Jul

11

2025

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): I must begin by admitting that I am a verified Hala Alyan stan. There are perhaps no books I have gifted and recommended more than her two novels: Salt Houses, a story about the ripples of the Nakba in one Palestinian family from 1948 to the present, and The Arsonists’ City (the better yet lesser-known of the two), an epic family drama centered in Beirut. I thus approached Alyan’s newest book, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, with admittedly high expectations. I was not disappointed: This wild and gorgeous memoir defies simple summaries and genre constraints.

The book tells the story of Alyan’s unconventional journey to motherhood via surrogacy, alongside a series of interwoven vignettes and reflections on her family’s exile from Palestine and then Kuwait, her childhood in Lebanon and America, her battles with addiction, her unraveling marriage, and the power of storytelling. Alyan wrestles with the stories, traditions, and lineages that formed her, and that she is passing onto her daughter. These are stories laden with pain, but Alyan is such a skillful writer that I couldn’t put the book down. There are no simple conclusions or resolutions, only raw honesty and an ongoing journey toward self-knowing and self-acceptance. In the face of the erasure of Palestinian lives and histories, as well as the pressure on women to conform to particular narratives, this refusal to self-censor or limit what counts as a worthy Palestinian mother’s story felt defiantly expansive. I am in awe of the courage and compassion contained in the pages of Alyan’s remarkable book.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): If you like your beach reading to have some teeth, you can’t do better than Sarah Wynn-Williams’s dishy memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. And it literally has some teeth: Wynn-Williams introduces herself in an early scene of this brisk workplace tell-all by recounting the time when, at age 13, she was attacked by a shark in her native New Zealand. It “locked its teeth around my torso” and was “shaking me the way a dog shakes a toy,” she writes. On the brink of death, she is helicoptered to a hospital where doctors find her bowel bitten through and her left lung collapsed. When she awakes from a coma a few days later, her mother praises the doctors who saved her. Unable to talk, Wynn-Williams gestures for a paper and pen and writes, “I saved myself.”

The metaphor couldn’t be blunter. With a background in diplomacy at the UN and high hopes for the impact she believed Facebook could have on “sav[ing] the world,” Wynn-Williams pursues a job that doesn’t exist at the company, and eventually—after showing the higher-ups the part Facebook played in the Arab Spring—she lands the position. Like that adolescent at the beach in New Zealand, she wades into the company enthusiastically and fearlessly—oblivious to the lurking sharks.

As the book was being published in March, Meta—never mind its bumptious claims as champions of free speech—sought to silence Wynn-Williams and persuaded an arbitrator to demand that she uphold the terms of a nondisparagement agreement she signed when she was fired in 2017 (after bringing a sexual harassment complaint against a superior). She was ordered to refrain from promoting the book, and from “amplifying or repeating” any “disparaging, critical, or otherwise detrimental comments.” However, her publisher, Flatiron Books (Macmillan), came under no such decree and the book leapt onto the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists, even as Meta dismissed it as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”

Although she often provides more appalling detail than previously revealed, readers are likely familiar with Facebook’s role in, for instance, the genocidal riots in Myanmar fomented by misinformation posted on the platform or about the company’s compromising efforts to break into China or how it embedded its people in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. But those stories about executives—in C-Suite offices, private jets, fancy overseas hotels, global leadership conclaves—make the jaw plunge lower and lower with each outrageous anecdote. (Despite Meta’s assertion of their falseness, there are no reported libel suits in the works.) There’s man-child Mark Zuckerberg, making an off-the-cuff promise at a UN meeting to supply free WiFi to refugee camps (which was never planned and never happens) or trying to cozy up to China’s Xi Jinping or yelling at his underlings because he forgot to bring his passport to an airport. COO Sheryl Sandberg, of lean-in fame, sees dollar signs after a terrorist attack in Paris puts the issue at the top of the agenda at the World Economic Forum. Now governments will get off Facebook’s back about privacy, she enthuses, and prioritize surveillance: Good for business! She demands that Wynn-Williams crawl into bed with her as they fly back from the conference, as she has demanded of other younger women in the company. (Wynn-Williams declines and finds herself “iced out.”)

When Wynn-Williams returns to work after a five-month maternity leave—which involved a dangerous postpartum loss of blood (related, perhaps, to the old shark attack)—her boss (illegally) calls her in for an immediate performance review. “You weren’t responsive enough,” he tells her. “In my defense,” she replies, “I was in a coma for some of it.”

Most harrowing is a scene in an open office space where a woman convulses on the floor, foaming at the mouth and bleeding, and no one does anything until Wynn-Williams and two others move sharp furniture out of the way and call 911. Trying to give the operator information about the woman, Wynn-Williams asks a nearby worker, “Are you her manager?” “Yes,” she answers, barely looking away from her screen. “But I’m very busy.”

Wynn-Williams seems for the most part like a reliable narrator, or at least a witty and vividly observant one. She does lose some cred with me by gratuitously pointing out (albeit by quoting an outside observer) that the top brass at Facebook are all “Jews who went to Harvard.” Because of this, “You’ll never be like them,” he tells her. The point seems not so much to note her perpetual peripheral status as to distinguish her from those avaricious Jews and their “lethal carelessness” (like Great Gatsby’s “careless people” Tom and Daisy, from whom she takes her title). If what makes her not like them is her moral compass, it notably takes seven years for that compass to inch toward true north.

As the book breezed on, I had to wonder: How many times can she describe scales falling from her eyes before there are any illusions left to lose? “I decided that until I walked out the door for the last time,” she writes near the end, “I would try to work the system, because for so long I still believed I could do more good inside than out.” With all the evidence she piles up, that belief comes to seem self-servingly naive. She may be thrashing in the jaws of reckless power and wealth, but she continually manages to save herself.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The irony of the title of the new film Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is evident from the very first shots. The movie—an adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s brilliant memoir about the final days of Rhodesia, directed by and starring Embeth Davidtz—opens on a white farm family beginning their day, with everyone, adult and child, carrying a gun as they see the father off to his military service combating the African “terrorists” fighting to end white rule. Things have most definitely already gone to the dogs for the whites, who live in mortal fear of the dispossessed natives glaring at them with hatred as they drive past.

The narrative unfolds during the run-up to the first free elections; the whites are pulling for the more moderate cleric Abel Muzorewa, running against the hardcore Robert Mugabe. (That Mugabe would turn out to be a frightful dictator is, for the moment, neither here nor there.) The story is told from the point of view of the family’s eight-year-old daughter Bobo—played by Lexi Venter, in a performance equaled only by such classic children as Victoire Thivisol in Jacques Doillon’s Ponette and Aiden Noesi in Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway. Venter perfectly embodies the duality of settler childhood. She’s fascinated by the Black Africans around her; she enthusiastically (if disrespectfully) explores African gravesites and loves hearing African tales from Sarah, the family’s beloved maid. But at the same time, she strides around the farm as if the world were hers, and talks to African children as if they were her servants. She is, of course, a product of the isolated and scarce whites who view every Black person as an enemy.

Bobo is a queasy-making combination of grown-up and child, forced into early adulthood not only by the instability of both the state and her impoverished family. Should they stay or should they go? Her father feels it’s all hopeless and wants to leave. Her alcoholic mother (played by Davidtz) insists on holding out. Davidtz skillfully presents the steely determination in the poor and lost cause of the white farmers, demonstrating grit and determination, even through her drunken haze. She’s a sad, frustrated woman living in a sad and frustrating situation. Enmity flows freely in all directions—and ironically, the threat of violence hangs as much over the faithful Sarah as over the white settlers. (Her affection for Bobo, she’s warned by a Black worker on the family’s farm, could lead to her death as a collaborator.)

Perhaps the most revealing scene in the film is a dance held by the farmers, just as their fate is pretty much sealed. Despite military call-ups, despite having to travel fully armed, despite the fear, the whites party on the edge of the grave of their world. But in Davidtz’s skilled hands, there is nothing elegiac about it. It’s a world that deserved to die.

This week’s parshah, Balak, famously features a talking donkey who stops in her path as her rider, the sorcerer Bilaam, is on his way to attempt to curse the Israelites. This is by no means the only donkey in the classical Jewish canon; in fact, the Torah and Talmud are full of stories that mention the animal—we just rarely notice them. But as Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder of the queer yeshiva SVARA, teaches, if a donkey were to learn Torah and Talmud, “every time they’d see a donkey, they’d go ‘There’s me! There I am again!’” Rabbi Lappe uses this as a metaphor for the experience of marginalized people seeking out moments when we are reflected in Jewish texts. And indeed, if we were donkeys, Balak would undoubtedly be an all-time favorite parshah: For once, a donkey is not a side figure, but a main, speaking character!

The events of Parshat Balak take place outside the standard narrative of the Israelites’ travels through the desert in the book of Bamidbar. We find the biblical “camera” suddenly focused elsewhere: on the Moabite king Balak. Fearful of the Jewish people and their power, Balak hires the prophet and magician Bilaam to curse the Israelites. Despite his initial resistance, Bilaam consults with God, who allows him to take on the task on the condition that he only says what God tells him. But en route to perform his curse, Bilaam is stopped by his donkey, who sees a sword-bearing divine angel that is invisible to the sorcerer. After seeing the angel, the donkey refuses to continue along the road: She first veers off the path into a field, then presses herself against a wall, and then lies down. Following each of these acts, Bilaam beats her with his stick, increasingly angered by her obstinacy. But then, as the Torah explains, God “opened the mouth of the ass,” and she speaks to Bilaam, asking him if he has ever known her to act unreasonably. When Bilaam admits that he has not, God “uncovered Balaam’s eyes” and he sees “the messenger of God standing in the way, his drawn sword in his hand.”

If we read this story, in an overly-literal take on Lappe’s teaching, as a tale about appearances of the marginalized in our sacred texts, we notice that it is the donkey herself who has the power to see the sacred, the invisible angel heeded first by the unnoticed beast. We can see this as an illustration of the insight that’s only possible from the periphery. But if this reading risks fixing and idealizing disempowered identities, we might complicate it by understanding the angel less as an embodiment of the divine than as an intermediary. The story then seems to hinge on a kind of strange solidarity, one with unexpected outcomes: The lowly donkey is able to open her eyes to another unseen messenger. It is a moment of connection between two “supporting characters” in this main drama of God and men. Notably, the donkey both embraces and challenges her identity in the moment she confronts Bilaam. She speaks, but when she does so, she emphasizes her donkey-ness—identifying herself as “the ass that you have been riding all along” even as she moves away from her donkey-ness through the very act of speech. She is caught in the double-bind of highlighting the knowledge she has gained through her own experience, while simultaneously troubling the very terms of that identity in order to connect beyond herself.

In a recent exploration of identity politics, the political theorist Tessy Schlosser writes, “No identity is ever fully ours, and yet none is fully foreign. Naming ourselves in ways that others can grasp is part of what politics requires. And yet there is no fully legible person, and there is no complete recognition. There are only moments of contact.” In the moment on the road, the donkey, the angel (who has a divine message to communicate), and Bilaam (who seems to genuinely want to know God’s will) are all striving for recognition and to be recognized. But total legibility fails; they are left only with the contact they can make in that moment. As leftist communities debate the utility of identity politics—given how this framework, created by Black lesbians to struggle collectively against interlocking systems of oppression, has been co-opted in service of liberal individualism—Parshat Balak offers a surprising glimpse of the potency of encounters across difference, grounded in the messy indeterminacies of identity. There is not a single margin or a single center; it is by embracing this multiplicity and seeking recognition amongst ourselves on the margins that we can begin to see the world anew.

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.