Jan

30

2026

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): As an adult, I’ve unfortunately developed a short and ever-decreasing attention span—I blame it on technology destroying all my best neural pathways—and one of the side effects of this is that sitting through a movie is hard for me, especially in a theater where I can’t take a pause. One of the side effects of that is that I rarely see movies twice, which is why it’s so unusual that I saw Sentimental Value twice within a week at the end of 2025 (and would be happy to watch it with you a third time, if anyone is looking for a companion).

When I think about the works I’ve recommended over the past year in the Shabbat Reading List, it occurs to me that most of them have something in common: They’re complicated stories where no one is wholly good or wholly bad, where people do terrible things and repair is messy. It’s not that I think there aren’t morally simple questions in our current moment—in fact, there are many (genocide is wrong, kidnapping people because they don’t have paperwork that gives them permission to remain in their home is wrong, etc). But there are also complex ones, and our culture’s inability to distinguish between the two often leaves me depressed. What revives me is art that captures how capacious and contradictory human beings actually are.

Sentimental Value tells the story of a Norwegian family that, in its contours, is perhaps not so unusual. The parents are divorced; the father (Stellan Skarsgård), a well-known filmmaker, is disconnected and self-involved. The sisters are emotionally close, but constitutionally opposite—the younger, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), leads a stable life as an academic with a husband and son, and the older, Nora (Renate Reinsve), is a free-spirited actor with intimacy issues. The surprise main character at the center of the story is the family house itself, which the film anthropomorphizes into a being with wants and desires, feelings and memory. The house is sad when it’s empty, happy when it’s filled with noise; it stands quiet, constant witness to suicide, divorce, loneliness, and all the far subtler joys and traumas that define the lives unfolding within its walls.

When the arc of a story leads us toward warmth for a person we started out despising, it can feel like a cheap trick. Redemption narratives bankroll Hollywood, and most of them are vapid, unearned, and unmemorable—junk food in movie form. Importantly, Sentimental Value is not a redemption story. No one has really transformed by the end of the film, at least in terms of their inner core. What has transformed, though, is what we understand about each character, and what they understand about each other. Watching them see each other for the first time—as the house has seen them all along—is beautiful.

In one of the film’s early scenes, Nora leaves her sister’s house in the middle of a visit without explanation, seeming suddenly and mystifyingly sad. After Agnes closes the door behind her, she returns to the couch and tells her husband that she’s worried about her sister. It is hard not to be moved by this mundane moment of tenderness, rendered so quietly and out of view. It is even more moving when finally, far later in the movie, Nora finally sees it too.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): I couldn’t quite make out the white-lettered slogan on playwright/performer Anne Gridley’s black t-shirt from my back-row seat at Watch Me Walk. But early on, she made a point of telling us what it said: “No, I am not an inspiration.” The line is just one of the hilarious retorts with which Gridley schools the audience—presumably able-bodied and clueless—as she describes her late-onset hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), a neurological disorder that affects her mobility, requiring her to use aids to walk. (In press photos, Gridley’s shirt reads, “Not All Who Stumble are Sauced,” and on the night a friend saw the play, “Look out, it’s contagious!”)

The show is didactic, yes, but in such a disarming, sometimes self-ironizing, and often whimsical way that one wants to lean forward and earn straight A’s. Part of its humor comes from the seeming contradiction between Gridley’s sweet, girlish appearance—slight build, short kilt, dark tights, Doc Martens-like boots, an open zipper hoodie over that t-shirt—and her badass acerbity. If a random stranger, she tells us, demands to know, “What happened to you?” she replies, “My parents were anti-vaxxers.” In response to “God bless you”: “God did this to me.”

In fact, DNA did it to her. Gridley’s mother and grandmother had HSP. While we hear about an abundance of heartache in Gridley’s upbringing, Watch Me Walk veers away from becoming a traditional autobiographical one-woman show. There’s no wallowing here, nor any redemption narrative. The play is more interested in disorder—neurological, socio-political (“viva Luigi,” Gridley declares after describing her insurance company’s refusal to cover vital aids), and even theatrical. While this is Gridley’s first work as a playwright, she comes with a storied background as an actor in the wildly experimental troupe Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the show’s director, Eric Ting, is part of the leadership of the fiercely adventuresome Soho Rep. Little surprise that Watch Me Walk mixes together, among other things, satirical songs, a pair of chiseled male backup singers, medical exegesis, a man in a duck suit, and a big number with Gridley dressed as a magenta, many-tentacled, degenerating upper motor neuron.

Chiefly, the play makes the demand of its title. Gridley requires us to do the thing typically considered inappropriate, but essential to the bodily fact of theater: to stare at her for nearly two hours. We do watch her walk, back and forth again and again and again near the top of the show, across the long, white, narrow stage floor. In a sort of disability-rights inversion of the Brechtian estrangement effect, Gridley makes what is too often considered strange, familiar. And from there, she launches a witty—and scorching—critique.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 1988, the historian Arno J. Meyer published his controversial take on the Holocaust, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? In it, Meyer placed anti-Communism at the center of the Judeocide, for it was when the war against the Soviets went bad that the Final Solution really took wing. We now have Jochen Helleck’s World Enemy No. 1, which, though it only mentions Meyer and his work (dismissively) in a footnote, makes a strong and important case that the history of the Holocaust has been only a partial one—that for political reasons that should have nothing to do with serious study, the primacy of the Nazi war on Communists and Communism has been elided. As Helleck writes, “The fact that the Nazis rose to power and generated enormous backing across Germany and throughout Europe on the strength of their stridently anti-Communist politics and their ability to fuse Communists and Jews into a single monstrous threat is lost” in the dominant narrative.

For all too obvious reasons, hatred of Communism and Marxism is often treated as a secondary factor in the rise of the Nazis. Left out is the milieu in which the Nazi Party was born and grew, in the rise of violent Freikorps groups that combatted the various Communist-led failed revolutions in post-World War I Germany. During the Nazi rise to power, the street fights across Germany were between Nazis and Communists, with killings committed on both sides.

The Nazis’ foundational hatred of Marxism and the Communist Party earned it, as Hellbeck makes clear, the support of large segments of the Western world, and of course of huge swathes of the German population. When the campaign against the Jews picked up in Germany after the Nazi rise to power, the government would occasionally downplay or deny it, whereas the murderous attitude toward Communism was a constant. There are debates about what the Pope did or didn’t do to help the Jews; what is known for certain is that he had no problem with Hitler’s (and Mussolini’s) war on the Communists and the Soviet Union. Hellbeck explains a large part of the reason the anti-Communist was has been occulted: “Imagine a US government having to explain to millions of Americans and visitors from all over the world that the Soviet Communist order was Nazi Germany’s defining target and that the Holocaust was the culmination of a policy that persecuted Communists as subhumans.”

Hellbeck’s task is not to downplay antisemitism; rather it is to show that the Nazi hatreds of Jews and Communists were intertwined. Bolshevism was hated as a “Jewish” ideology; Jews were hated as the alleged bearers of Bolshevism. Jews were killed as bearers of the Communist bacillus. Jews and Communists were singled out by the Nazis during the period of the war on Soviet soil. Hellbeck’s work in no way diminishes the horrors of the Holocaust. His descriptions of the mass murders of Jews in the death camps are unflinching in their brutality. It is instead a rectification of a lacuna in the remembrance of the event.

In this week’s parshah, when Pharaoh gets word that his slaves have escaped, he and his army give chase; the Israelites panic until the Sea of Reeds splits, allowing them to cross to safety. After they pass through the parted waves, the Torah tells us that “the waters returned and covered the chariots and riders, all of Pharaoh’s army that followed him into the sea, not one of them remained.” However, the idiom translated as “not one of them remained” could be read more literally to mean something quite different: “but one of them remained.” A strand of midrashic thought picks up on this reading to make the unintuitive claim that the single Egyptian survivor of the Sea of Reeds was none other than Pharaoh himself. But if Pharaoh was spared, why do we never hear of him again?

Following a Rabbinic tendency to identify minor characters in the Bible with more well-known figures—what’s sometimes termed “the conservation of biblical personalities”—the Rabbis assert that Pharaoh went on to become king of Nineveh, a large and powerful city in ancient Assyria, most famous in the Bible for the prophet Jonah’s mission to convince its sinful residents to repent. It’s a surprising suggestion, since the story of Jonah takes place at a distance of hundreds of miles and years from the exodus story. But perhaps the two tales’ shared narrative structure—a Hebrew prophet is sent to threaten a gentile kingdom with God’s wrath unless they change their ways—prompted the Rabbis to imagine that it was the very same ruler who set up shop in another morally corrupt kingdom.

This time, though, Pharaoh has learned his lesson. In fact, the midrash is introduced with the assertion, “Know the power of teshuva, which can be learned from Pharaoh, king of Egypt.” Last time, he failed to heed Moses’s warning; this time, he acts with alacrity in obeying Jonah. “Let everyone turn back from their own evil ways and from the injustice of which they are guilty,” he announces. Instead of continuing the abuse, he transitions from tyrant to penitent, emerging as an exemplar of atonement. Indeed, Pharaoh-turned-King of Nineveh precisely fulfills Maimonides’s requirement, based on a Talmudic discussion, for what counts as “complete teshuva”: “a person who confronts the same situation in which he sinned when he has the potential to commit the sin again, and, nevertheless, abstains and does not commit it because of having done teshuva.” (This might also help us understand why we read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur.)

Viewing the King of Nineveh as Pharaoh helps to explain one of the most perplexing aspects of the Book of Jonah: the prophet’s opposition to the people of Nineveh being forgiven. When God renounces the planned punishment for Nineveh, the text tells us that “this displeased Jonah greatly, and he was grieved,” even begging God to “take my life, for I would rather die than live” with the news of Nineveh’s forgiveness. Read on its own, Jonah’s adamant opposition to God saving human life seems both inexplicable and oddly cruel. But if Jonah is confronting Pharaoh—who has committed a genocide against his people and done nothing to make amends—and is now facing the possibility of the king getting off easy once again, his indignation and anger make perfect sense.

While the midrash may imply teshuva requires only remorse and abstaining from future sin, Jonah’s refusal to accept such repentance highlights the limitations of this model. As Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, the 17th-century rabbi and kabbalist known as the Shelah, wrote, “It is not sufficient for a person doing teshuva to only abandon their sin. Rather, they must act in opposition to the sin they committed.” That is, we must not simply atone inwardly and avoid repeating the harm we’ve caused, but also strive to undo it through material change. If we have sinned by contributing labor to a nation ruled by a murderous regime, we should join a general strike. If we have sinned by being part of communities enabling the ongoing Nakba, we should work toward supporting return and reparations. Teshuva, at its most powerful, is not ultimately about our own ethical transformation or whether we deserve to be forgiven; it’s about our ongoing obligations to those we have wronged, and the horizon of a world where such harm is a thing of the past.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.