Shabbat
Reading List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.