Shabbat
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This week, we welcome Jonathan Guyer in his new role as interim editor at Jewish Currents.

Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): As the days get shorter and there are more occasions for family meals, I often find myself reaching for Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York. Home cooks may already know this 2001 winner of the James Beard Award as an absolute classic. But it’s much more than a dizzying array of Ashkenazi and Sephardi recipes. The cookbook doubles as one of the most in-depth studies of diaspora in general and Jewish life in particular.

Roden opens with an essay in which she explores the drama of exile and her personal pangs of nostalgia. “My own world disappeared forty years ago, but has remained powerful in my imagination,” Roden reflects. “When you are cut off from your past, that past takes a stronger hold on you.” She describes scenes from Jewish Cairo and connects her community to a “mosaic of other minorities” in the Egyptian capital, as well as across the Mediterranean and into Europe, to other Jewish families around the world. In short essays between recipes, she shares her discoveries from dinner tables in cozy homes, academic conferences, and over street fare about what makes Jewish food Jewish, in the process telling the story of how Jewish communities scattered from “Babylon to New York.” Such a broad project may seem impossible, but it is a delicious accomplishment.

Indeed, beyond telling a story of Jews through Jewish food, Roden’s work is an outstanding cookbook. Some of my favorite recipes are the chicken sofrito, a tender stew that Roden’s mother made for Shabbat dinner, and kofta bil karaz, the distinctive Syrian meatball in sour cherry sauce. (“The Jewish fondness for meatballs is legendary.”) There are helpful guides to deep-fried Roman artichokes and Austro-Hungarian blintzes, and plenty of ideas for your Hanukkah table.

Though Roden’s Cairo Jewish community has long since dwindled, with members exiled throughout the world, its dishes, like those detailed throughout the book, are “very much alive and full of movement.”

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): I recently reread Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave living in Ohio whose life is taken over by the specter of a daughter she had killed 18 years earlier to avoid having her returned to slavery. The book is a literary masterpiece; indeed, I hesitated to write about it here because who am I to “recommend” the Pulitzer-winning work of a Nobel laureate, easily one of the greatest American novels of all time?

If I’m writing this nonetheless, it is because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Beloved since I read it. I found the novel breathtaking—not just idiomatically but also in the more literal sense that its descriptions of slavery’s physical, sexual, and psychological violence often made it hard to read and breathe at the same time. This was true in an early scene when Paul D, who had been enslaved with Sethe and who turns up at her doorstep at the start of the novel, recalls a moment back at the plantation nearly two decades prior. Just before being sent to a labor camp in Georgia, Paul D saw his friend Sixo burned alive by the slave masters. Soon after, while awaiting transit to the camp, he also witnessed Halle, Sethe’s husband, lose his mind immediately after seeing Sethe being sexually assaulted by the slave master’s nephews. Watching these atrocities, Paul D was unable to even cry out in horror because an iron bit had been forced into his mouth. He recounts to Sethe that the worst part of it all, however, was seeing a rooster they called Mister in the yard at that moment. “Mister, he looked so . . . free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher,” he explained. “Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead.”

Reading Paul D’s words, I couldn’t help but shudder at the eerily familiar account of a world where chickens have more rights than people. Despite the obvious and important differences between the contexts, I immediately thought of Umm al-Khair, a Bedouin village in the Masafer Yatta region of the southern West Bank which is now surrounded by the Israeli settlement of Carmel on one side, and Carmel’s chicken coops on the other. As Ali Awad and Awdah Hathaleen, two close friends of mine from Masafer Yatta, have pointed out, Carmel’s chickens, too, “get rights that we as Palestinians are deliberately denied,” including ample electricity (the wires go directly from Carmel to the chicken coops, skipping over Umm al-Khair), unlimited water, and stable shelter not faced with demolitions.

Beloved is a story about the reverberating toll that this kind of dehumanization exacts, not just in the present but for generations to come. The longevity of such suffering is brought to the novel’s fore through the haunting presence of Beloved, the young woman who appears at Sethe’s home and who, it slowly becomes apparent, is a manifested form of the child who had died by Sethe’s hand years ago. Beloved’s return, however, does not function as a reconciliation; rather, it resurfaces past traumas and drives the family to calamity. While speculating on whether Beloved is in fact the returned daughter, a local woman remarks, “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” Or as Beloved herself states, “It is hard to make yourself die forever.” As I read these words, I thought again of the present: of the overwhelming death of the past 14 months, and the unknowable ways in which those who have been murdered will refuse to stay in the ground—the calamities that yet await even after the horrors of this moment.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is a work of such moral complexity—and concerned with so many issues, both timely and eternal—that watching it is almost physically exhausting. Its making was also an act of enormous courage in itself: Before he began production, Rasoulof had already been twice condemned by Iran’s Revolutionary Courts for his films’ unflattering portrait of the nation; this new movie, which won the special jury prize at Cannes, earned him a sentence of eight years in prison and flogging. (Happily, he was able to flee the country before the punishment could be imposed.)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set during the massive, widespread demonstrations of mainly young people—and particularly young women—against Iran’s theocratic regime in late 2022 and early 2023, and includes actual footage from participants showing police and Revolutionary Guard violence against the demonstrators. But the film is a fictional thriller that revolves around Iman, a man recently promoted to the role of investigator for the Revolutionary Courts, who is immediately presented with a moral dilemma. He has just been ordered to sign off on a death sentence ordered for a defendant whose case is less than clear to him. Should he simply affirm the sentence as commanded—and secure his own advancement and his family’s safety and stability—or refuse and risk it all? He seems to be a good man, but the poison of the regime he supports has entered his system.

The film focuses not only on Iman, but also on his loved ones. His devoted and utterly submissive wife Najmeh supports him and deals with their two teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana, who, though not particularly political themselves, nevertheless support the demonstrators’ demand for the ability to show their hair without being killed for it—and for a freer country. Iman’s job is so dangerous that he is given a gun to protect himself against opponents of the regime and his deadly role in it; when the pistol disappears, the suspicion and distrust that suffuse Iranian society writ large invade this once-loving family. As the repression, the interrogations, the unjust imprisonments all work their way into the household, Iman’s wife and daughters begin to realize that he is not the man they once knew.

There were many opponents of the mullahs who thought the demonstrations shown in the film signaled the end of the regime. But if The Seed of the Sacred Fig ends on a hopeful note, with videos of women tearing off and burning their headscarves, the filmmaker’s fate gives little cause for any enduring optimism.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): The first time I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 The Atlantic feature “The Case for Reparations,” I was a college freshman new to the South Side of Chicago, dipping my toes into campus activism and grappling with the city’s stark segregation. In the piece, Coates unspools the life story of one 91-year-old Black Chicagoan to show how a generation of Black people fled the plunder of Jim Crow in the South only to find themselves vulnerable to predatory home loans in the North, forcing many of them into poverty and instability while their white counterparts built nest eggs with federally insured suburban mortgages. Reading Coates, I grasped how the obstacles facing my neighbors—deteriorating housing stock; gun violence; stark health disparities as compared to white neighborhoods—were a product of a systematic policy of racial dispossession. In the years to follow, Coates would gain a reputation as an adherent of identity-oriented liberalism, but “The Case for Reparations” itself—even if it at times reductively places “racial” issues in opposition to “class” issues—is a deeply material analysis: It considers the financial deprivations of the American racial order, and argues that ameliorating them requires a vast economic response.

It might be only a slight exaggeration to say that “The Case for Reparations” changed my life. Compelled by Coates’ argument, I began taking history classes on race and urban policy and reporting stories on South Side politics, all of which led me to a broader investment in justice movements. Much more importantly, of course, Coates transformed the national conversation, making reparations for Black Americans a political horizon, even if briefly. It is this very power of writing to effect both individual and societal transformation—for good and for evil—that Coates examines in his newest book, The Message.

In the first chapter, based on a visit to Senegal’s Goree Island—a mythic site of the origins of slavery—Coates recounts how American slaveholders crafted narratives of African inferiority to justify their project: “Even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them . . . And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.” Here Coates grapples with his own ambivalences about Black nationalism and the “vindicationalist” tradition that sought to elevate histories of African civilization to counter racist dehumanization: “I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in ‘civilization,’ we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost,” he writes. But while the first chapter meditates on the dangers and the limits of narrative, Coates soon arrives at a more sanguine tone about the activist power of writing in the second chapter, set in conservative South Carolina. As he attends a school board meeting with a white teacher whose attempts to teach his book Between the World and Me have been censored, Coates reflects on the power of his own words, as well as those of his heroes, in spurring political involvement: “Books by Black authors helped Mary [the teacher] understand ‘why things are so fucked up.’ And it was these books that had brought [another local ally] Bobbie out to support Mary.”

Coates then turns to a reappraisal of his own past use of that power in The Message’s much-discussed final section—the book’s most robust—where he arrives in Israel/Palestine on a trip arranged by the Palestine Festival of Literature. The chapter is a usefully comprehensive introduction to the history and current reality of Zionism, but will not have much to offer for those already familiar with the terrain. It is striking, though, to read Coates’s own story of recognition. In coming face-to-face with the evidence of the naked racial domination that structures Israeli society, Coates is forced to revisit, and atone, for his previous blind spots around Palestine—including in “The Case for Reparations,” in which he highlighted Germany’s Holocaust reparations to the Israeli state as a positive model of what real material recompense to victims of great injustice might provide, without mentioning what those reparations enabled Israel to do to Palestinians.

Coates’s frank accounting of and clear anguish over this failure is refreshing, given how infrequently writers revisit their mistakes in public. He offers this as a model for a broader media reckoning with historic anti-Palestinian bias: “Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such [inhumane] systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion.” However, as the critic Parul Seghal points out in The New Yorker, Coates’s extended and at times grandiose descriptions of his newfound shock at Israeli apartheid can sometimes strain credulity because “his critics on the left, many of them of color, have long pointed out these very blind spots in his work,” including “his reticence where Muslim, and particularly Palestinian, death and suffering were concerned.”

Of course, it’s a good thing that Coates is now, even if belatedly, bringing the force of his moral outrage over Israeli apartheid to his large audience. Yet it is an odd time to read the paean to the might of words that Coates offers throughout The Message, at the very moment when words feel so ineffective in the face of a relentless genocide that has continued for more than a year. If you’re a writer in a milieu of writers, it’s easy to start to measure progress as a question of who’s saying what. But the road from the written word and cultural activism to material change can be winding and unpredictable. Hundreds of our brightest literary voices have committed to a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions; indie bookstores around the country are putting tables of Palestinian literature front and center—yet only 19 Senators can be convinced to vote for a resolution opposing sending offensive weapons to Israel after a tireless organizing effort. The hard-fought and long-overdue cultural wins are, of course, welcome—especially as plenty of pro-genocide media narratives continue to abound. But Coates’s conclusions about the role of the writer feel a little too neat and self-assured. Much as writers and artists must continue to play a historical part as a political vanguard, we must also grapple with the impotence of our words, not just praise their power.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Cinephiles know that every year we can expect two new films from the great Korean director Hong Sang-soo. I’m not belittling his work when I say that he’s able to be so prolific because he uses the same building blocks in each film; what matters is how he puts those pieces together. In every Hong movie, there will be much conversation, much drinking, heated disputes (often caused by the effect of the drinking on the conversation), and some form of misunderstanding or regret experienced by current or former couples. Time will be elastic, with the past following the present, or the same events appearing twice—sometimes in slightly different forms that either reinforce or “correct” the original representation. (The perfect Hong film bears a title that could fit many others: Right Now, Wrong Then.) With conversation the main form of action, he uses minimal technical means; the camera is usually simply plopped down, unobtrusively observing the characters. He’s not fond of cutting within scenes, since doing so interrupts the flow of the conversation, and instead resorts to zooming in and out, something we rarely see in arthouse films nowadays.

So as we sit down to view a new film by Hong, the question is always: Will those building blocks be assembled in a particularly interesting or surprising fashion, or will it be a repeat of something we’ve seen before? Happily for us, his newest film, A Traveler’s Needs, is a case of the former. Isabelle Huppert—who has twice appeared in previous Hong films—stars as Iris, a French woman in Korea; the film begins in medias res with her conversing with a young Korean woman, who then begins to play the piano. Iris asks her what she felt while playing, and then, strangely, writes her response to the woman’s words on an index card. They go for a walk and before a steel obelisk in a square, the Korean woman talks about her father, who contributed to its construction; again, Iris writes her comments down. We soon learn that Iris is essaying a curious, untried method of teaching French, one of her own devising: She has her students tell her something emotionally stirring, then has them learn how to express those feelings in French. The words, she reasons, will be truly embedded in them, thanks to their emotional weight. Later, Iris visits another student and her husband, or lover, or employee (their relationship is never clarified) and flirts with the latter rather childishly; when the student plays guitar, she tells Iris her feelings, which are word for word those of the first student after she played the piano. Is Hong suggesting that sincere, unique emotions don’t exist, and all is cliche? Or is it that they do exist, and are simply universal? He leaves it to us to decide.

Iris is a strange character, and not a very pleasant one. Yet in Hong Sang-soo’s hands, this mysterious visitor from the West—who doesn’t speak the native tongue, and who conducts her French lessons in English—brings out the depths of the characters she meets, while she herself remains shrouded in mystery. Those unfamiliar with Hong’s films would do well to start here. Those who already love him will be pleased to find him at his best.

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): On Monday night, I attended a screening of the new documentary Death in Umm al-Hiran, organized by the Israel/Palestine-based anti-occupation collective All That’s Left. The film—which tells the story of the 2017 police killing of Palestinian school teacher Yaqoub Abu Al-Aqia’an—opens with the audio of frantic calls to emergency services on January 18th of that year, during an Israeli raid on the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran (in the Wadi Atir area of the southern Negev, within the 1948 borders of Israel).

The narrative that follows is spliced together from interviews with Al-Aqia’an’s neighbors and relatives, many of whom are filmed next to the rubble of their homes, as well as audio that comes, eerily, from recordings of police cameras and radios that officers used to communicate that morning, and later footage from interviews carried out by the Israeli police investigations unit. As the story unfolds, we learn that before dawn that morning, hundreds of Israeli police officers stormed the village in order to carry out demolitions of multiple homes. Al-Aqia’an, realizing that his home was facing imminent demolition, packed his most important belongings into his car and began to drive away. As he drove, Israeli police opened fire: In a harrowing scene, we see his son carefully counting the 19 bullet holes in his father’s car. Gravely injured, Al-Aqia’an loses control of the car, which rolls down a hill and kills Erez Levy, an Israeli police officer. Israeli officials immediately label the incident as a terrorist attack. The film depicts detailed investigations by both police and outside researchers—recreations of the scene, including estimations of how inflated Al-Aqia’an’s tires would have been, how fast he would have driven—which definitively prove that he was shot before he hit Levy, not the opposite. It is at this point that the film pivots to the police’s internal investigations unit and the political struggle at the highest levels of Israeli government in an attempt to cover up Al-Aqia’an’s murder. The descriptions of these dynamics are granular, and while it can sometimes feel like the investigation’s depiction misses the forest for the trees, it also conveys the gruesomeness of the particulars, the heaviness of the details.

Several of my closest friends were in Umm al-Hiran on that January morning in 2017 on a protective presence shift, and the horror of that day has long loomed large in my mind. Yet watching the film this week came with a new form of horror: The entire village had been demolished and evacuated just four days earlier, on November 14th, an act celebrated by both past and current Israeli officials. As I watched a scene in the film showing Al-Aqia’an’s son speaking in front of the village’s mosque—“we lost my father; now we will lose the village,” he mournfully predicts—I couldn’t get out of my mind the video footage I watched again and again this week, of that same mosque being crushed with a single blow of a military bulldozer. With the heavy presence of the village’s demise in the room, it was hard not to transpose present despair onto the past anguish the film depicts. Indeed, at one point during the screening, an air raid siren sounded. There was a moment of confusion among the viewers, during which it was unclear whether the siren was happening in the present or was the sound of the horrific demolition footage we were watching. After we ran to a nearby bomb shelter, I got videos over WhatsApp of a Lebanese missile landing some four miles north of us, injuring five people on the street. While the context and circumstances of the violence on the screen and the broader reality of the present are vastly different, it was hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of simply saturating violence.

The future, unfortunately, looks no better than the past or the present. Based on plans first laid in 2003 and now being actualized, the village of Umm al-Hiran has been evicted in order to establish a Jewish-only town, Hiran, upon its ruins. Some of the most upsetting footage in the film is that of the upcoming Hiran settlement’s leader explaining that though a Bedouin group had “invaded” the land, it needed to be settled by Jews. Umm al-Hiran is one of 14 Palestinian villages slated to be demolished in order to build Jewish towns in their place; three have already been destroyed, and one more is expected to be razed in the next month, with the rest to follow after. As I left the film, contemplating this grim reality, I thought of another video I watched this week—of Umm al-Hiran’s residents returning the day after the demolition to pray at the empty site where the mosque had stood. There is not much hope to be found in this video, but there is steadfastness, and a commitment I hope we can model in the struggle to come.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In 1954, the 26-year-old agricultural worker Catarina Eufémia was shot and killed, with her baby in her arms, by a lieutenant of the the Salazar dictatorship during a strike of wheat harvesters for better wages. She quickly became an icon of Portugal’s anti-fascist left and, over the decades, has been memorialized in songs and poems. In 2019, Portugal’s populist, far-right Chega party began to rapidly gain political ground. It was in this political context, nearly 70 years after Eufémia’s death and close to 50 years after the fall of the Salazar dictatorship, that Eufémia also became the inspiration for another work of art: writer-director Tiago Rodrigues’s stinging play, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists. The show has been touring, mostly in Europe, since its 2020 premiere in Portugal and has now, with grimly apt timing, touched down in New York. It is playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater through this weekend (in Portuguese with English supertitles).

The play is set in 2028 in a rural area southeast of Lisbon, where a family has gathered at their country house for an annual ritual that is equal parts celebration and sacred duty: killing a fascist who has contributed to the harm or death of women. The family is following the instructions of their deceased mother and grandmother, a friend of Eufémia’s who avenged her murder by killing her own husband—a soldier who stood by as Eufémia was attacked. “I killed him for the good he didn’t do,” she explains in a letter to her progeny, who read it aloud as part of the rite. “May this inheritance serve for you never to fall silent at the sight of injustice . . . don’t hesitate to do harm in order to practice good.” Each descendant, regardless of gender, is named Catarina and wears a layered peasant skirt and apron. Upon turning 26, each becomes fully initiated into the tradition by gaining responsibility for pulling the trigger.

But the Catarina meant to come of age in this instance cannot follow through. As she takes aim, she is seized by immobilizing doubt. Through a series of arguments she has with her sister, cousin, uncle, and mother, the play engages perennial debates of liberation movements: When, if ever, is violence justified, not to mention effective? Do all lives truly deserve to be mourned? Can fascism be defeated with the tools of democracy when, as one Catarina puts it, “fascism corrodes democracy from within”? On the other hand, asks the young Catarina, what is left to defend if the ideals of democracy must be abandoned in the fight?

Though listing these questions may sound flat or didactic, Rodrigues’s rounded characters and stylized staging—the set features an abstracted wooden house with detachable walls and trees growing through its roof—give them a barbed texture. This way of engaging spectators both emotionally and analytically is one way that Bertolt Brecht ghosts Rodrigues’s play, which owes much in spirit and form to Brecht’s anti-Nazi version of Antigone. One Catarina uncle often quotes the great Marxist dramatist—“Those who lament the violence with which the oppressed respond to the violence of the oppressors are the same people who would like to eat beef without killing the cow” and “he who fights might lose; he who doesn’t fight has already lost”—making Rodrigues’s nod to Brecht’s self-conscious theatricality both wry and explicit.

The night I saw the show, as the play reached its conclusion with the kidnapped fascist delivering an increasingly appalling (and chillingly familiar) 15-minute populist speech, some audience members—not plants—booed, shouting “shut up” or noisily walking out. But nothing deters his misogynist, xenophobic paean to “freedom.” Do we have to shoot him? Or at least wish he might simply drop dead? This, in the end, is where Rodrigues invites our minds to go. As my thoughts headed that way, I was reminded of good old Woody Guthrie and the slogan on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” Not literally, of course, but with words, music, ideas, and imagination, which, like Catarina itself, create space for engaging those impossible questions.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): This past Saturday evening, I went to see a band I’ve admired since high school and last caught live in college, more than a decade ago: Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I knew going in that the vibe would fit my desolate post-election mood. The band has long purveyed a singular sort of leftist music, infused with the emotional energy of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism but rarely making these themes completely explicit, in part because their work is largely instrumental. Perhaps the most notable exception to this wordlessness is also the band’s most memorable political statement, the wrenching spoken-word monologue that opened their iconic first album, F# A# ∞, in 1997: “The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides . . . The government is corrupt . . . We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.” But for the most part, the music’s political implications are left unspoken or surface only in places proximate to the songs themselves—for instance, in the name of their most recent record: “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD,” a reference to a now long out-of-date (and even then incomplete) tally of Gazans killed by Israel. (“NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall?” they write in the album description. “this new century will be crueler still. / war is coming. / don’t give up. / pick a side. / hang on.”)

For the entire two-hour set—during which the band, as is their practice, did not acknowledge the crowd except for a wave before each member left the stage—I was held rapt in the catastrophe of the present. There is something fundamentally punishing about a Godspeed show: the solemnity of the non-engagement; the long, attention-taxing songs; the incantatory cycles of repetition; the inscrutable and sometimes brutal images projected behind the band; the ear-splitting, body-shaking volume at which they prefer to play. This visceral, consuming experience of extremity felt especially right in this moment, a way of forcing myself to face something, face everything, without distraction or easy relief. And at the same time, while Godspeed’s work draws much from the traditions of ambient drone, which often foregoes the immediately impactful dynamics of pop music, the band also leans into movingly melodic guitar lines and rousing crescendos. (If the album titles I’ve already mentioned highlight their avant-garde impulses, two others—Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND!—exemplify their anthemic posture.) As songs like the aching, epic “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD” swelled and soared, they offered me something else I needed: a way to be alongside others feeling not only the grim enormity of our plight but also some sense of a path through it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, along with the Mexican print show I recommended last week, you can now see an exhibition featuring the career of perhaps the most extraordinary architect you’ve never heard of: Paul Rudolph. The man was not in the league of a Le Corbusier or a Frank Lloyd Wright, and many of his massive, almost monstrous buildings put up in the ’50s and ’60s have since been torn down. (You can see the process of demolishing one in this remarkable clip.) Others, including some of his most impressive, were never built at all. But Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph will give you a chance to discover—and even, in a sense, experience—this forgotten genius of American architecture.

Before going to the show, I recommend watching this stunning seven-minute video of one of Rudolph’s masterpieces, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth campus. The mass and weight can be viscerally felt; the construction inspires admiration, terror, and awe in equal measure. Indeed, part of Rudolph’s problem was that he was unabashedly Brutalist, even simply brutal. But at the same time, there is something almost playful about his work—for instance, in his trademark application of a rough “corduroy” texture to raw concrete. Rudolph loved the cheap and flexible method of modular construction, and his buildings often look like boxes piled on top of other boxes in odd, overhanging configurations. The show contains maquettes and drawings of many such edifices.

Like other Brutalists, Rudolph designed public housing projects, including one in the Bronx on Mosholu Parkway that is still standing and occupied, and another in Buffalo on the Lake Erie waterfront that has been largely demolished. But he was able to apply the same formal touches to constructions as radically different as a university campus and a parking garage. Perhaps Rudolph’s most paradoxically whimsical project, one fortunately never realized, is his design for a Lower Manhattan Expressway. Though like Robert Moses’s original plan, it would have destroyed a huge swath of the city (a fatal flaw that, as catalog author Abraham Thomas points out, was also common to many Brutalist housing projects), Rudolph’s design would have called for the expressway itself to run under what is described as a “mountain range of buildings,” one after another over and along the length of it, in which life and business could continue above and beside the hum of traffic.

Materialized Space is a generous show, featuring clips from films that include his architecture (such as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums) and models of projects built and unbuilt from around the world (Rudolph was big in Asia), as well as furniture and rooms assembled in accordance with his designs. It’s a marvelous revival and revelation.

Daniel May (publisher): I thought I was prepared. Intellectually, analytically, I expected it. But emotionally, it turns out, I wasn’t ready. The dread began to build the evening of the vice presidential debate, which, I know, is a campaign ritual of next to no consequence. We were driving from Brooklyn to Boston to visit my wife’s parents that night, and we listened to the debate on the radio; every twenty minutes or so the static would drown out the dialogue and we’d scan the stations to pick it up again. Something about the setting—the sea of brake lights in front of us on the interstate, the glow of the dash, our kids sleeping in the backseat—gave the words a weird weight, and stripped of the visceral revulsion I feel when watching Trump, I suddenly understood the basic architecture of the race. No matter the question, Vance’s answer was the same: The government is run by feckless bureaucrats who do the bidding of a global elite and have allowed an invasion of criminal immigrants across our borders who are driving down your wages and driving up your housing costs. In response, Walz would say something about trusted leadership and effective governance. After it ended, we turned off the radio and sat in silence for a few minutes until one of us said: “We are so fucked.”

The next morning, I started Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Over the next three days, I was in its grip in a way that reminded me of reading in my adolescence, when a book would become my world, its scenes and characters somehow more alive and demanding than the scenes and characters of my own life. As a child, this was wondrous. As an adult responsible for, among other things, the care of two small children, this was unsettling. The reading felt strangely physical; I would open the book and feel my chest tighten. I had visions of the pages reaching up my chest and wrapping themselves in cords around my neck. I burned through all but the last chapter in Boston, but back in Brooklyn, I let the book sit by my bedside for weeks before finishing it. I didn’t want to be back in its terrible hold.

The book imagines the descent of present-day Ireland into first fascism and then civil war. It tells this story from the perspective of Eilish Stack, a mother of four whose husband, Larry, works for the teacher’s union and is, early in the book, arrested and imprisoned for leading a demonstration. Eilish tries unsuccessfully to gain any information about Larry—where he’s being held, what he’s being held for, whether there will be a trial. At work, her marriage to a disappeared dissident raises suspicion among her supervisors, which quickly leads to her firing. As protest against the state turns into armed rebellion, she works to smuggle her eldest son out of the country. Instead, he joins the resistance.

For the first hundred pages or so, I thought the book was about fascism. And through short scenes of bureaucratic negotiation and workplace culture, Lynch evocatively portrays how democratic culture might slip from nationalism into authoritarianism and then into totalitarianism. However, Lynch’s primary interest is not political, but ethical.

The world of the book is entirely contained by Eilish’s perspective, and to the extent that there is a narrative arc, it is in the narrowing of that perspective as the range of her options disintegrates. As violence consumes her neighborhood, the only question is how to keep her family alive. The wisest around her insist that she should leave, but she has a father struggling with dementia, a son at war, and a husband she cannot accept is dead. For Eilish, there is no honorable struggle to join, no politics to be analyzed, no social context to be understood. There is only the question of how to keep her family alive amid total social and political disintegration.

In interviews about the book, Lynch has said that it was inspired by the image, so widely shared, of the drowned migrant child on the shore of the Mediterranean. “Why don’t I feel this more?” he recalls asking himself. He set out on what he called an exercise in “radical empathy,” imagining the unraveling of his own country, Ireland, into an unlivable warzone, the sort of place that you would have no choice but to flee with your family, on a fragile raft you knew might not hold together in the wind.

As an exercise in empathy, the novel raises a troubling question: For white readers, must the avenue of understanding run through white examples? As the book became, for me, less about Trump and more about Syria and then fully about Gaza, it grew harder and harder for me to read. But what does it say about me that this book imagining the destruction of Dublin had a greater emotional hold on me than many images I’ve consumed over the last year of the actual destruction of Gaza? What does it say that I felt that horror so forcefully when asked to imagine it in a city that felt more like my own?

There are some obviously damning answers to these questions, and there is truth in those answers. But I think there are also more generous answers, that have something to do with novels and what they ask of us, which in turn has something to do with spending hours with people who aren’t real and yet whom we can know intimately. In this respect, reading a novel is always an exercise in radical empathy. Prophet Song is powerful because of the depth of the empathy that runs through it, but it is interesting, and haunting, because of the difficult questions it raises about the limits of that empathy.

I tend towards the material in my political analysis, and I generally feel that liberals as a whole dramatically inflate the political importance of empathy. But I also know that politics is about solidarity, in the most mundane sense: who are you with, and who are you against. Drawing on deep reservoirs of nationalism, Trump and the right draw their lines clearly and starkly. Among the lessons of this election is just how far we on the left have to go in order to begin to offer an alternative vision of solidarity that can contest for power. I don’t know that we need any reminders of just how important that work is. But if you do, I’ve got a book for you to read.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I think of myself as being pretty knowledgeable about cartoons—which make up the majority of television shows I watch—but I had not heard of Cartoon Network’s Over the Garden Wall until my boyfriend suggested we watch it last month. The series follows two half-brothers, Wirt and Greg, who are lost in the woods and trying to find their way home. The scenarios they find themselves in and the characters they encounter are sometimes full of whimsical delight, such as a riverboat populated by posh frogs and a schoolteacher’s alphabetical lament over a missing lover. At other times, they are steeped in shadowy horror. Both registers are unmatched—in visuals and audio—by any other animated work I’ve seen.

Created by Adventure Time’s Patrick McHale, the show celebrated its tenth anniversary this week. Originally aired in 2014 as the network’s first mini-series, Over the Garden Wall won that year’s Emmy for Outstanding Animated Picture, beating out episodes of The Simpsons, Archer, South Park, and Bob’s Burgers for the title. It is a beautiful work of art, with a mix of illustration styles; a score rooted in opera, folk music, and jazz; and detailed attention to architectural designs and fashion trends across eras. I don’t think a character has captured my heart quite like Greg, whose combination of stubbornness and curiosity feels like the epitome of a beloved and annoying younger brother. If you have not seen Over the Garden Wall—or if it’s been years since you have—it is worth watching for that small pleasure alone.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mexican Prints at the Vanguard, is an exciting show on two levels: aesthetic and historical. It is, first of all, a marvelously organized display of wondrous prints made between the 18th and mid-20th century. But both the works themselves—most of which were political productions by radical artists—and the rigorous presentation of their context also serve as a reminder of just how revolutionary the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) really was. Indeed, it helps one to understand that the revolution didn’t really end in 1920, but rather was carried on, with highs and lows, into at least the 1940s—particularly under President Lázaro Cárdenas, a leader whose name seldom appears among the greats of Latin American revolution, but who here gets his due.

The exhibition gives pride of place to representations of the leaders and campesinos of the armed phase of the revolution, even in works produced later: We have Rufino Tamayo’s simple and moving El Revolucionario (1929–30), in which a gun-toting campesino looks off into the distance, and Diego Rivera’s classic lithograph, Zapata (1932), which depicts the general alongside his horse. But the show also bears on other revolutionary scenes, ones far less known yet every bit as radical. For instance, a poster by Alfredo Zalce—made for Teachers’ Day, celebrated every May 15th since 1918—is a tribute to the role that educators played in liberating Mexico. In a frame marked “yesterday,” it shows a teacher being shot down during the Cristero Rebellion, a response to the secularization of Mexican education; below, under the heading “today,” an orderly class of women receive an education once forbidden to them. Elsewhere, we see a poster of common people handing over coins, doing their part to clear the debt that Mexico incurred when Cárdenas nationalized foreign oil companies in 1938.

The exhibition is weighted heavily toward the Mexican Communist Party—which was never large, but which carried great weight in the art world. The show includes the stunning masthead of the party’s paper, El Machete, made by David Alfaro Siqueiros. The Soviet Union features prominently: In one bold poster, a Red Army soldier holds his rifle at the ready, accompanied by the text, “The Soviet front is our first line of defense. Support it!”; Lenin and Stalin also make appearances. More subtly Soviet is a print showing four great Mexican figures—Madero, Zapata, Cárdenas, and Camacho—lined up exactly as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin were in Soviet posters of the time.

Across many of these works, fascism is condemned in both its local and foreign forms, and the cause of Spain is defended, emphasizing the internationalism of the Mexican Revolution. Ultimately, Mexican Prints at the Vanguard provides an invaluable guide to the revolutionary politics and history of a nation whose radicalism is too often obscured, and whose people are regularly traduced.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Before they became cliched slogans, theories of intersectionality were a way of answering a thorny question on the left: How do we reject forms of oppression which claim to be correcting for other forms of oppression? How do we critique colonialism, for example, when it claims to be attenuating discrimination against religious or ethnic minorities in colonized societies; against women, against gay people? Often, answers to this question veer in one of two unfortunate directions: either agreeing that oppressed people have conservative tendencies that necessitate colonial interventions, or denying those tendencies altogether. In this context, Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World is a truly “intersectional” novel, able to look at misogyny in Arab societies without ever losing sight of the Western intervention that produces and exacerbates these (and many other) forms of violence.

Abulhawa’s protagonist is Nahr, a Palestinian refugee and resistance activist who tells the reader her life-story in an extended flashback from a high-tech Israeli prison. Nahr grew up in Kuwait where, forced by her family’s dire economic circumstances as well as by the maneuvering of her sometimes-friend-sometimes-pimp Um Baraq, she became a sex worker serving Kuwait’s well-off men. Abulhawa’s descriptions of the sexual violence that Nahr endures are harrowing, and, related through Nahr’s broken and emotionless recollection from prison, they are almost too much to bear. At the same time, we’re made aware that these stories of horror are also used against Nahr by Israel, which positions itself as her savior. Foreign reporters show up to the prison, not to ask Nahr about her activities in the resistance or her reasons for undertaking them, but about her history of being raped by Arab men. A note that a Palestinian friend manages to slip to Nahr in prison spells out the dynamic: “Israel is selling a story that Muslim men abused you your entire life, then forced you to join a terrorist group. They claim Israel saved you, and prison has given you a better life.”

Here, Abulhawa forcefully outlines the painful dilemma where the narration of one form of oppression can cynically be used as fuel to justify another. For her part, Nahr rejects this colonial narrative by refusing to talk to reporters of her time as a sex worker. Abulhawa herself, however, speaks, unflinchingly relating Nahr’s experiences of sexual violence, though also situating them within the frame of a lifetime of dispossession inflicted by a colonial world order: experiences that include everything from the reverberating trauma of the Nakba, to Nahr’s childhood and adolescence as a refugee, to the torture and displacement her family faces after the US invades Kuwait in 1990. We also see Nahr return to Palestine, fall in love with a farmer and resistance fighter, find a community, risk losing it each day that nearby settlements grow, and finally, decide to try to get her land back through both mundane and spectacular forms of resistance. Through it all, we see the various fronts on which Nahr has been fighting her whole life, and their many violent intersections; in perhaps the starkest manifestation of this, it is a former rapist of hers from Kuwait who helps build a case against Nahr in the court of public opinion by releasing nude photos of her to Israeli intelligence agencies and newspapers. Oppression breeds oppression, Abulhawa seems to be saying, and no new oppression can free you from an old one—an insight that remains as urgently necessary as it is obvious.

Josh Lambert (contributor): Recently, McSweeney’s posted a humor piece entitled “If Jack Kerouac Tried to Write On the Road Now,” the point of which is that Kerouac must’ve really concentrated to bang out that book in just a few weeks (which he actually didn’t, but whatever), whereas nowadays we’re so inundated by alerts on our smartphones that sustained focus is impossible. That’s cute, I guess. But there’s a much better answer to the hypothetical of Kerouac writing today in Emma Copley Eisenberg’s recent road trip novel, Housemates. Because, if Kerouac were to write that book in 2024, I hope he might make his female characters more than “one-dimensional objects of the male gaze” and cool it a bit with the “romanticized racist stereotypes.”

Eisenberg gives Kerouac a nod, explicitly, but she presents the road trip novel without the heteronormative, misogynist, fatphobic, and exoticist assumptions so often baked into that genre. The Housemates trip takes place during the summer of 2018, and the travelers are a couple of queer twentysomething not-quite-yet-artists who’ve met in a shared house in West Philadelphia. Leah is a nonbinary Jewish writer in search of a subject; her grad school summer fellowship pays for the trip, and her girlfriend supplies the vehicle. Leah’s traveling companion is Bernie, a large-format photographer who grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, and who needs to travel to her dead mentor’s cabin to find out whether she can stomach accepting any of the photographs or cameras he willed to her. Without putting too fine a point on the tenser, more threatening moments of this generally calm, contemplative novel, driving through rural Pennsylvania, camping and staying at motels, means something quite different for women and gender nonconforming folks than it meant for Kerouac’s dudes.

As with most good road novels, Kerouac’s included, plot isn’t especially the point in Housemates. What propels the book, instead, is concern for its characters. The moments that got to me were very small ones, blips of razor-sharp observation. To take just one example, the novel gives us glimpses of Leah’s Jewish, Upper West Side family, and her strained relationship with her brother, Evan. While Leah’s been building up a queer community for herself in West Philly, Evan, who went to Brandeis and got religion, has tilted to the Trumpian right. Towards the end of the novel, Eisenberg sums up the current state of the sibling dynamics, neatly capturing how sexual, family, and international politics could overlap in the late 2010s: “Evan’s wife posted anti-trans articles to the original social media app. Leah posted Free Palestine memes to the photo-sharing one.” But, frayed as their relationship is, there’s still hope there. The narrator muses, “If, to a father, a daughter is his heart with feet, walking around in the world, what to a little sister is an older brother? A tether, a satellite, a mirror, a fact-checker, a mentor and mentee?” And then the novel launches into a little memory that explains why Leah hasn’t given up: “When Leah was little, she and Evan had played a game where they would try to keep the other under a blanket for as long as possible. While she had held the blanket down with all her might no matter how much Evan swore and yelled, at the slightest squawk from her, Evan would whip the blanket off, releasing her, asking if she was alright.”

If you’ve felt estranged from a sibling who helped to make you who you are; if you’ve wondered whether it’s possible to make art anymore; if you’re worried about the future of the United States even while you kind of hate the whole idea of it, I suspect Eisenberg’s Housemates might be the road trip novel you’ve been waiting for.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This week I’ll urge you to see a pair of new documentaries that are of equally enormous interest but formally at antipodes. Black Box Diaries austerely narrates the director’s own terrible ordeal. In 2015, the journalist Shiori Ito—then a 25-year-old intern—met Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a senior figure in Japanese journalism, for dinner; she got drunk and was taken back to Yamaguchi’s hotel, where she passed out and later awoke to find him raping her. The Tokyo prosecutors refused to act on the case, claiming there was insufficient probative evidence. Even when a warrant was finally issued, the office of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe almost certainly exerted pressure not to disturb or arrest the accused (Yamaguchi is Abe’s biographer and friend). Ito then tried civil courts, where—despite calumnies, threats, and ostracism—she ultimately won her case.

As its title suggests, Black Box Diaries tells this sadly familiar story largely through the victim’s own testimony, supplemented by secretly recorded conversations. It’s as unadorned a film as one will ever see: Ito directly addresses the camera, and the visuals are minimal. She doesn’t shy away from sharing the most vulnerable moments of her experience, including her wish to end it all. But her intense sadness—the result of being assaulted, insulted, vilified, and countersued—is compounded by the way the film depicts Ito almost entirely alone, other than visits with her lawyers and the publisher of her memoir. Her solitude is unbearable, as was her personal Golgotha.

If Black Box Diaries errs on the side of minimalism, Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is perhaps too visually busy. This is a function of the director’s effort to tell the extremely complex story of the Congo’s gaining of independence—and subsequent collapse into a multi-sided war, which led to the murder of the country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba—at the same time that it makes a case for jazz (particularly free jazz) as the cultural backdrop for the liberation struggles of what was then called the Third World. (Those interested in going deeper into all this should read Stuart Reid’s The Lumumba Plot, which manages to weave this story’s many threads into a coherent whole.) In this film, the hypocrisy and viciousness of the West and the UN are on full display, as is the venality of too many African leaders.

Almost immediately after independence was declared on June 30th, 1960, the fragile unity of the Congolese fell apart, helped along in no small measure by the interference of Belgium, the former colonial ruler, along with the US and Britain. This intrusion included sending jazz musicians like Louis Armstorng to Africa, supposedly as goodwill ambassadors and representatives of Western democracy. But as Grimonprez shows, Armstrong was also a Trojan horse: During his post-independence tour, his entourage included CIA agents sent to spy on local figures and events. If the film has many villains (among them UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld, whose role in the Congo tragedy was actually far more despicable than in the events we see here), three figures stand out as heroes: The Indian diplomat V.K. Krishna Menon, civil rights icon Malcolm X, and, surprisingly, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev. While today the Soviet Union is routinely bashed, we should never forget that, for all its faults, it was a mighty voice against Western colonialism. Indeed, we have few leaders in the world today with the fire Khruschev had, standing at the podium of the UN, shouting, “Death to colonialism! Bury it!”