Oct

17

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For fans of the Florida issue of Jewish Currents, I recommend Sasha Wortzel’s new film River of Grass, a meditation on the Everglades. The film braids the writing and activism of environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who died in 1998 at 108; the struggles of those currently fighting the environmental degradation of the area by the likes of Big Ag and others; and the author’s own personal recollections of growing up amid the unique ecology of South Florida. While it provides a useful, cogent portrait of current political action—most prominently through the work of Miccosukee activist and educator Betty Osceola, whose indigenous-led “prayer walks” have recently targeted the notorious detention camp Alligator Alcatraz—it is not afraid to slow down, to let the filmmaker think aloud, remember, dream.

Having myself grown up on the dredged swamp that is South Florida, with evidence of its wildness always threatening to come in—the storm leaking through roofs and window frames, the alligators in swimming pools, the gnats and mosquitoes in swarms—I felt that potent mix of despair and love that is sometimes called “climate grief” in Wortzel’s close attention to the landscape, and to the people who are trying to stave off the destruction one Burmese python at a time. The necessity of this work in a circumstance perhaps past hope is what lends the film its spiritual core.

There are upcoming showings of River of Grass in Miami and New York City, including one sponsored by JC, and moderated by me.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Early in Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, in the year 1998, our then-15-year-old protagonist Bunny Glenn finds herself in an apartment in Baku, in conversation with Fuad Bay, her Azerbaijani neighbor, and Eddie, a crushable British documentary filmmaker. The setup gives Eddie an opportunity to enlighten both Bunny and the reader about the political economy of the oil trickling beneath the “knobby paved streets” of Baku that Bunny, a lonely Foreign Service brat, wanders for hours each day. He rehearses the story of “Mr. Five Percent,” a man who happened to get in just on time on the “Contract of the Century” for Azerbaijan’s oil rights as the Soviet Union was dissolving. The conversation also gives Bunny, sporting freshly blow-dryed hair and a new pink dress, the opportunity to fantasize: “Bunny let herself imagine that she and Eddie were a couple, say a royal couple, going off to a state dinner . . . Eddie had recently come from the shower, Bunny knew from his damp hair, the visible smoothness of his cheek, some faintly herbal smell.” So established are the two overlapping frames of Mobility. Always hovering in the background is the oil industry, the awe-inspiring feat of transporting the substance beneath oceans, the billions of lives powered by its byproducts, the unfathomable wealth earned along its path. In the foreground is the more manageable story of one Bunny Glenn as she confronts the vagaries of adolescence and early adulthood: vexing men, family drama, postgrad drift, calorie counting, the corporate ladder. Kiesling writes deftly in both registers, precise and descriptive but never overwrought.

After the early scenes in Baku, Bunny once again finds herself shoulder-to-shoulder with the world of oil a few years after college when she winds up back at the family home in Beaumont, Texas, nursing a breakup and navigating bleak career prospects. Hired as a temp admin at a local engineering firm, she impresses her boss with her copy-editing skills and finagles her way into a communications position at his in-laws’ family oil company. An Obama devotee who “believes in global warming,” Bunny has some discomfort with her new field—“the flares, the sour gas, the oceans slicked with crude”—but not enough to overcome her relief at finally being able to move into her own apartment, to afford health care and Zumba classes. She takes heart in promises that she will eventually get to work on the company’s burgeoning “renewables” division (an attempt to fortify the business against shifting political winds) and aligns herself with campaigns to diversify the racial and gender makeup of the oil industry, allowing her to feel that she is fighting some dragon after all. And, industry compatriots and her consultant fiancé remind her, what might society look like for a woman like her without oil? Wouldn’t she be reduced to giving birth “outside in a shed,” rather than a hospital full of machines?

While Bunny is a shallow and oblivious character, Kiesling is gentle enough with her that she sometimes still earns the reader’s affinity, especially given how often the accurate political rebukes to her line of work come dripping in misogynistic condescension, whether from the dirtbag muckraking journalists in ‘90s Baku or, later, from her older brother John, who runs free in leftist intellectual circles in Ukraine while Bunny gets stuck in suburban Texas supporting their newly divorced mother. The exception is Sofie, John’s girlfriend, a Swedish environmental journalist whose cocktail of kindness, coolness, conviction, and intellect most unsettles Bunny’s confidence in her path. During one political argument with bystanders, Bunny observes that “Sofie was like a man in that she could speak confidently and at length, but like a woman in that she could read and direct the energy produced by the things she said.” And still, Sofie’s terms of articulating political resistance rarely connect with Bunny in ways she could imagine applying to her own life. “I’m not having children . . . the world does not need another child of affluent people in the West,” she tells Bunny, who “had never heard anyone say this before.”

On the whole, as it tracks years of such discussions amid its main character’s pursuit of career mobility, Mobility is a novel about the temptations of complicity, and how difficult they can be to resist when the negative externalities are still a few years and miles away, less tangible than health insurance or a nice hotel on the company card. And, in its final pages, in a turn towards somber speculative mode, it becomes a novel about what it might look like when those compromises finally catch up with us.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Iranian director Jafar Panahi is world cinema’s symbol of resistance. Arrested and banned from making films by the Islamic Republic, he has, since his release from prison, remained in Iran. During the years-long ban he found clever and successful ways to continue producing films, including one called This is Not a Film. He had other people direct his films for him at his ultimate direction, or instead of making a film shot on film or digitally, he would make one with his phone. Through all this, a humanist refusal to submit to repression and a mocking resistance to the state has been a constant in his work.

It Was Just an Accident is his first film under the new dispensation. One might think Panahi would avoid controversy his first time out, but instead he has produced his fiercest, most directly political film. Resistance to the mullahs is everywhere present in It Was Just an Accident. Women go scarfless, and a couple is preparing to wed even though the bride is already pregnant—proof of the crime of premarital sex. The petty criminality and venality of Iranian society is laid bare. Bribes are demanded by everyone in the film: police, gas station attendants, nurses, everyone. Iran’s ostensibly Muslim society is rotted and rotten.

The focus of the film is Vahid. He’s a schlubby nobody who is first presented as a side character in what looks like it will be a story about a family who, on their way home through a dark night, accidentally run over a dog. Is this the accident of the title? The car breaks down in front of a warehouse, where one of the workers fixes the car. The boss, Vahid, drives into town in his van and suddenly he stops, swings open the passenger door, and knocks out a pedestrian, who he loads into the van. He drives to the desert and digs a grave, into which he throws the pedestrian and proceeds to bury him alive.

What follows is a tale of resistance, and a reflection on revenge and retribution. Vahid, we learn, was a prisoner of the regime, arrested for participating in a strike. He recognized the pedestrian, whose car had broken down in front of his shop, as his torturer. Or is he? Vahid drives around picking up people who shared his time in jail in an effort to have his suspicion verified.

With the supposed torturer locked in a crate, the former prisoners, two of them in their wedding attire, attempt to definitively determine if their captive is Pegleg, the man who tortured and raped them. Panahi, almost in the style of Hitchcock in The Trouble With Harry, treats the progress and process of judgment with a light, at times comic touch. The former prisoners want to kill Pegleg, but is this Pegleg? Justice must be done, but it won’t be meted out unless they are certain the right man will pay for the crimes.

Throughout the film the former prisoners, resisters all, maintain their humanity. They refuse to act in the arbitrary fashion they know from their dealings with the state’s repressive apparatus. They even assist their captive’s wife when her labor begins and pay for her admission to the hospital.

Panahi’s final message in It Was Just an Accident is that those who resist the theocrats and pay dearly for their refusal to submit will never become like their foes. The inhuman treatment they have received has not dehumanized them. Panahi’s return to making actual films is a tribute to his bravery and decency.

Last week, we mistakenly sent out the dvar Torah on Parshat Breishit, which is read tomorrow morning. We apologize for the error and are re-sharing that commentary now.

Shortly after October 7th, I led a group of Jewish Currents readers in a text study about mourning. At one point, we read about the custom of burying a murder victim as found, without the traditional rituals of bathing or shrouding the body, in order “to raise up anger and to wreak vengeance,” as the 16th-century Eastern European commentator Rabbi David HaLevi Segal puts it. As I hoped, we discussed the desire to do evil in return, which was of course the order of the day. While most of us debated whether the violence solicited was human or divine, the cartoonist Eli Valley made the provocative suggestion that God was the object of the fury, as if the practice anticipated Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust play, The Trial of God, in which the victims of the Khmelnytsky massacre arraign the Deity.

The Rabbis had the same thought about the world’s very first murder, which occurs in this week’s parshah, Breishit. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai compares Cain and Abel to two gladiators wrestling before a king who can stop the fight when he pleases, but chooses not to intervene. As the loser is dying, he howls, “Who will plead my case before the king?” Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai likens these desperate last words to Abel’s posthumous plea; when God confronts Cain, he says, “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” This midrash is shocking, not least to its author, who prefaces his parable, “The matter is hard for the one who says it; it is impossible for the mouth to make it explicit.” Ironically, Abel’s blood pleads for justice from the authority who oversaw his murder—indeed, the analogy implies, from someone who valued his life less than the spectacle of his death. It is as if God said to Cain, as a later midrash indeed suggests, “your brother’s blood is crying out about me from the ground.” (The difference between “to” and “about” here is merely vocalic.) Proving that not only moderns can interrogate the ways of God to man, this midrash outstrips even Wiesel, who piously imagines a trial scene, replete with evidence, moral claims, and reasoned judgments. For Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, only suckers mistake our world for a courtroom. It is instead a coliseum, in which the sole verdict is the emperor’s pollice verso, his capriciously turned thumb delivering or withholding mercy.

Atheism is in the air in the legends surrounding Cain: A fanciful, late-antique Aramaic translation has him proclaiming, “there is no judge and no judgment” before killing his brother, in what became the slogan of Jewish disbelief. Yet I doubt Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai was preaching godlessness, which would make his long career as a conscientious legalist and pious exegete a very strange, elaborate bit. So what was he teaching? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that in Breishit, Cain gets an oddly light sentence. Although biblical laws uniformly prescribe execution for intentional homicide, Cain lives on, and is even divinely protected from human retribution (“whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance”); although cursed to wander the earth, he promptly settles (in the absurdly named “land of Wander,” as if his exile were merely lexical), builds a city, and starts a family. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai is explaining this non-punishment as God’s acceptance of complicity. The king refuses to make the gladiator the scapegoat for the evils of the coliseum.

Such guilt-ridden mercy reminds me of an idea taught by my ancestor, the 18th-century Hasidic Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who assured his followers that when human beings are judged on the high holidays, we can be sure of an acquittal, because, after all, it was God, not us, who created the evil impulse. Remarkably, the Berditchever is casting himself, and all humanity, as Cain, repeating an argument the midrash assigns to the murderer pleading his case before God. After weeks of chest-beating and grovelling, such cynical optimism can feel refreshing. But the Berditchever Rebbe’s leniency implies a stringent catch. For, of course, we too can find ourselves in the position of the judge within rotten, unjust structures. (I think of this point, for instance, when I grade papers written by working-class students poorly educated in an underfunded school system—and of course, a good many politicians who crow about punitive “law and order” could profitably reflect on it as well.)

Who knows if there is divine justice or not, whether our cosmos is a courtroom or a coliseum? We may be certain, however, that our capitalist imperium is the latter, and we might thus learn from Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai’s God to pardon those trespasses in which we ourselves are implicated.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, will be published in November 2025.