Jan

16

2026

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): “It is a fact,” the philosopher Martin Buber writes, that “several” Hasidic masters “attempted by means of theurgic or magic activities” to “make of Napoleon that ‘Gog of the Land of Magog’ mentioned by Ezekiel,” and thus hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Having idly opened Buber’s foreword to his novel, For the Sake of Heaven (1945), I do not know whether I was more surprised to learn this “fact” or that Buber had fictionalized this apocalyptic endeavor. Hooked by Buber’s explicit analogy between the story’s subject and World War II, in which he detected “false Messianism on both [!] sides,” I bought the book.

I recommend it, albeit with certain caveats. For instance, Buber is aware that there ought to be female characters, and that the Zaddikim may have occasionally mistreated their wives, but he cannot get beyond a few, fumbling passages about marital relations. More broadly, For the Sake of Heaven, originally published under the (much preferable, very metal) title Gog and Magog, is largely composed of associated, chronologically ordered anecdotes, like those collected in Buber’s famous Tales of the Hasidim (1933). (In fact, many of the anecdotes are simply taken from that anthology.) This is an odd way to write a book—one hesitates to call it a novel, and indeed, Buber’s term is “chronicle.” The reader is constantly pivoting between the larger plot, such as it is, and the local spiritual insights of one rebbe or another.

In a way, this formal tension expresses the book’s thematic question: can the saint enter into history? Buber saw the “sacred anecdote” as encoding “the oneness of inner and outer experience” in which the spiritual master sheds a flash of sudden, spontaneous light perfectly suited to the occasion. But what does such pure illumination have to do with larger social problems, with history that plays out over time, and with intractable political forces? Two camps of Hasidim debate, and battle over, this question. Those of Lublin employ “practical Cabala” (that is, magic) to aid Napoleon, who they concede to be a villain, to accomplish their messianic aims; the quietists of Pshysha, meanwhile, reject this instrumental use of evil means. The Pshysha faction faces an additional paradox: precisely the passivity they council prevents their leader, the so-called “Holy Yehudi,” from defying his teacher, the Seer of Lublin, and establishing his own court. Both Hasidic sociology and world history thus raise thorny practical problems for the spiritual master.

While Buber frames the book in terms of World War II, I wonder if he was also thinking of the Zionist project. Napoleon’s allure in the novel involves his campaign in the Middle East; rumors circulate that he seeks the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. Moreover, Buber reports that he finally finished the novel after dreaming of “a demon with bat’s wings and the features of a judaizing Goebbels.” My friend Sam Brody (conveniently, a Buber scholar) suggested that this monster of Jewish fascism might represent the Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Sam also speculated that the Seer’s enthusiasm might reflect mainstream Zionists’ joy at the Balfour Declaration, since Buber’s heterodox, binationalist group, Brit Shalom, was wary of sponsorship by the British Empire and hoped instead to ally with Palestinians. Pshysha’s position, with which Buber explicitly sides, also anticipates Hasidic anti-Zionist arguments, especially the insistence that collective repentance must strictly precede redemption, a claim which one finds in, for instance, the writings of the Satmar Rebbe.

Buber would certainly have repudiated any association with Haredi anti-Zionism. And yet, For the Sake of Heaven rejects the Seer’s messianic dealings with the devil, preferring the Yehudi’s pacifism. And its oddly diffuse, occasionally almost unreadable form thus acquires a historical plangency, the series of tenuously connected anecdotes levying a spiritual protest against a smoothly plotted, self-assured Zionist narrative of a Jewish return to history through the coherent agency of a nation-state.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator):Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is beautifully shot, raucously funny, and nail-bitingly suspenseful, but what ultimately sets it apart is how precisely it captures the calamity that is artificial intelligence––especially impressive given that AI only enters the film explicitly in its denouement.

Up until then, the plot is a well-crafted, if somewhat familiar, satire of global capitalism: Man-su, a mid-level manager at a paper manufacturing plant (played by Lee Byung-hun of Squid Game fame), has a perfect house and a perfect family, until an American company buys out the paper plant he works at and unceremoniously fires him. After 13 months of limited employment in manual labor jobs––despite his decades of experience and his “Pulp Man of the Year” award, there aren’t enough paper manufacturing jobs to go around––his wife declares that they must sell their house and move to an apartment. Emasculated and desperate, Man-su instead decides to take matters into his own hands by murdering his job competition.

Each killing is preceded by a moment of hesitation, as Man-su grapples with his conscience and recognizes himself in his victims: in their marital disputes, in their desperation to support their children, in their refusal to abandon the only work they know. Each time, however, he overcomes this sentimentality by repeating the same mantra used to justify his own firing: “No other choice.” His hesitation becomes progressively easier to overcome as he grows accustomed to murder––the first one is Chaplinesque in its absurdity and physical comedy, while the last is so efficient and brutal it belongs in Park’s Old Boy.

Finally, Man-su is offered a new job, and we come to the film’s pivot: his interviewers tell him that the manufacturing company will be trying out a new AI-run manufacturing system, and Man-su will be the only one in the factory, only there to make sure the AI is running properly. They ask whether he has any concerns. Man-su––who previously promised his own workers that he would categorically refuse to have them replaced by automation––laughs at the very idea of having any moral scruples.

In the film’s closing, we see Man-su driving to work, the only passenger car on a highway clogged with massive semi-trucks. We then see him walking through a factory emptied of people, populated only by enormous, whirring, inhuman machines. While he luxuriates in this hard-won isolation, the audience is forced to ask: how could this miserable fate have been worth it? The lights go out. As the credits roll, the camera cuts to a scene of automated machinery decimating a forest.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is the only other film I’m aware of that has featured the societal effects of AI this prominently. Whereas Aster depicts AI as a conniving force at work behind the backs of the characters, Park instead shows Man-su as a gleeful participant in enabling the AI regime, so long as it facilitates his family’s middle-class existence. Unlike with Aster, AI does not represent some new evil; it’s simply the logical endpoint of capitalistic atomization, toward which society trudges inexorably, and which appears to us as if it were our fate.

True, despite his mantra and the film’s title, there were always other choices for Man-su; true, there is also the choice for us in the real world to stop the mindless proliferation of AI at the expense of human welfare. But in our dog-eat-dog reality, who among us would forgo the logic of capitalism that sustains our lives of bourgeois comfort?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Queen Kelly is the greatest film that ever wasn’t. Directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring Gloria Swanson, it’s best known to millions as the film from Swanson’s glorious past that is screened by her character, delusional has-been actress Norma Desmond, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The cruelty of that scene, in fact of the casting and the entire film, is made more extreme by the fact that Queen Kelly was the film that ended the directorial career of Stroheim, who plays Desmond’s ex-husband.

The new restoration of the film by Kino International has been in the works for 40 years, and provides us with as complete a version of the unfinished masterpiece as we’ll ever have. Stroheim was the great immoralist of the silent cinema, and in an oeuvre full of the cynical and sex-drenched, Queen Kelly is the capstone.

The existing footage, assembled according to Stroheim’s script and with new intertitles drawn for the screenplay, gives us all the more reason to regret Queen Kelly’s demise. Here we have Stroheim at his most extravagant, with crowd scenes so massive they almost take your breath away. The frank sexuality of the film, which would have become more obvious had it been completed, surpasses even Stroheim’s previous works: this is, after all, a film about a former convent girl, Sally Kelly, who meets a handsome prince who falls in love with her when her panties fall off at the moment of their meeting, and who becomes a madame of a brothel in Tanganyika in East Africa, where her regal manner earns her the title Queen Kelly.

The shoot was shut down by producer Joseph Kennedy, Gloria Swanson’s lover, shortly after the Kelly character’s arrival in Tanganyika, where she meets the “employees” and a Dutchman named Jan, played by Tully Marshall—as revolting a character as ever lit up a screen, his awfulness accentuated by the high-contrast lighting on his face and his incessant slobbering. Kelly is immediately betrothed to him, weds him, and swears never to sleep with him. Here the film ends.

Legend has it that the film’s two backers, Swanson and Joseph Kennedy, pulled the plug due to cost overruns, but this seems not to have been the case. Swanson in later years would claim she ended the film—at least Stroheim’s role in it—because a switcheroo had been pulled on her: she thought that the establishment in Africa would be a bar, and it was only during the shoot she learned she was about to become a madame. In fact, in every version of the script the business is a brothel.

The truth, found in her archives, was that after a number of disputes with Stroheim, the break came as a result of the introduction of Kelly’s husband Jan. As Swanson wrote in her memoirs, “Mr. Stroheim began instructing Mr. Marshall in his usual painstaking fashion, how to drool tobacco juice onto my hand while he was putting on the wedding ring. It was early morning, I had just eaten breakfast, and my stomach turned. I became nauseated and furious at the same time.” This was the last straw. Swanson called Kennedy, told her “the director is a madman,” and Stroheim was fired. What remains is still worthy of admiration, the slender remains of a masterpiece.

The recounting of the ten plagues that God wrought upon the Egyptians is among the most frequently “cutesified” parts of Passover; these curses have been immortalized in children’s songs (“frogs here, frogs there, frogs were jumping everywhere”), finger puppets, and other themed toys for the seder table. But as the Torah makes clear, the plagues—the first seven of which appear in this week’s parshah, Vaera, with the final three featured in next week’s parshah, Bo—are anything but whimsical. Why, we might wonder, does God see fit to unleash these particular forms of suffering on the people of Egypt? What is the significance of the Nile turning to blood, swarms of lice, or any of the other horrors the Torah describes?

The Rabbis answer this question with a moral principle: The plagues were “middah k’neged middah,” or “measure for measure.” The plague of blood, for example, was appropriate because the Egyptians, in an attempt to regulate Israelite sexuality and limit birthrates, prevented women from ritually immersing after menstruation. Frogs, the Rabbis go on to teach, flooded Egypt because the Egyptians compelled the Israelites to handle rodents and insects as part of their dehumanizing labor. (Indeed, one might read the words “swarming” and “creeping” in the midrash as parallel to the Torah’s terms describing the Israelites’ growth, thus implicitly linking the plague with the reality of forced population control.) And, the midrash’s argument continues, the Egyptians suffered from lice because the Israelites were forced to sweep public areas, and so the dust turned to lice that attacked the Egyptians.

One way of understanding “middah k’negged middah” is that God evaluates the sin at hand and actively chooses an appropriately corresponding curse. The Talmud, in the tractate of Rosh Hashanah, for example, explains that God goes so far as to “change the natural order” to enact parallel punishment. But there is another way to understand this principle. Rabbi Tali Adler points out that at least some of the plagues show the Egyptians the extent of the suffering they inflicted upon the Israelites. For example, she writes, blood “makes it clear that the Nile, the source of life for the Egyptian people . . . is actually a site of mass murder. All of Egypt, suddenly, is forced to confront the truth that what is life-giving and sustaining for them has been the locus of unbearable suffering for the people they oppress.” In this reading, the plagues are not simply a form of divine retribution but are instead a direct consequence of the Egyptians’ wrongdoings: The water turns to blood for the straightforward reason that it is quite literally saturated with the blood of Israelite babies. The plagues, then, are the empire’s atrocities made visible; they are middah k’negged middah, a parallel that is also an exposure. In her book Doppelganger, which deals extensively with doublings and recapitulations, Naomi Klein writes: “We sense that . . . even for the most resourced among us, the curtain hiding the suffering and the ugliness is badly frayed. That just as societies can flip into their monstrous doppelganger, so can the earth—from habitable to uninhabitable.” The plagues, for the Egyptians, are such a moment of collapse and reversal: Their world flips, and reveals its corresponding, constitutive horrors.

In discussing the subsequent drowning of the Egyptians in the sea, the Talmud in the tractate of Sotah likewise applies the concept of “middah k’negged middah”: “In the pot in which they cooked, they were cooked.” The Egyptians drowned Israelite infants, and so they too ultimately drowned. The Talmud goes on to explain that the reason the Egyptians had felt safe killing babies in this way was because they assumed they would be spared from “middah k’negged middah” punishment: “For the Holy Blessed One already took an oath not to bring a flood upon the world,” the Talmud explains, referencing God’s promise to Noah following the flood. The ruling class thought that they could use water to inflict horror because they would be exempt from punishment by water; they believed they had found a wily way to game the system and avoid the consequences of their actions—but, inevitably of course, they had to live in the world they created.

Klein argues in Doppelganger that when it comes to experiencing the “mirror side” of the world and of our actions, “doubles” are “warnings or harbingers.” She writes that ”when reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.” Indeed, after Pharaoh and the Egyptian ruling class ignore the warning posed by each plague, the punishments we encounter in Vaera escalate further with the death of the Egyptian firstborns in next week’s parshah, culminating in mass Egyptian death in the Sea of Reeds in the parshah after that. Because the evil empire of Egypt did not heed the warnings presented to them, they could not escape. So too even the most powerful of our day will not be able to hide from the impact of the cruelty and devastation that they have created as the invisibilized foundation of our daily life. Because in the end, we all must live in whatever world we build; we will all experience the shadow sides of our actions, measure for measure.

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.