Jan

9

2026

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For a not insubstantial number of women watching Heated Rivalry—a smutty new Canadian romance about a nearly decade-long affair between closeted pro hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov—the show has become an all-out obsession bordering on psychosis. When they are not rewatching one of its six episodes, they are replaying them in their mind, or endlessly consuming related content about the show and its stars, previous unknowns Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie (of course, the algorithm gladly obliges). These women speak of the trouble they’re having leaving the HR world behind; they report sleepless nights, a loss of interest in their work or home lives, and conversations that always end up back on their boys.

I am one of these women. I am very sick and this is a cry for help.

There is so much supplemental content to consume about the show. (My personal favorites are the episode recaps on Empty Netters—by all accounts a normal hockey bro podcast hosted by two very straight ex-pro players until Shane and Ilya came along and broke their brains. The comments on YouTube are all gay men talking about how watching the Netters discuss the show with so much genuine excitement, tenderness, curiosity, and, yes, horniness, is healing them.) And yet I’ve read nothing that is even attempting to answer the most important question: Why the fuck is this happening to us? I’ve heard about all the weird shit the CIA got up to with MKUltra; could this be Canada’s answer? Some subliminal hypnosis-type shit? WHAT IS THE ENDGAME HERE?

Romance writers are having a field day online arguing that the mainstream is just getting acquainted with the intoxicating contours of their genre, which aims to light up the pleasure centers, not to disappoint. After all, the show was adapted from Game Changers, a gay hockey smut series by Rachel Reid. The show—and the authentic, embodied chemistry between its leads—elevates the committedly lowbrow aesthetic of slash, a genre in which mostly women write erotic romances between famous male duos, real and fictional. (The slash comes from the ur example, Kirk/Spock, but imagine Harry/Draco, or Lennon/McCartney. HR takes its inspiration from the real-life feud between hockey stars Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.) In my very basic armchair analysis, it seems the female attraction to slash, and to “boy love” in general, may be a way of imagining sex and love without the steep and often violent power imbalances inherent in heterosexual relationships. In other words, the fantasy is equality. Indeed, though Shane and Ilya do sometimes hurt one another, they are also peers (ahem, rivals)—rich and famous phenoms on the international stage. No women were harmed in the making of this soft core. To account for the loss of the erotics of power, the love is forbidden, hence its setting in male pro sports, one of the only provinces left in North America where queerness remains entirely unspoken.

But whatever, no need to overthink things. It’s hot, it’s romantic, it’s beautifully shot. Though I can’t say it’s particularly deep (certainly not as deep as Normal People, its hetero counterpoint in more ways than one), there are some scenes, especially in the latter half of the series, that are so well-written, well-acted, and well-choreographed that I was literally screaming at the screen. One commenter on a post asking for an explanation for their Heated Rivalry psychosis, touting their therapeutic credentials, said the answer is simple: joy. I’m still not sure that Canada isn’t building an army of middle-aged women supersoldiers. But fuck it, everything is so dark. Treat yourself and watch the gay hockey show.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): In 1980, International Harvester closed the Wisconsin Steel Works in South Chicago. Not content to lay off thousands of workers, the company also employed a complex legal scheme to renege on its pension obligations—signed off on by a corrupt company union connected to the Chicago Democratic machine.

The company did not reckon, however, on the steel workers themselves, who organized, under the name “Save Our Jobs,” what their lawyer called a “spiritual union” and fought a 17-year campaign of protests, pickets, and lawsuits to claw back their pensions. They were led by Frank Lumpkin, a Black Communist steelworker who was already 64 years old in 1980.

His wife, Beatrice Lumpkin, who is still alive (and currently, keinehora, 107 years young), wrote a biography of her husband, “Always Bring a Crowd!” The Story of Frank Lumpkin, Steelworker (1999), focusing on the battle with International Harvester. The book, like its protagonist’s life, bridges between the Old Left and the desperate 1980s battles against deindustrialization. Lumpkin moved North from Florida during the Great Migration, and he participated in the wave of post-World War II strikes and in Communist efforts at racial integration in the late 1940s, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Movement. The political repression of McCarthyism crushed the Left organizationally, but could not repress the spirit of class struggle. When the moment arrived, Lumpkin seized it to organize a multiracial, militant group. Save Our Jobs shaped Chicago and even national politics, contributing to Harold Washington’s 1983 mayoral victory over the Democratic machine, and anticipating Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the last progressive presidential campaign until Bernie Sanders in 2016. And though the plant never reopened, Save Our Jobs wrung substantial settlements from International Harvester and its shady corporate partner—exemplifying the simple idea that when workers fight, we win.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some years ago, the wildly eccentric artist Alex Melamid, formerly half of the marvelous team of Komar and Melamid, devised something called the Art Healing Ministry. Working out of a small gallery in Soho, patients would bring him their problems, psychological and physical, for which he’d prescribe works of art, usually housed at the Frick Collection, the sight of which would cure their malady. I’m certain that Alex—whose work at the time I helped propagate by having him as designated artist-in-residence at Queens Hospital Center, where I then worked—would prescribe the current exhibition, “Renoir Drawings”, on display at the Morgan Library until February 8th, 2026, for almost anything that ails you. “Joyful” might be a cliché in describing Renoir’s work, but if it is, it’s only because it so aptly applies to his oeuvre, including the works on display here.

Joyful and alive. When I visited the show, the woman standing next to me before Renoir’s drawing of a salon, its walls, and the people and furniture in it enthused over how alive everything was, how the walls and the chair were as vibrant as the people. This is true everywhere in the exhibition.

The curators have assembled the preliminary stages of several of the larger and more impressive drawings. The most thorough tracks a painting through all of Renoir’s preparatory work. There are many sketches for Three Bathers, a large work depicting the pink, fresh-skinned young women who dominate Renoir’s art. They are first drawn separately, with Renoir experimenting with the right poses, the right gestures, and the right way to draw their feet. One drawing in particular, of a model who appears in several of the works, a young woman with bangs, shows her nude body turned away from the viewer so only her back is seen. In the sketch, done on paper on canvas, Renoir has worked the skin color to the point of perfection. The enormous work involved, we must remember, was for a sketch, something that Renoir never would have expected to be displayed. The final image is one of sheer youthful joy bursting from the large frame.

Grim times require respite. Alex Melamid was entirely right: In any given dreadful situation, there exist works of art that can rescue you. The hour or two you spend at the Morgan with Renoir’s drawing will be time well and fruitfully spent.

The opening chapter of our parshah—and of this new book of the Torah—succintly and chillingly details the Egyptians’ escalating oppression of the Israelites. It begins with Pharaoh warning his people that the Israelites have become “much too numerous for us” and imposing forced labor upon them; when this fails to diminish the perceived demographic threat, he imposes even harsher conditions. When these, too, fall short, he enlists midwives to secretively kill every Israelite boy they deliver. After the midwives refuse his order, he mobilizes the entire population to toss every baby boy into the Nile.

The Torah portrays this genocidal turn not as an aberration from the original xenophobic fearmongering or the subsequent system of forced servitude but rather as their logical continuation. Indeed, commentators emphasize that the later murderous measures began as propaganda portraying the Israelites as a fifth column. For example, the 17th-century scholar David HaLevi Segal, known as the Taz, explains that Pharaoh uses a singular pronoun to describe the Israelites because he’s referring to the singular entity that is the people of Israel; it is the very fact of their distinctive, shared identity that he perceives as a threat. Therefore, Segal claims, when Pharaoh says “let us deal shrewdly with it [i.e., the Israelites],” he is in fact asking: “What can we do so as to make them not a people?” The 19th-century commentator the Beit HaLevi notes that a verse from Devarim, well-known from its inclusion in the Passover Haggadah, that is traditionally translated as “the Egyptians did evil to us and oppressed us” can instead be rendered as “they portrayed us as evil, and afterwards oppressed us.” In other words, Pharaoh’s campaign of escalating violence against the Israelites had to begin by manufacturing consent—convincing the public that the Israelites’ growing presence was an existential threat demanding opposition by any means necessary.

Many commentators likewise understand Pharaoh’s imposition of harsh labor as an attempt to destroy the Israelites’ collective presence in Egypt. The 13th-century French commentator Chizkuni suggests that enslavement is a form of population control, in which people’s lives are dominated by labor to an extent that makes family life and procreation impossible. The late 15th- and early 16th-century Italian commentator Sforno, on the other hand, sees it as an attempt to provoke a mass exodus. He reads Pharaoh’s statement that the Israelites “will get up from the land” not as a warning, as is it generally understood, but as a hope: that Pharaoh can simply make life hard enough that the Israelites leave of their own accord, allowing the Egyptians to ethnically cleanse the Israelites while avoiding condemnation from surrounding nations.

But when these methods are unsuccessful, Pharaoh quickly shifts from attemping expulsion, population control, and cultural genocide to direct, systematic killing. The 13th-century commentator Nachmanides notes that his first murder plan, which uses the midwives, is more private: Pharaoh only enlists a small segment of the population to conduct the slaughter, and does so in a way where those involved can claim plausible deniability. If the midwives are clever, Nachmanides suggests, the Israelite women may simply believe their children were tragically stillborn. When the midwives furnish excuses for why this subtler plan is impossible, Pharaoh determines that the broader population has developed sufficient animus to enable mass participation in genocide. Every Egyptian is now commanded to toss Israelite boys into the river. But Nachmanides argues that this isn’t yet the final stage of creating a genocidal public: At this point, Egyptians are only commanded to kill those Israelite babies they happen upon, and courts would still pretend to pursue justice on an Israelite parent’s behalf if they demanded it. Only when Pharaoh sees that he’s gotten away with this level of violence—that the Egyptian populace are willing participants and that the surrounding kingdoms either do not notice or raise no protest—does he abandon all restraint: Egyptians are commanded to actively invade Israelite houses seeking baby boys to execute. This, he explains, is why Yocheved, Moses’s mother, needed to hide him.

Amid the drama of the liberation narrative that unfolds over the following parshiyot, it’s easy to miss a startling fact: After the first chapter of Shemot, the genocide is never mentioned again. The Israelites are still enslaved, enduring harsh labor, until the exodus, and when God later commands them to recall their time in Egypt, they are instructed to remember the enslavement, not the slaughter. However, this omission becomes slightly less jarring when we view the enslavement and the attempt to kill all baby boys not as distinct evils but as part and parcel of the same genocidal goal: to destroy a people’s existence as such.

There’s another curious element to the way the Torah recalls this time. While God reminds the people at several later points in the Torah that they were slaves in Egypt, the most commonly found mention of their centuries in Egypt is adjoined to the frequent commandment not to oppress the stranger, “because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This admonishment doesn’t state that we suffered in Egypt, that we were enslaved in Egypt, or that we died in Egypt—merely that we were strangers. This is often presented as a call to empathy, that our history of suffering should move us to demand better conditions for other vulnerable people. But this isn’t just an insistence on ameliorating the suffering of the stranger: It’s a warning that otherness and subjugation are all too often linked. By frequently reminding us of our alienness, the Torah highlights that before we were slaves in Egypt, we were strangers. We saw the ease with which those in power can prey upon the stranger—how effortless it was for normal people to learn to hate the stranger, and for that hatred to manifest in unconscionable violence. These repetitive verses warn that the path to becoming subjugators is a deceptively simple one.

Unlike Amalek, who are immortalized as an eternal enemy, the Torah does not mythologize the Egyptians as uniquely evil; in fact, we are even commanded not to abhor them. Left-wing Jews have often noted, grimly, that we have become like Pharaoh—that in the foundational story of our oppression and liberation, we now occupy the role of oppressor. But becoming like Pharaoh doesn’t mean that we have taken after a uniquely, mythically cruel subjugator; we have become like Pharaoh in that he and the Egyptians fell into the horribly common, well-trod path of scapegoating and subjugating those who threaten their national identity. The opening chapter of our book of liberation is a chilling reminder about the nature of eliminationist violence—which is dangerous not only in its unique forms but in its terrible ordinariness. Countering such violence is thus possible only by uprooting the pervasive chauvinist, supremacist logics from which it grows.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.