Jul

24

2026

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): If you want to understand the current artificial intelligence crisis in higher education, you could do worse than reading I Didn’t Come Here To Lie, which tells Karen Lewis’s life story. An odd recommendation, perhaps, first because Lewis led the Chicago Teachers Union, which represents workers at primary and secondary schools (not universities)—and, moreover, she died in 2021, back when “large language models” would have sounded like a euphemism for fridge magnets.

Nonetheless, her book captures the deskilling of teachers: how neoliberal “reformers” attempted to subject public education to quantitative surveillance, routinize the humanistic craft of pedagogy, and privatize as much of the Chicago public school system as possible. As one reads this story, all the supposed philosophical puzzles, technological utopianism, and stock market hype fall away, and one can see clearly: first they fought to discipline and proletarianize public school teachers, and now they’re coming for college instructors.

Fortunately, Lewis’s book also tells the story of how teachers fought back: the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, led by Lewis and Jesse Sharkey, managed to take over a moribund, passive union and went on a successful, weeklong strike in 2012. (They started with a small reading group, studying Naomi Klein and the University of Illinois educational policy professor  Pauline Lipman. A few years later, they were leading tens of thousands of workers on strike: how’s that for a feel-good story about books?) And the strike (itself excellently chronicled in Micah Uetricht’s short book Strike for America), which happened at the height of Obama’s presidency and targeted his longtime crony, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, announced a new labor independence and militancy. Indeed, the model the strike piloted, of teachers’ unions bargaining on behalf of their communities, spread to Republican states too in the series of “Red for Ed” strikes.

Lewis’s memoirs were co-written with Elizabeth Todd-Breland, because Lewis was ill with terminal brain cancer. They are lively, funny reading: Lewis represents the single finest product of my current quirky, tenuously integrated middle-class neighborhood, Hyde Park. She emerged from its public school speaking excellent French; she was among the first Black students at Mount Holyoke and then Dartmouth (the latter of which she detested); she completed a mid-career masters degree in documentary filmmaking; and so on.

Perhaps most strikingly, she eventually converted to an idiosyncratic Conservative Judaism, which satisfied her desire for ceremonious pomp and her love of study and reason. Her stubborn skepticism led her matter-of-factly to reject first the Trinity and then Zionism. In one of my favorite anecdotes in the book, she forced Rahm to accept an extended strike so as to avoid the union’s ratification vote falling on Rosh Hashanah. When he told her he could get “fifty fucking rabbis” to permit that, she simply told him she’d be “going to shul,” and he should “take your soul and do whatever you think you need to do with it.”

Among the counterfactuals that haunt Chicago mayoral politics, “What if Lewis had not developed cancer and had been able to run against Rahm?” ranks high, second only to “What if Harold Washington had not had a massive, fatal coronary in 1987?” For me, the first one also feels personal—I’m a member of Lewis’s old synagogue, Rodfei Tzedek, and if she had lived, it’s not impossible to imagine seeing her on Shabbos morning at shul. Her memoir, at least, feels like it provides all the stories I might have heard at kiddush, conveying the warmth, optimism, and strength of a great teacher and labor leader.

Noa Azulai (program coordinator): As is often the case, a post from the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib recently stopped me in my scrolling. In it, he reflects on the painful loss of people he loves, the impulse he had to, as he says, find his own exit—and why he didn’t. “Years ago,” he writes, “I sought out a dear friend and OG and said ‘I think l’d like to survive and really live, but I’m not sure how,’ and one of the first things he told me was ‘The longer you live, the longer you live.’”

Had I not just finished Jaqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, I might’ve scrolled on by. But the post-apocalyptic novel lingered in my mind, and when I read that line from Abdurraqib’s friend it was immediately clear: That’s what the book is about.

The novel follows the narration of a young girl who finds herself, along with 39 other women, trapped in an underground bunker at an unknown time, in an unknown place, for an unknown reason. The 39 others remember their lives before “the disaster”—the day they were captured, itself a hazy, violent memory—but the child, as they call the narrator, does not. Masked, silent, unflinching male guards pace past their cage, day and night—not that the child knows what day and night are. She doesn’t even have a clear concept of outside.

One day, the guards mysteriously disappear, and the women discover a world above their heads: arid, bare, and seemingly completely uninhabited. They wonder if they’ve been taken to another planet. Seasons pass in lighter and heavier rains, nothing like the seasons they once knew. Some of the women pair off into couples. Some learn to sing. They spend their days building wooden homes, cooking meat from the bunker’s endless prepper-style freezers, and wondering when, or if, they will come upon answers to their bizarre lives’ infinite questions.

The situation, put simply, is a nightmare. And it’s not hard to imagine why, given the real life that Harpman led—born in 1929 to a Jewish family in Belgium, she and her family fled the Holocaust for Casablanca, where she spent her youth in exile. After the war, she returned to Belgium to find that much of her paternal family had been killed at Auschwitz. She eventually published I Who Have Never Known Men in French in 1995.

But the nightmare becomes, through Harpman’s curious and singular character, a backdrop to the real story of what it means to live at all. In the face of unfathomable disaster, with every question the child asks and every discovery the child makes, something, maybe even living, becomes marginally more worth it. Harpman seems to say that the very point of living through tragedy is just the fact that you get to. And every day, something else might come of that. The longer she lives, the longer she lives.

“After all,” the child writes, once she is old and dying, “if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.” She discovers, after a life of wandering the lonely, and only, landscape she’s ever known, that her story is worth telling because it happened. Because she is, in fact, a human, just like anyone else whose stories get told. It reminded me of pikuach nefesh, the Jewish principle of every life a universe. Every life lost is a universe, and every life lived is one too.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Two worthy films are opening today from countries rarely represented on American screens.

A Sad and Beautiful World is a sad and beautiful new Lebanese film, directed by Cyril Aris and released by Watermelon Pictures. I had the great pleasure of interviewing the brothers Badie and Hamza Ali, the founders of the distributor, which is best known for its focus on films by and about Palestinians. They told me their goal was not only to present the Palestinian cause, but also to present the Arab world as inhabited by ordinary people trying to live their daily lives, confronting problems both universal and local. This new film meets that goal perfectly.

It begins as a romcom, complete with a meet-cute, when Nino’s car drives into the office of Yasmina’s mother. When the two meet at Nino’s restaurant to discuss the damages, they realize they knew each other as children and were in love when they were seven; fate has given them a second chance.

We seem to be set for a boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-and-girl-get-back-together story, but this is Lebanon. War and corruption are omnipresent. Nino’s restaurant once belonged to his parents, who were killed when their car was shot up while Nino was a child. Yasmina’s father, having fled a miserable marriage to her mother, is now in Germany. Yasmina lives with her mother, an awful woman. Yasmina has made a success of herself as a consultant. But again, this is Lebanon. She can only give the government for which she consults positive advice. She too wants to leave, but she becomes pregnant by Nino, and she can’t imagine having a child in such a hopeless place. Nino, though, is an eternal optimist; Yasmina calls that his “disease.” She wants to leave; he wants to stay. Their relationship will be battered by the conflict.

Director Aris grounds his love story in a dark, confusing reality, and I’m still not sure if Nino’s optimism or Yasmina’s realism ultimately wins out. A Sad and Beautiful World is both romantic and harsh. It is not a romcom.

Venezuela’s woes are present everywhere in Ema Alvarado’s little jewel of a film The Lost Chapters, but we see them in their effects and not their immediacy. There are no demonstrations, no poverty or crime. Alvarado, who also stars in the film—the entire cast seems to be related to her in one way or another—plays Ema, a young woman visiting her former home, her father, and her grandmother on a brief visit to Caracas. Her father owns a bookstore, or rather what used to be a bookstore; it has been closed “due to the situation in the country,” as he tells someone who calls him, and he’s now converting it to the Museum of Venezuelan Books.

The same “situation” that’s caused him to shutter his bookstore is also stocking his future museum. Educated people who are leaving Venezuela are eager to sell their personal libraries to him. He doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for all the books he’s accepting, but like all true readers, he can’t stop himself from accumulating them. He’s limiting himself now only to books by Venezuelan authors. Ema has discovered a mysterious Venezuelan author, Bolivar Cardona. Whereas Ignacio, her father, is promiscuous in his book buying, Ema wants only one book, Elvia, by the mysterious Cardona, who apparently wrote or plagiarized hundreds of books published under countless pseudonyms.

This focus on books gives The Lost Chapters the feel of a quiet, unhurried Bolaño novel. The world might be falling apart, but Alvarado’s camera seldom moves, seldom even pans. Everything is carefully framed, as if the world is fixed in place. But the country is actually all movement and loss. Ema’s family members are scattered around the world, in Chile, in Spain, anywhere but Venezuela. Perhaps worse is the state of Ema’s grandmother, Mamama, whose memory is going; though she remains in Caracas physically, she’s not really there, not always aware of who Ema is or how they’re related.

All that’s stable are the photographs the characters occasionally pick through, images of people gone and forgotten, places forgotten, events forgotten. And then there are the bookstores, stacked to the ceiling with books either not for sale or that no one wants. The Lost Chapters is a bittersweet love song to a lost country, to forgotten authors who wrote forgotten books. But perhaps I have it wrong. Ema’s hunt for the one book by the mysterious Cardona keeps him alive, whatever his real name was—as long as one person searches for, and hopefully one day finds and reads, his work.

This week’s parshah, Vaetchanan, continues Moses’s farewell speech to the Israelites. In the Book of Devarim’s characteristic style—emotive, exhortative, lyrical—the parshah concludes with a description of God’s love for the divinely “treasured people.” Moses explains, “It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that God desired you and chose you; indeed you are the smallest of peoples. But it was because God loved you.” As the medieval Spanish commentator Rabbeinu Bachya writes, citing the verse in Proverbs “a numerous people is the glory of a king,” we might have expected God to choose a mighty and multitudinous nation, one able to extol God’s name more widely. But God’s choice of the Israelites is not about God’s honor. It is simply about love—and a particular idea of love. God does not love the Jewish people because of their valor or strength or wit; they have no attribute that explains God’s love for them and have done nothing to merit it. This view of love is echoed in the work of American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who writes in his book The Reasons of Love that “what we love and what we fail to love is not up to us.” For Frankfurt, “what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it.”  

There’s something very romantic about such a notion of love. It expresses how, as Frankfurt writes, “there are no necessities of logic or of rationality that dictate what we are to love.” Indeed, I could tell you all the many wonderful traits I love about my spouse, but those traits are insufficient to explain my love. If you were to provide me with another person who also had that exact same list of characteristics, they would still not be dear to me in the way my spouse is. This quality of love gives it a kind of numinous aura, helping it transcend the strictures of earthly rationalism. By applying this sense of unaccountable relationality and inexplicable passion to God’s love for the Jewish people, we can better understand the magical, mysterious irrationality of the feeling of being in relationship with the Divine.  

But I’m not sure we can read the verses about God’s fervent love for the Jewish people without considering them in the context of the lines that introduce them: “When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and casts out many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations much larger than you—and the Lord your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction; grant them no covenant and extend them no mercy.” The verses are chilling and disturbing enough in their own right, to say nothing of how they have been interpreted: for instance, the halachically and morally misguided ruling that understands this as a prohibition on renting or selling homes to Arabs. In light of this preface, we ought to wonder: Is the particularism of the Book of Devarim’s love part and parcel of its genocidal injunctions? Love as unexplainable preference may have low stakes when talking about our own intimate circles, but this changes dramatically when it comes to peoples and nations.      

Again and again throughout his book, Frankfurt asserts that it is “a necessary feature of love that it is not under our direct and immediate voluntary control”—in short, that we cannot choose what we love. But there are hints within the text that trouble this claim, and ultimately complicate his account of love. Frankfurt admits that we have some choice in what we care about; I think the crucial element missing in his account is the ways that care can slide into love. If what or who we love is the outgrowth of what or who we know and choose to learn about and put ourselves in proximity to—and thus what we care about—then even if we may not have full choice in what we love, we have more agency than Frankfurt allows for. 

Indeed, in his Laws of Teshuva, the Rambam explains that the greater knowledge we have of something, the more we are able to love it. Commenting on a verse from our parshah—the famous first verse of the V’ahavta prayer, ”you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might”—the Rambam writes, “One can only love God [as an outgrowth] of the knowledge with which one knows God. One’s love is dependent upon one’s knowledge. A small [amount of knowledge means] a lesser love. A greater [amount of knowledge means] a greater love.” This observation entails a responsibility to seek knowledge: to learn about others, to put ourselves in their proximity. Even in the domain of love, there is a politics to what we choose to care about, and thus to what we love. 

Maya Rosen is an associate editor at Jewish Currents.