Reading List
Jan
24
2025
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): For many years, New York theaters steered clear of plays dealing with Palestine—most infamously the Public Theater during the First intifada, which cancelled a scheduled touring production from East Jerusalem’s El-Hakawati Theater, and the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), which backed away from a production of My Name is Rachel Corrie in 2006. Both institutions have long since course corrected. After some foundering, the Public Theater has produced important Palestinian works in the last couple of years, among them Mona Mansour’s The Vagrant Trilogy, an absorbing epic about Palestinian displacement and dispossession, and Fouad Dakwar’s beguiling pop-punk musical-in-progress, Fouad of Nazareth. NYTW quickly moved to make up for the Rachel Corrie fiasco, and started to work with the Freedom Theater in Jenin, among other initiatives.
Over the horrendous last 15 months, stages across the country have seen much more work by and/or about Palestinians. While that has not been the case on Broadway and for the biggest regional theaters, in general, the theater world, at last, has not exerted anywhere near the level of anti-Palestinian repression that has plagued the art world recently. Just as the ceasefire deal was announced, I caught two stirring examples, playing right across the street from each other on the Lower East Side: The Mulberry Tree by Hanna Eady and Edward Mast at La Mama and, in a co-production with the Under the Radar festival, A Knock on the Roof by Khawla Ibraheem at NYTW (running through February 16th). (This month, Under the Radar and La Mama also presented The Horse of Jenin, which I didn’t have a chance to see.)
Knock (whose script was published in a chapbook for Jewish Currents subscribers last year) is equal parts charming and harrowing. With just a chair on an otherwise bare stage (plus some haunting shadow effects), Ibraheem plays Mariam, a young, frustrated mom in Gaza, who speaks directly to the audience, with warmth and wit. Aesthetically, then, the play resembles innumerable one-woman confessional shows of the last several decades, and the familiar form helps bring us straight inside Mariam’s mind.
But occupation and bombardment render the familiar brilliantly strange. Like the dishes of many a disgruntled housewife, Mariam’s sit in the sink—but here, it’s because of electricity blackouts that disable running water. She tells her six-year-old son that it is too dangerous to swim in the sea—because open sewage pollutes it. Her husband who is studying abroad can’t make it home for Ramadan—he can’t get cleared through the checkpoint. These domestic woes become subsumed by Mariam’s intensifying, and ultimately tragic, obsession: preparing to grab essentials and flee in the five minutes between a “knock on the roof”—a low-impact munition that the Israeli military shoots at a residential building as a warning—and the start of full-on bombing. She repeatedly describes a ritualized practice routine of gathering up her son (in the form of a pillowcase stuffed with weighty objects for her nightly practice), dashing down seven flights of stairs to the street, and sprinting as far away as she can in those five minutes. Though written in 2017, Knock feels entirely of this moment, with its evocations of buildings reduced to rubble and the relentless clangor of explosions.
The Mulberry Tree, on the other hand, takes place decades in the past; seeing this play, which unfolds between 1942 and 1948, within just a couple of days of Knock underscored for me the straight line that runs from the Nakba to now. The Mulberry Tree centers on the relationship between a rabbi and a neighboring Palestinian boy named Noor. The action develops against the backdrop of major events in Israel’s founding—the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel, the UN Partition Plan, the expulsion of Palestinians—with these incidents depicted through their impact on the mundane and intimate lives of Noor, the rabbi, and their families. Though the rabbi insists that as both an Arab and a Jew he cannot choose sides, history eventually forces him to become an Israeli, if only because he can stay where he is, while Noor and his relatives are driven away. Noor makes a surreptitious trip back to check on his family’s house and on the rabbi, whom he’d entrusted with their key, only to find that all the Palestinian homes in the village have been appropriated by Jews. The sense of betrayal is heartbreaking, most of all because we have seen how, once upon a time—before the triumph of statist Zionism—Jews and Palestinians could live amicably as neighbors.
Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): In Elia Suleiman’s 2019 film It Must Be Heaven, the director’s character is told by a French producer that the company will not take his new film because it is “not enough about Palestine.” This line encapsulates a dilemma that has always existed for Palestinian artists, and which has become almost inescapable since October 7th: the expectation, or even the duty, to address “the cause” on the one hand, and its heavy burden on artistic freedom, on the other.
Written before but published amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Yasmin Zaher’s novel The Coin is a provocative and exhilarating rejoinder to that question. Although Palestine surfaces in sporadic memories, the book’s glamorous and unabashed narrator is less concerned with her homeland than with a clean break from her past: She incessantly scrubs her apartment and body, gets swept up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and, as a teacher at a mostly Black middle school, rolls out her unorthodox and brutally realist pedagogy. The title refers to a silver shekel that the narrator swallowed on a road trip to the Negev Desert with her family years earlier, and which she is convinced is mystically shaping her fate from a point on her back that she cannot reach through the extensive self-cleaning routine that she dubs a “CVS retreat.” Like the narrator and her silver shekel, I swallowed The Coin. It took me less than a day to finish.
What I found most compelling about The Coin was its straight-talking narrative voice. Zaher’s protagonist doesn’t express much sentiment at life’s ups and downs, even when recalling her parents’ premature death in a traffic accident. She always keeps her emotions and relations at a distance, including about her years-long relationship with Sasha. “I never thought of him when he wasn’t there . . . I would have preferred a relationship of passion, but I always need one foot on the ground,” she explains. The detachment is like the cleanliness: It is a way of asserting control in an otherwise unpredictable and unforgiving world. The narrator unashamedly confesses that she expects “a certain kind of life” that is both in her hands and just out of reach. Even though she is the heiress to half of her family’s millions, she is left “simultaneously rich and poor,” as the money is locked away in line with her father’s will, and she receives only a steady income to sustain her life of controlled luxury in New York. This material limbo also serves as a springboard for the novel’s subversive exploration of prejudice that is not the exclusive remit of white Americans, such as anti-Black racism and obsession with class status, and how they trouble but don’t necessarily prevent our sympathies.
In one of her most vivid childhood memories, relayed toward the end of the novel, the narrator talks about her estrangement from a Jewish Israeli friend after discovering remnants of pre-Nakba Palestinian life in their home. “I was old enough to know right from wrong,” she says with clarity. And yet she also asserts that the rules of right and wrong may need bending in this topsy-turvy world. “I used to think that if people saw the real face of wickedness, not the mask, then they would revolt. I used to be a proponent of transparency. When Netanyahu and Trump were elected I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster.” In its unapologetic licentiousness and materialism, and in its searingly honest voice, Zaher revels in the hypocrisy that is perhaps unavoidable and forever pervasive when America is “both the key and the curse.” In doing so, she seems to be giving license for Palestinians to be as ugly and complicated as any other people, even when they’re clad in high fashion.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I first saw I’m Still Here—Walter Salles’s remarkable new film about the disappearance of an opposition activist during the military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985—at the New York Film Festival this past fall. I was sitting next to a young Brazilian woman, and as we chatted I asked her what she would pose to the director if the opportunity presented itself. She told me that she’d like to know if he thought the film could spread awareness of what went on during that period and make people confront its legacy. My question was not an abstract one; I knew I’d be interviewing Salles the next day for Cineaste. I duly asked Salles the woman’s question, and he expressed hope that it would indeed serve this function in Brazil—which, unlike Argentina and Uruguay, has never truly reckoned with the truth of its past.
Salles’s hopes have been amply fulfilled. Over three million Brazilians have seen I’m Still Here in theaters, and it has sparked important conversations about the nation’s history. Such discussion is particularly essential now, when this terrible moment has been so recently on the brink of recurring: In January of 2023, supporters of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro refused to accept his loss to Lula da Silva and stormed the capital complex in Brasilia in an attempt to stage a coup d’état. Rarely has a political film come at such a propitious moment and to such good effect.
The film, which has received two Oscar nominations, recounts the disappearance of real-life former congressman Rubens Paiva, who assisted opponents of the military government until he was taken from his home by the military in 1971 and never seen again. His wife Eunice spent years trying to get to the bottom of her husband’s fate, a quest that led her to law school and a career as a human rights lawyer. (The unquestionable star of the film is Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice, portraying her as steely, unrelenting, and quietly heroic, committed both to uncovering the truth and to holding her family together.) Decades later, it was confirmed that Paiva had been tortured and murdered the day after he was taken away.
Salles, whose own family fled Brazil for a time after the coup, was friends with one of the Paiva daughters; the film is thus not only a work of political homage and memory, but a return to his own adolescence and a reckoning with his own past. It’s a beautifully crafted work. The first half hour, which takes place while the family is still together and living life to the fullest, is shot with a constantly moving camera, to a backdrop of the Brazilian pop of the time; after Rubens is disappeared, so too are the bright light, music, and movement. All elements of this masterpiece serve to express the profound tragedy of what was done to Rubens and his family—and to Brazil.
In this week’s parshah, Vaera, Pharaoh is repeatedly described as “not listening” to the words of God and Moses. After Moses and Aaron’s first appeal to free the Israelites at the end of last week’s reading, Pharaoh declared, “Who is this Adonai that I should listen to Their voice?” Now, God warns Moses that this recalcitrance will be a pattern: “Pharaoh will not listen to the two of you.” Sure enough, God’s prediction bears out. Over and over again, as Moses and Aaron petition Pharaoh for the Israelites’ freedom—first through verbal appeal, then through a series of escalating plagues—we are told: “And he did not listen to them.”
Each time, Pharaoh’s refusal to hear their demands is preceded by the statement that his heart had been hardened—in some cases, by God. For many commentators, this understandably poses a theological dilemma: If God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and made it difficult, perhaps even impossible, for him to free the Israelites, why does he deserve divine punishment? Some interpretations resolve the dilemma by arguing that Pharaoh had already sinned to such a degree that repair was no longer possible, and God’s intervention simply ensures that he is punished rather than attempting insincere repentance. Others, however, point to the fact that Pharaoh is first described as hardening his own heart, and argue that every mention of this stubborn refusal, even those the text ascribes to God, is in fact at Pharaoh’s own initiative. Watching his empire collapse around him as escalating devastation reaches even his own home and family, Pharaoh nonetheless evinces an obstinate refusal to change policy.
Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, a 19th-century commentator, is among the scholars of the second camp, who argue that Pharaoh’s refusal was his own choice. Exploring the psychological and emotional processes that produce Pharaoh’s refusal, Hirsch points to the fact that three different roots are used to describe Pharaoh’s heart hardening: “kasheh,” “kaved,” and “chazak.” Each of these, he argues, highlights a distinct way in which people fail to reckon with the world’s difficulties. “Kasheh” (“hard”) is used to describe those who are inured to disturbances from the outside world, for whom everyday horror leaves no impression. “Kaved” (“heavy”) is used for those who can register some amount of what’s happening in the world around them, but aren’t swayed to feel or act differently. And “chazak” (“strong”) is used for people who purposefully and stubbornly refuse to be impacted by the devastation that they witness, who see the world crumbling around them but refuse to relinquish their immediate access to power and profit, even knowing that this spells eventual doom. This final description of Pharaoh and his stubborn refusal to listen feels particularly, horribly resonant today; whether it be billionaires, politicians, and corporations willing to set the world on fire, even as the flames creep ever closer to their own strongholds, so long as they can wrest every last bit of profit from the earth before it’s consumed, or the leaders and supporters of a genocidal Israeli state laying the groundwork for its own demise just to extend their system of supremacy, however briefly—our world has no shortage of Pharaohs, of those who see the collapse they’ve engineered and stubbornly insist that they’ll somehow emerge untouched and victorious.
But Pharaoh is not the only one who refuses to listen to God and Moses in our parshah. Indeed, at the beginning of the portion, we learn that the Israelites actually precede Pharaoh in their refusal. They initially heeded Moses’s promise of liberation, only to be met with a redoubling of their oppression; so when Moses reiterates God’s promise to free the people from bondage, we are told that “they would not listen to Moses, for their spirits were crushed by cruel bondage.” Looking at the seemingly implacable circumstances of their suffering, the Israelites’ frank assessment of the world around them makes it impossible for them to hear and internalize a vision of freedom.
Remarkably, God tasks the Israelites with precisely the same posture that Rabbi Hirsch condemns in Pharaoh: adhering stubbornly to a vision of the world that defies the evidence before their eyes. So why does our tradition condemn only Pharaoh’s belief in the impossible? The difference lies in their distinct positionalities: For Pharaoh and the corrupt power-brokers who inherit his legacy, their own actions bring the destruction from which they believe they, impossibly, will be spared. The Israelites, on the other hand, exist in a painful world not of their own creation, which God wants them to believe they can escape. Wielded by the oppressor, faith without evidence is foolhardy commitment to an unjust world; in the hands of the oppressed, it is a tool for unmaking an unjust world.
While the text acknowledges that the Israelites’ failure to heed Moses stems from their crushed spirits and cruel bondage, Moses and God still want the people to believe in their imminent liberation and set the conditions for its possibility, preparing for their exodus. But this does not mean that they are expected to take a rosy view of their present circumstances. Rather, they are charged with the Gramscian notion of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”—the idea that we must soberly confront the dire straits in which we find ourselves, and yet refuse their inevitability. Today, too, we must assess the ruin around us with clear eyes, acknowledging the full scope of the wreckage; and we must also stubbornly insist that the world could be otherwise.
Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.