Feb

27

2026

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer) At the end of Milo Rau’s Hate Radio last week, I walked out of the theater feeling surprisingly unmoved. I couldn’t understand why seeing an imagined re-creation of a radio broadcast that incited genocidal violence in Rwanda in 1994 hadn’t left me horrified, shocked, disgusted, upset. But in the days since, the piece has scratched at me painfully, as if my clothes had picked up burs in the theater and they eventually pierced my skin. That effect makes a terrible kind of sense: the anti-Tutsi hatred spewed by the hosts of Kigali’s Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) couldn’t impel Hutus to murder their neighbors instantly; the dehumanizing rhetoric had to seep in over time as part of quotidian activity.

Hate Radio depicts that normalizing process. Most of the play’s nearly two-hour running time takes place in a reconstruction of the RTLM studio, where three hosts sit at a round table with large mics, while a DJ spins the likes of Nirvana and Reel 2 Real (“I like to move it, move it”) in the adjoining booth, and an armed soldier silently stands guard. The studio is encased in glass walls, and the audience members, arrayed on opposite sides of this transparent box, watch each other take in the action. The constant sight of other spectators and the sense that we are being watched, along with the vitrine-like enclosure, create emotional, analytical distance. But at the same time, the hosts’ banter (in French and Kinyarwanda) comes into our ears through headphones—a most intimate medium (supertitles translate the text). Visually we’re pushed away, even as, aurally, we’re pulled in.

And much of what we hear sounds ordinary—the hosts chatting about weather and soccer and the latest headlines, taking calls from listeners, dancing along to the DJ’s tunes, trading quips. But all that badinage is laced with poisonous rhetoric about the “cockroaches” who have committed atrocities against the majority of Rwandans while trying to take over the country. With a jovial nonchalance, the radio jocks egg on a massacre.

The consequences are plainly expressed in a prologue and epilogue that frame the broadcast scene, comprising video segments that feature survivors and witnesses of the genocide. Blinds drawn closed over the set’s glass walls serve as screens for each brief individual testimony in larger-than-life projections. These are fictional characters, based on interviews, diaries, and transcripts of the post-genocide Gacaca courts, writer-director Rau says in a program note.

Rau doesn’t explain why he constructed these composite testimonies rather than tell a specific person’s story, but I think it’s because he is more interested in examining traumatic and unjust historical events and the ways they are remembered and narrated than in exploring individual psychologies—which is, in part to say, that as a theater maker, he’s not drawn to narrative realism. Born in Switzerland and currently the artistic director of the annual Vienna Festival, he ran the NTGent theater in Belgium for five years, and has been making work with his own company, the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM), for nearly two decades. A progressive provocateur, he often examines political violence, but doesn’t gorily depict it directly, at least not in the pieces he has brought to New York previously—Five Easy Pieces, a chilling and controversial collaboration with a children’s theater company about an infamous Belgian child-murderer, and Antigone in the Amazon, an allegorical re-vamping of Sophocles, for which he worked in Brazil with members of the MST (Landless Workers Movement) to confront the 1996 murder of farmers by military police. Two more of his works will be shown in New York next month: The Interrogation, a monologue by Édouard Louis; and The Pelicot Trial, a staged reading of materials from the trial of the notorious French rapist.

Hate Radio is an old piece. First presented in 2011, it has toured the world (including Rwanda) on and off since then. Platforms for hate speech have only proliferated in those dozen years—from the manosphere to the Oval Office—and the tone of contemptuous jocularity struck by Hate Radio’s men and woman in a glass booth has become our flammable soundtrack.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): With Gotham at War, the historian Mike Wallace completes his magisterial 3,000-page history of New York City. Even with all that space, Wallace couldn’t get to the present. The first volume, Gotham, covered New York from its beginnings to 1898; the second, Greater Gotham, from 1898 to 1919, and now, in the third and final volume, we have the Depression to 1945.

It wouldn’t be far from the truth to call the trilogy encyclopedic, given the heft and dimensions of each volume. Within their pages are, despite the gaps in the coverage and the heavy emphasis on Manhattan, as complete a picture of the city as we are ever going to see.

Gotham at War takes us through the Depression, the process of recovery, and the myriad and conflicting reactions to the rise of fascism and World War II. Wallace doesn’t over-romanticize the meeting and supposed melding of the ethnic groups that make up the city’s population, of which New Yorkers are often unjustifiably boastful. He gives substantial coverage to the pro-Nazi German American Bund, with its unfailing support of Hitler and its hatred of Jews. Less well known is the shameful fact that the Italian American community had a significant pro-Mussolini bent, and that the Irish Catholic Legion was also a significant reactionary Jew-baiting organization. The role of exclusionary immigration laws as they relate to New York presents us with surprising facts and figures about the tiny numbers of Chinese and South Asian immigrants in the city in the period covered. Wallace’s examination of race relations is not shy about racial conflict alongside comity. The issue was and is a complicated and often unflattering one, but Wallace does it justice.

Politics take up significant space in Gotham at War, and at some points it seems the coverage is almost too extensive. This is a history of New York, and the focus is often national and international rather than local; the only thing New York about it is often that the key organizations and players were based here. But no 1,000-page book will have 1,000 perfect pages.

Wallace deals with almost every possible aspect of New York life, including its rise as an art and fashion capital after the fall of Paris in 1940. Musical theater is covered through the perfect combination of the military and the city in On the Town. The New York intellectual journals, which have been written about to death [editorial note from David Klion: disagree, there is still more to say!], are discussed briefly yet sufficiently.

But at the end of the volume, with New York established as the “capital of the world” and home to the United Nations thanks to Rockefeller largesse (the family covered the costs of the real estate on which the UN headquarters stands), the reader is left with the stirring memory of figures who appear throughout the book whose like we haven’t seen since. Fiorello La Guardia is presented as a thoroughly admirable man who occasionally stumbled, but always recovered and righted himself in time. Eleanor Roosevelt is the archetypal liberal, the upright conscience that stood in contrast to her husband who, politician that he was, wouldn’t always stand up for what he believed. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. gets a great deal of credit for his fight for civil and human rights, as does a great forgotten figure, Vito Marcantonio, the American Labor Party congressman from East Harlem, a man close to the Communists and a fierce defender of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. New York gets the treatment it deserves in Wallace’s trilogy, warts and all.

A. Gopalan (senior editor): I may not always remember what sport the Super Bowl is associated with, but I will never forget this year’s halftime show: It introduced me to my new obsession. Since that Sunday, the Puerto Rican sensation Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny—whose ubiquity I had miraculously escaped over the past few years—has been playing in my head(phones) nonstop. I was first hooked by the political ballad “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”), in which Benito’s smooth vocals, layered over a strong baseline and güiro percussion, ring with foreboding: “Thеy want to take my river, and my beach too / They want my neighborhood and for grandma to leave / No, don’t let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai / ‘Cause I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii.” The music is hypnotic, as is the anti-colonial fervor; I was struck by Benito’s clear-eyed look at Hawaii, where the theft of land and resources continues under the auspices of representative democracy.

Not all Bad Bunny songs are revolutionary anthems: His Grammy-winning 2025 album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS serves up techno club hits like “VeLDÁ,” romantic dirges like “TURiSTA,” and block-party bangers like the irresistible “NUEVAYoL.” But the motherland has still seeped deep (not least because Bad Bunny worked with an anti-colonial Puerto Rican historian in making the album). The titular “DtMF,” otherwise a song about the long shadow of a breakup, features the seemingly random mid-chorus line, “I hope my people never move away [from Puerto Rico].” The aching short film that accompanies DtMF goes further, expanding the story of an aging Benito’s personal regrets into a parable about a rapidly gentrifying island. In a colonial context, Benito seems to be saying, all private losses open on to the structuring violence of empire like streams into an ocean. This thread is pulled through all of DtMF: “WELTiTA” is a fun song about a sexy day at the beach whose music video features the triumphant destruction of a “Private Property, No Trespassing” sign placed there by gringos. “LA MuDANZA,” the album-ending self-tribute, closes with the vow: “No one’ll kick me out of here, I’m not going anywhere / Tell them this is my home where my grandfather was born”; in the music video, Benito is singing this over scenes of himself running past US Border Patrol agents clutching a light-blue (independence) Puerto Rican flag.

And it’s not just the lyrics and visuals. The album’s instrumentation is all political, part of Benito’s project to create a generationally integrated Puerto Rican culture rooted in the local rhythms of salsa, bomba, plena, reggaeton, and dembow, all of which are named over and over. Then there are the people playing the rhythms: A crew of brilliant, exclusively Puerto Rican musicians who, in live performances on YouTube (don’t miss their Tiny Desk), get solos so dedicated and reverent you forget whose concert you are watching, who carry entire choruses, and whose joyous street dancing quickly steals the camera’s focus in every video.

One gets the sense that something really special is going on here. A megastar returning to his roots and becoming, in a word, rooted there, creating music with and for his community? And in the process, making songs that will have you thinking, feeling, and constantly dancing while also pissing off the powers-that-be? Sign me up.

Last week’s parshah, Terumah, and this week’s, Tetzaveh, consist largely of detailed instructions about the building of the Mishkan, or Tabernacle, and the garments that must be fashioned for the High Priest. At the very end of Tetzaveh, we’re told how to dedicate this structure upon its completion and the process for installing the priests in their roles. God instructs Moses on the details of a seven-day ceremony: the procedures for anointing the priests with oil and dressing them in their ceremonial garb, and the identical set of sacrifices to be offered each day—a bull as a sin offering, a ram as a burnt offering, a second ram as a peace offering, and a grain offering.

However, when Parshat Tzav, which is read a few weeks from now, details the actual unfolding of this ceremony, there are some notable deviations. In particular, we see a heavier emphasis on sin and atonement, both in the nature of the sacrifices and in the priests’ conduct. The “par,” or “bull,” in our parshah is referred to throughout Tzav exclusively as the “par hachatat,” or “the sin offering of a bull.” The priests are told that they must not leave the Tent of Meeting for seven days, so that “atonement shall be made for you.” And most crucially, there’s an eighth day ceremony that’s entirely absent from this week’s parshah: In addition to the priests sacrificing the same offerings as the previous seven days, the Israelites are commanded to bring a goat sin offering, an ox and ram as peace offerings, and a grain offering. The medieval commentator known as the Ramban points out that the sacrifices for this eighth day ceremony looks strikingly similar to what will later be described as those for Yom Kippur.

At first glance, the discrepancy between the given instructions and their enactment is baffling: Either our parshah neglected to mention an entire day of ritual, or Parshat Tzav added an extra day with no clear reason. Commenting on this gap, the Ramban suggests that this divergence is due to a crucial rupture that occurs in the interim: the sin of the Golden Calf, which transpires in next week’s parshah, Ki Tissa. While God ultimately reconciles with the people following the violation of their newly formed covenant, and they move forward with the project of constructing the Mishkan, this locus of worship and spiritual connection is fundamentally altered. The establishment of this structure and the commencement of its sacred project are now dependent upon an intricate process of atonement. In the Ramban’s understanding, the central purpose of the Mishkan is to prolong the revelatory experience of Mount Sinai by housing God’s presence amongst the Israelites, providing an ongoing source of intimate relationship and divine instruction. But after the people’s grave sin, this structure cannot look quite the same as it would have absent any context of harm.

I have been thinking about how the Torah’s changes between the proposed and actual forms of the Mishkan may provide the Jewish left with a framework for thinking about how we build a new Jewish world. Our communities have increasingly insisted on the necessity of building new Jewish institutions—both to build robust Jewish life that exists outside of the Zionism that permeates the Jewish mainstream, and to divorce ourselves from the model of institutions funded by and beholden to a small cadre of immensely wealthy donors. These donors are not only overwhelmingly committed Zionists, a reality that undergirds the former problem, but their interests fundamentally align more broadly with those of the ruling elite.

Building new centers of vibrant Jewish life outside the ethnonationalist frameworks and corruption of the current mainstream is certainly vital. But, reflecting on the Ramban’s understanding of the Mishkan’s new process of dedication, I wonder how the construction of these institutions must necessarily look different in the wake of such immense damage. These spaces are being built not only in response to many decades of harm by mainstream Jewish institutions—both through their support of Zionism and their ongoing attempts to align with ruling-class interests—but also in the midst of, and eventually the aftermath of, a genocide against Palestinians committed by Israel in the name of Jewish safety, championed by our most powerful collective bodies. Even though leftist Jews vehemently opposed these actions, nothing we build in the wake of this rupture can look quite the same as it might have were it constructed absent such harm.

This might look in part like a shift from projects of the few to those of the many. While our parshah details only the participation of Moses and the priests in the installation process, the narrative in Parshat Tzav notes the participation of the entire people. Though some individuals still take the lead, the Mishkan’s establishment is now seen as both a responsibility and liability shared by the entire collective. Additionally, as the Ramban notes, the repair and atonement involved in the installation process lay the groundwork for Yom Kippur. Rather than a one-off forgiveness rite, this becomes an institutionalized mechanism for addressing future harms. And there’s more than one yearly process: Whereas the Book of Shemot primarily details the sacrifices of the installation ceremony and routine daily offerings, our next book, Vayikra—following the incident of the Golden Calf and subsequent atonement—focuses largely on those sacrifices brought in response to sin. There’s an acknowledgment that even if our most egregious past breaches have been repaired, we’re always at risk of causing new harm. The knowledge that we have addressed past sin cannot instill a sense of infallibility; rather, we must build anew with a mechanism for addressing future harms that all communities, organizations, and individuals are susceptible to.

Our discussion thus far has been within the Ramban’s framework, who sees the Mishkan as a central institution of the Israelites’ religious life that merely shifts in form following their sin. However, Rashi, following many midrashim, asserts that the entire project of the Mishkan—including the very instructions to build it—was a response to the sin of the Golden Calf (working off the notion that the Torah does not always follow chronological order). As one midrash imagines it, the Mishkan is in fact a mechanism of atonement for the Israelites’ transgression—a structure that never would have existed absent the violation of the Golden Calf but that was made necessary to repair the harm committed, and make communal life possible again in its wake.

While the Ramban and Rashi’s accounts of the Mishkan’s function are mutually exclusive, they both offer valuable models for envisioning the kinds of institutions necessary to build both a liberatory Judaism and a more just world. There are those institutions that will be centers of vibrant Jewish life—the kinds we would have always desired, places of community-building and learning, whose construction and functioning will nonetheless necessarily be shaped by a confrontation with the damage caused by prior institutions, and the ways Judaism has been co-opted into the service of genocidal and fascist projects. And there are the institutions needed in the wake of that damage, to directly respond to it and begin the process of repair, many of which already exist or are being created—those whose work is devoted to supporting Palestinian liberation, and pursuing a just future in Israel/Palestine; those that aim to redirect communal funds toward the communities most directly harmed; those devoted to political education for our community, breaking down indoctrinated chauvinist visions of how to achieve Jewish safety and educating toward an ethic of solidarity and interdependence. We don’t live in the world of Parshat Tetzaveh, laying out instructions within an idealized vacuum; we live in the aftermath of vast communal failure, determining how to address the harm and still build something sacred.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.