Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Bea Lumpkin, a Jewish Communist, died last weekend at the age of 107. Her life was as remarkable for its commitment as for its duration. Like a leftist version of Woody Allen’s Zelig or Forrest Gump, she was curiously present for nearly every major political movement of her century: protesting the luxury liner S.S. Bremen when it docked in New York under a Nazi flag; organizing a militant union for laundry workers in the ‘30s; campaigning for Henry Wallace in 1948; enduring harassment and eviction during the McCarthyist blacklist; integrating movie theaters in Chicago and organizing neighbors in Gary, Indiana; visiting Cuba after the 1959 revolution; teaching at Malcolm X College (renamed in ‘68 from Theodor Herzl Junior College, a remarkable factoid about midwestern decolonization) as Black Power arose and was violently suppressed on Chicago’s South and West Side (she knew Fred Hampton, and among her works are several books on the African roots of mathematics); alongside her husband, organizing workers at Wisconsin Steel to hold their employer accountable for pensions after their plant was shuttered; and more. Of course, Lumpkin’s radical politics meant that, unlike Zelig or Gump, those icons of passive anonymity, Lumpkin was actively striving, fighting oppression, raising consciousness. I can think of few more inspiring memoirs than her Joy in the Struggle.
Though Lumpkin lived her final years a few blocks from me, I knew her only from her books, and from short videos a friend passed along. Nonetheless, even in small, mediated encounters, one got a strong sense of her character. For instance, upon being told that Chuck Schumer had capitulated to Donald Trump on this or that, she responded that the reward given to Jewish kapos who cooperated with the Nazis to liquidate their fellow Jews was simply that they were killed last. In some sense, there is not much difference between that centenarian and the teenager at CUNY who debated her physics professor’s account of the vacuum by asking, “Could you have a hole in the doughnut without the donut around the hole?” (The professor, remarkably, understood the dialectical-materialist import of her question and shouted her down; the 1930s were a magical decade of Modernist upheaval.)
Lumpkin was spunky and sharp. Smarter than most college professors, she wrote simply and pungently, for ordinary people; she was an organic, working-class intellectual. Like many Communists of her generation, she was both a disciplined Party member and pragmatically catholic in working with anyone who might advance the cause of liberation. A senior labor organizer told me that when Bea decided she passed muster, Bea gently touched her arm and said, “Have you read Marx yet?,” showing up to their next meeting with photocopies of the assigned reading. She was a committed optimist; she believed that socialism could and would be won, that racism could and would be defeated. In the book, she shares an observation by her husband, Frank Lumpkin, that his experience of the Great Migration from Florida to the North showed how white workers could change their attitudes to Black people very quickly in response to circumstance: “Education can be overnight.” She also describes, while the family toured Europe in 1963, arriving late to a dark campsite in Nuremberg; they woke to discover themselves standing inside “the stadium of the Nazi Party.” For her, the moral was clear: just as the night of fascism had passed, so “capitalism, too, would not last forever.”
On many Jewish gravestones, one finds the expression t’hei nafshah tzrurah b’tzror hachaim—may her soul be bound in the bundle of life. Lumpkin found little use for the Jewish religion, and in her case, the wish seems almost comically superfluous: there is no doubt that she was connected, that her link in the chain remained strong and unbroken. As the last of that generation passes, the prayer, which is to say the question, is really about us: With what will we be bound up, and how will we live committed lives?
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In the summer of 1971, Judith Malina, the co-founder and co-director of the Living Theatre, sat in a dark Brazilian jail cell reading Tess of the d’Ubervilles by resting the book on the windowsill so it could catch some light from the courtyard. Malina describes this incident in the last of four volumes of her diaries, just published by Northwestern University Press, edited and with contextualizing introductions by the theater scholar Kate Bredeson. The series offers a compelling and intimate portrait not just of a visionary artist, but of an artistic community and a fervent era. (Full disclosure: Though we met long after the period covered in the diaries, 1947 to 1971, I knew and loved Malina, who died in 2015 at 88.)
Like numerous layered scenes in the diaries, the one in the cell conveys much about Malina in a condensed, dramatic way. Along with other members of the Living, she is imprisoned by Brazil’s military dictatorship—ostensibly on trumped-up marijuana charges, but really for conducting lefty performance workshops in favelas. She reaches for Hardy because she must keep her mind occupied and it’s one of only a couple of books on hand. (She can “hardly bear to read,” one of the other two, Actors on Acting, and Martin Buber’s I and Thou “fills me with a religious emotion that’s almost unbearable in this environment.”) Reading Tess, she writes, “I identified with all of it.” And while she doesn’t spell out in this passage why, we know by this late point in the chronology of the four volumes that she despised hypocrisy, the second-class treatment of women, and the sexual double standard.
Malina doesn’t remark on the novel’s subtitle, either—“A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented”—but that could serve as the diaries’ subtitle, too. Not that Malina was “pure” in any pedantic or moralistically sexist sense, but you don’t have to read far into the diaries’ 1,600 pages to recognize her unwavering commitment, over some 70 years, to pacifist anarchism and to the search for theatrical forms that would hasten the arrival of a revolutionary future.
As for “faithfully presented,” well, one can never know for sure about diaries, but she doesn’t just record moments of artistic triumph and personal delight (a category into which I’d put her sharing a 30-day jail sentence in New York with Dorothy Day for civil disobedience.) With wit, insight, and unremitting self-scrutiny, Malina also bares faults and missteps in her work and turbulent love-life as she and her company—co-led by her husband, Julian Beck—endeavor to live their communal, anti-capitalist, free-love, fully vegetarian, non-violent, anti-nuke, anarchist ideals. Seeing her grapple with all the inherent conflicts and contradictions of that effort is one of the gifts of these volumes. We watch her raise two children while directing, writing, acting, reading, thinking, and touring. In one of many parenting-in-stride accounts, she tells of a border stop in France, where she reads her toddler daughter a story about a tiger while customs officials inspect every piece of paper in their car. She describes the experience of her mother’s early death and burial and shiva with spare, heart-wrenching clarity. Her father, a rabbi, had died years before, and now, an only child, she “felt no comfort” after the shiva; “it was like bursting into an implacable reality. I was alone. Earth was hard, unremitting.”
At the same time, like other great artist diaries, Malina’s brings us behind the scenes to reveal the creative impulses and impasses at the heart of The Living’s process. The second volume (1958-1968)—comprising previously unpublished material (like the fourth volume)—chronicles one of the most fruitful and influential periods in the Living’s long history, during which the company worked on plays by poets and European modernists and started experimenting with entirely new forms.
In Jack Gelber’s hyperrealist The Connection (1961),a group of jazz musicians comes together to jam and await their heroin fix. During one rehearsal, a cast member showed up late and high on the stuff. “Within five minutes everyone could see it,” Malina writes. “Even those who had never seen it before saw it. It was almost too painful. He faltered. He rose and fell. He perspired. His eyes quivered, dilated, closed. How does he feel while this is happening? I shall never know.” A few days later, she is focused on technicalities: “I do not like the tempo of the second act. I want to portray the horror, but I have only a terrible nervous activity.” For Kenneth Brown’s The Brig (1963), Malina tightly choreographed a troupe of Marines brutalized by fellow servicemen to create a parable of brute authority. (The Living Theatre has kept experimenting with new forms for more than half a century beyond the end of these diaries, and remains active today.)
In 1964, evading tax harassment, members of the Living exiled themselves to Europe and toured all over. In residence at Avignon in 1968, they worked on three pieces, including their most iconic—and explosive—(though not best) production, Paradise Now. An image from the show has, unfairly, come to serve as a shorthand for artistic excesses of the ‘60s: naked bodies groping each other and writhing around the floor. The company made an easy leap into the May 1968 student rebellion. They returned to the US and found it changed. “When we left America,” Malina writes, “everyone thought it a kind of humorous exaggeration when we said in answer to questions about our theatre’s aims: ‘To bring about the revolution.’ Now this word is on everyone’s tongue. The luncheonettes are full of people talking about the revolution.” But they soon found that the left had become more militant, even violent, in their absence, and felt ever more out of place. “And if the purpose of the revolution isn’t to feed all the people and stop all the violence it isn’t revolution,” she muses. “It’s just a reaction formation, a psychological spiritual assault on oppression, which is not enough, and belittles the effort and the glory of many.”
Malina never stopped ardently believing that a “nonviolent beautiful anarchist revolution” was possible and that theater could help make it happen; reading her diaries can just about make you believe it too.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A quarter of a century since its initial release in 2000, the great Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros is still capable of shocking even repeat viewers with its sheer genius. The recently restored version is now showing in theaters around the country and will soon stream on Mubi. The film opens in the middle of a chase, with all the requisite thrills and chills, as a car driven madly by Gael Garcia Bernal weaves through congested city streets, a pickup truck in hot pursuit, the passenger in the latter firing wildly at Garcia’s vehicle. In the back seat, Garcia’s passenger is trying to staunch the blood flowing freely from a suffering canine. Suddenly, the car seems to explode in a brutal collision at an intersection. We’re only minutes into the film, and we’re already exhausted.
We’ve been treated to a skillful action film opening, but here Iñarritu leaves that vile and pointless genre behind. The high-impact collision is both trigger and metaphor for what the rest of the film provides: a tale of social, romantic, familial, class, and cultural collisions in Mexico. The car crash is the organizing principle of Amores Perros, as we are shown the lives of people affected by it, those in it, and those nearby. Iñárritu and his screenwriter Guillermo Arriagia don’t make the accident the endpoint of the story. Rather, it is part of a continuum, interrupting lives in midstream and sending out shockwaves that ripple far beyond it.
The film is told in three chapters, each focusing on a pair of characters. Octavio and Susana are star-crossed lovers at the lower end of the social scale. Octavio is a young man with no aim in life until he discovers his family’s pet dog is murderous in high-stakes dog fights. The driver of one of the other cars in the accident is the beautiful supermodel Susana, whose married lover has left his family for her, and who is obsessed with her own pet dog. Witnessing the accident—and profiting by it, as he steals the money Octavio has with him at the time—is Martín, a rundown wreck of a man who lives with his beloved dogs. He, we will learn, is a former professor who left his profession and family to engage in armed struggle against the Mexican state.
There are, then, two obvious connecting threads in Amores Perros, the accident and dogs. But there are so many others teased out over the length of the film: love and its disasters; family strife; the quest for gain in honest and dishonest, clean and dirty forms.
All their paths cross at the intersection, all their lives will take a turn because of the accident, and yet the characters will never be aware of each other. They are all residents of the same city, but of different worlds within it. Amores Perros is a fairly long film, clocking in at two and a half hours. Though it makes no references to the great Mexican muralists, it is in essence an homage to them—an enormous, brilliant, imposing fresco of Mexican life and society.
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Korach from Samuel Catlin
When God calls out to Moses from the burning bush and tells him of the role he must play in liberating his people, Moses protests his divine vocation: “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?” he asks. After God reassures him, Moses continues to question the choice, ultimately begging, “Please, my Lord, make someone else Your agent.”
Unlike Moses as he faces his future, we readers understand that the obscure, if not outright arbitrary, logic of election is a theological leitmotif. In 1942, the great German Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach pointed out that, in contrast to the Homeric epics, which focus on the ruling class, the personages of Biblical narratives often have humble origins and undergo tremendous upheavals in their fortunes as a result of God’s attention. For them, the often unexplained allocations of divine favor to individuals and groups—from the vocations of Abraham and Moses, to the priestly elevation of the Levites, to the election of Israel from among the nations—entail social and political consequences for everybody.
This week’s parshah begins with Korach, a Levite, challenging the authority of Moses (and Aaron): “You go too far,” Korachtells the brothers. Backed by 250 influential Israelites, Korach appears to be staging a coup. In this moment, Moses’s own words at the burning bush come back to haunt him in the voice of another: Who, after all, is Moses, that he should lead Israel? There is, however, a critical difference between Moses’s protest and Korach’s. When Moses asks this question, he presumes that there must be somebody else more fit for the role God imposes on him; when Korach re-poses the same question, it is not in order to position himself as a superior chieftain so much as to question the Israelite hierarchy itself. “For all the congregation is holy,”Korach argues, repeating for emphasis, “all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?”
The medieval midrash Bamidbar Rabbah interprets Korach’s assertion as a reference to the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The Rabbis imaginatively elaborate on Korach’s argument: “If you [Moses] alone had heard it [the Torah] while they [the Israelites] had not, you could have claimed superiority,” but the Torah has been given to “all the congregation, all of them.” Moses’s personal uncertainty thus returns to him as radically egalitarian political critique.
This story is probably best known as the moment in the Torah when God abandons a heretofore abiding norm of inflicting collective punishment. Although God initially moves to smite the people as a whole as punishment for Korach’s offense—his defiance of a divinely ordained hierarchy—Moses and Aaron beg God to reconsider, and ultimately the majority of the Israelites are spared while Korach, his supporters, and their families are “swallowed up” by the earth. Readers may be inclined to celebrate this movement away from notions of collective guilt as a step toward justice—and it is that. Yet it also betrays the brittle authoritarianism of theocracy. (Interestingly, Auerbach notes a certain continuity between that theocracy and the text that represents it: Biblical narrative, he writes, is “tyrannical,” “autocratic,” and “levies a claim to absolute authority.”) Korach’s criticism is a reasonable one, but God has no answer for it except retributive violence.
Korach has therefore proven troubling for traditional commentators, who offer up a surfeit of justifications for his fate in a centuries-long midrashic display of what Freud called “kettle logic”: a series of independently plausible but mutually contradictory explanations. This makes good sense, though, once we understand that the trouble with Korach is a symptom of a trouble with God—a trouble that cannot be repressed quite as efficiently as Korach is swallowed up by the earth.
Consider Moses’s response when he hears Korach’s complaint: He “falls upon his face.” In Bamidbar Rabbah, the Rabbis interpret this reaction as an expression of Moses’s fear concerning the “dissension” of these rebellious Israelites, “for this was already their fourth offense.” To explain this interpretation, the Rabbis relate a parable: “The matter may be illustrated by the case of a king’s son who had offended his father and for whom his [the king’s] friend had effected a reconciliation once, twice, and three times. When he offended a fourth time, the king’s friend lost courage. ‘How many times can I trouble the king?’ he thought.” The Rabbis apply this parable to the parshah by enumerating the Israelites’ previous offenses against God and Moses’s repeated intercessions on their behalf: first, the incident of the Golden Calf; next, the episode in which God reacts to the Israelites’ “bitter complaints” with a raging fire; and third, when the people attempt to return to Egypt and God threatens them with pestilence. “When the dissension of Korach broke out,” the midrash explains, Moses said: “‘How many times can I trouble the Omnipresent One?’ Consequently, ‘When Moses heard this, he fell upon his face.’”
The connection between the parable and the parshah seems fairly obvious. In Rabbinic parables, “the king” almost always represents God, and there is plenty of traditional precedent for representing the relationship between God and Israel as a paternal-filial one. So the son (Israel) offends the king (God) three times, and on each of those three occasions, the king’s friend (Moses) brokers a reconciliation on the son’s behalf. But by the fourth instance, he worries he has tested the king’s patience too much and grows afraid of what might happen if he were to further trouble him.
Like many midrashic parables, however, this one turns out to complicate the text it is invoked to explain. While the parable helps the Rabbis explain why Moses “falls upon his face” when Korach confronts him, it also represents a triangular relationship that cannot be smoothly transposed onto the parshah. Recall Korach’s argument: “For all the congregation is holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?” The critique depends for its force on the fact that Moses and Aaron are members of the “congregation of the Lord” above which they wrongly “raise themselves.” In principle, from Korach’s perspective, Moses is not meaningfully different from himself; they are both, equally, Israelites. If the parable represented this situation more exactly, it would be a parable about a king with two sons, a bad son who misbehaves (Israel) and a favored son who intercedes (Moses). Instead, the Rabbis tell of a friend to the king, someone with whom the son has nothing explicitly in common, neither blood nor station. While this setup exempts the friend from the royal lineage—foreshadowing Moses’s exclusion from the promised land following his own transgression in next week’s parshah, Chukat—it also implicitly affirms the arrogant view Korach attributes to Moses: the belief that Moses is not really one of the congregation, that he indeed stands apart from and even “above” it.
Thus, as the midrash complicates our understanding of the parshah it purports to explain, so the parshah in turn subverts the midrash. The friction between the parable and its scriptural application sends us back to the Rabbis with a more critical perspective. Why can the king not resolve matters with his son directly? How has the son “offended” the king? We are not told. We may wonder, though, whether the son didn’t act out of frustration stoked by the favor shown by his father to a friend from outside the family. Is it possible that the son was not really in the wrong? And why is the friend so afraid of the king? By imbuing this minimally sketched royal court with unexpressed tension and intrigue—it is “fraught with background,” as Auerbach famously characterized Biblical narrative—the sages who aim to interpret the Torah may simultaneously be relating their own uneasiness upon reading a parshah which nevertheless remains, like the king in the parable, authoritative.
Samuel P. Catlin is assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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