Feb

28

2025

Josh Lambert (contributor): I’m not the world’s most confident French speaker, but when I’m in Paris, I always make a point of stopping in the comic book shops to see what’s new. Over the years, I’ve been astonished at how many extraordinary and relevant works of graphic fiction and reportage get published in French and never seem to get mentioned in the US press, even among comics fans. If you can read a little French, even with the help of a translation app, I recommend taking a look.

Two extraordinary examples are nonfiction works created by artists who survived the 2015 attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Luz (Rénald Luzier) showed up late on the day of the attack—his birthday—and narrowly missed the violent scene; in 2016, he published O vous, frères humains, a nearly wordless adaptation of a classic essay by Albert Cohen, the extraordinary Corfu-born, Romaniote Jewish novelist, about his first encounter with antisemitism at the age of 10 in Marseille. The book, completed in the aftermath of the attack, grapples with how to live in a world of bewildering, baseless hatred. In Dessiner encore (2021), Luz’s colleague Coco (Corinne Rey) recounts her experiences on the day of the attack itself (she was forced to open the door to the offices and witness her colleagues’ murders) and in the months following, when, racked by fear and despair, she was unable to draw.

On my most recent trip, the work that stood out to me was Salomé Parent-Rachdi’s Amour, Sexe, et Terre Promise: Reportage en Israel et Palestine (2024). Based mostly on reporting that Parent-Rachdi conducted between 2017 and 2020, the album presents the romantic and sexual stories of people living in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, mostly in their own words and—through the illustrations of artist Zac Deloupy—in their homes and personal spaces. Parent-Rachdi could be criticized for sensationalism; in picking who to profile, she certainly sought out people in unusual and intense situations. Examples include the wife of a jailed Palestinian militant who brings her husband’s smuggled semen to a fertility clinic so that the Israeli state cannot prevent them from having children and an Orthodox Jewish man in Jerusalem who, having failed to find a woman to marry, uses an agency created for LGBTQ+ Jews to connect for co-parenting to find a female non-romantic partner to have a child with him. That said, for me at least, the book served as a beguiling reminder of how wildly diverse people are in their sexualities, and how much shame, loneliness, eccentricity, and strange desire exists everywhere.

One other reason to mention this particular collection is that it straddles—awkwardly and painfully—the before and after of October 7th. The album begins with an October 2023 phone call between Parent-Rachdi and Deloupy, in which they acknowledge the horrors of Hamas’s attack and the Israeli response, wonder whether they can go on with the project, and note that “in Gaza, for example, most of the things that [Deloupy] drew are now destroyed.” In a brief epilogue, the authors recount what they’ve heard more recently from their interview subjects, though “because of their anger, sadness, or despair,” some didn’t respond to them at all. One, a French-speaking journalist and fixer from Gaza City, despairs: “They’ve erased my story and I have no future.” It feels more than a little strange to read about people’s sex and love lives in the midst of such suffering, and, understandably, for some readers it may just be an impossible book for this moment. I felt some of that myself, but I also appreciated Parent-Rachdi struggling, as other writers have, to center intimacy, love, and devotion in our thinking about what has been destroyed throughout the last 16 months—and what is still worth fighting for.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, published in 2005 and adapted by the Coen brothers into an award-winning film in 2007. This is the first of McCarthy’s works that I’ve read. It follows three main protagonists, each trying to chase or outrun the others in the aftermath of a botched drug deal: Moss, who was a welder before finding a briefcase with two million dollars in cash in the desert; Chigurh, who is hunting down the briefcase and remorseless about those he kills on the way; and Bell, the sheriff who follows their trails and reflects on the ways that Texas has changed since his youth.

It’s no wonder that No Country for Old Men is famous in its film adaptation. Reading the novel evoked what I love most about certain movies: figuring out what is happening in real time, without a narrator spelling it out explicitly. McCarthy is sparse with punctuation, including quotation marks; it takes effort to follow the dialogue and plot lines as they unfold, yet is simultaneously easy to get caught up in the current of the writing. The prose is gripping, and as I read, I truly had no idea how the story would turn out. In part, I’m writing this recommendation with a selfish desire: I would love to process the ending of the book with others, but I’m not in a book club. If you have read this novel and want to share your thoughts—or have any articles about it you’ve found thought-provoking or clarifying—please reply!

In referencing McCarthy’s work, it feels important to include news that surfaced last year: A woman named Augusta Britt opened up publicly about a romantic and sexual relationship that McCarthy initiated with her in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and he was in his forties. As someone who knows little about McCarthy or Britt, I can only echo the sharp criticism of the initial Vanity Fair article about the relationship—which elides the ethical concerns of grooming in a scenario with that age differential and power dynamic—and try to honor Britt’s telling of her own story, in which she credits McCarthy as saving her life. Interestingly, she describes reading the characters he based off of her in several of his works as more violating than anything in the physical relationship she had with him in her youth. There is much to say—and some has been written—about this, but I’ll leave that to others who have more insight into McCarthy’s work, Britt’s life, and these hard topics than I do.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Lincoln Center’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema is the annual confirmation that French cinema is, much like that formerly great land itself, not what it once was. But even so, the festival always includes some worthwhile films among the dross. This year’s iteration, which runs from March 6th until March 16th, is no exception.

At the top of my list is The Second Act, the latest from Quentin Depieux, a filmmaker I always recommend heartily. Like many of his works, it’s a Pirandellian take on the shooting of a film, in which the actors switch freely between their actual selves and the roles they’re playing, leaving us to decide if it’s the performer or character who’s being difficult. The Second Act features two of France’s biggest stars, Léa Seydoux and Vincent Lindon, who seems to be in almost every French movie shown here; each plays both to type and against type. Like all of Depieux’s films, this one is briskly paced, intelligent, and funny—though it culminates in a strikingly dark ending. I assume this is why, when it opened at Cannes, it caused a certain amount of upset. Don’t let that dissuade you: The Second Act is one of the two films you absolutely shouldn’t miss.

The other is Koya Kamura’s lovely and subtle Winter in Sokcho. Based on Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel of the same name (which I prefer to the film), it’s the story of a young French Korean woman who never knew her French father, but who studied the national literature as a kind of homage to her roots. When an older French graphic novelist comes to stay at the inn where she works a menial job, they gravitate toward each other—she more to him than he to her. It’s a potent meditation on misunderstanding, the illusions of closeness, and unfulfilled dreams.

Of the films I was able to screen before the festival, one other is well worth catching, the most classically French of the bunch: Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours, starring Hafsia Herzi and Isabelle Huppert (who’s as ubiquitous as Lindon) as women from wildly divergent backgrounds who meet while visiting their husbands in prison. They develop an unlikely and—thanks to the way Huppert plays her part—unsettling friendship. The brilliance of the film is that we have no idea where this strange linkage finds its source, nor where it will go. And in Huppert’s and Mazuy’s hands, an ending that would normally be considered unhappy becomes something liberating instead.

This week’s parshah, Terumah, describes a plethora of seemingly banal details about the Tabernacle’s construction. But hidden among this minutiae, we also find a profound societal critique. The portion begins with God encouraging Moses to solicit gifts from the Israelites to use as building materials: “Gold, silver, and copper; blue [tchelet], purple [argaman], and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats’ hair,” as well as animal skins, fine wood, and oils. Though the combination of gold, silver, tchelet, and argaman might seem ordinary in the description of grand architecture, the Bible describes only two other buildings as being made with the same materials: the Temple in Jerusalem, which itself was based on the Tabernacle, and the palace of King Achashverosh, made famous through the story of Purim. For the Persian Jews of Shushan, living after the destruction of the First Temple, the design of Achashverosh’s palace must have been unsettling: Was this what the prophets had meant when they assured the Israelites that the Temple would be rebuilt?

The Talmud accentuates the unnerving similarity between the holy abodes of the Tabernacle and Temple, on the one hand, and Achashverosh’s palace, on the other, claiming that the castle was decorated with vessels from the Temple, that the king donned the garments of the High Priest, and that the feast itself was a parody of a Temple sacrifice. Both the Book of Esther and the rabbis extend this disturbing comparison even further: The Hebrew root m-l-kh (“king”) appears dozens of times in the first chapter of Esther alone, emphasizing that Achashverosh, and not God, is seemingly in charge—a claim accentuated by the rabbinic assertion that Achashverosh’s dominion stretched across the entire world. Indeed, the Book of Esther is the only book of the Bible in which God’s name does not appear a single time. Such a world is both parody and nightmare: The destroyed Temple has not been rebuilt but instead replaced by a gaudy palace; God is absent, apparently superseded by a mad king; the Torah has been overridden by legalized licentiousness. Though the Purim story takes place after the destruction of the First Temple, the rabbis, who lived after the destruction of the Second Temple, understood themselves as trapped in the same nightmare. In their words, “We are still Achashverosh’s servants.”

This, for the rabbis, is what it means to be in galut, or exile: not simply to be physically displaced, but also to live in a world that is, at its core, out of joint—a world in which imperial powers have usurped God’s authority, palaces and fortresses are treated as holy sites, and morality has given way to nihilism and the will to power. The rabbis went so far as to say that the Shechinah, God’s divine presence, is itself in exile with us. Though they understood the Shechinah as merely accompanying us, the Kabbalists radicalized the claim, declaring that part of God was, like us, actually trapped in a world gone mad. Crucially, for the Kabbalists, none of these exiles can be undone alone; the Jews can only be redeemed together with the rest of the world, whose redemption is in turn bound up with God’s.

The Kabbalists did not just acknowledge these exiles, but also crafted rituals to intensify their experience of them: waking at midnight each night to mourn their state of exile, the murder of the righteous, and the victory of evil or wandering from place to place to emulate the Shechinah’s displacement. Perhaps counterintuitively, as Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krokotzkin documents, nowhere was this attitude more pervasive than in the land of Israel itself. The Kabbalists did not understand traveling there as a journey to a lost homeland, nor as a means of reestablishing Jewish sovereignty. Rather, they saw the land of Israel as the site of ultimate catastrophe—the destruction of the Temple and the exile of both the Jewish people and the Shechinah. The land of Israel was the place where galut could be most fiercely experienced, and the Kabblists believed that only by confronting the fullness of that rupture could the work of communal, global, and divine redemption begin.

Statist Zionism, by contrast, set out to “negate the exile”—but it could only do so by first limiting the concept. As Raz-Krokotzkin argues, “The Zionist perception of exile as the lack of realization of the political aspirations of the Jews and nothing more empties the concept of all of its deep contents in that it accepts the world order in its present form.” To detach the Jews’ exile from those cosmic and divine exiles is to wrongly accept their inevitability. According to Raz-Krokotzkin, such an attitude toward exile is inseparable from Zionism’s colonial violence against Palestinians: Only by severing their own exile from that of the world could Zionists hope to solve their own uprootedness by uprooting others.

The fact that Zionism’s opponents have also understood exile in mere territorial dimensions tragically testifies to the success the Zionist movement has had in redefining the term. Judith Butler, for instance, argues that “exile” necessarily implies a circumstance “that can only be reversed through ‘returning’ to the homeland,” and suggests instead an ethic of “dispersion.” A similar claim is made by those who suggest countering Zionism with the doikayt, or “hereness,” of the Bund, whose watchword has long been: “Wherever we live is our homeland.” There is no doubt that dispersion and doikayt—as well as the revitalized notion of diasporism—offer a far more inspiring ethical vision than Zionism’s ethnonationalism. And given that many Jews who speak about exile today see Zionism as its antidote, it is no wonder that the term has fallen out of favor on the left. And yet, what is lost in the transition from galut to doikayt is the intertwining of collective, global, and divine alienation. If we insist that wherever we are is where we’re meant to be, we risk imagining—like Zionism—that we can unlink any one form of exile from all the others. In other words, we risk a certain complacency. The Kabbalists, by contrast, recognized that it is only when we make ourselves feel less at home, jar ourselves into mourning, and deepen our alienation that we are forced to confront the scale of the crisis around us. But if we instead affirm our rootedness, might we not be tempted to settle for simply redeeming our little corner of the world? If we declare a particular land to be our homeland, might we not lose sight of the violence used to claim and control that land? If we cease our insistence on exile, might we not one day mistake Achashverosh’s palace for the sacred Tabernacle and Temple?

Theodor Adorno, writing in exile from Germany in the wake of the Holocaust, argued that the only responsible philosophical approach “in the face of despair” is to “contemplate all things . . . from the standpoint of redemption.” In other words, we must constantly take stock of how far our world is from being whole: We must declare, again and again, that a different world is possible. Accordingly, Adorno calls for “perspectives . . . that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” Seeing ourselves as being in galut allows for a perspective that maintains that wherever and whenever we live, there are “rifts and crevices” for which we are responsible. It insists that so long as Achashverosh still rules, we are all in exile and that none of us—including the divine—can be at home until all of us are.

Aron Wander is a rabbinical student, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.