Shabbat
Reading List
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): The Well I Fell Into, the excellent new album from indie rock band WHY?, finds frontman Yoni Wolf at his most plainspoken as he meditates on the ruins of a relationship. The group’s previous work is rife with Wolf’s ambiguous imagery, deadpan aphorisms, and tangles of winding wordplay, reflecting the project’s origins in alternative hip-hop. But while glimmers of this appear throughout The Well I Fell Into, the record is often disarmingly direct. On “Marigold”—a song about the futility of repairing all that’s broken—the narrator undercuts the titular motif as soon as he sets it up: “This is not a parable / this is real, it’s painful.” When the cathartic chorus erupts, it summons a cosmic-seeming sense of isolation through completely naturalistic dialogue, as a bus driver disrupts the speaker’s reverie: “Last stop, come on man, you gotta get off / I gotta get it back to the depot / Last stop / yo, bro, time to get off / what, you ain’t got no people?”
The record repeatedly wrings pathos from such straightforward scenes. On “Later at The Loon,” the couple hovers at the kitchen counter as the narrator nibbles at a skirt steak. “You ain’t eating nothing,” the speaker reports, “seems like you wanna listen / you ask me how’d my therapy go / I say, ‘we mostly talked about you.’” Soon his partner is weeping and he’s failing to: “I really want to cry but can’t / I hate how cold and strident I am.” Wolf once filled his songs with humiliating confessions and hyperbolic self-castigation. But here, the admissions of deficiency and blame are strikingly unadorned. “Please, God / someone tell me what to do,” he begs on “Brand New,” and on “The Letters, Etc.,” he admits, “I acted like a fool . . . I guess it’s my own damn fault.” Behind Wolf’s plaintive pleas and laments, the music soars. The band has refashioned its old sonic palette—pretty but brash, percussive yet ethereal—into something newly gorgeous, alternately soaring and subdued.
But even as the album’s portrait of heartbreak is anchored in the everyday, the personal arc is affixed to one with a much grander scale—the structure of Jewish time. Wolf has noted that the record’s narrative of reckoning and rebirth is bound up with the relationship between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah; indeed, the title of “G-dzilla G’dolah” frames the song’s hope for a new beginning in the context of the shofar’s call, while “Versa Go!” takes the Day of Atonement as a paradigm for the speaker’s entire way of being: “I know I’m no carnival / I’m the drive away / on a Jewish holiday / from a sorrowful, ancient calendar / a 24-hour fast.” Elsewhere, too, allusions to Jewishness quietly elevate mundane moments. In the therapy recap scene on “Later at The Loon,” the narrator isn’t consuming just steak, but a treyf pairing: “swallow with whole milk / I can tell it makes you sick.” And in the opening lines of “Brand New,” while the narrator’s partner “watch[es] Bachelorette in bed,” he “smokes about the exile,” and later confesses that he’s become “a stranger in this strange land.”
The two registers—the sacred and the quotidian—collide most subtly and powerfully on the album’s loveliest song, “Atreyu.” The opening line recasts the verse from Song of Songs traditionally used in Jewish wedding vows, seemingly to evoke a bygone era of romance: “I’m yours, you’re mine.” But it soon becomes clear that the song is something else entirely—a gesture of comfort for the narrator’s dog, an unwitting victim of human separation. “You are my only ride or die / I’ll always be right by your side,” Wolf murmurs, each syllable achingly tender. And when the chorus comes, a simple promise resounds as a mythic image of wandering and arrival: “I’ll take you / I’ll walk you home.”
Aparna Gopalan (news editor): In the past year, it has been hard to relax and harder to laugh, but Nida Manzoor’s comedy has been a reliable exception. When I experienced her martial-arts-meets-Bollywood-meets-bildungsroman film Polite Society, I was captivated by Manzoor’s wild imagination, the freshness of her writing, and the emotional heft of her extremely silly characters. So I watched the only other thing she has made so far: her debut Channel 4/Peacock show We Are Lady Parts, which follows a very angsty punk band made up of five very British Muslim women.
This premise alone may have been able to carry the show, but Manzoor does not rest on it, instead using all the filmmaking tools at her disposal to guarantee that we laugh ourselves to tears: a voiceover done right; magical realist flights of fancy; and some of the funniest songs you’ll ever hear, including bangers like “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister but Me” and “Voldemort Under My Headscarf.” Manzoor’s ragtag assemblage of women is likewise hilariously sketched. Through the eyes of protagonist Amina—a microbiology PhD student who is on the hunt for a good Muslim husband while secretly in love with Don McLean—we meet Saira, the band’s badass leader who worships at the altar of punk and works in a butcher’s shop; Ayesha, the closeted lesbian drummer who drives Ubers for a living; Bisma, who is raising a kid on the proceeds from zines such as “The Killing Period: Apocalypse Vag,” and Momtaz, the band’s agent with a day job selling cheap lingerie to elderly aunties.
But while these irreverent characterizations are very funny, at no point does We Are Lady Parts encourage us to treat the band members flippantly. Quite the opposite: Rarely does one meet women drawn this lovingly and carefully, and I have never seen Muslim women in particular afforded full inner lives in such a natural way, laden with the complexities of identity without suffocating under them. We see Amina contending with the many joyful flavors of haram, be that punk music or the desire to make out with a dreamy crush; Bisma wrestling with what covering up her dreadlocks with a hijab means for her as a Black Muslim woman; Ayesha agonizing over her white girlfriend’s insistence that coming out of the closet is the only healthy way to be queer; and Taz and Saira beefing over how to successfully cloak Lady Parts in a “fun Muslim” aesthetic without selling out. Through these characters’ journeys, Mazdoor is able to take on the big questions: the vexed terrain in which Muslim women’s agency is shaped, the many silences marginalized creators are forced to endure to succeed under capitalism, and the evergreen puzzle of whether winning ‘a seat at the table’ is, ultimately, a blessing or a curse. This show, however, is unequivocally a blessing; it makes you laugh, cry, think, and squirm, sometimes all at once. So don’t walk to watch We Are Lady Parts. Run.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Until I watched Jon Ornoy’s Lost in the Shuffle, I had spent precisely zero minutes of my 72-year life thinking about the deck of cards. Now, thanks to this utterly wonderful new documentary, I am certain to spend hours annoying friends and family with fun facts about this curious object—and the historical revelation that Canadian magician Shawn Farquhar, the star of the film, believes to be hiding in plain sight within it.
Lost in the Shuffle explains the fascinating history of the deck, from its origins in China to its development in the West—with the first mass production occurring in the French city of Rouen—and its many modifications over the centuries. But the film is, first and foremost, a tribute to the magicians who manipulate the cards. It features an international cohort of performers, all of them wonderful raconteurs who regale us with the sources of their lifelong obsession, what magic means to them, and their favorite “plot,” or trick. A magician from England, who says the deck saved his life, ventures that our reactions to magic say everything there is to know about us, and explains that card tricks are all based on the notion of bringing order out of chaos; one from Texas, who is blind, claims he was told by a neuroscientist that he has the most highly developed tactile sense in the world—and after seeing him work the cards, who are we to doubt him? The tricks the cast performs are remarkable, and Farquhar incorporates elements of all of them into the plot that ends the film, when he solves the mystery he believes to be raised by the standard deck: the circumstances of the 15th-century death of King Charles VIII of France.
The standard story is that the monarch died after bonking his head on a doorway. But Farquhar marshals evidence drawn from the faces of the cards to argue that he was actually murdered by his wife, Anne of Brittany. His close readings of the images are pretty stunning. Did you ever notice, for instance, that the Queen of Spades faces in the opposite direction as all the other queens? Or that the King of Hearts has two sets of arms, one of which seems to be stabbing him in the head? Now look at his sleeves—they don’t all have the same pattern. In fact, the stabbing arms (at the top and bottom of the card) have the same cuffs as the Queen of Spades. Is Fardquhar’s theory plausible? Who knows! Regardless, you will thoroughly enjoy hearing him make the case and learning about all these minor details. (And as an aficionado of French history, I can’t help but love a film that quotes and doubts the writings of the 15th-century French chronicler Philippe de Commines.) No film you see this year will surprise and delight you like this one—and after watching it, a deck of cards will never be the same.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Diana Varenik (director of circulation): Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! had been on my reading list for months. But between the ongoing genocide in Gaza and a recent personal loss, I felt I didn’t have it in me to read a book about death. Last week I finally did, and I’m here to tell you what others already have: it’s high-octane, achingly rich, funny and devastating—and more relevant than ever in the face of mounting existential dread and sadness.
The novel follows Cyrus Shams, a twenty-something orphan, poet, and recovering alcoholic who is obsessed with martyrs–a fixation which, ironically, is the only thing keeping him alive. This obsession with martyrs stems from his own tenuous attachment to life, but also represents an attempt to make sense of the death that circumscribes his family’s story: his mother, Roya, killed when her commercial Iran Air flight is shot down by a US Navy Warship; his father, Ali, who stays alive just long enough to see Cyrus out of the house; Uncle Arash, whose service in the Gulf War saw him riding through battlefields nightly outfitted as the “angel of death,” visiting dying soldiers to entice them away from suicide; and Orkideh, an artist whose final installation is to die, publicly, at the Brooklyn Museum.
The pervasiveness of death elicits many different reactions among the characters: it numbs his late father, unravels his uncle’s sanity, and prompts bitter resignation in Orkideh, who reflects that “it seems very American to expect grief to change something…Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.” For Cyrus, the loss manifests as various afflictions–chronic insomnia, bedwetting, and addiction. One of his many coping mechanisms is a game he plays to help himself fall asleep, visualizing scenes between the dead and fictional characters or celebrities. We see his late father sharing a blunt with the poet Rumi, his mother having tea with Lisa Simpson, Orkideh and Donald Trump shopping for original works of classic art at a suburban mall. Indeed, part of the novel’s finesse comes from its unrelenting humor, which is a welcome complement to the crushing storyline.
In the midst of this mass death–casual, senseless, numeric–Martyr! grapples with how we grieve for the casualties of empire, whether they are our own, or whether they are not. Cyrus tries desperately to construct a definition of martyrdom that gives meaning to his mother’s death–the difference between 289 and 290 people killed on Iran Air flight 655, which he understands is “meaningless at the level of empire.” In an interview with AnOther Magazine, Akbar draws the obvious parallel: “When you read that 11,500 children have been murdered in Gaza, that is a pulverisingly large number. But if it was 11,501 or 11,499, I can’t qualitatively or emotionally comprehend that difference in value. Whereas narrative can return that granularity.” To Cyrus, that difference is a whole world, and it might be this insistence on radical specificity that makes Martyr! so forceful.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Jacques Rozier, the subject of a retrospective starting next week at Lincoln Center, was the great cineaste maudit of the French New Wave. Of the same generation of directors as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol, all quite prolific, he only made five feature films over the course of a 40-year career. Plagued by a variety of problems—from organizational problems to difficulties with financing his films and holding casts together—Rozier produced a movie a decade starting with Adieu Philippine in 1962 and ending with Fifi Martingale in 2001, leaving 22 fallow years until his death. This modest output helped keep him from widespread recognition. But now that his films, which have seldom been shown in the US, have been restored and are being distributed by Janus Films, we can count on them soon showing not just in New York, but at art houses and museums across the country, and eventually through the Criterion Collection.
Rozier’s favored theme was vacation: the instincts it unleashes, its pleasures and longueurs. On holiday, he understood, relationships are made and fall apart, friendships are tested, and good and bad tendencies are exposed as people are freed from the constraints of work life. In his films, young men are constantly trying to pick up young women, and the women know just how to fend off unwelcome advances. (In this regard, Rozier’s oeuvre is very French.) His is a cinema of sunshine and movement; the characters are always on the go, whether in cars or on trains, boats, or motor scooters. Like all the New Wave filmmakers, Rozier claimed the influence of great American films—in his case, screwball comedies, particularly of the Marx Brothers. He was not always successful in these homages, but when he was, as in Adieu Philippine and Maine-Ocean Express (1985), he approached genius.
Adieu Philippine in particular is not to be missed. It’s a joy from its first minute to its last—a movie so bright you almost need sunglasses to watch it, in which the non-professional cast brilliantly plays exactly what they are: beautiful young people looking to enjoy themselves. The film takes place at the height of the Algerian War, and the protagonist’s imminent call-up to the army hangs over him, but ultimately nothing can dim the sun in this magnificent film. While this is his best, all of the features are worth seeing, with the exception of Fifi Martingale, which was never released; Rozier said this was because the distributor went bust, yet one wonders if it wasn’t because the film is unwatchable. The less said about it the better. In addition to the main attractions, I also recommend the short film program, which includes Blue Jeans (1958)—made before Adieu Philippine and sharing much of the same spirit—and two excellent brief documentaries ’60 about the shooting of his friend Godard’s Contempt (1963), focusing on the phenomenon of Brigitte Bardot.
Rozier was the last of the great New Wave directors to die, surviving Godard by a year. If Godard made too many films, Rozier didn’t make enough. The loss was his, but also ours.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I keep imagining the moment when the idea occurred to the creators of the Jellicle Ball, a show at Manhattan’s Perelman Arts Center recreating queer ballroom culture a la Paris Is Burning, performed to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats: Wait . . . the Jellicle BALL . . . where they walk the . . . CAT-walk? We are going to make SO. MUCH. MONEY! Honestly, fair enough. Clever puns and double entendres abound in the show—just extended for the third time—which really rewards those familiar with both 1980s underground ball culture and the blockbuster Broadway musical from the same era. (Embarrassingly, my childhood love of musicals means I’m way more acquainted with the latter than the former, but whatever I forgot from Paris Is Burning, I’ve picked up in pop form from RuPaul’s Drag Race.)
Lloyd Webber famously resisted any deeper meaning for his show (“It’s about cats, Hal,” he famously said to a partner asking about the subtext), and that’s all well and good, but Jellicle Ball really benefits from the layers. You can tell that the all-Black and -Latinx cast is a mix of musical theater kids and people from the ball scene, and they’ve also made special effort to bring in some ball elders like Junior LaBeija, playing Gus the Theatre Cat, and DJ Capital Kaos, who unfortunately doesn’t do much; he remixed all the music and then Lloyd Webber said no—they had to do it faithfully or no dice.
It really shouldn’t work with the music being what it is—can you really duckwalk to “Magical Mister Mistoffelees”? Turns out you . . . can?! What makes it work is the recharacterization of the beloved Cats characters: McCavity is a fabulous couture thief, the Rum Tum Tugger serves Pretty Boy Realness, Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer are outer borough brats, Grizabella the Glamor Cat is an old Face Queen and house Mother fallen on hard times, and the Magical Mister Mistoffelees is a show-stopping supermodel ball queen. Does it feel sort of weird pretending to be at a ball—that is, mustering a big response to catwalk interactions that have been meticulously planned in advance amid an audience half composed of old Midwestern white people? Yes. And I admittedly wasn’t in the mood walking into the theater to hoot and stand and clap on cue. All that said, I’m glad I saw it. I actually felt sort of moved when the cast recites the “The Naming of Cats” (recall that all of the lyrics are T.S. Eliot poems)—about each cat’s secret, extravagant name, known to themself if not to their human companions—in this queer context. Perhaps Eliot really was a queen.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): If I can’t exactly recommend Miranda July’s All Fours—her much-heralded “perimenopause novel”—what I can recommend is talking about it with your friends. Nominally about middle age, the novel follows a 45-year-old artist who leaves her husband and child for a solo cross-country road trip but ends up spending three weeks in a motel room half an hour from home having a meet-cute and then an all-consuming affair with a hot and hung 31-year-old. With a little ingenuity, a spare $20K, and a spouse willing to open up the relationship, the book seems to promise, your creative and erotic dreams can come true.
When I showed up in Chicago with the novel in my hand, one friend explained to his wife, “It’s Fifty Shades of Gray for the cultural elite.” He hadn’t read the book but was already familiar with an intimate, much-discussed scene involving a tampon. Another friend said the plot sounded suspiciously like Eat, Pray, Love: a well-resourced white woman takes a journey to an exotic place (here, a working-class suburb) to find herself. A third texted that he’d loved it because “She has a journey of experience at the age when you feel like nothing can happen for the first time anymore.” (The narrator also sleeps with the 31-year-old’s first-ever lover, a woman old enough to be his mother.) “You = married people with kids,” I had to retort.
The truth is that I found the book depressing. July is a masterful storyteller with a deliciously particular sensibility—for her narrator, the future is “another lover, reaching backward in time to cup my balls,” such that “instead of dangling in the present I was held […] and aroused by my never-ending preparations.” But I felt like the author of this psychological breakdown wasn’t quite aware of its gravity, instead pitching her narrator’s despair, again and again, as a quirky joke. When I shared my dismay with a friend, he answered, “It’s The Yellow Wallpaper for 2024,” a comparison made all the more apt for the attention given the Victorian-era wallpaper in the motel room where we spend the bulk of the story. I agreed. In July’s hands, today’s straight white woman is queer, non-monogamous, and still miserable.
The book I’ve actually been recommending to friends all year also happens to be about so-called women’s desire. Laura’s Desires, however, has no allegiance to contemporary fiction’s relentlessly plotted variations on the American dream. Laura Henriksen’s book consists of two long poem-essays, one on dreams and the other—harder to describe—loosely oriented around Variety, Bette Gordon’s 1983 film about a fictionalized version of New York City’s Variety Photoplays porn theater. Part of the excitement of reading poetry that flirts with prose is the way that, within lines and stanzas, images and ideas press themselves against one another. This feels, I think, something like desire and something like sex, a topic of interest and experience that moves through Henriksen’s book in surprising and pleasurable ways. In one instance, a discussion of Gordon’s earlier film Anybody’s Woman opens into a discussion of feminist theory (is it possible that “narrative functions to fix the objectified image of a woman within a male fantasy”?). Soon enough, we’re talking about the categories of “good girl” and “bad girl,” and then we’re reading Simone Weil.
Maybe I appreciate Laura’s Desires so much because it dwells not in the short-lived freedoms of the road trip but in the “kind of freedom we could pursue for each other in waking life.” Maybe because it plumbs the many ways “It is not possible / to be at home in this world, and there’s / nowhere else to go.” Maybe because it takes this position not as a problem to be undone or a reason to flee, but as an opportunity to delight in what life actually is.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Back in May, I extolled the virtues of some of the great Parisian cemeteries, Père Lachaise and Montparnasse. But New York has burial grounds just as full of the fascinating dead. Any lover of Jewish history, literature, or culture owes themselves a trip to, of all damn places, Glendale, Queens, which I recently visited with former Jewish Currents editor Larry Bush. There, in Machpelah Cemetery, Mount Judah Cemetery, and especially Mount Carmel Cemetery, you’ll traverse 20th-century American Jewish history. Entertainers, writers, revolutionaries, martyrs, labor organizers, politicians, gangsters—the full gamut of Jewish life, the glory and the tragedy, can be found in this corner of New York just yards away from the Jackie Robinson Parkway.
The most easily accessible of them—at least by car; on the subway, the M, J, and Z will get you there—is Machpelah Cemetery. As soon as you pull into the front gate on Cypress Hills Street, there before you is the monument marking the plot of Harry Houdini and his family. A large sculpture of a weeping woman leans against the broad stone bearing both this name and Weiss, his real last name, and above them a bust of the great escape artist, one of the most famous Jews in American history; he’s joined by his wife, his rabbi father, and his brother Hardeen, who was also a magician. (By the way, Houdini didn’t die from a punch to the stomach, as is commonly believed. He died more than a week after the punch from a ruptured appendix, but correlation is not causation.) Then you can travel a few minutes to Mount Judah, for the stone bearing the name Andrew Goodman—of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the three civil rights activists murdered by the KKK during Freedom Summer. Fittingly, the stone is decorated by a number of hands reaching out toward one another.
Mount Carmel, back across the road from Machpelah, is where you’ll hit the jackpot. (Stop in the office and ask for the locations of some of these people so you can easily find them.) Not far from the gate are the stone markings the remains of Leo Max Frank—the most well-known Jewish victim of lynching in America, killed by a Georgia mob fired up by the Populist leader Tom Watson—and the great progressive congresswoman Bella Abzug. Further in you can find mobster Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, who died mysteriously after falling or being pushed from a hotel window in Coney Island, where he was being hidden after he squealed to the DA on his fellow members of the criminal gang Murder, Inc. In the second and third sections of the cemetery you’ll come upon the amazing Otto “Abbadabba” Biederman, the mathematical genius who worked with gangster Dutch Schultz in the numbers racket. Comedian Henny Youngman has a modest stone, which notes that he was the husband of Sadie, the woman of whom he famously quipped, “Take my wife—please.” And then there’s Mendel Beilis, described on his stone as “martyr,” who was tried for blood libel in Russia. Exonerated, he later moved to America.
Most moving for me was the section for members of the Workmen’s Circle. Here, lined up along the road, are the graves of the heroes of Yiddish labor and literature: the revered writer Sholem Aleichem; poet Morris Rosenfeld; Saul Yanovsky, anarchist and editor of the movement’s paper the Fraye Arbiter Shtime; Aaron Samuel Liebermann, whose stone declares him the “founder of Jewish socialism” (in Yiddish, of course); Abraham Cahan, editor of the Forverts; Socialist Party congressman Meyer London; and Bund leader Szmul Zygielbojm, who committed suicide in 1943 to draw attention to the murder of European Jewry. I found the graves of these men inexpressibly sad. All of them are three times dead—not only are they themselves deceased, but so is the cause they fought for and the language they used in that fight. To most visitors many of these stones, with nary a word in English, are now totally illegible.
Cynthia Friedman (managing director): As soon as I read Ziwe’s New Yorker essay about finding out that her feet are on Wikifeet—and rated only as “okay”—I knew I wanted to read her book of essays, Black Friend. Across the collection, the comedian and writer expertly wields her distinctive humor and directness—which propelled her into the mainstream with her Instagram Live interviews asking celebrities if they’re racist—to guide readers through her personal experiences and existential reflections on Blackness in America.
In the eponymous essay, “how many black friends do you have,” Ziwe observes that nearly every white celebrity responds that they have “four or five” Black friends. The bizarre recurrence of this exact answer, she concludes, is a golden mean that allows white liberals to not appear racist. If someone says that they have three Black friends or fewer, they will elicit criticism or raised eyebrows for living a segregated life; if they answer with a specific number higher than five (imagine, “I have nine Black friends”) then the question becomes a more concerning one: why are you counting your Black friends? Of course, the question is a trap, and she talks about why famous people still feel compelled to sit for interviews even while knowing of her approach.
Ziwe’s essays cover topics like pet adoption, affirmative action, imposter syndrome, and reality TV. Her comedy always hits, which speaks to her knowledge of the issues she writes about and the people she’s talking to. (The footnotes are the best part. When she writes about the widespread revelations of famous people wearing blackface—from “Canada’s sexiest prime minister, [REDACTED], to America’s sweetheart [REDACTED]”—she includes a footnote: “This would explain why my shade of Fenty is always sold out.”)
And yet, underneath these stories, she is writing about the more profound: safety and risk, class and labor, belonging and loneliness. While the book is fun to read, something sad tugged at me: It harkens back to the height of racial justice uprisings and the Movement for Black Lives organizing, when the United States seemed to be collectively consumed with reckoning with our history of racial oppression and taking steps towards inculcating anti-racist practices at an institutional level. Since then, the horizon of possibility has narrowed dramatically, even as many continue to agitate for justice, improved conditions, and a more hopeful future. I don’t know if Ziwe would identify herself as being on the front lines of that fight, but her work can arm readers with nuanced perspectives, insights, or at least a laugh.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Before you go: Our friends at the New Jewish Culture Fellowship are accepting applications until August 5th. Apply now!
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Rehearsal spaces make great dramatic settings. From the bare Broadway stage of A Chorus Line to the dingy community hall of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, auditions and acting exercises can reveal the participants’ unspoken feelings, expose the dynamics of relationships, and encourage self-reflection. Such drama is even more heightened when the setting typically requires its inhabitants to keep their guards up, which is why theater-in-prison stories are practically a genre of their own.
One of the central questions that animates this genre is what value to attribute to art-making in the demeaning conditions of imprisonment. Promo for the 2005 documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars, proclaimed “the power of art to heal and redeem–in a place where the very act of participation in theatre is a human triumph and a means of personal liberation.” Jack Hitt’s classic radio piece, “Act V,” for This American Life, which follows men incarcerated at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center as they rehearse and stage Hamlet takes a more skeptical view, while the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, chronicling a production of Julius Caesar in a maximum-security prison in Rome, seems downright cynical about the possibility of rehabilitation through drama club.
The riveting new movie, Sing Sing, which will be released nationally in August, leans toward a redemption narrative, and with good reason: it is produced by and based on the work of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which provides programs in theater, writing, dance, music, and visual arts at eight prisons in New York State; the recidivism rate for its alumni is 3 percent, compared to a 60 percent national average. But the movie, directed by Greg Kewdar, smartly avoids sentimental hyperbole by including, for instance, a member of the ensemble who can’t access the memory of a happy place during an acting exercise. When one participant says that their workshop helps them “become human again,” it’s clear that he is referring to the dehumanizing carceral system, not the (undisclosed) criminal act that put any of them in high-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the first place.
Unlike most theater-in-prison movies, Sing Sing is a feature film. It’s based on a real RTA project, a hilarious 2005 time-traveling, hodge-podge production, “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code,” that mashes up ancient Egyptians, pirates, Freddy Krueger, and Hamlet. While the film employs several professional actors—blazing Colman Domingo in one of two central roles—most of the cast is made up of RTA alums formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing (and they all have financial equity in the film). One of them, Clarence Maclin, in a knockout debut, plays a version of his younger self, Domingo’s formidable foil. The central plot traces their growing friendship, from rivalry to wary curiosity to appreciation to love, as Domingo’s character’s long-held faith in the promise of the theater work falters in the face of the system’s callousness, and Maclin’s gradually takes hold.
Even in the rehearsal room, where they find some reprieve from the cell searches and clanging gates that punctuate most of their time, these aspiring Hamlets can’t ever count themselves kings of infinite space, as the taunting whistles of MetroNorth trains zooming along nearby tracks remind them. But they do find—they create—a rare place for empathy and imagination, and it invites our own.
Zelda Gamson (member of JC council): As a child growing up in Mandatory Palestine, Linda Dittmar would take trips in her parents’ car, bask in the comfort of a hotel, and spend the summer months with her grandmother in the cool hills of Jerusalem. These vivid memories of her childhood were eventually overridden by the 1948 war, its aftermath, and her move to the United States. It was on a visit back to Israel to search for lost Palestinian villages that these memories came flooding back, and became the heart of her new book, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and The Claims of Belonging (2023).
Tracing Homelands recounts trips Dittmar took with her partner, Deborah Bright, an American landscape photographer who specializes in bleak and unpeopled images. In the ’90s, Bright suggested that they look for lost Palestinian villages in Israel, but it took Dittmar over a decade to agree to the idea. In 2005, when they were driving around the countryside, Bright stopped to take one of her many photographs (some of which appear in the book) and beckoned Dittmar out of the car to see a collection of rocks scattered in a pine forest. Dittmar resisted at first but eventually walked over to Bright, who held up a rock that had been chiseled. Dittmar knew then that they were not just rocks. They had likely belonged to a Palestinian house. But from which village?
After that first encounter, Dittmar and Bright decided to pool their investigative skills to answer that question. With help from Palestinian and Israeli collectors and archivists, Dittmar and Bright assembled everything they could get their hands on—maps, photos, lists, land surveys, exhibitions, letters, government documents—in order to find “Palestine in Israel.” Their annual visits from 2005 to 2008 brought them face to face with the Nakba, and the destruction and subsequent erasure of around 450 Palestinian villages that it entailed. The book painstakingly documents Israel’s process of appropriating and then renaming Palestinian villages in Beisan (Beit Shean), Al-Lydda (Lod), Qaysaria (Caesarea), Saffuriya (Tzippori), Ayn Khud (Ein Hod), Bir’im (Baram). Some places were turned into housing or tourist sites, and others were simply dismantled, their remains buried or scattered in fields and forests.
As they traverse what political scientist Meron Benvenisti calls the “tortured landscape of my homeland,” Dittmar’s “troubled internal landscape” of memories resurfaces: the villagers who used to grow wheat in the field adjacent to her house, the “sweetness” of visits with Palestinian neighbors near her grandmother in Beit HaKerem, her schoolgirl patriotism during the 1948 war, and adolescent disappointment at being treated like a girl in the army. Referring to a veteran soldier, who took part in the massacre at Deir Yassin during the Nakba, she writes that “Amos’s refusal to know the past belongs to all us Israelis…It’s safer to remain silent…to refuse to talk, to be afraid to talk, to not know how to talk, or to forget to talk—even when we inwardly scream.” Dittmar’s beautiful and complex book, at once a love letter to and mournful indictment of the country of her childhood, stands as a brave exception to this culture of silence.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): “The art world was one big melting pot of hypocrisy and contradictions.” This is the conclusion drawn by Bianca Bosker in her entertaining and frightening book Get the Picture, a deep dive into this world. (Because my wife is an artist, I came to Bosker’s book already having some experience of the sheer miserableness of what goes on behind the works hung on the walls.) As she did in her previous book on wine aficionados, Cork Dork, Bosker acts as a kind of George Plimpton, who understood that the best way to understand a world is to inhabit it, learn its language and mores, and experience it in all its dailiness. For his singular sports writing, Plimpton played hockey, baseball, and football with professionals. Bosker, for her part, interns at a gallery setting up exhibitions, sells works for another at an art fair, and stands guard at the Guggenheim. Along the way, she learns that it’s not just the past that’s a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote; gallerists, receptionists, and museum guards can all attest that in the world of art, too, they “do things differently there.”
Bosker begins at the only gallery that responded to her dozens of inquiries. (Even at the small spot in Brooklyn that takes her on, the owner considers her the enemy because she’s a journalist.) The scales quickly fall from her eyes. The shallowness, the pettiness, the sheer rottenness of it all smack her in the face; the importance of looking and sounding just right are stressed above any real knowledge of art. Hatred of the non-art-buying public is a central element. The gallery is on the second floor, and she soon learns that this is because a ground-floor gallery is known to attract foot traffic from those looking to freeload, while serious people—i.e., those who will spend money—climb the stairs. The hostility of this sphere is cultivated: At one gallery, the receptionists are trained to answer the phone with the last syllable of its name on a descending note, just to project negativity. As for the art itself, Bosker sees again and again that while reputations are sometimes based on talent, they more often correlate to contacts—being in the right places with the right people at the right time.
After her stint at the art fair, she ends her voyage at the Guggenheim, where she stands for hours watching and protecting the art. Bosker tells us that the average time visitors spend in front of a painting in a museum is 17 seconds, with most of it spent reading the explanatory panels, so in order to force people to look at the work itself rather than the words describing what is right before them, she takes to standing in front of the placards. (I’ve now begun doing my own observations of viewing practices, and have concluded that the real average is far lower.) Inspired by her experience, Bosker offers some sage advice: Don’t go through a museum looking at everything, and instead stand for minutes or hours before each work. Ignore the panels and immerse yourself in the work. Understand it. Question it. And after reading Get the Picture, be grateful that you love art but don’t live off it.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
David Klion (contributing editor): The New York Intellectuals—a heavily Jewish scene, formed around Cold War liberalism and high modernist literary tastes, that profoundly shaped everything from art criticism to foreign policy—have both generated and received a ton of press in the decades since their postwar peak. Their lingering influence over our contemporary political discourse runs from left-wing publications like Dissent and The New York Review of Books to right-wing publications like Commentary and Tablet. Neoconservatism, the subject of my ongoing book project, essentially began as a dissident branch of the New York Intellectuals. Jewish Currents, though it has its earliest roots in the Moscow-aligned Communist Party that the New York Intellectuals abhorred, nonetheless owes an immense debt to the forms of argumentation they pioneered.
It can be hard to find a fresh angle on such a well-trodden topic, but Ronnie Grinberg, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, has succeeded with Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, published earlier this year. A rare work of academic history with crossover appeal to more mainstream readers, Write Like a Man is also the first book to give full attention to the fraught gender dynamics that shaped the New York Intellectuals. Most of the group was male, defined by names like Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe. Grinberg not only gives fair due to the most prominent women in the group—chiefly Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter—she also ingeniously demonstrates how gender shaped the actual writing produced by both male and female New York Intellectuals.
The title comes from a killer 1963 quote from NYRB co-founder Jason Epstein: “With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.” To Grinberg, “writing like a man” refers to a mode of rigorous, swaggering, aggressive argumentation rooted in the legendary cafeteria alcoves of then all-male City College, where many of the future New York Intellectuals spent the 1930s engaged in verbal duels with Stalinists. It’s a style still recognizable today, and Grinberg portrays it as a means of assimilation for the sons of poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants trying to assert their masculinity in an America that stereotyped Jews as meek and effeminate. Grinberg’s female subjects, as the Epstein line suggests, held their own in the group because they were able to master this style—though as Grinberg also shows, the women in the scene who came from different backgrounds (either as gentiles or, in Arendt’s case, as a German Jewish emigre with formidable Old World academic credentials) received more deference from their male peers than the shtetl-descended women who were often treated simply as wives.
Diana Trilling, who along with Decter was one of the few representatives of the latter type who gradually asserted her own reputation as a public intellectual, is Grinberg’s most compelling character and something of a test case for her argument. Resented and often dismissed by the men and women of the group alike, and not always without reason, Diana Trilling’s most enduring legacy might be as an astute critic of her own social milieu.
Whether or not one is fully persuaded by Grinberg’s definition of masculine prose, Write Like a Man is among the most enjoyable and impressively researched books on its subject, brimming with colorful anecdotes and unexpected insights on every page. Grinberg has both redefined and reignited interest in the New York Intellectuals, and I look forward to citing her often.
Cynthia Friedman (managing director): If you are in New York City before July 28th, I highly recommend that you see the Met’s exhibit on The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. The show collates a breathtaking variety of art to explore how Black artists in Harlem, then at the vanguard of creative production, depicted different areas of life during the political and cultural upheavals of the first half of the 20th century. The exhibit rooms—each themed on a broad subject—provide nuanced framing that is instructive in guiding the viewer through the breadth of work included.
In the room about family and society, the curators point out the artists’ portrayal of elders with dignity and interiority, in contrast to popular national media depictions; the presence of queer networks; and the complex coexistence of the radical fight for racial justice alongside the community’s push for assimilation and conservative social values. In another set of works dedicated to artistic freedom, the curators insist on the importance of spaces and mentors—often in historically Black colleges and universities—that supported Black artists in creating nonfigural art, such as landscapes and still life paintings, in defiance of societal expectations for their work to consistently be overtly political.
As I walked through the different rooms, I began to recognize the names and distinctive styles of the artists. In some of his portraits—including of writer and philosopher Alain Leroy Locke and renowned civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois—Winold Reiss used pastel to mix detailed realism with minimalist sketch. Archibald J. Motley, Jr. painted social scenes, such as jazz clubs, picnics, and the streets of Chicago and Paris, with dynamic movement and smooth, vivid colors. Laura Wheeler Waring’s portraits of young women, such as “Girl in a Green Cap,” are done with soft brush strokes that invite a sense of intimacy; the same is true of a still life of roses, set on a table in a transparent vase. William H. Johnson, whose portraits and scenes unfurl boldly along one flat plane, invites the eye to linger on each detail. This is just a small fraction of the array of techniques and themes on display, and it doesn’t capture the sense of significance and beauty in wandering through the comprehensive whole. For that experience, I recommend seeing for yourself.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is enjoying something of a moment. While their most famous work, The Red Shoes (1948), has been popular since it premiered, many of their lesser-known films have been re-released over the past couple of years and garnering more attention. For instance, The Small Back Room (1949), a study of a tormented explosives expert, is currently showing at Film Forum in a new restoration. Unlike their best-known movies, it features all the elements of a postwar film noir—the dark shading of both the cinematography and the characters’ actions. (If you miss its theatrical showing, you can watch it on the invaluable Criterion Channel, along with several of their other films.) The duo’s entire oeuvre is also the subject of a fascinating new film essay, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. Though directed by David Hinton, it’s really the work of Martin Scorsese, who has played an enormously important role in promoting the pair. Indeed, Made in England consists of Scorsese sitting center-screen and discussing clips from every film in the Powell-Pressburg canon with great insight and enthusiasm.
They were, in many ways, an unlikely couple. Powell, who was born in England, started working in film as a young man, taking on various roles for big-budget silent spectacles shot in France, until he was promoted to direct British films called “quota quickies”—cheap movies produced to fulfill the requirement that a certain percentage of films shown in Britain were made by native filmmakers in native studios. After a few years of this he met Pressburger, a Hungarian who had worked as a screenwriter in Germany until forced to flee when Hitler assumed power; he escaped to France, and then to England. Their earliest films, shot during the war, were mainly expressions of love for Britain, its people and its ways. The greatest of these works—and one that Scorsese explains influenced his own filmmaking—was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). Its epic length belies its movingly personal story of friendship and love across a lifetime.
Once the war ended, they needed to move beyond propaganda films, and they truly hit their stride with The Red Shoes—a film that, as unlikely as it might sound, Scorsese tells us influenced the making of his movie Raging Bull (1980); apparently Scorsese considered De Niro’s boxing moves to be the counterpart of the dance that dominates The Red Shoes. Scorsese is especially good on films like Black Narcissus (1947), the team’s only film based on an outside source (Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel of the same name). He points out the brilliant and subdued use of color, as well as the influence of great painters on its palette.
While Made in England is a gift to fans of the works it considers, it can be appreciated even by those not familiar with them. Scorsese gives a master class in how to watch a film, and how every choice made by a director matters. A hardened auteurist, Scorsese is a believer in the director as the sole author of a film, even if here he relents a bit by granting Pressburger—primarily a screenwriter—some agency. As a result, he fails to discuss the films’ fabulous ensemble casting and give proper attention to the actors who appear and reappear, like the great Anton Walbrook. But Made in England can be forgiven for this. It is a warm and intelligent tribute to two masters of the seventh art.
***
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
