May

2

2025

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Partway through the short book Hierarchies of Solidarity—a conversation between the German-based researchers Sinthujan Varatharajah and Moshtari Hilal—Varatharajah offers a telling anecdote about a demonstration against the genocide in Darfur they had recently attended in Berlin. While Varatharajah was pleased to see many non-Sudanese people turn out for the march, they were struck by how the protestors had adopted and transformed popular pro-Palestine chants: As a spin on “Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry, Palestine will never die,” the demonstrators shouted “Darfur, Darfur, don’t you cry, Sudan will never die.” The problem, though, was that the chant didn’t quite fit—neither rhythmically nor analytically. As Varatharajah notes, “Darfur’s tears will not be dried by proclaiming Sudan’s longevity”; due to the country’s historical oppression of non-Arab Black populations, Sudan, they explain, “is in many respects the real problem for Darfur.” This encounter encapsulates the key questions raised by the book and in an accompanying conversation between Varatharajah and the Palestinian writer Hebh Jamal: How can we show solidarity across multiple contexts without flattening or abstracting them? Why do certain struggles gain more prominence in the West while others are ignored by activists? How do we create a broad coalition that supports Palestinian liberation while also acknowledging coalition partners’ own culpability in other contexts of oppression? What is solidarity—and what does it mean for it to be mutual but not transactional?

It’s a challenging subject to tackle in part because the bad-faith versions of these inquiries are so prominent. Frequently, the question “Why do you care about Palestine more than Sudan?” is lobbed as an attack to imply that focusing on Israel stems from antisemitism. (Of course, there are plenty of reasons why someone may focus primarily on Palestine, including the amount of money and support that Western governments provide to Israel; the prominence of pro-Israel activism in many countries; and, currently, the fact that the number of bombs dropped on Gaza and number of children killed there far outpace many other recent wars.) So it’s refreshing that Hierarchies of Solidarity offers a forum to explore these challenges in which a commitment to Palestinian freedom is shared and assumed, and in which the goal of the discussion is not to undermine the movement for Palestine but to sharpen it.

Jamal’s conversation with Varatharajah is especially fruitful, allowing both activists to productively work through points of tension. Varatharajah grounds their approach to these questions in their own experience participating in the Eelam Tamil struggle against the state of Sri Lanka, pointing out that it can be challenging to effectively rally left solidarity against Sri Lanka’s majoritarian Sinhalese rule because of how Sri Lanka has framed itself as a champion of Global South causes and is allied with states that otherwise oppose Western imperialism and support Palestine. Jamal, meanwhile, draws attention to the difficulties of actualizing multidirectional solidarity in practice: In her predominantly Turkish community in Mannheim, speaking out on behalf of Kurds can risk alienating the majority of would-be fellow Palestine activists. Jamal and Varatharajah also tackle the evergreen question of whether minority groups’ nationalist aspirations can succeed without ultimately replicating the evils of national state building. “It is like charities—they should only exist to elevate an issue. And the moment that is resolved, it should dissolve. It is the same with nationalism,” Varatharajah muses.

Varatharajah and Jamal discuss both the promise of being able to draw connections between Palestine and other environments as well as the problems with broad phrases like “When Palestine is free, we all are free.” In addition to reducing Palestinians to symbols, such phrases can mimic the colonial logic of creating a “center” against which everything else is reduced to a “periphery.” I’m familiar with the danger of creating a universal template from one specific context from my own reporting on how a definition of genocide that takes its shape from the Holocaust has sometimes prevented the public from recognizing other instances of genocide that don’t share precisely the same hallmarks. At the same time, there are useful ways of drawing connections—patterns from across contexts that help illuminate specific dynamics, material connections between oppressive regimes, and strategies for fighting back. Indeed, understanding that our liberation is bound up with that of others can aid, rather than undermine, solidarity: In the book, Hilal approvingly cites Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, Jewish Currents contributors and authors of Safety through Solidarity, who posit in their book that solidarity with other marginalized groups is a crucial component of Jewish safety.

Hierarchies of Solidarity poses more questions than answers. Much of the book’s focus is the discursive realm, and though Hilal and Varatharajah make a compelling case that the internet is a certain type of public square that counts as “real life,” the material stakes of the conversation aren’t always clear: While Varatharajah speaks approvingly about movements putting out statements for other causes as a practice of solidarity, it’s not clear to me what these statements, in and of themselves, typically accomplish, or how to think about actualizing solidarity beyond Instagram graphics or tweets. But in modeling how to untangle the tensions and possibilities of solidarity through good-faith, productive debate, Hierarchies of Solidarity offers a key contribution to the conversation.

Daniel May (publisher): Over the last 100 days, it has often felt like I’m living through some dystopia imagined by the staff of this magazine on our darkest days: a world where accusations of antisemitism are used to withhold billions of dollars in research funds, where writing an op-ed in a school newspaper supporting BDS is grounds for masked men to throw the author in the back of an unmarked van, where the country’s oldest Jewish “civil rights” group applauds the regime for arresting those who protest against a US-funded war, where the president posts CGI-enhanced videos of himself dancing in an ethnically-cleansed Gaza. We knew how dark the water in our pond had become, but it’s another thing to see it color the whole damn sea.

Among other historical precedents, the current repression can’t help but call to mind prior campaigns of anti-communism. Earlier this week, a colleague shared an Instagram post featuring a picture of a “Free Morris Schappes” button from 1941; Schappes, editor of Jewish Currents from 1946 to 2000 (!!), was imprisoned for 14 months for perjury after refusing to provide names to the Rapp-Coudert Committee, the New York State body charged with identifying communist influence in the state’s education system.

While I didn’t consciously recognize it, it was surely this context that led my eyes, as I was hustling to get out the door for a week of vacation earlier this month, to land on Phillip Roth’s I Married a Communist, a book that has long sat on my shelf unread. My prior neglect was due to some combination of my ambivalent relationship to Roth and being put off by the title, but within pages of starting the book on the plane, I felt like I was back in the company of a voice so familiar to almost be familial: brilliant, cranky, offensive, verbose, and, at times, must-read-that-sentence-three-times-over beautiful.

Alongside American Pastoral and The Human Stain, I Married a Communist is part of Roth’s “American Trilogy,” each of which has the same architecture: Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter-ego and narrator, tells the story of a man from his past—a man with a secret that the novel slowly uncovers. In I Married a Communist, that man is Ira Ringold, miner-turned-radio actor. The story, in form, is a tragedy. We follow Ira’s radicalization during World War II, his recruitment into the Communist Party, his work as a laborer (where he develops a reputation for his impersonation of Abraham Lincoln at CIO rallies), his success as a radio-play actor, and his marriage to the beautiful and famous actress Eve Frame—closeted Jew, overt antisemite, and mother to a brutally manipulative daughter. We also learn of his affairs with his Polish masseuse and his step-daughter’s best friend (this is, after all, a Roth novel), as well as the destruction of his life and livelihood after Eve vengefully writes and publishes the best-seller I Married a Communist, which exposes Ira’s supposed starring role in the Communist plot to take over American media.

Ira is not quite unsympathetic, but he’s also not attractive. Roth paints his politics as rigid, unthinking, repetitive, and boring. What makes him interesting is everything but his politics—his lust, his rage, his appetite, his self-doubt, and his desire for status alongside his resentment of it. Ultimately, he is undone by internal conflict, his inability to be as disciplined and rigid and, Roth suggests, simplistic as his politics.

It is one of the hallmarks of liberal ideology to describe itself as un-ideological, and it is tempting to read I Married a Communist as a literary testament to a familiar postwar Jewish liberalism: comfortable with contradiction, averse to utopianism, hesitantly but still thoroughly American-exceptionalist in its embrace of the US as the least bad political option for creatures made, as Isaiah Berlin liked to put it, of such “crooked timber.”

While accurate, that would be incomplete. As irritating as Ira may be, and as cruelly withering his treatment of Eve (a character based on Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom, who wrote a memoir in part about her relationship with Roth—that Roth in turn wrote her into his novel reveals such next-level pathos that it’s hard to know what to even say about it), the real contempt in the book is for the anti-communist grifters who push Eve into writing the book and who ride its success into Washington. They have all the Manichean immaturity of Ira, but none of his sense of justice. And the real hero is Ira’s brother Murray, who narrates Ira’s story to Zuckerman and who is as thoughtful as his brother is rash, who is loyal to literature and language above any political party, but is also unequivocally of the left—a leader in the teacher’s union who, when called before New Jersey’s version of the Rapp-Coudert Committee, refuses to name names and is fired from his high school teaching position.

Perhaps my reading is overly generous, but I closed the book thinking that part of what it means to claim the tradition of the “Jewish left” is to own a political tendency that is simultaneously unequivocal and equivocal, adamant and perhaps even rigid in its commitments while unwilling to let those commitments rest in any easy relationship to one another and even unsure of whether they do. The task, as one character describes to Zuckerman in the novel, is “not to erase the contraction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being.” To be clear about the world while confused about oneself is perhaps a contradiction, but it’s a contradiction worth aspiring to.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Toward the end of Joan Didon’s harrowing posthumous book Notes to John, her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, remarks, “Nothing about families turns out to be easy, does it?” By the time this understatement is uttered, we’ve been made witness—through the notes Didion wrote to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, detailing her sessions with Dr. MacKinnon—to a wrenching dissection of a mutually destructive parent-child relationship. For all their particular drama and tragedy, in broad strokes, the issues between Didion and her daughter Quintana, who struggled with alcoholism, are like those of almost all parents and children. No self-aware reader of this strange book can emerge from reading it unscathed.

Some have questioned the propriety of publishing these notes, found in a box after Didion’s death in 2021 and not intended for public consumption. Those circumstances shape not only the questionable ethics of the text but also the aesthetics: Anyone hoping for a taste from the beyond of Didion’s brilliantly blank, disabused prose, will be disappointed by these simple, straightforward reports, in which not Didion’s voice but Dr. MacKinnon’s is dominant. But Didion’s irrepressible personality comes through nonetheless, as she divulges details of her childhood and speaks to how her parents made her who she was, and alternately justifies her actions and admits her failings, often taking on blame for Quintana’s woes that she is told is not hers to bear.

Reading this book, I felt myself falling deeper and deeper into depression. The advice given to Didion—and the conclusions she draws as to what to do—include everything and its opposite. There seems to be no way out of her terrible predicament: If she and Dunne step in to help their daughter when crises arrive, Dr. MacKinnon says they’re being overprotective; if they don’t, they fear Quintana will think they’ve abandoned her. At one point, Didion’s psychiatrist, who is in contact with Quintana’s and knows some of what goes on in her sessions, tells his patient that her daughter feels that when facing her parents she’s in the presence of a united front against her; Didion responds in frustration that parents are always advised not to be divided, but to stand as one. It’s no surprise that Dr. MacKinnon offers no solution that would allow her to square this circle—because there is none. Ultimately, Notes to John is a 200-page expansion of the single most important work on family ever written, Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse,” which famously opens, “They’ll fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” Just as sadly relevant, in Didion’s case and nearly everyone’s, are the lines that follow: “They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.”

Notes to John made me recall a moment from my past that could serve as an appendix to this text. Though I raised my son from the time he was three, and had always thought myself a more than good enough parent, when I first saw Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, I recognized myself in too many of the father’s actions; with each passing moment that showed this difficult character doing very me-like things on-screen, I sunk further into my seat. When I got home, I called my son to apologize for any and everything I did that might have done him harm. And he gave me the highest praise a parent can hope for: “You don’t have to apologize. You weren’t like the father; you weren’t an asshole.” I want this encomium engraved on my tombstone.

This week’s double parshah, Tazria-Metzora, describes in great detail a skin condition known as “tzaraat,” often translated as “leprosy.” According to rabbinic tradition, tzaraat is not only a physical malady but also a punishment for lashon harah, literally “evil speech,” a term that refers to slander and gossip. The rabbis treat this phenomenon with a perhaps hyperbolic gravitas. In the most robust Talmudic discussion of the act, they claim that gossipping is equivalent to heresy and of equal weight to Judaism’s three cardinal sins of murder, idolatry, and forbidden sexual relations; that one who gossips should be stoned and that God cannot tolerate keeping them alive; and that gossip kills not only the person who spreads it, but also the subject of the slander and anyone who hears it.

This grand denunciation notwithstanding, rabbinic literature is short on specifics about what negative speech qualifies as lashon harah, offering only a few caveats—for instance, that such speech is permitted when done in the presence of the person it concerns or of three other people (and thus becomes public knowledge), or when it’s about someone quarrelsome. And the subject isn’t treated systematically in authoritative law codes like the Tur and the Shulchan Arukh. It wasn’t until the 19th century that this prohibition was, as scholar Benjamin Brown writes, “transformed from a principle-based domain into a rule-based discipline,” as part of a broader process of applying legalistic precision to ethical teachings that he calls the “halakhization of musar.” He argues that “the peak of [that] process” was Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan’s Chafetz Chaim (1873), an immensely popular book laying out a set of directives about what can and cannot be said and under what circumstances. Despite the Talmud’s aforementioned leniencies on speaking lashon haron—and the fact that the rabbis of the Talmud regularly berate and demean one another—Chafetz Chaim took an incredibly strict approach, prohibiting even speech that is true or positive. The book is still widely studied in yeshivas and seminaries, and continues to carry great cultural weight: The slogan “Lashon harah doesn’t speak to me” is adorned in Hebrew on rubber bracelets and bumper stickers in religious communities across Israel and the United States, the phrase furnishing everything from the names of nonprofits to the titles of pop songs.

In 2017, Rabbi Kagan’s great-great-great-granddaughter Rachel Sandalow-Ash published a piece entitled “In Defense of Lashon Hara: Why Gossip Is a Feminist Imperative,” in which she asks, “Is gossip just a derogatory term for women’s speech? And are prohibitions against gossip just another way to silence women?” As critic Alexandra Schwartz notes in her recent review of gossip podcast host Kelsey McKinney’s new book on the subject, the term originated as a way of describing an emotional, relational connection (the etymology of “gossip” comes from “God sibling”) but quickly became negatively associated with women and their “idle talk,” a link that has functioned to denigrate speech that “can act as a check on power” in a patriarchal world. (The primary story in the Torah of someone afflicted with leprosy, which becomes one of the core textual sources linking the disease with gossip, reflects this gendered association: After both Aaron and Miriam speak about Moses’s wife, Miriam alone is stricken with the condition.) Since gossip can be a mighty tool for the marginalized to share information about people who have acted abusively, it makes sense that the halakhization of lashon harah occurred at the tail end of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, a period when the Jewish world—like the broader world—was rapidly opening to new kinds of authority that threatened traditional gender norms and communal structures. Chafetz Chaim restricted precisely the sorts of speech that might facilitate questioning the status quo.

If gossip can serve the vulnerable by undermining hegemonic power structures, it can also do so by helping to maintain systems of care. When certain personal information is shared without malice—for example, that someone is sick or out of work—it can allow a community to know who could use extra support. This social function of gossip suggests an alternative way of understanding the rabbinic linkage between lashon harah and tzaraat, in which the two are connected because they can both teach us something about communities of care. Drawing on our parshah’s directive that the afflicted leper should “call out, ‘Impure! Impure!,’” the Talmud states that anyone who is suffering should “announce his pain to the community” so that “the community will pray for mercy on his behalf.” The rabbis thus reinterpret an injunction that forces lepers to uphold their own ostracization, reading it instead as a way for the community to know of their pain and help them. Under this framework, leprosy, like gossip, is tied to the imperative to make suffering visible, to open our eyes to the pain around us.

This understanding of tzaraat may help illuminate a strange mention of the malady elsewhere in the Talmud: In a cryptic discussion on redemption in the tractate of Sanhedrin, the rabbis refer to the Messiah as a leper. What might this mean? When the third-century sage Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi asks the prophet Elijah when the Messiah will come, Elijah responds that he should go ask him himself, for he is sitting outside the city gates. Rabbi Yehoshua asks how he will know which one is the Messiah, to which Elijah responds: “He sits among the poor who suffer from illnesses. And all of them untie their bandages and tie them all at once, but the Messiah unties one bandage and ties one at a time. He says: ‘Perhaps I will be needed to serve to bring about the redemption. Therefore, I will never tie more than one bandage, so that I will not be delayed.’” We might take Elijah’s answer to suggest that the Redeemer is not only already here, but ready to act with alacrity—waiting only for us to seek out and value the sick and the leperous, the yentas and and the gossips.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.