Jan

31

2025

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): In December, I saw two of the best theater performances that I’ve seen in a long time: Francesca D’Uva’s one-woman show, This Is My Favorite Song, and Dan Fishback’s rock opera, Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment. They have some similarities—both artists mix story-telling and music to reckon with their personal experiences of loss and struggle in the pandemic.

D’Uva’s show is composed of a series of comedic monologues interspersed with songs that cover the gamut of her life: the headaches and joys of nannying, having a crush on Mary in the elementary school Easter pageant, winning a bespoke participation award for the high school swim team, and—in the show’s most extensive throughline—the grief and strangeness of losing her dad to Covid in June of 2020. D’Uva’s writing and performance move between a serious, heavy emotional register and hilarity, each informing, rather than cheapening, the other. Early in the show, after she first mentions her dad’s death, the stage fills with haze from a smoke-machine, the lights turn red, and she sings a death metal-esque interlude: “I don’t want to do this show,” crouching like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. She goes into detail about losing her dad, such as the ritual of donning PPE at the hospital for the chance to say goodbye after months of seeing him on a ventilator on Zoom, or the awkwardness in social situations when people find out the cause of his death and don’t know what to say. In the second half of the show, she transitions from her usual laugh-out-loud musical numbers into a subtle, melancholic song. She amplifies the sound of tapping on a small urn of her father’s ashes, and her vocals elongate into abstraction. The show ends in an imagined scene where she needs to save her dad’s life in a video game, and Shakira—a minor character throughout—comes to the rescue.

A few days later, I saw Fishback’s show which, as the playbill puts it, tells the story of “a chronically ill gay bitch trapped at home during a time of global fascism and a mass-disabling pandemic.” The performance begins with members of the band introducing one another, as part of a kabbalistic ritual to transport Dan’s spirit from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, into the body (Ron Shalom’s, in this case) that he inhabits for the rest of the show. The care and attention to accessibility and risk mitigation that is at the center of the narrative was also present offstage: Joe’s Pub paused its bar and restaurant service for the two-day run to support a fully masked theater experience. Fishback integrated ASL interpretation, open captioning, and audio descriptions into the performance, inspired—as he talked about in an episode of The Sick Times podcast “Still Here”—by Ryan J. Haddad’s “Dark, Disabled Stories,” which had also played at the Public, in the spring of 2023, and which I also loved. The songs are about isolation, desire, rage, collective care, organizing, and ancestors. The energy onstage was palpable, the music superb. I was rapt; if the soundtrack was available as a recording, I would listen to it many times over. (You can hear one song, “Laughing with Lizards,” as the first track of an EP that Fisbhack released last year.)

As pandemic mitigations have evaporated in the last two years, while the virus continues to circulate and cause mounting damage, I know from friends and from my own experience that people who prioritize Covid safety feel continually isolated and forced out of the social, cultural, and even routinely necessary spaces they wish to be part of. In one act, Fishback sings that the feeling of betrayal from people he thought cared about him is something that will stay with him for the rest of his life. Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment was a space in which, for two brief afternoons, a community that mourns and rages alongside him—both in the theater and in the livestream audience—could be together and hear their experiences articulated.

Over the years, I’ve heard people wonder aloud about the dearth of Covid-related art, including conjectures about a collective wish to forget that traumatic and turbulent period. But these performances make me doubt that narrative. They are wildly creative, moving, and brilliant pieces of art—my only criticism is that neither had a longer run.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Ever since I tore through Nicholson Baker’s mesmerizing 1988 debut novel The Mezzanine—an interior monologue that unfolds entirely over the course of an escalator ride—a few years ago, I’ve been eager to read more of his work. So I was excited to happen upon a used copy of his 2009 book The Anthologist, which also rests on a nearly-too-cute premise: The novel consists of the musings of an unsuccessful poet procrastinating on composing an introduction to a volume of rhyming verse. The delightfully ridiculous (and ridiculously named) narrator, Paul Chowder, is equal parts pathetic and grandiose, slipping between strident declarations about the nature of his craft and admissions like: “My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I’m a study in failure.” Indeed, the novel finds him not only failing to eke out a word but facing financial ruin and wrestling with the departure of his girlfriend, both of which could be remedied by simply getting down to work. But of course he can only ramble on, regaling the reader with details of his humdrum life mixed with proclamations that might form the substance of his repeatedly postponed writing project. Chowder, we quickly learn, believes that the neglect of rhyme in contemporary English poetry (including his own) constitutes a colossal aesthetic error. His rants on the subject, though often ridiculous, are also deeply felt, and liberally peppered with beauty and brilliance. At one point, for instance, he announces that “poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing” that contains its own cure to despair: the inherent forward motion of rhyme, a miraculous means of “addicting yourself to what will happen next.” If this is a far less ambitious work than The Mezzanine, it nonetheless shares its searching intelligence and belief in the infinity inherent in the endless minutiae of the world—in what Chowder calls life’s “untold particulars.”

Reading The Anthologist, I couldn’t help thinking of another tender novel of procrastination and obsession: Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins. In Haber’s 2024 novel, which I enjoyed immensely last fall, the central deferral is on the scale of decades. The unnamed narrator, a retired professor, has been struggling to get a serious start on a book-length essay about the French writer (and alleged father of the essay form) Michel de Montaigne ever since grad school; he’s gotten as far as a list of potential titles, all suggestive but ambiguous. In the opening pages, the speaker settles on a new one that accords perfectly with his fundamental predicament: The Intrusion of Distraction. His whole existence has been a series of diversions and disruptions that render his life’s work impossible, a situation he universalizes: “Once again my phone chirps, that shrill chirp that births a goddamn knot in my chest each time it chirps, every chirp another attack against sanity and solitude and fucking Christ, I think, growing frustrated, growing antsy and aggrieved, pacing the house in my pale-yellow slippers, the modern world has destroyed the ability to have a single unfettered thought, humankind has demolished discernment and irony, the parsing of ideas with the slightest nuance because all of these require sustained, undisturbed time”—he goes on. In wonderfully winding and ferociously fervent prose, the tragicomic narrator digressively circles his unfulfillable project, raving about modernity, his passion for coffee, his son’s irritating interest in dance music, the colleagues and students who have misunderstood and waylaid him—all while approaching and then retreating from what he’s avoiding most of all: his grief over the recent death of his wife. Much like Baker’s novel, Haber’s study of the self-aggrandizing and unactualized intellectual’s inner turmoil unlocks the tenderness hidden within the abrasive and the absurd.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some time back, Jewish Currents published my conversation with the founder and executive director of Israel’s Akevot Institute, which studies, and sometimes uncovers, the state’s crimes. In the introduction to that interview, I praised the videos the organization produces, many of which feature testimony from participants in those very crimes. The short films often focus on Israel’s most familiar purveyors of unbridled government violence: the army. But Akevot’s new six-part web series, Blue Marks, concentrates not on the outward-facing forces aimed at destroying anyone who resists Israel, but instead on the inward-facing defenders of the established disorder—the police.

Filmed and edited by Matan Ben Moreh, each episode considers a different aspect of police violence or segment of the population that regularly endures it. The focus here is not the police’s treatment of Palestinian citizens. Rather, those at the receiving end of the violence are Jews, but Jews who are disturbers of the status quo: leftist demonstrators against the government, poor Mitzrahim, the ultra-Orthodox, and Ethiopian Jews. What Blue Marks shows with shocking clarity is that to disrupt the system founded by Ashkenazim and maintained by right-wing Mizrahim is a risky proposition. Any country’s forces of repression are an expression of the national id, acting unencumbered by morality. Their choice of targets are likewise revealing; indeed, the identities of the internal enemies explored here exemplify the contradictions that lie beneath the veneer of Jewish unity proclaimed by Zionism.

The series highlights how frighteningly easy the Israeli police are to resort to brutality. Water cannons, horses, truncheons, and skunk cannons—which spray the victim with foul-smelling liquid—are all weapons of first resort. Activists and even two insiders, including a former national chief, describe the police force’s degeneration into what one of them explains should, because of its willingness to act outside the law, more properly be called a militia. None of the interviewees has any great hope for a shift in the status quo; as a sociologist who had worked for the police for decades tells Ben Moreh, the public largely supports the police, so why would things change? The cops will remain free to beat and kill, to violate Israel’s proclaimed democratic rights. If Israeli settlers in the West Bank already act like the Black Hundreds who slaughtered Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the police are like the Cossacks, seated atop their horses, swinging their modern knouts. Blue Marks is a powerful chronicle of their awful acts—and of an underappreciated sign of Israel’s descent into ignominy.

Do we believe in demons? Apologies for the atavistic-sounding question—I am, of course, thinking of Donald Trump. He has called his opponents “demonic,” playing on a growing belief among conservative Christians that they are surrounded by people literally possessed, and a yearning for an authoritarian exorcism. But saner liberals also seem drawn to the language and causal framework of the satanic when describing Trump. Sometimes, this is explicit, but more often it’s latent. For instance, in the view of the New York Times editorial board—secular liberalism’s high priests—Trump is above all sui generis: exceptional for his charisma, his defiance of American political norms, and his personal vices; explicable in personal rather than collective, systemic terms (which is to say, inexplicable); malignant and aberrational, to be defeated individually in court, rather than by posing a political alternative (which is to say, not to be defeated)—in short, if not supernatural, then at least supersocial. People like me usually scoff at this personalizing obfuscation, preferring to trace continuities between Trump’s politics and longer processes in the American state and economy, to see him as the predictable outgrowth of increasing inequality, foreign wars come home, and discontent with the neoliberal consensus. Yet contemplating, say, the arcane symbolic tattoos on Trump’s alcoholic, sexually abusive, and ultra-violent nominee for secretary of defense, I wonder how many of us are confident enough in our cool, rational analyses not to be spooked. For me, at least, the demonic names the gap between what I know and how much I fear, reflecting the way my anxieties, like hospital bacteria with a tolerance for antibiotics, have grown resistant to rational explanation.

As it happens, this week’s parshah implicitly stages a debate regarding the existence of demons. Anyone who has been to a Passover seder knows the “rationalist” side: The Haggadah, quoting an early midrash on the verse in our parshah, presents God as insistently denying the role of any angel or other supernatural intermediary in striking the firstborn sons of Egypt. And indeed, God—instructing the Israelites, through Moses, to paint their doorposts with blood—emphasizes divine agency: “When I see the blood I will pass over you, so that there will be no plague to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” But when Moses relays the plan to the Israelite elders ten verses later, he attributes the impending violence to an angelic Destroyer: “God will see the blood . . . and God will stand over the door and not let the Destroyer enter and smite your home.” As the (wonderfully named) scholar Shimon Gesundheit proved, this sequentially later verse is actually the older text—and in a previous version, was attributed to God. A later scribe, Gesundheit shows, demoted the line from God’s word to Moses’s and inserted before it the revised version in which God takes sole responsibility for the killing. In that added verse, the scribe also massaged the name of the angelic Destroyer (“hamashḥit”) into an odd, incongruous verb form (“l’mashḥit”), the “m” preserving a remnant of the divine killer. With monotheistic zeal, the later scribe reduced a rival supernatural agent to a simple report of the process at hand; the text’s transfiguration records an early moment of secular disillusionment, the knowing rationalist poo-pooing someone else’s demon as a mere phantom.

These two verses within the very same chapter of our parshah thus present opposing images of that night: In one, a Supreme Deity is both judge and executioner, personally decimating Egyptian society, in a perfectly choreographed spectacle of omnipotence. In the other, destruction comes from a mysterious, malignant force, held in check by—but ontologically separate from—a protecting God. The mashḥit has its own shadowy methods and motives, maybe even its own jurisdiction. For this reason, if I prefer the later scribe’s version metaphysically, I am more morally comfortable with the earlier text, in which the death of numerous innocents is, in some sense, not God’s doing.

I suspect the earlier text also more accurately captures the experience of revolutionary transformation. While the ultimate point of the plagues is to demonstrate God’s sovereignty—everyone, even Pharaoh, will “know that I am God”—as they unfolded, that question remained in doubt. For both Egyptians and Israelites, the time of the plagues was chaotic and confused, with rival interpretations of these catastrophes. The only certain fact would have been manifest contradiction: a clash of peoples, classes, natural forces, and even gods, in which it was unclear not only who would prevail, but even what the sides were. Perhaps the scribe’s revision of the Destroyer into a destroying God not only correlates with the emergence of a rationalizing monotheism—gradually draining the world of its spooky, local demons—but also reflects a retrospective projection of historical clarity. That is, if the older text depicts a still unresolved war among the gods, the later one knows not only who won, but that there was never any real contest.

That earlier version, then, understands demons neither as exceptional, fearsome forces that altogether deny analysis, nor simply as illusions to be dispelled by the smug, enlightened analyst. Rather, demons are the “morbid symptoms” of a social “interregnum”: the old, conservative constraints have been loosened, but the left is not yet strong enough to provide a new direction, so reliable prognostication fails. The twin texts of our parshah suggest that in such moments, analysis rarely outstrips, and frequently lags behind, political praxis. In other words, we will never be able to interpret our world until we can change it.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.