Shabbat
Reading List

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!

Ari Brostoff (senior editor): Feeling bleak and thinking about models for militancy, I recently read Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.’s Black Against Empire, a definitive history of the Black Panther Party published in 2013. I had known that the BPP understood Black Americans as inhabiting an internal colony, and that it sought to achieve autonomy through two very different strategies: on the one hand, organizing armed self-defense, and on the other, creating “survival programs”—most famously, the Free Breakfast for Children Program that fed tens of thousands of kids in 23 cities. I didn’t know how these strategies interacted, though, and Black Against Empire offers a striking thesis in this regard.

In Bloom and Martin’s account, the Party—which saw itself as the legitimate representative of a Black community living under occupation—initially focused heavily on self-armament as a revolutionary strategy (an uncanny subject to explore in the midst of escalating terror deployed by right-wing vigalantes far more heavily armed, and far more dangerous to civilians, than the Panthers were in their day). One of its earliest activities was a cop watch program in which Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and other founding members tailed the police around Oakland, monitoring their attacks on Black residents and inspiring other community members to do the same.

By 1968, though, even as the Panthers’ membership base was exploding, much of its leadership had been killed, imprisoned, or exiled—and it was at this point that mutual aid work came to the forefront of its strategic vision. Led largely by women, who made up the majority of the Party by the start of the 1970s, the Panthers at one point ran a staggering number of programs around the country, including “liberation schools, free health clinics, the Free Food Distribution program, the Free Clothing Program, child development centers, the Free Shoe Program, the Free Busing to Prison Program, the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation, free housing cooperatives, the Free Pest Control Program, the Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program, renter’s assistance, legal aid, the Seniors Escorts Program, and the Free Ambulance Program.” The BPP’s self-defense and mutual aid programs both emboldened one another and helped split the Party apart, as factions with divergent revolutionary timelines came to see one or the other strategy as the only legitimate option under circumstances of constant state infiltration, and given the growing complacency of liberal allies.

In the same period, the Party pursued its internationalist strategy to strikingly serious ends: It engaged not only in campaigns of mutual solidarity with anticolonial movements around the world, but conducted full-on diplomatic missions: In Algeria (which cut off relations with the US government after the Six-Day War) they were granted an embassy building, and in Vietnam, they negotiated prisoner exchange programs with the Viet Cong. The Party’s rise to something like real power happened staggeringly fast, as did its dissolution in the 1970s, rent by attacks by federal agents, the co-option of its social programs, internal schisms, and Newton’s growing madness. “No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies . . . . This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party, and may not happen again for a very long time,” Bloom and Martin conclude. I wonder how long this very long time will be.

David Klion (newsletter editor): I’ve finally gotten around to reading Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, by my friend Stephen Wertheim, who I interviewed for Jewish Currents in March. It’s a brisk, deeply researched, and thought-provoking revisionist history of the US foreign policy establishment surrounding World War II, pinpointing the moment when America abandoned its traditional mode of engagement in world affairs in favor of global hegemony underwritten by military force. The conventional narrative many of us grew up with says that Washington was isolationist prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which jolted the US into reluctant global leadership. Wertheim challenges this myth in two ways: first, by demonstrating that “isolationism” was a retroactive pejorative aimed at US foreign policy elites whose actual preference was for internationalist commercial engagement; and second, by identifying the real hinge point as June 1940, when the Nazis occupied Paris and the prospect of a single power dominating Europe and its colonies terrified the American ruling class. Some of the implicit conclusions might be unsettling, but this is an essential read for understanding how American empire came to seem permanent and inevitable—a topic very much relevant today.

Speaking of empires, I’ve also been rereading God Emperor of Dune, the batshit insane fourth book in Frank Herbert’s classic series, in which the universe is ruled for millennia in an enforced peace by a tyrannical human-worm hybrid with oracular visions and the memories of all of his ancestors. The book makes no sense if you haven’t read its three predecessors, and only a bit more sense if you have, and it’s plodding and problematic and trashy, but I absolutely love it and hope Denis Villeneuve someday finds a way to adapt it to film. Of all the messy Dune sequels, this is the standout.

I don’t have a clever transition here, but one more thing I want to plug is the show Players, from the makers of American Vandal, the first season of which is available on Paramount Plus. I can’t pretend to be unbiased about this—I’m kvelling that my cousin Misha Brooks is a TV star, and that his show is actually good! I don’t know that I would normally watch a mockumentary about a League of Legends team and its bratty, washed-up-in-his-late-twenties leader (who goes by “Creamcheese”), but it’s extremely funny and I fully expect Misha to go places. It’s pretty cool watching a relative you always knew was charismatic prove it beyond any doubt; now it’s everyone else’s turn to discover him.

Dana Bassett (development director): Is there a word for the déjà vu-like feeling of doing something again for the first time since this pandemic started? I had one of those experiences recently, when I went to see a live puppet show by Poncili Creación at the Market Hotel (which is actually not a hotel, but a large, open room with a stage and a bar in the back) in Brooklyn.

I had seen Poncili, the collective name of Puerto Rican twins Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro, perform dozens of times before Covid, but not since. When I arrived, the space was packed with maskless 20-somethings, making me feel doubly out of place as a “still wearing a mask everywhere even when it is decidedly uncool” 30-something. Luckily, the performance started shortly after I walked in, as Efrain creeped on stage to request the audience back up ten paces and sit on the ground. Everyone obliged, and the vibe shifted immediately from a buzzy tangle to quiet anticipation. I stayed back, pressed against the wall and away from the crowd, which I remembered at that moment was also my preference when I attended live shows in my previous life.

I don’t want to give away too much about the actual performance, which was 15-ish minutes of pure joy and wonder, but suffice to say, this is not your average puppet show (I described Poncili to a colleague as “puppets but actually cool” and I stand by that description). Wrapped in colorful cloaks and wielding oversized painted foam appendages, Poncili Creación do not present puppets, they are the puppets. (Los títeres has become one of my favorite Spanish vocabulary words.) The twins’ ability to transform space using only their bodies is mesmerizing, and despite the fact that I was semi-horrified by the masklessness of the crowd, it was extremely charming to see adult faces light up as if they were children watching a marionette show at a farmers market. Their mouths opened and eyes widened as Pablo and Efrain’s figures merged into superhuman configurations and bright, chromatic monsters made from broomsticks and bedsheets.

It’s the kind of thing you have to see to believe. And happily, Poncili Creación are performing outdoors(!) at the end of this month as part of the exhibition Life Between Buildings at MoMA PS1. You can see their puppet-gnomes-turned-sculptures on display through January 2023, and sign up for a free ticket to their performances the last week of July.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): For many years I’ve kept a commonplace book, noting lines in books I’m reading with which I identify. As it’s developed and grown, the total of this is my autobiography, but one without a single word of my own. Unsurprisingly, the writer who appears most often is the uncompromising, misanthropic French philosopher E.M. Cioran. Somewhat unexpectedly, right behind him is the English-born novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer. Some of the latter’s interests are as foreign to me as could be—like his taste for drugs, raves, and tennis. But his sensibility, his literary and some of his musical tastes, chime with mine, and so I put up with his praise for Burning Man.

The Last Days of Roger Federer, Dyer’s latest book of essays, is not a collection. Rather, it’s an eccentric essai fleuve, a lengthy rumination on a couple of topics, mainly that of the final phase of an artist’s life and of the Nietzschean concept of the Eternal Recurrence, through which a final work is just a prelude to a return to the beginning.

Dyer’s conception is a bold one, as it drifts seemingly at random from Nietzsche to J.M.W. Turner to D.H. Lawrence to Pharaoh Sanders. But within it are two key clues that explain his method. The first is his mention of sometimes having been forced during his youth in England to take the “milk train,” a night train that wandered slowly along its route, stopping at stations big and small, yet always arriving at its destination. The other is his discussion of William Basinski and his beautiful and moving The Disintegration Loops (an obscure musical work beloved by me and my son). Dyer describes them perfectly: “In the first of these [loops] a very simple melody, lasting perhaps six seconds, is looped over and over. It sounds like a recording of a melancholy brass band, with parts of the past from which it is exhumed still clinging to it. With some reverb and other small, subtle treatments the loop continues to unfold but, as it does so, the sound quality slowly and imperceptibly deteriorates.”

This description of Basinski’s masterwork can serve as a stand-in for everything Dyer looks at in The Last Days of Roger Federer. He speaks of artists who died young or suddenly didn’t have a last phase, death having arrived too soon, while other artists who died old still had other works they might have produced. Some artists go on far beyond their prime; others never return after initial success.

Dyer’s reading is vast, his insights profound, whether about the work of Tennyson or the last records of John Coltrane. It is a breathlessly exciting work, full of marvelously clever insights. The best of them all is a question, one that went directly into my commonplace book, expressing the universal joy whenever an event we are attending draws to a close: “Why did we come if while being here we would end up being so preoccupied by no longer being there. Could it be that our deepest desire is for everything to be over?” I’ll answer that: yes.

Before you go: applications for the 2022-2023 New Jewish Culture Fellowship, which is run by Jewish Currents Contributing Editor Maia Ipp and Rabbi Matt Green, are now open! To learn more and to apply before the August 1st deadline, click here.

Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): HBO is currently streaming a documentary called The Janes, about the Chicago-based underground abortion service Jane that began in 1969 and formally disbanded with the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973. While HBO has advertised it over the past month, you will not find it anywhere on the landing page of the streaming service, and instead will have to search for it. This seems apt for a lot of discourse around abortion—we have yet to see action match words from Democratic leaders.

In any case, you should search for and watch this documentary. I went into it already knowing a fair bit about Jane thanks to my friend, Jewish Currents contributor Madeleine Schwartz, who early in the Trump years arranged a screening of Jane: An Abortion Service, a documentary made in the mid-90s about Jane, and then published an oral history in Harper’s. The new HBO documentary goes into greater contextual detail than the 90s doc—for example, I didn’t know that there was a service run by clergy that existed simultaneously with Jane dedicated to helping women access abortion care.

The women who ran Jane were primarily white and upper-middle class, in college or in their 20s, and in many cases students at the University of Chicago (my alma mater; I wish I had known this history when I was a student). Frustrated with antiwar organizing dominated by male blowhards and wanting to do something (a frustration that still resonates today), what started out as one woman arranging abortions for friends and then friends of friends grew into an entire service of women arranging abortions and caring for the women undergoing them. After a few years, they realized they could do the abortions themselves, so the man who had been doing the abortions trained a few of them, and then they took on the whole operation.

One aspect of the post-Roe conversation has been focused on the issue of surveillance, which was at the front of my mind as I watched the documentary. Jane advertised publicly in small newspapers, bulletin boards, and other such forums, while being as careful as possible to hide their tracks—they had two locations that changed every week, and designated drivers that changed routes constantly to ferry women between the two locations. This seems so quaint now, and yet for the time it was a pretty sophisticated and successful operation. (To what degree the Chicago mob and law enforcement may have turned a blind eye until a woman purposefully ratted them out is also raised in the documentary).

There’s more to learn and understand about Jane than what I’ve mentioned above, so do watch the films and read about that history. And if you are in a position to provide support, financial or otherwise, please seek out abortion funds, not Planned Parenthood.

Mari Cohen (assistant editor): The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nuñez is a book about two young women who first meet as freshmen roommates at Barnard in 1968. Georgette is trying to escape the poverty and violence of her upstate hometown; Ann is determined, by any possible means, to repudiate and recompense for her rich WASP background. Throughout the following years, Georgette observes Ann closely, as if taking in a museum exhibit. Never simplistic or reductive, Nuñez paints the curious Ann in multiple dimensions: utterly maddening, problematic, and exhausting—and yet often admirable, principled, and fixated, unreservedly, on the truth. Then the two have a falling out, and Georgette loses track of Ann until, after a tragedy, she suddenly resurfaces as the tabloids’ cautionary tale for polite society as to what might “go wrong” with the white radical. The novel considers what it means to live through a period of backlash, repression, and disillusionment following a moment of revolutionary possibility, and how our duties of justice toward individuals close to us don’t always gel with our duties of justice to the broader world. It’s gripping, thought-provoking, and beautiful.

Separately, if you’re a Jewish Currents reader based in the Midwest with a passion for hardcore music, I have just the upcoming shows to recommend to you. A few years ago, my friend Aaron Meyer and his bandmates Sam Macinnes and Molly Berkson formed the anti-Zionist Jewish hardcore punk band Acid Mikvah. (James Walsh recently joined as drummer.) Just before the pandemic forced us all inside, I saw them bring down the house at a Chicago leftist Jews’ Purim party with their trademark hits like “Outlive Them” and “Jewish Standard Time.” (Sample lyrics from the latter: “Late to klezmer / Late to mitzvah / JST / Late to brunch / Late to Torah / JST / Early bed / Early TV / JST) I can’t claim any hardcore expertise, but even to a novice like me the music is cathartic and catchy, with infectious guitar riffs and drum licks surrounding Aaron’s emphatic, echoey vocals. Now, Acid Mikvah is taking the show on the road for a six-stop tour, with their last few dates in St. Louis, Iowa, and Minneapolis this weekend. Listen to their four-track demo and see all the tour dates and info on their Bandcamp page.

Alice Radosh (co-chair, JC Council): The Lost Women of Azalea Court, by Ellen Meeropol, is a multi-layered novel that, at first glance, focuses on the residents of a neighborhood association who are searching for an elderly, possibly demented missing neighbor. Meeropol’s choice of the name Azalea for the community is probably not inadvertent; thousands upon thousands of strains and breeds of azalea have been named and registered, and a commonality binds them together, but within that, each displays unique features. As one door after another opens in Azalea Court, stories of rape, family secrecy, loneliness, racism, dementia, poverty, anger, and torture spill out and intermingle with political and social differences. Meeropol manages to present these individual storylines and to find the commonality that binds them. While the focus remains on the residents’ stories, the specter of two issues are entwined throughout the book and almost serve as meta-characters. One is the familiar history and trauma of the Holocaust; the other is the less familiar history and trauma of “insane asylums” in the United States. The questions raised by these themes should be familiar to Jewish Currents readers and to anyone with left politics: Does a personal experience of the Holocaust provide a lifelong explanation for what can only be described as horrific behavior? And does the realization that active political opposition to the state is capable of destroying a person’s life allow loved ones to perform whatever acts are perceived as necessary to protect the family?

The Lost Women of Azalea Court raises issues worth thinking about and struggling with. It will be released in September and is available for pre-order.

Mitch Abidor: Werner Herzog has long since lost his gift for directing fictional films of any worth. In the past few decades he has made many excellent documentaries, but his touch for fiction has failed him, with the exception of 2019’s Family Romance, LLC.

Happily, his first foray into literary fiction, The Twilight World—which, like Family Romance, LLC, is a hybrid of fact and fiction—reveals him to be an extraordinary talented writer, applying the same eccentric worldview, and the same attraction to men at the extremes, that we find in his best films.

The Twilight World is the true story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier stationed in the Philippines during World War II and ordered to hold the island on which he was stationed in the expectation that the retreating Japanese forces would return. Faithful to his charge, Onoda and three comrades (later two, then one, then none) roam the island, keeping track of the days (at the end of 29 years of isolation Onoda was only five days off in his calculation of the date), unaware the war is over. When, after years of hiding, he is being sought by Japanese authorities, he refuses to believe that his rescue is anything but an enemy ploy.

This is a mangy and mad tale of fidelity. Onoda and his comrades didn’t only roam the island or settle in a camp. Thinking they were at war, they engaged in gunfights with local residents and troops, which resulted in the deaths of two of Onoda’s fellows.

It’s not only Onoda’s almost insane stubbornness that makes this a natural Herzogian project. After the difficulties he experienced during the shooting of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog grew to hate the jungle, and this hatred is shared by Onoda. The soldier had only one uniform, which he constantly had to repair, and Herzog tells of how it wasn’t constant movement or thorns that damaged it, but “the rot in the jungle, the humidity that erodes all materials.” The jungle is hell, for “there is one unvarying constant: everything in the jungle is at pains to strangle everything else in the battle for sunlight.”

If Onoda was able to keep track of time, he was ignorant of what occurred within it, and Herzog explains that there was no present for Onoda, only a past and a future (then again, it is like that for all of us). But events occur in a broad present, and Onoda is limited in how he is able to interpret anything. Planes from different eras fly overhead, all signs of the ongoing World War he is still serving in. He is unaware that other wars are going on, that planes are flying to Korea and Vietnam, which as far as he knows are still occupied by Japan. Onoda is only convinced the war is over when a Japanese man sent to retrieve him brings his former commanding officer to tell him it’s time to come home. A good soldier of the Emperor, he obeys his commander.

Herzog’s mastery of language (in Michael Hoffman’s impeccable translation), the brilliance of his descriptions, and his insights into Onoda’s character are stunning. There is only one moment when we regret this wasn’t a film: when Onoda visits a memorial to Japan’s war dead which includes his own name, since he had been declared dead in 1959.