Jun

13

2025

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Arielle Angel (Editor-in-Chief): In the latest issue of n+1, E. Tammy Kim writes about middle age. In a loose, diaristic collection of vignettes titled “Creature of the Late Afternoon,” she explores the surreality of the “sandwich generation” sans children—an “open-faced sandwich,” for whom the word “family” still describes “the one I was born into: mother, father, and brother.” It is her parents’ deaths that will define her adulthood, she writes, not the milestones of the next generation. This confrontation with mortality is not subtle: The essay begins with a visceral description of the exhumation of her grandparents’ graves in Korea (her uncle is tired of the burden of keeping them up and has opted for a more final cremation), and ends with the author accompanying her parents on a ride around the cemetery in Washington State where they have recently bought plots. The prose is understated and unsentimental, but with an easy intimacy, leaving plenty of room for the reader to tap into the big emotions roiling under the text.

That’s particularly true if you, like me, happen to be a childless woman in your 40s, reeling from multiple familial losses. Over the last year and a half of mourning my father, I have thought often about whether it’s possible to feel satisfied with your last words to a loved one. People say “Tell them now!” and that seems like good advice, but when faced with the opportunity to communicate something holistic to the living, I cannot find anything to say except “I love you,” which is important, but too generic to feel significant. Kim tells us she is working on a book about her mother, and that she often feels strange memorializing her while she is still alive and well. She wants the book to provide an answer to the question of her own childlessness, in form if not in content; for her aging mother, and for herself. The size and desperation of that desire hints at the impossibility of fulfilling it. Words refuse to distill what continues to accrue moment to moment; words cannot resolve death. But as Kim’s essay suggests, they might still capture the texture of a life lived together.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): British journalist Rachel Shabi’s new book, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, takes on the dizzying and unenviable task of trying to chart a way through the hall of mirrors that is antisemitism, anti-antisemitism, and anti-anti-antisemitism politics. It begins by retreading the familiar history of Western antisemitism, from a Christian hatred that became structural in religious and then legal regimes in Europe to a more (but not exclusively) prejudicial manifestation. The main novelty for a popular audience lies in placing this historical narrative in relation to other forms of racism—and indeed, as the blueprint for the European project of racemaking—while maintaining antisemitism’s distinctive character that eludes easy categorization within a binaristic and structural understanding of racism. Unlike other forms of racism, Jews’ attenuated and contingent relationship to whiteness (hence the title, “off-white”) meant they were scapegoated as much as subjugated, and the consequences were not any less deadly. Drawing on a wide range of contexts, Shabi presents a compelling alternative history that captures antisemitism’s function “to confuse us over where actual power lies and to dilute and repel our efforts to confront the social, racial, and economic injustices emanating from those real structures of power.”

Antisemitism may defy a strictly material analysis, given that wealth and status have failed to protect Jews—as Shabi argues, the limited bestowal of privilege by ruling powers is “part of its MO”—yet Shabi’s alternative framework of how antisemitism is used highlights continuities over ruptures in the story of eternal Jewish persecution. In understanding antisemitism as a structure of scapegoating, Shabi does not sufficiently address questions of real power, and how Jewish political agency and subjectivity change over time. When she considers how this might come to bear on fortifying progressive coalitions, it becomes particularly apparent that class hierarchies and institutional positioning shape how communities approach questions of safety.

Shabi foregrounds Britain’s antisemitic history as “the first and the worst,” all the way from the medieval persecution of Jews forced into money-lending to the contemporary British elite’s cynical and overzealous philosemitism. But while there may be “creepy resonances” between the bookends of this history, her telling downplays the significance of changes on questions of agency. Jews were readmitted into Britain in the 17th century, and the development of their own independent institutions and closer integration into the establishment happened well before most other minority groups arrived in the mid-20th century. This historical head start helps explain why mainstream British Jewish institutions have typically sought safety through vertical alliances with the state, rather than through participation in anti-racist coalitions, except in cases where the class position of Jews aligned more closely with other marginalized groups—for example, in the anti-fascist demonstration at Cable Street. (The pattern is not unique, as other upwardly mobile minorities, such as the British Hindu community, have followed a similar political trajectory.)

More significantly, Shabi’s framework struggles to fully account for the most profound rupture in modern Jewish political life: the establishment of Israel and its refractions across the diaspora. She insightfully shows how Zionism once positioned itself as a radical break from diasporic history before eventually rebranding itself as the endpoint of antisemitic persecution. But while she is clear that the Zionist project of political sovereignty has essentially rendered the framework of antisemitism defunct for understanding the position of Israeli Jews vis-a-vis Palestinians, she sidesteps the thornier question of how to understand a diaspora that mostly regards Zionism as identity rather than merely ideology. This revolution in political subjectivity, and more importantly in material and institutional relations, goes unaddressed. How, for example, might her frame of antisemitism apply to a protest outside a synagogue or Hillel that is hosting an IDF fundraiser? From a moral and material perspective, Shabi rightly argues that the left must fix its focus on the actors who exploit these fears, and she adeptly remaps this evolving cast to include far-right parties and Christian Zionists. But if antisemitism is increasingly internalized through the lens of Zionism, reproducing the very zero-sum dynamics that she wants to dismantle, Shabi underestimates how fraught it becomes to build the kind of unified, progressive coalition she envisions. The impasse, then, lies no less in reckoning with Zionism’s political consequences—both for Palestinians and for the Jewish communities increasingly organized in its shadow.

Off-White doesn’t profess to offer solutions, only a diagnosis—perhaps because it spans so many contexts that demand different responses, or perhaps because the devil lies in the praxis. The commendable initiatives that Shabi does briefly highlight in her conclusion—antisemitism training for leftists, Jewish groups working to disentangle religious and cultural practice from the violence of the Israeli state, and alternatives to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, among others—are either premised on or actively engaged in the project of separating Judaism and Jewishness from Zionism. Her book serves as a thoughtful primer that can equip progressives to better understand and combat antisemitism and disrupt the cycle of weaponization, but Shabi also gestures, perhaps more than she intends, toward the necessity of recognizing Jewish agency in shaping the present impasse and hopefully the way out. While she is right to insist that the left must direct its critique toward state and colonial power, these regressive dynamics are not simply imposed from above, but are today sustained within our communities. In the battle for a better world, the Jewish left’s unique role in challenging our institutions or building our own, disentangling Judaism from Zionism, and resisting the weaponization of antisemitism is no less urgent than the left’s need to reclaim this space.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Sex is the first of a trilogy of films by the Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, released here in the US after the third film, Love. This is not the intended order, but it’s the order Americans have, and though the changed sequence alters the impact of elements of the unified whole, it does nothing to change the brilliance of each individual film.

Sex begins with two uniformed chimney-sweeps sitting in their office discussing dreams. One of them, the supervisor, tells the other about his dream of the previous night, in which he met David Bowie, who looked at him as if he were a woman. He’s confused by the dream’s significance, its meaning, its questioning of his masculinity. But after all, it’s nothing more than a dream. His fellow sweep, however, has a more material tale to tell: the previous day, after a job at a client’s house, he was asked by the client—a man of a certain age—if he wanted to have sex. He begged off, he explains, but then, after leaving and upon further reflection, returned and had sex. He’s not, he insists, gay. He was just pleased that someone looked upon him with so overtly sexual a gaze. So innocent does he think this passing event is that he tells his wife about it. It was just sex, not cheating, and he claims she was fine with it.

But she wasn’t, and her entire world, her vision of her husband and of their marriage, has been forever changed. The privacy of their facial expressions during sex has been violated. For the husband, this was just loosely floating, uncontrollable desire that signified nothing. For the wife, it’s a sign that his desire, fully controllable, is no longer directed meaningfully towards her, whatever he might say.

The supervisor is going through his own crisis. He sings in a church choir, and he feels his voice has changed. A singing teacher tells him his tongue is tense, and bizarrely tugs at it to release the tension. He’s asked to sing the song in which his voice failed, and his son, with whom he has a warm and close relationship, later reproaches him for not singing a religious song to demonstrate his problem. He accuses his father of hiding his religious faith from the attractive young singing coach.

The nature of faith, sex, and dreams are the themes of this touching and intelligent film. Is it right to place a name on a direction of sexual desire? How are the faithful to deal with forms of desire their religion considers aberrant? Do our dreams reveal something truly fundamental about us? Haugerud, as he did in Love, allows his characters the opportunity to clearly and fully explore their ideas and feelings. Everyone’s values and beliefs are expressed, with no judgment attached.

Oslo itself is also a theme of the other film in Haugerud’s trilogy, Dreams—the Norwegian capital’s shift from the social democratic ethos represented by its old, stodgy, but welcoming city hall to more stark modern architecture. The film contains countless scenes of cranes at work or at rest, of lots being cleared for future construction. Nothing is fixed, all is in flux—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Dreams expresses the uneasiness of the present and the future, while at the same time accepting that new forms of happiness are possible.

What makes a society collapse? What causes a functional body politic to sink into corruption, oppression, and disarray? Is it only an outside invasion that can bring about such a collapse, or is it always a consequence of some force that was already lurking unnoticed, like poisonous seeds that have just begun to sprout and germinate? These questions animate our parashah, Behaalotecha, which functions as a dividing line between two radically different parts of the Book of Bamidbar. The first 9.5 chapters, up to the middle of our parashah, depict a perfectly ordered populace: each tribe in its place, everyone numbered and accounted for, in lockstep. The remaining 26.5 chapters depict a community in disarray, dysfunction, and dispute: jealous grumbling among leaders, rebellious cravings, belligerent insurrections, the implosion of collective leadership, a pagan orgy. The polity has broken down. So how did things fall apart?

The axis of this shift centers on a description of the apparently copacetic beginning of the journey from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land: “Then they traveled from the mountain of YHWH a trek of three days; the Ark of the Covenant of YHWH traveling in front of them . . . and the cloud of YHWH was upon them by day in their travels from the camp.” Though the people are ostensibly doing just as they were commanded, the Rabbis hear foreboding, discordant notes in this description. The Palestinian Talmud compares the people’s attitude setting out from Sinai to “those youngsters who are let out of school and run out,” fleeing the mountain joyfully, as the medieval commentator Ramban describes it, “lest [God] give us even more commandments.” The Babylonian Talmud grounds this suspicion hermeneutically, reading “from the Mountain of YHWH [me-har YHWH]” as “from after YHWH [me-aharei YHWH].” They had been walking faithfully after YHWH; now they ran, eager to get away.

But even if “me-har” sounds similar to “me-aharei,” why would the rabbis choose to read the verse this way? A haunting note in the nomenclature may provide our answer. This is the only time in the Bible that the site of revelation is referred to as “the Mountain of YHWH,” rather than Sinai, Horeb, or more general terms like “the mountain” or “Mountain of God” [Har HaElohim]. The appearance of God’s personal, revealed name only here, when the people are leaving the mountain, laces a text about fulfilling God’s commandment with a subtext of abandonment. A surface reading of the narrative might obscure this brewing desertion—an apt representation of a community whose ruptures and rancor can also be ignored on a surface reading. Their turn was in process before it showed its face.

What was it about God that the people were fleeing, that might have portended their impending societal collapse? For the Ramban, it was an aversion to responsibility, like schoolchildren racing off before their teacher can give them more homework. For the 19th-century scholar Netziv, it was an aversion to a specific form of divine delight: “Their intention was to turn away from the pleasure (‘oneg) that was there with God. So they sought to take pleasure in pleasures of the flesh.” In a probing chapter on our parashah, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg deems these interpretations “radically different”: According to the Ramban, this is “a flight from the burden of the Law,” while for the Netziv, it is an “exchange of delights,” in which the mystical and spiritual is replaced by the carnal and appetitive. But, we might ask, are obligation and pleasure really so opposed?

The Netziv’s notion of “pleasure . . . with God” recalls the prophecy from the Book of Isaiah read publicly on Yom Kippur. After delivering God’s vow that if we banish oppressive subjugation, we will always receive divine guidance, strength, and abundance, the prophet relates a parallel promise about pleasure: “If you turn back from trampling the Shabbat, from doing as you please [hafatzekha] on My holy day; if you call the Shabbat ‘Pleasure [‘oneg],’ YHWH’s holy day ‘honored’; and you honor it, instead of going about your business, seeking out deals as you please [hafatzekha] and talking shop, then you can take pleasure [tit‘anag] with YHWH.” As this verse points to, ‘oneg Shabbat, a phrase referring to the delights of Shabbat, is not about dinner parties or fancy food, but the cessation of exploitation. It is contrasted with another kind of pleasure, hafetz—doing what you please, the delight of licence, of profit, of cutting a deal, of instrumental benefit. This more profound pleasure of ‘oneg is experienced when chains are unfettered, when those who have share their fortunes with those who have not. It’s the joy of solidarity.

Solidarity and justice, the life of shared responsibility, the life of the law, from which the people fled in aversion, are not austere rejections of pleasure; they are pleasure. Pleasure pleasure, real pleasure. Isaiah’s “‘oneg”, is contrasted with “hafetz”, license, but is not contrasted with pleasures of the flesh. He specifically uses a word that, in his own writing, refers to carnal delights, suggesting that the rapturous delight of responsible living is the pleasure of the flesh, par excellence. This interwovenness of delight and obligation is captured in the rabbinic concept of “the joy of commandedness” (simhah shel mitzvah). It is the joy celebrated in Aja Monet’s poem “Black Joy”:

joy

joy is family

is brotherhood

is sisterhood

is feeling another’s dimple in your face

is together

joy is together

it’s together unified on the frontlines

our joy

our joy will astonish the world

because joy

true joy

has always been

and will always be

Justice

“The Mountain of YHWH” isn’t just unprecedented as a name for Sinai; it is also a term for a completely different mountain, the site of the Temple, in the Promised Land, evoking the purpose of the journey they are to undertake. As Isaiah proclaims, “It shall be, in the end of days . . . that many peoples will go and say, ‘Let’s go and ascend to the Mountain of YHWH’ . . . And many peoples shall go and say: ‘Let’s go, and be instructed in [God]’s ways, and let’s go in God’s paths.’ For instruction [Torah] shall go out from Zion, the word of YHWH from Jerusalem . . . And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they study war anymore.” As the prophet makes clear, their commanded destination isn’t a place to have, but a Promised Land of instruction, of Torah, of the pleasure of responsibility—a Promised Land for all peoples to trade in the profit of war for the delights of growing food. Yes, the people marched on toward the geographic territory, but promptly craved the mythic gluttony of Egypt, cultivated jealousy, feared warrior tyrants in the land more than the God of liberation, and arrogantly tried to conquer the land on the strength of their own might. In walking toward the Land of Israel, they turned their back on the Mountain of YHWH, the site of Torah. Nowhere is the Promised Land further away than the Land itself, if life in the land is averse to the pleasure of responsible living.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.