Oct

3

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In 2021, I recommended Botte di Ferro, a play by Ben Gassman about a tumultuous love affair between two Queens kids moving into early adulthood. The sequel, Adult Relationships, which runs at The Tank in New York City from November 1st–21st, is well worth your time.

Here, Jess Barbagallo and Layla Khoshnoudi reprise their roles as Noah and Negeen, two not-meant-to-be high school sweethearts—though that term is far too innocent to capture the way these two hurt and mock each other, crossing boundaries that might otherwise lead to restraining orders—who can’t seem to let it lie. They’re middle-aged now, both married with kids, and, in a classic dramatic setup, have been brought together by the death of a troubled friend. They haven’t spoken in many years—they’re wary of one another, and also moths to the flame. The pleasure of the show is in their chemistry, as we watch their old intimacy creep back in—and combust.

While Botte di Ferro was told with a shuffled chronology, almost in the form of memory, Adult Relationships feels more immediate, following the erstwhile lovers over the course of a single night, as the funeral gives way to a raucous, regressive (in the Freudian sense) high school reunion. The dancer Lena Engelstein stands in for the crowd of third-culture adult classmates as they blur around and intrude on and provoke our leading non-couple. (This was the most experimental and unfinished piece of the readthrough I saw, so I’m excited to see how it settled in the fully staged show.)

Through the course of these two shows, Noah and Negeen have joined my personal pantheon of dramatic couples. As in another personal fav, Normal People (the show adaptation, more so than the book), the relationship becomes a prism to explore the passage of time—both the imprint of young love and its long wake.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Despite my deep and abiding love for my wife, I’ve never been able to share her admiration for Gertrude Stein, whose writings have always been little more than gibberish to me. When Edwin Frank, in his splendid account of the 20th century novel, Stranger Than Fiction, included Stein’s Three Lives as one of the central books of the period I decided to give it an umpteenth try, and discovered that he and my wife were right. It was a remarkable book, and a surprisingly enjoyable read.

And so I was led to read Francesca Wade’s Gertude Stein: An Afterlife, out this month from Scribner. Wade’s vibrant volume is several books in one. First of all, it’s an astute, honest, and open-minded account of the subject’s life. Stein, to put it bluntly, was not a nice person. She was quick to take offense, displayed little loyalty to friends and admirers, and was jealous of the success of others—James Joyce being a particular bête noire.

Wade’s book is also, and necessarily, an account of the life of Alice Toklas, Stein’s devoted partner. It’s also necessarily an examination of the couple they formed, one that was admired by some, and derided by many more who found the power dynamic between them baffling and upsetting. What made that dynamic especially odd, as Wade very clearly shows, is that while most people thought Stein all but crushed Toklas, who surrendered all of her individuality and talent on the altar of Stein’s genius, there were others, like Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, who found Toklas’ denigration of Stein repellent.

Wade doesn’t fall into either of these camps, and finds that the strange balance the two women found was necessary both to their thriving and lasting as a couple and for the nurturing of Stein’s genius. One can be convinced by Wade on this point or not, but it’s never a good idea to assume the right to judge another couple from the outside. They were what they were, and their partnership and love lasted decades, so who are we to judge?

Finally, the book reminds us of the impact Stein has had on modernist and post-modernist culture, from John Cage to The Living Theater to Frank O’Hara.

With great care and intelligence, Wade makes Stein’s writings appear to be far more coherent, far more full of human meaning and significance than many have found in them. Wade’s affection for The Making of Americans, Stein’s magnum opus weighing it at well over 1,000 pages, is infectious. In Wade’s hands this is not the assemblage of disjointed sentences and words it might seem to be, but rather a way of understanding humankind. Wade makes it all seem so attractive that I went as far as downloading The Making of Americans onto my Kindle. That I’ve gotten even that close to reading the book is a tribute to Wade’s persuasiveness as a critic and biographer.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I’m dashing off this recommendation early in the week, as I prepare for Yom Kippur and its attendant cycles of emotions, because I want to take a moment to put Ira Khonen Temple’s music in front of you while they’re beginning their East Coast tour. Temple (a recent guest on On the Nose) is a songwriter, musician, and cultural organizer, and their forthcoming album, Strange Tongue / Mistame-Loshn, is one in which, in their words, “queer, trans songwriting meets the urgent, living breath of Yiddish culture.” Elsewhere, they describe it as being “about heartbreak, courage and rebellion.” I always delight in hearing Temple’s accordion when I chance upon it, including, memorably, alongside Morgan Bassichis’s singing in Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah on a triangle of Manhattan pavement.

In their new music video, “Change My Shoes,” their playfulness and ingenuity come through—and we can glimpse, but not fully appreciate, the depth of their historical knowledge of Yiddish and folk music and culture. When they perform live, their music roots me to the spot; it blends past and present, sorrow and chaos and radiance. I’m excited to listen to the full album when it drops. And for friends in Brooklyn, I’ll see you at the Jalopy on Monday.

Parshat Haazinu, the penultimate portion in the Torah, contains one of Moses’s last speeches to the Israelites. He knows that he is about to ascend Mount Nebo, where he will look from afar at the Promised Land and take his final breaths. He has little time left to instruct the nation he has guided through the wilderness, and in this pivotal moment, he abandons the prose he has used throughout the rest of Devarim and begins to speak in verse. Through his turn to poetry, Moses points the Israelites—and the reader—toward an overwhelmingly expansive vision of God.

He accomplishes this by, in the words of rabbi and Bible scholar Shai Held, “bombard[ing] the reader with a seemingly endless array of theological metaphors.” These metaphors for God appear in rapid succession and often contradict each other. In just a few verses, Moses presents God as male and female, as animate and inanimate, as relatably human and incomprehensibly other. God’s words are dew and rain; God flares up in fire. God labors to birth the people and nurses them like a mother; God is a valiant warrior. God is a rock, steady and fixed; God bears a flashing blade, flying unpredictably through the air. The effect is destabilizing, making it impossible to abide in, or even to comfortably grasp, any one image of the divine. By mixing his metaphors so wildly, Moses seems to be insisting that God is beyond any constrained categories of the human mind.

This swirl of language demands that we understand divinity non-dualistically, a way of thinking that allows us to dwell in contradictions without insisting on resolving them. In an 1817 letter to his brother, the poet John Keats famously described this kind of consciousness as “negative capability”: the state “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative capability involves a rejection of the idea that there is any one absolute, unassailable way of knowing the world; for Keats, a great artist must accept that contrasting claims or modes of experience can be true simultaneously. Our parshah summons us to a similar awareness not only in its whirlwind of images, but within an individual comparison: Remarking on the verse that compares God to “an eagle who rouses its nestlings, gliding down to its young,” the medieval commentator Rashi writes that an eagle “hovers above its nestlings—touching them and yet not touching them; this [touching and not touching at once] is like God.” Much as Keats saw negative capability as a precondition for producing great art, Rashi sees it as a precondition for a relationship with God.

This vision of God demands profound humility from any theologian or seeker. Indeed, the Hasidic mystic Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev sees this verse as sounding a cautionary note against any form of religious arrogance: “Woe to the person who says, ‘I have arrived, I understand God,’” he explains. In truth, “the higher the level on which someone serves God, the more they come to know how a comprehension of God can never be reached.” Whatever insights one has of God, whatever metaphors one finds helpful and resonant, God is always beyond them.

However humbling this recognition, it can also empower us to experiment freely with our theological language for the divine. The high holiday liturgy is replete with descriptions of God as King; for many of us, such patriarchal and even authoritarian images prove deeply alienating. But our parshah’s capacious, unfixed mode of imagining God can offer license to reconceive of God in newly liberating ways. In a 1989 essay, the poet and liturgist Marcia Falk describes her process of using diverse biblical images—wellsprings, fountains, wind, breath, and more—to “serve as fresh metaphors for Divinity,” in order to “shatter the idolatrous reign of the lord/God/king.” Contrary to those who would dismiss such revision as a heretical, contemporary innovation, our parshah shows that this project—invoking new, subversive metaphors for God to destabilize inherited theological conceptions—has deep roots in Jewish tradition.

For Falk, this feminist work also aimed “to help construct a theology of immanence” to “affirm the sanctity of the world”—that is, to help us turn our attention to the divinity inherent in all things. Our parshah’s profusion of images likewise makes God manifest through the irreducible, beautiful complexity of earthly life. As we emerge from the Days of Awe ready to strive to make this year better than the last, perhaps it might help us hold fast to the certainty of that splendor even as we accept the limits of our understanding.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.