Shabbat
Reading List

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Science fiction doesn’t always age well, but Philip K. Dick’s work is an exception. The Penultimate Truth is a good example. Written in 1964 and set in 2025, the novel has its moments of satisfying prescience: Who but Dick would have predicted that our world would contain, for instance, a text-generation machine that tells insipid jokes about genocide?

But Dick is less interested in prophecy than in historical revision. The conceit of The Penultimate Truth is that the masses of humanity live in claustrophobic underground tanks, manufacturing what they think are robotic soldiers to fight an ongoing nuclear war with the Soviets. In fact, the war lasted only two years and has been over for a decade. These “leadies” are actually mechanical serfs in the expansive demesnes of a tiny culture-industry aristocracy dwelling luxuriously on the earth’s surface, which busies itself writing and producing propaganda films of apocalyptic destruction. Their Bible, which they lovingly study and imitate, is a pair of faked, contradictory documentaries about World War II, intended to convince Soviet audiences that Hitler was spying for the United States, and to convince American audiences of the opposite, thus igniting World War III.

As is often the case with Dick’s fiction, serious political ideas are exaggerated into monstrous, paranoid paradoxes: Here, he is literalizing the idea that national conflicts are illusory, ideological superstructures that conceal the real, class war. The joke about “genocide” proves central to the plot, in which a time-traveling Native American man orchestrates the unraveling of this order. Dick often highlights the parallels between the Holocaust and earlier American exterminations, and here he shows his feudal elite rushing to stake settler claims on war-torn land as its radioactivity approaches livable levels, in a kind of suicidal homesteading.

Dave Lontano, the regime’s nemesis, paradoxically has been liberated from the 15th century by mysterious alien artifacts retrojected (by time machine) in a bungled attempt to frame an enemy of the state for violating archeological remains. Lontano is endowed with strange powers and subjected to a fluctuating temporality, so that he oscillates between youth and old age, becoming an uncanny (if a bit cringe) icon of the subaltern’s syncopated vengeance, and of the curious entanglement of modes of production across centuries.

Not all of this ultimately coheres, but it’s fascinating and strange—and not a bit dated. How could one date, after all, a fictional world where feudalism and monopoly capitalism, settler-colonialism and the culture industry are jumbled together in a coeval heap? The novel escapes becoming a Cold War period piece by substituting for the historical period a historical question mark.

Noa Azulai (program coordinator): I’ll be honest: When I joined Jewish Currents last October, I didn’t foresee my first recommendation for the Shabbat Reading List being Justin Bieber’s headline set at Coachella. I figured I’d come up with something more… intellectual. But a couple nights ago, when I found myself up at 1 am rewatching the moment when the pop star’s voice pivots up a few octaves, I felt moved to write about it. (I should note I was not actually at Coachella, the influencer-laden music festival set annually in the California desert, nor have I ever been.)

The performance itself has been, unsurprisingly, divisive. Some critics are calling it “lazy” or “unprofessional,” or raising the perhaps-valid point that if a woman gave nothing the way some think Justin did, their careers wouldn’t survive it. That may be right. But I want to direct you to the last 20 minutes of his set, at which point Justin positions himself in front of his laptop and begins pulling up YouTube videos of his earliest songs, singing along to them. The crowd goes nuts. I am, somehow, in tears, as Justin cycles through hits like “Baby,” “Beauty and a Beat,” “Favorite Girl,” and “Confident.” Songs that soundtracked my middle school dances, my first kisses, my teenage summers drinking smuggled vodka out of plastic water bottles by the beach. I wasn’t a Belieber by any metric, but in the 2010s you didn’t have to be. He was everywhere.

Then, he faced what so many who undergo the meat grinder of childhood fame do: mental health crises, PR crises, other personal crises that we are not, and should not, be privy to. His Coachella performance was his first in over four years, after cancelling the remainder of his Justice World Tour in 2022/2023 due to health issues. It was, in many ways, his great return to the place he’d first arrived when he was just 13 years old: the world stage. In that moment, when his adultish monotone voice reaches back up for the octave of his younger self, he smiles.

We should never underestimate the power of nostalgia to draw up unforeseen connections within, and perhaps also outside, of ourselves. As technology, led by those with the most destructive tendencies, outpaces my own tolerance for change, I find myself tenderized by the most seemingly meaningless things sometimes—in this case, the international pop sensation Justin Bieber, singing songs of a shared youth to his own past self as much as to ours.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As the US increasingly becomes the repressive, imperial state the left always warned we’d become, Punishment Park, the great leftist film from the Nixon era, goes surprisingly unmentioned. I was pleased and surprised to find that Peter Watkins’ chilling warning from 1971 is available on what has become my go-to streaming service, Tubi, a subsidiary of Netflix, which is free and stuffed with an astounding variety of films. If many of the films are totally forgettable direct-to-video junk, Tubi also makes available silent classics (Battleship Potemkin, Greed, Sunrise), American indies (Language Lessons, Slacker) and foreign treasures (Mississippi Mermaid, Godard’s Film Socialisme). It was while scrolling through Tubi that I found Punishment Park, by the director of such left-wing standards as La Commune (Paris, 1871) and the greatest of all artist biopics, Edvard Munch.

In Watkins’ film, the Vietnam War is still raging, and opponents of all stripes—anticapitalist revolutionaries, pacifists, hippies, whatever—are being rounded up and receiving summary trials carried out by right-wing draft boards. Sentences are passed and the guilty—i.e., all of the defendants—are presented with the options of either serving a lengthy prison term or three days and two nights in Punishment Park. Almost all choose the latter. The park is something of a misnomer, for it is a long stretch of the Southern California desert which must be traversed by those who choose that as their sentence. The goal is to reach an American flag planted in the middle of nowhere, 53 miles from the starting point. The obstacles are not just the distance and the baking heat. Also set loose in the desert, shortly after the prisoners begin their trek, are uniformed members of various forces of repression—army, local police, state police, National Guard—all armed, all allowed to shoot to kill.

Here we have the dream scenario of our native aspirant dictator: Leftists penned in and subject to the death penalty, amid the illusion of the ability to regain their freedom. As in all of Watkins’ films, the performers are non-actors, chosen for their resemblance in life to the characters in the film. From the right and the left, they discuss the situation in the park and the nation and react to provocations and threats, not—or not just—as their characters, but as themselves. Punishment Park is thus full of the lucubration of the long-haired radicals many of us were back then: the jargon, the ultra-radicalism, but also the valiant spirit of resistance. Against them are conservatives who are housewives, businessmen, and union leaders, while pursuing them across the desert, armed and ready to wipe them out, are soldiers and cops whose faces and voices haven’t changed in the intervening 55 years.

Watkins at times allowed his films to go on way too long, and they were sometimes buried under self-congratulatory revolutionary boasting and posturing. Punishment Park shows a far more likely scenario: Radicals fenced in in the open with no one or nothing to protect them, and with the press on hand to film the cold-blooded slaughter. Punishment Park is a warning from the past we can still learn from.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! has been on my reading list since it debuted two years ago. I will follow in the footsteps of our former publisher Jacob Plitman’s famously brief reading recommendations to say: If this has been on your list, now is the time to read it. Covering addiction and recovery, global empire, art, and friendship, Martyr! moves between past and present, spanning the perspectives of its compelling, imperfect characters. Cyrus Sham’s story and Akbar’s lyrical prose are unlike anything else I’ve read, and have stayed with me. 18/10.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): A few weeks ago in this newsletter, Raphael Magarik recommended Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, soon before it was predictably and tragically snubbed at the Oscars. Allow me to re-recommend this film for your viewing and save it from the oblivion of a mere nominee.

The Secret Agent takes place at the tail end of the internationally lauded “Brazilian Miracle,” a time of, well, miraculous economic expansion and urbanization. What enabled this growth was, in part, a military dictatorship that took power in a coup and subsequently used state terror to brutally crush popular dissent. The global celebrations of Brazil’s entry as a player on the world economic stage belied a domestic atmosphere of violence and fear, and it is this disconnect––disturbing to the point of comedy––that Filho deploys as the film’s central theme.

Depicting a dark underbelly out of view of the general public is typical enough of film noir, and The Secret Agent’s plot fits that familiar template: Marcelo, our protagonist, is on the run from a ruthless killer-for-hire while most of Brazil is busy partying during Carnaval. What sets The Secret Agent apart is how self-conscious, almost Brechtian, it is. Films themselves play a major role in it, displacing the public’s paranoia around very real political violence onto entertaining fantasies––yet this divide between film and reality unravels when a police coverup of a murder manifests into The Secret Agent’s own depiction of a disembodied leg attacking nighttime park-cruisers, with the lighting, soundtrack, and cinematography you’d expect from a classic horror movie.

This gesture against realism becomes all the more compelling in tandem with the film’s framing device: An archival researcher is discovering Marcelo’s story in parallel to the main plotline. I must respectfully disagree with Magarik’s comment that, in “celebrating the archival work of those who cling to, reconstruct, and honor the past of a battered and fragmented resistance,” The Secret Agent is “somehow a hopeful movie.” I would argue, rather, that we’re left wondering how much of what we see is “real,” and how much of it is the archivist’s interpretation of scattered recordings. If anything, this is the film at its most disorienting––the archivist’s work does less to uncover a past than to retroactively distort it into the shape of a thriller.

To call the film’s ending anticlimactic is to massively understate the point. It is anticlimactic in the way revolutionary struggle––the bare struggle to survive in an unjust world without betraying one’s own principles––is almost always anticlimactic. Most stories of resistance are stories of loss, in every sense; power is brutal, and history is forgetful. If there is no satisfying ending here, let alone a happy one, it is because, beyond the magic of film and of Carnaval, this is how life in this broken world is.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Fiume o morte! by the Croatian director Igor Bezinovic—which will be screened this week at Metrograph on the Lower East Side and then will be showing around the country—presents a unique model for making historical films. Though for much of the film, the characters dress in period costumes, they do so not to lend verisimilitude but as an integral part of the mockery of an event in Italian and Croatian history that was at one and the same time opera buffa and tragedy: the 1919 “conquest” of the city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) by the proto-fascist army of the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. It is a warning and a reminder that even the most absurd events can have aftershocks of great terror. In this case, D’Annunzio attempted to undo the Treaty of Rapallo and to see to it that Fiume, which had been granted city-state status, would be annexed to Italy. A year after the occupation ended in bloodshed, the actual fascists took over not just a small city, but all of Italy.

In order to tell the story, Bezinovic makes use of the period, documented in some 10,000 photos and kilometers of film. The “actors” in the film are all locals from Rijeka, many of whom were convinced to participate when casually approached by the director to recount what they knew of D’Annunzio and his invasion. The factitious quality of the events is made clear by the actors’ being posed, in stills and in moving picture footage, exactly like the participants in the actual event. This mock verisimilitude allows us to see that in many cases even the original players were playing the part of a conquering army. The conquest of Fiume was, we see, proof positive of the dangers of putting a poet or poseur in power, granting him some special right to do whatever he wishes. D’Annunzio, famous for his amorous adventures, his cocaine use, and also as Italy’s most famous writer of the period, was in fact a tiny man, bald and (literally) toothless. The notion of him as a conqueror should have been seen by all concerned as a joke. But he showed, as so many have since, that a clown and a buffoon can, by force of character and will and through his persuasive powers, inflict great harm.

For a second recommendation this week—what François Ozon gets especially right in his film of Camus’ The Stranger is the physicality of this supposedly philosophical novel. Along with the protagonist, Meursault, his lover Marie, his neighbor Salamano, and his friend Sintès, whose personal troubles lead to a fateful encounter on the beach, the sun and the heat of summertime Algiers are central characters. Sweat, glare, and the desire to escape the stifling air are constant, as the characters attempt to live their lives. It is not only Sintès and his dispute with the brother of his Algerian mistress that impel Meursault to the murder by the springs, but, as he says at his trial, the sun. Ozon’s film, shot in crisp black and white, makes the heated air palpable.

Meursault, played by Benjamin Voisin, is virtually expressionless and emotionless throughout the tale, as he is in the novel. Camus’ neutral prose is translated skillfully by Ozon, though a flat affect is far easier and more acceptable in a reader’s imagination than on the screen. Meursault shows no emotion when killing, an essential element in Camus’ tale; he is equally emotionless at his trial, when he refuses to say anything exculpatory. He is honesty incarnate, quietly so. It is only when the prison chaplain comes to see him and calls him to accept God in his final moments that he explodes. It is a stunning reminder of the heart of the existentialism of Camus: There is no God, and we are all guilty of something and can expect no forgiveness.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): Don’t read Lily Meyer’s The End of Romance if you don’t like reading about someone who could be you, or one of your friends. Don’t read it if a book about a millennial feminist who crafts elaborate theories to cope with her most intimate problems will feel too uncanny valley—as one friend remarked when I pitched it to one of my best lady groupchats—to be engrossed by it. However, to my fiction girlies looking for a smart, fun romance, and who can handle the relatability, please do read it and text me about it.

The book follows the journey of Sylvie Broder, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who runs away from an abusive husband and reinvents herself as a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, where she spends her days trying to conceptualize how to “end romance”—to completely divorce sex and love in order to liberate straight women from the patriarchy. I found myself deeply invested in this maddening protagonist whose attempts to theorize her way out of heartbreak inevitably lead her into a devastatingly messy love triangle entirely of her own making—with two very familiar-sounding men offering radically different types of love and visions of a life together. Oh, and she still can’t bear to officially ask her loser high school sweetheart for a divorce—which frankly makes no sense for a woman who is so fiercely independent and so committed to her own pleasure and self-actualization (and also has no trouble picking up any man at a bar on any night of the week).

Sylvie over-intellectualizes her problems, and then creates new ones, to avoid doing what she obviously wants and needs to do. I desperately wanted to yell at her, “You must cross the street by yourself Sylvie!”—inspired by Vivian Gornick’s therapist’s advice in Lux (which Sylvie would obviously love). But I also really felt for her. The hardest part of life is often not knowing what you need to do, but actually doing it. That first step into an uncertain future can be excruciating. Meyer crafts Sylvie’s inner monologue (often via conversations with an imaginary turtle friend) so well that it was easy to empathize. Fortunately, along with the turtle, she has a delightful best friend, Nadia, and an equally delightful older mentor, Elaine, who are not only her best supports on her journey, but profound models of love and friendship.

Upon finishing The End of Romance, I learned that it was in part inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story, so readers, if you want to book club that too, I’m here for it.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I find baseball dull, but I like amiably contrarian, gracefully written essays about cultural history, and so I enjoyed David Henkin’s Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball. Much baseball writing is mired in religious mystique about the game’s unique, intrinsic qualities, and is consequently as appealing to an unbeliever as a subway evangelist’s sermon. Henkin, a fan but also an academic historian, is gently skeptical of these pieties, whether it’s the supposedly high, morally improving rate of failure (as he points out, it depends how you count), or the weird fetish for the field’s geometry, which converts the sport into an odd, latter-day Pythagorean cult.

Instead, the book focuses on the culture around baseball, and there it turns out there’s plenty to say. In an essay worthy of Raymond Williams, Henkin shows how a sport constantly celebrated for its pastoral qualities is actually a product of cities: 19th century urbanization created the crowds for spectator events, the print public sphere in which to chronicle and interpret ongoing athletic competitions, and, paradoxically, the very longing for green space and fantasies of rural simplicity that now leads us to associate baseball with the country, rather than the city. Other essays in the book take up the sport’s historical dynamics of gender (female fans were necessary to distinguish baseball players’ balanced masculinity from the cruder, blood-sport virility of, say, boxing; yet women who were too into baseball were often belittled or subject to suspicion for insincerity), its connections with empires (intriguingly, not just the United States’), and its odd tradition of ordinary people logging statistical information about the games they watch.

Out of the Ballpark would be a good book for a baseball fan to buy for a loved one who does not understand, say, why they can rattle off players’ batting-averages from the Carter administration, or why they make a yearly pilgrimage to see the St. Louis Cardinals play, as if compelled by some avian migratory pattern of their own. And though Henkin avoids bombastic claims, I feel he offers a peaceably revisionist account of the American Pastime—that is, of a core component of the national culture. In place of essentialist, chauvinistic mythology, his work quietly suggests, we might discover a genially self-critical, intellectually worldly fandom. A prospect perhaps as remote as the White Sox winning the pennant this year—but, of course, one can hope.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It takes no great courage to make a film attacking the crimes of the Stalin years. Those years tainted the name of socialism and even more, of communism for all eternity. We’ve been inundated over the years with communists depicted in literature and film as hypocrites, cowards, liars, and sycophants. But if it were true that communist governments and parties were composed of people bereft of all morals and decency, would the system have lasted as long as it did, and would millions around the world have looked to it as their hope?

It would be far bolder for an artist to posit that even under during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, there were communists, even prosecutors, who believed honestly and firmly in Stalin and communism—men and women who thought that if crimes were being committed, they were aberrations, and that if the crimes were made known then all would be well. Sergei Loznitsa’s latest film, Two Prosecutors, is precisely that film. Kornyev, a newly minted prosecutor played with firmness and rigor by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, is a believing communist and Stalinist who is presented with a prisoner who has been a victim of false charges and torture. Without hesitating (the film takes place over the course of two days), he decides that it is his duty as a communist to stand up against the false charges, and abuse of power. These acts were committed, he is sure, in an effort to sabotage the Soviet state, by enemies within the state disguised as loyal communists.

Kornyev is a character against the standard type. He brandishes his Communist Party membership booklet with pride, almost as a weapon. Doors should and must open for him because that booklet is proof of his loyalty and, even more, his probity. And so, when he is passed a note, written in blood, by a prisoner of the NKVD saying he’s been tortured, he expects the prison warden to open all the necessary doors so he can interview the prisoner, an Old Bolshevik. He is shocked when the reality is different, but he is undaunted, for with his booklet he is the incarnation of right and he believes that right cannot but triumph in the world’s first socialist state. His meeting with the prisoner shakes him, but not his belief in communism: Rather. it confirms him in his belief that the enemy has insinuated himself into the heart of the system. The system is pure, but has been perverted by corrupt elements in the secret police.

He bravely and foolishly decides to go to Moscow to inform the state prosecutor, Andrei Vishinsky—historically one of the great monsters and hypocrites of the Stalinist years—and is certain that by telling him what is happening all will be well. But Kornyev‘s vision is simply an inversion of the system of the purges. If for the Stalinist leadership anything that is going wrong is the work of Trotskyists in the pay of Nazis and fascists, for Kornyev the extermination of real Bolsheviks is also a conspiracy, but through infiltration of the NKVD. Both sides are conspiratorial, and both are possessed of an unbreakable and unfalsifiable logic. Kornyev is every bit as wrong as Vishinsky. The difference is, the latter has the might of the state behind him. Kornyev’s party booklet won’t be able to save him.

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): My family has used We Tell it to Our Children: The Story of Passover for our intergenerational seders since the mid ’90s, when my parents won a set at a JCC fundraiser. If you’re looking for a family-friendly option, this is a guaranteed hit. It’s less of a conventional haggadah and more of a script of the Exodus story, embedding prayers and foods where they fall narratively. The set comes with black-and-white illustrations of the characters to be photocopied, cut out, colored in, and taped to chopsticks or pencils, creating puppets for participants to hold as they play their parts. The script includes a narrator plus nine puppet roles, though some, like the Taskmaster or Yocheved, are brief, so a single guest could play various characters—those too young to read are assigned to the role of the sheep, who only bahs. Everyone can join in for the songs, which borrow familiar tunes but add new lyrics that advance the plot.

This haggadah is participatory, kooky, and fun for small children. It is also deeply uncool, and I would not recommend springing it on adult guests who are not prepared to sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” rewritten into a lament of slave labor. In We Tell it to Our Children, Israel is a place “that would take us many, many hours to get to from here if we flew very fast in a plane.” For a more politically engaged seder, your narrator might have to improvise a few additions.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): We use the Yedid Nefesh Haggadah, which attempts to make a traditional seder maximally accessible. It has a complete Hebrew text, a translation into readable English, a transliteration of the parts one might sing, and a relatively unobtrusive, inoffensive commentary. Its pages are intuitively designed and uncluttered.

I am skeptical of the implicit claim of many contemporary haggadot that a book can lead a seder; my professional intuition, as a teacher of old literature, is that, on their own, premodern texts—no matter how brilliant or thoughtful—make nothing happen. I suspect that many buyers of haggadot with fancy bells and whistles (questions for discussion, modern meditations, updated plague-lists and the like) are making a category error: It is as if they were looking for advice on how to host a party in the assembly directions for their sectional. I also find the common practice of circular reading of arcane texts and then unplanned, uninformed discussion baffling; that’s a pedagogical modality appropriate for a last-minute substitute teacher in a middle school English class, but for no one else.

Instead, I prepare a class on one of the texts in the haggadah, with one or two supplemental texts (traditional and modern), simply presented context so people can understand it (a good resource for this background is the scholarly commentary in the Schechter Haggadah, which incidentally also has lovely illustrations), and several open-ended questions for discussion. The rest of the text, I explain, can be chanted in about five minutes to fulfill one’s obligation in recitation; those who are not so moved can read parts silently or simply breathe meditatively during that short interval.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): I can’t recommend a particular haggadah any more than I have been able to use a single one at the many seders I have led over the decades. For the most DIY of Jewish holidays—the only one officially centered in the home, not a synagogue—I say: make your own. The seder, by definition, offers the outline. Fill it in as the times—and the folks gathered—demand. After all, as Vanessa Ochs points out in The Passover Haggadah: A Biography, ad hoc home Pesach ceremonies took place beginning in 70 CE, with written versions not appearing until the 11th century, and not proliferating until after the invention of the printing press in 1440. (The first printed haggadah was produced in Guadalajara, Spain around 1480.) What’s more, the model for the seder as we have come to know it emerged from the Hellenistic period: a Greek symposium of food, drink, and, most of all, discussion. For me, the most meaningful seders are the ones where we all debate the themes and provocations of the ritual a lot more than we read.

This is not to say we should ignore the gazillions of haggadahs that have been created through the centuries. We should steal copiously from slickly published volumes and homespun zines alike—from those promoting commentary by rabbis of various ideologies to 20th century variants that began mapping the Exodus story onto contemporary liberation struggles. My own collection includes, among others: a facsimile of the 14th century Sarajevo haggadah; a velvet-covered copy of the one Arthur Szyk illustrated in Poland in the mid-1930s, which drew parallels between Pharaoh and Hitler; the Let My People Go haggadah from the 1970s focusing on Soviet Jews; the famous countercultural “Freedom Seder” of 1969 opposing the Vietnam War and supporting various civil rights movements; lots of feminist, queer, labor, immigrant, and ecological ones; JFREJ’s Black Lives Matter take from 2019; and the “Gaza Liberation Seder” produced by Barnard and Columbia students for the observance in the campus encampment two years ago. That’s not to mention inserts—from the 1944 prayer for eating chametz on Passover from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to poems from the First Intifada. Pulling from these varying texts (often by distributing them around the table and inviting folks to pipe up when they see something worth sharing) is a way of instantiating, through this thoroughly performative ritual, its palimpsestic nature. That makes sense for a holiday about recognizing ourselves as people—and as a people—in history.

In the analog days of yore, I literally copied and pasted materials into an ever-fattening loose-leaf notebook, that—notwithstanding decades-old wine stains on the pages—resembles more than anything a stage manager’s promptbook. A section for each seder element includes references to discussion-provoking passages from printed haggadahs, as well as accumulated poems, testimonies, short stories, and drashes, many contributed by participants. (Among perennial favorites: For the story-telling part of the seder, Marge Piercy’s “Maggid”; for the Hallel, the “Footnote” section of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”) In recent years, rudimentary Adobe-designed and printed versions have kept that notebook on the shelf, but the principle has not changed: Keep the bones, collectively produce the flesh. Indeed, it has become more emphatic.

Lately, I have pared the document down to a two-page outline—taking us back to the millennia-old guide (plus a few prompts). I keep the stack of haggadahs and yellowing xeroxes on hand at the table, but it’s the conversation that matters most. Often, just asking each person to say why they wanted to be at a seder that night is enough to spark deep, hours-long discussion—and singing, and jokes, and argument, and advocacy. Day-dayenu, day-dayenu.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Favorite haggadahs? God save us. Anyway, there’s only the Manischewitz haggadah. Everything else is chametz.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Last week, I read this piece in New York Magazine by Narges Bajoghli on the relationship-ending conversations about Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran happening among Iranians scattered across the world, both in Iran and in the global diaspora. The author herself writes from amid the fracture: “In Australia, my cousin Ali and his group of friends—many of whom I knew from childhood trips to Iran—were writing screeds against me on social media for not using my platform to back the bombings of Iran. Cousins and old friends will no longer speak to me because I will not sign on to the proposition that American and Israeli bombs will deliver liberation. Some of them I have known my whole life. Some of them, I realize now, I did not know at all.”

It’s a familiar story for many American Jews, as the author notes explicitly in the piece. As a Miamian, I also recognize the passions and violence of other diasporas; I’m thinking now of a news story from a few weeks ago, in which Cuban exiles rode a speedboat from Florida into Cuban waters, aiming, as the Cuban government said, for “armed infiltration.” Four of them were killed. This comes at a moment where Lindsey Graham is gleefully threatening a US invasion of Cuba on Fox News: “Free Cuba. Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. It’s just a matter of time now.” He mentions he’s in Miami and holds up a hat that says “Free Cuba”; no doubt it was given to him by a Cuban exile.

It is shocking that anyone can look at the images from Tehran, water and sky on fire, and think, “I want this for my country because I love my country. I love its people.” But the ubiquity of this attitude is a warning in itself about the potency of the commingling of pain and nationalism in a collective story. To Bajoghli, the only ethical response in such a moment is a kind of “double consciousness,” or perhaps, a dialectics, that the story makes impossible. “The question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political system’s end and grief for its victims at the same time,” she writes. “I think you have to. I think the people who can’t, on either side, are telling you something about what they’ve had to shut off in themselves to survive this.”

David Klion (contributing editor): I’ve just binged the first four seasons of Apple TV’s For All Mankind ahead of the fifth season, which premieres on March 27th. I was expecting a sci-fi epic in the vein of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, both of which the show’s co-creator Ronald D. Moore was centrally involved in. But while there’s definitely some of that in For All Mankind’s DNA, the actual experience of watching has brought very different shows to mind, including The Americans, Mad Men, and perhaps above all Friday Night Lights. You know how Friday Night Lights is nominally about high school football, but really it’s a soap opera about the triumphs and tragedies of a close-knit community of Texans and a kind of grand metaphor for America as imagined by well-meaning liberals? For All Mankind is exactly that, except replace high school football with space exploration. It’s a show, in other words, I can enthusiastically recommend to all sorts of people in my life who don’t care about sci-fi.

Though it becomes increasingly recognizable as sci-fi as it goes, the show belongs more precisely to the genre of alternate history. The point of rupture from our timeline occurs in the pilot: In June 1969, about a month before the scheduled Apollo 11 mission that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, the Soviet space program stuns the whole world by landing a cosmonaut there first. NASA is shaken, as is President Nixon, and instead of a manned moon landing serving as America’s pinnacle achievement in the space race, the Soviet win goads Americans into dreaming much bigger. What about a permanent lunar base? What about manned missions to Mars? What about… okay, no spoilers.

Each season leaps forward about a decade, with the first set mainly in the 1970s and the upcoming season set in the 2010s. Some things change, like the winners and losers of presidential elections, while others stay the same—Apple has punctuated the show with needle drops of era-defining songs that apparently would have been written in any timeline. While individual characters come and go, the show remains tightly focused on a core group of astronauts, mission controllers, engineers, and family members based out of Houston. For all the science and history geekery on display, For All Mankind is primarily character-driven. It invests us emotionally in a wildly diverse extended family whose lives are oriented around a space program far more ambitious and consequential than the one we know.

Among those consequences is an America that’s incrementally woker than the real one, where progress on women’s equality, gay rights, and more happens a little faster than it actually did. Is this strictly realistic? Maybe not, but here’s where I’m reminded of Star Trek, with its utopian vision of humanity transcending war, prejudice, and capitalism in favor of space exploration and scientific knowledge for its own sake. The original series, the one with Kirk and Spock, aired from 1966-1969, concurrent with the Apollo Program and the height of the Great Society, and premiering before Vietnam and the New Politics tore everything apart. Martin Luther King was famously a fan and convinced actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, that it was crucial for Black kids to see a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise; Nichols, in turn, inspired Mae Jemison, who became the first Black woman in space in 1992 (a fictional Black woman makes it to space much earlier in the For All Mankind timeline).

Regardless of that era’s myriad flaws, we’ve never fully recovered its idealism; today we live in a fallen America, one in which even space travel is the province of manic private-sector reactionaries (For All Mankind has something to say about for-profit space companies too). As corny and over the top as For All Mankind can sometimes be, there’s something beautiful and profoundly life-affirming about a show that imagines what our world might have been like if the 1960s Space Age had never ended. The show’s title is taken from the plaque the real Apollo astronauts left on the lunar surface (“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind”), but it’s appropriate to the spirit of the show, which is first and foremost a celebration of humanity—all of it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve always insisted that it’s impossible to judge another couple’s marriage. It’s difficult enough to understand the inner workings of our own, so how dare we judge those of others? But none of this applies when it comes to the marriages we encounter in literature, and it is as literature that I’ve felt free to judge the marriage of the great German poet Paul Celan and his French artist wife Gisèle Lestrange as we see it in Letters to Gisèle (1951-1970). Fixed on the page, like a dead butterfly minus the beauty, this collection is a horrific voyage into the depths of all that can be worst in marriage: deception, illusion, self-delusion, crushing of personality, willing submission, and, finally, destruction. Exasperation, anger, desperation are there, but also great loyalty and compassion, finally crushed under the weight of history and madness.

There is much discussion in these letters of Celan’s famously difficult poetry, his “messages in a bottle,” as he called them. This includes Celan’s fascinating and unconsciously comical attempts to teach his wife German by providing her with cribs of select words in poems he’s sent her so she can read and understand his work in its original form. Celan taught German at the Ecole Normale Supèrieure, so he had experience in teaching German literature. It seems certain that this method was not employed by the poet in his classes at France’s most elite academy.

There are, however, other commentaries on his poetry, some of them enormously enlightening. The most pertinent of them all is from a letter in 1965, which included a poem of which he was especially proud, though with a caveat: “It is quite decent, maybe not opaque enough.”

The volume is replete with Celan’s complaints that his work is insufficiently appreciated and understood, that people fail to see that his poetry is all a response to the death camps. But it is also a chronicle of a man’s war with his milieu, his insistence that those around him in the literary world were antisemites, that antisemitism was everywhere, the left as guilty as the right (“the brown red and the red brown,” as he calls them). Celan was unjustly accused of plagiarism by the widow of a poet with whom he had been close, and the charge and his insistence on the omnipresence of antisemitism ate away at his vitals, perverting him as a human being.

But more than anything, this volume is an account of a marriage whose stated motto was “I stand firm,” and whose obvious fault lines and fractures and problems were ignored in the false belief that all was well, until such belief was no longer possible. Pledges of eternal love flow back and forth, followed by separations, internments in mental hospitals, a stabbing… The couple’s second motto, repeated in countless letters—including one written two days before Paul tried to stab Gisèle—was “Wird sind es noch immer” (“We are still what we are”). Gisèle gives her life to her husband, as a person and an artist. She allows him to be the one to bestow titles on all her artistic works over the course of their marriage. She is forgiving of his infidelities, one of which lasted ten years. They convince themselves that all will be well, or at least that it’s possible. Paul says at one point that separation from her would be “the victory of our enemies. I do not accept this separation.” The enemies were within him, and they did win.

Pual and Gisèele finally separated for good, and on April 20th, 1970, he disappeared. The battles of Celan against himself, poetry, antisemites, the literary world, and his wife ended under the Pont Mirabeau. His body was fished from the Seine weeks later. Letters to Gisèle is the tombstone of their marriage, the memorial to that battle.