Shabbat
Reading List
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.
Josh Lambert (contributor): The discourse around the recent series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm was pretty predictable: proclamations of the end of Jewish comedy, or at least the end of an era, nostalgic lists of old Jewish comedians, or laments that it is “hard to think about the finale of ‘Curb,’ or rewatch the ‘Palestinian Chicken’ episode, amid the cruelty and carnage of the past six months.” Jews have always told jokes during periods of horror, though—see, for example, the Warsaw ghetto jokes collected by Shimon Huberband. What’s more specifically painful right now is the unease of laughing when Jews are perpetrating atrocities, day after day, and when there’s so much fundamental disagreement among Jews about whether they constitute atrocities at all.
This brokenness has been captured by the comedian Antonia Lassar, who gives me the tiniest sliver of hope that we can rebuild a more loving and just Jewish community in the U.S. Lassar is the kind of queer Reform Jew who prays most comfortably at Evangelical churches and Chabad houses. On TikTok, she’s got hundreds of thousands of views for her take on Reform synagogue décor, plus all the IBS content you could want. She’s performed sketch comedy with the Upright Citizens Brigade and a one-person show about sexual violence on college campuses, and she recently started co-hosting a podcast “sometimes about Jews, sometimes about comedy, and always about gossip.” Her new tour reminds me a bit of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette in its ambition: Lassar wants her audience to laugh, but also to confront the loneliness of the moment we’re in. I would rather not describe precisely what you’ll be getting yourself into, if you see one of her upcoming shows in Boston and Atlanta, but you can expect discomfort, group singing, and the possibility that you’ll walk out feeling a tiny bit less despair.
Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I’ve been watching the fourth season of The Great North, a cartoon that follows the Tobin family in the fictional town of Lone Moose, Alaska. The show’s charm hinges on its rich set of characters. The family is a mix of grounded and eccentric: The eldest, Wolf, and his fiancée-then-wife Honeybee Shaw exchange movie quotes and creative business ideas; 16-year-old Judy is passionate about drama and the arts; Ham, a sweet soul, bakes cakes and casually re-comes out as gay every once in a while; and the youngest, Moon, lives for the outdoors and wears a bear onesie as his primary outfit. Their caring and attentive dad, Beef—voiced by the fantastic Nick Offerman—does the parenting solo. In the first episode, we learn that his wife ran off years ago, and was not a responsible mother even when she was around. (In one scene, the kids reminisce about when she named their childhood dog “Grandma,” so that when she was out partying, she could truthfully say that the kids were home with Grandma.) Alongside the family, we get to know the cast of folks about town: straight-faced Mayor Peppers, a member of the Sugpiag tribe; Santiago, a gentle and contemplative man; Alyson Lefebvrere, who runs the point-and-shoot photography store at the mall.
Watching The Great North is a wholesome and funny experience, yet its adult themes (and sometimes adult language!) ensure the show never reaches a saturation point of feeling sappy. There is a comforting reliability about the show: not only does Hulu release one episode a week—a throwback to TV schedules before streaming—but each episode ends with lessons that invoke humility, kindness, generosity, and being true to oneself for kids and grown-ups alike. On days when those qualities feel painfully absent from the political stage, it’s a welcome respite to enter the world of the Tobins for a spell, before going back out.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Don’t be put off by the monstrously trivializing title of Tricia Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice. The Freaks Came Out to Write—a more appropriate name for an empty-headed chronicle of hippie life—is in fact an important book about a once-great newspaper. This depiction of New York’s storied alt-weekly, stitched together from the accounts of hundreds of those who participated, is at once totally familiar and full of surprises, and serves as a reminder of the value of oppositional journalism.
The Voice was born in 1955. Its founders included Norman Mailer, and while the celebrity novelist never played more than a marginal role, he is credited with coming up with its iconic name. The Freaks Came Out to Write reacquaints us with many of greats from the past of New York journalism: The paper’s news section included Jack Newfield and his annual lists of the ten worst landlords and the ten worst judges; Wayne Barrett and his dogged investigations into crooked and venal politicians and developers (including Donald Trump); Nat Hentoff and his fervent civil libertarianism; and the immortal, unreconstructed communist Alexander Cockburn. The culture pages featured film critics like Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and the music writers Robert Christgau, Richard Goldstein, Gary Giddins and, before he was fired for punching a coworker, Stanley Crouch. For a time, The Voice even had one of the best sports sections ever to appear in a non-sports periodical. This sparkling cast of writers all appeared at the same time; those of us who read it faithfully knew just how lucky we were.
But the stories of life at the weekly told by the former writers show us a side of the paper not obvious to its readers. Egos were difficult to control, and battles over space were constant. (One must admire the editors who had to herd what one participant calls “a herd of ocelots” to produce a paper that was essential reading for so many years.) The Freaks Came Out to Write also illuminates the way political shifts roiled the publication. The growth of the feminist movement was not greeted warmly by The Voice’s core cadre of white men, like Hentoff and Barrett. The same held during the rise of the fight for gay rights, and for efforts to acknowledge the importance of Black culture. This part of the story is not a pretty one, but it’s to Romano’s credit that she tells it warts and all.
While The Voice still exists today (after a few-year hiatus), it is a shell of its former self. This book shows that the paper did not simply die, but was deliberately killed, as the writers who were at its heart were fired one by one, and the focus shifted away from rigorous investigative journalism. Remembering how vital The Voice once was, and the role its reporters played in uncovering corruption and general sleaziness in city government, I couldn’t help but think of the dreadful moral state of New York today, rudderless under an untrustworthy mayor. This abominable status quo is partly owed to the absence of a paper like The Voice was in its heyday, which held our elected and unelected rulers’ feet to the fire.
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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.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Earlier this week, the translator, critic, and Jewish Currents contributor Lily Meyer published her engrossing debut novel, Short War, which spans two continents and nearly five decades to trace the entanglements of family, eros, and empire. The book begins in Santiago in the spring of 1973—just before the US-backed coup that deposed the socialist Chilean president, Salvador Allende, and inaugurated 17 years of right-wing military dictatorship—following American Jewish teenager Gabriel Lazris as he grapples with fascism’s rise. Brought to the country by his conservative father’s work as the Santiago bureau chief for an American newspaper, Gabriel has been radicalized by his friend’s militant dad, and is now a committed communist and self-loathing American. “He remembered walking around Chicago on his last visit to the States,” Meyer writes, “pitying everyone he saw for not having an Allende of their own on the horizon. Allende was possibility.” Gabriel’s reckoning with the crumbling of the nation’s socialist experiment intersects with his escalating alienation from his family, as he begins to suspect his father of collaborating with the CIA to sow discord in Chile. But even as the political situation deteriorates, he finds a new home for his idealism in a whirlwind romance with a girl named Caro, who joins him in a Communist Party farm labor program. When the novel later turns to Gabriel’s flailing daughter Nina, whose 2015 excursion to Buenos Aires to salvage her PhD dissertation is derailed for a quest to Santiago in search of information about her family, it becomes an intimate exploration not only of Chilean democracy’s tragic dissolution, but of the wrenching ways that historical trauma corrodes relationships down the generations. (If you happen to be in or near the Twin Cities next Tuesday, April 16th, come see me in conversation with Meyer at SubText Books in St. Paul.)
Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Today I read the Mondoweiss article “‘Come out, you animals’: how the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital happened” by Tareq S. Hajjaj, which uses eyewitness testimonies to reconstruct the two-week Israeli siege that killed at least 381 Palestinians (with over 1,000 others either dead, injured, or missing) at Gaza’s largest hospital complex.
The article recounts how Israeli soldiers entered the hospital on March 18th to break up a gathering of Gaza’s civil government employees, who had come to al-Shifa to receive their salaries. Framing the gathering as a meeting of “terror operatives,” the Israeli forces began to besiege the complex using tanks and drones. Those whom Israel deigned to consider civilians were asked to leave the hospital, and when “some of the staff members, including doctors, refused to leave . . . they were executed immediately and without argument.” Soldiers later went through the hospital compound in search of those who had not evacuated; these people, too, were executed, at least 22 of them in their hospital beds.
Afterwards, the Israeli army gathered the government workers in the hospital’s courtyard. I will quote what comes next: “It then proceeded to execute them, one after the other. When the slaughter was done, army bulldozers piled up their corpses in the dozens, dragging them through the sand and burying them.” In the weeks to come, photo after photo would show severed limbs covered in sand, being dug up by hand by the government employees who still remained.
I’ve found no adjectives to characterize Hajjaj’s report. “Horrific,” “harrowing,” “monstrous,” and “unbearable,” have long since collapsed under the weight of Gaza’s realities. But this piece demands to be read. These scenes cannot be allowed to go unseen. I invite you to read and bear witness, for whatever little witness is even worth anymore.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Thanks to the portability of books, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance are far better known than the movement’s visual artists. But the impressive new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, will do much to right that imbalance. This exhaustive (but not exhausting) show reveals the breadth of the work of Black artists in the 1930s and ’40s, while examining the ways their output, so rooted in American reality, intersected with that of Europeans like Matisse, Picasso, and Man Ray. While many museum shows on Black art since the 2020 police killing of George Floyd have had a narrowly political focus, this exhibition presents an expansive view of Black American life and aesthetics. Each room corresponds to a theme, and the first two make the range of style and subject clear. The first room, titled “Thinkers,” includes formal, even stuffy portraits of Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson; the next one, “Everyday Life in the New Black Cities,” abandons formality and offers frames bursting with life, like Archibald Motley’s The Picnic and The Liar, Hale Wooodruff’s Cubist The Card Players, and Jacob Lawrence’s Pool Parlor.
I was particularly struck by Palmer Hyden’s The Janitor Who Paints, a lovely portrait of a man whose life is split between survival at a menial job and art; it’s a strong but subtle statement of persistence and strength. But the most interesting portraits are those painted by Winold Reiss, a German refugee who famously portrayed W.E.B. Du Bois and the aforementioned Alain Locke, presented with detailed heads and with bodies presented largely in outline. For me, though, the star of the show is unquestionably William H. Johnson. As I roamed through the rooms, I gravitated naturally to a number of colorful canvases painted in a deceptively simple style. In one, a colorfully dressed couple stand under a crescent moon; the man is wearing a yellow jacket with a long yellow feather in his fedora, and the woman dressed to the nines. In another, an elderly man in a vest sits casually, backwards, on a chair, the colors stark and clear. That these works stand out above the rest is no knock on the rest. This well-conceived, well-curated collection of paintings, drawings, photographs, and films pays homage to artists who have long deserved—and are finally receiving—the attention they merit.
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): I want to recommend an indispensable report by Yuval Abraham, published by +972 Magazine and its Hebrew partner Local Call, on the artificial intelligence system—known as “Lavender”—that the Israeli military has used to compile its kill list in the Gaza Strip.
Theoretically, the role of the system is to identify suspected Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives—but in practice it has selected targets using a definition “so permissive [that] it loses all meaning,” one source told Abraham. Drawing on testimonies from six Israeli intelligence officers, the report explains how the AI program uses supposedly common “characteristics” of militants—flagging people who switch mobile phones, move between houses, or simply belong to certain WhatsApp groups—to rank the likelihood that an individual is affiliated with a militant organization on a scale from 1 to 100. As pressure to kill more militants mounted in the first weeks of the war, the threshold for defining targets fell, until Lavender’s kill list included some 37,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army recognized and accepted that the system made errors in approximately 10% of cases, marking individuals “who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.” And yet, the military “gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists” without double-checking them.
As dystopian as this killing machine may be, I was even more struck by the article’s revelations about how, after October 7th, a prevailing atmosphere of “hysteria” and thirst for revenge propelled an unprecedented loosening of the rules of engagement. Once the AI had identified targets, the Israeli military attacked them in their private residences because, from an intelligence perspective, it was “easier” than locating them on the battlefield—if they were ever on the battlefield at all. This was done using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs” that wiped out entire families and their neighbors because, as another intelligence officer explains, “you don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people.” Israel’s military also tore up its own rulebook for calculating “collateral damage,” giving itself permission to kill between 15 and 20 civilians in order to destroy a single low-ranking militants. As for senior militants, 100 civilians were knowingly killed in some attacks on the commanders of brigades or battalions. When read alongside Abraham’s past revelations on Israel’s military conduct—showing the targeting of high-rises and civilian infrastructure in order to try to pressure Palestinians to rise up against Hamas—the piece makes it clear how Israel’s war on Gaza has swiftly become one of the most deadly bombing campaigns in modern history.
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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.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I loved Julio Torres’s My Favorite Shapes, a comedy special centered around his beloved collection of trinkets and objects, which arrive via a conveyor belt onto a set that looks like a gay futuristic dollhouse. So I was super excited to see Torres’s first feature film Problemista—if a little afraid of being disappointed. I am happy to report that it is a perfect entry in the nearly extinct genre of fun 90-minute movies.
Problemista is a story of an El Salvadoran immigrant, played by Torres himself, on a quest to get a work visa and a job designing toys for Hasbro. He links up with a pathologically difficult art critic (Tilda Swinton) who has promised to sponsor him if he can help assemble a show of her late husband’s paintings. (The Isabella Rossellini narration is a nice touch; I would guess Torres chose her because of her own charming and aesthetically-aligned DIY series about the sex lives of animals, Green Porno.) The movie’s fierce aesthetic dedication reminded me of Wes Anderson, but unlike Anderson, Torres’s world never feels twee or indulgent. Also contra Anderson, it never steamrolls the emotional content of the film. On the contrary, each shot—of garbage put out on a New York street or collected in a puddle; of shoes and various tech wires in the Swinton’s chaotic loft—is a rich still life, brimming with emotional information. Give Julio Torres all the money!
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): With The Old Oak, Ken Loach—the most uncompromising of left-wing directors—has likely ended a staggering filmmaking career that began in 1967. For nearly six decades, Loach’s focus has always been on the working class: its struggles, its failures, and its victories, which are more often moral than material. While his appreciation for workers has not made him blind to their flaws, he has been unwavering in his belief that there is only one revolutionary class, one force that can change the world. His final trio of films—I, Daniel Blake; Sorry We Missed You, and now The Old Oak—are all shot in the northeast of England, once a hotbed of radicalism and a center of Labour Party power. Loach shows us the tragic results of the death of the industries that made the northeast so vital: Demoralization, unemployment, poverty, and utter despair have replaced solidarity and hope, as much of working-class Britain has become a source of the xenophobia at the heart of Brexit.
The Old Oak, which largely stars non-professional actors, takes place somewhere near Newcastle and Durham, in a once-thriving mining village that died when the pits were shut down after the miners’ strike of 1984 was crushed. Syrian immigrants have been bused into the town, and at the center of their support network is a struggling, bedraggled pub owner named TJ. His desire to support the town’s new residents isn’t something he understands as political; he is simply a decent man who has screwed up his life and now wants to do the right thing. Taking on this role pits him against a small group of his regulars who spend their days inveighing against the foreigners, whom they claim get everything while they, the native-born, get nothing. With the help of his new friend Yara, an energetic young Syrian woman who learned English in a refugee camp, TJ does all he can to integrate the Syrians into the community. He even applies a solidarity-forging tactic from the miners’ strike by having refugees and locals eat together in his pub.
It’s an arduous struggle, and TJ must battle his own despair to carry on. But if in Loach’s most recent films the fight has been a futile one, it was always unlikely that he would end his career on a hopeless note. While the utopian finale scene is perhaps a tad too pat, it nevertheless succeeds in tugging at our heartstrings. And in an inspired move, Loach has the end credits play over footage of the annual march to Durham Cathedral to honor the miners’ legacy, which includes a blessing of banners. Among them is one made by Syrian refugees, proclaiming, “Strength, Solidarity, Resistance.” This beautiful image is the perfect visual shorthand for the locals’ acceptance of their new comrades.
With The Old Oak, Loach leaves filmmaking the way he came in: a fighter.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety. The text is divided into 54 parshiyot, or sections; given the idiosyncrasies of the Hebrew calendar and occasional doubling up of parshiyot, this works out to one parshah per week, which Jews around the world read concurrently on Shabbat morning. This universally regimented schedule is a foundation for Jewish communal discourse and interpretation, the text accruing ever-increasing strata of meaning over the course of generations. As the insights of each new year are layered on those that came before, every new reading of the parshah is also a re-reading. Each word, even each letter, points not to one stable meaning but to an endlessly generative world of signification.
Last week, we inaugurated 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. While it might seem strange for a historically secular magazine to embark on such a project, especially when we’re already in Vayikra, the third book of the Torah—rather than at the beginning of the year, with the opening verses of Breishit—we are trying this now because many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification. This is a deeply difficult moment to be in the wider Jewish world, as mainstream communities have by and large supported Israel without reservation while it has killed at least 33,000 people in Gaza. As pictures surface of soldiers celebrating Jewish holidays in Gaza and reading from the Torah using a military knife, it’s easy to feel that the tradition is theirs alone. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. 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.
