Feb

14

2025

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): On Monday morning, I stood with several dozen other protestors outside the Jerusalem Russian Compound, an interrogation facility and prison where Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna, two of the owners of the beloved East Jerusalem cultural institution the Educational Bookshop, were awaiting a court hearing. The day before, Israeli police officers had raided the shop’s Arabic- and English-language branches, located across the street from each other on the central thoroughfare of Salah a-Din Street. Police used Google Translate to decipher English and Arabic book titles, and grabbed anything with a Palestinian flag on the cover. They dumped piles of books on the ground and stuffed others into garbage bags, leaving with armfuls of material—including a children’s coloring book—that they claimed could incite violence. They also took with them Mahmoud and Ahmad, both under arrest. Because a higher level of authorization is needed for incitement charges, police later changed their claim to assert that Mahmoud and Ahmad had “disturbed the public order.” When their lawyer asked in court what exactly they had done to disrupt the peace, the police representative responded, “selling books.”

It is stating the obvious to note that a society that considers books beyond the pale is a tyrannical and oppressive one. It is also perhaps self-evident that books should disturb the public order by challenging us to think critically about new ideas and act upon our conclusions. In the past few days, the bookstore and its owners have become a liberal cause célèbre—in part because their case so starkly illustrates these basic principles, and in part because the bookstore is frequented by English-speakers, including members of the Western media and diplomatic core. Still, at risk of adding to the chorus, I feel compelled to say how much the Educational Bookshop has meant to me personally. The store is one of my favorite places in Jerusalem. The Munas are always quick to provide recommendations and point you to new works and lesser-known authors. The tiny shop is somehow large enough to hold vital book launches and talks in a downstairs event space (where I also took Arabic classes for some time) and a cozy cafe upstairs, along with the main floor’s extensive stacks of books. Jerusalem is not a city where you can have your pick of stores that sell English-language material critical of Zionism, and the bookshop has become a meeting point for students, diplomats, journalists, and curious wanderers, a near-mandatory pilgrimage site for tourists curious about Palestine. As it has for so many, it has played a formative role in my life here. The bookshelves in my apartment are laden with the gems discovered there: the Arabic textbooks I used for years; contemporary Palestinian fiction and poetry; academic works on Jerusalem history; novels from around the world; an anthology of contemporary stories from Gaza (edited by Mahmoud and recently featured on Jewish Currents’s podcast); one of my favorite cookbooks, which focuses on Gazan cuisine; books that taught me about the history, economics, and geography of occupation; works of critical theory that changed how I think about the violence in this land and classics that expanded my perspective beyond it.

Mahmoud and Ahmad were released to five days of house arrest after spending two nights in the Russian Compound, and they are banned from their own store for the next 20 days. Awful as that is, though, their arrest is not the worst thing that has happened in this land this week. As I was at the protest outside the court, I was getting updates on my phone about a series of demolitions happening in Masafer Yatta at the same time, which left dozens of people homeless; the night before, Israeli forces shot and killed two women, one of whom was eight months pregnant, in the Nur Shams Refugee Camp. West Bank Palestinians whom I know were detained this week for longer than the Munas without receiving a single sentence of media coverage. As the Israeli journalist Orly Noy noted, “In a reality in which children are starved and left to die of thirst, where the death toll from Israel’s campaign of destruction numbers in the tens of thousands, where survivors struggle to rebuild their lives amid ruin and under constant threat, a raid on a bookstore might seem trivial, marginal.” But, Noy continued, this event should not be brushed away. “Israel’s persistent and systematic campaign against Palestinian culture and identity is a fundamental element in the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians, which in turn enables their physical destruction. To reduce a people to dust, even the semblance of a culture must not remain.” Indeed, it is no coincidence that the last 16 months have seen, along with physical destruction and mass murder, Israel’s banning of Al Jazeera, cancellation of film screenings, arrest of academics, and detention of so many people for simply posting on social media, along with, of course, the scholasticide in Gaza. There are many forms our resistance to such a reality must take, but one must be an insistence on continuing to engage with and support Palestinian culture. And so if you’re looking for your next book, there’s an unassuming little shop tucked into Salah a-Din Street, bursting with literary treasures, which also ships internationally. Placing an order there might be a small gesture, but it’s one more way of fighting back.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): What is the role of an avant-garde artist during a revolution? The great experimental theater director Lee Breuer (1937–2021) pondered that question through his renegade artwork amid the student and worker uprisings in Paris of May 1968. Breuer was based in Paris at the time for a few years of Euro-wandering, along with fellow artists with whom he would soon form the ground-shifting theater company Mabou Mines when they returned to the United States in 1970. As a member of the Mabou Mines collective for the five decades between its founding and his death, Breuer remained a brilliant, bohemian iconoclast. He created ingenious new performance forms that he called “animations” and also radically adapted classics: His Gospel at Colonus (1983) transposed Sophocles into the Black church, and his Peter and Wendy (1996, based on J.M. Barrie’s original) starred one actor as Wendy—and as the voice of all the other characters, represented by entrancing puppets. For Mabou Mines Dollhouse (2003), Breuer cast Ibsen’s canonical drama with men under five feet tall and women nearly six feet tall on a miniaturized set, so that the main character, Nora, physically chafed against a constricting world built by and for men. And for Lear (1990), Breuer reversed the genders entirely so that Shakespeare’s disintegrating protagonist transformed into a mother of three sons. (Full disclosure: I served as the dramaturg for Lear.)

But before all that, Breuer tried to make a movie called Moi-même—a super-meta satirical short about a pre-pubescent boy trying to make a movie about himself during May 1968 in Paris. Breuer shot many hours of silent black-and-white film in Paris that year, intending to dub in dialogue later. He never finished the project. More than half a century later, Breuer’s son, the filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, began a collaboration with his father, which he continued on his own following Breuer’s death. Lorwin wrote a script and hired actors (some of them the children of original cast members) to voice the lines. Composers and sound designers added underscoring and effects. And Lorwin edited it all into a coherent shape—which is not to say an undemanding, straightforward story. Rather, Moi-même revels in the moody abstractions and disjunctive narrative style of the French New Wave—and of Breuer’s later work. (Jean-Luc Godard himself appears in Moi-même in a cameo role.) The finished film—lambent, layered, and lyrical—will have its New York premiere on February 27th at L’Alliance, followed by a Q&A with Lorwin.

The way Breuer’s son completed the film uncannily mirrors the doubling at its core: Kevin, the film’s protagonist, is played by two actors—one a child, the other a budding young man; a jump-cut or dissolve sometimes replaces one actor with the other, while some scenes include both actors. Occasionally, we see Kevin in bed, dreaming. The events that follow could be from his dreams, from the film he is making, or from the frame film in which he is the narrating hero. The viewer is never sure. These scenes include images of him riding in the back of a luxurious taxi through gorgeously gray Parisian streets, pitching his movie to creepy men to procure “bread” to fund it, observing some goons on the cab’s running board shooting down a woman in the road, and, often, lighting up a smoke.

Along the way, Moi-même presents only small glimpses of the general strikes and demonstrations that were roiling Paris at the time: a fleeting shot of a poster of Che, a couple of quick cuts to footage of student protests outside the Sorbonne, some vague crowd chants in the soundtrack, and a wry line here or there, like when Kevin is advised to “cut the politics and consolidate the characters.” Despite the setting, no one could quite call this cinema engagé, work intended to support political action; to Kevin, “my film is everything,” even as May ‘68 activists were taking over factories, universities, and cultural institutions. And if Breuer participated in the famous occupation of the Théâtre de l’Odéon (where his fellow American experimental theater makers, the pacifist-anarchists Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater, joined in), he never publicly mentioned it.

And yet, the slogan of that occupation—“Power to the imagination”—is not only quoted in Moi-même; its spirit permeates it. “The theatre, the cinema, art and literature etc., have all become industries under the control of an elite bent on alienation and profiteering! Sabotage the cultural industry!” proclaimed a leaflet distributed at the occupation of the theater. “You are art! You are the revolution!” In its dreamy 60 minutes that take up questions of personal and artistic legacy, Moi-même reminds us, too, of the abiding commitment beneath Breuer’s—and Mabou Mines’s—oeuvre: that refusing commercial narrative logics can help inspire new visions for the world.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It’s astounding that Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the show about the great German Romantic painter that opened last weekend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first solo exhibition of this seminal artist, who died in 1840, to be held in the United States. Put another way, the fact that this event took 185 years to occur is proof that when you come down to it, we live in a philistine backwater populated by mouth-breathers (present company excluded).

Friedrich’s work offers an ideal primer on German Romanticism, an artistic movement that feels almost literary in its starkly defined worldview and deeply philosophical bent. The setting of a Friedrich painting is always stunning but usually inhospitable; even his images of spring look like scenes of winter. Humanity’s place in the landscape is that of spectator and wanderer, with the rocky fields, towering mountains, and jagged cliffs serving as a reminder of how little space we take up in the vastness. It’s rare to see a full-sized figure in the works on display, and those that do appear—like the man in the spectacular Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1817)—are still dwarfed by what surrounds them.

The motifs one finds here define the Romantic movement. Ruins are a regular presence, speaking to the futile and ephemeral nature of everything we humans do. One of the most stunning works in the show, a painting of a ruined monastery in Oybin, Germany, from 1812, is illuminated from behind by the strange, mystical yellow light of a sun that may be rising in hope, or else setting in sorrow. Friedrich’s early work is heavy on religious imagery, full of lonely crucifixes standing in the midst of fields, denoting a spiritual realm as eternal as the natural one in which they’ve been placed. Rivers and seas offer a particularly powerful expression, in their immensity, of the smallness of our lives in the here and now. The most awe-inspiring work in the show—justly centered—is Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808-1810), an enormous canvas dominated by a dark blue sea under a dark sky, with a monk taking up negligible space at the water’s edge. It brings together all of the painter’s themes: the enduring power of religion, the majesty of nature, the marginality of our place in the universe.

Time is an essential element in all of Friedrich’s works. Ruins remind us of the passing of centuries; tall trees speak of the years required for them to reach their great height; stones jut from the ground, a vestige of some long-lost age when the earth’s movements drove them from their original place. The fullest expression of this theme appears in the painting The Stages of Life (1834), in which an old man stands on a cliff looking out at the sea, accompanied by figures representing the ages between infancy and senescence. It’s sad that we had to wait so much time—almost two centuries—for a show like this one. But it’s here, and we should celebrate it.

This week’s parshah, Yitro, tells the story of the final stage in the Israelites’ exodus from bondage—the revelation and acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The preparation for receiving the Torah is complex: Moses goes up and down the mountain several times, relaying God’s instructions to the Israelites and the Israelites’ messages back to God. In one famous exchange, God tells Moses to warn the people that they should wash their clothing and remain in a state of purity for the next three days so they’ll be ready to receive the Torah through a direct divine encounter. When repeating this message to the Israelites, Moses adds one more detail: “Be prepared for the third day,” he tells them, “you shall not go near a woman.” This raises a core problem for a feminist interpretation of the Torah, even beyond the apparent framing of women as facilitators of impurity: It seems that Israelite women are not included in this address; they are therefore absent from revelation itself.

Some contemporary translators and commentators have tried to address this issue by modifying the text itself. The 2008 The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, for example, adds “[the men among]” prior to the gendered prohibition, so that the verse reads “[the men among] you shall not go near a woman.” This bracketed addition, the editors explain in a note, indicates “that although the inclusion of women is generally assumed, in this particular verse the imperative must be addressed to men.” There is a classical basis to their emendation: The medieval commentator Rashi, for example, argues that these instructions were offered not to prevent women from participating in revelation, but to ensure their presence. The mandate, he explains, enables “the women to immerse themselves on the third day and be pure to receive the Torah,” for if they were to have intercourse within this three-day period, they might become impure.

But Judith Plaskow, a founder of Jewish feminist theology, reads the stipulation against approaching women as an unequivocal indication that the revelation was exclusively addressed to men. For Plaskow, this is a supreme stain on revelation and an example of “the profound injustice of Torah itself.” It is in this passage, she writes, that “the Otherness of women finds its way into the very center of Jewish experience.” Plaskow notes that the Jewish tradition views the revelation at Sinai not as a one-time historical event but as a mythic narrative we relive every day through the process of learning, and thus continuing to acquire, Torah. Because of this, the foundational exclusion of women did not simply happen once, but is rather a recurring event baked into the fibers of Judaism. Nevertheless, Plaskow implores her readers to demand inclusion in the Jewish collective—“to start with the certainty of our membership in our own people,” which entails the necessity “to re-member and recreate its history, to reshape Torah.”

This call for women to reconstitute the collective reminds us that the original sin of gender-exclusive revelation is likewise not a reflection of divine will, but a human creation: Although Moses often conveys God’s will, the rabbis tell us that his instruction here was added at his own volition. Had Moses not intervened, the stipulation to “not approach women” would never have existed. Today, too, many of us are being pushed out of the Jewish collective. But it behooves us to remember that, like Moses’s addition, this exclusion is not divinely decreed. Similarly, the systems of domination that underlie it are not transcendent; they are within our power to undo.

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