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Mari Cohen (associate editor): Even without the slight twang of its strings, “But Daddy I Love Him,” the sixth track on Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, would recall motifs from the pop megastar’s early career. The retelling of a forbidden romance forged against a family and community’s wishes seems to nod to Swift’s breakthrough hit “Love Story”—but this time with an f-word and a more embittered tone. And as Swift breaks into the exuberant chorus—“But I’m running with my dress unbuttoned/screaming ‘But daddy I love him’”—I find myself thinking most of “The Way I Loved You,” a deep cut favorite of mine from her 2008 album Fearless about wanting to ditch a sensible and chivalrous partner for a toxic but intoxicating ex. “The Way I Loved You” succinctly captures the “thesis” of Taylor Swift as a songwriter: that romantic love, at its apex, is a dangerous and all-consuming force that embodies the opposite of rationality. After the limp disappointment of her 2022 album Midnights—which lacked any narrative thrust, and seemed designed for TikTok snippets—Swift is back to probing every corner of a doomed romance. “I’m tellin’ him to floor it through the fences / No, I’m not coming to my senses,” she sings with a wink in “But Daddy,” and Swift the songwriter seems to have returned in all her disturbed glory.
If “But Daddy” encapsulates the promise of this new entry in Swift’s catalog, it also contains many of the flaws that have given this record such a mixed reception. As has been typical in her recent work, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner’s production have softened her vocals, muting the song’s emotional catharsis. It’s not clear why the track has to go on for so long. And in several lines, Swift is simply overwriting, a problem that has dogged her since 2020’s evermore but has become especially clear on this sprawling 31-track double album. It pains me to say that this song marks only one of the times the words “precocious” and “empathetic” each appear on the album; don’t even get me started on “sanctimonious performing soliloquies.” Almost every song on the record has a few imperfections that ought to have been sanded down. “Guilty as Sin,” a daring infidelity fantasy that’s probably her sexiest track since 2017’s Reputation, is hampered by a few too many adverbs in the bridge. “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” builds to an all-time wallop of an outro, in which a palpably furious Swift excoriates an ex-lover: “Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? In 50 years will this all be declassified?” But to get there, you have to make it through the song’s tuneless and clichéd verses. Still, at this point I’m relieved that, unlike on Midnights, she sounds like she feels something. On “Down Bad,” a pulsing bop that likens an ill-fated whirlwind romance to an alien abduction, content easily gels with form: Her vocals float up (“For a moment we had cosmic love”) and then crash down into a low, self-aware deadpan (“Now I’m down bad crying at the gym . . . Fuck it if I can’t have him/I might just die it would make no difference”). On “The Black Dog,” about an ex who’s still sharing her location, Swift’s vocals are especially plaintive as she finally makes use of her skill of trapping novel-length narratives into concise phrases: “And I still mean it / Old habits die screaming,” she wails in the earworm chorus.
I’ve never had much interest in Taylor Swift’s romantic escapades. Both stans’ and haters’ obsessive interest in matching her songs to her exes—admittedly egged on by her own PR— undermines how her storytelling plays with subjectivity and authorship. For some critics, TTPD is unbearably weighed down by its lore: namely, the fact that rather than the expected album about long-term ex Joe Alwyn, Swift dropped more than two dozen tracks apparently about her brief tryst last year with The 1975 frontman and edgelord Matty Healy, an association that many fans found dismaying. (Hence the rebuke of tongue-clucking “Sarahs and Hannahs” on “But Daddy I Love Him.”) I too am fatigued with Taylor Swift the personality, but TTPD has given us more reason to see her as amicably divorced from Taylor Swift the artist. On the campy delight “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” she sings about plastering on a fake smile to perform her stadium megashow. To add another layer, she’s now started performing the song live on tour. When she’s hitting her marks while singing about hitting her marks, but wanting to die inside, who can say what’s real? Taylor Swift the personality has been doing an All-American victory tour with NFL boyfriend Travis Kelce, but the speaker on much of TTPD has no qualms about appearing raw, unlikeable, and even pathetic. You don’t know me at all, the album seems to say. And isn’t it liberating that we don’t have to? After all, we’re just here for the music.
Cynthia Friedman (managing director): A few weeks ago, I went to see Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature film, I Saw the TV Glow, with a close group of friends. They had reassured me that, while sometimes classified as horror or thriller, this would not be a film with jump scares or dripping suspense. Rather, it’s in part an artistic portrayal—with flickers of the supernatural—of a teenager struggling to inhabit his own life, steeped in the unsettled feelings, murky confusion, and detached numbness that define his adolescence. The lighting, cinematography and score bring the audience into the realm of his emotions in ways that language alone would fail to do.
As a seventh grader, Owen is drawn to a TV show called The Pink Opaque, which follows two girls who, from different sides of town, fight evil together—and is rendered in the cheesy, low-tech style of TV shows that ’90s kids will feel nostalgia for. The late-night show airs after Owen’s strict curfew, but he is persuaded to evade his parents’ restriction after connecting with an older student, Maddy, who he finds sitting alone in the gymnasium, hair covering her eyes, reading the episode guide. Throughout high school, the TV show is more real to Owen and Maddy than life outside of it. When she eventually leaves their town, Owen stays behind, wandering through the years with a lingering sense that something may be wrong. He is made to confront possibilities that blur reality and his beloved TV show, and I followed the trajectory of his choices with a genuine uncertainty of where they would lead.
Schoenbrun is a trans filmmaker, and this film is a deeply personal one; it’s worthwhile to read about the “soon to be cult-classic” in their own words. In interviews with Jezebel and Polygon, they speak about the relationships between queerness, dissociation, and the outlet for belonging and love that was available to them: television. Following Owen through his youth makes me think about how, growing up, we gravitate towards the friends we do; even when we only have a nascent sense of ourselves, and who we might become, we sometimes signal hidden depths to one another in ways we don’t yet understand. Leaving the theater with friends, the mood was delicate but heavy. We have each made it into adulthoods of our choosing—with their own tumults, certainly, but with friendships and romance, self-knowledge and self-expression. We stood outside on the steps, inwardly reflecting on the pain of searching for that freedom and the heartbreak of wanting someone to find their way towards it.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In June of 1858, Edgardo Mortara—a six-year-old Jewish boy living in Bologna—was taken from his parents by the police and delivered to the Catholic Church in Rome. The basis for this state-sponsored kidnapping was that the young Jew had been secretly baptized by the family’s Christian maid; the baptism was considered valid, and the Church could not allow a Catholic to be raised by Jews, even if the Jews in question were his own parents. This infamous incident is the subject of Marco Belocchio’s brilliant new film, Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. Belocchio, who has been one of Italy’s most important filmmakers for five decades, has always demonstrated a blazing hatred for the Catholic Church, and in the Mortara story he has ample material for condemnation of that institution. Indeed, the film presents us with an unrelentingly depressing spectacle. The obvious injustice of Mortara’s fate is of no concern to the Church, which maintains that the saving of his soul matters more than anything else—and in any case, his parents could always regain custody by converting. Priests, inquisitors, and even Pope Pius IX himself are all complicit in the crime, and insist that their actions are in keeping with god’s will. Mortara became the Catholic the Church made him into: He joined the priesthood at the age of 21 and remained a faithful member of the clergy until his death in 1940.
At the time of the abduction, Italy was not yet a unified nation, and large portions of the territory called Papal States were under the political and religious control of the Pope. Priests thus had a free hand to control the lives of those who lived in these states. Jews had few rights, and it was considered a blessing to rescue them from their ancestral religion, so cases like Mortara’s were not unique. His stood out not for the fierceness with which the family fought to regain their child, but for the international scope of the movement to reverse the kidnapping. Jews around the world leapt to the family’s defense, and were joined by liberals everywhere. But to no avail. The powerlessness of the Jews who attempted to rescue Mortara is exemplified by a chilling scene in the film. Official representatives of the Roman Jewish community, the privileged and sole Jewish interlocutors with the Pope, make their case; the Pope is enraged by their temerity, and every member of the delegation is made to crawl up to his feet and kiss his shoes.
Kidnapped is a tragic tale of an arrogant Church and its powerless victims. After you watch it, seek out the historian David Kertzer’s excellent account of the case, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which makes it clear that with some exceptions, the events in this film occurred as depicted, however outrageous they appear.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Josh Lambert (contributing writer): On October 7th, I was about halfway through reading Jess Row’s novel The New Earth. At the best of times, it would’ve taken me a long time to finish a novel so huge, demanding, and ferociously distressing, but the awfulness of that day, and what we immediately knew would follow, made it even more daunting.
The emotional and narrative core of the novel is the murder of an American Jewish Palestine solidarity activist, Bering Wilcox, by the Israeli military. The initial reviews rightly name-checked Rachel Corrie—who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer when protesting a house demolition in the Gaza Strip in 2003—but Row’s character is very specifically herself: a Jewish child of the Upper West Side, the sometimes-white-passing grandchild of an African-American physicist, a member of a family of extravagant achievers who seem to have achieved exactly nothing. Their professional commitments reflect the novel’s post-2016 specificity: Bering’s mother, Naomi, is a climate scientist who studies the warming oceans and knows there’s no hope, while Bering’s sister Winter, an immigration attorney, tries to keep her clients, and then her partner Zeno, from getting deported. The only centripetal force across the novel’s many digressive scenes, flashbacks, and interpolated texts—unsent email drafts, dark-web message board chats, the transcript of an interview with the Israeli sniper who shot Bering—is Winter’s request that the family gather for her wedding, despite the way they’ve been spinning out in their unceasing grief.
Because it is a lengthy and maximalist swing at the Great American novel in the Trump era, I had the sinking feeling that The New Earth might disappear into semi-obscurity. I doubted that anybody will ever put it on a college syllabus, but the recent events on college campuses—with students and professors putting themselves on the line for justice in Gaza—have given me hope that some readers might find their way to a novel dedicated to those “who work every day, against the world’s cynicism, against seemingly impossible odds, for a just, free, and peaceful future for Palestine and Israel.” After all, as Laura Tanenbaum noted, in her New Republic review, the question at the core of Row’s novel is “not, why would Bering, or why did Rachel Corrie, take a radical leap toward solidarity, but, rather, why don’t more of us?”
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Hilla Medalia’s Mourning in Lod, which is streaming on Paramount+ starting today, traces a web of violence in the “mixed” Jewish–Arab city of Lod in central Israel. It begins in the home of the Palestinian widow and daughter of Mussa Hassouna. His wife shows the filmmaker a video from May 2021, of a settler shooting and killing her unarmed husband, who had arrived at a roundabout as right-wing Jewish Israelis rampaged; we see the victim’s family reckoning with their grief over the cold-blooded murder. Soon after Hassouna’s death, the young man’s funeral would turn into a demonstration, which would turn into rock-throwing, part of the 2021 intifada—and this opening chapter not only sets the scene for all that follows, but also demonstrates the director’s great skill at melding the intimate and personal with the world-historical.
The scene shifts to a Jewish mother and son in their apartment, who are also grieving. The husband and father in this case, Yigal Yehoshua, was driving home from work when he encountered the Palestinian rock-throwers, and a slab of concrete went through his window and struck him; he was declared brain dead at the hospital, where his family consented to donate his organs. We then meet Randa Owies, an ailing Palestinian woman who’d desperately needed a kidney, and whose unexpected rescue came from Yehoshua. But this is not the happy ending it might be elsewhere: When the story of the cross-community transplant spreads, Israeli Jews are incensed and express their rage on social media. While Yehoshua’s family remains proud of their decision, and invites the recipient and her daughters to an event commemorating his death a month later, deep tensions remain. Most of the attendees are yarmulke-wearing Mizrahi Jews; the Palestinians are uncomfortable and fearful, feeling the hatred of some in the crowd, whom they say look like settlers, not like “ordinary Jews.” And much later, when Hassouna’s father—who, along with his son’s widow, has been pursuing justice for that murder—meets with Yehoshua’s brother, telling him that he knew and liked Yehoshua and has always gotten along with Jews, his words ring hollow, the mouthing of clichés after the anger he had already expressed. After all, the suspects in Yehoshua’s murder have by then spent years in jail, though not formally charged, while the man who murdered Hassouna has walked off scot-free.
Medalia doesn’t shy away from this complexity, or from the reality that fundamentally undermines any hope of a redemptive arc—that Randa’s life with her new kidney was only made possible by death and injustice. And tragically, the killings associated with Mourning in Lod didn’t end in 2021: The sound engineer of the film was murdered on October 7th.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Last week, the world lost music legend Steve Albini, who died of a heart attack at the age of 61. Though an influential musician in his own right—his punk band Big Black is one of the ’80s indie underground groups chronicled in Michael Azerrad’s classic book Our Band Could Be Your Life—Albini is best known for recording the work of other major artists. I first encountered his name as a 13-year-old falling in love with the Pixies’ 1988 record Surfer Rosa. The album has a singular, otherworldly sound; the mix is somehow both crowded and spacious, with the gnarled guitar tones ebbing and flowing and the drums cranked strangely high. Reading about the making of that record is the first time I can remember being aware of or interested in not just the artist behind an album, but the producer—a label Albini himself strenuously resisted, preferring the term “engineer.” “A producer is someone who is completely responsible for a session,” he said, “but in my case those decisions are made by the band . . . Ultimately what I’m trying to do is satisfy the band.” His self-deprecation was refreshing, and speaks to something real about his method; other distinctive producers whose work I seek out, like David Fridmann or BJ Burton, clearly apply a heavier hand. But despite his effort to undersell his own influence on the records he engineered, Albini is obviously partly responsible for a sound—raw, noisy, propulsive—that indelibly marked the history of American indie rock.
The range of artists he worked with was staggering. “I’ve recorded 1,500 to 2,000 records, and I know they are all quite different,” he said in 2005; the count is now surely hundreds higher. My own favorites run the gamut. In addition to Surfer Rosa, I adore early works in that abrasive mode, like The Breeders’ Pod (1990) and Nirvana’s In Utero (1993), in addition to more recent iterations of that style like Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory (2012). But other albums I especially treasure sound little or nothing like those records: the somber, simmering slowcore of Low’s Things We Lost in the Fire (2001); the haunted, jangling country of Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co. (2003); the delicate, orchestral grandeur of Joanna Newsom’s Ys (2006). In the days since Albini’s death I’ve returned to these albums and discovered many I’ve never heard—not only the work he recorded, but also his own music with the band Shellac, which just released its final album with Albini today. Part of the pleasure of following Albini’s output has always been the sense of an abundance that feels infinite—and even now that his life has been cut short and his oeuvre completed, I take solace in the fact that there’s always more to encounter.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Kathleen Peratis (co-chair of board of directors): I wanted to congratulate Nathan Thrall, a good friend of Jewish Currents, for winning the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. This gorgeous and searing tale follows the personal tragedy of Abed Salama, whose child is burned to death in a bus accident along with five other children in the occupied West Bank. As much as the bereaved father can’t help doing what parents do—blaming himself—Thrall makes us understand that it was not merely a series of bureaucratic screw ups: the impenetrable thicket of rules and roadblocks can and does amount to death sentences for Palestinians. In weaving together these alternating strands—intensely personal, deeply political—Thrall is indicting the very system itself.
In an interview with Jewish Currents on October 4th, Thrall fatefully said that he was motivated to write the book to draw attention to the “daily violence and oppression” faced by Palestinians rather than only “when there is something like a war in Gaza going on.” This line now reads as strikingly prescient: To be attentive to this horrifying daily reality is to better understand the heightened conflict of the present.
Jonathan Shamir (fellow): Wim Wenders’ new film, Perfect Days, eschews the angels and assassins of his past films in favor of an unlikely protagonist, a diligent and taciturn Japanese public toilet cleaner named Hirayama. We are immediately brought into Hirayama’s world: his daily routine of pre-dawn rituals (trimming his mustache and watering his plants), the humming of the cassette collection on his morning commute, and the meticulous pride that he takes in his work.
Throughout these repeated sequences, and Hirayama’s long silences, we glean a deep sense of his interiority. The camera dwells on his face, and surfaces the subtleties of his inner life, such as an incipient smile at his growing plants, or his longing glance toward a woman on a park bench. In the absence of speech, we also hear the movements of his breath and the satisfied gulps of his vending machine coffee.
Along with the gorgeous shots of Tokyo—from Hirayama’s minimalist apartment to the canopies of hi-rises and trees—this all lends itself to a serene and almost meditative cinematic experience that relishes in the joys that can be unearthed from everyday life.
After a first half that is largely devoid of plot, Hirayama’s niece Niko turns up at his doorstep after fleeing his wealthy sister’s home after an argument. Her arrival doesn’t exactly upend his routine, but it does infuse the film with a different kind of emotional force that undercuts the stripped-down philosophy of happiness for which the film has been widely celebrated. Behind the choreographies of contentment, a loneliness also exists, and Hirayama’s emotional crests with his niece—and during a tender game of shadow tag with a terminally-ill stranger—reveal the exigency of human connection for even the most introverted characters.
Hirayama has an ability to keep relationships at arm’s length. We discover this in his emotionally fraught yet underdeveloped interaction with his sister when she comes to pick up Niko in a chauffeured BMW. But while Hirayama’s restraint may facilitate a quiet contentment, it also delimits what his life could be. At the end of the film, as Hirayama’s drives off in his van, Wenders returns to the protagonist’s expressive face, which contorts with joy and despair—at times, holding both feelings at once. And as Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ plays in Hirayama’s van, Wenders seems to be calling on us to revel in the ups, downs, and ambivalence itself.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Having recently traveled to Paris—a city I’ve lived in, visited countless times, and roamed thoroughly—and with summer vacations on the horizon for many, I thought I might use this space to recommend some places any Paris-bound readers might not have thought to visit. (First, a warning: This summer will be a terrible time to go. The Summer Olympics are being held there from late July to early August, so if you can book a hotel room it will be triple the normally high price, and getting around on the metro will cost you double through the first week in September. But there’s still some time before all that.)
Paris is unequaled when it comes to its dead, and sports marvelous cemeteries; I highly recommend Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall’s Permanent Parisians, an illustrated, out-of-print guide to all of them. I prefer Montparnasse to the more famous Père Lachaise, but both will give you hours of pleasure. While Pére Lachaise is prettier, Montparnasse is the final home of many if not most of the writers closest to my heart. There you can visit Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who share a site (now sadly defaced by people leaving outlines of kissy lips on the tombstone); Samuel Beckett; Susan Sontag, whose son once said he didn’t see her being laid to rest in a dismal cemetery in Queens, where she was born; the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar; the Peruvian revolutionary poet César Vallejo; and the misanthropic philosopher E.M. Cioran. Cinephiles can spend time with the founder of the Cinématheque, Henri Langlois, whose gravestone is decorated with stills from great films, as well as the famed director Éric Rohmer. I could go on. Maps of the most celebrated residents are available at the gate.
After visiting the remains of the singer Serge Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg), you can visit his apartment in the 7th arrondissement, which is now a museum, Maison Ginsbourg. (Tickets are extremely difficult to get, since there’s only room for about a dozen visitors at a time.) Gainsbourg was a famously dissolute and provocative character, known for burning a 500-franc note on live TV and, on another televised occasion, telling Whitney Houston that he wanted to “fuck” her. In contrast to his crassness, the museum is lovingly presented by his daughter Charlotte, with taped tours available in French or English; she explains the lives spent in the spaces we pass through, and there’s no need to be an especial fan of Gainsbourg to thoroughly enjoy this eccentric place. Stranger still is my favorite museum in Paris: the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (the Museum of Hunting and Nature). No, I’m not kidding. This is the weirdest and wildest collection of stuff you’ll ever see—a museum that doesn’t take itself overly seriously, and which provides laughs and amazement in every room. Unlike many of Paris’s museums, it is never packed with fellow tourists. Rather, it’s a favorite of Parisians and full of parents with their kids, who are all having a blast.
Skip the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Jeu de Paume, which are mobbed daily. Instead visit the places I’ve spoken of, plus the Maison Auguste Comte (the home of the philosopher who founded positivism), the Musée de la Franc-masonerie (the Museum of Freemasonry), the Musée Gustave Moreau (the studio of the symbolist painter). Finally, go to the Panthéon and pay your respects to Rousseau, Voltaire, Émile Zola, Jean Jaurès, and the latest honoree, the Armenian Communist Resistance leader Missak Manouchian. They’ll make you forget the wretched state of France today, in its final years before a Le Pen presidency.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Laura Elkeslassy (contributor): A couple of years ago, I called the piano virtuoso and composer Maurice El Médioni. I was working on my project Ya Ghorbati—a multimedia album that excavates my family’s roots in Morocco, France, and Israel, weaving together the stories of Jewish Arab divas from the last century with new performances of folk and sacred music—and I wanted permission to record El Médioni’s classic song “Ahlan wa Sahlan.” When he picked up the phone, my breath caught in my chest: He sounded just like my great uncle, who had been like a grandfather to me and who, like El Médioni, had left the Maghreb in the 1960s and spent most of his life in Marseille. El Médioni laughed and told me I didn’t need to pay him for the rights; credit would be enough. It was a testament to a universe of folklorists where music was part of a world to be shared.
Since his death at the end of March, I’ve been listening once again to El Médioni’s music. Born in Oran in 1928, El Médioni grew up in a Jewish family of musicians and café owners. (His uncle Saoud l’Oranais was a renowned master of Arab Andalusi music. At an early age, he began teaching himself piano, riffing on popular Arab and French tunes. As a young adult, he worked as a tailor by day and played in cabarets at night. He often entertained the soldiers who had landed in Algeria as part of Operation Torch—the 1942 Allied invasion of French-occupied North Africa—some of whom were accomplished musicians in their own right. From African American soldiers, El Médioni learned jazz, boogie-woogie, and fox trot; from Puerto Rican soldiers, he learned rumba. In 1962, following the War of Independence, El Médioni emigrated to France, first to Paris and then to Marseille. It was in the latter city, where he would spend the majority of his life, that he composed “Ma guitare et mon pays”—a heart-wrenching song that captures the pain of a generation of North Africans in exile—for the great Jewish Algerian singer Line Monty. El Médioni’s son Yaakov recalls Monty visiting his home and singing, as enraptured listeners swayed back and forth, eyes closed, hands to their cheeks, longing for their beautiful childhood days in Oran, Tunis, or Casablanca.
Over the course of his life, El Médioni composed dozens of hits. One of the last heirs to the formidable lineage of Jewish Andalusian music, he was also a great innovator, creating a wholly original sound fusing Andalusi nubas (classical music from medieval Al Andalus) and rai (20th-century popular Algerian music) with global influences from boogie-woogie to rumba to French cabaret. He collaborated with many of the greatest musicians of his era, including Reinette l’Oranaise, Lili Boniche, Lili Labassi, Blond-Blond, Sami El Maghribi, Mahieddine Bachtarzi, Blaoui Houari, Ahmed Wahby, Fadhéla Dziria—as well as with younger musicians, such as Khaled, Roberto Rodriguez, the Klezmatics, mixing what he called “pianoriental” riffs with Rai, Cuban grooves, and Klezmer. In 2012, he reunited with long-lost collaborators thanks to the El Gusto project, an initiative imagined by the Algerian filmmaker Safinez Bousbia, which brought together the Jewish and Muslim musicians who had been part of the Hadj Mohamed El-Anka ensemble in the 1950s. Toward the end of his life, El Médioni emigrated to Israel, where he participated in the revival of Jewish Arab music, notably on the Andalusian orchestra scene. Generations of listeners will remember him for his rich musical contribution, his innovative talent, his technical prowess, and his sense of hospitality. To me, he represented one of the last living links to my grandparents’ world—a world at once Jewish and Arab, where lullabies, weddings, songs, and ballads were sung seamlessly in Arabic, French, and Hebrew, and where Jewish and Muslim life were profoundly intertwined. He carried a cultural torch that is now our inheritance. Allah yerhamak ya maalem.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Slow, the new film by Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradze, is a fascinating examination of a rather unique couple: a self-proclaimed promiscuous woman and an asexual man. Elena, a modern dancer, is rehearsing with a group of young deaf people in preparation for a performance when she meets Dovydas, who will be her sign interpreter. Their mutual attraction is immediately clear, and they seem to be heading to the inevitable consummation until Dovydas informs Elena of his disinterest in sex. This notion baffles Elena: What is a relationship without sex? Can the first stages of intimacy, like making out, really suffice? Why do they for him, but not for her? She attempts to seduce him and is put off by his refusal to bend—even as there are signs that he might. Kavartadze’s boldness lies in her frank depiction of the adamancy with which both characters cling to their views of sex, as well as their real affection for the other.
Dovydas’s life is a truncated one in Elena’s eyes, but not in his. By attending thoughtfully to their relationship, this moving film puts in question the nature of our romantic entanglements, and of our very identities. Freud and countless others have posited sex as one of humanity’s basic needs, along with food and shelter; what’s left of that idea when there are those who reject sex as a need, and not for reasons of physical infirmity or religious belief? (Elena’s childhood best friend appears as a representative of religious celibacy, but because she lives in a social world that also rejects sex—the convent—it is not an issue in the same way.) In a society in which the accumulation of sexual partners is a significant marker of masculinity, how does asexuality shift the meaning of being a man? Slow leaves these and other questions open, integrating them in a non-judgmental way that draws us in emotionally and intellectually. It is an extremely adult film.
Briefly: Another worthwhile and open-ended movie premiering today is Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. It’s a languid, novelistic film, in which every shot is a paragraph. While it initially seems to be a straightforward work about the intrusion of the wealthy into a backwoods community, it plays with our expectations and leads us in a direction we’d never have expected. The ending left me stunned, as it will you.
Mari Cohen (associate editor): On Tuesday night, when I began receiving a barrage of texts and Slack messages announcing that the NYPD had descended on Columbia University’s campus to break up the Gaza solidarity encampment and remove the students occupying a campus building, I turned on the university’s student radio station, WKCR. Soon, a reporter at the station, Teddy Wyche, was updating listeners on the whereabouts of several field reporters who had been barricaded into campus buildings by the police. A young woman came on the mic to brief us on the latest news about whether—as Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper had all claimed—most of the protestors were “outside agitators” who had come to menace Columbia’s students. So far, there was no evidence anyone arrested was not a student, the reporter clarified. Shortly after a jazz break, they began to report that the campus state of emergency had been called off, and then that the police were releasing the other reporters to move freely. One of them was patched in to describe the scene at no-longer-occupied Hamilton Hall (named “Hind’s Hall” by the students after six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed in Gaza), which he said had almost all of its first floor windows smashed out. Wyche, back at the mic, gave a birthday shout out to one of the reporters, who, now that it was midnight, had turned 20 years old.
It’s clear that I’m not the only one who was enraptured and even emotionally moved listening to WKCR that night. They sounded so young, but they knew what they were doing. They said what they knew when they knew it; when they didn’t know, they said that, too. When they were overwhelmed, or scared, they didn’t hide it, but they kept going. Sometimes, they spoke candidly from their own perspectives: “I don’t know if I’m going to feel safe on campus with the police here until May 17th, after what I’ve seen tonight,” said the reporter who had described the post-raid scene at Hamilton Hall. When I checked in on the station over the next few days, I remained impressed. Yesterday, they aired a nearly hour-long interview with one of the students who had been arrested in Hamilton Hall, who gave the most direct account I’ve heard so far of what happened in the building: a vivid play-by-play of the officers’ actions, including what she described as police using excessive force, kicking students and slamming them to the ground.
Anyone who goes into journalism professes to be motivated by the familiar platitudes about “speaking truth to power.” But journalism as a form has no inherent nobility: The tools of reporting, writing, and publishing confer a subtle authority that can just as easily be employed to marginalize and malign as to elucidate and expose. Journalism also includes the work of CNN anchor Dana Bash, who, the morning after the Columbia police raids, aired a segment that flipped the entire course of events on its head, casting the police as liberators freeing the campus from—once again!—“outside agitators” who had created an environment for Jewish students akin to Germany in the 1930s. But the WKCR students—along with their reporter peers nearby at City College—offered a reminder of what journalism can be in the right hands: rigorous, careful, and dogged; willing to track the riot police across campus until they physically block you in; conscious of the reporter’s own responsibility and role in the story—and in history. If only more of their all-grown-up colleagues could follow their lead.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Aparna Gopalan (news editor): At an anarchist book fair last fall, I got my family a gift that I can’t stop thinking about recently: a marathon of a board game called “Bloc by Bloc: Uprising.” The game’s protagonists are four oppressed blocs—workers, neighbors, prisoners, and students—and each player plays one of these on a board made up of areas like “overcrowded jail,” “gentrifying residential zone,” “garment sweatshop,” and “privatized university.” The blocs’ shared goal is to revolt: organize new members, build barricades and encampments, evade or clash with police, and eventually, liberate entire swathes of the city.
I’ve played radical games before—Paul Peterson’s hilarious “Guillotine” is a particular favorite—but Bloc by Bloc is not so much a board game as a training manual for revolutionary street politics. As police deployments intensify and the 10-day countdown to the National Guard’s arrival ticks up each round, players are faced with the urgent tactical questions that dog real movements: Which zones are going to be easiest to liberate (public park, plaza, street market), and which the most necessary (interior ministry, telecom network hub)? Is the subway open or closed today, and how is that going to affect our ability to reinforce our encampments around the city? Should I spend my turn planning new escalations with other blocs, or focus on growing the size of my own bloc first? Should I be building a new encampment at the bankrupt junior college, or travel to defend comrades about to face a police sweep at the smartphone factory instead? The last of these questions is particularly pressing because the game immediately ends if one of the four blocs is fully defeated. As a result, solidarity is not an option but an existential need. I often found myself abandoning my own plans and dashing across the board to protect other players, using my special powers—if I was playing as “students,” I could sneak past police; as “prisoners” I could beat them up—for collective defense, and often sacrificing my encampments and even bloc members for the survival of the whole.
The game is set up like the real world in that there are countless police and yet their numbers keep growing. Often, it felt less like we were building a movement than simply trying not to be eliminated. The challenge then became to figure out what strategies—the gambits, the feints—would enable us to break that holding pattern. In our case, the strategy that eventually worked was going on the offensive. Once we burned down our first police van, the tide turned: soon we were hemming the cops into ever-smaller parts of the city as we built camp after camp. When we liberated our first zone, around four hours into the game, we could have cried. The board began changing color as we flipped each tile to its “liberated” version, and slowly the city turned into a landscape of mutual aid centers and graffiti and street parties, with no police in sight.
When I played the game to stave off feelings of left futility in late 2023, I couldn’t imagine that similar struggles would materialize again so soon. As encampments spread across university campuses, we are living through the reality Bloc by Bloc so effectively simulates—the violent ubiquity of police raids, the difficult tradeoffs of collective action, and the thrill of small liberations. When you’re taking a break from reinforcing the real encampment near you, or maybe while you’re hanging out at that encampment, do check out Bloc by Bloc!
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Iranian film Terrestrial Verses, directed by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatam, could not be more simply made. In nine scenes, each of which unfolds in a single shot, an ordinary Iranian negotiates with some authority figure off-screen, heard but never seen. The directors have spoken of their debt to the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and formally their film is really an homage to his brilliant Ten (2002), which takes place entirely in a car, the camera trained on the driver and passenger as the passengers talk about their lives. Terrestrial Verses likewise has no real plot: The only connection between the various supplicants and authorities is the intrusiveness of the latter and the powerlessness of the former. By bringing together these disparate vignettes, Asgari and Khatam portray the cruelty of Iran’s repressive regime—not through the spectacular brutality of Revolutionary Guards beating or shooting people, but through the mundane indignities of daily life.
The film opens with a new father standing at the window of a government office, where he is attempting to register his baby’s name: David, after his wife’s favorite author. While the banter about the eccentric choice of a Western name is almost lighthearted, as the registrar suggests more typically Iranian names, the ultimate result is chilling—the parent’s choice is deemed unacceptable. The second chapter begins with a carefree little girl, Selena, dancing before a mirror in a clothing store to what is clearly Western music played through her headphones. She’s there for her mother to purchase the proper Islamic attire mandated for a school ceremony, and she’s soon buried beneath robes, veils, headbands, and flowers. The scenes that follow play out further dynamics of restriction. We see one young woman accused of immorality by her school principal, another propositioned by a potential boss, yet another whose car has been impounded because a traffic camera showed her driving without a head scarf. A man trying to get a driver’s license must take off his shirt to show the clerk his tattoos and justify them; a filmmaker has to tear pages from his script before a culture ministry official will allow it to be made.
The understatement of the mise-en-scène makes the characters’ degradation all the more terrible, and the stationary camera makes the people’s silent anger scream. Shot over seven days with no permits, Terrestrial Verses is an act of political courage. But it is above all a brilliant film.
Jonathan Shamir (fellow): I didn’t realize how weary I’d grown of the detachment and ironizing that is so prominent in contemporary fiction until I recently read Garth Greenwell’s 2020 novel Cleanness, which dives headfirst into the extremities of human feeling. Following a gay American teacher in the twilight of his tenure in Sofia, Bulgaria, the book is told in a gorgeous and breathless first-person voice that is like a hoover for every crumb of experience. The term “stream-of-consciousness” feels too cerebral for this novel, which seems more interested in tracing the motions of the body and the heart.
This surfeit bubbles up most often through the narrator’s romantic and sexual encounters; three of the book’s nine chapters are dedicated to his relationship with a young Portuguese student named R., while two chapters relay his intense experiences of BDSM with other men. Greenwell’s depictions of sex are not only vivid with visceral detail, but also attuned to the ways that sex functions as a site of both self-abnegation and self-realization. In Cleanness, desire has an unstable relationship to language—the “blunter instrument” of the narrator’s imperfect Bulgarian means that he can express himself sexually “without self-consciousness or shame”—and to the self, as the narrator grapples with how to even recognize the authenticity of the feeling.
Across the full range of the novel’s scenarios, Greenwell treats the narrator’s other emotions with no less depth: his subtle sadness as he moves through the crowd at anti-government protests, his inebriated tenderness toward a local dog, his stunted attempt to comfort a heartbroken student.Cleanness perceptively illuminates the similarities between these ostensibly quite different categories of experience. After failing to provide meaningful mentorship to his student, the narrator reflects on how he has “worn [him]self down to a bearable size”; when he spits the word “faggot” as he steps uneasily into the role of a dom in the penultimate chapter, he finds himself moved to tears by the dignity of his submissive partner. The narrator’s constant self-doubting highlights how relationships as apparently rigid as teacher-student or dom-sub roles are much less stable than expected. By troubling such dichotomies, the novel depicts a life lived fully in the uncertainty and richness of the in-between. As the narrator tells the campus dog at the novel’s end, breaking the rules to let her inside: “You’re filthy . . . but I love you.”
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
