Shabbat
Reading List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mari Cohen (associate editor): The novelist Sally Rooney, as Dwight Garner put it recently, takes as her “primary subject . . . love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive.” In the past, I might have quibbled with him. Even as a Rooney admirer, I’ve always found her romance plots hindered by their reliance on hackneyed tropes: Childhood sweethearts dance around each other in adulthood; a young woman enters an electric affair with an older man. But in her new novel, Intermezzo, Rooney evades this trap by freeing her main romantic pairings from cliché—and by moving them slightly out of the novel’s center. Indeed, the most important relationship in the book is not that of a couple but of a pair of brothers, Peter and Ivan, who have weathered their parents’ painful divorce and, most recently, their father’s death from cancer, and who are negotiating how to approach the distance that has grown between them. Both are fiercely intelligent, but are otherwise a study in opposites: The elder, Peter, is a charming debater-turned-lawyer trying to conceal his depression, while the younger, Ivan, is an awkward competitive chess player adjusting to adulthood. Ivan falls in love with an older woman separated from her alcoholic husband, while Peter is juggling relationships with both a dynamic college-aged woman and the ex-girlfriend who pulled away after a devastating accident.

Rooney zooms in on these brothers with prose that is precise and rhythmic, her long paragraphs transmitting the winding nature of their inner worlds, how thoughts repeat and morph and collide. She experiments, gently, with form: Peter’s manic energy is captured by staccato, incomplete, backwards sentences—“A proliferation of feeling he thinks. Disorder of sentiment. Remembering the way his father would write out on lined paper the doctor’s instructions, spidery handwriting, names of medications”—while Ivan’s quiet anxiety is slow, drawn out, and sprawling: “For a few minutes Ivan lies on the bed not knowing what to think, what task to feed into his brain, to go on analysing past events, his own mistakes and regrets, the wrongs he has done to others or the wrongs done by others to him, or the confusing events in his life that seem to involve both kinds of wrong.”

Rooney, of course, is known as a novelist not just of the romantic but of the political. Off the page, she speaks forcefully about Palestine and about Marxism; in her first three books, characters regularly DM each other about the nature of capitalism, attend rallies, and contemplate the confines of class. Often, though, the characters’ political obsessions seem immaterially discursive, a sprinkling of brightly colored frosting that endlessly fascinates critics but remains on the novel’s surface. This mode accurately depicts how left politics operate in the lives of a certain set of young literary professionals (the milieu from which Rooney generally draws her main characters), but doesn’t have a lot more to say than that. In Intermezzo, the characters’ political preoccupations are less central. This, however, doesn’t feel like a retreat: It just feels honest, an unabashed embrace of Rooney’s clear interest in the minutiae of small-scale intimate relationships. In her 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You, the tidy, domestic resolution of the love stories felt jarring after the characters spent the book emailing each other long meditations on the abyss of modern capitalism and climate change; here, the interpersonal relationships are less burdened by attempts to speak in a visionary political voice, more free to stand in their specificity. Along the way, Peter muses on how the realities of his job measure up to his ambitions to fight for justice, Ivan refuses to fly for the sake of the climate, and another character is evicted by her landlord; everyone’s life is, of course, structured by the realities of money and power and gender; the story, and thus the politics, speaks for itself.

Early in Intermezzo, Ivan’s love interest Margaret (the only other character, besides the two brothers, whose inner monologue is depicted) reflects on her first tryst with Ivan: “She has been contained before . . . by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now.” Throughout the novel, the characters struggle with how to cut open life’s netting, how to free themselves, and their relationships, from patterns and narratives that entrap them. They struggle toward a practice of love that is expansive and generous, that can help two brothers overcome years of mistrust and distance, that can hold partners together even in unconventional circumstances. It’s simple and yet complex; meticulous but alive; funny but deeply sad. It’s Sally Rooney’s best novel yet.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I confess that I have only read the “Jewish” parts of Marxism and Form (1971), my favorite work by Fredric Jameson, the great literary theorist who died this week. That is to say, I have read the chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács—all but the chapter on Sartre, which is, at least for me, a hundred pages of impenetrable, gentile boredom. The names of these theorists are emblazoned on the book’s cover as if they were a musical supergroup, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Jameson was trying to explain and defend Hegelian Marxism, which promised that historical materialism could approach literary texts not as propaganda or morality plays, but as complex forms, in whose development we could chart the course of an evolving, universal history. Somehow, the book he ended up writing consists of a series of mournful vignettes about Central European Jewish intellectuals.

It’s hard to know what Jameson would have thought of this observation, not just because his origins were WASPy and patrician, but because he largely avoided personal reflection, even as he built a superstar career defending, often single handedly, Marxism’s claim to primacy among High Theories. But the Jewishness of Marxism and Form is no coincidence. It reflects the “elective affinity” Michael Löwy would later trace between early 20th-century Central European Jewish writers, barred by antisemitic prejudice from academic postings, and thus institutionally marginalized and driven toward a utopian, romantic mode of left-wing politics. Löwy’s student Enzo Traverso later studied a cohort of doubly “heretical” adherents of what he called “Judeo-Marxism,” who rejected the vulgar, dogmatic scientism of Karl Kautsky and the Second International, as well as Orthodox religiosity and post-war Zionism. Often rebels against both Jewish and contemporary left pieties, these Judeo-Marxists produced eccentric, offbeat theories, probed the arcane troves of Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, and tended more toward modernist experimentation than by-the-book socialist realism. Thus, if one wanted, as Jameson did, to find sources for a Marxism that was intellectually rich, thick with ironies and paradoxes, and critically adequate not just to proletarian novels and folks songs, but to Balzac and Beethoven (and then, in Jameson’s eclectic, catholic, and massive corpus of writing, to pretty much any cultural artifact whatsoever), then of course one would end up writing about Jews.

And despite Jameson’s ideal of objective impersonality, there are hints he was aware of his Jewish focus. A section epigraph in his chapter on Ernst Bloch reads, “Next Year in Jerusalem! —Old Jewish Prayer,” the single pithiest distillation of the utopian longing that animates Jameson’s whole career. More telling, perhaps, is the uncharacteristically personal turn with which he concludes his discussion of Marcuse, writing that despite the bleak, unrevolutionary conditions of mid-century American capitalism, “it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom” in several minds, the last of which is that of Marcuse, the “philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing—from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of traffic of the freeways and the ominous shape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, as it were from beyond them, in the future—the almost extinct form of the Utopian idea.”

In Jameson’s hands, the paradigmatically Jewish condition of exile undergoes a double metamorphosis, first into Marcuse’s estrangement from the land of his birth by the Nazi catastrophe, which either killed or uprooted nearly all of Jameson’s book’s subjects, and then second, into the existential predicament of the social theorist lost in post-war consumer capitalism, adrift in a history that seemed to have lost its plot. That predicament, and his oft-repeated, defiant insistence that nonetheless, one must not, could not, forget Jerusalem and the dream of a redeemed future, was, of course, Jameson’s great theme. So it pleases me, in spite of his studied impersonality, to point out that in 1971, Jameson had only recently left Harvard for the University of California, San Diego, where he overlapped with Marcuse for several years—and that perhaps here is an autobiographical clue that Jameson was a quiet devotee of our exilic tradition, which he reimagined as the melancholy condition of the left intellectual in an unfriendly historical moment, struggling to transform his nostalgia into hope for a future, into a yearning for a world transformed.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): After reading the critic Philip Lopate’s latest collection, My Affair with Art House Cinema—a lengthy compilation of reviews and essays that I devoured in just a couple of days—I was struck anew by how close I feel to his sensibility. It’s not just that Lopate is, like me, a Brooklyn Jew, or that we share taste in books and films. It’s that neither of us has the desire, or perhaps the ability, to ignore the failings of even those we admire. (The title of one of his previous collections, Against Joie de Vivre, is more or less my credo.) For instance, Lopate’s short book on Susan Sontag, whom Lopate respected immensely, speaks unhesitatingly of her snobbery and scorn for anyone not part of her exalted world. (I experienced this directly on a couple of occasions, when I encountered her at film screenings. Never have I felt so like Gregor Samsa as I did under her disdainful gaze. “Who,” her expression said, “is this bug impinging on my sight?”)

It is this refusal of hagiography that makes My Affair with Art House Cinema so worthwhile. Lopate, who is especially fond of Japanese and Chinese cinema like the works of Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, also loves Akira Kurosawa, the most accessible of Japanese cineastes. But he readily critiques Kurosawa’s most famous film, Rashomon. “The fact that it is ‘iconic’ does not necessarily make it a masterpiece,” he writes, correctly identifying the various weaknesses that too many viewers and critics choose to ignore, such as the performance of Toshiro Mifune. Lopate even criticizes the work of friends, both filmmakers and critics. Yet unlike one of them—Jonathan Rosenbaum, who, he writes, “seems not to appreciate the difference between honesty and incivility”—Lopate never steps over the line into the land of churlishness.

He writes brilliantly about films both famous and lesser-known (including underappreciated works by prominent directors, like Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband) with great sensitivity for their writerly aspects as well as their strictly cinematic qualities. For those familiar with the movies he discusses, his readings are endlessly illuminating. But this book is also a wonderful guide to films the reader might have missed. While I had avoided Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty for reasons Lopate understands perfectly—a film that popular and critically acclaimed had to be crap—his case for it was so convincing that the day I read his review, my wife and I watched it. We were mesmerized for the entire two-hour-and-twenty-minute runtime, including the end credits. So consider this a recommendation not only of Lopate’s wonderful book, but also of the many films he so insightfully endorses.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): I’m not much of a rereader, but I’ve read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love four or five times over the past decade. Far more personal than the revered critic’s better-known works, the 1999 book details her experiences with a single therapist, beginning at age 42. Though their work together was prompted by Sedgwick’s diagnosis with breast cancer 18 months earlier (a disease from which she would die at age 58, ten years after the book’s publication), their conversations roam far beyond her lifelong “wish of not living” or her desire, following the initial cancer treatment, “to be realer.”

On first read, I was enthralled by the intimate details, at once ordinary and extraordinary, of a tremendous thinker’s inner life: her childhood memories, her relationship with her parents, her email correspondences and embarrassing dreams and fantasies about sex. I was captivated, too, by the invitation into the dynamics of therapy: Sedgwick’s initial fear that her new therapist might be “too dumb,” and the arguments, the affection, and the finely tuned shames that reliably burble up as their sessions continue.

My specific interest in therapy has waned over the years, but the book has continued to offer surprising gifts. For one, there’s its peculiar aesthetic: Drawing inspiration from the poet James Merrill, Sedgwick renders her narrative in the ancient Japanese form of haibun—blocks of prose punctuated by haiku—accompanied by a kind of “speaking spirit,” in the form of her therapist’s notes. Then, there are Sedgwick’s vulnerable and earnest attempts at parsing her own relationship to queerness. (“I know I want to talk about sex; it’s what I do for a living . . . But my own sexuality—do I even have one? It leaves me stony with puzzlement.”) In more recent rereadings, I have delighted, too, in the whispers of Jewishness that appear, a matter-of-fact part of Sedgwick’s otherwise wholly secular life. In her “handsome, provincial Jewish family” of origin, for instance, her mother refused to be called “Mom” because, Sedgwick speculates, it sounded either too uncultured or too American.

Sedgwick’s body of work resists “the idea / that you’re born sewn up / in a burlap bag with a / few other creatures, / and you have to claw / and fight inside that burlap / bag for your whole life.” Her sense of non-belonging in her family of origin, and the queer family she makes of her friends, are major themes throughout this book and her life more broadly. In those friendships, we get a taste of how, as she writes, “I recognize love.” In a recording of her reading an early excerpt of the book in 1998, the large audience’s love for her is evident in both their hush and their waves of delighted laughter. Generative, expansive pleasure, Sedgwick tells her therapist early on—the kind this book uncovers and enacts—is the only thing that might “bring me through to real change.”

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Each of the few times we’ve seen a sustained explosion of left protest in the past year—most notably during the student encampments of the spring—I’ve been reminded that I need to revisit the work of Rosa Luxemburg, which theorizes, among other things, the alchemical process which transforms local disruptions into a revolutionary crisis. But between work, organizing, and the constant witnessing of horror, my capacity for serious reading has been so reduced that instead of picking up The Essential Rosa Luxemburg as I ought to have done, I decided to start with Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg. It proved to be the perfect on-ramp.

Using text from primary sources, including Luxemburg’s published writings, speeches, and letters, together with intricate black-and-white sketches of her too-short life, Red Rosa offers a portrait of Luxemburg’s remarkable personal story and political thought. We see Rosa growing up as a Jewish, disabled girl in Tsarist Poland, reading Marx as a teenager, and quickly coming to situate her own experiences of discrimination inside a grander narrative of global racial-capitalist exploitation (“I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch . . . I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears”). We see her break gender barriers to study in Zurich; fall in revolutionary love; speak at the Socialist International; publish both propaganda newspapers and a dissertation on Polish industrialization; and eventually, move to Berlin and join the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, whose trajectory she quickly influenced with her writing and speeches.

Throughout this story, Evans rejects the biographer’s distance from the subject’s ideas, instead layering Luxemburg’s ideological and political insights into the telling of her life story. Panels featuring a tea kettle boiling over in Rosa’s kitchen are overlaid with her analysis of capitalism’s use of imperialism as a release valve; blackboard illustrations Rosa draws when teaching at the Party school lay out the doctrine of historical materialism; and in a memorable sex scene, Rosa’s bed covers are decorated with scenes depicting the history of labor action across the Russian Empire in 1905, culminating in quotes from her classic 1906 booklet “The Mass Strike.” The result of this masterful melding is that, unlike with most biographies, I finished this one oriented towards Luxemburg not just as a historical icon on a pedestal but as a strategist whose work offers weapons for the present struggle—if only we would pick them up. I’m ready to return to The Essential Rosa Luxemburg now.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): One should never pass up an opportunity to see a screening of a film by Robert Bresson. The great French director—whose rigor and uncompromising fidelity to his vision are nearly unrivaled—reinvented the medium, creating a cinematic language based on non-professional actors who are forbidden to “act” in the traditional sense. In a Bresson film, the characters’ speech is stripped of any histrionics; only the essential remains. (Anyone interested in the aesthetics of cinema must seek out not only his oeuvre itself, but also his treatise Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson, a collection of interviews, which give us access to the creative process of a genius who was sui generis.) I discovered Bresson in the early ’70s, when I first saw Four Nights of a Dreamer (showing in a restored version at this year’s New York Film Festival). I was so taken with this film that I sought out all the others—and later moved to Paris in the hope of meeting and working with him. I sadly failed in the latter, but I succeeded in the former; I recently found an account of my rendezvous with the legend, which I wrote and misplaced 45 years ago, and published it in Film Comment.

Over the next two weeks, Film Forum is screening two of Bresson’s late works. The Devil, Probably (1977), showing for a week starting today, is his most resolutely contemporary film, a meditation on disaffected youth and the collapse of civilization. It’s a dark film, one that holds out little hope for humanity—or the planet—and demonstrates much contempt for every aspect of modern life. It is also Bresson’s least successful film, its despair almost caricatural. His best films were adaptations of or modeled on works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or Bernanos. The Devil, Probably likewise probably has a certain value as a chronicle of the death of the spirit; more than that I can’t honestly say.

The following week, from September 27th through October 3rd, you can see Lancelot of the Lake (1974). This project, which Bresson pursued for decades, is both radically different from and radically continuous with the rest of his oeuvre. While the milieu is unlike any other in his filmography—the film is set in the Middle Ages and recounts the end of the court of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—the pared-down sets, the lack of outward emotion, the play of gazes, the strictly dictated rhythm of speech that gives the scenes an almost musical quality, and the austere framing we expect from Bresson are all here. The jousting tournaments, the failure of the hunt for the Holy Grail, the disintegration of King Arthur’s court, and the love between Lancelot and Queen Guinevere are all infused with the Bressonian spirit (the style that Paul Schrader, in a book he wrote before becoming a famous director and screenwriter, called “transcendental”). There can be little doubt that this enormously grave work exerted an influence on another film that is its polar opposite: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Indeed, when the knights hack away at each other in this comedy, it’s a direct homage to the opening scene of Bresson’s film. No stranger borrowing has ever occurred in the history of world cinema.