Jul

26

2024

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Rehearsal spaces make great dramatic settings. From the bare Broadway stage of A Chorus Line to the dingy community hall of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, auditions and acting exercises can reveal the participants’ unspoken feelings, expose the dynamics of relationships, and encourage self-reflection. Such drama is even more heightened when the setting typically requires its inhabitants to keep their guards up, which is why theater-in-prison stories are practically a genre of their own.

One of the central questions that animates this genre is what value to attribute to art-making in the demeaning conditions of imprisonment. Promo for the 2005 documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars, proclaimed “the power of art to heal and redeem–in a place where the very act of participation in theatre is a human triumph and a means of personal liberation.” Jack Hitt’s classic radio piece, “Act V,” for This American Life, which follows men incarcerated at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center as they rehearse and stage Hamlet takes a more skeptical view, while the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, chronicling a production of Julius Caesar in a maximum-security prison in Rome, seems downright cynical about the possibility of rehabilitation through drama club.

The riveting new movie, Sing Sing, which will be released nationally in August, leans toward a redemption narrative, and with good reason: it is produced by and based on the work of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which provides programs in theater, writing, dance, music, and visual arts at eight prisons in New York State; the recidivism rate for its alumni is 3 percent, compared to a 60 percent national average. But the movie, directed by Greg Kewdar, smartly avoids sentimental hyperbole by including, for instance, a member of the ensemble who can’t access the memory of a happy place during an acting exercise. When one participant says that their workshop helps them “become human again,” it’s clear that he is referring to the dehumanizing carceral system, not the (undisclosed) criminal act that put any of them in high-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the first place.

Unlike most theater-in-prison movies, Sing Sing is a feature film. It’s based on a real RTA project, a hilarious 2005 time-traveling, hodge-podge production, “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code,” that mashes up ancient Egyptians, pirates, Freddy Krueger, and Hamlet. While the film employs several professional actors—blazing Colman Domingo in one of two central roles—most of the cast is made up of RTA alums formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing (and they all have financial equity in the film). One of them, Clarence Maclin, in a knockout debut, plays a version of his younger self, Domingo’s formidable foil. The central plot traces their growing friendship, from rivalry to wary curiosity to appreciation to love, as Domingo’s character’s long-held faith in the promise of the theater work falters in the face of the system’s callousness, and Maclin’s gradually takes hold.

Even in the rehearsal room, where they find some reprieve from the cell searches and clanging gates that punctuate most of their time, these aspiring Hamlets can’t ever count themselves kings of infinite space, as the taunting whistles of MetroNorth trains zooming along nearby tracks remind them. But they do find—they create—a rare place for empathy and imagination, and it invites our own.

Zelda Gamson (member of JC council): As a child growing up in Mandatory Palestine, Linda Dittmar would take trips in her parents’ car, bask in the comfort of a hotel, and spend the summer months with her grandmother in the cool hills of Jerusalem. These vivid memories of her childhood were eventually overridden by the 1948 war, its aftermath, and her move to the United States. It was on a visit back to Israel to search for lost Palestinian villages that these memories came flooding back, and became the heart of her new book, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and The Claims of Belonging (2023).

Tracing Homelands recounts trips Dittmar took with her partner, Deborah Bright, an American landscape photographer who specializes in bleak and unpeopled images. In the ’90s, Bright suggested that they look for lost Palestinian villages in Israel, but it took Dittmar over a decade to agree to the idea. In 2005, when they were driving around the countryside, Bright stopped to take one of her many photographs (some of which appear in the book) and beckoned Dittmar out of the car to see a collection of rocks scattered in a pine forest. Dittmar resisted at first but eventually walked over to Bright, who held up a rock that had been chiseled. Dittmar knew then that they were not just rocks. They had likely belonged to a Palestinian house. But from which village?

After that first encounter, Dittmar and Bright decided to pool their investigative skills to answer that question. With help from Palestinian and Israeli collectors and archivists, Dittmar and Bright assembled everything they could get their hands on—maps, photos, lists, land surveys, exhibitions, letters, government documents—in order to find “Palestine in Israel.” Their annual visits from 2005 to 2008 brought them face to face with the Nakba, and the destruction and subsequent erasure of around 450 Palestinian villages that it entailed. The book painstakingly documents Israel’s process of appropriating and then renaming Palestinian villages in Beisan (Beit Shean), Al-Lydda (Lod), Qaysaria (Caesarea), Saffuriya (Tzippori), Ayn Khud (Ein Hod), Bir’im (Baram). Some places were turned into housing or tourist sites, and others were simply dismantled, their remains buried or scattered in fields and forests.

As they traverse what political scientist Meron Benvenisti calls the “tortured landscape of my homeland,” Dittmar’s “troubled internal landscape” of memories resurfaces: the villagers who used to grow wheat in the field adjacent to her house, the “sweetness” of visits with Palestinian neighbors near her grandmother in Beit HaKerem, her schoolgirl patriotism during the 1948 war, and adolescent disappointment at being treated like a girl in the army. Referring to a veteran soldier, who took part in the massacre at Deir Yassin during the Nakba, she writes that “Amos’s refusal to know the past belongs to all us Israelis…It’s safer to remain silent…to refuse to talk, to be afraid to talk, to not know how to talk, or to forget to talk—even when we inwardly scream.” Dittmar’s beautiful and complex book, at once a love letter to and mournful indictment of the country of her childhood, stands as a brave exception to this culture of silence.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): “The art world was one big melting pot of hypocrisy and contradictions.” This is the conclusion drawn by Bianca Bosker in her entertaining and frightening book Get the Picture, a deep dive into this world. (Because my wife is an artist, I came to Bosker’s book already having some experience of the sheer miserableness of what goes on behind the works hung on the walls.) As she did in her previous book on wine aficionados, Cork Dork, Bosker acts as a kind of George Plimpton, who understood that the best way to understand a world is to inhabit it, learn its language and mores, and experience it in all its dailiness. For his singular sports writing, Plimpton played hockey, baseball, and football with professionals. Bosker, for her part, interns at a gallery setting up exhibitions, sells works for another at an art fair, and stands guard at the Guggenheim. Along the way, she learns that it’s not just the past that’s a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote; gallerists, receptionists, and museum guards can all attest that in the world of art, too, they “do things differently there.”

Bosker begins at the only gallery that responded to her dozens of inquiries. (Even at the small spot in Brooklyn that takes her on, the owner considers her the enemy because she’s a journalist.) The scales quickly fall from her eyes. The shallowness, the pettiness, the sheer rottenness of it all smack her in the face; the importance of looking and sounding just right are stressed above any real knowledge of art. Hatred of the non-art-buying public is a central element. The gallery is on the second floor, and she soon learns that this is because a ground-floor gallery is known to attract foot traffic from those looking to freeload, while serious people—i.e., those who will spend money—climb the stairs. The hostility of this sphere is cultivated: At one gallery, the receptionists are trained to answer the phone with the last syllable of its name on a descending note, just to project negativity. As for the art itself, Bosker sees again and again that while reputations are sometimes based on talent, they more often correlate to contacts—being in the right places with the right people at the right time.

After her stint at the art fair, she ends her voyage at the Guggenheim, where she stands for hours watching and protecting the art. Bosker tells us that the average time visitors spend in front of a painting in a museum is 17 seconds, with most of it spent reading the explanatory panels, so in order to force people to look at the work itself rather than the words describing what is right before them, she takes to standing in front of the placards. (I’ve now begun doing my own observations of viewing practices, and have concluded that the real average is far lower.) Inspired by her experience, Bosker offers some sage advice: Don’t go through a museum looking at everything, and instead stand for minutes or hours before each work. Ignore the panels and immerse yourself in the work. Understand it. Question it. And after reading Get the Picture, be grateful that you love art but don’t live off it.

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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 Pinchas

Last week’s parshah concludes with a vigilante murder. The Israelite men had begun having sexual relationships with local Moabite women in the desert and subsequently started to offer sacrifices to the Moabite deity, Ba’al Peor. God, infuriated, commands Moses to round up the instigators for public execution—but Pinchas, Aaron’s grandson, decides to take matters into his own hands. When he sees an Israelite man, Zimri, bringing a Midianite woman, Cozbi, into his tent, he is overcome with zealousness and stabs them with a spear.

The incident and all that surrounds it is violent, misogynistic, and xenophobic. To make matters worse, the Torah unequivocally celebrates Pinchas’s behavior, idolizing the rage-killing as a sacred act performed on God’s behalf. Our parshah, which is named for Pinchas, opens with God’s praise for his actions:

Pinchas, son of Elazar son of Aaron the Priest, has turned my wrath away from the Israelites through avenging my vengeance, and so, despite my vengefulness, I did not put an end to the Israelite people. Therefore, say that I will grant him my pact of peace, and it will be for him and his descendents, that they will be priests forever, because he was zealous for his God, and made expiation for the Israelites.

Both Pinchas’s behavior and his reward have been the subject of much commentary, very little of which directly condemns or even confronts these actions. But left unchecked, this text is dangerous. It has been used by settlers, fundamentalists, and violent Jewish supremacists—such as the infamous far-right, anti-Arab Israeli leader Meir Kahane—to justify violent zealotry.

Fortunately, there are a few essential voices, particularly among the rabbis of the Talmud and early midrash, who complicate the biblical account. In the Talmudic tractate of Sanhedrin, the rabbis suggest that if Zimri had retaliated and killed Pinchas in self-defense, he would have been justified. Elsewhere, the rabbis claim that the Israelite elders condemned Pinchas’s actions and attempted to excommunicate him; God granted him and his descendants the priesthood in perpetuity to enable him to continue living among the people.

The late 19th-century Lithuanian commentator Rabbi Baruch HaLevi Epstein goes further, citing this passage as evidence that enacting vigilante justice on God’s behalf is never permitted, because there is no way to determine that it truly stems from pure motivations. In his reading, the line between acting passionately for God and acting passionately to prop up our own egos is so imperceptibly thin that we are forbidden from acting violently, even in the case of the most seemingly righteous impulse. While the rabbis of the Talmud suggest that Pinchas should never have acted as he did, Rabbi Epstein emphasizes that we shouldn’t either.

Rabbi Epstein’s interpretive work on Parshat Pinchas thus preemptively anticipates an appeal from the feminist theologian and scholar Judith Plaskow to confront the most challenging texts of our tradition in order to root out their impact. We must continue to heed Plaskow’s call. The legacy of Pinchas’s violence lives on—in war-mongering and Jewish supremacy in Israel/Palestine, in our communities, and likely in each of us, in ways both obvious and inconspicuous. Through confronting the story of Pinchas, we can continue to interrupt and uproot the habits of mind that this story has sustained over millennia.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.