Shabbat
Reading List
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): For years I’ve maintained that Ben Lerner’s best work is not one of the autofictional novels for which he is most famous, but rather his enigmatic 2006 poetry collection Angle of Yaw. So I was especially eager to read The Lights, the new volume of poems he released last fall. The book is preoccupied with some of the questions about language, politics, and their interrelation that emerged from his 2019 novel The Topeka School. In that book’s final scene, which unfolds at a protest outside an ICE office, the narrator reflects on the “people’s mic”: “It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning how to speak again.” In The Lights, Lerner delves further into the co-constitution of speech and community, frequently by meditating on music. In “The Stone,” he writes: “Imagine a song, she said, that gives voice to people’s anger . . . The anger precedes the song, she continued, but the song precedes the people, the people are back-formed from their singing . . . The voice must be sung into existence, so song precedes speech, clears the ground for it.” Lerner explores the same themes in the context of Jewish continuity in “The Chorus,” in which the speaker remembers his anxiety over introducing the Hanukkah song at his elementary school winter concert: “it’s horrible to separate from a chorus . . . and then return to the group and sing . . . There is always a gap between songs, traditions, and a child must bridge it (or there will be violence) and that’s what the songs themselves tell us if we listen.”
Lerner’s poems once eschewed autobiography, and when the lyric “I” appeared, it tended to obscure rather than ground or clarify, offering a subject whose identity could not be precisely mapped. (One untitled poem in his 2004 collection The Lichtenberg Figures opens, “I had meant to apologize in advance. / I had meant to jettison all dogmatism in theory and all sclerosis in organization. / I had meant to place my hand in a position to receive the sun.”) But the poetry in The Lights, perhaps informed by Lerner’s turn to the self in his fiction, is full of apparent references to his own life, sometimes related with disarming lucidity. These moments occasionally break the spell of language, as in “The Media,” when he writes, “I’m just clicking on things in bed, a review by a man named Baskin who says I have no feelings and hate art.” More often, though—like in the gorgeous, UFO-haunted title poem—the personal illuminates the high-concept abstraction it sits alongside, the interplay somehow exceeding solipsism: “I hold the back of his head and see / unexplained lights over him / that love makes, even if what I want in part / is to be destroyed, all of us / at once, and so the end of desire is caught in it.” Ultimately, just as Lerner’s fiction bears the mark of his poetry, his poetry now seems enriched by his experimentation with prose; in each form, he continues to approach new modes of togetherness in language, where “we are alone / and we are not alone with being.”
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): Susan Sontag’s only documentary, Promised Lands (1974), was banned by Israeli authorities on the grounds that it was “damaging [to] the country’s morale.” Sontag’s transgression: She offers a bleak snapshot of a shell-shocked Israeli society in the wake of its vertiginous fall from perceived invincibility following victory in the 1967 war into the disillusionment of defeat in the 1973 war.
Promised Lands avoids spectacular imagery and cogent narrative, offering instead a series of discrepant vignettes of Israel at a crossroads—from close-ups of charred corpses to oscillating worshippers at the Western Wall—and an eerie soundscape comprised of Jewish liturgy and bombshells. Here, the war is etched more on the land and in the faces of its inhabitants than codified in any sort of story. The only explicitly political visions are provided by two interviewees—who represent liberal and revisionist Zionist thinking—yet they are left nameless and their dialectic without any synthesis.
Despite her formal resistance, Sontag cannot totally evade the meaning-making machine of nationalism. While the film often depicts cemeteries and grieving families, other scenes signal where such grief may end up. In a waxwork museum, we are shown a lachrymose tableaux of Jewish history, as the Shema blares on repeat. Promised Lands ends with psychiatrists reproducing the stimuli of war to ostensibly help a traumatized patient, who cowers beneath his pillow—followed by a drill in preparation for the next war. Taken together, these scenes indicate how the state metabolizes grief to generate more violence: An unyielding narrative reinscribes the fixed position of eternal Jewish victimhood, constraining the future and perpetuating trauma.
If Sontag refuses to hand a readymade meaning over wholesale to the viewer, it is not because she rejects meaning-making; rather, she makes visible the process of struggling toward meaning, and its attendant political implications. As Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli writer who is one of the film’s unnamed interviewees, puts it, turning to ancient Greeks: “It became like a tragedy: We were right, and they were right, and we fought and fought and fought. The end of it is either that one will destroy the other or that we live in some sort of a compromise.” He follows this analysis with a warning: “The Jews know drama; they don’t know tragedy.”
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In many ways, Benjamin Balint’s Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and the Hijacking of History (2023) is a return to the issues raised in his previous book. Kafka’s Last Trial (2018) was an account of the legal battle over a set of Kafka’s papers possessed by a former secretary of Max Brod, the friend of Kafka who was given (and refused to carry out) the task of destroying his writings. The question in that case was not only who was the rightful owner of these texts—the secretary’s family, the library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, or the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany—but who can lay claim to Kafka himself, a Jewish writer who wrote in German.
This is much the same question addressed in Balint’s new book, about a similar literary figure. Bruno Schulz—a Polish Jew born in 1892, who spent most of his life in the medium-size Polish city of Drohobycz, now in Ukraine—was a writer of short stories and an artist who earned his living teaching art at a local high school. He was part of the minority of Polish Jews who lived and wrote in Polish, rather than Yiddish, and neither his stories nor his art have anything to say about Jewishness directly. When his town was occupied by the Nazis, he became the favored Jew of a local Gestapo officer, who had Schulz paint the walls of his childrens’ rooms. After Schulz was murdered by another Nazi officer 1942, these wall paintings were lost until they were rediscovered by German filmmakers in 2001. This raised the question of where the paintings belong: Should they remain where they were? Should they be moved to a local museum? Or was the work’s proper place Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial? Israel peremptorily settled the matter, apparently bribing local officials and sending a team to simply remove the works, restore them, and put them on display.
While Israel’s claim to Kafka was bolstered by his flirtation with Zionism, Schulz never even winked at the ideology; Israel considered him its property simply because he was a Jew killed by the Nazis, and because the state understands itself as the rightful heir to the culture the Nazis nearly obliterated. But are the circumstances of Schulz’s death—and the practical consideration that more people would see Schulz’s work in Jerusalem than in a provincial Ukrainian town—enough to justify uprooting his work from its home and to enlist it in the cause of Zionism? In his judicious and careful account, Balint presents all the parties’ cases fairly, but won’t accept that Israel has a right to such overreach. It’s hard for any reader of these two books not to see that Israel’s expropriation of Kafka and Schulz stands in for the state’s expropriation of all of Jewish life.
This week, we welcome Maya Rosen to her new role as the Jewish Currents Israel/Palestine fellow.
Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): Since October 7th, many in the Jewish community have been working to untangle what it means to have gone from enduring a genocide to being charged with perpetrating one, and the parallels between colonialism in North America and Israel/Palestine. The PBS miniseries, Little Bird, presents a rare opportunity in television to think through questions of trauma, culpability, and the legacy of violence.
Drawing on the personal experiences of co-creator Jennifer Podemski, who hails from a half-Ashkenazi Jewish and half-Anishinaabe family that survived both concentration camps and residential schools, Little Bird depicts the horrors of the Sixties Scoop, when tens of thousands of indigenous children in Canada were forcibly removed from their families and placed in the foster care system to be adopted by white families.
The opening scenes of the show toggle back and forth between the morning routine of Bezhig Little Bird and her family on Long Pine Reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1968 and the 1985 engagement party of Esther and David, who first met at their Montreal synagogue as children. In 1968, Bezhig and her siblings happily play outside as their parents get ready for the day, though when a police car drives past, their doting mother hurriedly rushes them inside in a panic; meanwhile, in 1985, Esther, standing in the affluent home of her future in-laws, gives a speech at her engagement party explaining that the family she and David will build will counter the destruction of the Holocaust. We soon learn that they are actually the same person: Bezhig Little Bird, the five-year-old indigenous child on the reservation, has grown up to be Esther Rosenblum after she was abducted from her family by the Canadian government and later adopted by Golda, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Montreal.
Esther/Bezhig is pushed to search for her birth family and explore her indigenous roots following a racist comment by her fiancé David’s mother. This journey leads to potent yet painful collisions between her identities and their intersecting histories of genocide. After finding out more about her birth family, Esther/Bezhig confronts Golda, who explains to her: “You were not taken care of. This is what they told us. Save these children. They need good homes. It’s a mitzvah!” Bezhig/Esther retorts, “You don’t think governments have lied before?... You can’t take a five-year-old child away from their family and think they’re just going to forget. You should know. Have you forgotten your family that you lost?”
Despite its name, the Sixties Scoop ended only in the 1990s, and the last residential schools in Canada closed only in 1996. As the show notes in a concluding slide to each episode, there are currently more indigenous children being held in custody than ever before. These high numbers—sometimes called “the Millennial Scoop”—is a direct outgrowth of hundreds of years of attempts by the Canadian and US governments to destroy indigenous families. “We’re not very far removed from that dismantling of families and that’s all by design in the Indian Act,” Podemski has explained. “It says ‘remove the Indian in the child,’ that’s the legislation that still exists today. And to do that, you need to go to exceptional measures to make sure that’s done and that there’s no more kids, so that the land becomes available and the resources become available.” All of this, Podemski explains, means that we are “still living very much in a colonial violence state.” Given the persistence of colonial violence—from North America to Israel/Palestine—Little Bird provocatively probes what kind of repair can be done.
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): Abdallah Al-Khatib’s harrowing documentary Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege (2021) follows the Assad regime’s siege of Yarmouk—once the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria—from 2013 to 2015. The filmmaker paints an intimate portrait of daily life under extraordinary duress: Residents live off weeds, and express disappointment when the vendor tells them the weeds have run out; children’s dreams orbit satiating meals and the return of dead relatives; and men pray in front of a row of white body bags. Yet the film also has a transcendental quality. These scenes are interspersed with voiceovers in which Al-Khatib meditates about the state of siege. We watch, for example, as snow lashes against pedestrians, and Al-Khatib tells us: “Under siege, individual sorrow is a luxury, and secret sorrow an unforgivable betrayal. For the besieged, collective pain is a quality and path to survival.”
About a decade on from the events of Al-Khatib’s film, the Gaza Strip—where more than two-thirds of the population are refugees or descendants of refugees driven from their homes during the Nakba, when Zionist militias displaced more than 750,000 Palestiniansin order to establish the State of Israel—is subject to an even more brutal siege. Little Palestine, with its terrible echoes in the present, makes poignantly present the layers of dispossession in Palestinian history. We listen as Yarmouk’s residents recount their lives before they were forced to flee Palestine in 1948; and, as the film ends, they are scattered once again. But displacement, Little Palestine makes evident, is also a route to multiple attachments. As one refugee in the film says, he wants “the right to return from this place.”
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson is an enormously interesting account of the marriage between Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. A model work of demythologization, this revealing and often disturbing book not only presents an unsentimental picture of its central couple, but also raises larger questions about our need for myths—and our willingness to either ignore or shape reality to sustain them.
Steinberg, a South African journalist, writer and scholar, shows that Winnie was far from the simple image of a steadfast, loving wife presented when her husband was released from prison after 27 years, exemplified by the many photos of her marching beside him with her fist raised in defiance and joy. The book details her many affairs, which covered the span of their marriage. Of course, her infidelity is none of our business (nor is notorious playboy Nelson’s), and even Nelson did not insist that his wife be celibate while he was imprisoned. But Winnie’s choice of partners was a matter of legitimate concern, as they were often men suspected of being police plants or spies, which gave the authorities direct access to what was going on in the African National Congress. Even when warned that she was involved with men who may be enemy agents, Winnie carried on with them.
Nelson was alternately alarmed by and supportive of his wife, and in Steinberg’s portrait he is more befuddled and bewitched than betrayed. Politically, the two were dramatically divided: While Nelson, after leading the ANC’s military wing, ultimately opted for negotiated peace in an effort to establish a multiracial society, Winnie remained a vocal supporter of armed struggle in all forms, including the murder of alleged informers by burning them alive. She also had a circle of bodyguards, known as the Mandela United Football Club, who engaged in torture and killing of political enemies at Winnie’s behest. Steinberg points out that as the multiracial democracy that Nelson advocated came into being without dislodging white South Africans from the top of the social hierarchy, Nelson came to be viewed as a sellout, while Winnie’s uncompromising vision made her star rise.
But as Steinberg perspicaciously notes, at the height of Nelson’s fame, many of the hundreds of thousands who lined streets around the world to catch a glimpse of him likely didn’t know he’d been imprisoned for his involvement in armed struggle, carried out alongside the South African Communist Party with the support of the Soviet Union. If the Mandelas’ story is often told in a way that domesticates reality, Steinberg’s book serves as a necessary and vital corrective.
Below, we are sharing a remembrance of the activist Kathy Ottersten, who passed away this week. The remembrance was written by Jewish Currents contributor Hannah Gold, who interviewed Kathy for our Fall 2023 issue.
Hannah Gold (contributor): I came to know Kathy two years ago—they reached out to me after I published an essay on their early activism in New York. In the time since, they became an important mentor and friend to me, and we kept in touch through hours-long phone calls, email correspondence, and an in-person meeting last October.
Kathy loved to tell stories about the many turns their life had taken. As a teenager in a large Irish American family, Kathy trained to join the Irish Republican Army. Later, they rode with the Hell’s Angels, and had the tattoo to show for it. Kathy’s first civil disobedience arrest was alongside Father Daniel Barrigan, and, soon after, they joined the queer-led activist coalition ACT UP, where they served as a board girl, facilitator, and member of the media and housing committees. Kathy was a full service sex worker, picking up johns in and near Penn Station. They were the second openly intersex person elected to office in this country, and the first in Alaska. Kathy recently moved in with their polycule, and had planned to shift careers and become a therapist, because they believed sex workers and trans people deserve psychiatric care from people who understand their experiences firsthand.
Their life was marked by violence. Their first wife, Maria Fuentes, was murdered, and it took over thirty years for Kathy to find her grave on Hart Island—we visited together, with their sister and their partner, last fall. Even within their queer communities, Kathy was often berated with transphobic comments. Still, as the first openly trans member of ACT UP, they intentionally took on public roles while beginning their hormone-assisted transition, because visibility was a cornerstone of their activism. “My body changed in front of that [group],” Kathy told me, “and I . . . knew it would, and I made sure I was seen.”
It was characteristic of Kathy to put themself or their body on the line in this way. They were the first person arrested in ACT UP’s Stop the Church protest, and risked jail time as a defendant in an ACT UP-coordinated trial that helped to legalize the harm reduction practice of needle exchange in New York. Had the defendants lost their case, Kathy’s then-identity as a trans woman would not have been respected; they’d have been placed in a men’s prison. I admired Kathy for many reasons, but their bravery perhaps ranked highest. I have often returned to their words when I asked them about their volunteering for the needle exchange trial: “I wish risk-taking was understood as a base part of human compassion. You take the risk to save lives. Maybe that’s how you love people.”
Kathy loved fiercely, and they were beloved. They liked to tease and to laugh, and to stay out late. They promised to teach me to walk in six-inch heels (start low, they said). Kathy rejoiced in their queer and activist communities. They mentored younger trans people, sitting alongside teenagers as they came out to their parents, and leading some of the earliest trans support groups in New York. Kathy learned from the activist movements that came before them (“I thought okay, I can sit in jail—a lot of my civil rights heroes had spent time in jail”) and were inspired by those that followed (“I am in love with the people behind me . . . They are able to conceive a world that I can’t even imagine.”). Kathy lived in a world that was often hostile to them and those they loved, but they believed in the power of revolutionaries, of activism, education, and love, to create a world that would be different for the generations that followed. In light of their death by suicide this week, I feel a profound sadness and anger that this world couldn’t do better by them. May Kathy’s memory be a blessing, and may it feed a revolution.
Aparna Gopalan (news editor): I recently read Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age, a novel about the 1971 war through which what was then East Pakistan became the independent nation of Bangladesh. Those nine months were some of the most brutal in the subcontinent’s history, with Pakistani soldiers massacring hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Bengalis, and raping and torturing women on a mass scale; at various points, Indian soldiers and Bengali militants also committed mass atrocities. So while I braced myself before picking up Anam’s book, knowing that the story in its pages would be a blood-soaked one, what I did not expect was the book’s tenderness.
Anam’s protagonist is the middle-class, Urdu-speaking single mother Rehana, who lives in Dhaka and anxiously watches her children, Maya and Sohail, as they are increasingly drawn into the fight for a free Bangladesh. After the Pakistani army invades Bengal in March 1971, Sohail becomes a Bengali nationalist guerilla, and Maya begins work as a movement journalist. But the reader is not permitted direct access to this revolutionary ferment. Instead, we are stuck at home with Rehana, who is worried sick about her children and trying to carry on with day-to-day life in a city under siege. At one point, she goes out to buy groceries, only to find the streets clogged with corpses. Slowly, Rehana begins imbibing her children’s revolutionary fervor even as she keeps praying they will drop their weapons and return home. Moved by Maya and Sohail’s pleas for her help with the Bengali cause and unable to turn away from the mounting violence, Rehana, too, joins the movement. She weaves blankets for the refugees, allows guerillas to bury stashes of arms under her rose bushes, and eventually, welcomes a convalescing Bengali militant into her home—a man with whom she falls in love and whom, facing a tragic test of her maternal loyalties, she ultimately betrays.
In vivid, lyrical prose, Anam persuasively renders Rehana’s journey, illuminating the ways that the protagonist’s emotional and political selves inform and interrupt one another—and showing us a view of war from within that is seldom in the purview of books about revolutions. Even more promisingly, Anam does not end the story at Bangladeshi independence. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, picks up where A Golden Age leaves off, and shows—from the perspective of Maya, Rehana’s daughter—the disappointments and betrayals that abound in the wake of national independence. (While writing this recommendation, I learned that there is a third installment in this series as well, told from the point of view of Maya’s daughter.) As we sit with the unbearable horror of the genocide in Gaza as well as the distant, but live, possibility of Palestinian liberation, Anam’s novels offer a window into another such moment of revolutionary struggle and genocidal repression, showing both its promises and its profound violence.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The classic Austrian Expressionist film The City Without Jews (1924)—directed by Hans Karl Breslauer, and based on the 1922 novel by Hugo Bettauer—is widely and aptly described as prescient. In the movie, the legislature of Utopia (a stand-in for Vienna) responds to public protests about economic ills by voting to expel the city’s Jews. The results are catastrophic: Culture withers and dies, and the economy only declines further, as foreign governments and firms refuse to loan money to Utopia. As the lawmakers realize they’ve made a terrible mistake, they hold another vote; a new bill, which requires trickery to ensure its passage, ultimately allows the Jews to return. While The City Without Jews is far from great cinema, the boldness of its conceit and the warning it issued elevate it above its failings.
Revisiting the film now, it provides insight not only into the Austrian mindset of a century ago, but also into the current fear of antisemitism that has gripped Jewish communities around the world. Counterintuitively, The City Without Jews does much to allay these fears by demonstrating the mechanisms of antisemitism when it constitutes an existential threat, none of which apply in the present. As the film shows, this danger occurs only when popular demonstrations against the Jews are followed by government indifference or antisemitic action. Today, all Western governments have staunchly defended their Jewish citizens and their place in society. In November, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that American Jews “feel alone”—an absurd claim, since Jews have more defenders now than at perhaps any other time in our history. In a moment of rampant confusion over the scale and danger of antisemitism, The City Without Jews offers a much-needed dose of clarity.
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan’s part-animated documentary The Wanted 18 (2014) tells the absurd yet true story of Palestinians from the majority-Christian town of Beit Sahour who purchased a herd of cattle from a kibbutz to end their dependency on Israeli milk during the boycotts of the First Intifada, only for the cows to be deemed “a threat to the national security of the State of Israel.” Fearing that the actions of this Palestinian collective would serve as a blueprint for nonviolent resistance, and that their organizing toward self-sufficiency could become the basis for a proto-state, Israel cracked down on the agricultural activism with full force, sending hundreds of soldiers and even two military helicopters to hunt down the activists and their cattle. The contrast between the peaceful cows—brought to life through animation, in humorous sequences interspersed among interviews and archival footage—and the army’s violence highlights the brutality of occupation. Israel’s vicious campaign of arrest and torture, and eventually their tragic killing of an activist, show the lengths the state will go to maintain domination.
Despite this horror, The Wanted 18’s picture of the Palestinian organizing of the First Intifada captures the energy and innovation of this communal solidarity. After tax strikes and boycotts were met with punitive Israeli measures, the Popular Committees delegated everything from teaching to food production, modeling inspiring new social forms. But even as the film celebrates this utopian potential, its optimism is tempered by an understanding of the events that followed the First Intifada. The activists from Beit Sahour express the view that the Oslo process co-opted and ultimately quashed grassroots organizing. The sour taste of this thwarted potential only builds as the film’s chronological narration arrives at the retrospective vantage point of 2014, and the activists’ mounting sacrifices are brought into ever-sharper relief against an occupation that still persists.
The valorization of this period, then, serves as a retort to a stunted present. In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Amer Shomali—a Palestinian raised in a Syrian refugee camp, where he heard tales of Beit Sahour’s legendary social solidarity—expresses his disappointment when he finally arrived at the town. “I thought it was this perfect place where everybody helps everybody else, but instead many of the people were obsessed with cars and brands and cared only about themselves,” he says. In the film’s final scene, which seems to amount to a gesture of escapism, Shomali walks through the desert near Beit Sahour in search of one of the lost cows. “To feel that life is still worth living you need to believe in something, and I chose to believe in a white cow living in a cave,” he says. The Wanted 18 may be a charming paean to the resistance of the First Intifada, but it also feels like a eulogy for a lost future.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A new exhibition on the work of Belgian Jewish artist Stéphane Mandelbaum, which runs through February 18th at the Drawing Center in Manhattan, has no title other than the artist’s name. But one piece in the show includes a Yiddish phrase that would have been an apt title: “Kush mir in tukhis!” This brusque order—Kiss my ass!—captures the rebellious attitude that animates Mandelbaum’s work. Over the course of his short, brazenly Jewish life, he refused to be a “nice Jewish boy.” His 1986 murder at the age of 25 was almost a natural capstone to a life lived on the edge: He had been involved in a failed plot to steal a Modigliani painting, and when he insisted on payment, the ring of art thieves he’d collaborated with killed him, poured acid on his face, and left his body in a vacant lot.
Mandelbaum’s outsider ethos, rooted in the ineluctable otherness of a Jew, comes through in all of his drawings. (Unsurprisingly, he was an admirer of Pierre Goldman, whom I wrote about last week; Goldman’s political and ethical defiance receive their artistic expression in Mandelbaum’s oeuvre.) For the most part, he did his drawings on cheap paper with graphite pencil and ballpoint pen, often sprinkled with French or Yiddish text. Through these limited means, he produced riveting portraits of a wide variety of subjects, from his father—a pre-war immigrant from Poland who worked as a miner and was also an artist—to his fellow denizens of louche bars and hangouts in Brussels, to intellectual icons like the painter Francis Bacon and the writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. His most audacious pieces feature Nazis like SA leader Ernst Röhm and chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Mandelbaum understood that he was only around to draw because his parents survived the evil of people like them, and the Holocaust loomed over his life and art. Indeed, even his most seemingly offhand works somehow carry this enormous historical weight.
Jessica de Koninck (contributor): All of Us (Saddle Road Press, 2023) is a book about miracles, not miracles in any supernatural sense, but the more important miracles of everyday life, of human beings, of our ability to relate to one another, of the small details that make living an exquisite joy to those who pay attention, and Esther Cohen pays close attention. Cohen was the long-time arts consultant for Jewish Currents and director of Bread and Roses, the cultural arm of 1199/SEIU, health and human services union, but mostly she is a consummate poet, writer, and workshop leader. In alternating stories and poems, All of Us depicts decades of life along Route 17 in upstate New York through the people Cohen finds there—Democrats and Republicans, single mothers, Brooklyn transplants, etc.—and what she has come to love about each of them. Her voice is both fresh and authentic. It’s a book about sitting on the porch and watching the world go by, a book unafraid to acknowledge the beauty inherent in all things. And it’s fun, and it’s funny. Reading All of Us made me smile again and again.
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): In 1998, the Israeli filmmaker Asher Tlalim moved to London after his wife, Ronit, was accepted onto a PhD program. Their relocation, Tlalim says in his documentary Galoot (2003) “swept away the ground beneath my feet.” But this radical estrangement also forced him to turn to “my Israel here: my home, my children, and our friends”—and enabled him to probe some of the central tensions of Israeliness.In the 99-minute film, as Tlalim follows a troupe of Israeli expats in London, we are granted a window into a homogenous social world unraveling amidst the rousing diversity of a metropolis; their own oscillating self-perceptions (a journalist called Boaz quips that Israelis in Israel think they’re Finnish and find out that they’re Lebanese when they go abroad); and the ways that the formation of Israeli identity is bound up in relationships with Palestinians.
At the university of SOAS, where Ronit is pursuing her PhD, Tlalim encounters Khaled, a Palestinian working there as a service and shop manager. While their meeting is initially colored by mutual suspicion, the men soon become friendly, and Khaled invites Tlalim to his home. There, Tlalim learns of the dispossession suffered by Khaled and his housemate Amjad—both of whose home villages were destroyed by Zionist militias in 1948—and he weaves these stories into the film’s center.
Despite its lofty ambitions—the filmmaker says his primary subject matter is Israeli society— Galoot is ultimately an intimate portrait. But a portrait, the film makes clear, can never be confined to a single person, a single people. Though the film is guided by the director’s voice, we only ever briefly glimpse his reflection; in this autobiography of sorts, Tlalim sidelines his own image to make space for others, especially Khaled and Amjad. He takes trips not only to his own childhood home in Tangiers, and to his wife’s ancestral town of Leżajsk, but also to the erased villages of Khaled and Amjad—affirming the entanglements between these uneven and multisited experiences of exile.
Without looking away from the “very high cost” of exile, the film also shows its generative potential. It is only away from Israel/Palestine that connections like that Tlalim shares with Khaled and Amjad can be forged, and Ronit comes to understand that “with the perspective of distance, disconnection, and hardship, it forces you to look at things differently.” In the film’s final scene, Khaled plays with Tlalim’s son, Jonathan, and the director notes: “This miracle can only happen in galoot.” Exile, the film makes clear, is not only a marker of physical distance, but also a condition of transformed relation that can point a way forward.
One more thing: This Shabbat, Rabbis for Ceasefire is hosting a Shabbat for Ceasefire, bringing together Jews (and friends!) in the ceasefire movement. Services will be livestreamed Friday evening, Saturday morning, and for havdalah. They are also offering some incredible workshops Shabbat afternoon.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As a rule, the New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) is far less daring than the annual Other Israel Festival—whose last iteration, scheduled for November, was called off after October 7th. Rarely willing to address controversial topics, the NYJFF tends to focus instead on the warhorse of Jewish film: the Holocaust. While this year’s festival, which began earlier this week and runs until January 24th, refrains from treating the most sensitive subjects, it does stray from its familiar terrain. Of the films I was able to see in advance of the event, the most important were two that deal with widely divergent ways of confronting one’s Jewishness: Gad Elmaleh’s Stay With Us and Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case.
Gad Elmaleh, a Moroccan-born Jew, is a virtual god of French comedy, and a man willing to push himself in interesting ways. (A 2016 episode of This American Life features his attempt to find success as a stand-up comedian in the United States.) In his new, autofictional film, Elmaleh returns to Paris from abroad to see his family—but also to convert to Catholicism, against the wishes of his parents and sister. As a contemporary film that deals with a genuine crisis of faith and takes the question of religion seriously, Stay With Us is a rarity. It’s hardly a comedy, and what little humor there is—in the form of Elmaleh’s stand-up about religion in France—falls dreadfully flat. But Elmaleh compellingly presents his attraction to Catholicism, a pull also felt by notable Jewish converts to the faith like the great thinkers Henri Bergson and Simone Weil. We seldom see such profound questioning of one’s belonging to the Jewish people on screen. Stay With Us is perhaps the most heartfelt and unsentimental Christian film ever made by a Jew.
The Goldman Case, on the other hand, considers a French Jew quite committed to his Jewishness. Cédric Kahn’s film fictionalizes the second murder trial of the Jewish leftist Pierre Goldman in 1976. Goldman, virtually unknown in the US, was a cause célèbre in France. On trial for killing two pharmacists during a holdup, he admits to other crimes but denies committing these murders. The son of two Polish Jewish Communist resistance fighters, Goldman lived his short life—he was born in 1944 and assassinated in 1979—haunted by having arrived too late to kill Nazis, and endlessly estranged from European life. Indeed, his rebellion against his native country was all-consuming, his alienation perfectly expressed in the title of his classic memoir, Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France. In Kahn’s exemplary treatment of this fascinating figure, still widely admired by many leftists and Jews, Goldman is presented just as he was in life: uncompromising and unpleasant, exasperating his lawyers with his refusal to behave with civility. He was the Jew as the eternal outsider, and his Jewishness is foregrounded at every moment, rightly framed as the motive force behind his revolutionary ideas and actions.
Alice Radosh (JC council): Katherine Fennelly did not discover that her family was Jewish until she was in her 30s. That revelation went from surprise to distress as the author researched the hidden history of her grandfather, Francis Kalnay, described in Family Declassified: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Journey from Spy to Children’s Book Author (2023).
Kalnay was known to his family as an award-winning children’s writer, a charming raconteur, superb chef, successful architect, and inveterate womanizer who abandoned his wife and children. What he successfully concealed from his family and most of the world was that he was a high-level spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and—in a more familiar tale—that he was Jewish. As his descendant, Fennelly was granted access to 400,000 pages of unpublished OSS reports, personal memos and letters. Drawing on her academic training as a social scientist and her story-telling ability, Fennelly uses these documents to weave a wonderful hybrid of family story, World War II history, and spy adventure.
Kalnay’s story begins with him leaving Hungary in 1919 and embedding himself in the expatriate Hungarian community of Bohemian socialists in New York. His knowledge of six languages landed him a government job with the Foreign Language Information Service and, with the outbreak of World War II, Kalnay was tasked with interviewing European refugees arriving in New York. The OSS used this information to develop networks of spies, and Kalnay’s work grew commensurately: He went from debriefing refugees to training resistance forces in sabotage of enemy targets. He recruited and headed a secret group known as the Kay (for Kalnay) Project which sent teams behind enemy lines to target factories, bridges, and supply dumps in addition to rescuing downed Allied airmen. Kalnay was one of the few foreign-born Americans that decoded the German Enigma messages. His work was described by his superiors as “brilliant” and his contacts as “the best in the country.”
Yet after the war, Kalnay fell into total silence. None of this was known to anyone in the family until Fennelly discovered the records that resulted in the publication of Family Declassified. And especially obscured was the family’s Jewish heritage. When he was a year old, his mother was institutionalized and erased from the family story. Kalnay listed his Catholic step-mother on official documents and never acknowledged his Jewish mother’s existence. Fennelly addresses this repressed history by taking us to Hungary in World War II, where close to 75% of the Jewish population was murdered. The extent of her grandfather’s deception is brought home to Fennelly when she realizes that he must have known, but never revealed, that his mother was murdered by the Nazis and his sister by the Hungarian Arrow Cross. By following the threads of her family story, Fennelly personalizes a lesser-known massacre during the Holocaust that scholars at the Holocaust Memorial Museum say “even the Germans were surprised by.”
Francis Kalnay signed an oath to “forever keep secret” information obtained in the service of the OSS. Yet no oath prevented him from acknowledging his Jewish roots, and the few family members who discovered this fact were similarly reluctant to have this truth revealed. Shortly before his death at age 93, Francis Kalnay lowered his voice into a whisper to reveal the family name was not Kalnay after all, but Klein. Family Declassified takes you through the amazing life that ended with this truth.
Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): How do you represent a massacre? Stefano Savona’s documentary Samouni Road (2018) tries to do it by assembling fragments of memory into a kaleidoscopic narrative. Drawing on the experiences of the children of the Samouni family—and in particular, Amal—Savona reconstructs a gruesome episode from Israel’s 2009 invasion of the Gaza Strip, in which Israeli soldiers killed 48 civilians in the neighborhood of Zeitoun.
The film is explicitly concerned with questions of representation: The children are constantly hunched over on the floor to draw, and they always end up rehashing their traumas in chalk. Ateya, Amal’s father and a supreme raconteur, even opines that stories are what separate humans from beasts. His instruction looms large over his children: Amal begins the film by musing that she “doesn’t know how to tell stories,” and her older brother Faraj laments that they did not write down the stories Ateya told them before he was killed. “How were we supposed to know what would come?” Faraj asks.
But Savona doesn’t provide any easy answers about what representation does. A gorgeously rendered yet claustrophobic black-and-white animation fills in the gaps in Amal’s traumatized recollection, but alongside the live action, it feels fragile and even unreliable. The extent to which this form captures Amal’s own subjective experiences, let alone the truth, is left unclear. While there are moments of beautiful allegory—such as the Quranic birds of Ababil dropping their stones on the invading elephant army—the scratchboard sequences are more brutalist. Ateya lives only in the animated world, and we watch him mowed down by Israeli soldiers in his own home.
Savona draws on several voices and forms—of live action, animation, reconstructed drone footage. But there is a sense that tragedy on such a mass scale defies easy representation. In an act of morbid administration, the locals leaf through the photocopied IDs to compile a comprehensive list of the dead. Aside from writing two rows of cursive names on a piece of paper, they draw a single sprawling family tree—the Samouni clan—with its branches prematurely pruned.
In the shadow of familicide, Savona seems to cling to the idea of regrowth, the idea that there could be coppicing after all. He shows us the replanted orchards after the destruction, and ends the film with Faraj’s wedding. At the same time, the film also reminds us that destruction often leaves the soil barren in its wake. Pre-teen Mahmoud, one of the younger brothers who has had to become the “father” to his younger siblings, vows never to marry in order to avoid leaving behind a widow when he dies for the resistance. He, too, is drawing his father as this dialogue takes place, yet representation provides no restoration or catharsis. Instead, it seems to spur him on as he pleads with his mother to “let me go greet my father.”
