Shabbat
Reading List
Dana Bassett (development director): If there’s one thing I know about being Lebanese-American, it is that Lebanese-Americans love one thing–and that thing is Lebanese-American Khalil Gibran. With this knowledge firmly in hand, I was of course intrigued to see the words “Illustrated by Khalil Gibran” printed on the dark orange cover of The Book of Khalid, which stuck out to me while I was looking over second-hand titles at the Bed-Stuy bookstore and cafe Better Read Than Dead.
The back cover mentions that the novel, written in 1911 by Ameen Rihani, is considered to be the first by an Arab-American writer in English and that Rihani was besties with the great Gibran, who apparently based The Prophet (Leb 101 required reading) off of Rihani’s characters. As a devoted Arab-American, what could I do but give the man at the bookstore counter his eight dollars? It was my long-winded, disjointed and overly descriptive destiny.
I later learned from my friend Zain, who is an aficionado of forgotten authors, that, though The Book of Khaled was originally published a century ago, it was republished in 2012 by Neversink Press. According to Zain, Neversink “digs up forgotten authors for contemporary audiences.” Despite the book’s impressive historical pedigree, I have to admit that I do kind of understand why it was forgotten.
The text is presented as a “found manuscript” partially authored by the wandering dreamer, prophet, and fool Khalid and buttressed by the omniscient narrator’s interviews with various individuals, including Khalid’s best friend and travel companion, Shakib. But the narrative is very convoluted, and there are only three small illustrations by Gibran. The style makes it hard to tell what is “real” and what is not. The parafictional interplay between the narrator’s intervention and Khalid’s own almost makes the text interesting but mostly makes it confusing. Despite my communal loyalty to Gibran and best efforts to appreciate Rihani’s novel, I cannot earnestly say I recommend that you read it.
After a winding introduction, the book mostly follows the lives of an opposite but codependent pair of friends, Khalid and Shakib, and their selected misadventures as immigrants from Baalbek to the Little Syrian section of downtown Manhattan and back. While certain aspects of the novel feel significant, like Khalid’s propensity for burning books once he finishes reading them and a moving chapter on the metaphysical quality of ruffles, the chapters don’t necessarily relate to or build upon one another. In fact, the novel feels disjointed, as Khalid jumps from one failed scheme to the next. In one instance, the narrator abruptly ends a chapter on a painful event in Khalid’s life and then quickly pivots to Khalid’s meditation on the beauty of the natural world. Funnily enough, my edition is a “readers copy” with a menacing warning across the bottom: UNCORRECTED ADVANCE READER COPY — DO NOT QUOTE. Another apparent layer of separation between me and being Lebanese.
When I mentioned I was personally struggling with how much I wasn’t enjoying the book, Zain sympathized. “I find that books that deal with cultural identity—between two worlds and all!—tend to be all over the place all of the time!” he texted back.
I’m still going to finish The Book of Khalid (this weekend, in fact), but my waning interest in Khalid and Shakib’s activities feels like a personal failure of my Lebanese-ness.
“Inshallah it will come together in the end,” Zain wrote.
Inshallah Zain is right.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): This piece by Vivian Gornick in Lux gave me publishing envy, so I thought I would share it with you. It’s a portrait of Gornick’s relationship with her analyst, Dr. F, “a small, neat woman in late middle age, a German-Jewish Freudian analyst who wore an air of gravity that was both reassuring and off-putting.” Having internalized the patriarchal orientation of psychoanalysis at the time, Dr. F struggles to help Gornick with her issues: The analyst thinks they are trying to resolve Gornick’s trouble with men; Gornick thinks they are trying to resolve her trouble with work. (“Whether the therapists knew it or not, they were keepers of a culture that people like me were now rebelling against.“) The moments of epiphany in the piece—whether Gornick’s or Dr. F’s, relayed by Gornick—reminded me what I love about Gornick’s writing, the way she rings a line of dialogue like a bell, the way meaning resounds in small episodes. It made me want to go back and read Fierce Attachments. But also, how exciting to read something new! Viv has still got it.
Aparna Gopalan (contributing editor): If you are queer, Asian, or part of a complicated parent-child relationship, Kim Hye-jin’s Concerning My Daughter is not a book you should pick up without careful planning. Not simply because it will leave you bawling for minutes or hours (although it is likely to do that) but because it might leave you haunted for days and weeks to come.
The book is told from the perspective of an unnamed 70-something-year-old woman who works in a nursing home in an unnamed country and watches her also-unnamed 30-something-year-old daughter with constant pain and disapproval. With the usual accoutrement of a novel (proper nouns, a plot) stripped away, all that’s left on the page is the raw, first-person experience of a woman laboring her way to the grave while watching her beloved child grow up to be gay.
The book opens with the daughter in financial distress. After asking her mother for money that is nowhere to be found, the daughter ends up temporarily moving in with her mother and bringing her partner Lane along with her. This sets up scene after scene of the mother’s suffering as she is forced to look directly at the things she had otherwise “only imagined and assumed,” and, one might add, things she had denied. In one early scene, the mother watches her daughter and Lane through a bedroom door left ajar. She recounts: “my daughter, dressed in a sleeveless shirt and shorts, has one arm wrapped gently around the girl who’s facing away from her. Sisters who get along well. Close friends. But what draws them to each other isn’t something so common and ordinary. Whatever it is, it’s clearly beyond my assumptions or expectations.”
The mother does not take this irrefutable proof of her daughter’s sexuality well. Over the course of the novel, she becomes more venomous than any first-person protagonist has any right to be, at one point saying to herself, “Why won’t she try to live a normal life? Why won’t she even try? Why did I bring a child like that into the world? And to think how happy I was when I first had her! She was a wonder to look at and gazing down at the sleeping child filled me with feelings I can only describe as love...Why does my daughter, of all people, have to like women?...How could she be so cruel? Why am I ashamed of this child that came out of me? I don’t like the fact that I am ashamed to be her mother. Why is she making me deny her, and by extension myself and this entire life I’ve lived?”
Reading these internal asides, snipes, and diatribes, one seems to get a front row seat to the thoughts of every parent with a child who refuses to conform. It’s like finding the private diaries of Evelyn from Everything Everywhere All At Once and witnessing the guilt, sadness, disgust, and stubborn denial that simmers underneath the surface of a seemingly-benign disapproval. Reading this book feels like a faux-ethnographic exercise in trying to answer the questions any child facing a parent’s rejection asks themselves, such as, Why are they like this? Where is their horror coming from? And what makes it so very enduring? The mother’s narration offers tantalizing clues.
At times, it seems her disapproval of her daughter is animated by nothing more than petty shame as she imagines her family becoming fodder for gossip: “What if someone sees? What if strange accounts travel from household to household, embellished and altered at every stop, sweeping through the neighborhood? What if the words reach my ears like a storm?” But there are deeper fears at play, too: “You think you’re going to be young forever?” the mother asks her daughter. “You are alone. What do you have? A husband? Children? Friends and colleagues will leave you eventually.” As the novel progresses, the mother’s narration repeatedly returns to the anxiety that her child will live out old age just as she is: toiling endlessly in an often demeaning job, coming home everyday to an empty house, living only with memories of people who are gone.
Ultimately, the mother’s refusal to accept her daughter seems to stem from an unshakeable belief that her child will not be able to defy the laws of society and normalcy to find peace, love, and a graceful old age with Lane.“What kind of world do they think they live in?” she thinks when her daughter and Lane speak up against a neighbor beating his wife rather than simply turning their eyes away. “A magical, brilliant place they read about in books? The kind of thing a few people can pick up and overturn?”
As the book goes on, the mother’s anguish intensifies: at one point she confesses she wants to kill Lane. But then, when a patient at her nursing home is mistreated and the mother resists it rather than watching from the sidelines, she herself begins acting as if she can transform the world from a cruel place to a kind one. She refuses to believe her colleagues when they say old people’s suffering is just “the way of the world,” or just “normal.” She begins to make a scene, to do things that set people talking, defy the rules she so insidiously inflicts upon her child.
The mother’s growing hypocrisy—preaching conformity to others while refusing it for herself, telling her daughter to stop protesting at work even as she herself loses her job for her “sentimentality”—makes the second part of the book even more infuriating than the first. It takes a homophobic mob attacking her daughter for the mother to see that like her, her daughter and Lane “stand with their feet planted on firm ground, not in fantasies or daydreams...They exist in the thick of life, terrifying, relentless.”
This is not to say the mother “comes around” to having a gay daughter—this story, after all, is not bound by the plot requirements of an Oscar-nominated movie. Even as she spends her days caring for a patient that she (not to spoil anything) literally steals out of her nursing home, the mother hopes that the sight of her changing diapers and cleaning bedpans will make her daughter and Lane ‘realistic’ about their old age. She hopes they will “go find themselves a real partner now – someone who will share the responsibility and trust,” because her daughter’s seven-year-long relationship still cannot appear “real” in her eyes. But no other ending could have really done this book justice or made it feel like it is ventriloquizing all the world’s unaccepting parents, laying bare their deepest fears for their children to read with pain and horror, but also, maybe only for a minute, with understanding.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Nineteenth-century Danish art is certainly not something museumgoers get to see much of, which makes “Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 16th, all the more welcome. The show is a generous one, with about 100 works in various mediums organized by theme. Sketches and paintings of arresting nature scenes abound, as do portraits. Danish monuments are covered, too, and striking works depicting eerie dolmens feature prominently. Most impressive are paintings of Copenhagen and its harbor, particularly Johan Christian Dahl’s Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight (1846). The painting is a massive work, more than three feet by five feet, of a looming nighttime sky, the moonlight glimmering on the water captured with the perfect degree of sadness and gloom.
One interesting series of paintings and drawings of rooms—some inhabited, some not—makes brilliant use of space and geometric shape. Among this latter group are two pieces that make the entire exhibition worthwhile: Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 (1912) and Moonlight, Strandgade 30 (1900–1906). These are the only paintings in the show by the greatest of all Danish artists—indeed, one of the greatest artists of his time—Vilhelm Hammershøi. (Two drawings are also included, as well as a suitably scruffy-looking portrait.) I mentioned Hammershøi when I recommended the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney, for light and private interiors were these artists’ great subjects. Both of the Hammershøi paintings are of uninhabited rooms, but it’s his genius that an empty room becomes the perfect pretext for filling a space with shadow and light, laid onto the canvas with a stunning variety of tone. Shadows of objects replace the objects themselves. In Moonlight, light seems to originate from an impossible place below the surface on which light is cast. But Hammershøi has seen something we don’t: that light can come from below, reflected off a well-polished floor. Different qualities of light are handled with equal mastery; hazy light and harsh light are given their individual personalities. There is no need for a figure in the room, for light is given being.
I can only assume there was some curatorial problem that prevented the museum from having more works by Hammershoi, who stands head and shoulders above his compatriots. Even so, two unforgettable works on a show is a number not to be sneered at.
A personal note: When we travel, my wife Joan and I like to have a theme for our trips that will take us beyond the tourist route. So we visited the Lisbon of Fernando Pessoa, the Paris of Proust, and Oslo through the films of Joachim Trier, visiting every location in his works shot in the Norwegian capital. We already have our package of lists and maps of the locations containing paintings by Hammershøi, as well as the places he painted them. “Beyond the Light” has whetted our already voracious appetite for more of this largely unsung genius.
We hosted a conversation between artist Katz Tepper and Greg Bordowitz back in March of last year, where Tepper discussed how kinship, disability, and diasporism informed the creation of their film Roasted Cockroach for Scale. We wanted to share that Roasted Cockroach is on view at Lauren Gitlin and has been extended until February 19. You should go see it if you’re in New York!
Mari Cohen (associate editor): Within a Budding Grove, the second of seven volumes in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is often described as the installment in which the narrator—seen in the previous book mostly preoccupied with missing his mother at bedtime—grows up a bit and becomes obsessed, instead, with his love for a series of youthful and feisty girls. But what kind of love is this? The book, which I read last month in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation revised by Terrence Kilmartin and then D.J. Enright, is less interested in love’s capacity to bring us closer to another person than in the way that love obscures, or interferes, with understanding another: “The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow…all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry a very clear impression of her.” Since the narrator’s approach to his objects of desire is less about them than about his impression of them, the real thing is likely to disappoint, just as his attendance at a performance by the actress La Berma and his later visit to a church in the seaside resort town Balbec are feeble letdowns compared to the images he has constructed over a period of years.
When he finally has a chance to meet the girl he’s long admired from afar at Balbec, real life’s intrusion on carefully nurtured fantasy briefly dampens his excitement: “The certainty of being introduced to these girls had had the effect of making me not only feign indifference to them, but actually feel it.” Instead of an experience shared by two people, love, in Budding Grove, is mostly an extended negotiation with the self, about what the narrator can make himself believe about a girl, and whether he can successfully stave off despair by convincing himself she must feel the same way. Indeed, what Proust calls love here might better be understood as lust or a crush; in any case, it’s a relatively pessimistic account of how stubbornly the self intrudes in our attempts to know others. But to read it, and to chew on Proust’s exhaustive and penetrating analysis of every passing emotion our narrator has as he fumbles his way into adulthood, is nothing but a delight.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Since New Year’s Eve, my wife and I have been slowly making our way through the oeuvre of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. This week, after celebrating our twin sons’ first birthday, we watched his 1988 masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro. It turned out to be perfect for the occasion. This quiet, whimsical film follows two young sisters as they settle into an old house in the countryside, where they’ve moved to be closer to the hospital where their mother is convalescing from an unspecified illness. As their professor father attends to the house and his work, the girls spend most of their time exploring their new home and the surrounding forest, where they discover a number of friendly, magical spirits, from tiny soot-like beings that swarm mischievously through the house to the large, cuddly, titular beast who reigns over the woods. Though the specter of the mother’s sickness tinges the film with melancholy, My Neighbor Totoro is largely free of narrative conflict. Instead, it’s structured around the sisters’ mundane little missions—planting acorns in the yard and urging them to sprout, meeting their dad at a bus stop to deliver an umbrella—which are suffused with the dreamy unreality of youth. Like Maurice Sendak’s picture books or Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book, My Neighbor Totoro is the rare work that approaches the actual, unadulterated experience of childhood, in which the world is an infinite reservoir of wonder.
David Klion (newsletter editor): The guitarist and songwriter Tom Verlaine, best known as the frontman of the band Television, died last weekend at 73. Though never quite as commercially successful as its peers in the 1970s downtown Manhattan punk scene—a scene that also included Blondie, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Patti Smith—Television was enormously influential on the way alternative rock would sound over subsequent decades. Perhaps inspired by this classic Onion article, which mentions Television, I’ve been playing 1977’s Marquee Moon for my enthusiastic four-month-old daughter this week. I have a particular fondness for one of the gentler tracks, “Guiding Light,” which seems to anticipate the entire oeuvre of U2, one of the many bands to acknowledge Verlaine’s impact.
I’ve also been revisiting Will Hermes’s wonderful 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, which is a panoramic account of the diverse music scenes that exploded across New York City in the mid-1970s (amid the punitive fiscal crisis historians increasingly recognize as the beginning of the neoliberal era). In addition to Television and all the other aforementioned bands, Hermes covers everything from hip-hop to jazz to salsa to classical, all of which thrived as cheap rents attracted misfits from the outer boroughs and the suburbs and facilitated creative cross-pollination. It situates Verlaine in a wider context; while his talent was singular, it was realized through contact and collaboration and experimentation, as everything worthwhile is.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Pierre Le-Tan, who died in 2019, was a French artist and illustrator who collaborated with the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, among others. He was also, as he tells us in his marvelous volume A Few Collectors, a tireless collector of thousands of objects, for whom “collecting [was] both essential and completely useless.”
A Few Collectors is itself a collection, a series of illustrated vignettes about the collectors whose path he crossed over the course of a lifetime. There’s the collector who owned the dildo once in the possession of the French fascist writer Robert Brasillach; the former beauty who never married because objects were more important than men; and the people who own things that were once Le-Tan’s, which he had to sell when financial hard times hit.
Though art and artistic objects dominate, there is also the man who collects the wax models of the heads of criminals and, most fascinating of all, the man who collected crumpled pieces of paper: restaurant checks, letters, tissues. Sadly, upon his death his heirs flattened all these apparently worthless pieces of paper he had so carefully saved, destroying a lifetime’s worth of collecting. The tags attached to the crumpled objects, lovingly drawn by Le-Tan, go untranslated from the original French, so only the bilingual will know the sorrow attached to the crumpled letter paper, related to “Nicole, a bad memory,” or that the saved post-it note is described as “a minor, but charming” item.
My thousands of books will find a home with my son after I die. But how long, I wondered after reading A Few Collectors, will my collection of hundreds of bookmarks, picked up at bookstores from around the world, survive me?
Before you go!
There’s a new magazine from Jewish Currents contributors Madeleine Schwartz and Linda Kinstler that should be on your radar: The Dial, which calls itself “the world’s little magazine” and aims to cover stories from around the globe. The magazine’s first issue is devoted to the international fight for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy and includes stories from Poland, Ghana, Turkey, France, and more. Enjoy!
Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): I’ve been thinking about the quietly devastating film Aftersun, directed by Charlotte Wells, ever since I watched it earlier this week. The compulsion to revisit images, replay scenes, feels especially appropriate in this case: The movie starts with the instantly recognizable sound of a VCR player rewinding as the protagonist, Sophie—now an adult—recursively rewatches video footage from a vacation she took as an 11-year-old with her dad. This understated framing device signals the film’s interest in everything that has evaded the camera’s gaze—that hovers, elusive, behind the moments that Sophie keeps returning to.
The enigma Sophie is searching for in these videos is, simply put, her dad, Calum (played exquisitely by Paul Mescal; the young actor who portrays Sophie, Frankie Corio, is also wonderful). If you think that Mescal, who had his break-out performance two years ago as a university-age heart-throb in a Sally Rooney adaptation, seems a bit young to be cast as the parent of a pre-teen, that’s kind of the point: He jokes about the “old” parents of his daughter’s age-mates, but also visibly struggles to live up to his own idea of what a father should be. As the film follows the pair through a few days on the Turkish coast (normally, we gather, Calum lives in London, while Sophie’s home is in Edinburgh with her mom), it captures the tenderness between them—in gorgeous, sometimes wordless scenes washed with the golden glow of summer or the soft lilac light of dusk—as well as the darkness that Calum tries to conceal. After Sophie goes to bed at night, he does Tai Chi, seeking with an excruciating and dancerly grace to banish the cloud that smothers him. That this shadow never falls directly across the camera only makes its presence harder to bear. In one scene, Sophie tries to interview Calum on video (“When you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing now?”), but he makes her stop recording. The viewer watches in the dead mirror of the TV screen as he sits on the bed, facing away from Sophie, and answers one of her questions with a clipped, false cheer.
The film is full of this formally inventive reticence: of camera angles that reach around doors, catch Calum reflected in mirrors, or bore into the back of his neck as he walks away. It withholds, creating in the viewer the very experience that it captures so precisely and painfully—and sending us, like Sophie, poring back over its images of thwarted intimacy, in search of answers they artfully refuse to yield.
David Klion (newsletter editor): A group chat I’m in recently started a weekly film club. Every week, someone takes a turn nominating three films to watch, and we vote on which sounds most interesting, then watch that one and discuss it together. I really recommend doing something like this with your friends. It’s simultaneously a great communal activity and way to discover movies you probably weren’t going watch otherwise.
In the spirit of starting a trend, I want to recommend one of our latest selections, Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical 1979 musical All That Jazz, which most of us never would have thought to watch but were blown away by. It’s not a typical musical (not that there’s anything wrong with musicals as a genre, but if they’re not your thing, this isn’t what you’re probably imagining), and no less an authority than Stanley Kubrick called it “[the] best film I think I have ever seen.” It’s a kind of deep dive into the psyche of a successful and charismatic creative who thinks most of what he does is shit and whose lifestyle is rapidly killing him. If that description resonates with you in any way, maybe pitch it to the film club that you formed upon my earlier recommendation.
Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): One of the funnier books I return to every so often is artist Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (2009), a graphic novel in the form of an auction catalog detailing items once owned by the titular characters, Lenore and Harold.
Lenore (played in the book’s staged photographs by none other than Sheila Heti) is a recipe developer at The New York Times; Harold (depicted by artist Paul Sahre), about ten years her senior, is a commercial photographer who travels for work several times a year. I can’t say this is the most subversive piece of art I’ve ever enjoyed—in part because the compulsion to continue reading, at first, derives from the gossipy delight of digging into someone else’s conspicuous consumption—but it has made me consider what it means to hold onto the matter of a relationship, even after the associated objects cease to seem like anything but stuff.
The entire narrative of the couple unfolds over a series of about 300 auction lots and their descriptions. We witness, through ephemera, gifts, and trash, how Lenore and Harold got together (“LOT 1006: A pair of movie tickets // A pair of unused tickets to Annie Hall at the Film Forum”), the banal domestic life they lived as a couple (“LOT 1119: Dog salt and pepper shakers // A pair of dachshund salt and pepper shakers. Given by Morris’s mother to Doolan”), and the long dissolution of their relationship (“LOT 1306: A white noise machine // a no. 500 Sleep Sound by Invento white noise machine, kept by Morris . . . Irreparable damage to top and sides, as if struck by a hammer”). Though the drama plays out over the course of several years, the form of auction catalog as fait accompli lends itself to a kind of pessimistic reading: Every time I return to the book, I find myself searching for more clues as to the tensions that tear apart the relationship. As much as Jewish Currents readers might relish the easy materialist analysis the form encourages, Shapton’s text would make anyone contemplate the strange and mundane objects from ex-lovers and friends that they still possess.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve long found the 19th-century French socialist Paul Lafargue admirable for two reasons. The first is his suicide alongside his wife Laura, the daughter of Karl Marx. In his suicide note, Lafargue wrote, “Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyze my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.” No longer able to fully participate in the social struggles that had given his life meaning, he chose to exit the world on his own terms, ending his note with an optimistic declaration that the cause for which he fought would triumph: “Long live Communism! Long live international socialism!”
The other reason for my admiration is his one truly great contribution to socialist thought, his pamphlet The Right to Be Lazy, which was recently published by NYRB Classics in a new, vibrant translation by Alex Andriesse. As a theorist, Lafargue’s ultra-radical line famously inspired his father-in-law to say that if this is Marxism, “je ne suis pas marxiste.” In The Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue takes the socialists and the wider working class to task for valorizing the greatest ill that afflicts them: work. The time has come, he insists, for the proletariat to reject existing morality and thinking and “return to their natural instincts.” “They must proclaim the right of laziness,” he writes, “a hundred times nobler and holier than the Rights of Man cooked up by the philosophizing lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. They must hold themselves to working only three hours at a time, lazing about and feasting the rest of the day and night.”
How will they be able to do this? By supporting mechanization, which reduces the need for manpower and, in the new socialist order, will permit them to spend their time fishing. The death of capitalism will reduce the need to overproduce, making labor superfluous. True socialism is not, for Lafargue, the ultimate sanctification of labor, but rather its gravedigger. (In the end, it was not Marxism but Situationism that followed the path laid out by Marx’s kin, with their call to “Never Work.”)
It’s no surprise that none of what Lafargue imagined has come to pass. Like most Marxist writing, this great book can be classified as science fiction, though actual science fiction (think Jules Verne) has predicted the future far more accurately than, say, anything in the catalog of Verso Books. Still, the fact that things didn’t turn out as Lafargue hoped—that veneration of work remains ubiquitous even among leftists and the drive for consumption, which in Lafargue’s time spared workers, is now the defining feature of all classes—takes nothing away from the cogency, the sparkle, the sheer fun of The Right to Be Lazy.
Lafargue, in his diagnosis of the ills of capitalism, brings a class analysis to the problems that impact every individual. Almost all of us spend our lives busy at something of little use or interest to us. And as he reminds us, there’s nothing revolutionary about a marginal reduction in the workday, unless it’s to virtually zero.
Alex Kane (senior reporter): Even among peers like Dissent and Jewish Currents, Commentary magazine remains the most famous—not to mention most politically influential—of the “little magazines” that came to prominence during the American post-war period. In the journal’s heyday, leading left-liberal literary and political personalities like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and Hannah Arendt regularly graced Commentary’s pages. Today, the magazine publishes pieces like Elliot Abrams’s most recent lamentation concerning the “Jewish freak out” over Israel’s new hardline government (you might remember Abrams from his Iran-Contra days). I had sometimes wondered about Commentary’s transformation from renowned literary journal to publisher of neoconservative polemics, but it wasn’t until I finished Benjamin Balint’s Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right that I truly understood how the metamorphosis came to be. Balint’s treatment of the magazine’s politics in the 1950s and 1960s–from its early dalliances with the civil rights movement to its editorial backlash against the New Left–deftly shows that the roots of neoconservatism lie not in foreign policy but the domestic clashes that defined the post-war era.
Overall, Balint’s account of the magazine’s history is a brisk tale with a healthy mix of literary and political gossip, all of which keeps the reader curious about Commentary as a social project as well as a political one. Balint—whose own neoconservative credentials include a fellowship at the Hudson Institute and a stint as assistant editor at Commentary itself—does not set out to challenge the assumptions that drove the magazine’s ideological shift from an anti-Stalinist leftist outpost to neoconservative rag. This might disappoint readers who want a history of the neoconservative movement that bares down on the ideology’s murderous mistakes (chief among them, propping up Latin American dictators and, of course, the Iraq War). Instead, Balint takes the magazine on its own terms and writes an entertaining and candid account of its greatest successes and controversies.
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): The biographer Robert Caro has chosen his subjects carefully—as one would hope, given that he spent seven years writing the story of 20th-century New York through the career of its central planner Robert Moses and has devoted the rest of his life to a five-volume, still-in-progress biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson. It’s easy to imagine what a movie about Caro and his subjects could be: a rote exploration of a nerdy kid from the Upper West Side and the outsized antiheroes whose deeds he has spent his life chronicling. But the documentary Turn Every Page does something more surprising. The film pairs Caro with the man in his own shadow: the editor Robert Gottlieb, who has been working with Caro for over 50 years. It’s not an obviously compelling premise (I dutifully bullied the friend who asked if I wanted to see it before realizing: of course I did), but it yielded a very charming movie that is not only the best but perhaps the only film I’ve ever seen about the craft of editing.
Lovingly directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Turn Every Page oscillates between the two Roberts and their accounts of their working life together. Both men are New York Jews born in the 1930s who have maintained a lifelong, manic enthusiasm for reading. Caro, the more cantankerous of the two, channeled his enthusiasm into prodigious research; at one point, he recounts how he knocked on the right doors in Texas’s Jim Wells County until he solved the decades-old mystery of how Johnson apparently stole his first Senate election. Gottlieb, who is wily, grandiose, and a collector of women’s handbags in a—I don’t quite know how to explain this . . . and neither does his wife . . . but, a straight guy way?—channeled his own mania into becoming an almost absurdly prolific editor. First at Simon & Schuster and then at Knopf, he edited everything from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park to most of Toni Morrison. (He also edited The New Yorker for a few years.) He edited every page of The Power Broker, Caro’s bestselling 1974 Robert Moses biography, cutting it down from over a million words to a reasonable 750,000, leaving us with the 1,300-page classic now in its umteenth printing.
The relationship between writer and editor has also been a challenging one. While the film is circumspect about the deeper sources of Caro and Gottleib’s difficulties in working together, it seems clear that they have met their match in one another. Not only do the two men equal each other in their obsessive habits and long-ranging ambitions—they crack jokes throughout about whether Caro will finish his fifth Johnson volume for Gottlieb before one or the other dies—they also share a deep stubbornness concerning the granular questions that shape the crafts of writing and editing. Their most notable squabble concerns the value of semicolons, the topic of an entire, delightful sequence of the film. The Roberts appear on screen together only in the documentary’s final scene, when Lizzie Gottlieb is finally permitted to observe their editing process. The permission is conditional, though: She must turn the sound off on her camera, because the editing process between these two garrulous men is, at the end of the day, “private”—and, one gets the sense, almost sacred.
Mitch Abdior (contributing writer): The streaming channel Ovid.tv has added a marvelous series of films on anarchism, all of which are available starting today. Taken as a whole, these films cover anarchism in all its varied forms from the mid-19th century until the present.
Five movies in the collection were made by the two-man collective Pacific Street Films. The filmmakers, Steve Fischler and Joel Sucher, have known each other since elementary school and have worked on films together for over 50 years (for a complete career overview, see my article in the Fall 2022 issue of Cineaste). This series includes their classic documentary on the Jewish anarchist movement, Free Voice of Labor (1980), which follows the movement from its immigrant beginnings to its end, with the 1977 closing of the Yiddish anarchist newspaper, Freie Arbeiter Stimme. It’s an affectionate and moving portrait of this once-great movement. Also featured are Pacific Street’s Red Squad (1972), an angry documentary about the NYPD’s activities during the Vietnam War era; Frame Up! (1974), which recounts the framing of Black activist Martin Sostre in Buffalo in 1967; and Anarchism in America (1982), which presents an eclectic picture of the varieties of American anarchism and the ways they fit into the American geist. (On a different—and non-anarchist—note, the 1999 film From Swastika to Jim Crow is a fascinating work about the German Jewish émigrés who taught at historically Black colleges upon arriving in the US after fleeing Hitler—men who successfully handled the move from Heidelberg to the wilds of the Deep South.)
Two films about the anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti are streaming as well. The 1971 Italian feature film Sacco & Vanzetti is an overheated and not entirely accurate account of the trial. (I remember reviewing this film for my college newspaper 50 years ago, proof of Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return.) But Peter Miller’s excellent 2006 documentary Sacco and Vanzetti thoroughly demolishes the case against the two men. Neither film hides the fact that they were not gentle souls, as they’ve long been depicted, but rather members of a violent wing of anarchism—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Also streaming by Peter Miller is a history of the hymn of the international working-class movement, The Internationale (2000). The interview subjects are an international lot who place the song in its multiple historical and sentimental contexts. It’s a thoroughly inspiring half-hour of cinema.
Stew Bird and Deborah Schaffer’s The Wobblies (1979) has justly been added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry (for further information, see my article in the Summer 2022 issue of Cineaste). Bird and Schaffer constructed their filmed history of the revolutionary union out of interviews with surviving members of the Industrial Workers of the World. The result is lively, informative, and irreplaceable.
Finally, the three-part series No Gods, No Masters (2017) by Tancrède Ramonet is something of a mixed bag. Ramonet covers the history of anarchism from Proudhon in the mid-19th century to the end of the Spanish Civil War. The three parts all contain magnificent footage of people and events from the anarchist past, from the contemporary newsreel of the French anarchist bandits of the Bonnot Gang’s final battle with the police in 1912, to the anarchist fighters under Durruti in Spain. The series is worth watching if only for this material. An international battery of experts provide a thorough history of the movement, but the problem is the voiceover narration, which is full of exaggerations and errors (for instance, it claims that the Paris Commune gave women the vote and that the American volunteers during the Spanish Civil War were members of the IWW, among many other mistakes). Watch the whole series and trust the experts when they speak; take everything else with a bucketful of salt.
Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): The other day, I went to “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” at the Museum of Modern Art, which reexhibited collected works from the gallery Just Above Midtown, or JAM. Organized and led by multimedia artist and gallerist Linda Goode Bryant between 1974 and 1986, JAM was a self-described laboratory for and by Black artists, who were given total creative control when working with Goode Bryant. The art featured in the MoMA retrospective is in turn innovative, beautiful, and sometimes strikingly labor intensive. I took a long time walking through the rooms of the exhibition, absorbing the breadth of the work on display. Howardena Pindell’s bricolage of individually painted hole-punches fixed to a canvas with string and adhesive, Senga Nengudi’s hanging sculptures of nylon stockings filled with sand (“reminiscent of both breasts and testicles”), and David Hammons’s designs made from paper pulp and hair represent only a fraction of the diverse media and subject matter in the collective’s work.
The exhibition is also forthright about how funding was a constant challenge for JAM: One wall is papered over with all of the overdue bill statements Goode Bryant received over the gallery’s life, which she had kept in storage since its closing. At another point, the curators pair a timeline of JAM’s debts and evictions with MoMA’s asset accrual and expansion. The exhibition offers a view into what was possible, artistically and communally, thanks to the ambition and labor of JAM’s artists. It also encouraged me to imagine what the art world could have been had JAM received institutional backing and kept its doors open through the 90s and into the 2000s. This exhibition is on view until February 18th; if you’re in or passing through New York, definitely go check it out!
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): Last Sunday, JC Editor-in-Chief Arielle Angel staged an intervention with me, her husband, and a couple of our friends, all former theater kids of one stripe or another: None of us had seen the movie Fame, and this had to be fixed right away. Fame, released in 1980, is set at New York’s High School of Performing Arts, a prestigious public conservatory then located in the city’s theater district; the movie was a big enough hit that in the years after its release, the high school was nicknamed “the Fame school.” I was expecting high camp: ballerinas bashing each other’s kneecaps, voice teachers undermining their most talented students. Instead, Fame turned out to be a beautifully made, hyperkinetic but almost understated love letter to arts education.
Fame is full of pathos, of course: There are dancers in an interracial love triangle, a babushka-wearing Jewish mother who doesn’t want her actress daughter to change her name from Doris to Dominique, a sad clown of a repressed young homosexual who lives alone in a neon-soaked Broadway apartment while his mom flies to Hollywood to make pictures. The students’ senior year melodrama includes an actor named Ralph Garcie turning his bottled-up insecurity and rage into a rapid rise and fall as a standup comic.
But the film’s nervous system is made up of its scenes of rehearsal and performance, from its hilarious opening audition montage to Irene Cara, who, in a breakout role, pounds out her ballad “Out Here on My Own” on the piano. (Cara passed away late last year; sadly, one of the film’s other brightest stars—Gene Anthony Ray, who plays the defiant, lovable dancer Leroy Johnson—struggled with addiction and died of AIDS complications in 2003.) One of the best sequences in the movie takes place at a packed screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show—no drama unfolds, it’s just theater kids having fun.
Mari Cohen (associate editor): Nearly a decade since the explosive debut of season one of Serial, the genre of the narrative journalism podcast has begun to seem almost like a cliché. There can be no doubt that the market is oversaturated, and that the proliferation of true-crime imitations is not just annoying but arguably harmful. Still, I continue to find certain facets of the form intriguing—namely, the way the figure of the host makes visible the journalist as a character in the reporting process, signaling to the listener that the findings are being channeled to us through a specific individual. Of course, the extent to which this is true varies—plenty of podcast and radio hosts play the “neutral” straight man—but at the very least, hearing the host’s voice, and their participation in conversations with sources, reminds us that they, too, are a persona in the story, rather than some omniscient authority hovering above.
The “Trojan Horse Affair,” Serial’s fourth season, released about a year ago, plays on this dynamic to great effect. The story begins with Hamza Syed, a doctor-turned-journalism-student, on a quest to report on the provenance of the Trojan Horse letter, a mysterious letter that turned up on the desks of Birmingham, UK officials in 2014 professing to be the communication between two Islamists plotting a takeover of local schools. The letter seemed like an obvious hoax, but it still spurred a series of investigations and interventions that led to the rollback of a number of reforms that had made Pakistani Muslim students more successful in public schools. It also prompted changes to British counterterrorism policy that disproportionately targeted Muslims and other minorities. Hamza, himself a British Pakistani Muslim living in Birmingham, is disturbed by the extent to which this bogus letter prompted so much outrage and policy change, and hopes that if he can uncover where the letter actually comes from, he might persuade British politicians and journalists to reconsider their response. Syed manages to enlist Brian Reed, a white American reporter known for the successful Serial productions podcast “S-Town,” to take on the story with him.
More interesting than what Hamza and Brian do find is what they don’t find. While they turn up compelling evidence that the Trojan Horse letter may have been written by a peculiar school head teacher desperate to turn attention away from her own misconduct, their efforts to fully grasp why the Birmingham City Council and UK Parliament ignored this obvious link is mostly futile. The answer is maddening and illuminating in its banality: It’s a lot easier for even well-meaning officials to fall in line behind an Islamophobic status quo than to commit to doing due diligence. No one in charge can really explain why they didn’t try harder to get it right, because no good answer really exists. Along the way, throughout their multiple years of reporting, Syed and Reed’s reporting partnership—and their charming “buddy comedy” dynamic—showcases the tensions between two diverging approaches to journalism. Reed, despite his stature in new media, hews closest to traditional journalistic “objectivity.” He never wants to make assumptions about what he’s going to find, and he’s in it for the “good story.” Any impact his story makes is just icing on the cake. Hamza, meanwhile, finds it impossible to divorce his approach to the story from his own experiences of racism and Islamophobia. How can he not have certain suspicions about where the story is headed, he wonders, or frustrations with certain sources? And if his reporting is not going to make an impact, what’s the point of doing it at all? It’s intriguing to hear Brian admit that that impact is not his primary motivator—and that, until now, he hasn’t had to think much about what is. The podcast reveals Brian to be a sharp, dogged, likable reporter, and one obviously, at times, emotionally caught up in the work. Could he really not be politically invested in what his story might do in the world? Or does he just not want to admit that he is?
Major NYTimes investigations and smash-hit podcasts are known for often provoking real change. But the aftermath of the release of the “Trojan Horse Affair” has been anticlimactic. Rather than consider its own damaging role in the original scandal, the British press has doubled down, running hit pieces on the podcast. Local journalists have mostly declined to pick up on the reporting, and politicians who came off looking shady in the podcast are mostly back to their regular posts. The primary school head teacher who was implicated as a potential author of the hoax letter is still at work—it’s unclear if anyone even tried to interview her after the podcast came out. A few months after the release of the podcast, Hamza admitted to Vulture that this was disappointing: “My motivations are at the level of the politicians. To make them face stuff. And if something I do has no bearing on them, then I’ll always be in some form of mourning regardless of the collateral benefit it brings, because it means we continue to have the same people in charge of us.”
I can relate. Often enough, the reporting work I do fails to produce real accountability. I can point out when institutions and politicians are engaging in harmful behavior and expose contradiction after contradiction, but often enough, these actors’ reputations and credibility remain largely unscathed, the status quo weighing heavily on their side. Does it matter if you keep trying to scream the truth if no one’s listening? Hamza, at the end of the podcast, expresses doubt that he wants to continue in journalism, if this is what it’s like. For now, though I’m still here, doing my best to nudge the rock up the hill.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This year’s New York Jewish Film Festival started yesterday and will be running through January 23rd. Here are some highlights:
I usually enjoy the challenge of keeping my weekly recommendations under 500 words—my version of an Oulipian constraint, like Georges Perec writing a novel without using the letter E. But to properly treat Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s breathtakingly original film Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden, I would have to explode this limitation. Instead, I will simply say that this film brilliantly blends period movie footage with Salomon’s masterwork, Life? or Theatre?—a series of hundreds of paintings she made about the story of her family and of her love for her stepmother’s singing teacher. These works, which included dialogue painted onto the images, serve as a kind of animated telling of the story; in the film, selections of her words are read by some of France’s greatest actors.
The Polish director Krzysztof Lang’s March ’68 is a love story between two students, the tale of the 1968 Polish student protest movement against censorship, and finally, a recounting of the horrific antisemitic campaign carried out by an ostensibly socialist country in the wake of the Six-Day War of the previous year. Lang braids the stories together with great skill. Hania, the aspiring actress at the film’s center, is the daughter of a neurosurgeon who loses his post because he is a Jew, despite having hidden his identity. She is also actively involved in the protests that arose after the censoring of a play by Poland’s national writer, Adam Mickeiwicsz. Hania’s love interest, Janek, is the son of a colonel in the country’s security forces, who is a key player both in crushing the student protests and in executing the campaign against the few remaining Jews in Poland. Lest anyone think director Lang is exaggerating the antisemitism of the time, in the background we can see and hear anti-Jewish speeches given by supporters of the government—and even from Władysław Gomułka, the head of state. March ’68 is an important history lesson.
Amanda Kinsey’s Jews of the Wild West is not great cinema, but it does tell a story that is not very well-known: that of Jews who settled in the American West. Though some of the stories it tells are fairly familiar—like those of Levi Strauss and of Josephine Marcus, the wife of the lawman Wyatt Earp—it also features forgotten figures like Bronco Billy Anderson, a Russian Jew who starred in the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. Kinsey interviews ranchers, rabbis, historians, and descendants of settlers in the West, who provide a loving picture of this alternative to life in the slums of New York and Chicago.
It’s impossible not to be captivated by the 11 minutes of the uncredited Yiddish film Jewish Life in Lvov, made up of simple street scenes shot in that Polish city shortly before the war. It’s a nothing of a film that history turned into a heartbreaking document. When it was made, it was just a sentimental reminder of the old world—within a decade, that world was no more.
