May

23

2025

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): Sarah Aziza’s words have been ones I have returned to again and again over the last 19 months, from her haunting cataloguing of watching the first weeks of the Gaza genocide unfold to her reflection on the role of witnessing in the pages of this magazine. Aziza’s new memoir, The Hollow Half, tells the story of her brush with death from anorexia, alongside her family’s story—their expulsion from Palestine in 1948, the experience growing up between the US and Saudi Arabia, and their attempts to return home to a land hollowed by Israel’s colonization. Sarah’s mom is white, her father Palestinian, and she writes of coming into her identity as a Palestinian American woman, making sense of these two halves of herself. She traces the hollowing grief of the ongoing Nakba and the pressure to conform to American whiteness, all while trying to understand and overcome the gnawing pain that literally eats her from within. Aziza writes with a breathtaking fierceness and vulnerability, her intellect matched by her lyricism.

Near the end of the book, Aziza reflects on being denied entry to Israel. She writes that the experience of receiving the officer’s “no” at the border “colonized, spread. Joining, compounding my anorexic drive to silence the other, unbearable histories inside my flesh. Starving to murder time, to sever self from self.” In response to this devastation, Aziza movingly invokes the words of Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who, she notes, “standing in the midst of a longer disaster” of slavery and anti-Black racism “calls for a courageous grappling, a yes to the weight of what we inherit, and the ruptures we live among. It is only through such reckoning that liberation might be found.” Reading Aziza’s words, during perhaps one of the bleakest moments in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, was painful, but it was also a reminder of what we are struggling for—a people’s right to live, full and whole. We are blessed to have such courageous storytellers as Sarah Aziza.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I first saw Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers when it came out in December 2023. I’d promised the friend I’d brought along that we wouldn’t see anything depressing. When the lights came up, though, both of us were teary. “That was so sad!” she said. “Wait, no,” I said. “I think it’s uplifting!”

All of Us Strangers is about a lonely gay writer who meets and forms a relationship with a mysterious stranger. It’s sexy, dark, and surprisingly fast-paced for a film in which very little happens. I won’t give away why it could be pitched as either uplifting or depressing, depending on how you spin it—that would ruin the movie, and I think you should see it.

But I will say that I watched All of Us Strangers again this week, and while I stand by my initial assessment that it’s ultimately hopeful, I can’t argue with the fact that the film is suffused with a deep, at times almost suffocating, melancholy. It’s present from the very first shot, when we see Andrew Scott writing—or more accurately, trying and failing to write—alone in a high-rise London apartment building that seems like an architectural manifestation of late-capitalist isolation.

In the end, then, what All of Us Strangers left me with was neither uplift nor sadness, but rather, simply an awareness of my own capacity to feel. Which reminded me of another film I saw recently: Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace. I wasn’t going to write about Blue Sun Palace, since my brother worked on it and I’m far from a neutral source. But the film, which centers around a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens, hasn’t left my mind since I first saw it weeks ago, and rewatching All of Us Strangers emphasized why. In both films, grief is always close at hand; both feature protagonists whose lives have been marked by tragedy. And to the extent that either is hopeful, that hope hinges on what might happen after the credits roll—a future that is anything but guaranteed.

It can be hard to feel deeply in a world so enveloped by horror, as ours is in this moment. It’s often easier to numb out or become cynical; the hazards are simply fewer. But I had no choice but to feel while watching Blue Sun Palace and All of Us Strangers. These are films about the kind of sadness that threatens to never release you, and the arguably scarier belief in the possibility of something else. It is precisely this range of emotions that reminds me that I am human. What more could I ask of art?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language—now streaming nearly everywhere, including on Kanopy for free—might be the best film I’ve seen in 2025. It’s certainly the funniest; this model work of absurdism, which stays faithful to its premise without ever becoming too exaggerated or silly, had me laughing so hard I was afraid my neighbors would hear me through the walls.

Set mostly in an alternate-reality version of Winnipeg where the population is predominantly Iranian and the main language is Persian, the movie is made in the style of Iranian arthouse cinema—full of charming children, sensitive adults, and touching reflections on human solidarity. In this cockeyed Winnipeg, Louis Riel, the leader of a 19th-century rebellion of Métis Manitobans, is a national hero; accordingly, the unit of currency is the riel (a nod to the Iranian rial). The film finds a fictionalized version of Rankin returning home from Montreal, where the people in government, obsessed as they are with their own quest for sovereignty, don’t even know which province Winnipeg is in. The film is a wonderful sendup of Canada that plays cleverly on its hypothesized cultural fusion. Gray, freezing Winnipeg is still its grimly ugly self, a city so grim that schoolchildren are told to frown when class pictures are being taken. But now the city streets are lined with the same sad-looking stalls and shops often featured in Iranian films, selling old typewriters and birthday cakes. (One store sells only turkeys, another just Kleenex.) At one point, Rankin waits for someone in a Tim Hortons—Canada’s Dunkin Donuts—where the pastries are served accompanied by not coffee, but tea in a glass served from a samovar, Iranian-style.

Delightful absurdity abounds. A tour guide having a rough time finding interesting sites leads the group to a bus stop where someone forgot his briefcase in 1983 (the luggage has been left in place ever, in the hope the owner will return for it), and to Louis Riel’s grave, located in a triangle formed where an off-ramp and a highway meet, where they are obliged to observe 30 minutes of silence. A class of Iranian children attend a French immersion school inexplicably set up in a drab building in a part of town known as “the Beige neighborhood”; their teacher despises them and, after one of the students is unable to read an exercise on the blackboard because he says a turkey stole his glasses, expels them all. (His story is later corroborated.)

Though unsparing in its mockery not only of the country in which it’s set but also of the exalted humanism of Iranian films, its satire is suffused with affection. Universal Language is a film of tremendous intelligence, originality, and warm humor—something urgently needed today.

The shemita, or sabbatical, year described at the beginning of this week’s double parshah is troubled by a central contradiction. On the one hand, the land is meant to rest, and there is thus a ban on plowing, planting, harvesting, and other intensive agricultural activities that the Rabbis associate with private ownership. On the other hand, all creatures—owners along with their slaves and hired workers, landless sojourners, and even animals—are meant to eat as equals from the produce of the land. The problem is that the ecological purpose of shemita threatens its social purpose: If standard agricultural practices are restricted, what will the poor and vulnerable eat? How can redistributive politics operate in the context of limited resources and, in our world, a shrinking ecological pie?

The severity of this contradiction depends on a society’s agricultural mode of production. In a fully, or even partially, pastoral or nomadic society, in which people have access to common lands and resources—such as forests, and grazing and hunting grounds—shemita would not have a significant impact, because food could be obtained without agricultural labor and without upending the social order. But the Torah asks the obvious question that would have faced the Israelites, agriculturalists who relied on annual crops and stored surplus for their sustenance: “What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?” The Torah implies that the people are meant to subsist on the accumulated surplus of previous years, as well as the fruit that continues to grow in orchards and volunteer growth, meaning plants that arise on their own from seeds of previous crops. The poor can enjoy some of the food that grows naturally during shemita but otherwise must rely on existing welfare institutions’ surplus, presumably contributed by the rich. In other words, according to the Torah, the imperative for ecological rest is clear, yet the question of how to implement its vision of social equality is left unanswered.

The rabbinic tradition, however, placed a greater emphasis on how shemita might serve as a social equalizer. One of the major rabbinic tenets of shemita is the suspension of the right of exclusion—the basis of private land ownership—allowing anyone to freely graze in any field. The Mekhilta, an early rabbinic text, even suggests that ideally all fences should be torn down during shemita. As the medieval commentator known as the Ramban emphasizes, this means that the right of public access to land during shemita is paramount: “According to Torah law, a person may not guard their field and lock the gate in poor people’s faces on the shemita year, even if he wants to give away the yield at the time of harvest. Rather, the field should be ownerless and available to the poor for the entire year.” In this understanding, shemita is meant to do more than feed the poor; it temporarily restores a world of common lands and sustenance unfettered by private property.

The Tosefta, another rabbinic text, prioritizes redistribution over ecological rest, innovating a different model of collective ownership known as “otzar beis din,” or “the court’s storehouse.” The Rabbis ruled that a court, as an agent of the poor, was authorized to engage in otherwise illicit activities—commercial-scale harvesting and the guarding of fields, as well as confiscating crops from those who harvested excessive amounts. The court’s storehouse would then distribute provisions to every household and maintain a surplus for the common good. The Rabbis thus subvert private ownership by devising an institution of centralized ownership rather than by reverting to common lands. This solution essentially ignores the imperative to let the land rest, and instead pragmatically adapts to the existing agricultural mode of annual crop production in a way that responds to the practical challenges of property abolition.

While the otzar beis din doesn’t achieve everything the Torah is aiming for, it was a reasonable attempt at implementing a very difficult commandment given real-world constraints, while also avoiding treating shemita as an abstruse, arbitrary commandment that can be fulfilled on a formal level alone. This latter approach, however, is what developed in the State of Israel. The dominant approach to shemita in Israel today is called “heter mechirah,” literally “selling permission,” and dates back to the 1880s settlement period, when Jews who had arrived in Palestine struggled to meet subsistence levels in a normal year, even without shemita restrictions. The heter permits Jewish farmers to sell their farmland to non-Jews for the year and work as a gentile’s “employee” or “subcontractor” in order to avoid the prohibition of working Jewish-owned land during shemita. Thus, in a darkly ironic development, Jewish colonization of Palestine and its attendant land takeover coincided with the creation of this legal fiction that allowed largely dispossessed Palestinians to gain legal title to land—but only insofar as it helped Jews circumvent the rigors of Torah law and its vision of equality.

This loophole continues to allow its practitioners to avoid wrestling with the substantive questions about how society should be structured to accommodate the obligation to observe shemita—questions with implications for the whole Jewish world. What would our society look like if, every seven years, we broke open the gates of all private property? How might we create an otzar beis din that can effectively prioritize universal subsistence over private control and wealth accumulation? Are there any parallel obligations on the owners of non-agricultural land or other productive resources? How must shemita function in the context of stolen land? These are questions that should trouble today’s Jewish state, for as our parshah states, a society that ignores shemita will face dire consequences. If the land is not given rest by its inhabitants, it will take its own rest after violent upheaval and exile: “Then shall the land make up for its sabbath years throughout the time that it is desolate and you are in the land of your enemies.” Shemita is coming, in other words—but, unless we change our ways, it will be apocalyptically forced upon us.

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