Oct

31

2025

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): This month, New York University’s Skirball Theater staged a production of Krapp’s Last Tape, one of the celebrated short works of absurdist master Samuel Beckett. In the play, Krapp, a rumpled sort of fellow, sits at a desk with a tape recorder in a spare room illuminated by a single hanging light. Over the course of his adult life, he has obsessively maintained a spoken diary, recorded on countless spools of tape and logged in a massive, dusty ledger.

On this particular “late evening in the future,” he listens to his 39-year-old self, who, it happens, has just re-listened to his 20-something-year-old self, full of fire and possibility. We hear of the death of his mother, of a dog and his rubber ball, of a romantic encounter with a woman on a pier. Present-day Krapp then makes a fresh recording—the titular “last tape,” in which he berates both Krapps the Younger, laments his literary failures, and once again recalls the encounter on the pier. Expectations for a full, brilliant future—how silly.

Many of the greats, including Michael Gambon and John Hurt, have played Krapp. This production, directed by Vicky Featherstone, features Stephen Rea, a proud son of Belfast known as much for his groundbreaking film and theatrical work as for his patriotism. Rea apparently recorded the younger Krapp’s dialogue years ago in hopes of one day playing the role. Watching it live, I was struck by the spare dramatics and the deliberateness of the comedic business, and marveled at Rea’s physical gifts as he shambles around a barren stage.

It’s a play very much about meditating (or obsessing) on the past, on fleeting moments, old patterns and recognitions, the curses we inflict on ourselves, and our unresolved pains and losses. Taking on Krapp requires the gravitas and clear vision of one who has lived, seen, erred, and kept going. Watching Rea as he rewinds, pauses, and fast forwards the tapes, always on the precipice of epiphany, is both aching and funny, a manifestation of how we both relive and re-edit our memories to avoid a true reckoning with who we are and who we have been.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): The first thing I heard at the end of Jewish Plot was the man next to me apologizing to his guest—“I’m sorry, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all”—which playwright Torrey Townsend would probably take as a compliment. My fellow theatergoer may have been surprised to see a work of meta-theater centered around a fictional play, a fact which the show’s marketing seems to purposely conceal, or he may have been caught off-guard by its in-your-face disgust with Zionism. But even though I knew to expect both of these going into it, I was still thoroughly shocked myself.

The play, which runs at Theatre 154 in New York City through November 7th, opens with actor Madeline Weinstein’s announcement that the cast will be performing the fictitious I.W. Bruntmole’s Jewish Plot, a supposed long-lost Victorian melodrama depicting antisemitic prejudices in 19th century London. What’s more interesting than the play-within-a-play itself––a story of a lover rejected by his beloved after she learns he’s Jewish, performed with flat but entertaining slapstick affect––is Weinstein’s frenetic presentation of it. She tells us that most of the cast and the director have quit at the last minute, and talks around the obviously related fact that Townsend, her friend, has gone more than a little insane over his many years of working on this show.

The first 20 minutes are just an aperitif to the show’s real meat, which begins when Townsend supposedly delivers a freshly-penned second act to the cast, sight unseen. What begins as a simple continuation of the melodrama quickly turns into Townsend’s personal rant against his agent, Joshua Harman, the theater world at large, and, most especially, against himself. “[Are you] too good at using your Jewishness to actually be successful?” an actor reads from his script.

Once we learn that Townsend’s grandfather was a Zionist propagandist, the play-within-the-play descends into an orgy of cruelty. The Jewish character is falsely accused of murder and blood libel, and is paraded through the town square; Weinstein reads off Townsend’s instructions for the audience themselves to hurl human excrement at the actor, then to strip naked and have a very literal orgy. The scene grows only more horrific as the show grinds on, transporting us into the pits of hell, interspersed with descriptions of the violence in Gaza and deranged quotes taken directly from Theodore Herzl and Townsend’s grandfather.

If the play is meant to capture what it means to be an American Jew right now––as its marketing suggests––it is a failure. Townsend’s screed is too rambly, and too specific to himself, to have any cohesive depiction of a general “Jewish experience.” Where it succeeds, and remarkably so, is in the very depiction of this failure. As Townsend’s anxiety over how to make sense and use of his Judaism spirals out of control, the melodrama’s Jewish protagonist begins to split in two. In the play itself, he is very firmly a Jew and suffers specifically from antisemitism, but as his existence becomes a general symbol of a scapegoat applied to contemporary times, his character begins to slip from a Jew into a metaphor for an immigrant or even a Palestinian. He becomes “Jewish” in scare-quotes, Jewish only in the sense that “everybody is somebody’s Jew,” as Townsend quotes Primo Levi.

At the root of Jewish Plot is this fundamental anxiety of non-identity, the inability to map the historical experiences of Jewish persecution onto a present where a Jewish ethno-state actively seeks to inflict this same persecution onto others, purportedly in the name of Jews as a whole. Beyond the very real, genocidal violence playing out in this drama is a metaphorical suicide, Jews murdering “Jews.” Townsend perhaps veers more toward shock value than thematic depth in his conclusion, but he’s one of the few artists I’ve seen depict this societal psychosis with appropriate gravity.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Pascal Bonitzer has been a presence on the French cinematic scene for nearly 60 years—as a critic at the Cahiers du Cinéma, as the screenwriter of countless films, and as a director. Though he has occasionally made a film that I liked, for the most part his name in the credits has signaled that I should run the other way. For every worthwhile film, like The Young Karl Marx, for which he wrote the screenplay, there have been many others I couldn’t abide. And never, until now, have I ever been emotionally touched by a film that bears his name.

Auction, his latest, is a pleasant surprise. Bonitzer has always been an exemplar of the worst form of intellectualisme, of a pretentious, self-absorbed cinema that eschews any human feeling, but here he presents a story of enormous directness and simplicity. It is a film in which the characters are recognizable human beings—flawed, changeable, and unpredictable.

Based on a true story, Auction recounts the recovery of a painting by Egon Schiele that went missing during World War II, stolen by the Germans from its Jewish owner. It is now in the possession of a simple factory worker in Alsace who, when he learns of its history, refuses to profit from it. He wants it to be returned to the heirs of its original owner. We are taken into the world of art auctions, of the wheeling and dealing of auction houses, lawyers, and collectors. Both honorable and dishonorable conduct are on display. Because this is a Bonitzer film, I spent its running time waiting for an unexpected and unlikely turn of events. Instead I got a film of remarkable warmth in which the most unexpected of all outcomes arrives for everyone involved: a happy ending.

The casting and acting are extraordinary. As strong as Alex Lutz is in the role of the auctioneer, who presents himself as a man who loves to be hated, he is overshadowed by the female leads. Lea Drucker and Nina Hamzawi are excellent as lawyers, but the film is stolen by Louise Chevillote as Aurore, a troubled woman, an emotionally unstable mythomaniac who nonetheless manages to see things more clearly than anyone else. Auction is intellectually and emotionally intelligent. It allows the characters to breathe and even redeem themselves.

One more rec: Film Forum in New York is currently screening a series of films in honor of the great film historian Kevin Brownlow, author of one of the essential books of film history, The Parade’s Gone By. It was originally scheduled for 2020, but Covid screwed things up. It will be running until November 6th, when it will screen two fascinating films by Brownlow himself. Winstanley (1975) is his telling of the story of Gerrard Winstanley, the leader and theoretician of the 17th century radical Levelers. The other is the cinematically and morally challenging It Happened Here (1965), which imagines an England that was invaded during World War II, was defeated, and became a collaborationist-run National Socialist state opposed by a not especially savory resistance movement. One character in the Resistance explains that “sometimes to fight fascism you have to use fascist methods.” A curious idea, and one that merits reflection.

This week’s parshah begins with Abraham’s divine election: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing,” God tells him. But as many commentators, both ancient and contemporary, have asked: Why is Abraham the one who’s blessed and charged with a sacred directive? What makes him special? In last week’s parshah, the text explains that Noah was singled out for survival because he was “a righteous man, blameless in his age,” yet here there’s no such explanation. A number of commentaries attempt to fill this gap by narrating how Abraham, brought up in a deeply idolatrous society, came to recognize and worship the one true God. Beyond modeling how one might enter into relationship with the divine, they offer a way of understanding what it takes to break from the prevailing norms of one’s society.

Maimonides gives one famous account of Abraham’s awakening, which he imagines grew out of the young patriarch’s own reasoning and solitary study. As soon as Abraham was weaned, Maimonides explains, he began contemplating the heavenly spheres, pondering how they could revolve without anyone to control them. “There was no teacher and no one to inform him,” Maimonides writes, because Abraham “was sunken in Ur Casdim amidst the foolish idolaters—his father and mother and all the people [around him] were idolaters, and he worshiped with them.” Yet despite his environs, little Abraham’s “heart wandered and he began to understand, until he grasped the truth, and understood the path of righteousness through his accurate comprehension.” Maimonides, ever the rationalist, believes that even amidst a hegemonic culture of wrongdoing, it was possible for Abraham to perceive the truth through the power of philosophical logic. Crucially, this was a long process: Maimonides states that even though Abraham began questioning as a young child, he didn’t become fully “aware of his Creator” until the age of 40. The Divrei Yirmiyahu, a commentator on Maimonides, notes that it was particularly hard for Abraham’s contemporaries to arrive at monotheism through their own contemplation because idolatry offered an alternative explanation of the universe. (This resonates with what we know from our own world: We see that while all people are capable of understanding that every human being deserves life and dignity, it is harder to intuitively arrive at this view if one is raised within a supremacist society that insists otherwise.) In this telling, the path of righteousness is self-evident—if only it is not obscured by society’s false gods.

Another account, from a midrash in Breshit Rabbah, is so famous that many mistake it for part of the biblical text. In this imagined history, Abraham’s father, Terah, was an idol merchant, and whenever potential customers would come to the family’s store, Abraham would dissuade them from making a purchase, mocking the idols’ ineptitude. One day, he smashed all but the largest idol and put a club in that idol’s hand. When his father returned, Abraham claimed that the idol had gotten angry and shattered the rest. Terah’s response of fury and disbelief serves as proof that he does not, in fact, believe the idols he worships are capable of such material action. A midrash in Sefer HaYashar provides background to this story, explaining how Abraham himself lost faith in the idols: We’re told that as a child, he noticed that the idols never consumed the food he offered them; once this aroused sufficient doubt, “the spirit of God” rested upon him. In contrast to Maimonides’s narrative, in which contemplation reveals the self-evident truth, this narrative shows how someone can come to doubt the systems and ideologies in which they’re enmeshed by observing their fallibility.

But as the midrash in Breshit Rabbah highlights, disillusionment doesn’t necessarily lead to rejection. That story ends with Terah, despite his implicit admission that idols are powerless, turning Abraham over to the evil ruler Nimrod, who casts him into a furnace as punishment for his religious defiance. (Miraculously, Abraham emerges unharmed.) Just as in our world, while there are people who sincerely believe the mythologies and propaganda of their society, there are also others who are too bought into the system to abandon it even when they realize it’s built on treacherous foundations. The fact that Terah betrays his own son to defend the lie to which he has committed his life is a chilling reminder of the power of hegemony over truth.

A final midrash presents a radically different vision of Abraham’s path to recognizing God, told through a parable: “This is analogous to one who was passing from place to place, and saw a burning building [birah doleket]. He said: ‘Is it possible that this building has no one in charge of it?’ The owner of the building looked out at him and said: ‘I am the owner of the building.’ So, because Abraham our patriarch had been saying: ‘Is it possible that this world is without someone in charge?,’ the Holy Blessed One looked at him and said to him: ‘I am the owner of the world.’” “Birah doleket,” rendered above as “burning building,” is often translated as “a lit-up palace”; according to this translation, Abraham, in Maimonidean fashion, recognizes that order and beauty must come from something greater. But as the midrash scholar Paul Mandel points out, although “birah” in later Hebrew means “palace,” in early Rabbinic Hebrew, it was used to refer to a large, unstable tenement building. Moreover, “doleket” simply does not mean “beautifully lit-up” and is never used this way in Hebrew; rather, it refers to something being consumed by fire.

If we read the story through the lens of this translation, the narrative changes dramatically: Abraham sees a fragile world in flames and wonders how there could be no one to tend to such horror; God peers out from the top story, announcing ownership of a world that it is burning with God trapped inside, and which God desperately needs help in tending to. In this model, realization of the order of things comes not through grasping some fundamental truth that lies beyond the strictures of one’s society, but through recognizing devastation. Abraham comes to understand that the world he walks through every day, the one everyone around him passes through so nonchalantly, is a world in flames. It’s also a recognition that even if only some in this society are responsible for igniting the fire, the rest are happy to let it burn—and that salvaging any world worth living in can only be done by first putting out the fire.

Breaking free of any hegemonic ideology is a daunting task. The rabbis, in explaining Abraham’s origin story, nonetheless insist that being raised and conditioned in a corrupt society neither guarantees nor excuses one’s own corruption. Maimonides, in his description of what happened following Abraham’s epiphany, also adds an important addendum: “When he recognized and knew God, he began to formulate replies to the inhabitants of Ur Kasdim and debate with them, telling them that they were not following a proper path. He broke their idols and began to teach the people that it is fitting to serve only the God of the world.” Recognition alone is not enough; discovering a moral truth—or, inversely, recognizing prevailing moral corruption—comes with the attendant obligation to move one’s society. If we wish to walk in the ways of Abraham, we must learn from the model of the great original iconoclast: to examine our world with clear eyes, to recognize the falsehoods and the flames, and to bring others along with us on the journey forward.

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