Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For those of us who identify as “readers,” it can be difficult to disentangle who we are from what we’ve read. I have often in my life—though I admit, mostly when I was much younger—had the sensation that a book was a direct message, sent to me by some higher power (even when that was, well, a teacher). Like a most accurate tarot reading, it said this is what you need to know right now, or even, this is who you need to be, in characters and symbols at once clear and obscure.

In Bibliophobia, the critic Sarah Chihaya attempts to take stock of her reading life, and to understand its intertwinement with her severe depression. In place of, say, a family tree, or a character list, the book’s very first pages are a list of the texts she will discuss in order of appearance, suggesting both love as well as a formidable loneliness. “Since I was a child,” she writes, “I have secretly believed that if I read enough, one day the right book would come along and save me.” Of course, if books have the power to save, they can also destroy—either directly, by shattering some defense or mendacity (The Bluest Eye does this for an adolescent Chihaya trying to understand her own experience of race as a Japanese American in lilywhite Ohio), or simply by withholding the anticipated salvation. “For me,” Chihaya writes early in the book, “being a depressed person and being a reader-writer are knotted up in each other all the way back to the beginning.” The book braids together close, impressionistic reads of various meaningful texts with passages tracing Chihaya’s suicidal thought habits from her youth through adulthood. She consistently reads her own life as just another text, and yet the triumph of the book is that in its writing, you begin to feel her finally inhabiting this life as fully as the stories of others, where she previously preferred to dwell.

For me, one of the joys of the book was actually the personal inventory it inspired me to perform. How have I been changed by literature? Which pieces specifically? What did they do? I can rattle off the texts that destroyed me and put me back together—Angels in America, Gilead, Giovanni’s Room, Villette—but unlike Chihaya, an inveterate re-reader adept at weaving literature into her own biography, I find it difficult to answer these questions with as much particularity. It was always about language, that much I know, and the sense that despite all the fumbling to communicate in real life—the fundamentally doomed linkage between signifier and signified—these books were a place where language had, impossibly, won. Here I was, somewhere else, seeing something in my own mind’s eye, thinking a thought I had always known but never articulated. I suppose I’m describing an experience of hope, though I’ve never thought of it in those terms before. In the weeks since I’ve read Bibliophobia, I’ve been trying to isolate different texts in my mind, to imagine myself without them. It is never so straightforward as a major life lesson missed, merely a small, subtle glitch in my form: an imperceptible blurring in part of my outline, a dull discoloration on a small patch of skin. But without all those books, it would be obliterating.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In the mysterious opening of Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film, a group of youngish people are gathered in a room as an old computer is wheeled in. The device contains ten-year-old footage from a movie that was never completed, which we soon get to see: A handsome young man is on the balcony of an apartment building with another man in drag; they go to a crowded market and soon wind up in bed together. One of the men in the audience makes a call and asks the person on the other end to come see him. The recipient, it turns out, is one of the actors in the unfinished film, who has aged well, and the man summoning him is the director of the material, who explains that he wants to complete the project, jumping over the decade between shoots. (During this interval, he explains, the footloose and fancy-free young man we saw has become a wildly successful real estate magnate.) They have limited time to complete the film, due to the actor’s prior engagements—and the imminent birth of his child. So they agree to rush the process, squeezing it all into the 15-day Lunar New Year of 2020. But with only a few days to go, word comes that a dangerous epidemic has broken out in Wuhan.

Watching An Unfinished Film, which is shot in a compelling documentary style, you can’t help but feel that you’re there in the midst of the original Covid outbreak. The handheld camera follows the cast and crew as they are struck by panic and descend into chaos. The director does his best to hold everything together, but it’s futile; they try and fail to flee to their homes as security forces blockade them into the hotel in which they’re shooting the film, in accordance with China’s strict quarantine procedures. The lead actor, desperate to get home to his wife and infant, scuffles with the police to no avail. And so the world is reduced to a hotel room.

Ye, one of China’s most respected directors, expertly blends the footage from the supposedly old film fragment (which is actually a current work-in-progress of his own) into the many layers of the present, mixing fiction with actual scenes of China under lockdown. He elegantly deploys split-screen to capture the uncanny but all-too-familiar multiplication of images in video calls, in which each speaker appears twice: on the screen of the film, and on the miniature screen-within-the-screen. But it is the claustrophobia and fear of the terrible first Covid months that pack the main punch. An Unfinished Film is a masterful “making of” film of a film never made—but it is also a documentary of a real-life disaster.

Maia Ipp (contributing editor): What if there was an MFA program for stand-up comedy? This is the premise of Camille Bordas’s wonderful new novel The Material, which dives into a world where aspiring young comedians workshop each other’s routines and their mid-career faculty begrudgingly advise them while trying to get their own careers and personal lives back on track. I was delighted by how Bordas made it feel effortless to take on Big Ideas and serious emotional content alongside so much genuine, sometimes painful humor. Indeed, the question of cruelty in comedy comes up throughout the book in interesting ways, and the book’s commitment to narrative is matched by its sharp intelligence. And perhaps most importantly for a book about comedians, it’s very, very funny. I loved it. (And I’ll avoid spoilers, but one of the student’s bits, about an interactive Holocaust survivor hologram, might be of special interest to the JC audience.)

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): For those of us who live under a rock, awards season is the one time a year when new music and movies make their way to us, often via insistent recommendations by family and friends. This year, I’m grateful to this form of compulsory cultural education for bringing me the music of Chappell Roan. All I previously knew of Roan was that she had refused to endorse Kamala Harris over Palestine, and had responded to a Biden White House invitation to perform for Pride month with a memorably artistic “fuck you.” Turns out she’s got more than just good politics: This girl has got pipes. Roan’s now-soulful, now-fluttering vocals are the heart of her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which I devoured in one sitting last weekend.

The album is a spectrum from bop (“Femininomenon,” “HOT TO GO!” “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl”) and ballad (“Coffee,” “California,” “Kaleidescope”), but the best stuff lies somewhere in the middle. This includes the irresistible “Pink Pony Club,” a queer anthem that starts with a Tennessee-to-Santa Monica bildungsroman and ends with “I…’m gonna keep on dancing at the Pink Pony Club” playing in a loop in your head for days to come. Other mid-spectrum gems include “Red Wine Supernova,” a glittering dance number about early love with a pre-chorus so catchy that a lesser singer would have stopped right there; “Picture You,” a song whose soft, almost-growled verses slide up to a soaring refrain that shows off the storytelling power of Roan’s vocal creaks; and “Casual,” a low-fi, Avril Lavigne-esque production that, together with Roan’s relatively-restrained vocals, allows her absurdly diaristic lyrics to take center stage.

And what lyrics they are. These are not your mom’s ballads, nor the bops from gym class. “Red Wine Supernova” opens mid-scene with “her canine teeth in the side of my neck”; “Picture You” masquerades as a slow-dance track but is actually the most aching song ever written about masturbation; and “Casual” features a chorus so R-rated that parents are substituting the lyric “green beans on the passenger seat and you’re freaking me out” to be able to listen to it with their kids. I get it; you do what you need to do to listen to great music, and Midwest Princess is certainly that—emotionally hefty, vocally beguiling, gay as all hell, and designed to make you feel both young, and how much younger you could still be.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): It wasn’t until I was reading an article about British composer Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar win for his soundtrack for The Brutalist that I realized I know his work in a totally different genre. Before he turned his attention to the more orchestral, avant-garde music for which he’s now famous, Blumberg spent a few years as the guitarist and singer for an indie rock band called Yuck. The news of his victory sent me back to their self-titled 2011 album—the only one featuring Blumberg, who departed in 2013—which I loved then but hadn’t touched in at least a decade. As critics noted at the time of its release, there’s nothing sonically groundbreaking or even particularly adventurous about Yuck, which wears its influences (namely, the fuzzy and melodic alt rock of the ‘80s and ‘90s) on its sleeve. I wasn’t sure how well its aesthetic would age, especially with another 14 years of artists working in that tradition, wearing out its tricks.

As it turns out, Yuck sounds nearly as fresh and vital today as the original progenitors of that style, while putting most other inheritors to shame. This is not to say that it’s not nakedly derivative; the emulation is just particularly exquisite. Barn-burning opener “Get Away” summons a squall as sublime as Dinosaur Jr.’s; “Operation” rides a riff as rousingly chaotic and irresistibly propulsive as Sonic Youth’s; “Stutter,” “Suck,” and “Shook Down” achieve the laconic loveliness of Pavement’s last record. Where other followers of those artists often feel like rote imitators, Yuck deploys these familiar moves like an old language in which they’re entirely immersed, somehow making it their own even as they decline to innovate. I’ve had the record on loop all week; if your tastes are anything like mine, you’ll find its raucous beauty and nostalgic glow the perfect companion to the first glimmers of spring.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In literature and film, baseball has long been associated with sentimentality, trading on its leisurely pace, its bucolic playing field, the mythology of its rural roots. (Never mind that, as Kevin Baker’s book The New York Game demonstrated, it was the city of all cities, New York, that was the real cradle of the national pastime.) Carson Lund’s delightful new film, Eephus—named after a difficult-to-hit pitch in which the ball is lobbed in a high arc to confuse the batter’s timing—at first leads us to expect a rerun of the pinnacle of baseball romanticization, Field of Dreams. The entire film takes place on a playing field in a quiet Massachusetts town: On a pleasant October day, two teams of local amateurs are facing off in Soldiers Field, a rundown stadium that’s about to be torn down to allow for the construction of a school. The film opens with a local old codger, opening his folding chair, setting up a folding table and taking out his scorebook. It’s all a perfect setup for schlock sentimentality.

But Lund isn’t interested in the familiar hooey about baseball representing a purer, bucolic America—or rather, he is to the extent that he uses it to betray our expectations. He does so with humor, affection, and enormous insight into the place the sport—and more broadly, competition and failure—play in our lives. The film is suffused with a charming bemusement at its characters. Indeed, the players are a slovenly lot. They’re out of shape, dressed in mismatched uniforms, and spend the game drinking; one smokes a cigarette, which he’s acquired by sending a child spectator to go out and get him “some smokes.” They’re hardly serious sportsmen. The players on the opposing teams converse while they’re on base, and an older teammate even offers a younger one a job in the middle of the game. Yet Eephus is also a tribute to the characters’ profound dedication to what they come to realize is an absurd endeavor: playing ball.

This commitment comes through clearly after the game is cut short by the ump, who decides to shut it down due to darkness when the score is still tied. But there are no ties in baseball, and a game can hypothetically carry on forever. (Appropriately, the pitcher who throws the titular eephus describes it as a move that freezes time, as the lobbed ball seems to hover in the air.) And so, the players press on without an ump, calling balls, strikes, and outs by the honor system, backed by the lone fan in the stands. The game drags on meaninglessly, as even the players admit, into the dark of night, the ball invisible to all. After all, this is the last game at Soldiers Field, and they must press on. But why? The word “pointless” comes up over and over. And when the game is finally decided, the players simply walk away, ignoring the celebratory fireworks, having realized they’ve pursued a goal to its end—that is, to no end.

Josh Lambert (contributor): I’m not the world’s most confident French speaker, but when I’m in Paris, I always make a point of stopping in the comic book shops to see what’s new. Over the years, I’ve been astonished at how many extraordinary and relevant works of graphic fiction and reportage get published in French and never seem to get mentioned in the US press, even among comics fans. If you can read a little French, even with the help of a translation app, I recommend taking a look.

Two extraordinary examples are nonfiction works created by artists who survived the 2015 attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Luz (Rénald Luzier) showed up late on the day of the attack—his birthday—and narrowly missed the violent scene; in 2016, he published O vous, frères humains, a nearly wordless adaptation of a classic essay by Albert Cohen, the extraordinary Corfu-born, Romaniote Jewish novelist, about his first encounter with antisemitism at the age of 10 in Marseille. The book, completed in the aftermath of the attack, grapples with how to live in a world of bewildering, baseless hatred. In Dessiner encore (2021), Luz’s colleague Coco (Corinne Rey) recounts her experiences on the day of the attack itself (she was forced to open the door to the offices and witness her colleagues’ murders) and in the months following, when, racked by fear and despair, she was unable to draw.

On my most recent trip, the work that stood out to me was Salomé Parent-Rachdi’s Amour, Sexe, et Terre Promise: Reportage en Israel et Palestine (2024). Based mostly on reporting that Parent-Rachdi conducted between 2017 and 2020, the album presents the romantic and sexual stories of people living in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, mostly in their own words and—through the illustrations of artist Zac Deloupy—in their homes and personal spaces. Parent-Rachdi could be criticized for sensationalism; in picking who to profile, she certainly sought out people in unusual and intense situations. Examples include the wife of a jailed Palestinian militant who brings her husband’s smuggled semen to a fertility clinic so that the Israeli state cannot prevent them from having children and an Orthodox Jewish man in Jerusalem who, having failed to find a woman to marry, uses an agency created for LGBTQ+ Jews to connect for co-parenting to find a female non-romantic partner to have a child with him. That said, for me at least, the book served as a beguiling reminder of how wildly diverse people are in their sexualities, and how much shame, loneliness, eccentricity, and strange desire exists everywhere.

One other reason to mention this particular collection is that it straddles—awkwardly and painfully—the before and after of October 7th. The album begins with an October 2023 phone call between Parent-Rachdi and Deloupy, in which they acknowledge the horrors of Hamas’s attack and the Israeli response, wonder whether they can go on with the project, and note that “in Gaza, for example, most of the things that [Deloupy] drew are now destroyed.” In a brief epilogue, the authors recount what they’ve heard more recently from their interview subjects, though “because of their anger, sadness, or despair,” some didn’t respond to them at all. One, a French-speaking journalist and fixer from Gaza City, despairs: “They’ve erased my story and I have no future.” It feels more than a little strange to read about people’s sex and love lives in the midst of such suffering, and, understandably, for some readers it may just be an impossible book for this moment. I felt some of that myself, but I also appreciated Parent-Rachdi struggling, as other writers have, to center intimacy, love, and devotion in our thinking about what has been destroyed throughout the last 16 months—and what is still worth fighting for.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, published in 2005 and adapted by the Coen brothers into an award-winning film in 2007. This is the first of McCarthy’s works that I’ve read. It follows three main protagonists, each trying to chase or outrun the others in the aftermath of a botched drug deal: Moss, who was a welder before finding a briefcase with two million dollars in cash in the desert; Chigurh, who is hunting down the briefcase and remorseless about those he kills on the way; and Bell, the sheriff who follows their trails and reflects on the ways that Texas has changed since his youth.

It’s no wonder that No Country for Old Men is famous in its film adaptation. Reading the novel evoked what I love most about certain movies: figuring out what is happening in real time, without a narrator spelling it out explicitly. McCarthy is sparse with punctuation, including quotation marks; it takes effort to follow the dialogue and plot lines as they unfold, yet is simultaneously easy to get caught up in the current of the writing. The prose is gripping, and as I read, I truly had no idea how the story would turn out. In part, I’m writing this recommendation with a selfish desire: I would love to process the ending of the book with others, but I’m not in a book club. If you have read this novel and want to share your thoughts—or have any articles about it you’ve found thought-provoking or clarifying—please reply!

In referencing McCarthy’s work, it feels important to include news that surfaced last year: A woman named Augusta Britt opened up publicly about a romantic and sexual relationship that McCarthy initiated with her in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and he was in his forties. As someone who knows little about McCarthy or Britt, I can only echo the sharp criticism of the initial Vanity Fair article about the relationship—which elides the ethical concerns of grooming in a scenario with that age differential and power dynamic—and try to honor Britt’s telling of her own story, in which she credits McCarthy as saving her life. Interestingly, she describes reading the characters he based off of her in several of his works as more violating than anything in the physical relationship she had with him in her youth. There is much to say—and some has been written—about this, but I’ll leave that to others who have more insight into McCarthy’s work, Britt’s life, and these hard topics than I do.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Lincoln Center’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema is the annual confirmation that French cinema is, much like that formerly great land itself, not what it once was. But even so, the festival always includes some worthwhile films among the dross. This year’s iteration, which runs from March 6th until March 16th, is no exception.

At the top of my list is The Second Act, the latest from Quentin Depieux, a filmmaker I always recommend heartily. Like many of his works, it’s a Pirandellian take on the shooting of a film, in which the actors switch freely between their actual selves and the roles they’re playing, leaving us to decide if it’s the performer or character who’s being difficult. The Second Act features two of France’s biggest stars, Léa Seydoux and Vincent Lindon, who seems to be in almost every French movie shown here; each plays both to type and against type. Like all of Depieux’s films, this one is briskly paced, intelligent, and funny—though it culminates in a strikingly dark ending. I assume this is why, when it opened at Cannes, it caused a certain amount of upset. Don’t let that dissuade you: The Second Act is one of the two films you absolutely shouldn’t miss.

The other is Koya Kamura’s lovely and subtle Winter in Sokcho. Based on Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel of the same name (which I prefer to the film), it’s the story of a young French Korean woman who never knew her French father, but who studied the national literature as a kind of homage to her roots. When an older French graphic novelist comes to stay at the inn where she works a menial job, they gravitate toward each other—she more to him than he to her. It’s a potent meditation on misunderstanding, the illusions of closeness, and unfulfilled dreams.

Of the films I was able to screen before the festival, one other is well worth catching, the most classically French of the bunch: Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours, starring Hafsia Herzi and Isabelle Huppert (who’s as ubiquitous as Lindon) as women from wildly divergent backgrounds who meet while visiting their husbands in prison. They develop an unlikely and—thanks to the way Huppert plays her part—unsettling friendship. The brilliance of the film is that we have no idea where this strange linkage finds its source, nor where it will go. And in Huppert’s and Mazuy’s hands, an ending that would normally be considered unhappy becomes something liberating instead.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When I stumbled upon the first season of the Netflix series Mo a couple of years ago, I simply couldn’t believe this show existed: Here was a popular American series that clips along with family sit-com jocularity in tidily built half-hour episodes and, at the same time, talks about Palestine and offers a piercing critique of US immigration policy. When the second season (reportedly the series’s last) launched at the end of January, I couldn’t help binging it, not only because each of the eight episodes ends on an expertly-devised little cliff-hanger, but also because the new season goes even deeper in its political poignance. And it’s still hilarious.

The series is based loosely on the experience of its author and star, the comedian Mohammed Amer. When Mo opens, the hero and his family have been waiting 22 years for their asylum claim to be processed, after having fled Palestine for Kuwait and, later, Kuwait for the US—a timeline and journey that parallels Amer and his family’s experience. Our affable protagonist is a big-hearted bumbler, devoted to his mom and older brother (who has autism); his father died years earlier, and Mo struggles vainly to provide as the man of the family. (A critique of conventional masculinity is a strong undercurrent of the show.)

The comic set-ups are familiar, but always with a twist. For instance, Mo’s mom is a traditional immigrant hewing to the ways of the old country—but, uniquely for American TV, a Palestinian Muslim whose ties to religion and home are not, as they would be in a standard sitcom, fodder for ridicule. If Mo is familiar as a ne’er-do-well screwup—a grown man who lives at home and can’t hold down a job—we soon see that it’s not because he’s a schlubby slacker, but because he’s undocumented and his lack of papers prevents him from legal employment. In the first episode, he loses a reasonably stable, under-the-table job in an electronics store because of an impending ICE raid, and everything unspools from there. Ingeniously, it’s always the system that is the butt of the jokes.

Soon after, Mo is injured when gunmen open fire in a grocery store where he is shopping—an occasion for mordant quips from the paramedics who try to determine how many casualties are required for it to qualify as a mass shooting. Lacking health insurance, Mo refuses medical care and self-medicates with lean, a codeine-bearing cough-syrup concoction, which originated in Houston and is just one of the show’s nods to the city where it’s set and where Amer grew up (and where, like his character, he learned Spanish alongside his English and Arabic). Mo soon becomes addicted and that sets off a series of lies that become too much for his hardworking girlfriend, a Mexican American who runs an auto body shop. Mo lands a series of gray-economy jobs and downright illegal gigs, all the while trying to help his mom’s fledgling olive oil business. These situations constantly propel him into new scrapes and increasingly absurd escapades, and by the end of the first season, he has inadvertently entered Mexico. Lacking a passport, he has no way to come back home to Houston. For the United States, too, Mo has no right of return.

The second season opens six months later, with Mo selling falafel tacos from a pedal-powered food cart in Mexico City, where he also works side hustles wrestling and playing in a mariachi band. It’s hard to describe how the show deepens while maintaining its levity without too many spoilers, but, suffice it to say, the new season mixes even more audaciously the humorous with the harrowing, as every misstep leads to new lows and every new low has some comically critical payoff: Mo is officially deported—but, being stateless, he can’t be sent away! In a side-splitting scene, Mo blows his top in a fancy new restaurant run by his ex-girlfriend’s new beau—a highly successful Israeli chef. Farcical anti-Palestinian assumptions bounce off the walls as Mo decries the chef’s appropriation of Mo’s land, culture, culinary repertoire, and girlfriend—listen for a patron’s confusion of “hummus” with “Hamas.”

Mo is not afraid to be schmaltzy, but it has earned every drop. A scene in which Mo’s brother visits a therapist and receives a diagnosis is one of TV’s most honest and touching treatments of autism, and don’t even try not to cry when Mo and his family at last visit relatives in the West Bank in an episode of profound celebration and steadfastness. (Mo scored a passport after his ex-girlfriend dumped the Israeli dude and married Mo to help him get a greencard.)

At the season’s end, the family heads back to the US; this is, after all, an American story—but with some discomfiting parallels to Palestinian experiences. A West Bank settler who trains his sights on Mo near the end, for example, resembles a shotgun-bearing interceptor threatening Mo as he illegally crosses into Texas early in the second season; the callous Israeli soldier who searches Mo at Ben Gurion Airport mirrors the cruel guard in a vile Texas border facility where Mo is detained. In this moment, when it’s hard to think about the state of either US immigration or Palestine without utter despair, Mo offers some satirical levity and, most amazingly, gets a US audience to root for an undocumented, Palestinian immigrant.

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): In the opening scene of the Argentinian television show El Fin del Amor (2022), the feminist philosopher and writer Tamara Tenenbaum and a friend debate the meaning of twerking while drinking at a club in Buenos Aires—circling the possibility of resignifying aesthetic forms that emerge from oppressive contexts. When the bartender reveals a new Jewish star tattoo on her arm, Tenenbaum discloses that she, too, is Jewish, surprising her friend, who asks why she never talks about her Judaism. Tenenbaum brushes off the question, but the rest of the show is an exploration of that avoidance and the fraught, twisted path of some kind of return, the grappling of an edgy academic with her Orthodox background.

The show, a semi-autobiographical portrayal of the real feminist philosopher and writer Tamara Tenenbaum—who rose to fame for a longform 2019 essay bearing the same name as the show (which was translated into English last year)—is like no other I’ve encountered. Its abundant references to and discussions of critical theory sit alongside frequent scenes of explicit sex and hard drug use. And, to boot, it certainly has more extensive halachic references than I’ve ever witnessed before in popular culture. The combination often feels improbable: How can there exist a TV show where feminist reckonings with niddah (Jewish menstrual purity laws) are a central driving force of the narrative? The Jewish content of the show is somewhat staggering. We see mundane aspects of religious Jewish life, such as Tenenbaum’s childhood friend Sarita, with whom she reconnects early on in the show, kashering her kitchen before Passover, selling her chametz to a gentile, ironing her husband’s kippot, marking her period in a calendar to calculate niddah stipulations, and much more. We also get less typical glimpses: In multiple scenes, for example, Tenenbaum articulates the sexual energy she feels around imagining going to the mikveh. In moments, a spectral manifestation of Tenenbaum’s childhood self appears, and we see her religious childhood pitted against her current life. A flashback to Tenenbaum as a young girl reading the laws of niddah is followed immediately by a present-day scene in which she has sex while on her period; an image of her child self in a Queen Esther costume on Purim is followed by a hook-up with Ofelia, a friend who is a trans woman; a youthful memory of hearing about a friend’s cousin who was expelled from the community after she married a gentile comes up against the backdrop of her recently-ended relationship with a non-Jewish partner.

The Jewishness of the show feels real and lived—an outlier in the current landscape of Jewish television, which offers up, alternately, the misogynistic kitsch of Nobody Wants This, the unrealistic exoticism of Unorthodox, or the stereotyped schmaltz of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. That’s not to say the show is perfect: The intellectual references sometimes feel like posturing, Tenenbaum can be annoying and unlikeable as a character, and there’s no real plot to speak of. El Fin del Amor is most successful as a thought-provoking, nuanced mediation on rejecting the binaries—between religiosity and secularism, piety and eroticism, tradition and radicalness—that so often constrain our thinking about Jewishness and its portrayal in popular culture. The show is a reflection on the freedom that can come from constraints, the passion that can arise from boundaries, and the responsibility that doesn’t disappear with independence. “I don’t believe in anything,” Tenenbaum says directly into the camera in the final scene, “but I believe in mitzvot.” These mitzvot do not necessarily entail compliance with the religious strictures of Tenenbaum’s upbringing but rather signal a recommitment to a kind of relationality made possible by obligation. This kind of dedication may seem countercultural in today’s world but, set against the backdrop of Buenos Aires’s party scene, El Fin del Amor makes it seem not so far out of reach.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When my wife suggested we celebrate my birthday with a visit to the Cy Twombly exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, I was happy to accept. I was in the mood for crayon squiggles—or “loops,” as the gallery calls them. The first room of the show didn’t disappoint. The variety-within-sameness of Twombly’s scrawls—whether on paper or over gray house paint on canvas—is strangely charming in its anarchic spirit. The untitled paintings on display all date from the years 1969–1971; along with their spiraling central motif, four of them share identical lines of illegible “writing” in a non-existent language. The boldly drawn loops are themselves diverse in shape and character, varying in length and in abruptness of slope, especially across the works dating from 1970. The most complex work in this room is an untitled piece from 1968, completed in crayon on house paint, in which the loops and nonsense text provide a diagram of an impossible object.

Down the stairs was a room that froze me in my tracks, especially after the gray of the first set of paintings. It was full of landscapes in magical oil, all painted on large canvases and bearing the influence of J.M.W. Turner. Green—the green of a forest seen from afar—is the dominant color, cut across in some cases by a cloud of white, either at the top, or slicing the canvas diagonally, as in the magnificent Paesaggio from 1986. As in Turner’s most fully developed, almost abstract works, we often can only make out the subject if the title identifies it. In Condottiero Testa di Cozzo, loosely based on a painting by Titian of the Grand Duke of Alba, shades of green are interrupted by a red, white, and black blur—a parrot, but one that is pure color without form.

The generous exhibition—which also includes a suite of paintings from Twombly’s travels across Russia as well as Central and East Asia—is a fascinating display of the artist’s versatility. We are not accustomed to thinking of Twombly as a master colorist, nor as a painter who refers back to classical art. And yet this show, particularly the gallery of “landscapes,” provides a glimpse into another Cy Twombly: one who has carefully considered art history and put it to use in an extremely personal way.

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): On Monday morning, I stood with several dozen other protestors outside the Jerusalem Russian Compound, an interrogation facility and prison where Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna, two of the owners of the beloved East Jerusalem cultural institution the Educational Bookshop, were awaiting a court hearing. The day before, Israeli police officers had raided the shop’s Arabic- and English-language branches, located across the street from each other on the central thoroughfare of Salah a-Din Street. Police used Google Translate to decipher English and Arabic book titles, and grabbed anything with a Palestinian flag on the cover. They dumped piles of books on the ground and stuffed others into garbage bags, leaving with armfuls of material—including a children’s coloring book—that they claimed could incite violence. They also took with them Mahmoud and Ahmad, both under arrest. Because a higher level of authorization is needed for incitement charges, police later changed their claim to assert that Mahmoud and Ahmad had “disturbed the public order.” When their lawyer asked in court what exactly they had done to disrupt the peace, the police representative responded, “selling books.”

It is stating the obvious to note that a society that considers books beyond the pale is a tyrannical and oppressive one. It is also perhaps self-evident that books should disturb the public order by challenging us to think critically about new ideas and act upon our conclusions. In the past few days, the bookstore and its owners have become a liberal cause célèbre—in part because their case so starkly illustrates these basic principles, and in part because the bookstore is frequented by English-speakers, including members of the Western media and diplomatic core. Still, at risk of adding to the chorus, I feel compelled to say how much the Educational Bookshop has meant to me personally. The store is one of my favorite places in Jerusalem. The Munas are always quick to provide recommendations and point you to new works and lesser-known authors. The tiny shop is somehow large enough to hold vital book launches and talks in a downstairs event space (where I also took Arabic classes for some time) and a cozy cafe upstairs, along with the main floor’s extensive stacks of books. Jerusalem is not a city where you can have your pick of stores that sell English-language material critical of Zionism, and the bookshop has become a meeting point for students, diplomats, journalists, and curious wanderers, a near-mandatory pilgrimage site for tourists curious about Palestine. As it has for so many, it has played a formative role in my life here. The bookshelves in my apartment are laden with the gems discovered there: the Arabic textbooks I used for years; contemporary Palestinian fiction and poetry; academic works on Jerusalem history; novels from around the world; an anthology of contemporary stories from Gaza (edited by Mahmoud and recently featured on Jewish Currents’s podcast); one of my favorite cookbooks, which focuses on Gazan cuisine; books that taught me about the history, economics, and geography of occupation; works of critical theory that changed how I think about the violence in this land and classics that expanded my perspective beyond it.

Mahmoud and Ahmad were released to five days of house arrest after spending two nights in the Russian Compound, and they are banned from their own store for the next 20 days. Awful as that is, though, their arrest is not the worst thing that has happened in this land this week. As I was at the protest outside the court, I was getting updates on my phone about a series of demolitions happening in Masafer Yatta at the same time, which left dozens of people homeless; the night before, Israeli forces shot and killed two women, one of whom was eight months pregnant, in the Nur Shams Refugee Camp. West Bank Palestinians whom I know were detained this week for longer than the Munas without receiving a single sentence of media coverage. As the Israeli journalist Orly Noy noted, “In a reality in which children are starved and left to die of thirst, where the death toll from Israel’s campaign of destruction numbers in the tens of thousands, where survivors struggle to rebuild their lives amid ruin and under constant threat, a raid on a bookstore might seem trivial, marginal.” But, Noy continued, this event should not be brushed away. “Israel’s persistent and systematic campaign against Palestinian culture and identity is a fundamental element in the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians, which in turn enables their physical destruction. To reduce a people to dust, even the semblance of a culture must not remain.” Indeed, it is no coincidence that the last 16 months have seen, along with physical destruction and mass murder, Israel’s banning of Al Jazeera, cancellation of film screenings, arrest of academics, and detention of so many people for simply posting on social media, along with, of course, the scholasticide in Gaza. There are many forms our resistance to such a reality must take, but one must be an insistence on continuing to engage with and support Palestinian culture. And so if you’re looking for your next book, there’s an unassuming little shop tucked into Salah a-Din Street, bursting with literary treasures, which also ships internationally. Placing an order there might be a small gesture, but it’s one more way of fighting back.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): What is the role of an avant-garde artist during a revolution? The great experimental theater director Lee Breuer (1937–2021) pondered that question through his renegade artwork amid the student and worker uprisings in Paris of May 1968. Breuer was based in Paris at the time for a few years of Euro-wandering, along with fellow artists with whom he would soon form the ground-shifting theater company Mabou Mines when they returned to the United States in 1970. As a member of the Mabou Mines collective for the five decades between its founding and his death, Breuer remained a brilliant, bohemian iconoclast. He created ingenious new performance forms that he called “animations” and also radically adapted classics: His Gospel at Colonus (1983) transposed Sophocles into the Black church, and his Peter and Wendy (1996, based on J.M. Barrie’s original) starred one actor as Wendy—and as the voice of all the other characters, represented by entrancing puppets. For Mabou Mines Dollhouse (2003), Breuer cast Ibsen’s canonical drama with men under five feet tall and women nearly six feet tall on a miniaturized set, so that the main character, Nora, physically chafed against a constricting world built by and for men. And for Lear (1990), Breuer reversed the genders entirely so that Shakespeare’s disintegrating protagonist transformed into a mother of three sons. (Full disclosure: I served as the dramaturg for Lear.)

But before all that, Breuer tried to make a movie called Moi-même—a super-meta satirical short about a pre-pubescent boy trying to make a movie about himself during May 1968 in Paris. Breuer shot many hours of silent black-and-white film in Paris that year, intending to dub in dialogue later. He never finished the project. More than half a century later, Breuer’s son, the filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, began a collaboration with his father, which he continued on his own following Breuer’s death. Lorwin wrote a script and hired actors (some of them the children of original cast members) to voice the lines. Composers and sound designers added underscoring and effects. And Lorwin edited it all into a coherent shape—which is not to say an undemanding, straightforward story. Rather, Moi-même revels in the moody abstractions and disjunctive narrative style of the French New Wave—and of Breuer’s later work. (Jean-Luc Godard himself appears in Moi-même in a cameo role.) The finished film—lambent, layered, and lyrical—will have its New York premiere on February 27th at L’Alliance, followed by a Q&A with Lorwin.

The way Breuer’s son completed the film uncannily mirrors the doubling at its core: Kevin, the film’s protagonist, is played by two actors—one a child, the other a budding young man; a jump-cut or dissolve sometimes replaces one actor with the other, while some scenes include both actors. Occasionally, we see Kevin in bed, dreaming. The events that follow could be from his dreams, from the film he is making, or from the frame film in which he is the narrating hero. The viewer is never sure. These scenes include images of him riding in the back of a luxurious taxi through gorgeously gray Parisian streets, pitching his movie to creepy men to procure “bread” to fund it, observing some goons on the cab’s running board shooting down a woman in the road, and, often, lighting up a smoke.

Along the way, Moi-même presents only small glimpses of the general strikes and demonstrations that were roiling Paris at the time: a fleeting shot of a poster of Che, a couple of quick cuts to footage of student protests outside the Sorbonne, some vague crowd chants in the soundtrack, and a wry line here or there, like when Kevin is advised to “cut the politics and consolidate the characters.” Despite the setting, no one could quite call this cinema engagé, work intended to support political action; to Kevin, “my film is everything,” even as May ‘68 activists were taking over factories, universities, and cultural institutions. And if Breuer participated in the famous occupation of the Théâtre de l’Odéon (where his fellow American experimental theater makers, the pacifist-anarchists Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater, joined in), he never publicly mentioned it.

And yet, the slogan of that occupation—“Power to the imagination”—is not only quoted in Moi-même; its spirit permeates it. “The theatre, the cinema, art and literature etc., have all become industries under the control of an elite bent on alienation and profiteering! Sabotage the cultural industry!” proclaimed a leaflet distributed at the occupation of the theater. “You are art! You are the revolution!” In its dreamy 60 minutes that take up questions of personal and artistic legacy, Moi-même reminds us, too, of the abiding commitment beneath Breuer’s—and Mabou Mines’s—oeuvre: that refusing commercial narrative logics can help inspire new visions for the world.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It’s astounding that Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the show about the great German Romantic painter that opened last weekend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first solo exhibition of this seminal artist, who died in 1840, to be held in the United States. Put another way, the fact that this event took 185 years to occur is proof that when you come down to it, we live in a philistine backwater populated by mouth-breathers (present company excluded).

Friedrich’s work offers an ideal primer on German Romanticism, an artistic movement that feels almost literary in its starkly defined worldview and deeply philosophical bent. The setting of a Friedrich painting is always stunning but usually inhospitable; even his images of spring look like scenes of winter. Humanity’s place in the landscape is that of spectator and wanderer, with the rocky fields, towering mountains, and jagged cliffs serving as a reminder of how little space we take up in the vastness. It’s rare to see a full-sized figure in the works on display, and those that do appear—like the man in the spectacular Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1817)—are still dwarfed by what surrounds them.

The motifs one finds here define the Romantic movement. Ruins are a regular presence, speaking to the futile and ephemeral nature of everything we humans do. One of the most stunning works in the show, a painting of a ruined monastery in Oybin, Germany, from 1812, is illuminated from behind by the strange, mystical yellow light of a sun that may be rising in hope, or else setting in sorrow. Friedrich’s early work is heavy on religious imagery, full of lonely crucifixes standing in the midst of fields, denoting a spiritual realm as eternal as the natural one in which they’ve been placed. Rivers and seas offer a particularly powerful expression, in their immensity, of the smallness of our lives in the here and now. The most awe-inspiring work in the show—justly centered—is Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808-1810), an enormous canvas dominated by a dark blue sea under a dark sky, with a monk taking up negligible space at the water’s edge. It brings together all of the painter’s themes: the enduring power of religion, the majesty of nature, the marginality of our place in the universe.

Time is an essential element in all of Friedrich’s works. Ruins remind us of the passing of centuries; tall trees speak of the years required for them to reach their great height; stones jut from the ground, a vestige of some long-lost age when the earth’s movements drove them from their original place. The fullest expression of this theme appears in the painting The Stages of Life (1834), in which an old man stands on a cliff looking out at the sea, accompanied by figures representing the ages between infancy and senescence. It’s sad that we had to wait so much time—almost two centuries—for a show like this one. But it’s here, and we should celebrate it.