Shabbat
Reading List

Mari Cohen (associate editor): I’ll admit I don’t always feel drawn to the short story as a form. I often find that, as if to preemptively concede to the limited space, contemporary authors go out of their way to make their characters inscrutable and distant. Lorrie Moore’s classic 1998 collection Birds of America, which I read over the last few weeks, never falls into this trap. Moore’s protagonists are wickedly funny and observant, sometimes self-destructive but usually self-aware. That said, the tone of the collection is dominated by melancholy: characters handle grief, heartbreak, and ennui in mostly generic towns across America. But the stories never collapse under their own emotional weight—Moore’s zany plots and piercing insights buoy each entry in the collection. In one late story, a woman copes with the disappointment of her adulterous husband and distant adult daughter by pouring her entire will to live into renovating and de-verminizing a new house—a monomaniacal desire whose pursuit inches closer and closer to violence: “Every house is a grave, thought Ruth. All that life-stealing fuss and preparation. Which made moving from a house a resurrection . . . and made moving to a house the darkest of follies and desires. At best it was a restlessness come falsely to rest.”

The finest story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” adopts a different mode than most of the others. The characters are nameless, referred to only as the Mother, the Husband, the Baby. It’s the rare entry in the book where the protagonist, the Mother, is a writer. Moore usually avoids the navel-gazing trap of making her characters novelists or journalists (they are standardized test writers, dancers, librarians, adjuncts, or housepainters instead.) Here, though, the protagonist-as-author-stand-in conceit is well-earned. “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” (which might be at least semi-autobiographical) is about a baby with cancer and his family’s initiation into the strange customs of the hospital’s “Ped Onc” ward. The vivid descriptions of the Baby, full of life, playing with a light switch, innocent to the cancer inside of him, make the story one of the most devastating I’ve ever read. But the narrative also asks us to doubt our submission to its power. The Husband keeps urging the Mother to “take notes” for an eventual writing project, because the family will need the money. The Mother protests, warning that she’s not capable of capturing the reality of what they’ve been through: “The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really.” The gap between relaying and experiencing cannot be bridged, and yet this narrator’s “slow, fake song” made of the “mouth’s eager devastation” is as tuneful as any I’ve heard.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): This summer, any time I’ve hopped in the car alone for a quick drive, my go-to soundtrack has been the impeccable trio of songs that opens Girl with Fish, the new album by feeble little horse. (The Pittsburgh-based band took their aggressively twee name, styled without any capital letters, from a translation of Kafka’s The Castle.) Like fellow equine indie rockers Horsegirl, feeble little horse are obviously indebted to grunge and its noisy progenitors, but approach familiar moves—like pairing massive, overdriven guitars and disarmingly sweet vocals—with a lively confidence that makes the sound feel fresh. Indeed, it’s primarily the soaring, all-consuming distortion of the first three tracks that makes them so perfect for a ride in the sweltering heat. But there’s also something fittingly seasonal about the band’s mercurial pace, which alternates between languid and frenetic. As the jittery riffs of “Tin Man” fade into the slow plod of “Steamroller,” the blend of energy and lethargy feels distinctly summer-y.

If you have a bit more time to spare, the rest of Girl with Fish (only 26 minutes in full) is also excellent. While the remaining songs never quite match the immediacy of the opening tracks, they do compellingly expand the band’s sonic palette—the verses of “Slide,” which overlay acoustic guitar with glitchy electronics, are a highlight—and grow more structurally daring: “Pocket” completely undoes itself halfway through, while closer “Heavy Water” traverses an epic arc in just over two minutes. I was excited to see how the band pulled all of this off live at their Minneapolis show, scheduled for July. But sadly the band canceled the tour supporting the album before it began, citing health concerns. Here’s hoping they’re back in action by next summer.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I don’t know when I last read a novel of such perfect sadness and beauty as Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist. As a reader, I despise any form of redemption, so the premise initially struck me as trite and hackneyed: A retired librarian, living alone and with almost no friends, signs up to work at a senior citizens’ home, where he learns about himself. But I picked it up anyway, having found deWitt’s previous novel, French Exit, to be a magnificent work that freed its characters of the need to be nice (or even decent) and demonstrated a real sense of how the human heart works.

In The Librarianist, Bob Comet has spent his career at a library in Portland, Oregon, working the early shift so he can have the place to himself. He relished the silence and solitude: deWitt writes that his “favorite dream was that he was alone and it was early in the morning and he was setting up for the day, and all was peaceful and still and his shoes made no sound as he walked across the carpeting, an empty bus shushing past on the damp street.” The quiet interiority of an empty library—an intensification of the institution’s typical tranquility—functions as a metaphor for the life of this man who has hardly had a life at all. Indeed, Comet has barely moved or changed over the course of his 75 years. He lives alone in his childhood home, and while he was briefly married, his wife (the only woman he’d been with) promptly left him for his best friend (the only friend he’d ever had). As with French Exit, deWitt immediately finds the proper tone, the correct level of wistfulness and despair, to tell his tale, modulating it as the action dictates.

Though Comet’s entry into the world of the nursing home—where he starts volunteering by reading Edgar Allen Poe to the residents on Halloween, driving them all from the room—is treated as a stroke of chance, it’s also part of a search for human contact. When, almost halfway through the book, Comet makes a startling discovery about one of the seniors, deWitt uses the occasion to shift modes, giving us a lengthy flashback that takes us into the character’s past, and then another that goes back further still. These flashbacks illuminate each other and our protagonist in unexpected ways. We see that the Bob Comet of the present is the Bob Comet of the past; it’s unlikely that he could have been other than he is, or that anything could have turned out differently from the way it has.

Ultimately Comet does accept the need for others, and deWitt describes the redemptive realization almost apologetically, as if he knows this development is too familiar. But this, too, is part of the beauty of The Librarianist. After all, the strange paths we all take often lead to a conventional end.

Before we get to this week’s recommendations, we wanted to let you know that our podcast, One the Nose, is recording a mailbag episode! Email editor@jewishcurrents.org with the subject “MAILBAG” with any question you might want the editors of Jewish Currents to answer. Voice notes are encouraged, but we also ask you write a short summary of your question in the body of the email. We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): We’re in the middle of a crunch ahead of our next print issue, which means it can be hard to find the spare time, will, or brainpower to make it through anything longer than an essay or short story. (Foolishly, at the beginning of the summer, I started Robert Bolaño’s 900-page door-stopper, 2666. Needless to say, I haven’t made it very far.) Looking for something that wouldn’t make me feel guilty for abandoning it, I turned to Vintage’s 2013 collection of short stories by Vladimir Nabokov. The stories are, in miniature, much of what you may have loved about reading Nabokov’s novels. Many of the entries in this collection are meticulously constructed literary documents of emigration, campus life, the persistent allure of authoritarianism (at different points summoning Pnin, Lolita, and “the one about chess”). Classics like “The Vane Sisters” and “Signs and Symbols,” or even early-career bangers like “Spring in Fialta” and “Russian Spoken Here,” plumb VVN’s various formal and thematic fascinations—not to mention some of his personal antipathies—with enough mastery and in short enough space that I’m able to avoid the emotional baggage of another novel left unread.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): This week, I read Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, a play whose 2014 debut at Soho Rep I missed. The play is adapted from Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1859 work by the same name and recycles much of its source material’s dialogue to tell the same story: a melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation with predictably violent ends. Despite the vexed relationship between the two works, you cannot miss the adaption’s deviations from the original: The 2014 play begins with a character who introduces himself as a “black playwright”—identified in the text as BJJ, the author’s initials—and appears onstage nearly nude to lament the difficulty of finding white actors to inhabit the roles of racist slave owners for his adaptation of the Boucicault play. As the black playwright recounts a conversation with an imagined therapist—exploring his relationship to anger at white people and the misery of having to locate himself in a complex tangle of perception and representation—he paints his entire body white, so he can play the roles he cannot cast. He is then joined onstage by a double—a character called only “Playwright,” a stand-in for Boucicault himself—who paints himself red, preparing to play the Native American characters, attended to all the while by his “Assistant,” who is actually Native American. All three of these characters will play multiple roles in the drama to come—the adaptation itself—a clever rejoinder to the (white) therapist’s suggestion to pursue “colorblind casting.” The black playwright will play the “evil” white slave owner as well as the so-called “moral” one; the playwright will play the Native American character; and the Native American assistant will play two enslaved black men. The women characters will all inhabit only one role, and are cast straightforwardly.

The result is a mind-bending accumulation of layers, a proliferation of doppelgangers, all of which call every moment, every reading, into question. When Zoe, the titular “octoroon,” reveals to George (the “good” slave owner, played by the black playwright) that she has only been passing as white and thus cannot accept his love, she is, of course, not the only fraud. And how to read a scene where the two slave owners—both played by a single black man in effect fighting himself—engage in a brawl? Who is about to be lynched when the mob’s suspicion regarding a recent murder turns from the red (white) man to the white (black) one? The only people who seem on solid ground regarding their roles are two code-switching enslaved women—Minnie and Dido—who speak to one another in a contemporary black vernacular and to the white men (or the black playwright) in the self-consciously exaggerated “slave talk” of historical fiction. Their general indifference to the events of the play often lends a note of comic relief, but it also communicates a refreshing wholeness and solidity in themselves.

In the first scene of An Octoroon, the black playwright recounts a dream where he is being attacked by a swarm of bees, until he realizes that he is the swarm “And when they dissipate and fly away, / they leave nothing behind.” This image of confusion between inside and outside stayed with me throughout the play’s doubling and mirroring and reversals, a haunting encapsulation of race’s destabilizing and depersonalizing scripts.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Alexander Stille has made his name as an insightful chronicler of all things Italian, writing books on Italian Jews during the war, the Mafia, and Silvio Berlusconi. (He comes by this naturally, as the son of the former editor of the newspaper Corriere dela Sera.) He has now written his first book set in America, The Sullivanians. On the surface, the subject may seem an odd choice. The title refers to a cult of a few hundred people devoted to the theories of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan, who lived communally on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This small group, whose reach rarely extended below West 72nd Street, hardly seems to merit an entire book. But Stille’s accomplishment is just how much he’s able to make of these people and what they signified.

The Sullivanians came together many years after Sullivan himself died, under the leadership of a man with no professional training as a therapist, Saul B. Newton (born Cohen). He took Sullivan’s vision—the essence of which can be summed up by the famous opening line from Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse,” “They’ll fuck you up, your mum and dad”—to its ultimate extreme. In the first place the nuclear family had to be destroyed, so even if members were married—a practice allowed only, Stille writes, “for practical reasons” like taxes or insurance—sex with other partners was mandatory. Kids were housed separately from their parents, and the obligatory promiscuity ensured no one could be sure who their father was. The children were routinely shipping off to boarding schools in faraway places, where they’d seldom hear from their parents. (Stille never asks why the Sullivans weren’t anti-natalists, not having children at all being the surest way to avoid fucking them up.)

The group’s life was otherwise structured by a paranoid and dictatorial form of left-wing politics. Newton, whose past included years in the Communist Party and a period as an officer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, exercised totalitarian power over the Sullivanians, demanding sex from any female member who caught his eye. Everything about the followers’ lives was determined by the leadership, and surveillance was nearly constant. To spread their idiosyncratic left-wing message, the Sullivanians set up a theater company, The Fourth Wall, based in the East Village, which also served as a vanity project for one of Newton’s serial spouses, a former actress. As Newton’s daughter Esther says in the book, the Sullivanians “combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the musical theater.”

How was it possible that intelligent people—including, at various points, Jackson Pollock, Judy Collins, Richard Elman, and Richard Price—surrendered their will to a mountebank like Newton? Sadly, the story of the Sullivanians follows a pattern familiar not only from the history of cults, but from the history of the left: In the name of the ultimate good, saving the human person, a group of misguided idealists accepted evil and refused to call it such.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Barbie, erstwhile indie darling Greta Gerwig’s latest blockbuster, is only the beginning. As Alex Barasch recently reported in an alarming New Yorker feature, the top brass at Mattel have already cooked up a whole host of future productions based on the company’s intellectual property, including a horror movie about the Magic 8 ball, spearheaded by Jimmy Warden, Cocaine Bear writer; a Daniel Kaluuya-produced Barney feature; and a Lena-Dunham-directed live-action Polly Pocket project. In the piece, an exec fantasizes about getting Guillermo del Toro on board, citing his “worldbuilding” skills. As the IP takeover of the movie business marches on, what’s a culture snob to do? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Marvel movie all the way through, but I did gamely don big pink sunglasses and join for a Monday evening showing of the Barbie movie—I wanted to find out if I would have to hand it to Gerwig for making Barbie an actual work of art. Life’s small pleasures, etc.

As it turns out, there’s no great moral or artistic conflict to face here. Gerwig’s story of a “Stereotypical Barbie” (Margot Robbie)—who suffers a rude awakening when she travels to the Real World to fix the imperfections popping up in her utopian Barbie Land life—offers plenty in the way of fun, and very little in the way of substance. The film’s built environment, of course, is breathtaking: Barbieland is a perfect plasticky pink and comes into view with a realism that remains unnervingly uncanny. The gags that play on the essential strangeness of the extended Barbie universe—the way the different adult women dolls are all just named “Barbie”; the fact that the job of the main Ken (a hilarious Ryan Gosling) is not “lifeguard” but “beach”; how Barbie’s feet are built in a perfect heel-ready arch—are legitimately funny, especially as they build in absurdity throughout the film (the apex of this is Ken busting out into a musical number as the background dissolves into surrealism).

All along the way, Barbie wants to assure us that it is in on the joke, that it gets how Barbie dolls have served as a symbol of unattainable white, airheaded beauty. It also wants us to know that it “disavows” that. As the critic Allison Willmore writes in Vulture, “There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.” These defensive gestures are mostly just that—gestures—that stop short of injecting any real subversiveness into the heart of the film. Sasha, the teenager who ends up saving Barbie Land with her mom, calls Barbie a “fascist” who makes women feel bad about themselves, but soon enough, she comes around to appreciating Barbie’s potential. Similarly, Mattel’s executive board is presented as a gaggle of hapless white men, but Will Ferrell’s portrayal of theCEO is so over-the-top and ridiculous that it steamrolls over any real critique of the brand. At one point, the movie’s faceless narrator (Helen Mirren), chimes in to point out that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a protagonist with Robbie’s doll-like beauty crying about how she “isn’t pretty.” But Robbie is still the movie’s center, and Mirren’s interjection mostly appears like an attempt to preempt some critic from making the same point in a review. Just like the corporate Twitter accounts that desperately volley “woke” memes at consumers to prove that they are both savvy and relatable, the movie is full of signifiers, but very little is actually signified. (Most of the bits have the appropriate size and depth for a high-quality comedy sketch, not an entire movie.)

At the film’s climax, America Ferrera, playing Sasha’s mom, delivers a cathartic monologue about the impossible pressures placed on women, which is affecting, but might land better if Ferrera’s character had been given any real depth, and which will feel mostly familiar to anyone who has been aware of feminism for more than five minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie’s feminism is of a corporatist, Hillary Clinton vintage, using the gender make-up of the Barbie Land Supreme Court, presidency, and boardroom as a proxy for assessing women’s liberation, as especially as compared to the real world, where they are woefully left behind. It doesn’t feel quite up to a moment in which one of the real-life Supreme Court’s women has been one of its most dogged supporters of stripping women of their rights.

The movie concludes with the point that, instead of having to choose between Robbie’s “stereotypical” beautiful Barbie or one of her superstar compatriots—astronaut Barbie; president Barbie; award-winning-physicist Barbie—we ought to be offered an “ordinary Barbie,” one who doesn’t have to be perfect in looks or intellect or ambition to have worth. Fair enough, but we’ve still had to spend the whole movie with the original one, who, despite Robbie’s best bright-eyed efforts, mostly remains a blank slate. The movie’s best material is reserved for Ken, who tries to rise above his sidekick station and seize Barbie Land for the patriarchy, prompting a long sequence of jokes about how a man would design his dream house, with mini fridges full of beer and endless showings of The Godfather. At times, it dips into easy cultural “heteropessimist” shorthand, but it’s overall an apt representation of how masculinity, too, can be confining. All said and done, it might not be a great look for Barbie that, despite all the feminist signaling, the male character is awarded the most interesting arc. No worries though—I’m sure the Barbies will still fly off the shelves.

Dana Bassett (director of finance and outreach): If you, like me, were made physically ill by watching bundles of notebooks Joan Didion had never even written in sell for $11,000 at her estate sale last November, then maybe you will find a bit of relief in the Hilton Als-curated exhibition “Joan Didion: What She Means.” The show boasts over 200 objects, including some of the late author’s personal ephemera and the work of approximately 50 visual artists, and gives Didion fans at least some chance of viewing the objects she left behind.

Originally staged at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the exhibition is now on display until (if the earth even makes it this long) January 2024 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Let’s not mince words—Joan wouldn’t. The title is a bit overly ambitious: I found the exhibition to be more about where Joan lived throughout her career, the many subjects of her writing, and what she means to us (or maybe Hilton Als specifically), than a strong statement on what her oeuvre means to the many genres and movements she touched. To be fair, how can one really pin down what a writer like Joan means, when she really means so much to so many?

Despite this, and the confusingly bifurcated layout of the exhibition (which is staged over three galleries, two of which are contiguous and the third is clear across the museum’s second floor), I loved every second of this bricolage portrait of Didion. The objects on display include family heirlooms too precious for the auction (including her step-grandmother’s chamber pot), ephemera and clippings that span her long, illustrious career, and visual parallels to various snippets of her writing. How can you not love such a detailed visual explication? It’s an opportunity to immerse yourself in a wry world of hippies, movie stars, politics, and place. I found the most charming aspect of the exhibition to be the sweet, if a bit saccharine, handling of Didion’s life by Als: pieces from his own personal Joan collection. These lend a human touch to what otherwise might feel like an overly didactic pairing of artworks with excerpts. A taped interview between the two plays over speakers in the last room, titled “Sentimental Journeys: New York, Miami, San Salvador” and features work from mainstays of the Miami art world, Felix Gonzales-Torres and Ana Mendieta (paired, of course, with excerpts from Miami). Something about listening to these two converse while my eyes traveled up Felix’s string of lightbulbs just felt right.

There were a few other moments that prompted me to think, “Wow, is Hilton Als this good of a curator, or did the Hammer curatorial assistants take a heavy hand?” There was a huge “Monotone” painting by Silke Otto Knapp, drawings of pages out of Didion’s books by Jack Pierson, a giant rope “River” by Marine Hassinger, and what appeared to be a stack of melted and burned papers by Noah Purifoy titled, “Watts Uprising Remains.” In other words, the art was good, too.

The exhibition is also unsurprisingly dominated by photography, both fine and documentary. Visitors will see a mix photographs of Joan, such as the iconic Juergen Teller portraits of Didion in her signature oversized Celine sunglasses (a pair of which fetched $27,000 at auction), and of important historic moments referenced in her writing, including a Jeffrey Henson Scales portrait of Huey Newton (alongside the appropriate corresponding selection from 1979’s The White Album), various works by Diane Arbus, and photographs of a pregnant Sharon Tate by Jay Sebring. There are also photos of Didion’s Malibu home, taken by Henry Clarke in 1972 for Vogue, yearbooks with their pages open to images of her class photos, and pictures of her daughter’s christening in 1966. Like Didion’s writing, there is simply so much.

Of course, an exhibit this dense invites repeat visits (which I will hopefully be able to do) and, as is custom, a giant exhibition catalog. You can of course buy this oversized tome at the gift shop, along with a selection of reissued Didion books and Als’ White Girls. For those who aren’t able to see the show in person, I suspect that the art book version of Joan Didion: What She Means is an above average companion to what was an engrossing visual experience—one fit for the Joan Didion-headed amongst us and the average museum visitor alike.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Since the 2008 release of his controversial study The Invention of the Jewish People, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has often been dismissed as a crackpot. But having now read this book for the third time (once in French, twice in English), I can confirm that he is nothing of the sort. In fact, Sand’s main point, that the Jewish people are an invention, is perfectly unobjectionable.

To be clear, Sand does not say that the Jewish people doesn’t exist now. He claims only that the idea of a unified Jewish people with a shared origin and history is little but “mythistory.” His analysis is inspired by two major writers on nationalism, Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson, with the latter’s absolutely brilliant and essential book, Imagined Communities, providing the foundation for Sand’s thesis. Following Anderson, Sand argues that all nations and nationalisms are artificial constructs, built around myths and founding texts. As he writes: “Just as the French were persuaded that their ancestors were the Gauls, and the Germans cherished the idea that they descended directly from their Aryan Teutons, so the Jews had to know that they were the authentic descendants of the ‘children of Israel’ who came out of Egypt.”

Central to this founding myth—which was later used to “justify the right that [the Jewish people] claimed over Palestine”—is the notion that after the defeat of the rebellion in Judea in 70 CE, the Jews were expelled from their land. Chapter by chapter, Sand chips away at every part of the story. He shows, most importantly, that there is no evidence of a mass expulsion from Judea anywhere in the archaeological record or written sources from this era. Moreover, Sand points out that exile was not the typical Roman way of dealing with defeated peoples, nor would it have been feasible, considering the marked shortage of trucks and trains in the first century. There was thus no unified people from which we all sprung, but rather various pre-existing diasporic communities, augmented over many years by converts, since opposition to proselytism was not a feature of Judaism until much later. The most debatable part of the book is Sand’s acceptance of the widely contested “Khazar thesis,” which claims that Ashkenazi Jewry descended from a multi-ethnic group of Turkic peoples. Sand is convinced by this theory—which, as he demonstrates, was widely accepted by even Zionist scholars until the 1960s—since there weren’t enough Jews in Germany in the Middle Ages to populate the Jewish regions of Eastern Europe.

Sand is clear in his belief that once a myth takes hold a people is formed, whatever the legitimacy of the original claim. He even insists Israel has the right to exist, though only in a truly democratic form. Indeed, the most crackpot thing about The Invention of the Jewish People is Sand’s admirable hope that at some point Israel will become a democracy for all its residents.

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Dahlia Krutkovich (JC Fellow): While driving up to the Adirondacks late last night, a group of friends and I got to talking about Wesleyan University’s recent decision to end preferential admission for legacy applicants. One of my friends bitterly remarked that this was all but a PR move, considering what she sees as the real influence game in college admissions: private donations. In honor of this gripe—which I think overstates exactly how many people are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to universities at any given time—I wanted to draw your attention to the eminently watchable but strikingly uncanny documentary Operation Varsity Blues, which I saw back in April 2021, when I spent the five days after receiving my Covid vaccine feverishly bingeing a series of straight-to-streaming documentaries about grifters.

The film follows the federal investigation into “college consultant” Rick Singer’s “side door” scheme. In Singer’s telling, applicants can get into American colleges via two possible routes: the front door (a deserving applicant takes their rightful place among the best and the brightest) or the back door (well-connected parents donate unseemly amounts of money to prestigious schools to assure their dauphin’s spot). Singer’s “side door” involved defrauding the College Board and a few select universities by doctoring the teenagers’ resumés, paying adults to take standardized tests in applicants’ place, and paying off coaches to reserve roster spots for “athletes” who had never seen the field. You might have read some of the coverage of the operation, which ensnared Felicity Huffman and her YouTube-famous daughter, among other minor figures in the world of California strivers.

It’s a fairly outrageous situation, made only more ridiculous by its treatment in the documentary. The bulk of the drama is composed of reenactments of conversations between Singer and his clients, drawn from recordings Singer himself delivered to the Feds as part of a negotiated deal. The wigs are confusingly bad (cuts between news footage of the real people who had these conversations and the actors who play them emphasize just how, well, visually off they are); the interstitial scenes of a nameless female FBI officer listening in on the conversations, typing and looking shocked, are hamfisted; and the activities the parents do while on the phone—to try to add some visual drama to what are ultimately fairly wooden conversations—are laughably poignant (one father gazes at his cliffside pool while talking about his generous gift to a water polo team). Awash in unreality, Operation Varsity Blues is perhaps less a documentary than a simulacrum of one—the doc succeeds in making you question not only the choices of its subjects, but also the judgment of everyone involved in the production decisions.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): In a recent New Yorker article—titled, in print, “Now You See It”—Kathryn Schulz reviews The Art Thief, the latest book by journalist Michael Finkel. The author is three-for-three in writing books that, as she puts it, “search for meaning—moral, aesthetic, ethical—in criminal acts.” In this recent work, Finkel writes about the unbelievable acts of Stéphane Breitwieser, who, between 1994 and 2001, stole about two million dollars’ worth of art, which he stored in his attic for his personal enjoyment. Details about his heists—including that he carried them out in broad daylight, during a museum’s open hours, and sometimes even schmoozed with the guards—are a thrilling read.

Yet I was equally riveted by Schulz’s dive into what defines a heist; what sets them apart from other forms of theft? The elements she outlines register as immediately true, though I doubt I would have been able to name them myself. First, the stolen object must be “spectacularly valuable”—no one, for example, would call shoplifting items from a convenience store a “heist.” Next, it must be stolen from “an institution of significant standing,” as she writes: “[...] they happen in banks, preferably on Wall Street, or museums, preferably The Met.” And crucially, the theft itself must be “borderline impossible,” often involving a team of rare individuals who, combined, have the exact skill set required for the job. While society may look down on theft in general, the so-called bad guys in the story of a heist are usually the characters we cheer on in its retelling (perhaps, in part, because such schemes are typically not for the money, and, while spectacular, are largely not violent).

Before reading Schulz’s review, I hadn’t given much thought to heists as a genre, but there is an episode of Rick and Morty, a cartoon that I quite embarrassingly love, about “the never-ending assembly of a meaningless crew.” In it, Rick—an alcoholic sci-fi inventor, and the purported “smartest man in the galaxy”—takes his grandson, Morty, to “HeistCon,” a convention filled with fans of what one aficionado calls the “heisting arts,” of which Rick is a loud critic. They must assemble a crew to get inside—“crew assemblies are the worst part!” Rick later cries—and the episode unravels from there as a very meta, and very clever, riff on the heist genre. It’s fun to read Schulz’s article and reflect on it with a more sophisticated lens. While your reference point may not be a “gleefully nihilistic” animated show with a reputation of aggressive fandom and a now widely disgraced co-creator, you will likely be able to reflect on other pieces of entertainment you’ve consumed, such as Ocean’s Eight, The Italian Job, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, or even, as Schulz argues, Man on Wire, the 2008 documentary of Philippe Petit’s stunt of illegally walking a tightrope between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in 1974.

Schulz’s article is a brilliant trifecta: a glimpse into Breitwieser’s astonishing exploits, a fascinating analysis of what makes a heist, and—which I don’t get into here, but rounds out the piece—an inquiry into how Finkel’s own subjectivity, like ours, is intertwined with the page-turner he produced.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Though my visual impairment prevents me from reading physical books, I sometimes torture myself by stopping into bookstores to see what’s out there before trying to find Kindle versions. Recently, while browsing the new releases table at Brooklyn’s Center for Fiction—which offers the world’s best chocolate chip cookies, as well as great books—I espied Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding. Novels with “Harding’” in the title are not legion, and my mental filing system informed me that this was probably a book I recall reading and loving in 1983. I checked the copyright; indeed, this was a reissued edition of the novel I remembered as wildly wonderful. Rereading it confirmed that my memory got it exactly right.

My Search for Warren Harding concerns an aspiring historian named Elliot Weiner. (He makes a point of informing us that despite what his name sometimes leads people to believe, he’s not Jewish.) Weiner is on the hunt for the love letters Warren Harding wrote to his mistress and, more importantly, the lover herself, whom he thinks he has located in Los Angeles. In one sense, it’s a novel about academia and the lengths to which scholars will go to get a scoop—in this case, confirmation that the 29th president had an illegitimate daughter, as his real-life mistress claimed. But Plunket’s book uses this premise as a platform for a brilliantly excoriating portrayal of human foibles and weakness. It closely resembles another great novel of the 1980s, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Both books feature main characters who mistakenly believe themselves superior to those around them, all of whom are accurately portrayed as ridiculous creatures. They’re also both magnificent, biting satires of the cities in which they take place (Toole’s in New Orleans, Plunket’s in LA).

Weiner, originally from Pittsburgh but currently residing on the Upper West Side, exemplifies the condescension and smugness of New Yorkers toward La La Land and its residents. But his antipathy goes much further. My Search for Warren Harding is filled with his unpleasant reflections on anyone with a gender, race, sexual orientation, body type, or clothing style not his own. To a large extent Plunket can write this way because sentiments like these passed more easily back in 1983, but now as then the main character’s views tell us much of what we need to know about him. Unsparing in his stereotypes, Weiner damns himself far more than those he condemns.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Two weekends back, I visited Minneapolis’s Trylon Cinema—a tiny theater with wonderfully idiosyncratic programming—to see Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Released in South Korea in 2002, this first installment in Park Chan-wook’s “vengeance trilogy” (which includes the more highly acclaimed Oldboy) follows a young man named Ryu, who is deaf and mute, as he struggles to arrange a kidney transplant for his dying sister. His blood type isn’t a match, and his sister’s doctor warns that they’re unlikely to find a donor in time. So Ryu turns to a group of organ traffickers who promise her a kidney in exchange for one of his—and his life savings. Of course, the gang reneges on their end of the bargain, leaving Ryu broke. He soon learns that a suitable kidney has miraculously become available, but they can no longer afford the surgery. (It costs the exact amount Ryu has lost; this heavy-handed irony is typical of the film’s almost allegorical melodrama.) His radical anarchist girlfriend convinces him to kidnap the daughter of the factory boss who recently fired him, reasoning that they can simply collect the ransom money and return her unharmed. For somewhat ambiguous reasons, the couple decides to target the daughter of the company’s president instead; things soon go horribly awry, sending both Ryu and the president on murderous paths of revenge. The results are harrowing, as the violence coursing beneath an unequal society bursts to the surface.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is as beautiful as it is wrenching, setting terrible suffering within stunningly composed shots. When it arrived in the US in 2005—three years after its South Korean release, on the heels of Oldboy—many critics, overwhelmed by the film’s bleakness and disturbed by its marriage of brutality and formalism, wrote it off as a cynical aestheticization of violence. In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis declared that “the violence carries no meaning beyond the creator’s ego”; the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips called the film “disingenuous” and “callow at its core.” But where these writers saw gratuitous reveling in human cruelty, I saw a sensitive critique of our desire for spectacular retribution. While Park makes monstrous acts pleasing to the eye, the same gorgeous scenes leave us aghast and guilty for our sympathy. Cinema of revenge often rejoices freely in justified bloodshed—but this haunting film never lets the viewer off the hook for our investments in the characters and their inevitably catastrophic choices.

Arielle Angel (editor in chief): I thought season one of Hulu’s The Bear—about a world class chef named Carmy who returns home after his brother’s suicide to run his failing Chicago sandwich joint—was fine. The second season feels a bit more improbable, and therefore a bit more artificial, than the first. For convoluted reasons they have to transform the crumbling “Beef” into the fine dining “Bear” on a truncated three-month timeline. And perhaps most improbable considering the financial strain that necessitates said timeline, they are retaining all of their staff (i.e., the characters we know and love from season one) instead of finding people who already have the requisite skills to run such an establishment, scattering them across the city and the globe to apprentice for the best in the biz.

And yet, the artifice and hyped up stakes makes room for things to get loose elsewhere. Indeed, this season luxuriates in the creative process. There are extended montages that jump between what’s on the plate and what’s in the mind; a scene where a practitioner repeats a skill—in this case, producing that fancy, football-shaped ice cream scoop, called the quenelle—again and again until he gets it right. The plot, to my delight and surprise, ends up taking backseat to a kind of essay on the pursuit of mastery. This was already my favorite aspect of season one, crystallized in the character of Marcus, a former McDonald’s cook who takes Carmy’s arrival as a spur to begin upping his pastry game. His pursuit of the perfect doughnut last season nearly brought me to tears. His arc continues here, but is replicated in the storylines of a number of other characters, who one by one find and nurture their purpose in food and hospitality.

Carmy has been through this already—he found his purpose, and more or less achieved this mastery, long ago. His storyline is more about what it looks like to try and have a life (in this case, a romantic relationship) when your capital-L Life blots out the sun. There is distress and pathos in the way he regards the ambition of his young protégé Syd. If you really want this, he warns her, “you have to care about everything more than anything.” It’s not clear that he thinks she should heed this call. It was painful at times seeing myself in him—his perfectionism, his monomania, his fear that letting up an inch will cost him everything. Is there a route to mastery that bypasses these qualities, this sacrifice? I was impressed to see a popular show foreground this question.

That this show is about upscale restaurants—an industry that relies on low-wage work while catering to the wealthy—certainly complicates its noble portrait of the kitchen; I wished the writers attempted even a gesture at the uncomfortable interplay between creative labor and capital. I winced when a character working as a host at a Michelin-starred restaurant compared restaurants to hospitals (hospitality, get it?), harshly admonishing the malingering Richie about his lack of care in drying the forks. Anti-work, this show is not. And still, it’s pretty moving when Richie starts tending the forks properly. Even after capitalism, there will still be intrinsic value for people in doing what needs doing, well.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s new documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, was filmed by the only journalists remaining in the Ukrainian port city when Russia began its siege in February 2022. On the very first day, with no information, the press crew optimistically reassures a woman that the Russian forces won’t be firing at civilians, and that she can return home; when they run into her again a day or so later, her home has been shelled. 20 Days in Mariupol captures the assault in all its terrible violence. We witness the shelling of the university, apartment buildings, hospitals, and individual people. Chernov doesn’t spare us the worst, including the deaths of pregnant women, children, and babies. The crew of three follows Ukrainian doctors and nurses into operating rooms, documenting their often vain efforts to save lives while ducking to avoid the impact of Russian artillery.

At one point, they encounter a policeman, Vladimir, who addresses the camera to say how important it is that these images be shared, to reveal Russia’s crimes to the world. He becomes their guardian angel for much of the film, escorting them to spots that still have connections to the outside world so their images can be transmitted to the AP. By now we all know the horrors inflicted over the course of the war—the blood, the crying families, the mass graves—but seeing it all in this concentrated form, we are reminded of the sheer monstrousness of Putin’s Russia. To add insult to murder, Russian officials and journalists are shown describing the very footage we are seeing as faked and describing the victims as actors. It seems that Alex Jones has spawned imitators all over the world.

While the doctors, nurses, and firefighters are heroes, most of those we see here are not, and Chernov makes no effort to depict them as such; the ordinary Ukrainians are merely people suffering a fate they can’t escape, and not always with grace and dignity. Bombed stores—as well as those simply closed due to the siege—are shown being looted, with people taking soccer balls, office chairs, and electronics. And while the city’s residents hate the Russians, they are also quick to complain of those on their own side. Suffering, we are reminded, ennobles no one.

Despite its significance and power, I do have a bone or two to pick with the film. More than occasionally, we hear Chernov patting himself on the back for sticking it out in Mariupol. And it’s always painful to hear a journalist ask someone throwing bodies into a mass grave the stupidest questions imaginable, such as “how does this make you feel?” These days, with the press under attack, one would prefer not to have to roll one’s eyes at journalists doing what journalists do. But it’s hard not to wonder what the hell someone asking a question like that could possibly be thinking.

Before you go: Applications for the 2023–2024 New Jewish Culture Fellowship (NJCF) are now open. The Fellowship brings together an interdisciplinary cohort of groundbreaking Jewish artists to share work, discuss issues and texts, and learn from and with each other over the course of an academic year. Each fellow will receive a $1,000 stipend to support creative work, and the opportunity to propose supported/paid events, workshops, or classes. Apply here before August 7th, 2023.