Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Josh Lambert (contributor): I’m not proud of it, but I initially resisted picking up Elizabeth Graver’s Kantika, released in April, because it was giving off such try-hard vibes. Marketing postcards, publicity emails, and review copies started showing up on my desk and in my inbox about a year ago, none of them subtle about presenting this book as the Sephardic novel we have all been waiting for. As a professor of American Jewish literature, I’m often asked to recommend novels of Sephardic life in the US, and I knew I would be delighted to have another to add to that not-especially-long list. But the title (“song” in Ladino), the cover (tilework evoking the East), the blurbs (“a gripping story of twentieth-century Sephardic exile and reinvention”), the dedication (“in memory of my grandmother”), the epigraph (from a “Ladino proverb”), the archival family photos at the beginning of each chapter—it all left me feeling a bit exhausted, and made me worried that this “multigenerational saga” rooted in family history would be too straightforwardly made-to-order.

The book’s first chapters, set in Turkey, Spain, and Cuba, didn’t entirely allay those concerns. Though skillfully and movingly told, they did check all the boxes I was expecting. The novel really came to life for me in its last third, as it turned, unexpectedly, into the intimate story of a mother raising a disabled stepdaughter. This, too, is based on Graver’s family lore—her aunt Luna Leibowitz wrote charmingly about life with cerebral palsy for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel—but Graver takes us into the consciousness of a kid with a disability, and the stepmother who has to overcome prejudices to care for her, with such sharpness and insight that it made me want to recommend the book to everyone I know.

I also started out a little skeptical of Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, published in March. I’ve admired Novey’s fiction and essays before, but when I opened this novel up to find it was alternating between two voices, chapter to chapter, I got worried. (You can blame my annoyance with that structure, and whatever else is bothering you, on Jonathan Safran Foer.) And I didn’t feel especially eager to learn more about the estranged relations between Leah, a somewhat indistinct (and possibly autofictional) woman living in New York, and Jean, her sort-of-stepmother who “never left the town where she was born . . . in the Southern Allegheny Mountains.” As I kept reading, I found bits here and there that drew me in: Jean, who has just died when the novel begins and narrates much of it in flashbacks, was an outsider artist who spent her final years constructing large metal towers, taking inspiration from Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Diane Arbus, as well as her Jewish family’s history in the scrap metal business. But other aspects of the story felt a bit pat—Jean, an idiosyncratic thinker living in a red state, befriended a neighbor kid and, guess what, there were some political and socioeconomic differences that may or may not have been overcome by an interpersonal bond.

I kept going, though, and when I reached the climactic scene, it bowled me over. It’s the chapter when Leah finally enters Jean’s house and sees the art she had been working on for all those years. It turns out that everything we’ve learned about Leah and Jean has been supplied so we have the complete context not just for how the art looks and why it was made, but also for all the emotions and history that Leah brings to bear when she encounters it, including the anxiety she feels when her son runs too quickly around it, ignoring her warnings. (That resonated; the one constant feature of my own museum visits over the past decade has been balancing my attempts to appreciate what I’m experiencing with my fear that one of my kids might bump into something and destroy it forever.) Reading this passage, I thought back to that moment at the beginning of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station when the narrator says that he “worried that [he] was incapable of having a profound experience of art.” Novey’s novel works overtime to remind us all, quite reassuringly, that we do have that capacity.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Every few months, a friend of mine hosts a salon where she invites loved ones and their friends to share in-progress creative projects. The offerings have ranged widely since I started attending. People have presented many varieties of musical arrangements (acapella, guitar, electronic); poetry, family history, and cultural criticism; drawings and photography; and even a temperature quilt. At the last salon I attended, my friend Hallel gave a PowerPoint presentation on her then-forthcoming, now published, zine, Park Slop: A Walking Tour.

The title is a play on the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, known today for its upscale shops and the affluent young couples who frequent them, strollers in tow. The project commemorates the area’s past life as a hub for lesbian community and political organizing between the 1970s and early 2000s by chronicling notable or representative locations from that era, organized into ten themes. Hallel, an archivist by trade, provides information on the significance of each location (including small details, like the recipe for one restaurant’s mocktails) alongside a photograph of each site in its current state. The themes range from the concrete, like nightlife and parenthood, to the abstract, such as self-segregation and memory. Yet even in the more archetypical travel guide categories, the information is not always what one would expect. The section on parenthood features the Dykes & Tykes East Coast Lesbian Mothers Defense Fund and their community events in Prospect Park; the one on worship acknowledges the often fraught intersections between religious institutions and queer constituents—while also documenting examples of churches that hosted HIV support groups or organizing meetings. Only two of the ten profiled institutions remain active—Ginger’s Bar and the Lesbian Herstory Archives—while the rest of the featured buildings are now nondescript private residences or storefronts. The zine doesn’t aim to be exhaustive; as Hallel writes in the introduction, “It does not contain every possible address where dyke shit went down, which would be impossible to compile, especially given the historically private nature of lesbian social life. The goal is to catalog a critical mass of addresses that gives a sense of the lifeblood of Dyke Slope,” as it was affectionately called.

The project is thoroughly researched and, in classic zine fashion, wonderfully DIY. Channeling the commitment to accessibility of those who inspired the project, the whole thing is available for pay-what-you-wish download (you can enter $0 for a free copy). If you’re interested in queer history, Brooklyn history, or the practice of remembering layers of the past beneath the streets we traverse now, you’ll learn a lot.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Many years ago, when I was reading and loving Henry Petoski’s great history of my favorite writing implement, the pencil, my then-girlfriend saw the book, shook her head, and said, “Only you, Mitch. Only you.” The brilliance of Petoski’s study is in its careful attention to all that has gone into creating the pencil as we know it, both technically and historically. Who thinks about the fact that just the right wood and lead material had to be found to give us a usable object, or knows that Eberhard Faber pencils—with their yellow body and black band around the eraser bracket—were modeled on the German flag? The things we take for granted around us make for some of the most interesting books.

A great recent example of such a work is Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise, which has gotten me enthused about—and pontificating on—a subject we seldom think of as having world-historical significance: parking. While all drivers have worried about finding a spot, most rarely consider the social inequity involved in turning our streets over to the storage of other people’s personal property. This surrender of the commons is bad enough, but as Grabar definitively proves, it’s far from the worst aspect of our focus on parking our cars. In his compelling account, which leans heavily on Donald Shoup’s classic The High Cost of Free Parking, the central ill of parking is that city codes have long required the provision of absurd numbers of spots for every house, apartment building, store, and office complex. These minimums vastly increase the amount of space required for any new commercial building or private dwelling. In many cases, this adds so much to the price of a construction project that it’s never completed—or if it is, the cost is ultimately added onto rents and sales prices. Our fixation on parking has fueled the housing shortage and thus the homelessness crisis.

The numbers show that there is way too much parking in America. New York has three million spaces; Philadelphia, 2.2 million (3.7 spots for every household); the Bay Area, 15 million, which is 2.4 for each car and, Grabar writes, “enough to wrap a parking lane around the planet twice and still have some left over.” The idea that there aren’t enough available spots because we can’t find one where and when we want is the equivalent of Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe bringing a snowball into the Senate as proof that global warming is a myth. To bring his data and analysis to life, Grabar tells—and tells well—numerous stories of business and housing disasters caused by parking requirements. We also learn about fiascos like the time the city of Chicago sold its parking meters to a private firm; then-Mayor Richard Daley claimed the move would result in a two billion dollar windfall, but it drained the city’s coffers instead.

When those of you in New York see cars parked in unmetered spots, you should think of this insight from Grabar: If every spot had a meter, then the revenue produced from making people pay for the storage of their property would enable free mass transit. Not a bad idea.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): If you’re looking for an exercise in poor taste executed to deranged perfection, consider The Ruling Class, the 1972 film British playwright Peter Barnes adapted from his play by the same name. It’s the story of Jack Gurney, 14th Earl of Gurney—his upper-class family’s last, best hope in hanging onto its estate, social standing, and political power after the 13th earl accidentally takes his own life in an act of unintended (perhaps autoerotic) self-asphyxiation. The trouble is that this earl, a paranoid schizophrenic who believes himself to be Jesus Christ, has been living in an institution for some time. Facing a continuity crisis, his family decides to let him loose upon the world, leaving us to watch him preach, determinedly, a gospel of love, love, and love, as per the times.

Much of the plot revolves around the extended Gurney clan’s attempts to dissuade Jack of his delusions (in a particularly inconvenient turn, he at one point disavows his previous claim to be the messiah, deciding instead that he is actually Jack the Ripper) and pair him off with his uncle’s mistress in hopes of having him produce a more acceptable heir. Suffice it to say, the family finds Jack’s charismatic mania and belief in the “power of love” to be formidable obstacles, throwing a wrench or two into their devious little scheme. Does Jack know he’s being used? Does he really think he’s God? Two-thirds of the way into the film, I thought I had an answer. (Writing this now, it occurs to me it all sounds like the plot of a vintage Eddie Murphy film or perhaps a vehicle for Adam Sandler.) But the final 20 minutes plunges you into a nightmare that suggests the poorly-bred rabble—those who, in Jack’s words after he’s undergone something of a “class re-education” regimen—are “sapping the foundations of . . . society with their adultery and fornication! The barbarians . . . waiting outside with chaos, anarchy, homosexuality, and worse”—can and must be contained by force if necessary, and perhaps even when not entirely necessary.

Peter O’Toole as Jack Gurney is alternately terrifying, heart-breaking, and hilarious; you, the viewer, are never quite prepared for his explosive histrionics, and neither seem to be his colleagues on screen. Hysteria aside, O’Toole clearly grasps that the only way to land the laughs (and the shocked gasps) is to play it straight. His inflections and overladen gestures lampoon the classic British stage acting tradition—his own background, really—and his relish for language and rhythm, not to mention his pure delight in hidden meanings and reversals, charmed me, but they may test your patience.

Like O’Toole’s performance, the movie has a lot going on—again, for some, perhaps too much: the breathtaking poetry of the language, rapid-fire exchanges loaded with Wildean subtext (One exchange: Jack’s Uncle: “We’re just talking about you and the subject of marriage. We think you should take a wife. Jack: “Who from?”), a Communist butler who DGAF anymore, short, inexplicable song-and-dance numbers, almost Expressionistic camera work that utilizes high angles and dizzying pans to capture the sinister decadence of the Gurney home, and extreme closeups to inspect the pasty contours of their well-bred faces.

Peter Medak, the director, never misses an opportunity to skewer the landed aristocracy and its ossified, hypocritical sense of piety. There’s an anarchic quality to the movie that recalls Monty Python: a politics less of ”down with the Tories, up with Labour” and more “we are a ridiculous people, are we not?” The movie seems to want to seize a certain political and cultural moment: postwar, pre-Thatcher Britain, which saw a generation coming of age, questioning the old ways and the relevance of the upper class. But it does so without ever deluding itself about the entrenched nature of British aristocracy and the absurdity of its traditions and apparent values. The film has haunted me since seeing it. A fine outcome, in my view—top marks.

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Last weekend, I took my colleague Mitch Abidor’s advice and went to see The Mother and the Whore, French director Jean Eustache’s close study of the last days of the 1968 generation’s idealism, with a group of friends. We didn’t know quite what we were getting ourselves into: It was only after purchasing tickets that we realized the film is an eye-popping three hours and forty minutes. But as Mitch writes, The Mother and the Whore is a work of “genius”—one that, while challenging to complete in a single sitting, was still enrapturing enough to prevent me from leaving the theater once between 6 and 10 pm.

The film is meandering and fairly plotless, following the emotional rhythms of jobless dandy Alexandre’s affair with a young nurse, Veronika, and the disastrous impact it has on his relationship with his live-in girlfriend and sponsor, Marie. The film takes a pointedly conservative stance on the freedoms (personal, professional, sexual) afforded to women as feminism gained political ground, with Alexandre declaring to another jobless (male) friend early in the runtime that you can’t tell the difference between a bourgeoise and a working girl, a nurse and a socialite—all women are the same now! Indeed, a reactionary undercurrent runs through the film’s drama, but I couldn’t help but empathize with Alexandre, who believes wholeheartedly in what ’68 could have been—and still, full of awe, recalls sitting in cafés among the working people the general strike sought to lift up—only to return, again and again, to the fact that all of the political grandstanding of the time has failed to deliver on its promises. (One of the most memorable back-and-forths of the film unfolds when Alexandre and the aforementioned jobless friend spot Sartre in the corner of Les Deux Magots, the intellectual watering hole of the day. They whisper to Veronika, with palpable glee, that he’s a total drunkard and a fake, claiming that he brings his own barrel to stand atop when he talks to working men.)

Alexandre is preoccupied with frauds, dupes, and liars—and implicitly, authenticity. In one of his monologues, he wishes that he could be like the men in cafés who sit around repeating the words of others. Later in the same scene, he abruptly turns on his radio to tune into “the Sunrise Preacher,” a booming Catholic priest who declares on his early morning show that contemporary society is full of lazy and licentious people, and that we should all take to an honest, traditional life. Alexandre tells Veronika that he loves the preacher, whose apparently authentic shtick never bores him.

Where the film was previously at least somewhat subtle, it takes an explicit turn in the final forty minutes, as it hones in on the supposed antidote to society’s collapsed social and sexual standards and total lack of political possibility: the traditional family. In an aching, minutes-long close-up, Veronika sobs, essentially, about how much it sucks to be poly and how the only way to live a truly decent life is to become a wife. This emotional marathon of a film ends with a proposal. For all of the film’s artistic transgression—and its truly funny, eccentric side characters whose lives lead nowhere—I was taken by the finality of its dramatic resolution. One more reaction, perhaps, against the current of its day: all those indeterminate New Wave fade-outs from a generation before.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Umberto Eco – A Library of the World, a new documentary that opens today at New York’s Film Forum, begins with Eco—the Italian novelist and semiotician who died in 2016—walking through his personal library, with its 1200 rare books and 30,000 contemporary works. The camera tracks his motion through the collection, showing us the volumes all neatly aligned on their shelves. There before me was the image of heaven.

For the film’s 80 minutes, my wife and I were as enchanted as if we were watching . . . well, I don’t know what would compare to this. Throughout the film, director Davide Ferrario intercuts scenes of magnificent libraries from around the world—some stately, with old-fashioned wooden shelves and card catalogs, others more modern and austere in their beauty. By the end, I realized that a documentary showing nothing but books on shelves would almost be enough for me.

However, Umberto Eco is a loving meditation not just on the book as object, but also on its title subject, who is featured through pieces of interviews, TV appearances, and talks from over the course of his celebrated career. It is Eco’s account of his own library that makes sense of his eclectic collection, which boasts sections on alchemy, esotericism, and the 17th-century German polymath Athanasius Kircher. His main interest, we learn, was in false ideas and those who think them up. His library thus omits Galileo, who was right, but includes Ptolemy, who developed an entire theory of the universe that held together perfectly, yet was absolutely wrong. That, for Eco, is far more interesting than a worldview that conforms to reality. Much like Borges, whom he often invokes in the film, Eco was also attracted to the odd and obscure. Who among us has heard of the French work Le Chef d’oeuvre d’un inconnu (The Masterpiece of an Unknown Man, not to be confused with Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece”)? In Eco’s library you can find this fascinating, pseudonymous 18th-century work, which opens with a two-page popular ditty—carefully transcribed, along with its music—before unfolding into 300 pages of analysis of this simple love song. Who needs Pale Fire?

Films like this, in praise of an individual subject, are almost always disappointing in their exaggerated claims, or suffer from the nullity of the things the subject says. (I’m thinking in particular of every film about Leonard Cohen, in which a second’s reflection on his supposed profundities reveals that everything he utters is hollow and meaningless.) But Eco’s words here never fail to please: Every phrase that comes out of his mouth is aphoristic, yet never pretentious or ponderous. How can we argue when, for instance, he declares that hate, rather than love, is the great universal sentiment? (Love, he explains, is directed at a person and craves exclusivity, while we can expend hatred on anyone and everyone.) All of his quotes are the priceless gems of a writer and thinker who was truly alive, a condition he equated with “being intellectually curious.” The joy of thought can sometimes make you tingle; Umberto Eco – A Library of the World inspires frissons of delight from beginning to end.