Jul

12

2024

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Sorry/Not Sorry, a new documentary by Cara Mones and Caroline Suh, is an examination of the Louis C.K. Affair. The comedian’s career famously came crashing down in 2017, when The New York Times reported on accusations of sexual misconduct from five women, including two young comedians who said that he had masturbated in their presence after inviting them to his hotel room. The facts of the case are not in question, since C.K. fessed up and issued a public apology. But, this film asks, how sincere was the apology? And what is the correct penalty? Is eternal banishment too much, or just right?

In the aftermath of the revelations about C.K., a film he’d written and directed was shelved and shows were canceled; he claims he lost $35 million. During his time in the desert, he was horribly ill-served by some of his defenders—most notably Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle, both of whom mocked his victims. And nine months later he was back, performing in venues large and small, though now he had to personally shell out the rental fees for the big ones like Madison Square Garden. Sorry/Not Sorry features footage of him joking onstage about his hiatus, and we’re supposed to find him callous—but he’s a comedian, and isn’t that what comedians do? Perhaps the most honest response to C.K.’s comeback in the film is that of a young man about to see him at the Garden: “We all allow ourselves a certain amount of hypocrisy, and this is mine.”

Along with the question of how long a sinner ought to spend in purgatory, there is the quandary of what to do with his prior existence. Sorry/Not Sorry uses old clips to demonstrate that C.K.’s proclivities were a secret to no one—that masturbation was the core of his sexuality is amply demonstrated even by a not especially careful examination of his work on the stage and on his TV shows. So should his oeuvre now be discarded? Most of it has been removed from streaming services: His FX show Louie, for instance, can now only be found on the comedian’s website, where you have to pay to watch it (which I did). Just as I recalled, it’s a brilliant series, in which the difficulty of relationships, of parenting, of confronting our personal devils is addressed with amazing insight and admirable frankness. The self-loathing of men of a certain type—and the clumsiness and worse this leads to—have never been so clearly delineated; his dictum that “men are the worst thing that has happened to women” is borne out in almost every episode, as it has been in his life. (This was a series, after all, with an episode where C.K.’s avatar defends the practice of masturbation against the attacks of a beautiful Christian crusader—and ultimately retires to her hotel room bathroom to masturbate.) There’s no question about it: Knowing what we know now, the show is impossible to watch without a deeply queasy feeling.

Jacob Plitman (former publisher): For all the growing interest in labor organizing, there aren’t enough good books about it. Dr Jane McAlevey, who just passed away, wrote four. All four are characteristically savage, direct, and biting manifestos, ranging in form from memoir (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)), to academic study (No Shortcuts), to political roadmap (A Collective Bargain), to technical manual (Rules to Win By). Part of why, I think, there aren’t enough good books on organizing is that it is grinding, unpredictable, sometimes boring, and often hard to describe. When you’re organizing, everything is possible yet nothing feels under your control. Organizers haunt doorways where workers clock in. You have to try to look casual while speed-walking up to exhausted workers clocking out, and smile to try and make the whole thing slightly less awkward. You’re not a canvasser, but you are waving down strangers. You’re not a salesman, but you do want to discuss the matter of the workers’ health insurance. The goal, basically, is to meet a worker, strike up a conversation, and ten minutes later secure an invitation to their home. When you do manage to get a phone number, type it in and hit call immediately. If it doesn’t ring you know it’s fake. Don’t act weird. You’re the one coming off like a manic bible salesman; the worker is just trying to get home. Approach 15 workers a day in this manner for six days a week for two months and, if you’re lucky, you will start getting somewhere. Then the easy part is over.

Her main lesson is that you must not give up: Workers will empty their hearts to you, take on public roles, display astounding courage, and then won’t answer your phone calls. The boss will start “fighting back,” which literally means illegally harassing, disciplining, interrogating, surveilling, or maybe firing worker leaders. And at the next shift change, the sight of you will strike the bravest leaders mute. If your leaders get fired, you file lawsuits with the labor board. Eight months later, they will eventually win and get wages repaid. At that point, the leader may have been in a homeless shelter for weeks. It’s up to you to figure out how to tell them they won, because their cellphone got cut off a while ago.

In organizing work, bluntness is a virtue, and McAlevey was a hammer in a world of nails. She specialized in commandments:. You must build workers into a fighting organization, and teach them to wield that organization to extract the maximum from the employer. You must refuse convenient strategies that remove agency from the worker leaders, even when there are strong arguments for doing so. You must seek maximum participation from the worker unit even when that will make things complicated. You must struggle towards majority decision-making. You must get close to the workers, and stay close to them. You must win.

McAlevey’s voice—at turns drill sergeant, dreamer, historian, tactician—will endure. So must we. 18/10.

Carrie Shapiro (board of directors): It’s been almost 10 years now since I started taking the classes at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), a unique concept of seminar-style adult education that is taught at a sophisticated level by brilliant young academics on everything from Faulkner to Numbers Theory. The classes in New York City are held in Manhattan and Brooklyn, twenty or so people around a table in cultural spaces, backrooms of bars, or the BISR headquarters in Dumbo. And since Covid, there are plenty of courses taught over Zoom as well.

I normally get enough satisfaction from just reading BISR’s beautiful course catalog, perusing all these ideas without committing to anything. And then one class will connect perfectly to what I’ve been noodling alone in my mind. At present, that’s Suzy Schneider’s online class on risk, which could not be more relevant to my summer conversations on swimming in the ocean, heat waves, and elections. For those of us far from university days, our dinner conversations are fun and noisy, jumping from topic to topic, but generally pretty low on facts and theory. This is made up for by a BISR class, which involves hours of reading original sources and big thinkers followed by three hours of freewheeling and in-depth conversation with much younger people each week for a month. In the spring, I took Suzy’s class on the modern history of Palestine. Even though I’ve been immersed in this topic for years, I’ve never actually read the essential documents from the late Ottoman era through to the British Mandate documents and up to the best academic thinkers of today, such as Rashid Khalidi and Avi Shlaim. The course joins the long list of subjects that I’ve delved into over the past decade: the Frankfurt School, subways, psychoanalysis, monuments, non-profits, President Jackson, Robert Moses, William Morris, Primo Levi, Socrates. It has made the world so much bigger and understandable for me.

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Weekly Parshah Commentary

Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Parshat Chukat

The rabbis of the Talmud are famous for making meaning from the smallest of textual oddities. In the case of this week’s parshah, Chukat, their attentive eyes notice a seemingly jarring transition from one topic to the next: “The Israelites arrived in a body at the wilderness of Zin on the first new moon, and the people stayed at Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there. The community was without water, and they joined against Moses and Aaron.” What is the connection, the rabbis ask, between the death of the prophetess Miriam and the community’s need for water?

They respond by explaining that the Israelites had been drinking from a well that was provided to them on the basis of Miriam’s merit, and when she died, the well dried up. (“Miriam’s well” later became a recurring motif in Jewish feminist ritual, most famously through the practice of placing a cup of water, known as Miriam’s Cup, on the Passover seder table.) At first, the replacement for this well comes through the violent assertion of power. Moses strikes a rock: “Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?” he asks, and water flows once again; God punishes Moses for his outburst, telling him that he is no longer allowed to enter Canaan. But despite this error, the Talmud teaches that after Miriam’s death, the water returned through the merit of Moses and Aaron.

Later in Parshat Chukat, however, we are presented with an entirely different way to understand this well, and thereby communal sustenance. After Aaron dies, we get an odd little scrap of poetry. The Israelites arrive in Beer (a site in the desert that literally means “well”), where God tells Moses, “Assemble the people that I may give them water.” The Israelites then sing a song to the well, which the medieval commentator Rashi claims is the same one they have been drinking from all along: “Spring up, O well—sing to it—the well which the chieftains dug, which the nobles of the people started with maces, with their own staffs.” This is water brought forth in some way by the entire people, and accessed without hierarchy, without strife—a well by and for the people. This image of abundance through collectivity echoes a midrash that teaches that when Moses and Aaron initially gathered the Israelites around the rock to get water, each person was, impossibly, literally adjacent to the rock, able to access the water without pushing or waiting. This is, in the language of the midrash, “one of the places where the small can encompass the great,” where a tiny space comfortably holds huge numbers of people.

Today I cannot read these stories of a thirsty people panicking and crying out for water without thinking of Gaza. We have no miraculous well, no prophetic leader who will summon a solution in an instant. But we do have one other. Audre Lorde, in her iconic essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” teaches that “without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” So despite the temptation to fixate on individual responsibility—to pour energy into questions like how many GoFundMes for starving Gazan families can I stretch my funds to donate to, or can I make it to this protest on this day—we must remember that it is only together, assembled in solidarity, that we can hope to sing forth the nourishment that is needed.

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.