Mar

27

2026

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): Don’t read Lily Meyer’s The End of Romance if you don’t like reading about someone who could be you, or one of your friends. Don’t read it if a book about a millennial feminist who crafts elaborate theories to cope with her most intimate problems will feel too uncanny valley—as one friend remarked when I pitched it to one of my best lady groupchats—to be engrossed by it. However, to my fiction girlies looking for a smart, fun romance, and who can handle the relatability, please do read it and text me about it.

The book follows the journey of Sylvie Broder, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who runs away from an abusive husband and reinvents herself as a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, where she spends her days trying to conceptualize how to “end romance”—to completely divorce sex and love in order to liberate straight women from the patriarchy. I found myself deeply invested in this maddening protagonist whose attempts to theorize her way out of heartbreak inevitably lead her into a devastatingly messy love triangle entirely of her own making—with two very familiar-sounding men offering radically different types of love and visions of a life together. Oh, and she still can’t bear to officially ask her loser high school sweetheart for a divorce—which frankly makes no sense for a woman who is so fiercely independent and so committed to her own pleasure and self-actualization (and also has no trouble picking up any man at a bar on any night of the week).

Sylvie over-intellectualizes her problems, and then creates new ones, to avoid doing what she obviously wants and needs to do. I desperately wanted to yell at her, “You must cross the street by yourself Sylvie!”—inspired by Vivian Gornick’s therapist’s advice in Lux (which Sylvie would obviously love). But I also really felt for her. The hardest part of life is often not knowing what you need to do, but actually doing it. That first step into an uncertain future can be excruciating. Meyer crafts Sylvie’s inner monologue (often via conversations with an imaginary turtle friend) so well that it was easy to empathize. Fortunately, along with the turtle, she has a delightful best friend, Nadia, and an equally delightful older mentor, Elaine, who are not only her best supports on her journey, but profound models of love and friendship.

Upon finishing The End of Romance, I learned that it was in part inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story, so readers, if you want to book club that too, I’m here for it.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I find baseball dull, but I like amiably contrarian, gracefully written essays about cultural history, and so I enjoyed David Henkin’s Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball. Much baseball writing is mired in religious mystique about the game’s unique, intrinsic qualities, and is consequently as appealing to an unbeliever as a subway evangelist’s sermon. Henkin, a fan but also an academic historian, is gently skeptical of these pieties, whether it’s the supposedly high, morally improving rate of failure (as he points out, it depends how you count), or the weird fetish for the field’s geometry, which converts the sport into an odd, latter-day Pythagorean cult.

Instead, the book focuses on the culture around baseball, and there it turns out there’s plenty to say. In an essay worthy of Raymond Williams, Henkin shows how a sport constantly celebrated for its pastoral qualities is actually a product of cities: 19th century urbanization created the crowds for spectator events, the print public sphere in which to chronicle and interpret ongoing athletic competitions, and, paradoxically, the very longing for green space and fantasies of rural simplicity that now leads us to associate baseball with the country, rather than the city. Other essays in the book take up the sport’s historical dynamics of gender (female fans were necessary to distinguish baseball players’ balanced masculinity from the cruder, blood-sport virility of, say, boxing; yet women who were too into baseball were often belittled or subject to suspicion for insincerity), its connections with empires (intriguingly, not just the United States’), and its odd tradition of ordinary people logging statistical information about the games they watch.

Out of the Ballpark would be a good book for a baseball fan to buy for a loved one who does not understand, say, why they can rattle off players’ batting-averages from the Carter administration, or why they make a yearly pilgrimage to see the St. Louis Cardinals play, as if compelled by some avian migratory pattern of their own. And though Henkin avoids bombastic claims, I feel he offers a peaceably revisionist account of the American Pastime—that is, of a core component of the national culture. In place of essentialist, chauvinistic mythology, his work quietly suggests, we might discover a genially self-critical, intellectually worldly fandom. A prospect perhaps as remote as the White Sox winning the pennant this year—but, of course, one can hope.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It takes no great courage to make a film attacking the crimes of the Stalin years. Those years tainted the name of socialism and even more, of communism for all eternity. We’ve been inundated over the years with communists depicted in literature and film as hypocrites, cowards, liars, and sycophants. But if it were true that communist governments and parties were composed of people bereft of all morals and decency, would the system have lasted as long as it did, and would millions around the world have looked to it as their hope?

It would be far bolder for an artist to posit that even under during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, there were communists, even prosecutors, who believed honestly and firmly in Stalin and communism—men and women who thought that if crimes were being committed, they were aberrations, and that if the crimes were made known then all would be well. Sergei Loznitsa’s latest film, Two Prosecutors, is precisely that film. Kornyev, a newly minted prosecutor played with firmness and rigor by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, is a believing communist and Stalinist who is presented with a prisoner who has been a victim of false charges and torture. Without hesitating (the film takes place over the course of two days), he decides that it is his duty as a communist to stand up against the false charges, and abuse of power. These acts were committed, he is sure, in an effort to sabotage the Soviet state, by enemies within the state disguised as loyal communists.

Kornyev is a character against the standard type. He brandishes his Communist Party membership booklet with pride, almost as a weapon. Doors should and must open for him because that booklet is proof of his loyalty and, even more, his probity. And so, when he is passed a note, written in blood, by a prisoner of the NKVD saying he’s been tortured, he expects the prison warden to open all the necessary doors so he can interview the prisoner, an Old Bolshevik. He is shocked when the reality is different, but he is undaunted, for with his booklet he is the incarnation of right and he believes that right cannot but triumph in the world’s first socialist state. His meeting with the prisoner shakes him, but not his belief in communism: Rather. it confirms him in his belief that the enemy has insinuated himself into the heart of the system. The system is pure, but has been perverted by corrupt elements in the secret police.

He bravely and foolishly decides to go to Moscow to inform the state prosecutor, Andrei Vishinsky—historically one of the great monsters and hypocrites of the Stalinist years—and is certain that by telling him what is happening all will be well. But Kornyev‘s vision is simply an inversion of the system of the purges. If for the Stalinist leadership anything that is going wrong is the work of Trotskyists in the pay of Nazis and fascists, for Kornyev the extermination of real Bolsheviks is also a conspiracy, but through infiltration of the NKVD. Both sides are conspiratorial, and both are possessed of an unbreakable and unfalsifiable logic. Kornyev is every bit as wrong as Vishinsky. The difference is, the latter has the might of the state behind him. Kornyev’s party booklet won’t be able to save him.

One Shabbat morning, a stranger walked into the synagogue where I worked at the time with a large knife in a sheath on his belt. In response to our immediate alarm, he eagerly explained that he had brought it to services to help with our animal sacrifices. Of course, normative Judaism has not practiced sacrifice for nearly 2,000 years, since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. But perhaps the man should be forgiven for assuming that Jews still ritually slaughter birds and livestock in synagogues, considering how central such practices are to Judaism’s sacred texts and traditional liturgies.

This week’s parshah, Tzav, contains detailed instructions for the sacrifices Aaron and his sons are to offer in the Tabernacle. Some of these directions are given for the first time, while others are reiterated from last week’s parshah—a repetition that seems to emphasize their abiding importance, beyond the circumstances of their first utterance. The medieval scholar Rashi underscores this in his interpretation of the parshah’s second verse, in which God says to Moses, “Command Aaron and his sons thus: This is the law of the ascent offering.” Rashi comments: “The expression ‘Command’ always implies urgency to carry out a command, and implies . . . that it is binding upon all future generations.” By Rashi’s time, however, the commandments described here had not been practiced for over a millennium. What could it have meant to him to emphasize that these laws are incumbent on “all future generations,” and how should we find meaning today in these sacrifices we do not perform, but whose instructions we continue reiterating?

Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, the 18th-century Ukrainian mystic and Torah commentator known as the Meor Eynayim (meaning “the light of the eyes”) after the title of his magnum opus, offers one answer. He suggests that such commandments are metaphors for the practice of studying Torah. He reinterprets a phrase from this parshah’s opening verses—“the law [literally “Torah”] of the ascent offering”—to mean “Torah study that lifts one upwards.” (For this reading he relies on the multiple meanings of the word “Torah,” which can suggest both an individual law or the entire body of Jewish texts and religious wisdom.) He thus argues that the Torah that appropriately replaces sacrifice must be a form of learning that struggles actively with the text, yielding ethical insights that implicate and transform the reader in the process.

For the Meor Eynayim, our study of Torah raises us up when it is not a meek encounter with a text we read rotely, but instead a process of wrestling both with the text and with ourselves.

This claim is based in part on the Zohar’s use of the word “struggle” to describe Torah study. This Aramaic word for “struggle” that denotes sacred learning, the Meor Eynayim notes, is the same word the Targum, the canonical Aramaic translation of the Bible, uses to describe Jacob wrestling with a divine figure. By way of analogy, then, the labor of wrestling with Torah, rather than passively inheriting it, is a means of drawing near to and struggling with God. For the Meor Eynayim, this yields ethical transformations that will “bring our evil urge to submission.” “Through Torah you can rise upward,” he states; “you can lift your own darkness up and turn it into the light of dawn”—the time of Jacob’s struggle with the angel, as well as the time when the ashes of the sacrifice are removed from the altar, as directed in the beginning of our parshah.

The Meor Eynayim provides us with both a description and an example of what he instructs us to do when we study Torah. Rather than jettisoning our parshah’s precise repetitions of the laws of animal sacrifice as obsolete, he reinterprets them with a radical new spiritual meaning: We must challenge the text of the Torah as it challenges us in turn. We must struggle to find meaning in it, and in that meaning to discover the ethical claims Torah makes on our lives. Like the sacrifices so painstakingly described in our parshah, which can only be fulfilled through the integrated activity of both body and mind, this vision of Jewish learning implicates us fully, demanding embodied engagement and expression in the totality of our lives.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.