Shabbat
Reading List

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!”

Solomon Brager (director of community engagement): Beirut, a graphic novel trilogy by the Lebanese filmmaker and author Barrack Zailaa Rima, was originally published in 2017 in French, but was translated and published in English just this year by Invisible Publishing. Beirut collects three short comics made over the course of 20 years, depicting Rima’s comic avatar’s return to Beirut, a city seemingly trapped in an impasse of crisis. In each comic, Rima narrates her own movement through Beirut’s streets, observing it as a kind of loving outsider: Rima is from Tripoli, not Beirut, and has lived in Belgium for many years, yet she, like so many, is drawn to the city’s iconic status. It’s all too easy to call Beirut timely—of course Lebanon is in the news and of course the Palestinian refugees that populate the pages of Rima’s comic are front of mind. But, as Rima writes in the last part of the trilogy, in 2017, “It doesn’t matter at all if you are in Beirut or elsewhere. Today, all cities are alike.” The struggles feel familiar, if particular. Society collapses and so does distance. Indeed, I recognized in Rima’s depiction of Beirut a crumbling I am familiar with in New York, a similarity that collapses distance not only in the physical likeness of urban decay but in the fact that our government is currently funding the bombing of that city rather than fixing our own crises.

There is power and pleasure granted by this long-term trilogy, in seeing the rich development of one artist’s style over a number of years. The comic from 1995 is starkly drawn in black ink, yet simultaneously surreal in its flaneur-wanderings through a cross-section of the city. Every page is dripping with hopeful nostalgia—elders tell stories of their younger days protesting; lines from folk songs appear as text on the page; Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali’s character Handala crosses the pages, casting a long shadow; the iconic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, twenty years dead, asks from a photograph, “Do you believe everything that is written in newspapers?” In short, the comic posits, something old is being lost—but to a future that holds possibility. The second to last panel of the 1995 comic reads, “I will tell you the stories of my city,” but the last panel is blank, carrying us into the open future. The next two sections, drawn two years apart in 2015 (“Beirut bye bye…”) at the beginning of Beirut’s garbage crisis—a result of the government’s failure to find a place for Beirut’s waste when the only trash dump serving the city shut down—and 2017 (“Beirut Rewind”), focusing on the continuing protests of what became known as the “You Stink” movement that responded to Lebanon’s ongoing garbage problem.

These entries exhibit the sophistication of a long-developed style: Rima moves thoughtfully between detailed cross-hatching and heavier painted lines, with the significant additions of grayscale and, crucially, collage. In “Beirut bye bye…,” a photograph of dunes peaks out from a panel at the seashore; the overwhelm of new development and privatization in the city is felt in the silhouettes of ominous, looming construction equipment and planes overhead, cut out of paper in contrast to the drawn people; a child in the backseat of a car passing a locked-down, locked-out city, thinks, “How can it be made bearable?” Extremists rendered in spray-painted stencils burn books, and spray-painted and paper-cut flames lick at both the pile of books and the taxi that carries the narrator throughout the stories. The comic ends with the narrator in a plane, leaving a burning city. These new entries are less charming, darker, more distressed. But Rima is still funny; she refers to developers as “ninja turtles,” and, as she flies away from Beirut, the avatar of the city’s memory, now a trash collector, calls out, “Safe travels… and come back to see us soon!” Two years later, Rima’s narrator turns to the cyclical nature of political hope, connecting the nostalgic stories from the 1967 anti-imperialist protests in the trilogy’s first comic to the second comic’s 2015 protests against corruption—an attempt through time travel to develop something like a strategy, a road map to something better. It’s a beautiful collection of work that I think everyone should read. And, if you’re in New York, I recommend picking up your copy and other SWANA comics and art books in-person from Storm Books and Candy, the new, wonderfully curated Lebanese-owned bookstore in Greenpoint.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): The day after I read Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger (which I recently recommended in this newsletter), I ran out to my local bookstore to pick up a book that Hammad cites: Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European. Like Hammad’s text, Said’s began its life as a lecture—delivered in 2002 at the Freud Museum of London after its original hosts, the leadership of the Freud Society of Vienna, made the outrageous decision to cancel the scheduled talk because the Palestinian American intellectual had been photographed standing in Lebanon, preparing to throw a stone toward a military guard tower in Israel. (Said described the act, which harmed no one, as “a symbolic gesture of joy” celebrating the recent end of Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon.) The lecture—which was delivered while Said was in the late stages of his battle with leukemia, and which became the last book he published before his death in 2003—is an unorthodox meditation on Sigmund Freud’s own final completed work, Moses and Monotheism (1939). In this puzzling and provocative text, Said explains, the founder of psychoanalysis indulges in a series of quasi-historical conjectures, proposing that the prophet Moses was not an enslaved Hebrew secreted away into an Egyptian household, as the book of Exodus teaches, but rather was born as an Egyptian—and that Moses introduced monotheism, an idea invented by the pharaoh, to the Israelites.

Said is less interested in the historical veracity of these claims than in what they suggest about Freud’s understanding of Jewishness. For Said, by offering an “opening out of Jewish identity towards its non-Jewish background,” insisting on a continuity between Judaism and its “non-Jewish antecedents and contemporaries,” Moses and Monotheism powerfully “undermine[s] any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular.” This vision, he argues, stands in stark contrast to the Zionist conception of Jewishness as a stable, singular national identity. “The establishment of Israel,” Said writes, “consolidated Jewish identity politically in a state that took very specific legal and political positions effectively to seal off that identity from anything that was non-Jewish.” In the wake of this violent ossification, Said urges us to return to Freud’s destabilized, “irremediably diasporic” Jewishness, and to heed its broader lesson that even collective identity is necessarily intertwined with the Other.

Reading Said’s text now, amid Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Lebanon, I find its generosity at once inspiring and difficult to bear. Who am I to receive such a potent reimagining of my own identity from someone so deeply affected by the cruelty perpetrated in its name? I sense a trace of this same discomfort in the Jewish scholar Jacqueline Rose’s response to the lecture—which was originally delivered after the talk, and which is included as a postscript in the published volume. After praising Said’s recovery of Freud’s bewildering text as “a political parable of our times,” she asks whether he has been too charitable. Where Said emphasizes the openness of Freud’s portrait of Jewishness, Rose highlights the ways in which the great psychoanalyst remained committed to a kind of Jewish essentialism and exceptionalism. Likewise, while Said proposes that Jewishness and other “besieged identities” might transform historical injury into a rigorously solidaristic “politics of diaspora life,” Rose meditates mournfully on how such wounds shape peoples: “Trauma, far from generating freedom, openness to others as well as to the divided and unresolved fragments of a self, leads to a very different kind of fragmentation . . . and causes identities to batten down.” For Rose, this is less an analytical disagreement than a difference in degrees of hope. But perhaps it also points to a dual responsibility for Jews in this moment: to strive bravely toward the vision that Said articulates while also soberly confronting our daunting distance from this ideal.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It might seem superfluous to recommend Robert Caro’s widely acclaimed biography of urban planner Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and which I recently reread for the first time in many years. The book is not only perhaps the greatest biography ever written by an American, but—in its sweep, its insights into character, and its magnificent writing—a classic of American literature. Caro helps us understand how Moses transformed the face and life of New York both for the 40 years he ruled its parks and highways and in the six decades since his departure from the scene. His highways, the construction of which committed the city to cars over mass transit, cemented New York as a place where it is equally impossible to get around by car (due to traffic) or public transportation (as spending is diverted away from subways, trains, and buses). The cars that flood into Manhattan from Moses’s highways turn New York into a perfect trifecta: It’s also a city in which it’s impossible to get around on foot.

A friend, a professor of political science, recently admitted to me that he hadn’t read The Power Broker; no 1200-page book, he insisted, could be devoid of unnecessary material. I told him he was wrong. Despite its size, Caro’s account of how one man obtained so much influence—and how he was able to maintain it across generations—is a page-turner, and every word is necessary. It’s not just that Moses’s maneuvering and machinations require space to explain, but that Caro is appropriately scrupulous in his portrait—crediting Moses for the good he did by spending long stretches of the book describing what a drive from the city to Long Island was like before Moses’s arrival, as well as the paucity of playgrounds and green spaces for New Yorkers to enjoy. But just when it seems Caro is going to become part of Moses’s chorus of admirers, he immediately switches tone and gives us the other side of the coin, rigorously cataloging the evil that Moses did. Caro’s Moses is a savior and a devil, a bully and a boon companion; for better and worse, he is all of us in one man (though his worst is worse than most of us can ever aspire to). Caro is clear that Moses was a racist, and that he also hated middle- and working-class white people only slightly less than Black and Latino people. And yet, Caro shows that in many ways, Moses wanted to do good for those he disdained. Indeed, the moral question at the heart of The Power Broker is the same one posed decades later in the first season of the sitcom The Good Place: Can an act be considered good if performed for the wrong reason? For Caro, the good Moses did was done to increase his personal power. So does that change the nature of a park built where none was before?

Revisiting The Power Broker now, I kept thinking that, as bad as Moses was, he got things done, some of them worth doing. Now we New Yorkers live in a city in which nothing gets done. It has taken longer to rebuild the oval tracks in Marine Park, a few blocks from my home, than it did for Moses to have the entire park built 90 years ago. Even worse, we lack the will to fix the ills he imposed on us, as the governor’s cowardly failure to impose congestion pricing proves. We have weak politicians and a populace that hates the present and refuses anything new. Maybe we deserved Moses; maybe we needed him. Maybe we need someone like him still.

Alice Radosh (co-chair, JC Council): When was the last time you picked up a copy of The Communist Manifesto and settled down for a good read? Never? Too long ago to remember or admit? If so, I urge you to get a copy of China Miéville’s book, A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (Haymarket Books). Miéville, a British writer and leftist activist, is best known for his award-winning speculative fiction. He brings the same brilliance, humor, and combativeness to his non-fiction.

A Spectre Haunting opens by describing the Manifesto as “short and rude and vivid,” a text whose impact “has been utterly epochal.” Miéville reminds us that The Communist Manifesto is just that—a manifesto, a call to arms, not a “judicious, cautious set of scholarly propositions.” It was written hastily and under pressure in 1848 by Marx (primarily) and Engles (to a lesser extent). At the time, Europe was in the throes of political and economic crises, and the Communist League (a “small group of squabbling émigrés,” as Miéville describes them) needed to respond quickly. Marx, tasked with drafting the League’s response, toiled endlessly over the document. Infuriated by what became known as Marx’s lifelong “abiding brinkmanship with deadlines,” the League threatened him with “further measures” if he did not deliver the promised tract. The result is what Miéville describes as a “rush-written pamphlet, where flawed and hastily conceived passages sit alongside brilliant insight.”

Miéville’s slim volume systematically takes the reader through the text’s 194 paragraphs, with the unabridged 23-page Manifesto presented as an appendix. In Miéville’s deft hands, you see the text as he does, vivid with fury and sarcasm, as well as with respect for the strength of the forces aligned against communism. There are a number of surprises: Every leftist can quote, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains” and “WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE” (caps in the original), but how many of us know that the Manifesto begins by crediting the bourgeoisie with playing a “most-revolutionary” role in the areas of chemistry and agriculture and in the development of steam navigation and railways? In fact, the bourgeoisie, according to Marx and Engels, have accomplished “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.” Miéville, in elucidating the text’s more surprising elements, ensures that the Manifesto does not become a reified object instead of a work to be grappled with, and his thorough and thoughtful explication of the text is followed by two detailed chapters that evaluate the criticisms that have followed the Manifesto from its publication to the present.

Marx’s work has proved enduring in part because his analysis remains so relevant. Indeed, as Miéville notes, sales of Marx’s works have consistently proven to be a barometer of the times. During the financial crisis of 2008, for example, there was a substantial spike in sales of his works. Explaining this trend, Miéville quotes the critic Marshall Berman: “Whenever there’s trouble, anywhere in the world, the book becomes an item. When people dream of resistance . . . it provides the music for their dreams.” It is because of this enduring relevance and artistry, Miéville argues, that the Manifesto demands not only to be read but “to be read aloud to savor the poetry.” And, aloud or not, A Spectre Haunting demands to be read along with it.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Last week, just before I began my Yom Kippur fast, I finished The Designated Mourner, a play by Wallace Shawn (who you might also know as an actor from My Dinner with Andre and The Princess Bride), first performed in 1996. I carried it with me through the holy day and have not stopped thinking about it since. The play is an account of a small group of dissidents in an unnamed country amid an authoritarian turn—and a “vague hanger-on,” Jack, who defects when things start getting bloody. Jack’s wife, Judy, the daughter of dissident poet Howard, offers a simple explanation for Jack’s betrayal even before we learn of its contours. “If you stop and think about it,” she says to the audience, “you have to admit that human motivation is not complex, or it’s complex only in the same sense that the motivation of a fly is complex. In other words, if you try to swat a fly, it moves out of the way.” But this is the starting point and not the terminus of Shawn’s exploration of Jack’s psyche—his tenuous sense of self and eerie dislocation, his libidinal distractions, and a contempt for “highbrow” culture that seems to prefigure the “edgelord.” We follow him to nice hotels and living room parties as tens of thousands of bodies pile up “in every sort of inappropriate spot, such as the carousel in the middle of the park” and friends are publicly executed while dining out, bullets in the back of their heads.

But if we want to distance ourselves from Jack, Shawn denies us the satisfaction of an easy identification with his former circle. Here, the playwright retains a suspicion of the comforts of bourgeois life—the way its fleeting material pleasures and even its most treasured cultural artifacts can act as pacifiers—that he first explored in his 1991 play The Fever. Indeed, in The Designated Mourner, the dissidents are largely impotent. Howard, their elderly unofficial leader, has seemingly last written something truly subversive in his 20s; he remains in the crosshairs of the regime less because of continued action, but because of his silence, his refusal to renounce his former work. His group reads books, attends plays, drinks tea, and debates morality and the lot of the poor, but rarely do we see them do any more than that, which makes it all the more striking when that is enough to call down a death sentence—and not at all surprising that they are helpless to stop it.

In the spring, during the brutal crackdowns on student encampments, I experienced a new kind of fear. I saw clips of CNN’s Dana Bash offering the number of student arrests at various schools as their own justification, incontrovertible evidence of protester violence, even as the picture on screen showed the violence of police. I had known, intellectually, that we on the left were on our own, that greater and greater repression was on its way, but this time I felt it. Our continued protest threatens the comfort of polite, liberal society. And in response, they bare their teeth, the way a dog does when you reach for its bone. I am thinking of this again as we near the election, all the various ways that things stand to get even worse, particularly as it relates to movement repression. And yet, perhaps many of us—and I indict myself here, just as his plays implicate Shawn—are also still too comfortable, not organized enough, or resistant to organization altogether, and therefore unable to stop what’s coming.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Errol Morris’s latest documentary, Separated, is a reminder of something that should never be forgotten: Under Trump, to borrow from Adam Serwer, it’s the cruelty that was—and will be—the point. There are no surprises in the film, which focuses on the policy of family separation at the border instituted by his administration. Indeed, this is not a film of the quality and originality of Morris’s masterpieces, like The Thin Blue Line (1988) or The Fog of War (2003). Made for MSNBC, it is a cautious, straightforward, and very un-Morris-like movie; the director’s voice is seldom heard pushing the interview subjects into revelations or confessions they’d rather not make. And while Morris has never shied away from reenactment, this film contains more than is really advisable: As the camera follows a group of migrants from Central America until their capture and the separation of a mother and child, the artificiality undercuts the film’s overall effect. Still, for all its limitations, the film is worthwhile, informative—and horrifying.

The villains in this story are many. Of course there’s Trump and his advisor, the reptilian Stephen Miller. There’s Scott Lloyd, the pathetic director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a political appointee who simply rubber-stamped anything passed down to him. (He provides the nearest thing to a gotcha moment in Separated: When asked about a “possibly apocryphal story” around the separations he’s stumped; he clearly doesn’t know the meaning of the word “apocryphal.”) Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirsten Nielsen, and the revoltingly thuggish head of ICE, Thomas Homan—who delights in the horrors his henchmen carry out—round out the list of perpetrators. Jonathan White, who ran day-to-day operations at the ORR, comes as close to a hero as any government official in the film. It was he who realized what was going on at a time when those above him were denying there was any such program, and it was he who tried to put a stop to a practice that was both illegal and inhumane. The enormous increase in kids being held at White’s children’s holding facilities put the lie to the government’s claim that the only children separated from their parents were those few taken from asylum-seekers who provided an unsafe environment. The other heroic figure is NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, whose firsthand descriptions depict the sheer awfulness of the policy, and whose work was the basis for the film.

All of this, we are told, was done to please Trump’s base. I’ve read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s impressive books on what made them what they are, but however much they might have had their pride stolen or been made strangers in their own land, none of this really explains, let alone justifies, the gratuitous viciousness on display in Separated. For many, though, none of it was vicious enough. Now they crave the deportation of millions. By the time J.D. Vance runs for president in 2028, they’ll be calling for mass executions.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Novelist (and Jewish Currents contributor) Isabella Hammad’s new book, Recognizing the Stranger, is a searching meditation on narrative turning points—not only in literature but in relation to Palestine. The bulk of this slim volume, whose richness defies its brevity, is the text of a lecture that Hammad delivered last September at Columbia University, as part of a long-standing series in memory of the renowned Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. The speech focuses on the particular literary technique of the “recognition scene.” She traces the form back to Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis, “the moment when the truth of a matter dawns on a character,” famously and tragically exemplified in Oedipus’s realization that he has killed his father and married his mother. Hammad sees anagnorisis as a phenomenon intricately bound up with the Palestinian struggle. Palestinians, she writes, are well acquainted with scenes of outsiders suddenly discovering the justice of the Palestinian cause: “apparent blindness followed by staggering realization.” Such understanding is both abrupt and gradual, accumulating slowly and then erupting all at once with a startling clarity that pierces layers of obfuscation and dehumanization. “To recognize something,” she writes, “is . . . to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know.”

For Hammad, this feature of personal narratives around Palestine politicization is both inspiring and endlessly frustrating. She finds hope in “the possibility of a swift movement from ignorance to knowledge,” even as she laments the “despairing déjà vu” of witnessing others come to a belated recognition, over and over again, of the reality that Palestinians have been unambiguously describing, decade after decade. Reflecting on a conversation with an Israeli man she met on a kibbutz in the Galilee—a deserter who, after encountering a Palestinian man approaching the Gaza border fence entirely naked, fled rather than follow his orders to shoot—she quotes BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti: “How many Palestinians . . . need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?” And what, Hammad asks, does it mean that in such paradigmatic recognition scenes about Palestine, the Palestinian is always only the occasion for another’s insight and never the center of their own narrative, their humanity made an object even as it’s finally seen? Repeatedly and elegantly, the lecture recasts the question of the potential and limits of recognition—aesthetically, interpersonally, and politically—as Hammad thinks with Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Anne Carson, and many others, letting complications multiply without resolution.

In a different world, the book might have ended just as Hammad’s lecture did. But of course, nine days after her September 28th talk, everything changed. In a potent, sobering afterword, which takes up a quarter of the page count, Hammad reckons with the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th and Israel’s ongoing genocide—and with the ways that both she and the world have been irrevocably changed. Watching Israel unleash immense violence, with the support of Western governments and media outlets supposedly committed to humanistic universalism, she newly comprehends the continued “proximity of humanism—its institutions, its material effects—to coloniality” and the possible irredeemability of humanism as an ideological edifice. “Others understood this better and faster than I did,” she confesses, “so this may be my own personal moment of recognition.” And while in the lecture she had asserted that turning points can only be identified as such after the fact, she admits that the present moment seems like one, though its directionality is darkly inscrutable: “Are we seeing the beginnings of a decolonial future,” she wonders, “or of a more complete obliteration than the Nakba of 1948?” This coda elevates an already remarkable book, as Hammad leans into her own uncertainty while also summoning a new stridency and clarity of purpose. “Do not give in,” she insists, the text approaching the tenor of a sermon. “Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face.”

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): David Henry Hwang’s mordant comedy Yellow Face begins by recounting the real-life 1990 controversy over the casting of the white actor Jonathan Pryce in the role of a French Vietnamese character in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon. Hwang’s protagonist—who shares the playwright’s name and a good number of other biographical details—has been riding on the success of his 1988 Tony Award for M. Butterfly and is happy to marshal his fame to protest a move that echoes “the yellow face days of Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu.” The predictable retort? There just isn’t someone qualified among America’s pool of Asian actors.

That excuse drew appropriate groans from audiences in 2007, when Yellow Face had its New York premiere at the Public Theater. Now, as the show is enjoying an overdue run on Broadway, those groans have turned to guffaws—not least because only minutes before we hear Miss Saigon’s producers defend their casting, the audience has erupted into entrance applause for the actor currently playing “David Henry Hwang” (or DHH, as the program calls him): Daniel Dae Kim (Hawaii Five-0, Lost), one of the hunkiest leading men out there.

Yellow Face takes the form of a mockumentary of sorts, mixing fact and fantasy as it considers the wonders—and limits—of the promise offered by both theater and America: that everyone can make themselves into whomever they wish. Alongside Kim, six actors play myriad roles of varying races and genders, frequently not their own. With amusing references to an actual Hwang flop about the Miss Saigon flap that closed in previews in 1993, our current play’s hero finds himself scrambling to find the best actor to lead the cast of his new play. DHH contorts himself trying to learn the one thing he is not allowed to ask during auditions: Is Marcus (Ryan Eggold), the actor he likes, really Asian? Marcus doesn’t look it, but maybe he’s half-Asian? As Marcus succeeds in the role and is embraced by the Asian American community, DHH quickly concocts a heritage for him, declaring Marcus the descendant of Siberian Jews (“Siberia is in Asia!”). Marcus enthusiastically takes on the mantle and soon lands the lead role in a revival of The King and I. He usurps DHH as a leading activist against anti-Asian discrimination—even taking up happily with DHH’s ex-girlfriend.

In the play’s second part, Hwang raises the stakes, moving beyond theatrical skirmishes to the political stage—and the media that covers it. DHH’s immigrant father (a poignant Francis Jue) is targeted by a probe into the bank he directs (as was Hwang’s real father). In a stunning scene, a New York Times reporter, cunningly introduced as “Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel,” interviews DHH, and flagrantly manipulates his source. While that scene is fictional, the journalist and his damaging articles were real—Jeff Gerth’s front-page story in 1999 reported on a federal investigation into the transfer of tens of millions of dollars from China to Hwang’s father’s California bank. No charges were ever brought in the case. Gerth was also behind the reckless hounding of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist falsely accused of passing military secrets to China. A short scene drawn from Lee’s FBI interrogation transcript is shocking, with agents taunting Lee with the execution of the Rosenbergs.

If the satirical shenanigans of the play’s first part playfully posit race as a social construct, its second part shows the material consequences of racial difference that cannot so easily be laughed away. And, in Hwang’s deft hands, both present the theater as a most revelatory arena for letting those complex, competing notions clash.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Quentin Dupieux, the director of Daaaaaalí! (that’s six A’s and one exclamation point), has made strange films before, with strange central characters. These have included a murderous automobile tire, a jacket that drives its owner to ruin, and a strange beast that women find extremely attractive. With his latest American release, he presents us with a protagonist who actually existed, but is no less bizarre: the heretical surrealist Salvador Dalí. Though the man co-wrote two of the greatest classics of avant-garde cinema—Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930)—film was not his primary métier. He is, along with Warhol and Picasso, among the most famous and successful painters of the 20th century. Now, most famous and successful doesn’t mean greatest. But for decades he was a constant presence in the media. To properly understand Daaaaaalí!, those unfamiliar with the man himself should watch this clip of the artist on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. Once you get past the oddness of seeing the eccentric painter alongside the silent film star Lillian Gish and Negro League baseball great Satchel Paige, you’ll get a good sense of the man: his over-the-top Catalan accent, odd speech patterns, and mix of languages in every sentence. His exaggerated real-life delivery is perfectly captured by the actors who play him in Dupieux’s film.

I say “actors” because Dupieux, true to form, has made a surreal movie about a surrealist painter. The role is played by five separate performers; while one is an aged version of the painter who mainly appears when Dalí is supposed to be an old man, the other four show up interchangeably with no rhyme or reason. In a single conversation, we get a different Dalí in every shot. (Is Dupieux commenting on the lack of fixity in identity? On Dalí’s changing moods and sentiments? It seems not, since each and every Dalí is solipsistic and megalomaniacal.) The film revolves around a young neophyte journalist who wants to make a film about Dalí. He agrees to the interview, but only if she has the most gigantic camera available. It takes many tries to get a machine that meets the surrealist’s stringent requirements. Along the way—as if in a film by Dalí’s collaborator, Luis Buñuel—dinners are interrupted by the recounting of dreams, which become dreams within dreams, until the viewer no longer knows what’s real or imagined. The film is set in a seaside town in which the residents and objects come straight from Dalí’s paintings—the very first shot shows a piano with water pouring from it, as featured in Fontaine nécrophilique coulant d’un piano à queue—presenting an alternate universe in which Dalí was not a surrealist at all, but a realist.

Daaaaaalí! is an utterly mad film, made in the image of both its main character and its director.