Jan

23

2026

Alex Kane (senior reporter): I have long thought of the scholar and author Tareq Baconi as one of the sharpest minds on Palestine. His book Hamas Contained is the best book on the Islamist organization that I have read, and Baconi is a frequent source of mine whenever I write on Gaza and Hamas. But, like many of the people I call up to help me understand contemporary politics, I knew very little about his personal life.That changed in November, when Baconi published his astonishing memoir, Fire in Every Direction.

Baconi’s new book is a stunning, intimate, and beautiful coming-of-age tale, in which his awakening as a queer boy and then man in the Middle East unfolds against the backdrop of war and dispossession. Structured around a series of letters he receives from his childhood love, Baconi gives his readers a bracing look at what it meant to grow up gay in Amman. The book transported me to moments in his life in ways that I am grateful for—it allowed me, to the extent possible, to understand his upbringing and the forces that shaped his life. I loved the intimate moments detailing conversations with his parents, his awkward middle and high school days, and his departure from the Middle East for college. He never allows the political to disappear, weaving in the Nakba, the Second Intifada, and the US invasion of Iraq without any of it seeming incidental to his personal story, subtly making it clear just how much the politics of the region have shaped his life without the book splitting into irreconcilable genres.

The book also stands as a rejoinder to hackneyed and propagandistic descriptions of queer life in the Arab world that aim to depict it as a homophobic backwater. While Baconi’s book never shies away from discussing the repression of queerness in the region, his frank discussion of the issue allows us to see queer Palestinians for the humans they are, with all their hopes, fears, and loves, instead of as props in a battle to depict Arab and Palestinian society as barbaric outposts that need dominating.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Twenty-some-odd years ago, I don’t remember the season, my friends and I ended up in the narrow backroom of an Italian restaurant in the East Village, where a three-person band stood in a little clearing at the front, carved out from the jumble of wooden tables and chairs. Zack Djanikian (known for his work with Graham Nash) on sax, Solomon Dorsey (Brandi Carlile, Amos Lee) on upright bass, and, standing at the mic with a guitar, Krystle Warren—slender, hair shorn close to the head, with a deep, sonorous voice that in some moments had the rich, romantic quality of the cry of a freight train. To watch her sing was to understand what it meant for the body to be an instrument; she sang with all of it; she played it.

We were only supposed to stay for a few songs—I remember I was having a party that night, and was expecting guests not long after. And indeed, I reluctantly left early, though later than I should have, so as not to keep anyone waiting. But I lost two of my friends to that room: drummer Michael Riddleberger (Bleachers, Maya Hawke) and engineer and producer Ben Kane (D’Angelo, Emily King). They were fixed in place. Soon, they too would join the band, and make some of the most achingly poetic, exquisitely arranged records as Krystle Warren and the Faculty.

But to experience Krystle Warren’s music you have to see her live, which I did a hundred times in the early aughts, back before Bowery Poetry Club had tablecloths (or tables) and was full of freaks. One feels her musical intelligence at work, sampling from other songs in the crescendos or breakdowns of her own, riffing, dialing up the intensity, making the room electric with the feeling that one is witnessing a moment that will never happen quite the same way again.

For the first time in seven years, Krystle Warren, who now lives in France with her partner, is coming back to New York for a show on February 7th at Public Records, with the now rarely-assembled Faculty, in a shuffled lineup and with a handful of Grammys between them from other projects. I highly recommend you check it out.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): My discovery of the work of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck was an accidental one. I was visiting the room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art containing the only painting on display by the great Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi, when I saw on the wall opposite it a simply stunning painting by Schjerfbeck, whom I’d never heard of. The painting, “The Lace Shawl” (1920), is an almost otherworldly work.The woman wearing the shawl has a strange, greenish, elongated face, with boldly red lips. She looks dolefully to our right, her outsized eyes staring numbly across the green background into the void. It’s a work I would return to on every subsequent visit to the museum, wondering who the artist was and what the rest of her work was like.

The Met has satisfied my curiosity with the exhibition Seeing Silence, the first Schjerfbeck show in the US since 1940. It is a feat, a rare opportunity to experience the work of an ignored genius. It is also a chance to see and almost feel how the painter freed herself of the strictures of academic style and found her way to an extremely personal form of modernism, while living on the outskirts of European art.

Such progress in a painter isn’t rare, but in Schjerfbeck’s case it occurs in a curious way. Already, at around the time she was painting patriotic scenes from Finnish history in the purest conformist style, she was also producing strange canvases like “Drying Sheets,” in which all forms of storytelling are absent. All that’s left are the almost abstract shapes of sheets on grass. It’s a work about color and form, a hint of much that was to come.

The influence of Hammershoi in leaving behind narrative work is obvious, and it is a useful one, as it freed her of the anecdotal. An empty room, a mother holding her baby, her face turned from the viewer—all of it of enormous beauty both in itself and as signposts of the artist’s future.

Not that the anecdotal disappears; rather, it becomes more subtle. Schjerfbeck often painted her elderly mother, seated and reading or performing domestic tasks. In a simple, pared down 1902 work, her mother is seated in a room with a simple blue wall, reading in her rocking chair, her back turned to the painter, uninterested in her artistic endeavors.

The catalog for the show is a beautiful one, filled with enlightening essays, but however good the reproductions, they are unable to show us a key element in many of Schjerfbeck’s paintings: the way she layered the paint and worked with the canvas. The texture of the works, the lightness of the brush strokes, the abrading of the paint, even—as in the beautiful “Fragment” from 1904—the areas of the canvas left untouched, are an integral part of her vision.

The show ends with a series of self-portraits from the artist’s final years. The horrors of aging and of impending death are the true subjects of these works. The artist’s face, mouth tightly puckered, is painted with a limited palette or monochromatically. She stares at us, her eyes wide open. The immediate thought when viewing these works is of their resemblance to the character screaming on the bridge in Munch’s painting, and there’s certainly that. But her ears seem to be pointed, as if she were Nosferatu. The end of life is a vampire, sucking out what little juice is left in us.

If seeing atrocities did anything to stop them, the term “livestreamed genocide” would be an oxymoron. Indeed, it is not obvious that seeing images of disfigured bodies and crying relatives saves lives—or that it honors, rather than betrays, the dignity and humanity of those this “content” portrays—which is why writers and activists have interrogated the political utility of sharing images of the death and dehumanization of Gazans. Similarly, while weeks of videos of ICE agents beating people and dragging them from their cars and homes has helped to activate some people, the scale of mobilization has not matched the deluge of awful images. Why, then, do we continue to trust the value of exposure, believing that if only people saw how bad it truly is, they too would surely join our fight?

Our parshah describes the final three plagues: locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn. In describing the penultimate plague of darkness, the Torah tells us that this darkness was “thick” and that “people could not see one another, and for three days no one could move about.” In other words, the darkness was not only about a lack of sight but also entailed a forced stagnation; accordingly, rabbinic traditions teach that the inability to move around was not simply because people could not navigate without sunlight but rather that they were literally frozen in place. Building on this interpretive tradition, the early modern Ashkenazi biblical commentator Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, known as the Kli Yakar, writes that the inability to move means that the previously established pattern—in which Pharaoh summons Moses, repents, asks that the plague be lifted, and then retracts his promise to free the Israelites after the plague’s resolution—became impossible in this case, because Pharaoh was unable to send for Moses in the midst of forced stillness. This interpretation is backed up by a detail in the text: Darkness, unlike most of the other plagues, ends on its own, without Pharaoh’s intervention.

The frozenness of the plague of darkness shifts us away from the use of visibility as a tactic for freedom. We might read the previous plagues as punishments enacted in order to expose Egyptian violence against the Israelites: an attempt to show the Egyptians how bad things were, and move them to change their behavior. Darkness offers no such opportunity, and no such hope. It is the moment the Exodus narrative abandons all attempts to persuade the Egyptians, and pivots to preparing for liberation. Indeed, the Kli Yakar references Rashi, who teaches that one of the purposes of darkness was to allow the Israelites to sneak into Egyptian homes unnoticed, so that when they later came to demand reparations from their enslavers, they would be able to locate exactly where the Egyptians kept their gold and jewels. This plague was not designed to move the Egyptians: Its purpose was to enable the initial steps of the Exodus.

The queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the limits of “faith in exposure,” in which one places “extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se—knowledge in the form of exposure . . . That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, is hardly treated as a possibility.” But, as we know from our own world, there often comes a moment that breaks the belief that making the truth known inherently leads the reader—or viewer—to act. The plague of darkness represents that moment for the Israelites, when new ways of understanding had to be cultivated.

The final plague, in which the Egyptian firstborns are killed, is distinct from the others in many ways, including that it is the only one that requires the Israelites’ participation. They must slaughter a lamb and paint its blood on their doorposts, as a sign to God to spare the firstborn of those houses. This ritual is not a one-time protective activity; instead, it becomes a yearly commandment to offer the Paschal sacrifice (and, later, to commemorate this sacrifice through the Passover seder). The killing of the firstborns is a brutal act of violence—but, importantly, the commandment to commemorate this moment in the future is marked not by more death, but rather by the genesis of new practices of storytelling and ritual for the nascent Jewish people.

As an alternative to a hermeneutic that relies on “faith in exposure,” Sedgwick offers what she terms the “reparative impulse”: This desire, she explains, “is additive and accretive . . . It wants to confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.” This approach looks at what is present and asks us to imagine what we can create beyond it. Rather than trying to tear away illusion and reveal the most naked, pure form of the world, reparative interpretation asks us to imagine more, to build something better. After the plague of darkness, the Torah moves to a reparative posture—the Israelites do not only survive, but are taught ritual and practice that will endure long into the future. They become active and agential, gathering into a collective that is prepared for liberation.

Today, our faith in exposure is rightly shattered: Revealing evil has not stopped it. Pointing at what is here in front of us cannot remake the world. We cannot make change by watching videos, or by asking others to watch. But making the awful visible is far from the only tool at our disposal. We must meet our neighbors, build real power. We must stand between ICE agents and our neighbors. Only creating new ways of acting and relating can bring us to freedom.

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.