Jul

18

2025

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): For the last several years, I have been reading up on Jews and Native Americans. Motivated at first by mere curiosity, I have come to see it as a fruitful conjunction for thinking about land and nation, rootedness and diaspora. Much of this reading is scholarly and in my field of specialization (Renaissance Europe), material I would hesitate before recommending to outsiders. Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, by contrast, is quick-moving, contemporary, and lively.

Clarren, who has written journalistically about the American West for 20 years, tells her family’s story of emigrating from Eastern Europe to escape anti-Jewish pogroms—but with a twist. Her ancestors quickly migrated west, attracted in no small part by the promise of free land for homesteaders. As Clarren discovered in the course of her research, that land had been incrementally but systematically stolen from the Lakota people, through numerous, increasingly unfavorable treaties of dubious legality; outright massacres like Wounded Knee; paternalistic, exploitative, and opaque management of tribal lands by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; and forcibly assimilationist programs to suppress Native languages and practices. Thus, as her grandparents, uncles, and aunts acquired land, raised cattle, opened saloons and stores, bootlegged during Prohibition, and generally prospered and acculturated, they did so against a backdrop of slow-moving economic dispossession and cultural annihilation.

Troublingly, though these two stories were deeply intertwined, no one in her family seems to have reflected on the crime behind their good fortune. Among the few remaining signs of this intimate proximity is a faded photograph of Clarren’s uncle, dressed in a suit and carrying a pistol, shaking hands with Joseph White Bull, in a “feathered war bonnet” and holding a ceremonial pipe. Initially, Clarren hopes to explain this staged meeting through archival research, but the image proves ultimately illegible; instead, she meets White Bull’s grandson Doug, interweaving his family’s story with her own. The book thus turns forward, toward reparations and repair, rather than backward, to an elusive past. (In doing so, it also undoes some of the privatizing, individuating structure of family-history itself as a genre.) The Cost of Free Land can be painful reading, given the astoundingly horrific treatment of the Lakota. Nonetheless, in one, probably unintended sense, I found it a relief. Given how intensely American Jews are grappling with, or decrying the grappling with, settler colonialism far away in Palestine, Clarren’s sustained attention to the moral problematics of American Jewry in the place we actually, well, settled refreshingly re-orients us politically to our land of habitation. This, I would suggest, is a worthwhile and salutary exercise in doikayt.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When the late avant-garde playwright and director Lee Breuer hit on the idea of transposing a Sophocles play into the form of a Black Pentecostal church service some 40 years ago, he said he was testing his theory of Greek tragedy. The ancient genre had developed out of ritual practice, he reasoned, and, as the classical plays alternate between spoken text and choral interludes, they structurally resemble a gospel worship service. What’s more, Breuer told an interviewer in 1984, “I really feel that if you go one step further with cathartic theatre you might find pity and terror turning into joy and ecstasy.”

His Gospel at Colonus, with a rich and rousing score by Bob Telson, took that step, turning Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus into an exultant tale of redemption. A thrilling new production, directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is now running through July 26th at Manhattan’s Little Island, in its gem of an outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Hudson River. If catharsis means the purging of terrors that leaves one feeling spiritually restored, Breuer’s theory was right: This show provides the respair these trying times require.

In Oedipus at Colonus, one of Sophocles’s three Theban plays, the action picks up after the patricidal, incestuous tragic hero gouges out his eyes in Oedipus Rex, and before his sons battle to the death leaving their sister to bury her disfavored brother in Antigone. Breuer’s version follows the original play’s basic action: Led by his daughter Antigone, blind Oedipus, who has been exiled from his former kingdom of Thebes, makes his way to Colonus, on the outskirts of Athens, where he seeks and ultimately—after overcoming several obstacles—finds sanctuary.

Though Chowdhury has pared down Breuer’s 1983 staging (at 90 minutes, the current production is half the length of the original, and it has 24 rather than 60 performers), he still delivers a sumptuous experience, arguably, a more sumptuous one. Unlike the more staid, churchy staging in BAM’s proscenium opera house—with a preacher (then played by Morgan Freeman) standing at a podium and dozens of choir members arrayed on risers behind him—Chowdhury has created a more embracing configuration, thanks in part to the more intimate horseshoe seating at Little Island. Here, most of the band is set up center-stage, surrounded by a low, glossy red wall. The actors/singers sit in the first row of the audience, moving into the circle onstage or walking its perimeter as dictated by the action. The Preacher (Stephanie Berry, who also sometimes plays Oedipus) has her own perch, an upstage platform beautifully bedecked with tall grass and flowers. We, the audience, are the congregation. As the sun sets over the river, the red set seems to melt into the horizon and the cornflower blue costumes become dusk itself. It’s magical.

It’s the music, though, that is most enthralling. Telson’s score includes straight-up gospel, R&B, hymns, the blues, even some pop, and the cast—several career professionals plus members of the James Hall Worship and Praise choir—are virtuosos across these genres. Beyond the emotionally-infused, technically-adroit singing, the arrangements convey a powerful sense of interpersonal care and mutual dependency, which is a core theme of the show. Thus, when singers have star solo turns in which they can offer their own flourishes, they are always supported by—and in musical dialogue with—the chorus. Sometimes, a pair alternates lead and backup roles in duets, like when Oedipus’s daughters Antigone and Ismene sing together of their grief over his death (a change from the original, in which only one daughter spoke, while only the other sang). A similar ethos can be felt in the tender interactions between the two (and sometimes three) performers who portray Oedipus—Berry, as well as the young bass-baritone Davóne Tines and the older (and blind) jazz vocalist Frank Senior.

Like the Preacher, Theseus (the King of Athens) is played in this production by a woman, which creates an unexpected sense of rapport between them. That the woman portraying Theseus is the gospel star Kim Burrell adds a meta-theatrical parallel to the play: Having apologized for homophobic remarks she’d notoriously made in a 2017 sermon, she is finding grace as she now works among a cast that includes a number of queer colleagues.

Oedipus at Colonus departs most from Sophocles in taking a decidedly Christian turn, as the hero, a cursed sinner, finds forgiveness in the “love of God” (as one song puts it) and, as he dies giving a blessing to Athens, he becomes a kind of savior. Certainly, the gospel singers on stage are not out there as just contract performers; they are palpably praising the Lord with every glorious note. The spirit is infectious, even if one is not inclined to praise the same, or any, lord. Besides, even in this context, Theseus’s welcome to Oedipus when he arrives in Colonus, felt decidedly Jewish, too (not to mention, terribly timely): “I too was an exile,” Theseus tells him. “Therefore / No wanderer shall come to me / As he has done, and be denied.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): With great skill and economy, the documentarist Justin Schein manages to fit two films into the 86-minute runtime of Death & Taxes. It is, first of all, a film about the significance of inherited wealth in the United States, a country where the top 1% own as much wealth as the bottom 50%. As the writer Alissa Quart notes in the film, many among the rich began life on second or third base. Inheritance tax is thus the only way to even slightly level the playing field. The main voice disputing this is the filmmaker’s father, Harvey Schein; Death & Taxes begins with him fulminating against the idea that what he’s accumulated over the course of a very successful lifetime should be taxed “a second time.” This notion is one of the shibboleths his son Justin sets out to demolish. In doing so, the director also presents us with a sensitive portrait of his father’s ascent from working-class, immigrant Jewish Brooklyn to financial success.

Harvey’s prosperity was the result of a career working for various record labels, most significantly Columbia Records and then Sony Music, where he ran the international division. He was a driven and frugal man, but as everyone who knew him says in the film, he was also an unpleasant man—self-centered, with a ferocious temper. While his industriousness got him to the top, his brashness ultimately cost him his job at Sony, whose Japanese owners were not enamored of his audacious American style. (It also ultimately led to the ruin of his 40-year marriage.) Justin presents an unflinchingly honest depiction of his father, while still taking care to highlight the glimmers of a more decent human being that complicate the picture.

Given that the penny-pinching Harvey hated shelling out for a cab when a subway was available, or paying for the train when a walk was possible—and even spurned his wife by moving to Florida to avoid paying a state sales tax—it’s only natural that he despised the notion that anything he’d saved would go to the government rather than to his designated heirs. Justin considers this antipathy and its opposite by assembling an ideologically diverse crew of experts, ranging from Grover Norquist on the right to Paul Krugman and Robert Reich on the left. What the former view as confiscatory, the latter see as the key way to ensure the common good. While Justin’s sympathies with the left are clear, as with his father, he treats those on the other side with empathy and understanding.

Death & Taxes never loses the thread of the two intersecting stories—the one personal, the other political—integrating them or letting them play out separately as it suits the material. The end result is an eternally timely exploitation of the individual and societal damage wrought by enduring inequality.

At the end of last week’s parshah, Aaron’s grandson Pinchas witnessed an Israelite man having sex with a Moabite woman, contrary to the Torah’s prohibition on Moabites being “admitted into the congregation of God.” Rather than appealing to God or to any established legal structure, Pinchas took his spear and killed the couple. This week’s parshah, named after Pinchas, begins with God rewarding him for his murderous fanaticism by granting him and his descendants “a covenant of peace,” which ensures them the priesthood for all time. Contemporary readers are right to find this honor a horrifying endorsement of vigilante violence, especially as Pinchas is explicitly invoked as an inspiration for extremist ethnonationalism in Israel/Palestine today.

But we are not the first readers to find the valorization of Pinchas disturbing, or to seek alternative interpretations. The 19th-century Polish Hasidic rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, for example, asked why the story of Pinchas comes just before Moses names Joshua as his successor. The Kotzker answers that before this incident, Moses had considered Pinchas his likely replacement, but Pinchas’s violence forced him to reconsider. “A zealot cannot be the leader of Israel,” the Kotzker imagines Moses thinking, before asking God to name someone else instead.

When Moses turns to God with this request, the language he uses is unusual: “Let God, Source of the breath of all flesh, appoint someone over the community.” The medieval commentator Rashi wonders why Moses describes God with this atypical nomenclature and answers that Moses’s use of the phrase “Source of the breath” emphasizes the individual spirit of all living creatures, to gesture toward a desired leadership model that is responsive to the unique needs and concerns of every individual. Citing an ancient interpretative tradition, Rashi glosses Moses’s appeal as: “Lord, the personality of each person is revealed to you, and no two are alike. Appoint over the nation a leader who will tolerate each person according to their individual character.”

This parshah, then, can be seen as presenting two competing models of political and religious leadership. One model, embodied in Pinchas and rejected by Moses, is based on violent enforcement of rigid legal interpretations. The second model, embodied in Moses’s appeal to God, demands religious and communal leadership that can be attuned to the needs of every community member, inspired by the divine capacity to respond to each person.

Following this second model, our parshah provides us with an example of what the divine capacity to meet individual needs looks like in the context of human society’s flawed and oppressive hierarchies. Not long after Pinchas receives his covenant of peace, the Israelites prepare to divide the land of Israel into allotments based on tribal affiliation. But these allotments are based on a patriarchal social structure in which women have no inheritance rights. In response, five sisters—Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah—approach Moses directly, explaining that their father Tzlofchad has died without any sons. They argue that it is unjust for them to be kept from an inheritance and for their father’s land to be lost to his tribe simply because they are women. “Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!” they demand.

Rather than invoking his authority, insisting on the primacy of the Torah’s laws and refusing to brook any dissent, as a Pinchas-style leader may have done, Moses immediately brings their case to God, who agrees that their cause is just and announces that the Torah’s property allotment structure will be changed in order to more equitably include women like Tzlophchad’s daughters. One classical midrash imagines these women deciding to appeal to divine justice, because it will recognize claims human societies do not: “God’s compassion is not like the compassion of humanity,” the sisters explain. “Humanity favors men over women. God is different, and God’s compassion extends to men and women alike.” Even when human social structures are unjust, this commentary suggests, a divine ideal of justice persists that can be invoked and appealed to.

Pinchas the man treats the laws of the Torah as unimpeachable and unilaterally enforces them with violence, while Pinchas the parshah subverts this autocratic vigilantism, upholding a political structure in which the marginalized can dissent to God’s law, appealing directly to a divine morality that transcends the biases and injustices of human society. The man and woman whom Pinchas kills are the passive victims of the law, but Moses understands the need for a different type of leadership, one that enables the dispossessed daughters of Tzlofchad to dissent to Moses and to God—and to have the righteousness of their dissent canonized in Jewish law.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.