Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Two episodes of Henry Louis Gates’s four-part PBS series, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, have aired so far, and, little surprise, they have barely glanced at joint Black-Jewish efforts on the American Old Left. It’s a fair guess that the remaining episodes won’t either. A short series of such broad sweep requires extreme condensation, of course, but abiding liberal disdain for any whiff of Communism is likely also at work. (Perhaps that’s why, at least so far, the show does not tell the tale of the Scottsboro Nine, whose defense was led by Jewish Communists.) Nonetheless, much of the storied 20th century alliance between Blacks and Jews was forged through Communist Party-affiliated organizations, not least the International Workers Order (IWO), a mutual aid society that provided its members with high-quality, low-cost health insurance, medical clinics, summer camps, theaters, language schools, baseball teams, magazines (including Jewish Life, founded in 1946 and renamed Jewish Currents a decade later), and other benefits even as it organized for workers’ rights, racial justice, and progressive social programs.

To fill in TV’s inevitable gaps, pick up the multi-faceted new anthology, From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930-1954, edited by Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker. In 13 chapters (plus a coda by Paul Buhle, the indispensable popular historian of the Jewish left), the book ranges over various aspects of the influential but largely forgotten “fraternal society” that, in its brief quarter-century existence, Sampson and Zecker write in their introduction, offer an “early multiethnic model of intersectional, pathbreaking, militant activism around inequities of race and class that can help bridge the false dichotomy between them and allow us to exit the cul-de-sac of dubious arguments where ‘identity politics’ comes into conflict with supposedly more genuine issues of class.”

The IWO was born of lefty Jewish fractiousness: In 1930, when the socialists of the Arbeter Ring (Workers Circle) froze Communist members out of leadership, the rebuffed radicals (known as di linke, the left) created the new organization. It grew swiftly—within five years it had nearly 70,000 members, and eventually, more than 200,000—building sections for immigrant speakers of different languages, among them Ukrainian, Finnish, Hungarian, Spanish, and, the largest, Yiddish (called the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, JPFO). Explicitly and emphatically antiracist—“No Jim Crow in the IWO” was a key slogan—the IWO’s African American members organized through a section called the Lincoln-Douglass Society. Unlike IWO leadership, the vast majority of members were not connected to the Communist Party, though most “were pro-Soviet and comfortable with the IWO’s mix of benefits and political and cultural activities.”

The anthology focuses largely on the JPFO, with chapters describing Yiddish adult education in the American Communist movement; radical Jewish artists (a legacy extended in the fabulous fantasy cityscape on the book’s cover, by Ben Katchor); the intersectional, feminist Emma Lazarus Clubs; and parallel Jewish organizations in Latin America and Canada. The underlying tension between Yiddish (and other ethnic) particularism and Communist universalism is a running theme, as are the IWO’s moderating efforts, and sometimes ideological about-faces, as it joined the Popular Front during World War II and as the JPFO sought to work alongside more mainstream Jewish organizations to defeat fascism and save European Jews and, later, their culture.

Several chapters address Black activists affiliated with the IWO. One analyzes the fascinating revisions W.E.B. Du Bois made to his theory of the color line after visiting the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto; others take up the work of Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson, including charming scenes of Robeson visiting children at IWO summer camps.

Sampson and Zecker are careful to warn against our being too romantic about seeking a perfect usable past in the JPFO—some members remained diehard defenders of Stalin—but they suggest we may find “solace and inspiration” in the ways the Old Left tackled injustices “with creativity and vigor.” A chapter on the IWO’s demise—it was extinguished by “a Cold War coterie of actors from the House Un-American Activities Committee, the federal Department of Justice, and the New York State Insurance Department”—offers its own implied lessons, as the tactics to crush an anti-racist, pro-immigrant, worker-centered movement sound scarily familiar.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn’s debut memoir Loose of Earth tells the story of her father’s sudden cancer in his mid-30s, and how the disease intensified her West Texas family’s homeschooled, right-wing Christianity. Blackburn’s brilliant disciplinarian and veterinarian mother did her own research, as we now say, and concocted a deranged mix of faith-cures and exorcism, tinctures and crunchy dietary limits, and new religious practices. (For Jews, the oddest may be her printing of scriptural verses on notecards to be affixed on doorways—that is, a reinvention of the mezuzah!) Retrospectively, Blackburn came to wonder whether her father’s disease had more to do with PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” that the Air Force and 3M invented to suppress petroleum fires—that suffuse the aquifers near all the airbases around which her father grew up, and on which he worked before becoming a commercial pilot.

In about 200 pages of prose as clean (and occasionally as sublime) as the flat, semi-arid land around Lubbock, Loose of Earth is an exceedingly ambitious book. Blackburn is, all at once, reckoning with her domineering mother (who carried around a spoon to beat her children, and who pretended that she learned that Kathleen shaved her legs by divine revelation, fusing in her daughter the fears of both God and herself), with the entanglement of the military-industrial complex and a hypertropically rationalistic Christianity (in which, as among many Evangelicals, scripture seems to be not the Bible but the more rigorous Bible Concordance), and with broader legacies of environmental degradation.

As an eco-memoir placing a dysfunctional family against a landscape ravaged by the deep state, Loose of Earth reminds me of Full Body Burden, Kristen Iversen’s telling of her childhood in the shadow of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. And in probing an austere Protestantism in military West Texas, Blackburn’s book resembles A.G. Mojtabai’s Blessèd Assurance, which grapples with how clergy in Amarillo understood the assembly of nuclear bombs in their backyard. Blackburn’s memoir is a worthy successor to both of these wonderful books.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The name George Templeton Strong might ring a bell for those who watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War series, which aired in 1990. Strong was a New York lawyer who kept a diary from the age of 15 until he died at 55 in 1875. Excerpts from the diary’s Civil War years were used by Burns to provide the civilian point of view. If I remember correctly, and I’m not sure I do, Strong came off as a bit of a snob. Even so, I’ve been curious since then about his diaries—four million words recounting daily life in New York during a crucial period in its history. Sadly, a four-volume condensation from the 1950s is long out of print.

But thanks to the irreplaceable Library of America, Strong now gets his partial due, in a generous collection of entries from the years 1860-1865, George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries, edited by Geoff Wisner. It’s an engrossing volume that I tore through in just a few days, one providing insight into the mindset of an educated resident of the city at a trying time.

The book begins with the secession crisis of 1860. I was won over early by Strong’s unabashed hatred for the seceding states of the South, which he hates with a burning passion. Never before had I felt just how relevant that period was to today, both in the issues it raised and in the emotions it stirred, then and now.

I was hooked early in the book, in the entry for December 20th, 1860, when Strong said he was already “inexpressibly weary of the subject” of North vs. South. And then he voices a sentiment I felt could have been uttered almost any day of our own sad era of Cold Civil War: “Could these Algerine states [i.e., the uncontrollable and troublesome South] be cut out of our map & transferred to any unoccupied region of the Indian Ocean, it would be good riddance.” How many among us feel the same way about the same states Strong is referring to 165 years later, a region now rotted not by secessionism and slavery but by Trumpism.

Throughout this volume, Strong is unstinting in his hatred of the South, and for all the right reasons. He regularly describes it as “woman-flogging and child-selling,” as a hotbed of baseless “chivalric” braggadocio and rural imbecility. He wishes nothing but ill on Southerners, and regards the hangman’s noose as too good for a section brimming with treasonous yahoos who brought on national ruin.

Strong uses some antiquated and offensive language, but he is full of admiration and sympathy for African Americans. He’s proud and impressed with the escaped slaves, known as “contrabands”, who served with bravery in the US army. He’s righteously angry, enraged in fact, by the New York draft rioters of July 1863 and their murderous actions towards defenseless Blacks. It increases his hatred of the “Keltic” working-class, who carried out the riots and murders. Slavery and treason must be stopped. Anything that impedes these things is worthy of the noose. The unreliability of war information is a constant. Battles are won or lost in different editions of daily newspapers. Friends are killed in battle, then said to be wounded, then unharmed. Strong comes to trust nothing he reads or hears; this is a very modern book.

We also get to see Abraham Lincoln up close, since Strong met with him several times as a member of the US Sanitary Commission. Strong admired Lincoln beyond measure, despite his “plebeian” bearing and longwinded tall tales and jokes. He correctly predicted that Lincoln’s second inaugural address would live forever.

Strong was wrong on a couple of major counts, particularly in his faith in the repulsive Andrew Johnson. But his fear of a revived South trying to impose its will was spot on. It took a hundred years to shake the Confederacy’s death grip on national politics, and its zombie hand is still at our throats.

Josh Nathan-Kazis (news director): This is my first week on staff at Jewish Currents. I’ve been imagining coming to work here since 2018, when the publisher at the time, Jacob Plitman, met me for lunch at a diner down on Pearl Street to tell me about his plan to revitalize the magazine. It sounded like a wild and necessary adventure, and it still does, and I’m glad it’s finally my adventure, too. I’ll be starting a news desk at Jewish Currents; look out for a new newsletter from us in the next few weeks. I worked as a reporter at the Forward earlier in my career, and have spent the past few years writing about healthcare companies for Barron’s, a business magazine.

Barron’s has offices in one of the boxy towers near Rockefeller Center, and this past fall I rode there most mornings on a big blue CitiBike, 40-odd pounds of aluminum and barely-functioning gear hubs and dried mystery gunk. I always imagined I would have expansive thoughts in the CitiBike saddle, that I could draft an article or write a novel or whatever. But my thoughts on the bike were small and got smaller: Ten more pedal strokes to get this enormous lunk to the top of the Central Park hill, nine more pedal strokes, eight…

In his 1978 novel The Rider, the Dutch writer Tim Krabbé describes this weird inability to think big thoughts while riding. “On a bike your consciousness is small,” he writes. During a race, “what goes round in the rider’s mind is a monolithic ball bearing, so smooth, so uniform, that you can’t even see it spin.”

The Rider is a (the?) classic of cycling literature, but it’s a remarkable enough book that it deserves to be read even by those with no interest in machines you need to pedal. In the 2002 English translation by Sam Garrett, it’s a brisk 148 pages that delivers a kilometer-by-kilometer account of a punishing 150-kilometer amateur road bike race around the town of Meyrueis in southern France. (Someone has mapped the very hilly route Krabbé describes; let’s just say I’m not eager to try it on a CitiBike.) The race is narrated by a character who shares the author’s name, and the book is autofiction that could easily pass as memoir, except that the actual race he’s describing seems to have been an invention.

It shouldn’t be compelling, but it is. The author was well known as a chess player in Holland, and maybe what makes the novel work is that he thinks about road cycling as though it’s a chess problem, or a mathematical equation to be solved. There’s endless worrying over gear ratios, over the game theory of when to sprint and when to hold off. In those days before electronic odometers and GPS, he describes how he calculated the length of his training ride (to the hundredth of a meter) by measuring the distance he traveled per pedal stroke, then counting pedal strokes as he rode by carrying a sack of matchsticks and tossing one to the ground after each hundred turns of the crank.

Krabbé counts everything. The race is the 309th of his racing career. One of the mountain passes he crosses, the Col de Perjuret, is 1,028 meters high. When he competed against a friend in a backyard jumping competition as a child, his best long jump was 2.12 meters. A few years later, as a 15-year-old, he says he averaged 28.794881 kilometers per hour around a 22.5 kilometer course near his house, measuring his time with a chess clock.

That all sounds like product of a tedious mind, but Krabbé is an extraordinary writer, and the absurd mathematical precision is leavened by brilliant evocations of the physical and mental torture of road racing. “I have a black heart pumping powerlessness to all parts of my body,” Krabbé writes of a moment of extreme fatigue.

I don’t think I ever got that tired riding the CitiBike to work, but I think I know what it feels like after reading Tim Krabbé.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): My preferred mode of political escapism these days is reading English Marxist historians from the eighties. Swaddling myself in their easy, unlabored prose as in a lambswool blanket, I take a rueful pleasure in their dismay at what seemed to them apocalyptic (Thatcherism), but which we now know as the mild, earliest stage of a disease that has grown much nastier. And then too, there is the charming assumption that the reader has already heard of the Peterloo massacre or formed an opinion of Eleanor Marx. This sense of a broadly shared radical history gives me the illusion of belonging to a Left community—I like to imagine, reading Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson, that I am down at the pub, swapping historiographical fine points over a pint with the lads.

Currently I’m reading Thompson’s posthumous collection of essays and reviews over thirty years, Persons & Polemics. It’s an odd mix: a demolition of a revisionist hack’s attempt to whitewash a massacre of radical workers (“One needs a book like this, every now and then, to recall that the patron saint of historians is St. Sisyphus”); measured reassessments of the British left of the 1930s, portions of which either literally perished at the hands of or were psychically crushed by fascism in Spain and beyond; an indignant defense of jury trials as democratic tradition against the state’s attempts to curtail them; bizarre poetry about the Terracotta Army and early Chinese history; and more.

Not all is equally scintillating, but much is brilliant, and Thompson, even when savaging a reactionary book, is somehow always decent and good-natured. His politics, by the point these essays appeared, mixed unrepentant class radicalism, skepticism of Marxism’s scientific pretensions, a mournful sense of the lost lifeworlds of workers’ commons, and an allergy to narratives of progress. He is withering about the great liberal historian Lawrence Stone’s claim that premodern workers had unsentimental, purely economic families, which Thompson sees as a self-congratulatory, bourgeois teleology. He defends William Morris against accusations of being a utopian dreamer, reading Arts and Crafts socialism not as a backward, doomed nostalgia but as a model for anti-capitalist moral critique. He insists that William Blake is as great a dialectician as Marx.

Is all of this coherent or correct? Who knows, but it is splendidly humane and very funny (my modal annotation is simply “lol”). And as contemporary America settles into the mold of its vulgarity, there seem to me worse temporary respites than the defiant workers of ye olde and merry England.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve long wanted to render homage to the Wolf family of the German Democratic Republic (that is, the former East Germany)—the physician and writer Friedrich Wolf and his two sons, the spymaster Markus and the filmmaker Konrad. I believe I mentioned them in my recommendation last year to visit the Friedrichshain cemetery in Berlin, where Markus and Konrad are buried among the great figures of German Communism. I placed pebbles on their graves. The family, Jewish and Communist, fled Nazi Germany for the Soviet Union, where they survived Stalinist purges and the brutal infighting of the German Communist Party. At war’s end, they returned to their homeland and played vital roles in the new socialist state.

Anthology Film Archives is celebrating Konrad’s centennial with a two-week long retrospective, which ends February 11th. Those who can make the films should see as many of them as they can. Those with access to the Kanopy streaming service can watch most of them there. Konrad was, in my opinion, the greatest of all East German filmmakers—a man deeply committed to socialism, but who came to realize as the years passed that the country his family had helped to found was falling far short of the ideal.

The retrospective includes what we can consider Konrad’s homage to his father, an important figure in both social medicine and culture in pre-Nazi Germany: a film version of the play Professor Mamlock, perhaps the earliest treatment of Nazi antisemitism, originally performed in Paris in 1933 and first made into a film in the Soviet Union in 1938. The younger Konrad’s 1961 version, screening on February 8th, is a well-constructed critique of the role of silence in the rise of terrorist states, a film of nearly chilling actuality.

The best of Wolf’s films, and for my money the greatest of all East German films, I Was Nineteen (1967), is screening on February 9th. It’s an autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s time in the Red Army as a German interpreter and thus a “traitor to the Fatherland,” as he called himself. The film is a study of men at war, of coming of age in the harshest circumstances, of the hypocrisy and obsequiousness of the defeated, but also and above all of the silent survival and reemergence of the condemned idea of socialism. The film’s most moving moment is a shot from the back of a truck as the Red Army men leave a freshly liberated village, its newly appointed Communist mayor sitting by the road listening to Ernst Busch sing a song from the Spanish Civil War. Wolf simply and very cinematically expresses the continuity of these struggles and the final victory over fascism.

The Naked Man on the Sports Field (1973) is a surpassingly frank account of the struggles of an artist under a socialist regime that has assigned art and artists a well-defined and restricted role. The theme of the alienated artist and intellectual would appear several times in the waning days of actual existing socialism, but it was seldom dealt with as well as in this film.

The cinema of the GDR seldom gets its due. Anthology Film Archives, which has always swum against the tide, is to be praised for taking this project on.