Shabbat
Reading List

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.

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.