Shabbat
Reading List
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.
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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.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Sorry/Not Sorry, a new documentary by Cara Mones and Caroline Suh, is an examination of the Louis C.K. Affair. The comedian’s career famously came crashing down in 2017, when The New York Times reported on accusations of sexual misconduct from five women, including two young comedians who said that he had masturbated in their presence after inviting them to his hotel room. The facts of the case are not in question, since C.K. fessed up and issued a public apology. But, this film asks, how sincere was the apology? And what is the correct penalty? Is eternal banishment too much, or just right?
In the aftermath of the revelations about C.K., a film he’d written and directed was shelved and shows were canceled; he claims he lost $35 million. During his time in the desert, he was horribly ill-served by some of his defenders—most notably Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle, both of whom mocked his victims. And nine months later he was back, performing in venues large and small, though now he had to personally shell out the rental fees for the big ones like Madison Square Garden. Sorry/Not Sorry features footage of him joking onstage about his hiatus, and we’re supposed to find him callous—but he’s a comedian, and isn’t that what comedians do? Perhaps the most honest response to C.K.’s comeback in the film is that of a young man about to see him at the Garden: “We all allow ourselves a certain amount of hypocrisy, and this is mine.”
Along with the question of how long a sinner ought to spend in purgatory, there is the quandary of what to do with his prior existence. Sorry/Not Sorry uses old clips to demonstrate that C.K.’s proclivities were a secret to no one—that masturbation was the core of his sexuality is amply demonstrated even by a not especially careful examination of his work on the stage and on his TV shows. So should his oeuvre now be discarded? Most of it has been removed from streaming services: His FX show Louie, for instance, can now only be found on the comedian’s website, where you have to pay to watch it (which I did). Just as I recalled, it’s a brilliant series, in which the difficulty of relationships, of parenting, of confronting our personal devils is addressed with amazing insight and admirable frankness. The self-loathing of men of a certain type—and the clumsiness and worse this leads to—have never been so clearly delineated; his dictum that “men are the worst thing that has happened to women” is borne out in almost every episode, as it has been in his life. (This was a series, after all, with an episode where C.K.’s avatar defends the practice of masturbation against the attacks of a beautiful Christian crusader—and ultimately retires to her hotel room bathroom to masturbate.) There’s no question about it: Knowing what we know now, the show is impossible to watch without a deeply queasy feeling.
Jacob Plitman (former publisher): For all the growing interest in labor organizing, there aren’t enough good books about it. Dr Jane McAlevey, who just passed away, wrote four. All four are characteristically savage, direct, and biting manifestos, ranging in form from memoir (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)), to academic study (No Shortcuts), to political roadmap (A Collective Bargain), to technical manual (Rules to Win By). Part of why, I think, there aren’t enough good books on organizing is that it is grinding, unpredictable, sometimes boring, and often hard to describe. When you’re organizing, everything is possible yet nothing feels under your control. Organizers haunt doorways where workers clock in. You have to try to look casual while speed-walking up to exhausted workers clocking out, and smile to try and make the whole thing slightly less awkward. You’re not a canvasser, but you are waving down strangers. You’re not a salesman, but you do want to discuss the matter of the workers’ health insurance. The goal, basically, is to meet a worker, strike up a conversation, and ten minutes later secure an invitation to their home. When you do manage to get a phone number, type it in and hit call immediately. If it doesn’t ring you know it’s fake. Don’t act weird. You’re the one coming off like a manic bible salesman; the worker is just trying to get home. Approach 15 workers a day in this manner for six days a week for two months and, if you’re lucky, you will start getting somewhere. Then the easy part is over.
Her main lesson is that you must not give up: Workers will empty their hearts to you, take on public roles, display astounding courage, and then won’t answer your phone calls. The boss will start “fighting back,” which literally means illegally harassing, disciplining, interrogating, surveilling, or maybe firing worker leaders. And at the next shift change, the sight of you will strike the bravest leaders mute. If your leaders get fired, you file lawsuits with the labor board. Eight months later, they will eventually win and get wages repaid. At that point, the leader may have been in a homeless shelter for weeks. It’s up to you to figure out how to tell them they won, because their cellphone got cut off a while ago.
In organizing work, bluntness is a virtue, and McAlevey was a hammer in a world of nails. She specialized in commandments:. You must build workers into a fighting organization, and teach them to wield that organization to extract the maximum from the employer. You must refuse convenient strategies that remove agency from the worker leaders, even when there are strong arguments for doing so. You must seek maximum participation from the worker unit even when that will make things complicated. You must struggle towards majority decision-making. You must get close to the workers, and stay close to them. You must win.
McAlevey’s voice—at turns drill sergeant, dreamer, historian, tactician—will endure. So must we. 18/10.
Carrie Shapiro (board of directors): It’s been almost 10 years now since I started taking the classes at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), a unique concept of seminar-style adult education that is taught at a sophisticated level by brilliant young academics on everything from Faulkner to Numbers Theory. The classes in New York City are held in Manhattan and Brooklyn, twenty or so people around a table in cultural spaces, backrooms of bars, or the BISR headquarters in Dumbo. And since Covid, there are plenty of courses taught over Zoom as well.
I normally get enough satisfaction from just reading BISR’s beautiful course catalog, perusing all these ideas without committing to anything. And then one class will connect perfectly to what I’ve been noodling alone in my mind. At present, that’s Suzy Schneider’s online class on risk, which could not be more relevant to my summer conversations on swimming in the ocean, heat waves, and elections. For those of us far from university days, our dinner conversations are fun and noisy, jumping from topic to topic, but generally pretty low on facts and theory. This is made up for by a BISR class, which involves hours of reading original sources and big thinkers followed by three hours of freewheeling and in-depth conversation with much younger people each week for a month. In the spring, I took Suzy’s class on the modern history of Palestine. Even though I’ve been immersed in this topic for years, I’ve never actually read the essential documents from the late Ottoman era through to the British Mandate documents and up to the best academic thinkers of today, such as Rashid Khalidi and Avi Shlaim. The course joins the long list of subjects that I’ve delved into over the past decade: the Frankfurt School, subways, psychoanalysis, monuments, non-profits, President Jackson, Robert Moses, William Morris, Primo Levi, Socrates. It has made the world so much bigger and understandable for me.
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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.
This week, we welcome Naomi Gordon-Loebl in her new role as the deputy publisher at Jewish Currents.
Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I first met Alessandra Lacorazza a few years ago when she directed my friend Julia Weldon’s music video, “Til the Crying Fades,” honoring the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. I remember her telling me that she was writing a film about the summers she spent with her father as a child. That film is finally out, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
In the Summers, which I saw last month at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows two sisters as they visit their loving, adventurous, and also flawed father in New Mexico every summer. The sisters are played by several actors who shift as the characters age; the father, Vicente, is played by René Pérez Joglar, who incredibly has never acted in his life—though he has spent quite a bit of time on stage as the Grammy-award winning musical artist Residente. The acting is one of the film’s several strengths; the intimacy, pain, and at times rage on screen is so tangible that it is hard to believe that these people were ever strangers to each other.
In the Summers is also visually stunning; the haunting landscape of Las Cruces is almost a character in and of itself, and the film is full of slow, artfully lit scenes whose emotional weight lingers. The image of Pérez Joglar’s shaking fingers, lighting a cigarette as he waits for his daughters, will live in my mind for a long time. But the biggest reason that In the Summers has stayed with me is that it is a portrait of human complexity. Vicente is the consummate fun, playful father; when he challenges his daughters to a hands-free spaghetti-eating contest, or teaches them to play pool at the local bar, there’s something almost pure and innocent about him. At other moments, he is cruel, callous, even terrifying, as is the case on one nighttime drive that I won’t spoil here. Lacorazza has said in interviews that she made the film for “children of complicated but beautiful parents,” and it feels as though the film embraces both versions of Vicente as wholly true, neither canceling out the other. It’s the kind of complexity, and even paradox—cruelty and innocence, intimacy and distance, love and harm—that, when words fail us, art gives us a way to understand.
Marc Jonathan Costello (art and design director): Marshall McLuhan’s decisive treatise on media has a long tail. Published in 1967, The Medium is the Massage has its Cold War anchors, but it still feels like it could have dropped on the eve of 2024. The book anticipates the seismic change brought on by our digital age—centering on mediated life, but ultimately discussing cybernetics and computing as well. The strategic misspelling of “message,” functioned within the new era McLuhan was theorizing. The misspelling gave the book a decisive something “off,” and operated to psychically fill the book with meaning, giving it a memetic quality. (Charli XCX is cashing in on precisely this memetic effect, using intentionally distorted and blurred typography from a cool Type Foundry in such a way that it just looks like condensed Arial. The move is impressive, and I expect at least 70% of our core audience are enjoying Brat summer.) Quieten Fiore’s editorial design is the perfect fit for McLuhan’s text: The book feels like a zine, composed of considered graphic layouts, each simultaneously a cultural referent and clip art. The work makes use of contrast to communicate confidence in its irony, accompanied with repeating thumbnail art, and strong yet self-aware modern typography. As the title suggests, the work of the author, editor, and designer blurs thanks to the new technologies which McLuhan, Fiore, and the producer, Jerome Agel clearly demonstrate.
There’s always something eerie about seeing the cultural and technological soothsayer’s prediction from the past reflected in the present. In the section titled “your neighborhood,” we see the arrival of the global village, a term analogous with globalization: “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all men.” Simultaneously, we see within that statement the conventional critique of social media. What is often missed is the bluntness of electric circuitry. The virtual global village lives in fiber optic cables and remote data centers, rendering affects, and assuring the smooth flow of supply chains with a complex series of zeros and ones.
In the section titled “your job,” McLuhan asks, “When this circuit learns your job, what will you do?” He’s a tad optimistic about the potential of this new regime to free labor from work. The creative industry is currently holding its breath about artificial intelligence (AI). A perverse anxiety flows across LinkedIn dot com, as well as the creative studios, mapping Soho and Dumbo. Some creative directors see the potential of AI—maybe, as McLuhan suggests, as a way to overcome being forced to “do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old,” or as a progression of the tendency of authorship to dissolve against the tide of technology. But for the rest, the stakes are more existential: Can taste really just be reduced to data points? I say that with a tinge of irony because the regime of zeros and ones already has more sinister consequences than making bad advertisements. McLuhan’s cold war foresight that “real, total war has become information war” aligns disturbingly well in our social media landscape constituted in a frictionless scroll of real and fake atrocities, customized to your silo. Likewise, algorithmically-generated kill lists in Gaza, executed by unmanned drones, show us the military version of making work at the intersection of art and technology, that McLuhan, concerned with nuclear winter, didn’t anticipate.
Perhaps McLuhan and Fiore have a debt to pay for their role in aligning counterculture to cybernetics, but their work reading the tea leaves, and ultimately acting on a collective intelligence, can’t be denied. McLuhan’s most prescient proposition is that the global village created by the market and its electronic circuits established a new figure of youth that flees its individualism, and is drawn to roles over goals or specialized jobs. He saw this in the growth of the counterculture and its rejection of a mass subject. We see the evolution of this pattern today in the rise of so many niche subcultures, driven by memetic language and attended to by parasocial relationships—each with their own evolving niche markets. Here we come full circle to our era. If we’re all just data points, it’s a losing game, and all our dystopian fears are probably true. The puke green background could be filled with whatever charli-meme generated type you want—it could be an atrocity, a scene from a porn, or your favorite recipe. It doesn’t matter. However, if we can see in McLuhan’s predictions what is yet incomplete—the potential of cracking open the tools of culture, of technology, and the self—then maybe we can see what is possible when we all have our fingers on the pulse.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The dreadful spectacle that is American politics today can be traced to many different moments in our nation’s past. Was it the ’60s and the reaction to the anti-Vietnam War movement, or perhaps the Goldwater candidacy? Was it McCarthy in the ’50s, or the isolationists and America Firsters of the ’30s and ’40s? Or should we seek the source further back still, in the Civil War era? After all, reading William Freehling’s magnificent two-volume opus on the secession crisis, The Road to Disunion, reveals that many then felt the same paranoia about federal designs on freedom that haunt us still. Or should we go even further back? If we read Freehling’s Prelude to Civil War—his history of the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833—we have to ask how much of our system’s rot is owed to John C. Calhoun.
John Ganz’s brilliant and compelling debut, When the Clock Broke, focuses mostly on more recent precedents for the present insanity. The book centers on the early 1990s and the policies, people, and ideas that exploded into prominence during those years. Some of the individuals discussed are more familiar or obvious than others; Ganz’s originality and intelligence is manifest in his ability to make us see that the cult of the Mafia boss John Gotti represented as important a cultural and even political inflection point as Rush Limbaugh, whom he also discusses. Little-known thinkers like the fascist-leaning Sam Francis and the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard are shown to be important and influential thinkers: To read Francis’s fulminations against modern culture and democracy and his advocacy of the cause of “middle-American radicals,” and Rothbard’s critique of government involvement in our lives as a form of tyranny, is to confront the politics of the modern Republican Party. Ganz gives a detailed recounting of the 1992 campaign of Ross Perot, in which an inchoate, incoherent rage at the political class found its perfect representative in a man who had no real program, demonstrated authoritarian tendencies in his professional dealings, and had nothing to boast of but a largely bogus reputation for campaigning to save POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War. Angry middle-class middle Americans needed no more than that to choose him to show their discontent.
The Gotti chapter, which also outlines the beginnings of Rudy Giuliani’s career, places the popularity of Gotti and of the fictional Corleones in a social context that explains not only their popularity, but a widespread sense of the degeneration of America. For the right, Ganz argues, “the famiglia in The Godfather stood for an earlier, more wholesome and integrated social form fighting to keep itself intact in an American culture that threatened to dissolve it.” The supposed superiority of the Mafia to the American government is demonstrated in the first scene of The Godfather, when the undertaker Bonasera turns to Don Corleone for assistance. Ganz cites the aforementioned Francis, who wrote that “America, as the Don describes it and as Bonasera has experienced it, does not behave like the Corleone family after all, and the differences between the two societies do not favor America.” The Mafia, Francis argues, is what sociologists call a gemeinschaft, a society based on honor and deference, while America is a sterile gesellschaft based on cold rationality. For the insurgent far right, the former is always to be preferred.
To speak of the degeneration of America assumes it once had a certain majesty. But America is not France; we never had a moment as sparkling as the French Revolution, or the Popular Front of 1936, or May ’68, and so its descent into political idiocy has been a steep one. Our history has played out against a backdrop of economic and racial inequality, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and boobocracy. The fall Ganz describes in When the Clock Broke, which indeed accelerated in the 1990s, was thus a fall from a height that was never more than ankle-high.
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.
Raphael Magarik (contributing editor): At a moment of excitement about radical unionism, and since the United Auto Workers (UAW) seems to be emerging from a half-century stupor, I’ve been reading about leftist and labor movements. Last year, I read Detroit, I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, an excoriating account of Black workers rebelling against the UAW’s racism and complacency in the late sixties and early seventies. The book is remarkable for the Black Marxist tradition it chronicles, which differs considerably from the more media-friendly (and nationalist) Black Panthers; for its prophetic linking of deindustrialization and militarized policing; and for the spunk of its protagonists, as when they take over the student newspaper of Wayne State University and convert it into a radical medium.
Perhaps less famous, if only because newer, is Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge, a comprehensive and moving history of the Farm Equipment Workers union (FE)—a brilliant and brief-lived experiment in radical unionism. Though formally organized in the 1930s, the union derived its militant traditions from the deep hatred workers at International Harvester felt for their managers, and especially the McCormick family of robber-baron owners. Indeed, Gilpin’s title comes from Nelson Algren’s phrase for the subterranean resentments that lingered in Chicago after the Haymarket affair: in 1886, after Chicago police killed strikers at the McCormick reaper plant, at an otherwise peaceful labor rally, someone threw a bomb at the police; the anarchist August Spies and three of his comrades were framed for the crime and executed. The FE drew on these longstanding grievances, partly because its leadership (including the author’s father, DeWitt Gilpin) were mostly committed, if hardly doctrinaire Communists, who understood unionism as class struggle.
In its brief institutional existence, the FE’s militant striking exacted remarkable concessions from International Harvester: contracts with good wages, an impressive system of shop-stewards who addressed workplace grievances, and all without making many concessions on the union’s right to strike. Moreover, as early as the 1940s, the Communist organizers insisted on racial equality within the union: this having Black union leaders, bargaining for Black workers’ interests, and, in the case of the Louisville local, even making daring attempts to integrate public parks and hotels.Sadly, the FE was crushed in the anti-Communist repression of the late forties and early fifties—targeted for “raids” by Walter Reuther’s much larger, much less radical UAW. The union was eventually summoned before the House Un-American Committee and forced to testify as they were waging a 1952 strike, during which they faced an ugly, falsified murder charge against one of their Black leaders in Chicago. By the 1950s, they had given in to Reuther and were folded into the UAW, where staff organizers were permitted to hold their positions so long as they renounced their links to the party, and the the tradition of unremitting war against the boss gave way to a top-down, liberal, and bureaucratic union.
The Long Deep Grudge ends on a plangent note: even in the fifties, IH was starting to close its Midwest plants to move to cheaper and less unionized locales. By the seventies, the liberal UAW’s dream of shared prosperity gave way to a long, slow series of union concessions, and the mismanaged International Harvester was sold off to private equity as part of the long dismantling of American industry. Despite this bitter ending, the book is nonetheless a delightful read. Gilpin thoroughly revised her decades-old dissertation into zippy, narrative history, rich with colorful characters. By writing labor history as a tense drama of class struggles, Gilpin lets us feel the power and excitement of radical ideas. And most importantly, she shows how the disciplined, Communist thinking of the FE’s core leadership and a more diffuse, anti-authoritarian anarchism that suffused the base delivered material victories for workers.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Across her lengthy career, the great French director Catherine Breillat has had one great theme: sex. While cinematic depictions of sex have usually focused on men’s experiences, Breillat is unflinching in her portrayal of the act—and the relationships around it—from the woman’s point of view. The ironic title of her 2002 film Sex Is Comedy fits precisely nothing in her catalog, which spans five decades. Her approach is more fittingly summarized by the title of her 2004 film Anatomy of Hell, in which she underlined both the centrality of sex and her refusal to prettify it by giving the lead male role to a porn star, Rocco Siffredi. Sex in Breillat’s work is sometimes ugly and clumsy, as we see in her early films about young women entering the sexual fray like 36 Fillette (1988), and even more so in more recent work like Fat Girl (2001). After suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in 2004, Breillat was sidelined for several years; during her recovery she was victimized by a con man, an experience that became her 2013 film Abuse of Weakness. Her weakened state has slowed down her production. But in Last Summer, her first film in a decade, Breillat’s vision has not in any way softened.
Anne, played by the radiant Léa Drucker, is a successful lawyer married to a successful businessman, living in a palatial home with their two adopted daughters. The husband’s troubled teenage son, Théo, moves in with them; he’s a typically hostile adolescent who is also—not incidentally—quite handsome, in a rather bedraggled way. This being a Breillat film, we know what to expect: The teenager and the woman twice his age soon move from hostility to an affair. Breillat understands her characters and their motivations perfectly. In addition to Théo’s unsurprising attraction to the beautiful Anne, he hates his father, so what better way to strike out at him than sleeping with his wife? And while Anne loves her husband, the affair offers a respite from a life that has come to bore her. The morality of it all never enters into anyone’s considerations. The play of these various elements is skillfully executed, and the way Breillat represents the headlong nature of their affair—as well as its conversion into anger and hatred and then back again—is both troubling and natural.
The film is full of perfect Breillat moments, exemplary of what makes her and her films so extraordinary. The first time the couple has sex, for instance, the camera focuses on Théo’s face and its contortions; this is sex from the woman’s point of view. When we see them together the second time, the camera is in an extreme closeup on Anne—but it’s not from the man’s point of view. Rather, it shows the woman taking pleasure in her own pleasure.
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Stage lore has long maintained that all theaters are haunted by the spirits of deceased performers. They come out and play to empty houses in the wee hours by the glow of the “ghost light”—a single-bulb floor lamp left on for them in theaters all night. (A duller interpretation insists these lights are there to prevent folks from tripping on the scenery.) In my adolescent stage-struck, Hebrew-school years, I conflated the ghost light with the ner tamid, the eternal flame that hangs above the Torah ark in synagogues across the world. To me, both represented spiritual connection with my far-flung peoples—past, present, and future.
The performance artist/comedian/songwriter Morgan Bassichis made that connection flesh in their poignant and hilarious show, Can I Be Frank?, which channels, claims, frames, and honors the performance artist/comedian/songwriter Frank Maya, who died of AIDS in August 1995 at age 45. Best known as the first out gay comic to have a half-hour special on Comedy Central, and for his chill responses to cringey questions about “homosexuals” on The Dick Cavett Show in 1991, Maya fronted a band, performed streamy “rants” and comic bits in mainstream gigs and in downtown spaces like Dixon Place, PS122, the Kitchen, and the very stage at La MaMa where Bassichis just conjured him. I saw Maya–and so many artists lost to AIDS, who also haunt these venues–perform there decades ago. Ever since, I have been scampishly quoting his joke about Anne Frank–which I won’t spoil here–and was delighted that Bassichis landed it, and that an audience still guffaws at its truthy irreverence.
Bassichis opens his show with one of Maya’s rants on the reverence owed to the dead, but stops and starts over several times, cutting in to offer commentary, some of which purposely misses the point, in a droll demonstration of both the necessity and impossibility of summoning up one’s ancestors. In presenting some of Maya’s material, refashioning his routines, and performing a couple of his songs alongside their own, Bassichis exposes the distance between Maya’s world and today’s, and tenderly builds a queer bridge across them.
I hadn’t remembered that so much of Maya’s material was about death, ghosts, afterlives—maybe because everything was about death in those terrible times. I did remember how much was about sex, an aspect Bassichis also grabs onto. How inspiring, they suggest, that even as ACT UP was lying down in the streets to protest the state’s murderous indifference to AIDS, Maya was ranting about a guy too tired to have sex with him or joking that if it hadn’t been for his scout leader “I wouldn’t have had sex till I was 16.” Insisting on life’s lusts and joys–everyone, everywhere, even in the direst circumstances—Bassichis shows, is what keeps the lights on. Bassichis played a handful of sold-out performances earlier this month, but keep an eye out: I can’t imagine they won’t land a longer run somewhere soon.
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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.
Josh Lambert (contributing writer): About 15 years ago, when I was researching my book on Jews and obscenity law in the United States, a kind historian told me about a Polish Jewish immigrant to the US, Chava Zlotchever, who changed her name to Eve Adams, ran a lesbian tea house in Greenwich Village, privately published a book called Lesbian Love in 1925, was entrapped by the New York police and deported to Europe, and was finally murdered at Auschwitz. I spent a decade searching for Adams’ book, scouring archives and contacting rare book dealers, and the only copy anyone had heard of was the one at Yale that had gone missing in the 1990s. I gave up hope. Then, miraculously, the historian Jonathan Ned Katz convinced a woman in Albany, who had discovered a copy of Lesbian Love in her apartment building, to share it. As an appendix to his excellent book on Adams, Katz published the complete text of Lesbian Love in 2021.
I’ve been thinking about this story recently because it helps to explain why I am so very excited about Hannah Levene’s debut novel, Greasepaint, a quasi-historical, experimental novel about lesbian bars in midcentury New York. To my utter delight, Levene’s fiction reads like what we might have gotten if Eve Adams had lived in New York into the 1950s, staying involved in the lesbian bar scene while getting into jazz and experimental poetry, maybe even started slicking her hair back and wearing white t-shirts. The novel wheels wildly through the lives of the people she could have met, including the daughter of a Yiddish poet, a “butch belle juive,” and many “Jews whose anarchism was like a layer of grease on them, like it’d come from cooking.” (Levene has said, about her research, “I couldn’t see the difference between butch and Yiddish anarchist after a while.”) Embracing these characters, Greasepaint worries very little about plot or how to get from one scene to another, and much more about folks making music, eating food, and talking, talking, talking.
It would be easy to situate Levene’s book within a recent wave of LGBTQ+ fiction that recovers and reimagines the lives of queer Jews in a variety of historical settings. But unlike many other historical fantasias of queer yiddishkayt, Greasepaint doesn’t feel creakily nostalgic, but rather deeply and sweetly alive. As Agnes Borinsky noted in the latest issue of The Anarchist Review of Books, Levene understands that “it is in the shuffling, fumbling, unfolding tenderness and conversations that accompany any larger political project that some version of a new world gets built.” With her winning characters and her electric, inconsistently punctuated prose style, Levene offers hope that such new worlds might still be possible for us, and redresses, a little, what we’ve lost in centuries of brutal suppression of writers like Adams.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I recommend the documentary film Queen of the Deuce, a modest, engrossing portrait of the larger-than-life, chain-smoking, hard-gambling, deal-making Chelly Wilson, who owned most of the porno theaters on 42nd St.—known as “the Deuce”—during its heyday in the late ’60s and ’70s.
Wilson, born Rachel Serrero in the Greek port city of Salonika, escaped to New York City before the Jews were deported to death camps, leaving her young children in hiding with gentile neighbors. Her rags-to-riches story starts with selling chestnuts and ends with a porn empire that sees the industry through its explosion—from “soft core” to “beaver” to “beaver and pickle” to “hard core.” The business is not altogether legal—Wilson’s daughter, Bondi, who works in distributing their films, is eventually arrested on felony obscenity charges. But Wilson, a twice-married lesbian who lived with her lovers but kept her husbands in the family, remains uncowed and unapologetic, holding court from her packed apartment above one of her theaters.
My grandparents were also Saloniki; they did not get out and were deported to Auschwitz. I always wondered, more so after their deaths, if we were reducing them to their tragedy, if we forced them to wear their “survivorship” like a forever hospital gown. It is for this reason that I appreciated the treatment of the Holocaust in the filmmaker’s telling of Wilson’s story—a significant part, but not the whole; neither the beginning, nor the end. In Queen of the Deuce, Wilson gets to be all of who she was.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Green Border, the new film by the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland, wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a cri de coeur and a call to action in the face of European indifference to the fate of the refugees who attempt to immigrate to the continent, a flight that has cost 30,000 people their lives since 2014. A film with so clear a message is bound to be flawed, weighed down by an excess of good sentiments—and to be sure, at almost two and a half hours, Green Border goes on a tad too long. But its excesses are almost justified by the scale and severity of the horrors—the baseness, cowardice, and racism—of the crisis. The film is set largely at the border between Belarus and Poland in 2021, when the vicious governments of both countries were treating refugees like ping pong balls, expelling them back and forth across the border; Belarus, certain that Poland and its ruling far right Law and Justice Party would refuse to respect European Union laws governing the acceptance of asylum seekers, had the express aim of embarrassing the EU. The callousness of both countries—and specifically of their border forces—is represented precisely as it played out then and continues to this day. We see the refugees beaten, robbed, and abused as they wait on one side of the border to be sent to the other, only to be beaten, robbed, and abused.
The film unfurls in chapters. We first travel with a group of mainly Syrian refugees as they fly into Minsk and are transported to the border, where they expect to cross into the freedom of Europe. But they have no such luck, and every glimmer of hope is crushed almost as soon as it appears. Holland then switches focus to Janek, a border guard whose wife is expecting a baby, and who clearly has no stomach for the dirty work he’s been given. And yet he carries it out all the same. We then meet a group of good-hearted Polish activists attempting to assist the refugees while respecting the laws not respected by the government. Their moral and strategic dilemmas are perhaps the strongest element of Green Border: Doing what’s legal might save a life here and there; breaking the law might do more, but could jeopardize everything. Just when the film seems to have gone on too long, Holland finds a striking new way to express the brutality and hypocrisy of what we’ve seen: The same Poles who could find no room in their hearts or their country for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, or Africa welcome 2 million Ukrainians in 2023.
Green Border is a very European film. But any American viewing it can only think of the cruelty of ICE during the Trump regime—much of which has remained with Biden’s own border restrictions, and will surely worsen should the felon-candidate be elected again. So far we haven’t reacted much better than most Poles.
***
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.
