Feb

21

2025

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When I stumbled upon the first season of the Netflix series Mo a couple of years ago, I simply couldn’t believe this show existed: Here was a popular American series that clips along with family sit-com jocularity in tidily built half-hour episodes and, at the same time, talks about Palestine and offers a piercing critique of US immigration policy. When the second season (reportedly the series’s last) launched at the end of January, I couldn’t help binging it, not only because each of the eight episodes ends on an expertly-devised little cliff-hanger, but also because the new season goes even deeper in its political poignance. And it’s still hilarious.

The series is based loosely on the experience of its author and star, the comedian Mohammed Amer. When Mo opens, the hero and his family have been waiting 22 years for their asylum claim to be processed, after having fled Palestine for Kuwait and, later, Kuwait for the US—a timeline and journey that parallels Amer and his family’s experience. Our affable protagonist is a big-hearted bumbler, devoted to his mom and older brother (who has autism); his father died years earlier, and Mo struggles vainly to provide as the man of the family. (A critique of conventional masculinity is a strong undercurrent of the show.)

The comic set-ups are familiar, but always with a twist. For instance, Mo’s mom is a traditional immigrant hewing to the ways of the old country—but, uniquely for American TV, a Palestinian Muslim whose ties to religion and home are not, as they would be in a standard sitcom, fodder for ridicule. If Mo is familiar as a ne’er-do-well screwup—a grown man who lives at home and can’t hold down a job—we soon see that it’s not because he’s a schlubby slacker, but because he’s undocumented and his lack of papers prevents him from legal employment. In the first episode, he loses a reasonably stable, under-the-table job in an electronics store because of an impending ICE raid, and everything unspools from there. Ingeniously, it’s always the system that is the butt of the jokes.

Soon after, Mo is injured when gunmen open fire in a grocery store where he is shopping—an occasion for mordant quips from the paramedics who try to determine how many casualties are required for it to qualify as a mass shooting. Lacking health insurance, Mo refuses medical care and self-medicates with lean, a codeine-bearing cough-syrup concoction, which originated in Houston and is just one of the show’s nods to the city where it’s set and where Amer grew up (and where, like his character, he learned Spanish alongside his English and Arabic). Mo soon becomes addicted and that sets off a series of lies that become too much for his hardworking girlfriend, a Mexican American who runs an auto body shop. Mo lands a series of gray-economy jobs and downright illegal gigs, all the while trying to help his mom’s fledgling olive oil business. These situations constantly propel him into new scrapes and increasingly absurd escapades, and by the end of the first season, he has inadvertently entered Mexico. Lacking a passport, he has no way to come back home to Houston. For the United States, too, Mo has no right of return.

The second season opens six months later, with Mo selling falafel tacos from a pedal-powered food cart in Mexico City, where he also works side hustles wrestling and playing in a mariachi band. It’s hard to describe how the show deepens while maintaining its levity without too many spoilers, but, suffice it to say, the new season mixes even more audaciously the humorous with the harrowing, as every misstep leads to new lows and every new low has some comically critical payoff: Mo is officially deported—but, being stateless, he can’t be sent away! In a side-splitting scene, Mo blows his top in a fancy new restaurant run by his ex-girlfriend’s new beau—a highly successful Israeli chef. Farcical anti-Palestinian assumptions bounce off the walls as Mo decries the chef’s appropriation of Mo’s land, culture, culinary repertoire, and girlfriend—listen for a patron’s confusion of “hummus” with “Hamas.”

Mo is not afraid to be schmaltzy, but it has earned every drop. A scene in which Mo’s brother visits a therapist and receives a diagnosis is one of TV’s most honest and touching treatments of autism, and don’t even try not to cry when Mo and his family at last visit relatives in the West Bank in an episode of profound celebration and steadfastness. (Mo scored a passport after his ex-girlfriend dumped the Israeli dude and married Mo to help him get a greencard.)

At the season’s end, the family heads back to the US; this is, after all, an American story—but with some discomfiting parallels to Palestinian experiences. A West Bank settler who trains his sights on Mo near the end, for example, resembles a shotgun-bearing interceptor threatening Mo as he illegally crosses into Texas early in the second season; the callous Israeli soldier who searches Mo at Ben Gurion Airport mirrors the cruel guard in a vile Texas border facility where Mo is detained. In this moment, when it’s hard to think about the state of either US immigration or Palestine without utter despair, Mo offers some satirical levity and, most amazingly, gets a US audience to root for an undocumented, Palestinian immigrant.

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): In the opening scene of the Argentinian television show El Fin del Amor (2022), the feminist philosopher and writer Tamara Tenenbaum and a friend debate the meaning of twerking while drinking at a club in Buenos Aires—circling the possibility of resignifying aesthetic forms that emerge from oppressive contexts. When the bartender reveals a new Jewish star tattoo on her arm, Tenenbaum discloses that she, too, is Jewish, surprising her friend, who asks why she never talks about her Judaism. Tenenbaum brushes off the question, but the rest of the show is an exploration of that avoidance and the fraught, twisted path of some kind of return, the grappling of an edgy academic with her Orthodox background.

The show, a semi-autobiographical portrayal of the real feminist philosopher and writer Tamara Tenenbaum—who rose to fame for a longform 2019 essay bearing the same name as the show (which was translated into English last year)—is like no other I’ve encountered. Its abundant references to and discussions of critical theory sit alongside frequent scenes of explicit sex and hard drug use. And, to boot, it certainly has more extensive halachic references than I’ve ever witnessed before in popular culture. The combination often feels improbable: How can there exist a TV show where feminist reckonings with niddah (Jewish menstrual purity laws) are a central driving force of the narrative? The Jewish content of the show is somewhat staggering. We see mundane aspects of religious Jewish life, such as Tenenbaum’s childhood friend Sarita, with whom she reconnects early on in the show, kashering her kitchen before Passover, selling her chametz to a gentile, ironing her husband’s kippot, marking her period in a calendar to calculate niddah stipulations, and much more. We also get less typical glimpses: In multiple scenes, for example, Tenenbaum articulates the sexual energy she feels around imagining going to the mikveh. In moments, a spectral manifestation of Tenenbaum’s childhood self appears, and we see her religious childhood pitted against her current life. A flashback to Tenenbaum as a young girl reading the laws of niddah is followed immediately by a present-day scene in which she has sex while on her period; an image of her child self in a Queen Esther costume on Purim is followed by a hook-up with Ofelia, a friend who is a trans woman; a youthful memory of hearing about a friend’s cousin who was expelled from the community after she married a gentile comes up against the backdrop of her recently-ended relationship with a non-Jewish partner.

The Jewishness of the show feels real and lived—an outlier in the current landscape of Jewish television, which offers up, alternately, the misogynistic kitsch of Nobody Wants This, the unrealistic exoticism of Unorthodox, or the stereotyped schmaltz of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. That’s not to say the show is perfect: The intellectual references sometimes feel like posturing, Tenenbaum can be annoying and unlikeable as a character, and there’s no real plot to speak of. El Fin del Amor is most successful as a thought-provoking, nuanced mediation on rejecting the binaries—between religiosity and secularism, piety and eroticism, tradition and radicalness—that so often constrain our thinking about Jewishness and its portrayal in popular culture. The show is a reflection on the freedom that can come from constraints, the passion that can arise from boundaries, and the responsibility that doesn’t disappear with independence. “I don’t believe in anything,” Tenenbaum says directly into the camera in the final scene, “but I believe in mitzvot.” These mitzvot do not necessarily entail compliance with the religious strictures of Tenenbaum’s upbringing but rather signal a recommitment to a kind of relationality made possible by obligation. This kind of dedication may seem countercultural in today’s world but, set against the backdrop of Buenos Aires’s party scene, El Fin del Amor makes it seem not so far out of reach.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When my wife suggested we celebrate my birthday with a visit to the Cy Twombly exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, I was happy to accept. I was in the mood for crayon squiggles—or “loops,” as the gallery calls them. The first room of the show didn’t disappoint. The variety-within-sameness of Twombly’s scrawls—whether on paper or over gray house paint on canvas—is strangely charming in its anarchic spirit. The untitled paintings on display all date from the years 1969–1971; along with their spiraling central motif, four of them share identical lines of illegible “writing” in a non-existent language. The boldly drawn loops are themselves diverse in shape and character, varying in length and in abruptness of slope, especially across the works dating from 1970. The most complex work in this room is an untitled piece from 1968, completed in crayon on house paint, in which the loops and nonsense text provide a diagram of an impossible object.

Down the stairs was a room that froze me in my tracks, especially after the gray of the first set of paintings. It was full of landscapes in magical oil, all painted on large canvases and bearing the influence of J.M.W. Turner. Green—the green of a forest seen from afar—is the dominant color, cut across in some cases by a cloud of white, either at the top, or slicing the canvas diagonally, as in the magnificent Paesaggio from 1986. As in Turner’s most fully developed, almost abstract works, we often can only make out the subject if the title identifies it. In Condottiero Testa di Cozzo, loosely based on a painting by Titian of the Grand Duke of Alba, shades of green are interrupted by a red, white, and black blur—a parrot, but one that is pure color without form.

The generous exhibition—which also includes a suite of paintings from Twombly’s travels across Russia as well as Central and East Asia—is a fascinating display of the artist’s versatility. We are not accustomed to thinking of Twombly as a master colorist, nor as a painter who refers back to classical art. And yet this show, particularly the gallery of “landscapes,” provides a glimpse into another Cy Twombly: one who has carefully considered art history and put it to use in an extremely personal way.

This week’s parshah, Mishpatim, opens with a jarring turn from the sublime to the mundane. Last week, in Parshat Yitro, we read about the revelation at Mount Sinai, arguably the most awe-inspiring moment in the Hebrew Bible. Our parshah, though, begins with a set of laws governing the acquisition of Hebrew slaves. It is hard to imagine a more abrupt and deflating transition. The Jewish people have just been liberated from slavery in Egypt—an exodus that leads to their theophanic encounter. It’s a moment which generations of commentators have understood as a paradigmatic mystical experience. But instead of continuing this heightened scene or even gradually transitioning back into the quotidian, the Torah suddenly instructs the people in the proper procedures for enslaving their fellow Israelites—for committing the monstrous crime from which they suffered for generations in Egypt, and for which the Egyptians were brutally punished.

Perhaps this abrupt turn should not be understood as a letdown, but rather as a necessary intervention to ensure that the Israelites’ mystical experience does not untether them from morality. Because of mysticism’s emphasis on directly experiencing ultimate truth beyond conventional modes of perception and conduct, including boundaries between ethical and unethical behavior, it can be easily weaponized to disregard or even justify the most harmful interpersonal activity. This is attested to across religious and cultural contexts, as in the all-too-common predations of spiritual teachers on their students, or the fact that many of the most violent and fanatical Jewish supremacists in Israel/Palestine, such as Yitzchak Ginsburgh and his followers, are also some of contemporary Judaism’s most avowed mystics.

It therefore would have been reasonable to worry that the visceral experience of God at Mount Sinai might have caused the Israelites to fall into a triumphalist understanding of their religious task, according to which their direct access to God allows them to transcend moral concerns. Against the potential hubris that comes from experiencing such proximity to the divine, Mishpatim intrudes on the Israelites’ sublime encounter by imposing a detailed legal code to govern, and thus mediate, their relationships with God and with each other. The choice to interrupt revelation specifically with laws regulating slavery seems designed to prevent the Israelites from imagining that their capacity for transgression is different than that of any other nation, or that their mystical encounter with God exempts them from behaving in line with God’s vision of justice. Because even though the Torah, troublingly, permits slavery, it strictly limits it, turning the institution into something closer to indentured servitude with a required end date.

One classical midrash notes the limits the Torah puts on slavery to draw a contrast between Egyptian slavery and the way the Israelites are commanded to behave. In emphasizing this comparison, the midrash interprets the opening of Mishpatim as a warning to the Israelites that if they violate the parshah’s laws governing interpersonal conduct, “God will do to them what God did to Egypt.” The particular covenant between God and the Jewish people, according to which they were freed from Egypt to receive the Torah, does not grant them any leniency regarding ethical behavior. If anything, our parshah suggests that the opposite is true: that the Israelites’ mystical encounter with divinity heightens their moral responsibility. Just as the Israelites experienced a collective revelation at Sinai, so too is their moral responsibility shared. This is evident in the commandment from Mishpatim, the most frequently repeated injunction in the Torah: “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or orphan. If you do mistreat them, I will heed their outcry as soon as they cry out to Me.” The 12th-century commentator Ibn Ezra notes that the verbs in these verses are inconsistent in grammatical number: the first usage of “mistreat” is plural, while the second is singular. He interprets this to mean that when it comes to ethical behavior, individual and collective responsibilities are intertwined; all Jews share moral culpability for the harms they see others causing.

Ibn Ezra’s underlying argument, according to which the entire Jewish people is one unified body vis-à-vis their ethical obligations, is not dissimilar from the rabbinic understanding that the entire Jewish people, as one, received God’s direct revelation. This idea—that the many can fuse into one, and mortal consciousness can merge with divinity—exemplifies the mystical nature of the Israelites’ experience at Sinai. Mishpatim, with its legalistic interruption of this narrative, and Ibn Ezra, with his extension of that narrative to the structure of ethical obligation, make the implicit claim that mystical experience must not be isolated from commitment to a moral code. In this we find a corrective to two seemingly different contemporary trends: on the one hand, those progressive meditators and psychedelic journeyers who prioritize their pursuit of spiritual experience over the day-to-day ethical cultivation that Mishpatim demands, and, on the other, the militant mystics who commit violence in part because their experiences of encountering divinity make them believe they are above moral concerns.

By imposing these strict moral demands, the Torah reminds us that the revelation it describes makes us no better and no worse than any other people. We too have the capacity to enslave and oppress, to victimize others in the same ways we have been victimized, and, in response to that fact, we must put limits on our power. In other words, the Torah is committed to making sure that we do not pursue sublime religious states at the expense of mundane moral commitments. Instead, we are directed to integrate prosaic ethical practices into the peak moments of our religious lives, and in turn let those peak moments enliven our moral obligations.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.