Shabbat
Reading List

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): A few years ago, in an email from YIVO, my mother stumbled upon this recording of the Malavsky Family Choir singing the four questions in a mix of Ashkenazi-inflected Hebrew and Yiddish translation. Recorded in New York in the 1950s, their rendition of the “Fier Kashes” is so delightful that it’s since become not only a staple of my seders, but a welcome earworm of the whole Passover season. It may be too late to feature in this year’s seders, but I can’t recommend it enough as a small joy with which to usher in these last days of Passover.

“Tateh, tateh,” the tune begins, using the classic text of the Yiddish four questions—“Father, father. We want to ask the four questions, father”—before the family explodes into a classic Ashkenazi “Ma Nishtanah” melody, but in majestic multipart harmony. Each question is then introduced in Yiddish: “The first question is . . .”—recited in Hebrew, and followed in Yiddish translation. Certain pronunciations will delight those who grew up hearing Yiddish-inflected Hebrew: “matzeh,” “mu-ror,” “mah-nish-taw-naw,” “ha-lai-loo ha-zeh,” any of which makes the transliteration in a 1960s Maxwell House Haggadah actually look sensible. My favorite part, however, is the translation of the third question. After hearing that for the rest of the year we dip not even once, while on Passover we dip twice, we get an enlivening bit of commentary: “Eyn mol, khreyn in kharoyses, und de tsveyte mol, tsibeleh in zaltsvaser!” (“One time, horseradish in charoset, and the second time, onion in saltwater!”) It’s expressed in such a way that you can almost see a set of chorus girls kicking up their legs to punctuate the line.

Listeners more articulate than I am about music will likely hear, in the choral stylings of this vinyl single, the staticky sound of assimilation. Like brisket rubbed in Lipton’s powdered onion soup, though, these markers of assimilation sound, 70 years later, a lot like tradition. They may also be part of what makes the preservation of this history possible. My family seders conclude with another set of questions, part of the seder repertoire my mother’s father brought from Poland and which is preserved, in this case, through Paul Robeson. For those who love Yiddish questions, I include this recording of Robeson singing “Vi Azoy Leybt der Kayser?” (“How does the kaiser live?”) as a bonus.

Josh Lambert (contributor): Lately, whenever anyone asks me for a recommendation in Jewish American literature, the field of my academic expertise, my first thought is always Fran Ross’s 1974 comic novel Oreo. It’s a book I’m embarrassed to have discovered way too late—long after I had written an extensive guidebook to the field and years after earning my PhD—but it has become one of my very favorites to teach. I’m hardly alone; there was a miniature boom in Oreo scholarship in the first couple decades of this century, with probably too many examples to reasonably link to.

Ross retells the myths of Theseus as the tale of a Black Jewish teenage girl from Philadelphia, named Christine, who is searching for her absentee Jewish father. Ross’s debt to James Joyce’s Ulysses is obvious, but she’s much funnier and more approachable—albeit with some serious flights into esoterica. Her jokes and wordplay hold up remarkably well half a century later: “When told at an early age that she would one day have to seek out her father to learn the secret of her birth, she said, ‘I am going to find that motherfucker.’ In her view, the last word was merely le mot juste.”

Oreo can be read alongside a half-dozen or so celebrated novels about race in the canon of American Jewish literature—esteemed books like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants. And, not that it should be a competition, but judging from Ross’s deployment of Yiddish throughout the novel, she knew more of the language than most of her peers, who mostly cribbed from Leo Rosten. Moreover, in acknowledging the existence of Black Jews—as developed characters rather than as magical personalities, frauds, or simply absurdities—the novel’s sense of what family can mean, and what contemporary Jewishness can look like, is much more relevant than much else of what’s on offer in Jewish culture. For instance, the novel, in its humor, understands that you really can’t make assumptions about who somebody is just by knowing their name. In one scene, after Christine tirelessly searches for her father by combing through all the people listed under Samuel or S. Schwartz in the Manhattan phone book, she tries one, in a building on West End Avenue, with no luck: “The Schwartz in 4-B was too young to be her father. Besides, she was Chinese.”

I should note that the novel has many of the qualities of 1970s blaxploitation film, and in addition to all its charmingly recondite vocabulary, it is filled with racist, misogynist, and homophobic language, outlandish dialect spellings, and instances of violence, including even what might be considered child sexual assault. Still, the jokes seem so decidedly directed at the haters, and not at vulnerable people, that describing it as bigoted seems wrong, and my students, at least so far, haven’t seemed to find it offensive.

It’s no mystery why I didn’t discover this incredible novel earlier. Ross was a non-Jewish African American lesbian writer, who seems to have been afraid of nothing and nobody. She wasn’t the only non-Jew writing about Jews in the 1970s—think of John Updike’s Bech stories or William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice—but Oreo’s depth and strangeness set it apart. Despite having worked, briefly, for luminaries Toni Morrison and Richard Pryor, there was no way she was going to get the attention she deserved for writing a profoundly funny Jewish novel. Ross and her partner, Ann Grifalconi, essentially self-published Oreo, and it reached a larger audience only after being reissued in 2000 by a university press. But better late than never—it’s a novel that I expect Jews will be reading for another couple hundred years, at least.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Weimar Germany remains a frequent subject of art both high and low. Though the most popular current representations of the period are probably the oft-revived musical Cabaret and the recent Netflix series Berlin Babylon, these are merely cheap, vulgar knockoffs of the works produced at the time by the German artists of the school known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), including Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann. A show on the movement at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, on display until May 26th, offers viewers the perfect introduction to this scene—and a scathing portrait of Germany in the process of disintegration.

Indeed, seldom has an aesthetic school produced such a sharp indictment of the society from which it emerged. For these artists, “objectivity” did not mean political even-handedness. There is no straining for impartiality, for instance, in Georg Scholz’s 1922 painting Of Things to Come, which shows three larger-than-life bourgeois men, smug and self-satisfied, towering over the factories they rule. Nor is there any in George Grosz’s Panorama (Down with Liebknecht), with its joyful bourgeois lubriciously celebrating the murder of the leader of the Spartacist uprising. Elsewhere, the work confronts us with the awful predicament of the poor and marginalized, their features exaggerated almost to grotesqueness. Throughout the show, we see clearly the murderousness at the heart of the defeated, postwar German society, the viewer all too aware of the horror it will soon wreak. It is a world inexorably headed toward disaster that is hanging on the gallery walls.

But the Weimar we encounter here is just as much the lustful and decadent one we have come to expect, with the era’s sexual openness exhibited in works such as Karl Hubbuch’s Enough for One, Rudolf Schlichter’s sarcastically titled drawing Handsome Johnny, and the scandalously frank Two Girls by Christian Schad. The show also includes August Sander’s coldly biting portraits and even everyday objects like the iconic Breuer chair; the capacious variety prevents the immense scope from inducing exhaustion. Those familiar with the gallery will understand what high praise it is when I say that the exhibition is worth the price of putting yourself through the hideously Germanic gauntlet of the security screening in front of the building. Just grin and bear it. As with so many things today, protesting is useless.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The veteran French director Claude Lelouch is fond of quoting Willa Cather’s familiar line that “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Though he’s never specified what he takes these archetypal tales to be, his work makes clear that one of them is the meeting of two people fated to fall in love. Lelouch, still an active filmmaker at 87, is best known for his Oscar-winning 1966 film A Man and a Woman, one of the unquestioned classics of this infinitely fertile genre. This masterpiece has been restored and is now showing at New York’s Film Forum (along with several other works in a kind of mini-retrospective)—and which will be making the rounds of the country’s shrinking number of arthouse cinemas.

As the film’s title suggests, here Lelouch pares the genre down to its essentials. A handsome man (played by the debonair Jean-Louis Trintignant) meets a beautiful woman (the otherworldly Anouk Aimée); they discover and submit to their mutual attraction, the woman rebels against it, and then in the end, they realize it can’t be fought against. That’s the basis for half the films ever made, but A Man and a Woman stand out for the verisimilitude of an element that has all but vanished from film: conversation. Eric Rohmer may be the master of the intellectual discussion, but no director has portrayed the banal exchanges of those falling in love as convincingly as Lelouch. His lovers always seem to register the precise instant the spark is lit, and from that moment on their talk carries the same underlying message, no matter the venue or the ostensible subject. Indeed, in A Man and a Woman—in which the hero and heroine meet at their children’s school—the most striking conversation amoureuse occurs in the company of those children, in the shape of silly banter that ends up conveying much more.

Lelouch has always been fond of elaborate camera movement, and A Man and a Woman is famous for a shot in which the viewer circles the lovers as they embrace in the sands of the beach at Deauville, a simple and direct expression of the dizziness of early love. The lovers will soon hit a bump in the road, her past intruding on their shared present, but we remain confident they’ll ultimately overcome it all. An oft-told tale that has seldom been better told.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I had a blast watching Mickey 17, the latest movie of filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, who previously directed Parasite six years ago. Despite being someone who is constitutionally ill-equipped to handle horror movies, I had been compelled by the reviews I’d read of Parasite, and so I sought out a sturdy friend to accompany me to see it. I will never watch the movie again—my poor heart, and those terrifyingly suspenseful moments on screen—but it was superb.

Mickey 17 has been met with mixed reviews. I think some of these are in reaction to the film’s predecessor; people went into Mickey 17 hoping or expecting to experience another work of scathing social commentary executed with artistic prowess and almost mathematical precision. Mickey 17 is not that film. It retains Ho’s comedic timing and absurdist tendencies, but is wackier and weirder. Given Ho’s backing from a major studio and the essentially carte blanche he received after the wide acclaim, awards, and box office success of Parasite, one gets the sense that, this time, he decided to follow a topic he was curious about, and play around with it. Imagine if one of the stranger movies you had ever seen had a $118 million budget, phenomenal cinematography and sound design, and its pick of any cast member it wanted—you’re probably close to imagining what Mickey 17 is like. And indeed, watching the high-quality version of someone’s pet project is a treat.

The titular Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, signs up to be an “expendable” on a space mission, in a world about 30 years into the future in which scientists have figured out human cloning but the technology is only allowed extraterrestrially, to skirt ethical concerns. Pattinson has come a long way from my primary association with him—an emotionless, sparkling vampire in the Twilight series, circa my young adulthood—and his acting and narration make the 137-minute film feel dynamic and funny pretty much the entire way through. (Some critics have pointed to a messy third act; I see their argument but it didn’t dampen my experience.) Mickey is kind of an idiot, but he’s so earnest that it’s hard not to be endeared. The other main characters we meet are also entertaining: Steven Yeun as Mickey’s grifter friend, whose hijinks led to Mickey’s decision to leave earth to begin with; Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette as a power-hungry and uncomfortably affectionate couple who take their fanatic followers to a new planet after political failure; and Naomi Ackie as Mickey’s smart, willful girlfriend, whose possessiveness over Mickey takes on new meaning as the story progresses. The film engages some ethical questions—around such themes as bodily autonomy, labor exploitation, and ecosystem colonization—but these questions act as fodder for the characters’ exploration of their own internal quandaries and failures, more than as sharp commentary on particular issues.

While Mickey 17 is sci-fi, rather than horror, you still might want to find someone to lean on in the theater; I must have turned to look at my friend and said, “What the?!?!” at least five times in the first 30 minutes. But if you go into the film in the mood to be along for the ride, it’s bound to be a fun one.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): Over the course of the week I spent reading Yael van der Wouden’s 2024 debut novel The Safekeep, I kept trying to recommend it to people—my friends at a dinner party, my mother and grandmother during a family visit, my coworkers on Slack. I wanted everyone to read the novel that I was living inside of, unable to think beyond. But The Safekeep, as it turns out, is one of those books that is nearly impossible to describe without giving away key plot points. “What’s it about?” would come the very reasonable question. “Well . . . it’s about a woman . . . who lives alone in postwar Holland . . .” It’s not exactly a riveting sell.

This is what I can say: The Safekeep is gripping. It’s also queer, and it’s also hot. And it epitomizes the era of queer fiction we have blessedly entered into: As we move away from the Obergefell-tinged pressure to represent queer love as a wholesome, morally unimpeachable fairytale, we are finally talking about the more interesting things that queer relationships, like all human relationships, can be—dark, ugly, sexy, scary, twisted, and complicated.

The Safekeep is set in 1961, in a society that is trying to piece itself back together when the markers of what tore it apart are still everywhere. It seems to me no accident that the book came out in 2024, a year in which the world wrestled, desperately and perhaps fruitlessly, with similar questions around culpability and justice. But The Safekeep does not take place in a courtroom or some other space of geopolitical reckoning; it takes place in a single house in the countryside, and the story unfolds between two individual women, both of whom are flawed, human, and too complex to reduce to simple moral binaries. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time—which is a sign, I think, that van der Wouden has gotten something right.

Daniel May (publisher): On March 17th, Israel resumed its bombing of Gaza, killing in one overnight attack 436 people, among them 183 children. Here is how the Associated Press described the scene at one of Gaza’s few remaining emergency rooms: “One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.” Reading these words, I found myself returning to a grim set of questions, well-worn by the days and weeks and months of the last year and a half: How much to keep reading? How much to look? Does staring into this void force me to face it? Or does the staring just build mental calluses that wrongly soften the blows? Is looking away simply necessary self-protection, or am I building up the muscles of avoidance? And what is the point of these questions anyway; isn’t this all a slide into narcissism, when children’s legs have been blown off?

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the Egyptian American journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad faces the void—and stays there. Over 187 pages, he tracks the emotional and political toll of witnessing Gaza’s devastation. In form, the book is a polemic, an assault on the myths that the West tells itself and the hypocrisy of American liberals who proclaim their commitment to human rights while insisting that the unfolding destruction of Gaza is justifiable. For El Akkad, this is a story of many losses—above all the losses of Palestinians murdered by those who profess their commitment to freedom, but, most personally for him, the loss of a belief in American ideals that, as a child growing up in Egypt and Qatar listening to Nirvana records whose covers had been blackened by censors, provided inspiration from afar. Covering the wrath of America’s war on terror as a journalist showed him “the ugly cracks in this thing called ‘the free world.’” And yet, he continues, he “believed that the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The book describes what happens when that belief is abandoned. One outcome is anger, directed primarily at politicians, journalists, and arts institutions that describe the destruction as “tragic,” but are in fact most offended by protestors whose tactics they find distasteful or those who buck liberal dogma by refusing to vote for the president who supplied the bombs. When the Democratic president supports genocide, he writes, “an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more’ starts to sound a lot like ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.’”

As scathing as that indictment is, I found the book most affecting, and most troubling, when El Akkad turns his gaze inward. “What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal?” he asks. “What is wrong with all these people who can?” And what is to be done when every action seems so limited, at best symbolic? Ultimately, the book lands on a call for refusal: a refusal most practically to support the machinery of war economically, but, more broadly, a refusal to participate in any institution that contributes to or supports the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. He calls this “negative resistance” and suggests that while the state is well equipped to handle protest, it has no answer for the person who says “I will have no part of this.”

It’s not entirely clear what this might mean in practice, at least for most of us. How exactly are we—as taxpayers and students and workers and rent-payers in the heart of the empire—supposed to “have no part of this?” El Akkad finds some solace in recent protests and boycotts, but given the darkness of the book, it isn’t surprising that he is most moved by the extreme sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. This example points to the central dilemma of withdrawal as a form of political resistance: The most meaningful sacrifices seem beyond what most could be expected to offer. For this reason, Thoreau’s famous refusal to pay taxes to a slave nation always felt to me both the only morally defensible position and of limited political power. I can’t say, though, that I have answers for what to do in the face of such unrelenting horror. But in reading El Akkad’s book, I realized just how much, over the last year, I have trained myself to stop asking these questions. I know the reasons why I’ve done so, but it is still a moral and political failure. Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When the French director François Ozon is on his game, there are few filmmakers who can equal his ability to draw out the uneasiness, the pure creepiness, that dwells beneath the surface of his characters’ lives. In his work desire is omnipresent, though often expressed obliquely, and nothing and no one is safe from its depredations. Secrets abound, and what people show others is merely a screen concealing who they really are, what they really want.

The director’s latest film, When Fall Is Coming, is Ozon at his most Ozonian. None of the characters are who or what they initially seem to be; their acts at first appear to contradict their nature, but gradually their logic emerges. The film revolves around Michelle, a beautiful and stylish octogenarian who lives in a middle-class home in the French countryside. Against this rural backdrop, she carries herself with a distinctly urban grace. Her closest friend is the chain-smoking and down-to-earth Marie-Claude, who is much more of the region. But despite their apparent incompatibility, the two women are close enough that Michelle regularly drives her friend to visit her son, Vincent, in prison. Michelle’s quiet life in retirement is disrupted when her beloved grandson arrives for an extended visit, escorted by his mother—who is poisoned by mushrooms picked by Michelle. While she insists it was a terrible accident, accusations fly that the poisoning was intentional, and the visit is quickly terminated. There are hints of Michelle’s louche past, which has destroyed the mother-daughter relationship and ruined her daughter’s life.

While Ozon sometimes explains what in the characters’ pasts drives them in the present, for good and ill, a zone of shadow lingers over the edges of every life and action. Did Michelle mean to poison her daughter, after all? Certainly not—unless she did. Even she’s not sure. Why, when Vincent is released from prison, does he develop a strangely close relationship with Michelle? And why does he say he’s going to hang out with friends late at night but actually head to a deserted playground, where unexplained figures occupy the swings? We expect things to go badly awry, and indeed they do—or perhaps they don’t, and all is for the best. In When Fall Is Coming, Ozon presents us with a world whose inhabitants are much like the mysterious mushrooms. Are they toxic or a delicacy? It’s almost impossible to tell.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): I first encountered the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in 2014, where—accompanied on stage only by his guitar and his wife, Amanda Shires, playing fiddle—he performed memorable melodies from his breakthrough album, Southeastern. In the following months, I grew attached to the album, the release of which capped off a comeback narrative for Isbell. A one-time songwriting prodigy for the Drive By Truckers, he had been kicked out of the band for excessive drinking, but thanks to the steadfast love of Shires (also a talented songwriter and musician in her own right), he had managed to get sober. Southeastern chronicled this tale with songs like the classic love ballad “Cover Me Up,” and alt-country jams like “Stockholm” and “New South Wales.” But here and on his next LP, Something More Than Free, Isbell also dabbled in richly drawn fictional portraits, inhabiting the psyches of lost Southern men trying to maneuver their way toward emotional attachments. Throughout much of college, whenever I was running out of time before a paper deadline, I’d drag myself to a back corner of the library, face the wall, put on Southeastern or Something More Than Free, and white-knuckle my way through the writing. Shockingly, this association hasn’t diminished my love for the albums: The melodies were just that catchy, the lyrics just that clever.

Isbell released his next few records under the name “Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit,” reflecting the pride-of-place of his full band (including Shires). These albums, particularly 2017’s The Nashville Sound, continually elevated his stardom in the Americana world, earning several Grammys, but I was less captivated. The band is talented, and a real treat to see live, but outside of a few standout songs, many of Isbell’s melodies seemed less specific, his songwriting voice less unique. And the narrative—of his and Shires’s world-conquering love—was beginning to get, well, repetitive. Isbell had aced the straightforward pledge of devotion with “Cover Me Up,” and the much-acclaimed “If We Were Vampires” couldn’t live up to it. Forgive me, but there are parallels here to Taylor Swift, who spent several albums spooling a meta-narrative about escaping scandal and finding the perfect man, which resulted in her writing the same song again and again.

At the end of 2023, though, Shires and Isbell divorced. All too soon after, Isbell, now in his mid-40s, had shiny white veneers on his teeth and a new 29-year-old girlfriend. As with fans’ reactions to Swift’s 2023 breakup from longtime beau Joe Alwyn and subsequent fling with edgelord 1975 frontman Matty Healy, many die-hard Isbell fans were none too pleased to see their oracle acting, well, like an asshole. (And if you think pop stans are the only dramatic ones, you should see the folk-rock bros melting down over Isbell’s betrayal on Reddit.) But just as Swift responded to this friction with some daring songwriting, the personal turmoil seems to have driven Isbell back into the studio—alone with only a guitar, where he recorded Foxes in the Snow, released last month, his most intimate and interesting album since his earlier solo efforts. Here, Isbell’s deft guitar picking manages to do the work of a full band, swelling and fading in a multiplicity of voices. The songwriting is simple and focused, relying on Isbell’s natural ability to churn out choruses that sound like instant folk classics. Lyrically, the songs offer honesty, even when uncomfortable: “I was a Gravelweed and I needed you to raise me / I’m sorry the day came when I felt that I was raised,” he sings, on the best song, “Gravelweed,” sounding both penitent and bitter. The next line doubles as an apology to both an ex and an audience that seemed to prefer an older, better-behaved version of him: “And now that I live to see my melodies betray me / I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.” (On “True Believer,” the narrator has harsher words for the meddling fans: “Why y’all examining me like I’m a murder suspect?”) Elsewhere, on “Good While It Lasted,” he captures how the giddy anxiety of a new relationship can share some of the same emotional hallmarks of heartbreak: “For a moment in the afternoon / I almost didn’t think of you / And it was good while it lasted.” It’s not a perfect album, and there are a few snoozers here—“Don’t Be Tough,” “Wind Behind the Rain”—but Isbell’s return to the core songwriting skills that make him great is something to celebrate.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): The Encampments, opening this weekend at the Angelika in NYC, is a new film that tells the story of the past year’s student protest movement—in its own words and on its own terms. At the movie’s center is the US-backed genocide in Gaza, and the activism of Columbia students who sparked a nationwide uprising when they demanded that their university divest from the war economy. Narrated by Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil, the film tells the story of how student protestors escalated their tactics and grew the movement, all as the genocide grinded on and repression from Columbia’s administration grew. Their work led to the launch of the Gaza solidarity encampment and the occupation of Hind’s (Hamilton) Hall in April 2024. The film shows how the protest movement spread across the country, in some places garnering significant attention, such as the encampment at UCLA, where students were attacked by fascist mobs, as the administration and local police stood by.

At the screening I attended, Munir Atalla, who heads production for the Palestinian-led Watermelon Pictures film label, which helped produce the movie, described Mahmoud Khalil as “the beating heart of the film.” Listening to Khalil’s kind voice and watching his steady presence between press conferences and negotiations felt particularly poignant and urgent in this moment, as he continues to languish in ICE detention, waiting to be reunited with his pregnant wife and community.

The other beating heart of the film is, of course, Gaza, and specifically its young people living under Israel’s war of annihilation. We hear from Bisan Owda, the award-winning storyteller and journalist from Gaza, who weeps as she speaks of what the students’ solidarity has meant to her, what it feels like to know that her people are not forgotten or abandoned. Back at the Columbia encampment, we see an evening meeting open with the news that a student had lost more of her relatives in Gaza that day. The students remind each other: This is why we are here. Gaza is not a world away; we are all connected, and all complicit.

As the Trump administration wages its war on universities under the false pretext of fighting antisemitism, watching the film felt like a powerful corrective, and—dare I say—even a balm, to the crazy-making of being gaslit by misinformation and smear campaigns. As Israel’s daily atrocities in Gaza continue, and the repression across the US worsens, the film is also a reminder of the call for justice that, despite everything, is growing and that the powerful are desperate to stifle.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I am forever working through a backlog of novels that came out a decade or two ago, but that I never managed to read. The upside of this practice is that I read books that have stood the test of time; the downside is that sometimes they don’t feel so current. But the most recent novel I finished, Louise Erdrich’s LaRose from 2016, very much does. The book begins with a tragedy on the first page: While hunting deer, Landreaux Iron accidentally shoots and kills his best friend’s five-year-old son, Dusty. This first loss is followed quickly by another. As a kind of justice, the Irons give their own five-year-old child, LaRose, to Dusty’s parents to raise as their own. But the novel is not about either of these events, both of which occur within the first few pages. It is about everything that happens in the aftermath.

The question of how we heal from the irreparable, or how we move forward from the unforgivable, feels paradoxically hyper-relevant and hyper-irrelevant to me right now. As the genocide in Palestine continues, its death toll climbing by the day, it seems like the wrong time to think about repair. And yet I don’t know how to banish the question from my mind—because every unspeakable act brings with it a seemingly unanswerable question: How will the world ever recover from this? How will anyone ever heal from what has been done?

I thought often, while reading LaRose, about something a restorative justice practitioner once told me: “Forgiveness and healing are not expectations of the process,” she said. “The hope is just to move the needle in some way.” In the novel, no one ever heals from Dusty’s death; his loss is just as devastating on the last page as it is on the first. But—and I realize this is a strange thing to say—it’s an uplifting novel. In those first few pages, it’s hard to imagine how the book can even go on. The fact that it does is an achievement worth noting.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some years ago, in a review of the first-ever American exhibition of the paintings of the great early 20th-century Austrian painter Richard Gerstl, I mentioned a few other figures who deserve a far more prominent place in art history and institutions than they actually occupy. One of the underappreciated artists I cited, Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946), is now the subject of a magnificent show at David Zwirner Gallery, up until April 12th. The eponymous exhibition—the first show dedicated to Spilliaert in New York in nearly 50 years—is perfectly curated and organized. Despite the modest scope, it’s an absolute blockbuster.

Like his more famous compatriot James Ensor, Spilliaert was born and spent most of his life in the seaside city of Ostend, Belgium. The place features prominently in many of the works on display. Indeed, Spilliaert specialized in scenes of a resort in its dead season—the empty shore, the empty promenade, empty streets and the empty sea. In one 1909 work, the curves of the Ostend promenade and of the Kursaal (a spa building) rising from the sands produce a kind of unsettling fisheye perspective that accentuates the barrenness of the most touristy part of the city. In another 1909 study of the promenade, dripping India ink summons a shadowy melancholy. And in The Foreshore or the Steamer, Spilliaert uses different materials—watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and chalk—for each natural element, transforming a seemingly simple scene into a rich tapestry of feeling.

Even when Ostend isn’t explicitly present, the chill of the North Sea can be felt in almost everything on display. Take, for instance, Spilliaert’s icy portraits, which bear the obvious influence of Edvard Munch, like his ghostly, blank-eyed 1908 self-portrait, suffused with a sickly green, or the eerie Lady with Lorgnette. But perhaps most striking is the immense 1912 work The Hanged, in which dead bodies dangle from the bare branches of a tree. While an American viewer can’t help but read the image as one of a mass lynching, it is in fact an illustration of a poem by the medieval bandit poet François Villon, likely written while awaiting his execution. Spilliaert beautifully captures Villon’s anguished call: “Brother humans who will live after us / Don’t harden your hearts against us / For the pity you show we poor ones / God will feel for you.”

Spilliaert is, in a way, a cursed artist. When, after decades of neglect, London’s Royal Academy of Art finally held a major show of his work in 2020, the timing made it pass relatively unseen. Lord knows when a show of his work will next make its way here. It shouldn’t be missed.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In 2013, nine months after the death of the radical feminist luminary Shulamith Firestone, Susan Faludi published an impressive, heavily researched account of Firestone’s life in The New Yorker, laying out the personal and political dramas that separated the brilliant author of the Dialectic of Sex from the movement she helped found, and catalyzed her lonely spiral into poverty and madness. An explosive writer and organizer, Firestone was at the center of the New York City-based radical feminist movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s that tore itself apart almost as soon as it announced itself in earnest, and just as its ideas were gaining ground. Faludi’s article details this implosion in a vivid, claustrophobic catalog of leftist folly: call-out culture (they called it “trashing”) and impossible purity tests, factionalism, and a self-destructive penchant for tearing down its leaders. By 1970, the movement appeared gutted, with most of its prominent leadership tossed and groups splitting down to the atom. Several women suffered nervous breakdowns; some ended up homeless; several others committed suicide. Firestone was one of those destroyed leaders. “Basically, I don’t believe finally that the revolution is so imminent that it’s worth tampering with my whole psychological structure, submitting to mob rule, and so on, which is what they’re all into,” she wrote to her sister in 1970. A few years later, she had a full schizophrenic break.

This portrait of a movement driven crazy by movement work, leaving women who aspired to sisterhood in extreme isolation, is the backdrop to Airless Spaces, Firestone’s second and last book, published in 1998 after nearly a decade spent in and out of public psychiatric hospitals. (Semiotext(e) recently reissued it with an introduction by Chris Kraus and an afterword by Faludi, but I read an old copy and can’t speak to these new additions.) The jacket copy refers to the book’s collection of intimate, tragic vignettes as “short stories,” and I suppose they are, but they are more a collection of people, such as you might find in a terrible waiting room lit with buzzing fluorescent lights: exhausted, forgotten, barely hanging on. Sometimes they are Firestone—she is recognizable despite the various names she gives herself in third-person tellings, as well as in the “I.” Much of the time they are sharply observed portraits of others, people whose lives outside the institutions have come to make even less sense than they do inside. It’s a bleak read, to be sure—the last section is a collection of “Suicides I Have Known,” ending with that of her brother—but the writing is crisp, entertaining, and alive, a reminder that our guide to this gallery of life’s “losers” is none other than the great Shulamith Firestone.

There were a few strong attempts by intergenerational groups of feminists to build a community around Firestone in her later years, but ultimately they did not last, as the women moved away or themselves grew ill. She died alone in her apartment, face down on the floor. “Care” has become a kind of buzzword in movement spaces. But if the term has become cliched, its practice remains elusive. If there’s anything to glean from Firestone’s story—in movements and mental institutions that were more malady than cure—it’s that we cannot stop talking about care until we learn how to do it. Otherwise, our political communities will end in tatters; our ideals will come to nothing.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Women’s consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and early ‘70s—apart from serving as the pilot light of second-wave feminism—had a significant theatrical life. Feminist theater companies that sprang up across the country half a century ago often staged the inherently dramatic process of CR participants discovering that the oppression they thought was theirs alone was in fact shared by others, that the problems they faced were not individual but structural. As these groups fizzled out over the years—casualties of internal conflicts over sexuality, race, and class; the institutionalization of feminism; and especially conservative backlash—pop culture began treating them as a joke. The movies Women in Revolt (1971), Annie Hall (1977), 10 (1979), and Private Benjamin (1980), for instance, as well as many early SNL sketches, mocked the insights women drew from CR groups.

In 1988, a moment marked by Reaganism’s triumphant ascent and glossy magazines that extolled the “new traditionalist” women who were fleeing unfulfilling jobs to find contentment in serving their husbands and children, Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Heidi Chronicles premiered to rave reviews and major prizes. A touching and troubling comedy, its passive protagonist essentially blames the women’s movement—and not, say, the failure of men to share equally in housework or the expense and scarcity of good childcare—for not having enabled well-educated, upper-middle-class white women like herself to enjoy both satisfying family lives and flourishing careers. Lauded as giving voice to the disappointment women were reluctant to air, the play’s portrayal of a CR group showed a hilariously touchy-feely encounter where women constantly hug and vacantly reassure each other.

Now, a generation later, the wonderfully shape-shifting playwright Bess Wohl has returned CR groups to the stage, but this time with genuine curiosity, complexity, self-reflection, and yes, humor. Her poignant new play, Liberation—running Off-Broadway until April 6th—depicts a group of six diverse women in CR meetings held in the gym of a rec center in Ohio in the ‘70s. Over the span of several years, we see them tentatively, then more forthrightly, take up issues like workplace discrimination, the overwhelming responsibilities of caregiving, and stifling marriages (“Now my kids are grown, and my husband is retired which means he’s home all day,” says one, by way of introduction. “I’m here because I need things to get me out of the house so I don’t stab him to death.”) In a moving, anti-titillating second-act opener, the women sit together naked, exploring what they like—but really, mostly hate—about their bodies. They bond, they fight, they reveal their hypocrisies, they become politicized.

But the play is not simply a chronicle of this process; it’s a deep and emotional, even desperate, inquiry by the daughter of the CR group’s initiator, looking back on the ‘70s from the present. As the framing narrator of what the play’s subtitle calls “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember,” the daughter is an affable host, setting the scene and walking in and out of it, playing her own mother in the CR group sessions. As a writer both beleaguered by and adoring of her own children, she is looking belatedly for guidance from her recently deceased mother: “My devoted, dutiful mom who sewed the costumes for every school play and cooked every family dinner and did all the dishes and took me to every piano lesson and sat through it and never, ever missed a recital even though I was definitely not a musician—she was actually . . . a radical?” the daughter wonders aloud. In the strange space of theater, even one that’s fairly realistic in its depictions, she can do what a lot of us yearn to do: meet a deceased parent and ask what we never asked about their pre-parenthood life. In a beautiful, gut-wrenching scene toward the end, the daughter does exactly this—only to find that the search for a usable past is as failingly personal as it is political.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Jonathan Schell’s The Village of Ben Suc—recently reissued by NYRB Classics—originally appeared as a long article in the July 8th, 1967 issue of The New Yorker. Schell, then just 23 years old, was on the scene in January 1967 when the Vietnamese village of Ben Suc, a hotbed of activity by the freedom fighters of the National Liberation Front (known by Americans as the Viet Cong), was, as the phrase went at the time, “destroyed in order to save it.” It was a village that, like others in the triangle on the Saigon River, loyally paid its taxes to the NLF and housed many of its members. The Americans therefore decided to clear thousands of people from their homes and fields, parking them in a makeshift space that resembled nothing so much as a lightweight concentration camp, its inhabitants forbidden from passing its perimeter on pain of death. While Ben Suc was not, like My Lai, the site of a massacre, the American GIs innocents certainly killed civilians callously and carelessly. When it first appeared, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Schell’s text was a work of moral and political immediacy; today it remains essential reading as the patient examination of one of our great crimes as Americans.

Schell writes of the assault on Ben Suc in a measured tone and with a specificity that underlines both the cruelty and stupidity of the American effort in Vietnam. We learn, for instance, that only one member of the American forces in Ben Suc spoke Vietnamese, which obviously inhibited their ability to communicate with people who had been deprived of their homes, supposedly for their own good. And when the army provided their victims rice, it was not Vietnamese but poor-quality American rice; for the villagers, this was tantamount to being fed dog food. He portrays the American soldiers not as murderous goons, but as young men infected with a casual racism they felt no need to hide—and which he dutifully records in painstaking detail. Small wonder that the US and its local puppet allies lost the war for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese.

For me, as for many of those of my generation, a life on the left has been a life of defeat after defeat, and often of discovering that we supported the wrong causes, even if for the right reasons. But as The Village of Ben Suc affirms, strident opposition to the war in Vietnam—and advocacy for true justice, not just the mealy-mouthed “peace” so many restricted themselves to—was perhaps the most correct cause of my life. (For a comprehensive demonstration, I also recommend Geoffrey Wawro’s The Vietnam War, a thorough and frank military history that shows how the US could under no circumstances have won the war, while unflinchingly documenting the innumerable crimes committed in our name.) Reading Schell’s text now renewed my disgust for the ubiquitous sentimentality and lachrymose verbiage about our veterans; I, for one, will never thank anyone who took part in that calamity for their service.