Shabbat
Reading List

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): My family has used We Tell it to Our Children: The Story of Passover for our intergenerational seders since the mid ’90s, when my parents won a set at a JCC fundraiser. If you’re looking for a family-friendly option, this is a guaranteed hit. It’s less of a conventional haggadah and more of a script of the Exodus story, embedding prayers and foods where they fall narratively. The set comes with black-and-white illustrations of the characters to be photocopied, cut out, colored in, and taped to chopsticks or pencils, creating puppets for participants to hold as they play their parts. The script includes a narrator plus nine puppet roles, though some, like the Taskmaster or Yocheved, are brief, so a single guest could play various characters—those too young to read are assigned to the role of the sheep, who only bahs. Everyone can join in for the songs, which borrow familiar tunes but add new lyrics that advance the plot.

This haggadah is participatory, kooky, and fun for small children. It is also deeply uncool, and I would not recommend springing it on adult guests who are not prepared to sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” rewritten into a lament of slave labor. In We Tell it to Our Children, Israel is a place “that would take us many, many hours to get to from here if we flew very fast in a plane.” For a more politically engaged seder, your narrator might have to improvise a few additions.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): We use the Yedid Nefesh Haggadah, which attempts to make a traditional seder maximally accessible. It has a complete Hebrew text, a translation into readable English, a transliteration of the parts one might sing, and a relatively unobtrusive, inoffensive commentary. Its pages are intuitively designed and uncluttered.

I am skeptical of the implicit claim of many contemporary haggadot that a book can lead a seder; my professional intuition, as a teacher of old literature, is that, on their own, premodern texts—no matter how brilliant or thoughtful—make nothing happen. I suspect that many buyers of haggadot with fancy bells and whistles (questions for discussion, modern meditations, updated plague-lists and the like) are making a category error: It is as if they were looking for advice on how to host a party in the assembly directions for their sectional. I also find the common practice of circular reading of arcane texts and then unplanned, uninformed discussion baffling; that’s a pedagogical modality appropriate for a last-minute substitute teacher in a middle school English class, but for no one else.

Instead, I prepare a class on one of the texts in the haggadah, with one or two supplemental texts (traditional and modern), simply presented context so people can understand it (a good resource for this background is the scholarly commentary in the Schechter Haggadah, which incidentally also has lovely illustrations), and several open-ended questions for discussion. The rest of the text, I explain, can be chanted in about five minutes to fulfill one’s obligation in recitation; those who are not so moved can read parts silently or simply breathe meditatively during that short interval.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): I can’t recommend a particular haggadah any more than I have been able to use a single one at the many seders I have led over the decades. For the most DIY of Jewish holidays—the only one officially centered in the home, not a synagogue—I say: make your own. The seder, by definition, offers the outline. Fill it in as the times—and the folks gathered—demand. After all, as Vanessa Ochs points out in The Passover Haggadah: A Biography, ad hoc home Pesach ceremonies took place beginning in 70 CE, with written versions not appearing until the 11th century, and not proliferating until after the invention of the printing press in 1440. (The first printed haggadah was produced in Guadalajara, Spain around 1480.) What’s more, the model for the seder as we have come to know it emerged from the Hellenistic period: a Greek symposium of food, drink, and, most of all, discussion. For me, the most meaningful seders are the ones where we all debate the themes and provocations of the ritual a lot more than we read.

This is not to say we should ignore the gazillions of haggadahs that have been created through the centuries. We should steal copiously from slickly published volumes and homespun zines alike—from those promoting commentary by rabbis of various ideologies to 20th century variants that began mapping the Exodus story onto contemporary liberation struggles. My own collection includes, among others: a facsimile of the 14th century Sarajevo haggadah; a velvet-covered copy of the one Arthur Szyk illustrated in Poland in the mid-1930s, which drew parallels between Pharaoh and Hitler; the Let My People Go haggadah from the 1970s focusing on Soviet Jews; the famous countercultural “Freedom Seder” of 1969 opposing the Vietnam War and supporting various civil rights movements; lots of feminist, queer, labor, immigrant, and ecological ones; JFREJ’s Black Lives Matter take from 2019; and the “Gaza Liberation Seder” produced by Barnard and Columbia students for the observance in the campus encampment two years ago. That’s not to mention inserts—from the 1944 prayer for eating chametz on Passover from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to poems from the First Intifada. Pulling from these varying texts (often by distributing them around the table and inviting folks to pipe up when they see something worth sharing) is a way of instantiating, through this thoroughly performative ritual, its palimpsestic nature. That makes sense for a holiday about recognizing ourselves as people—and as a people—in history.

In the analog days of yore, I literally copied and pasted materials into an ever-fattening loose-leaf notebook, that—notwithstanding decades-old wine stains on the pages—resembles more than anything a stage manager’s promptbook. A section for each seder element includes references to discussion-provoking passages from printed haggadahs, as well as accumulated poems, testimonies, short stories, and drashes, many contributed by participants. (Among perennial favorites: For the story-telling part of the seder, Marge Piercy’s “Maggid”; for the Hallel, the “Footnote” section of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”) In recent years, rudimentary Adobe-designed and printed versions have kept that notebook on the shelf, but the principle has not changed: Keep the bones, collectively produce the flesh. Indeed, it has become more emphatic.

Lately, I have pared the document down to a two-page outline—taking us back to the millennia-old guide (plus a few prompts). I keep the stack of haggadahs and yellowing xeroxes on hand at the table, but it’s the conversation that matters most. Often, just asking each person to say why they wanted to be at a seder that night is enough to spark deep, hours-long discussion—and singing, and jokes, and argument, and advocacy. Day-dayenu, day-dayenu.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Favorite haggadahs? God save us. Anyway, there’s only the Manischewitz haggadah. Everything else is chametz.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Last week, I read this piece in New York Magazine by Narges Bajoghli on the relationship-ending conversations about Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran happening among Iranians scattered across the world, both in Iran and in the global diaspora. The author herself writes from amid the fracture: “In Australia, my cousin Ali and his group of friends—many of whom I knew from childhood trips to Iran—were writing screeds against me on social media for not using my platform to back the bombings of Iran. Cousins and old friends will no longer speak to me because I will not sign on to the proposition that American and Israeli bombs will deliver liberation. Some of them I have known my whole life. Some of them, I realize now, I did not know at all.”

It’s a familiar story for many American Jews, as the author notes explicitly in the piece. As a Miamian, I also recognize the passions and violence of other diasporas; I’m thinking now of a news story from a few weeks ago, in which Cuban exiles rode a speedboat from Florida into Cuban waters, aiming, as the Cuban government said, for “armed infiltration.” Four of them were killed. This comes at a moment where Lindsey Graham is gleefully threatening a US invasion of Cuba on Fox News: “Free Cuba. Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. It’s just a matter of time now.” He mentions he’s in Miami and holds up a hat that says “Free Cuba”; no doubt it was given to him by a Cuban exile.

It is shocking that anyone can look at the images from Tehran, water and sky on fire, and think, “I want this for my country because I love my country. I love its people.” But the ubiquity of this attitude is a warning in itself about the potency of the commingling of pain and nationalism in a collective story. To Bajoghli, the only ethical response in such a moment is a kind of “double consciousness,” or perhaps, a dialectics, that the story makes impossible. “The question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political system’s end and grief for its victims at the same time,” she writes. “I think you have to. I think the people who can’t, on either side, are telling you something about what they’ve had to shut off in themselves to survive this.”

David Klion (contributing editor): I’ve just binged the first four seasons of Apple TV’s For All Mankind ahead of the fifth season, which premieres on March 27th. I was expecting a sci-fi epic in the vein of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, both of which the show’s co-creator Ronald D. Moore was centrally involved in. But while there’s definitely some of that in For All Mankind’s DNA, the actual experience of watching has brought very different shows to mind, including The Americans, Mad Men, and perhaps above all Friday Night Lights. You know how Friday Night Lights is nominally about high school football, but really it’s a soap opera about the triumphs and tragedies of a close-knit community of Texans and a kind of grand metaphor for America as imagined by well-meaning liberals? For All Mankind is exactly that, except replace high school football with space exploration. It’s a show, in other words, I can enthusiastically recommend to all sorts of people in my life who don’t care about sci-fi.

Though it becomes increasingly recognizable as sci-fi as it goes, the show belongs more precisely to the genre of alternate history. The point of rupture from our timeline occurs in the pilot: In June 1969, about a month before the scheduled Apollo 11 mission that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, the Soviet space program stuns the whole world by landing a cosmonaut there first. NASA is shaken, as is President Nixon, and instead of a manned moon landing serving as America’s pinnacle achievement in the space race, the Soviet win goads Americans into dreaming much bigger. What about a permanent lunar base? What about manned missions to Mars? What about… okay, no spoilers.

Each season leaps forward about a decade, with the first set mainly in the 1970s and the upcoming season set in the 2010s. Some things change, like the winners and losers of presidential elections, while others stay the same—Apple has punctuated the show with needle drops of era-defining songs that apparently would have been written in any timeline. While individual characters come and go, the show remains tightly focused on a core group of astronauts, mission controllers, engineers, and family members based out of Houston. For all the science and history geekery on display, For All Mankind is primarily character-driven. It invests us emotionally in a wildly diverse extended family whose lives are oriented around a space program far more ambitious and consequential than the one we know.

Among those consequences is an America that’s incrementally woker than the real one, where progress on women’s equality, gay rights, and more happens a little faster than it actually did. Is this strictly realistic? Maybe not, but here’s where I’m reminded of Star Trek, with its utopian vision of humanity transcending war, prejudice, and capitalism in favor of space exploration and scientific knowledge for its own sake. The original series, the one with Kirk and Spock, aired from 1966-1969, concurrent with the Apollo Program and the height of the Great Society, and premiering before Vietnam and the New Politics tore everything apart. Martin Luther King was famously a fan and convinced actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, that it was crucial for Black kids to see a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise; Nichols, in turn, inspired Mae Jemison, who became the first Black woman in space in 1992 (a fictional Black woman makes it to space much earlier in the For All Mankind timeline).

Regardless of that era’s myriad flaws, we’ve never fully recovered its idealism; today we live in a fallen America, one in which even space travel is the province of manic private-sector reactionaries (For All Mankind has something to say about for-profit space companies too). As corny and over the top as For All Mankind can sometimes be, there’s something beautiful and profoundly life-affirming about a show that imagines what our world might have been like if the 1960s Space Age had never ended. The show’s title is taken from the plaque the real Apollo astronauts left on the lunar surface (“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind”), but it’s appropriate to the spirit of the show, which is first and foremost a celebration of humanity—all of it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve always insisted that it’s impossible to judge another couple’s marriage. It’s difficult enough to understand the inner workings of our own, so how dare we judge those of others? But none of this applies when it comes to the marriages we encounter in literature, and it is as literature that I’ve felt free to judge the marriage of the great German poet Paul Celan and his French artist wife Gisèle Lestrange as we see it in Letters to Gisèle (1951-1970). Fixed on the page, like a dead butterfly minus the beauty, this collection is a horrific voyage into the depths of all that can be worst in marriage: deception, illusion, self-delusion, crushing of personality, willing submission, and, finally, destruction. Exasperation, anger, desperation are there, but also great loyalty and compassion, finally crushed under the weight of history and madness.

There is much discussion in these letters of Celan’s famously difficult poetry, his “messages in a bottle,” as he called them. This includes Celan’s fascinating and unconsciously comical attempts to teach his wife German by providing her with cribs of select words in poems he’s sent her so she can read and understand his work in its original form. Celan taught German at the Ecole Normale Supèrieure, so he had experience in teaching German literature. It seems certain that this method was not employed by the poet in his classes at France’s most elite academy.

There are, however, other commentaries on his poetry, some of them enormously enlightening. The most pertinent of them all is from a letter in 1965, which included a poem of which he was especially proud, though with a caveat: “It is quite decent, maybe not opaque enough.”

The volume is replete with Celan’s complaints that his work is insufficiently appreciated and understood, that people fail to see that his poetry is all a response to the death camps. But it is also a chronicle of a man’s war with his milieu, his insistence that those around him in the literary world were antisemites, that antisemitism was everywhere, the left as guilty as the right (“the brown red and the red brown,” as he calls them). Celan was unjustly accused of plagiarism by the widow of a poet with whom he had been close, and the charge and his insistence on the omnipresence of antisemitism ate away at his vitals, perverting him as a human being.

But more than anything, this volume is an account of a marriage whose stated motto was “I stand firm,” and whose obvious fault lines and fractures and problems were ignored in the false belief that all was well, until such belief was no longer possible. Pledges of eternal love flow back and forth, followed by separations, internments in mental hospitals, a stabbing… The couple’s second motto, repeated in countless letters—including one written two days before Paul tried to stab Gisèle—was “Wird sind es noch immer” (“We are still what we are”). Gisèle gives her life to her husband, as a person and an artist. She allows him to be the one to bestow titles on all her artistic works over the course of their marriage. She is forgiving of his infidelities, one of which lasted ten years. They convince themselves that all will be well, or at least that it’s possible. Paul says at one point that separation from her would be “the victory of our enemies. I do not accept this separation.” The enemies were within him, and they did win.

Pual and Gisèele finally separated for good, and on April 20th, 1970, he disappeared. The battles of Celan against himself, poetry, antisemites, the literary world, and his wife ended under the Pont Mirabeau. His body was fished from the Seine weeks later. Letters to Gisèle is the tombstone of their marriage, the memorial to that battle.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): The Secret Agent introduces itself with an onscreen caption, “Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief.” That sly understatement sets the tone for what follows. The film’s story mostly occurs during Carnaval, and Brazil’s multi-decade military dictatorship is portrayed as a phantasmagoric, excessive nightmare of corrupt festivity, presided over by a lord of misrule: President Ernesto Geisel, to whose portrait, hanging in government offices, the camera periodically and pointedly returns. Developing the Carnaval theme, the director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, mixes a host of disparate styles and allusions—gorey shootouts set to jaunty music; sudden lurches from the tape-recorded briefings in the 1970s to their reception in the present; a mock horror sequence of a severed leg rampaging against queer lovers in a late-night park; and a heartfelt, at times sentimental, drama of a family shattered by gangster capitalism and state violence. This emotional and generic pastiche renders the movie’s images of crushing reaction and corruption all the more powerful; the playful, drunken chaos throws the viewer off-kilter, so that we latch onto moments of sincere emotion.

The movie also frames the Brazilian dictatorship within longer histories of fascist and colonial violence. The protagonist, Marcelo Alves (Wagner Moura), is a university professor on the run from a rapaciously privatizing, rabidly right-wing businessman. He finds temporary refuge in a building run by an elderly anarcho-communist, Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), as part of a shadowy diaspora of the pursued and exiled, all with fake names. In a melancholic evening toast to the group, Dona Sebastiana recalls her experience in Italy during the Second World War, listing memories she refuses to narrate, whether because of shame, trauma, or just prudence. We see that Brazil in the ‘70s is merely the latest battleground in a global, century-long fascist war on the left, a ruthless campaign that not only claims physical victims, but also scars the survivors and erases the memory of its own brutality. And yet, “The Secret Agent” is somehow a hopeful movie, celebrating the archival work of those who cling to, reconstruct, and honor the past of a battered and fragmented resistance.

In one telling scene, the repugnant police chief Euclides Oliveira Cavalcanti (Robério Diógenes) visits a tailor, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor whom he mistakes for a Nazi soldier, and whose scars he consequently wants to ogle. The confusion captures how throughout South and Central America, the anti-Communist right often styled itself as continuing the fascist project. Here, even the literal disfiguration of Nazism does not speak for itself, but must (terrifyingly) be interpreted by those who can get it entirely backward. (The scene is sharp enough that I will forgive the schmaltzy touch of having the tailor exhibit a Chanukah menorah… during Carnaval?). Chief Euclide’s mistaken identification of the Jewish victim as the fascist perpetrator, of course, acquires a special, vicious irony in the present, when many Jews seem prone to the same ugly interpretation of our tragic history.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Gian Franco Rosi’s documentaries are as formally distinctive as those of any director of scripted film. There’s no explanatory text or voiceover as he guides us through the situations and places he covers. The images are always magnificent, without overpowering the message, however subtle that might be. Rosi’s new film, Pompeii: Below the Clouds, is a perfect distillation of his aesthetic, a film of extraordinary plastic beauty in service to a tragic message.

The titular clouds fill the screen as the film begins. They are the clouds that cover Mount Vesuvius, the neighboring city of Naples, and the volcano’s most famous victim, the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The clouds connect them all, and that is precisely what Rosi poetically, lovingly, and bitterly deals with in the film. What is the relation of today’s Naples to the city that once bore the name Neopolis and the destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum? The answer, of course, is complex, and Rosi provides it in all its complexity.

We see the ruins of Pompeii, the dead frozen in the poses in which death found them. We see archaeologists working at a nearby site, uncovering relics buried and hidden from view for millennia, working carefully to disinter them, cataloging everything about them in their notebooks. Everything for these archaeologists is nearly sacred. The same goes for curators at the national museum, wandering among the statues in the dark and examining them by flashlight, which, one of them explains, makes the details all the more visible.

Naples is a deeply religious city, and Rosi shows pilgrims walking on their knees or lying on their bellies and pulling themselves along. There is no commentary, either on the soundtrack or in the way the scenes are shot. Rosi is close to them and yet far from judging them.

And then there is the other side of Naples, a city as corrupted by the Camorra as Sicily is by the Mafia, and not just by the Camorra. As a prosecutor says: The whole city is a crime scene, for beneath it grave robbers have dug tunnels under almost every neighborhood to plunder Roman graves. The prosecutor and a Carabinieri commander helicopter around the city, entering the tunnels only to find rooms denuded of as many as twelve frescoes, Roman—Italian—treasures lost to the population forever. These tunnels took years to build, and yet no one knew of them or prevented the thefts. The thieves are, in a way, like Vesuvius, murderers of the nation’s patrimony.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt is a masterpiece of cinematography and sound design, viscerally suspenseful and strikingly beautiful. It is also morally repugnant, representing art at its most vacuous.

The film centers around Luis (Sergi Lopéz), a Spanish father who, along with his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), is at a rave in Morocco to search for his lost daughter Mar. He doesn’t find her, but one of the ravers, Jade (Jade Oukid), tells him of another rave deeper in the desert where Mar might be. Soon after, a group of soldiers arrives to break up the rave and evacuate European citizens for unexplained reasons. As the cars are being escorted away, Jade and her motley crew of fellow ravers make a break to escape the soldiers, and Luis impulsively follows them; thus they become unlikely travel companions, heading together to the next rave.

Why exactly are there soldiers evacuating people? What is the nature of this war that’s breaking out? If you hoped Sirāt would answer these questions, you’d be disappointed. Occasionally, we’re shown a ploddingly familiar gesture toward global conflict—lines for gas which seem to stretch for miles, or military convoys passing along—but we’re never given an explanation for why all this is happening. At one point a radio mentions the impending outbreak of World War III; one of the ravers turns it off instantly, sparing the film any need for further detail.

Sirāt is not a film that cares much for particularity. Even at the level of characterization, it operates only in broad, connotative strokes: Virtually no detail is provided about Mar other than that she’s missing, because what matters is not really the absence of an individual with complex motivations and relationships with other characters, but simply that Luis has a reason to be forlorn. Among the entire cast of characters, there is essentially no internal conflict, and not one of them has anything that could be called “development” across the entire film. The effect is that when they die, their deaths don’t seem like the obliterations of real and individualized human beings, but more like tragedies of the most generic, melodramatic sort, where the victim is substitutable for anyone else.

These are not just aesthetic quibbles. What we see in Sirāt is the logical endpoint of a humanism allergic to particular detail, where even war itself—a war that may well be unfolding at this exact moment—becomes nothing more than a spiritual allegory, exemplified by the film’s increasingly ridiculous ending. Because this war is left almost entirely abstract and unexplained, it appears as ineffable, fated—and although the self-important may take solace how this very fatedness affords the chance of “crossing over” into divine apathy, it is worth insisting that war is no spiritual symbol, but something very particular, very contingent, and very real.

What Sirāt does well—exceptionally well—is its long shots and its soundtrack, which at times blend into a masterful translation of the repetitive yet suspenseful thrum of rave music into filmic form. It fails, utterly, in its attempt to portray the infinite present of a rave as a desideratum rather than a moral abdication. If you’re interested in watching a film set in the desert, I’d instead recommend Dune, which manages to be more politically salient while also featuring sandworms.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer) At the end of Milo Rau’s Hate Radio last week, I walked out of the theater feeling surprisingly unmoved. I couldn’t understand why seeing an imagined re-creation of a radio broadcast that incited genocidal violence in Rwanda in 1994 hadn’t left me horrified, shocked, disgusted, upset. But in the days since, the piece has scratched at me painfully, as if my clothes had picked up burs in the theater and they eventually pierced my skin. That effect makes a terrible kind of sense: the anti-Tutsi hatred spewed by the hosts of Kigali’s Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) couldn’t impel Hutus to murder their neighbors instantly; the dehumanizing rhetoric had to seep in over time as part of quotidian activity.

Hate Radio depicts that normalizing process. Most of the play’s nearly two-hour running time takes place in a reconstruction of the RTLM studio, where three hosts sit at a round table with large mics, while a DJ spins the likes of Nirvana and Reel 2 Real (“I like to move it, move it”) in the adjoining booth, and an armed soldier silently stands guard. The studio is encased in glass walls, and the audience members, arrayed on opposite sides of this transparent box, watch each other take in the action. The constant sight of other spectators and the sense that we are being watched, along with the vitrine-like enclosure, create emotional, analytical distance. But at the same time, the hosts’ banter (in French and Kinyarwanda) comes into our ears through headphones—a most intimate medium (supertitles translate the text). Visually we’re pushed away, even as, aurally, we’re pulled in.

And much of what we hear sounds ordinary—the hosts chatting about weather and soccer and the latest headlines, taking calls from listeners, dancing along to the DJ’s tunes, trading quips. But all that badinage is laced with poisonous rhetoric about the “cockroaches” who have committed atrocities against the majority of Rwandans while trying to take over the country. With a jovial nonchalance, the radio jocks egg on a massacre.

The consequences are plainly expressed in a prologue and epilogue that frame the broadcast scene, comprising video segments that feature survivors and witnesses of the genocide. Blinds drawn closed over the set’s glass walls serve as screens for each brief individual testimony in larger-than-life projections. These are fictional characters, based on interviews, diaries, and transcripts of the post-genocide Gacaca courts, writer-director Rau says in a program note.

Rau doesn’t explain why he constructed these composite testimonies rather than tell a specific person’s story, but I think it’s because he is more interested in examining traumatic and unjust historical events and the ways they are remembered and narrated than in exploring individual psychologies—which is, in part to say, that as a theater maker, he’s not drawn to narrative realism. Born in Switzerland and currently the artistic director of the annual Vienna Festival, he ran the NTGent theater in Belgium for five years, and has been making work with his own company, the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM), for nearly two decades. A progressive provocateur, he often examines political violence, but doesn’t gorily depict it directly, at least not in the pieces he has brought to New York previously—Five Easy Pieces, a chilling and controversial collaboration with a children’s theater company about an infamous Belgian child-murderer, and Antigone in the Amazon, an allegorical re-vamping of Sophocles, for which he worked in Brazil with members of the MST (Landless Workers Movement) to confront the 1996 murder of farmers by military police. Two more of his works will be shown in New York next month: The Interrogation, a monologue by Édouard Louis; and The Pelicot Trial, a staged reading of materials from the trial of the notorious French rapist.

Hate Radio is an old piece. First presented in 2011, it has toured the world (including Rwanda) on and off since then. Platforms for hate speech have only proliferated in those dozen years—from the manosphere to the Oval Office—and the tone of contemptuous jocularity struck by Hate Radio’s men and woman in a glass booth has become our flammable soundtrack.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): With Gotham at War, the historian Mike Wallace completes his magisterial 3,000-page history of New York City. Even with all that space, Wallace couldn’t get to the present. The first volume, Gotham, covered New York from its beginnings to 1898; the second, Greater Gotham, from 1898 to 1919, and now, in the third and final volume, we have the Depression to 1945.

It wouldn’t be far from the truth to call the trilogy encyclopedic, given the heft and dimensions of each volume. Within their pages are, despite the gaps in the coverage and the heavy emphasis on Manhattan, as complete a picture of the city as we are ever going to see.

Gotham at War takes us through the Depression, the process of recovery, and the myriad and conflicting reactions to the rise of fascism and World War II. Wallace doesn’t over-romanticize the meeting and supposed melding of the ethnic groups that make up the city’s population, of which New Yorkers are often unjustifiably boastful. He gives substantial coverage to the pro-Nazi German American Bund, with its unfailing support of Hitler and its hatred of Jews. Less well known is the shameful fact that the Italian American community had a significant pro-Mussolini bent, and that the Irish Catholic Legion was also a significant reactionary Jew-baiting organization. The role of exclusionary immigration laws as they relate to New York presents us with surprising facts and figures about the tiny numbers of Chinese and South Asian immigrants in the city in the period covered. Wallace’s examination of race relations is not shy about racial conflict alongside comity. The issue was and is a complicated and often unflattering one, but Wallace does it justice.

Politics take up significant space in Gotham at War, and at some points it seems the coverage is almost too extensive. This is a history of New York, and the focus is often national and international rather than local; the only thing New York about it is often that the key organizations and players were based here. But no 1,000-page book will have 1,000 perfect pages.

Wallace deals with almost every possible aspect of New York life, including its rise as an art and fashion capital after the fall of Paris in 1940. Musical theater is covered through the perfect combination of the military and the city in On the Town. The New York intellectual journals, which have been written about to death [editorial note from David Klion: disagree, there is still more to say!], are discussed briefly yet sufficiently.

But at the end of the volume, with New York established as the “capital of the world” and home to the United Nations thanks to Rockefeller largesse (the family covered the costs of the real estate on which the UN headquarters stands), the reader is left with the stirring memory of figures who appear throughout the book whose like we haven’t seen since. Fiorello La Guardia is presented as a thoroughly admirable man who occasionally stumbled, but always recovered and righted himself in time. Eleanor Roosevelt is the archetypal liberal, the upright conscience that stood in contrast to her husband who, politician that he was, wouldn’t always stand up for what he believed. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. gets a great deal of credit for his fight for civil and human rights, as does a great forgotten figure, Vito Marcantonio, the American Labor Party congressman from East Harlem, a man close to the Communists and a fierce defender of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. New York gets the treatment it deserves in Wallace’s trilogy, warts and all.

A. Gopalan (senior editor): I may not always remember what sport the Super Bowl is associated with, but I will never forget this year’s halftime show: It introduced me to my new obsession. Since that Sunday, the Puerto Rican sensation Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny—whose ubiquity I had miraculously escaped over the past few years—has been playing in my head(phones) nonstop. I was first hooked by the political ballad “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”), in which Benito’s smooth vocals, layered over a strong baseline and güiro percussion, ring with foreboding: “Thеy want to take my river, and my beach too / They want my neighborhood and for grandma to leave / No, don’t let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai / ‘Cause I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii.” The music is hypnotic, as is the anti-colonial fervor; I was struck by Benito’s clear-eyed look at Hawaii, where the theft of land and resources continues under the auspices of representative democracy.

Not all Bad Bunny songs are revolutionary anthems: His Grammy-winning 2025 album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS serves up techno club hits like “VeLDÁ,” romantic dirges like “TURiSTA,” and block-party bangers like the irresistible “NUEVAYoL.” But the motherland has still seeped deep (not least because Bad Bunny worked with an anti-colonial Puerto Rican historian in making the album). The titular “DtMF,” otherwise a song about the long shadow of a breakup, features the seemingly random mid-chorus line, “I hope my people never move away [from Puerto Rico].” The aching short film that accompanies DtMF goes further, expanding the story of an aging Benito’s personal regrets into a parable about a rapidly gentrifying island. In a colonial context, Benito seems to be saying, all private losses open on to the structuring violence of empire like streams into an ocean. This thread is pulled through all of DtMF: “WELTiTA” is a fun song about a sexy day at the beach whose music video features the triumphant destruction of a “Private Property, No Trespassing” sign placed there by gringos. “LA MuDANZA,” the album-ending self-tribute, closes with the vow: “No one’ll kick me out of here, I’m not going anywhere / Tell them this is my home where my grandfather was born”; in the music video, Benito is singing this over scenes of himself running past US Border Patrol agents clutching a light-blue (independence) Puerto Rican flag.

And it’s not just the lyrics and visuals. The album’s instrumentation is all political, part of Benito’s project to create a generationally integrated Puerto Rican culture rooted in the local rhythms of salsa, bomba, plena, reggaeton, and dembow, all of which are named over and over. Then there are the people playing the rhythms: A crew of brilliant, exclusively Puerto Rican musicians who, in live performances on YouTube (don’t miss their Tiny Desk), get solos so dedicated and reverent you forget whose concert you are watching, who carry entire choruses, and whose joyous street dancing quickly steals the camera’s focus in every video.

One gets the sense that something really special is going on here. A megastar returning to his roots and becoming, in a word, rooted there, creating music with and for his community? And in the process, making songs that will have you thinking, feeling, and constantly dancing while also pissing off the powers-that-be? Sign me up.

Allison Brown (managing editor): I got Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution shortly after its publication in 2022, but the prospect of reading it at that time felt daunting. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit with the trauma I knew I would find within its pages. Told through a mix of memoir, interviews, and narrative, Radius recounts the story of the revolutionary Egyptian feminist group Opantish, which formed in late 2012 to intervene in the increasingly frequent mass sexual assaults of women protesters that were taking place in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the symbolic and geographic heart of the revolution.

As the 15th anniversary of the popular uprising that brought an end to Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule quietly came and went this past January, however, I felt the need to hear from the revolutionary activists who had continued to fight even as the counterrevolution took hold. I had been wrong to think Radius would be hard to read; I flew through its 200 or so pages in just two sittings.

The book is a gripping account from the front lines of a remarkable organizing operation in which a group of everyday people, led by women, developed the tactics and infrastructure for identifying where in the massive protest that filled the square an assault was happening and deploying a team to disrupt it. El-Rifae describes, for example, how Opantish volunteers would break through the mob that had encircled a woman protester and then link arms to create a corridor—a radius—of safe passage through which women volunteers could reach the woman under assault and form a protective circle around her; then, a second circle would form to protect the inner group, and the whole formation would move back out through the corridor.

There’s another, more meditative and deeply moving dimension to the book, too, discernible in the meaning-making work El-Rifae does in the aftermath of trauma and loss. An epigraph to the book’s fourth and final part comes from Opantish member Habiba looking back from 2015: “It’s like we all went out and we did this huge, crazy thing together, and then we went home and we never talked about it again.” And El-Rifae herself reflects in that same year, “I feel myself and everything that has happened, everything I still haven’t worked out about the revolution and Opantish and the coup, being put in a box and labeled ‘defeat.’”

Radius is El-Rifae’s breaking through the silence encircling the revolutionary struggle as it took shape in Opantish, a forging of a pathway for the memories of that experience to be carried out into the present. At once personal and collective, the narrative corridor El-Rifae has created is marked by deep care, sensitive to how “the constant swings of the revolution . . . had pushed and pulled people toward each other and then apart, and into and out of themselves, too.” It’s also a narrative that transmits the warmth of the fire that fueled Opantish. As fascist forces here in the US seek to chill the organizing of collective care that’s emerged to resist ICE’s brutal violence, this warmth feels vital.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): Here in Minneapolis, we’re waiting with baited breath to see what the promised conclusion of Operation Metro Surge actually looks like on the ground: Will it mean a true end to this brutal occupation, or some kind of quieter continuation? As national attention begins to turn away from the Twin Cities, I’ve been appreciating the importance of local media—especially the small, left-wing outlets that have worked tirelessly to report on ICE’s siege despite limited resources, and which are now beginning to document the aftermath. For instance, Minnesota Reformer, a progressive nonprofit publication, is doggedly following the fight to seek some semblance of justice for Alex Pretti, the activist and nurse executed in the street by Customs and Border Patrol officers last month. Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom specifically dedicated to “covering immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota,” is tracking local legislative efforts to help people recover from the invasion’s devastating economic impact. Meanwhile, Racket—a writer-owned website run by veterans of the shuttered alt-weekly City Pages—is reporting on grassroots efforts to fundraise for impacted communities, while continuing their unbeatable weekday roundups of ICE-related stories. (This week’s collection is aptly titled “Daily Updates on DHS Goons in MN Till We’re Absolutely Sure They’re Gone.”) For the work these small but mighty publications have done and are continuing to do to make visible the reality of the federal assault and local resistance, they deserve your attention and support.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A glowing New York Times article on a new Netflix series based on Orhan Pamuk’s great novel, The Museum of Innocence, gave me great hope. Among the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s many works of fiction, this is the most engaging and accessible. The story and the characters are primary in this tale of romantic obsession, or, more accurately, amour fou—mad love.

Pamuk traces his protagonist Kemal’s yearslong obsession with Füsun, a young shopgirl and distant relative. Kemal breaks off an existing engagement for Füsun, turns everything about his life upside down, loses her to an unworthy man, dedicates his fortune to fulfilling her life’s dream by turning her into a movie star, and spends all his evenings with her and her family just to be in her presence. So great is his love and obsession that he steals possessions of hers, things she’s touched, anything related to her, so she will always be present to him. The Museum of Innocence is in this regard an anti-Proust novel. Whereas for Proust, involuntary memory is the only kind that counts, Kemal’s beloved is present in every concrete object she has approached, so his memory is always active and willed. When the novel reaches its tragic end, Kemal turns the saved objects into a museum dedicated to Füsun’s memory.

The nine-part series, directed by Zeynep Günay Tan, is faithful to the novel, thanks to Pamuk’s insistence that he be allowed to vet the script and ensure that no liberties were taken. The leads, physically at least, are well chosen. A Turkish heartthrob named Selahattin Pasali plays the wealthy, spoiled Kemal with the right amount of cockiness, wonder, and slightly modulated arrogance. Eylül Kandemir as Füsun is exactly as beautiful as she’d need to be to be the object of obsession.

The path of their love is, of course, not smooth, and all of the romances in the series are twisted by Turkish mores. Füsun is looked down on as a shop girl, but also as someone who once participated in a beauty contest, a sign that her morality is dubious. Kemal’s wealth makes him welcome everywhere, even as an intruder in Füsun’s household after she has wed another.

The series’ strength is precisely its fidelity to Pamuk’s vision. But it is also flawed. The director allows no scene to go unaccompanied by a sappy score. At first this is merely annoying. Over the course of nine episodes it begins to seem like a crutch for the director and the actors, as all their emotions are spelled out in the music. And, to return to Proust, Füsun becomes quite unpleasant and, for this viewer at least, turns out to be very much like Swann’s love Odette. Kemal, like Swann, has wasted his life on someone who was simply not for him. I didn’t feel like this when reading the novel.

Even with its flaws, Museum of Innocence is worth watching. If you haven’t read the book, it will lead you to it. And Kemal’s museum dedicated to Füsun really exists, built by Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul. It’s probably unique in the world: a real museum dedicated to a fictional character. My wife and I went to Istanbul shortly after it opened to visit it. It’s a place of wonder.