Shabbat
Reading List

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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Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): This Monday, I attended the DOC NYC US premiere of While We Watched, a documentary by Indian filmmaker Vinay Shukla about NDTV news anchor Ravish Kumar and his lonely crusade against deepening ethnonationalism and crumbling democracy in Narendra Modi’s India.

Here at Jewish Currents, we’ve long been struck by the parallels between India and Israel’s rightward rush (to say nothing of the effects on their global diasporas). Indeed, as a closer observer of Israeli politics, it’s impossible to watch this film without drawing parallels to the Israeli context. Focusing as it does on the media’s near-total conscription into Modi’s strongman nationalism—a bait-and-switch that offers an enemy in Kashmir and India’s Muslim minority instead of jobs or basic services—it’s not hard to make the connection to Benjamin Netanyahu’s own media echo chamber, described by Elisheva Goldberg in this magazine a few years ago. In any event, the film paints a bleak picture of a democracy in freefall, where every channel but one resembles Fox News (truly they must be taking notes; the Tucker Carlson vibes are strong).

Kumar is an earthbound hero: When a journalist from a local outlet calls to say he’s doubting the ability to do honest work after witnessing the attacks on NDTV (among other things, the network’s broadcast signal is mysteriously disrupted in a number of locations, and Kumar himself is forced to travel with full-time security), Kumar does not readily provide the inspiration the caller craves. I’m also doubting, he says. I’m the same as you. A running motif of the film is cake—an office tradition on an employee’s last day—as one by one NDTV staffers tired of the stress and the attacks leave the office for greener pastures. Each time, Kumar bows his head toward his sad slice in a corner of the room before offering half-hearted well wishes. It’s worth knowing, though it isn’t explicitly stated in the film, that most of the other ultranationalist anchors depicted started out at NDTV. They were not always that way. Kumar may have doubts, but it does not seem like he is going to quit. Then again, it may not be up to him, as Kumar reminded us himself at a talkback after the film; NDTV is in the middle of a hostile takeover by billionaire Gautam Adami, which will almost certainly curtail the already circumscribed freedoms the network now enjoys.

The film is making its way through the festival circuit now, so unfortunately, I don’t know where it will screen next, but keep an eye out for it—I’m sure it will soon get wider distribution. It left me considering what becomes of dissenters when a society’s slide toward totalitarianism is too far gone to stop. Either way, Kumar reminds us, sometimes you fight not for victory, but to show the world that there was “someone on the battlefield.”

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): I recently read my second book by Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux: Happening, a slim memoir chronicling the author’s pursuit of an illegal abortion in 1963, translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. While the book’s direct and unapologetic account of an infuriatingly stigmatized medical procedure is bracing, it’s perhaps most thrilling for its philosophical undercurrents. As she recalls each step in the harrowing process of accessing the clandestine care she needs, Ernaux meditates on the metaphysics of the formless forces that shape her predicament: the fetus within her and the law that surrounds her. The fetus entirely consumes her internal sense of time, shifting the outward temporality of her young life inward; what was once “a series of meaningless days punctuated by university talks and lectures, afternoons spent in cafés and at the library, leading up to exams and the summer vacation, to the future” contracts into “a shapeless entity growing inside me which had to be destroyed at all costs.” The law, meanwhile, choreographs her entire world—including her own writing—against her: “The law was everywhere. In the euphemisms and understatements of my diary; the bulging eyes of [Ernaux’s former fellow student] Jean T; the so-called forced marriages, the musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the shame of women who aborted and the disapproval of those who did not.”

Together these two enemies represent the same single formidable obstacle: reality. “If only I didn’t have this REALITY inside me,” the young Ernaux writes in her diary; decades later she describes the law as an “invisible, elusive reality.” What she needs is something that is outside reality, to circumvent and obliterate it. Indeed, the stigma around abortion clouds it in a haze of non-being—searching for some sense of the procedure itself, she realizes that “although abortion was mentioned in many novels, no details were given about what actually took place. There was a sort of void between the moment the girl learns she is pregnant and the moment it’s all over.” She finds an even more extreme lacuna in her conversation with a doctor who refuses to put himself on the line to help her: “Neither of us had mentioned the word abortion, not even once. This thing had no place in language.”

In one sense, Ernaux’s task is to bring the concrete physicality of abortion into language—to render the unspeakable speakable and turn nothing into something. (“These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” she reflects near the book’s conclusion.) But Ernaux is also interested in elevating abortion from its social negation into a more essential kind of nothingness. Early on, she writes that her “investigation” into this era of her life “must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” In the same passage, Ernaux compares her determination to write the book to her resolve to obtain the procedure—a thrilling reversal of the ubiquitous analogy between a book and a child. It’s fitting, then, that Happening itself aspires to the same sort of nothingness Ernaux found in her abortion: the radiant banality of everyday life.

David Klion (newsletter editor): Sometimes a cultural phenomenon just bypasses us; we know it’s there in the background for years, we have some glancing familiarity with it, we’re aware that it’s good and that lots of people like it, but we never really focus on it. For most of its 30-year existence, that was how I experienced the Wu-Tang Clan, the massively influential hip-hop collective that emerged out of Staten Island when I was a kid and achieved its commercial peak the year of my bar mitzvah. Yes, I knew it existed; yes, I could probably name around half of the ten rappers who have been part of the group; yes, I’d listened to “C.R.E.A.M.” and a handful of other tracks, registered that Method Man played a secondary character on The Wire, and heard about the Martin Shkreli fiasco. I had a sense that these guys were a big deal and for good reason, but they hadn’t yet become a big deal to me personally.

For whatever reason, 2022 is the year I decided to fill this gap and get really into the Wu, beginning with their classic debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers and continuing with Wu-Tang Forever and the solo debuts of GZA, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, and the rest. I watched the first two (of a planned three) seasons of Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga, a kind of extended biopic, as well as the Showtime documentary miniseries Of Mics and Men, and dug up old interviews on YouTube and in Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s wonderful New York City atlas Nonstop Metropolis, which includes a conversation with RZA about growing up in the shadows of the two Staten Island housing projects that produced much of the group. I even listened to improbably successful mashups of Wu-Tang’s output with that of the Beatles and Fugazi. I approached Wu-Tang with the same obsessive passion that I brought to the Star Wars franchise back when Wu-Tang was actually new and relevant.

Plenty of other acts, from Bob Dylan to my colleague Mari’s beloved Taylor Swift, merit this kind of geeked-out fandom, but Wu-Tang is especially rewarding—in part because the members embrace fan culture in their own right, not only of hip-hop but of kung fu movies and comic books, but also because the group is so stacked with superstar MCs who invite comparisons and rankings and bouts of individual obsession. That said, I don’t have a single favorite; who’s to say whether GZA’s lyrical cleverness is more impressive than Ghostface’s frenetic flow, Method Man’s goofy charisma, or RZA’s prophetic intensity and sick beats? And why is Inspectah Deck not at least as famous as any of the above? (A very unfortunate basement flood, it turns out.) I’m just marveling that so much talent came out of one corner of one borough at one time, and that it took me this long to appreciate it. 2022 is also the year I became a dad, and as the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard said, Wu-Tang is for the children.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As I walked through the marvelous Morris Hirschfield show at the American Folk Art Museum, initially I ignored the display case filled with shoes. Why, I wondered, were they there? They were, however, part of the show—a key part,for Hirschfield had patented a slipper design. The shoes turned out to be as delightful as the paintings, and they also provided a clue as to how to interpret the latter.

Hirschfield, a Polish Jewish immigrant and self-trained artist who lived, as a 1943 Newsweek article put it, “in the wilds of Brooklyn” (specifically, Bay Ridge) often posed his mainly female figures against striking backgrounds, sometimes clothed and sometimes nude. But the backdrops, the subjects, and their clothing or lack thereof shouldn’t distract viewers from what clearly mattered above all to Hirschfield: their shoes—ornate, colorful, simple yet loving constructs.

There are also barefoot works in which the figures’ feet, like the rest of their bodies, are not photographically plausible. The catalog of the show, wittily and appositely titled Master of the Two Left Feet, is accurate, and is not mocking Hirschfield when it describes that flaw in his technique. There is much that is “wrong” in Hirschfield’s paintings, from female anatomies to strangely painted animals, buildings, and nature settings, but it is the assemblage of these “wrong” elements that makes every painting in the show so right.

As with the work of any great artist, a Hirschfield painting is immediately recognizable: a uniform spirit and sensibility animate every canvas. Inspired sometimes by classical works, sometimes by showgirls, and sometimes by a unique personal architectural sense, not a single work here is boring.

Hirschfield’s importance was noted in his lifetime, and his work was praised and exhibited in a solo show at MoMA in 1943 by and among the Surrealists; the most important supporter and collection of modern art of his time, Peggy Guggenheim, was also an admirer. The Folk Art Museum show also includes a room showing his works alongside those of better-known artists like Magritte. Compared to that of the more trained Surrealists, Hirschfield’s surrealism was totally spontaneous, made from the stuff in the mind and talent of an immigrant who scuffled to make a living with no hope—and perhaps no desire or expectation—of recognition. The museum—which doesn’t charge an admission fee, by the way—gives Hirschfield his rightful place in the pantheon not only of outsider art, but of art tout court.

The richly illustrated and informative book accompanying the show, Master of the Two Left Feet, by the art historian Richard Meyer, is an excellent guide to the show, the work, and the life of this extraordinary artist. It’s an essential acquisition both for those who make it to New York before the show closes on January 29th, 2023 and for those who don’t.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Since Sunday morning, when I heard the news of the death of Mimi Parker, half of the legendary indie rock band Low, I’ve listened to little else. For nearly three decades, singer and drummer Parker, who died of ovarian cancer at the young age of 55, made hauntingly beautiful music with her husband, singer and guitarist Alan Sparhawk, and a rotating cast of bassists. On their 1994 debut album I Could Live in Hope, Low emerged with a slow, singular sound whose cavernous sleepiness—anchored in Sparhawk’s shimmering chords, Parker’s minimalist percussion, and the couple’s gentle harmonies—cut against the volume and velocity that governed alternative rock.

The band subtly and patiently developed this style over their next three records, finding a space in it for achingly melodic pop as well as washes of droning noise. They began to expand their aesthetic on albums like 2001’s Things We Lost in the Fire and 2005’s The Great Destroyer, partnering with producers Steve Albini and David Fridmann—paragons of the very sound the band had initially abjured—to push their style to accommodate a brisker pace and more traditional uses of distortion without abandoning their distinctive, otherworldly haziness. The band continued to experiment; on their most recent trilogy, a collaboration with experimental pop producer BJ Burton, they truly made distortion their own, embracing a transcendent cacophony. The last two records, 2018’s Double Negative and 2021’s HEY WHAT (which I wrote about for this newsletter last year), have been rightly hailed as late period, out-of-left-field masterpieces on the level of ’80s auteurs Talk Talk.

Last year, when asked what unifies Low’s sound across this evolution, Parker responded, “Well, the vocals. No matter what we throw them on top of, the vocals keep it what it is.” This is what anchored the band’s exploration of their signature constellation of feeling: sorrow, yearning, desperate desire. The couple made their home in Duluth, Minnesota—just north of Minneapolis, where I’ve lived since 2015—and I’ve come to think of Low as the sound of Minnesota winter, brutal yet immaculate. From the glacial spaciousness of I Could Live in Hope to the barren ruins of HEY WHAT, their music conjures a forbidding, foreboding terrain, a lonely place where sad souls can find each other. The sound of Parker’s and Sparhawk’s voices is the sound of this desolate communion.

In a remembrance for The Guardian, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who produced Low’s 2013 album The Invisible Way, discussed the inimitable beauty of Parker’s crystalline soprano. “There’s something truly sacred about the way she sang and savoured notes,” he wrote, “almost as a form of meditation—the way that she and Alan could breathe together and make this music that was secular church music, or something.” I love the way Tweedy falters here: or something. It points to the tensions that live in Low’s music, which is not exactly secular; Parker was, and Sparhawk remains, a devout Mormon, and much of their oeuvre is rooted in their religion. But they never seem dogmatic, never evangelize (not even on the lovely 1999 Christmas EP); rather, they articulate faith as an embrace of the mystery tied to the uncertain hope of redemption. In his story “A Report,” the ex-Mormon writer Brian Evenson articulates a vexed relationship to religious tradition by imagining a prisoner attempting to transmit an inscrutable code between the cells. “I am part of a chain conveying a message that I cannot understand,” he says. “But perhaps someone understands it.” It reminds me of Low’s song “DJ,” on which Sparhawk sings: “Our fathers said what their fathers said / Our mothers did what their mothers did / We find each other on the edge of it.” Between each line, Parker’s ghostly voice joins his for a wordless response, the warmth of its infinite fragility a kind of company in the unknown.

May her memory be a blessing.

Aparna Gopalan (outgoing JC fellow): In June, as I was crafting and praying over my Jewish Currents job application, I haunted the “Editor’s Picks” section of the website to try and understand this magazine’s world. I read and re-read the pieces listed there, trying to puzzle out what that list, as a curatorial artifact, could tell me about the people behind Currents and what they were proud of—what they understood as stories particularly well-told. At the time, I didn’t know that my prayers would soon be answered and I’d get to spend the rest of the year working with and learning from those very people.

As I transition out of my fellowship and on to a new job this week, I’m thinking back to my time poring over “Editor’s Picks” and coming to the realization that the list did carry clues about the story of these people: what they cared about, what they had labored over in the past few years, and where they hoped to go in the future. Their act of curation itself told a story, both of experiences & memories, and of political hopes & dreams.

If I were to experiment with form in trying capture the story of my time at Currents in a “Fellow’s Picks” list, then, what would be on it? I’d definitely start with something like Naftuli Moster’s piece, which, besides being a classic Jewish Currents story aimed at holding the reactionary tendencies in one’s own community to account, was the first thing I “mock-edited.” Ari reviewed my edit with me, and my notes from our conversation begin with “WHAT ARE THE STAKES OF EACH LINE?” in all caps—a question this team asks itself every day. Then there would be Mari’s investigation into Israel Studies, which I helped do pull-quotes for. Even in such a “small” task, Currents’ attunement to political stakes did not diminish—just as the piece itself modeled journalistic integrity, Arielle taught me, so too must our representations of it, which meant foregoing some of the more “spicy” quotes in favor of quotes that stayed true to the fullness of the story being told. I learned this lesson again when crafting my own explainer on inflation with Nora and Dave, who helped me move through my rejection of “balance” as a fake political neutrality towards finding a new “balance” which deepened and broadened my critiques so I could speak to those who don’t agree but are nevertheless willing to listen.

Helping Claire with Yiyun Li’s powerful, meandering book review and listening to the poetry she curated over the months had me suspecting that there might actually be value in having a reader work to glean meaning rather than in providing them with an unearned, unfulfilling clarity. But I also did get to work in the more comfortable (to me) ‘cultural materialism’ vein with Nathan’s interview on literary conglomerates, in the process learning to ask not only “does this line belong” but also “does it belong here?” To balance out the interventionist editing instincts such questions strengthened in me, I had the truly singular and humbling experience of helping contextualize Edward Said’s letter to American Jewish intellectuals, a piece where the author’s words were what they were and any additional clarity had to be achieved around them.

I could go on, but in the interest of brevity, the rest of my “list” would probably be populated with the ‘bread and butter’ of Currents’ political journalism. As I helped edit Alex’s weekly newsletters on increasingly terrifying assaults on Palestinian rights (and increasingly militant resistance) alongside Arielle, Nora, Mari, and others, it became clear to me that this is a magazine grappling with the question of how to keep on speaking about increasingly unspeakable tragedy, and to do so in ways that intervenes in the world rather than just represent it.

This was the ethos—one of a perpetual attunement to stakes, an unwavering gaze trained on injustice others may or may not find “newsworthy,” and a careful craftsmanship brought to bear on the every word whether prosaic or poetic—that I can retrospectively say characterized “Editor’s Picks,” and has characterized my time with this community of incredible mentors and comrades which I hope to belong to for a long time. In the meantime, I hope to keeping poking my head in here every now and then!

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): I’ve been shy about approaching these recommendations because my friends are constantly publishing books, and it’s hard to recommend just some. But I would be hoarding important pleasures if I didn’t mention a few beloved new ones.

Alice Dark’s novel Fellowship Point is a portrait of a whole community via two women in their eighties who are lifelong friends, one a thoroughly devoted wife and mother, the other a solitary and secretive writer. The book became my social life during an isolated week of late summer (and it reminded me, through its counterexample, how dreadfully thin most contemporary American fiction is). That said, Anna DeForest’s A History of Present Illness is an artfully slim portrait of the medical industrial complex that is as much poem as novel. And Leigh N. Gallagher’s Who You Might Be manages at once to be both extremely cool and the most compassionate novel I’ve read in ages: in a tightly knit collision of characters that moves across California, Detroit, and New York, it taught me a ton about graffiti, reacquainted me with the tenderness and terrors of young love, and made me cry. I’ll add one slightly-less-recent novel rec that might interest readers here: Zaina Arafat’s fast-paced queer coming-of-age You Exist Too Much. Apparently she was recently introduced at a reading as “the Palestinian Larry David.” I can’t disagree.

I also loved Kendra Allen’s memoir Fruit Punch, a lament about growing up in a girl-turned-woman’s body, with rhythms that stick in your ear, sentence after sentence hanging in disharmony until, finally, silence demands we hear resolution where there can be none. Sofi Thanhauser’s deeply researched book Worn: A People’s History of Clothing begins with the realization that “clothes are made,” and then takes us through history and around the world to show us how. Finally, I’m thrilled that Tanaïs just won the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction for their book In Sensorium. You can get a taste of the book and their brilliance in my interview with them in Literary Hub back in February.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This year’s DOC NYC festival, which opened Wednesday and runs through November 17th in-person, with streaming options available until November 27th, includes almost 200 films and events. Though they’re not the only worthy ones, I’d like to recommend two must-see documentaries playing at the festival.

The first is Valerie Kontakos’s Queen of the Deuce, a film about gay porn, ethnic cinema, the Holocaust, and Times Square as it once was. The combination might seem impossible, but Kontakos weaves these strands together seamlessly and entreatingly as she tells the story of Chelly Wilson, the “queen” of the title. Chelly was a larger-than-life figure: brash, brassy, boisterous, and a businesswoman through and through. After immigrating to America from her native Greece, she eventually found her way to the movie business, and ended up running and living above the Eros, the Times Square gay porn theater, while also owning others, including the Adonis, also a famous gay site of the ’60s and ’70s. (Chelly, though married to a man, was herself a lesbian—and, like her husband Rex Wilson, a closeted Jew.) Kontakos, a Greek American filmmaker who has lived in Athen for the past 20 years, uses Chelly’s past as an entry point to tell the too-often-ignored horror story of the fate of the Jews of Salonika, Chelly’s hometown, 95% of whom perished during the war. The Queen of the Deuce lovingly tells Chelly’s tale through the voices of her daughters, friends, and collaborators, all of whom adored this extraordinary woman.

In Closed Circuit, Israeli director Tal Inbar has constructed a chilling documentary of a 2016 terrorist attack in a Tel Aviv restaurant that resulted in the deaths of four customers. Inbar documents the entire course of the attack, from the moment the killers crossed over from the Occupied Territories to their arrest, made possible by the closed-circuit cameras that are an omnipresent aspect of daily life in Israel. Their images are captured in their ill-fitting suits entering Israel, crossing Tel Aviv, reaching the restaurant, chatting with staff, and then taking out machine guns and attempting to kill as many diners as possible. The ubiquity of these cameras means that we see not only one of the killers shot and lying wounded on the street, but the other hiding in an apartment building lobby, where he is then invited up to the apartment of an off-duty policeman and offered tea to help him calm down. Inbar interviews people who were there—among them a young woman whose father was killed, who has never fully recovered from the loss. Others simply went about their business after the shooting stopped. This return to normalcy is also seen in the closed-circuit footage: After the dead and wounded have been removed from the restaurant, we witness the staff return, clear the tables, and wash down the counters.

I’ll recommend one more film that opens today in New York, though not at DOC NYC. Shlomi Elkabaz’s Black Notebook: Ronit is a labor of love, beautiful and tragic. The director, the brother and collaborator of the Israeli actor Ronit Elkabaz, demonstrates his affections and admiration for his brilliant sister in every shot. The documentary first covers the making of one of the greatest Israeli films—Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the story of an interminable religious divorce trial—which the siblings co-directed. But it also follows Ronit’s path after the completion of the film as she struggles with cancer, demonstrating perseverance and optimism all along the way—an optimism that will sadly be betrayed by the reality of the disease. It’s a courageous and heart-rending film.

Mari Cohen (assistant editor): I’ve previously alluded in this newsletter to my longtime fascination with the specter of “alien contact” as an opportunity to examine the social structures of our society through the lens of a completely unfamiliar visitor. Yet for someone interested in the liberatory possibilities of imagined worlds, my adult sci-fi reading resumé is embarrassingly thin. I’m confronting just what I’d been missing out on after picking up The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin thanks to the enthusiastic recommendation of my colleagues Nora and Aparna. I believe this book has changed my life.

In The Dispossessed, protagonist Shevek grows up on Anarres—a moon of the planet Urras—settled 200 years previously by a group of utopian anarchists. The Anarresti have succeeded in constructing their property-less, government-less, mutual-aid-based society on their inhospitable, dry moon; Shevek’s generation has never known anything different. On Urras, meanwhile, a society more familiar to us lives on: Two empires, one capitalist and one authoritarian communist, fight for geopolitical control of the planet, and great wealth inequality and violence rage on. Citizens of the two planets have little to no contact with one another until Shevek, a once-in-a-generation physics genius, makes the dramatic choice to visit Urras after his own society becomes unfriendly to his research.

By juxtaposing the two planets, LeGuin has ample opportunity to train her anthropologist’s eye on each, resulting in richly detailed landscapes and fascinating passages of imagined social history. The exposition never feels gratuitous or didactic—its scaffolding is built in service to Shevek’s story. In adopting the Anarresti perspective, LeGuin effectively defamiliarizes the capitalist and carceral reality of Urras: In a class on the history of Urras, Anarresti children are genuinely baffled to learn what a “prison” is. The characters often call each other “propertarian” as an insult.

The Dispossessed maintains a stubborn commitment to complexity. Annaresti society is an astonishing feat, but it is not an easy paradise. Food, labor, and governance are equitably shared, and the powerful social value placed on communal responsibility keeps violence rare without the need for prisons or police. Yet human beings remain human beings, and can’t entirely dispel their dreaded “egoism”: Shevek’s jealous and controlling physics mentor takes credit for his labor and thwarts his more esoteric investigations. The powerful hive-mind, too, can be employed in less generous ways: A musician friend of Shevek finds his experimental compositions shunned because the group councils in charge of composition are suspicious of anything new.

The defects of Annares are symbolically underscored by the comparison of its harsh landscape to the lush natural features of Urras. On his visit to Urras, Shevek takes genuine delight in observing and experiencing its scenery: “The tenderness and vitality of the colors, the mixture of rectilinear human design and powerful, proliferate natural contours, the variety and harmony of the elements, gave an impression of complex wholeness such as he had never seen.” Yet LeGuin does not depict Anarres’s flaws in order to deem it a dystopia or denigrate it as a fool’s project. Shevek may be an Annaresti iconoclast, but he remains Annaresti at heart, suspicious of the “propertarianism” everywhere on Urras. For all of his planet’s flaws, he would not trade its spirit of solidarity for the unequal spoils of Urras. As he tells an audience of wealthy Urrasti partygoers, “Our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns.”

I have a tendency towards cynicism, which is helpful when it’s time to be clear-eyed about what I see around me, and less helpful when it’s time to imagine an otherwise. I want to be a good radical, but it’s hard to shake my skepticism, to believe in what else might be possible, especially amidst a modern left racked by division and factionalism. LeGuin’s speculative fiction has opened a portal in my mind. Watching an elsewhere in action on Anarres, I am moved to truly visualize how else we might labor, how else we might love, how else we might live. I don’t know how to get there. But I know I’ll be thinking about The Dispossessed for many days to come.

Ari Brostoff (senior editor): For me, the special pleasure of putting together this summer’s issue of Jewish Currents was that, though it did not technically have a theme, we had reason to dub it our secret psychoanalysis issue. Four different pieces—on grief and grievance in American Jewish politics, therapy’s repressed religious origins, psychoanalysis in Israel/Palestine, and the HBO series Couples Therapy—were centrally concerned with psychoanalytic questions; to celebrate the issue’s release, we held an event about decolonization and the clinic.

I never quite know how to describe my own relationship to psychoanalysis: I’ve never studied it seriously or undergone a full treatment, but my enthusiasm and curiosity about the practice is a bit more than, shall we say, secular. So I’ve been delighted this week that a new magazine about psychoanalysis, Parapraxis, has launched online, with the first print issue coming out in December (I have the honor of being on the masthead as a contributing editor). Maybe the reason I was so excited about JC’s secret psychoanalysis issue is that it wasn’t always obvious to me that a magazine could be a regular forum for psychoanalytic thought. But my brilliant friend Alex Colston—one of the founding editors of Parapraxis together with Hannah Zeavin, a deeply witty and thoughtful participant in our decolonization and the clinic event—knew better.

As the excellent introductory essay to their first issue reminds us, Freud understood psychoanalysis as being in many ways a study of error because our mistakes, gaffes, and blunders, which he called “parapraxes,” offer insight into the workings of the unconscious, which has a mind of its own. At the same time, as the editors write, attention to the buried workings of the psyche provides psychoanalysis with its great social project: “the recuperation of history through its traumas and limits toward a curative and, we hope, emancipatory end.” If journalism, as the saying goes, is a first draft of history, then it stands to reason that Freud’s method should find itself at home in the form of a magazine, with its inevitably blundering attempts at understanding the world in real time.

It has been a treat reading the handful of pieces now up online, which include an inquiry by Nathan Rochelle Duford into a neofascist male pundit’s mysterious claim that having sex with women would make him gay; a piece by McKenzie Wark challenging psychoanalysts to reckon with their field’s failures with regard to the treatment of trans patients; and an essay by JC contributing writer Zoé Samudzi on the South African Jewish photographer David Goldblatt’s images of rural Afrikaner families near the end of the apartheid regime, which dramatically illustrate everyday attempts to shore up a crumbling form of racialized kinship. The first print issue, with the theme “The Family Problem,” looks very exciting, and I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival in my mailbox next month.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): Each time I’ve landed on the Bookshop.org website this week, I’ve been faced with an ad for a suite of books by Art Spiegelman. This turns out not to be a personalized recommendation based on the embarrassing number of times I’ve read Maus, but an ad in connection with the lifetime achievement medal Spiegelman will receive at the National Book Awards Ceremony on November 16.

Missing from the banner, however, and from Bookshop.org altogether, is the book I consider the best Holocaust book out there, or anyway my favorite: Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, created in conversation with comics scholar Hillary Chute, and featuring sketches, early drafts, and tons of insight into the composition process. I reread it a few months ago, marveling at how, from the time he began drafting Maus—when the available research on the Nazi genocide easily fit on a few bookshelves—Spiegelman nevertheless managed to anticipate and pointedly avoid the genre and aesthetic he calls “Holokitsch.”

MetaMaus acquaints its reader with an artist whose brilliance and foresight risks being obscured by his commercial success. (In the words of Spiegelman’s wife, the editor Françoise Mouly: “Next to making Maus, your greatest achievement may have been not turning Maus into a movie.”) Spiegelman comments on his desire to disown the term “Holocaust,” which he finds overly religious and martyrizing; his lifelong project “to make as many graven images as I could”; and the book’s tepid reception in Israel (he wonders if this is because it’s too resolutely diasporist). The book also includes a collection of typewritten 1983 rejection letters from publishers, which are, in retrospect, deliciously vindictive to peruse. (Editors “just didn’t find the story here to be sufficiently compelling,” complaining it “never quite gets on track.”) You also get a few nuggets from Spiegelman’s therapist, the survivor Paul Pavel, who tells us that “neurosis is just a solution that has become a problem” and wonders if, beyond a Christian obsession with sacrifice and martyrdom, part of the reason survivors were heroicized had to do with life always “taking the side of life.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In yesterday’s newsletter, I wrote about Tantura and H2: The Occupation Lab, two of the movies screening at this year’s Other Israel Film Festival—a far more interesting and daring event than most Jewish film festivals. But there are a number of other documentaries on view that I heartily recommend to readers of Jewish Currents.

Assaf Banitt and Shay Hazkani’s The Soldier’s Opinion is an account of the group within the IDF whose job it was to read all outgoing letters, providing the army’s leadership with a view of the soldiers’ state of mind. When soldiers spoke frankly about things like drug use, they were reported. But Big Brother was not always evil: On rare occasions, the patterns found in letters from a particular unit led to positive institutional changes. The censors interviewed in the film speak about how they came to know the soldiers whose letters they read—their hopes, fears, and failings.

Julia Bacha’s Boycott, an important film for American viewers, tells us about the coordinated effort by an unholy alliance of right-wing Jews and evangelical political figures to ban BDS activity, forcing companies to pledge not to participate in a boycott of Israel. It should seem obvious to those with even the most casual knowledge of the First Amendment that this is unconstitutional (as some courts have found, though not all). Still, it’s hardly shocking that state legislators are lazy and ignorant enough to pass such laws: Some of those interviewed by the director acknowledge not having read the bills at all. The film does a brilliant job of showing the not-so-hidden antisemitism of the fundamentalist proponents of these laws and their belief that Jews are all going to hell—after they redeem the Holy Land to prepare the way for the Rapture. (Almost comically, the rabbi of Little Rock’s largest congregation speaks of his opposition to such laws, while the legislator who proposed the Arkansas bill admits he never spoke to any Jews.) The people who stood up against these laws in Arkansas, Texas, and California by refusing to sign the required pledge displayed impressive courage, risking their livelihoods in the name of what’s right.

The Forgotten Ones, directed by Michale Boganim, is a moving and justifiably angry film on the mistreatment of Israel’s Mizrahi Jews. Boganim—the daughter of one of the key figures of the Israeli Black Panthers, who Prime Minister Golda Meir famously said were “not nice” for raising hell in fighting discrimination and insisting on their rights—shows the myriad ways Mitzrahim have been sidelined and victimized by the country’s Ashkenazi leadership. But sadly, as Boganim admits, many Mizrahim came to vote for the right, turning their backs on the positive role (perhaps always illusory) they might have played as intermediaries between the Palestinians and the Jews.

The film I most strongly recommend is Moshe Alafi’s The Samaritans: A Biblical People, a frank and fascinating portrait of the tiny religious group living in two West Bank cities. Its 850 members still follow the rules of this ancient offshoot of Judaism to the letter, and this wonderful film explores their practices, customs, mores—and, most importantly, the threat to their continued existence posed by declining birthrates.

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): I recently finished reading Home Bound, a richly layered new memoir by the writer and attorney Vanessa A. Bee. The book considers all the things that a home can be to a person: not only a place of shelter, but an arbitrary determinant of opportunity, a social signifier, a speculative investment. And, at the same time, a loving attempt to externalize one’s interior self; the comforting manifestation of a cherished set of ideas.

In a series of essayistic reflections, Bee explores how her many homes have shaped the direction of her life and contributed to her complex sense of identity. Born in Cameroon, she was adopted as a baby by her biological aunt, and spent her early childhood in a majority-white town in central France before moving into government-administered housing in Lyon, then in London. When she was a pre-teen, she and her mom moved to Reno, Nevada, where they at first lived crammed into an aunt and uncle’s already full house. Bee narrates the way her social and political consciousness emerged in response to her shifting place in the world. Whereas, in Lyon, she realized during a series of neighborhood protests against police brutality that “the mere act of living in this project makes us the kind of people who’d burn our own homes . . . a reality that subsumed our identity the moment we qualified for the white apartment,” in Reno, she may have shared a bed with her cousin, but the middle class neighborhood “masked my poverty and excused by blackness. It allowed me to pass.”

Bee has said that she initially set out to write “an essay collection loosely themed around the importance of state assistance for economically vulnerable kids to succeed—a sort of anti-Hillbilly Elegy.” Her book interweaves this thread with more intimate explorations of her family lineages—but her insistence that a home is a right remains central. For Bee, a better world would be one in which everyone had not only adequate shelter, but the ability to shape their surroundings; she writes about buying her first condo—while working at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), trying to guarantee affordable housing for others—and painting the walls, as she was forbidden to do while living in the apartment in Lyon.

This emphasis on housing as a site of personal agency as well as decommodified security reminded me of the wonderful book Modern Housing for America, by the historian Gail Radford, about a New Deal-era group often remembered as the “housers,” a movement of activists and intellectuals who attempted to bring high-quality social housing to the US. The group insisted that public housing must be beautiful and desirable, offering not only the essentials but also “freedom and flexibility.” Radford tells what is ultimately the story of the movement’s crushing defeat without acceding to the tendency of past events to generate their own sense of inevitability. It’s no wonder that the book has become popular among a new generation of housing activists; it quietly insists on an enduringly revolutionary set of possibilities. Bee’s own book ends on a forward-looking note, as she lets go of some of the homes she has carried with her and embraces others. If readers of this newsletter will excuse the shameless promo, I should mention that I’m excited to discuss all of this and more with her in a conversation at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., this coming Tuesday, 11/1.

Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): Recommending a book by Mike Davis this week feels like adding to the sea with an eye dropper. Beautiful, moving words have been written about Davis’s books, his life, his ethos, his “prophetic” analyses, his piercing prose, his refusal of careerism, his commitment to the cause of labor. Then there are Davis’s own self-representations, mined from countless interviews, which seem to capture his essence better than what anyone else can write.

What could I add to all this to convince you to read or reread Davis but a personal story? As for many others, Davis was my gateway drug to socialism. I went to college aspiring, embarrassingly, to become a development economist. Reading Planet of Slums shattered that dream. “From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago,” Davis wrote. “Most cities of the South, however, more closely resemble Victorian Dublin,” a Dickensian slumscape of destitution, disease, and despair.

The sheer erudition of Planet of Slums—the speed with which it zipped from place to place without ever losing local specificity or the global picture—blew me away, but what was most mind-boggling about the book was how Davis completely subverted understandings of capitalism, progress, and history itself. In hoping to be a development economist, I had wanted to help “develop” my country (India) so “we” could reach where Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago had. But here was Davis telling me that in fact the whole world—Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago included—was actually heading the way of Bombay and Rio, and that this trajectory was no error or glitch to be fixed by an economist but exactly what the system was designed to produce and keep producing into the future. “The one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums,” Davis wrote, “might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of...Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.”

The post-Slums reversal left me reeling and made me deeply suspicious of everything else I had ever read or learned that had taken the narrative of history-as-progress for granted. After all, what Davis challenged here was more than just a definition of urbanism or development—it was the baseline assumption inherent to modernity that however unequally, however incompletely, over the past several thousand years things have been getting better. What if this were false for the vast majority of people? How dramatically would everything we do have to shift if we accepted that the slum was going to be the norm in a generation or two, not the ignoble exception? Through years of graduate work, organizing, conversations, and writing, I’ve gone back to Davis’s provocation again and again, asking myself the same questions.

If, as the cliche goes, the mind is not a vase to be filled but a fire to be lit, it was Davis who lit mine along with thousands of others’ in a conflagration that may have the power to change things or at least to tip the first domino. My political personhood began with Mike Davis, and I mourn what we’ve all lost now that he is gone—our teller of truths, starter of fires.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Never in a million years did I think I would be summoned to defend the viciously maligned gay rom-com Bros in the Jewish Currents newsletter—and not only because I am deeply, hopelessly straight. But also because it’s admittedly . . . not great. I don’t frankly disagree with Ari when they wrote, last week, about the “total lack of chemistry in all its guises” between the leads.

But—and of course, I should really stay in my lane here, but whatever—it’s just a studio rom-com! It’s allowed to, like, have a few laughs and be totally forgettable. Why does it have to be, as Ari reported of the conversations swirling around the film in the queer community, the “not-kidding-around-this-time nail in the coffin of queer life and art”? Take it from a straight: Rom-coms are bad! That’s part of their appeal! And this one had some actual laughs (though admittedly I can’t remember them now), which is more than I can say for that abomination of a gay Christmas movie Happiest Season. (Of course, I only watched that Christmas movie because it was gay and I can’t say I’ve seen other ones. Are all of them that soulless?) I understand the pressures that come with greater mainstream representation, but freed of personal investment from this particular representational discourse, I’ve decided to die on the hill of mindless fun.

But perhaps the real reason I feel compelled to make Bros the first (totally gratuitous) back-to-back rec in this newsletter is that Ari left out a crucial piece of context for those fence-sitters in the JC readership. This is almost less a gay rom-com than it is a Jew/non-Jew rom-com (a hallmark of all the greats of the genre: Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally): In a kind of curious bait and switch, the only real conflict between the two leads, while disguised as being about Billy Eichner’s over-the-top gay presentation, is actually about his over-the-top Jewiness. Basically, what’s-his-face hot guy and his nice goyishe family are annoyed. Is it a parable about internalized homophobia or heartland antisemitism or just about the fact that Jews and/or gays need to tone it down? Who cares! It’s Friday night and I want to not think about the midterms or kids throwing soup at Van Gogh or, god forbid, Kanye for approximately 120 minutes. Consider this your permission to do that!

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I recently read two articles in a left-wing magazine that I found politically ignorant and, in fact, ignoble. They were all that’s terrible in left-wing writing, replete with name-calling and self-righteousness, filled with a self-proclaimed purity few mortals can attain to. Turning from them in disgust, I needed to read someone I could be confident would not disappoint, someone free of cant and self-delusion. I had to choose between H.L. Mencken and Joan Didion. Not having re-read her since her death, I went for the latter’ classic collection, The White Album. I was right to do so: Didion never lets you down.

Her mastery of language, eye for detail, and refusal of the obvious make all of the essays, written during the height of the ’60s and into the ’70s, essential documents of their time and of our society. It makes no difference what subject she examines, even unlikely ones, like Hollywood or shopping malls or the establishment of high-occupancy vehicle lanes in Los Angeles. But where Didion excelled, and where many—I warn you all now—will find her extremely problematic, is her description of ’60s America as a country not breaking out of its shackles but descending into chaos.

For Didion, the representative event of the new America being born was the Manson murders, the low point of the decade elevated to an archetypal moment. Student radicals are mocked, their posturing interpreted as ultimately meaningless, their college occupations empty, for “disorder was its own point.” A fundraising event held at the home of Sammy Davis Jr. is ridiculed as mercilessly for its vapidity as Tom Wolfe’s account of a different event in Radical Chic. The music played there is mocked as “not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless-steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson.”

All of this is relatively light compared to her attacks on the still-young women’s movement. Didion rejects the notion that women are protesting their status in society: “But of course something other than an objection to being ‘discriminated against’ was at work here, something other than an aversion to being ‘stereotyped’ in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seems that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children.”

Any magazine editor who published these words today would be unemployed by day’s end. Didion would later write about political issues from a slightly different viewpoint, and do so brilliantly. But the heart of Didion, why she is still necessary, is for her tonic effect, for her illusionless vision of humanity. She was part of a generation, that, as she wrote, “lived with the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs,” of experiencing “the political irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.” We all need a dose of Didion, those who refuse ambiguity most of all.