Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): One of the best things I’ve read since Zohran Mamdani’s momentous win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary was this essay by Abdaljawad Omar in Mondoweiss, which explores the shifting role of Israel in American politics. Since Andrew Cuomo conceded to the 33-year-old socialist Tuesday night, much of the left has been in a state of euphoria; everyone I know is gorging on hope, stuffing it into their cheeks like chipmunks before a long winter. I’m not generally the hopeful sort—I find it more bearable to resolve to keep on without it—but I have rationed myself some happiness this week, and I have felt irritated by the rumblings of those for whom nothing is ever good enough. There were many who criticized Mamdani for what I believed to be a brilliant solution to that age-old shibboleth, the question of Israel’s “right to exist”; Mamdani asserted that he believes Israel has a right to exist “as a state with equal rights,” an unassailable answer that is only enhanced by the way it undoes itself, exposing the impossibility of such a prospect. Others were annoyed with the space he devoted to validating Jewish fear, even as he maintained his commitment to Palestinian freedom. Yes, this whole setup is irredeemably racist! Mamdani shouldn’t be dogged by this question everywhere he goes. But he is, and it’s refreshing to see him handle it with grace, and then win.

Omar never equivocates on the significance of Mamdani’s victory. On the contrary, he identifies it as a “monumental” sea change in American politics. But he also helped me better understand the anxieties of those who are not sated by Mamdani’s performance, who critique “not out of cynicism but historical memory,” while also offering an illuminating analysis of just what has changed. This is not an overnight transformation from the hegemony of support for Israel to the embrace of Palestinian liberation, but rather a gradual arrival to a place where the issue has become “contested terrain—one in which candidates can engage, hedge, affirm, or deflect without automatic disqualification.” If there is opportunity here, there is also a risk: that “the system, unable to fully neutralize Palestine as a politics, will instead absorb it as discourse—sanitized, defanged, and made legible only through the grammar of ‘balance.’”

Where the piece shines brightest is in its apt descriptions of Zionist excess, and the symptoms we are witnessing of an America increasingly chafing under its weight. “When every critique becomes a potential hate crime, when every call for ceasefire is labeled incitement, and when every protest is framed as an antisemitic gathering—something begins to shift in the symbolic order. The very machinery meant to preserve Israel’s hegemonic position in American moral life begins to unravel it,” he writes. The electorate is exhausted by the badgering about “Israel’s right to exist,” by “the politician’s obligatory fealty, the ritualistic declarations of support.” They have become stale in repetition, drawn too much attention to the coercive machinery. We are not, Omar asserts, “in the presence of a victorious counter-hegemony, but in the ruins of a narrative that exhausted itself by insisting too much, too often, and at the expense of everything else.”

This analysis resonates, and while it comes as some relief, it also opens onto some anxiety of my own. Omar leaves mainstream American Jews outside the frame of his analysis, and yet they are everywhere in the piece, insisting on narrative supremacy. Since Tuesday, many of them have been caught in an embarrassingly public racist meltdown, expressing hysterical delusions that the principled Mamdani is going to do 9/11 or shut down all the synagogues. It is not hard to see how an exhaustion with the demands of Zionist fealty inevitably leads to exhaustion with those Jewish communal enforcers who are requiring it, often at the expense of a focus on the material issues that immiserate their neighbors. This is exactly what right-wingers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are picking up on when they offer up anti-interventionism with a side of antisemitic conspiracy. But the appeal is not limited to the right. It is a condition ripe for the proliferation of antisemitism, and for its utter disregard, from which all of us will suffer.

Daniel May (publisher): No one knows how to make magazines work. The algorithms that once had a knack for getting articles you might want to read in front of your scrolling eyeballs now just feed you “influencer content” and advertisements for whatever shoe you last looked at. As traffic has slowed, online advertising that once generated real money has dwindled. Growing a substantial subscriber base requires putting content behind a paywall, which makes the work less accessible, which means it gets to less people, which makes it harder to grow a subscriber base. To say publishing is not a business I would recommend implies it’s a business. But magazines do not make money, almost ever. They lose money, which means that magazines, especially smaller magazines, exist because people with excess capital believe that they should. But magazines are a hard sell for philanthropists. It’s hard to measure the “impact” of a magazine, and any serious one is likely to publish at least some work that any donor, just like any reader, is sure to take issue with—a truism that is even more true for magazines of the left.

All this to say that a rather small number of donors enable most magazines to exist. Many of the good ones rely on one supporter in particular, the Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundation, which seems to have taken upon itself the charge of single-handedly keeping alive the world literary political journalism: the work of places like n+1, Lux, The Baffler, Africa Is A Country, and some dozen others (including, of course, Jewish Currents). In doing so, the workshop has made itself indispensable for those invested in such enterprises. Recognizing the potential inherent in its role as a hub of literary criticism and analysis, in the fall of 2023 they launched The Ideas Letter, a newsletter/online magazine that brings together work by the prodigious network of writers, editors, and intellectuals connected to the workshop.

It sounds like faint praise to say that The Ideas Letter is way better than it needs to be, but it’s way better than it needs to be. Most foundations highlight the work they support, and every biweekly issue does feature a selection of curated essays, some of which are written by authors or appear in publications supported by the workshop. But each issue also includes two or three (or sometimes, in special issues, more) original essays and reviews. While issues contain a certain eclecticism, there is, I think, a central preoccupation that guides the Letter as a whole. Both befitting and betraying its host, perhaps the single most influential (and controversial) liberal philanthropy in the world, many of the issues and essays touch in some way on how to understand the collapse of the liberal order as we have known it over the last half-century. You might encounter a probing essay by longtime Amnesty International senior staffer Nicolas Bequelin on whether the infrastructure of human rights can survive the end of the Western hegemony upon which it is built—and whether it should; or Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion on whether liberalism can survive the decline of liberal institutions (including the aforementioned world of magazines); or the Tunisian political psychologist Nadia Marzouki on the limitations of anti-imperial politics in her home country.

For perhaps obvious reasons, I took special note of last week’s issue, which featured the best review I’ve read of my colleague Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, by Jewish Currents contributing writer Linda Kinstler. In that review, Kinstler puts Beinart’s book in conversation with Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza, and wonders whether in all their darkness both books might not in fact be overly hopeful. Both, she notes, implicitly assume that the devastation in Gaza marks a definitive break; but what if the lesson we end up learning is that there is no lesson, that the world will in fact accept such violence and move on to the next horrific episode?

In that issue, Kinstler’s essay sits alongside a personal essay by Liberties managing editor Celeste Marcus on a lifelong attempt to understand the nature of the Jewish God, and an analysis of Beinart’s work and career by longtime Nation columnist Eric Alterman. As a trio, the pieces offer a good example of the publication’s (and the workshop’s) approach to its term of self-description: “Heterodox.” Consistently surprising in form and rigorous in content, The Ideas Letter invites readers into the extended community of the Ideas Workshop; in doing so, it makes a strong case for all the “little magazines” the workshop supports, including its own.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Let me begin by saying that the Catalan director Albert Serra’s documentary Afternoons of Solitude is a film that not only is not for everyone; it’s a film that will morally upset many of you. Its subject matter, bullfighting, toward which Serra takes no clear position, is a sport—if I might call it that—that is viewed by many as the equivalent of cockfighting, an undisguised form of animal cruelty. In come places the rules and the cruelty have been modified, but Afternoons of Solitude is about bullfighting in its purest form, in Spain, during the day, with the matador facing the possibility of death and the bull, after being stuck with banderillas, facing near certain death.

Serra, whose films until now I’ve found pretentious and dull to the point of suffocation has, with this film, produced a mesmerizing work, a film that does nothing to disguise the murderousness of tauromachy on both sides. The focus of the film is the young Peruvian torero Andres Roca Rey. We are told nothing about him, his antecedents, or the trajectory of his career. We join him and his team of toreros as they are on their way to a corrida, with the discussion mainly about the route. Several of them are in costume, the famous traje de luces. These occasional scenes in the van going to or from an arena are our only moments of respite from the deadly artistry of the bullfight.

Serra’s cameras place us right in the heart of the action. Every cry, every shout of advice from Roca Rey’s people, his cuadrilla, can be heard—their warnings, their encouragement, their counsels to the matador as to how the fight should progress through its foreordained stages and when it’s time to end it. In two of the fights, Roca is butted but not gored by the bulls, and in both cases, he returns to the arena. Machismo can reach no more crazed or exalted heights. The posturing of the matador during the fight, his almost insane taunting of the animal, as if it can understand it’s being taunted, are shown to us in closeup. After especially successful corridas, his cuadrilla praise his cojones. An entire society’s vision of masculinity is laid out for us. And yet, Roca Rey, preternaturally slim, is wearing the absurdly ornate bullfighter’s costume. We are shown all that is required in order for him to don it: with pantyhose as a foundation, pink knee socks, and the donning of the knickers requiring him to be lifted off the ground by his wardrobe master.

Roca Rey is full of bravery and bravado; his bulls only occasionally explode in rage. The traje de luces ends a bullfight covered in blood, none of it Roca Rey’s. Afternoons of Solitude is a film from which you will at times want to look away, but won’t be able to. I expected, even wanted to hate this film. I didn’t. Not in the least. As much as any deep film on human relationships, this film has led me to question why I didn’t and what that says about me.

We want to remind you that our Summer issue will be here soon—in fact, subscribers can already read it online—and until June 23rd, we’re offering 50% off print subscriptions. Sign up now and enter code SUMMERFIFTY at checkout to get the discount.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): This year, some friends and I took on Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald’s meditation on memory, loss, and the haunted continent that is Europe. It concerns an unnamed narrator’s meetings with Jacques Austerlitz, a historian of architecture, who, over the decades, tries to come to terms with his life as an orphaned Czech Jew in the shadow of World War II. He grows up in Wales under the care of a Calvinist preacher, then travels to Prague and beyond to learn about his parentage. We follow Austerlitz and the narrator’s meanderings through the majestic, haunted train stations, old fortresses and castles, libraries, and concentration camps that dot the old continent, all built on the human remains and ravages of Europe’s colonial past.

Sebald interrogates questions of quiet profundity around the reliability of memory, the power or futility of art, symbols, and photos in wrestling with the traumas of the past. (On the latter subject, the narrator recalls an observation made by a close friend of Austerlitz’s parents: “One has the impression, she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sighs of despair. Gemissements de desespoir was her expression, said Austerlitz, as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives.”)

The book’s formal innovations, of “going the full Proust”—long, unbroken, paragraphs, a fearlessly stream-of-consciousness style that produces sentence that coil and swoop back in on themselves, the unforgettable imagery, enigmatic symbols (those moths) and metaphors within metaphors, the sense of a man at the end of his rope, grasping for something to make his life of loneliness legible—make it one of more unnervingly moving reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Some of the questions around narrative reliability may chafe. Is Austerlitz a creation of the narrator, a means of coping through a breakdown? (Sebald—Fight Club fan?) Seeing Austerlitz through the eye of our narrator, we are, I think, meant to consider if the former is perhaps a vessel for the latter, if some authorial mischief is at play. It’s all in service of a grand yet still poignant idea: Reaching out across time for a sense of self-resolution, connection, comfort—peace, even—no matter how futile. As the late Richard Eder wrote in a sublime 2001 review: “Sebald’s past is a parabola. It arcs up to meet us, and when it arcs down it pulls us with it.”

Ari M. Brostoff (contributing editor): Last weekend I participated, along with a group of collaborators, in a sort of conclave for artists and other practitioners who work with groups—often either assembling them as organizers, unsettling them through performance, or both. The program was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the performing arts complex better known as BAM) and included a number of screenings; many of the films we watched were made by collectives from around the world and documented the usually unseen work of group formation that precedes an uprising.

The most astonishing film came at the end: Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans), a 2013 experimental feature directed by the Algerian filmmaker Narimane Mari, which follows a ragtag group of Algiers tweens who raid the kitchen of a French colonial army barracks on a quest for foodstuffs beyond their usual paltry bean rations, and wind up capturing a soldier. In an interview with Film Comment, Mari explained that she recruited the film’s 20 young actors from the Algiers neighborhood where the film was shot; because “much of the film wasn’t scripted yet,” they “decided together who was best at which part.” The semi-improvised work of this acting troupe has an arrestingly unassuming quality even in the film’s early scenes of the kids making fart jokes on the beach; later, as the kids descend into a labyrinth of surreal colonial infrastructure and morph into an ad hoc guerilla organization, it becomes genuinely shocking. It also makes the film—the debut of which coincided with the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence—historically unplaceable, or impossible, a self-conscious artifact of the scrambled timescape of postcolonial city life. The way the kids talk and dress and gesture in the presence of a digital camera’s harsh lens marks them vividly as children of the present era, even as their escapades place them in a dream-logic version of The Battle of Algiers and the loopy soundtrack (a contribution from the French prog rock duo Zombie Zombie) lends their adventure the darkly propulsive retro optimism of Stranger Things. Watching the film last weekend, it was impossible not to think of the children risking their lives for bread in Gaza—and of the devastating brilliance of the way these children have already begun to document the burning world around them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As summer approaches, Berlin is almost certain to be on the menu for some of our readers. I thought I’d share ways to see a Berlin that is neither a touristy Cold War/Nazi/Holocaust museum, nor the all-English-speaking sub-Brooklyn that so many cities are or aspire to be. My son and I went to the German capital recently in search of the remnants of socialism—of the communist Berlin that was crossed by a boulevard bearing the name Karl-Marx-Allee, originally Stalin-Allee.

The DDR Museum (DDR are the initials for the official name of East Germany—Deutsche Demokratische Republik) is the place to start. Though aimed at tourists, it gives a pretty fair overview of life in the former German Democratic Republic, covering daily life as well as the country’s politics and culture. Its gift shop includes objects like rubber duckies dressed in the uniform of the VoPo, the People’s Police who guarded the country. What’s not to like?

There are still statues and monuments dating from the vanished country, including the centrally located one at Marx-Engels-Platz. But if you walk along the avenues around Alexanderplatz, you’ll find tile murals on the outside of buildings, like that at 29 Alexanderstrasse, the Haus des Lehrers, commemorating the work of teachers. A bit further down at 29 Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, on the face of the Presscafé is another mural honoring communist journalists, which features Marx looking over the shoulders of the writers. The most moving monument can be found near Zoo Bahnhof: the monument to Rosa Luxemburg. The sculpture, consisting simply of her name, rises from the waters of the Landwehr Canal where her body was thrown after she was murdered.

Providing inexpensive housing for all was a prime goal of the government of the DDR, and you can travel to outer neighborhoods like Marzahn and walk around Helen-Weigel-Platz or the Allee-der-Kosmonauten to examine the beautifully brutalist (not oxymoronic) apartment blocks that in no way resemble or feel like American projects. Or just walk down Karl-Marx-Allee from Alexanderplatz and look around you. At Strausberger Platz you’ll find a wedding-cake apartment building on the order of a majestic Soviet palace, covering two blocks on both sides of the boulevard, containing 5,000 apartments. The variety of exteriors within the sameness of the prefab buildings, with their slashes and dashes of color, is a real lesson in urbanism and architecture.

Soviet-style socialism being dead, two cemeteries are essential visits. In Friedrichsfelde Cemetery there is a large and moving section dedicated to the socialist and communist dead. You’ll find the resting places of figures from both the Social Democratic and Communist parties in a beautifully designed walled area. On the other side of the wall is a section housing the panjandrums of communism, including the Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, the family of the martyred Karl Liebknecht, the head of East German espionage Markus Wolf, his brother the filmmaker Konrad Wolf, and the physician Georg Benjamin, brother of Walter Benjamin. Interestingly, all the Jews buried there have pebbles placed on their graves. The cemetery tells another, uglier story: the plaques have been brutally removed from some graves, and the death masks from another, as they were vandalized by fascists in March.

On Chauseenstrasse in downtown Mitte is what’s known as the French Cemetery, the final residence of the cultural elite of the DDR, including the composer Hanns Eisler, the writer Anna Seghers, and the turbulently married couple Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. Not coincidentally, next to the cemetery is the Brecht-Weigel Museum (reservations required), located in their house. The visit is only to Becht’s part of the house (they lived separately in the same building), so his interests, particularly in Chinese culture, are obvious everywhere you turn.

Outside of socialism, a visit to the house in Wannsee where the Final Solution was negotiated is well worth the long ride on the S-Bahn. The magnificent manor provides a beautiful view of the lake, and also has a café serving babka and bagels, which a sign advertises—correctly—as Jewlicious. Before heading out from Wannsee, those who love literature should pay tribute to Heinrich von Kleist, whose grave is on a low hilltop overlooking the lake, on the precise spot he committed suicide after shooting his companion, a willing accomplice in the venture.

A final note: Berlin is enormous and the public transport is as bad as New York’s. Be prepared to travel an hour to get anywhere.

A special note this week: Our Summer issue will be here soon, and to mark it, we’re offering 50% off print subscriptions. Sign up now and enter code SUMMERFIFTY at checkout to get the discount.

Arielle Angel (Editor-in-Chief): In the latest issue of n+1, E. Tammy Kim writes about middle age. In a loose, diaristic collection of vignettes titled “Creature of the Late Afternoon,” she explores the surreality of the “sandwich generation” sans children—an “open-faced sandwich,” for whom the word “family” still describes “the one I was born into: mother, father, and brother.” It is her parents’ deaths that will define her adulthood, she writes, not the milestones of the next generation. This confrontation with mortality is not subtle: The essay begins with a visceral description of the exhumation of her grandparents’ graves in Korea (her uncle is tired of the burden of keeping them up and has opted for a more final cremation), and ends with the author accompanying her parents on a ride around the cemetery in Washington State where they have recently bought plots. The prose is understated and unsentimental, but with an easy intimacy, leaving plenty of room for the reader to tap into the big emotions roiling under the text.

That’s particularly true if you, like me, happen to be a childless woman in your 40s, reeling from multiple familial losses. Over the last year and a half of mourning my father, I have thought often about whether it’s possible to feel satisfied with your last words to a loved one. People say “Tell them now!” and that seems like good advice, but when faced with the opportunity to communicate something holistic to the living, I cannot find anything to say except “I love you,” which is important, but too generic to feel significant. Kim tells us she is working on a book about her mother, and that she often feels strange memorializing her while she is still alive and well. She wants the book to provide an answer to the question of her own childlessness, in form if not in content; for her aging mother, and for herself. The size and desperation of that desire hints at the impossibility of fulfilling it. Words refuse to distill what continues to accrue moment to moment; words cannot resolve death. But as Kim’s essay suggests, they might still capture the texture of a life lived together.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): British journalist Rachel Shabi’s new book, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, takes on the dizzying and unenviable task of trying to chart a way through the hall of mirrors that is antisemitism, anti-antisemitism, and anti-anti-antisemitism politics. It begins by retreading the familiar history of Western antisemitism, from a Christian hatred that became structural in religious and then legal regimes in Europe to a more (but not exclusively) prejudicial manifestation. The main novelty for a popular audience lies in placing this historical narrative in relation to other forms of racism—and indeed, as the blueprint for the European project of racemaking—while maintaining antisemitism’s distinctive character that eludes easy categorization within a binaristic and structural understanding of racism. Unlike other forms of racism, Jews’ attenuated and contingent relationship to whiteness (hence the title, “off-white”) meant they were scapegoated as much as subjugated, and the consequences were not any less deadly. Drawing on a wide range of contexts, Shabi presents a compelling alternative history that captures antisemitism’s function “to confuse us over where actual power lies and to dilute and repel our efforts to confront the social, racial, and economic injustices emanating from those real structures of power.”

Antisemitism may defy a strictly material analysis, given that wealth and status have failed to protect Jews—as Shabi argues, the limited bestowal of privilege by ruling powers is “part of its MO”—yet Shabi’s alternative framework of how antisemitism is used highlights continuities over ruptures in the story of eternal Jewish persecution. In understanding antisemitism as a structure of scapegoating, Shabi does not sufficiently address questions of real power, and how Jewish political agency and subjectivity change over time. When she considers how this might come to bear on fortifying progressive coalitions, it becomes particularly apparent that class hierarchies and institutional positioning shape how communities approach questions of safety.

Shabi foregrounds Britain’s antisemitic history as “the first and the worst,” all the way from the medieval persecution of Jews forced into money-lending to the contemporary British elite’s cynical and overzealous philosemitism. But while there may be “creepy resonances” between the bookends of this history, her telling downplays the significance of changes on questions of agency. Jews were readmitted into Britain in the 17th century, and the development of their own independent institutions and closer integration into the establishment happened well before most other minority groups arrived in the mid-20th century. This historical head start helps explain why mainstream British Jewish institutions have typically sought safety through vertical alliances with the state, rather than through participation in anti-racist coalitions, except in cases where the class position of Jews aligned more closely with other marginalized groups—for example, in the anti-fascist demonstration at Cable Street. (The pattern is not unique, as other upwardly mobile minorities, such as the British Hindu community, have followed a similar political trajectory.)

More significantly, Shabi’s framework struggles to fully account for the most profound rupture in modern Jewish political life: the establishment of Israel and its refractions across the diaspora. She insightfully shows how Zionism once positioned itself as a radical break from diasporic history before eventually rebranding itself as the endpoint of antisemitic persecution. But while she is clear that the Zionist project of political sovereignty has essentially rendered the framework of antisemitism defunct for understanding the position of Israeli Jews vis-a-vis Palestinians, she sidesteps the thornier question of how to understand a diaspora that mostly regards Zionism as identity rather than merely ideology. This revolution in political subjectivity, and more importantly in material and institutional relations, goes unaddressed. How, for example, might her frame of antisemitism apply to a protest outside a synagogue or Hillel that is hosting an IDF fundraiser? From a moral and material perspective, Shabi rightly argues that the left must fix its focus on the actors who exploit these fears, and she adeptly remaps this evolving cast to include far-right parties and Christian Zionists. But if antisemitism is increasingly internalized through the lens of Zionism, reproducing the very zero-sum dynamics that she wants to dismantle, Shabi underestimates how fraught it becomes to build the kind of unified, progressive coalition she envisions. The impasse, then, lies no less in reckoning with Zionism’s political consequences—both for Palestinians and for the Jewish communities increasingly organized in its shadow.

Off-White doesn’t profess to offer solutions, only a diagnosis—perhaps because it spans so many contexts that demand different responses, or perhaps because the devil lies in the praxis. The commendable initiatives that Shabi does briefly highlight in her conclusion—antisemitism training for leftists, Jewish groups working to disentangle religious and cultural practice from the violence of the Israeli state, and alternatives to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, among others—are either premised on or actively engaged in the project of separating Judaism and Jewishness from Zionism. Her book serves as a thoughtful primer that can equip progressives to better understand and combat antisemitism and disrupt the cycle of weaponization, but Shabi also gestures, perhaps more than she intends, toward the necessity of recognizing Jewish agency in shaping the present impasse and hopefully the way out. While she is right to insist that the left must direct its critique toward state and colonial power, these regressive dynamics are not simply imposed from above, but are today sustained within our communities. In the battle for a better world, the Jewish left’s unique role in challenging our institutions or building our own, disentangling Judaism from Zionism, and resisting the weaponization of antisemitism is no less urgent than the left’s need to reclaim this space.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Sex is the first of a trilogy of films by the Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, released here in the US after the third film, Love. This is not the intended order, but it’s the order Americans have, and though the changed sequence alters the impact of elements of the unified whole, it does nothing to change the brilliance of each individual film.

Sex begins with two uniformed chimney-sweeps sitting in their office discussing dreams. One of them, the supervisor, tells the other about his dream of the previous night, in which he met David Bowie, who looked at him as if he were a woman. He’s confused by the dream’s significance, its meaning, its questioning of his masculinity. But after all, it’s nothing more than a dream. His fellow sweep, however, has a more material tale to tell: the previous day, after a job at a client’s house, he was asked by the client—a man of a certain age—if he wanted to have sex. He begged off, he explains, but then, after leaving and upon further reflection, returned and had sex. He’s not, he insists, gay. He was just pleased that someone looked upon him with so overtly sexual a gaze. So innocent does he think this passing event is that he tells his wife about it. It was just sex, not cheating, and he claims she was fine with it.

But she wasn’t, and her entire world, her vision of her husband and of their marriage, has been forever changed. The privacy of their facial expressions during sex has been violated. For the husband, this was just loosely floating, uncontrollable desire that signified nothing. For the wife, it’s a sign that his desire, fully controllable, is no longer directed meaningfully towards her, whatever he might say.

The supervisor is going through his own crisis. He sings in a church choir, and he feels his voice has changed. A singing teacher tells him his tongue is tense, and bizarrely tugs at it to release the tension. He’s asked to sing the song in which his voice failed, and his son, with whom he has a warm and close relationship, later reproaches him for not singing a religious song to demonstrate his problem. He accuses his father of hiding his religious faith from the attractive young singing coach.

The nature of faith, sex, and dreams are the themes of this touching and intelligent film. Is it right to place a name on a direction of sexual desire? How are the faithful to deal with forms of desire their religion considers aberrant? Do our dreams reveal something truly fundamental about us? Haugerud, as he did in Love, allows his characters the opportunity to clearly and fully explore their ideas and feelings. Everyone’s values and beliefs are expressed, with no judgment attached.

Oslo itself is also a theme of the other film in Haugerud’s trilogy, Dreams—the Norwegian capital’s shift from the social democratic ethos represented by its old, stodgy, but welcoming city hall to more stark modern architecture. The film contains countless scenes of cranes at work or at rest, of lots being cleared for future construction. Nothing is fixed, all is in flux—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Dreams expresses the uneasiness of the present and the future, while at the same time accepting that new forms of happiness are possible.

Daniel May (publisher): Diversion—from the Latin, “to turn aside.” The term’s neutrality suggests that what we might turn aside is of lesser importance than what we are turning toward, but in general parlance we understand that, as a noun, an effective diversion allows us and even compels us to turn aside, and turn away from, what we know is of less urgency and less meaning than what the diversion calls us toward. This is the danger of the diversion, of course, and of an economy that so relentlessly produces it. But in bleak and demanding times, who among us is immune from the mental rest that a good diversion provides?

But what makes a good diversion? Let’s propose three conditions. First, of course, it cannot be overly demanding; it must pull us out of the pressures of family and the obligations of politics (this is why almost all great art makes for bad diversion) but it can’t lead to their neglect (heroin: bad diversion). Second, it must be demanding enough to hold one’s attention, lest the wandering mind return to the horrors of the day’s news or the anxieties of, say, the last conversation with one’s parent. Third, and by far the most difficult, it must not actively make one feel worse about themselves. This is the fundamental problem not only with say, opioids, but with so much of what counts as diversion in an economy that has come to depend on it; the numb what-am-I-doing-with-my-life hangover that follows an hour of scrolling on Twitter or TikTok and lasts almost as long as the scroll itself.

So let me submit: the NBA podcast. Bear with me.

Given the pride of place that it holds in the formation of American masculinity, sports as such offers an ambivalent candidate for diversion. The central problem is that those invested in sports tend to be, well, invested in it. However preposterous and patently ridiculous it is to those free from the gravitational pull of fandom, for the vast majority of the inhabitants of Planet Sports, life is either frustrating or heartbreaking—and the latter only in the good years. I spent no small amount of psychological energy in my twenties actively working to unburden myself of the hold that the Minnesota Vikings—a multimillion-dollar company that exists in order to make it easier for other companies to sell their products to viewers of its games—had over my mental well-being.

Perhaps that is a bad example, as football is particularly ill-equipped when it comes to the third condition. The sport is straightforwardly brutal, and however much I can still find myself getting sucked into a playoff game, watching more than a half makes me feel like I’ve been sniffing glue (disclaimer: I’ve never sniffed glue). But I can hazard a defense of basketball, on aesthetic and even political grounds. That defense would point to the accessibility of the sport (it can be and often is played in parking lots and playgrounds), its historical connection to America’s underclass, the relative (compared to other leagues) political engagement of its stars and even executives, and above all the nature of the game, which revolves around how to make space for others (or, if you’re good, how to let others make space for you). I can, however, understand why such a defense would ring hollow to anyone aware of the actual economics of the NBA, or those that may grow annoyed at the screams of partners or friends potentially waking up sleeping children because some guy put some ball in something. More personally, and I write this as someone who has loved basketball for as long as I’ve been sentient, the trouble is that actually watching basketball takes up too much damn time. In this respect, it cannot meet our first condition; it is just too demanding.

But! The NBA podcast—and more specifically the trio of shows that are the crown jewel in “The Ringer’s Podcast Network”: The Bill Simmons Podcast, The Ringer NBA Show, and The Zach Lowe Show—is just demanding enough, easily assimilable into dishwashing or exercise, providing escape with minimal self-loathing.

While the hosts of all these pods are constantly on each other’s shows, each one manages to retain a distinctive vibe. While Simmons is bombastic, encyclopedic in his knowledge of NBA history and histrionic in his enthusiasms (and resentments), the NBA Show trio of Justin Verrier, Rob Mahoney, and Wosny Lambre (Big Woz) come off as friends that like hanging out to talk hoops while gently mocking each other’s non-basketball related hobbies.

But the best of these is The Zach Lowe Show. Lowe is a former high school teacher and PhD student in US history who worked as a criminal justice reporter at The Stamford Advocate and The American Lawyer before turning to the NBA. I like to think that his politics and academic training have something to do with my affection for him, but the truth is that it would take an exacting, and creative, reading of his work to draw the connections. He clearly just loves basketball. He loves the strategy of it, he loves the players, he loves the executives, he loves the coaches, and he loves those that love the game. That love leaves him with a generosity toward those in the sport but a general annoyance with the vast majority of those in sports media, who he subtly but clearly considers insufficiently respectful and considerate of the talent and brilliance of the people that play and make the sport. To wit: after a 20-minute monologue describing all the limitations of recently fired Knicks coach Tom Thibodeou, he imagined a conversation with the subject of his criticisms: “The counters that Thibs would have to all of this shit that I’m saying now, I would be like, oh, oh, so you actually thought about all of this and then charted it out five steps ahead; if I do that, they’re going to do that. These are not original ideas to this coach. He knows more about basketball than I will ever know. He forgot more about basketball today than I will ever know.”

In substance, none of this is remarkable. But it’s hard to care deeply about something as ultimately trivial as sports while also being careful with it. We want our diversions to mean less to us than what we truly value. But we also don’t want to feel like suckers for caring about them. It’s a hard balance to strike, but when it is struck, it is just pleasurable enough.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): The first of many times that I picked up The Sellout, the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Paul Beatty, must have been shortly after its release in 2015. My inability to commit to reading the novel was not because I couldn’t get into it, but the exact opposite: the prose was so alive, so dense that I found myself paralyzed every time I tried to read it, deferring until I felt I had the necessary lucidity of mind to fully grasp its genius. Needless to say, that fabled state of mind never arrived, but I did finally read the book, and it was everything I imagined it would be.

The Sellout begins at the Supreme Court with the trial of the Black protagonist—known in his case by his surname Me, known to his lover by the nickname Bonbon, and known to his father’s erstwhile frenemy as The Sellout—for reinstating slavery and segregation in his Californian hometown, the agrarian ghetto of Dickens, in order to put it back on the map (literally, after its erasure). From the courtroom, where the narrator lights up a joint because charging him for such a minor misdemeanour would be “like charging Hitler for loitering or a multinational oil company like British Petroleum for littering,” he gives us his life story, and explains how he found himself pioneering the violent reversal of American history’s not-so-relentless forward march.

Beatty’s novel is a carnivalesque critique of ‘post-racial’ America, playfully taking ideas about race to their logical extremes to expose the hypocrisy, and often the emptiness, in their wake. In other words, he’s trying to bring back overt racism to force America to confront the lie of its disappearance. In the picaresque adventures across Dickens, a group of Black thinkers known as the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals rewrite a “politically correct” version of the American canon, excising the n-word and replacing the word “slave” with “dark skinned volunteer”; a washed-up child actor volunteers to be the narrator’s slave in order to feel “relevant again,” quipping that “true freedom is having the right to be a slave”; gangs perform historical reenactments of the glorious turf wars of the past; and white children playact their own freedom rides to the newly-segregated Chaff Middle School (even though, given that only Blacks and Mexicans live in the area, it is already de facto segregated) after the narrator puts up a punny sign that the whites-only Wheaton Academy will be set up next door.

What drew me in more than anything else was Beatty’s remarkable prose, overflowing and overloaded with everything from legalese to psychoanalytic theory to a full array of erudite African American cultural references and vernaculars, not to mention flashes of Spanish and Latin, and even a line of Cyrillic at one point. The language is alive and thrashing with all these different registers, as though this kind of maximalist cognitive overload can meet the questions about race that are overdetermined to the point of absurdity, and, of course, have no easy answers.

It’s also been a long time since literary fiction made me laugh so much. (Special mention to one early scene when the narrator’s father—“the sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology”—mugs the narrator to test whether the bystander effect applies to Black people, only to instigate a pile-on because he didn’t account for the “bandwagon effect.”) But for all the times I laughed, there were times I felt like I shouldn’t, and jokes that flew miles over my head. The raucous and irreverent humor felt like it was also probing what laughter might be revealing, and what it might be staving off. In the penultimate chapter, the narrator recalls going to a comedy show with his father where the comedian evicted two white audience members for laughing. “Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing.” The room goes silent, and the narrator reflects on why he didn’t confront the comedian. Not because the aggrieved white people needed him, but because there is a void in the center: “So what exactly is our thing?”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The exhibition of paintings by René Magritte at the Luxembourg + Co. gallery on the Upper East Side, on display until July 12th, provides visitors with an opportunity to do something rarely possible with such a well-known and omnipresent artist. The show, titled The Phantom Landscape, allows us to examine Magritte’s paintings—so beautiful, so rich, so disarming—away from the crowds and distractions of museums that are little more than stops on the tourism checklist. Magritte’s playfulness, his wit, and, most importantly, the questions he slyly poses about language and images as they exist separately and in relation to each other can best be appreciated in the gallery’s quiet, well-laid-out sixth floor space.

The show features works any Magritte aficionado is familiar with, but sometimes with a curious twist. In the famous La Clef des songes (The Interpretation of Dreams) from 1935, which is nearly as emblematic of the artist’s oeuvre as Ceci n’est pas une pipe, we are presented with images of a horse, labeled “the door”; a clock, labeled “the wind”; a pitcher, labeled “the door”; and a valise, labeled “the valise.” Magritte’s questioning of the nature of language’s falsely assumed necessary relationship to the object named is presented here with the greatest simplicity, the objects painted as they would be in a child’s primer. And yet the simplicity is denied by the artist’s refusal to fix them with their commonly accepted names. The version on display in the show is not the most familiar version, captioned in French; rather, here we get a rare work in English by the francophone Belge. This was an opportunistic choice by Magritte—the Parisian gallery at which he was shown had gone bust, so he repainted the original in English in an effort to sell to an American. I assume it worked.

Magritte provides no answers to the questions his paintings pose. Le Paysage fantôme (The Phantom Landscape), from 1928, is a portrait in muddy colors of a plain-looking woman—Magritte’s wife Georgette—with the word “montagne” written across the middle of her face. Is it that her nose is a mountain in the landscape of her face? Is the face obscuring the landscape, rendering it a ghost? Many possible answers work, and this is the central richness of Magritte.

There are several paintings in which the scene being painted, often an actual landscape, is interrupted by the canvas within the canvas that continues the landscape that is being painted. Does the painting continue the landscape, or vice versa? The opposition and collaboration of artifice and reality are ever-present in Magritte’s work. Bright blue skies with banks of clouds predominate, reinforcing the oneiric quality of the paintings. Dresses in human poses with no bodies in them, the torsos of classical sculptures at an otherwise deserted seaside, a solitary gravesite on the sand, a unicorn with a castle tower as a horn—these are images unmistakably by Magritte. The gallery has wisely kept explanatory texts to a minimum. Even the French titles are untranslated. I approve wholeheartedly. The Phantom Landscape allows and even obliges us to truly consider the works on show. It insists that we spend more than the 17 seconds surveys have shown most museumgoers spend before any painting. The rewards are immense.

Josh Lambert (contributor): Sharp-eyed viewers of the season finale of The Last of Us, which aired on HBO Max this past Sunday, will have caught something I was waiting for all season. When Dina gives Ellie a bracelet for good luck, we catch just a glimpse of the charm on it, a hamsa.

Those of us who have played the original video game understand why Dina would wear a symbol beloved by North African Jews and Muslims, and by Sephardic Jews more generally. The game takes pains to let us know that Dina is Jewish—a descendant, she explains to Ellie, of Jews who survived the Inquisition and the Holocaust before also surviving a zombie apocalypse. For whatever reason, the show entirely skipped the scene in the game in which the two young women wander through a ruined synagogue, chatting about belief and prayer, the Jewish calendar, the Torah, and the tradition of eating apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah.

As the On the Nose podcast mentioned a couple years ago, the game has occasioned some intense arguments online about its politics. I have quibbles both with the idea that The Last of Us, Part 2 offers “the most fleshed out direct Jewish representation in a AAA [i.e., blockbuster video] game,” and with the argument that the whole game can be boiled down to an “allegory about Israel-Palestine.” But the moment in Sunday’s finale when Dina’s dreamboat baby-daddy, Jesse, pronounces “This is not our war” offers some sense of why I’ve read the game as reflecting the tendency of liberal American Jews in the mid-2010s to take the position that mounting fascism in Israel, Netanyahu’s empowerment of Hamas, and the immiseration of Gaza were just not their problem. “Everything’s a moral if only you can find it,” the show tells us, in a slogan you might have also caught on a bookstore wall in the finale.

There’s plenty more to say about this, let alone about dozens of other changes, many of them unaccountable, that the show has made in adapting the game for television. But if you’re interested specifically in the backstory to Dina’s character that has been left out of the series you’ve watched, and if you can put up with, or skip over, a smattering of critical theory, please keep your eyes out for an article I’ve written for the summer issue of the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies, which should be available online in the next couple of weeks.

Devin E. Naar (advisory board): For a beautifully illustrated and historically rooted tale about the relationship between a Sephardic Jew from the Ottoman Empire and his Japanese friend in Seattle during the World War II-era incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry, check out Josh Tuininga’s graphic novel, We Are Not Strangers. Inspired by stories Tuininga heard about his great uncle’s unusual efforts to support his Japanese friend during Incarceration, the graphic novel not only reveals a little-known but much-needed story of allyship, but also highlights the vulnerabilities that the Sephardic characters face along the way—whether difficulties at Ellis Island, being targeted by white men in Seattle, or a side plot about a charming Nona (grandmother) who smuggles her way across the US border to circumvent immigration quotas. (Full disclosure: I wrote the afterward!)

If you are interested in a deeper dive into the politics and ideologies of Sepharadim and Mizrahim, peruse the recordings of the 2025 Sephardi Modernity Seminar Series: “Partners, Outsiders, and Others: Sephardi Jews and the Global Left.” Organized by Angy Cohen of the Spanish National Research Council and Yuval Ivry of Brandeis University, the series features leading scholars who delve into themes as diverse as Iraqi Jewish feminist leftists, Mizrahi feminist politics, Jewish communists in Egypt, and Sepharadim and leftist activism in Argentina and Brazil, among other topics. The opening session, “Colonized Outsiders; Arabised Jews,” begins with Moshe Behar of the University of Manchester exploring a critique of the Balfour Declaration by Yosef Castel, a local, Ottoman-born, self-described Palestinian Jew in 1921. Inspired by an ethos stemming from his upbringing in the multinational world of the Ottoman Empire, Castel posited a binational solution to the question of Palestine before the better-known Ashkenazi advocates of this vision, associated with Brit Shalom, entered the scene. We need more exposure to and knowledge of the array of Jewish political expressions on the left engaging with and critiquing Zionism.

In terms of contemporary cultural representation, if you haven’t seen the second season of the Netflix series Mo, you must do so. While Alisa Solomon encouraged JC readers to watch the series a few months ago, it’s also worth considering from the perspective of Sepharadim and Mizrahim. A tremendously necessary, humanizing, and funny portrait of a Palestinian family based in the US—with a detour to Mexico due to draconian US immigration laws—the show misses an opportunity to convey an equally nuanced dynamic with regard to Jewishness. Jewishness is presented largely through Fiddler on he Roof-style caricatures and a hyper-white representation and ongoing commentary about the blue eyes of the character of Guy, an Israeli restaurateur and the new love interest of Mo’s ex-girlfriend. What stories that move beyond the Israeli/Palestinian or Jew/Arab binaries could Mo have told if one of the characters were Mizrahi or Sepharadi—Middle Eastern, of Arabic- and/or Ladino-speaking heritage? Perhaps an heir of the kind of figures featured in the Sephardic Modernity Seminar Series mentioned above? Rather than accepting the Ashkenormativity of American Jewish culture, what if Mo had taken a cue from the work of Palestinian musician Jowan Safadi, whose provocative and must-watch bilingual music video, “To be an Arab,” delves into questions of Arabophobia and self-hatred among Sepharadim and Mizrahim?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Anyone old enough to have lived through the Reagan years can’t help but be horrified by the cult that has formed around his falsified memory. When even Democrats cite him positively, we know the degradation of American life is pretty much complete. This is, after all, the man who financed and armed the murderous contras in Nicaragua, who ignored AIDS, who was the benignant face of unfettered greed—and who brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction. It is this last element of the Reagan nightmare that resides at the heart of Jeff Daniels’s new documentary Television Event. The titular phenomenon is the three-hour, made-for-TV movie The Day After that first aired on November 20th, 1983, when it was seen by 100 million Americans. The Day After was not only effective cinematically, but had an impact on the real world, by showing the American populace what it would look like if we descended into the nuclear war that Reagan was so casually courting.

In Television Event, the story is told by the main driving forces behind the making of the movie, including cocky director Nick Meyer, network suits Brandon Stoddard and Stu Samuels, producer Robert Papazian, and writer Ed Hume. Their narration brings to life the world of 1983, in which the threat of an atomic apocalypse was in the air; Daniels adds in the context of the massive anti-nuclear demonstration in the spring of 1982, when a million people marched in Manhattan against Reagan’s seeming rush to war. As we learn, the production faced an uphill battle: The White House mounted a campaign against the film, network censors tried to soften it, and advertisers were almost impossible to find. (The Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn brand took advantage of the situation and seized promotional spots across the three hours for only $11,000.)

The genius of The Day After was the choice to have it set right in the heart of middle America (Lawrence, Kansas) amidst the daily doings of a group of its residents. It was the bucolic America of Reagan’s ads—the “Real America” of Republican fantasy—that we saw literally obliterated. (No one who has seen the film needs reminding of just how graphic it was: the people incinerated, the flames engulfing everything, skeletal systems made visible before the bodies vanished in the nuclear storm.) The movie was intended as a warning, and it worked. After it made the prospect of nuclear devastation cinematically real, the American public made their feelings felt and finally had a sensible conversation about Reagan’s disastrous policies. Two months later at his State of the Union address, the president had to sound like a peacenik.

It may be true that we’re living in a Golden Age of television, but the splintering of media consumption means that no such shared spectacle will be possible again. If the 1980s were no aesthetic high point for the medium, Television Event makes a compelling case that these three hours justified its existence.