Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): Palestinian pianist Faraj Suleiman’s new album, Maryam, is quick to lure its listeners into a world of domestic bliss. The opening track, “Packed Love,” sung in a duet with Dima Zahran, paints a picture of two lovers at home: “the stillness overflowing on the carpet” and “the scent of the cooking on the walls.” But this exaggerated satisfaction seems destined to be undercut, and we soon find that the relationship at the center of the album, and indeed the whole world around it, is more ephemeral than any of his previous work. Already by the second track, “A Handful of Air,” a list of a lover’s requests—“a handful of air,” “a smile in a glass,” and “a box for my laughter”—teeter somewhere between high romance and empty promises. Unlike the firm grounding in Suleiman’s other albums, and in particular, the contrasting pulls of Haifa and Berlin as home and diaspora, Maryam is dislocated, and follows this dream-like relationship from the vantage point of a break-up.

The lyrics of this brief album—it clocks in at just over half an hour—are written by Amer Hlehel, an acclaimed Palestinian actor whose role in the black comedy Mediterranean Fever (2022) deserves its own recommendation. In contrast to the political and sardonic lyrics of Majd Kayyal, who collaborated with Suleiman for his albums Better Than Berlin (2020) and Upright Biano (2023), Hlehel is a dramatist: The album has characters, in this case, two lovers, and something resembling a narrative arc, and physical objects—such as a recurring hair clip and a picture of the couple—feel like anchoring props in an otherwise unmoored world.

In its exploration of lost love, Maryam charts a range of emotions from the most mundane to the most elevated. “Bye Bye Love” begins with the male protagonist sitting down at 2 am to watch back-to-back films before insisting that he really is okay. The song thrillingly blends video-game beeping with an expansive brass band that captures the contrasting coexistence of regression into digital rabbit holes (he also imagines Super Mario jumping ahead of him) alongside the psychological high-drama of a break-up. Meanwhile, the most tender song of the album, “Remnants of Soul,” is a stripped-back piano ballad in the tradition of Suleiman’s very best songs. Addressing the earlier requests from his lover, the bewitching simplicity of delivering a hair clip feels like a desperate lunge for something concrete as the rest of the world recedes.

The album’s ambition, though, is larger than break-up music: It is about the shattering of reality—and tentative attempts to piece it back together—which arises from the end of love, and from the end of the world as we know it. Maryam ends with the song “Counting Two Lives,” which repeats the full lyrics of the opening track, only now with Suleiman singing alone. The repetition signals the passage of time, and his solo drawl sounds defeated—but it is not only the delivery that has changed. He adds a verse that the two have grown old and gray, that their love has been “constant like a port,” and then in another verse, he declares that his lover has left and that “everything sweet” from the opening song has turned bitter. Yet we also become aware that, all along, both the first and last song of the album have been framed through the hypothetical; memories, projections, and reality all blur into one another. At its conclusion, the song again returns to the same peaceful domestic images, repeated this time instead as a prayer of hope, the words themselves something to hold on to.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): The work of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas tends to elicit incendiary reactions from his ideological opponents. One of the most common Democratic responses to his conservative voting record, which has helped to weaken voting rights and abortion access, is that he is an “Uncle Tom”—a traitor to Black Americans. The epithet mirrors the name-calling that often targets anti-Zionist Jews who are told they too are traitors to the Jewish community. These insults are often used to shut down debate and obscure the fact that there is no monolithic “community” to appeal to. Just as anti-Zionist Jews often make a case rooted in what they see as Jewish interests for why Israeli policy should be countered, conservative Black thinkers like Clarence Thomas make a Black case for why liberal policies should be countered. This is not to say that Thomas’s political project should not be rebutted, but rather that it be opposed on its merits instead of through identity-based attacks.

Thomas’s Blackness is at the heart of his court opinions—an argument expertly laid out by Corey Robin in his 2019 book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. A brisk, informative intellectual biography-cum-legal analysis, Robin’s book traces how Thomas’s early Black nationalism shows up in his conservative court opinions, and how his racial pessimism structures his politics. Thomas’s life was shaped by his upbringing in the Jim Crow South, and in response to the harshness of American apartheid, he turned to the Black nationalism of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. Thomas eventually jettisoned the leftist elements of his former politics, but he never left Black nationalism behind. Indeed, race and racism show up in Thomas’s opinions even in cases that do not, at first glance, seem to be about race at all. Thomas’s vote in the infamous Citizens United case to strike down limits on corporate spending in elections was, at least in part, a reaction to South Carolina legislator Benjamin Tillman, a white supremacist legislator who wanted to regulate corporate spending because he was worried that pro-civil rights companies would spend money to oppose racism in US politics. And Thomas’s anti-gun control opinions are rooted in a worldview that sees Black men as needing armed protection from white supremacy.

Thomas’s conservative Black nationalism may not represent the majority Black American opinion, but Robin’s provocative closing argument posits that Thomas’s worldview is “distinctively American and of the moment” and has parallels in liberal and left-wing understandings of contemporary society. Parts of the left, Robin argues, share Thomas’s vision of “the permanence and autonomy of race, of the inability of politics to overcome social disrepair, [and] of the ineffectiveness of state action.” It’s a disquieting position, in part because Thomas’s solution is to take this state of affairs and preserve it, rather than challenge it. Robin exhorts his readers to grapple with the resonances between the left’s understanding of race and Thomas’s vision, and move beyond this conception by adopting different premises that can help us change this state of affairs, rather than reify it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Given his genius, it’s almost impossible to put together a bad exhibition of the photographs of Weegee (1899–1968). But Weegee: Society of the Spectacle—the new one running at the International Center for Photography until May 5th—is superior to all of the many shows of his work I’ve seen over the decades. Loosely organized around the philosopher Guy Debord’s classic Situationist text of the same name, the exhibition calls our attention to the ways the images on display consider the role of the spectator—and the spectacle of daily life in a gritty, rundown New York. The 81 works in the show, a small fraction of Weegee’s ample oeuvre, pack a mighty punch even for those already familiar with them.

Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, was a caricature of a hard-boiled news photographer; he looked permanently pissed-off, a cigar stuck in his scowl. He was always ready to capture the latest crime or tragedy, often while the victim was still warm. Weegee managed to get the jump on his peers because when he wasn’t driving the streets, his trunk full of cameras, he’d be waiting in his apartment behind the police headquarters on Centre Street, whose activities he monitored on a police radio. Murder was his bread and butter, and this show features many of his most striking images of killings—many of them mob rub-outs, each one a film noir in still form. But he also had a keen eye for the living. The show includes perhaps his most famous photo, in which a crowd of a million people pose for his camera on the beach and boardwalk at Coney Island on a hot July day in 1940. Social commentary is present as well: In one picture, four children sleep in the same bed in a Little Italy apartment; in another, a homeless man poses with two wealthy women at the Metropolitan Opera ball, an image Weegee faked by bringing the former into the frame. (All’s fair in art and social criticism.)

As the exhibition’s title suggests, Weegee had a particular fondness for photographing onlookers. The best such shot, Balcony Seats at a Murder, shows a man dead in the entryway to an Italian café as cops stand around, seeming to enjoy the scene of which they are a part, while the residents of the building where the killing took place, as well as the neighboring tenements, hang from their windows to get a better view. Others portray people gawking at the Empire State Building after it was struck by a plane and Williamsburg children looking—and some laughing—at a dead body in front of their elementary school; in both cases, the object of interest is left outside the frame. The accumulation of these images emphasizes a grim reality: Everything and anything, particularly the gruesome, is a show.

It almost goes without saying that Weegee is commenting on us, his viewers—or rather on the newspaper readers whose daily paper originally ran his scenes of death and mayhem. What can be said about people who can casually glance at a photo in their morning paper of a man thrown from a car after an auto accident, his hands still gripping the steering wheel? But of course, Weegee, the voyeur at the source of it all, is no better than the rest of us.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): In December, I saw two of the best theater performances that I’ve seen in a long time: Francesca D’Uva’s one-woman show, This Is My Favorite Song, and Dan Fishback’s rock opera, Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment. They have some similarities—both artists mix story-telling and music to reckon with their personal experiences of loss and struggle in the pandemic.

D’Uva’s show is composed of a series of comedic monologues interspersed with songs that cover the gamut of her life: the headaches and joys of nannying, having a crush on Mary in the elementary school Easter pageant, winning a bespoke participation award for the high school swim team, and—in the show’s most extensive throughline—the grief and strangeness of losing her dad to Covid in June of 2020. D’Uva’s writing and performance move between a serious, heavy emotional register and hilarity, each informing, rather than cheapening, the other. Early in the show, after she first mentions her dad’s death, the stage fills with haze from a smoke-machine, the lights turn red, and she sings a death metal-esque interlude: “I don’t want to do this show,” crouching like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. She goes into detail about losing her dad, such as the ritual of donning PPE at the hospital for the chance to say goodbye after months of seeing him on a ventilator on Zoom, or the awkwardness in social situations when people find out the cause of his death and don’t know what to say. In the second half of the show, she transitions from her usual laugh-out-loud musical numbers into a subtle, melancholic song. She amplifies the sound of tapping on a small urn of her father’s ashes, and her vocals elongate into abstraction. The show ends in an imagined scene where she needs to save her dad’s life in a video game, and Shakira—a minor character throughout—comes to the rescue.

A few days later, I saw Fishback’s show which, as the playbill puts it, tells the story of “a chronically ill gay bitch trapped at home during a time of global fascism and a mass-disabling pandemic.” The performance begins with members of the band introducing one another, as part of a kabbalistic ritual to transport Dan’s spirit from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, into the body (Ron Shalom’s, in this case) that he inhabits for the rest of the show. The care and attention to accessibility and risk mitigation that is at the center of the narrative was also present offstage: Joe’s Pub paused its bar and restaurant service for the two-day run to support a fully masked theater experience. Fishback integrated ASL interpretation, open captioning, and audio descriptions into the performance, inspired—as he talked about in an episode of The Sick Times podcast “Still Here”—by Ryan J. Haddad’s “Dark, Disabled Stories,” which had also played at the Public, in the spring of 2023, and which I also loved. The songs are about isolation, desire, rage, collective care, organizing, and ancestors. The energy onstage was palpable, the music superb. I was rapt; if the soundtrack was available as a recording, I would listen to it many times over. (You can hear one song, “Laughing with Lizards,” as the first track of an EP that Fisbhack released last year.)

As pandemic mitigations have evaporated in the last two years, while the virus continues to circulate and cause mounting damage, I know from friends and from my own experience that people who prioritize Covid safety feel continually isolated and forced out of the social, cultural, and even routinely necessary spaces they wish to be part of. In one act, Fishback sings that the feeling of betrayal from people he thought cared about him is something that will stay with him for the rest of his life. Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment was a space in which, for two brief afternoons, a community that mourns and rages alongside him—both in the theater and in the livestream audience—could be together and hear their experiences articulated.

Over the years, I’ve heard people wonder aloud about the dearth of Covid-related art, including conjectures about a collective wish to forget that traumatic and turbulent period. But these performances make me doubt that narrative. They are wildly creative, moving, and brilliant pieces of art—my only criticism is that neither had a longer run.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Ever since I tore through Nicholson Baker’s mesmerizing 1988 debut novel The Mezzanine—an interior monologue that unfolds entirely over the course of an escalator ride—a few years ago, I’ve been eager to read more of his work. So I was excited to happen upon a used copy of his 2009 book The Anthologist, which also rests on a nearly-too-cute premise: The novel consists of the musings of an unsuccessful poet procrastinating on composing an introduction to a volume of rhyming verse. The delightfully ridiculous (and ridiculously named) narrator, Paul Chowder, is equal parts pathetic and grandiose, slipping between strident declarations about the nature of his craft and admissions like: “My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I’m a study in failure.” Indeed, the novel finds him not only failing to eke out a word but facing financial ruin and wrestling with the departure of his girlfriend, both of which could be remedied by simply getting down to work. But of course he can only ramble on, regaling the reader with details of his humdrum life mixed with proclamations that might form the substance of his repeatedly postponed writing project. Chowder, we quickly learn, believes that the neglect of rhyme in contemporary English poetry (including his own) constitutes a colossal aesthetic error. His rants on the subject, though often ridiculous, are also deeply felt, and liberally peppered with beauty and brilliance. At one point, for instance, he announces that “poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing” that contains its own cure to despair: the inherent forward motion of rhyme, a miraculous means of “addicting yourself to what will happen next.” If this is a far less ambitious work than The Mezzanine, it nonetheless shares its searching intelligence and belief in the infinity inherent in the endless minutiae of the world—in what Chowder calls life’s “untold particulars.”

Reading The Anthologist, I couldn’t help thinking of another tender novel of procrastination and obsession: Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins. In Haber’s 2024 novel, which I enjoyed immensely last fall, the central deferral is on the scale of decades. The unnamed narrator, a retired professor, has been struggling to get a serious start on a book-length essay about the French writer (and alleged father of the essay form) Michel de Montaigne ever since grad school; he’s gotten as far as a list of potential titles, all suggestive but ambiguous. In the opening pages, the speaker settles on a new one that accords perfectly with his fundamental predicament: The Intrusion of Distraction. His whole existence has been a series of diversions and disruptions that render his life’s work impossible, a situation he universalizes: “Once again my phone chirps, that shrill chirp that births a goddamn knot in my chest each time it chirps, every chirp another attack against sanity and solitude and fucking Christ, I think, growing frustrated, growing antsy and aggrieved, pacing the house in my pale-yellow slippers, the modern world has destroyed the ability to have a single unfettered thought, humankind has demolished discernment and irony, the parsing of ideas with the slightest nuance because all of these require sustained, undisturbed time”—he goes on. In wonderfully winding and ferociously fervent prose, the tragicomic narrator digressively circles his unfulfillable project, raving about modernity, his passion for coffee, his son’s irritating interest in dance music, the colleagues and students who have misunderstood and waylaid him—all while approaching and then retreating from what he’s avoiding most of all: his grief over the recent death of his wife. Much like Baker’s novel, Haber’s study of the self-aggrandizing and unactualized intellectual’s inner turmoil unlocks the tenderness hidden within the abrasive and the absurd.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some time back, Jewish Currents published my conversation with the founder and executive director of Israel’s Akevot Institute, which studies, and sometimes uncovers, the state’s crimes. In the introduction to that interview, I praised the videos the organization produces, many of which feature testimony from participants in those very crimes. The short films often focus on Israel’s most familiar purveyors of unbridled government violence: the army. But Akevot’s new six-part web series, Blue Marks, concentrates not on the outward-facing forces aimed at destroying anyone who resists Israel, but instead on the inward-facing defenders of the established disorder—the police.

Filmed and edited by Matan Ben Moreh, each episode considers a different aspect of police violence or segment of the population that regularly endures it. The focus here is not the police’s treatment of Palestinian citizens. Rather, those at the receiving end of the violence are Jews, but Jews who are disturbers of the status quo: leftist demonstrators against the government, poor Mitzrahim, the ultra-Orthodox, and Ethiopian Jews. What Blue Marks shows with shocking clarity is that to disrupt the system founded by Ashkenazim and maintained by right-wing Mizrahim is a risky proposition. Any country’s forces of repression are an expression of the national id, acting unencumbered by morality. Their choice of targets are likewise revealing; indeed, the identities of the internal enemies explored here exemplify the contradictions that lie beneath the veneer of Jewish unity proclaimed by Zionism.

The series highlights how frighteningly easy the Israeli police are to resort to brutality. Water cannons, horses, truncheons, and skunk cannons—which spray the victim with foul-smelling liquid—are all weapons of first resort. Activists and even two insiders, including a former national chief, describe the police force’s degeneration into what one of them explains should, because of its willingness to act outside the law, more properly be called a militia. None of the interviewees has any great hope for a shift in the status quo; as a sociologist who had worked for the police for decades tells Ben Moreh, the public largely supports the police, so why would things change? The cops will remain free to beat and kill, to violate Israel’s proclaimed democratic rights. If Israeli settlers in the West Bank already act like the Black Hundreds who slaughtered Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the police are like the Cossacks, seated atop their horses, swinging their modern knouts. Blue Marks is a powerful chronicle of their awful acts—and of an underappreciated sign of Israel’s descent into ignominy.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): For many years, New York theaters steered clear of plays dealing with Palestine—most infamously the Public Theater during the First intifada, which cancelled a scheduled touring production from East Jerusalem’s El-Hakawati Theater, and the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), which backed away from a production of My Name is Rachel Corrie in 2006. Both institutions have long since course corrected. After some foundering, the Public Theater has produced important Palestinian works in the last couple of years, among them Mona Mansour’s The Vagrant Trilogy, an absorbing epic about Palestinian displacement and dispossession, and Fouad Dakwar’s beguiling pop-punk musical-in-progress, Fouad of Nazareth. NYTW quickly moved to make up for the Rachel Corrie fiasco, and started to work with the Freedom Theater in Jenin, among other initiatives.

Over the horrendous last 15 months, stages across the country have seen much more work by and/or about Palestinians. While that has not been the case on Broadway and for the biggest regional theaters, in general, the theater world, at last, has not exerted anywhere near the level of anti-Palestinian repression that has plagued the art world recently. Just as the ceasefire deal was announced, I caught two stirring examples, playing right across the street from each other on the Lower East Side: The Mulberry Tree by Hanna Eady and Edward Mast at La Mama and, in a co-production with the Under the Radar festival, A Knock on the Roof by Khawla Ibraheem at NYTW (running through February 16th). (This month, Under the Radar and La Mama also presented The Horse of Jenin, which I didn’t have a chance to see.)

Knock (whose script was published in a chapbook for Jewish Currents subscribers last year) is equal parts charming and harrowing. With just a chair on an otherwise bare stage (plus some haunting shadow effects), Ibraheem plays Mariam, a young, frustrated mom in Gaza, who speaks directly to the audience, with warmth and wit. Aesthetically, then, the play resembles innumerable one-woman confessional shows of the last several decades, and the familiar form helps bring us straight inside Mariam’s mind.

But occupation and bombardment render the familiar brilliantly strange. Like the dishes of many a disgruntled housewife, Mariam’s sit in the sink—but here, it’s because of electricity blackouts that disable running water. She tells her six-year-old son that it is too dangerous to swim in the sea—because open sewage pollutes it. Her husband who is studying abroad can’t make it home for Ramadan—he can’t get cleared through the checkpoint. These domestic woes become subsumed by Mariam’s intensifying, and ultimately tragic, obsession: preparing to grab essentials and flee in the five minutes between a “knock on the roof”—a low-impact munition that the Israeli military shoots at a residential building as a warning—and the start of full-on bombing. She repeatedly describes a ritualized practice routine of gathering up her son (in the form of a pillowcase stuffed with weighty objects for her nightly practice), dashing down seven flights of stairs to the street, and sprinting as far away as she can in those five minutes. Though written in 2017, Knock feels entirely of this moment, with its evocations of buildings reduced to rubble and the relentless clangor of explosions.

The Mulberry Tree, on the other hand, takes place decades in the past; seeing this play, which unfolds between 1942 and 1948, within just a couple of days of Knock underscored for me the straight line that runs from the Nakba to now. The Mulberry Tree centers on the relationship between a rabbi and a neighboring Palestinian boy named Noor. The action develops against the backdrop of major events in Israel’s founding—the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel, the UN Partition Plan, the expulsion of Palestinians—with these incidents depicted through their impact on the mundane and intimate lives of Noor, the rabbi, and their families. Though the rabbi insists that as both an Arab and a Jew he cannot choose sides, history eventually forces him to become an Israeli, if only because he can stay where he is, while Noor and his relatives are driven away. Noor makes a surreptitious trip back to check on his family’s house and on the rabbi, whom he’d entrusted with their key, only to find that all the Palestinian homes in the village have been appropriated by Jews. The sense of betrayal is heartbreaking, most of all because we have seen how, once upon a time—before the triumph of statist Zionism—Jews and Palestinians could live amicably as neighbors.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): In Elia Suleiman’s 2019 film It Must Be Heaven, the director’s character is told by a French producer that the company will not take his new film because it is “not enough about Palestine.” This line encapsulates a dilemma that has always existed for Palestinian artists, and which has become almost inescapable since October 7th: the expectation, or even the duty, to address “the cause” on the one hand, and its heavy burden on artistic freedom, on the other.

Written before but published amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Yasmin Zaher’s novel The Coin is a provocative and exhilarating rejoinder to that question. Although Palestine surfaces in sporadic memories, the book’s glamorous and unabashed narrator is less concerned with her homeland than with a clean break from her past: She incessantly scrubs her apartment and body, gets swept up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and, as a teacher at a mostly Black middle school, rolls out her unorthodox and brutally realist pedagogy. The title refers to a silver shekel that the narrator swallowed on a road trip to the Negev Desert with her family years earlier, and which she is convinced is mystically shaping her fate from a point on her back that she cannot reach through the extensive self-cleaning routine that she dubs a “CVS retreat.” Like the narrator and her silver shekel, I swallowed The Coin. It took me less than a day to finish.

What I found most compelling about The Coin was its straight-talking narrative voice. Zaher’s protagonist doesn’t express much sentiment at life’s ups and downs, even when recalling her parents’ premature death in a traffic accident. She always keeps her emotions and relations at a distance, including about her years-long relationship with Sasha. “I never thought of him when he wasn’t there . . . I would have preferred a relationship of passion, but I always need one foot on the ground,” she explains. The detachment is like the cleanliness: It is a way of asserting control in an otherwise unpredictable and unforgiving world. The narrator unashamedly confesses that she expects “a certain kind of life” that is both in her hands and just out of reach. Even though she is the heiress to half of her family’s millions, she is left “simultaneously rich and poor,” as the money is locked away in line with her father’s will, and she receives only a steady income to sustain her life of controlled luxury in New York. This material limbo also serves as a springboard for the novel’s subversive exploration of prejudice that is not the exclusive remit of white Americans, such as anti-Black racism and obsession with class status, and how they trouble but don’t necessarily prevent our sympathies.

In one of her most vivid childhood memories, relayed toward the end of the novel, the narrator talks about her estrangement from a Jewish Israeli friend after discovering remnants of pre-Nakba Palestinian life in their home. “I was old enough to know right from wrong,” she says with clarity. And yet she also asserts that the rules of right and wrong may need bending in this topsy-turvy world. “I used to think that if people saw the real face of wickedness, not the mask, then they would revolt. I used to be a proponent of transparency. When Netanyahu and Trump were elected I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster.” In its unapologetic licentiousness and materialism, and in its searingly honest voice, Zaher revels in the hypocrisy that is perhaps unavoidable and forever pervasive when America is “both the key and the curse.” In doing so, she seems to be giving license for Palestinians to be as ugly and complicated as any other people, even when they’re clad in high fashion.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I first saw I’m Still Here—Walter Salles’s remarkable new film about the disappearance of an opposition activist during the military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985—at the New York Film Festival this past fall. I was sitting next to a young Brazilian woman, and as we chatted I asked her what she would pose to the director if the opportunity presented itself. She told me that she’d like to know if he thought the film could spread awareness of what went on during that period and make people confront its legacy. My question was not an abstract one; I knew I’d be interviewing Salles the next day for Cineaste. I duly asked Salles the woman’s question, and he expressed hope that it would indeed serve this function in Brazil—which, unlike Argentina and Uruguay, has never truly reckoned with the truth of its past.

Salles’s hopes have been amply fulfilled. Over three million Brazilians have seen I’m Still Here in theaters, and it has sparked important conversations about the nation’s history. Such discussion is particularly essential now, when this terrible moment has been so recently on the brink of recurring: In January of 2023, supporters of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro refused to accept his loss to Lula da Silva and stormed the capital complex in Brasilia in an attempt to stage a coup d’état. Rarely has a political film come at such a propitious moment and to such good effect.

The film, which has received two Oscar nominations, recounts the disappearance of real-life former congressman Rubens Paiva, who assisted opponents of the military government until he was taken from his home by the military in 1971 and never seen again. His wife Eunice spent years trying to get to the bottom of her husband’s fate, a quest that led her to law school and a career as a human rights lawyer. (The unquestionable star of the film is Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice, portraying her as steely, unrelenting, and quietly heroic, committed both to uncovering the truth and to holding her family together.) Decades later, it was confirmed that Paiva had been tortured and murdered the day after he was taken away.

Salles, whose own family fled Brazil for a time after the coup, was friends with one of the Paiva daughters; the film is thus not only a work of political homage and memory, but a return to his own adolescence and a reckoning with his own past. It’s a beautifully crafted work. The first half hour, which takes place while the family is still together and living life to the fullest, is shot with a constantly moving camera, to a backdrop of the Brazilian pop of the time; after Rubens is disappeared, so too are the bright light, music, and movement. All elements of this masterpiece serve to express the profound tragedy of what was done to Rubens and his family—and to Brazil.

Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): Former President Jimmy Carter broke many American taboos about Middle East diplomacy after leaving the White House. He visited Gaza in 2009 and saw the damage wrought by the Israeli military on schools and homes. He met with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal even though the United States government designated the militant organization as a terrorist group. And he publicly and unequivocally described Palestinian inequality under Israeli occupation as apartheid. But when Carter passed away last month, it felt like many players in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, by focusing exclusively on his four years in Washington, were rewriting his legacy to erase his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians. For example, Biden’s outgoing USAID administrator Samantha Power, in a New York Times opinion essay, heralded his human rights legacy without so much as mentioning Palestinians.

So I picked up Carter’s 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book is unlike any I’ve read by a head of state or politician. Carter is curious and humble, informed by his extensive conversations with Israelis, Palestinians, and actors from Arab states. He is forthright about his Christian faith and connection to the Holy Land, yet the material throughout is meticulously reported. One particularly compelling chapter, “The Wall as a Prison,” offers his analysis of day-to-day life under occupation, which he presents to Israeli interlocutors as part of the book’s narrative. At one point, he grills then-President of the Supreme Court of Israel Aharon Barak about the situation in the occupied territories and pushes him to see Israeli oppression firsthand, to which Barak shrugs that he’s a judge, not an investigator.

Carter’s analysis is anything but radical, yet the backlash against the book’s publication in 2006 was intense. Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg called Carter “cynical” and “anti-historical.” Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who has served as Biden’s State Department envoy for combating antisemitism, wrote that he “relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes.” But neither attack reckoned with Carter’s actual ideas. The relatively early use, for the United States establishment, of that word “apartheid” made it so the likes of Goldberg and Lipstadt couldn’t hear what he was saying—which is too bad; it’s a sober and fair book that consistently takes into account Israel’s security concerns while offering legitimate criticism grounded in history, law, and eye-witness accounts.

Carter, in 1977, was the first American president to call for a Palestinian “homeland” (notably, not a state). But, in actuality, the Camp David accords he negotiated between Israel and Egypt cut out Palestinians. The treaty had the effect of “enshrining a perpetual condition of statelessness” for the Palestinians, according to Seth Anziska, author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo. Yet this process seems to have driven the former president to redouble his diplomatic efforts as a private citizen in the decades that followed. “If you want to understand the Carter of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, you need to think about the pain and disenchantment he felt about the failures of the Camp David process,” Anziska told me in 2023. “There’s a self-reflection, a nuance, and an observation of detail, and a desire to affect political change on the basis of actual reality that animates how he thinks about policy.”

Choosing peace over apartheid, as Carter put it bluntly but clearly, is a decision that everyone must face. “It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail,” he wrote. It was not only the warning of an idealist, seeking equal rights for Palestinians, but the exhortation of a pragmatist who understood the imperative of a just resolution for Palestinians.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): In the last days of 2024, my hopes of catching a screening of horror auteur Robert Eggers’s visually exquisite new film Nosferatu while my twin sons napped were nearly dashed, thanks to a terror that has recently gripped my kids—a fear of shadows. With minutes to spare, my wife and I managed to assuage their concerns about the faceless shapes passing over the walls and usher them to sleep, and I rushed off to the theater. As soon as the movie began, with a shot of a young woman named Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) pleading to the camera, her face half-consumed by darkness, I realized the irony of the situation: I’d assured my children that shadows are nothing to be afraid of only to go experience an artwork premised on the legitimacy of that very fear.

Indeed, Eggers’s Nosferatu—a remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 masterpiece, itself an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula—is essentially made from the menace of shadows. For most of the film’s runtime, the vampiric visage of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is shrouded, conjuring uncertainty and anticipation that haunt the viewer. Seemingly inspired by the unforgettable shots of the monster’s silhouette from Murnau’s original—which Eggers explicitly pays homage to in shots of his own—this new Nosferatu seizes on shadows as its central metaphor for evil. When Ellen’s strapping and naive husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), tasked with selling a decrepit mansion to the mysterious count, stops to rest at an inn close to Orlok’s castle, the innkeeper’s wife warns him, “Beware his shadow. The shadow covers you in nightmare. Awake, but a dream. There is no escape.” Later, after a terrifying encounter with the vampire leaves Thomas petrified and on the brink of death, the Roma religious novice who nurses him back to health observes, “You are lost in his shadow.”

But, as is already clear from that opening shot of Ellen’s face, it is not only the monster whose essence is expressed through this image. At one point, the young woman—plagued by frightening visions and premonitions, and increasingly convinced of her own inherent sinfulness—demands to know, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” This is perhaps the central question of Eggers’s rendition of the classic vampire tale. And while the film’s key innovation on its source material is to explore the particular relationship between Orlok and Ellen, presenting each as the other’s shadow in service of a feminist reflection on men’s efforts to constrain women’s appetites, it’s also interested in the more capacious framing of Ellen’s question. Silhouette portraits linger constantly in the background of the film’s interiors, a subtle reminder of the shadows we each cast—and attempt to domesticate. In one of the film’s most delightfully melodramatic monologues, discredited occult expert Albin Eberheart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) exclaims to a rationalist skeptic, “We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the Devil as Jacob wrestled with the angel in Peniel and I must tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.” If there is little that’s surprising or unfamiliar in Eggers’s Nosferatu, it nonetheless masterfully orchestrates an encounter with this darkness, and renews its hold on our imagination.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Oceans Are the Real Continents, the debut feature by Italian director Tomasso Santambrogi, is a perfect portrait of despair—of the death of the revolutionary dream. This beautiful film, shot in stunning black and white, tells the intersecting stories of three sets of characters in a small town in Cuba, leaving no room for the illusions that once sustained that nation’s idealism, and which have been effaced through decades of rationing, repression, and decay.

Indeed, for the contemporary Cubans depicted here, flight is the only hope left—abroad, or into a vanished past. The desire to get out moves even children: When two little boys speak constantly of “Yankees,” they’re not referring to the country that invaded and blockaded their own, but to the baseball team they believe they’ll one day join; their future lies to the north, and everything is pointed in that direction. Edith, a young puppeteer, has two preoccupations: preparing a show and gathering the paperwork she needs to go to Italy. She has no idea what she’ll do there, or what might await her, but that uncertainty is better than the grim predictability of her life in Cuba. Milagros, an elderly woman who never speaks a word, lives alone and sits daily at her kitchen table to read a lover’s letters sent from Angola in 1989, when the Cuban army, fulfilling its internationalist duty, was sent to Africa to help defend the freed colony from attacks by South Africa and the Namibian rebel army of SWAPO. The letters tell of ubiquitous death and destruction, voicing increasing worry and despair, but also of forthcoming gifts and his hopes for his return. Every day Milagros—played movingly by Milagros Llanes Martínez—leaves the house and heads to the town’s rundown train station, where she still expects to find her lover. In the film’s final shot, all the characters are at this station, waiting futilely or preparing to depart.

In Oceans Are the Real Continents the revolutionary glories of the Cuban past are all but absent, so it’s instructive to watch it alongside Mikahil Kalatozov’s 1964 film I Am Cuba. Made while the nation was just coming into its heyday as a shining socialist light for the peoples of the Third World, it too opens on scenes of great despair—but it is the despair of Havanans and peasants under the Batista regime, propped up by the US. If Oceans Are the Real Continents dwells entirely in anguish, I Am Cuba moves from desperation to rebellion: first in the city, with the heroic struggle of the students at the University of Havana, and then with the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains. The film ends on a joyous scene of the fighters making their way down to the streets of Havana, among them actors bearing perfect resemblances to Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel and Raul Castro. In a way, the entire history of the Cuban Revolution can be told by splicing these films together, end to end.