Shabbat
Reading List
Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): Sarah Aziza’s words have been ones I have returned to again and again over the last 19 months, from her haunting cataloguing of watching the first weeks of the Gaza genocide unfold to her reflection on the role of witnessing in the pages of this magazine. Aziza’s new memoir, The Hollow Half, tells the story of her brush with death from anorexia, alongside her family’s story—their expulsion from Palestine in 1948, the experience growing up between the US and Saudi Arabia, and their attempts to return home to a land hollowed by Israel’s colonization. Sarah’s mom is white, her father Palestinian, and she writes of coming into her identity as a Palestinian American woman, making sense of these two halves of herself. She traces the hollowing grief of the ongoing Nakba and the pressure to conform to American whiteness, all while trying to understand and overcome the gnawing pain that literally eats her from within. Aziza writes with a breathtaking fierceness and vulnerability, her intellect matched by her lyricism.
Near the end of the book, Aziza reflects on being denied entry to Israel. She writes that the experience of receiving the officer’s “no” at the border “colonized, spread. Joining, compounding my anorexic drive to silence the other, unbearable histories inside my flesh. Starving to murder time, to sever self from self.” In response to this devastation, Aziza movingly invokes the words of Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who, she notes, “standing in the midst of a longer disaster” of slavery and anti-Black racism “calls for a courageous grappling, a yes to the weight of what we inherit, and the ruptures we live among. It is only through such reckoning that liberation might be found.” Reading Aziza’s words, during perhaps one of the bleakest moments in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, was painful, but it was also a reminder of what we are struggling for—a people’s right to live, full and whole. We are blessed to have such courageous storytellers as Sarah Aziza.
Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I first saw Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers when it came out in December 2023. I’d promised the friend I’d brought along that we wouldn’t see anything depressing. When the lights came up, though, both of us were teary. “That was so sad!” she said. “Wait, no,” I said. “I think it’s uplifting!”
All of Us Strangers is about a lonely gay writer who meets and forms a relationship with a mysterious stranger. It’s sexy, dark, and surprisingly fast-paced for a film in which very little happens. I won’t give away why it could be pitched as either uplifting or depressing, depending on how you spin it—that would ruin the movie, and I think you should see it.
But I will say that I watched All of Us Strangers again this week, and while I stand by my initial assessment that it’s ultimately hopeful, I can’t argue with the fact that the film is suffused with a deep, at times almost suffocating, melancholy. It’s present from the very first shot, when we see Andrew Scott writing—or more accurately, trying and failing to write—alone in a high-rise London apartment building that seems like an architectural manifestation of late-capitalist isolation.
In the end, then, what All of Us Strangers left me with was neither uplift nor sadness, but rather, simply an awareness of my own capacity to feel. Which reminded me of another film I saw recently: Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace. I wasn’t going to write about Blue Sun Palace, since my brother worked on it and I’m far from a neutral source. But the film, which centers around a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens, hasn’t left my mind since I first saw it weeks ago, and rewatching All of Us Strangers emphasized why. In both films, grief is always close at hand; both feature protagonists whose lives have been marked by tragedy. And to the extent that either is hopeful, that hope hinges on what might happen after the credits roll—a future that is anything but guaranteed.
It can be hard to feel deeply in a world so enveloped by horror, as ours is in this moment. It’s often easier to numb out or become cynical; the hazards are simply fewer. But I had no choice but to feel while watching Blue Sun Palace and All of Us Strangers. These are films about the kind of sadness that threatens to never release you, and the arguably scarier belief in the possibility of something else. It is precisely this range of emotions that reminds me that I am human. What more could I ask of art?
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language—now streaming nearly everywhere, including on Kanopy for free—might be the best film I’ve seen in 2025. It’s certainly the funniest; this model work of absurdism, which stays faithful to its premise without ever becoming too exaggerated or silly, had me laughing so hard I was afraid my neighbors would hear me through the walls.
Set mostly in an alternate-reality version of Winnipeg where the population is predominantly Iranian and the main language is Persian, the movie is made in the style of Iranian arthouse cinema—full of charming children, sensitive adults, and touching reflections on human solidarity. In this cockeyed Winnipeg, Louis Riel, the leader of a 19th-century rebellion of Métis Manitobans, is a national hero; accordingly, the unit of currency is the riel (a nod to the Iranian rial). The film finds a fictionalized version of Rankin returning home from Montreal, where the people in government, obsessed as they are with their own quest for sovereignty, don’t even know which province Winnipeg is in. The film is a wonderful sendup of Canada that plays cleverly on its hypothesized cultural fusion. Gray, freezing Winnipeg is still its grimly ugly self, a city so grim that schoolchildren are told to frown when class pictures are being taken. But now the city streets are lined with the same sad-looking stalls and shops often featured in Iranian films, selling old typewriters and birthday cakes. (One store sells only turkeys, another just Kleenex.) At one point, Rankin waits for someone in a Tim Hortons—Canada’s Dunkin Donuts—where the pastries are served accompanied by not coffee, but tea in a glass served from a samovar, Iranian-style.
Delightful absurdity abounds. A tour guide having a rough time finding interesting sites leads the group to a bus stop where someone forgot his briefcase in 1983 (the luggage has been left in place ever, in the hope the owner will return for it), and to Louis Riel’s grave, located in a triangle formed where an off-ramp and a highway meet, where they are obliged to observe 30 minutes of silence. A class of Iranian children attend a French immersion school inexplicably set up in a drab building in a part of town known as “the Beige neighborhood”; their teacher despises them and, after one of the students is unable to read an exercise on the blackboard because he says a turkey stole his glasses, expels them all. (His story is later corroborated.)
Though unsparing in its mockery not only of the country in which it’s set but also of the exalted humanism of Iranian films, its satire is suffused with affection. Universal Language is a film of tremendous intelligence, originality, and warm humor—something urgently needed today.
David Klion (contributing editor): I’ve had a little more than two years to settle into the identity of special needs parent, ever since a geneticist sat me and my wife down and explained to us that our daughter has an extremely rare (one in 32,000) genetic condition that neither of us carry and that would permanently alter the course of our lives. Though things have gone about as well as they could have relative to the expectations set at that moment, and our daughter is thriving and charms everyone she meets, it was a traumatic moment and one I’ll likely spend many more years processing. At one point I tried to write about it for publication, but it didn’t come together. I still haven’t figured out exactly what I feel comfortable saying, or how to write about it in a way that anyone else might find helpful.
It’s in this context that I read Amanda Hess’s debut book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, which was released last week and which movingly describes the experience of special needs parenting. Hess’s older son was diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (one in 15,000), whose possible symptoms include an increased cancer risk and a prominent tongue that often requires surgical correction. While the specifics of our situations are very different, no one I’ve read has done a better job conveying the shock and terror of receiving a diagnosis like this, or the awe of seeing your child grow and develop in defiance of your worst fears.
I am not impartial here; I’m friends with Hess and her husband, I know their sons, Hess and I share a book editor, and I’m quoted on this exact subject in Second Life. Specifically, there’s a passage where I tell Hess that people kept asking me: Did you know before she was born?—in what I interpreted as an ambient obsession with choice and control in our professional class demographic. “The real tragedy, these interactions seemed to say, was having a baby with traits you did not personally select,” Hess writes. “Babies don’t work like that, and that’s part of what makes parenting meaningful: You do not get to choose.” Much of the public discourse on parenthood, and in particular the recent and unsettling vogue for natalism, strikes me as naively celebratory and saccharine; by contrast, I found this passage, and many others in Second Life, refreshingly honest. Hess writes about her children with ferocious love, but she never denies or minimizes the sacrifices or anxieties that accompany the decision to reproduce, and she is bracingly real about her own self-doubts.
I don’t want to make Second Life sound solemn, though; Hess is a tremendously funny observer, and her son’s condition is only one aspect of the book (much as it’s only one aspect of raising any special needs child). The bulk of Second Life is concerned with the way the internet, and particularly fertility apps, mediates the experiences of pregnancy and child-rearing. Hess has a singular talent, often on display in her cultural criticism in The New York Times, for capturing the quotidian experience of browsing the internet and being manipulated by its algorithms without ever judging or trivializing the emotional impulses being thus manipulated. In the current moment, when it can feel as though technology is rendering writing obsolete, there is something hopeful about reading such careful and precise writing about the humanity that all our technology is built around.
Nathan Goldman (senior editor): This past weekend, I ventured out to downtown St. Paul not once but twice, to see The Magnetic Fields perform their 1999 magnum opus 69 Love Songs over the course of two consecutive nights. These shows—part of a tour pegged to the iconic record’s 25th anniversary, which has now extended well into year 26—were not my first foray into that particular kind of retrospection. In fact, all but one of the shows I’ve seen this year were similar events: I also caught Frank Black celebrating his 1994 alt-rock classic Teenager of the Year and The Hold Steady commemorating their 2005 indie bar band epic Separation Sunday. (I’ve got two more coming up: Of Montreal doing their 2005 synth-pop extravaganza The Sunlandic Twins and Frank Black again, this time with his better-known act the Pixies, paying tribute to their early-’90s records Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde.) As the critic Peter C. Baker has noted, this practice, once “intriguingly novel,” has become ubiquitous—a testament, he argues, to the “acceleration of a culture industry that is unsettlingly dedicated . . . to monetizing our nostalgic attachment to media from the past.” Baker examines the perks of these “nostalgia exercises”—both for ardent fans and for artists scrambling to make ends meet in an inhospitable environment—as well as their aesthetic limits, principally the devaluation of variety and surprise. As he writes, these concerts largely abjure “the simple pleasure . . . of never knowing what song is coming next.”
Of the album-based shows I’ve seen, these ones honoring 69 Love Songs were the most immune from Baker’s critique, not because of the performances themselves but because of the band and album in question. For one thing, even when the setlist isn’t known in advance, spontaneity has always been minimal in Magnetic Fields shows, which tend to unfold less like indie rock concerts than recitals, with the band members seated and staid, performing faithful renditions with little commentary and no chaos. But more importantly, 69 Love Songs, whose title functions as a literal description of the offering, is not so much a record in the traditional sense as it is a durational formal experiment, a test of the songwriter’s prowess and the listener’s patience—the songs feel most fully realized as part of this absurd, ungainly whole. The project is also inherently performative, embracing artifice over authenticity: Stephin Merritt, who composed each of the 69 tracks, dons character after character, never singing confessionally and regularly routing the emotions at hand through clever wordplay and trope-laden genre imitation spanning everything from electro-pop bangers to country ballads. (Indeed, Merritt has said the album was initially conceived as “a theatrical revue with four drag queens,” a premise that survives in his choice to outsource vocal duties on a number of songs to a quartet of other singers.)
The band did not disappoint, proceeding dutifully but energetically through the mammoth tracklist. (“After this song,” Merritt quipped before the night one closer, “there will be a 22-hour intermission.”) For the most part, they fulfilled what Baker calls the “implicit promise . . . that old songs will sound like old recordings.” Still, certain structural limitations called for rearrangements and other alterations: Of the original vocalists, only Merritt and Shirley Simms were present (tragically, LD Beghtol, who performs my favorite song on the album and also wrote a charming little “field guide” to the record, died in 2020), so the two split singing with latecomer Anthony Kaczynski, who also took on some of the parts that Merritt does on-record, presumably to give his singularly beautiful bass voice a break. And in a delightful counterpoint to the band’s sedate reputation, they did indulge in occasional jokes and wry witticisms, sometimes injected into the music, as when they transformed the cheerleader-style chorus of “Washington, D.C.” into a laconic lament. But while many of the shifts and flourishes were welcome, they weren’t necessary; the true star was the songs themselves. Hearing one after another, I was awed anew at the achievement of the album—dozens upon dozens of truly brilliant tracks—and at Merrit’s peculiar genius. There are songwriters who mean more to me, but none I know who can match his uncanny ability to wring real feeling from a formalist exercise, unlocking the eros latent in the very structure of the love song. In his hands, the rote and well-trod become sublime.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s LOVE, now showing in New York and coming soon elsewhere, is a jewel of a film. In this perfectly controlled work, every element—the acting, the writing, the direction, the cinematography, even the music—is perfectly in balance, each augmenting all the others. The film revolves around the sexual dilemmas of Marianne, an oncologist at Oslo University Hospital, and her nurse, Tor, who has no interest in a relationship; he’s satisfied with the joys of cruising and casual sex, and spends insomniac nights riding the ferry to a nearby island in the fjords, using Grindr to alert him to any possible partners. But a meetup on the ferry soon gives way to a sexless emotional entanglement. Meanwhile, a friend has set Marianne up with a geologist who lives on that same island. The shidduch takes, and Marianne finds herself drifting into a relationship she doesn’t really want. Through these two figures, LOVE meditates on the role of chance in modern romance.
Though the film is so emotionally and aesthetically rich it nearly bursts from plenitude, it also benefits from a narrow focus. The intimate plot involves a limited cast—these two main characters, the partners they attract, and a friend of Marianne’s who’s organizing a cultural event for the Oslo 100th birthday—and a contained setting. (The entire locale, from Marianne’s hospital to city hall to the islands in the fjords, can be covered in ten minutes.) In Haugerud’s hands, this small world contains more than enough. We’re inexorably drawn into the stunning beauty of the fjords at night: the lights reflected in the water, the city itself glimmering in the background. Even the docks’ loveliness feeds the film’s wistful mood. While this melancholy splendor—and the unhappiness and ill health the characters suffer—conspire to create an atmosphere of gloom, it’s often playfully punctured by the leads’ knowing smiles.
The film’s formal harmony, as well as the intelligent conversation at its center, puts one in mind of the best of Éric Rohmer. (The two directors also share a taste for putting calendrical context at the beginning of a scene.) Even the ambient quiet that envelops the words spoken in the romantic scenes is stunning. And while LOVE ends on an unresolved note, this too is a thoughtful choice, reflecting a deep understanding of how people actually live, and sometimes love.
LOVE is the first film in Haugerud’s “Oslo trilogy,” whose other two entries—SEX and DREAMS—will be shown later this year. Though the three linked movies are meant to function independently, it still feels almost inappropriate to review this one on its own. Given the cinematic mastery on display, the three movies will surely work together in some way that enhances the meaning of each. But for now LOVE is what we have, and so it is LOVE that you must see.
Sanders Isaac Bernstein (contributor): I approached Rachel Cockerell’s new family memoir, Melting Point: Family, Memoir and the Search for a Promised Land—a tale told wholly through archival materials and interviews—with, admittedly, great expectations. Its method of composition, a collage “from diaries, letters, memoirs, articles, and recordings,” gave me hope that I might even encounter a Benjaminian montage. Could Cockerell’s mosaic of fragments, a wandering narrative from Theodor Herzl’s Zionism and Israel Zangwill’s Territorialism (in which her great-grandfather played an important role), through the New Playwrights Theatre in interwar New York City (where her great-uncle was a playwright), and finally to the postwar London of her grandmother and Aliyah-bound great-aunt, reveal the fracture lines of history—its contingency? She suggests as much in her preface: “A Jewish homeland in Palestine was only one of several possibilities: As one character in the book says, ‘It’s never inevitable at the time.’”
But as I set out reading, I found the book to be strangely uncurious about how the past might have conceived its future differently, its textual selections focusing more on the immediate aura of its historical personages—how Theodor Herzl seemed “royal” or that Ze’ev Jabotinsky was “gallant,” or that Mike Gold had “‘proletarian’ props”—than in their political visions. The great potential of the book’s formal composition seemed to yield to the limits of the texts Cockerell chooses to describe the historical path that led to the writer’s existence, which began when her great-grandfather David Jochelman left Russia for London to team up with Zangwill on the Galveston Plan—a strange turn-of-the-century resettlement project of 10,000 Russian Jews in the United States by way of Galveston, Texas.
This journey isn’t without interest. The opening section begins with the first Zionist Congress and the pogroms of 1903 and guides us through the development of the Galveston Plan, while the second section plunges its readers into the 1920s and New York City’s socialist theater world, where Cockerell’s great-uncle, the forgotten playwright Emjo Basshe, was once active. If the final section, about the Jochelman family’s time in London from the ’20s to the founding of Israel, lacks some of this drive, its nostalgic interviews endow it with textured memory.
But while moments may be intriguing, the book’s framing often feels tired; history, in this context, seems designed to confirm the current state of the world rather than unsettle it. The treatment of the Galveston Plan is a case in point. The plan is certainly a historical curiosity, but my (perhaps naive) hope had been that Cockerell’s approach would let us see it as a real possibility—as it felt to the people at the time. Instead, Cockerell’s choice to filter the plan through the retrospective memoir of AJC leader Morris Waldman, instead of, say, a Jewish emigrant setting out from Germany’s Bremen ports, renders the venture “a somewhat romantic story,” in Waldman’s words, dooming the plan before we can even begin to understand it, let alone believe in it.
In the afterword, Cockerell reveals that survival has been the guiding logic of her text, directly linking her existence with the success of Zionism. She notes that a friend of Zangwill wrote that the Zionist leader had “confessed to me once that he had wasted half his life on Zionism.” Reflecting on this, Cockerell writes, “I have Zangwill’s half-wasted life to thank for my existence.” Where the scholar Bernard Marinbach once called the Galveston Plan “a movement which had abandoned Zionist aspirations as hopeless,” such a perspective is absent in Melting Point; Cockerell, rather, lets Zangwill’s friend frame this project simply as an outgrowth of the Zionist movement. In this way, Cockerell’s final words recast the Galveston Plan as a kind of rehearsal of a successful Zionism—and the book, in turn, becomes about how, even before the founding of the Jewish state, the dream of Zionism saved at least one family of Jews.
Perhaps the book reflects Zionism’s own myopia—where its focus on survival reproduced, rather than challenged, old forms—most notably, the ethnostate. The book similarly sacrifices the strange possibilities of the past’s vision of the future for an overarching pattern we know too well—pogroms, Zionism, World War II, Israel. I can only wonder what Melting Point might have revealed had Cockerell not only let the past tell its story through her artful collage but also let its perspectives influence her tale’s arc, not history as we know it now, but, rather, how it could have been.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): David Bezmozgis’s recent short story, “From, To,” published in the New Yorker, is a dispatch from the present tense of Jewish American family life. The protagonist—like Bezmozgis, a Gen X Soviet Jewish immigrant with a college-aged daughter—loses his mother suddenly. The loss strikes in the first paragraph, and delivers some of the most beautiful writing in the piece. Upon hearing the news from his aunt, “he feels a plummet and a deletion commensurate with the space his mother occupied in his life. Nothing will fill it. He knows this from his father’s death. He’ll go around with another amorphous blank, until he himself becomes one in the consciousnesses of his children.” The details and rituals of mourning are handled tenderly, but unsentimentally: the late-night call to the funeral home; the last, unceremonious parting with the dead body; the first morning in the hard truth of absence. “All that passes for normal life strikes him as mockingly, even malevolently, strange.”
This is a high-stakes emotional environment in which to set the familiar intergenerational political impasse between father and daughter, who is active in her school’s encampment alongside her Palestinian Egyptian girlfriend. Here, too, the portrait of middle-aged Jewish grievance and myopia is accurate and arresting. The protagonist seems entirely inured to what he identifies as the casual eliminationist fascism of his elders—this is thoroughly digested, even with some distaste, and in fact, universalized: All people share this totalitarian drive, if they think it will benefit them. But he is activated in describing—in perhaps the most propulsive cadences in the piece—the explosion of post-October 7th vitriol against Israel, narrowly focused on its most bombastic expressions. He tiptoes up to the edge of empathy with Palestinian fathers in attempting to understand the clips of Gazan suffering posted by his largely “third world” soccer crew, before retreating again and again into his own story, his parents’ story: “birth in the embers of the Shoah, Yiddishkeit, Soviet existence, antisemitism, immigration, courage, struggle, family, community, legacy.” He fears that his daughter Mila has lost any connection to these seminal Jewish struggles, that she cannot feel the pain of his own grandfather for his lost brother—murdered by gentiles “in the proverbial wood”—that what the grandson “feels doesn’t possess sufficient charge to be transmitted further.” What does “from the river to the sea” or “intifada, revolution” mean to his daughter in light of this inheritance?
But these questions are never asked of Mila, so they are never answered. We never see her youthful political folly or her principled defiance, her soft denial or wholehearted appeal to Jewish identity. For her part, she appears polite and dignified in her mourning and her activism in a way that falls flat. If she is withholding from her father in his moment of grief, we soon understand why, as her decision to return to the encampment under the threat of its clearing instead of staying at the shiva another night spurs an ugly outburst in front of her girlfriend. According to her father, the rift in their relationship is the fault of the “homicidal maniacs” who perpetrated October 7th, and not at all a function of his lack of curiosity about her. It is an apt accounting of the father’s unrelenting projection, his successful barricading of his own story from the one playing out in Gaza, his smug indulgence in his own grievance. And yet, by the end of the story, as the protagonist earnestly appeals to law—real estate law, of all things!—as if dispossession and apartheid and genocide were not the law in Israel, and martials the Kaddish’s invocation of peace toward a misguided sense of moral superiority, the reader suspects that the author has just gotten on his soapbox. Though the father’s outburst saves him from perfect righteousness, it is not enough to suggest a deeper authorial self-awareness, an ability to see around his largely “reasonable” protagonist. It made me feel an uncomfortable desire to debate the author rather than sympathize with the character, which was otherwise easy to do. An enormous shame for a story so otherwise sensitively observed.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): One of life’s purest delights is the pleasure of discovering the work of a great artist I’d never heard of—as happened to me just recently while reading about the family of the French composer Léon Reinach (1893–1944). The surname will ring a bell for those familiar with the Dreyfus Affair: Léon was the son of Theodore Reinach, one of three Jewish brothers, along with Salomon and Joseph, who were among the most vocal supporters of the Dreyfusard cause. The family had risen to wealth and prominence thanks to the French Revolution, which emancipated the Jews and the republic—in which they prospered and to which they all felt they owed a debt. The Reinachs were deeply involved in French cultural life, and though he worked as a lawyer, Léon also studied musical composition at the Paris Conservatory. He married into even greater wealth: His wife, Béatrice, hailed from the fabulously rich Camondo banking family. (The clan, originally from Constantinople, was so powerful in Turkey that, in order to facilitate communication between their different offices, they built their own staircase connecting the streets that separated them, about which I wrote some years ago.)
All of this gave Léon the leisure to live his life pretty much as he pleased, and the result was the remarkably beautiful Sonata in D Minor for Violin and Piano from 1925. The piece is seldom performed, and I haven’t been able to find any recording of it other than one haunting rendition by the Italian pianist Maria Pia Carola. The sonata bears all the earmarks of its time and place, but raises the standard tropes of early 20th-century French composition to its highest emotional level. From the first notes of the first movement, the music is nearly unbearably beautiful, the piano and the violin almost yearning for one other. D minor is the key of virtually all klezmer, and while there is nothing remotely klezmer about this piece, the ache it expresses is deeply Jewish.
Indeed, it’s hard, in retrospect, to separate the sonata’s sorrow from the composer’s fate. Léon and his family thought their wealth and connections would enable them to avoid the destiny of the Jews around them. But their efforts to exempt themselves from the escalating antisemitic measures only worked for so long. (On the registration card he, like all French Jews, was forced to carry, Léon gave his profession as “comp. de musique.”) He was deported with his family late in the war and died in Birkenau. That his magnificent music is almost totally unknown only adds to the tragedy.
Mari Cohen (associate editor): Partway through the short book Hierarchies of Solidarity—a conversation between the German-based researchers Sinthujan Varatharajah and Moshtari Hilal—Varatharajah offers a telling anecdote about a demonstration against the genocide in Darfur they had recently attended in Berlin. While Varatharajah was pleased to see many non-Sudanese people turn out for the march, they were struck by how the protestors had adopted and transformed popular pro-Palestine chants: As a spin on “Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry, Palestine will never die,” the demonstrators shouted “Darfur, Darfur, don’t you cry, Sudan will never die.” The problem, though, was that the chant didn’t quite fit—neither rhythmically nor analytically. As Varatharajah notes, “Darfur’s tears will not be dried by proclaiming Sudan’s longevity”; due to the country’s historical oppression of non-Arab Black populations, Sudan, they explain, “is in many respects the real problem for Darfur.” This encounter encapsulates the key questions raised by the book and in an accompanying conversation between Varatharajah and the Palestinian writer Hebh Jamal: How can we show solidarity across multiple contexts without flattening or abstracting them? Why do certain struggles gain more prominence in the West while others are ignored by activists? How do we create a broad coalition that supports Palestinian liberation while also acknowledging coalition partners’ own culpability in other contexts of oppression? What is solidarity—and what does it mean for it to be mutual but not transactional?
It’s a challenging subject to tackle in part because the bad-faith versions of these inquiries are so prominent. Frequently, the question “Why do you care about Palestine more than Sudan?” is lobbed as an attack to imply that focusing on Israel stems from antisemitism. (Of course, there are plenty of reasons why someone may focus primarily on Palestine, including the amount of money and support that Western governments provide to Israel; the prominence of pro-Israel activism in many countries; and, currently, the fact that the number of bombs dropped on Gaza and number of children killed there far outpace many other recent wars.) So it’s refreshing that Hierarchies of Solidarity offers a forum to explore these challenges in which a commitment to Palestinian freedom is shared and assumed, and in which the goal of the discussion is not to undermine the movement for Palestine but to sharpen it.
Jamal’s conversation with Varatharajah is especially fruitful, allowing both activists to productively work through points of tension. Varatharajah grounds their approach to these questions in their own experience participating in the Eelam Tamil struggle against the state of Sri Lanka, pointing out that it can be challenging to effectively rally left solidarity against Sri Lanka’s majoritarian Sinhalese rule because of how Sri Lanka has framed itself as a champion of Global South causes and is allied with states that otherwise oppose Western imperialism and support Palestine. Jamal, meanwhile, draws attention to the difficulties of actualizing multidirectional solidarity in practice: In her predominantly Turkish community in Mannheim, speaking out on behalf of Kurds can risk alienating the majority of would-be fellow Palestine activists. Jamal and Varatharajah also tackle the evergreen question of whether minority groups’ nationalist aspirations can succeed without ultimately replicating the evils of national state building. “It is like charities—they should only exist to elevate an issue. And the moment that is resolved, it should dissolve. It is the same with nationalism,” Varatharajah muses.
Varatharajah and Jamal discuss both the promise of being able to draw connections between Palestine and other environments as well as the problems with broad phrases like “When Palestine is free, we all are free.” In addition to reducing Palestinians to symbols, such phrases can mimic the colonial logic of creating a “center” against which everything else is reduced to a “periphery.” I’m familiar with the danger of creating a universal template from one specific context from my own reporting on how a definition of genocide that takes its shape from the Holocaust has sometimes prevented the public from recognizing other instances of genocide that don’t share precisely the same hallmarks. At the same time, there are useful ways of drawing connections—patterns from across contexts that help illuminate specific dynamics, material connections between oppressive regimes, and strategies for fighting back. Indeed, understanding that our liberation is bound up with that of others can aid, rather than undermine, solidarity: In the book, Hilal approvingly cites Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, Jewish Currents contributors and authors of Safety through Solidarity, who posit in their book that solidarity with other marginalized groups is a crucial component of Jewish safety.
Hierarchies of Solidarity poses more questions than answers. Much of the book’s focus is the discursive realm, and though Hilal and Varatharajah make a compelling case that the internet is a certain type of public square that counts as “real life,” the material stakes of the conversation aren’t always clear: While Varatharajah speaks approvingly about movements putting out statements for other causes as a practice of solidarity, it’s not clear to me what these statements, in and of themselves, typically accomplish, or how to think about actualizing solidarity beyond Instagram graphics or tweets. But in modeling how to untangle the tensions and possibilities of solidarity through good-faith, productive debate, Hierarchies of Solidarity offers a key contribution to the conversation.
Daniel May (publisher): Over the last 100 days, it has often felt like I’m living through some dystopia imagined by the staff of this magazine on our darkest days: a world where accusations of antisemitism are used to withhold billions of dollars in research funds, where writing an op-ed in a school newspaper supporting BDS is grounds for masked men to throw the author in the back of an unmarked van, where the country’s oldest Jewish “civil rights” group applauds the regime for arresting those who protest against a US-funded war, where the president posts CGI-enhanced videos of himself dancing in an ethnically-cleansed Gaza. We knew how dark the water in our pond had become, but it’s another thing to see it color the whole damn sea.
Among other historical precedents, the current repression can’t help but call to mind prior campaigns of anti-communism. Earlier this week, a colleague shared an Instagram post featuring a picture of a “Free Morris Schappes” button from 1941; Schappes, editor of Jewish Currents from 1946 to 2000 (!!), was imprisoned for 14 months for perjury after refusing to provide names to the Rapp-Coudert Committee, the New York State body charged with identifying communist influence in the state’s education system.
While I didn’t consciously recognize it, it was surely this context that led my eyes, as I was hustling to get out the door for a week of vacation earlier this month, to land on Phillip Roth’s I Married a Communist, a book that has long sat on my shelf unread. My prior neglect was due to some combination of my ambivalent relationship to Roth and being put off by the title, but within pages of starting the book on the plane, I felt like I was back in the company of a voice so familiar to almost be familial: brilliant, cranky, offensive, verbose, and, at times, must-read-that-sentence-three-times-over beautiful.
Alongside American Pastoral and The Human Stain, I Married a Communist is part of Roth’s “American Trilogy,” each of which has the same architecture: Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter-ego and narrator, tells the story of a man from his past—a man with a secret that the novel slowly uncovers. In I Married a Communist, that man is Ira Ringold, miner-turned-radio actor. The story, in form, is a tragedy. We follow Ira’s radicalization during World War II, his recruitment into the Communist Party, his work as a laborer (where he develops a reputation for his impersonation of Abraham Lincoln at CIO rallies), his success as a radio-play actor, and his marriage to the beautiful and famous actress Eve Frame—closeted Jew, overt antisemite, and mother to a brutally manipulative daughter. We also learn of his affairs with his Polish masseuse and his step-daughter’s best friend (this is, after all, a Roth novel), as well as the destruction of his life and livelihood after Eve vengefully writes and publishes the best-seller I Married a Communist, which exposes Ira’s supposed starring role in the Communist plot to take over American media.
Ira is not quite unsympathetic, but he’s also not attractive. Roth paints his politics as rigid, unthinking, repetitive, and boring. What makes him interesting is everything but his politics—his lust, his rage, his appetite, his self-doubt, and his desire for status alongside his resentment of it. Ultimately, he is undone by internal conflict, his inability to be as disciplined and rigid and, Roth suggests, simplistic as his politics.
It is one of the hallmarks of liberal ideology to describe itself as un-ideological, and it is tempting to read I Married a Communist as a literary testament to a familiar postwar Jewish liberalism: comfortable with contradiction, averse to utopianism, hesitantly but still thoroughly American-exceptionalist in its embrace of the US as the least bad political option for creatures made, as Isaiah Berlin liked to put it, of such “crooked timber.”
While accurate, that would be incomplete. As irritating as Ira may be, and as cruelly withering his treatment of Eve (a character based on Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom, who wrote a memoir in part about her relationship with Roth—that Roth in turn wrote her into his novel reveals such next-level pathos that it’s hard to know what to even say about it), the real contempt in the book is for the anti-communist grifters who push Eve into writing the book and who ride its success into Washington. They have all the Manichean immaturity of Ira, but none of his sense of justice. And the real hero is Ira’s brother Murray, who narrates Ira’s story to Zuckerman and who is as thoughtful as his brother is rash, who is loyal to literature and language above any political party, but is also unequivocally of the left—a leader in the teacher’s union who, when called before New Jersey’s version of the Rapp-Coudert Committee, refuses to name names and is fired from his high school teaching position.
Perhaps my reading is overly generous, but I closed the book thinking that part of what it means to claim the tradition of the “Jewish left” is to own a political tendency that is simultaneously unequivocal and equivocal, adamant and perhaps even rigid in its commitments while unwilling to let those commitments rest in any easy relationship to one another and even unsure of whether they do. The task, as one character describes to Zuckerman in the novel, is “not to erase the contraction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being.” To be clear about the world while confused about oneself is perhaps a contradiction, but it’s a contradiction worth aspiring to.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Toward the end of Joan Didon’s harrowing posthumous book Notes to John, her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, remarks, “Nothing about families turns out to be easy, does it?” By the time this understatement is uttered, we’ve been made witness—through the notes Didion wrote to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, detailing her sessions with Dr. MacKinnon—to a wrenching dissection of a mutually destructive parent-child relationship. For all their particular drama and tragedy, in broad strokes, the issues between Didion and her daughter Quintana, who struggled with alcoholism, are like those of almost all parents and children. No self-aware reader of this strange book can emerge from reading it unscathed.
Some have questioned the propriety of publishing these notes, found in a box after Didion’s death in 2021 and not intended for public consumption. Those circumstances shape not only the questionable ethics of the text but also the aesthetics: Anyone hoping for a taste from the beyond of Didion’s brilliantly blank, disabused prose, will be disappointed by these simple, straightforward reports, in which not Didion’s voice but Dr. MacKinnon’s is dominant. But Didion’s irrepressible personality comes through nonetheless, as she divulges details of her childhood and speaks to how her parents made her who she was, and alternately justifies her actions and admits her failings, often taking on blame for Quintana’s woes that she is told is not hers to bear.
Reading this book, I felt myself falling deeper and deeper into depression. The advice given to Didion—and the conclusions she draws as to what to do—include everything and its opposite. There seems to be no way out of her terrible predicament: If she and Dunne step in to help their daughter when crises arrive, Dr. MacKinnon says they’re being overprotective; if they don’t, they fear Quintana will think they’ve abandoned her. At one point, Didion’s psychiatrist, who is in contact with Quintana’s and knows some of what goes on in her sessions, tells his patient that her daughter feels that when facing her parents she’s in the presence of a united front against her; Didion responds in frustration that parents are always advised not to be divided, but to stand as one. It’s no surprise that Dr. MacKinnon offers no solution that would allow her to square this circle—because there is none. Ultimately, Notes to John is a 200-page expansion of the single most important work on family ever written, Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse,” which famously opens, “They’ll fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” Just as sadly relevant, in Didion’s case and nearly everyone’s, are the lines that follow: “They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.”
Notes to John made me recall a moment from my past that could serve as an appendix to this text. Though I raised my son from the time he was three, and had always thought myself a more than good enough parent, when I first saw Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, I recognized myself in too many of the father’s actions; with each passing moment that showed this difficult character doing very me-like things on-screen, I sunk further into my seat. When I got home, I called my son to apologize for any and everything I did that might have done him harm. And he gave me the highest praise a parent can hope for: “You don’t have to apologize. You weren’t like the father; you weren’t an asshole.” I want this encomium engraved on my tombstone.
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Some years back, the Brooklyn-based dancer and choreographer Hadar Ahuvia needed to renew her Israeli passport, so she headed to the embassy in New York. (Born to kibbutzniks whose own parents were Zionist “pioneers” from Europe, Ahuvia lived in Israel from ages five to ten.) The Hebrew-speaking guard asked her a standard security question about any items she carried: “Kol ma she’yesh lach, hu shelach?”—“Everything you have is yours?”
For Ahuvia, the query landed as nothing short of ontological. As part of a project investigating the folk dances that Jews living in Palestine invented beginning in the 1930s, Ahuvia had been asking herself that very question: Do the steps and movements she had been performing since childhood belong to her when they have been appropriated from other cultures? She has them, in her body—passed down from her mother, who led an Israeli folk dance troupe—but can she claim them as hers?
Ahuvia shrewdly addressed this question through performing the dances themselves in a series of live shows. (I saw and admired versions in 2018 and 2019.) In these performances, she unpacked the troubling origins and propagation of dances like “Hineh Ma Tov” and “Dodi Li” among others that any of us who went to Jewish summer camp grapevine-stepped and bounced our knees to. Now, the director Tatyana Tenenbaum has extended Ahuvia’s exploration in a multi-layered documentary film, Everything You Have Is Yours, showing at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Manhattan from May 2nd to May 8th. (The May 6th screening is co-hosted by Jewish Currents and will feature a conversation afterwards between editor-in-chief Arielle Angel and Tenenbaum.)
The documentary traces and expands upon Ahuvia’s research—often incorporating archival film of dance performances in pre-State Israel and throughout the decades that followed—and digs further into the paradox the choreographer confronts as she detaches from the Zionism that was her family creed while struggling to decide if she also wants to, or even can, let go of the embodied memory of the dances. We see Ahuvia rehearsing and performing her live shows with her assembled troupe of dancers and designers, and we also hear from some of those colleagues—American Jews, non-Jews, and Israelis with a range of relationships to Zionism.
Folklore, of course, is always a construction that does identitarian work. (One astonishing scene shows footage of Ahuvia’s mom teaching Israeli folk dances to “Messianic Jews”—doctrinal Christians who practice some Jewish rituals—who seem to seek a cultural hekhsher from these lessons.) The concept of authenticity is also always constructed: Culture constantly adapts as it encounters new stimuli; Israeli dance is hardly unique among folk traditions, which liberally incorporate what they come into contact with. But the deliberateness with which Israeli folk dances were assembled by agglomerating and modifying bits of Rumanian horas, Yemenite steps, and Palestinian dabka—while seeking to supplant these origins—enacted a violent form of appropriation, especially, Ahuvia suggests, when their accompanying songs celebrated Zionist military victories or boasted that Jewish settlers had made an empty desert bloom.
Meanwhile, the film also highlights the profound joy of connecting corporally to a cultural legacy. For example, the renowned dancer and choreographer Ze’eva Cohen, who came to New York from Israel in the early 1960s, speaks movingly in an interview in the film of the revelatory moment in her career when she began delving into and reclaiming dances of her Yemenite heritage. Nowhere is the vitality of this process stronger than in scenes featuring the Freedom Dabka Group, a Palestinian troupe based in Staten Island. Co-founder Amer Abdelrasoul notes —in a comment that is striking in part because of how it expresses the same underlying idea but with the opposite emotional valence as Ahuvia’s quandary—that dancing dabka is “not only fun and cool, it helps Palestinians form an identity.”
As the film continued, I felt myself yearning for a direct encounter between the Freedom Dabka Group and Ahuvia and her collaborators. But such a meeting never materializes on screen. Because it can’t—at least not until the two groups are on equal footing. For now, we hear the stomps of both troupes as the camera cuts between them toward the film’s end. And then, amid a crowd in Prospect Park to whom FDG is teaching some dabka steps, Ahuvia bobs along, smiling.
Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): When an acquaintance recently asked me about my favorite novels, I was surprised to realize that the shelf where I keep my most beloved books holds only one work of fiction: Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. The 1964 “novel”—it’s more a collection of linked stories—details life in and around working-class Brooklyn in the 1950s. I first encountered it in a creative writing class almost two decades ago, where it was presented as a notable example of “voice”: The text is full of idiosyncratic attempts to capture its characters’ speech, often barreling past respected conventions of punctuation and spelling to leave the impression of a manuscript whose typewritten pages are still hot from a feverish typing spree.
I do love the book’s voice—it’s angry and musical and shakes loose rhythms of syntax so ingrained I rarely perceive them at all—even if I now find the creative writing totem of “voice” a ridiculous way to approach such a rich, complicated, and unsettling social portrait. As with many of the books I loved early in life, though, I feel compelled to cast a suspicious eye on Last Exit and my affection for it: Can I really go around recommending this violent, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, racist set of stories to readers in 2025? “Last Exit to Brooklyn is not a book one ‘recommends,’” reads a 1964 review that also calls the book “repulsive,” its characters “more animals or ‘things’ really than people.” The book sparked a landmark English trial for obscenity violations, if not for these very reasons, then for the fact that it dared to depict the illicit underbelly of Brooklyn life at all. (Today’s Brooklynites, meanwhile, can find a signed post-trial edition at The Word Is Change for $500.)
The book’s most memorable story, “Strike,” takes us into the pained and desperate inner world of Harry Black, the “worst lathe operator” of a 1,000-man factory. As the union’s shop steward, Harry loves to spend a workday bossing around his rank-and-file coworkers, just as his overseer bosses him. When the union goes on strike and he’s put in charge of strike headquarters, he grows drunk on his own flimsy power, guzzling booze purchased with union funds while his co-workers plod the picket line. Meanwhile, Harry becomes an unwitting token of strike negotiations: The company is so intent on firing him that it is willing to extend the strike for that alone, and union officials see him as a useful diversion from their other asks, their “builtin patsy.” On strike myself two years ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about that uneasy story; when I revisited it, I found a searing critique not only of union dynamics, but of the machinations of capitalism under which those dynamics are forged.
In a review of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake from Jewish Currents’s recent Winter issue, executive editor Nora Caplan-Bricker identifies in that novel a “nihilism . . . too airless to support the flicker of a counterreality.” The description gave language to a quality I’ve observed in a number of recent works, notably Tony Tulathimutte’s brilliantly grim Rejection. That book, like Last Exit, compels us into the language and psyches of a series of characters whose fates nosedive ever more bleakly. While Selby’s book would seem to traffic in an equally grim perspective, Last Exit manages to avoid feeling airless. Instead, what’s so memorable about a story like “Strike” is the compassion it demands we feel for its sociopathic protagonist. In Caplan-Bricker’s words, Selby’s Last Exit offers us a “generative ambivalence,” the kind that might inaugurate the possibility of exit, even from an abject world.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): For some reason I can’t explain, I avoided Amalia Ulman’s 2021 debut film, El Planeta, for a couple of years. But the other day, uninspired by all the options on the many streaming services I subscribe to, I decided to give it a shot. Within minutes I was smitten with the main characters, the movie, and the director. It’s a quirky—but not too quirky—little film about an impoverished mom and daughter who refuse to let the world see their actual state, living entirely false and stylish lives. (The film stars Ulman and her actual mother, and contains more than a few directly autobiographical elements; like their real-life analogues, the central duo are Argentines who moved to Gijon, Spain, during one of Argentina’s many financial crises.) Having finally seen this marvelous first effort by Ulman, I was overjoyed to learn about the follow-up, Magic Farm, which opens in US theaters today.
It does not disappoint. Before she started directing, Ulman was a visual artist, and her keen aesthetic sense is evident from the striking first image—a weird, distorted overhead shot of what looks like someone on a bike on a furry ball, but is soon revealed to show a person on a motor scooter riding on a dirt road. We’re almost immediately transported to a street in New York, where a young crew (which includes Ulman herself, as well as Chloë Sevigny) is shooting a film about the latest fashion in Mexico—men wearing long, pointed shoes—as part of a series on strange trends around the world. The project soon takes them to San Cristobal, Argentina, to capture the craze for Big Carlito, a singer who wears bunny ears and whose videos are supposedly all the rage. But it turns out that the crew member who set up the shoot has screwed up: There are San Cristobals all over South America, and no one in this one, out in the dusty countryside, knows anything about the legendary Carlito. Undeterred by this fatal flaw in their plan—or the fact that only Ulman’s character speaks Spanish—the crew decides to stay and invent a fad to film instead.
Along the way, they encounter locals loaded with eccentricities, like the woman whose house is decorated with French phrases and drawings of the Eiffel Tower (a tribute, she claims, to a long-ago affair with Gérard Depardieu). But as in El Planeta, Ulman doesn’t allow the characters’ peculiarities to overshadow their real human qualities, as they wrestle with failed love and other personal crises. As the absurd but touching drama unfolds, Ulman makes fabulous and eccentric use of color and patterns, transforming this drab town in the middle of nowhere into a vibrant, captivating somewhere.
