Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Two must-see exhibitions: The first is Material/Inheritance at the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore, a group show curated by Leora Fridman pulling together artists who have been fellows in the now four-year-old New Jewish Culture Fellowship. Full disclosure: Though I did not participate in the show, I was a fellow in the first cohort. Many NJC fellows have graced the pages of Jewish Currents over the years, and at least one work in the show—Elie Lobovits’s Fertility series—was first published in Jewish Currents’s Summer 2022 issue. So this is not an impartial review so much as an affirmation that, as I said in this newsletter a few weeks ago, and as JC contributing writer Sol Brager wrote in Artforum last summer, something is up right now in the world of Jewish art.

The fellowship and the show take as a galvanizing text JC contributing editor and NJCF co-founder Maia Ipp’s 2019 essay “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant Garde,” which lamented the communal disinvestment in arts and culture in favor of Israel-related projects and programming. In this regard, the show feels like a coming out of sorts for a group of mostly millennial Jewish artists that is beginning to see itself as part of a cohort, perhaps, engaged in deeper conversation with one another about Jewish politics and identity. For me, the show’s highlights included Nat Sufrin’s irreverent and provocative How to See the Shoah: Google Images Translation of Celan and Reznikoff, which breaks down two poems—Paul Celan’s “Ashglory” and Charles Reznikoff’s “Holocaust”—into phrases alongside their Google images searches, displayed in a grid. I also really enjoyed two dramatic audio works: Jay Eddy’s naturalistic three-channel installation The Death of Arthur, following three generations mourning the death of a grandfather, and Ben Gassman and Brandon Woolf’s playful, stylish Between the Bread, which focuses on the sandwich as a site of urban inter-ethnic encounter. But perhaps my favorite piece was Liat Berdugo’s performative slide lecture Seeing it for the Trees, performed live at the opening, which uses the JNF-KKL’s photographic archive alongside personal images as a way to understand the role of trees in the formation of ethnonationalist statehood. The room was packed during Berdugo’s performance—much of the audience, the silver-haired crowd you might expect at a Jewish museum on a Sunday afternoon—and I couldn’t help but notice that this was just the kind of work that would have been pushed out of mainstream Jewish institutions just a few years ago. It made me feel hopeful that, despite the pervasive sense of an ossified Jewish communal infrastructure, a shift might be underway. The show is up until June 11th, and will include another day of performances at the closing in Maryland as well as some “activations” in New York City.

I also cannot recommend enough Images on which to build at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in Manhattan, curated by (another NJC fellow) Ariel Goldberg, which focuses on photography-based art, activism, education, and media production within queer and trans communities in the 1970s to the 1990s. “Presenting trans and queer image cultures from this time creates spaces beyond the visual, where felt experiences of affirmation, recognition, and connection form legacies to shape our present and future,” Goldberg writes in their curatorial statement. The show is barely more than one big room, and yet it feels dense with a web of connections; each listed artist or collective brings with them an entire community—sometimes an entire lineage. The space is frankly packed with people, and I found myself incredibly moved by the project of identifying and uplifting one’s yikhes. Perhaps I’m a sucker for the performative slide lecture (what an amazing form!) but when you go, you must make time for The Dyke Show by JEB (or Joan E. Biren), which, among other things, recovers the images of lesbian photographers, most of whom could only be claimed as lesbians in retrospect. This act of looking queerly, uncovering what the straight world would prefer not to see, acts as an anchor for the exhibition as a whole. The audio was recorded in front of a live audience—JEB toured the show between 1979–1984—and we hear them laugh and sigh and hum with interest, recognition, gratitude, and relief. In this moment of renewed homophobic and transphobic backlash, I found a lot of strength in listening to the reactions of that room, in feeling for a moment like I was there with them. I felt anew the meaning of that old Yiddish adage, “We Will Outlive Them.”

David Klion (contributing editor): I just finished a used copy of Breaking Ranks, Norman Podhoretz’s second memoir, which was published in 1979, and which I stumbled upon at the Strand last week. The neoconservatives are a topic of obsessive study for me, and Podhoretz in particular is a guilty pleasure as well; in spite of his awful politics and equally awful personality, in his prime he was a wonderful writer. I’m a fan of Making It, his first memoir, which I wrote about for Jewish Currents in 2017, 50 years after its publication, and later discussed on an episode of Know Your Enemy with Matt Sitman and JC contributor Sam Adler-Bell. That book, which is only tangentially concerned with politics, is a shamelessly self-aggrandizing account of the author’s rise from working-class Brooklyn to the Upper West Side intelligentsia. Making It managed to piss off all of Podhoretz’s friends in the latter milieu, not with overt ideological heresies but with its heresy against propriety; middle-class intellectuals weren’t supposed to acknowledge their own ambition for prestige and material success, much less brag about how far they’d already come. But dishy, confessional memoirs are less scandalous now than they were then, which might be why Making It has developed something of a cult following in the past few years among precisely the kind of lefty New York writers whose forebears hated it.

Breaking Ranks is a more conventional book, and much less referenced nowadays, but it’s an essential text for understanding the rise of neoconservatism. (It’s also a key source for Benjamin Balint’s Running Commentary, a favorite of multiple JC staffers that has been recommended here a few times already.) Loosely framed as a letter to his teenage son John, who would later inherit the editorship of Commentary that he still holds today, Breaking Ranks is an account of Podhoretz’s evolution from Cold War liberal to quasi-radical to reactionary over the course of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. The publication of Making It is a pivotal moment halfway through Breaking Ranks; it’s fun to consider whether Podhoretz’s alienation from his left-wing peers was more cause or effect of the controversy surrounding his previous memoir. Either way, the decade or so after Making It saw Podhoretz—and Commentary—embrace the right on nearly every major issue, triggering the Old and New Left alike.

From a contemporary vantage, what’s most striking about Breaking Ranks is how little the structure of elite political discourse has changed since the late ’70s. Today we have a surplus of writers making the pivot from left to right, always citing the same basic grievances: the rise of a new class of educated elites and a new dogma that betrays core liberal principles; the social advancement of marginalized groups to an extent that makes the author personally uncomfortable; the alleged hostility of university campuses and intellectual publications to open debate on hot-button issues. We hear this stuff all the time now, though rarely as articulately as Podhoretz put it when he established the template decades ago. Meanwhile, Podhoretz himself is still alive at 93; just last year, he told the Claremont Review of Books that he’s not sure Donald Trump actually lost the 2020 election. Everything old is neo again.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Last week, I attended one of the final nights of Ryan J. Haddad’s “Dark, Disabled Stories” at the Public Theater in New York. It was a terrific performance. Haddad is a gay actor with cerebral palsy, and the play is made up of autobiographical vignettes about his dating life and his experiences navigating New York City—especially its transit systems—with his walker. Haddad’s humor guides audience members through each story—a skillful balancing act that makes the difficult parts bearable and prevents his exploration of being disabled in an environment structured by ableism from coming off as any sort of “tragedy.” He makes clear at the beginning—after a story that begins with him giving a blowjob to a cute date in a pub bathroom—that if anyone is there to pity him, they should leave.

The play not only tells nuanced, non-universal stories about living with a disability, but also models ways to produce accessible theater. Haddad performs alongside another actor, Dickie Hearts, who signs the monologues in ASL; both are costumed in shirts that say “Ryan,” and the two interact onstage in creative, funny, and lovely ways. A third actor, Alejandra Ospina, plays the role of “Descriptor,” intermittently verbalizing visual cues for blind and low-vision audience members, which are telecast on a panel above the stage. The narration is also projected in text form on the back wall of the set.

Hearts and Ospina each share one monologue from their own lives. (Haddad subs in as the narrator or Descriptor.) Hearts shares a story of being consensually hand-cuffed during sex by a stranger from Grindr: He moves from his initial terror at having his method of communication restricted into an experience that begins to feel hot. Ospina’s scene—discussing her predicament, as a person in a motorized wheelchair, when a subway elevator is broken—has no positive resolution. She shares her grief at missing professional and social appointments, and the terror and uncertainty of being trapped underground.

The play seems successful at providing value—in the form of recognition, insight, or a mix of both—to disabled and non-disabled audience members alike. (It was cool to be in an audience where many people were visibly using mobility aids.) Even though this run has ended, I recommend that you follow Haddad’s work and look out for his future projects, which I suspect will be just as incisive and moving.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some of the French director François Ozon’s finest films, like Swimming Pool and Under the Sand, were co-written with the novelist Emmanuèle Bernheim, who died of cancer in 2017. Sadly, Americans who don’t read French have virtually no access to her remarkable and strange body of work. But with the American arrival of Ozon’s latest film, those who have been deprived of Bernheim’s company will now at least have a faithful film adaptation of one of her best books, the autobiographical Tout s’est bien passé (Everything Went Fine). The title refers to Bernheim’s father’s assisted suicide, and this jarring way of describing that event is a perfect example of Bernheim’s genius.

As the book and film make clear, Bernheim’s father, André, a wealthy retired industrialist and well-known art collector, was a very difficult man who treated his daughter coldly when she was a child. His marriage to Bernheim’s mother was a miserable one, not least because he was gay and deeply involved with a violent man who abused him. As the film begins, André has a stroke that leaves him severely diminished—his face twisted, his left eye drooping. Unable to do anything for himself, André announces that he wants to end it all, and it’s up to Emmanuèle (and not his other daughter, Pascale) to figure out how to get it done. Dutiful daughter that she is, she carries out her father’s wishes against her will.

Everything Went Fine’s exploration of aging succeeds on the strength of its actors. In his courageous performance as André, the usually vibrant and exuberant André Dussolier inhabits a character for whom sitting upright in a chair is a major accomplishment. Charlotte Rampling, whose performances usually burst with sexual energy, is trembling and grim as André’s ex-wife. Hannah Schygulla, once the iconic actress of the New German Cinema, plays the white-haired representative of the assisted suicide organization. The ravages of age are made all the more stark for those of us who knew these actors when they—and we—were young.

Emmanuèle and her sister hope that their father will change his mind—that as the day he calls “Le jour J,” meaning “D-Day,” approaches, André will realize that life is beautiful. But he remains stubborn. For him life is no longer beautiful, and he perseveres in his death drive, overcoming every last obstacle placed before him in his quest to end his days with a modicum of dignity. In the end, everything goes fine.

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): Earlier this month, I watched the 1986 movie Heartburn for the first time. I didn’t realize until later that the novel from which the film is adapted—Nora Ephron’s thinly veiled account of her cataclysmic divorce from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein—turns 40 this year. The anniversary has inspired a spate of celebratory pieces, framed as correctives to the condescending and chauvinistic reception that greeted both book and film in the ’80s. A representative critic complained at the time that the novel was “a great misuse of talent . . . whose only point is to nail Carl Bernstein,” who cheated on Ephron when she was seven months pregnant with their second child. The movie, which bombed, was likewise called “one-sided” and castigated for its “tunnel-vision point of view of the offended party.” (The film would have been stronger, a third critic suggested, if it had explored the motivations of the fictionalized, philandering husband; perhaps, for example, he was “disgusted by [his wife’s] pregnant body.”) According to the recent biography of Mike Nichols, who was Heartburn’s director, the hostile reaction took such a toll on him that he checked himself into psychiatric care.

The commentariat was right about one thing: The film is firmly situated in its protagonist’s point of view, faithful to the texture of her experience. This is the source of its defining feature, which is not spite but a fully realized precision. Every setting is rich with sociological detail (a New York apartment hung with sophisticated theatrical posters; a Washington, DC, townhouse dusty from a perpetually unfinished renovation). Many of the strongest scenes explore the pressure on the Ephron character, Rachel, to accept her husband’s affair, an expectation that warps her social milieu. After the adultery is revealed, Rachel’s best friend makes a habit of asking whether she is “being good”—in other words, whether she is resisting raising questions to which she will not like the answers. Rachel is played by a dauntless Meryl Streep, whose performance captures the embodied vulnerability of the character’s position. Heavily pregnant, she flees to New York City, balancing her toddler and her overnight bag on either side of her enormous belly, schlepping between a group therapy session and a magazine office where she goes in search of work. It’s the specificity of her reaction to what yet another critic dismissed as the “banal” fact of adultery that makes the betrayal land with such force. If Heartburn indulges in revenge in its final moments—in the form of a key lime pie that we watch Rachel bake, knowing and yet not quite believing its slapstick fate—then at least, as the saying goes, it is sweet.

Dahlia Krutkovich (fellow): When I entered college, I boasted a spotty attendance record at a Reform Sunday school as my only experience with religious education, and as a result, I had no real sense of Jewish tradition. I was lucky, then, that one of the most exciting professors at my liberal arts college taught a course on critical interpretations of the Book of Exodus, which I took my sophomore year mainly out of interest in the instructor and only vague curiosity for the subject material. I was even luckier that the primary accompanying text for that class, Avivah Gottleib Zornberg’s commentary The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on the Book of Exodus, became my formal introduction to Jewish textual interpretation.

Zornberg, who holds a PhD in English literature from Cambridge and whose father was the chief Rabbi of Scotland, approaches Exodus and its accompanying midrash—stories written by Torah scholars that explain the Bible’s apparent omissions or errors, which a classmate of mine earnestly referred to as “Bible fanfic”—as if they are, together, structured like a psychological self. Her interpretative method, she writes, hinges on the concept of the plain language of the text—the redemption of the Exodus story as it is written—being a conscious layer of meaning, while the midrashic stories and exegeses function as “unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning.” She writes in her introduction to the volume that, “The public, overt, triumphal narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted in the midrashic texts into multiple, contradictory, unofficial narratives which, like the unconscious, undercut, destabilize the public narrative.” If the Exodus story is the constitutive narrative of Jewish religious peoplehood, placing it alongside the centuries’ long effort to retrieve and address the trauma of the flight from Egypt offers a compelling gestalt.

The readings and interpretations that follow are some of the most humanistic and deeply kind I’ve come to encounter in modern commentaries. In her essay on the first chapter of Exodus, where the narrative opens on the Israelites’ sense of selfhood impoverished by generations of enslavement, she hones in on the midrash’s preoccupation with mirrors. Placing Lionel Trilling and (perhaps obviously) Jacques Lacan alongside Rashi, Zornberg recasts this apparent preoccupation as an incipient celebration, one that implicitly represents the first moments in which the Israelites are able to reconstitute themselves as a people ready for divine covenant.

Now that I have also had the pleasure of reading some more of the more typically dry, chauvinistic debates and commentaries, I’m relieved and grateful for having had such a wise, introspective, and pluralistic introduction to Judaism as polyphonic textual tradition, one full of accumulated knowledge and accidental assertion.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Recently, while visiting my sister in Spain, I decided to delve into the work of one of the country’s most celebrated novelists and picked up Javier Marías’s 1992 novel A Heart so White, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Marías, who sadly died last September, begins the narrative with a literal bang: A young woman, just back from her honeymoon, goes to the bathroom during a family lunch and abruptly shoots herself, leaving no clues as to why. We soon move forward in time and learn that that young woman was the second wife of the narrator’s father and the sister of the narrator’s mother, who married her dead sister’s widower after her death. Over the course of the novel, these details and their backstory are revealed to the narrator only slowly, changing how he sees the nature of his own relationship to his wife, Luisa, and to the concept of marriage itself.

Marías tells this story in a manner that can only be called Proustian: He frequently launches—mid-plot—into page-long searching meditations on the nature of human behavior. But if Proust tends to obsess over minute details—how one observes light hitting the water; how a memory flits into the brain; how people negotiate a conversation in polite society—Marías’s digressions are broader, concerned with life’s major philosophical questions, and therefore perhaps an eerier narrative insertion. “Each step taken and each word spoken by anyone in any circumstances (hesitant or assured, sincere or false) have unimaginable repercussions that will affect someone who neither knows us nor wants to, someone who hasn’t yet been born or doesn’t know they’ll have to suffer us and become, literally, a matter of life and death,” the narrator muses while thinking about how husbands and wives come into each other’s lives by chance. And unlike Proust’s leisurely (maybe even glacially) paced narratives, Marías’s plot is taut and quick, at times unfolding like a thriller.

As the narrator slowly learns about his father’s dark past, he is led to dwell on the inherent instability and insecurity of trusting in another person. One must enter a marriage, he concludes, with the knowledge that it is possible everything will change, a third-party could unexpectedly enter the frame, a partner could one day be provoked to infidelity, or even to violence. At times, he describes this fear as one that’s gender-neutral and reciprocal—he or his wife could each one day become villain or victim.

But the specter of violence and power that hangs over the novel is decidedly male: The hushed, overheard stories that populate the narrative are those of philandering men with the very lives of trusting women in their hands. The narrator and Luisa appear as paragons of a newer, more modern Spanish generation: They are both working professional translators, they communicate well, she seems to have relatively equal say in the relationship. But still, they are beset on all sides by darker stories. In a hotel room in Cuba, they hear a man speaking to his younger, dependent mistress, promising to kill his sick wife back home. On a job overseas in New York City, the narrator stays with a friend and witnesses her attempt to navigate a dating scene of shady men demanding sex tapes. Can the narrator’s loving heterosexual marriage evade these oppressive legacies? Marías leaves us with that question.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo can be counted on for at least two, if not three, new films a year. Hong is not only their director; he is also their producer, screenwriter, editor, and composer. His productivity is greatly aided by his consistent use of straightforward plots, the same actors, and a simple aesthetic that takes advantage of even simpler means. But simplicity doesn’t mean lack of complexity.

His new film, Walk Up, stars Kwon Hae-hyo, who usually plays very Hong-like characters. Here he appears as a film director who takes his daughter to meet an old female friend, an interior designer. Following Hong’s signature style, the camera, placed at a medium distance from the characters, simply runs, with no movement or cuts, as the conversation runs its leisurely course. While events in each scene continue to flow unedited before the camera, in another Hong-ian turn, once the director leaves to meet a potential financier for his next film, the flow of time becomes an uncertain thing. The “chapters” of the film occur at varying intervals, with the passing of time signaled by the presence or absence of a character from a previous scene. The arcs of relationships—parental, amorous, and amical—rise and fall both within the scenes and between them; it is for us to reconstruct what occurred in the gaps. But time is not exactly linear; variations of the same events seem to recur, and the film’s end circles back to the past.

Hong’s simple setups and minimal editing make him one of the cinema’s most literary directors: The characters’ words matter. Though lacking in flash, he is also extremely cinematic. He respects the integrity of time and space immensely, and it’s precisely through the long takes that his characters have the room to reveal themselves to each other—and to us. But what is most cinematic is his ability to make undercurrents clear without hammering us over the head with them. It’s the glances, the gestures, the space between the characters that make Hong’s films so extraordinary.

Before you go!

Together with the Foundation for Middle East Piece, Jewish Currents is co-sponsoring a virtual event this coming Tuesday about how the Kohelet Policy Forum—a right-wing, US-funded Israeli think tank—is shaping law in policy in the the US and in Israel/Palestine. Read more about it and sign up here!

We also wanted to announce there will be no Thursday or Friday newsletter next week. Chag Pesach Sameach!

Jess Bergman (contributing writer): At the end of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater, the titular sex pest and erstwhile puppeteer, Mickey Sabbath, has lost virtually everything: two wives, a beloved mistress, his artistic practice, his job, his home. In exile from his life, Sabbath returns to the beach town where he grew up and pays an impromptu visit to his senile cousin Fish. Inside Fish’s untidy house, he finds “his own mother’s treasured sideboard,” and inside that sideboard, a carton of items that once belonged to his older brother Morty, a pilot who died in 1944 when his plane was shot down over the Pacific. To Sabbath, these material traces—an electric shaver studded with hairs, a red-white-and-blue yarmulke, a miniature ceramic fish—are shattering: “Just things. Just these few things, and for him they were the hurricane of the century.”

I thought of this melancholy encounter with a life’s detritus last weekend, on a visit to the Newark Public Library, where Roth’s personal library and other archival objects are on permanent display. The exhibit, located at the top of the palatial marble stairs that Roth immortalized in Goodbye, Columbus, consists, as you might expect, mostly of books. But alongside the inscribed galleys from admiring peers and a fat second edition of Webster’s unabridged Twentieth Century Dictionary you’ll find the sleek Eames Chair and ottoman where Roth sought relief from chronic back pain, a wastepaper basket and felt-tip pens from his study, a pennant from Weequahic High School. My favorite item was a worn-looking Mets cap with a dusty smudge on its brim.

I stopped by the exhibit while in Newark for Philip Roth Unbound, a three-day festival held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. It was a celebration of what would have been Roth’s 90th birthday—and a kind of reclamation after the disastrous rollout of his authorized biography in 2021. On Saturday morning, I took a seat at the back of a packed auditorium for “Letting the Repellant In,” a panel featuring the novelists Susan Choi, Gary Shteyngart, and Ottessa Moshfegh, moderated by Ayad Akhtar. The conversation explored the provocations in Roth’s work, both the deliberate and the artless, from his defiance of Jewish respectability politics to his frequently (but not, in my view, uniformly) misogynistic characterizations of women. While each panelist had their own unique relationship to Roth, they were largely in agreement that disgust, discomfort, and the expression of subterranean desires are essential ingredients of quality literature. Choi movingly defended the occasionally grotesque sexuality in Roth’s oeuvre as part of a vulnerable dedication to depicting embodiment: not just the irrepressible libido of the young man, but also the infirmity of the old. (This insight prompted minor disagreement from Moshfegh, who self-identified as “a prude.”) After a quick lunch break at the wood-paneled deli Hobby’s—where every table is set with a complimentary ice bucket of pickles—I caught an afternoon reading of Roth’s 1959 story “Defender of the Faith” by Morgan Spector, star of HBO’s 2020 adaptation of The Plot Against America, whose actorly yet restrained performance was almost as impressive as the fact that he took a single sip of water while speaking for an unbroken hour and a half.

Attending only a small slice of events in the very middle of the festival, I was mostly spared from the kind of portentous remarks usually saved for opening and closing ceremonies. But there was a moment during the audience Q&A portion of “Letting the Repellant In” when a familiar flicker of anxiety emerged: Given the debates about representation, likeability, and “problematic” authors roiling liberal college campuses and MFA workshops, one attendee wondered, would Roth’s work continue to be taught? As someone who came to his novels outside of the classroom, and who has always understood his reputation as owing more to ordinary readers and literary critics than any scholarly edifice, I confess I found the question a little beside the point. Looking around at the rapt audience—which skewed older, but included a decent smattering of my generational peers—it was hard to muster too much fear about the durability of Roth’s legacy. At the very least, I thought, the proceedings would have flattered his insatiable ego.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I’m not sure what’s going on: Usually I walk around like Jay Sherman in the 90s animated cult classic The Critic (catch phrase: “It stinks!”). But lately I’ve seen so much good art—and even more surprising, a lot of it Jewish. Are these the fruits of mid-pandemic? Are we entering a more fertile phase in Jewish art? (If you think the answer to the latter question is “yes” and have theories about why this may be, reply to this email and let me know.) Either way, last Friday night, I attended one of the sold out performances of Alexandra Tatarsky’s solo show Sad Boys in Harpy Land at Abrons Art Center, which I loved. From the first sequence, in which Tatarksy is a cartoonish lounge singer, wriggling behind the mic while performing a song about death by canned fish—a number she follows up by cracking a can of anchovies in oil and stuffing them into her mouth with her fingers—I was equal parts captivated, confused, and almost pleasurably repelled.

Tatarsky is a clown—that’s how she defines her otherwise difficult to describe practice of being weird onstage with props. For almost a decade she has been working on an interconnected series of absurd existentialist performances about nothing that she calls Seinfeld (get it?), and which takes as a loose text Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 18th century artist bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. (She mocks the sound and pretensions of this word, bildungsroman; she often makes words physical in this performance, processing them through the body like a ball traveling a Rube Goldberg machine.)

The headline for Talya Zax’s piece about the show in The Forward (which I would be surprised if she chose) proclaims that the show is “about” the Holocaust. I don’t think that’s right, but it does seem that Tatarsky has found the object she needs for her ongoing performance of painful, meaningless (hilarious) nothing by leaning into the contours of a kind of mid-century Jewish trope. I’m reminded here of the Jews that surround Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer: grotesque, lecherous, dramatic, with an almost primordial relish—a talent, perhaps—for suffering. (“Gentiles have a different way of suffering,” Miller writes. “They suffer without neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.”) It is a very old Jewishness, a nod to the history of Jew-as-onstage-metaphor for all of suffering humanity—made new and strange by the sheer extent of its strangeness. The show has finished its run, unfortunately, but since it seems that Tatarsky is committed to keeping up the bit indefinitely, there will undoubtedly be another chance to catch her.

Alice Radosh (co-chair, JC Council): Before I read historian and museum curator Richard Rabinowitz’s new book, Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story, Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance was the example that came to mind of a narrative that uses inherited objects to tell a family’s story through the generations. But I suspect very few Jewish Currents readers are walking around with netsuke—the tiny wood and ivory sculptures centered in de Waal’s narrative—in their pockets. And de Waal’s family, the cosmopolitan Ephrussi clan whose wealth was rivaled only by their co-religionist friends, the Rothschilds, may feel a tiny bit out of reach for most of us.

From more familiar objects, Rabinowitz weaves together what, for many Currents subscribers, is probably a more familiar story. Using the skills he cultivated in his curatorial work for New York City’s Tenement Museum, Rabinowitz brings alive the non-religious but strongly Jewish world of early 20th-century immigrant Brooklyn. Each chapter of Objects of Love and Regret is structured around an ordinary item once found in the Rabinowitz family home in East New York. Each object’s history explores a different dimension of his family’s early struggle to hold on to tradition and community while becoming “American.” In examining a simple bottle opener, for instance, Rabinowitz recounts the story of his then-teenage mother teaching his grandmother how to use the tool as part of an American kitchen. In another chapter, Rabinowitz honors a wooden cigar case that housed rarely useful but never-to-be-discarded odds and ends. Beach chairs, first used for homemade picnic lunches in local parks, became used for stoop sitting as the family left the tenements and moved to a neighborhood of attached houses. The history of the chairs says all that needs to be said about the loss of community. As stuff, the objects might seem like nothing special, but over the course of Rabinowitz’s storytelling and research, they come to feel very special.

The book is a lot more than a walk down memory lane. Rabinowitz sensitively tracks the upward mobility of his parents alongside the social fragmentation and physical decay that reshaped Brooklyn between the 1930s and 50s. As he investigates these changes, he presents both what happened in his family’s neighborhood as well as a vision of what could have been, a parallel that is simultaneously heartbreaking and thought-provoking as Brooklyn continues to evolve. Long-time readers of the magazine will recognize and appreciate being immersed in a neighborhood that has long since disappeared; newer Currents subscribers will be introduced and welcomed into that era.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): While watching the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s latest film, Rimini, I wracked my brain trying to come up with another filmmaker with as grim a vision of humanity. Lars von Trier—whose shamelessness in degrading his actors, particularly women, puts him and Seidl in the same class—comes close. But in Seidl there is less aestheticizing of humanity’s sorry state. He is not only a filmmaker who sees us as morally and emotionally fallen beings, but one for whom our physical ruin is omnipresent. His cruelty to his characters isn’t physical; rather, it consists in casting an unflattering gaze on human bodies and their desires. His films are so many portraits of Dorian Gray—he puts the hidden image of Wilde’s classic repeatedly on display.

Like much of Seidl’s oeuvre, Rimini—which continues its run in New York at the Quad this week and will open in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal on March 31st—seems to be a documentary, and if you go into it accepting that premise, you’ll wonder at every moment how the participants agreed to take part. But it is, in fact, a carefully constructed fiction film, tracing the extremely plausible downward trajectory of Richie Bravo, an Austrian easy listening singer, played with chilling realism by Michael Thomas. Once a big star, he has now landed in Rimini, a city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, where he performs in hotel dining rooms before crowds of middle-aged, German-speaking tourists, all reliving their lost youths through this rather absurd-looking schlockmeister in his sub-Elvis costumes. Earning almost nothing from his shows, Bravo supplements his income by sleeping with female admirers, who pay for the very dubious pleasure of doing so. Rimini itself is as broke as Bravo: The film, which takes place in winter, shows a desolate resort city in its off-season, the streets and beaches covered in snow, the empty hotels looking as rundown as the people, many of whom are refugees from Africa sleeping outdoors or killing time waiting for nothing.

Bravo’s life is shaken out of its pathetic rut by the appearance of an attractive young woman who he attempts to pick up. But he soon learns that she is his long-lost daughter, who has come to claim years of unpaid child support. In a typical Seidl touch, Bravo accepts that he owes the money and promises to turn it over—but in order to do so, he must commit the basest act of a very base life.

I fear I might have made Rimini sound like an unattractive experience, and it’s certainly not a date movie. But it is an exhilaratingly clear-eyed portrayal of human sadness and delusion.

David Klion (contributing editor): Just over a year ago, my colleague Nathan Goldman wrote in the Shabbat Reading List that he was reading Moby-Dick to his infant twins, who were born premature and were still in the NICU at the time. “Now that the boys are in separate rooms, I read each chapter to one and then the other, so we can all share in the same surges of language seeking the unspeakable,” Nathan wrote. “I hope by the time we reach the final page, we’ll all be home together.”

It was a lovely sentiment, and it stuck with me, though I had no idea that in less than a year I would become a NICU dad myself. I didn’t end up reading Moby-Dick out loud to my daughter until after we took her home, 11 weeks after her premature birth, and with many medical challenges still ahead of us. The wonderful thing about newborns is that you can read anything to them; they aren’t listening for the story or the characters or the themes, but for the cadences of their caretaker’s voice. We read her children’s books too, of course, but personally I find that I come alive as a reader when I try to channel Melville’s 19th century prose, even if that means stumbling over the occasional antiquated word. At five and a half months, our daughter doesn’t need to know anything about the New Bedford whaling industry or veiled homoerotic themes or biblical allusions to register her father’s intensity when recounting all of the above. For my part, this strange, lyrical novel (which I started years ago but never finished) is best appreciated out loud, with a captive listener—ideally one whose mind is still taking form. I don’t expect she’ll remember any of this when she’s older, but I have faith some of it will linger deep in her subconscious, and that someday she’ll be able to revisit it on her own terms.

This week, I’m exiting the role of newsletter editor, though I will remain with Jewish Currents as a contributing editor and will continue to write for the magazine. When I launched the Shabbat Reading List three years ago, it was my hope that readers would get to know the people who make up the Jewish Currents family as human beings, beyond our most considered editorial output. That goal has been fulfilled many times over, and I’ll always be proud to have built this newsletter and its ever-expanding audience. This isn’t goodbye, because I’m not going anywhere, but I do want to thank you all for returning to the newsletter week after week. It’s been an honor; let’s keep in touch.

Jessica de Koninck (member, JC Council): One of the things I love about reading poetry is that it encourages me to view different aspects of my own life in new ways––a secret pleasure that sometimes feels deliciously indulgent. As a gift to myself, I first read Hila Ratzabi’s new poetry collection, There Are Still Woods, for Tu B’Shevat, and I have since read it several times more. Her poems pay close attention to all that lives, and I have felt my own perspective enriched by that close attention. In the poem “End of the Anthropocene,” Ratzabi writes, “There is a way to be an animal on earth”; that phrase appears to be at the heart of her project, as she proceeds to study that way of being. The poem continues:

I’m surviving, I’m branching

The leaves are t-t-t-t-tapping

The poet becomes the tree. For Ratzabi, everything living––including leaves––is capable of speech. Even in Ratzabi’s most dystopian moments, she is able (to borrow a phrase from the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski) to “praise the mutilated world.” In “Goodnight Earth,” she writes:

How the new species

crawl out of broken cells,

hatched chicks, new eyes

all over their fur

glowing in a thousand directions.

Whatever terrible things we humans may do to the planet, these poems seem to say, life will still somehow win out. She finds even in plant life the qualities she both admires and would like to see in people. For example, in “Forest Arrangement” she writes:

The trees are so good at waiting

I forget they are alive.

They watch me. I insist on it.

How could they not, being everywhere?

The clear sense of unity among and all living things animates her writing. To read Ratzabi is to remember that life around us can be a source of abundant inspiration; and to connect with that sense of awe and wonder reminds us to do a better job of stewarding our planet. Filled with poems of love and grief for the earth, There Are Still Woods makes urgent the truth that the planet is ours for the saving and may yet be saved.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): I spent a few hours this past weekend reading Your Hearts, Your Scars, a slim, potent collection of essays by the writer Adina Talve-Goodman (z”l) about the fullness and the complexities of a life lived with “two hearts in my possession: one inside, and one out.” The first is the donated heart she received at age 19; the second, the single-ventricle one she was born with, which led her to experience heart failure at age 12. “Is your suffering dear to you?” she asks herself three times in the opening essay, quoting a story from Talmud. There and elsewhere, Adina treads through questions of ableism, strength, and shame with lightness and humor. In another essay, she entertains a suitor’s suggestion that there might be something zombie-like about living in a body containing a dead stranger’s heart, admitting there were days when she “did walk about the world feeling a lot like death in drag”—but ultimately she finds the greater horror lies in being cherished for her scars.

The collection itself is unfinished—Adina died of a rare and swift cancer caused by post-transplant immunosuppressants in January of 2018, 11 years after she received the donor heart. It’s easy to lose sight of the specific gifts of this book within the many layers of her living legacy: In a postscript, Hannah Tinti, the One Story magazine editor who helped edit this collection, characterizes Adina as “a hero in colorful scarves and overalls” with “a weakness for glitter and Cher.” Adina was the managing editor of One Story, a performer and trained clown, and the daughter of two rabbis. (Her mother, Rabbi Susan Talve, is known for opening her St. Louis synagogue to BLM protesters in 2014 and 2017.) Even after the transplant, Adina held on to the heart she was born with—not, she tells a nosy doctor, because it’s “a Jewish thing to take your organs home with you,” but because she wanted to keep what was rightfully hers and maybe to find out what a “dying heart” contains. The heart was released to her “in an urn through a funeral parlor,” she recounts drily, “as my own ‘remains.’”

The essays here deal in a troubled economy of gratitude and gifts, where one person’s death becomes another person’s life. But they are populated with the seemingly lightweight details of young adulthood: makeout sessions in basements and in cars, awkward breakups, too-long conversations with strangers, encounters on late-night subway platforms. On a walk to an Iowa cemetery on the ten-year anniversary of her transplant, where she means to pray but realizes she cannot recall the words, Adina remembers that the second-century miracle worker Shimon bar Yochai is said to have lived with “one eye laughing and one eye crying.” These essays devote themselves to living in this space, refusing the ostensible weight of their subject with a bright, insistent humor.

Adina was a new friend the year we both lived in Iowa (her first and my last), warm and sharp and generous and funny. Reading these essays lent new valences to my memories of hiking with her in the woods near my house, of sharing cocktails one night at a dance party that turned out not to be dance-y enough, of burning intentions in her backyard under a new moon. I was moved by the way a voice really can stay alive in print, how encountering Adina in these pages made her briefly, vividly present. There’s a moment in one essay when she bristles at being called “pretty” by a nurse, and concludes that what the nurse must mean is that she looks “a lot like life.” It’s a phrase I want to use to describe this book, which is too brief, and incomplete, but full of life regardless.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Mark Mazower’s history of Greece during World War II was, for me, a great revelation. The story of the killing fields of Eastern Europe is well known, told over and over again from every conceivable angle. Mazower’s account of the less familiar horrors of the Nazi war in Greece can only leave the reader with unbounded respect for the Greek people, who fought first against the Italians and then against the Germans. Mazower has since written an excellent history of Salonika and, most recently, of the Greek Revolution of 1821, which led to the Greeks’ liberation from Ottoman rule.

My knowledge of the Greek Revolution was severely limited—mainly to the story of Lord Byron and the philhellenes (foreign admirers of Greece who joined the fight)—and given Mazower’s particular affection for the Greeks, I was expecting a tale of heroism against all odds. But The Greek Revolution is a story with few real heroes, and certainly not one of unblemished freedom fighters standing up to oppression. The reality is far more interesting and far more human.

Initially launched by a group of idealists, the revolution soon became a swirl of many wars, all of them marked by brutality. As part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece had a sizable Turkish community, and the revolution was an ethnic and religious war as well as a war for independence. There was no Greek nation, Mazower makes clear, and regional ties to local notables—local bandits, even—were stronger than bonds with any of the men who posed as political leaders of the struggle. Civil war within the Greek camp was constant, as were assassinations. Plunder was a strong if not principal motivation for many of those who fought the Turks, and accounts of looting fill the pages of Mazower’s book. Murder of civilians was carried out by both sides. This situation was a shock for the hundreds of philhellenes. Many, Mazower tells us, wondered who were the oppressed and who the oppressors; on the ground, things were not as clear as they had seemed from a safe distance. Mazower makes this tale of crossed loyalties and constant back-stabbing vivid and exciting.

On another note: There’s a film opening this weekend at Film Forum—and running for one week—that I wasn’t all that happy with, but which I’m certain will interest many readers of Jewish Currents. Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ‘45 documents the amazing accomplishments of the Labour government that trounced Churchill in the election of 1945 and proceeded to carry out a program unimaginable in today’s UK, or anywhere else. In just a couple of years, under the leadership of Clement Attlee, and the truly great Nye Bevan, Labour created the National Health Service; built decent public housing; and nationalized the mines, as well as the rails, the airlines, and transport of all kinds—upending the world as it was. It’s a marvelous story, told by men and women who lived through it. But Loach, ever the Labour leftist, is unable to explain how it all came crashing down, except by resorting to the simplistic explanation that it was all top-down and the workers didn’t control industry. Loach’s picture of a socialist Britain will inspire hope in many, if not in me.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): To call Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention extremely detailed would be an understatement. The 2011 biography of the Black Muslim leader by the late Manning Marable, one of the most esteemed historians of his generation, reaches into every nook and cranny of Malcolm’s life and pulls out something interesting. Somehow, Marable does it without the book ever feeling like a slog. As with any work about Malcolm, the subject’s far more famous autobiography, which Alex Haley wrote with Malcolm’s cooperation, looms large over this book. Marable, making a case for another authoritative biography in the shadow of this totemic work, deals with his position by frequently referencing the autobiography, using archival and government sources as evidence to highlight its convenient omissions and debunk some of its more hallowed myths. With little pathos, Marable spends a good chunk of his biography examining how Malcolm exaggerated his pre-conversion life of crime to increase the drama of his prison time and support the narrative of the Nation of Islam delivering him from sin; more salaciously, Marable also posits that Malcolm may have cheated on his wife Betty and had a sexual relationship with a man for money, two assertions that upset his family greatly. (Ta-Nehisi Coates delves into the controversial notion that Malcolm engaged in gay activity here.) While I can’t help but enjoy the gossipy intrigue the book sometimes trades in, Marable’s reassessment of Malcolm’s much-debated political and spiritual transformation from Nation of Islam devotee to Black Power movement pioneer is far more important.

If you’ve read the autobiography or watched Spike Lee’s movie that adapted it, you’re familiar with how Malcolm turned his back on the Nation of Islam’s bizarre and sectarian take on Islam and race. According to Marable’s account, those works capture the broad strokes of Malcolm’s transformation, but the details in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention complicate their otherwise straightforward narrative. Marable shows how Malcolm flirted with rejecting the Nation’s ideology before he formally left the fold, and how he bounced between praising mainstream civil rights leaders and calling them “Uncle Toms”—sometimes in the same week!—while he was still in the Nation. In other words, his transformation into a more orthodox Muslim and a proponent of involvement in mainstream politics happened in fits and starts, not all at once. Marable also spends a great deal of time on Malcolm’s overseas travels, which included stops in the Middle East and Africa, where he met with the likes of Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and Palestine Liberation Organization officials. It was there that his fascination with Pan-Africanism and his flirtation with socialism crystallized.

Marable ends the book in the only place you really can: the assassination of Malcolm X by Nation of Islam members. Marable demonstrates that the NYPD and FBI had no interest in solving the case, and that they arrested the wrong Nation members who were ultimately convicted. Evidence he uncovers in the book points to a Newark Nation of Islam member as one of the culprits. In 2021, the two men pinned for the murder had their convictions thrown out—a testament to Marable’s careful work.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Now that my 13-month-old twin sons have mastered the art of seizing and paging through books, we’ve ended up spending most of our reading time on board books designed to withstand the tugging of tiny, shockingly strong hands. But for last night’s bedtime story, I reached for a long-neglected paper favorite: Du Iz Tak?, written and illustrated by Carson Ellis. This imaginative tale—which follows a cast of whimsically rendered bugs who discover a sprout that soon develops into a leafy plant, which, in turn, becomes a vibrant social space—is composed entirely in a made-up bug language. It’s hard to say what difference this makes to my kids, still early in their journey into speech, but as a parent I love the way it brings me closer to their view of the world. Usually, reading to them means speaking words I understand and they don’t. But as I read the strange syllables of Du Iz Tak? aloud, we all share the experience of struggling to comprehend, delighting together in the interplay of confusion and sense.

Though Ellis’s book is decipherable—or at least I think I’ve begun to parse it!—the experience reminds me of a remark the Italian designer Luigi Serafini once made about his beautiful Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia of imaginary phenomena featuring surreal illustrations and a nonsensical language produced by automatic writing. “The book creates a feeling of illiteracy,” Serafini said, “which, in turn, encourages imagination, like children seeing a book: they cannot read it, but they realize that it must make sense (and that it does in fact make sense to grown-ups) and imagine what its meaning might be.” By throwing adults out of the stable certainty of meaning, Du Iz Tak? similarly facilitates that pleasure in bewilderment—and the struggle to understand.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When I was informed of the existence of a volume of the fables of Vasily Eroshenko, I knew it was a book I had to read. Eroshenko has been described as a “blind left-wing Esperantist”—i.e., a speaker of the constructed international language Esperanto—a combination that is obviously quite rare. His appeal to me is obvious, since I’m legally blind and an Esperantist as well, though a lapsed one. (I’ve translated works from the communist Esperanto movement of the early 20th century; part of my marriage ceremony was performed in Esperanto; and the ketubah my artist wife created is written in English, Hebrew, and Esperanto.)

Born in a Ukrainian village in 1890, Eroshenko lost his sight at age four, but this did nothing to prevent him from living a life of activism and frenetic movement. He spent years in Japan, where he was deeply involved in both the Esperanto and revolutionary movements, associating with men who would form the core of the Japanese Communist Party. He later moved to China, where he was less happy but still ran in remarkable circles with some of China’s most important intellectuals. His travels allowed him to survive the extermination of the Soviet Esperanto movement, and he finally returned to his birthplace in 1952, where he died that same year. He was apparently a somewhat difficult man, but his political and linguistic activism bespeak a commitment to human brotherhood and solidarity.

And yet, however optimistic Eroshenko’s beliefs might have been, his newly published collection of Aesopian tales, The Narrow Cage—featuring anthropomorphized insects, fish, and a variety of quadrupeds—presents a tragic vision of life and humanity. These tales, bleak beyond compare, are clearly expressions of Eroshenko’s lived experience as an outsider. While they frequently invoke notions of “selfless love” and “self-sacrifice” as the ultimate good, the reward for self-abnegation is almost always betrayal and death. Creatures of all kinds are called on to free themselves from slavery, but it is the potential liberator who is turned on and slaughtered by the enslaved. The Narrow Cage reveals the darkness latent in Eroshenko’s anarchism, in which death is the ultimate anarchist. As one of its incarnations says in the story “Two Deaths,” echoing Bakunin: “All must die. It makes no difference to me. For I am an anarchist. I am an equalizer! I kill flowers and birds and men and women and children. Ah, what fun it is to reap destruction on living things.”

Before you go!

We leave you with one final recommendation from Jewish Currents Press: The second printing of the Israeli Black Panthers Haggadah is finally here! We think this beautiful hardbound edition featuring footnotes rich with anecdotes, notes on the authors’ intentions, and crucial context about the movement, will make a meaningful contribution to your Passover seder for years to come. Domestic orders placed by March 16th will arrive before the first night of Passover (April 5th). Order yours today!