Jan

10

2025

Mari Cohen (associate editor): It may be 2025 now, but I’ve spent the last week listening to the fruits of my final labor of 2024: a comprehensive playlist of my favorite songs released last year. (Apple Music version here, for those of you admirably using the lesser-evil streaming service.) I’ve been doing this annually for seven years now, and, as tends to happen to rituals over time, my yearly project has expanded: My ambitions have only gotten grander and more completionist, my playlists more sprawling and eclectic. Making the finishing touches on December 31st, I had to remind myself that my goal was to make a little playlist of music I like for fun, not permanently capture and honor the essence of any good 2024 song that might exist. Whether it was worth the consternation, who knows, but I do think I eventually compiled a banger of a playlist.

My top album last year was the indie rock band Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven, which weaves one irresistible pop hook after another in between cathartic screamy vocals. Some of my other favorites were albums that I had initially deemed overhyped: I liked MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, a record of wry songs about being pathetic, but couldn’t quite get what differentiated him from other indie rock dudes enough to earn him so much breathless critical acclaim; then, I saw him live (in a room packed with mustachioed Brooklyn men, of course) and immediately became hooked on the guitar riffs of simultaneously plaintive and goofy songs like “On My Knees.” (It was a good year in general for indie rock dudes, thanks also to Father John Misty, Los Campesinos!, Fontaines DC, This is Lorelai, Vampire Weekend, and the genre-classification-defying Mk.gee.) I had found Waxahatchee’s Americana record Tigers Blood enjoyable but a bit too similar to her 2020 masterpiece, St. Cloud. But upon relistening to this latest album, I was struck by the airtight construction of each song. (Also good in the folky singer-songwriter department this year: albums by Hurray from the Riff Raff and Willi Carlisle.) And I’ve gotten a little tired of seeing every project related to the band Big Thief showered with uniform and predictable critical praise—some of their albums are actually better than others!—but I have to hand it to frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s latest solo effort, Bright Future, which almost had me in tears from the first song, “Real House,” a spare, haunting tune about childhood. Also notable last year were Charly Bliss’s ecstatic power pop on Forever, British songwriter Nilüfer Yanya’s infectious melodies on My Method Actor, and Cassandra Jenkins’s spacey, poetic meditations on My Light, My Destroyer.

As usual, I had help from music critics’ end-of-year roundups, which pointed me to good releases I had missed; I’m especially grateful to the Chicago-based critic Josh Terry’s year-end list, as well as Stereogum’s Top 50 Albums. However, besides those two, I found that reading through most music publications’ end-of-year lists wasn’t as fun as usual. Maybe it’s because I was mystified by some of the biggest albums this year: As much as it pains me not to give all my support to a fellow five-foot-tall woman, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short and Sweet just sounds like run-of-the-mill pop to me. I had plenty of fun with Charli xcx’s BRAT over the summer, but she’s had punchier lyrics and more memorable melodies on other projects. (In the Big Pop department, I’d pick Billie Eilish’s and Beyoncé’s 2024 albums above either of those two.) And while I think it’s good that Taylor Swift’s gargantuan status didn’t grant her unwarranted laurels for the messy The Tortured Poets Department, I also think that in writing off the album as a whole, many have missed some genuinely good songs, like the classic Swiftian breakup tune “The Black Dog” or the self-conscious critique of the entertainment industry “Clara Bow”—both more interesting than anything Sabrina Carpenter could write. Sorry! Good thing I get to make the rules on my playlist. And hopefully you’ll find something you like on it too.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Many American Jews are raised to regard Christmas with some mixture of loathing and envy. Not me. I grew up in a decidedly Judeo-normative New York milieu, and well into my twenties, I consequently felt no more strongly about Santa, wreaths, stockings, and Yule logs (whatever those are) than your average Presbyterian feels about a lulav and etrog. And so when, in college, I first watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), it was lost on me that it was a movie preoccupied with Christmas. Preoccupied, that is, in the sense one might say that Luigi Mangione was preoccupied with health-insurance executives. For Wilder (born, of course, Shmuel Vilder, in Eastern Europe’s Galicia), as I learned when I revisited the film last week, was a prophet, a militant vanguard in the struggle against what the kids call Christian hegemony, the John Brown, if you will, of that glorious revolutionary struggle now known as The War on Christmas.

Thus The Apartment is the perfect hangover cure for those groggy weeks following enforced conviviality and over-eating. C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemon), a literally sniveling white-collar flunky at an insurance company, allows his superiors to conduct their adulterous trysts at his eponymous apartment, in hopes of climbing the corporate ladder. When he discovers that senior executive Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) is sleeping with and badly mistreating Baxter’s unrequited crush, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator in the company building, he must choose between his romantic idealism and his corporate ambitions.

The Apartment scandalized audiences with its frank, cynical look at the tawdry sex lives of Manhattan office workers. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, directors like Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz were testing the limits of the Hays Code, guidelines for censorship that barred nudity and profanity, any “inference of sex perversion,” and the like. More subtly, though, the film, which largely plays out in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, is daringly caustic about phony, secularized American Christianity. When Sheldrake gives Kubelik a $100 bill as a Christmas gift, for instance, it clarifies their relationship’s transactional, commercial logic, even as he insists that she not be depressed on Christmas. Wilder pointedly shows us, several scenes later, Sheldrake unwrapping presents with his son in his suburban, single-family home, a domesticity as glittering and ephemeral as their decked-out tree. Nor is it just Sheldrake who sees in Christmas something other than peace on earth and goodwill to all men: The company’s Christmas party is depicted as a pagan bacchanal, a festival of intoxication and sexual harassment. When Baxter is at his lowest, on Christmas Eve, having just realized that he has been lending his apartment to his romantic rival for Kubelik’s affections, he gets drunk at a bar with a Santa Claus impersonator, who is indignant about the bar closing; the bartender points out it’s Christmas, and the actor replies, “I know. I work for the outfit.” In this movie, Santa Claus is an illusion: The reality is exploitative work and weary despair.

As an antidote to Christian hypocrisy, The Apartment offers Jewish moral critique, dispensed by Baxter’s neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen). Dreyfuss ministers to Kubelik after she attempts to kill herself with sleeping pills; he refuses to allow her to sleep, giving her liters of coffee and repeatedly slapping her. Through this implicit ritual of disenchantment, he is exorcising her unrealistic attachment to the dybbuk Sheldrake. Just as he tends to Kubelik, so he diagnoses and treats Baxter’s soul; under the misimpression that it is Baxter who has abused Kubelik, Dreyfuss admonishes him to “be a mensch,” which he translates as “be a human being.” Menschlichkeit represents a softer, more humane Jewish masculinity, an alternative to that proffered by Baxter’s superiors. (Dreyfuss’s wife offers Kubelik chicken soup and refuses to let Baxter clean the dishes, ostensibly because she fears he’ll break them; I assume her real concern is that he will treif them.) In the film’s climax, on New Year’s Eve, Baxter stands up to Sheldrake and explains that he finally intends to “be a mensch,” even at the expense of his career. He is, in other words, renouncing the goyishe naches of professional advancement. And the movie is suggesting that viewers might similarly dispense with the middle-class hoopla, spectacle, and frenzied consumption of the holidays in favor of modest, Yiddish-inflected ethical responsibility. As New Year’s resolutions go, I have heard worse.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Toward the end of The Last Republican, Steve Pink’s new documentary on Adam Kinzinger—the former Republican congressman who lost his seat for voting to impeach Trump—denies that there was anything heroic about his actions. “We,” he says, referring to himself and Liz Cheney, “were surrounded by cowards.” In this simple sentence, Kinzinger provides a snappy and accurate description of America in 2025.

Kinzinger is not a man to idolize. He is, after all, a conservative ideologue: an unconditional admirer of Ronald Reagan who rode the Tea Party wave into office, and who voted with Trump more than 90% of the time. Still, however odious his politics may be, there’s no denying that it does require a certain amount of courage to take a position that will not only cost you your job, but will also earn you mockery, hatred, and death threats. By the time of the hearings of the January 6 Commission—of which he and Cheney were the only two GOP members—Kinzinger and his wife required 24/7 protection. To emphasize the contrast with the overwhelming majority of the party, Pink skillfully employs clips of top Republicans like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell condemning Trump in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup juxtaposed with those from just weeks later, in which they bend at the knee and kiss Trump’s ring. To have stood firm, as Kinzinger did, was an admirable act. Pink isn’t shy about displaying his disdain for Kinzinger’s politics. But what makes The Last Republican interesting is precisely the fact that the former congressman holds to his values, rather than presenting himself—or allowing himself to be presented—as a Democrat manqué. For Kinzinger, it’s his church-going, patriotic values that drove him to take the stand he did.

If Kinzinger is wrong about not being courageous, every day brings further proof of ubiquitous cowardice. We are now living in, as Dalton Trumbo dubbed the McCarthy era, “The Time of the Toad.” At every level, individuals and institutions—Disney, Bezos, Google, media conglomerates, journalists—are competing to show how low they can go to kowtow to The Leader. Despite claims to the contrary, it seems there was never really a Trump Resistance. Even the fate of The Last Republican embodies this pervasive gutlessness. Film distributors, The New York Times recently reported, are shying away from distribution of progressive films, including Pink’s and others on domestic dissent—as well as those on Israel/Palestine like The Bibi Files and No Other Land. Perhaps we’re living through what the French call a “retreat,” in order to leap further. We’ll see.

This week’s parshah, Vayechi, literally means “he lived.” Yet despite its name, the parshah is about death—Jacob’s deathbed blessings to his sons, the mourning rites that follow his passing, and then Joseph’s death. This past year, I, like so many others, have found myself overwhelmed by the encounter with so much grief, and I desperately wanted to write this dvar Torah about anything else: perhaps how the blessings Jacob gives his children represent intergenerational political strife, or the ways the blessings, which balance intimate knowledge with global awareness, prefigure later tensions in Jewish history. But in the end, our parshah really is about death, beckoning us to confront the topic head on.

At first, it seems to be the story of a good death: Jacob gathers his family around him, offers them final words of blessing, and gives instructions for how he wants to be buried. But after he actually dies, it becomes less clear that this is a model for “doing death well.” Although Jacob’s family fulfills his final wish—to be buried in Canaan—they allow for the pageantry of Egyptian court procedure at every step. Indeed, they are accompanied on their travels to Canaan by “all the officials of Pharaoh, the senior members of his court, and all of Egypt’s dignitaries,” and before this procession, Jacob receives an Egyptian-style embalming, followed by a 70-day period in which the Egyptians “bewail him.” Is this extensive pomp and circumstance, apparently characteristic of Egyptian court mourning, the “gathering to his kin” that he desired?

Jews are often surprised to learn that Jacob was embalmed, because Jewish burial rites entail simply wrapping a washed body in a plain shroud. There is a particular power in this stark confrontation with the fact of death, mirrored in the austerity of the shiva: The mourner must sit with their grief; there are no distractions, no fancy floral arrangements to decide on or choices about which casket to select—only simplicity and brutal presence. The rabbis notice that Joseph, according to the Torah, “observed a mourning period of seven days for his father,” and suggest that this is a precursor to shiva. Yet Parshat Veyechi leaves the reader wondering: Did Joseph and his brothers have time to simply sit and feel, or were they constantly distracted by the Egyptian court pageantry? Might they have even sought out this very spectacle as a way to avoid feeling the full brunt of their loss?

I have spent too much of this terrible year running away from stories of death. I avert my gaze away from online posts about a Gazan child killed in their favorite sneakers or a father murdered before he held his newborn baby, and I recoil at images of the childhood bedrooms of hostages killed before they could return home. I can bear the anger I feel at witnessing this war, and try to channel it to take action, but I struggle to sit with the grief, distracting myself to avoid encountering the pain. Yet it is only when we allow in our sorrow—in silence rather than noise—that we can truly face it, and let it transform us. Sarah Aziza, wrestling with the figure of the witness in Jewish Currents almost exactly a year ago, wrote, “Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.” I wonder if mourning harbors a similar power: We can break, letting that rupture help us to break open the world. And it is only without distraction, without fanfare, in moments of quiet grief, that this breakage becomes possible.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.