Shabbat
Reading List

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.

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.