Nov

22

2024

Mari Cohen (associate editor): The first time I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 The Atlantic feature “The Case for Reparations,” I was a college freshman new to the South Side of Chicago, dipping my toes into campus activism and grappling with the city’s stark segregation. In the piece, Coates unspools the life story of one 91-year-old Black Chicagoan to show how a generation of Black people fled the plunder of Jim Crow in the South only to find themselves vulnerable to predatory home loans in the North, forcing many of them into poverty and instability while their white counterparts built nest eggs with federally insured suburban mortgages. Reading Coates, I grasped how the obstacles facing my neighbors—deteriorating housing stock; gun violence; stark health disparities as compared to white neighborhoods—were a product of a systematic policy of racial dispossession. In the years to follow, Coates would gain a reputation as an adherent of identity-oriented liberalism, but “The Case for Reparations” itself—even if it at times reductively places “racial” issues in opposition to “class” issues—is a deeply material analysis: It considers the financial deprivations of the American racial order, and argues that ameliorating them requires a vast economic response.

It might be only a slight exaggeration to say that “The Case for Reparations” changed my life. Compelled by Coates’ argument, I began taking history classes on race and urban policy and reporting stories on South Side politics, all of which led me to a broader investment in justice movements. Much more importantly, of course, Coates transformed the national conversation, making reparations for Black Americans a political horizon, even if briefly. It is this very power of writing to effect both individual and societal transformation—for good and for evil—that Coates examines in his newest book, The Message.

In the first chapter, based on a visit to Senegal’s Goree Island—a mythic site of the origins of slavery—Coates recounts how American slaveholders crafted narratives of African inferiority to justify their project: “Even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them . . . And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.” Here Coates grapples with his own ambivalences about Black nationalism and the “vindicationalist” tradition that sought to elevate histories of African civilization to counter racist dehumanization: “I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in ‘civilization,’ we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost,” he writes. But while the first chapter meditates on the dangers and the limits of narrative, Coates soon arrives at a more sanguine tone about the activist power of writing in the second chapter, set in conservative South Carolina. As he attends a school board meeting with a white teacher whose attempts to teach his book Between the World and Me have been censored, Coates reflects on the power of his own words, as well as those of his heroes, in spurring political involvement: “Books by Black authors helped Mary [the teacher] understand ‘why things are so fucked up.’ And it was these books that had brought [another local ally] Bobbie out to support Mary.”

Coates then turns to a reappraisal of his own past use of that power in The Message’s much-discussed final section—the book’s most robust—where he arrives in Israel/Palestine on a trip arranged by the Palestine Festival of Literature. The chapter is a usefully comprehensive introduction to the history and current reality of Zionism, but will not have much to offer for those already familiar with the terrain. It is striking, though, to read Coates’s own story of recognition. In coming face-to-face with the evidence of the naked racial domination that structures Israeli society, Coates is forced to revisit, and atone, for his previous blind spots around Palestine—including in “The Case for Reparations,” in which he highlighted Germany’s Holocaust reparations to the Israeli state as a positive model of what real material recompense to victims of great injustice might provide, without mentioning what those reparations enabled Israel to do to Palestinians.

Coates’s frank accounting of and clear anguish over this failure is refreshing, given how infrequently writers revisit their mistakes in public. He offers this as a model for a broader media reckoning with historic anti-Palestinian bias: “Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such [inhumane] systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion.” However, as the critic Parul Seghal points out in The New Yorker, Coates’s extended and at times grandiose descriptions of his newfound shock at Israeli apartheid can sometimes strain credulity because “his critics on the left, many of them of color, have long pointed out these very blind spots in his work,” including “his reticence where Muslim, and particularly Palestinian, death and suffering were concerned.”

Of course, it’s a good thing that Coates is now, even if belatedly, bringing the force of his moral outrage over Israeli apartheid to his large audience. Yet it is an odd time to read the paean to the might of words that Coates offers throughout The Message, at the very moment when words feel so ineffective in the face of a relentless genocide that has continued for more than a year. If you’re a writer in a milieu of writers, it’s easy to start to measure progress as a question of who’s saying what. But the road from the written word and cultural activism to material change can be winding and unpredictable. Hundreds of our brightest literary voices have committed to a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions; indie bookstores around the country are putting tables of Palestinian literature front and center—yet only 19 Senators can be convinced to vote for a resolution opposing sending offensive weapons to Israel after a tireless organizing effort. The hard-fought and long-overdue cultural wins are, of course, welcome—especially as plenty of pro-genocide media narratives continue to abound. But Coates’s conclusions about the role of the writer feel a little too neat and self-assured. Much as writers and artists must continue to play a historical part as a political vanguard, we must also grapple with the impotence of our words, not just praise their power.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Cinephiles know that every year we can expect two new films from the great Korean director Hong Sang-soo. I’m not belittling his work when I say that he’s able to be so prolific because he uses the same building blocks in each film; what matters is how he puts those pieces together. In every Hong movie, there will be much conversation, much drinking, heated disputes (often caused by the effect of the drinking on the conversation), and some form of misunderstanding or regret experienced by current or former couples. Time will be elastic, with the past following the present, or the same events appearing twice—sometimes in slightly different forms that either reinforce or “correct” the original representation. (The perfect Hong film bears a title that could fit many others: Right Now, Wrong Then.) With conversation the main form of action, he uses minimal technical means; the camera is usually simply plopped down, unobtrusively observing the characters. He’s not fond of cutting within scenes, since doing so interrupts the flow of the conversation, and instead resorts to zooming in and out, something we rarely see in arthouse films nowadays.

So as we sit down to view a new film by Hong, the question is always: Will those building blocks be assembled in a particularly interesting or surprising fashion, or will it be a repeat of something we’ve seen before? Happily for us, his newest film, A Traveler’s Needs, is a case of the former. Isabelle Huppert—who has twice appeared in previous Hong films—stars as Iris, a French woman in Korea; the film begins in medias res with her conversing with a young Korean woman, who then begins to play the piano. Iris asks her what she felt while playing, and then, strangely, writes her response to the woman’s words on an index card. They go for a walk and before a steel obelisk in a square, the Korean woman talks about her father, who contributed to its construction; again, Iris writes her comments down. We soon learn that Iris is essaying a curious, untried method of teaching French, one of her own devising: She has her students tell her something emotionally stirring, then has them learn how to express those feelings in French. The words, she reasons, will be truly embedded in them, thanks to their emotional weight. Later, Iris visits another student and her husband, or lover, or employee (their relationship is never clarified) and flirts with the latter rather childishly; when the student plays guitar, she tells Iris her feelings, which are word for word those of the first student after she played the piano. Is Hong suggesting that sincere, unique emotions don’t exist, and all is cliche? Or is it that they do exist, and are simply universal? He leaves it to us to decide.

Iris is a strange character, and not a very pleasant one. Yet in Hong Sang-soo’s hands, this mysterious visitor from the West—who doesn’t speak the native tongue, and who conducts her French lessons in English—brings out the depths of the characters she meets, while she herself remains shrouded in mystery. Those unfamiliar with Hong’s films would do well to start here. Those who already love him will be pleased to find him at his best.

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): On Monday night, I attended a screening of the new documentary Death in Umm al-Hiran, organized by the Israel/Palestine-based anti-occupation collective All That’s Left. The film—which tells the story of the 2017 police killing of Palestinian school teacher Yaqoub Abu Al-Aqia’an—opens with the audio of frantic calls to emergency services on January 18th of that year, during an Israeli raid on the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran (in the Wadi Atir area of the southern Negev, within the 1948 borders of Israel).

The narrative that follows is spliced together from interviews with Al-Aqia’an’s neighbors and relatives, many of whom are filmed next to the rubble of their homes, as well as audio that comes, eerily, from recordings of police cameras and radios that officers used to communicate that morning, and later footage from interviews carried out by the Israeli police investigations unit. As the story unfolds, we learn that before dawn that morning, hundreds of Israeli police officers stormed the village in order to carry out demolitions of multiple homes. Al-Aqia’an, realizing that his home was facing imminent demolition, packed his most important belongings into his car and began to drive away. As he drove, Israeli police opened fire: In a harrowing scene, we see his son carefully counting the 19 bullet holes in his father’s car. Gravely injured, Al-Aqia’an loses control of the car, which rolls down a hill and kills Erez Levy, an Israeli police officer. Israeli officials immediately label the incident as a terrorist attack. The film depicts detailed investigations by both police and outside researchers—recreations of the scene, including estimations of how inflated Al-Aqia’an’s tires would have been, how fast he would have driven—which definitively prove that he was shot before he hit Levy, not the opposite. It is at this point that the film pivots to the police’s internal investigations unit and the political struggle at the highest levels of Israeli government in an attempt to cover up Al-Aqia’an’s murder. The descriptions of these dynamics are granular, and while it can sometimes feel like the investigation’s depiction misses the forest for the trees, it also conveys the gruesomeness of the particulars, the heaviness of the details.

Several of my closest friends were in Umm al-Hiran on that January morning in 2017 on a protective presence shift, and the horror of that day has long loomed large in my mind. Yet watching the film this week came with a new form of horror: The entire village had been demolished and evacuated just four days earlier, on November 14th, an act celebrated by both past and current Israeli officials. As I watched a scene in the film showing Al-Aqia’an’s son speaking in front of the village’s mosque—“we lost my father; now we will lose the village,” he mournfully predicts—I couldn’t get out of my mind the video footage I watched again and again this week, of that same mosque being crushed with a single blow of a military bulldozer. With the heavy presence of the village’s demise in the room, it was hard not to transpose present despair onto the past anguish the film depicts. Indeed, at one point during the screening, an air raid siren sounded. There was a moment of confusion among the viewers, during which it was unclear whether the siren was happening in the present or was the sound of the horrific demolition footage we were watching. After we ran to a nearby bomb shelter, I got videos over WhatsApp of a Lebanese missile landing some four miles north of us, injuring five people on the street. While the context and circumstances of the violence on the screen and the broader reality of the present are vastly different, it was hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of simply saturating violence.

The future, unfortunately, looks no better than the past or the present. Based on plans first laid in 2003 and now being actualized, the village of Umm al-Hiran has been evicted in order to establish a Jewish-only town, Hiran, upon its ruins. Some of the most upsetting footage in the film is that of the upcoming Hiran settlement’s leader explaining that though a Bedouin group had “invaded” the land, it needed to be settled by Jews. Umm al-Hiran is one of 14 Palestinian villages slated to be demolished in order to build Jewish towns in their place; three have already been destroyed, and one more is expected to be razed in the next month, with the rest to follow after. As I left the film, contemplating this grim reality, I thought of another video I watched this week—of Umm al-Hiran’s residents returning the day after the demolition to pray at the empty site where the mosque had stood. There is not much hope to be found in this video, but there is steadfastness, and a commitment I hope we can model in the struggle to come.

This week’s parshah, Chayei Sarah, begins by detailing Sarah’s death and Abraham’s subsequent aging; though he has been blessed with wealth, as Abraham nears the end of his life, he faces a ruptured relationship with the beloved son meant to carry on his legacy—a son whom he nearly sacrificed in last week’s reading and who is now alone, with no wife or heirs. The largest narrative chunk in this slow, meditative parshah begins with Abraham seeking to rectify this situation, charging his senior servant—identified by the rabbis as Eliezer, a servant mentioned earlier in Breishit—to return to the land in which Abraham was born and find Isaac a wife. Although Abraham only instructs Eliezer regarding the geographic constraints of his search, Eliezer devises a specific test to find a suitable partner for Isaac. He positions himself by a spring outside the city, declaring to God, “Let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’—let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac.”

Eliezer is seemingly interested not just in the location and lineage of Isaac’s prospective wife, but in the quality of her character; most commentators identify the trait he’s seeking as chesed, or kindness. Improbably, he’s scarcely finished speaking when Rebecca—who the omniscient narrator informs us is from Abraham’s family—arrives; she fills her jug with water, offers it to Eliezer to drink, and then offers to water all ten of his camels until they finish drinking. She carries out the task with great alacrity: In a single verse, the text relates that she hurried (“vatimaher”) and that she ran (“vataratz”) to and from the well to fill the camel’s trough.

Even at first glance, this is an act of admirable generosity—to meet a stranger’s call and then offer more. But its full significance becomes clear when we consider the magnitude of the task. As Bible scholar Jack Sasson notes, one camel can drink up to 100 liters at a time, especially after a long journey. To provide ten camels with roughly 1000 liters of water would have taken dozens upon dozens of trips. Rebecca doesn’t commit to a mere gesture of kindness—she commits to lengthy, grueling labor on behalf of a stranger. And she does so with urgency! The test Eliezer devised was, it seems, not meant just to find a suitably kind match for Abraham’s son; if that had been the case, a woman who simply offered water to Eliezer would have sufficed. But this is a matter of perpetuating a legacy, building a world. Isaac, as the inheritor of Abraham’s mission in the world, needs a partner who is not merely pleasant; she needs to be committed.

In the past few weeks, I have been inundated with messages from organizations, friends, comrades, and strangers about how to move forward—what we need to do to face this mask-off fascism, to make sure as many people as possible survive. One theme that arises frequently is the need to be kind to one another, to be gentle in our interactions. And this kindness is good, vital, even essential—but it is also insufficient. Moments of care alone cannot sustain us as our broader systems collapse; what we require is labor. We all need a draught of water, but that offers only temporary reprieve. The 19th-century commentator the Malbim, describing Rebecca’s thought process, imagines her registering Eliezer as too weak even to tilt the water jar for himself, in pain and in need; surely, she thinks, if he can’t manage this, he can’t draw water for ten camels. What good is the reprieve of this drink if he remains stranded at the well, his camels too weak to go on? In Rebecca’s response, she registers Eliezer’s immediate needs as well as the support he requires for a long journey ahead, understanding both as necessary and urgent.

If anything is clear from the weeks since the election—and this past year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which our movements have been unable to stop—it is that we need to build. If the world we live in is one collapsing around us, one we cannot stand to perpetuate, we must build in the rubble. Our care for one another must take the shape not only of response to immediate needs, but also commitment to that long, slow work, even when it’s grueling. Daily kindnesses and care must be accompanied by a broader orientation towards our community, our world—toward forging structures that will sustain us, as we continue to toil with and for each other.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.