Wallace McCamant, coaches them on proper comportment, urging them to cast off any evidence of suspicious foreignness, insisting that they replace ads for their rugs that bear images of camels and “Mohammedans,” that they shift their traditional Christmas celebration from January 6th (the Epiphany) to December 25th and commit other dispiriting acts of assimilation.

In Act Two, which takes place 100 years later in the affluent Glendale area of Los Angeles, we meet an accomplished group of Armenian Americans, whose ties to their heritage are felt but frayed. The living room in this home has been turned into a makeshift TV studio—furniture rearranged, standing lights glaring—for the shooting of a reality show, whose name gives the play its title. The group (same actors, new roles) has gathered for the Christmas episode in which they are to share aspects of their cultural observance with the show’s uber-famous star of Armenian descent. (If you have a pulse, you know the reference. And there’s more than one swipe at her skin tanner.)

The star is delayed “wrapping up glam,” the cameraman explains, so he asks the group to let him shoot as they introduce themselves to her empty chair—and they do, to uproarious effect. They end up squabbling over a movement to add “Armenian” as a subcategory of the Middle Eastern/North African classification in the 2030 census. Now, at a time when the simit one of them has baked for the occasion is gluten-free, some of the assembled argue that Armenians are not white. “My own lived experience is I’m not white at the airport,” notes one, who also reveals that he lost a promotion at his academic job because “they didn’t want to give tenure to another white man.” Now it is the cameraman—of Irish descent—who, standing in for the audience, is confounded by the slipperiness of racial classification. Monahan takes a couple of cheap shots here, but her aim is always sure, and it was moving to sit in a mainstream theater among a seldom-represented audience and witness them responding audibly to every recognizable reference and character from their community.

I laughed a lot through the play—but watching it as citizen ceremonies have been canceled, asylum and refugee processes paused, and immigration processing halted—it was the kind of laugh that stings the throat.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): On January 29th, 2024 the IDF murdered Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl, after returning to the scene where they had already killed six of her relatives and two ambulance workers. In its cruelty, cowardice, stupidity, and impunity, this single event can stand as a synecdoche of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. It stands to condemn Israel forever.

Hind was in her uncle’s car when the IDF killed her relatives, stuck in a kind of no man’s land into which no one could enter to rescue her. The Palestinian Red Crescent in Ramallah attempted to send an ambulance for her, but it needed to jump through a number of administrative hoops before dispatching a crew of rescue workers. The little girl was in a panic, so workers in Ramallah stayed on the phone with her to keep her morale up. The situation, though, was almost hopeless from the start. After all that circuitous bureaucracy, the ambulance sent to rescue her was inexplicably fired on and destroyed, the crew blown literally to pieces. Hind stayed in the family car and her dead body was only recovered 12 days later. Israel promised an investigation. We’re still waiting for the results.

The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s almost unbearable dramatization of the killings and the failed attempt to save the child, is concentrated in the Ramallah office, where the angry, impetuous Omar (Motaz Malhees), who first contacts Hind, attempts to speed up and even circumvent normal processes in order to rescue the child. He is opposed by his supervisor, Mahdi (Amar Hlehel), who, though a stickler for procedure, is being especially punctilious in order to avoid adding the ambulance crew to the day’s death toll. Hind is put off by Omar, and so she spends most of her time on the phone with Rana (Saja Khilani), who keeps her occupied and as calm as possible.

The film is made even more difficult to watch because of a choice the director made that underlined the horror of that day in northern Gaza. Ben Hania used the actual recordings of Hind’s pleas, which lasted for hours. The voices of the Red Crescent workers are usually those of actors, interspersed in moments of special drama with those of the actual dispatching crew. Hind is deathly afraid, caught in a car full of murdered, bleeding relatives, but the workers do a miraculous job keeping her hopeful.

It’s all for naught. The film ends with footage of the destroyed car and ambulance, and of old video of Hind playing in a water filled sand pit, the closest thing in her short life to the beach we hear her mother telling us she so wanted to see again.

In 1982, the majority of jurists on the international MacBride Commission concluded that Israel’s actions in Lebanon legally constituted an attempted genocide of the Palestinian people. In his 1984 essay “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said lamented that the Commission’s damning report had no effect whatsoever on US foreign policy, asking: “How is it that . . . the premises on which Western support for Israel is based are still maintained, even though the reality, the facts, cannot possibly bear these premises out?” He notes that the MacBride Commission’s assessment that “the facts speak for themselves” is patently false. Facts, he explains, “require a socially acceptable narrative to sustain, absorb, and circulate them,” a dynamic made especially clear in “Zionism’s war against the Palestinians . . . where Israeli propaganda seems to lead a life of its own.” Said urges us to consider how certain narratives become “socially acceptable.” Who, or what, gives “permission to narrate”?

Said argues that the interdiction on narrating the reality of Palestinian history is not a discrete speech act—Thou shalt not narrate!—but a diffuse “disciplinary communications apparatus” that functions to “overlook . . . most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light” and “punish . . . those who try to tell the truth.” Four decades later, the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd pointed out in the 2023 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton University that Palestinian narration remains strictly foreclosed. Even those rare Palestinians granted “permission to narrate,” including El-Kurd, inevitably find that their narratives are not really their own. They have always been framed in advance by Western media and Western institutions—framed selectively, in other words, by the same apparatus that extends permission in the first place.

Parshat Vayeshev comprises a suite of narratives about the “permission to narrate.” In the first of these stories, Joseph’s envious brothers stain his distinctive tunic with blood and use it to convince their father Jacob of the false narrative—the lie—that Joseph has been mauled to death by an animal. In another, Joseph, now a slave in Egypt, is sexually assaulted by his master’s wife. “She caught hold of his garment and said, ‘Lie with me!’ But he left his garment in her hand and got away,” the text explains. The woman then uses the abandoned garment to lend weight to the lie that Joseph had sexually assaulted her. “This one came to lie with me; but . . . when he heard me screaming at the top of my voice, he left his garment and got away,” she tells her servants. Given no opportunity to share his side of the story, Joseph is swiftly arrested and imprisoned.

In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, the protagonist Josef K. finds himself, like his biblical namesake, accused of a crime “without having done anything wrong.” Although K. constantly narrates his innocence, his narration always takes place on the terms of an obscure juridical system whose rules and purview elude his (and the reader’s) comprehension. In the penultimate chapter, a priest tells K. a parable about a man who stands “before the Law” and seeks admission into it, and the official doorkeeper who bars his passage. In a parody of rabbinic interpretive discourse, K. and the priest debate the story’s meaning, which concludes with the priest telling K. that he doesn’t have to take everything said by the doorkeeper, the parable’s figure of juridical authority, as “true,” but he does “have to consider it necessary.” On this view, the doorkeeper may very well be lying about the Law. But nevertheless, because he has so much power over the man—“to doubt his dignity is to doubt the Law itself”—his lies are yet efficacious. It is as if they were true. As K. complains, the priest’s gloss makes “lies . . . into a universal system.”

Said observes just this disarticulation of truth and necessity in his analysis of the MacBride Commission’s effective failure. That report contained a truth: Israel’s actions in Lebanon in 1982 were genocidal. If this truth had had the force of necessity, the report would have resulted in, minimally, the imposition of some penalty upon Israel and some redress for the victims. Instead, the entity with the power to decide (the US government, playing doorkeeper to the Palestinians “before the Law”) simply ignored the report and continued arming and funding Israel, as it does to this very day. What was necessary—what power made happen in the world—bore no relation to truth.

The biblical Joseph, too, seems trapped in a universe of lies. The garments he leaves behind in the course of the wrongs done to him are cunningly deployed by his abusers as evidence for narratives that are untrue, yet nevertheless as efficacious as if they were true. Joseph never gets to counter-narrate; necessity prevails over truth.

Tamar, Joseph’s niece, features in our parshah’s third story. After she is widowed twice over by Judah’s sons Er and Onan, Judah refuses to follow custom and marry her to his next son, Shelah, convinced that Tamar herself is somehow to blame for the deaths. Disgraced, Tamar disguises herself as a veiled prostitute and sleeps with Judah—remaining veiled so he does not recognize her—and then claims his “seal, cord, and staff ” as collateral for his promised payment. After Tamar conceives, Judah, still not realizing the truth, sentences her to death for “playing the harlot.” On the eve of her execution, Tamar sends Judah’s paraphernalia back to him with a message: “I am with child by the man to whom these belong.” Not until Judah “recognizes” them does he comprehend what has happened and repair the harm he has done to Tamar.

Tamar understands that truth without necessity cannot beget justice—and in this violently patriarchal milieu, women’s narratives cannot achieve that unity of truth and necessity. Only the literal patriarch himself can give the truth the force of necessity, by an act of “recognition”: It is Judah’s narration of the facts that matters, not Tamar’s. Her triumph is thus won on the terms set by the gendered system that oppresses her. Ultimately, she may be heroic, but she is not free; she has only figured out, to borrow a line from Judith Butler, “how to work that trap that [she] is in.”

El-Kurd, likewise caught in a trap as a Palestinian with “permission to narrate,” finds his own way to work it. “I prefer to focus my talks on reporting Zionist brutality rather than on addressing the challenges of representation, because these challenges inevitably pale in comparison with the repression and violence on the ground,” he explains. “But that very violence is precisely why we should sometimes address these predicaments of representation that ensnare advocates of Palestinian liberation in the Western world.”

El-Kurd uses his permission to narrate to expose that permission for what it actually is: a ruse of Western power, a function of the Zionist ideological apparatus committed, as Said argues, to the strict separation of truth and necessity. By turning the trap of Western recognition against itself, he aims to bring about different, freer conditions for Palestinians’ self-narration, conditions not achieved by either Joseph or Tamar in our parshah: in their own words, on their own terms, without permission, necessary and true.

Samuel P. Catlin is assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.