Nov

8

2024

Daniel May (publisher): I thought I was prepared. Intellectually, analytically, I expected it. But emotionally, it turns out, I wasn’t ready. The dread began to build the evening of the vice presidential debate, which, I know, is a campaign ritual of next to no consequence. We were driving from Brooklyn to Boston to visit my wife’s parents that night, and we listened to the debate on the radio; every twenty minutes or so the static would drown out the dialogue and we’d scan the stations to pick it up again. Something about the setting—the sea of brake lights in front of us on the interstate, the glow of the dash, our kids sleeping in the backseat—gave the words a weird weight, and stripped of the visceral revulsion I feel when watching Trump, I suddenly understood the basic architecture of the race. No matter the question, Vance’s answer was the same: The government is run by feckless bureaucrats who do the bidding of a global elite and have allowed an invasion of criminal immigrants across our borders who are driving down your wages and driving up your housing costs. In response, Walz would say something about trusted leadership and effective governance. After it ended, we turned off the radio and sat in silence for a few minutes until one of us said: “We are so fucked.”

The next morning, I started Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Over the next three days, I was in its grip in a way that reminded me of reading in my adolescence, when a book would become my world, its scenes and characters somehow more alive and demanding than the scenes and characters of my own life. As a child, this was wondrous. As an adult responsible for, among other things, the care of two small children, this was unsettling. The reading felt strangely physical; I would open the book and feel my chest tighten. I had visions of the pages reaching up my chest and wrapping themselves in cords around my neck. I burned through all but the last chapter in Boston, but back in Brooklyn, I let the book sit by my bedside for weeks before finishing it. I didn’t want to be back in its terrible hold.

The book imagines the descent of present-day Ireland into first fascism and then civil war. It tells this story from the perspective of Eilish Stack, a mother of four whose husband, Larry, works for the teacher’s union and is, early in the book, arrested and imprisoned for leading a demonstration. Eilish tries unsuccessfully to gain any information about Larry—where he’s being held, what he’s being held for, whether there will be a trial. At work, her marriage to a disappeared dissident raises suspicion among her supervisors, which quickly leads to her firing. As protest against the state turns into armed rebellion, she works to smuggle her eldest son out of the country. Instead, he joins the resistance.

For the first hundred pages or so, I thought the book was about fascism. And through short scenes of bureaucratic negotiation and workplace culture, Lynch evocatively portrays how democratic culture might slip from nationalism into authoritarianism and then into totalitarianism. However, Lynch’s primary interest is not political, but ethical.

The world of the book is entirely contained by Eilish’s perspective, and to the extent that there is a narrative arc, it is in the narrowing of that perspective as the range of her options disintegrates. As violence consumes her neighborhood, the only question is how to keep her family alive. The wisest around her insist that she should leave, but she has a father struggling with dementia, a son at war, and a husband she cannot accept is dead. For Eilish, there is no honorable struggle to join, no politics to be analyzed, no social context to be understood. There is only the question of how to keep her family alive amid total social and political disintegration.

In interviews about the book, Lynch has said that it was inspired by the image, so widely shared, of the drowned migrant child on the shore of the Mediterranean. “Why don’t I feel this more?” he recalls asking himself. He set out on what he called an exercise in “radical empathy,” imagining the unraveling of his own country, Ireland, into an unlivable warzone, the sort of place that you would have no choice but to flee with your family, on a fragile raft you knew might not hold together in the wind.

As an exercise in empathy, the novel raises a troubling question: For white readers, must the avenue of understanding run through white examples? As the book became, for me, less about Trump and more about Syria and then fully about Gaza, it grew harder and harder for me to read. But what does it say about me that this book imagining the destruction of Dublin had a greater emotional hold on me than many images I’ve consumed over the last year of the actual destruction of Gaza? What does it say that I felt that horror so forcefully when asked to imagine it in a city that felt more like my own?

There are some obviously damning answers to these questions, and there is truth in those answers. But I think there are also more generous answers, that have something to do with novels and what they ask of us, which in turn has something to do with spending hours with people who aren’t real and yet whom we can know intimately. In this respect, reading a novel is always an exercise in radical empathy. Prophet Song is powerful because of the depth of the empathy that runs through it, but it is interesting, and haunting, because of the difficult questions it raises about the limits of that empathy.

I tend towards the material in my political analysis, and I generally feel that liberals as a whole dramatically inflate the political importance of empathy. But I also know that politics is about solidarity, in the most mundane sense: who are you with, and who are you against. Drawing on deep reservoirs of nationalism, Trump and the right draw their lines clearly and starkly. Among the lessons of this election is just how far we on the left have to go in order to begin to offer an alternative vision of solidarity that can contest for power. I don’t know that we need any reminders of just how important that work is. But if you do, I’ve got a book for you to read.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I think of myself as being pretty knowledgeable about cartoons—which make up the majority of television shows I watch—but I had not heard of Cartoon Network’s Over the Garden Wall until my boyfriend suggested we watch it last month. The series follows two half-brothers, Wirt and Greg, who are lost in the woods and trying to find their way home. The scenarios they find themselves in and the characters they encounter are sometimes full of whimsical delight, such as a riverboat populated by posh frogs and a schoolteacher’s alphabetical lament over a missing lover. At other times, they are steeped in shadowy horror. Both registers are unmatched—in visuals and audio—by any other animated work I’ve seen.

Created by Adventure Time’s Patrick McHale, the show celebrated its tenth anniversary this week. Originally aired in 2014 as the network’s first mini-series, Over the Garden Wall won that year’s Emmy for Outstanding Animated Picture, beating out episodes of The Simpsons, Archer, South Park, and Bob’s Burgers for the title. It is a beautiful work of art, with a mix of illustration styles; a score rooted in opera, folk music, and jazz; and detailed attention to architectural designs and fashion trends across eras. I don’t think a character has captured my heart quite like Greg, whose combination of stubbornness and curiosity feels like the epitome of a beloved and annoying younger brother. If you have not seen Over the Garden Wall—or if it’s been years since you have—it is worth watching for that small pleasure alone.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mexican Prints at the Vanguard, is an exciting show on two levels: aesthetic and historical. It is, first of all, a marvelously organized display of wondrous prints made between the 18th and mid-20th century. But both the works themselves—most of which were political productions by radical artists—and the rigorous presentation of their context also serve as a reminder of just how revolutionary the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) really was. Indeed, it helps one to understand that the revolution didn’t really end in 1920, but rather was carried on, with highs and lows, into at least the 1940s—particularly under President Lázaro Cárdenas, a leader whose name seldom appears among the greats of Latin American revolution, but who here gets his due.

The exhibition gives pride of place to representations of the leaders and campesinos of the armed phase of the revolution, even in works produced later: We have Rufino Tamayo’s simple and moving El Revolucionario (1929–30), in which a gun-toting campesino looks off into the distance, and Diego Rivera’s classic lithograph, Zapata (1932), which depicts the general alongside his horse. But the show also bears on other revolutionary scenes, ones far less known yet every bit as radical. For instance, a poster by Alfredo Zalce—made for Teachers’ Day, celebrated every May 15th since 1918—is a tribute to the role that educators played in liberating Mexico. In a frame marked “yesterday,” it shows a teacher being shot down during the Cristero Rebellion, a response to the secularization of Mexican education; below, under the heading “today,” an orderly class of women receive an education once forbidden to them. Elsewhere, we see a poster of common people handing over coins, doing their part to clear the debt that Mexico incurred when Cárdenas nationalized foreign oil companies in 1938.

The exhibition is weighted heavily toward the Mexican Communist Party—which was never large, but which carried great weight in the art world. The show includes the stunning masthead of the party’s paper, El Machete, made by David Alfaro Siqueiros. The Soviet Union features prominently: In one bold poster, a Red Army soldier holds his rifle at the ready, accompanied by the text, “The Soviet front is our first line of defense. Support it!”; Lenin and Stalin also make appearances. More subtly Soviet is a print showing four great Mexican figures—Madero, Zapata, Cárdenas, and Camacho—lined up exactly as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin were in Soviet posters of the time.

Across many of these works, fascism is condemned in both its local and foreign forms, and the cause of Spain is defended, emphasizing the internationalism of the Mexican Revolution. Ultimately, Mexican Prints at the Vanguard provides an invaluable guide to the revolutionary politics and history of a nation whose radicalism is too often obscured, and whose people are regularly traduced.

This week’s parshah, Lech Lecha, was also the weekly Torah reading that followed the 2016 election. I remember feeling then that its description of God’s assurances to Abraham rang hollow in the face of my shattered liberal optimism. Now, I find myself an unsurprised but still despondent leftist, grappling with the déjà vu of returning to this parshah after the same awful result, consumed with the feeling that we have been unable to collectively change course.

The rabbinic commentators are also familiar with this feeling of living the same events over again. In fact, they read this disconcerting sentiment into the text of our parshah. Lech Lecha tells the story of Abraham’s early relationship with God, as mediated through the divine promise of land and progeny. The rabbis understand the events of this parshah as prefigurative: “You find that everything that is written in Abraham’s regard is written regarding his descendants.” Thus, just as Abraham travels to Egypt from the promised land of Canaan fleeing famine, so does his grandson Jacob and his family. Just as Abraham is threatened with death by Pharaoh, so are all the Israelite firstborns in Egypt. And just as Abraham leaves Egypt wealthy after conflict, so do the Israelites after their liberation from slavery.

The medieval mystical commentator Nachmanides follows the midrash in interpreting the events of this parshah as anticipating later parts of the Israelites’ story, employing the medieval commentarial principle of “maaseh avot siman l’banim” (“the actions of our ancestors are an omen for their children”), which holds that the stories of the core characters of Breishit often foreshadow later parts of the Torah. But while the rabbis of the midrash focus on Abraham, Nachmanides calls attention to our other ancestor featured in this parshah: Sarah. As Abraham and his clan enter Egypt from Canaan, he turns to his wife and asks her to lie for him: “If the Egyptians see you, and think, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live. Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.” Sarah complies, and is immediately captured and taken into sexual slavery by Pharaoh. God (not Abraham—he is too busy being showered with wealth in the form of livestock) intervenes on her behalf, inflicting a plague on Pharaoh and his household. This prompts the Egyptian ruler to realize what has happened. He summons Abraham to ask why he lied, and then sends him and Sarah away, with Abraham retaining all the bounty he had accumulated.

Nachmanides criticizes Abraham for his behavior, writing that he sinned in putting his wife in such a horrific situation out of fear for his own life. Abraham’s actions, according to Nachmanides, prefigure the later enslavement of the Jewish people: “It was because of this deed that the exile in the land of Egypt by Pharaoh was decreed for his children.” In the hands of Nachmanides, the principle of “maaseh avot siman l’banim” is thus not simply a means of noting narrative foreshadowing, but acquires a moral, causal valence. The feminist Torah scholar Rabbi Dr. Bonna Devora Haberman z”l extends this reading to speak to the way that harmful actions recur, casting our inability to break patterns as central to our wrongdoing. Writing about Abraham’s actions and the future enslavement of his descendents in Egypt, Haberman notes, “Generations later still, many Jews and non-Jews continue to practice the same abuses in our families, communities, and between nations.” That is to say, there are consequences when we fail to learn the lessons of the past, and the repetition of earlier misdeeds will lead to catastrophe.

We need to learn how to break patterns in order to create structural change, rather than taking pride in small wins that we soon discover are easily reversed. Yes, Sarah was freed from Pharaoh, but we have no indication that Abraham repented, or that he taught his children a different way of behaving; indeed, a few short generations later, Sarah’s descendants were back in Egypt, suffering as she did. We can sink into the same patterns, read the same parshiyot, and end up back in the same narrow places. But we can also seek out the places where our ancestors broke free and never went back—such as Abraham’s bold decision in our parshah to renounce the idolatrous ways of his parents and commit himself to the God of the Jewish people. There are moments when iconoclasm shifts the course of the world, when our stories change permanently. And so yes, we read the same sections of the Torah each year. But we read them as different people in a different world. And this in and of itself can be the start of change.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.