Shabbat
Reading List

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.

David Klion (newsletter editor): It seems like half the millennials I know are having babies right now, like a post-pandemic (yes, I know, the pandemic never ended and never will) baby boom is underway. I’m not a dad yet, but I’m struck by how many new or expectant dads in my general demographic I know and how few books there are about what it means to be a dad at this apocalyptic historical moment.

That’s why I’m so grateful for Raising Raffi, the new book of essays by n+1 co-founder and Jewish Currents Soviet Issue informal adviser Keith Gessen. Gessen and his wife, the writer Emily Gould, are a few years older than me and also live in Brooklyn, and for the past six years they’ve both been chronicling the life of their first son, Raffi, for various publications. Raffi (who, disclosure, I’ve met a few times) is adorable and funny and clever, but at various points he’s also been a “terrorist” who hits and kicks and screams and generally defies authority. In recounting this, Gessen is unsparing, both of Raffi and of his own shortcomings as a father.

There are reasonable questions to ask about whether it’s ever fair to describe one’s young child in an unflattering light, which are thoughtfully explored in a review of Raising Raffi in the new issue of The Drift (a great little magazine that owes an obvious debt to Gessen’s n+1). But personally I found the book to be tender, honest, and appropriately humble about the awe-inspiring responsibility that parenthood confers. Raffi may not have consented to an examined life, but do any of us really consent to any aspect of our childhoods? What is never in doubt is that he has two loving, self-aware, and deeply engaged parents who are trying their best at an essential yet impossible task while confronting a pandemic, an out-of-control housing market, a segregated urban public school system, and the unique challenge of maintaining a Russian cultural identity in a child who may never get the chance to visit Russia. I learned a lot.

Raising Raffi has been published just in time for Father’s Day. The new dads and dads-to-be in your life would probably appreciate a copy.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Every night my wife and I wake up every few hours to feed our twin sons, so we’ve been working through a slate of TV shows selected to hit an attention sweet spot: engaging enough to help keep us up, easy enough to follow that our exhausted brains can keep up. After cruising through all seven seasons of Veep, we turned to Search Party, the dark comedy starring Alia Shawkat that ran from 2016 until this year. The show, which is streaming on HBO, follows a group of aimless and entitled millennials who, in search of something to give their lives meaning, become embroiled in a missing person case. I’ve been thinking of it as Girls meets Pretty Little Liars. But what sets Search Party apart is the way it evolves (or unravels) over the course of its five seasons. The absurdity ratchets up over and over as the show advances a thesis so hyperbolic that it totally works: that my generation’s desire for purpose is, at bottom, sociopathic narcissism. By the final season, any semblance of self-seriousness has dissipated as the show makes its final transformation—into a horror satire.

Serial comedies rarely conclude gracefully; many recent ones descend into repetition while amplifying the saccharine and sentimental at the expense of humor (see Broad City, The Office). But Search Party, by self-consciously jumping the shark and leaning into its most ridiculous impulses, stays clever and compelling until the end.

Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): Fans of the Japanese “ramen Western” Tampopo: Criterion is currently streaming another film from the same director, Juzo Itami, and starring two of the same actors, Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsotumu Yamazaki, called A Taxing Woman, and you should watch it. It’s a comedy about the Japanese tax system, featuring dogged pursuits, underworld bosses, and critiques of capitalist greed, with a bit of sex. The movie was so successful in Japan it inspired a video game. (And if you haven’t seen Tampopo, you should watch that, too!).

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The New York Times described Selin Karadag—the main character in Elif Batuman’s new novel, Either/Or, a sophomore at Harvard of Turkish parentage—as someone who “overthinks” everything in her life, which is certainly true. She is, after all, a young woman who, early in her freshman year in a wonderful passage in the wonderful The Idiot, worked out the similarities between a box of tissues and books. But her overthinking is that of someone who loves books. As Selin said in The Idiot: “I wasn’t interested in society or ancient people’s money troubles. I wanted to know what books really mean.” And so she’s a careful reader who solipsistically seeks and finds references to her own life—particularly her unrequited love for Ivan, a Hungarian grad student in mathematics she has now unsuccessfully pursued through two volumes (three if we count his cameo in Batuman’s first book of essays on Russian literature, the delightful The Possessed).

Selin’s reading is varied, from Kierkegaard’s Seducer’s Diary, a section of the two-volume work Either/Or which lends its title to this novel, to Eugene Onegin, to the Muslim mystic Rumi, to Chekhov’s short story “Lady with a Lapdog,” to Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers. Even the poetry and advice column in the local weekly published by the homeless provides food for reflection on her attempts to lead a real life and to experience physical love.

If at times her thoughts on great works seem willfully flip, they are the fruit of her genuine love for literature, her intolerance for what she considers exaggerated or false. Why does Proust go on about his mother’s goodnight kiss? Even a Proustian can feel a certain grudging respect for and comprehension of someone who can admit to “repulsion,” for Proust’s conflation of his love for his mother and romantic love. These are the opinions that might well be held by a 19-year-old at Harvard, and upon reflection, many of them are spot on. After all, as Geoff Dyer has written: “Just because a book is a classic doesn’t mean it’s good.” But they are also steps along the way to Selin’s discovery of herself and her authorial vocation and voice. Selin feels herself to be unattractive and has never been kissed, much less had sex, and her experiences along the path to sexual awakening read as true, as honest, and as unflinching as any such account.

Ironically, it’s far from Harvard, while traveling in Anatolia, that Selin finally discovers the unlikely book that speaks directly to her and explains what she wants and hopes to achieve: Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. Batuman is unmistakably describing herself in this magnificent passage: “She wanted to fathom the human condition. She valued reading, travel, and relationships with radically different people: the kind of people who didn’t necessarily get the point of each other.”

Or there’s this, which explains what she and her creator ultimately learned from literature. She wasn’t going to borrow the experience of others. No, Selin tells herself, she “was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.”

Ari Brostoff (senior editor): There is a long-running joke in my family that my grandma—who passed away peacefully at 94 at her home in Van Nuys, California, last week—wasn’t funny. It started several years ago when my grandpa, the funny one, was dying; we were gathered at the hospital when my mom casually demeaned my grandma’s comedy chops. To this, my grandma responded with a face of utter indignation that not only proved once and for all just how funny she was, but also pointed to the particular character of her funniness: her role as the family straight man. So on the night of her funeral, having already made our way through a stack of home videos, we watched Funny Girl.

As a total failure at Jewish homosexuality, I had not previously seen Barbra in her breakout film role, and…it’s no joke! She’s divine. Streisand first developed the part of the celebrated Ziegfeld girl, comedian, and actress Fanny Brice when Funny Girl appeared on Broadway in 1964 (the show was revived this spring, with Beanie Feldstein, and has received tepid reviews). In 1968, William Wyler, the director of classics like The Best Years of Our Lives and Roman Holiday, made his sole musical theater foray with an adaptation of the play, with Streisand, then 26, again taking the lead.

In the film’s telling, Brice struggled at the start of her career with what a lyric in an early number, “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty,” bluntly identifies as her “frumpy faces that could cause ya/to have temporary nausea.” The movie both knows that this is absurd (Barbra’s Fanny is painfully gorgeous) and also has to insist that it’s true—not so much in a spirit of Jewish representational politics, which remain implicit if hilariously obvious (“I’m a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls!” she gripes), but to underscore the fact that Brice, a Lower East Side loudmouth, is a comedian. It really is her faces (she boasts of “36 expressions”) rather than her face; it’s not the “skinny legs” she’s accused of dancing on, but the fact that she’s blithely out of step with the choreo. In a moment that I experienced with intense pleasurable longing as the grown-up incarnation of a child who desperately wanted to be on stage despite lacking any discernible performance skills, a nightclub manager who has just fired Brice from his chorus line walks in on her mugging for a nonexistent audience and matter-of-factly diagnoses her with main character syndrome: “You’re no chorus girl, you’re a singer, and a comic.” He rehires her immediately, as a star.

Many of the best scenes in the rest of the film involve Barbra goofing around onstage with an increasingly professional cast of back-up performers around her as she ascends to real celebrity. As the movie progresses, however, it closes in on Brice’s doomed relationship with her real-life husband Nicky Arnstein, a suave international playboy, high-stakes gambler, and white collar criminal played by Omar Sharif, whose star flames out terribly as hers rises. The second-act drama lacks the energy of the first-act romp, and I found myself wishing Barbra would get back on stage—which she finally does, closing out the film with “My Man,” one of Brice’s most famous numbers, nearly broken but in total command, neither a character actor nor an ingenue but a full-fledged performer at last. I think my grandma would have approved.

Siddhartha Mahanta (editor): “‘Like, I’ve decided, is the cruelest word … We should be able to see something as it is, even if it is unfamiliar to us, without resorting to comparisons to what we know.’”

This line appears in Customs, the second poetry collection from Solmaz Sharif, a 38-year-old Iranian writer profiled by Rozina Ali in the April 2022 issue of Lux. “It’s this challenge to herself as a writer and to her readers — to not resort to the comfortable — that allows her more control over language,” Ali writes. “More deeply, though, it challenges her readers to think about themselves as political subjects, and to think about what they owe one another.”

Filled with probing insights like this, Ali’s piece presents Sharif, a National Book Award finalist for her first collection, as an artist in constant negotiation between the political and the aesthetic, form and function. As Ali writes: “The book is about customs and borders (visas and airports and immigration officers), about customs in America (obsessions with self-care, lifestyles that desire the fake over the authentic — soy creamer over dairy, a photo of the view over the view itself) — and further still, it is about the customs we lose, those that disappear from our tongues and flesh when we are exiled from home.” Solmaz’s subject, it seems, is America at quiet, devastating war with its own Americanness, and the casualties of that war.

The artist at work, interrogating their own style and truth for a deeper meaning—this can be stuffy stuff. But Ali, a journalist whose enviable body of work includes deep reporting on immigration, the war on terror, and the role of American military power around the world, understands Sharif’s ultimate destination as a poet and a thinker:

One of the oft-repeated misconceptions of Sharif as a political poet is that she is not as concerned about aesthetics as she is about the message. She rejects this. For Sharif, language and liberation are tied, but if that was all there was to her work, she told me, she would have been an orator. She may resist aesthetics de rigueur, but form is a primary consideration for her. Revisiting her poems, it becomes obvious that the length of the white space on the page and specific punctuation, or lack thereof, are careful choices. The repetition of closed brackets in “Without Which,” for example, evokes a sense that something is being inserted “that doesn’t belong there, or is trying to correct what is being said,” she explained. If metaphors limit moral vision, for Sharif, form offers a way to expand it. If there is no turning back to the lost past, she seems to say through Customs, there is no giving up either. One must use what one has, to scrutinize, insert, and cross thresholds toward different imagined futures.

Ali’s close reading of Solmaz’s work and itinerant life suggests poetry’s potential to reveal power, as experienced by much of the rest of the world, to an audience often blissfully unaware or unbothered by the exertion of power and all its consequences.

Speaking of those bothered by the unbothered: Make time for Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow’s not-little—in fact, quite epic—interview with essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, published in The Drift, the big-brained, big-hearted, spunky little magazine beloved by those with a pulse and conscience (Panovka and Barrow are co-editors of the publication). They conduct the interview with an openness and curiosity about the world as it is today and how it emerged from the world before they came of age. The result is thrilling.

Mishra offers a sweeping indictment of America in the post-Cold War world era, a time of missed opportunities, neoliberal excess, galling arrogance, catastrophic violence, the return of autocracy, generation-pummeling upward redistribution of wealth, and soon-to-be boiling oceans. I found myself struck by Mishra’s description of “the pathology of belatedness in history — what really happens when you’re from a poor country, not fully industrialized, trying to catch up with the modern West.” The consequence, he tells The Drift, is a suffering that arises from “constantly comparing yourselves to the richer, more powerful people in the Western countries,” and the painful awareness of your own inferiority. “These feelings can become very deeply grounded in national psychology, and … the peculiar evil talent that demagogues possess is to bring them out into the public sphere and make them potent again.” For a largely (excuse the term) Western audience still living in blithe ignorance that there is a world out there that you affect, whether you choose to know it or not, I suspect he could come off as accusatory. Or, short of that, just very charismatic and annoyed. Either way, a win.

Throughout the interview, Mishra pulls no punches. He reminds us that operating in any other mode just isn’t worth it, particularly where the future of American prestige is concerned:

Whatever happens in Ukraine, de-Americanization is going to accelerate. And by that I mean something other than moving away from American financial and payment systems. The United States once represented for many people — and I would include my younger self in that category — different kinds of possibility for emancipation. All of us had grown up in post-colonial societies that were flailing, that were not really delivering on their original promise of equality or stability, let alone prosperity. We thought of globalization as a wonderful thing.

The American ideology, the global ideology that replaced so many different postcolonial projects of national dignity, of collective welfare, was a highly individualistic ideology of meritocracy, individual prosperity, self-fulfillment, finding yourself, expressing yourself. All these notions were quite alien to many of us in conservative, hierarchical, and stagnant societies, and very thrilling, and they became truly global in the 1990s. That American ideology really collapsed in the last decade. And a lot of what we’re seeing today, whether it’s Modi’s Hindu chauvinism, Chinese supremacism, or Russian imperialism, is an attempt to resurrect or recreate or forward some kind of ‘indigenous’ ideology.

Because there’s a big vacuum there, left by a catastrophic loss of faith in America. The American ideology of empowerment, of self-improvement, of meritocracy and prosperity has been revealed as utterly hollow — as much a trick played by American elites on the American people as on the rest of the world. So there is this other thing being offered to people now: go back and find some Russian essence or Hindu essence, different ways of acquiring power. Power is really the name of the game here, whether we are speaking of Putin, Modi, Trump, or the liberal cold warriors. That said, I worry more about the countries that possess supreme power, cultural as well as military and economic, but continue to misuse it. Macron said in 2019 that NATO is brain-dead. I worry that, and we don’t discuss this as much as we should today, future historians will marvel at how the brain-dead institutions of the West led us all into catastrophe.

Mishra is, I suspect, right about what has precipitated the resurgence of various indigenous ideologies around the world. I differ on the question of the loss of faith in America. Maybe a certain version of America and its place in the world must die for a new one to take its place. When and how that may happen, of course, feels unnervingly difficult to predict.

The interview is grim but urgent, necessary stuff that really lights my fire.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): I read Salt Houses, by Hala Alyan, over the course of May. It is a gorgeous novel, tracing the lineage of one family through the eyes of different members, across a smattering of ages—ranging from a preteen girl of 11 to a matriarch at 75. The character who opens the novel was a young mother when she and her family were displaced from Jaffa to Nablus in the Nakba; we first meet her over a decade later as she prepares for her daughter’s wedding. The story travels on from there, unfurling further generations and geographical upheavals.

I was traveling with a friend when I began reading it, and I kept saying to her, “this is so devastating.” But two aspects of Alyan’s writing soften the experience of following along with the family’s intermittent tragedies and hardships: the poetry of her prose and the rich inner lives of the characters. I fell in love with several of them, and they linger. We move in time from mosques and outdoor courtyards in the 1960s to malls and apartments in the 2010s, and what remains constant is the presence of war and how life continues, in its miracles and mundanity, despite.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I despise costume dramas and avoid all the supposedly high-class, mostly British narishkeit that infests our cinemas like the plague. But I have no hesitation about recommending Xavier Giannoli’s film Lost Illusions, set in Restoration France and as costume a drama as one could wish for. Not only is it an engaging film, one that holds you in its power for its full two-and-a-half hours, but aside from some minor annoyances (like the occasional gratuitous presence of naked people) it is a vibrant adaptation, faithful to the spirit of one of the great novels of a writer I cherish, Honoré de Balzac.

Part of Balzac’s multi-volume Comédie Humaine, which in length at least far surpasses Proust’s untouchable À la recherche du temps perdu, Lost Illusions is the tale of Lucien de Rubempré, who leaves his native Angouleme for Paris and the literary life he craves.

He aspires to love, to rank, to aristocracy, and to literary glory, about all of which he harbors great illusions. But he also harbors illusions about himself, about his ability to conquer the many worlds he wants to enter. All of these illusions will be lost, crushed coldly and cruelly by those around him. It is not only cliquishness, romantic and artistic rivals, backstabbing, and greed that get in the way of Lucien’s sincere desire to create great works of literature (his sole published book is a slim volume of poems dedicated to the married woman he loves, and then as now, poetry is not the entryway to fame and fortune). Lucien actively participates in the derailing of his own career. He’s a liberal opponent of the monarchy (for pay) one moment, and an ardent supporter (from ambition to confirm his right to an aristocratic name) another. His blind ambition not only destroys his own career, but that of the young actress he loves and who loves him. The hatred he inspires by his hypocrisy and greed for advancement splashes onto her and crushes her acting career.

Lost Illusions is showing at New York’s two essential theaters: Lincoln Center and Film Forum. Here’s one more recommendation: the brothers Paolo and Vittoiro Taviani, over the course of many decades, made some of the most important Italian films, works like Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars. Vittorio died in 2018, and the now 91-year-old Paolo has directed his first solo feature, Leonora addio. Proof that great age is not an obstacle to reaching out in new directions, Leonora addio is a stunningly beautiful and original film, shot, in the first section, in brilliant black and white before switching to color in its second chapter.

The film is Pirandellian in the purest sense. The first section tells the story of Pirandello’s remains. The great author had requested that his ashes be laid to rest in his native Sicily, ensconced in a rock, but the fascist government disobeyed his wishes and buried him in Rome. At war’s end, he was finally transferred to Sicily, though it took years for his site to be prepared. The scene then switches to Brooklyn and an adaptation of a Pirandello story set among Italian immigrants, a tale of murder and perhaps madness.

The sum of this is a moving and occasionally humorous portrait of Italy and Italians in the 20th century, of fascism and the fight against it, of superstition, religion, culture, and adaptation to new circumstances and the new world. It is rich, it is beautiful and provoking, and it is showing at Lincoln Center as part of its Open Roads festival on June 14th and 15th.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I haven’t yet watched this particular video from friend-of-the-mag Morgan Bassichis’s Questions to Ask Beforehand, but I did see a version of this performance—an almost vaudevillian combo of standup and songs—in early April at the New York gallery Bridget Donahue, and it was a trip. Bassichis’s on-stage persona is an irresistible (and very Jewy) cocktail of narcissism and self-deprecation, irreverence and serious political commitment. Part of their shtick is improvisation, which they pass off as a kind of flighty underpreparedness and which is the engine for their charisma—for how you root for them to stick the landing when you’re in the audience. On the night I saw the show, they killed in the comedy department. But perhaps my favorite number of the night was the uncharacteristically reverent “What Would Douglas Say?” (at around 1:03:00 in the linked video), a moving homage to the art historian and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp, who died in 2019, in which audience members are called on to read quotes from his work. This led me to read Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy” the day after I saw the show. It’s an invaluable essay which—making use of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”—attempts to dissect the activist’s hostility to mourning, and to assert the ways this hostility can lead to counterproductive currents within a movement. Highly recommended reading for this moment of strange and half-buried grief.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): I tend to be skeptical of criticism written by people close to the creator of the work under consideration. Whatever the critic’s commitment to impartiality, isn’t genuine fair-mindedness impossible when friendship is at stake? But Ross Feld’s Guston in Time made me reconsider. Originally published in 2003 and reissued last week by NYRB Classics (I promise: unlike my last recommendation of a work from the press, this one actually exists), the book is a beautiful reflection on the controversial late work of the painter Philip Guston, and on Feld’s relationship with him in the last years of his life. Their bond began with a piece of criticism: a review Feld wrote of a 1975 show. Guston’s then-recent decisive (and widely derided) turn from abstract expressionism to the cartoonish figural work he would make until his death in 1980 had alienated him from much of the art world. But Feld thought Guston was on to something brilliant. Guston wrote Feld a grateful note about the piece, and a friendship was forged.

Rather than cloud the understanding of the work, in Guston in Time the critic’s affection for the artist seems to sharpen the readings of the paintings. He writes strikingly about their “profound, even crude unmannerliness and obverse beauty.” Cherries (1976) is “a delirious congregation of imperfections”; the cigarette in Talking (1979) is “the most homely, appealing clock of them all: burning down, fitfully drawn at, used, disposable yet addicting—a kind of little life held between the knuckles.” For Feld, the work’s comic exterior belies its metaphysical depth; its brashness represents a bold lurch into the roiling abyss of the image.

Guston in Time buzzes with the effervescence of mutual admiration, which is crystallized in excerpts from Guston’s letters interspersed between chapters. The men’s entire correspondence appears as an appendix. “When I think about your work,” Feld writes to Guston, “the thinking itself receives some complementary enfolding: the shape of the critical thought finds itself aligning with the work by equal valencies. Mental meets mental; numb meets numb.” Guston responds: “How exquisite and precise! I will dwell on this thought—savour it. For it connects (how?) in some startling way with my double sense of an ‘itching’—a febrile need to make a masterpiece and equally as strong (and then melancholy) realization of this total impossibility.” The letters form a lovely coda that, like the book itself, makes a strong case against the strict separation of friendship and criticism.

Lauren Goldenberg (vice chair of Board of Directors, JC Council member): Last week, I read All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen. This is a group biography of three women—​​Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland—that questions the genre of biography and the definitions of success and failure. You have probably not heard of these women, or likely only one or two of the three, but they are all worth your time and attention: figures whose lives were spent mostly during the first half of the 20th century, each with particular skills and styles that didn’t quite fit in, such that they were each uniquely themselves. This is also a book about lesbian and gay life during this time. These women are fascinating and the book is so well-written; I read it because of multiple strong recommendations from others, and I now highly recommend it to you.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Portuguese director Miguel Gomes has thus far directed five feature films (seven if we count the three volumes of his Arabian Nights as separate films), all of them possessed of intelligence, wit, and originality. The cinema, the cinematic process, and Portuguese reality feature prominently in them all as subjects for investigation and meditation. Unlike his compatriot Pedro Costa, the other contemporary Portuguese director with an international reputation, Gomes handles this all with a light touch, which doesn’t detract from his films’ seriousness as works of art.

His latest film, The Tsugua Diaries, now showing at Lincoln Center, is the most successful of them all, and a perfect entry point for those not familiar with his work. Made with his partner, the documentarist Maureen Fazendeiro, the film recounts the challenges of shooting a film under lockdown restrictions in the Portuguese countryside.

But the directors made a choice that adds a fascinating level to the film: starting on day 21 of the shoot, the film unfurls in reverse, ending with the first day of filming. Covid’s fracturing of time that Covid is thus baked into the film.

Who are the three people dancing wildly in the first scene? What is the strange structure they’re building? Why are they alone in a large country house? Why is one of the directors only present via a walkie-talkie? How will one of the actors’ violation of Covid rules impact the film? These simple questions are not always answered, and in a sense are illegitimate: telling the film back to front gives us effects without causes, and the causes that are subsequently revealed become effects that precede causes. Throughout, we have answers to questions we hadn’t posed.

Character development, we are told, is meaningless in this context, since the characters’ later development in the film preceded them in time. This joyful play with storytelling, free of ponderousness or portentousness, makes The Tsugua Diaries one of the most enjoyable intellectual treats in the cinema in many a month.

Here’s one more: Nanni Moretti, who has long been the most interesting of Italian filmmakers—turning out a stunning variety of films, from self-reflective fiction films, film diaries (not to be missed in this genre is Caro Diario), documentaries, and straightforward fiction films. His latest, the excellent Three Floors, based on the novel by the Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, is showing at Lincoln Center as part of its annual Open Roads festival of new Italian films on June 13th and 14th.

Three Floors is the deepest of Moretti’s films dealing with family. The families in the comfortable three-story Roman building of the film’s title are all traversing crises and confronting potential disintegration, and through the crises they reveal their true natures.

As always, Moretti treats his characters with respect and refuses to be judgmental. Three Floors, through the death, infidelity, irresponsibility and mental cruelty depicted, is a perfect expression of the most profound line ever uttered in a film, that said by Octave in Renoir’s Rules of the Game: “In life, the thing is that everyone has his reasons.” The humanism of Nanni Moretti and Three Floors is a welcome balm.