Feb

6

2026

Josh Nathan-Kazis (news director): This is my first week on staff at Jewish Currents. I’ve been imagining coming to work here since 2018, when the publisher at the time, Jacob Plitman, met me for lunch at a diner down on Pearl Street to tell me about his plan to revitalize the magazine. It sounded like a wild and necessary adventure, and it still does, and I’m glad it’s finally my adventure, too. I’ll be starting a news desk at Jewish Currents; look out for a new newsletter from us in the next few weeks. I worked as a reporter at the Forward earlier in my career, and have spent the past few years writing about healthcare companies for Barron’s, a business magazine.

Barron’s has offices in one of the boxy towers near Rockefeller Center, and this past fall I rode there most mornings on a big blue CitiBike, 40-odd pounds of aluminum and barely-functioning gear hubs and dried mystery gunk. I always imagined I would have expansive thoughts in the CitiBike saddle, that I could draft an article or write a novel or whatever. But my thoughts on the bike were small and got smaller: Ten more pedal strokes to get this enormous lunk to the top of the Central Park hill, nine more pedal strokes, eight…

In his 1978 novel The Rider, the Dutch writer Tim Krabbé describes this weird inability to think big thoughts while riding. “On a bike your consciousness is small,” he writes. During a race, “what goes round in the rider’s mind is a monolithic ball bearing, so smooth, so uniform, that you can’t even see it spin.”

The Rider is a (the?) classic of cycling literature, but it’s a remarkable enough book that it deserves to be read even by those with no interest in machines you need to pedal. In the 2002 English translation by Sam Garrett, it’s a brisk 148 pages that delivers a kilometer-by-kilometer account of a punishing 150-kilometer amateur road bike race around the town of Meyrueis in southern France. (Someone has mapped the very hilly route Krabbé describes; let’s just say I’m not eager to try it on a CitiBike.) The race is narrated by a character who shares the author’s name, and the book is autofiction that could easily pass as memoir, except that the actual race he’s describing seems to have been an invention.

It shouldn’t be compelling, but it is. The author was well known as a chess player in Holland, and maybe what makes the novel work is that he thinks about road cycling as though it’s a chess problem, or a mathematical equation to be solved. There’s endless worrying over gear ratios, over the game theory of when to sprint and when to hold off. In those days before electronic odometers and GPS, he describes how he calculated the length of his training ride (to the hundredth of a meter) by measuring the distance he traveled per pedal stroke, then counting pedal strokes as he rode by carrying a sack of matchsticks and tossing one to the ground after each hundred turns of the crank.

Krabbé counts everything. The race is the 309th of his racing career. One of the mountain passes he crosses, the Col de Perjuret, is 1,028 meters high. When he competed against a friend in a backyard jumping competition as a child, his best long jump was 2.12 meters. A few years later, as a 15-year-old, he says he averaged 28.794881 kilometers per hour around a 22.5 kilometer course near his house, measuring his time with a chess clock.

That all sounds like product of a tedious mind, but Krabbé is an extraordinary writer, and the absurd mathematical precision is leavened by brilliant evocations of the physical and mental torture of road racing. “I have a black heart pumping powerlessness to all parts of my body,” Krabbé writes of a moment of extreme fatigue.

I don’t think I ever got that tired riding the CitiBike to work, but I think I know what it feels like after reading Tim Krabbé.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): My preferred mode of political escapism these days is reading English Marxist historians from the eighties. Swaddling myself in their easy, unlabored prose as in a lambswool blanket, I take a rueful pleasure in their dismay at what seemed to them apocalyptic (Thatcherism), but which we now know as the mild, earliest stage of a disease that has grown much nastier. And then too, there is the charming assumption that the reader has already heard of the Peterloo massacre or formed an opinion of Eleanor Marx. This sense of a broadly shared radical history gives me the illusion of belonging to a Left community—I like to imagine, reading Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson, that I am down at the pub, swapping historiographical fine points over a pint with the lads.

Currently I’m reading Thompson’s posthumous collection of essays and reviews over thirty years, Persons & Polemics. It’s an odd mix: a demolition of a revisionist hack’s attempt to whitewash a massacre of radical workers (“One needs a book like this, every now and then, to recall that the patron saint of historians is St. Sisyphus”); measured reassessments of the British left of the 1930s, portions of which either literally perished at the hands of or were psychically crushed by fascism in Spain and beyond; an indignant defense of jury trials as democratic tradition against the state’s attempts to curtail them; bizarre poetry about the Terracotta Army and early Chinese history; and more.

Not all is equally scintillating, but much is brilliant, and Thompson, even when savaging a reactionary book, is somehow always decent and good-natured. His politics, by the point these essays appeared, mixed unrepentant class radicalism, skepticism of Marxism’s scientific pretensions, a mournful sense of the lost lifeworlds of workers’ commons, and an allergy to narratives of progress. He is withering about the great liberal historian Lawrence Stone’s claim that premodern workers had unsentimental, purely economic families, which Thompson sees as a self-congratulatory, bourgeois teleology. He defends William Morris against accusations of being a utopian dreamer, reading Arts and Crafts socialism not as a backward, doomed nostalgia but as a model for anti-capitalist moral critique. He insists that William Blake is as great a dialectician as Marx.

Is all of this coherent or correct? Who knows, but it is splendidly humane and very funny (my modal annotation is simply “lol”). And as contemporary America settles into the mold of its vulgarity, there seem to me worse temporary respites than the defiant workers of ye olde and merry England.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve long wanted to render homage to the Wolf family of the German Democratic Republic (that is, the former East Germany)—the physician and writer Friedrich Wolf and his two sons, the spymaster Markus and the filmmaker Konrad. I believe I mentioned them in my recommendation last year to visit the Friedrichshain cemetery in Berlin, where Markus and Konrad are buried among the great figures of German Communism. I placed pebbles on their graves. The family, Jewish and Communist, fled Nazi Germany for the Soviet Union, where they survived Stalinist purges and the brutal infighting of the German Communist Party. At war’s end, they returned to their homeland and played vital roles in the new socialist state.

Anthology Film Archives is celebrating Konrad’s centennial with a two-week long retrospective, which ends February 11th. Those who can make the films should see as many of them as they can. Those with access to the Kanopy streaming service can watch most of them there. Konrad was, in my opinion, the greatest of all East German filmmakers—a man deeply committed to socialism, but who came to realize as the years passed that the country his family had helped to found was falling far short of the ideal.

The retrospective includes what we can consider Konrad’s homage to his father, an important figure in both social medicine and culture in pre-Nazi Germany: a film version of the play Professor Mamlock, perhaps the earliest treatment of Nazi antisemitism, originally performed in Paris in 1933 and first made into a film in the Soviet Union in 1938. The younger Konrad’s 1961 version, screening on February 8th, is a well-constructed critique of the role of silence in the rise of terrorist states, a film of nearly chilling actuality.

The best of Wolf’s films, and for my money the greatest of all East German films, I Was Nineteen (1967), is screening on February 9th. It’s an autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s time in the Red Army as a German interpreter and thus a “traitor to the Fatherland,” as he called himself. The film is a study of men at war, of coming of age in the harshest circumstances, of the hypocrisy and obsequiousness of the defeated, but also and above all of the silent survival and reemergence of the condemned idea of socialism. The film’s most moving moment is a shot from the back of a truck as the Red Army men leave a freshly liberated village, its newly appointed Communist mayor sitting by the road listening to Ernst Busch sing a song from the Spanish Civil War. Wolf simply and very cinematically expresses the continuity of these struggles and the final victory over fascism.

The Naked Man on the Sports Field (1973) is a surpassingly frank account of the struggles of an artist under a socialist regime that has assigned art and artists a well-defined and restricted role. The theme of the alienated artist and intellectual would appear several times in the waning days of actual existing socialism, but it was seldom dealt with as well as in this film.

The cinema of the GDR seldom gets its due. Anthology Film Archives, which has always swum against the tide, is to be praised for taking this project on.

This week’s parshah culminates with God’s revelation of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, a momentous occasion in the biblical narrative and in the formation of Jewish religious identity. For it’s here that the people as a whole formally enters into the covenantal relationship with God. Of the initially proclaimed commandments, one in particular attracted the attention of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995): “You shall not kill.”

Throughout his career, Levinas meditated on this biblical injunction against murder. Inverting the conventional philosophical notion that ethical matters (How should I act?) follow from ontological ones (What am I?), Levinas argues that the I—the agential subject who is commanded not to kill—does not precede the encounter with the Other who must not be killed. Rather, the I exists because of the experience of this relation to the Other. Before I am even myself, I am my not-killing-of-the-Other, so that, technically speaking, I am never solely, or entirely, myself at all. I am constituted in my very being by this absolute responsibility for the life of the Other—the stranger, the neighbor—a responsibility which, moreover, is radically asymmetrical and nonreciprocal: It binds me regardless of the actions of the Other.

This reversal of the assumed relationship between ontology and ethics has precedent in traditional Jewish thinking about the covenant. Rabbis in the Talmud observe that, upon receiving the Torah, the Israelites state, “We will do and we will hear” the commandments, suggesting their willingness to join the covenant—to “do” what God commands—even before they have “heard” its terms. Levinas, who wrote a commentary on this Talmudic passage in 1964, echoes it in his philosophy: If I am, then before I have ever heard the explicit commandment not to kill, I must already have obeyed it.

Levinas consistently designates the human face as the locus of this primordial responsibility: “The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear ‘You shall not kill,’” he writes. The face of the Other, therefore, has the effective force of a divine commandment. Unlike the Torah, issued only to the Israelites, the face commands universally.

Yet Levinas warns that the I’s “primary obedience” to the face of the Other is “upset by the third person emerging next to the other; the third person is also a neighbor, and also falls within the purview of the I’s responsibility. Here, beginning with this third person, is the proximity of a human plurality. Who, in this plurality, comes first? This is the time and place of the birth of a question: of a demand for justice!” The arrival of the “third person” inaugurates a “sociality in which responsibility is made concrete in justice,” through the operations of “institutions, courts, and thus the state.” This “third person” marks the transition, in Levinasian terms, from the ethical (the relation to the Other) to the political (the adjudication of a human plurality).

The transcendental ethics Levinas derives from the biblical commandment is diluted by its necessary translation into the concrete social realm. In practice, he suggests, I must privilege the faces of some Others over other Others—and, implicitly, I must therefore be more able to kill those other Others. Levinas’s interpretation of “You shall not kill,” which initially reads as a strong philosophical case for nonviolence, ultimately seems to risk stranding us in pragmatic pessimism, opening the door to utilitarian realpolitik and exclusionary communitarianism? (As Judith Butler has argued, his steadfast commitment to Zionism, as well as his yoking of a universal ethics to a particularly Jewish dispensation, can’t simply be brushed aside here.)

Our parshah stages this disjunction between God’s ethical demands on the Israelites and the messy “proximity of a human plurality.” Just before the revelation at Sinai, Moses explains to his father-in-law Jethro how he serves as the Israelites’ “magistrate”: “The people come to me to inquire of God. When they have a dispute, it comes before me, and I decide between one person and another, and I make known the laws and teachings of God.” Jethro objects: “The thing you are doing is not right. You will surely exhaust yourself, and these people as well. For the task is too heavy for you, you cannot do it alone.” He advises Moses to establish a juridical system to delegate his duties: “Seek out from among all the people capable men who fear God, trustworthy men who spurn ill-gotten gain. Set these over [the people] as chiefs . . . Have them bring every major dispute to you, but let them decide every minor dispute themselves.”

This story deals with what Levinas would call the political, rather than ethical, domain. Jethro’s pragmatic recommendation—complete with a built-in recognition of the law’s intrinsic vulnerability to venal exploitation—results in an expansion of the political and the proliferation of those mediating institutions Levinas mentions. Even before a case is judged, the distinction Jethro draws between “major” cases to be judged by Moses and “minor” ones left to his appointees already implies a juridical decision on the question Levinas poses: In this plurality, whose claims to justice “come first,” and are regarded as most worthy of the prophet’s attention?

I wonder, though, just what it is about the work of justice that’s “too heavy” for Moses. Is the problem only with the quantity of justice that needs doing—or is it instead (or also) a problem with justice itself? We may agree with Jethro’s assessment that what Moses is doing—justice—“is not right,” if we understand “right” here to mean absolute responsibility for the life of the Other. Perhaps justice, definitionally, cannot be absolutely right. On this view, the parshah relates a translational rupture between ethics and justice: practical justice below Mount Sinai versus the ideal commandment revealed atop it. Is this a narrative representation of the impossibility of truly obeying the commandment?

A later passage in the Torah suggests not: None of the commandments, we are told, is “too baffling for [the Israelites], nor is it beyond reach.” Instead of an impasse, we can interpret the parshah’s tension between ethics and justice as a call—a command, if you will—to find ways into configurations of living in “the proximity of a human plurality” that enable everyone, Jewish or not, to do what the face of every neighbor, every stranger, commands: “You shall not kill.” Plurality is, after all, the only mode of human existence any of us will ever know. (In the Torah, only those two humans who were eventually expelled from Paradise briefly got to enjoy—if that is the appropriate word—any other.) And it’s a good thing, too, since the task of living rightly on the earth is surely “too heavy” for each of us. As Jethro says: “You cannot do it alone.”

Samuel P. Catlin is assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.