Shabbat
Reading List
Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): When I finished my stint in the UK and moved back to the US in September, I needed something light to carry around while schlepping through Brooklyn to buy used furniture from strangers. So I started reading Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, which I found while unpacking the books I had left at my parents’ house. Like many people who encounter Lispector in the wilderness, I immediately became a devotee. And after reading a few of her novels, I splurged on Too Much of Life, the new unabridged collection of her newspaper columns that ran between 1967 and 1976.
At times diaristic but never pointedly confessional, these crônicas—a Brazilian genre of brief, digressive prose pieces—take a variety of forms: flash fiction, irritated accounts of boring parties, odes to and jeremiads against the apparatuses of modern life (the telephone, the typewriter), and a host of intellectual and spiritual meditations. As I’ve made my way through the first 250 pages, I’ve been struck by the intimacy and humor of many of these dispatches. To my mind, these qualities of her weekly work are less as an intentional, aesthetic effect than a function of Lispector’s personality. Like in her novels, her style across columns is spare and crystalline, but unlike her longer work, the crônicas don’t build towards a poetics to unlock or an emotional landscape to parse. They feel like an author inviting you into the banal mental and intellectual labor of writing: trying out ideas, working through a query, getting tired of yourself, and going to bed.
Lispector is also writing from the vaunted vantage point of self-proclaimed middle age. Even in the more seemingly frivolous columns, she feels like an auntie drawing you in to tell you something important, because the lesson has come at a personal cost: the cost of thinking. It is breathtaking when those moments of confidence coincide with what appears to be a germ of an idea for a novel (I would argue you can see the beginning of The Hour of the Star in her serialized retelling of an issue with a hired maid and a clairvoyant cook).
My high school art history teacher once pointed out the snow on the branches of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow as, on some level, evidence of the joy of painting. Bruegel enjoyed his vocation to such an extent that he delighted in the work and challenge of such a detail. In his epilogue to Too Much of Life, Lispector’s son Paulo writes that it’s not clear whether his mother kept the column just to have a steady income, but her writing does reveal she relished the joy of extra thinking.
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): A few years ago I saw a video installation called Manifesto, created by the German artist Julian Rosefeldt, in which Cate Blanchett, dressed as a variety of characters (sanitation worker, CEO, etc.), delivers excerpts from manifestos by strongly opinionated people from the choreographer Yvonne Rainer to Karl Marx. It was then—even more than while watching Elizabeth or Carol, other notable films in which the actress, as the queen of England or a bored lesbian, allows us to enjoy the pressure of her iron grip—that I discovered the strength of my desire to be talked at by Cate Blanchett for two to three hours at a stretch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, I really loved Tár.
The biggest question that has been asked about Tár, which has provoked considerable dissonance among friends and critics, is whether it’s a reactionary jeremiad against “cancel culture” (see this review by Richard Brody) or is navigating the current culture wars in a more subtle way (see this one by Zadie Smith). The question largely circles around a single early scene in which Lydia Tár, the fictitious world-famous conductor and impresario portrayed by Blanchett, blows up at Max, a student in her master class who is trying (though not very hard) to cancel Bach. Tár has arrived to teach the class shortly after a public appearance at the New Yorker Festival with critic Adam Gopnik, who fawns over her; the conductor’s preferred mode of communication, we quickly learn, is holding forth. Onstage at the festival, she talks at Gopnik and at her rapt audience; now, teaching the class, she begins to talk at her students. The scenes are twinned, her speech flowing almost unbroken from the former into the latter, between sycophant and challenger, like Blanchett moving between manifestos in Manifesto. All of this works beautifully, except for one problem: Max. He describes himself woodenly as “BIPOC” (c’mon) and “agender” (really?) and is not just disdainful of Bach’s misogyny but seems strikingly unfamiliar (he’s a Juilliard student!) with the composer’s work. Tár calls him “a robot”; he is, essentially, a prop. Meanwhile, Blanchett is striding about, going off on an unhinged rant that, when it later surfaces on the internet, helps to take her down. Her lines are brilliantly written; his are generated by algorithm. The scene is totally maddening. And then—it is over, never to meaningfully return.
The truth is that Tár is ultimately uninterested in politics, much as Manifesto is far more invested in Blanchett’s power to convince than it is about the particular contents of any one manifesto. Tár is about a long-haired butch who pairs luxurious baggy sweaters with baseball caps, whose daughter calls her “Lydia,” who has conned the world into thinking she’s the second coming of Leonard Bernstein though she has not a grain of populism in her frightened elitist soul, and who succumbs to a very familiar—one might say classical—form of hubris: believing she can treat young women as playthings without facing consequences.
I would have watched it for four more hours—this instant cult classic that would have been a truly great movie if it had taken its antihero’s adversaries just a little more seriously, instead of wanting to save its pitch-perfect condemnation for itself.
David Klion (newsletter editor): As a new dad, my reading time is limited and I’ve been bouncing between a few different books without making adequate headway in any of them. Movies have been a better bet, and fortunately for me, as a card-carrying member of the Writers Guild of America, East, I now get sent DVDs and streaming logins for every movie up for awards this year. Here are the last three I watched, in descending order of how much I liked them:
Tár: Apparently I’m not the only JC staffer recommending Tár this week, but it’s just that great. A lot of the online discourse around Todd Field’s masterpiece focuses on the interminable public discourses around “cancel culture” that you’re probably as sick of as I am. The film is certainly informed by those debates, but it’s first and foremost a work of art, not a shallow polemic—and like all great art, one takes what one wishes from it. Whether you think “wokeness” has gone too far or not far enough is beside the point; either way, you’re going to be engrossed in Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of the fictional (but wholly believable) conductor Lydia Tár—a creative genius, a fraud, a striver, a predator, and a singularly compelling figure whose subjectivity shapes every scene, as the movie vacillates between horror and farce.
The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg’s latest, a semi-autobiographical family drama co-written with Tony Kushner, didn’t have to be as good as it is. It could have easily been a cliched coming-of-age saga combined with an indulgent celebration of the magic of cinema, full of little winks at the Spielberg canon, and no doubt that’s all some will see in it. But The Fabelmans is more subtle than that, positing filmmaking less as an escape from a crumbling home life than as a lens into that very dysfunction and a means for distorting and manipulating an unpleasant reality. Spielberg is critical of his younger self and empathetic for both of his late parents (Michelle Williams and Paul Dano are both terrific, if not the least bit convincing as Jews), and there are sublime moments, including a confrontation with two high school bullies that serves as an allegory for how Jews have used Hollywood as a means to negotiate relations with a sometimes-hostile America.
Glass Onion: It’s fine, I guess, and no doubt far more commercially successful than the first two. Everyone is a broad caricature and the mystery isn’t all that mysterious, but we do get to see a lot of actors having fun, and Edward Norton’s scathing portrayal of (essentially) Elon Musk could hardly be more timely. You could do worse.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve always accepted the rule that whoever invokes Hitler when discussing their opponent automatically loses. And yet, as I read Confidence Man, the engrossing and terrifying new volume on Trump by journalist Maggie Haberman—who has covered him extensively over the past few years, risking great damage to her soul—I realized the similarities between the two men are unmistakable.
I am not a fool, and am not likening even Trump’s worst actions to those of Hitler. He’s a racist, to be sure, and despite surrounding himself with Jews, he is full of antisemitic prejudices. (Haberman even tells us that Trump kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, that he regretted not having German generals running the US military, and that he said Hitler did good things.) But it is in Trump’s work and political methods that he most resembles Hitler. The constant lying is an obvious trait shared by the two men, as is the certainty that a lie repeated often and loudly enough will be accepted as truth. The constant dysfunction and chaos that marked all of Trump’s operations, the pitting of one underling against another, the lack of clarity around orders and designs—all of this was typical of Hitler. Those under Hitler were said to be “working toward the Führer,” anticipating and acting in accordance with what they thought he intended. And so it is with Trump: Life working for him was a daily, non-lethal Night of the Long Knives, with no one safe from his ire.
In my review of the first volume of Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler for Jewish Currents, I wrote of how, on top of all his murderousness, Hitler was also a chiseler. Trump is famously tax averse, and Hitler, in his first years as Chancellor, likewise failed to pay his taxes; it was ultimately necessary for a law to be passed exempting him from them. Had Trump known of this, we can be certain the Republican legislature would have obliged. Trump’s greed in licensing his name was anticipated by Hitler as well: Stamps in Nazi Germany bore his image, and he received royalties on each one sold. Should Trump return, be prepared for something similar. As Confidence Man demonstrates, nothing is outside the realm of possibility.
Mark Egerman (board co-chair): If you’re reading this newsletter, then Hanukkah on Rye—the newest Hannnukah-themed Hallmark Christmas movie—is not for you. It’s not that people engaged in modern Jewish life (in any of its forms) can’t or shouldn’t watch it. But they should know that the film is nominally about Jews in the same way Toto’s “Africa” is about Africa or Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado is about Japan. Even though Judaism is as central to the plot as it is in Fiddler on the Roof, which Hanukkah on Rye tries and fails to play for a laugh, it’s hard not to feel like a voyeur while watching it.
This is essentially a Christmas-themed remake of You’ve Got Mail—itself an adaptation of a far more Jewish movie, Shop Around the Corner, which is itself an adaptation of Miklós László’s Parfumerie. In the past three years, Hallmark has incorporated Jews into a few entries in its annual barrage of new Christmas films. But while those earlier films find comedic potential in the fact that not everyone celebrates Christmas, Hanukkah on Rye technically ignores Christmas—it’s exclusively about Hanukkah and features exclusively Jewish characters, who pepper their speech with Yiddish—while replicating the entire structure of a Christmas movie.
The central tension of the film centers on a rivalry between two delis: Gilbert’s on the Lower East Side and Zimmer’s from LA, which is opening a new location next door. The LES has never looked more goyish; the movie was shot in Winnipeg, and there are a number of incredible moments when a character will point to a three-story building built in 1970 and say, “This used to be a tenement where my great grandmother lived.” But of course, none of this really matters, because the whole absurd setup exists just to fill out the standard Hallmark Christmas script, now with a new ethnic flair.
The central problem with the movie is that substituting Hanukkah for Christmas just doesn’t make sense. It’s a stretch to imagine that the deli takes people caroling each night of Hanukkah—especially given that they keep singing the second Hanukkah candle blessing for some reason. But the biggest howler for me was when the female lead’s parents admitted that the deli was in bad shape because of a rent hike and said they had refrained from telling her because they didn’t want to ruin her Hanukkah. This is a woman in her 30s without children. There is no Hanukkah to ruin; she’s fine.
The whole film is a mess: Lisa Loeb briefly appears and sings a new Hanukkah song, and here’s a wise Magical Negro character that would have been offensive even 30 years ago. The emotional climax (spoilers ahead) comes during a cook-off between the delis to see which makes the best latkes. When everyone realizes that they taste the same, the families discover that they all used the exact same recipe from their great grandmothers. For a brief moment it looks like the romantic leads might be second cousins. Sadly, no—their great grandmothers were simply (and incredibly unrealistically) friends on the boat over to Ellis Island. I guess the extended Hallmark Christmasverse just wasn’t ready for that.
Ari Brostoff (senior editor): In the 1980s, photographer Nan Goldin began taking pictures of her friends in New York’s downtown scene—the glamorous, doomed home of a generation of queer avant-garde artists and writers. She photographed people dressed fabulously at parties, people sick with AIDS, couples fucking, and her own bruised face after being beaten by an abusive boyfriend. Many of these images appear in her landmark 1986 photo diary, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Looking back at the series today, these images restore blazing life to a world largely destroyed by AIDS, and then by gentrification. Goldin’s gaze—painfully intimate but also stagey, romantic but unsentimental—was formative for me, as it was for so many others, in illuminating a version of the city gone before our own time.
Laura Poitras’s new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed weaves together Goldin’s life as a photographer with the story of the struggle, both personal and political, that consumed her over the past decade. In 2014, Golden became addicted to painkillers after a surgery; after she recovered three years later, she founded a group called P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Their primary target is Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin and played a pivotal role in a massive increase in opioid prescriptions in the 1990s. One of the group’s main tactics has fused Goldin’s stature in the art world with her fight against Purdue. P.A.I.N. has publicly shamed the many museums that have accepted large donations from the Sackler family, which owned Purdue, in an egregious case of “artwashing”: For a long time, the Sackler family name was most familiar not for the deaths they caused, but for its prominence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other major cultural institutions.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed faces the challenge of juxtaposing the mix of gorgeousness and repulsion in Goldin’s work as an artist with the unvarnished horror of the crimes she has highlighted as an activist. It succeeds miraculously, creating a portrait of pain and pleasure, artmaking and exploitation, worthy of Goldin’s own oeuvre.
Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): My first job was as a fact-checker at a magazine that came out every other week. That meant that “close”—the final stages of finishing an issue—came around twice a month, and with it the inevitable night when all the checkers stayed at the office until 3 or 4 am, annotating drafts, eating cheap takeout, and growing increasingly slap-happy and unhinged. We would ship the magazine to the printer on Thursday, drag ourselves into work at noon on Friday, and wake up Monday to start the cycle again. A quarterly magazine like Jewish Currents is a different beast, however. Close isn’t a night or two—it’s a month-long stretch. During these sprints to finish an issue, it can be hard to unwind in the evenings.
This close, I found the perfect diversion in the genius Spanish-language comedy series Los Espookys, which follows a group of friends who decide to pursue their love of horror by starting a business that puts on paranormal spectacles. The show itself isn’t remotely scary: Its practitioners of fright are an exceedingly gentle group of misfits, played by co-creators Julio Torres and Ana Fabrega as well as Bernardo Velasco and Cassandra Ciangherotti. (Fred Armisen also has a role as Velasco’s character’s uncle.) I was inspired to watch it by the wave of online lamentations that I saw after HBO announced its cancellation earlier this month. As many have said in the past few weeks, it’s a shame to lose a show that’s like nothing else on television: a bilingual comedy that uses subtitles to enhance its humor; a story about queer millennials who just want to attain excellence at their one weird thing; a fractured fairytale where the deadpan punchlines always kill and there’s something liberating about the minimal stakes.
Sleep-walking through the last few days, the thing I’ve loved most about the show is its dreaminess: It takes place in a fictional Latin American country where everyone takes strange events in stride. A water spirit shows up wanting to watch a movie; a television news host displays signs of demonic possession; a haunted mirror ingests a diplomat. The candy-sweet color scheme lends a softness to the surreality. If you, too, find yourself on the edge of incoherence as the holiday break begins, you could hardly do better than to enjoy the two seasons in an all-too-short binge.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has paid dearly for having displeased the authorities of the Islamic Republic. Banned from making films, placed under house arrest for much of the past 12 years, and sentenced to jail time this past summer, he has nevertheless persisted, finding unique means of circumventing the ban. In his films This is Not a Film (2011) and Taxi (2015), rather than using standard film equipment, he has used his cell phone as a movie camera, circumventing the ban he lives under.
Panahi has always been fond of allowing reality to intrude into his fiction films. In his great film The Mirror (1997), the main character is a little girl making her way home from school on her own when her mother fails to pick her up. Almost halfway through the movie, the little actress rebels against working with Panahi—though after several viewings, I’m still not sure whether this turn is genuine, or if everything in the film is staged. In Offside (2006), he placed a group of women attempting to view a World Cup qualifying match in the stadium during a real game, making it impossible for the actors and crew to know how the film would unfold.
Panahi’s new film, No Bears, takes his circumventing of his ban and his mixing of fiction and reality to an even greater extreme. The film opens on a scene of a man and a woman meeting outside a café in Turkey and arguing over their possible flight to France. We soon learn that the scene we are seeing is being viewed by Panahi on his laptop, from a small Iranian town across the border. He is directing the film from his room, with his assistant guided by the shooting script as Panahi reviews the process and issues directions to the cast and crew. We’re never told why Panahi is in the nowhere town in which he’s rented a room from a poor but admiring local, who never calls him anything but “dear sir.”
It soon becomes difficult to tell just what in the film being shot in Turkey is part of Panahi’s script and what reflects the real collapse of an escape attempt, as the film script and the lives of the actors seem to intersect. Meanwhile, Panahi—who had taken photographs in the Iranian border town—becomes embroiled in a local squabble revolving around superstitions that determine young people’s mates at birth. He is ultimately forced to flee for Tehran, as tragedy engulfs everyone who has passed before his camera.
In all of Panahi’s previous films except for Crimson Gold (2003), even in the worst circumstances, there has been a persistent undercurrent of humor, and thus hope. No Bears is in a much darker register. It’s a film in which even seemingly nice people harbor evil, where fear reigns. The only hope is captured by the title: At one point, a local warns Panahi about walking down a certain street, telling him he will be attacked by bears—but he soon clarifies that this is merely a superstition.
*****
Check out our last piece of the year, a Jewish Currents staff roundtable on Christmas, in which we debate the question: Is Christmas bad or good?
Remember that our Winter 2022 issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon! If you enjoy our newsletter and the recommendations you see each week in the Shabbat Reading List, subscribe to receive our work in print—and receive a free tote back as part of our subscription drive! Every subscription dollar we receive goes toward supporting our staff, producing the magazine, and building the Jewish Currents community.
And before you go: Editor-in-chief Arielle Angel wrote a forceful letter to the editor in response to The New York Times’ recent editorial on the new Israeli coalition, writing that the paper of record “offered a master class in how to offer nothing but hand-wringing.”
We’re taking the rest of the year off, so we’ll see you in 2023!
Josh Lambert (contributor): Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow has done just fine for itself, thank you: Since it was published in July, it has made several bestseller lists, the film rights sold at auction for $2 million, and over the next year it’ll appear in about 20 languages. Plus The Atlantic just picked it as one of its top 10 “most thought-provoking books” of the year.
It took me a while to give the book a chance: Though it’s a novel about video game developers and I’m more or less addicted to video games, I usually steer clear of books that are this popular. (I’m an English professor, and I like to think my tastes are a little more refined.) Now that I’ve read it, I can say I wasn’t entirely wrong—Zevin’s book isn’t exactly avant garde—but it is a very solid, admirable work of fiction, worthy of your attention for half a dozen different reasons.
Not least of these, and almost unremarked upon in most of the reviews I’ve read, is that the novel tells the story of US video games over the past three decades or so as the story of two Jewish kids and their friendship. In other words (and I can’t believe I’m the first to be making this comparison), this novel couldn’t more obviously be The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for video games. Its protagonists are Sam Masur, a Korean Jewish kid raised mostly by his Korean grandparents and mostly unwilling to acknowledge his disability, and Sadie Green, an MIT undergrad who takes inspiration, in one of her first games, from her grandmother Freda’s experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust. Like Jordan Mechner, a Jewish kid who spent his time at Yale making a landmark 2D fighting game, Sam and Sadie’s first big hit traffics in Orientalism: “It was 1996,” Zevin’s narrator reminds us, “and the word ‘appropriation’ never occurred to either of them.”
The novel’s a big, overstuffed armchair of plot, characters, invented video games, and precisely chosen symbols, like a long-suffering Donkey Kong arcade cabinet. It’s an unashamedly accessible story that admirably resists the convention of making every single narrative about who ends up sleeping with whom. There’s more than a ladleful of suffering and trauma, plenty of opportunities for a good, cathartic cry, and some of the most insightful writing about video games I’ve ever read. If you’re lucky enough to have a beach vacation ahead of you this winter, this’ll work, but it’d be equally diverting to listen to the audiobook while shoveling snow.
Mari Cohen (associate editor): I could choose to think of 2022 as the year Taylor Swift dropped a sloppily written and artistically regressive garbage heap of an album—which nonetheless broke records on the charts and garnered undue critical praise, and which sent me into a familiar crisis of faith about whether I can continue to maintain my defense of her songwriting prowess. (For a more interesting take on a crisis of faith, check out the one saving grace of Midnights: a song, buried deep in the bonus tracks, with a breathlessly raw reflection on sexual violation, purity culture, and desire.) But my disappointment was assuaged by the fact that, MID-nights aside, this year offered an incredible batch of new music releases.
In compiling a playlist of my favorite music of the year—an annual tradition of mine—I’ve added more than 110 songs, and haven’t been able to resist including whole chunks of the standout albums I’ve had on repeat. This year those have included CAPRIsongs, a buoyant mixtape by British producer and songwriter FKA twigs; Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths and Blue Rev by Alvvays, the two expertly crafted, earworm-heavy girl-fronted-power-pop records that soundtracked my fall; Running with The Hurricane, an pop country album full of soaring melodies from Australian rock band Camp Cope; the beautifully weird and weirdly beautiful God Save the Animals by Alex G, about which I’ve already waxed poetic in this newsletter; RENAISSANCE by Beyoncé, which probably needs no further introduction; and, finally, R&B savant SZA’s triumphant SOS, a 23-song album released after a five-year hiatus that marks not just her return to form as the high priestess of sad self-destructive girls on the dating market, but a mastery of new territory, from early aughts pop punk to full-on rap.
I also enjoyed records this year from Hurray for the Riff Raff, Wilco, The 1975, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, Carly Rae Jepsen, Plains, Big Thief, Mitski, Charli XCX, Amanda Shires, Wet Leg, and probably some more I’m forgetting. An embarrassment of riches! You can listen to my playlist here. (It’s not in any particular order; I recommend listening on shuffle.) And yes, at the end of the day I found a few Midnights songs to include, mostly out of respect for the beautiful blend of Swift’s voice with Lana Del Rey’s at 2:57 of “Snow on the Beach,” a song which doesn’t appear to be about anything but sounds pretty nice anyway. What can I say—contemplating so much good music puts me in a spirit of generosity!
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Earlier this week, the excellent literary criticism magazine Bookforum announced that after 28 years of continuous publication, it was closing down. As a longtime reader of the magazine and someone invested in the health of the literary ecosystem, I was devastated by the news. Bookforum has been a stable pillar of American criticism, the venues for which are now vanishingly few and continuing to evaporate—a trend that threatens the stability of a rigorous and accessible public conversation about books. Reflecting on the legacy of the publication, it struck me how it stood as something like a last bastion of a particular view of what book reviews can do. For various reasons relating to different editorial philosophies, many magazines (including Jewish Currents) prefer to publish reviews that advance an argument that exceeds the scope of the text or texts under discussion. But Bookforum was committed to the notion of a review as responsive only to the book in question. While their pieces often did speak to larger concerns, they were not required to; this modesty made possible other kinds of experimentation within the form, while also clearing space for magazines like ours to pursue other, complementary approaches. As the critical ecosystem contracts, the space for a variety of forms of engaging with books shrinks, which attenuates the quality of public intellectual life.
While we mourn the loss and consider what its death at the hands of a massive digital media conglomerate means for the ways such institutions make ends meet (if you value our own critical contributions, please consider subscribing), it’s a good time to revisit some of the wonderful pieces that made Bookforum the shrewd, vibrant, and stylish little magazine it was, from Tobi Haslett’s definitive pan of Thomas Chatterton Williams, to Parul Sehgal’s roving meditation on contemporary books about parenthood, to Jennifer Wilson’s rich dissenting opinion on George Saunders’s study of Russian literature as a guide to the craft of fiction, to Justin Taylor’s ode to the transcendent darkness of Joy Williams. I could go on and on, and look forward to years of new discoveries in the archives of this exemplary publication.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It’s guaranteed that any Edward Hopper show will be both an artistic and popular success. The current show at the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s New York, on display until March 5th, 2023, is certainly all that. Bringing together paintings, sketches, and commercial work related to New York, the exhibit considers the ways that the city served as a perfect backdrop for what was his major theme: solitude.
We see it in almost every Hopper painting containing human beings. Men and women are alone on trains, in apartments, offices, theaters. But Hopper’s figures are solitary even when they’re with other people: a couple taking their coats off as they take their seats in the painting Two on the Aisle are looking away from each other, as is the couple standing on the stoop of a brownstone in Sunlight on Brownstones. In Chair Car, a beautiful painting of passengers on a railroad car, no one is sitting next to anyone else. No one has a friend or lover; all are strangers to each other. Theater features frequently—either directly, with a lone usher standing in an overhead light, or players taking a bow, or metaphorically: the views through windows, both from the outside in and the inside out, turning life into a minimalist stage work.
One almost has to take it on the painter’s—or the museum’s—word that these are New York paintings. The crowds and human connection that define the city are almost totally absent. Hopper couldn’t paint something like George Wesley Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s, in which the crowd around the boxing ring is almost physically involved in the bout. New York has many things, but the beauty of its natural light is not one of its distinguishing characteristics—and yet, Hopper’s paintings are very much about light. He is a modern heir of the masters of light: Georges de la Tour, Johannes Vermeer, Caravaggio, Vilhelm Hammershøi. If these great painters turned candle light and natural light into characters, the harsh sunlight in Hopper’s paintings of buildings—particularly roofs—turns them into abstract works. But in his most important paintings, light comes from many directions and many sources: table lamps, streetlights, sunlight, neon, moonlight. In some cases, the light even seems to emanate from the figures. themselves.
Hopper, whose style is direct, clear, and easily graspable, is not a modernist. But in his vision of contemporary life as anomic—and in his foregrounding of artificial light to establish planes, to modify or accentuate shapes—he is one of the great painters of modernity. This is a show not to be missed.
*****
Remember that our Winter 2022 issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon! If you enjoy our newsletter and the recommendations you see each week in the Shabbat Reading List, subscribe to receive our work in print—and receive a free tote back as part of our subscription drive! Every subscription dollar we receive goes toward supporting our staff, producing the magazine, and building the Jewish Currents community.
One last thing before you go: We’re excited to promote the 8th Annual Yiddish New York Festival, the nation’s largest festival of Yiddish music, language and culture. December 24–29th, join online or in-person for a terrific array of klezmer concerts, lectures, films, language classes, social justice workshops, singing, klezmer workshops, Yiddish folk dance, cabaret, Yiddish karaoke and more! There are programs for adults, kids, and teenagers. Use Promo Code YNY10 for a 10% discount on full-festival registrations.
Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): You might be hearing people talk about the new show Wednesday, which focuses on a teenage Wednesday Addams, of the canonical Addams family—indeed, it just surpassed the previous record-holder for most hours viewed in a week for an English-language Netflix series. If you want a critical review, this just isn’t it. I started the show while visiting a friend, and we were both much more hooked than we expected to be. Jenna Ortega is marvelous as the characteristically brooding, depressive, and clever Wednesday; I could (and in fact did) watch the subtle, calculated changes to her facial expressions for hours. (As Ortega has discussed, Tim Burton—who executive produced the series and directed four of its eight episodes—was so pleased with a take in which she didn’t blink that he insisted she avoid blinking altogether; this unsettling stillness makes the minor movements of her face and eyebrows all the more vivid.)
In the first episode, Wednesday is quickly kicked out of her regular high school for a murderous prank against kids bullying her brother Pugsley, and she enrolls mid-year in Nevermore Academy, a school for “outcasts”: students who could be called monsters, such as gorgons whose snake hair turns you to stone and artists whose images come alive. The school is based near the town of Jericho, which is obsessed with its pilgrim heritage. The story follows shifting allegiances and mysteries about who Wednesday can trust and who is plotting subterfuge or revenge, against the backdrop of an unknown monster in the woods. In Wednesday’s mission to unearth and eradicate misdeeds of the town’s founder, the narrative has satisfying echoes of the fight against white supremacy. The insights we get into the side characters are a highlight of the series, and at the end I was left wanting to spend more time with what’s basically a cool, creative, and thoughtful group of friends.
Ari M. Brostoff (senior editor): I think my favorite thing I read this year is Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head, a book I did not recommend earlier because I have no real idea of how to describe it. The bleakly comic 1961 novel’s premise is not difficult to convey: It is about a mild-mannered British wine merchant, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, smugly satisfied with an existence compartmentalized between his society wife, Antonia, and his free-spirited young mistress, Georgie, whose life falls apart when Antonia announces she is leaving him for her psychoanalyst, a friend of the family named Palmer Anderson. This much I was able to explain to Sam, my friend whose shelf I found the book on when I stayed with him in the Catskills this fall. He had not read it himself, but in solidarity he spent the weekend reading “The Idea of Perfection,” one of Murdoch’s influential essays on moral philosophy (besides writing a couple dozen novels, she was a prominent Oxford philosopher). The essay is largely concerned with the question of how to be good, a quandary also posed by A Severed Head: Much of the novel finds its characters wrapping their ludicrous treatment of each other in the cloak of the affable.
None of this, however, is exactly the point, which was why, once I reached the second third of the book, I had to stop describing it to Sam altogether: I have never read a novel of ideas so packed with spoilers. A Severed Head seems for a moment to be set in a farcical version of bourgeois London, but the reality is far stranger. As characters pair off in increasingly rapid and shocking configurations, it becomes clear that desire in this fictional universe operates in a strange, almost algorithmic way. Love is experienced so intensely, fleetingly, and destructively that it reveals itself as synonymous with fetishism—a point made most directly via the severed heads that pile up throughout the novel, often through the sorcery of Palmer’s half-sister Honor Klein, a demonic anthropologist Jewess who functions to make all that is politely bad, indescribably worse. The short book turns out to be a long joke about structuralism, psychoanalysis, and the bourgeois novel itself; I can’t tell you what it means, but can report that it has remained under my skin for months. The other day I started reading another Murdoch novel, 1973’s The Black Prince, which opens with one character blithely revealing to another that he may have accidentally killed his wife. I don’t know what this one’s about yet either, but I’ll keep you posted.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): I’ve spent much of the past year binging episodes of the podcast Blank Check, in which actor and comedian Griffin Newman and critic David Sims discuss every installment in a director’s filmography. The recent episode on the 1999 psychological drama Eyes Wide Shut—part of a miniseries on the career of paradigmatic auteur Stanley Kubrick—inspired me to return to this magnificent, vexing film for the first time in a decade.
It’s a nice time of year for it. As Newman, Sims, and guest David Ehrlich acknowledge, Eyes Wide Shut is set in this season, and it’s become something of a truism that it’s a Christmas movie, its unsettling and graphically sexual subject matter notwithstanding; in his book on Christmas films, critic Alonso Duralde calls it “a Christmas movie for grownups.” Newman, Sims, and Ehrlich suggest that the portrait of the holiday in the first act, which features a lavish Christmas party, is one seen from a Jewish perspective: pure spectacle, stripped of even the faintest trace of sacred significance. This made me wonder whether the film’s entire understanding of Christmas might be understood as Jewish. (As the podcast mentions, the film’s source text—the 1926 Austrian novella Dream Story—was written by the Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler; Kubrick, himself a nonobservant Jew, excised its Jewish content in the process of adaptation.)
To call Eyes Wide Shut a Jewish Christmas film is perhaps provocative, considering that the movie follows a doctor and his wife (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, at the time still actually married) as Cruise’s character finds himself caught up in a cultic orgy of the abominably rich—and their seemingly homicidal conspiracy to keep their rituals secret. But in my reading it’s not the wealthy, sinister cabal that is coded as Jewish, but rather Cruise’s character. Goyish though he may be, the doctor is proximate to yet removed from the world of the ultra-rich at the film’s center in a sense that evokes the paradoxes of Jewish assimilation. In line with the Blank Check hosts’ observation that the opening offers an estranged, hollowed-out vision of Christmas, I wonder whether the film’s critical approach to the holiday is thus rooted in a distinctly Jewish sense of familiarity cut with alienation. The result is powerful: In the same way that Kubrick artfully and disturbingly empties sex of eroticism, he plumbs the ways holy mystery can metamorphose into a phantasmagoria of secular menace.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Quietly, subtly, brilliantly, Mia Hansen-Løve has made a name for herself as perhaps the best filmmaker in France today (sorry, Claire Denis and Olivier Assayas, Hansen-Løve’s partner). She is certainly the French director making the most emotionally real films. Unlike too much contemporary French cinema, her films are not about Big Issues—immigration, class differences, state violence. Rather, her work returns to what the French long did best: tales of people dealing with the everyday issues of love, family, loss, and resilience.
Hansen-Løve’s new film, One Fine Morning—which opens today in New York and Los Angeles for one-week runs, prior to its full opening on January 27th—is so solidly real in its feelings, so well acted by its stars, that it’s almost painful to watch. Pascal Greggory plays Georg Kienzler, a former philosophy teacher now fading away with Benson’s syndrome, a neurodegenerative condition. His daughter Sandra, played by Léa Seydoux, is a young widow who does her best to take care of him while falling in love with her late husband’s friend Clément, played by the always excellent Melvil Poupaud. The lovers’ back and forth—the emotional turmoil of their attraction to each other, the fears and hopes it induces, the pull of outside forces—is magnificently limned. There’s not a false note in the writing or acting, or even in the decors. Even the streets the characters walk down speak volumes about who they are, as we follow them along rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the Grande Mosquée in the Latin Quarter. Yet no one is a walking cliché: Their struggles and successes are those of recognizable people.
Hansen-Løve’s films are unabashedly concerned with crises confronted by the comfortable and educated. (The central calamity in One Fine Morning is one the director lived through herself, with the illness of her own father, also a philosophy teacher.) Sandra is a translator and interpreter, her on-again, off-again lover an astrochemist. Hansen-Løve’s characters live in their dearest objects, which are almost always books. Apartments are well-stocked with tomes in several languages; as in her earlier film, Things to Come, the issue of what to do with a character’s library when it has to be dispersed is a major one. How wonderful it is to watch a movie in which the question is raised as to the proper category under which to place a book by Elias Canetti, and where the camera lovingly glides over Adorno’s works in German.
Aging and its attendant horrors feature prominently in Hansen-Løve’s work. Her tenderness toward the difficulties senescence inflicts on the elderly and their children is manifest, and nothing about it is sugarcoated. The film allows for exasperation on all sides, and no condemnation of this feeling is even implied. Hansen-Løve’s characters do the best they can with remarkable strength.
If the great French humanist cinematic tradition—that of Renoir and Truffaut—still exists in France, it’s thanks to Mia Hansen-Løve.
*****
This week, organizer Elena Stein has a remembrance of Shatzi Weisberger, adapted from a piece written for the Jewish Voice for Peace community:
Late last week, the legendary People’s Bubbie, Shatzi Weisberger, died at 92 years old in her home in New York City. A lesbian, AIDS nurse, death educator, life-long organizer, and proud member of JVP, Shatzi was at the center of a multi-generational, anti-Zionist political community.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I called Shatzi, worried. “Do you need groceries?” I asked. She paused. “I don’t need groceries; I need friendship.” That began years of weekly conversations and one of the most meaningful relationships of my life. We talked about everything from her early life to prison abolition and the struggle for Palestinian liberation. We celebrated birthdays at the beach, drank piña coladas at the pier, and sang showtunes in our favorite gay piano bar. We argued with love, and of course, we marched side by side.
Rocking her iconic signs at every major demonstration in NYC—from Nakba Day to Pride—Shatzi came to symbolize something much larger than herself: We need each other across generations, and all of us have elders and ancestors at our backs.
When Shatzi was diagnosed with a terminal illness, she abruptly found herself without the care or money she needed. Without skipping a beat, a community of mostly young JVP members flocked to her side, caring for her round the clock, all while reflecting on life with her and visioning the world we’re working toward, even as she knew she wouldn’t make it there. Among her final words: “I feel the love—beyond, beyond.” Shatzi Weisberger, Z’’L. May her memory be for a revolution.
*****
Before you go, we have a few event announcements and reminders. A few weeks ago, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel recommended Vinay Shukla’s new documentary While We Watched, about NDTV news anchor Ravish Kumar and his lonely crusade against deepening ethnonationalism and crumbling democracy in Narendra Modi’s India. Tomorrow afternoon, Jewish Currents will be screening the film at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn at 2 pm, followed by a Q&A with the director. There are a few tickets left exclusively for Jewish Currents readers. If you’d like to attend, please RSVP here: whilewewatched@pm.me. Don’t miss this one-day-only opportunity!
The next day—Sunday, December 11th—join us at the Museum of Jewish Heritage at 4 pm for a panel on “Writing the Third Generation of Holocaust Survivors” as part of The New York Jewish Book Festival. The conversation, moderated by Angel, will feature contributing writers Linda Kinstler and Helen Betya Rubinstein and contributor Menachem Kaiser. Register here. And don’t forget to stop by our table and say hello!
Also, on Saturday, December 17th, join us at Union Pool for a Hanukkah party and concert by Black Ox Orkestar, starting at 7 pm. The party is open to all, and you can purchase tickets to the concert here.
Dana Bassett (development director): Alex Katz is probably the coolest artist ever. When I had the opportunity to interview him for my podcast, Bad at Sports, in 2018, I was struck by how closely his straightforward demeanor matched the energy of his paintings. Katz said it was all about style—and he and Ada, his wife and longtime muse, truly exude it.
I found out about Katz’s major retrospective at the Guggenheim via Roberta Smith’s (p)review in The New York Times, which I started reading before stopping myself—even though Katz’s work is extremely well known, I wanted to avoid any spoilers so the experience would be a surprise. I couldn’t wait for a chance to visit, which finally came a few weeks ago. The title of the retrospective, Gathering, is taken from his friend James Schuyler’s poem “Salute,” which is printed on a wall inside the exhibition. The name seems like an odd choice, a single common word pulled from a poem, until you read it:
Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.
It is precisely this particular kind of gathering—an attempt to capture the material of an ephemeral moment even while knowing that it will pass—that Katz’s work performs.
Poetry is literally and figuratively woven through the entire exhibit, which displays Katz’s large, brightly colored paintings—inspired by the scale and direct visual language of billboards—in chronological order. The experience of walking through was like listening to a gut-wrenching epic poem; sometimes it was so overwhelmingly beautiful that, for the first time, I was thankful for the benches interspersed through each floor of the museum. Katz’s earliest works are largely biographical, and the retrospective features paintings of his mother (a Jewish immigrant from Odessa who became a star of the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side) and subway scenes from the late 1940s. In 1949 and 1950, Katz was awarded summer residencies in Maine, where he still has a home and studio; it was here that his lifelong obsession with capturing natural light—and what he termed ‘empirical sensations”—began. I was particularly moved by a grouping of small paper cutout compositions from this period that presage Katz’s minimally rendered figurative works. They are darling, but somehow also blunt and deliberate.
After his time in Maine, Katz broke from the dominant abstract mode of the downtown New York painters of the ’50s and committed himself to figurative works. He set about painting his social circle of artists and friends, as well as Ada, who he met at a party in 1957 and married three months later. In the following decades, Katz would paint innumerable portraits of Ada, and though he insists that he thinks of his subjects primarily in terms of compositional utility, it’s impossible not to read into the emotional texture of these paintings, which emerge from one of the most enduring artistic partnerships of the past century. Throughout the winding galleries, you watch Ada and Alex age and have a child, Vincent, whose own growth you can track over the years.
As a whole, the show is at once documentation of a life well lived—full of friends and family, scenes of nature and the city—and a tribute to Katz’s refinement of a visual style that strives to turn broad swaths of color into concise portrayals of light and space. While I’ve spent countless afternoons in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago admiring the painting Vincent and Tony, seeing it in context, in the company of its friends, added a new depth that I find difficult to adequately describe.
I don’t want to give away too much—you should really go see the show!—but I do want to briefly mention the gallery just beyond the top of the Guggenheim spiral. The paintings in this room are all later works, painted in the past decade or so, predominantly in tones of black and gray. There’s a devastating painting of the back of Ada’s head, her hair now completely gray, almost more shape and memory than person. The very last painting against the back wall—Ocean 9, made earlier this year—depicts the swell of water from Coney Island, which Katz remembers from a childhood visit. It’s hard to spoil the effect, how something so static can feel so kinetic and alive. The painting is a sublime triumph, a testament to Katz’s mastery of the enigma of light, still being gathered after all these years.
Josh Lambert (contributor): Though I’ve read Elif Batuman’s novel Either/Or, which recently made The New York Times’ “Notable Books” list for 2022, I can’t tell you whether it’s any good. It’s a novel set at a place and time so drenched in my own memories and regrets—the college I went to, one year before I got there—that I had to give up any hope of evaluating it.
I lapped the novel up, relishing and cringing at references that could compose a clickbait-y “You went to Harvard in the late 1990s if . . . ” list: the prospect of summer travel updating a Let’s Go guide; heady discussions after Jay Harris’s core Moral Reasoning class “If There Is No God, All Is Permitted”; the green-on-black Unix terminals, with Pine email and the creepy “finger” command that allowed you to see where your friends had last logged in. I identified with Batuman’s protagonist, Selin, in more personal ways, too: In her second year of college, she discovers sex like an anthropologist from Mars—or maybe like a person fated to encounter Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” 20 years later—and without getting into the details, that also brings back uncomfortable memories for me.
But if I can’t guess whether or not the novel will resonate the way it did for me with Jewish Currents readers who are younger or older than me and/or haven’t done time in Cambridge, I do feel sure that if you read this magazine, you’ll enjoy one minor aspect of the book that I haven’t seen mentioned in any of its admiring reviews (and this wasn’t there in The Idiot, Batuman’s previous novel, which narrates Selin’s first year of college).
I’m referring to Batuman’s pointed caricature of her childhood friend, the novelist and essayist Dara Horn, in a character here called Leora. Explaining how they know each other, Selin says, “Leora had been my best friend when we were little, and then we went to different middle schools and high schools, but now we were at college together.” This checks out with public knowledge about Batuman and Horn, but even if it didn’t, some of what Selin has to say about Leora is a dead giveaway. One of Selin’s classmates writes a story about a girl whose mother hands her a box filled with “the priceless artifacts of her people,” and tells her that if she “ever forgot those things, then she would have helped to murder her ancestors.” That makes Selin think of her old friend: “I knew that Leora believed something like that, and thought she had to learn her ancestors’ languages, translate their books, and memorialize how they had been murdered.” (Horn famously studied Hebrew and Yiddish in college, and before she began writing novels, she completed a prize-winning undergrad thesis on “the messianic experiment in modern Jewish literature.”) When Selin gives Proust a try, she reflects that “Leora said [Swann’s Way] was so boring that she could hear her own hair grow,” and that sounds to me like Horn, too. The really telling bit, though, in a novel published less than a year after Horn’s success with People Love Dead Jews, is Selin’s understanding that Leora, by the time she arrived at college, “already thought every single person on earth was anti-Semitic.”
Well, yeah. Selin’s charming because, naïve as she often is, she perceives the individuals and groups around her with an unsettling clarity, and she doesn’t spare the ones she loves.
Daniel May (publisher): I’m not a Star Wars Person. When I finally watched Rogue One a few months ago on a friend’s recommendation, I had to review the Wikipedia entry on the first film about a half-hour in, to remind myself how exactly the plans for the Death Star ended up in R2D2. I have a hard time taking seriously an evil emperor named “Darth Sidious” (and I had to look up that name). All to say, I wasn’t awaiting Andor with any kind of great anticipation. But I do think that Tony Gilroy is one of the more underrated writer/directors in Hollywood (Duplicity, in my view, is a stone-cold classic), so when I heard that he was the showrunner, I got curious.
Within the first few minutes of the premier, it was obvious that this was a very different kind of “Star Wars Story.” The central question the show poses to the larger Star Wars universe is: “What would it look like if ‘The Empire’ acted, well, like an empire?” Among the things it might do is subcontract security out to companies that manage profitable projects. And so, in Andor, the plot gets started when our exceedingly reluctant hero-to-be Cassian Andor gets into a brawl with two off-duty corporate security officers that work for a nameless entity that manages the industry and administration on various planets.
Another thing such an empire might do is find planets with valuable resources to plunder, kill as many of the people native to those planets as necessary to establish control, and provide the survivors with narcotics and alcohol, limited space for living, and special dispensation to travel on certain days to certain locations for certain ceremonies. (And so, we discover in the first few episodes that Cassian is the lone survivor from an indigenous community from one such planet, and the climactic moment midway through the first season takes place during one such ceremony on another.) Other things said empire might do include providing limited autonomy to certain communities and then stripping it from them in response to the slightest resistance, torturing those that resist or have information on those who do, arbitrarily arresting huge numbers of people and then again arbitrarily extending their prison terms, and managing a massive system of incarceration and forced labor.
Call it Origins of Space Totalitarianism. Except that put that way it sounds, well, exceedingly silly. And there are enough weird creatures that it does at times feel as silly as any Star Wars installment. But it’s also genuinely unsettling. A colleague summed it up as “Star Wars for Adults,” but another way to put it is that it very much not at all for kids. If I told you the creative torture device employed by the empire it would sound goofy AF, but the scene in which its used messed me up. And the episodes set in the prison complex are so suffocating I felt physically relieved when the credits rolled.
One of the achievements of the show is that it remains so unsettling even as we know where it is going. We know that however reluctant Cassian may be, however sure he is that resistance is pointless, he will eventually join the struggle and help to steal the plans for the Death Star. But the show holds the tension by making it difficult to root for the outcome, as the rebellion that we know that Cassian will eventually join is so thoroughly compromised by the long odds of their struggle. There is no “Force” here to call upon in the face of “the dark side”; all that the rebellion has is its own creative use of violence, betrayal, and the pursuit of weakness. Under total domination, the show suggests, the question is only whether to struggle. The empire determines the how.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve been enjoying the FX series Fleishman Is in Trouble, now streaming on Hulu, far more than I expected—so much so that I was curious about the novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner on which it’s based. Turning to books on which TV series are based is not generally a good idea, and I fully expected to put this one aside after ten pages. But I didn’t. In fact, everything about it swept me up, and it totally absorbed several days of my life.
The narrative voice—which belongs to one of the supporting characters, Libby—is a strange one, in that it recounts the inner lives and disintegrating marriage of the two main characters, Toby and Rachel Fleishman, as if she were inside their heads. But Brodesser-Akner pulls this off with aplomb, skillfully pulling the rug out from under our feet whenever we feel we have the characters pegged. We’re also aware that that voice is essentially hers, since Libby’s biography, particularly her life as a writer for a men’s magazine, exactly tracks the author’s own. Fleishman Is in Trouble is thus a remarkable act of self-ventriloquism.
It’s also a moral novel, a depiction of the state of the strictly delimited world of relatively young, wealthy Jews living on the Upper East Side. (Jewish and New York-centric as it is, it is in many ways a throwback to 18th-century French examinations of mores and morals like Les Liaisons dangeureuses. That’s perhaps an exaggeration, but it’s not an enormous one.) While some might find it objectionable that the book and show lack nonwhite characters, this is part of its documentary style: These people would socialize primarily if not exclusively with their own kind. Toby Fleishman is a hepatologist—financially successful by most people’s lights, but not by those of the Upper East Side, making $285,000 a year. His wife Rachel, a fanatically driven talent agent, earns far more, and the distance between their ambitions drives a wedge between them. Tracing their lives, the novel asks: Is it enough to be good and do good, as Dr. Fleishman is and does? Is it bad to want more? And what makes one lean one way or the other?
Sex plays an enormous part in the story, but in a way it’s a red herring. Though the book first seems to be about how sex binds or separates or twists people, it’s ultimately a novel about the unknowability of others, and how little we realize that they have a reality as real to them as ours is to us. Social life, work life, and marital life—all are a collision of these hidden, mysterious realties. (In this it resembles one of the unsung great novels, Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, one of the most profound works on this subject ever written.) But Fleishman Is in Trouble is also, finally, a novel about marriage—as happiness, as hell, and everything in between—and gender. It ends with an angry, heartfelt cri de coeur from the narrator/author about just how little has changed for women, even as it may seem that everything has.
_____
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