Feb

20

2026

Allison Brown (managing editor): I got Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution shortly after its publication in 2022, but the prospect of reading it at that time felt daunting. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit with the trauma I knew I would find within its pages. Told through a mix of memoir, interviews, and narrative, Radius recounts the story of the revolutionary Egyptian feminist group Opantish, which formed in late 2012 to intervene in the increasingly frequent mass sexual assaults of women protesters that were taking place in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the symbolic and geographic heart of the revolution.

As the 15th anniversary of the popular uprising that brought an end to Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule quietly came and went this past January, however, I felt the need to hear from the revolutionary activists who had continued to fight even as the counterrevolution took hold. I had been wrong to think Radius would be hard to read; I flew through its 200 or so pages in just two sittings.

The book is a gripping account from the front lines of a remarkable organizing operation in which a group of everyday people, led by women, developed the tactics and infrastructure for identifying where in the massive protest that filled the square an assault was happening and deploying a team to disrupt it. El-Rifae describes, for example, how Opantish volunteers would break through the mob that had encircled a woman protester and then link arms to create a corridor—a radius—of safe passage through which women volunteers could reach the woman under assault and form a protective circle around her; then, a second circle would form to protect the inner group, and the whole formation would move back out through the corridor.

There’s another, more meditative and deeply moving dimension to the book, too, discernible in the meaning-making work El-Rifae does in the aftermath of trauma and loss. An epigraph to the book’s fourth and final part comes from Opantish member Habiba looking back from 2015: “It’s like we all went out and we did this huge, crazy thing together, and then we went home and we never talked about it again.” And El-Rifae herself reflects in that same year, “I feel myself and everything that has happened, everything I still haven’t worked out about the revolution and Opantish and the coup, being put in a box and labeled ‘defeat.’”

Radius is El-Rifae’s breaking through the silence encircling the revolutionary struggle as it took shape in Opantish, a forging of a pathway for the memories of that experience to be carried out into the present. At once personal and collective, the narrative corridor El-Rifae has created is marked by deep care, sensitive to how “the constant swings of the revolution . . . had pushed and pulled people toward each other and then apart, and into and out of themselves, too.” It’s also a narrative that transmits the warmth of the fire that fueled Opantish. As fascist forces here in the US seek to chill the organizing of collective care that’s emerged to resist ICE’s brutal violence, this warmth feels vital.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): Here in Minneapolis, we’re waiting with baited breath to see what the promised conclusion of Operation Metro Surge actually looks like on the ground: Will it mean a true end to this brutal occupation, or some kind of quieter continuation? As national attention begins to turn away from the Twin Cities, I’ve been appreciating the importance of local media—especially the small, left-wing outlets that have worked tirelessly to report on ICE’s siege despite limited resources, and which are now beginning to document the aftermath. For instance, Minnesota Reformer, a progressive nonprofit publication, is doggedly following the fight to seek some semblance of justice for Alex Pretti, the activist and nurse executed in the street by Customs and Border Patrol officers last month. Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom specifically dedicated to “covering immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota,” is tracking local legislative efforts to help people recover from the invasion’s devastating economic impact. Meanwhile, Racket—a writer-owned website run by veterans of the shuttered alt-weekly City Pages—is reporting on grassroots efforts to fundraise for impacted communities, while continuing their unbeatable weekday roundups of ICE-related stories. (This week’s collection is aptly titled “Daily Updates on DHS Goons in MN Till We’re Absolutely Sure They’re Gone.”) For the work these small but mighty publications have done and are continuing to do to make visible the reality of the federal assault and local resistance, they deserve your attention and support.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A glowing New York Times article on a new Netflix series based on Orhan Pamuk’s great novel, The Museum of Innocence, gave me great hope. Among the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s many works of fiction, this is the most engaging and accessible. The story and the characters are primary in this tale of romantic obsession, or, more accurately, amour fou—mad love.

Pamuk traces his protagonist Kemal’s yearslong obsession with Füsun, a young shopgirl and distant relative. Kemal breaks off an existing engagement for Füsun, turns everything about his life upside down, loses her to an unworthy man, dedicates his fortune to fulfilling her life’s dream by turning her into a movie star, and spends all his evenings with her and her family just to be in her presence. So great is his love and obsession that he steals possessions of hers, things she’s touched, anything related to her, so she will always be present to him. The Museum of Innocence is in this regard an anti-Proust novel. Whereas for Proust, involuntary memory is the only kind that counts, Kemal’s beloved is present in every concrete object she has approached, so his memory is always active and willed. When the novel reaches its tragic end, Kemal turns the saved objects into a museum dedicated to Füsun’s memory.

The nine-part series, directed by Zeynep Günay Tan, is faithful to the novel, thanks to Pamuk’s insistence that he be allowed to vet the script and ensure that no liberties were taken. The leads, physically at least, are well chosen. A Turkish heartthrob named Selahattin Pasali plays the wealthy, spoiled Kemal with the right amount of cockiness, wonder, and slightly modulated arrogance. Eylül Kandemir as Füsun is exactly as beautiful as she’d need to be to be the object of obsession.

The path of their love is, of course, not smooth, and all of the romances in the series are twisted by Turkish mores. Füsun is looked down on as a shop girl, but also as someone who once participated in a beauty contest, a sign that her morality is dubious. Kemal’s wealth makes him welcome everywhere, even as an intruder in Füsun’s household after she has wed another.

The series’ strength is precisely its fidelity to Pamuk’s vision. But it is also flawed. The director allows no scene to go unaccompanied by a sappy score. At first this is merely annoying. Over the course of nine episodes it begins to seem like a crutch for the director and the actors, as all their emotions are spelled out in the music. And, to return to Proust, Füsun becomes quite unpleasant and, for this viewer at least, turns out to be very much like Swann’s love Odette. Kemal, like Swann, has wasted his life on someone who was simply not for him. I didn’t feel like this when reading the novel.

Even with its flaws, Museum of Innocence is worth watching. If you haven’t read the book, it will lead you to it. And Kemal’s museum dedicated to Füsun really exists, built by Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul. It’s probably unique in the world: a real museum dedicated to a fictional character. My wife and I went to Istanbul shortly after it opened to visit it. It’s a place of wonder.

In his 1935 poem, “Questions From a Worker Who Reads,” Bertolt Brecht asks, “Who built Thebes with its seven gates? / In the books stand the names of kings. / Did kings haul the rock?” The historians, of course, mislead us, erecting textual monuments to monarchs while effacing the workers. Brecht cannily begins with an architectural feature that survives only in ancient texts, in which the seven portals commemorate the mythical defeat of the city’s seven Greek assailants. The magical number seven signals the legendary qualities of official history. (Like leftists reading the weekly parshah, Brecht is concerned with political critique, not with these texts’ historicity: As his worker remarks later, “Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, / The drowning still cried out for their slaves”; these are imaginary cities, with real slaves in them.)

I imagine Brecht’s worker reading Terumah, this week’s parshah, in which God gives instructions for building the Tabernacle, and asking, “Who built the menorah with its seven lamps?” But while God delivers the directive to Moses, the menorah is actually fabricated, at the end of Shemot, not by Moses but by Betzalel, the Tabernacle’s divinely selected and inspired craftsman. In a midrash responding to this contradiction, Rabbi Levi imagines Moses puzzled by God’s instructions for the menorah’s construction—as readers both ancient and modern have consistently been by this notoriously sketchy and confusing passage. God first elaborates orally to Moses, then shows him a fiery hologram of the menorah, and finally gives up and refers him to Betzalel, who builds it “immediately” and apparently without trouble. By playfully expanding God’s order that the menorah be “hammered work” (“miqshah”) into a scene of Moses’s repeated perplexity (“nitqasheh”), Rabbi Levi suggests that the menorah-texts are hard to visualize and contradictory so as to underscore the limits of the lawgiver’s words and the necessity of the artisan. The laborer, who imposes mental form onto the material world, works miracles the prophet can barely comprehend.

We are, unfortunately, liable to misunderstand the miracle, wondering not at the labor process but at the finished product. In an alternate midrashic tradition, God addresses Moses’s perplexity by having him hurl a talent of gold into a fire, in which the menorah “is made by itself.” Here, God’s instructions in Shemot (for instance, “six branches shall issue from its sides”) describe not its spatial form but its wondrous auto-assembly. This midrash is canonized by Rashi, because it explains a textual anomaly: While the text of Shemot 25:31 reads, in numerous manuscripts and ancient versions, “you shall make [ta’aseh] the menorah,” our Masoretic text instead has “the menorah shall be made [te’aseh].” Both Betzalel and Moses disappear before the self-fashioning art-object. In this story of what Marx calls “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor,” the finished article’s shiny surface obscures the contradictory social processes from which it emerged.

What Marx calls commodity fetishism, Jewish tradition terms “idolatry.” Strikingly, Rashi reports a close parallel in the case of the Golden Calf. When Moses indignantly interrogates his brother about his role in that debacle, Aaron evasively replies that the people gave him gold; “I hurled it into the fire and out came this calf”—and Rashi imagines him saying, “I did not know that this calf would come out, but it did.” (The narrator earlier described Aaron crafting the calf, so we know he is lying.) Ironically, he ducks responsibility for fashioning an idol by repeating his error, assigning animated agency to inert metal. Disconcertingly, the parallel suggests that the same danger attends the menorah.

Perhaps this is because the menorah is a paradox: a solid basis for flickering, transient flames. As the Bible scholar Jon Levenson argues, the menorah imitates the burning bush, which Moses sees in the wilderness, alight but inexplicably unincinerated. Thus, Levenson writes, the menorah “is actually a stylized tree, complete with ‘branches,’ ‘almond-shaped cups,’ ‘calyces,” and ‘petals,’” and it burns “continually.” The menorah responds to a yearning for a stable representation of God, who is in truth “a devouring fire”—a chemical reaction rather than a substance, pure combustion and ceaseless change, incandescent with transfiguration. Necessarily frustrated in its realization and thus liable to lead us astray, the desire to bring such a deity into the world might itself still return us to Moses’s momentary encounter with a violent light and heat that promises liberation to a beleaguered group of slaves. In her 1977 oral history The Romance of American Communism, the critic Vivian Gornick wrote that the workers she knew as a child found in Marxism “abstractions with the power to transform” and so “experienced a kind of inner radiance: some intensity of illumination that tore at the soul.” Which is to say the menorah would point us, in Brecht’s poem, not to seven-gated Thebes, but to the worker’s reading itself—a restless consciousness coming to see itself in, and striving to remake, history.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, is out now.