Mar

28

2025

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): The Encampments, opening this weekend at the Angelika in NYC, is a new film that tells the story of the past year’s student protest movement—in its own words and on its own terms. At the movie’s center is the US-backed genocide in Gaza, and the activism of Columbia students who sparked a nationwide uprising when they demanded that their university divest from the war economy. Narrated by Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil, the film tells the story of how student protestors escalated their tactics and grew the movement, all as the genocide grinded on and repression from Columbia’s administration grew. Their work led to the launch of the Gaza solidarity encampment and the occupation of Hind’s (Hamilton) Hall in April 2024. The film shows how the protest movement spread across the country, in some places garnering significant attention, such as the encampment at UCLA, where students were attacked by fascist mobs, as the administration and local police stood by.

At the screening I attended, Munir Atalla, who heads production for the Palestinian-led Watermelon Pictures film label, which helped produce the movie, described Mahmoud Khalil as “the beating heart of the film.” Listening to Khalil’s kind voice and watching his steady presence between press conferences and negotiations felt particularly poignant and urgent in this moment, as he continues to languish in ICE detention, waiting to be reunited with his pregnant wife and community.

The other beating heart of the film is, of course, Gaza, and specifically its young people living under Israel’s war of annihilation. We hear from Bisan Owda, the award-winning storyteller and journalist from Gaza, who weeps as she speaks of what the students’ solidarity has meant to her, what it feels like to know that her people are not forgotten or abandoned. Back at the Columbia encampment, we see an evening meeting open with the news that a student had lost more of her relatives in Gaza that day. The students remind each other: This is why we are here. Gaza is not a world away; we are all connected, and all complicit.

As the Trump administration wages its war on universities under the false pretext of fighting antisemitism, watching the film felt like a powerful corrective, and—dare I say—even a balm, to the crazy-making of being gaslit by misinformation and smear campaigns. As Israel’s daily atrocities in Gaza continue, and the repression across the US worsens, the film is also a reminder of the call for justice that, despite everything, is growing and that the powerful are desperate to stifle.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I am forever working through a backlog of novels that came out a decade or two ago, but that I never managed to read. The upside of this practice is that I read books that have stood the test of time; the downside is that sometimes they don’t feel so current. But the most recent novel I finished, Louise Erdrich’s LaRose from 2016, very much does. The book begins with a tragedy on the first page: While hunting deer, Landreaux Iron accidentally shoots and kills his best friend’s five-year-old son, Dusty. This first loss is followed quickly by another. As a kind of justice, the Irons give their own five-year-old child, LaRose, to Dusty’s parents to raise as their own. But the novel is not about either of these events, both of which occur within the first few pages. It is about everything that happens in the aftermath.

The question of how we heal from the irreparable, or how we move forward from the unforgivable, feels paradoxically hyper-relevant and hyper-irrelevant to me right now. As the genocide in Palestine continues, its death toll climbing by the day, it seems like the wrong time to think about repair. And yet I don’t know how to banish the question from my mind—because every unspeakable act brings with it a seemingly unanswerable question: How will the world ever recover from this? How will anyone ever heal from what has been done?

I thought often, while reading LaRose, about something a restorative justice practitioner once told me: “Forgiveness and healing are not expectations of the process,” she said. “The hope is just to move the needle in some way.” In the novel, no one ever heals from Dusty’s death; his loss is just as devastating on the last page as it is on the first. But—and I realize this is a strange thing to say—it’s an uplifting novel. In those first few pages, it’s hard to imagine how the book can even go on. The fact that it does is an achievement worth noting.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some years ago, in a review of the first-ever American exhibition of the paintings of the great early 20th-century Austrian painter Richard Gerstl, I mentioned a few other figures who deserve a far more prominent place in art history and institutions than they actually occupy. One of the underappreciated artists I cited, Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946), is now the subject of a magnificent show at David Zwirner Gallery, up until April 12th. The eponymous exhibition—the first show dedicated to Spilliaert in New York in nearly 50 years—is perfectly curated and organized. Despite the modest scope, it’s an absolute blockbuster.

Like his more famous compatriot James Ensor, Spilliaert was born and spent most of his life in the seaside city of Ostend, Belgium. The place features prominently in many of the works on display. Indeed, Spilliaert specialized in scenes of a resort in its dead season—the empty shore, the empty promenade, empty streets and the empty sea. In one 1909 work, the curves of the Ostend promenade and of the Kursaal (a spa building) rising from the sands produce a kind of unsettling fisheye perspective that accentuates the barrenness of the most touristy part of the city. In another 1909 study of the promenade, dripping India ink summons a shadowy melancholy. And in The Foreshore or the Steamer, Spilliaert uses different materials—watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and chalk—for each natural element, transforming a seemingly simple scene into a rich tapestry of feeling.

Even when Ostend isn’t explicitly present, the chill of the North Sea can be felt in almost everything on display. Take, for instance, Spilliaert’s icy portraits, which bear the obvious influence of Edvard Munch, like his ghostly, blank-eyed 1908 self-portrait, suffused with a sickly green, or the eerie Lady with Lorgnette. But perhaps most striking is the immense 1912 work The Hanged, in which dead bodies dangle from the bare branches of a tree. While an American viewer can’t help but read the image as one of a mass lynching, it is in fact an illustration of a poem by the medieval bandit poet François Villon, likely written while awaiting his execution. Spilliaert beautifully captures Villon’s anguished call: “Brother humans who will live after us / Don’t harden your hearts against us / For the pity you show we poor ones / God will feel for you.”

Spilliaert is, in a way, a cursed artist. When, after decades of neglect, London’s Royal Academy of Art finally held a major show of his work in 2020, the timing made it pass relatively unseen. Lord knows when a show of his work will next make its way here. It shouldn’t be missed.

After several parshiyot of extensive detail about the products and processes needed to assemble the Tabernacle, it is finally erected in our parshah, Pekudei. Upon its completion, the Torah states: “And when Moses saw [vayar] all the labor [melakha], and behold [vehinei] they had done it—as God had commanded, so they had done—Moses blessed [vayevarekh] them.” A rabbinic midrash picks up on the linguistic parallel between this verse and the completion of the world’s creation in Bereishit: “God saw [vayar] all that They had done and behold [vehinei], it was very good . . . God finished the work [melakha] that had been undertaken . . . and God blessed [vayevarekh] the seventh day.” The midrash argues that this shared word choice suggests that the creation of the Tabernacle is equivalent to the creation of the world: God built a world for us, and we built a home for God.

This cosmic framing of divine homecoming is particularly stark coming so soon after Parshat Ki Tissa, in which the Israelites turn to idolatry after losing faith that Moses will return from Mount Sinai. While Moses successfully pleaded with God not to destroy the people in their entirety, it’s not clear in the event’s immediate aftermath that the relationship between God and the Israelites has been restored. The first sign we have that reconciliation has been attained is the moment when God’s presence enters the Tabernacle that the people have built. But what is it about the Tabernacle that symbolizes, or even elicits, forgiveness for such a grave sin?

In a recent dvar Torah on Parshat Ki Tissa, Aron Wander argues that the Israelites created the Golden Calf as a substitute not for God, but for Moses. According to Freud, Wander notes, all social collectives supplant their individual egos with a central figure-image with which all members identify, thus helping each individual connect with fellow members of the group. For the Israelites, recent survivors of slavery who are in the midst of a harrowing trek through the desert, the intuitive central image was the human exemplar they had before them: Moses, savior and redeemer, in touch with the divine but ultimately, perceptibly human. When they fear that Moses may never return from the mountain, the people immediately replace him with the Golden Calf, declaring that it was the molten image “who brought [them] out of the land of Egypt”—the calf a visual and visceral stand-in for their central figure and savior.

After the people’s desperate attempts to center themselves around a figure with whom they can identify, one whose demands are clear because they constitute a certain worship of the self, their penance entails a reversal: to place at their center a Tabernacle filled with the God they cannot see and cannot know, whose demands are vast and often inscrutable. Tellingly, as part of this reversal, even Moses, the great prophet, is excluded from the Tabernacle when God enters: “Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud had settled upon it and the Presence of God filled the Tabernacle,” the Torah tells us. It’s only when God’s presence lifts from the Tabernacle that humans can enter, and even then, God speaks to Moses from the empty space between the two cherubim—the divine will issued from a void that even Moses cannot penetrate.

Instead of building an idol, this time, the Israelites have built a world. When the verse says that Moses “blessed” the Israelites, the midrash fills in the text of the blessing that he gave them: “May it be your will [yehi ratzon] that the Divine Presence rests upon the work of your hands.” While the phrase “yehi ratzon,” a common formula for beginning a blessing, usually means “may it be God’s will,” in this case, such a formula is more ambiguous—both because it’s not followed by “may it be your will, God,” as is more typical, and because this would be simply repeating God’s express purpose in ordering the Tabernacle’s construction. The Ktav Sofer, a 19th-century Hungarian rabbi, makes the radical suggestion that the will being referred to is in fact that of the Israelites. Moses blesses them that they should desire God’s presence to dwell amongst them. The Ktav Sofer notes that after such an intricate project of building, the Israelites could have turned to pride and vanity, transforming this structure into just another idol. Thus, like God blessed the seventh day as an open space through which to sustain and orient the rest of creation, Moses blesses the Israelites that they might be able to worship something beyond their own self-image, that they might center themselves around both presence and void, through the knowledge that we are bound to one another not merely by sameness but also by our inarticulable strangeness.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.