Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): My dad died suddenly six weeks ago. In the days after the shiva—the people all gone, the kitchen table piled high with babka, my sister and I not yet ready to return to life—what else could we do? We watched TV. We watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, which, though it’s been on for 16 seasons, neither of us had ever watched before.

In case you, like me, have been living under a rock: Drag Race is a reality show where drag queens from around the country compete in a number of performance challenges where they sing, dance, act, tell jokes, impersonate celebrities, sew their own clothes, walk the runway, and, of course—in the head-to-head elimination challenge that closes each episode—lip sync (“for. your. life.” as RuPaul’s catchphrase goes).

Last summer, I dipped into HBO’s We’re Here, in which former Drag Race superstars go to small American towns and scrounge together the few out queers and their allies for an out-and-proud drag show. It’s well-made—more documentary than “reality”—and I dare you not to cry at least once an episode. But I always feel just a bit uncomfortable with the show’s gaze. Though it never crosses over into full-blown condescension toward rural America, it does seem designed to allow liberals in blue coastal states to pat themselves on the back for their open-mindedness. I’ve also always been just a tad wary of the show’s premise, which pushes drag on its small-town hosts the way some people push ayahuasca—a kind of mystical rite and shortcut to enlightenment for people of all genders and sexual orientations. In one particularly misguided episode, the queens enlist the mother of a queer young adult who committed suicide into the show, insisting that all the makeup and sequins are part of her healing. After the performance, she looks positively broken.

But on Drag Race, among those who have devoted their lives to drag, it seems hard to overstate its power. RuPaul often says that “drag does not change who you are, it reveals who you are,” a process we see in action in the “werk room” and on the mainstage, as the queens bare themselves by accretion. They glue down their eyebrows, and bury themselves in makeup, padding, and fabric, in a labor of artifice that becomes a route to the real. As the girls get painted, they talk about their lives: Many of them have been rejected by their families and have replaced them with drag families; they tell stories of addiction and religious fundamentalism and suicide, of bullying and poverty and chronic illness. When people advance in the competition, Ru will frequently talk about how they’ve been “peeling away layers.” In this regard, one gets the sense that these alter egos are not so much a means of escape from this world as a prophetic revelation toward a new one, fashioned in the queens’ own image.

I don’t know why this show has been such a balm for me as I grieve. Perhaps it’s the way that every episode follows the exact same script, each punctuated by a set of beloved RuPaul catchphrases—something reliable in a world destabilized through disappearance. But maybe I am simply responding to the show’s value system: it’s relentless emphasis on joy, self-love, and resilience. For now, the queens will have to model these feelings until I can produce them on my own again.

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): Over the past two months, I finally read Simone de Beauvoir’s best-known novel, The Mandarins—which too many friends to count have recommended to me as the rare novel to capture the feeling of political life. Originally published in 1954 and translated into English in 1956, it follows a circle of leftist intellectuals in Paris during the years after World War II.

From the opening scene, the novel considers the challenges of rebuilding after near-total loss. Gathering in December 1944 to celebrate the first Christmas since the end of Nazi occupation, the characters find themselves at “a very peculiar party,” as Anne Dubreuilh, one of Beauvoir’s protagonists, later reflects, attended by “all the dead who weren’t there.” It’s not only friends, lovers, and Resistance comrades who have been swallowed up by the darkness of the last four years, but also a whole society that has been “liquidat[ed]”: Gone is the world in which the characters understood themselves as denizens of a global power, replaced by one where Europe seems doomed to be annexed by either the United States or the Soviet Union. Over the next four years, the characters accomplish the impossible feat of starting over, only to be brought again and again to new lows. Anne’s husband, Robert Dubreuilh, a celebrated left-wing intellectual, organizes a new socialist party, hoping to remain independent of the rigidly sectarian Communists while simultaneously opposing American hegemony—but the Cold War redraws the political map faster than Robert can plant a flag for an independent socialist Europe, and he watches Nazi collaborators rehabilitated on the national stage as France’s sclerotic left is devoured by infighting. Robert’s protege, Henri Perron, suffers his own disappointment, laboring to balance his commitment to politics and his calling as a writer, only to feel himself misunderstood by both comrades and audience. And Anne—dedicated to a companionable but sexless marriage, believing her “life as a woman” to be “over”—rediscovers a hunger for experience in a surprise love affair, then suffers all the more acutely when it crashes and burns.

Anne’s narrative reminds the reader that The Mandarins is concerned with the fundamental question of how to live. But the novel’s most richly unusual quality is its attention to the struggles of writing and politics as, for these characters, the drama of life itself. (The various romances—a game of musical chairs involving an infinite secondary cast—are comparatively prone to drag.) Beauvoir gives us life-defining attachments founded in shared belief, and wrenching ruptures over divergent political calculations. The novel, like its characters, refuses any zero-sum choice between devotion to people and to ideas. In a perceptive essay on The Mandarins, the literary critic Toril Moi writes that the novel advances Beauvoir’s philosophical argument that “for our lives to have meaning, we need the responses of others, understood as free subjects”: It is the possibility of understanding and being understood that justifies the effort involved in writing, arguing, loving; it’s the fact that the other is “other” and can disagree that gives their recognition value and power. Or, as Henri reflects, “If you spend the best of your days trying to communicate with others, it’s because others count.” Ultimately, it’s a fundamental interest in other people—and a sense of responsibility to them—that compels Beauvoir’s characters to recommit to their work every time their dreams and ambitions fail.

I was surprised, when I went looking for writing about the novel, to learn that it received mixed reviews in its own time. It won France’s highest literary honor but was dismissed by the Cold War-era American press. Critics tended to interpret it as a roman à clef—with Anne and Robert standing in for Beauvoir and her famous partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Henri modeled on Albert Camus—an approach that caused Beauvoir no end of frustration. (She did, however, openly acknowledge that Anne’s romance with an American was modeled on her affair with the writer Nelson Algren.) If its popularity among my friends is any indication, it has recently found a more receptive Anglophone audience (Moi, too, hypothesizes that “its moment may have come”). Perhaps a formal reappraisal can begin with the standard that the novel itself elaborates through its characters’ vigorous debates. Their challenge, as they define it, is to reclaim the territory of personal experience from the “right-wing aesthetes” while insisting on the individual’s enmeshment in the broader world. The result, Robert argues, should be literature that “mak[es] us see things in a new perspective by setting them in their true place”—holding subjective impressions of beauty alongside the contexts that falsify them or give them meaning.

The Mandarins does just this, capturing a crushing historical moment in a portrait of people fighting to make it otherwise. Their sense of futility is, of course, all too familiar. Projection is yet another form of bad reading—the opposite of the astute recognition that Henri seeks—but I appreciated the novel’s particular resonance, and the way that, for Beauvoir, the characters’ lives are neither reducible to their failures nor separable from the hopes into which they put everything.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): There are many, many films about people exploring the world after they die. But few if any treat this terrain as movingly—or with as much love and sympathy for its characters—as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s early work After Life (1998), which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. In the film’s imagining of the next world, when we die, we find ourselves in a waiting room in a dreadful office building. The bureaucratic workers at this way station call our names and explain to us how we will spend eternity: We are to choose one moment from our lives, which will be recreated and filmed so we can enjoy it over and over forever. There’s no catch; we won’t discover that this treasured memory was actually hellish, or come to regret it. The reward for leaving the life we lived is that we get to relive its best moment forever.

After Life goes on to show the dead talking about their lives with the officials of the beyond as they ponder which cherished memory to select, describing moments great and small. In a move that imbues the film with pathos, Kore-eda chose to have the actors give unscripted reflections on their own lives. After the characters make their decision, After Life depicts a film crew’s painstaking recreation of the chosen episodes by a film crew. Everything must be just so; after all, these scenes must last until the end of time. Beyond offering a comforting vision of death, the film is a celebration of the singular beauty of those rare moments in our lives that marked us deeply. (As the narrator in Chris Marker’s immortal short film La Jetée says, “Moments we remember differ from others by the scars they leave.”) On the night before I went in for bypass surgery a few years ago, when I feared I might die, this was the film I chose to watch.

Ever since I first saw the film upon its original release, I’ve known precisely what event I’d choose to relive forever. (Regular readers may recall that I mentioned it once before.) The moment took place on June 22nd, 1962, at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, then the home of the New York Mets. I was ten years old and loved nothing as much as I loved the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros), and my father had taken me and my brother to see them play the Mets in a twi-night doubleheader, two games beginning at dusk. The moment I still think of as the most beautiful one of my life was the scene when we came up the ramp in right field: the bright lights, the green grass, and the Colt .45s. I can still see the gray of their uniforms; the blue and rust of the trim, hat, and socks; my favorite player on the team, Román Mejías, as he came up to bat. Every subsequent moment of happiness has been an echo of that one. If only there really was a crew who would one day reconstruct it for me.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Back in 2020, the lockdown provided the impetus for me to finally read historian Julian Jackson’s massive and critically acclaimed biography of Charles de Gaulle, the wartime Free French leader and postwar statesman. I’ve spent much of my life despising de Gaulle, whom I’ve long considered a reactionary and rebarbative wannabe dictator. But Jackson’s biography shows him to be a complex and intelligent man, whose love of his country was aimed at a France of the spirit rather than the flesh. This tome also makes clear that Jackson is a master of the sources and the country—and even more, of English prose. Along with Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Oppenheimer bio American Prometheus, it is the best biography I’ve ever read.

Jackson’s new book deals with a subject that intersects very much with the story of de Gaulle. France on Trial is a thorough, brilliant account of the 1945 trial of Marshal Philippe Pétain, chief of the French state based in Vichy that collaborated with the Germans between 1940 and 1944 after the French defeat and fall of the Third Republic, who was accused of treason and collusion with the enemy. Pétain signed the armistice with Germany that put an end to the French military effort and set up and led the Vichy government, and was the personification of what he called the “National Revolution,” which replaced the motto “liberty, equality, fraternity” with “work, family, fatherland.” The question debated at his trial, which unfolded over three weeks in a stifling courtroom in the heart of Paris, was whether these actions constituted treason or, as Pétain claimed, served as a way to protect the French people against the worst Nazi crimes. Ultimately, Pétain was found guilty and sentenced to death before his sentence was commuted to life in prison, and he died in 1951.

France on Trial is not popular history, but it is history aimed at a broad public. Jackson eschews academic jargon as he shrewdly addresses all the primary and subsidiary matters the trial raised: questions of the nature of historical fact and interpretation, of the relative weights of legality and legitimacy, of the possibility of impartiality in controversial legal matters, and of the persistence of historical memory into the present. He deftly paints the myriad characters—resistors and collaborators, Gaullists and Pétainists and Communists—without hiding his deeply informed opinions of them and their stances. As he examines all the trial’s intricacies, Jackson never loses his narrative thread and keeps even the most abstruse matters clear and comprehensible.

Throughout the book, Jackson also carefully considers the relationship between the trial and France as it exists nearly 80 years later. He points out the disproportionate weight given to Pétain’s various crimes: The oppression of France’s Jews played only a minor role in the proceedings, while the persecution of Resistance fighters was highlighted. In the decades since, the romance of the Resistance has faded, while interest in the Vichy government’s crimes against the Jews—and Pétain’s role in them—has grown. Jackson thoughtfully explores this shift in French attitudes toward their own history.

Sadly, Pétain still looms over French politics, most notably in the far-right (and Jewish) political figure Éric Zemmour’s defense of his record. Philippe Pétain is part of a past that won’t pass, and France on Trial is an unequaled guide to the man, his time, and his place in history.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): When Alejandro Zambra’s funny and touching novel Chilean Poet debuted in English in 2022—translated by Megan McDowell—many critics focused on how the story of a Chilean poet/professor named Gonzalo, his onetime-stepson Vicente, and adrift American journalist Pru aptly symbolizes Chile’s struggle to negotiate its national identity in the shadow of history. I found these interventions helpful; yet for me, the novel’s heart lay in the delicate relationship between Gonzalo and Vicente, such that I read the story’s central question in reverse: less concerned with what their relationship might mean for the future of Chile and its literature than about what Chilean literature might mean for the connection between the poet and his stepson. While the long string of Chilean poets that Pru interviews come off as caricatures (if vibrant, amusing ones), Gonzalo and Vicente are depicted with painstaking particularity. In one of the novel’s most beautiful sequences, the narrator describes the rhythms of daily life for Gonzalo, Vicente, and Vicente’s mom Carla: “They always bought powdered cinnamon and garlic and merquén. They usually had heartburn. They usually had hopes and misgivings.” The poetics of language can both help and hurt Gonzalo and Vicente’s attempts to reach each other: In the latter case, Gonzalo struggles to adapt to the Spanish word for stepfather (“padrastro”) given how it can be literally translated as “bad father.” Yet once Gonzalo and Carla have separated, poetry serves as the magnet to pull Gonzalo and Vicente back together after a long period of estrangement. Vicente has taken after Gonzalo to become a burgeoning poet, and the two rattle off the names of the poets they’ve read: “They bring up names, which is the favorite or perhaps obligatory sport of poets, and it’s fun, but above all it allows them to talk a lot while saying practically nothing.” Can poetry—like sports or television might do for other men—provide the scaffolding that holds a relation together? Even in a novel titled Chilean Poet, most of the original poetry in the narrative is explicitly, self-consciously bad—including a hilarious series of anguished haikus that Gonzalo writes after his first breakup with Carla. If, as the novel humorously posits, poetry is the national sport of Chile, Zambra seems most interested in not the World Cup final but in families kicking the ball around in the backyard—in how, even when emotion runs roughshod over craft, poetry can supply the language for two idiosyncratic individuals to speak to each other.

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): In a week when Israel has massacred starving Palestinians and flattened a corpse with a tank, and an American airman self-immolated in protest of the genocide in Gaza, it has felt more than ever like language is failing to capture, let alone move, our world. As I found myself despairing over the power of words, I was heartened to read Aria Aber’s interview with poet Fady Joudah on his new collection, […], in The Yale Review, in which Aber and Joudah discuss the role of language in the face of catastrophe.

While the topics of the conversation range from bookmaking to mysticism, I was most struck by Joudah’s insistence on bringing eros into his poetry alongside the horrors, even as—and perhaps because—the world is collapsing around him. “In these poems of longing, I reclaim my body from the culture that wants to hear and read me only as a voice in the aftermath of disaster and as a wound at that, not much more,” he tells Aber. By evoking the vivid immediacy of human passions and fragilities (Aber quotes a speaker’s yearning to “lick . . . ears against revenge”), his poetry wrestles language away from the same colonial expectations that make genocide possible in the first place. “Eros is a marker of life,” Joudah says, “against alienation, against death as a tool that imposes subordination.” Bringing desire and beauty into the frame when the world has turned into a morgue—against the perception that Palestinians exist only as “a repository of wounds”—can help turn poetry into a “language of life,” even if only in hindsight. “I often think that the responsibility of the poet,” Joudah reflects, “is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human.”

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): This month, as I was traveling to Chennai—the city of my birth and early childhood—for the first time since before the pandemic, I started reading Ling Ma’s Severance. I’ve come late to Ma’s novel about a fungal zombie apocalypse, which was released in 2018 but rose to fame after Covid-19 rendered it prophetic. In addition to relishing the book’s all-too-relevant setting in post-contagion New York City, critics also raved about the potent critique of late capitalism Ma presented in the form of the book’s twenty-something protagonist Candace Chen—who decides to keep clocking in to her job in the Bibles department at a publishing company long after the rest of the world has caught Shen fever, the fungal infection that turns people into mindless, homebound zombies before killing them.

I was certainly gripped by Ma’s tense unfolding of disaster, which too closely mirrors what we saw in the past few years. Shen Fever spreads quickly, and by the time Candace’s publishing house provides the employees paltry PPE and people start going to parties decked out in stylized masks, it is too late. The other shoe drops quickly. One week, Candace is getting offered a massive bonus after agreeing to become one of the few in-person employees at the quickly-downsizing firm; the next week, her fellow in-person employees have left and her remote managers have eerily stopped asking for reportbacks. The few people she still interacts with advise Candace to go spend the end of days with her family, but having no relatives in the US—her parents died when she was in college—Candace thoughtlessly keeps to her work routine even as the world stops spinning. Mercifully, she does eventually stop trying to publish Bibles (if only because the supply chain breaks down) and instead starts using the office to follow her passion of becoming a photo-blogger, but she nevertheless keeps commuting morning and evening through the ghost town that is now New York. She even moves into the office after enough people die that the city’s transit systems fully shut down—all of which has the reader questioning if, even though she isn’t technically infected, Candace hasn’t become her own kind of zombie.

But through it all, what really plagues Severance isn’t the zombies or even the disaster capitalism; it’s the unreachable homeland. When she was a small child, Candace and her parents emigrated to the US from Fuzhou, a city in southeastern China that continues to loom large in their lives long after they’ve left. In chapter after chapter, Candace recalls the dense familial networks; the sprawling markets; the “hysterical, uncontrollable” world beyond her grandmother’s balcony. It is in her descriptions of Fuzhou that we first glimpse the emotional morass animating the otherwise robotic character of Candace; it is also here that Ma’s sparse, restrained prose takes on an almost hypnotic fervor. Indeed, one of the most haunting passages in the novel occurs not during the apocalypse but when Candace recollects “Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling,” the sensation of being in her birth city after dusk. “It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling,” she thinks. “It reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized.”

Severance’s two plotlines—the zombie capitalism and the migrant trauma—run on parallel tracks for most of the novel, but Ma expertly brings them into collision near the end as Candace begins to suspect that Shen fever is not just a fungal illness but also a disease of the memory. Candace recalls how infected people live their last days carrying out repetitive motions: serving dinner over and over, unceasingly changing channels on the TV, driving a zombie cab around New York City. More strikingly, this repetition of comforting routines seems not only to be the symptom of the disease, but also its cause. Candace works this out when she sees one of her friends immediately become fevered after trying on clothes from her childhood wardrobe on a visit to her family home, and again when she sees a nemesis become infected as he prowls the halls of a mall he used to seek refuge at as a teenager escaping a dysfunctional home.

But Candace herself remains tellingly immune to this malaise of memory. Even as she vividly remembers her mother, her uncles, and all her other links to Fuzhou, it is she—the orphaned migrant—who escapes infection, perhaps because her permanent severance from China renders her memories ineffectual, unable to infect her with any comforting nostalgia. Ma seems to be suggesting that the migrant, especially one raised by anxious, aspiring parents fleeing the Global South, cannot reach such complacency—a feeling of home so complete she can sink into it—and can thus never be in danger of putting her desire for belonging ahead of her immediate survival. Fuzhou nights may well haunt her. But the migrant cannot afford to act on the indulgence of such remembrances; there is, after all, too much work to do.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): I’ve listened to the November 2023 On the Nose episode with Naomi Klein more than once now, fortifying myself with the notion, as Klein articulates it, that to cede narrative territory on grief, trauma, or the Nazi genocide to the right or to the Zionist project would only empower those projects. In the wake of October 7th, Klein’s argument that we must write and insist upon our own narratives of these subjects offered me a kind of path forward. But I only just got around to the episode of David Naimon’s literary podcast Between the Covers where he interviews Klein on the Jewish aspects of her new book Doppelganger.

Between the Covers isn’t where I’d typically go for history and politics, which might be why it took me so long to listen to this episode, which was recorded on November 28th. Once I did, though, I immediately wanted to pass it on. Naimon and Klein discuss their long personal histories of organizing as Jews in solidarity with Palestine and offer a compact rendering of the past and present of the Zionist and anti-Zionist projects. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, at once inviting and forceful, that encompasses a wide range of topics: trauma’s transmutation into violence in Exodus (Klein calls the film our “homework”); the relationship between Canada’s book market and the IDF; Marx’s antisemitism; the potentially supremacist thinking inherent (or not) in “chosenness”; and Roth’s Operation Shylock (discussed at length in Doppelganger). They draw on thinking from Viet Thanh Nguyen, Fred Moten, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Said, and many others.

Over the past few months, I’ve often wished for a single piece of media to share with Jewish family and friends who have politics adjacent to mine but don’t quite share my perspectives. Around 52 minutes into the podcast, as I listened to Naimon’s gentle narration of the history of Israeli statehood, I realized I had found it. About ten minutes later, Klein’s persuasive discussion of “the antisemitism at the heart of the idea of Zionism,” affirmed this impression. Those who find the facts familiar will nevertheless appreciate hearing the two well-informed superstars think collaboratively about this history. Klein points out that the horrors in Gaza show us that “the horrors of the Second World War did not end”; they are only a new chapter in the same “annihilatory logic.” Naimon continues, pointing out that the typical memorialization of “the Holocaust” as the murder of 6 million Jews rather than 11 million people is a grave missed opportunity for building solidarities.

The two chapters of Doppelganger addressing “Israel, Palestine, and the Doppelganger Effect” are available to read online via Klein’s website. On the podcast, she adds some ideas she’s thought about since writing them. “Doppelganger stories,” she says, “often end with the annihilation of the other, but then the other turns out to be us. That’s when you’re stabbing your doppelganger, but you end up stabbing yourself.” Klein sees this phenomenon in the escalating horrors in Palestine, she says, where in an attempt to “destroy the body of the other we, we as Jews end up destroying . . . our spirits, our principles.” Because she’s referring here to “we Jews,” I can’t help thinking she might also be referring to the communal discourse surrounding these horrors, to the difficulty of changing recalcitrant perspectives across even smaller doppelganger-like differences. A conversation like this one—expansive, exploratory, and quietly persuasive—feels like it could actually shift someone’s views, and so offers a potential antidote to destroying ourselves.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): If the films of the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan have had a flaw, it’s what the French call “nombrilisme”—literally “navel-ism,” but best translated as “navel-gazing.” Though Ceylan’s cinema is remarkable for its intelligence, its formal rigor, and its plastic beauty, I’ve always found myself admiring his films more than loving them. But his latest work, About Dry Grasses (now playing at Lincoln Center in New York), breaks new ground by finally bringing politics into the frame.

Like most of Ceylan’s films, About Dry Grasses is set in the country’s hinterlands, where his characters confront their own failings and miseries. The main character, Samet, is a schoolteacher working in Turkish Kurdistan. He hates the “shithole”—his word—in which he has landed. Consumed with disgust at the locals and disinterested in the ongoing political struggles around him, he wants nothing more than to get out and teach in Istanbul. In a brilliant set piece that lasts over 20 minutes, Samet discusses the matter of political and social engagement with the leftist feminist Nuray, a teacher in a larger town with whom a friend sets him up. “Comrade Nuray,” as he calls her, lost a leg in a political bombing and remains politically active, and she comes down hard on the solipsistic Samet for his nombrilisme, though she sleeps with him all the same. Samet—a photographer, like Ceylan—is likely a stand-in for the director, and the film’s mercilessness toward him reads as self-criticism. Samet is selfish, temperamental, and disloyal; he thinks himself superior to his surroundings, but is he really?

Throughout the film, images of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—the nation’s founding father—hang in every room where people gather, just as they actually do throughout Turkey. If his face, always gazing into the radiant future he hoped to inaugurate, were to come to life, it would only be able to show disappointment.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I recently reread A.G. Mojtabai’s Blessèd Assurance, a mid-eighties journalistic account of Amarillo, Texas, home of the Pantex nuclear-weapon assembly plant. Mojtabai interviews local clergymen to understand how they have come to feel, as her subtitle has it, “at home with the bomb.” One might expect conservative pastors to argue that America is godly enough to be trusted with such terrifying violence, but in fact they mostly say the opposite. It would be not just folly, but heresy, they say, for America to apply Christian pacifism to our secular fallen world; such idealism belongs to a redeemed future, divided from our present by an apocalyptic chasm. Ironically, the fundamental Protestants end up having a more sophisticated, “realistic” view of secular politics than their liberal, non-believing Jewish interviewer.

Only the local Catholic bishop preaches against the Pantex plant, since he understands that the promises of Revelation cannot be held apart from our present-day world. His diocese bears a heavy price when it is financially cut off by the local combined charities, but the bishop’s dissent has little practical effect. When he earmarks a small pot of money for Pantex workers who voluntarily leave their jobs, nobody ever claims the money.

Mojtabai is an assured writer with a fine eye for scene and detail; an evangelical dentist’s instant pivot from praying over her to drilling, for instance, epitomizes the town’s odd mixture of fervent religiosity and mechanical capitalism. But I was drawn back to Blessèd Assurance for its rich account of the psychic life of the military-industrial complex. Mojtabai’s haunting book poses the ever-relevant questions of how religious congregations make their peace with militarism, and what spiritual resources nourish those few who resist.

Josh Lambert (contributor): Amy Kurzweil’s first graphic memoir Flying Couch (2016), was an intimate chronicle of the lives and relationships of three generations of women: Amy herself, her mother Sonya, and her grandmother Lily. Drawing extensively from Lily’s 1994 Holocaust testimony, Kurzweil explored the tension between her trepidation of representing her grandmother’s traumas and the imperative to preserve the stories of survivors.

Her new book, Artificial: A Love Story, turns to the paternal side of her family, and goes deeper into the ethical problems of reconstructing these voices from the past. Her father, who scarcely appeared in Flying Couch, turns out to be Ray Kurzweil, the author, futurist, and quite possibly the party responsible for my children’s occasional nightmares about the singularity. The book depicts Amy helping him to develop a generative-AI trained on his own father’s journals and letters, a literal “Dadbot.” The book sidesteps the quotidian questions that Chat GPT3 has brought into public discourse (should we ban it from classes? will it replace all the writers in Hollywood?) and heads straight for more philosophical ones: Will Amy ever be able to know her grandfather, the composer Frederic Kurzweil, who died long before she was born? What does it mean to know a person, anyhow? Or to love them? Kurzweil’s gorgeous, meticulous comics pages of course can’t answer all the questions raised by the rise of machine intelligence, but the insight she lands on by the end of the book works for me: “None of us are fully knowable. But with time and attention, with close looking, we are all lovable.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In this space I have written often of my distaste for the upbeat, the positive, and the whimsical in literature and film. (It was with a certain glee that I saw that NYRB Classics—the publisher of my recent translation of Claude Anet’s novel Ariane, A Russian Girl—was offering it as part of their “anti-Valentine’s Day” sale.) And yet here I am recommending the upbeat, positive, and whimsical Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 hit, which was re-released in theaters this week on Valentine’s Day.

The film follows an unfailingly cheerful young French woman from the provinces who moves to Paris, where she works in a café and sets out to find love, while also intervening in others’ lives. Amélie, played by the winsome Audrey Tautou, is the opposite of the typical anomic city-dweller. Rather than merely observing the sorrows of those around her, she takes it upon herself to right the wrongs she sees, injecting love (or simply happiness) wherever she can, by whatever roundabout route presents itself. Her plotting is carried out with what I would normally consider an odious joie de vivre, but Jeunet and Tautou—who takes the character’s adorableness right up to the border of unbearableness, knowing just when to pull back—make it all irresistible.

Among those whose happiness Amélie strives to secure is her long-widowed father, who never travels or does anything for amusement. Her plan to rescue him is particularly odd—and oddly based in reality. She steals a lawn gnome that sits atop her mother’s grave and has a stewardess who regularly visits her café take it on her travels, sending postcards to Amélie’s father, thus encouraging him to go abroad himself. At the time the film was made, France and Belgium were in the grips of the attacks of the Front de libération des Nains de Jardin (the Lawn Gnome Liberation Front), a group that stole these plaster gnomes in Phrygian caps from people’s lawns, assembling hundreds of them in forest clearings, or taking the unfettered ornaments on trips and posting their photos on the then-novel internet. Amélie is a delightful ode to just these sorts of diverting hijinx, and a relic from another era.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): For years I’ve maintained that Ben Lerner’s best work is not one of the autofictional novels for which he is most famous, but rather his enigmatic 2006 poetry collection Angle of Yaw. So I was especially eager to read The Lights, the new volume of poems he released last fall. The book is preoccupied with some of the questions about language, politics, and their interrelation that emerged from his 2019 novel The Topeka School. In that book’s final scene, which unfolds at a protest outside an ICE office, the narrator reflects on the “people’s mic”: “It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning how to speak again.” In The Lights, Lerner delves further into the co-constitution of speech and community, frequently by meditating on music. In “The Stone,” he writes: “Imagine a song, she said, that gives voice to people’s anger . . . The anger precedes the song, she continued, but the song precedes the people, the people are back-formed from their singing . . . The voice must be sung into existence, so song precedes speech, clears the ground for it.” Lerner explores the same themes in the context of Jewish continuity in “The Chorus,” in which the speaker remembers his anxiety over introducing the Hanukkah song at his elementary school winter concert: “it’s horrible to separate from a chorus . . . and then return to the group and sing . . . There is always a gap between songs, traditions, and a child must bridge it (or there will be violence) and that’s what the songs themselves tell us if we listen.”

Lerner’s poems once eschewed autobiography, and when the lyric “I” appeared, it tended to obscure rather than ground or clarify, offering a subject whose identity could not be precisely mapped. (One untitled poem in his 2004 collection The Lichtenberg Figures opens, “I had meant to apologize in advance. / I had meant to jettison all dogmatism in theory and all sclerosis in organization. / I had meant to place my hand in a position to receive the sun.”) But the poetry in The Lights, perhaps informed by Lerner’s turn to the self in his fiction, is full of apparent references to his own life, sometimes related with disarming lucidity. These moments occasionally break the spell of language, as in “The Media,” when he writes, “I’m just clicking on things in bed, a review by a man named Baskin who says I have no feelings and hate art.” More often, though—like in the gorgeous, UFO-haunted title poem—the personal illuminates the high-concept abstraction it sits alongside, the interplay somehow exceeding solipsism: “I hold the back of his head and see / unexplained lights over him / that love makes, even if what I want in part / is to be destroyed, all of us / at once, and so the end of desire is caught in it.” Ultimately, just as Lerner’s fiction bears the mark of his poetry, his poetry now seems enriched by his experimentation with prose; in each form, he continues to approach new modes of togetherness in language, where “we are alone / and we are not alone with being.”

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): Susan Sontag’s only documentary, Promised Lands (1974), was banned by Israeli authorities on the grounds that it was “damaging [to] the country’s morale.” Sontag’s transgression: She offers a bleak snapshot of a shell-shocked Israeli society in the wake of its vertiginous fall from perceived invincibility following victory in the 1967 war into the disillusionment of defeat in the 1973 war.

Promised Lands avoids spectacular imagery and cogent narrative, offering instead a series of discrepant vignettes of Israel at a crossroads—from close-ups of charred corpses to oscillating worshippers at the Western Wall—and an eerie soundscape comprised of Jewish liturgy and bombshells. Here, the war is etched more on the land and in the faces of its inhabitants than codified in any sort of story. The only explicitly political visions are provided by two interviewees—who represent liberal and revisionist Zionist thinking—yet they are left nameless and their dialectic without any synthesis.

Despite her formal resistance, Sontag cannot totally evade the meaning-making machine of nationalism. While the film often depicts cemeteries and grieving families, other scenes signal where such grief may end up. In a waxwork museum, we are shown a lachrymose tableaux of Jewish history, as the Shema blares on repeat. Promised Lands ends with psychiatrists reproducing the stimuli of war to ostensibly help a traumatized patient, who cowers beneath his pillow—followed by a drill in preparation for the next war. Taken together, these scenes indicate how the state metabolizes grief to generate more violence: An unyielding narrative reinscribes the fixed position of eternal Jewish victimhood, constraining the future and perpetuating trauma.

If Sontag refuses to hand a readymade meaning over wholesale to the viewer, it is not because she rejects meaning-making; rather, she makes visible the process of struggling toward meaning, and its attendant political implications. As Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli writer who is one of the film’s unnamed interviewees, puts it, turning to ancient Greeks: “It became like a tragedy: We were right, and they were right, and we fought and fought and fought. The end of it is either that one will destroy the other or that we live in some sort of a compromise.” He follows this analysis with a warning: “The Jews know drama; they don’t know tragedy.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In many ways, Benjamin Balint’s Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and the Hijacking of History (2023) is a return to the issues raised in his previous book. Kafka’s Last Trial (2018) was an account of the legal battle over a set of Kafka’s papers possessed by a former secretary of Max Brod, the friend of Kafka who was given (and refused to carry out) the task of destroying his writings. The question in that case was not only who was the rightful owner of these texts—the secretary’s family, the library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, or the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany—but who can lay claim to Kafka himself, a Jewish writer who wrote in German.

This is much the same question addressed in Balint’s new book, about a similar literary figure. Bruno Schulz—a Polish Jew born in 1892, who spent most of his life in the medium-size Polish city of Drohobycz, now in Ukraine—was a writer of short stories and an artist who earned his living teaching art at a local high school. He was part of the minority of Polish Jews who lived and wrote in Polish, rather than Yiddish, and neither his stories nor his art have anything to say about Jewishness directly. When his town was occupied by the Nazis, he became the favored Jew of a local Gestapo officer, who had Schulz paint the walls of his childrens’ rooms. After Schulz was murdered by another Nazi officer 1942, these wall paintings were lost until they were rediscovered by German filmmakers in 2001. This raised the question of where the paintings belong: Should they remain where they were? Should they be moved to a local museum? Or was the work’s proper place Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial? Israel peremptorily settled the matter, apparently bribing local officials and sending a team to simply remove the works, restore them, and put them on display.

While Israel’s claim to Kafka was bolstered by his flirtation with Zionism, Schulz never even winked at the ideology; Israel considered him its property simply because he was a Jew killed by the Nazis, and because the state understands itself as the rightful heir to the culture the Nazis nearly obliterated. But are the circumstances of Schulz’s death—and the practical consideration that more people would see Schulz’s work in Jerusalem than in a provincial Ukrainian town—enough to justify uprooting his work from its home and to enlist it in the cause of Zionism? In his judicious and careful account, Balint presents all the parties’ cases fairly, but won’t accept that Israel has a right to such overreach. It’s hard for any reader of these two books not to see that Israel’s expropriation of Kafka and Schulz stands in for the state’s expropriation of all of Jewish life.