May

8

2026

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): To mark 20 years since our graduation, my college roommates and I recently took a weekend trip away together. I have to admit, I was worried. We hadn’t spent significant time together in more than a decade. They’re both on the left side of the political spectrum, but I wasn’t super political in college—my Zionism made me fearful of leftist spaces—and so the friends I made at that time are not quite comrades. My companions on the reunion trip would be suburban career women, mothers of two. I didn’t know if I was going to spend the whole weekend listening to conversations about property taxes and soccer games, and trying to make my childless, assetless life legible to them.

There was a little of that, but for the most part, we fell into the easy togetherness we had in college. We laughed a lot. Sometimes you know that a relationship is dead when all you can do is “catch up” and then reminisce. But the quality of our conversations about the present were not matters of reporting, but opportunities for group analysis. We didn’t avoid politics, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that even the least overtly political member of our small group had been ostracized by friends for posting about Gaza, and that she had good questions about how to understand the responses she received from Zionist Jews in particular, which baffled her. I came away from the weekend feeling like some kind of miracle had occurred. I am old enough now that I have seen the different ways that friendships implode or disintegrate, even those that had once seemed lifelong. I have lost two of those friendships since October 7th. Here, suddenly, was some countervailing evidence: What was lost can be found again.

This is all a long-winded preamble to telling you about Happyend, a 2024 film about friendship and politics set in Japan in a not-so-distant fascist future, directed by Japanese American filmmaker Neo Sora. The film follows best friends Yuta and Kou; when we meet them, they are sneaking into an underground rave that quickly gets raided by the cops. There is something electric and tender between them; they are, it seems, in love, but the film never really suggests queer romance. This is the romance of teenage friendship, aided by the expanses of time available to pour yourself into another person. But the police raid reveals a difference between the two boys: While both are Japan-born, Kou is ethnically Korean—a foreigner in a society that is increasingly targeting foreigners. At school, an oppressive AI system is introduced to surveil their every move and hand out demerits for infractions. On the street, Kou is harassed by police using facial scanning technology; his mother’s shop is vandalized; the president calls a state of emergency on the basis of the foreign threat. Yuta is focused on music; he scarcely notices at first when his friend begins spending more time with Fumi, a girl with a staunch, precocious antifascist politics.

As Kou radicalizes, he becomes disgusted with his childhood best friend, who seems unwilling to face the political realities that are bearing down on Kou. It is not out of a deficit of love for Kou that Yuta doesn’t come along to protest, and indeed, some of the most heartbreaking moments in the film are ones where Yuta realizes that he is being slowly left and rejected. My sense is that Kou, with the zeal of the converted, is also missing something essential about Yuta, a character whose single quest in the film is to turn an abandoned construction site into a rave, and who steals the school’s AV equipment to do so: Yuta’s rebelliousness is itself an antifascist force, even without a coherent politics. I don’t want to give away the end, but suffice to say that Yuta finds a way to prove his love to Kou, but Kou has seemingly already moved on. Here’s hoping they find each other again.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): When I was young, I read and reread anthologies of jokes, especially Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor and Leo Rosten’s Giant Book of Laughter—both thick, musty tomes with hundreds of numbered jokes. I was a shy and studious child, and they promised formulae for social life, albeit ones that were half a century outdated. They also afforded access to the densely Jewish cultural milieu in which my parents’ generation had been raised, but which by the 1990s was largely confined to offputting, brined kiddush foods and kitschy television bits.

Imagine my surprised recognition in perusing the ur-source of these childhood secular bibles in the folklorist Mordekhai Lipson’s 1928 Yiddish volume, Di velt dertseylt, a selection of which has been translated by father-and-son team Jonathan and Jonah Sampson Boyarin under the title As The Story Goes: Funny, Strange, and Serious Stories of Yiddishland’s Jews. Many of the jokes I learned from Asimov and Rosten appear almost verbatim in Lipson’s book—like the one about the antisemitic Russian colonel who insists on calling his dog “yid” in the presence of a Jewish passenger; the Jew replies that it’s a pity the dog is Jewish, as otherwise he could have had a distinguished career in the Russian military. Lipson’s collection suggests that my curiosity and nostalgia had older objects than I’d thought.

While Rosten’s and Asimov’s books all feature anonymous, fictional characters, Lipson’s stories are all about specific, famous Jews—mostly rabbis, both Hasidim and mitnagdim, but also a few Enlighteners like Mendelsohn, famous converts to Christianity, and even a handful of Zionists. (A few lines are even, implausibly, attributed to medieval sages, like Abraham Ibn Ezra, who is reported to have complained about his luck in business, “Were I to sell candles, the sun would never set; were I to sell funeral shrouds, no one would ever die.”) While most of the stories must be apocryphal, the collection presents itself as documenting the verbal brilliance and pungency of the Ashkenazi elite. And where Jewishness in mid-20th century America signified an amorphous, witty ethnicity, here the stories capture ongoing and many-sided political and religious conflicts.

Lipson’s subjects generally articulate a non-dogmatic traditionalism; he celebrates rabbis’ extreme self-deprivation for charitable ends, legal flexibility to accommodate poor Jews’ material needs, or astringent critiques of wealthy businessmen. In their respective introductions, the Boyarins frame the work differently. Jonathan sees it as a window onto Eastern European Jewish life at a particular moment, one less sentimentalized than, say, Fiddler on the Roof; Jonah, meanwhile, sees it as a political resource, albeit a complicated one, which contains anti-capitalist critique and corrects for Christian hegemony. Maybe. For my part, I will say that many of the stories are in fact very clever, and several made me laugh out loud.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Paul Klee said of his artistic process that in basing so many of his creations on lines he was “taking a dot for a walk.” Seldom has an artist been as humorously clear about his practice, as is amply demonstrated in the terrific show Paul Klee: Other Possible Words, at the Jewish Museum through July 26th. It’s precisely the simplicity and possibilities inherent in the line, the simple stroke and its peregrinations, that is the basis for so much of Klee’s work. He constructed an oeuvre that, as we see in this show, was capable of abstract beauty and pointed political protest. Much of the exhibit is focused on Klee the enemy of Nazism and fascism. His politics, his modernism, and his Bauhaus background placed him on the Nazi enemies list, and even saw him falsely said to be a Jew. As a result, he spent his final years in exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1940.

In works like “Creators II” (1930) and “Departure of the Ghost” (1931), the lines weave and intertwine and multiply as shape with a hint of the human presence. These are lines that not only walk—literally, since in “Departure of the Ghost” they are poised atop two legs—they swoop, curl, and form intricate patterns as they cross paths. But his lines can be drawn into figurative service when need be, and Klee shows that they can be a weapon against fascism. Paintings like “Voice from the Ether” (1939) show a child converted into a radio, a passive recipient of the Nazi message being transmitted over the airwaves.

Klee was not devoid of a sense of humor, testimony for which is “Revolution of the Viaducts” (1937). Eleven viaducts of various colors, reduced to arches whose bases are in the form of human feet, have broken ranks and assembled in no order, refusing their assigned regimentation. “Mask of Fear,” a masterpiece from 1932, with its subdued colors, and its egg-shaped figure, looks to have been painted with fewer than 15 strokes, animated by fear and rage.

Most surprising in the show are a set of stark charcoal drawings, depictions of the daily horrors of Nazi rule. Drawn in 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to power, these small, seemingly hastily done works show people being shot down in the street; a man crawling; a stiff, bloated figure posed as a dictator; a manhunt; and people emigrating. These display cases are a mini-chronicle of the early years of Nazi rule.

Present also are the shaped and shapeless figures set against striking backgrounds that are Klee’s signature. But even the paintings of fruits, pears, figs, and apples are filled with foreboding, the fruits containing rotted spots.

Klee was fond of painting angels in his distinctive style, and there are some wonderful ones here. Sadly, Angelus Novus, his most celebrated angel and the one many of you will be anxious to see, thanks to its Walter Benjamin connection, is still blocked in Israel, a victim of Netanyahu and Trump’s war. In its place is an exhibition print, which at first glance has the aura of an original work of art spoken of by Benjamin, but which loses it upon reading the explanatory text that accompanies it. Benjamin still gets a nod. We arrive before it thinking we are seeing the Angel of History in an artistic work that once belonged to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Instead, we have an example of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

The first of this week’s two parashiyot, Behar, brings the laws of Vayikra to their culmination with their most comprehensive and radical regulation. According to the laws of land sabbatical and Jubilee, every seven years the land rests untilled—landowner, laborer, slave, and animal alike subsist off what grows naturally, without any claims to ownership. After seven such cycles, the Jubilee reverses all the real estate transactions of the previous 49 years, resetting economic equality and releasing all debt slaves. The Jubilee spirit also animates the intervening years, as the Torah follows up the Jubilee laws with strict regulation of debt bondage, concluding with a warning: “You may not subjugate them crushingly, but fear your God.”

This verse is strange for a number of reasons, principal among them that it’s not clear on its face what is being prohibited. What does it mean to subjugate someone “crushingly”? Given that the United Nations International Labour Organization estimated that, as of 2021, there were 5.8 million people in the world experiencing debt slavery, it’s a concern of practical, contemporary Jewish political ethics to figure out just what our Great Book prohibits. Granted, “crushingly” isn’t a conventional English word, but it mirrors the Hebrew “be-farekh,” which is hardly a normal word, either. Translated by others as “with rigour,” “ruthlessly,” “with crushing labor,” the word appears in only one other passage in the Torah, where it describes Pharaoh’s abuse of the Hebrews: “And Egypt worked the Israelites crushingly. And they embittered their lives with hard work, with mortar and bricks and with all sorts of work in the field—all their work which they set them to work, crushingly.”

One interpretive approach defines “be-farekh” by using the narrative detail sandwiched between its two mentions here: hard, physical labor. This is how the Passover Haggadah understands it, when it reads “Egypt worked the Israelites crushingly” as the referent of Devarim 26’s recollection that the Egyptians “set upon us hard labor.” This interpretation can be buttressed by meanings of “be-farekh” in later Hebrew. These later attestations are a helpful added tool in determining the word’s meaning given that Biblical Hebrew seldom uses this root. It is common in later Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, though, where it similarly means to “crush” or “rub out,” whether literally, such as crushing bread crumbs into fine flour dust or figuratively, such as refuting a spurious argument. Thus, in this reading, Pharaoh subjugated us as chattel slaves with backbreaking physical labor; we, in our parshah, are prohibited from subjugating debtors to backbreaking physical labor.

Other interpretations of “be-farekh” expand the reach of the prohibition beyond work that breaks the body. Observing that Pharaoh’s purpose in imposing slave labor was to disrupt Israelite fertility, these voices argue that Pharaoh’s oppressive labor attacked the Hebrews’ identity and family structure, and therefore, played out not just through hard, physical labor, but also through the identity-destroying assignment of labor mis-aligned with the worker’s age, gender identity, and more. According to these texts, Pharaoh sought to destroy our will, morale, and communal integrity by humiliating us with tasks that upended our self-conception and social role. If we are now in a position to collect from debtors, we are prohibited from humiliating them or crushing their dignity through labor. Much of our economy in the US has traditionally been and continues to be grounded in wealthy people, landowners, and corporations preying on those plunged into debt, who have lost their land and livelihood and are forced to work as day laborers or farmhands, stuck for perpetuity in servitude to a company town or an agribusiness, taking on all liabilities while unable to generate profits for themselves, often incurring debilitating injury—backbreaking, soul-crushing labor. The Torah anticipates that people with power will set up such economies and attempts to interrupt them.

But a third interpretation of “be-farekh” in the Rabbinic tradition goes deeper, seeking the root causes of such labor abuse in much more mundane labor practices. The most radical and farthest-reaching interpretation of “crushing labor” is the mainstream halachic interpretation: pointless labor. Pharaoh didn’t enslave the Hebrews because he needed workers for his public works. He enslaved them in order to break their society. The labor was just a pretext, a boondoggle. Pharaoh’s slavery was the imposition of labor for the purpose of subjugation and oppression. “What is crushing labor” prohibited by our parshah?, the Rambam asks in his legal code. “This is labor that has no demarcated scope, and labor that is not needed, but whose intention is simply to keep the other person working, so as not to be idle.” He follows the classical midrash’s surprisingly banal and evergreen examples: You may not tell a worker, ‘Heat me a beverage,’ if you don’t actually need it. Busy work is prohibited by Jewish law. You may not tell a worker, ‘Dig here until I return.’ Workers have a right to know the scope of the task, to know when they are nearing completion.

You want to understand how we get to a place where a society tolerates massively profitable corporations mangling the bodies and destroying the freedom and spirit of its laborers in order to squeeze every drop of labor out of them? It starts with every time a boss tells a secretary to make coffee in order to show her off to the boys; every time a school teacher imposes an assignment with no educational purpose, to keep the kids from socializing; every time a boss drums up tasks for workers, to keep them from idling and, I don’t know, talking to each other about unionizing. Each of those soul-crushing moments is an echo of the Biblical Pharaoh, who concocted a massive national labor project in order to break up Israelite families.

A whole swath of today’s sinful economic regime, what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”—“pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”—is forbidden by Jewish law. The 19th-century Eastern European commentator Malbim points out that that is why our parshah forbids us to “subjugate [workers] crushingly,” rather than simply, to “work them crushingly”: “‘work’ is for a purpose, but ‘subjugation’ means just in order to subjugate and abuse them.” On a macro, societal level, it is prohibited to impose, as Graeber puts it, “a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital.”

Debt Collective member Amy Czulada boils down debt by defining it as “a tool of oppression” that serves as “a means to silence and coerce the working class.” When the Torah heavily regulates the collection of debt and strictly prohibits the leveraging of debt into a mechanism for subordinating people and crushing their spirit, it points toward an abolition of debt as we know it, debt as an economic engine for wealth hoarding and labor exploitation. If society were to abide by the mitzvah not to subjugate debtors to backbreaking, humiliating, or soul-crushing, subordinating labor, it would be to fulfill Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s abolitionist tenet: “to change one thing: everything.”

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.