Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): In October 2025, I was working at a coffee shop in Tribeca when my phone began to light up with Signal messages, alerting me and thousands of other New Yorkers on various activist threads that ICE had descended on Canal Street and was rounding up street vendors. The request was simple: Get here right now. I almost never find myself randomly near Canal Street, but on that day, I was just a couple blocks south. I threw my computer in my bag and rushed over.
I arrived at one of several similar scenes unfolding concurrently in the area: some half-dozen ICE agents were preparing to arrest a West African street vendor while another half-dozen of us filmed and tried unsuccessfully to intervene. The crowd grew rapidly. Some of those arriving had clearly also received alerts about the situation. But many others appeared to be regular New Yorkers who had walked by and been drawn in. I was heartened every time someone wearing a suit or carrying a shopping bag stopped to ask, “What’s happening?”—and then, upon hearing “ICE is arresting someone,” immediately erupted with “Oh FUCK YOU, get the fuck out of our city!” Often, they put down their bag and stayed. But it was not nearly enough. What followed has been well-documented—despite the presence and attempted intervention of hundreds of New Yorkers, ICE kidnapped almost a dozen men, driving off with them in unmarked SUVs.
The Canal Street ICE raids were heavy on my mind when I arrived at a Sunday screening of Everybody to Kenmure Street, Felipe Bustos Sierra’s new documentary about a 2021 dawn raid in Glasgow, Scotland. The screening was at DCTV’s Firehouse, just a block and a half south of Canal Street, and the contours of the event depicted in the film—an immigration raid disrupted by the local community—are similar to what I witnessed last fall.
But Everybody to Kenmure Street tells a very different story. It is structurally simple—with few exceptions, the film unfolds chronologically over the course of one day. It’s composed almost entirely of footage from May 13th, 2021, shot by a mix of residents, news cameras, and documentarians. It begins with an upsetting and familiar image: an immigration van parked on a residential street, surrounded by a handful of scruffy-looking activists and an equal number of police officers. Not visible in the footage, but essential to the film’s story, is the man lying underneath the van, his arms wrapped around one of its axles. “Van Man,” as the anonymous activist has been called, made a crucial intervention when he crawled underneath the van early in the day. But part of the film’s argument is that this intervention was only one of many, equal in significance to the contributions of the eventually 2,500 residents who showed up to demand that their neighbors inside the van be let go. In other words: This is not a film about heroes. I’d argue that in our current era of celebrity worship on both the right and the left (I am nodding—warmly!—to our charismatic NYC mayor), that’s rare.
Felipe Bustos Sierra lives in Pollokshields, the Glasgow neighborhood where the film takes place, and yet he wasn’t among the crowds that day. As a result, he told The Guardian, “I missed out on that collective joy and expression of empathy which to me is happiness.”
It’s an unusual and fascinating way to describe a day that began with the kidnapping of two men by immigration forces. And yet, watching Everybody to Kenmure Street, it makes sense. Bustos Sierra is the child of Chilean exiles who fled the Pinochet regime. He told me that this sensibility—the joy that comes from acting in solidarity with our neighbors—is one he associates with the community of activists he grew up among. It’s familiar to me too. I grew up in a collective house of leftists in Brooklyn. It was a radical and clear-eyed household, but not a depressed one, perhaps because there was a shared understanding that working together for justice is the thing that keeps us tethered to our humanity. It is, therefore, an inherently life-giving practice.
That’s not just a metaphor, either. Protesting can feel like playing with fake money at the poker table; we’re going through the motions, sure, but we’re not taking anything home with us at the end of the night. But what if we were? Everybody to Kenmure Street reminds us that there’s a pot we could win. And the stakes are high. I’ll probably never forget the woman among the crowds on Canal Street wearing an Amazon Prime uniform who kept shouting, with real urgency in her voice, “Everybody has a right to live!”
Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): In an era of mealy-mouthed, PR-firm-produced public statements calibrated to offend as few people as possible, there’s something wonderful––almost magical––about hearing “Fuck Keir Starmer / Netanyahu’s bitch and genocide armer / Better off as compost for farmers” in a major album release. Thus runs “Liars Tale,” the lead single off Irish rap trio Kneecap’s high-octane sophomore album, Fenian.
Kneecap has never been shy about controversy, most notably in the wake of performer Mo Chara’s terrorism charge last year for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag thrown onto the stage during a performance. “Carnival” consists of the most direct reply on the album––set in a courtroom, its verses are withering speeches from the defense––but the whole album is shot through with the righteous anger of the wrongly accused. “Calling me sceimhleitheoir [“terrorist” in Gaelic], / Never heard that said before,” Mo Chara raps in “Smugglers and Scholars.”
What emerges throughout is an effortless connection not just between the Irish and Palestinian liberation movements, but between these movements and gangster rap as a form. As with the classics of N.W.A.-era rap, there’s an self-conscious effort to be outrageous (“Soon as you’re outraged, we’ve won,” Mo Chara tells us on “Big Bad Mo”)––yet the ultimate aim here is not to be subversive for its own sake, but to make the experience and rage of the oppressed as obtrusive and unignorable as they should be.
To overlook Fenian’s political content would be to misunderstand it as a project, but to reduce it to agitprop would be to miss an aesthetic achievement. Producer Dan Carey has done an exceptional job in creating the thrumming trap beats that characterize the album (most prominent on “Palestine”), and is at his best when he brings in his rock expertise for the infectious dancey guitar riffs of “An Ra” and the scintillating chord hits of “Cocaine Hill.” Perhaps most unique is the album’s atmospheric opening of “Éire go Deo,” which manages to integrate an ethereal treble pulse and soaring vocal sample with industrial-sounding breakbeats, all washing over speeches about Irish independence.
None of this is even to mention the group’s frequent blend of English and Gaelic––lines in one language will often veer off into turns of phrases in the other. Combined with the spat-out delivery of Mo Chara and co-performer Móglaí Bap, the effect alternates between a sensory assault and a delightful flow as rhymes switch between languages.
Fenian stands out to me as one of this decade’s best rap albums so far. Even if that doesn’t sell you on it, you should at least give it a listen to learn your cúpla focal.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The series DTF St. Louis, now streaming on HBO and Hulu, came and went, getting some merited attention in The New Yorker and The New York Times. It wasn’t one of those series that was given a roundtable discussion the morning after each episode in the aforementioned Times, as were Succession or Game of Thrones. But it was a far more insightful, perspicacious, and—dare I say—relatable show than so many others. DTF St. Louis disguised itself as a murder mystery and a portrait of suburban emptiness and depravity. It had generous doses of sexual shenanigans, affairs, voyeurism, and experimental homosexuality. These trappings cleverly served as misdirection, obscuring its true subject—loneliness.
Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), a big bear of a man who is a sign language interpreter, becomes friends with a TV weatherman, Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman). In the first episode, Floyd is found dead in the locker room of the local ballfield, next to a magazine open to a picture of a naked man with his face scratched out. The two police officers assigned to the apparent murder are a grizzled white former Chicago cop and a young Black woman from the local special crimes unit, each bringing very different styles and assumptions. At several points, the solution seems to be clear, but as the story unfolds—told in flashbacks out of chronological order—the obvious solutions are cast aside. Clark, unhappy in his marriage, is having an affair with Floyd’s beautiful but dissatisfied wife, played icily by a stunning Linda Cardellini. That’s a clear trail—too clear. The two friends, both experiencing romantic solitude, are on the hookup app “DTF [Down to Fuck] St. Louis.” This provides suspects and leads, all red herrings. There’s an insurance policy taken out for Floyd, his death thus being a source of profit for his wife, but this is another red herring. Floyd’s wife acts suspiciously, for a reason we hope will be explained, but which never is; under interrogation, she constantly asks the police investigators to speak louder. Yet another red herring.
Instead, DTF St Louis takes us to what is at the heart of so many lives: crushing loneliness, a loneliness for which marriage and supposed friendships are no cure. Floyd and Clark are, for a moment, suspected of having been lovers, and even make a move in that direction. In fact, what they have found in each other is what everyone seeks: someone to whom they can say anything and everything, however intimate and ugly. They join the app together and it is only with each other they can discuss it. Their fears—romantic, sexual, and professional—are their subjects. More than in their sexual hunt, more than in the acting out of fantasies that Clark and Floyd’s wife indulge in, and which Clark allows the cuckolded husband to watch while hidden in a closet, it is their time together, their sharing with each other of the self they don’t dare show the world, that makes their relationship essential to them both.
In DTF St. Louis we see a truth seldom discussed in film, TV, or literature: the love two men can feel for each other that is a result of and the producer of openness and that has nothing to do with homoeroticism. It is, instead, a feeling as profound as any two people can feel for one another. It’s the love described by Montaigne in his essay “On Friendship”—“because it was he, because it was me.” As DTF St. Louis shows us, it can be every bit as pure, selfless, and tragic as any romantic love.
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Naso from Aron Wander
This week’s parshah, Naso, offers instructions for how to become a nazirite—a person who consecrates themselves to God by taking a temporary vow to refrain from shaving their hair, imbibing intoxicants (or even consuming grapes), and coming into contact with a dead body. Given these laws, our parshah’s accompanying haftarah, from the Book of Judges, describes the origin story of Samson, an Israelite “judge” (a temporary military leader) whose mother is told by an angel that the boy must be a nazirite from birth. Samson is a strange and unsettling character. The judges who precede him lead the Israelites in battle against their enemies; Samson, who possesses superhuman strength, fights alone. The other judges, while flawed, have clear virtues; Samson is a lewd, thuggish brawler who foolishly reveals the secret of his strength—his long, never-shornhair—to Delilah, his Philistine lover who has already tried to kill him three times. Delilah betrays Samson to her fellow Philistines, who shear his hair, gouge out his eyes, and enslave him. When Samson is forced to dance for a raucous Philistine assembly, he cries out to God to allow him to avenge himself and then brings down the pillars of the temple where they are gathered, killing himself and thousands of Philistines.
What are we to make of Samson’s violence? In The Kingship of God, Martin Buber argues that Samson’s story is wedged between two ideologically opposed halves of the Book of Judges. While both sections are set during a pre-monarchic period of tribal federation, the first, anti-monarchist half describes a healthy, if flawed, system: Whenever the Israelites are threatened, a charismatic judge arises to lead the federation until security has been reestablished. The section’s core ideological thesis is epitomized by the judge Gideon’s refusal to assume the title of king after a military victory: “I will not rule over you myself, nor shall my son rule over you; YHVH alone shall rule over you,” he tells his soldiers. The second, pro-monarchist half details the gradual collapse of the system due to infighting, avarice, and idolatry. Its central thesis is summed up by its final, lamenting line: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did as they pleased.” Buber does not explain the logic of putting Samson’s rage-fueled, semi-nihilistic story between these halves, except insofar as it functions to distinguish the two.
Perhaps, however, there is a deeper political-psychological meaning to its placement. In his 1985 tome, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction, the socialist Biblical critic Norman Gottwald elaborates on the tribal federation described in the Book of Judges. He argues that it was formed through a broad, multi-ethnic social revolt against Canaanite elites by exploited Canaanite peasants, recently escaped slaves from Egypt, nomads, “and other disaffected elements” who forged an egalitarian society. Although Gottwald’s argument may have a wishful element to it, he, like Buber, is undoubtedly right to attribute a strong, anti-monarchist stance to the earlier half of Judges, which describes a society governed directly by God, without a centralized, corruptible human power.
One of the most significant challenges facing the Israelite tribal federation was its powerful—and often centralized—adversaries. The first Book of Samuel, which follows the Book of Judges, opens with a crushing Philistine victory in which the Ark of the Covenant is captured. Although the Israelites eventually defeat the Philistines, they are clearly shaken. Fearful of an advancing Ammonite force, they beg Samuel to ask God to appoint them a king. God sees their request as a betrayal: “For it is not you that they have rejected; it is Me they have rejected to rule over them.” Nevertheless, he instructs Samuel to accede—as long as he also tells the Israelites what their fear will cost them: A king will inevitably enlist their children to fight in wars, take their property, and effectively enslave them.
God’s prediction is borne out in the ensuing years. David plots the death of one of his commanders so that he can marry the commander’s wife; Solomon imposes forced labor on the Israelites; and the subsequent Israelite kings degenerate into increasingly avaricious idolaters. Most devastating of all, the Israelites’ abandonment of their semi-egalitarian project in the service of security doesn’t save them: They are still unable to withstand the increasingly powerful empires that come to dominate them.
Perhaps this explains the placement of the Samson narrative. On its own, it would be little more than a fantasy of physical prowess. But by situating it at the beginning of the decline of the federation, the redactor (or compiler) of the book gives it a cathartic function. Samson’s cry of rage at the Philistines becomes the redactor’s—and, perhaps, the reader’s—way of venting anger at the Israelite federation’s more powerful enemies, whose military pressure pushed the Israelites to emulate their centralized state systems. Samson seeks revenge for what the Philistines have done to him, while the redactor, perhaps, seeks revenge for what the Philistines have pushed the Israelites to do to themselves.
Despite its apparent pessimism, though, such a reading risks a certain naivete: It assumes that in the absence of outside enemies, the Israelites would have been able to maintain their utopian project. But the first obvious fractures in the federation—which appear soon before Samson’s story—seem to be the result of internal, rather than external, pressures. After Gideon dies, his son Avimelech (whose name literally means “My father is king”) preys on the Israelite residents of Shechem’s fears of decentralization, as well their nativism, to become ruler, setting off a bloody intra-Israelite conflict. And just before Samson, the text describes a brief war between the tribe of Ephraim and the city of Gilead sparked by the Ephraimites’ anger at not being invited to join a coalition against the Ammonites. In the latter half of the Book of Judges, this theme of intra-Israelite conflict is more explicit: None of the tales focus on the Israelites’ external foes. Instead, the tribe of Dan fights with an Ephraimite over who will get to control an idolatrous shrine, and the book ends with a bloody civil war in which the tribe of Benjamin is nearly exterminated.
We might conjecture, then, that the redactor uses Samson’s rage, at least in part, as a projection outward of an anger that would otherwise be directed inward. What appears as one-dimensional wrath against the Philistines is perhaps also grief, anger, and guilt at the Israelites’ inability to live up to the revolution they instigated. It suggests an even more trenchant despair: What if the Israelites’ utopian project was doomed from the start, not just because of the Israelites’ adversaries but also because of the Israelites’ own pettiness and selfishness? What if such traits are an ineradicable part of humanity? Taken together, these two dynamics—external threat and internal sinfulness—seem to leave no possibility of a political horizon. Samson’s gouged-out eyes seem to be the bloody harbingers of a foreclosed future. What hope, then, is there?
In a sermon perhaps less well-known on account of its refusal of cheap optimism, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of a similar temptation to despair—undoubtedly autobiographical in part—just months before his murder. “Life is a continual story of shattered dreams,” he lamented. ”We speak out against war, we protest, but it seems . . . to mean nothing.” As with the Israelites, this unending struggle has internal as well as external elements. “There is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in [each of] us,” he declared, and we are always tempted by arrogance, envy, and hate.
King does not offer his oft-cited affirmation that “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Instead, he concludes his sermon by saying, “If I can leave anything with you, let me urge you to be sure that you have a strong boat of faith.” Lest he be misunderstood, he explained that such faith was not assurance but rather the commitment to “still fight on.” In language that hauntingly prefigured his final speech, he continued: “When you get this faith, you can walk with your feet solid to the ground and your head to the air, and you fear no man.”
Perhaps King’s words help us identify the ultimate root of Samson’s despair. Samson is a nazirite from birth: He is born into a “boat of faith” rather than having to build one for himself, and he is shocked when it doesn’t guarantee his success. Maybe this is the rage, born of the hopelessness that comes with the apparent failure of God’s promise, that the redactor, consciously or not, is channeling: Did God not assure us that things would work out?
This brings us back to the nazirite vow. The Torah offers no explicit reason for becoming a nazirite and promises no reward; in fact, nazirites must bring expiation offerings for the unnecessary suffering they have taken upon themselves. This, perhaps, is the difference between Samson and nazirites by choice. Samson is shattered when his dreams are shattered. The nazirite, by contrast, knows that nothing is guaranteed by faith except faith itself. Each of us will, no doubt, have days when we cry out with Samson’s shocked despair, when the certainties we hold dear unravel before us, and the future seems neither obvious nor assured. But again and again, we must pledge ourselves to the struggle for a different world—one in which victory may never be assured, but neither is defeat.
Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.
