Shabbat
Reading List

Libby Lenkinski (member, JC Board of Directors): This week—the first week of the Jewish month of Iyar—always runs heavy on nationalism in Israel, with the official holidays of Yom HaZikaron, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers, and Yom HaAtzmaut, or Israeli Independence Day, following in quick succession. Counter the official government calendar, many citizens of Israel—Jewish and Palestinian alike—opt to commemorate the Nakba on Israeli Independence Day. In honor of that sentiment, I wanted to recommend a new video series from the Australian Jewish website Plus61J, titled “From Their Perspective: Palestinian Citizens of Israel.”

The series was produced and directed by Ghousson Bisharat, a Palestinian citizen of Israel herself, and features some of the most insightful voices on the issues and challenges facing the community, whose families survived the Nakba but did not leave the land within ’48 borders. Part One features veteran media and policy professor Amal Jamal explaining the development of Arab politics within Israel; Part Two is a sit-down with veteran feminist activist Nabila Espanioly, who talks about social issues affecting Palestinian citizens of Israel—like housing, crime, and poverty—and their disproportionate impact on women; Part Three focuses on Dr. Amal El-sana A’ H’Jooj, author and founder of a Jewish-Arab NGO (AJEEC-NISPED), who outlines the prospects and difficulties of intercommunal solidarity in Israel; Part Four offers a glimpse into the balancing act Palestinian Israeli identity entails with journalist, filmmaker, and anchorman Rami Younis; and Part Five follows the musings of Arab hip-hop pioneer, actor, activist, and poet Tamer Nafar, who doubles down on the importance of cultural production, despite the lack of any institutional infrastructure for Arabic-language media.

As an Israeli American who works to further justice, equality, and freedom throughout Israel and the territories it controls, I know that the only way of reckoning with Israeli Independence/the Nakba is to talk about what happened in 1948 from multiple perspectives. But I also know we can’t stop there. As we see from the afterlives of South African apartheid, American slavery, and European imperialism, legally and socially entrenched systems of oppression never completely end—they shapeshift. The same is true for what is an ongoing Nakba for the Palestinian people. But if there is any hope of a positive future for Israelis, Palestinians, and both peoples’ diasporas, we have to go beyond simple recognition of contemporary injustice’s historical roots. We need a sense of what true equality would mean for those who are today disenfranchised, and Palestinian citizens of Israel, who constitute 21% of the country’s population, here offer nuanced, painful, and complex perspectives on this system of dispossession. This series is just a taste of their reality.

I’m lucky to call some of those featured in this series friends and colleagues. Their views represent an entry point to a more profound set of ideas about equality, partnership, and the importance of addressing the past.

Daniel May (publisher): For weeks, I’ve been waiting—with an embarrassing degree of fanboy excitement—for Alisa Solomon’s review of the current production of Loraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which just moved to Broadway this week. Solomon is, to my mind, one of the great theater critics in the country, and I knew that whatever she had to say about Hansberry’s rarely-produced masterpiece would prove more insightful, informative, and moving than anything else I could read about the show, which has haunted me since I saw it a few weeks ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And Solomon does not disappoint. I sent her review to the friend with whom I saw the show, who wrote back: “This made me cry.”

If you’ve read anything about the play, you probably know that it is, as the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins put it in The New York Times, a “study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis.” Solomon cites Jacobs-Jenkins’s description approvingly but notes that the play hones in on a particular kind of liberal self-delusion: namely, a Jewish one. For Solomon, Hansberry’s portrait offers a searing indictment of a personality familiar to anyone who has spent time in the world of American progressive Judaism—a person caught between confidence in their own unique capacity to transform the world, a desperate need for the recognition of that capacity, and the brutal insistence of the world to both resist that transformation and refuse that recognition. As Solomon reads it, the play is a story of what happens to such a person when those delusions fall away, and for Hansberry’s Brustein, that is both a tragic and redemptive story; as the delusions crumble, so does the man. But only when those delusions or pretenses fall away can they be replaced with the commitment to other human beings that is ultimately at the root of any struggle for justice.

Solomon is undoubtedly right about all of this, but her review also helped clarify what I found so moving about the play, which isn’t quite captured by descriptions of it as a searing indictment of white liberalism, or even more particularly white male Jewish liberalism. It is that, to be sure—Brustein’s casual misogyny and offhand racism made the Brooklyn audience around me gasp—but in her own discussion of the play, Hansberry wrote that, “the silhouette of the Western intellectual poised in hesitation before the flames of involvement was an accurate symbolism of some of my closest friends, some of whom crossed each other leaping in and out, for instance, of the Communist Party. Others searched, as agonizingly, for some ultimate justifications of their lives in the abstractions flowing out of London or Paris. Still others were contorted into seeking a meaningful repudiation of all justifications of anything and had, accordingly, turned to Zen, action painting, or even just Jack Kerouac.” In her self-description, it was “the climate and mood of such intellectuals which constitute the core of a play called The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”

The various avenues Hansberry lays out here amount to a concise account of most, if not all, of the paths that Brustein travels in the play as he struggles to align his commitments with the world in which he finds himself. But what most stands out to me in this quotation is the context: The silhouette she details is that of some of her closest friends. Brustein is a monstrously self-absorbed misogynist unaware of the status his whiteness confers. He is also brilliant, imaginative, and—above all—unwilling to live a life that does not align with his deepest commitments. That leads him to enormous naivéte and self-involvement and despair; it also provides the possibility of his redemption. What makes the play great, to my mind, is that it conveys the love, impatience, fury, and ultimately hope that Hansberry clearly had for those “closest friends.”

While the show may land with particular force for those white, male Jews raised to regard their own ideas with wonder, Hansberry is, I think, ultimately speaking to anyone that has found themselves run aground by the gulf between their sense of justice and truth and the machinations of a world that seems uninterested in either. In the play’s final lines, Hansberry has Sidney offer words that extend to the audience that has spent the last several hours watching his undoing. “Let us both weep,” he says gently. “That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again . . . then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow.”

Dana Bassett (director of finance and outreach): Basketball is great for many reasons, but one of them is that, unless you work for the NBA, it’s a great non-work topic to discuss with anyone and everyone. And because we’re deep in the playoffs, it’s all I’m talking about.

I, myself, am a lifelong Miami Heat fan. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting between my dad and my uncle and my uncle’s giant bag of giant green seeded grapes and watching Alonzo Mourning and Tim Hardaway in the paint. When my family gathers on holidays, the Heat or the Dolphins (or college football—but never, ever the Marlins), are always playing somewhere in the background. But my interest in the Miami Heat really hit a fever pitch at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I, like so many people, became obsessed with the NBA bubble (and Anna Karenina, but that’s a different Shabbat Reading List rec altogether). I was enthralled not just by the gameplay (which many have argued was of an overall higher quality than usual) but also the minutiae, the stories, the drama. I was fascinated by who players brought with them to the bubble, how the food service worked, how the reporters had to live on site, the political outspokenness of WNBA and NBA players, group economics, the endless protocols and testing cycles, et cetera. More so than usual, the NBA was a microcosm of our society at large, with all its segmentation, hierarchy, and human intrigue. Most importantly though, it gave us (fans) something to talk about! I grew close to people who also followed the league, and the respite from all-to-common conversations about death and disease felt precious and important.

Anyway, I could go on and on and on about my personal interest in the NBA. I, like my mother, am the type of fan who is not actually enjoying themselves unless my team is holding a comfortable lead. But for the casual spectator, now is the absolute best time to get into the game. It’s the veritable World Series of basketball, our Super Bowl, if you will. It’s the NBA playoffs.

As I’m writing this, the first round is about to finish, and we have another to get through until we arrive at the conference finals, the penultimate round of the tournament. While there are a few second round matchups we could discuss, I want to highlight the impending battle between two scrappy, lovable underdogs: my beloved Miami Heat, who upset the Milwaukee Bucks (the highest seeded team in their conference) this week and what is (surprisingly) now the best team New York has to offer, the Knicks, who will meet at Madison Square Garden for the first game of their second round series this Sunday.

It’s the playoffs, so any matchup is exciting, but little is better than competing with a much-hated and long-standing rival. The Heat and the Knicks have a storied history, facing off in the playoffs four consecutive times during the 1997-2000 NBA seasons (including the infamous “leg game” during the first round of the 1998 Eastern Conference playoffs. Google it.). There is even a Wikipedia page titled “Heat–Knicks rivalry.”

Couple that history with both teams’ excellent rosters, and, my friends, we have a series. Miami’s star, Jimmy Butler, scored a historic 56 points in Game 4 against the Bucks, and Knicks point guard Jaylen Brunson has been punching well above his 6-foot-2 frame, scoring over 40 points in the last two games of their first round series against the Cavaliers.

I’m afraid that this series will have a lasting impact on my friendship with various Knicks fans in my life (I have received more than a few menacing texts), but I’m sure it’ll be an exhilarating match up either way. Can’t wait to see what Spike Lee wears to the game. Heat in 5.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When Jews and fabulous wealth are linked, it’s usually the Rothschilds and their European financial empire that come to mind. Far less known are the Sassoons, the extraordinarily prosperous Iraqi Jewish family who rose to the highest ranks of the English aristocracy. This family, sometimes called “the Rothshilds of the East,” are the subject of a fascinating exhibit at the Jewish Museum simply called The Sassoons, on display until August 13th. (I also highly recommend its catalog, written by Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson, which is as sumptuous as the show it documents.)

Though The Sassoons focuses on all that was splendid and splendorous about the titular family, it doesn’t ignore the mundane matter of the source of their riches. David Sassoon, the already wealthy paterfamilias, fled Iraq in 1832 to escape persecution by the Mamluk rulers and established himself, his family, and his businesses in Calcutta and Bombay, and later Shanghai. Unlike the Rothschilds, banking was not at the heart of the Sassoon portfolio; their fortune was made in the manufacture and trading of real objects—principally cotton, textiles, and opium. When the British government finally moved to ban the opium trade, the Sassoons fought the proposal tooth and nail, presenting use of the drug as a positive good. They lost, but by that time their wealth was so enormous, and its sources so varied, that this barely made a dent in their lifestyle.

The Sassoons does not question the morality of the family’s involvement in the opium trade or their lobbying against its prohibition; indeed, it is not particularly interested in examining capitalist business practices. Instead, it considers how a Jewish family from the Western world’s imperial colonies managed to reach the very heights of the British upper crust, presenting their history as a tale of the conflicting pulls of assimilation and tradition. The exhibit traces the family’s ascent through objects, photographs, and the conservative Western art they collected as larger and larger branches of the family left the colonies for life in England, abandoning the magnificent imitation British homes they built in India and China—well represented at the show—for mansions in London and the English countryside. It also includes a generous selection of family portraits painted by some of the most important portraitists of the time, like John Singer Sargent.

Though assimilation into the highest ranks of the British elite led some of the Sassoons—including the most famous member of the family, the poet Siegfried Sassoon—to abandon their religion, others remained true to their ancestral roots. The show displays the Judaica the family members collected, as well as Karaite and Samaritan documents. Notably, the family did most of its philanthropic work through Jewish institutions, which they established and supported. And their origins also made a mark in other ways: For many years, for instance, their business correspondence was written in Baghdadi Jewish dialect, which became a form of code used to keep its contents hidden from prying eyes. But for the most part, especially from the early 20th century on, the Sassoons became more British than the British. The exhibit demonstrates just how easily and successfully they negotiated this shift.

Dahlia Krutkovich (fellow): Last week, I told my partner, N., I was planning to recommend In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm’s 1983 chronicle of a cascading set of disputes between the guardians and would-be destroyers of the Sigmund Freud Archive, the unpublished letters, notebooks, and marginalia controlled by the Freud estate. N., who has a glancing interest in psychoanalysis but mostly just puts up with my prattling on about Juliet Mitchell et al., later texted me this New York Times Styles section feature on the resurgence of Freudianism in our times. A Styles piece, she added, only telegraphs that a fad has played itself out and we should leave it for dead. But In the Freud Archives, along with the The Journalist and the Murderer and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, the other books published at the height of Malcolm’s powers, proves “Malcolm is the best to ever do it,” in the words of Nora Caplan-Bricker, the executive editor of Jewish Currents. So I’ve decided to move ahead with my recommendation, which risks placing me behind the tastemakers but will at least please my boss.

Malcolm—who has been the subject of a flurry of profiles since her death in 2021 and the publication of her posthumous autobiography earlier this year— situates herself as a character but not a player in the unfurling Oedipal saga between up-and-coming Freud scholar Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and his erstwhile mentor Kurt Eissler, writing with an eye toward the extremely self-conscious self-styling these men engage in as they engage with her. Eissler, an Old World devotee of Freud, seeks to protect the father of psychoanalysis’s legacy from latter-day assassination attempts; Masson, whom Malcolm introduces as “a practiced hand at seeking and winning the favor of older men in positions of power,” verges on succeeding Eissler as director of the Freud Archive—a functionally tenured position from which, in his own telling, he hopes to expose the entire profession as “based on a lie”—but before his plot can come to fruition, his craven ambition and yen for the spotlight lead him to gab to a reporter (not Malcolm) and publicize his controversial theories about the Freudian paradigm. In a series of dramatic letters, Eissler blocks Masson’s full appointment to the archive, and both men, Malcolm relates, are variously heartbroken, incensed, and indignant about the betrayals at hand.

The bulk of In The Freud Archives devotes itself to reconciling factual incongruities between the different accounts of Masson’s rise and fall—including the scientific dispute at the heart of the personal drama between Eissler and Masson. The entire narrative has a functionally dialectic structure to it, in which Masson’s and Eissler’s unreliable retellings are made compatible via a third litigant, whose independent assessment of both men mostly feels like a relief by the time it comes in the book’s final act.

Malcolm’s craft reveals itself in how she structures her book around perspectives from a peanut gallery of analysts, whose diagnoses Masson refers to as “cheap parlor analysis.” As Malcolm works through what are, on their face, ego-driven personal narratives that don’t make sense, these sidebars help ground the narrative and remind the reader that, yes, the protagonists in this story are the compulsive neurotics they present themselves to be—even if no one goes as far as to say exactly that. Just as I would arrive at a point of ultimate frustration with whichever personality had Malcolm’s attention, she would pivot to an apparent straight man or woman—another analyst with little-to-no stake in the scientific squabble between characters—to comment gravely on the personalities on display. But this series of contemptible personalities is hard to bear not because Malcolm renders each a caricature or cartoon, but because you get the sense she’s distilled them into an essential impression, which is itself a clinic on reporting.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Like everyone, I can’t seem to avoid conversations about how worried we should be about artificial intelligence. Yesterday, my husband played me a “Drake” song created without Drake—the beat, lyrics, and voice were all AI-generated. My husband is worried about the chaotic potential of deep fakes in an already unhinged political landscape. I suppose I’m worried about art—or not even art so much as its basic building blocks: language, line, sound. What will happen to our humanness when simulacrum is source, when we are “generating” from an entirely closed loop? To ask this question is to recognize the various ways this humanness has already been impoverished by our addiction to various technologies and the incessant horrors and demands of climate catastrophe and late capitalism. As philosopher Timothy Morton writes in All Art is Ecological, “Being in a place, being in an era, for instance an era of mass extinction, is intrinsically uncanny. We haven’t been paying much attention.”

This passage constitutes the epigraph for Faye Driscoll’s epic masterpiece Weathering, which wrapped six performances at New York Live Arts last Saturday. The performance—described as a “a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects”—evokes such anxieties about disconnect and alienation by rushing headlong into their negation. Ten dancers stand upright, somewhat apart, on a squishy, white platform. In the beginning, it’s unclear that anything at all is happening; fingertips search, chins tilt, gaze wanders. (The phone-addled audience member wonders how things could possibly go on this way.) But when the tech crew descends to rotate the platform, one notices that the picture has changed. Something is happening. The figures have begun to reach for one another. They have taken hold of each other’s clothing, they are making contact, pushing or draping or reaching with various parts of the body, forming a shifting tableau that calls to mind The Raft of Medusa. Over the next 70 minutes, the pace—and the nature of the contact—continues to intensify. The platform spins faster. Clothes are shed or clawed off by others. Powders puff and oozes smear and juices drip. Creaks and moans become sustained howls. Is this an orgy or a massacre? Is this terror or delight? Are they becoming something else—animal, undead—or rooting deeper in a basic humanness?

Driscoll has an incredible capacity to stuff the enormity of human experience into her shows. The last work I saw of hers, You’re Me (2012), was a duet which seemed to encompass every possible permutation of interrelation. And still, Weathering is on an entirely different scale, and though it seems like each performance has the potential to be quite different, there is also a sense of her mastery. Indeed, Driscoll sits in the front row, with the audience, breathing into a mic the way a maestro waves her arms, getting up intermittently to help push the raft, or swat fallen objects away from its path. In a short video about the making of the work, Driscoll calls the work “a requiem for the body,” in a rapidly changing world. By the end of Weathering, I felt as if she had drawn me through the collapse of civilization to the other side. What was left there are our bodies, our voices.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): I’m not quite sure what to make of The Passenger and Stella Maris, the pair of imperfect but deeply compelling novels by Cormac McCarthy released at the end of last year. The books center on salvage diver (and former race car driver) Bobby Western and his sister Alicia, tortured mathematical geniuses whose father was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb. The Passenger opens with Alicia’s suicide and follows Bobby’s haunted, mercurial life in the wake of her death, with interstitial chapters flashing back to Alicia’s encounters with a gang of hallucinated figures whose wisecracking ringleader calls himself the Thalidomide Kid; Stella Maris, a narrative prologue and thematic postscript, comprises a series of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist at an inpatient psychiatric facility, where she admits herself after a car crash leaves Bobby in a coma.

The Passenger, which is nearly twice the length of Stella Maris, initially presents itself as comparatively propulsive: After Bobby surfaces a mystery about a sunken plane during a dive, he winds up being pursued by nefarious government agents. But the thriller premise is ultimately a red herring that serves only to generate a sense of ambient menace and send Bobby on the run, where he bumps into old friends for digressive conversations and has plenty of time for brooding self-torment. Despite the dramatic differences in structure and scope, each novel is organized around winding and absorbing philosophical dialogues on guilt, memory, and the nature of the universe. (I was surprised to find myself occasionally reminded of Rachel Cusk’s discursively driven Outline trilogy.) The subject matter, from the interpersonal to the historical to the cosmic, is unrelentingly heavy, but the rhythm of these exchanges generates a sense of lightness and play. At moments when I felt frustrated by the novels’ willful obscurity and irresolution or suspicious that their loose structure was a sign of underdevelopment rather than masterful subtlety, this liveliness—and the ambition that simmers beneath the surface of each page, as McCarthy confronts fundamental questions of existence—carried me through.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Argentine director Laura Citarella’s new film, Trenque Lauquen, is a leisurely, complex exploration of the mystery that is other people. The title of the film, we quickly learn, both means “round lake” in the Indigenous Mapuche language and is the name of the town a few hundred miles from Buenos Aires where most of the story unfolds. The drama begins by following two men and their attempts to locate their lover Laura, an aspiring biologist who did not return to Buenos Aires after her contract to survey the plants of the rural region surrounding Trenque Lauquen expired. (The film owes a debt to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the greatest of all modernist films about a woman’s disappearance, which is underlined when the word “Aventura” appears on the screen early in the first of its two parts.) This initial premise is complicated by a brilliant series of flashbacks, which trace Laura’s attempt to solve two mysteries upon which she, in turn, has stumbled. One relates to a decades-old affair between lovers whose correspondence she discovers hidden inside a book by Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai in the local public library; the other concerns the strange creature apparently being hidden by Elisa, a local physician whose every action is wrapped in secrecy.

Over the course of the film’s four hours, Citarella doesn’t entirely resolve these enigmas, as the film slips effortlessly across continents and between genres, from romance to mystery to science fiction to horror. She makes use of the lengthy runtime to unhurriedly unveil more minor revelations. For instance, Laura’s supervisor complains that she left town with a pair of her “wellies” (the subtitles are annoyingly Australian, with the Argentines exclaiming “crikey” on several occasions); in the final scenes, no attention is drawn to the high rubber boots on her feet—the lost “wellies.” Characters frequently allude to the theft of a car, while a local who has fallen in love with Laura claims it was not stolen at all. We are teased for several hours before seeing that he was right.

Throughout the film, past and present are skillfully and even drolly mixed. Laura’s work and the ultimate revelation of what’s afoot in Elisa’s home are resolutely modern, but the setting of the seemingly endless grasslands of Argentina’s Pampas evokes the country’s mythic past. Two places bear the name of the greatest of all literary gauchos, Martín Fierro, and Laura even crosses paths with actual gauchos, in their ponchos and serapes and black hats. All of this adds up to a compelling and beguiling portrait of Trenque Lauquen—a place, in Laura Citarella’s rendering, of unplumbed strangeness.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Two must-see exhibitions: The first is Material/Inheritance at the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore, a group show curated by Leora Fridman pulling together artists who have been fellows in the now four-year-old New Jewish Culture Fellowship. Full disclosure: Though I did not participate in the show, I was a fellow in the first cohort. Many NJC fellows have graced the pages of Jewish Currents over the years, and at least one work in the show—Elie Lobovits’s Fertility series—was first published in Jewish Currents’s Summer 2022 issue. So this is not an impartial review so much as an affirmation that, as I said in this newsletter a few weeks ago, and as JC contributing writer Sol Brager wrote in Artforum last summer, something is up right now in the world of Jewish art.

The fellowship and the show take as a galvanizing text JC contributing editor and NJCF co-founder Maia Ipp’s 2019 essay “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant Garde,” which lamented the communal disinvestment in arts and culture in favor of Israel-related projects and programming. In this regard, the show feels like a coming out of sorts for a group of mostly millennial Jewish artists that is beginning to see itself as part of a cohort, perhaps, engaged in deeper conversation with one another about Jewish politics and identity. For me, the show’s highlights included Nat Sufrin’s irreverent and provocative How to See the Shoah: Google Images Translation of Celan and Reznikoff, which breaks down two poems—Paul Celan’s “Ashglory” and Charles Reznikoff’s “Holocaust”—into phrases alongside their Google images searches, displayed in a grid. I also really enjoyed two dramatic audio works: Jay Eddy’s naturalistic three-channel installation The Death of Arthur, following three generations mourning the death of a grandfather, and Ben Gassman and Brandon Woolf’s playful, stylish Between the Bread, which focuses on the sandwich as a site of urban inter-ethnic encounter. But perhaps my favorite piece was Liat Berdugo’s performative slide lecture Seeing it for the Trees, performed live at the opening, which uses the JNF-KKL’s photographic archive alongside personal images as a way to understand the role of trees in the formation of ethnonationalist statehood. The room was packed during Berdugo’s performance—much of the audience, the silver-haired crowd you might expect at a Jewish museum on a Sunday afternoon—and I couldn’t help but notice that this was just the kind of work that would have been pushed out of mainstream Jewish institutions just a few years ago. It made me feel hopeful that, despite the pervasive sense of an ossified Jewish communal infrastructure, a shift might be underway. The show is up until June 11th, and will include another day of performances at the closing in Maryland as well as some “activations” in New York City.

I also cannot recommend enough Images on which to build at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in Manhattan, curated by (another NJC fellow) Ariel Goldberg, which focuses on photography-based art, activism, education, and media production within queer and trans communities in the 1970s to the 1990s. “Presenting trans and queer image cultures from this time creates spaces beyond the visual, where felt experiences of affirmation, recognition, and connection form legacies to shape our present and future,” Goldberg writes in their curatorial statement. The show is barely more than one big room, and yet it feels dense with a web of connections; each listed artist or collective brings with them an entire community—sometimes an entire lineage. The space is frankly packed with people, and I found myself incredibly moved by the project of identifying and uplifting one’s yikhes. Perhaps I’m a sucker for the performative slide lecture (what an amazing form!) but when you go, you must make time for The Dyke Show by JEB (or Joan E. Biren), which, among other things, recovers the images of lesbian photographers, most of whom could only be claimed as lesbians in retrospect. This act of looking queerly, uncovering what the straight world would prefer not to see, acts as an anchor for the exhibition as a whole. The audio was recorded in front of a live audience—JEB toured the show between 1979–1984—and we hear them laugh and sigh and hum with interest, recognition, gratitude, and relief. In this moment of renewed homophobic and transphobic backlash, I found a lot of strength in listening to the reactions of that room, in feeling for a moment like I was there with them. I felt anew the meaning of that old Yiddish adage, “We Will Outlive Them.”

David Klion (contributing editor): I just finished a used copy of Breaking Ranks, Norman Podhoretz’s second memoir, which was published in 1979, and which I stumbled upon at the Strand last week. The neoconservatives are a topic of obsessive study for me, and Podhoretz in particular is a guilty pleasure as well; in spite of his awful politics and equally awful personality, in his prime he was a wonderful writer. I’m a fan of Making It, his first memoir, which I wrote about for Jewish Currents in 2017, 50 years after its publication, and later discussed on an episode of Know Your Enemy with Matt Sitman and JC contributor Sam Adler-Bell. That book, which is only tangentially concerned with politics, is a shamelessly self-aggrandizing account of the author’s rise from working-class Brooklyn to the Upper West Side intelligentsia. Making It managed to piss off all of Podhoretz’s friends in the latter milieu, not with overt ideological heresies but with its heresy against propriety; middle-class intellectuals weren’t supposed to acknowledge their own ambition for prestige and material success, much less brag about how far they’d already come. But dishy, confessional memoirs are less scandalous now than they were then, which might be why Making It has developed something of a cult following in the past few years among precisely the kind of lefty New York writers whose forebears hated it.

Breaking Ranks is a more conventional book, and much less referenced nowadays, but it’s an essential text for understanding the rise of neoconservatism. (It’s also a key source for Benjamin Balint’s Running Commentary, a favorite of multiple JC staffers that has been recommended here a few times already.) Loosely framed as a letter to his teenage son John, who would later inherit the editorship of Commentary that he still holds today, Breaking Ranks is an account of Podhoretz’s evolution from Cold War liberal to quasi-radical to reactionary over the course of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. The publication of Making It is a pivotal moment halfway through Breaking Ranks; it’s fun to consider whether Podhoretz’s alienation from his left-wing peers was more cause or effect of the controversy surrounding his previous memoir. Either way, the decade or so after Making It saw Podhoretz—and Commentary—embrace the right on nearly every major issue, triggering the Old and New Left alike.

From a contemporary vantage, what’s most striking about Breaking Ranks is how little the structure of elite political discourse has changed since the late ’70s. Today we have a surplus of writers making the pivot from left to right, always citing the same basic grievances: the rise of a new class of educated elites and a new dogma that betrays core liberal principles; the social advancement of marginalized groups to an extent that makes the author personally uncomfortable; the alleged hostility of university campuses and intellectual publications to open debate on hot-button issues. We hear this stuff all the time now, though rarely as articulately as Podhoretz put it when he established the template decades ago. Meanwhile, Podhoretz himself is still alive at 93; just last year, he told the Claremont Review of Books that he’s not sure Donald Trump actually lost the 2020 election. Everything old is neo again.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Last week, I attended one of the final nights of Ryan J. Haddad’s “Dark, Disabled Stories” at the Public Theater in New York. It was a terrific performance. Haddad is a gay actor with cerebral palsy, and the play is made up of autobiographical vignettes about his dating life and his experiences navigating New York City—especially its transit systems—with his walker. Haddad’s humor guides audience members through each story—a skillful balancing act that makes the difficult parts bearable and prevents his exploration of being disabled in an environment structured by ableism from coming off as any sort of “tragedy.” He makes clear at the beginning—after a story that begins with him giving a blowjob to a cute date in a pub bathroom—that if anyone is there to pity him, they should leave.

The play not only tells nuanced, non-universal stories about living with a disability, but also models ways to produce accessible theater. Haddad performs alongside another actor, Dickie Hearts, who signs the monologues in ASL; both are costumed in shirts that say “Ryan,” and the two interact onstage in creative, funny, and lovely ways. A third actor, Alejandra Ospina, plays the role of “Descriptor,” intermittently verbalizing visual cues for blind and low-vision audience members, which are telecast on a panel above the stage. The narration is also projected in text form on the back wall of the set.

Hearts and Ospina each share one monologue from their own lives. (Haddad subs in as the narrator or Descriptor.) Hearts shares a story of being consensually hand-cuffed during sex by a stranger from Grindr: He moves from his initial terror at having his method of communication restricted into an experience that begins to feel hot. Ospina’s scene—discussing her predicament, as a person in a motorized wheelchair, when a subway elevator is broken—has no positive resolution. She shares her grief at missing professional and social appointments, and the terror and uncertainty of being trapped underground.

The play seems successful at providing value—in the form of recognition, insight, or a mix of both—to disabled and non-disabled audience members alike. (It was cool to be in an audience where many people were visibly using mobility aids.) Even though this run has ended, I recommend that you follow Haddad’s work and look out for his future projects, which I suspect will be just as incisive and moving.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some of the French director François Ozon’s finest films, like Swimming Pool and Under the Sand, were co-written with the novelist Emmanuèle Bernheim, who died of cancer in 2017. Sadly, Americans who don’t read French have virtually no access to her remarkable and strange body of work. But with the American arrival of Ozon’s latest film, those who have been deprived of Bernheim’s company will now at least have a faithful film adaptation of one of her best books, the autobiographical Tout s’est bien passé (Everything Went Fine). The title refers to Bernheim’s father’s assisted suicide, and this jarring way of describing that event is a perfect example of Bernheim’s genius.

As the book and film make clear, Bernheim’s father, André, a wealthy retired industrialist and well-known art collector, was a very difficult man who treated his daughter coldly when she was a child. His marriage to Bernheim’s mother was a miserable one, not least because he was gay and deeply involved with a violent man who abused him. As the film begins, André has a stroke that leaves him severely diminished—his face twisted, his left eye drooping. Unable to do anything for himself, André announces that he wants to end it all, and it’s up to Emmanuèle (and not his other daughter, Pascale) to figure out how to get it done. Dutiful daughter that she is, she carries out her father’s wishes against her will.

Everything Went Fine’s exploration of aging succeeds on the strength of its actors. In his courageous performance as André, the usually vibrant and exuberant André Dussolier inhabits a character for whom sitting upright in a chair is a major accomplishment. Charlotte Rampling, whose performances usually burst with sexual energy, is trembling and grim as André’s ex-wife. Hannah Schygulla, once the iconic actress of the New German Cinema, plays the white-haired representative of the assisted suicide organization. The ravages of age are made all the more stark for those of us who knew these actors when they—and we—were young.

Emmanuèle and her sister hope that their father will change his mind—that as the day he calls “Le jour J,” meaning “D-Day,” approaches, André will realize that life is beautiful. But he remains stubborn. For him life is no longer beautiful, and he perseveres in his death drive, overcoming every last obstacle placed before him in his quest to end his days with a modicum of dignity. In the end, everything goes fine.

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): Earlier this month, I watched the 1986 movie Heartburn for the first time. I didn’t realize until later that the novel from which the film is adapted—Nora Ephron’s thinly veiled account of her cataclysmic divorce from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein—turns 40 this year. The anniversary has inspired a spate of celebratory pieces, framed as correctives to the condescending and chauvinistic reception that greeted both book and film in the ’80s. A representative critic complained at the time that the novel was “a great misuse of talent . . . whose only point is to nail Carl Bernstein,” who cheated on Ephron when she was seven months pregnant with their second child. The movie, which bombed, was likewise called “one-sided” and castigated for its “tunnel-vision point of view of the offended party.” (The film would have been stronger, a third critic suggested, if it had explored the motivations of the fictionalized, philandering husband; perhaps, for example, he was “disgusted by [his wife’s] pregnant body.”) According to the recent biography of Mike Nichols, who was Heartburn’s director, the hostile reaction took such a toll on him that he checked himself into psychiatric care.

The commentariat was right about one thing: The film is firmly situated in its protagonist’s point of view, faithful to the texture of her experience. This is the source of its defining feature, which is not spite but a fully realized precision. Every setting is rich with sociological detail (a New York apartment hung with sophisticated theatrical posters; a Washington, DC, townhouse dusty from a perpetually unfinished renovation). Many of the strongest scenes explore the pressure on the Ephron character, Rachel, to accept her husband’s affair, an expectation that warps her social milieu. After the adultery is revealed, Rachel’s best friend makes a habit of asking whether she is “being good”—in other words, whether she is resisting raising questions to which she will not like the answers. Rachel is played by a dauntless Meryl Streep, whose performance captures the embodied vulnerability of the character’s position. Heavily pregnant, she flees to New York City, balancing her toddler and her overnight bag on either side of her enormous belly, schlepping between a group therapy session and a magazine office where she goes in search of work. It’s the specificity of her reaction to what yet another critic dismissed as the “banal” fact of adultery that makes the betrayal land with such force. If Heartburn indulges in revenge in its final moments—in the form of a key lime pie that we watch Rachel bake, knowing and yet not quite believing its slapstick fate—then at least, as the saying goes, it is sweet.

Dahlia Krutkovich (fellow): When I entered college, I boasted a spotty attendance record at a Reform Sunday school as my only experience with religious education, and as a result, I had no real sense of Jewish tradition. I was lucky, then, that one of the most exciting professors at my liberal arts college taught a course on critical interpretations of the Book of Exodus, which I took my sophomore year mainly out of interest in the instructor and only vague curiosity for the subject material. I was even luckier that the primary accompanying text for that class, Avivah Gottleib Zornberg’s commentary The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on the Book of Exodus, became my formal introduction to Jewish textual interpretation.

Zornberg, who holds a PhD in English literature from Cambridge and whose father was the chief Rabbi of Scotland, approaches Exodus and its accompanying midrash—stories written by Torah scholars that explain the Bible’s apparent omissions or errors, which a classmate of mine earnestly referred to as “Bible fanfic”—as if they are, together, structured like a psychological self. Her interpretative method, she writes, hinges on the concept of the plain language of the text—the redemption of the Exodus story as it is written—being a conscious layer of meaning, while the midrashic stories and exegeses function as “unconscious layers, encrypted traces of more complex meaning.” She writes in her introduction to the volume that, “The public, overt, triumphal narrative of redemption is therefore diffracted in the midrashic texts into multiple, contradictory, unofficial narratives which, like the unconscious, undercut, destabilize the public narrative.” If the Exodus story is the constitutive narrative of Jewish religious peoplehood, placing it alongside the centuries’ long effort to retrieve and address the trauma of the flight from Egypt offers a compelling gestalt.

The readings and interpretations that follow are some of the most humanistic and deeply kind I’ve come to encounter in modern commentaries. In her essay on the first chapter of Exodus, where the narrative opens on the Israelites’ sense of selfhood impoverished by generations of enslavement, she hones in on the midrash’s preoccupation with mirrors. Placing Lionel Trilling and (perhaps obviously) Jacques Lacan alongside Rashi, Zornberg recasts this apparent preoccupation as an incipient celebration, one that implicitly represents the first moments in which the Israelites are able to reconstitute themselves as a people ready for divine covenant.

Now that I have also had the pleasure of reading some more of the more typically dry, chauvinistic debates and commentaries, I’m relieved and grateful for having had such a wise, introspective, and pluralistic introduction to Judaism as polyphonic textual tradition, one full of accumulated knowledge and accidental assertion.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Recently, while visiting my sister in Spain, I decided to delve into the work of one of the country’s most celebrated novelists and picked up Javier Marías’s 1992 novel A Heart so White, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Marías, who sadly died last September, begins the narrative with a literal bang: A young woman, just back from her honeymoon, goes to the bathroom during a family lunch and abruptly shoots herself, leaving no clues as to why. We soon move forward in time and learn that that young woman was the second wife of the narrator’s father and the sister of the narrator’s mother, who married her dead sister’s widower after her death. Over the course of the novel, these details and their backstory are revealed to the narrator only slowly, changing how he sees the nature of his own relationship to his wife, Luisa, and to the concept of marriage itself.

Marías tells this story in a manner that can only be called Proustian: He frequently launches—mid-plot—into page-long searching meditations on the nature of human behavior. But if Proust tends to obsess over minute details—how one observes light hitting the water; how a memory flits into the brain; how people negotiate a conversation in polite society—Marías’s digressions are broader, concerned with life’s major philosophical questions, and therefore perhaps an eerier narrative insertion. “Each step taken and each word spoken by anyone in any circumstances (hesitant or assured, sincere or false) have unimaginable repercussions that will affect someone who neither knows us nor wants to, someone who hasn’t yet been born or doesn’t know they’ll have to suffer us and become, literally, a matter of life and death,” the narrator muses while thinking about how husbands and wives come into each other’s lives by chance. And unlike Proust’s leisurely (maybe even glacially) paced narratives, Marías’s plot is taut and quick, at times unfolding like a thriller.

As the narrator slowly learns about his father’s dark past, he is led to dwell on the inherent instability and insecurity of trusting in another person. One must enter a marriage, he concludes, with the knowledge that it is possible everything will change, a third-party could unexpectedly enter the frame, a partner could one day be provoked to infidelity, or even to violence. At times, he describes this fear as one that’s gender-neutral and reciprocal—he or his wife could each one day become villain or victim.

But the specter of violence and power that hangs over the novel is decidedly male: The hushed, overheard stories that populate the narrative are those of philandering men with the very lives of trusting women in their hands. The narrator and Luisa appear as paragons of a newer, more modern Spanish generation: They are both working professional translators, they communicate well, she seems to have relatively equal say in the relationship. But still, they are beset on all sides by darker stories. In a hotel room in Cuba, they hear a man speaking to his younger, dependent mistress, promising to kill his sick wife back home. On a job overseas in New York City, the narrator stays with a friend and witnesses her attempt to navigate a dating scene of shady men demanding sex tapes. Can the narrator’s loving heterosexual marriage evade these oppressive legacies? Marías leaves us with that question.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo can be counted on for at least two, if not three, new films a year. Hong is not only their director; he is also their producer, screenwriter, editor, and composer. His productivity is greatly aided by his consistent use of straightforward plots, the same actors, and a simple aesthetic that takes advantage of even simpler means. But simplicity doesn’t mean lack of complexity.

His new film, Walk Up, stars Kwon Hae-hyo, who usually plays very Hong-like characters. Here he appears as a film director who takes his daughter to meet an old female friend, an interior designer. Following Hong’s signature style, the camera, placed at a medium distance from the characters, simply runs, with no movement or cuts, as the conversation runs its leisurely course. While events in each scene continue to flow unedited before the camera, in another Hong-ian turn, once the director leaves to meet a potential financier for his next film, the flow of time becomes an uncertain thing. The “chapters” of the film occur at varying intervals, with the passing of time signaled by the presence or absence of a character from a previous scene. The arcs of relationships—parental, amorous, and amical—rise and fall both within the scenes and between them; it is for us to reconstruct what occurred in the gaps. But time is not exactly linear; variations of the same events seem to recur, and the film’s end circles back to the past.

Hong’s simple setups and minimal editing make him one of the cinema’s most literary directors: The characters’ words matter. Though lacking in flash, he is also extremely cinematic. He respects the integrity of time and space immensely, and it’s precisely through the long takes that his characters have the room to reveal themselves to each other—and to us. But what is most cinematic is his ability to make undercurrents clear without hammering us over the head with them. It’s the glances, the gestures, the space between the characters that make Hong’s films so extraordinary.

Before you go!

Together with the Foundation for Middle East Piece, Jewish Currents is co-sponsoring a virtual event this coming Tuesday about how the Kohelet Policy Forum—a right-wing, US-funded Israeli think tank—is shaping law in policy in the the US and in Israel/Palestine. Read more about it and sign up here!

We also wanted to announce there will be no Thursday or Friday newsletter next week. Chag Pesach Sameach!

Jess Bergman (contributing writer): At the end of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater, the titular sex pest and erstwhile puppeteer, Mickey Sabbath, has lost virtually everything: two wives, a beloved mistress, his artistic practice, his job, his home. In exile from his life, Sabbath returns to the beach town where he grew up and pays an impromptu visit to his senile cousin Fish. Inside Fish’s untidy house, he finds “his own mother’s treasured sideboard,” and inside that sideboard, a carton of items that once belonged to his older brother Morty, a pilot who died in 1944 when his plane was shot down over the Pacific. To Sabbath, these material traces—an electric shaver studded with hairs, a red-white-and-blue yarmulke, a miniature ceramic fish—are shattering: “Just things. Just these few things, and for him they were the hurricane of the century.”

I thought of this melancholy encounter with a life’s detritus last weekend, on a visit to the Newark Public Library, where Roth’s personal library and other archival objects are on permanent display. The exhibit, located at the top of the palatial marble stairs that Roth immortalized in Goodbye, Columbus, consists, as you might expect, mostly of books. But alongside the inscribed galleys from admiring peers and a fat second edition of Webster’s unabridged Twentieth Century Dictionary you’ll find the sleek Eames Chair and ottoman where Roth sought relief from chronic back pain, a wastepaper basket and felt-tip pens from his study, a pennant from Weequahic High School. My favorite item was a worn-looking Mets cap with a dusty smudge on its brim.

I stopped by the exhibit while in Newark for Philip Roth Unbound, a three-day festival held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. It was a celebration of what would have been Roth’s 90th birthday—and a kind of reclamation after the disastrous rollout of his authorized biography in 2021. On Saturday morning, I took a seat at the back of a packed auditorium for “Letting the Repellant In,” a panel featuring the novelists Susan Choi, Gary Shteyngart, and Ottessa Moshfegh, moderated by Ayad Akhtar. The conversation explored the provocations in Roth’s work, both the deliberate and the artless, from his defiance of Jewish respectability politics to his frequently (but not, in my view, uniformly) misogynistic characterizations of women. While each panelist had their own unique relationship to Roth, they were largely in agreement that disgust, discomfort, and the expression of subterranean desires are essential ingredients of quality literature. Choi movingly defended the occasionally grotesque sexuality in Roth’s oeuvre as part of a vulnerable dedication to depicting embodiment: not just the irrepressible libido of the young man, but also the infirmity of the old. (This insight prompted minor disagreement from Moshfegh, who self-identified as “a prude.”) After a quick lunch break at the wood-paneled deli Hobby’s—where every table is set with a complimentary ice bucket of pickles—I caught an afternoon reading of Roth’s 1959 story “Defender of the Faith” by Morgan Spector, star of HBO’s 2020 adaptation of The Plot Against America, whose actorly yet restrained performance was almost as impressive as the fact that he took a single sip of water while speaking for an unbroken hour and a half.

Attending only a small slice of events in the very middle of the festival, I was mostly spared from the kind of portentous remarks usually saved for opening and closing ceremonies. But there was a moment during the audience Q&A portion of “Letting the Repellant In” when a familiar flicker of anxiety emerged: Given the debates about representation, likeability, and “problematic” authors roiling liberal college campuses and MFA workshops, one attendee wondered, would Roth’s work continue to be taught? As someone who came to his novels outside of the classroom, and who has always understood his reputation as owing more to ordinary readers and literary critics than any scholarly edifice, I confess I found the question a little beside the point. Looking around at the rapt audience—which skewed older, but included a decent smattering of my generational peers—it was hard to muster too much fear about the durability of Roth’s legacy. At the very least, I thought, the proceedings would have flattered his insatiable ego.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I’m not sure what’s going on: Usually I walk around like Jay Sherman in the 90s animated cult classic The Critic (catch phrase: “It stinks!”). But lately I’ve seen so much good art—and even more surprising, a lot of it Jewish. Are these the fruits of mid-pandemic? Are we entering a more fertile phase in Jewish art? (If you think the answer to the latter question is “yes” and have theories about why this may be, reply to this email and let me know.) Either way, last Friday night, I attended one of the sold out performances of Alexandra Tatarsky’s solo show Sad Boys in Harpy Land at Abrons Art Center, which I loved. From the first sequence, in which Tatarksy is a cartoonish lounge singer, wriggling behind the mic while performing a song about death by canned fish—a number she follows up by cracking a can of anchovies in oil and stuffing them into her mouth with her fingers—I was equal parts captivated, confused, and almost pleasurably repelled.

Tatarsky is a clown—that’s how she defines her otherwise difficult to describe practice of being weird onstage with props. For almost a decade she has been working on an interconnected series of absurd existentialist performances about nothing that she calls Seinfeld (get it?), and which takes as a loose text Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 18th century artist bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. (She mocks the sound and pretensions of this word, bildungsroman; she often makes words physical in this performance, processing them through the body like a ball traveling a Rube Goldberg machine.)

The headline for Talya Zax’s piece about the show in The Forward (which I would be surprised if she chose) proclaims that the show is “about” the Holocaust. I don’t think that’s right, but it does seem that Tatarsky has found the object she needs for her ongoing performance of painful, meaningless (hilarious) nothing by leaning into the contours of a kind of mid-century Jewish trope. I’m reminded here of the Jews that surround Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer: grotesque, lecherous, dramatic, with an almost primordial relish—a talent, perhaps—for suffering. (“Gentiles have a different way of suffering,” Miller writes. “They suffer without neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.”) It is a very old Jewishness, a nod to the history of Jew-as-onstage-metaphor for all of suffering humanity—made new and strange by the sheer extent of its strangeness. The show has finished its run, unfortunately, but since it seems that Tatarsky is committed to keeping up the bit indefinitely, there will undoubtedly be another chance to catch her.

Alice Radosh (co-chair, JC Council): Before I read historian and museum curator Richard Rabinowitz’s new book, Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story, Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance was the example that came to mind of a narrative that uses inherited objects to tell a family’s story through the generations. But I suspect very few Jewish Currents readers are walking around with netsuke—the tiny wood and ivory sculptures centered in de Waal’s narrative—in their pockets. And de Waal’s family, the cosmopolitan Ephrussi clan whose wealth was rivaled only by their co-religionist friends, the Rothschilds, may feel a tiny bit out of reach for most of us.

From more familiar objects, Rabinowitz weaves together what, for many Currents subscribers, is probably a more familiar story. Using the skills he cultivated in his curatorial work for New York City’s Tenement Museum, Rabinowitz brings alive the non-religious but strongly Jewish world of early 20th-century immigrant Brooklyn. Each chapter of Objects of Love and Regret is structured around an ordinary item once found in the Rabinowitz family home in East New York. Each object’s history explores a different dimension of his family’s early struggle to hold on to tradition and community while becoming “American.” In examining a simple bottle opener, for instance, Rabinowitz recounts the story of his then-teenage mother teaching his grandmother how to use the tool as part of an American kitchen. In another chapter, Rabinowitz honors a wooden cigar case that housed rarely useful but never-to-be-discarded odds and ends. Beach chairs, first used for homemade picnic lunches in local parks, became used for stoop sitting as the family left the tenements and moved to a neighborhood of attached houses. The history of the chairs says all that needs to be said about the loss of community. As stuff, the objects might seem like nothing special, but over the course of Rabinowitz’s storytelling and research, they come to feel very special.

The book is a lot more than a walk down memory lane. Rabinowitz sensitively tracks the upward mobility of his parents alongside the social fragmentation and physical decay that reshaped Brooklyn between the 1930s and 50s. As he investigates these changes, he presents both what happened in his family’s neighborhood as well as a vision of what could have been, a parallel that is simultaneously heartbreaking and thought-provoking as Brooklyn continues to evolve. Long-time readers of the magazine will recognize and appreciate being immersed in a neighborhood that has long since disappeared; newer Currents subscribers will be introduced and welcomed into that era.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): While watching the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s latest film, Rimini, I wracked my brain trying to come up with another filmmaker with as grim a vision of humanity. Lars von Trier—whose shamelessness in degrading his actors, particularly women, puts him and Seidl in the same class—comes close. But in Seidl there is less aestheticizing of humanity’s sorry state. He is not only a filmmaker who sees us as morally and emotionally fallen beings, but one for whom our physical ruin is omnipresent. His cruelty to his characters isn’t physical; rather, it consists in casting an unflattering gaze on human bodies and their desires. His films are so many portraits of Dorian Gray—he puts the hidden image of Wilde’s classic repeatedly on display.

Like much of Seidl’s oeuvre, Rimini—which continues its run in New York at the Quad this week and will open in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal on March 31st—seems to be a documentary, and if you go into it accepting that premise, you’ll wonder at every moment how the participants agreed to take part. But it is, in fact, a carefully constructed fiction film, tracing the extremely plausible downward trajectory of Richie Bravo, an Austrian easy listening singer, played with chilling realism by Michael Thomas. Once a big star, he has now landed in Rimini, a city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, where he performs in hotel dining rooms before crowds of middle-aged, German-speaking tourists, all reliving their lost youths through this rather absurd-looking schlockmeister in his sub-Elvis costumes. Earning almost nothing from his shows, Bravo supplements his income by sleeping with female admirers, who pay for the very dubious pleasure of doing so. Rimini itself is as broke as Bravo: The film, which takes place in winter, shows a desolate resort city in its off-season, the streets and beaches covered in snow, the empty hotels looking as rundown as the people, many of whom are refugees from Africa sleeping outdoors or killing time waiting for nothing.

Bravo’s life is shaken out of its pathetic rut by the appearance of an attractive young woman who he attempts to pick up. But he soon learns that she is his long-lost daughter, who has come to claim years of unpaid child support. In a typical Seidl touch, Bravo accepts that he owes the money and promises to turn it over—but in order to do so, he must commit the basest act of a very base life.

I fear I might have made Rimini sound like an unattractive experience, and it’s certainly not a date movie. But it is an exhilaratingly clear-eyed portrayal of human sadness and delusion.