Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I am upstate, staying at the kind of house where people—mostly artists and poets and activists and performers—are always passing through, and where every few feet a new pile of books lies like a compost heap of their inner lives. I picked up a book from the top of one of these piles because it was old and slim and because I liked the title: And Really Frau Blum Would Very Much Like to Meet the Milkman, a collection of very short stories from the mid-1960s by Peter Bichsel, a Swiss writer I had never heard of, translated from German by the poet Michael Hamburger. Indeed, I almost wonder whether it destroys the magic to recommend it like this, whether my enchantment with the book is also a function of my surprise, of entering a book the way one slips directly into a strange lake, without first checking its temperature or having read its TripAdvisor page.

Either way, I was taken by these stories, which rarely go more than two-and-a-half short pages. Nearly stripped of time and place and context, they reminded me of certain descriptions of hauntings, apparitions caught in repetitive, mundane actions. The haunted ask: Why this? What has given this ascent of a staircase such emotional weight that it has become pressed in the folds of time, that it must be repeated nightly? Bichsel’s vignettes are like this. A woman receives a letter from a man—an estranged brother? a lover? a difficult friend?—that says very little, but she reads it over, it changes her mood. An old man becomes old in his habits; he turns the radio on and off, is irritated with both sound and silence. An old woman brings flowers to another old woman. A man comes to a bar each week at the same time, watches others play a card game in silence, and leaves when the game is through; when he dies, the card players aren’t sure how to remember him. A woman wonders about her milkman who comes very early in the morning and who she has never met: What do they know of one another? These slight, spare scenes somehow manage to touch the strange patterns of being alive.

(Editor’s note: I couldn’t find a copy of this book on Bookshop or almost anywhere else, except for a rare and expensive used edition linked above, which to me suggests that Arielle stumbling across it really was improbable.)

Ari M. Brostoff (senior editor): As often as possible for the past few months, I have lifted weights at the Blink Fitness down the street from my building. I am small, weak, still fairly new to changing in the men’s locker room, and using a women’s weightlifting app “ironically.” Almost everyone else in the weightlifting section of Blink is big, strong, and seems mesmerizingly able to improvise lifts, like the most talented kids at the playground. Nonetheless, in a powerful show of homosocial democracy, I am allowed to take up as much space as I need among them. It’s great. I still have some significant barriers to entry, though, like the fact that I only vaguely understand how my movements are connected to my actual muscles. When I mentioned this to my friend Dayna earlier this year—she was, at the time, showing me the more or less literal ropes at her own Planet Fitness—she told me that this knowledge would start to become embodied as I got more practiced. She also told me to watch the 1977 bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron, the film that made Arnold Schwarzenneger into a household name (it’s available on YouTube). This week I finally did.

Pumping Iron, directed by the British filmmaker George Butler, is a campy introduction to the world of competitive bodybuilding—it focuses on the run-up to the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions of 1975—and it is overwhelmingly about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s insane body and his incredible skill at self-objectification. Early on, Butler asks Schwarzenegger if he visualizes himself as a piece of sculpture. Arnold replies, in his singular Austrian-at-the-beach cadence, “yeah, definitely,” then goes on to suggest that his art form is in fact the higher one: While an artist who wants to embellish a figure’s musculature can just “slap on some clay,” he is doing it “the harder way.” He goes on to explain the feeling of “the pump,” in which the act of lifting increases bloodflow to your muscles and you get “a really tight feeling like your skin is going to explode,” and then in case you didn’t get it, says, “It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, as having sex with a woman and coming,” and then in case you still didn’t get it, asks, “So, can you believe how much I am in heaven? I’m, like, getting the feeling of coming in the gym, I’m getting the feeling of coming at home, I’m getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up . . . . So I’m coming day and night. I mean it’s terrific, right?”

Things for Arnold are terrific. He does push-ups with two blond girls astride his back. He falls asleep in the park in a cluster of bodybuilders, all barely clothed, like a pod of seals. (A running visual gag in the movie is how silly he looks every time he bothers to wear a shirt, like a Great Dane in a little sweater.) When asked about his weak points, he explains, “I have no weak points.” (He used to have some, but, he eliminated them.) His public appearances often involve little lifting but much flexing, which, if we take seriously his aspirations to being a sculpture, is actually the motion that shows him at the height of his craft: Even wearing a perfunctory Speedo, he is beyond naked, revealing parts of his body we didn’t know existed. It all gets a tad race-sciencey: The competitors who tremble before him include Mike Katz, who tells us he was called “Jewboy” growing up and became a huge jock in response; an Italian from New York with daddy issues; an Italian from Italy with mommy issues; and a Black Frenchman who doesn’t get any lines. Arnold himself is the son of an Austrian police chief (and, though the film doesn’t mention this, a former brownshirt) who spent his childhood “dreaming about very powerful people, dictators and things like that,” and cheekily plays himself as an easygoing psychopath (to win, he explains, you just have to completely separate yourself from your feelings; hence, his decision to skip his father’s funeral because a championship was two months away). Perhaps the ultimate joke of the film is that, as “villain[ous]” as Arnold makes himself, it would feel almost perverse to root for a lesser man. It will perhaps not be too big of a spoiler to say that at the end of the movie, he wins.

Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): The Last Movie Stars is a six-part documentary series on Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and their relationship, made by Ethan Hawke and currently streaming on HBO Max. It includes clips of Newman and Woodward’s performances spanning the length of their careers, as well as from talk shows and other public appearances. But the series also includes new material in the form of interviews that Newman commissioned of everyone in his life in preparation to write a memoir. For reasons unknown, Newman ended up burning all the recordings but, thankfully for us, his partner in the project had already had them transcribed. Hawke assembles an array of actors to read the transcripts over the course of the series, with George Clooney reading for Newman and Laura Linney, who studied with Woodward, reading for her. The clips are woven in with readings from the transcripts and interviews Hawke conducts with the actors doing the readings, as well as with Newman and Woodward’s daughters.

I love movies about the movies, and I loved this series. I learned things I didn’t know about Newman and Woodward as individuals and about their relationship, and it’s fun to watch the clips of their movies over time. It’s not all joyful—the series covers Woodward’s career frustrations after having kids, Newman’s alcoholism, the loss of Newman’s son, and tests of the couple’s devotion to each other and the life they built—but it is all deeply moving. Hawke’s Zoom interviews are also an important part of the film—he is trying to understand both the project he was commissioned to make and his subjects, and his sheer love of the actors and the movies is palpable. And of course, the magnetism of Newman onscreen is inescapable.

This was also very fun to watch having recently read Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, which I’ve previously recommended here (I also interviewed Butler about it), since Newman and Woodward cut their teeth in the Actor’s Studio alongside James Dean, Marlon Brando, and other stars of the era, all of which is covered in the book.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’d sooner have my fingernails removed with pincers and my nose cut off than be part of a reading group. And yet, Le temps perdu, Maria Alvarez’s documentary of a group of senior citizens in Buenos Aires that has been meeting for 17 years to read Proust, is a film of real charm.

The filming covers four years, from 2015 to 2019. The attendees—some regulars, some occasional, some just stopping in once—read a few pages aloud at each gathering in the Tribunales Café, right near the Teatro Colón and the city’s courthouses. The discussions are not orderly; the readers stop to comment on what they’ve read as it strikes them, agreeing or disagreeing with what Proust has written or with what someone has said or with the progress they’re making. Do people become better in old age, as it says in Le temps retrouvé, the final volume? Personal experience tells one reader that that’s simply false; another disagrees. And so it goes.

The Narrator’s lack of erotic feelings for Albertine are commented on, as well as the nature of Proust’s relationship with Albertine’s model, his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. Moving passages, particularly from the last volume, draw cries of awe at the author’s genius, while the way the madeleine has become a cliché is rightly bemoaned.

One of the group’s members comments on how every time he reads the full seven volumes it’s a different book, which is true of any great work of literature. But this is especially true given the scope of In Search of Lost Time. The nature of memory will matter more for some at one life stage than at another; jealousy is a burning issue when you’re young and a fading memory itself when you’re the age of the people in Le temps perdu.

Though some attendees are totally ignorant of the book (one, when told that it’s metaphorically a murder mystery, wants to know whodunnit), these elderly men and women, who have lived a long life in which they’ve seen coups, dictatorships, armed struggle, and state terror on the streets of their city, have retained their love of literature as a central element of their lives, and one they share with likeminded people.

One attendee says that she has felt every human emotion expressed in the group, and that’s more than plausible; as I’ve written before, if humanity were to disappear tomorrow, its entire emotional scale could be reconstructed from Proust’s pages.

Daniel May (publisher): Earlier this year, my best friend, who works as a special education assistant, helped organize the first Minneapolis teacher strike in over half a century. I flew home to walk the picket line with him, and the energy on the sidewalk was infectious. It was hard not to get swept up in the sense of community and purpose and possibility, and I came back to New York buzzing from the feeling of vicarious solidarity.

The strike lasted three weeks, and a deal was struck that, while significant, was far from sufficient to address the fundamental problem: teachers in the Minneapolis district make on average $14,000 less annually than those in neighboring St. Paul; the discrepancy is even worse compared with suburban districts. As the school year came to its slow end (the district extended the year to compensate for time lost during the strike), many of the staff who had walked picket lines through those frigid winter weeks left for jobs in other districts. For my oldest and closest friend, the collapse of the community that he had worked so hard to build and which had struggled so hard together was devastating. In a long conversation the last week of the school year, he told me that he felt like a ghost.

What do we do with the awful pain of political struggle? With the disappointments that so often follow hopes of transformation? With the alienation from movement and organization that so much involvement in movement and organization provokes? Those questions have been lingering with me since that conversation, and as they’ve tumbled around in my head I found myself turning back to James Baldwin’s 1972 memoir No Name in The Street, which is, among other things, one of the most searing accounts of political grief that I’ve ever encountered.

Grief—for loves lost, families undone, and a country blind to its own brutality—is a constant theme through all of Baldwin’s writing, but in No Name it is the ever-present subject, and it is by no means clear through the work whether that grief will ultimately give way to hope or possibility or life. Through the essays, grief is braided together of various strands: Baldwin’s darkening despair at the country’s capacity to recognize the most basic facts about itself; his struggle to face the chasm that has opened up in his and his nation’s life with the murders of Dr. King and Malcolm X; and a growing sense of alienation from the community that made him, a community from which his fame leaves him estranged as he is more and more asked to speak on its behalf.

Early in the book, Baldwin writes that “hope – the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are – dies hard. Perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or the other, become wicked: because they are so wretched.” And yet, (as he puts it a few pages earlier), while “most people are not, in action, worth very much” every human being is an “unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.” Doing so, Baldwin concedes, is an act of faith. As is all politics.

Throughout No Name, Baldwin reminds his readers that to live a life of that faith, or, if you like the word better, hope, leads one at times necessarily into despair. In those times, we need guides to the darkness—not necessarily to lead us out of it (there are no easy outs, the book constantly insists) but to remind us that even and perhaps most especially in our darkest moments, we are with the great many who have weathered storms as or more devastating than our own, and we are with those that will follow. That is not always enough, but there is more than a small degree of comfort in such company.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): In a standard V.S. Naipaul book, a cloud of repugnance hangs over every character. Hailing from a newly independent country typically somewhere in the West Indies or Africa, Naipaul’s protagonists find themselves breaking under the strain of assimilation in some Western milieu. Usually, they are trying and failing, largely through no fault of their own. The experience renders them invisible and bitter. They internalize the cruelty of dislocation. They are ignorant to the fact that their every careless action, dashed-off remark, or sour joke reveals a hidden prejudice or outright hatred: for themselves, for their fellow displaced people, as well as for those who did the displacing.

In a Free State, the Trinidadian author’s 1971 Booker Award-winning experimental novel, deals with these themes in four thematically interconnected stories. In a prologue, an unnamed passenger on a ferry from Greece to Egypt witnesses the bullying of an older, mentally unwell homeless man. In a short story, Naipaul traces the struggles of an Indian servant in Washington, DC who liberates himself from his employer only to find his latent prejudices toward Black people activated during his ensuing struggles to survive as a truly “free” man. Another short piece tells the dark tale of a West Indian man driven to violence as his fanciful illusions about climbing into the elite, educated life in Britain fall away. In a novella of sorts, two Brits—one a gay government official with a troubled past, the other the unhappy wife of another official—travel through a newly independent, unnamed African nation and former British colony (Uganda, we are meant to presume), amid what they gradually come to realize are the early days of a violent political upheaval; the travelers’ contrasting attitudes toward whether Britain had any business in this place at all, as well as their respective attempts at sexual dalliances, provides the tension that propels the strange, absorbing narrative. There’s much more to say about each of these stories. But in case it’s in any way unclear, they offer no comfort, no affirming lesson about the subaltern class bootstrapping its way into social visibility or happiness.

Naipaul’s characters seem incapable of articulating their sense of fracture, of finding the emotional lexicon to convey the sense of tragedy and loss that come from being born into empire. These traumas are where Naipaul always seems most comfortable. He appears to revel in the unpleasantness, often drawing on his own experiences and those of his family to force upon his characters—and his readers—violent emotional and psychological confrontations. Tidy resolutions are nowhere to be found.

Naipaul thrusts his characters, including the Brits, into contexts that expose the brittleness of their supposed freedom. By the 1970s, the chains of colonialism are, in theory, broken. But those touched by it, servants and masters alike, still find their possibilities, hopes, and dreams curtailed. The brutal, dehumanizing hierarchies of the past are technically gone, only to be replaced by the realities of economic exploitation in a rapidly globalizing world. The human capacity to simply not see those deemed inferior, either along ethnic or class lines—or some combination of the two—endures, and powerfully so. (As novelist Neel Mukherjee put it in a 2018 piece about the book for The Paris Review: “What if nations are broken in such profound ways by the experience of colonialism that freedom can only launch them into a state of replicating the selfsame power structures, similar instruments of oppression of its own peoples?”) In its wake, it turns people cruel and resentful—impulses not unfamiliar to Naipaul, a man who had an acknowledged penchant for acts of violence in his sexual relationships.

What will always bring me back to Naipaul is the maddening, debasing, darkly hilarious vision of a post-colonial creature. Does he yearn for the colonial days, as some have suggested? This question feels reductive to me: Colonialism happened, and whatever it broke—civilizationally and personally—doesn’t just go back together. This is a gnawing discomfort Naipaul is content to sit with. He’ll allow his mostly male characters to feel a sense of wonder as they step off the gangplank and venture into the big city, and show us through their eyes the marvels and visceral pleasures of Western excess. Then, without warning, the dream gives way to nightmare: characters buckling under the strain of endless shifts busing tables and cleaning kitchens; absorbing slurs and taunts from passersby; struggling with being understood, despite speaking English—proper, accented, Anglophile English; and reeling from sexual humiliations and insults to their fragile masculinity. The little indignities and everyday struggles metastasize, making the newly arrived hard and cold, consumed by self-interest and the prerogatives of survival in a world that will not recognize their basic humanity.

The possibility that I might in any way identify with these characters and their frustrations unsettles me. More specifically, the notion of accepting a world that does not recognize you, respect you, or dignify you as an individual, only as a signifier of a history broken long before you entered it, sends me reeling. This is the unsparing, often enraging stuff of Naipaul. I can’t seem to get enough of it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): After a short, brutal illness, the recent loss of my friend Michael Lardner—the heart and soul of the Marxist Education Project, where I often gave talks—has led me to reflect on death. This week, I will recommend some of my favorite short stories in which death features prominently and movingly.

First is James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the final story in his first book, Dubliners. I’ve often regretted, and I’m probably not alone, that Joyce did not continue to write the way he wrote in this book, in which every story is written in a stirring, perfectly formed language. “The Dead” is Joyce’s farewell to classical fictional forms, and he bids adieu with as perfect, as musical a piece of writing as has ever been produced in English.

There’s little story here: the events take place at a Christmas gathering, and though there are disagreements about Irish politics around the table, it’s all of no consequence. Then, a tenor attending the dinner sings a song, and a happily married woman in attendance suddenly remembers Michael Furey, a young man from her youth who once sang it for her, and who later died for love of her. Her husband realizes that his wife has been transported to the time and place of that love. The power of music, of love, and of memory are the subjects of “The Dead,” and its final sentences are almost impossible to read, so painful, so true are they: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Next is J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from Nine Stories. I’ve never gone more than a couple of years without reading this book since first doing so when I was 17, 53 years ago. The brilliance of its writing, the perfection of its tone, its quiet buildup to its abrupt ending still shocks me. The best of Salinger—well, actually, that’s The Catcher in the Rye—but some of the best of American short story writing is in this volume, and the wonder and mystery of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” remains an extraordinary feat.

Finally, from Jorge Luis Borges’s collection Labyrinths, there’s “The Witness.” I recommended this to Michael when he got his fatal diagnosis, telling him that when I thought I was going to die last year it was this three-paragraph story—if it can be called that—about what it is that dies with us when we go, that played an important role in giving me the strength not to let my heart kill me.

I’ll leave the final word to Borges, from the closing paragraph of that story: “[O]ne thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man’s or woman’s death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”

Before you go, a few more things:

-Jewish Currents Culture Editor Claire Schwartz’s first book of poems, Civil Service, is out this week! To quote the publisher: Claire “stages the impossibility of articulating freedom in a nation of prisons. Civil Service probes the razor-thin borders between ally and accomplice, surveillance and witness, carcerality and care--the lines we draw to believe ourselves good.” Fans of our culture coverage, and especially our poetry, won’t want to miss this.

-Next Thursday, August 11th, at 7 pm Eastern, our friends at Alte are hosting a screening of Peter Odabashian’s documentary My 2020, about a mixed-race family gathering to navigate a pandemic, political upheaval, and isolation together. The event, which is part of the Celebrating Aging Series, will be in Rosendale, New York, and will include a post-screening discussion with the director. Sign up here!

-Lastly, we would be remiss to not recommend a print subscription to our forthcoming summer issue! If you enjoy our newsletter and the recommendations you see each week in the Shabbat Reading List, we are sure you’ll love the in-depth reporting, essays, reviews and more that Jewish Currents magazine has to offer. Subscribers receive three gorgeous issues a year plus a special winter gift delivered directly to your home. Every subscription dollar we receive goes to supporting our staff, producing the magazine, and building the Jewish Currents community.

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Nathan Goldman (managing editor): I expected to like Teju Cole’s 2011 debut novel Open City because it belongs to a literary tradition I love—the flâneur novel, in which a narrator idly wanders city streets, his (and it’s usually his) thoughts digressing in step with his motion. But I ended up appreciating Open City most for the way it subverts that very form. It’s beyond cliché to compare Cole’s book to the works of W.G. Sebald, whose four brilliant novels of itinerant melancholy trace the lineages of 20th-century violence. Still, Cole’s prose and the project really are Sebaldian, much more so than most of the work that gets haphazardly compared to the German depressive. In Open City, as in Sebald’s books, a reticent man drifts about having long, even essayistic exchanges with others (often strangers) and noticing things about his milieu, especially the ways it’s built over and conceals brutal histories. But while Sebald figures his narrators’ post-Holocaust alienation as an almost metaphysical principle, transforming them into spectral vessels, Cole grounds us firmly in the life of his central character, Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatrist completing a fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. We quickly get a sense of Julius’s aloofness, which borders on misanthropy: Early in his self-imposed walking regimen he experiences the human bustle of New York streets “as an incessant loudness,” and when he encounters a disabled man on the subway, he refuses him money because he finds the man’s performance of suffering distasteful. These displays undercut the romance of his detached tone; if his rich, melancholic riffs on philosophy, history, and music remain intoxicating, they also come to seem arrogant, even menacing.

When we arrive at Open City’s striking climactic turn, in which Julius is accused of an act of brutal violence and says nothing in response, the pretense of the novel’s form elegantly collapses. Cole prepares us for this by having Julius reflect on the difficulty of the psychiatric task of diagnosis, since “the mind is opaque to itself, and it’s hard to tell where, precisely, these areas of opacity are.” He compares it to the ophthalmological phenomenon of “an area at the back of the bulb of the eye, the optic disk, where the million or so ganglia of the optic nerve exit the eye. It is precisely there, where too many of the neurons associated with vision are clustered, that vision goes dead.” This evokes an earlier discussion of literary theorist Paul de Man’s notion of insight, which “can actually obscure other things” and become “a blindness.” In the same way, it is Julius’s obsessive observation and analysis that obfuscates his own participation in the violence of the world. The final pages offer what I read as a subtle revision of Dante—perhaps a proto-flâneur, even if his course was divinely set—in which Julius, hearing an ambulance “heading toward Times Square’s neon inferno,” looks up at the stars, and sees in them not glimpses of heaven, but instead all that he cannot see. His descent into hell has taken him nowhere.

Reading reviews of the novel, I was struck that most critics, even those who admired the novel, read it quite differently. James Wood, in a representative rave for The New Yorker, sees Julius’s “ordinary solipsism” as “an obstacle to understanding other people,” but ultimately “enabl[ing] liberal journeys of comprehension.” For Wood, Julius’s solipsism places limits on his knowledge but does not truly undermine it. Indeed, Wood writes that Julius’s “political inactivity has to do with his ability to see things so well.” But Wood passes over everything in the novel that suggests we might mistrust the quality of Julius’s vision. Perhaps aiming not to reveal too much, most of the writing on Open City I read made no mention of the consequential climax; the one major review that did, in The New York Times, presented it as a shoehorned twist rather than a culmination of subterranean currents. A fascinating article by scholar Pieter Vermeulen resonated much more with my own reading. Vermeulen argues that critics have missed that the novel “interrogrates rather than celebrates” the idea of “literary cosmopolitanism,” in which “productive alienation” (Wood’s term) generates understanding. He suggests that Julius is not a flâneur at all, but rather a “fugueur”—an amnesiac figure for whom, in the words of philosopher Ian Hacking, wandering is “less a voyage of self-discovery than an attempt to eliminate self.”

Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): It used to be once a year, then every six months, and now every few weeks I find myself doomsday planning with my loved ones. When “it” happens—and the “it” could be anything, really: a typhoon, an armed mob, a nuclear missile—where will we run to? What will we take with us? What skills will we need to survive whatever it is we are running from? As we flee, how will we make sure that we both support others and protect ourselves from others?

Lately, these apocalypse-prep sessions have come to seem more and more like a reading group discussion of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. All our imaginary doomsday scenarios seem to echo the book’s protagonist Lauren Olamina’s flight from the ruins of her life in 2024 California. At the beginning of the book, Lauren is a disabled Black teenager living in a lower-middle class gated community. The walls protect Lauren and her family from the turmoil churning outside - armies of the homeless, the addicted (their drug is called “pyro” and causes pyromania), the poor, the armed, and others left to die amidst a total ecological and economic breakdown. But Lauren, precocious as she is, knows that the walls are only delaying the inevitable, and one day they will fall under the weight of the desperation of the masses outside. She keeps her bags packed, learns to fire a gun, invents a new religion that helps her get through the end of days, and tries against all odds to get her family to take her seriously.

One night, Lauren’s predictions come true in the worst, grisliest possible way as her neighborhood is attacked by gangs of pyromaniacs. Her family dies before her eyes. But even through her horror, Lauren’s survival training kicks in and she flees, joining the thousands who walk down I-101 in search of food, safety, hope: a life. Lauren navigates burning forests, escapes debt slavery, survives shootouts on the road, robs provisions from ruined neighborhoods, struggles to afford water priced like diamonds, runs into orphaned children lost in the woods, and faces again and again the vexed question of whether other people are enemies or allies, dead-weights or assets in her frenzied quest for survival. Her journey feels like one that is inevitably coming for all of us. If we are to reap what we have sown, Octavia Butler has at least offered us the comfort of knowing exactly how devastating a reaping is coming for us all.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Recently, I consumed two pieces of media which had completely different content but a common thread: by the end of each, I sat back and thought, “WOW, I see what you did there. Magnificent.” A slow build-up; subtle until it wasn’t.

The first was the film “Official Competition,” whose Rotten Tomatoes profile reads: “Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas star as two egomaniacs commissioned by a millionaire to make a movie together in this sharp comedy skewering wealth, art, and pride.” I’d argue that nearly everyone in the film is an egomaniac: the pharmaceutical tycoon (who appears only in choice moments to further the plot, and in one scene of great comedy) looking for a project to sanitize his public legacy; Cruz, eccentric and brilliant as Lola, the director of the film-inside-a-film; Banderas as Félix, a global celebrity who drives to the first day of rehearsals in a neon convertible, making out with a younger woman; and Oscar Martínez as Iván, an acting professor who takes his vocation, and himself, very seriously. Lola hand-picks Félix and Iván—renowned stars in their own circuits who have never acted opposite each other before—to play the roles of two feuding brothers. In a series of rehearsals, she uses the tension in the actors’ relationship to fuel their artistry; over the course of the film, the levity darkens. I promise you’ll want to see the rest for yourself.

The second piece of art I found with that same element of methodical genius in weaving a story together was Peking Duck, a fiction piece by Ling Ma recently published in The New Yorker. The narrator of the story is a creative writer whose parents immigrated to the US from China when she was young, and the piece goes back and forth between her memories, her current day in a writer’s workshop, and then (seemingly) to a version of the story that she presented in that workshop. The final section is written from the perspective of her mother, the main antagonist throughout; the work as a whole ambles along patiently, until it pierces.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A confession: my attachment to James Joyce has an intensely personal reason. For Joyce, dates were sacred, two of them in particular. First, June 16th, now known as Bloomsday, which was the day in 1904 when Joyce first went out with his companion and later wife Nora Barnacle, and the day the events in Ulysses take place. Joyce’s other holy date was February 2nd, his birthday. February 2nd is also my birthday (I turned seventy the day the book turned a hundred), as well as that of my son. I have nothing in common with Joyce but a birthday and virtual blindness, but the connection remains. And so I’ve read the book three times though I’ll likely never do so again.

Ulysses was published a hundred years ago, on February 2nd, 1922, the author’s fortieth birthday. The novel was the subject of a truly astounding exhibition at the Morgan Library, One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The Morgan has mounted, in a single room, a comprehensive collection of documents, manuscripts, books, magazines, paintings, photos, paintings, and even a store sign from the original Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Taken together, the items tell the story of Joyce’s writing life, dedication, and sacrifice, as well as the sacrifices he imposed on his family in his dedication to his art.

Joyce knew early on that he was fated to live away from his natal Dublin and that his fate was to never be understood. At twenty-two he wrote a lengthy poem printed as a broadside (which he was unable to pay for and so went undistributed) called “The Holy Office,” in which he said in the final stanza: “I stand the self-doomed, unafraid/unfollowed, friendless, and alone.” But he was not alone in his travels, accompanied by his faithful Nora (the exhibition includes one of the many salacious letters he wrote when they were apart), as well as their two children.

The exhibition follows Joyce on peregrinations to Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. The brilliantly conceived and executed catalog of the show tracks Joyce’s itinerary, featuring his passport, a letter from the ever-generous Ezra Pound offering advice on getting his poetry published, and another from Sylvia Beach who saw to the publication of Ulysses when no one else, including Virginia Woolf and her Hogarth press, would.

Anyone interested in Joyce, Ulysses, or just literature, can only be grateful to the Morgan for bringing together manuscript pages, corrected galleys, and addenda to the galleys, providing us with a near-perfect imager of the incredible work involved in the creation of the most difficult book in world literature.

More people love Ulysses than have ever read it. One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is so gripping that its success at bringing people to the actual work is all but certain. Reading Ulysses is not a test. You will miss many things in it, and that’s fine. Most people get things wrong about the book. For example, despite evidence to the contrary, the main character Leopold Bloom is assumed to be Jewish. But read it anyway: feel the thrill of the language, and experience the joy and affirmation of Molly’s soliloquy that ends the book.

Lastly, we would be remiss to not recommend a print subscription to our forthcoming summer issue! If you enjoy our newsletter and the recommendations you see each week in the Shabbat Reading List, we are sure you’ll love the in-depth reporting, essays, reviews and more that Jewish Currents magazine has to offer. Subscribers receive three gorgeous issues a year plus a special winter gift delivered directly to your home. Every subscription dollar we receive goes to supporting our staff, producing the magazine, and building the Jewish Currents community.

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Mari Cohen (assistant editor): As the latest phase in my quest to learn more about Marx and Marxism from various angles while my reading group works through Capital: Vol. 1 (We’re almost done!!! Hope I don’t jinx it by saying that…), I’m reading Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, a concise and accessible biography by Shlomo Avinieri from Yale’s Jewish Lives series. Part of the conceit of the book is to better understand and contextualize Karl Marx’s relationship to his Jewish heritage—Marx’s grandfather was a rabbi, while his father was forced to convert to Lutheranism to be able to practice as a lawyer in the Rhineland. While Avinieri reminds us of Marx’s support for Jewish political emancipation and offers an analysis of how his essay “On the Jewish Question” has been frequently misunderstood, most of what he offers on this topic is speculation—a reminder of how little we can actually know about how Marx understood his family’s Jewish history, since he almost never wrote or spoke of it.

What I’ve found most compelling in the book is the description of Marx’s engagement with political developments and leftist struggle in his lifetime. While Marx was primarily a writer and not a prominent organizer, and his role in political struggles of the day has been frequently exaggerated, he did have some involvement in leftist groups like the International Workingmen’s Association. Avinieri describes Marx engaging in careful calculation and modulation to aim his work toward certain audiences for certain political purposes. At times, he clashed with anarchist opponents over his argument that it was possible for socialist transformation to take place in certain contexts through peaceful, even electoral, means, rather than violent revolution. Frequently, Marx disdained the revolutionary efforts of his contemporaries, arguing that a true revolution could not come about until the proper conditions were in place; sometimes, he supported social democratic reforms for the time being. Marx’s debates with his comrades over revolution, reform, and pragmatism will be familiar, and interesting, to anyone engaged in leftist conversations at the present moment.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I’m not much of a podcast person, but I’m listening to one right now—Foreign Agent, distributed by Novara Media—that is right up JC readers’ alley (and also, full disclosure, happens to be co-produced by my husband, JC contributor Michael McCanne, as well as former media producer at The New Yorker and the Forward, Nate Lavey). It’s about Irish American support for the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary group that sought to unite Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom when the Republic of Ireland secured its independence in 1921, with the rest of Ireland. It’s partly a narrative history of the Troubles—the bloody, decades-long, ultimately unsuccessful struggle against British rule in Northern Ireland, which began in the late 1960s—but at heart, it’s the story of an American diaspora community seeking self-definition through political support of an armed nationalist movement across the sea. If that sounds familiar, know that Irish America did look to the American Jewish organizing work around the Zionist cause as inspiration for their efforts (see this documentary about NORAID, an American support group for the IRA, at around 12:00 for a really choice quote).

This detail ended up on the cutting room floor, but the podcast is jam-packed with stories of gun smuggling, courtroom drama (including one truly unbelievable defense strategy), a suspicious bank robbery, and more. Some of the most interesting bits regard the ideological splits within Irish America and the IRA itself. It’s commonly understood that although they aligned on the question of Irish republicanism, the IRA—an anti-imperialist group which had many socialists within its ranks and was inspired by Black liberation movements like the Panthers—were largely politically alienated from the more conservative, and often very racist, Irish American community. (One anecdote, in which Irish Americans chanted IRA slogans while protesting bussing efforts to integrate schools in South Boston, reminded me of Ari Brostoff’s vivid reporting on a housing fight in Crown Heights in which yeshiva bochers supporting the landlord chanted “Death to Arabs” amid clashes with Black tenants and their supporters.) But the podcast also introduces us to committed Irish American Communists like George Harrison who worked across stark political divides for the sake of Irish republicanism.

The Troubles are long over, and this issue has receded in the minds of many Irish Americans. But they do retain a place in Irish American memory and self-conception. Perhaps the most sympathetic thing Joe Biden said to or about Palestinians during his recent trip to the Middle East ran through his Irish American identity: “The background of my family is Irish American. And we have a long history not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the years for 400 years.”

David Klion (newsletter editor): I have a lifelong and unfulfilled dream of visiting Tokyo, and I still have no idea when I’m going to get around to it. Some of it stems from a specific fascination with Japanese culture, but I also study the history and development of cities globally and feel like I can’t really understand urbanism without visiting the largest conurbation in the world and seeing how it actually works.

A friend of mine who shares both interests, has spent plenty of time in Japan, and knows Japanese recently co-authored a new book, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which is the next best thing to an actual trip across the Pacific. There’s a lot of interesting text-based analysis inside, but what really sets this book apart is the illustrations, which peel back the facades of Tokyo at the block and neighborhood level and reveal the intricate ways that good urban design facilitates human-scale spaces. I’ve seen photos and film clips of Tokyo’s narrow alleyways lined with tiny, intimate bars, but Emergent Tokyo makes clear how such spaces are organized, how different kinds of people make use of them, and incidentally why—to use an urbanism Twitter cliche—they would be illegal to build almost anywhere in the United States. This isn’t just a book for Japanophiles, after all; it’s for anyone who wants to make the place they already live denser, cleaner, healthier, and livelier.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer: One way to describe Jono McLeod’s documentary My Old School, opening today at Film Forum, is as a true crime film—where the crime is to pose as a teenager, to return as a student to one’s former school 20 years after graduation, to become popular and inspirational, to display wisdom beyond one’s years and, acting in a school performance of South Pacific, to kiss a fellow student who isn’t aware that the man kissing her is twice her age.

Brandon Lee, arrives one day as a new student at Bearsden Academy in a wealthy suburb of Glasgow. He seems to look more mature than his fellow students, and his face is strange, leading some to wonder if he hadn’t had plastic surgery. He immediately conquers the school, its administrators, his teachers (one of whom comments she often learns from him), and most of all the other students.

His backstory as a well-traveled Canadian (he is good at copying accents), his intelligence, his charm, and his knowledge of music all make him a center of admiring attention. He defends a Black student, earning his protégé’s eternal gratitude, and takes kids for drives (claiming he has a license despite being only 16 because they get them earlier in Canada). Kids are invited to his house, where they are greeted and treated by his grandmother. He goes on vacation to Tenerife with some other teenagers. He’s even granted early admission to medical school.

But his charade falls apart and the truth is revealed. He is actually Bruce MacKinnon, who had attended Bearsden in 1975, where he was a good if unremarkable student, was virtually friendless, and had been admitted to medical school but later flunked out. Dwelling on this failure, which deprived him of the future he felt was his, he returned to high school 20 years later in an effort to get his life right, become popular, return to medical school, and actually become a doctor.

Lee/MacKinnon agreed to be interviewed for My Old School, but not to appear in it, so instead we have the wonderful trick of actor Alan Cummings lip-syncing Lee’s account of his adventure, to which is added events recounted through light-hearted animation. The students from his second stay are interviewed and they are all, without exception, funny, charming, amused and amusing about this strange case.

If My Old School is about anything more than one man’s scam, it’s about how willing people are to accept a story sincerely told. Looking back at footage and photos of Lee, the now adult students are struck by how old he looked, something they sensed at the time but shrugged off.

It is also a striking case of how memory can play you false. The incident of the kiss during South Pacific is handled brilliantly. It’s recounted several times, the kiss described by all, including Brandon’s partner in the smooch, as “a peck,” as “avuncular.” And then the filmmaker plays a video cassette of the actual kiss, which was long, deep, and repeated. The shocked expressions on the students’ and actress’ faces say all you need to know. Suddenly, for a moment, the story for them is less charming. A 32-year-old man kissing a 16-year-old girl that way is just wrong. He’s a less charming eccentric now.

And a sadder one. We learn he continues, decades later, to apply unavailingly to medical schools, trying to set his life on the path it was supposed to take. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in Scottish life.

Before you go, a few quick things!

-The Forward is hosting a live event next Thursday, July 28th, at 7 pm Eastern called “Hineni: Now Where Do I Go?”—an evening of conversation about how millennial American Jews are building community in, and outside of, traditional spaces. The panel will feature Jewish Currents Editor-in-Chief Arielle Angel, among others, so be sure to sign up!

-Jewish Currents Board Vice Chair Lauren Goldenberg has an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books this week with Isaac Butler, the author of The Method, a critically acclaimed new history of the development of method acting that should be of great interest to anyone who cares about Russians, Jews, the 20th century left, or Hollywood.

-Sasha Senderovich has a new book out that can serve as further reading for anyone who enjoyed our recent Soviet Issue, which was edited with a special advisory board that included Sasha. How the Soviet Jew Was Made offers “a close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.”

Aparna Gopalan (JC fellow): In stopping the world from ending, marching in the streets seems to do little, donating money even less, and voting least of all. In left collective consciousness, “organizing” might be one of the last political actions that remains sacred.

As a grad student, I used to be in awe of the staff organizers at my union. “Look at all these people devoting themselves to actually doing something,” I’d think, “taking on the powers that be while I sit here reading books.” But as soon as I began organizing, I started thinking about the job in a different way, one common among my colleagues. “All these people think we do sexy stuff,” I thought, “but they don’t know that most of our work is tedious spreadsheet wrangling and calling people who never pick up.”

With some distance, I can now see that both of these positions ascribe a kind of moral purity to the figure of the organizer, whether as a righteous warrior or a martyr to endless grunt work. What both miss is that the nature of organizing is always impure: organizers encourage workers to take risks that we ourselves do not face; we ask for their unpaid time and energy, indeed their devotion, to work we actually get paid to do; our training sometimes borrows too much from the corporate sciences of publicity or marketing or advertising, even when we are advertising collective power.

Daisy Pitkin’s On The Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union, published earlier this year, is the first book I’ve read that gets into the messy, tangled weeds of organizing. I know Daisy from the Labor Notes conference, where I was bowled over by her empathy and political insight. Nominally, her book is about her time organizing with immigrant workers—specifically one immigrant worker, Alma—at Arizona’s industrial laundries. But the book is really more of a literary tapestry. Its chapters bear only two titles: “Las Polillas” and “Fires,” repeated over and over again as Daisy weaves together scenes of camaraderie and emotion from her life and Alma’s, along with the life of the early 20th century garment workers’ organizer Clara Lemlich, and, incongruously, the lives of moths. These stories sit next to scenes of horror at industrial laundries, at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, and ultimately at offices of union organizers engaged in destructive internal turf wars.

Incorporating emotion and messiness into what could have been straightforwardly written as a story of class war, Daisy overturns the gendered ways we think of organizing as a firmly political act removed from the organizer’s personal life and identity and doubts. In doing so, On The Line opens up space for organizers to take our practice off the pedestal and open it up to reflection and critique. After all, if stories about organizing can be told in non-authoritative, non-masculinist ways, then maybe organizing itself can face up to its power asymmetries and its long history of excluding domestic and intimate spheres of struggle.

Daisy is now working with the Starbucks Workers United campaign, which happens to be funded by union dues of Arizona’s immigrant laundry workers who feature in On The Line. What could be a more beautiful snippet of class solidarity?

Alex Kane (senior reporter): At the risk of recommending something that our entire newsletter readership has already read, I’m going to offer up praise for Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism. First published in 1977 and reissued by Verso in 2020, it’s an arresting book to read now, when we lack a mass party that has cradle-to-grave programs designed to make your entire life revolve around the desire to make the world a better place. The American Communist Party was such a party, as the book shows. As Gornick writes about the Coops in the Bronx, famously a redoubt for Communists, “all social activities led to the Party.” Reading The Romance of American Communism makes me nostalgic for a time I never experienced, of a robust American left with a massive foothold in the labor movement. Nostalgia is not what I typically feel when reading history, but it’s the dominant emotion I get from Gornick’s intimate portraits of Communists and their inner lives. The book also gets into the downsides of what it feels like when such a totalizing presence in your life reveals itself to be hiding some very real skeletons, as the Communist Party did when it came to the crimes of Stalinism. If you’re a Jewish Currents reader who hasn’t read the book, you should do so now.

Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): Every once in a while, I decide the time is NOW to read a book I’ve had for years and been interested in reading but not quite gotten to. Last week, the time had come, NOW, to start reading Bleak House, Charles Dickens’s novel about an ongoing and never-ending case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce over a dwindling inheritance, from which a complex web of characters emanates. I haven’t read Dickens in at least 20 years, and I forgot how delicious his writing is—it cuts to the heart in one chapter and makes you laugh in another, and his characters have fantastic names (the aforementioned Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mrs. Pardiggle, and Sir Leicester Dedlock, to name a mere few).

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Christophe Cognet’s From Where They Stood, opening today at Film Forum in New York, is a unique film on the Holocaust. It doesn’t try to make a unique moral or ethical point, or attempt to tell us something new about the crimes of the Nazis. It allows those who were in the camps to tell of their experience, but not in a way we are used to. This is not a talking heads film, with a series of old people telling tales familiar to us all of the horrors they experienced. Instead, Cognet’s film is built around photographs taken by prisoners while they were still in the camps. How the photos were taken in the camps (Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Ravensbrück) and how they survived are equally incredible, but what’s most important is what they reveal.

The quotidian experience they present is at times jarring: prisoners in their striped pajamas, leaning out of windows, conversing, posing for the camera they know is photographing them in secret from the guards. They were prisoners, the photos say, but above all they were human beings. The photos are acts of resistance, both on the part of the photographers and of the subjects. Dachau and Buchenwald were not extermination camps, unlike Auschwitz. In Buchenwald, we see Goethe’s tree, standing tall and ancient alongside a barracks building.

But imprisoned photographers also captured the everyday terror of the camps, including a series of photos taken by a Greek Jew of a crowd of women being rushed onto the gas chamber in Auschwitz, and of the sonderkommando throwing their bodies into an open pit to be cremated. The picture was taken from within the gas chamber between killings. The members of the sonderkommando are standing among the newly dead bodies, one scratching his head as if trying to solve a problem never before posed.

The materiality of the Holocaust is accentuated by Cognet’s almost maniacal labors throughout the film to precisely situate the exact spot from which each picture was taken. The photos are printed on large transparent sheets and then held against the corresponding scenery. Were those trees here 70 years ago, he asks? Death was so familiar, he says, that the prisoners lay relaxing on the grass across from the crematorium. What’s that in that woman’s arms, the one going into the gas chamber? A baby?

“Here,” an intertitle says, “is where it happened.” The “here”, the “it,” and the “happened” are all memorably laid out in From Where They Stood.

Before you go, one last thing: Thursday, July 28th, 7 pm Eastern, The Forward is hosting a live event in Brooklyn on how millennial American Jews are building community in, and outside of, traditional spaces. The event will feature Jewish Currents Editor-in-Chief Arielle Angel as well as Abby Stein, Kendall Pinkney, and Alex Zeldin, and will be moderated by The Forward’s deputy opinion editor, Nora Berman. Sign up here!