May

15

2026

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel, Offseason, opens with a scene I blanch to relate. The narrator, in her late twenties, wakes from dozing on a train and suspects she has been sexually harassed by her seatmate, a middle-aged man, who is now faking sleep himself. The twist is that she identifies the man, across from whom she is sitting by chance, as the father of her elementary school classmate, whom she has not seen in 15 years and who does not recognize her. How much of this is real? Usually, the discovery that a narrator is unreliable brings a reader a special joy, as if one were Sherlock Holmes cracking a case. But who could take pleasure in admitting to themselves they disbelieve a report of molestation?

This is the first of the novel’s many caustic perversities. Having dropped out of a PhD, the narrator (I don’t think we ever get her name) is teaching at a girls’ boarding school in an unnamed beach town on the Atlantic coastline. At a year-end performance review, the dean notes that she has covered exactly one novel (Bleak House); spent class time “sexualizing” Stalin (whose first name she insists on spelling “Iosif”), as well as discussing pedophilia and suicide; and asked students to rank the traumas of their life on the whiteboard. The title, of course, is a pun, playing on the forlorn, wintry feel of the town during the school year and the narrator’s prolonged depression.

Somehow, all of this is extremely funny, partly because, amid all her self-delusion and derangement, her style is consistently mordant and sparkling. For instance, the supposed friend’s father, Mr. O’Donald, dresses his daughter in a “special green crown,” and while she danced, the boy the narrator loved “stared directly up her skirt, panting.” The narrator confesses, “I did not at that time have the wherewithal to overcome my personal feelings for the sake of political solidarity with the cultural symbols of Irish nationalism, because I was eleven years old.”

Lying under the narrator’s ambiguous sexual traumas are familial dislocations and victimizations. Her mother’s family fled the Soviet Union for Israel, indirectly explaining the narrator’s attachment to Stalin. During a Hanukkah visit home, her family eats latkes in her parents’ “vast bathroom” to avoid damaging their remodeled floors, the father lectures them about his wife’s bravery in returning to Eastern Europe to confront the family’s Holocaust history (he wonderfully calls this “a beautiful and important Jewish decision”), and the narrator shouts about her commitment to the anti-Zionist Bund. Later, the narrator is crestfallen to learn that her condescending magnanimity toward her Argentinian psychiatrist, whom she believes to be descended from Nazis, is misplaced: he is actually Jewish.

Offseason is the freshest Jewish novel I’ve read in some time, though given the field, that feels like inadequate praise. Similarly, one of the blurbs compares Sharp’s novel to Ottessa Moshfegh’s works, presumably because of their shared subjects (anhedonic women and prolonged depressions, all rendered absurdly), but for my money, Offseason is more inventive, politically canny, and warm-hearted than Moshfegh’s cynical, stylized abstractions. It is a gem of a novel, and I hope it will be widely read.

Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): If you’re in New York—and have a couple hundred bucks to spare—you still have a chance to catch Wally Shawn performing his astonishing 1990 play, The Fever. There are two more performances, the last on May 24th at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan.

If you know Shawn as a Jewish Voice for Peace comrade or fellow canvasser for Zohran Mamdani, the radical challenge of this play will not surprise you. (If you know him only as the nerds and ne’er-do-wells he plays in works like The Princess Bride or Young Sheldon, you’ll simply recognize his elfin charm and the reedy, rising timbre of his voice.)

Sitting in a chair, wearing street clothes, Shawn’s character—an unnamed traveler to an unnamed “poor country where my language is not spoken” and where a revolution is underway—delivers a mesmerizing two-hour monologue in which he recounts how he has undergone a crisis of class consciousness. The text winds among past recollections of the speaker’s cushy life at home and earlier trips to poor countries, his delirious hallucinations, and his present circumstances: sitting on the bathroom floor of his hotel room puking his guts out. His nausea is Sartrean—as existential as it is visceral—but his sickening realization isn’t that life itself lacks predetermined purpose, but that one’s place in the social order one is born into is as random as it is unshakeable.

The piece lives entirely in its incredibly vivid language. We are there with the narrator on the cold tile floor watching a water bug slither into a crack; we recoil with the kick “a tall revolutionary guard in an undershirt” delivers to his head in a scene he imagines; we feel the lustrous chill of a cold urban night on which “it seems that at a certain moment every car and face and pane of glass is suddenly covered in a delicious wetness, like the wetness you see on a frozen cherry”—a beauty, he says, “that is the sort of thing that the communists will never understand, just as human decency is the sort of thing that I will never understand.”

What he has come to understand is the inextricable link between the privileged and the poor: “if food is produced for the hungry children, then certain operas will not be performed; if certain performances are in fact given, then the food won’t be produced, and the children will die.” But it’s not this recognition that is the crux of the play; Shawn isn’t rubbing anyone’s face in the extractive and exploitative practices that produce their comfort. Rather, we see how, despite this knowledge, the speaker justifies his wealth and advantages. The play invites us into that seemingly irreconcilable struggle—to feel our own sweats and chills as we examine our culpability and contemplate how to break open a seemingly closed system.

Some 35 years ago, Shawn originally performed The Fever in private homes for well-to-do audiences before expanding its reach by presenting it in theaters. His idea was to speak directly, without artifice, to people of his own comfy class. The airline-like dynamic pricing that has pushed ticket costs to $229 as demand rises for these last performances, may deliver that audience, but the piece addresses anyone who hears echoes of the character’s self-justification in the brazen boasting of our country’s current leadership, for whom the immiseration of others for personal gain is not a problem, but a triumph.

Shawn has been playing The Fever in the same space where his exquisite new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days—an exploration of human decency from a more personal angle, also highly recommended—has been running. It closes after a matinee performance, also on May 24th, and as of this writing, there are still some $65 seats. (More on this play coming to Jewish Currents soon.) To round out this spring’s marvelous Wally Shawn moment, you can catch him in some of his more serious film roles in a series at the Metrograph.  Don’t miss his brilliant performances in two modern masterpieces—Vanya on 42nd Street and A Master Builder.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some book recommendations…

Top of the list is Arnoud Visser’s expansive history of the hatred of intellectuals, On Pedantry. As he writes, “A longue durée perspective has revealed that intellect and irritation have never been far apart.” Visser provides this perspective, taking us through ancient Greece, Rome, the Patristic Period of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Enlightenment Europe, and that most benighted of lands, America. Visser looks at more than the pedantry of grammar sticklers, who are easy targets. He looks at the image and presentation of philosophers and intellectuals throughout the ages, and how they’ve been mocked for their appearance (disheveled, bearded, homely), for having poor manners, for being disruptive, for being all head and no heart, and just for being generally unpleasant. Intellectuals have been attacked by other intellectuals for their pedantry, but that has been a self-contained internecine fight of little wide consequence. More alarming are the attacks from without, which have fed the most reactionary movements, both religious and secular, over the centuries. Visser writes of the ways Socrates has been viewed, but also of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. There is nothing pedantic about On Pedantry. It’s a demonstration that ideas can be exciting, as can intellectual history.

Leslier Fiedler’s classic volume of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, originally published in 1960 and newly reissued by NYRB Classics (of course), is an indictment of the classic American novel’s failure to properly come to grips with adult subjects, i.e., with relationships between men and women. Roaming widely, examining the course of the novel as a form from 18th century England to mid-20th century America, Fiedler conclusively demonstrates that all of American literature derives from works like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, which “presides over the birth of the American imagination.” Since Irving’s creation of the upstate Dutchman, the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been “a man on the run into the forest and out to the sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization’ which is to say, the confrontation of man and woman.” For Fiedler, the ultimate and exemplary love story of classical American fiction is that of Huck and Jim. A stunning book that is still pertinent and that illuminates extra-literary corners of American life and thought.

Daniel Okrent’s biography Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, a new addition to the great Yale Jewish Lives series, presents us with yet another genius whose work is among the most remarkable in the field of American popular music and about whom no reader can come away saying, “It would have been great to know him.” Sondheim was moody, touchy, rancorous, mean-spirited, slovenly, and often malodorous. Those of us who had the good fortune not to know him up close can revel in Okrent’s insightful, critical, yet fair evaluation of Sondheim’s shows and their impact on theater and musical life in general. This is a Jewish life, yet Okrent points out that only three Jewish characters appear in Sondheim-authored shows. But despite having no real contact with Jewish life, Sondheim’s personal language was filled with yiddishisms. Not having known him, never having confronted his unexpected and unjustifiable rages, we can all sit back and enjoy the music and lyrics of the author of Sunday in the Park With George, Pacific Overtures, Company, and Into the Woods, and in particular of the songs “Someone in a Tree,” “A Derby Hat” (both from Pacific Overtures, the former Sondheim’s personal favorite among the songs he wrote), and “Being Alive” as sung by Larry Kert. Okrent gives readers all the essential information they need to appreciate his subject’s accomplishments.

This past Tisha B’av, a fast day that is traditionally spent contemplating the unrelenting catastrophe of human history, I opened up Raul Hilberg’s formidable 1961 tome The Destruction of the European Jews, which attempts to determine “how the Jews of Europe were destroyed.” Not “why”—that question is summarily dealt with in the first chapter—but “how.” How was it logistically possible to coordinate a crime of such scale, a project that earlier generations of Jew-haters could only have imagined? The answer begins with a census. The earliest stages of the Holocaust, in Hilberg’s account, were not the thuggish acts of brownshirt intimidation, nor the mob violence of Kristallnacht, both of which he dismisses as atavistic. Rather, he attributes the foundation of mass murder to the humdrum bureaucracy responsible for classifying and counting every Jew, their family, and their property. “In 1933 the Jews were almost completely emancipated and almost completely integrated into the German community,” Hilberg writes. “The severance of Jew from German was consequently a very complex operation,” one undertaken by “an administrative apparatus” centuries in the making. It was this state machinery, capable of a complete accounting of the population, that transmuted the perennial pogroms of Christendom into a genocidal project.

This week’s parshah, Bamidbar, begins with a census that likewise prepares the ground for the destruction of an entire generation of Jews. The Israelites, of course, were not systematically annihilated—but those emancipated from Egyptian slavery were doomed to live out the rest of their days in the prison of the desert. One midrashic tradition explicitly connects the complete accounting of the people with their grim fate. Interpreting the idiom “raise their head,” used in our parshah to refer to taking a census, the midrash comments: “It is like one who says to the executioner, ‘Take that one’s head.’” What seems to be an assessment of each tribe’s military capability turns out to be a macabre list of the damned.

This reading is just one small piece of a robust Jewish tradition of viewing the seemingly innocuous activity of counting people with trepidation. In Shemot, a census is undertaken via the proxy of a half-shekel tax, so as to avoid contracting a mysterious plague. According to the Tamudic sages Rabbi Yitzhak and Rabbi Elazar, it is forbidden to count the Jewish people when God has not explicitly mandated doing so; after all, the Israelites were promised the innumerability of all the stars of the heavens and the sand of the sea. Even today, many Jews will count those gathered for a minyan, for example, by using the words of a Biblical verse with ten words, rather than counting each person with a number.

But what is the reason for this prohibition? Rashi warns that the evil eye is attracted to counted things. Thus the half-shekel is a kind of lightning rod that draws bad energy away from the people. This is why, Rashi explains, King David’s unsanctioned census provoked a deadly plague that claimed 70,000 lives. Taken toward the end of his reign, despite the protests of Yoav, King David’s general and right-hand man, the census is one of the stains on his kingship. By Rashi’s account, it seems that King David failed to use a proxy counter and thus exposed the people to the evil eye. The Ramban, however, finds it unlikely that King David would make that mistake. He explains that a core part of King David’s failure was that there was no pressing rationale: “There was no war, and he had no purpose for the people, he simply wished to gladden his heart in ruling over a large nation.”

The Ramban’s approach sheds light on another problem with the census—it can be used to abuse power and usurp divine knowledge. Counting a population is a seductive but dangerous act that arrogantly seeks comprehensive understanding of a people, something that is only possible for God. An all-knowing God perceives the population as a whole without losing sight of the individuals that compose it; the military commander is an oft-cited mortal counterpart for this mode of knowledge-as-power. The ideal commander knows both the aggregate capacity of his fighting force and the strengths and weaknesses of each individual who composes it. This ideal was exemplified by the legendary Cyrus, king of Persia, who could reel off by memory the names of all his soldiers. But a commander only knows what is relevant to combat, and even that is imperfectly known. When King David counts his people during peacetime, it is a Babel-esque assault on God’s domain—and an act of hubris.

In the age of the modern state, we count whole populations as a matter of course, with many goals, some perfectly benign. Taxation, providing welfare, determining electoral districts, and many more state functions are all the product of population-level data. But counting and naming also still serve the angel of death, determining who is available to kill, whose life is meaningless. As +972 Magazine first reported two years ago, the apparently indiscriminate killing of the early months of the Gaza genocide was actually a calculated endeavor. Population-level data was collected through mass surveillance, and an AI algorithm ranked everyone in the database on a one to 100 scale of likelihood of being a combatant—the census as kill list. Here, human soldiers wielded the godlike power to kill from the sky, with total disregard for the scale of mortality. In this sense, Nazi innovations in exterminatory knowledge have been updated for the 21st century by none other than the state their victims established. Like the Israelites in the desert, this is not a generation that will see the promised land.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.