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Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In 2017, the Whitney Biennial controversially presented “Open Casket,” a painting by the white artist Dana Schutz, based on a famous photograph of the lynched Black adolescent, Emmett Till. In response to sustained protests against the painting—at the museum and in reams of posts and articles—Schutz said that “Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection.”

Since then, at least, the critic and art historian Aruna D’Souza has been casting doubt on this steadfast liberal principle: that empathy for oppressed people drives progressive change. I first encountered her suspicion of this bromide in her 2018 book, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, a short volume of sparkling insights about the structural racism embedded in US exhibition spaces, and the Black resistance that has called them to account. Schutz’s artwork, and her defense of it, is one of the three case studies taken up in D’Souza’s book which, among other things, asks who is granted free speech—the common institutional defense of such exhibits—and who is denied it. On that saga, D’Souza reflects that “Where Schutz’s supporters heard in her words a brave attempt at empathy, her detractors heard her centering herself and her feelings—her white tears, as some would derisively describe it—at the expense of black viewers for whom Emmett Till was anything but historical.”

The limits and hazards of empathy—who is asked to feel it for whom, how it is elicited, what it ultimately produces—apparently kept gnawing at D’Souza, who has set about dislodging its teeth from discourses of resistance in the face of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. The result is the pamphlet-sized book, Imperfect Solidarities. Watching “the first genocide taking place on social media,” D’Souza considers the circulation of images by Palestinian documenters like Motaz Azaiza and Plestia Alaqad: People reposting them, she writes, “communicate their shock, their tears, their sense of grief, and encourage us to feel the same way in order to spur us to action.” But, she argues, such reliance on empathy puts the burden on those being victimized to perform what she calls the “traumatic labor” of making their circumstances known to audiences sitting in safety; second, empathy’s appeal comes from every direction, including the use of Israeli grief to justify obliteration of Palestinians; and third, it “often privileges the emotional response of those doing the witnessing, instead of the real conditions being experienced on the ground.” Witness, in short, becomes voyeurism; the obligation to act comes to depend on one’s self-satisfying feelings. Empathy, then, is a dangerous “prerequisite to political solidarity” and D’Souza calls, instead, for solidarity based on an ethics of care.

In such a short essay, D’Souza does not engage the considerable archive of such thinking (by, among others, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Robin D. G. Kelley, as well as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas); nor does she discuss current activist formations for whom care is an organizing principle and engine. Her unique contribution is instead thinking through the role of art in helping to produce a shift. Drawing on works spanning from the novelist Amitav Ghosh to artists Candice Breitz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Stephanie Syjuco, she shows how, contrary to old liberal pieties, artworks can deflect empathy. Rather than the translation and transparency that empathy insists on, D’Souza favors “context-specific alliances” that can appreciate opacity, “the right not to translate oneself into hegemonic terms.” Art, she shows, can open ways for us “to be able to act together without full comprehension, to be able to float on the seas of change.”

Jonathan Shamir (fellow): There comes a moment in the life of any post-punk band when it’s imperative to trade out angsty, low-fi garage rock for a more expansive, epic sound. They might get a new producer, or move to London—and there’s always a risk that they might lose their spark in making that leap. (I’m still reeling from Bloc Party’s decline.) I had high hopes that Fontaines D.C., the Irish five-piece whose three previous albums had so thoroughly charmed me with their affectionate and bristling portraits of their hometown (the initials in their name stand for Dublin City, not District of Columbia), would not let me down. Thankfully, their fourth album, Romance, released in August, shows that you can outgrow the warm but stifling embrace of your home while keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground.

For those of you who haven’t followed their meteoric ascent, the local lads got so big so quickly that their second record, A Hero’s Death, almost pipped Taylor Swift to number one on the U.K. album charts in 2020. They seem to have seen it coming. On “Big,” the opening track of their passionately restless and testosterone-fuelled debut album, Dogrel (2019), lead singer Grian Chatten screams: “My childhood was small, / but I’m gonna be big.” The band, with its rough-and-ready lyricism and thrashing riffs that recall The Libertines in their prime, soon proved him right.

Their third album, Skinty Fia, is a tough act to follow. It was probably my second-favorite album of 2022 (even the best rock group would struggle to dethrone King Kendrick). Its darker palette of haunting vocals and reverberating basslines fit its macabre subject matter: gravestones, abusive relationships, and suicides. There’s some romance in there, but the loftiest heights of love and deepest depths of loathing are reserved for Ireland itself, in songs that look unflinchingly back at home from the vantage of London. Most memorably, in the climax of “I Love You,” Chatten draws on a simile about the corrupted clergy to express his own conflicted patriotism: “And I loved you like a penny loves the pocket of a priest.”

Romance expands on the admirable mutability of Skinty Fia, delivering the band’s most sonically versatile album to date. Its sound spans nu-metal and anthemic rock: In the title track, the creepy clashing of the high keys on the piano conjure Radiohead experimenting with the occult; on the blithe “Bug,” Chatten’s stretched-out vocals channel the Britpop spirits of the recently revived. The album is also uncertain in its interests, even unmoored: It looks forward with morbid preoccupation, sideways at the all-consuming intensity of a toxic relationship, and backward at the musicians’ childhoods. But this restlessness may be the whole point. On the hip-hoppy “Starburster,” overstimulation is clearly the name of the game; Chatten rattles off all the abstruse and absurd things he is and wants to be (from “I want the preacher and pill” to “I am the pig on the Chinese calendar”) while the backing vocals repeat that “it may feel bad.” The sprawling lists are punctuated by the singer’s jolting gasps. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Chatten explained that the song is about a panic attack he had on the London underground. The dizzying options for self-creation in the modern metropole, or in love, are as debilitating as they are exciting. The album captures this spectrum of emotional states, from the aching viscerality of “retching with desire,” to a satisfied declaration of total numbness: “I don’t feel anything / I don’t feel bad.”

For all its panic attacks and death drives, Romance is also the group’s most accessible album to date, with cleaner mixing and bigger sounds. And that isn’t a bad thing. In perhaps the poppiest and best song of the whole album, the luscious dream rock number “Favourite,” the band waxes nostalgic about “bed radios” and “days playing football indoors.” In the ramped-up and often wild contrasts of modern life, the moments of simple tenderness that break through the clouds become especially bright, as when Chatten sings: “If there was lightning in me / you’d know who it was for.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Richard Behar’s Madoff: The Final Word was such a fun read that I did all I could to slow down my progress through its pages. Please don’t think that my describing an account of a Ponzi scheme in which thousands of people lost their life savings as “fun” makes me a heartless monster; it’s just that this portrait of a swindler, his swindle, and those who worked with or fell for it is executed with amazing brio, and with a point of view we’ve seldom heard in the years since the collapse of Madoff’s unprecedented scam in 2008.

According to Behar’s research, the scheme started in the 1960s, when Madoff, a fledgling investment advisor, lost $30,000 of his first client’s money. He borrowed funds to hide that loss and, like Max Bialystock in The Producers, discovered that there was an easy way to get rich: fraud. He took money given to him to invest and simply recycled it through all the investors. Year in and year out, through good times and bad, he paid out returns of 15%—or, for favored clients, even more—while profiting handsomely himself. The systems he used and the statements he sent out were all fraudulent. All told, $65 billion passed through Madoff’s hands.

What makes Behar’s book especially interesting is his insistence, backed by a number of experts, that there were no true victims; in fact, whenever he uses that word, he places it in scare quotes. His case: How is it that all of Madoff’s investors failed to question how it was possible to never, over the course of decades, lose any money in any quarter of any year? This is simply not within the realm of possibility. But who, after all, is going to question receiving thousands of dollars every few months? Everyone just cashed their dividend checks. For all parties involved, greed was the dominant force.

Jewish names appear on every page, and this is no accident. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was what is known as an “affinity crime”—that is, he focused on one particular group, in his case Jews like himself. One Jew brought in another Jew who turned their money over to a Jew who worked with other Jews at the highest level. (Italians occupied the middle ranks.) Among the innumerable defrauded Jews, one name stands out: Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel! What kind of Jew would knowingly involve the Jewish voice of conscience in a scheme he knew would ultimately cost him millions? Madoff told Behar that he took on Wiesel at the behest of mutual friends, adding, “I did have dinner with him once. You can’t even have a conversation with Elie . . . He’s full of shit, that guy. First of all, he didn’t lose any money [principal], like everyone else claims. He’s counting the profits.”

Madoff has a moral: You don’t have to be all that smart to make a killing in America. Being clever and immoral will do just fine.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): More than 1.9 million Americans are currently incarcerated in state prisons and jails, while 113 million have an immediate family member who has at one time been behind bars. Yet major literary fiction that directly and unsparingly takes up the prison remains rare. A welcome exception is Rachel Kushner’s 2018 novel The Mars Room, which conjures a California women’s prison in painstaking detail.

Drawing on deep relationships with incarcerated women as well as her own experience as a rebellious, free-range teen in San Francisco, Kushner centers the novel on the character of Romy Hall, a young mother raised in the Golden Gate City’s underbelly sentenced to two life sentences for killing her stalker. Alternating between Romy’s perspective and that of other figures from the prison, Kushner renders the building as a textured society with its own rich set of social codes: methods for passing items between cells in solitary confinement; canteen food recipes; and constant political negotiations with staff over privileges and rules. The narrative spares little in its frankness or its horror: An early scene involves a teenager going into labor in handcuffs while fellow prisoners are punished for coming to her aid.

The fictional prison called Stanville, based on a facility in Chowchilla, California that is one of the country’s largest women’s prisons, is presented as both continuity and contrast with its surroundings. Mountain lions shriek and gray foxes dart through rich yellow grasses in the Sierras above the facility, indicating an enduring natural beauty off-limits to its inhabitants. Yet on the valley floor, the prison’s sense of confinement extends to the eponymous town where it is located: The water is “poisoned,” the air is “bad,” and “people without cars walk the main boulevard in the hottest part of the day, when it’s 113 degrees. They amble along in the gutter of the road, scooting empty shopping carts, piercing the dead zone of the late afternoon with the carts’ metallic rattle.” In this sense, the prison and the world outside become a free-flowing and interdependent ecosystem, with the prison both resulting from and producing poverty and despair. But against this backdrop, Kushner’s narrative also shows how the prison, like all societies, encompasses a whole range of experiences: the characters reflect on their lot with dry wit, and Romy and her friends make each other laugh in the prison yard, walking past groups of women playing guitars, or having sex while lookouts watch for guards, or tanning slathered in cook oil and wearing homemade undershirts known as “slingshots.”

Given the sensitivity and depth I observed in the book, I disagree with diagnoses like that of critic Christian Lorentzen that The Mars Room foregoes literary beauty or complexity in its quest to make a noble political statement. While it’s true that the prose can be uneven—and Lorentzen correctly identifies that the voice of Romy, tasked with being our anthropological guide to the prison, can sometimes lose its independent spark—I didn’t find The Mars Room exceptionally didactic. On the contrary, I appreciated Kushner’s decision to draw characters with complicated pasts who have indeed committed grave harms, as opposed to others that could more easily win liberal sympathies such as the nonviolent drug offenders or the wrongfully convicted. The Mars Room refuses to tiptoe around its reader; it is confident it can tell full stories of incarcerated human beings without ever eclipsing the sharp edges of the prison walls that cage them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the history of the past half-century of Brazilian cinema is the story of the producer Luiz Carlos Barreto and his family. He and his wife and children have served as directors and backers of many of the country’s most important films and filmmakers since 1963, when he founded his production company. A man firmly on the left, he was a key supporter of the work of the Cinema Novo movement of the ’60s and ’70s, which brought Brazil to the forefront of world cinema. A small selection of the 50 films he has produced will be showing until September 15th for “Isso é Brasil,” a retrospective at Lincoln Center.

This festival includes a sampling of the full range of Barreto productions. The ’60s—the height of Cinema Novo—are best represented by two classics: Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth (1967) and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Barren Lives (1963). One of the most European of Brazil’s directors, Rocha made films radical in both form and content. Entranced Earth is an uncompromising satire of the political and intellectual classes in Brazilian society, highlighting their weakness and cowardice; none of those responsible for the injustices that reigned in the country escapes unscathed. Barren Lives is a harsh portrayal of the even harsher experience of the peasants of Brazil’s Northeast. Shot in gleaming black and white, it’s a tale of the callousness of the wealthy and the destitution of the poor—and the little hope they had for a better life. Like Barren Lives, Pereira dos Santos’s later, epic-length film Memoirs of Prison (1984) is based on a book by Graciliano Ramos—one of the most important Brazilian writers, a Communist arrested for his part in a 1935 left-wing uprising against President Getúlio Vargas. Sent to prison and then to a prison colony, his two-volume memoir of his incarceration is the basis for this film, a powerful tribute to the courage and tenacity of Ramos and his comrades.

This being a Brazilian festival, naturally there are two films about soccer stars: Garrincha, the People’s Joy (1963) and This Is Pelé (1974). Neither is a portrait of the men as men; Pelé’s support for the military dictatorship and Garrincha’s personal problems, which led to his drinking himself to death at age 50, are totally absent. Rather, we are presented with the magic of their play, with large chunks of both films dedicated to highlights from their careers, their amazing artistry with the ball at their feet. The retrospective also includes other popular cinema like the international smash hits Bye Bye, Brazil (1980) and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976), which made Sônia Braga an international star.

As we prepare for the arrival of two important new Brazilian films in the coming months—Walter Salles’s film on a political crime of the ’70s, I’m Still Here, and Petra Costa’s documentary on evangelical Christianity’s role in Bolsonaro’s rise, Apocalypse in the Tropics—“Isso é Brasil” provides us with crucial cine-historical background to understand the Brazilian filmmakers of today.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): My husband and I have been on the hunt for the perfect ’90s movie. By that we mean: original, fun, and action-packed, that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Think: Last Action Hero, Sneakers, Speed.) In discussing our quest with friends, people kept telling us to re-watch Twister (1996), which features a ragtag group of storm chasers getting way too close to tornadoes for the sake of science. It’s true: Twister got everything right: an ensemble cast (Bill Paxton; Helen Hunt; Carey Elwes; and Philip Seymour Hoffman!), romantic drama, world historical stakes, and CGI that holds up despite being almost 30 years old.

I cannot, unfortunately, say the same thing for Twisters, the paint-by-numbers remake released this summer. Every scene in the original has an analog here—the Big Trauma Backstory, the Twin Twisters, the Twister Hits a Community Event—in a way that punishes you, rather than rewards you, for having recently seen the original. There seems to be no discernible narrative connection between the original and the remake—no sense of whether or how this new team of storm chasers, using at least some of the technology that belonged to characters from the original, is related, or whether we’re even in a world where the first team existed at all. Paxton’s analog here is played by Daisy Edgar Jones, whose character’s Okie accent repeatedly slips into her Irish one. There is so much expository dialogue that it sometimes feels as if you’re reading the script doctor’s outline.

Both films are already somewhat ridiculous considering their villain is a natural disaster. (“This has to stop!” cries Hunt’s injured aunt in the original film. I burst out laughing.) But in that movie, at least it’s about understanding the tornadoes, collecting data to increase warning times. In the remake, it’s about dissolving them altogether by driving into them with some kind of chemical, which veers into techno-optimist Marvel movie territory. Skip Twisters, watch Twister instead.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): For several years, the director Nathan Silver has worked in a quiet corner of the cinema world, making small, sometimes intense DIY-style films like The Great Pretender (2018). His new film, Between the Temples, takes him in another direction. Even if this sweet comedy—a kind of Harold and Maude Have Shabbos Dinner—ends exactly where I could tell it would after the first ten minutes, it still provides a knowing and kindly mocking picture of the life of a Jewish cleric.

Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwarzman), the chazan at a shul in the Hudson Valley, is going through a crisis of faith following the accidental death of his wife (who, he never fails to point out, was an alcoholic). His despair is so profound that he can no longer sing. Schwartzman looks perfectly awful in the role, a total schlub, and his usually unpleasant edge is blunted just enough to make him sympathetic—but not sympathetic enough to avoid being socked in the face in a bar on a Friday night while wearing a yarmulke and carrying a tallis. He is rescued by Ms. Carla O’Sullivan (Carol Kane), his former music teacher, who visits him at shul the next week and announces that she wants to have a bas mitzvah. He’s resistant, but Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) tells him to prepare his new student.

I’ve not stepped foot in a shul in over 50 years (Baruch Hashem), but apparently nothing has changed in synagogue life. Smigel, who is brilliant in the role, has a ball with his portrayal of the sweet but sometimes silly rabbi and his entire modus operandi—aimed, as he says, at “putting Jews in the pews.” We see him carrying out his congregational responsibilities, which include running a bake sale to support the dedication of a Torah honoring victims of the Holocaust. (“Where bake sales meet the Holocaust is my sweet spot,” he quips.) He loves and is absolutely terrible at golf, at which he cheats. Early in the film we see him practicing putting in his office, sending the ball into a shofar placed on the floor; he warns Ben to tell anyone who opens the door that it’s not a kosher one. He tells terrible jokes and has a wife with heavily botoxed lips and a beautiful daughter, Gabrielle (Madeline Weinstein), whom he describes as “a mess.” In good Jewish parent fashion, he tries to make a shidduch between Ben and Gabrielle—it doesn’t go well. And of course, he must bend to the will of one of Ben’s two mothers (Dolly De Leon), a wealthy realtor and Filipina convert to Judaism who is more strict in her observance than anyone in the film born Jewish.

Silver shows himself to be a master at inserting brilliantly funny lines into unexpected places, none of them underlined and all of them much funnier for that. In a magnificent touch, the always excellent Keith Poulson gives a deadpan performance as a sneering bartender who also shows up as a waiter. Even the most over-the-top physical bit—Ben’s reaction when he learns that the burger he’s eating with Carla has cheese on it—is handled with great comedic flair.

So deft is Between the Temples that we don’t even realize that by the film’s end, Ben’s crises have only worsened. Maybe that’s what’s most Jewish about it.

Josh Lambert (contributing writer): 2024 has turned out to be a banner year for graphic narratives about the Holocaust. These texts take a wide variety of approaches to a familiar form, some more successful than others.

Replay—a graphic memoir by Jordan Mechner, who created the classic video games Karateka and The Prince of Persia—tells an intergenerational family tale but focuses on the author’s father, Francis, who fled Nazi-occupied Europe as a child in the 1940s. The book offers a sharply drawn and effective story, but there’s something jarring about the juxtaposition of Francis’s escape from a racist government and Jordan’s lack of self-consciousness about having gotten rich off the martial Orientalism of his video game narratives. While Replay doesn’t consider the link between trauma and the urge to violence, Leela Corman’s beautiful graphic novel Victory Parade is dazzlingly, distressingly attentive to this entanglement. In huge pages and gorgeous watercolors, the book slips between the Berlin of 1936 and the Brooklyn of 1943—and between dreams and reality—vividly evoking the pain of living through those nightmarish times. For its part, the long-awaited second volume of Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters interweaves this awful era with terrors of another kind. Like the acclaimed first book, it presents itself as the sketchbook of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old Latina girl growing up in late-1960s Chicago who is fascinated by horror comics (and always draws herself as a werewolf). The novel’s backbone is the more worldly horror of Holocaust testimony, recorded onto tape by Karen’s recently deceased neighbor, Anka Silverberg. While Ferris’s visual style is grotesquely exquisite, the book somewhat sensationalizes Anka’s experiences, raising urgent, difficult questions about pop culture’s fetishization of monstrous violence.

The two most recent entries in this genre are also the ones most interested in directly addressing the premises that underlie it. Heavyweight—the debut graphic memoir by Jewish Currents director of community engagement Sol Brager—delves into their German Jewish family’s dispossession by the Nazis and suffering during the war. But more than any Holocaust memoir I can recall, it also attends to the ways in which wealthy German Jews enriched themselves through complicity with European racism and colonialism. In Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz, out this week, CUNY professor Ari Richter likewise troubles oversimplified narratives of victimhood. The memoir explores his family’s Holocaust experiences and his own growing obsession with them. Richter’s aggressively unpleasant style—characterized by scratchy, dark drawings—conveys his visceral shame and anxiety, whose many causes include his own “internalized German supremacy” and his family’s “racial blind spots.” Like Brager, as Richter tells his family’s stories, he also grapples with an uncomfortable truth: that Jews’ suffering is more legible, legally recognized, and marketable than that of other people who’ve suffered brutal violence.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Some of my favorite TV and film over the last several years have been from Ireland (special shoutout to Normal People, which has a completely different kind of magic than the book). The North of Ireland in particular has had some hits, first with Derry Girls, an irreverent sitcom about the lives of a misfit clique of high school girls in the waning years of the Troubles, and now with Kneecap, a heavily fictionalized biopic about the real-life Irish language rap group of the same name, starring its actual members: Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí. I live with a Hibernophile who has a specific interest in the North and the history of the Troubles, so I was somewhat familiar with Kneecap’s music and story before going to see the film. As much as this movie is pure fun for everyone—Mo and Móglaí are two hard-partying, drug-dealing lads of the ceasefire generation and their debauchery makes up some of the most enjoyable extended sequences of the film—it is the politics of the indigenous Irish language that provides the heart of Kneecap. In the film (though not in real life), Móglaí’s IRA father instills in the boys a love of the language by drilling them on their irregular verbs in their youth, often repeating the maxim, “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.” Throughout the course of the film, proponents of the Irish language argue over whether Kneecap’s use of it to talk, for the most part, about sex, drugs, and FTP is a perversion of the language, or an assertion of its aliveness in the face of extinction. Detractors—mostly the police (or, as they say, “the peelers”), media figures, and local authorities—simply want it gone. These debates never play out didactically; if anything, the web of characters and their motivations sometimes feel overly contrived to make sure any such conversation is firmly in service of narrative.

This made me think of a conversation I had with a Yiddishist at a party a number of years ago, who said, essentially, that she got over her worry that she wasn’t speaking “properly” when she realized that almost no one else was. All Yiddish spoken today, after all, had been severed from a “pure, authentic” source, and was in development in a new context. I also found myself thinking of Sephardic studies professor Devin Naar, perhaps one of the only people on earth raising his young children entirely in Ladino—my father’s first language, and one he promptly abandoned. Though I have long been suspicious of revivalist projects, the film helped me to think differently about what changes politically when you embrace a language, however idiosyncratically, instead of letting it die. Indeed, as the band performs today in Irish at a major English music festival, backed by a message about the UK’s complicity in genocide, they are proving that such political commitments provide a firm basis for real global solidarity. And though the loss of language in my own family—as well as the genocide that abetted it—is more distant, they have succeeded in making me ask: What could Ladino mean to me, politically?

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): The Well I Fell Into, the excellent new album from indie rock band WHY?, finds frontman Yoni Wolf at his most plainspoken as he meditates on the ruins of a relationship. The group’s previous work is rife with Wolf’s ambiguous imagery, deadpan aphorisms, and tangles of winding wordplay, reflecting the project’s origins in alternative hip-hop. But while glimmers of this appear throughout The Well I Fell Into, the record is often disarmingly direct. On “Marigold”—a song about the futility of repairing all that’s broken—the narrator undercuts the titular motif as soon as he sets it up: “This is not a parable / this is real, it’s painful.” When the cathartic chorus erupts, it summons a cosmic-seeming sense of isolation through completely naturalistic dialogue, as a bus driver disrupts the speaker’s reverie: “Last stop, come on man, you gotta get off / I gotta get it back to the depot / Last stop / yo, bro, time to get off / what, you ain’t got no people?”

The record repeatedly wrings pathos from such straightforward scenes. On “Later at The Loon,” the couple hovers at the kitchen counter as the narrator nibbles at a skirt steak. “You ain’t eating nothing,” the speaker reports, “seems like you wanna listen / you ask me how’d my therapy go / I say, ‘we mostly talked about you.’” Soon his partner is weeping and he’s failing to: “I really want to cry but can’t / I hate how cold and strident I am.” Wolf once filled his songs with humiliating confessions and hyperbolic self-castigation. But here, the admissions of deficiency and blame are strikingly unadorned. “Please, God / someone tell me what to do,” he begs on “Brand New,” and on “The Letters, Etc.,” he admits, “I acted like a fool . . . I guess it’s my own damn fault.” Behind Wolf’s plaintive pleas and laments, the music soars. The band has refashioned its old sonic palette—pretty but brash, percussive yet ethereal—into something newly gorgeous, alternately soaring and subdued.

But even as the album’s portrait of heartbreak is anchored in the everyday, the personal arc is affixed to one with a much grander scale—the structure of Jewish time. Wolf has noted that the record’s narrative of reckoning and rebirth is bound up with the relationship between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah; indeed, the title of “G-dzilla G’dolah” frames the song’s hope for a new beginning in the context of the shofar’s call, while “Versa Go!” takes the Day of Atonement as a paradigm for the speaker’s entire way of being: “I know I’m no carnival / I’m the drive away / on a Jewish holiday / from a sorrowful, ancient calendar / a 24-hour fast.” Elsewhere, too, allusions to Jewishness quietly elevate mundane moments. In the therapy recap scene on “Later at The Loon,” the narrator isn’t consuming just steak, but a treyf pairing: “swallow with whole milk / I can tell it makes you sick.” And in the opening lines of “Brand New,” while the narrator’s partner “watch[es] Bachelorette in bed,” he “smokes about the exile,” and later confesses that he’s become “a stranger in this strange land.”

The two registers—the sacred and the quotidian—collide most subtly and powerfully on the album’s loveliest song, “Atreyu.” The opening line recasts the verse from Song of Songs traditionally used in Jewish wedding vows, seemingly to evoke a bygone era of romance: “I’m yours, you’re mine.” But it soon becomes clear that the song is something else entirely—a gesture of comfort for the narrator’s dog, an unwitting victim of human separation. “You are my only ride or die / I’ll always be right by your side,” Wolf murmurs, each syllable achingly tender. And when the chorus comes, a simple promise resounds as a mythic image of wandering and arrival: “I’ll take you / I’ll walk you home.”

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): In the past year, it has been hard to relax and harder to laugh, but Nida Manzoor’s comedy has been a reliable exception. When I experienced her martial-arts-meets-Bollywood-meets-bildungsroman film Polite Society, I was captivated by Manzoor’s wild imagination, the freshness of her writing, and the emotional heft of her extremely silly characters. So I watched the only other thing she has made so far: her debut Channel 4/Peacock show We Are Lady Parts, which follows a very angsty punk band made up of five very British Muslim women.

This premise alone may have been able to carry the show, but Manzoor does not rest on it, instead using all the filmmaking tools at her disposal to guarantee that we laugh ourselves to tears: a voiceover done right; magical realist flights of fancy; and some of the funniest songs you’ll ever hear, including bangers like “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister but Me” and “Voldemort Under My Headscarf.” Manzoor’s ragtag assemblage of women is likewise hilariously sketched. Through the eyes of protagonist Amina—a microbiology PhD student who is on the hunt for a good Muslim husband while secretly in love with Don McLean—we meet Saira, the band’s badass leader who worships at the altar of punk and works in a butcher’s shop; Ayesha, the closeted lesbian drummer who drives Ubers for a living; Bisma, who is raising a kid on the proceeds from zines such as “The Killing Period: Apocalypse Vag,” and Momtaz, the band’s agent with a day job selling cheap lingerie to elderly aunties.

But while these irreverent characterizations are very funny, at no point does We Are Lady Parts encourage us to treat the band members flippantly. Quite the opposite: Rarely does one meet women drawn this lovingly and carefully, and I have never seen Muslim women in particular afforded full inner lives in such a natural way, laden with the complexities of identity without suffocating under them. We see Amina contending with the many joyful flavors of haram, be that punk music or the desire to make out with a dreamy crush; Bisma wrestling with what covering up her dreadlocks with a hijab means for her as a Black Muslim woman; Ayesha agonizing over her white girlfriend’s insistence that coming out of the closet is the only healthy way to be queer; and Taz and Saira beefing over how to successfully cloak Lady Parts in a “fun Muslim” aesthetic without selling out. Through these characters’ journeys, Mazdoor is able to take on the big questions: the vexed terrain in which Muslim women’s agency is shaped, the many silences marginalized creators are forced to endure to succeed under capitalism, and the evergreen puzzle of whether winning ‘a seat at the table’ is, ultimately, a blessing or a curse. This show, however, is unequivocally a blessing; it makes you laugh, cry, think, and squirm, sometimes all at once. So don’t walk to watch We Are Lady Parts. Run.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Until I watched Jon Ornoy’s Lost in the Shuffle, I had spent precisely zero minutes of my 72-year life thinking about the deck of cards. Now, thanks to this utterly wonderful new documentary, I am certain to spend hours annoying friends and family with fun facts about this curious object—and the historical revelation that Canadian magician Shawn Farquhar, the star of the film, believes to be hiding in plain sight within it.

Lost in the Shuffle explains the fascinating history of the deck, from its origins in China to its development in the West—with the first mass production occurring in the French city of Rouen—and its many modifications over the centuries. But the film is, first and foremost, a tribute to the magicians who manipulate the cards. It features an international cohort of performers, all of them wonderful raconteurs who regale us with the sources of their lifelong obsession, what magic means to them, and their favorite “plot,” or trick. A magician from England, who says the deck saved his life, ventures that our reactions to magic say everything there is to know about us, and explains that card tricks are all based on the notion of bringing order out of chaos; one from Texas, who is blind, claims he was told by a neuroscientist that he has the most highly developed tactile sense in the world—and after seeing him work the cards, who are we to doubt him? The tricks the cast performs are remarkable, and Farquhar incorporates elements of all of them into the plot that ends the film, when he solves the mystery he believes to be raised by the standard deck: the circumstances of the 15th-century death of King Charles VIII of France.

The standard story is that the monarch died after bonking his head on a doorway. But Farquhar marshals evidence drawn from the faces of the cards to argue that he was actually murdered by his wife, Anne of Brittany. His close readings of the images are pretty stunning. Did you ever notice, for instance, that the Queen of Spades faces in the opposite direction as all the other queens? Or that the King of Hearts has two sets of arms, one of which seems to be stabbing him in the head? Now look at his sleeves—they don’t all have the same pattern. In fact, the stabbing arms (at the top and bottom of the card) have the same cuffs as the Queen of Spades. Is Fardquhar’s theory plausible? Who knows! Regardless, you will thoroughly enjoy hearing him make the case and learning about all these minor details. (And as an aficionado of French history, I can’t help but love a film that quotes and doubts the writings of the 15th-century French chronicler Philippe de Commines.) No film you see this year will surprise and delight you like this one—and after watching it, a deck of cards will never be the same.

***

Weekly Parshah Commentary

Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Diana Varenik (director of circulation): Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! had been on my reading list for months. But between the ongoing genocide in Gaza and a recent personal loss, I felt I didn’t have it in me to read a book about death. Last week I finally did, and I’m here to tell you what others already have: it’s high-octane, achingly rich, funny and devastating—and more relevant than ever in the face of mounting existential dread and sadness.

The novel follows Cyrus Shams, a twenty-something orphan, poet, and recovering alcoholic who is obsessed with martyrs–a fixation which, ironically, is the only thing keeping him alive. This obsession with martyrs stems from his own tenuous attachment to life, but also represents an attempt to make sense of the death that circumscribes his family’s story: his mother, Roya, killed when her commercial Iran Air flight is shot down by a US Navy Warship; his father, Ali, who stays alive just long enough to see Cyrus out of the house; Uncle Arash, whose service in the Gulf War saw him riding through battlefields nightly outfitted as the “angel of death,” visiting dying soldiers to entice them away from suicide; and Orkideh, an artist whose final installation is to die, publicly, at the Brooklyn Museum.

The pervasiveness of death elicits many different reactions among the characters: it numbs his late father, unravels his uncle’s sanity, and prompts bitter resignation in Orkideh, who reflects that “it seems very American to expect grief to change something…Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.” For Cyrus, the loss manifests as various afflictions–chronic insomnia, bedwetting, and addiction. One of his many coping mechanisms is a game he plays to help himself fall asleep, visualizing scenes between the dead and fictional characters or celebrities. We see his late father sharing a blunt with the poet Rumi, his mother having tea with Lisa Simpson, Orkideh and Donald Trump shopping for original works of classic art at a suburban mall. Indeed, part of the novel’s finesse comes from its unrelenting humor, which is a welcome complement to the crushing storyline.

In the midst of this mass death–casual, senseless, numeric–Martyr! grapples with how we grieve for the casualties of empire, whether they are our own, or whether they are not. Cyrus tries desperately to construct a definition of martyrdom that gives meaning to his mother’s death–the difference between 289 and 290 people killed on Iran Air flight 655, which he understands is “meaningless at the level of empire.” In an interview with AnOther Magazine, Akbar draws the obvious parallel: “When you read that 11,500 children have been murdered in Gaza, that is a pulverisingly large number. But if it was 11,501 or 11,499, I can’t qualitatively or emotionally comprehend that difference in value. Whereas narrative can return that granularity.” To Cyrus, that difference is a whole world, and it might be this insistence on radical specificity that makes Martyr! so forceful.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Jacques Rozier, the subject of a retrospective starting next week at Lincoln Center, was the great cineaste maudit of the French New Wave. Of the same generation of directors as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol, all quite prolific, he only made five feature films over the course of a 40-year career. Plagued by a variety of problems—from organizational problems to difficulties with financing his films and holding casts together—Rozier produced a movie a decade starting with Adieu Philippine in 1962 and ending with Fifi Martingale in 2001, leaving 22 fallow years until his death. This modest output helped keep him from widespread recognition. But now that his films, which have seldom been shown in the US, have been restored and are being distributed by Janus Films, we can count on them soon showing not just in New York, but at art houses and museums across the country, and eventually through the Criterion Collection.

Rozier’s favored theme was vacation: the instincts it unleashes, its pleasures and longueurs. On holiday, he understood, relationships are made and fall apart, friendships are tested, and good and bad tendencies are exposed as people are freed from the constraints of work life. In his films, young men are constantly trying to pick up young women, and the women know just how to fend off unwelcome advances. (In this regard, Rozier’s oeuvre is very French.) His is a cinema of sunshine and movement; the characters are always on the go, whether in cars or on trains, boats, or motor scooters. Like all the New Wave filmmakers, Rozier claimed the influence of great American films—in his case, screwball comedies, particularly of the Marx Brothers. He was not always successful in these homages, but when he was, as in Adieu Philippine and Maine-Ocean Express (1985), he approached genius.

Adieu Philippine in particular is not to be missed. It’s a joy from its first minute to its last—a movie so bright you almost need sunglasses to watch it, in which the non-professional cast brilliantly plays exactly what they are: beautiful young people looking to enjoy themselves. The film takes place at the height of the Algerian War, and the protagonist’s imminent call-up to the army hangs over him, but ultimately nothing can dim the sun in this magnificent film. While this is his best, all of the features are worth seeing, with the exception of Fifi Martingale, which was never released; Rozier said this was because the distributor went bust, yet one wonders if it wasn’t because the film is unwatchable. The less said about it the better. In addition to the main attractions, I also recommend the short film program, which includes Blue Jeans (1958)—made before Adieu Philippine and sharing much of the same spirit—and two excellent brief documentaries ’60 about the shooting of his friend Godard’s Contempt (1963), focusing on the phenomenon of Brigitte Bardot.

Rozier was the last of the great New Wave directors to die, surviving Godard by a year. If Godard made too many films, Rozier didn’t make enough. The loss was his, but also ours.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I keep imagining the moment when the idea occurred to the creators of the Jellicle Ball, a show at Manhattan’s Perelman Arts Center recreating queer ballroom culture a la Paris Is Burning, performed to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats: Wait . . . the Jellicle BALL . . . where they walk the . . . CAT-walk? We are going to make SO. MUCH. MONEY! Honestly, fair enough. Clever puns and double entendres abound in the show—just extended for the third time—which really rewards those familiar with both 1980s underground ball culture and the blockbuster Broadway musical from the same era. (Embarrassingly, my childhood love of musicals means I’m way more acquainted with the latter than the former, but whatever I forgot from Paris Is Burning, I’ve picked up in pop form from RuPaul’s Drag Race.)

Lloyd Webber famously resisted any deeper meaning for his show (“It’s about cats, Hal,” he famously said to a partner asking about the subtext), and that’s all well and good, but Jellicle Ball really benefits from the layers. You can tell that the all-Black and -Latinx cast is a mix of musical theater kids and people from the ball scene, and they’ve also made special effort to bring in some ball elders like Junior LaBeija, playing Gus the Theatre Cat, and DJ Capital Kaos, who unfortunately doesn’t do much; he remixed all the music and then Lloyd Webber said no—they had to do it faithfully or no dice.

It really shouldn’t work with the music being what it is—can you really duckwalk to “Magical Mister Mistoffelees”? Turns out you . . . can?! What makes it work is the recharacterization of the beloved Cats characters: McCavity is a fabulous couture thief, the Rum Tum Tugger serves Pretty Boy Realness, Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer are outer borough brats, Grizabella the Glamor Cat is an old Face Queen and house Mother fallen on hard times, and the Magical Mister Mistoffelees is a show-stopping supermodel ball queen. Does it feel sort of weird pretending to be at a ball—that is, mustering a big response to catwalk interactions that have been meticulously planned in advance amid an audience half composed of old Midwestern white people? Yes. And I admittedly wasn’t in the mood walking into the theater to hoot and stand and clap on cue. All that said, I’m glad I saw it. I actually felt sort of moved when the cast recites the “The Naming of Cats” (recall that all of the lyrics are T.S. Eliot poems)—about each cat’s secret, extravagant name, known to themself if not to their human companions—in this queer context. Perhaps Eliot really was a queen.

***

Weekly Parshah Commentary

Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.