Reading List
Jan
17
2025
Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): Former President Jimmy Carter broke many American taboos about Middle East diplomacy after leaving the White House. He visited Gaza in 2009 and saw the damage wrought by the Israeli military on schools and homes. He met with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal even though the United States government designated the militant organization as a terrorist group. And he publicly and unequivocally described Palestinian inequality under Israeli occupation as apartheid. But when Carter passed away last month, it felt like many players in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, by focusing exclusively on his four years in Washington, were rewriting his legacy to erase his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians. For example, Biden’s outgoing USAID administrator Samantha Power, in a New York Times opinion essay, heralded his human rights legacy without so much as mentioning Palestinians.
So I picked up Carter’s 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book is unlike any I’ve read by a head of state or politician. Carter is curious and humble, informed by his extensive conversations with Israelis, Palestinians, and actors from Arab states. He is forthright about his Christian faith and connection to the Holy Land, yet the material throughout is meticulously reported. One particularly compelling chapter, “The Wall as a Prison,” offers his analysis of day-to-day life under occupation, which he presents to Israeli interlocutors as part of the book’s narrative. At one point, he grills then-President of the Supreme Court of Israel Aharon Barak about the situation in the occupied territories and pushes him to see Israeli oppression firsthand, to which Barak shrugs that he’s a judge, not an investigator.
Carter’s analysis is anything but radical, yet the backlash against the book’s publication in 2006 was intense. Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg called Carter “cynical” and “anti-historical.” Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who has served as Biden’s State Department envoy for combating antisemitism, wrote that he “relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes.” But neither attack reckoned with Carter’s actual ideas. The relatively early use, for the United States establishment, of that word “apartheid” made it so the likes of Goldberg and Lipstadt couldn’t hear what he was saying—which is too bad; it’s a sober and fair book that consistently takes into account Israel’s security concerns while offering legitimate criticism grounded in history, law, and eye-witness accounts.
Carter, in 1977, was the first American president to call for a Palestinian “homeland” (notably, not a state). But, in actuality, the Camp David accords he negotiated between Israel and Egypt cut out Palestinians. The treaty had the effect of “enshrining a perpetual condition of statelessness” for the Palestinians, according to Seth Anziska, author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo. Yet this process seems to have driven the former president to redouble his diplomatic efforts as a private citizen in the decades that followed. “If you want to understand the Carter of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, you need to think about the pain and disenchantment he felt about the failures of the Camp David process,” Anziska told me in 2023. “There’s a self-reflection, a nuance, and an observation of detail, and a desire to affect political change on the basis of actual reality that animates how he thinks about policy.”
Choosing peace over apartheid, as Carter put it bluntly but clearly, is a decision that everyone must face. “It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail,” he wrote. It was not only the warning of an idealist, seeking equal rights for Palestinians, but the exhortation of a pragmatist who understood the imperative of a just resolution for Palestinians.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): In the last days of 2024, my hopes of catching a screening of horror auteur Robert Eggers’s visually exquisite new film Nosferatu while my twin sons napped were nearly dashed, thanks to a terror that has recently gripped my kids—a fear of shadows. With minutes to spare, my wife and I managed to assuage their concerns about the faceless shapes passing over the walls and usher them to sleep, and I rushed off to the theater. As soon as the movie began, with a shot of a young woman named Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) pleading to the camera, her face half-consumed by darkness, I realized the irony of the situation: I’d assured my children that shadows are nothing to be afraid of only to go experience an artwork premised on the legitimacy of that very fear.
Indeed, Eggers’s Nosferatu—a remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 masterpiece, itself an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula—is essentially made from the menace of shadows. For most of the film’s runtime, the vampiric visage of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is shrouded, conjuring uncertainty and anticipation that haunt the viewer. Seemingly inspired by the unforgettable shots of the monster’s silhouette from Murnau’s original—which Eggers explicitly pays homage to in shots of his own—this new Nosferatu seizes on shadows as its central metaphor for evil. When Ellen’s strapping and naive husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), tasked with selling a decrepit mansion to the mysterious count, stops to rest at an inn close to Orlok’s castle, the innkeeper’s wife warns him, “Beware his shadow. The shadow covers you in nightmare. Awake, but a dream. There is no escape.” Later, after a terrifying encounter with the vampire leaves Thomas petrified and on the brink of death, the Roma religious novice who nurses him back to health observes, “You are lost in his shadow.”
But, as is already clear from that opening shot of Ellen’s face, it is not only the monster whose essence is expressed through this image. At one point, the young woman—plagued by frightening visions and premonitions, and increasingly convinced of her own inherent sinfulness—demands to know, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” This is perhaps the central question of Eggers’s rendition of the classic vampire tale. And while the film’s key innovation on its source material is to explore the particular relationship between Orlok and Ellen, presenting each as the other’s shadow in service of a feminist reflection on men’s efforts to constrain women’s appetites, it’s also interested in the more capacious framing of Ellen’s question. Silhouette portraits linger constantly in the background of the film’s interiors, a subtle reminder of the shadows we each cast—and attempt to domesticate. In one of the film’s most delightfully melodramatic monologues, discredited occult expert Albin Eberheart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) exclaims to a rationalist skeptic, “We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the Devil as Jacob wrestled with the angel in Peniel and I must tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.” If there is little that’s surprising or unfamiliar in Eggers’s Nosferatu, it nonetheless masterfully orchestrates an encounter with this darkness, and renews its hold on our imagination.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Oceans Are the Real Continents, the debut feature by Italian director Tomasso Santambrogi, is a perfect portrait of despair—of the death of the revolutionary dream. This beautiful film, shot in stunning black and white, tells the intersecting stories of three sets of characters in a small town in Cuba, leaving no room for the illusions that once sustained that nation’s idealism, and which have been effaced through decades of rationing, repression, and decay.
Indeed, for the contemporary Cubans depicted here, flight is the only hope left—abroad, or into a vanished past. The desire to get out moves even children: When two little boys speak constantly of “Yankees,” they’re not referring to the country that invaded and blockaded their own, but to the baseball team they believe they’ll one day join; their future lies to the north, and everything is pointed in that direction. Edith, a young puppeteer, has two preoccupations: preparing a show and gathering the paperwork she needs to go to Italy. She has no idea what she’ll do there, or what might await her, but that uncertainty is better than the grim predictability of her life in Cuba. Milagros, an elderly woman who never speaks a word, lives alone and sits daily at her kitchen table to read a lover’s letters sent from Angola in 1989, when the Cuban army, fulfilling its internationalist duty, was sent to Africa to help defend the freed colony from attacks by South Africa and the Namibian rebel army of SWAPO. The letters tell of ubiquitous death and destruction, voicing increasing worry and despair, but also of forthcoming gifts and his hopes for his return. Every day Milagros—played movingly by Milagros Llanes Martínez—leaves the house and heads to the town’s rundown train station, where she still expects to find her lover. In the film’s final shot, all the characters are at this station, waiting futilely or preparing to depart.
In Oceans Are the Real Continents the revolutionary glories of the Cuban past are all but absent, so it’s instructive to watch it alongside Mikahil Kalatozov’s 1964 film I Am Cuba. Made while the nation was just coming into its heyday as a shining socialist light for the peoples of the Third World, it too opens on scenes of great despair—but it is the despair of Havanans and peasants under the Batista regime, propped up by the US. If Oceans Are the Real Continents dwells entirely in anguish, I Am Cuba moves from desperation to rebellion: first in the city, with the heroic struggle of the students at the University of Havana, and then with the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains. The film ends on a joyous scene of the fighters making their way down to the streets of Havana, among them actors bearing perfect resemblances to Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel and Raul Castro. In a way, the entire history of the Cuban Revolution can be told by splicing these films together, end to end.
The Book of Shemot, whose first parshah we read this week, is an epic tale of the redemption of an enslaved and suffering people—but it is not only that. It is also the fulfillment of a divine promise. Hovering behind the story of the exodus is God’s prophecy to Abraham back in the book of Breishit: Your children will suffer for generations in a strange land, but will eventually be liberated. In other words, suffering will bring redemption; pain will be translated into meaning. But as the Israelites’ agony accumulates in our parshah, the promised redemption seems to pale in comparison. In Egypt, their conscription into crushing labor escalates into a program of infanticide—and ultimately extermination. What future redemption can possibly justify such pain? Every newborn baby, smothered on a birthing stool or thrown into the Nile, is one more person for whom the promise of salvation is meaningless.
According to a midrash, this state of affairs exacted a devastating toll on the spirit of the Israelites. When Amram, an Israelite leader, heard that the wicked Pharaoh had decreed that all the Israelite male babies were to be killed, he divorced his wife. All the other Hebrew men soon followed his example; they wanted to spare their children the pain of being born only to die, to spare their wives the pain of bringing a baby into the world only to see them floating, dead, in the Great Nile. It was the child prophet Miriam, Amram’s daughter, who implored her father to overcome his despair. Because of Pharaoh’s wickedness, she argued, there is no guarantee that his decree would be fulfilled. But Amram, she continued, was a righteous man; anything he decreed, even actions that would lead to the disappearance of his people, would certainly be fulfilled.
In their own ways, Amram and Miriam were each wrestling with the implications of Abraham’s prophecy. Amram believed there is no future that could be worth the present suffering. Miriam, while not denying the enormity of the current hardship, still held out hope for a different world. She implored the people to continue living and reproducing—even as the threat to mere existence persisted, and redemption remained beyond imagination. And indeed, when Miriam’s mother bore a son, through stubborn determination and cleverness the child, Moses, was spared the slaves’ suffering and grew up to shepherd a reborn world into existence.
Today, though, a reborn world seems impossibly far off. In our reality of monstrous inversions—in which the slave nation has become Pharaoh—Jews of conscience are understandably struggling with hopelessness and despair. In the face of the violence and suffering wrought by Jewish hands, it is hard to imagine a future for our people. But perhaps the translation of Miriam’s call we must hear today is this: Jews ought to continue living as Jews—even without the promise that redemption from our own crimes is possible. The generative act demanded of us now is not biological but rather imaginative and social, the task of remaking our Jewishness beyond the frameworks that have brought our people to charge their chariots madly into the sea. Because if the wicked decree devastation, it might be fulfilled; but if even the righteous decree that all is lost, what hope is there?
Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.