Shabbat
Reading List
The Jewish Currents staff will be off the next two weeks to recharge, so there we won’t be publishing content or the Shabbat Reading List (though you can still look out for the weekly parshah commentary). See you in 2025!
Diana Varenik (director of circulation): In 2003, a dozen Palestinian teenagers erected a 16-foot-tall horse at the entrance of the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. The piece was titled “Al Hisan,” or “the horse,” and for 20 years it was both commemorative—its body made from the rubble of buildings and vehicles destroyed by Israeli forces—and celebratory, a monument to enduring Palestinian resistance after the Second Intifada. On October 29, 2023, an Israeli raid targeted and destroyed Al Hisan.
I learned this and much else at The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus, which the political puppet troupe Bread and Puppet recently performed at the Theater for the New City. The circus opens with the demise of a clown puppet bearing a sign that reads “empire” (and, with its demise, also the downfall of the contemporary beasts of Amazon, Nestle, Monsanto, and other corporate monsters). Bread and Puppet’s characteristic life-size papier-mâché figures, accompanied by an extremely zealous live brass band, then perform a non-linear series of vignettes: an homage to the Haitian Revolution, a tribute to healthcare workers, a march of screaming trees set to a stirring violin requiem, and a troupe of dancing fuschia piglets declaring forcefully that “the silly is a necessary ingredient of the serious.”
I admit that I entered the performance skeptical of Bread and Puppet, whose art and creative direction appear not to have changed significantly since the troupe’s early days in the anti-war era of the ‘60s. I visited the Bread and Puppet museum in Vermont earlier this year and found the artwork eerie and impenetrable. Absent the political context explored on stage, the puppets seemed to be empty signifiers alienated from the present.
But Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus was not out of touch. The show itself was startlingly relevant and forthright—whatever I had found enigmatic about the lifeless puppets in the museum was totally transformed in production. One macabre routine featured tigers ripping out and eating the entrails of billionaires, gruesomely returning some meaning to the oft-repeated slogan “eat the rich.” Some moments were extremely somber, including several tributes to Gazans murdered by Israeli forces over the last 14 months. One particularly rattling performance featured the story of Muhammad Bhar, a 24-year-old disabled Palestinian man who was mauled by an Israeli military dog and left to die after his family was forcibly removed from their home.
For me, the most memorable moment of the performance was a scene in which a performer narrated the story of the Jenin horse while the rest of the troupe brought out a 20-foot-long puppet of a person lying horizontally. Slowly, the puppeteers pulled pieces of the puppet’s body apart and rearranged them to produce two large horses. As the narrator described the destruction of Palestinian sites of culture and memory, the other performers re-shuffled the horse’s pieces. When the performers stepped aside so the audience could see the puppet, it had taken human shape once again—this time standing upright, and waving a Palestinian flag high above the audience.
Like Al Hisan, the metamorphosed puppet was a composite of objects that retained the memory of its prior selves, even as these components reformed again and again. And if such evolution is possible, the puppet suggests, then attempts at cultural destruction or erasure may ultimately be futile. I thought of the pieces that had once constituted Al Hisan—scraps from a Red Crescent ambulance which had carried the wounded, the building fragments which sheltered families, the pieces of cars which transported residents of Jenin to work and to school—and I thought of the rubble that may one day be given a voice in Gaza, in Jenin, and beyond.
Aside from the impressive artistry and emotional range of the performance, I think the reason I liked the show so much was to spite the men sitting behind me who grumbled throughout that they didn’t feel like being depressed (“Isn’t this supposed to be a circus?”) To them, I’d cite the fuschia piglets, who rightfully pointed out that the silly and the serious—indeed, even the tragic—cannot exist without each other. Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus is no longer playing, but Bread and Puppet Theater isn’t going anywhere. So don’t miss out next time these puppets take the stage near you!
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The recently opened Franz Kafka exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, marking 100 years since the death of the great author, provided me with more chills of excitement than almost any show I can remember seeing. This assemblage of manuscripts, diary pages, postcards, and letters allows the visitor to gaze upon the originals of some of the most important works ever written. Among works of art, only the end of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg moves me to tears—and yet, as I approached the display case containing the original manuscript of The Metamorphosis, and there, written clearly in Kafka’s hand, its famous opening words—Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt—I had tears in my eyes.
The page bearing this immortal line shows just how smoothly the writing of this novella went. The beginning of the story is written in the most relaxed and legible of hands, and the page contains only seven minor crossings-out; one sees how naturally this tale of a man turned into an insect came to Kafka—how immediate its experience was to him. Elsewhere, we see that this easy flow of prose was not uncommon for the writer, even though he often claimed that his works had to be wrenched from him. The final page of The Castle, for instance, moves along smoothly, with few corrections. But then it ends abruptly, mid-sentence: She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it is hard to understand her, but what she said— We’ll never know what the woman said, and the words hanging on the page make Kafka’s defeat all the more clear. Revelations such as these give this exhibition a greater value than the benefit inherent in being just inches from these basic texts of modern literature, of modern life.
The exhibition also works at undermining the image of Kafka as a lone genius, weighed down by the heavy responsibility of his talent. Loving postcards to his sister Ottla figure prominently, and they show that Kafka was not devoid of a sense of humor. One such missive is formally addressed to “sehr geehrte fräulein”—dearest miss—and continues in the same mock highfalutin tone. The photos of Kafka interspersed through the show, many of them taken in sanatoria where he stayed to cure his tuberculosis, show him simply having fun with friends. The curators make the case that some of the iconography of the tortured soul is a result of trickery: A famous photo of Kafka sitting alone, which appears on the cover of several books about him in English and French, is displayed here in its original form; it turns out that the author is not alone here at all, but sitting alongside a dog and a beautiful young woman, a waitress at a tavern he frequented.
For those interested in the question of Kafka’s relationship to Judaism and Jewishness, there is a whole section dedicated to this topic, including his fascination with Hebrew, which was linked to his interest in Zionism. The show features a letter he wrote in the language to his Hebrew teacher and a notebook with select words written out in German and in Hebrew. His Hebrew was obviously utilitarian rather than religious—“enema” and “fever” are among the words he cared to translate.
The next significant anniversary on the Kafka calendar—the bicentennial of his birth—is 59 years away, so those who care about literature have a long wait ahead of them before seeing an exhibition of this grandeur. It’s up until April.
Alex Kane (senior reporter): My idea of a break from my job—which entails consuming copious amounts of contemporary news about US and Middle East politics—is to read American history. It’s not exactly unrelated to my job, but it’s different enough. I started this practice in the hopes of better understanding the country I live in after being thoroughly destabilized by Donald Trump’s first win in 2016. Since then, I’ve read a lot about the American right, including, most recently, Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.
Like his earlier book Nixonland—which I previously raved about for the Shabbat Reading List—this book is a dizzying compendium of political events and pop culture happenings that Perlstein unearths to guide the reader from 1973 through 1976, when Richard Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford took his place. Reagan is a central character in the book, although I often found myself wondering why Reagan was mentioned in the subtitle when he would not become president until 1980. In fact, much of the book is devoted to Reagan’s formidable, but ultimately losing, quest to defeat the establishment-minded Ford in the 1976 Republican presidential primary. But in losing—notably, less badly than one might have expected in a primary against an incumbent president—the former California governor activated a right-wing network of business leaders, evangelicals, and Cold War hawks who jolted the Republican establishment and would make up the core of the Reagan coalition when he eventually won in 1980.
In addition to its main plot—the rise of Reagan as a political force—the book has a series of subplots that kept me engaged: a mini-biography of the shapeshifting Reagan, an exploration of Congress’s transformation in the wake of voter backlash to Watergate, the roots of the myth that hundreds of American soldiers were left captive and abandoned by the Johnson administration in Vietnam, and much more. The book was a perfect way to fill in my previously lackluster historical knowledge of this era. The 1960s and the Reagan years have clear ideological origins and lasting impacts, but the early- to mid-1970s have long been a black box to me. The Invisible Bridge clarified those interregnum years, making plain how a mix of inflation, Middle East wars, radical left-wing movements, and changing gender norms set the stage for a conservative counter-revolution that would ultimately coalesce in a president winning on the slogan “let’s make America great again.”
Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I started reading (and then writing for) Jewish Currents after its 2018 revival, and like many converts, I am both curious about and frankly ignorant of my adoptive community’s long history. Consequently, I took a special interest in Annie Sommer Kaufman’s new translation of Ben Gold’s Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story. Gold’s Yiddish novel was originally published in 1944 by the Communist newspaper Morgen Freiheit, which after World War II launched the English magazine Jewish Life, which became Jewish Currents in 1956. Since I don’t read Yiddish, Avreml Broide felt like a recovered family archive—and even with Kaufman’s learned and generous introduction and William Gropper’s original illustrations, reading this slim volume will hardly take much longer than flipping through an unearthed photo album of a precious ancestor.
And Gold is indeed our political forebear. Born in Bessarabia, a province of the Russian Empire today split between Ukraine and Moldova, he immigrated as a child to New York in 1910. At the age of 14, he joined the Furriers Union, leading its heroic 1926 strike, which won, for the first time in the United States, a 40-hour workweek. Initially a Socialist, Gold became a staunch Communist, and fought both the conservative American Federation of Labor and organized crime outfits like Murder, Inc. for control of the needle-trades unions in New York. He served a prison sentence for organizing a hunger march during the Great Depression, and was prosecuted for his Communist affiliation in the second Red Scare.
Avreml Broide draws heavily from Gold’s life, barely fictionalizing events like the great 1926 strike and characters like the Communist schismatic Jay Lovestone or Socialist Congressman Meyer London. But the protagonist, Avreml, is not Gold. He is rather, as the title promises, “a worker,” his heroism general rather than particular. When Avreml errs in pitying an old Socialist mentor turned strikebreaker, he piously confesses his faults and accepts the Party’s chastisement; when he learns how deeply his wife Miriem is committed to Lovestone’s heretical critique of the Party, he separates from her. Though Gold’s writing is earthy and concrete, his fiction, like his Communist solidarity, aims to transcend the specificity of the self.
Communist universalism also offers a fresh, surprising version of that most familiar American Jewish genre, the ethnic bildungsroman. In novels like Abraham Cahan’s 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky, the protagonist grows in self-consciousness as he (it is usually he) assimilates culturally and ascends the class ladder. As Kaufman astutely notes, Avreml Broide bucks these American dreams. Avreml refuses his father-in-law’s offer to set him up in business, and thus the novel rejects the developmental path from worker to capitalist. Avreml does Americanize, after a fashion, overcoming his shtetl nostalgia through the mass comradery of the union, and learning English in a Communist workers’ school and then in a courtroom, on trial for his role in a bloody strike. He thus comes to illustrate one of the Party’s slogans in the ‘30s, “Communism is 20th-Century Americanism”—yet this Americanism is always understood as tentative, produced and sustained in ongoing class struggle.
And thus the novel devotes nearly half of its 117 pages to Avreml’s youth in a small Eastern European city, a lovely folk-impressionistic yarn reminiscent of Isaac Babel’s short stories or Marc Chagall’s paintings. But that yarn, I suspect, has a straightforward politics, evident in the clear parallels Gold draws between the Old and New Worlds. There, Avreml wrangles with small-time thieves; here, he faces the same venial gangsters. There, a rapacious moneylender extorts and then evicts an impoverished tailor; here, Avreml finds the same capitalist exploitation. You can cross the Atlantic Ocean and learn English, sure, but you cannot escape class struggle. Indeed, the novel ends with Avreml returning to Europe, fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for a free Spain. To be sure, writing in 1944, Gold sees Spain as the first battleground in the war against fascism, linking it to World War II; in his final letter to his comrades, Avreml writes that he is fighting for “our America and the Jewish people.” For a time, that is, Communist internationalism was compatible with a guarded patriotism and Jewish group loyalty. And yet, this patriotism comes with critique: As Avreml observes, the United States (like other liberal democracies) abandoned the Spanish Republicans, who were armed only by the Soviets. More profoundly, by reversing Avreml’s migration story, Gold completely rewires the immigrant genre in which he is writing, as if the robbers in a heist movie were to give all the money back. Gold thus pointedly defies the literary teleology of the nation. At a moment when many American Jews are grappling with our community’s story of racial assimilation and class ascent, Kaufman has made available, in Gold’s novel, a welcome, if bracing, alternative: an unabashedly leftist story of the Jew who remains proudly, defiantly, a worker.
Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): Saddam Hussein wrote novels. That’s just one fascinating strand in the latest book from Steve Coll, The New Yorker staff writer and accomplished investigative journalist. Coll’s in-depth reading of the Iraqi autocrat’s little-known fiction, and their adaptation to Arabic television, make for some of the most compelling moments of The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. The book is every bit as riveting as Ghost Wars, his monumental 2004 dive into Osama bin Laden’s path to the September 11th attacks.
Coll sets out to understand how the George W. Bush administration got the question of Hussein’s defunct weapons of mass-destruction program so wrong, and his reporting paints remarkably intimate portraits of Iraqi scientists and American spies. For material that broadly speaking is somewhat familiar—the American invasion was a slow-moving train wreck, and we’re still living in the world that Bush wrought—Coll’s book nevertheless feels fresh, even thrilling at times.
But it can be difficult to revisit the material and see so clearly all the potential offramps, so many moments that could have averted the war and altered the course of Iraqi, American, and world history. What if Colin Powell, the secretary of state, had made public his criticism and reservations about a preemptive invasion? I couldn’t help but find myself wondering whether he may have instigated a cascade of departures across the federal government that might have ultimately stopped the war. He publicly stayed loyal to Bush, just as many policymakers and appointees have stayed loyal to Biden during the ongoing Gaza war. There weren’t mass resignations then, or today, and Coll’s book offers a bleak account of the world that unfolds when militaristic frenzy is left unchecked.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve long thought that one of the most delightful—but also most philosophical—songs ever written is They Might Be Giants’s “Older”: “You’re older than you’ve ever been / And now you’re even older / And now you’re even older / And now you’re even older.” I’ve been thinking of these lyrics, at once incontrovertibly obvious and deeply profound, ever since I left a screening of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour masterpiece, The Clock, showing at MoMA through February. This was my third time viewing a chunk of the film, but while I’d previously only taken two-hour gulps, at this showing I sat through four full hours—and got the project in a way I never had before.
As the title suggests, the film is built around clocks: Over the course of the absurd runtime, we see timepieces displaying each of the 1440 minutes of the day in scenes excerpted from I don’t know how many thousands of films (and sometimes TV shows). Sometimes, particularly on the hour, we see several clocks showing a given moment. (Three o’clock is a big one, for obvious reasons—that’s often when kids are released from school.) The clocks in Marclay’s film appear in all manner of locations and designs: They are in train stations and anonymous offices; on wrists, bedside tables, and famous buildings like Big Ben; they’re digital and analog, in Roman and Arabic numerals. Often we see people glancing at their watches without actually learning the time, or we know it only because it’s spoken aloud. On very rare occasions, people in the film explicitly philosophize about time. But mostly, temporality simply unfolds. It’s something that’s always there, and which we’re constantly conscious of even when we’re not conscious of being conscious of it.
The film is usually seen as a curiosity and a tour de force of cinematic editing. But Marclay is doing something far subtler than merely assembling random shots with clocks in them. Sometimes the connecting images are related to each other in one way or another: For instance, in one clip people draw guns and fire, and the shots land in a scene from an entirely different film. One may be in color, the other in black and white, unmooring the historic time of the genre from the chronological time of the film in front of us while also flattening the different scales into a unified flow: Time is one. And even as the minutes tick forward, time in the film is not unidirectional, as certain actors who appear and reappear (Robert DeNiro, Nicolas Cage, Dirk Bogarde, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close) grow older and younger at random. By drawing clips from works both highbrow and lowbrow, and from all across the globe, Marclay emphasizes how all of cinema—and indeed, the entire world—is caught in the same stream of time, which defies the borders of genres and nations.
The Clock is shown such that the time on the screen matches the time in the world. But even so, a few minutes into my viewing, someone took out his cell phone to check the time. There are things I simply cannot accept, and phone use in movie theaters is at the top of the list. So I leaned forward and informed him—though my inner Brooklynite prevented me from expressing myself quite this politely—that we are living the same moment as the people on the screen.
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.
