Shabbat
Reading List

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): On the cover of her new memoir, writer, director, and former actress Jennette McCurdy stands in a bright yellow frame, dressed in pink, holding a pink urn overflowing with pink confetti. The image is as provocative as the title: I’m Glad My Mom Died. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted to read it.

For much of the book—through McCurdy’s upbringing and twenties—her life and purpose revolve around her mom. Six-year-old McCurdy thrills at their close connection. At that age, she feels frustrated that her dad and brothers seem oblivious to subtle changes in her mom’s mood and mannerisms. She alone jumps up to do what will make her mom happy, and she feels a sense of accomplishment for nailing it most of the time.

Amidst accounts of narcissistic personality disorder, McCurdy’s clarity and perspective feel unique. Writing as her younger self, she often observes, without any judgment, the distance between what she wants and what she does—that is, what her mom wants. She hates having butterfly clips in her hair, but her mom loves it, so she wears them. She hates acting—being on stage makes her feel exposed and deeply uncomfortable—but she goes through intensive training, grueling background roles, and a career in the field to please her mother.

Her mom’s influence only gets darker as the book goes on. She introduces pre-teen McCurdy to anorexia, and the two share restrictive eating practices for years. When doctors and classmates’ parents air their concern, she feigns innocence. A few years later, when she finds out that McCurdy has been lying to her about having a boyfriend, she lashes out in classic abusive fashion: with 37 missed calls and a string of emails full of accusations and name-calling.

When—halfway through the book—her mother passes away, McCurdy turns to alcohol to cope with the sudden void at the center of her life. Yet, despite the heaviness of the subject material, McCurdy’s candidness and sharp humor make the book easy to read and hard to put down.

For many readers, the intensity of McCurdy’s experiences will resonate on subtler levels. The deference to someone else’s desires, big or small, prevents a young person from learning about their own instincts—a crucial step in the development of a sense of self. Later on in the book, through the intervention of a caring partner, McCurdy begins (and then quits, and later takes back up) therapy. For anyone who is also doing that sort of hard introspective work, this memoir may be a useful companion

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): An acquaintance of mine once suggested that all of us aging leftists have a favorite Communist-ruled country. He explained that he was especially fond of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and showed me his belt buckle with the nation’s state seal. I couldn’t contest his point. I, too, had long maintained a special interest in and even affection for the GDR. I had even visited with my then-five-year-old son in the summer of 1989—not knowing that the Berlin Wall would fall just months later, and the GDR would soon be no more.

Since then, the country has been written about almost exclusively as a gray, joyless police state in which everyone spied on everyone else and couldn’t wait to join the West. Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall is the first English-language book for the general readership to give a full picture of life in East Germany. Hoyer—herself an Ossi, or former citizen of the GDR—refuses to accept the West German version of events. In her view, the GDR, though imperfect, nevertheless provided its citizens with a decent life over the 41 years of its existence. Almost no country in the world did more for its women; the vast majority of women in the GDR were working by 1989, thanks in part to the availability of free daycare. Social mobility was also high since the working class had access to a college education. And unlike capitalist countries, the GDR did not later cut back on these subsidies for education, childcare, or housing, a decision that—combined with the withdrawal of Soviet resources—eventually led to financial woes. In short, Hoyer argues, it was socialism that killed socialism in the GDR.

Hoyer does not deny the harsh realities of many aspects of life in the GDR. The two men who led the country through almost all of its history, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, fought against the Nazis and lived through the Stalinist era of communism, and their fear and suspicion informed the state’s extensive security apparatus. But Hoyer shows that the security forces were not as large as is commonly believed, and that popular voluntary organizations assisted them in their work. Even while dissent was growing in the country’s final years, she argues, “attempts to open up the GDR were by no means attempts to destroy it—on the contrary, many young intellectuals and workers saw it as a means to strengthen the state and socialism.”

Beyond the Wall is a much-needed corrective to the self-congratulatory attitude of most Western historians who have written about East Germany. Indeed, socialism failed and failed miserably. But as Hoyer shows, its failure was, in many ways, a noble one.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): A few weekends ago, I binged the 2021 Netflix show Maid, which follows 25-year-old Alex as she flees her abusive boyfriend, moves into a domestic violence shelter, and begins working as a house cleaner to support herself and her daughter.

The show’s unflinching depiction of gendered poverty has been correctly lauded. Alex’s desperation is palpable as she battles abusive men, backbreaking work, and a broken welfare system trying to take away her agency. A particularly affecting motif includes Alex’s bank balance popping up on the screen and starting to tick down everytime she fills a few dollars of gas in her car, purchases cleaning supplies for work, or gets her kid a dollar store mermaid doll. Indeed, throughout the first episode it was that ticking bank balance, rather than even Alex herself, that seemed to be the true protagonist, so riveting did I find it, so harrowing its slow decline from $18 to 35 cents.

However, eventually this unflinching portrait of poverty . . . flinches. Even this has been celebrated by reviewers, who give the show props for finding a way to be “gritty” without devolving into misery-porn. But as a longtime student of racial capitalism, and a true cynic, I was less than convinced when—after attuning us to the vice grip of poverty on Alex’s life—the show suddenly lifts all such mundane constraints in the final few episodes. After struggling to arrest her fall with a tattered social safety net, Alex suddenly finds individual success. After losing her job as a maid, she quickly gains a rich patron. Her child starts attending an elite preschool, even though Alex is shown to be unable to afford residence in the school’s very wealthy catchment area. The domestic violence shelter provides her a phone with seemingly unlimited minutes that she can use to apply to college. When Alex’s unstable mother is admitted to a psych ward, no insurance statements populate the screen.

Normally, I would’ve been fine with all this; I don’t usually need to see a character’s bank balance to care about their story. But it was jarring to see Maid so completely abandon its dark, sociological beginnings in favor of a fairy-tale resolution. The showrunners seemed to be saying, “look, you get our point. Being a poor single mother and living through domestic violence is tough. Now wouldn’t you like to see Alex happy?” And don’t get me wrong: I’m glad Alex got a happy ending. But somewhere along the way, Maid went from showing us the ravages of structural injustice to telling us that (white) women can overcome even this if they really believe in themselves. So while I recommend Maid for its Barbara-Ehrenreichian first half, beware the Hallmark card ending.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Two things have happened recently: The first of my classmates from high school and college turned 40, and I got bangs. (Coincidence? You decide.) Strangely, these disparate events have prompted different people to recommend the 1978 movie Girlfriends, both as an investigation into curly bangs and the changing nature of friendships into adulthood. I was charmed by the film’s episodic portrait of Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayhew) as a young, broke, sexually liberated, Jewish photographer in New York City. Written and directed by women (Vicki Polon and Claudia Weill, respectively), it leans into the small drama of relationships—primarily Susan’s relationship with her remarkably slender and blonde roommate Anne (Anita Skinner), an aspiring writer who abandons their dyad to get married and have a baby. If this sounds a bit like Frances Ha or Girls, it’s because both of them clearly owe Girlfriends a debt. (In a direct nod, Weill even directed an episode of Girls, the one where Adam and Ray go to Staten Island.)

Despite these comparisons, I found myself wondering whether a movie like this could be made today—and finding it surprising that it was made then. For one thing, the last several decades hasn’t brought as much progress when it comes to women directors as one would hope. Indeed, in a familiar tale, Weill herself quit filmmaking due to sexual harassment and creative interference from a male producer during the making of her second film. But for another, the film feels almost politically allergic to dramatics, as if branding it a masculine enterprise. Though there is some talk of men, Girlfriends is basically a movie-length object lesson in passing the Bechdel test: The women ply one another for feedback on their artwork and gripe about being broke. Though there is one heated argument between them, the conflict is less a full-blown confrontation, but a study of that slow, diffuse way we lose people. A brief affair with a much older, married rabbi never graduates to full-blown theatrics. Susan gets a gallery exhibition in that breezy way that one imagines everything happened for boomers. It’s not really about all that. Girlfriends seems instead to be about representation in the simplest sense: a loving gaze on the life of a woman-artist in the big city after the sexual revolution. Its representation of Jewishness, too, as a dimension of the portrait’s specificity is refreshing—perfectly natural and embodied, not overladen with meaning or trying to be anything other than itself. In that way, it feels almost like a sociological study with suspiciously good lighting. In other words, it’s a vibe. And a good one.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Ulises de la Orden’s new documentary, The Trial, is an engrossing, horrifying, and heartbreaking chronicle of the 1985 trial of members of the Argentine military junta. After overthrowing President Isabel Perón in a 1976 coup, the junta oversaw state terror that included the disappearance and murder of thousands of leftists and other Argentines. The nearly three-hour film is built entirely from trial footage which has been preserved in international archives out of fear that a future Argentine regime might destroy it. The Trial reveals not just the material reality of that era, but also the depths of evil that made it possible.

The documentary tells the true story of the events featured in Santiago Mitre’s excellent 2022 fiction film Argentina, 1985. Prosecutor Julio Strassera, that movie’s hero, fades into the background; he mostly sits quietly, occasionally asks questions, and eventually gives a summary that earns him a standing ovation from the audience. De la Orden shifts the focus onto the victims. The director provides us with no explanatory voice-over, background information, or even the identities of the people testifying. We are instead left with the stories of those who were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in what the military called “the final solution.” The survivors and their families display immense heroism by having the courage to recall the horrors that were inflicted on them and their loved ones. Women speak of the omnipresence of rape, of babies born in captivity and taken from their mothers, or killed to prevent raising another generation of subversives. But the victims also recount touching moments of solidarity: One survivor describes a Maoist leader shouting “Long live Argentina! Long live the Working Class!” at his tormenters; another tells of a prisoner touching the shoulder of an unknown comrade, on his way to a torture session from which he will never return, and bidding him farewell.

Over and over again, de la Orden shows the bottomless shamelessness of the junta—and of those defending them. The defense lawyers waver between denial of any disappearances—claiming that those who have vanished simply fled and are living under assumed names, a thesis that echoes Holocaust deniers—and justifying the deaths as acts of war, since the military understood the advocacy of Marxism as a casus belli. (The prosecuting attorneys point out that even in an actual war, the acts carried out by the military are forbidden.) The sight of the defendants and their attorneys smiling and laughing at moments throughout the trial is more chilling than any horror film.

It was not until two decades after 1985, under President Néstor Kirchner, that Argentina began to officially commemorate the murders and disappearances. Today, the main torture center at the Navy School of Mechanics is a moving memory museum, while other torture centers around the country display the names and photos of some of the victims for all to see. Like these monuments, The Trial is a tribute to those who died, and to those who fought to make the perpetrators pay.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Recently, The New Yorker published two articles focused on US liberal communities that attempted to buck the 20th century trends of redlining, white flight, and segregation, seeking instead to create integrated neighborhoods.

The first is staff writer Jay Caspian Kang’s review of Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, a new book by Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler which follows integration efforts in an affluent suburb bordering Cleveland, Ohio. In the ’50s, groups of Black and (mostly-Jewish) white families organized to integrate the town of Shaker Heights, in part by encouraging more white people to move into its Black neighborhoods. Yet both Black and white liberals of Shaker Heights were ultimately as well organized in trying to keep poor people out as they were in combating segregation. “It’s . . . clear that the dream of Shaker Heights—expressed, as in so many places like it, through the cause of ‘good schools’—is primarily one of upper-middle-class solidarity,” Kang writes. “It is interesting and even commendable that such solidarity could cross racial lines in one suburb of Cleveland, but the latter part of the Shaker story is far more instructive: the dream falters once poorer people move into town.”

The second New Yorker article is an essay by the writer Jonathan Lethem on his childhood in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. When Lethem was born in 1964, the neighborhood had just been given its name by a group of locals trying to revitalize its old, crumbling brownstones and create a flourishing, and multiracial, middle-class community. The Boerum Hill brownstoners vocally supported integration. They fought the forces of redlining banks and of urban renewal—a controversial program in which cities seized and demolished supposedly “blighted” old homes and businesses, often to create suburban-esque structures like highways and shopping centers. But some of their poorer neighbors viewed the brownstoners as condescending agents of displacement. Lethem acknowledges the brownstoners’ good intentions and yet notes that they drew an invisible line between their new neighborhood and the public housing complex just blocks away, mostly sidestepping the larger moral and political questions of the day. “The boundary [between Boerum Hill and the public housing projects] was a recipe for cognitive dissonance, for a preëmptive turning aside, in favor of more solvable matters, like how to restore a ceiling’s crumbling plaster scrollwork,” Lethem writes.

I found the themes of both of these pieces reminiscent of undergraduate research I did on the neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago, which in the ’50s became one of the first communities in the country to implement an urban renewal program. I studied the papers of Jacob Weinstein, a local Reform rabbi who was nationally recognized as a pro-integration civil rights advocate, yet enthusiastically supported the urban renewal program that ultimately displaced many poor and Black Hyde Park residents. As Hyde Park rapidly integrated, Weinstein actively lobbied his congregants to stay in the neighborhood, even as many other local Jews were decamping to the suburbs. Weinstein believed that convincing well-to-do whites like his congregants not to flee required urban renewal, which would preserve the orderly, upper-middle-class character of the neighborhood. Perhaps, this vision suggested, the white Jews of Hyde Park could have it all: the comforts of suburbia and the richness of diverse city life, as well as the pride of living up to their political commitments.

Like the liberals of Shaker Heights, Weinstein and other Hyde Park activists prioritized class homogeneity in order to try to maintain racial heterogeneity, failing to see how racial inequality was tightly bound up in economic factors. And like the brownstoners of Boerum Hill, Hyde Park integrationists seemed to conceptualize their neighborhood as an island cordoned off from the rest of the metropolis. Weinstein believed, naively, that simply building an integrated Hyde Park might influence other communities to follow its model. Yet when the wrecking ball dust settled, the result was a relatively integrated Hyde Park, but one within a city that remained devastatingly segregated.

Before you go: Reuven Abergel is one of Israel’s pioneering activists: He founded the Black Panther movement in Israel and has advocated for an intersectional struggle with the Palestinians. Abergel also authored the Israeli Black Panthers Hagaddah, published by Jewish Currents Press. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, left-wing activists are coming together to grant him the crowdfunded “People’s Award,” which you can donate to here.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In some ways, my experience of blindness is radically different from Andrew Leland’s, recounted movingly and insightfully in his new memoir, The Country of the Blind. Leland suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that takes years or decades to obliterate the sufferer’s vision, while my trip to blindness was a rapid one: Over two nights, each of my eyes was partially blinded while I was sleeping due to non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (a stroke of the eyes). And while Leland’s condition will gradually take him into total darkness, mine goes no further than the original damage. But for now, both of us are, as Leland so aptly puts it, “too blind to be sighted, too sighted to be blind.”

Leland does a magnificent job situating his own experience within the politics of the blind community. He thoughtfully examines contested features of that world, such as the white cane—the most obvious marker of blindness, which some are reluctant to use out of shame. At one point Leland, who describes himself as proudly “out” as a blind man, relates an incident in which he was mocked as a phony for using the cane when he has partial sight; he reacts angrily, though not as forcefully as I have on the handful of occasions when people have questioned my legitimacy as a “truly” blind person. The Country of the Blind considers the way canes have become a disputed object, showing how the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the largest organization fighting for the blind, considers foldable canes, like the one I carry, to be anathema. “A sixty-inch long, unfoldable white cane is impossible to hide,” Leland writes. “And that’s a good thing. Because blindness isn’t something to be hidden!” And canes are not the only embattled aspect of blind life. The Country of the Blind traces the ins and outs of the debates between advocacy organizations and blind individuals over accommodations like audible pedestrian signals, which some support but others call belittling. I was shocked to find that many of the people Leland meets, for whom independence is paramount, proudly reject assistance when out and about. I have written elsewhere about the callous indifference I experience from the sighted; I think it’s the least anyone can do to offer to help me, say, at busy street corners, where I experience sheer terror.

Throughout his book, Leland avoids the saccharine tone adopted by Frank Bruni in his acclaimed but insipid The Beauty of Dusk, in which the author’s partial blindness is framed positively, as a source of goodness. For Leland, blindness is far more complex. The obstacles it produces allow him to experience his strength in overcoming them—sometimes with enjoyment, like the pleasure he has found in learning Braille. But he does not obscure the difficulties, and he is clear about his immense sorrow that the day will come when his wife and son will disappear from his sight. Like Leland, I haven’t let my blindness prevent me from living as fully as I can, and the experience has taught me that I have internal resources I’d never otherwise have accessed. Even so, I’d gladly sacrifice that lesson to regain the ability to read physical books, to see paintings of all sizes and media, to read subtitles without special glasses, and to simply cross the street.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): On at least three recent subway trips, I’ve been subjected to Tinder’s “It starts with a swipe” campaign, a peculiar effort at rebranding Tinder, the original hookup app, as a marriage factory. The ads feature gender-ambiguous, race-ambiguous bodies doing normative relationshippy things, underneath taglines like “Finally Having Kids,” “Hanging Out in the Daytime,” or “A Toothbrush at Their Place.” These unambiguously young and thin bodies pose in a landscape that—with its cars, furniture, and pastels—evokes the 1950s. The taglines are styled after the 1950s, too, in a syrupy cursive script. “Comfortable Silences,” “Proving Astrology Right,” “Someone to Go to Heaven With” (because why leave out that sweet sweet Christian flavor?). It’s Tinder wrapped in old-fashioned nostalgia and denuded of sex, as though to say, “You think this is the heyday of Gen Z? Fooled ya. You’re all cast as actors in Grease.”

And then there’s the one tagline that, I admit, never fails to elicit an emotional reaction from me: “Realizing You’re Not Dead Inside.” Whoever came up with the idea of making every unpartnered subway rider wonder if the life they are living is one in which they are DEAD is a cruel genius.

As an antidote to all this, and on the topic of feeling dead inside, I’d like to recommend Ruth Madievsky’s newish novel All-Night Pharmacy, in which a lost twenty-something follows first her sister and then a madcap series of mysterious characters to disentangle from her family, face her Soviet Jewish history, and become her own person. I admit I’m partial to any American book featuring Kishinev, home of Madievsky and also my dad. I’m also partial to novels written by poets, which tend to be full of zingers, as All-Night Pharmacy is. But this is also a novel where relationships evolve and dissolve, where a pleasing chaos chases our protagonist through hospitals, countries, drugs, and bars, and where her queerness and eventual pursuit of relationships that are realer than romance are what save the protagonist from feeling internally dead. Like a couple of other recent books (Milk Fed, The Golem of Brooklyn; is this a trend?) All-Night Pharmacy offers us a golem—“Silence creates golems,” one character opines. But, blessedly, there is no marriage plot.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): Some television shows become burdened with the purpose of defining their generation. For many now-creaky millennials, that show was Lena Dunham’s Girls, both an homage to and a critique of the gender and sexual politics and character and plot tropes of classic screwball comedies, Nora Ephron’s work, and Sex and the City. Over six seasons, we watch self-important aspiring writer Hannah, played by Dunham, and her friends, navigating young chaotic life in 2010s Greenpoint, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. They fall in and out of love, embrace and then abandon creative obsessions, fuck and fuck over one another, grow and regress, discovering varying degrees of grace and foolishness in the process. Through it all, the thread that binds the characters, both major and minor, is a tendency towards self-combustion: they live “the dream, one mistake at a time,” as the season-one tagline promises.

Dunham’s a masterful provocateur, directing arcs suffused with chaos, meanness, and revelation, from Hannah’s increasingly intolerable selfishness in the wake of her editor’s death to Adam’s twisted sexual relationships and Marnie’s awful treatment of multiple beaus. The resulting show is frequently shocking, sometimes moving, and often quite ugly. The series’ superb bottle episodes feel like short plays or films, burning through short fuses that keep the dramatic tension high and character revelations coming fast and furious. While the jokes didn’t always didn’t land for me and the plotting often seemed meandering and chaotic—perhaps mirroring what it is to Be Young—I stayed with Girls. Watching unlikeable characters failing over and over again, slouching further and further towards sociopathy, has its pleasures.

Over time, however, it became less enlightening to watch this cringey dramedy. Jessa’s descent into darkness, Shoshanna’s irrationally sunny innocence, and Marnie’s capacity for self-delusion began to feel less like hallmarks of layered, three-dimensional people, and more like a potpourri of quirks and ephemeral manias. It didn’t help that the ‘boys’—Adam, the terrifying-but-charismatic aspiring actor and recovering alcoholic, and Ray, the curmudgeon-with-a-heart-of-gold barista—appeared to deepen in complexity and nuance at the expense of the titular girls, who often came to feel like shards of Dunham’s rich, provocative personality rather than autonomous, flesh-and-blood humans. (Among the girls, Shoshanna may be the exception: her journey from naive and invisible among the clique to confident, capable, and fully actualized, is a triumph.)

To my mind, the show’s animating impulse was the experience of experience—of writing, of acting, of copious casual sex, of moving to Japan, of watching a parents come out, of substance abuse, of being intentionally bad at your very normy job, of flaming out of a world-class writing workshop, of motherhood—without an effort to turn those experiences into something narratively coherent and organic. Maybe this was Dunham’s real project: to interrogate whether Having The Experience can serve as an adequate substitute for Becoming A Person with a real, earned sense of responsibility for the emotional wreckage you cause.

As someone who spent most of his 20s mired in self-loathing and disgust over his perceived creative shortcomings, watching Girls felt like a bit of an attack, but the show tempers its vitriolic mockery with just enough empathy. So come for the mess, but stay for the stink of shame hanging on all the characters like a bad hangover.

A quick note before we get to this week’s recommendations: The Jewish Currents staff takes the last week of August off to recharge, so there will be no newsletter next week. We’ll see you all in September!

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Tara Booth (on instagram @tarabooth) is an artist whose work is full of color and has a subtly deadpan quality that is hard to explain: honest and a bit unruly, the drawings often portray experiences that most of us either gloss over or may hesitate to share publicly. In the self-portrait I have in my bathroom—a print called “Peeing in a Romper,” which I coveted for years before purchasing—Booth depicts the physical and emotional process of taking off a romper, showing herself wrestling with the garment until it’s eventually around her ankles as she sits, naked, on the toilet. In the final panel of the series, having succeeded at the task, she stares blankly at the viewer. It’s an ordeal that anyone who has worn a onesie, romper, or jumpsuit has gone through, a private moment of indignity or strangeness that typically goes unobserved. Happily for me, my roommates like—or at least don’t mind—looking at the drawing when they, too, are on the toilet.

I also have a slim book of drawings Booth and co-illustrator Jon-Michael Frank created as a way to “work through our own experiences with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation,” as they write in the introduction. Titled Things to Do Instead of Killing Yourself, the recommendations on each page are illustrated in a way that, as is typical of Booth’s work, invites a sense of the messiness and randomness of being alive. Some of the pieces of advice are genuine, like “change your sheets.” Some are whimsical: “Step on a jelly filled doughnut” or “borrow someone else’s baby and appreciate being alone.” Some are impossible: “Swap bodies with a mannequin”—or, conversely, widely relatable: “Get the most expensive and intensive gym membership and never go.” Other entries capture the mood of a heavy depression familiar to anyone who has experienced it, albeit with a bit of levity: “Make a quilt out of squares for each year in your life that was worth living,” or “float your birth certificate down a river in hopes that someone else will get more use out of your life.” This book sits on my night table, atop a stack of other art books and beneath a shofar. In recent years, therapy and medication have alleviated my own cycles of depression, but I still imagine a day when a friend or young cousin, whether they talk to me about their struggle or not, might come over, flip through its pages, and feel companionship.

Whether you purchase a print, book, or apparel for yourself or a loved one, or just follow her on social media, Booth’s artwork will add small doses of relief and intrigue into your routine.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Last week, I caught the opening night of Annie Baker’s newest play, Infinite Life, which runs until October 8th at the Linda Gross theater in Chelsea. I was first introduced to Baker’s work in 2013, when I saw her Pulitzer prize-winning play The Flick, about three employees of a movie theater struggling to connect. I remember being almost confused by the amount of silence in the play but impressed by its willingness to lean into these pauses until they became chasms. Silence is a much-discussed feature of Baker’s work, and it’s often meted out in very specific increments in her stage directions. In the text of The Aliens, she specifies that nearly a third of the play should be silent, “uncomfortably so”; in The Flick and elsewhere, the stage directions note when a certain kind of silence becomes another kind (“A happy pause in which they realize they’ve broken the tension, and then an awkward pause following that happy pause.”) and stage directions often come with time markers, prescribing 20 seconds of this and then another ten seconds of that.

This impeccable sense of timing is on display in Infinite Life, which runs an hour and 50 minutes with no intermission. Like Baker’s other plays—which often take place over a longer period of time in a single location—the lens of Infinite Life is fixed on a row of reclining outdoor chaise lounges, like you might find poolside at a hotel. But there is no pool, and this is no hotel. Though the largely older women we’re introduced to first appear to be on some kind of vacation, we quickly learn that they are at a pseudo-health facility in a strip mall a few hours north of San Francisco. They are there to participate in “water fasts” of varying lengths, an unorthodox treatment for various painful maladies that the women—strangers to one another, but companions for the fast—are desperate to resolve.

I have talked about Baker’s silences, but not her dialogue. Her plays are as talky as they are quiet, and the conversation has that incredible quality of being believably naturalistic, as well as poetic, hilarious, and heartbreaking in turns. The sharpness of the dialogue is what saves this play, perhaps one of her funniest, from replicating for the audience the monotony of the women’s days and nights while on the fast. Slowly, in its own meandering way, the play begins to ask questions about the nature and meaning of pain—questions that are both existential and strikingly concrete for the women sufferers.

Baker’s plays are never big, dramatic affairs. The drama is in the peaks and valleys in conversation; the viewer recalibrates to find it there. This can be an extremely rewarding experience, as the viewer becomes attuned to the drama of everyday connections and misses. But Infinite Life, perhaps astute as a comment about the narcissistic qualities of suffering, features far fewer moments of genuine connection. And though I enjoyed it immensely—and particularly Marylouise Burke’s show-stealing performance as the frail, midwestern Eileen—in retrospect, I felt frustrated by how committedly withholding Baker was with her characters, especially because the closing scene, which features one such moment of connection and care, is so breathtaking.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Two very worthwhile—and wildly different—films on Jewish themes are opening today at Film Forum: Michael Roemer’s nearly lost comedy classic The Plot Against Harry and Israeli director Michal Weits’s documentary Blue Box.

Shot in 1969 and first shown in 1971, The Plot Against Harry initially played in a single theater for just one week. Forgotten for nearly two decades, it finally got a wide release in 1990 after appearing at the New York and Toronto Film Festivals. The film centers on Harry Plotnick—a member of a dying breed, the Jewish gangster—who has made his living in the numbers racket and is newly released from prison. At first, Harry works to re-establish his racket, but after encountering his ex-wife on the outside, he decides to abandon his life of crime and win her back. Roemer sets this comedy against a magnificent and riotous portrayal of middle-class Jewish life in the late ’60s, with its brassy marriage banquets and bar mitzvahs featuring swans made of chopped liver. May the film never fall into oblivion again.

Michal Weits’s Blue Box, first released in 2021, is an intensely personal film about the links between the afforestation of Israel—paid for by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which collected coins in the once ubiquitous blue boxes (pushkes, as we called them) in synagogues across the diaspora—and the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland. Much responsibility for both projects fell on one man: Yosef Weitz, the director’s great-grandfather. Blue Box, which is constructed around the director and her family members’ reactions to her great-grandfather’s activities, considers how generations of Israelis might reckon—or fail to reckon—with their ancestors’ crimes.

In the film, Weits speaks about how childhood visits to the forests planted by the JNF under her great-grandfather’s leadership were a source of great pride for her. But once she came to understand how and why the land on which they were grown was acquired, the trees no longer seemed to be cause for celebration. Her great-grandfather, Weits comes to understand, is known not only as “the Father of Israel’s Forests,” but also as “The Architect of Transfer.” Before Israel was founded, he arranged an overwhelming majority of the purchases of land from effendis (landowners under the Ottoman feudal system) that led to the exile of the fellahin (peasants) who worked them; and in 1948, he was a key player in the expulsion of the Arab population during the Nakba. After the war, the Israeli government sold now-unpopulated land to the JNF, which planted the famous forests in order to render the land uncultivable, to prevent the return of refugees. As Blue Box makes disturbingly clear, the trees planted in Israel in my honor over the course of my early life—when I was born in 1952, when I graduated from Hebrew school at Flatbush Park Jewish Center, and when I was bar mitzvahed—make me an accomplice in the dispossession of a people.

The film draws on archival discoveries and Josef Weitz’s voluminous diaries, which include naked admissions of the crimes he didn’t understand as such; presented with these, the director’s family members’ reactions vary greatly. The youngest generation is willing to listen to her, and sympathize with her perspective; her elders refuse to do so. After all, the myth of Josef Weitz is the myth of the purity of the founding of the Jewish state. Like all myths, it dies hard—or refuses to die at all.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I’ve been on a Willa Cather kick all summer. I can’t exactly say why, never having previously been enchanted by lyrical descriptions of the American West, and yet I’ve waded through innumerable Nebraska sunsets and undulating wheatfields. Perhaps the best of her books I’ve read is the 1925 novel The Professor’s House, which centers on Godfrey St. Peter, an American historian in the midwestern college town of Hamilton, who has recently finished his magnum opus and is now working on a midlife crisis. In the novel’s present, St. Peter pines for his prize student, the suggestively named Tom Outland. Engaged to marry St. Peter’s daughter, Outland tragically died in World War I, leaving behind a potentially lucrative aeronautic invention. Much to St. Peter’s dismay, an opportunistic, war-profiteering Jew, Louie Marsellus, swooped in and snatched up Outland’s beloved, his patent, and his legacy. In an extended flashback, Outland recounts his discovery of an abandoned, Indigenous cave city in the American Southwest—a melancholy lost world, which anticipates his own demise and usurpation.

Quite unlike the novels that made Cather famous—nostalgic Georgics about blond pioneers exploiting the fecundity of the Great Plains—The Professor’s House is a weird experiment with Henry James’s “international theme,” in which callow, youthful Americans encounter their ancient, sophisticated predecessors in Europe. Thus we learn that St. Peters, who researches Spanish conquistadors, studied abroad in France; in the present, Marsellus wants to take the family on a European Grand Tour. James was cultivating, however ambivalently, a worldly cosmopolitanism. By contrast, Cather is haunted by the deep, reactionary fear that the violent colonial destruction of Native American culture is now being visited on White America through the milder, more civilized channels of Jewish mercantilism. A good portion of my pleasure in The Professor’s House is either narcissistic (I too am a midwestern professor, slightly adrift after completing a book manuscript) or masochistic (I have a sweet tooth for genteel literary antisemitism). Your mileage may vary.

In the old joke, a Jew prefers Nazi newspapers to Yiddish ones, because he likes to read about how powerful and successful the Jews are. Perhaps I find myself similarly flattered by Cather’s paleo-conservative dread of a Jewish modernity. But I am also tickled by the countercurrents and ironies. After learning that his homoerotic, anarchist-leaning companion Roddy has sold off the Indigenous antiquities Outland took to be a national treasure, for instance, he angrily tells Roddy, “You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets, like [Alfred] Dreyfus.” Well, by 1925, everyone knew Captain Dreyfus had been framed, rendering retrospectively absurd Outland’s accusation of racial betrayal. (Although Cather was definitely personally conservative, in this scene, I suspect that she is playfully retrojecting Sacco and Vanzetti, the falsely convicted anarchists of the 1920s, several decades back, thus midrashically entwining these Jewish and radical martyrs.) Even if Cather’s antisemitic nostalgia makes for despicable politics, it furnishes a good theory of the novel. The Professor’s House is far more playful, vertiginous, and, well, modern than most of her writing—in large part because it is usefully contaminated by Jewishness.

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Did you love the “plasticky” world-building of Barbie but no other aspect of the film? I have a recommendation for you: Jacques Tati’s Oscar-winning 1958 feature, Mon Oncle. Best known for its biting commentary on the social and material alienation that American consumerism brought to Europe after World War II, Mon Oncle is also a brilliantly designed slapstick comedy—one that tries to hone a theory of plastic as a transcendental signifier.

The thesis of Mon Oncle is fairly simple: the socially enmeshed life one finds in a small town is more humane, more straightforward, and generally less anxiety-inducing than the isolated, bourgeois existence that became popular alongside the boom of consumer culture. But as the film’s visual gags become more complicated, more absurd, and more self-assured, it furthers what is now a familiar argument in genuinely engrossing, amusing ways. The majority of the film’s action takes place at Villa Arpel, a gated home equipped with everything you’ve never needed: uncomfortable, angular furniture, kitchen appliances inspired by a trip to the dentist’s office, massive his-and-hers portholes in the master bedroom. There, a family of apparently very stylish taste resides, entertaining and impressing fellow suburbanites while trying to master their unintuitive environment. In one touching and unbelievable moment, Madame Arpel installs a motion-activated garage door for her husband, but there’s one snag: there’s no sensor inside. When Monsieur Arpel parks his brand new Cadillac in the garage and promptly gets trapped inside, the maid who is “scared of electricity” must be enticed to wave her hand across the console to let the couple out.

Tati, who trained as a mime, plays the silent and hapless titular uncle, Monsieur Hulot, who hopscotches between the earth-toned small town where he lives and the sharp, playfully hostile suburban villa. Despite his idiosyncratic, overwrought gestures, Hulot works as the comedy’s straight man, routinely trying to follow the logic of this built environment to conform to, well, common sense. While his sister dazzles the other wives in the neighborhood with her short-circuiting, hands-free steak cooker, Hulot flips furniture on its side to lie more comfortably, walks only on the awkwardly-placed stones on the lawn (until he mistakenly steps on a few plastic water lilies in the astroturf’s inset pool), and upon realizing the homeware in the kitchen is plastic, tries to bounce it (shattering a few hidden crystal water glasses in the process). You can imagine the misdirection that ensues when the Arpels’ bourgeois neighbors come to dine alongside Hulot and the manually-operated fish-shaped fountain.

The film functionally seals the world of the villa off from the world of the town, so as to shock the viewer when the two are reconciled, or placed in a single system. The camera never follows anyone the entire distance between the villa and the town where people live, eat, and drink communally. A few workmen come to the Arpel villa, and Hulot ferries his young nephew back and forth between suburb and school (a relationship that serves as the emotional core of the film), but the real invasion of the fabricated sphere into the “authentic” comes in the third act, when we see the plastic produced. It’s hard to say which mechanical process is interrupted while Hulot is asleep at his desk, but it’s bad: suddenly, the plastic hose comes out of the machine baubled and creased, giving the impression of a long chain of hotdog links. The workers, decked out in bug-man-looking suits, scramble to dispose of the fucked up product and hide the voluminous mass from a client touring the facility. In a few sequences of collective, fluid movement, the workers dash around in the background shots as the plastic factory’s top bosses chat and schmooze; the workers load the plastic onto a horse-drawn cart, drive it to some marshy, overgrown part of town, and attempt to dump the refuse. A few scenes later, a man tries to “rescue” the tubing, thinking it to be a body, only for the workers to jeer at him for being so foolish as to offer a human reading of an artificial situation.

By setting up an arcane world of consumption, then showcasing its heretofore hidden production, Mon Oncle provides a kind of interpretive key to Barbie. If you’re curious about a critique of the beginnings of a material culture that dominates our lives today—and enjoy a good visual pun—you can watch Mon Oncle on Vimeo.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I haven’t expected much from Czech cinema since 1968—the last gasp of the Czech New Wave, before it was crushed by Soviet tanks. So I went into Jiří Havelka’s Owners, a 2019 film just released in the US, expecting little more than a diverting yet inconsequential 90 minutes. But as it turns out, Owners is a delight. This comedy, which takes place almost entirely at a meeting of those who own apartments in a building that has seen better days, is a curious and successful gamble. Despite its overall light tone, it owes much to Sidney Lumet’s great 1957 jury room drama, 12 Angry Men. Like the jurors in that classic, the apartment owners are trapped: The group’s regulations, strictly enforced by one of the members, state that once someone has signed the attendance sheet, they’re stuck until the meeting’s end. As in Lumet’s film, captivity brings out the characters’ real natures, with all their foibles and failings; its revelation of racism, homophobia, and human pettiness is almost on the level of Radu Jude’s 2021 excoriation of today’s Romania, Bad Luck Banging.

In this scathing picture of the post-communist Czech Republic, solidarity means nothing to anyone. When the owners discuss installing an elevator, the woman who owns the first-floor apartment is against it—after all, she doesn’t need it—and since any decision requires unanimity, there will be no elevator; a similar spirit of selfishness marks discussions about sharing the cost of water, or electricity in the common areas. While Havelka presents the country’s communist past through the figure of an unrepentant but disagreeable communist, who constantly reminisces about how much better things were in his day, the hopelessness of the present is expressed through two smarmy businessmen—the twin sons of a recently deceased tenant, just back from their offices in Russia and America—whose relative charm seduces the other meanspirited, backbiting owners, whom they will inevitably betray. In the film’s vision, communism was a failure, but capitalism is the breeding ground of the greedy. Still, for all the seriousness of its message, Owners is a genuinely funny film, uproarious in its mockery of its characters—hustlers and drunks, opportunists and fools—and the society they have created.