May

1

2026

David Klion (contributing editor): The recent, zoomer-driven revival of interest in Lena Dunham’s Girls has me feeling a little smug. As an elder millennial two years older than Dunham, I loved Girls when it debuted in 2012, I loved every season through the 2017 finale, and I loved it on full rewatch in the early pandemic. The various objections critics raised at the time (that a show about a particular type of white millennial in Brooklyn was too white; that the four lead actresses were all the children of prominent creatives; that the characters were too unlikable; that Dunham’s public persona was also unlikable) struck me as tedious and superficial at the time, while the show’s sharp humor, emotional sincerity, and unsparing critique of the exact demographic it captured seemed to go over a lot of heads. I’m glad that with a decade’s hindsight, everyone can finally admit that Girls was always good.

It was not, however, very good for Dunham. Sure, it made her a lot of money, but it also turned a precociously talented 26-year-old into an overnight celebrity, and thus subject to a culture that systematically devours young artists, especially women. In the years after the finale, Dunham’s life fell apart—a combination of severe chronic health issues, painkiller addiction, semi-cancellation, the fickle cruelty of 2010s bloggers, the failure of various creative projects, and the end of both her romantic partnership with superstar pop producer Jack Antonoff and her “friendship” (in reality, a business partnership) with Girls co-showrunner Jenni Konner. Gradually, Dunham pulled herself back together, and now she has a bestselling and buzzy memoir, Famesick, that tries to make sense of what happened.

Taking the briefest of respites from research for my own book project, I ploughed through Famesick’s 400 pages in three sittings. I read a lot of memoirs these days, mostly of New York Jewish intellectuals with scores to settle, so trust me when I say that Dunham is a real writer and her book is genuinely good. It’s also harrowing, packed with gruesome body horror and intimate emotional violence. While there is plenty of fodder for celebrity gossip sites, and you’ve probably encountered some of the juicier details whether you wanted to or not, what makes Famesick worthwhile is the sense that Dunham, who turns 40 this month, has actually learned something.

Though Girls was in some ways preternaturally wise, part of why it initially unsettled viewers was that it was never clear how much Dunham identified with her narcissistic and oblivious protagonists. Was she celebrating them or skewering them, and which did she expect the show’s demographically similar target audience to do? The answer likely lay somewhere in between, but suffice it to say that the Dunham of 2026 has emerged from her many trials with an authentically adult perspective, including on her own poor decisions. She does not present herself as a pure victim (she made choices, including the choice to work harder for success and validation than her body could physically withstand) or as glibly triumphant (her many physical and emotional scars endure). Her portraits of the other people in her life—above all Antonoff, Konner, and Dunham’s formidable but frustrating mother, Laurie Simmons—all balance generosity with cold candor. She understands what is lovable and hateable about each of them, and about herself, and she allows us to draw our own judgments. She is, at the end of the day, an artist.

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): My partner, as a final (and admittedly random) elective credit for his psychoanalytic training, is taking a class on the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. So far, I have caught five of the ten required films, dutifully projected onto the walls of our apartment, or on our upstairs neighbor’s TV.

We’ve been moving chronologically across Almodóvar’s more than 40 years of filmmaking, starting with Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (there isn’t a standard translation of the title, but one is Pepi, Luci, Bom, and other women on the heap), a film from 1980 centered on the misadventures of poorly treated, poorly behaved women who are out for revenge and a good time. Pepi and the other early films are raunchy and disorganized, flippantly violent, juvenile and charming. They capture Madrid just a few years post-Franco, following young punks, mostly queer people and women—even the nuns are snorting cocaine and injecting heroin. Gender and sexuality are unstable, AIDS is killing, the clubs are full. Watched in rapid succession, the movies blur together in their absurdity, as recurring actors engage in convoluted plotlines. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, from 1988, is now a cult classic, and was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film. Eleven years later, All About My Mother finally won Almodóvar the prize. Both films are worth watching. But my favorite by far has been Volver.

Released more than two decades into his career, Volver is more polished, more normative—but only by Almodóvar’s standards. The film centers a family: Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz, and her mother, sister, daughter, aunt, and longtime neighbor. The aunt and neighbor still live in the village where Raimunda and her sister were raised, which is plagued by wind. Their mother and father were killed in a wildfire, stoked by those nefarious winds, but their mother has recently been sighted around the village; it’s believed that she returned as a ghost, to nurse her sister in her final weeks. The aunt’s death is one of two that open the film—the second occurs when Raimunda’s teenage daughter stabs her father (Raimunda’s husband) after he comes onto her. Most of the movie occurs in the aftermath of these losses. Raimunda comically and fairly nonchalantly deals with the body of her pedophile, deadbeat husband, while opening an ad hoc restaurant in an empty building next door. After the aunt’s funeral, the mother (who may or may not be a ghost), comes to live with Raimunda’s sister in Madrid, posing as a Russian emigre as she assists in her daughter’s apartment-based hair salon. For those recently awash in Almodóvar’s oeuvre, it’s a pleasure to see Carmen Maura, who starred in the earlier films in her twenties, return as a charming, maybe-dead grandmother.

In keeping with Almodóvar’s style, the men are cartoonishly villainous, or otherwise minor. The women are idiosyncratic in both their sloppiness and their devotion to each other, but are more tempered than the stars of his earlier projects (there’s only one sex worker in this film, and the protagonist is much too comfortable treating her badly). There is still a campy playfulness, and a willingness to bend the limits of the realistic. Unlike the earlier films, Volver makes good on each thread of the intricate plotline, and is tremendously satisfying. I won’t ruin the twists, but one elicited audible gasps from myself, my partner, and our benevolent host of an upstairs neighbor.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Love as a destructive force is at the heart of Arnaud Desplechin’s new film Two Pianos. It doesn’t lead to death in this case, as it does in other films that view love in this way, like Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door, but it wreaks havoc on a marriage and a musical career.

Mathias Vogler, played by the strikingly handsome François Civil, has returned to his native Lyon from Japan, where he has taught piano for several years. He’s come back—in a dreadful state—to participate in a concert with his revered former teacher, Elena Audin (a steely Charlotte Rampling), frail and elderly. Audin tells her former student that her mind is going and that rather than resort to playing from a score rather than from memory, she will be ending her career. She wants Mathias at her side when she makes the announcement. But the revival of a failed love from his past puts paid to this plan.

When Mathias arrives at Elena’s apartment directly from the airport, he faints dead away at the sight of a woman exiting the elevator. We’ve already seen her at home with her happy, enthusiastic husband, who recounts Jewish jokes and Hasidic tales. Claude and her husband are old friends of Mathias, though Claude was far more. It was the end of her affair with Voglet that drove him from France. The time away has done him no good: he loves her every bit as much as he did before leaving.

Claude has had a child in the interim, and Mathias, who has crossed paths with him by chance, realizes that the child is his. When Claude’s adoring husband dies suddenly, his hopes of picking up where they had left off are revived. She’s not averse to this, or is she? Two Pianos is an account of their coming close to repairing their loss, in the same way Matthias is attempting to repair his shattered career. However talented Matthias might be, it’s not the healing power of music and his rare talent that drive him, but the uncontrollable train that is thwarted love.

If Mathias is all desire, Claude is far more complicated. Desire there is, and she teases her ex with its rekindling, advancing and then retreating from her beloved. Seeing the return of a love thought lost then thwarted anew, Mathias’ self-destructiveness adds force to love’s destructive capabilities. Matthias must decide whether to stay and fight for Claude or to accept that the game isn’t worth the candle. Paradoxically, his decision will destroy him on one front and save him on another. I’ve not yet decided whether the end of the film is a happy one, or even if it’s the end of the story, and that is its genius.

In this week’s parshah, after delivering a set of prohibitions on offering physically blemished animals as sacrifices, God informs Moses of certain restrictions on the sacrifice of perfectly healthy animals: A newborn must be allowed to stay with its mother for at least seven days before being brought as an offering, and no animal may be slaughtered on the same day as its offspring. While some commentators explain the first rule in ritual terms (as a concern that an animal in its first week of life may prove unviable), most agree that the latter rule is primarily sentimental—that it feels inherently cruel to slaughter a creature alongside its young. Several commentators compare this to the rules prohibiting boiling a calf in its mother’s milk, and the requirement to send away a mother bird before taking her eggs or fledglings. The commentarial consensus—and among halachic authorities—is that despite being situated in the context of ritual sacrifice, the prohibition on slaughtering the mother and her young together is applicable even to non-ritual slaughter, just as in the cases of not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk and sending away the mother bird.

Many commentators take pains to emphasize that this rule is more for the sake of the humans involved than for the benefit of the animals. Shadal, a 19th-century Italian commentator, writes: “This isn’t really to have compassion upon the animals, but rather to strengthen the attribute of compassion in a person’s heart, and to distance them from cruelty.” Ramban, a 13th-century Catalonian scholar, makes this point most emphatically, arguing that if it were really about compassion for the animals, “God would have forbidden slaughter altogether!” Indeed, none of these prohibitions alter the animals’ ultimate fate: One is permitted to slaughter the mother one day and her offspring the next, or to cook the kid in one pot and use its mother’s milk to prepare a milchig dish in a separate pot. These commentators therefore insist that the goal of such commandments is to prevent inculcating a sort of casual cruelty, a trait unbecoming of the pious individual. Empathy here becomes not something that the animal truly deserves, but something I cultivate to ensure my own moral perfection.

This focus on one’s own goodness, to the exclusion of grappling with actual suffering inflicted, is echoed in a tendency in centerist, liberal Zionist discourse that insists that losing the ability to mourn Palestinian life is to lose one’s humanity. Within this rhetoric, the “loss” of life is seen as a fait accompli, a necessary tragedy. It is a discourse that views with aversion those who gleefully revel or indifferently shrug at the mass slaughter of Palestinians, but insists that the only moral option is to continue waging “just wars” while grieving the death and destruction that follow. For the members of this camp, if one solemnly mourns the tragically necessary losses entailed in defending an ethnostate, one can remain a compassionate individual.

In the Ramban’s diatribe on the nature of these mitzvot, he references a related sentiment from the meandering final mishnah of Tractate Kiddushin, where the Rabbis make the startling declaration that “the fittest of butchers is a partner of Amalek.” Why? Because to devote one’s entire life to the work of slaughter requires, in their minds, some measure of cruelty, of becoming callous to suffering. And this is true even for those butchers performing slaughter in the way the Torah mandates! The Rabbis acknowledge that slaughter that avoids the exceptional cruelty of killing a mother and her offspring together still necessitates some brutality. Yet the Rabbis aren’t arguing that butchers should not exist, that the community should abstain from meat. In the context of the mishnah, they’re arguing that rabbis and their families should not pursue such unclean, corrupting work. Rather, they should preserve their moral perfection while offloading the “necessary” brutality to others.

Notably, there are minority voices that disagree with this presentation of the mitzvot listed above. The Rambam, in his Guide for the Perplexed, writes that these prohibitions are in fact meant to prevent undue emotional suffering for the animals. And elsewhere in the Rabbinic corpus, we see the concept of “tzaar baalei chayim,” a prohibition on causing animals suffering, which—while occasionally limited in its application—does focus on the animals’ experiences and materially improving their circumstances.

In the context of our parshah, and in line with the dominant understanding of these prohibitions, I don’t disagree that mitzvot are meant to instill in us certain attributes, to shape our orientations to the world. But an approach that emphasizes cultivating our own moral excellence in complete detachment from material impact on others is one that turns compassion into a navel-gazing, self-congratulatory exercise that does not produce a more compassionate world. When people insist that “we will lose our humanity” if we cannot mourn Palestinian death, but concede that some measure of death is necessary to preserve the stability of their ethnostate, that mourning has not produced a more humane world, but rather a more humane self-image. If we are truly to reject cruelty, we must reject it for the violence it does to others, not only ourselves. One cannot merely refuse to revel in this world’s “necessary” suffering, allowing others to carry out this brutal work while maintaining our own sensitivities. Rather we must insist on building a world where the notion that our comfort and security can be built upon the “necessary” suffering of others is incoherent.

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