Shabbat
Reading List

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.”

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): There is a paucity of cinema in the Gaza Strip, which has to do with entangled material and imaginative constraints. As Sheren Falah Saab recently wrote in Haaretz, Israel’s blockade and Hamas’s religious closure of theaters have both contributed to conditions antagonistic to making films. Against this backdrop of enforced isolation, “not everyone is able to touch on the complexities that characterize the local population in Gaza,” according to Palestinian film critic Saleem Albeik. That is perhaps why Michel Khleifi’s Tale of the Three Jewels (1995)—the first feature-length movie to be filmed entirely in the Gaza Strip, which follows a young boy with an expansive imagination—feels especially remarkable.

Tale of the Three Jewels tells the story of 12-year-old Yusef, whose father is jailed, brother is on the run, and family is hungry. Desperate to escape his bleak reality, Yusef spends long hours out in nature. During one of his hunts for birds, he meets a striking girl, Aida, and falls in love instantly. He embarks on a bid to fulfill Aida’s mysterious request to find three missing jewels from her grandmother’s necklace in order to take her hand in marriage.

Khleifi’s film is a tender portrayal of childhood innocence: Yusef’s love of birds, his loss of appetite at the first pangs of young love, his fanciful plan to escape to Europe in an orange crate. But his imaginative forays are curtailed by the world’s limitations: The travel agent scoffs at his plan to travel to South America “without a passport,” his best friend, Salah, tells him that the money he raised for his trip would barely get him to Jerusalem. Seeking to acquire food for his family, Yusef sells some of his beloved birds; he even offers to sell the Palestine necklace that his incarcerated father gifted to him. Back in Yusef’s mother’s childhood, she tells him, “the children would play their games. They would run around screaming, filling the air with laughter. Now every family is split or squeezed together in this small piece of land. They want us to live like wild animals.” Still, in Khleife’s fabulist world, the childhood imagination prevails. Though the occupation is palpably present, it is ultimately Yusef’s mind—flitting between fantasy and reality—that guides the film.

In the current moment, I found the film incredibly painful to watch. Tale of the Three Jewels makes felt what Israel has stolen from Palestinians in Gaza: the right to a childhood, the right to dream of a future. In the opening sequence, when his sleep is disrupted by the routine interjection of a mother and the horrifically normalized rumbling of warplanes, Yusef quips: “If only once you’d let me finish my dream.” Today, the ordinary choreographies of family life in Gaza have receded and the warplanes are ever louder. How many more dreams have since been aborted, or turned into outright nightmares?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A couple of years ago, when I was quite ill and thought my time was up, I wanted to send in an omnibus recommendation of what I consider the greatest Jewish American novels. I didn’t croak—which is just as well, since I never wrote the piece. But that never-realized rec has haunted me ever since, and I continue to ponder which books merit this designation. Topping the list are Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold, and two by Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, all of which share a dyspeptic and darkly funny vision of Jews in America. Most of them have also been branded antisemitic by those unhappy with their portrayal of Jews and Jewish life—none more vociferously than Portnoy’s Complaint, which was roundly decried by the Jewish establishment upon its 1969 publication. Back then it was not just critics of Israel who were hounded, condemned from pulpits, and cast out as self-haters and antisemites; the mainstream Jewish community also targeted Jewish writers who failed to portray their people as noble, suffering figures, and dared to depict them as real, flawed human beings.

I first read and loved Portnoy’s Complaint as a teenager, not long after its release. I finished my umpteenth and probably final reading a short while ago and still found it the most perspicacious look at American Jewry ever written. No other text has so perfectly skewered the smugness, self-satisfaction, and unearned sense of superiority endemic to the middle-class Jewish world Roth saw around him in Newark, and which existed throughout the country. But his genius is not just in his perceptive mockery of the attitudes of his parents’ generation, filtered through the voice of narrator Alex Portnoy. Rather, what makes the book so brilliant is that, for all of his condescension toward his parents, Portnoy shares so many of their attitudes. He is merely a more self-aware version of them.

What I always find remarkable when reading Roth, particularly in the two works I have cited, is that though he was my parents’ age, his experience resonates uncannily with mine and my peers’. For instance, there is no better summary of the achingly aloof Jewish attitude toward goyim that we grew up with than a passage I can find in any copy of the book in seconds, in which Portnoy describes non-Jewish baton twirler Alice Dembosky and her “pièce de résistance” of tossing a flaming baton in the air and catching it. The nice Jewish boys in the stands appreciate her skill and worry she’ll be injured by the flames, but “despite this genuine display of admiration and concern,” Portnoy observes that “there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.”

I’ve always said that being a Jew is one of the three constitutive parts of my being, along with being a New Yorker and an atheist. But the Jew I am is a vexed Jew like Portnoy, like Roth—and like Kafka, one of Roth’s gods, who once remarked, “What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When an old colleague asked on Facebook last week—in good faith—whether “from the river to the sea” must always suggest the “non-existence” of Israel, I first shared Yousef Munayyer’s illuminating response to that question, and I then wondered what is meant by Israel’s “existence?” Couldn’t Israel continue as a center of self-determining Jewish life in some different relationship to Palestinians?

It’s obvious enough that the status quo is unsustainable, but there were also alternative roads not taken: what if the early Zionist movement had heeded the warnings of Ahad Ha’am or followed the antinationalist cultural vision put forward by Martin Buber and his colleagues in Ihud, the binationalist party founded in Palestine in 1942? I pulled the writings of an Ihud leader from the shelf after contemplating that Facebook query.

The book, long out of print, alas, is Dissenter in Zion, a collection of letters, speeches, and other writings by Judah Magnes (1877-1948). A rabbi and Jewish communal leader in the US in the early decades of the 20th century, and, after emigrating to Palestine in 1922, a founder and the first chancellor and president of Hebrew University. Magnes was an ardent binationalist who envisioned the university as a core of Jewish-Arab cooperation. Here’s a small and stirring sample from an address delivered by Magnes in Jerusalem in 1923:

And Eretz Israel? Here the Jew expects to develop a nationalism of his own. Of what kind will it be? Will the Jews here in their efforts to create a political organism become devotees of brute force and militarism as were some of the later Hasmoneans, and will they, like the Edomite Herod, become the obedient servants of economic and militaristic imperialism? Is it among the possibilities that some day it may become political treason for someone sincerely to repeat in the streets of Jerusalem Isaiah’s teaching that swords are to be beaten into ploughshares and men are to learn war no more? Or will the Jews of Eretz Israel be true to the teaching of the Prophets of Israel and attempt to work out their ideal society so that Jerusalem may be restored and Zion redeemed through righteousness and peace?

The world tumbles only forward, so it feels pointless, not to mention depressing, to imagine these alternate histories. Still, amid the moral vertigo of the Israeli assault on Gaza and its Jewish communal defenders in the US, Magnes’s vision provides a solid pillar to hang onto.

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): I have witnessed no shortage of ironies while covering Germany’s addled relationship to Israel and antisemitism over the years, but the outcry over Masha Gessen’s New Yorker essay on the country’s remembrance culture, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” has been particularly absurd. Gessen, the descendent of Holocaust survivors (and a member of Jewish Currents’s board of directors), had been slated to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize—supposedly awarded to thinkers who are “not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions”—but was told that the award ceremony would be suspended after they compared the Gaza Strip to Jewish ghettos under Nazi rule.

Gessen’s essay begins by describing Germany’s dizzying matrix of Holocaust memorials and museums. These well-meaning efforts, they write, have “solidified into dogma” that has prescribed new limits on free speech: A 2019 parliamentary resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has created “a McCarthyist environment” in the country’s thriving culture sector while also serving as a “ticket to the mainstream” for the measure’s extremist sponsor, the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

As Gessen journeys into eastern Europe, Holocaust memory proves no more immune to realpolitik than anything else. For post-Soviet states, the road to the European Union was paved by Holocaust memorialization efforts. Both Poland and Ukraine have since made revisionist claims about their complicity in Nazi crimes, and Israel has indulged them for its own ends. For example, in 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood shoulder to shoulder with his Polish counterpart to push the false historical narratives of the Polish right in exchange for political insulation from the European Union’s criticism of Israel’s occupation. And today, Israel is leveraging the trauma of the Holocaust to secure buy-in for its assault on the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu has called Hamas’s attack on the Nova musical festival on October 7th a “Holocaust by bullets,” in reference to the massacre at Babyn Yar. Comparisons, then, don’t seem to be the problem. It’s a question of which comparisons are made, and by whom.

Indeed, Gessen’s essay illustrates the very necessity of comparison to political analysis by offering illuminating transhistorical readings of its own; Hannah Arendt, Gessen writes, once compared Israel’s Herut party—the dominant Revisionist Zionist predecessor to Likud—to the Nazis. Certainly, Gessen points out, this would have constituted a violation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism, which forbids “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” In a work that now reads like a preemptive defense against their German critics, Gessen, like Arendt, transgresses the ultimate prohibition of Holocaust memory as it has been rendered in Germany and beyond: to draw on the universal lessons from the history Jewish suffering to criticize Israel.

Daniel May (publisher): Reading Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s short 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall” for the first time in graduate school felt like uncovering a secret document. His overt racism against Arabs—describing them as “savages” who are “culturally five hundreds years behind us”—felt too direct and dangerous to be public. Yet there was also something oddly refreshing about the text. In his unwillingness to temper the violence of his worldview to accommodate the sensibilities of the reader, Jabotinsky cuts through many of the pieties that shape our contemporary Jewish conversation on Israel/Palestine.

For Jabotinsky, Zionism is obviously a colonial project which—like its historical precursors—will be met with resistance. The native population, he writes, have “always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage.” Or, take the notion that Palestinians ought to be grateful for the material benefits or political protections that Israel provides its citizens. No people, Jabotinsky notes, will “give up their fatherland for a good railway system.”

The endpoint of Jabotinsky’s logic is that there is no possibility that the Palestinian Arabs will accept Zionist colonization, nor should they. Therefore, he concludes, “Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” And if it is the latter, the only way that it can proceed is “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” It is only through sufficient violence that Palestinian Arabs will recognize that Zionism is not going anywhere, and only when they accept it can any kind of agreement be reached.

Jabotinsky resigned from the Zionist movement in 1935 to protest its leadership’s refusal to declare its aim as the construction of a Jewish state, yet it is difficult to overstate how much his brand of revisionism has come to dominate contemporary Zionist thought. In the Jewish world, the idea that the Palestinians will not accept a Jewish state and that resistance can only be deterred through violence has come to be perceived as common sense. The devastation unleashed by Israel in this war is the manifestation of this ideology when pushed to its logical destination.

Jabotinsky’s logic also lurks behind the question that greets any criticism of Israel’s war: what else can you do with those that reject a Jewish state but defeat them through force? But Jabotinsky offers two alternatives to the bloodshed. First, he argues that eventually the Arabs will accept a Jewish state, and when they do Jews must embrace the moment. His point underscores the immense significance of the PLO’s recognition of Israel in 1988 and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, both of which undermine the constant refrain among Israel’s apologists that there is “no partner.” Second, Jabotinsky defines colonization in a very specific way, and only so defined does he argue that it will necessarily provoke resistance. “There is only one thing the Zionists want,” he writes, “and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want.” That thing is a Jewish majority that would enable a Jewish government, in which “the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews.”

Despite the dark promise of the text, 100 years after his writing, Jabotinsky points to what remains the only way out of the violence he both commends and predicts: a political framework that ensures no group is able to dominate another.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Seven years ago, while on a road trip through Pittsburgh, I ate at Conflict Kitchen, a public art project and eatery devoted to serving food from countries and communities in conflict with the US. After devouring my Iranian food, I found out that the restaurant had prompted a firestorm two years earlier when it had made Palestine its theme. At the time, B’nai Brith International wrote to the Heinz Endowments and asked them to suspend grant funding for Conflict Kitchen because, they claimed, its food wrappers featuring interviews with Palestinians were “anti-Israel propaganda.” In its press release, B’nai Brith put the word “Palestine” in quotes, as if to accuse Conflict Kitchen of centering a culture that didn’t even exist. The Heinz Endowments president wrote back to B’nai Brith and assuaged them, arguing that the Palestine iteration of Conflict Kitchen was “terribly at odds with the mission of promoting understanding.” As a college student at the time, I was not yet sure how to channel my ever-growing alienation from Zionist politics, but I recall being appalled by a response that suggested that Palestinians had no right to share their food, culture or simply exist as Palestinians in American public space.

It’s this erasure that the writer Karim Kattan takes up in a searing October 31st Baffler piece. Kattan describes being instructed by the organizer of a scheduled keynote address in Austria not to speak directly about Palestine, just one incident in a wave of repression in the US and Europe in the wake of October 7th. After Kattan pushed back, the organizer “didn’t exactly reject my humanity. It was simply a very inconvenient fact for her that I was a human; she had to contend with it and was very uncomfortable.” In beseeching him to “find a positive solution” without reserving his right to directly mention Palestine, she seemed to wish “very politely, that I could, very politely, cease to exist.” Kattan argues that a similar sentiment underlies certain handwringing over the devastation of Gaza that fails to meaningfully oppose it: “If only you could vanish, or—easier yet—if only you had never existed at all, and if only you could spare us the horror, the displacements, the bombings, the killings, the starving of a people that you are forcing us to unleash upon you.” Kattan’s prose is a powerful rebuke to those who have suggested that, for the sake of a more comfortable Zionist narrative, Palestinians should “disinvite [themselves] from the world.”

Claire Schwartz (culture editor): On November 17th, the Palestinian poet Hala Alyan posted a 2011 photograph of children on the beach in Gaza, arms outstretched, the clear blue sky punctuated with brightly colored kites. The day the picture was taken, the children broke the Guinness world record for the most kites flown simultaneously: 12,350. The day Alyan shared the photograph, 12,350 was the estimated death toll from this iteration of Israel’s relentless assault on Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. There is, of course, no common measure to this confluence—only a devastating coincidence: The children’s insurgent exuberance recedes and Israel continues to kill, the world that might have been rattling horrifically inside the one that is.

I have been thinking of these children and their kites since yesterday, when I learned that the Israeli regime assassinated Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer. I have been reading and rereading his final poem:

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

no even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

In the wake of Alareer’s death, the opening line constricts, the conditional already fulfilled. Then: You must live. Trade what the poet left behind so that a Gazan child might have a vision of love beaming back at them. Alareer does not write “your kite,” or even only “my kite,” but “the kite, my kite you made.” He implores the reader: Stitch your life to the wake of my living and make of it something definite: “Let it be a tale.” A tale (like a tail) is what comes after. It is a doubled after that Alareer’s poem charges us with—not only the after of persisting in catastrophe’s wake, but also the after in “to look after,” to care for, to return. As poet and performance artist (and JC artist-in-residence) Fargo Nissim Tbakhi writes: “The past is a future we return to.” On the photograph she posted, the kites’ tails flying every which way in the wind, Alyan overlaid the words: “Oh, the promise of our long, unruly memories.” The glimpses of other worlds that persist might, if we bring them forward with our living, offer a route toward as-yet-unrealized liberated futures. This is the charge I am holding: To make of Alareer’s life a kite, to thrash with the others in the narrow aperture of the poem’s if until it widens toward other ways, until all Palestinians can again touch their sea.

David Klion (contributing editor): The death of Henry Kissinger last week at 100 has been a cause for celebration on the left, uniting those old enough to remember the Nixon and Ford administrations with a younger generation whose collective impression of Kissinger was best articulated by Anthony Bourdain. There are innumerable books on the former national security advisor and secretary of state; one that influenced my own thinking is Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow (2016), which casts Kissinger as the prime architect of American empire as we know it today.

The book I want to recommend to Jewish Currents readers isn’t about Kissinger, but it tells us a lot about the tradition he belonged to. As I mention in my Kissinger remembrance in The New Republic, I happened to finish Fritz Stern’s Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (1977), a hefty tome I had been making my way through for months, just days before Kissinger’s death was announced. Stern and Kissinger had much in common: Both were born to Jewish families in Germany in the 1920s, and both fled the Nazis in 1938 and settled in New York City. They both went on to have distinguished academic careers, and even ran in the same social circles. But unlike Kissinger, who pivoted to war crimes, Stern remained in academia, teaching history at Columbia for decades prior to his death in 2016. Stern and Kissinger were both leading figures of the German Jewish diaspora, a community set apart culturally and socially from the Yiddish-derived milieu of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews in New York. Much of Stern’s work concerns German Jewish history, and Gold and Iron functions almost as an origin story for modern German Jewry and its distinctive self-conception.

Gold and Iron is a history that reads like a 19th century novel about elite intrigue set against a backdrop of diplomacy, war, and social upheaval. It tells the story of Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” who unified the German states into a single empire in 1871, and his long relationship with Gerson von Bleichröder, a Jewish financier who had functioned as the Rothschild family’s agent in Berlin before becoming a power broker in his own right. Bismarck was a product of the Prussian Junker class—basically, a militarized landholding aristocracy whose way of life was increasingly out of step with the modernizing economy of 19th century Europe—and in order to preserve his class’s privileges, he was determined to build a sophisticated industrial economy in which finance capital would play a central role. The wealthy and continentally connected Bleichröder made this possible, financing Bismarck’s military victories over Austria and France and helping to establish Germany’s diplomatic position and overseas colonial empire over subsequent decades (a particularly fascinating chapter covers his lobbying for the basic civil rights of Jews in newly independent Romania, using German diplomatic recognition and trade ties as leverage). In the process, Bleichröder became one of the wealthiest men in Germany, and essentially the public face of a rapidly rising Jewish financial and professional class.

Inevitably, this meant Bleichröder also became a prime target for the rapidly rising antisemitism of the Junker elite, who remained politically central in Bismarck’s Germany in spite of their declining economic fortunes. Despite a career spent bowing and scraping before the German state and ignoring constant antisemitic sleights including from Bismarck himself, Bleichröder never fully achieved the acceptance as a German that he desperately sought. As for his children and grandchildren in the 20th century, well, you can imagine where this story is headed.

Kissinger cast himself in the mold of Bismarck, imposing his realpolitik and grand strategy on the global chessboard. But the figure he more closely resembled was Bleichröder, the ambitious striver willing to endure elite antisemitism—in Kissinger’s case, that of Nixon and his Jew-baiting entourage—in exchange for proximity to the heights of power. As Stern shows, this was not Bleichröder’s unique character flaw, and nor was it Kissinger’s—it was the bargain that 19th century Germany and to some extent 20th century America offered its Jews, but it was, to put it in the most German terms, a Faustian bargain.

Jonathan Shamir (JC fellow): It’s strange to say that an academic article by two sociologists is a favorite that I frequently revisit, but the meticulous noticing of “Virtual Returns to Jaffa” (1998) by Salim Tamari and Rema Hammami creates a loving yet painful portrait of the city from which the authors’ families were expelled. In six vignettes, the writers vividly detail their visits to Jaffa alongside other Palestinian exiles, cataloging the emotional toll of returning to a place that has written you out of its history. It reads as an elegy of a city that has already been lost, but given the aggressive pace of gentrification in Jaffa since the article’s publication, it has itself come to feel like a precious artifact.

The inevitability of disappointment is conveyed throughout. Hammami’s discovery of her family’s home—transformed into an institution for the infirm—fails to deliver any catharsis. Tamari fulfills a modest desire to dine at a seaside Palestinian fish restaurant in Jaffa, only for new expectations to crop up—and to be dashed as quickly as they emerge. For the two writers and their fellow returnees, this “duty to the past” is as irrepressible as the present forces that are quashing it. Nowhere is this vicious cycle clearer than in the figure of Liza, a Palestinian who has joined them for the return and who “was taking pictures of everything that moved,” leaving her suspended between tenses: absent in the present, and already reliving the mediated past of a photograph from an indeterminate future. When Arab visitors reconstitute the past “using the rubble [of the old homes] as their nodes,” the present never seems to fit together properly.

For Hammami, abandoning the past would mean being “burned at the stake for collaborating with a reality built on the demolition of dreams,” yet the authors’ encounter with Murjana, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, troubles the nostalgic frame of their return. As a present-day inhabitant of Jaffa, Murjana pays no heed to the city’s repressed past, and her family seems more comfortable in Hebrew than in Arabic. Her invitation to the group to lunch at her family home forces them to live—however uneasily and temporarily—in the present.

In the final section, Tamari and Hammami resolve to “make greater efforts to observe the existing realities of Jaffa,” but their meandering into the present defies easy legibility. They obliquely discuss the Nakba and the displacement of Middle Eastern Jews using the Arabic word “tabadul” (“exchange”) with a Mizrahi shopkeeper named Shlomo. His slow and incomplete understanding of the word’s meaning (“You see,” he concludes unnervingly after pointing to his cassette collection, “we Arabs are like you”) is the closest the Palestinians come to any sort of recognition from those who have replaced them.