Shabbat
Reading List

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): If I can’t exactly recommend Miranda July’s All Fours—her much-heralded “perimenopause novel”—what I can recommend is talking about it with your friends. Nominally about middle age, the novel follows a 45-year-old artist who leaves her husband and child for a solo cross-country road trip but ends up spending three weeks in a motel room half an hour from home having a meet-cute and then an all-consuming affair with a hot and hung 31-year-old. With a little ingenuity, a spare $20K, and a spouse willing to open up the relationship, the book seems to promise, your creative and erotic dreams can come true.

When I showed up in Chicago with the novel in my hand, one friend explained to his wife, “It’s Fifty Shades of Gray for the cultural elite.” He hadn’t read the book but was already familiar with an intimate, much-discussed scene involving a tampon. Another friend said the plot sounded suspiciously like Eat, Pray, Love: a well-resourced white woman takes a journey to an exotic place (here, a working-class suburb) to find herself. A third texted that he’d loved it because “She has a journey of experience at the age when you feel like nothing can happen for the first time anymore.” (The narrator also sleeps with the 31-year-old’s first-ever lover, a woman old enough to be his mother.) “You = married people with kids,” I had to retort.

The truth is that I found the book depressing. July is a masterful storyteller with a deliciously particular sensibility—for her narrator, the future is “another lover, reaching backward in time to cup my balls,” such that “instead of dangling in the present I was held […] and aroused by my never-ending preparations.” But I felt like the author of this psychological breakdown wasn’t quite aware of its gravity, instead pitching her narrator’s despair, again and again, as a quirky joke. When I shared my dismay with a friend, he answered, “It’s The Yellow Wallpaper for 2024,” a comparison made all the more apt for the attention given the Victorian-era wallpaper in the motel room where we spend the bulk of the story. I agreed. In July’s hands, today’s straight white woman is queer, non-monogamous, and still miserable.

The book I’ve actually been recommending to friends all year also happens to be about so-called women’s desire. Laura’s Desires, however, has no allegiance to contemporary fiction’s relentlessly plotted variations on the American dream. Laura Henriksen’s book consists of two long poem-essays, one on dreams and the other—harder to describe—loosely oriented around Variety, Bette Gordon’s 1983 film about a fictionalized version of New York City’s Variety Photoplays porn theater. Part of the excitement of reading poetry that flirts with prose is the way that, within lines and stanzas, images and ideas press themselves against one another. This feels, I think, something like desire and something like sex, a topic of interest and experience that moves through Henriksen’s book in surprising and pleasurable ways. In one instance, a discussion of Gordon’s earlier film Anybody’s Woman opens into a discussion of feminist theory (is it possible that “narrative functions to fix the objectified image of a woman within a male fantasy”?). Soon enough, we’re talking about the categories of “good girl” and “bad girl,” and then we’re reading Simone Weil.

Maybe I appreciate Laura’s Desires so much because it dwells not in the short-lived freedoms of the road trip but in the “kind of freedom we could pursue for each other in waking life.” Maybe because it plumbs the many ways “It is not possible / to be at home in this world, and there’s / nowhere else to go.” Maybe because it takes this position not as a problem to be undone or a reason to flee, but as an opportunity to delight in what life actually is.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Back in May, I extolled the virtues of some of the great Parisian cemeteries, Père Lachaise and Montparnasse. But New York has burial grounds just as full of the fascinating dead. Any lover of Jewish history, literature, or culture owes themselves a trip to, of all damn places, Glendale, Queens, which I recently visited with former Jewish Currents editor Larry Bush. There, in Machpelah Cemetery, Mount Judah Cemetery, and especially Mount Carmel Cemetery, you’ll traverse 20th-century American Jewish history. Entertainers, writers, revolutionaries, martyrs, labor organizers, politicians, gangsters—the full gamut of Jewish life, the glory and the tragedy, can be found in this corner of New York just yards away from the Jackie Robinson Parkway.

The most easily accessible of them—at least by car; on the subway, the M, J, and Z will get you there—is Machpelah Cemetery. As soon as you pull into the front gate on Cypress Hills Street, there before you is the monument marking the plot of Harry Houdini and his family. A large sculpture of a weeping woman leans against the broad stone bearing both this name and Weiss, his real last name, and above them a bust of the great escape artist, one of the most famous Jews in American history; he’s joined by his wife, his rabbi father, and his brother Hardeen, who was also a magician. (By the way, Houdini didn’t die from a punch to the stomach, as is commonly believed. He died more than a week after the punch from a ruptured appendix, but correlation is not causation.) Then you can travel a few minutes to Mount Judah, for the stone bearing the name Andrew Goodman—of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the three civil rights activists murdered by the KKK during Freedom Summer. Fittingly, the stone is decorated by a number of hands reaching out toward one another.

Mount Carmel, back across the road from Machpelah, is where you’ll hit the jackpot. (Stop in the office and ask for the locations of some of these people so you can easily find them.) Not far from the gate are the stone markings the remains of Leo Max Frank—the most well-known Jewish victim of lynching in America, killed by a Georgia mob fired up by the Populist leader Tom Watson—and the great progressive congresswoman Bella Abzug. Further in you can find mobster Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, who died mysteriously after falling or being pushed from a hotel window in Coney Island, where he was being hidden after he squealed to the DA on his fellow members of the criminal gang Murder, Inc. In the second and third sections of the cemetery you’ll come upon the amazing Otto “Abbadabba” Biederman, the mathematical genius who worked with gangster Dutch Schultz in the numbers racket. Comedian Henny Youngman has a modest stone, which notes that he was the husband of Sadie, the woman of whom he famously quipped, “Take my wife—please.” And then there’s Mendel Beilis, described on his stone as “martyr,” who was tried for blood libel in Russia. Exonerated, he later moved to America.

Most moving for me was the section for members of the Workmen’s Circle. Here, lined up along the road, are the graves of the heroes of Yiddish labor and literature: the revered writer Sholem Aleichem; poet Morris Rosenfeld; Saul Yanovsky, anarchist and editor of the movement’s paper the Fraye Arbiter Shtime; Aaron Samuel Liebermann, whose stone declares him the “founder of Jewish socialism” (in Yiddish, of course); Abraham Cahan, editor of the Forverts; Socialist Party congressman Meyer London; and Bund leader Szmul Zygielbojm, who committed suicide in 1943 to draw attention to the murder of European Jewry. I found the graves of these men inexpressibly sad. All of them are three times dead—not only are they themselves deceased, but so is the cause they fought for and the language they used in that fight. To most visitors many of these stones, with nary a word in English, are now totally illegible.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): As soon as I read Ziwe’s New Yorker essay about finding out that her feet are on Wikifeet—and rated only as “okay”—I knew I wanted to read her book of essays, Black Friend. Across the collection, the comedian and writer expertly wields her distinctive humor and directness—which propelled her into the mainstream with her Instagram Live interviews asking celebrities if they’re racist—to guide readers through her personal experiences and existential reflections on Blackness in America.

In the eponymous essay, “how many black friends do you have,” Ziwe observes that nearly every white celebrity responds that they have “four or five” Black friends. The bizarre recurrence of this exact answer, she concludes, is a golden mean that allows white liberals to not appear racist. If someone says that they have three Black friends or fewer, they will elicit criticism or raised eyebrows for living a segregated life; if they answer with a specific number higher than five (imagine, “I have nine Black friends”) then the question becomes a more concerning one: why are you counting your Black friends? Of course, the question is a trap, and she talks about why famous people still feel compelled to sit for interviews even while knowing of her approach.

Ziwe’s essays cover topics like pet adoption, affirmative action, imposter syndrome, and reality TV. Her comedy always hits, which speaks to her knowledge of the issues she writes about and the people she’s talking to. (The footnotes are the best part. When she writes about the widespread revelations of famous people wearing blackface—from “Canada’s sexiest prime minister, [REDACTED], to America’s sweetheart [REDACTED]”—she includes a footnote: “This would explain why my shade of Fenty is always sold out.”)

And yet, underneath these stories, she is writing about the more profound: safety and risk, class and labor, belonging and loneliness. While the book is fun to read, something sad tugged at me: It harkens back to the height of racial justice uprisings and the Movement for Black Lives organizing, when the United States seemed to be collectively consumed with reckoning with our history of racial oppression and taking steps towards inculcating anti-racist practices at an institutional level. Since then, the horizon of possibility has narrowed dramatically, even as many continue to agitate for justice, improved conditions, and a more hopeful future. I don’t know if Ziwe would identify herself as being on the front lines of that fight, but her work can arm readers with nuanced perspectives, insights, or at least a laugh.

***

Weekly Parshah Commentary

Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Before you go: Our friends at the New Jewish Culture Fellowship are accepting applications until August 5th. Apply now!

Jul

2024

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Rehearsal spaces make great dramatic settings. From the bare Broadway stage of A Chorus Line to the dingy community hall of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, auditions and acting exercises can reveal the participants’ unspoken feelings, expose the dynamics of relationships, and encourage self-reflection. Such drama is even more heightened when the setting typically requires its inhabitants to keep their guards up, which is why theater-in-prison stories are practically a genre of their own.

One of the central questions that animates this genre is what value to attribute to art-making in the demeaning conditions of imprisonment. Promo for the 2005 documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars, proclaimed “the power of art to heal and redeem–in a place where the very act of participation in theatre is a human triumph and a means of personal liberation.” Jack Hitt’s classic radio piece, “Act V,” for This American Life, which follows men incarcerated at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center as they rehearse and stage Hamlet takes a more skeptical view, while the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, chronicling a production of Julius Caesar in a maximum-security prison in Rome, seems downright cynical about the possibility of rehabilitation through drama club.

The riveting new movie, Sing Sing, which will be released nationally in August, leans toward a redemption narrative, and with good reason: it is produced by and based on the work of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which provides programs in theater, writing, dance, music, and visual arts at eight prisons in New York State; the recidivism rate for its alumni is 3 percent, compared to a 60 percent national average. But the movie, directed by Greg Kewdar, smartly avoids sentimental hyperbole by including, for instance, a member of the ensemble who can’t access the memory of a happy place during an acting exercise. When one participant says that their workshop helps them “become human again,” it’s clear that he is referring to the dehumanizing carceral system, not the (undisclosed) criminal act that put any of them in high-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the first place.

Unlike most theater-in-prison movies, Sing Sing is a feature film. It’s based on a real RTA project, a hilarious 2005 time-traveling, hodge-podge production, “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code,” that mashes up ancient Egyptians, pirates, Freddy Krueger, and Hamlet. While the film employs several professional actors—blazing Colman Domingo in one of two central roles—most of the cast is made up of RTA alums formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing (and they all have financial equity in the film). One of them, Clarence Maclin, in a knockout debut, plays a version of his younger self, Domingo’s formidable foil. The central plot traces their growing friendship, from rivalry to wary curiosity to appreciation to love, as Domingo’s character’s long-held faith in the promise of the theater work falters in the face of the system’s callousness, and Maclin’s gradually takes hold.

Even in the rehearsal room, where they find some reprieve from the cell searches and clanging gates that punctuate most of their time, these aspiring Hamlets can’t ever count themselves kings of infinite space, as the taunting whistles of MetroNorth trains zooming along nearby tracks remind them. But they do find—they create—a rare place for empathy and imagination, and it invites our own.

Zelda Gamson (member of JC council): As a child growing up in Mandatory Palestine, Linda Dittmar would take trips in her parents’ car, bask in the comfort of a hotel, and spend the summer months with her grandmother in the cool hills of Jerusalem. These vivid memories of her childhood were eventually overridden by the 1948 war, its aftermath, and her move to the United States. It was on a visit back to Israel to search for lost Palestinian villages that these memories came flooding back, and became the heart of her new book, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and The Claims of Belonging (2023).

Tracing Homelands recounts trips Dittmar took with her partner, Deborah Bright, an American landscape photographer who specializes in bleak and unpeopled images. In the ’90s, Bright suggested that they look for lost Palestinian villages in Israel, but it took Dittmar over a decade to agree to the idea. In 2005, when they were driving around the countryside, Bright stopped to take one of her many photographs (some of which appear in the book) and beckoned Dittmar out of the car to see a collection of rocks scattered in a pine forest. Dittmar resisted at first but eventually walked over to Bright, who held up a rock that had been chiseled. Dittmar knew then that they were not just rocks. They had likely belonged to a Palestinian house. But from which village?

After that first encounter, Dittmar and Bright decided to pool their investigative skills to answer that question. With help from Palestinian and Israeli collectors and archivists, Dittmar and Bright assembled everything they could get their hands on—maps, photos, lists, land surveys, exhibitions, letters, government documents—in order to find “Palestine in Israel.” Their annual visits from 2005 to 2008 brought them face to face with the Nakba, and the destruction and subsequent erasure of around 450 Palestinian villages that it entailed. The book painstakingly documents Israel’s process of appropriating and then renaming Palestinian villages in Beisan (Beit Shean), Al-Lydda (Lod), Qaysaria (Caesarea), Saffuriya (Tzippori), Ayn Khud (Ein Hod), Bir’im (Baram). Some places were turned into housing or tourist sites, and others were simply dismantled, their remains buried or scattered in fields and forests.

As they traverse what political scientist Meron Benvenisti calls the “tortured landscape of my homeland,” Dittmar’s “troubled internal landscape” of memories resurfaces: the villagers who used to grow wheat in the field adjacent to her house, the “sweetness” of visits with Palestinian neighbors near her grandmother in Beit HaKerem, her schoolgirl patriotism during the 1948 war, and adolescent disappointment at being treated like a girl in the army. Referring to a veteran soldier, who took part in the massacre at Deir Yassin during the Nakba, she writes that “Amos’s refusal to know the past belongs to all us Israelis…It’s safer to remain silent…to refuse to talk, to be afraid to talk, to not know how to talk, or to forget to talk—even when we inwardly scream.” Dittmar’s beautiful and complex book, at once a love letter to and mournful indictment of the country of her childhood, stands as a brave exception to this culture of silence.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): “The art world was one big melting pot of hypocrisy and contradictions.” This is the conclusion drawn by Bianca Bosker in her entertaining and frightening book Get the Picture, a deep dive into this world. (Because my wife is an artist, I came to Bosker’s book already having some experience of the sheer miserableness of what goes on behind the works hung on the walls.) As she did in her previous book on wine aficionados, Cork Dork, Bosker acts as a kind of George Plimpton, who understood that the best way to understand a world is to inhabit it, learn its language and mores, and experience it in all its dailiness. For his singular sports writing, Plimpton played hockey, baseball, and football with professionals. Bosker, for her part, interns at a gallery setting up exhibitions, sells works for another at an art fair, and stands guard at the Guggenheim. Along the way, she learns that it’s not just the past that’s a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote; gallerists, receptionists, and museum guards can all attest that in the world of art, too, they “do things differently there.”

Bosker begins at the only gallery that responded to her dozens of inquiries. (Even at the small spot in Brooklyn that takes her on, the owner considers her the enemy because she’s a journalist.) The scales quickly fall from her eyes. The shallowness, the pettiness, the sheer rottenness of it all smack her in the face; the importance of looking and sounding just right are stressed above any real knowledge of art. Hatred of the non-art-buying public is a central element. The gallery is on the second floor, and she soon learns that this is because a ground-floor gallery is known to attract foot traffic from those looking to freeload, while serious people—i.e., those who will spend money—climb the stairs. The hostility of this sphere is cultivated: At one gallery, the receptionists are trained to answer the phone with the last syllable of its name on a descending note, just to project negativity. As for the art itself, Bosker sees again and again that while reputations are sometimes based on talent, they more often correlate to contacts—being in the right places with the right people at the right time.

After her stint at the art fair, she ends her voyage at the Guggenheim, where she stands for hours watching and protecting the art. Bosker tells us that the average time visitors spend in front of a painting in a museum is 17 seconds, with most of it spent reading the explanatory panels, so in order to force people to look at the work itself rather than the words describing what is right before them, she takes to standing in front of the placards. (I’ve now begun doing my own observations of viewing practices, and have concluded that the real average is far lower.) Inspired by her experience, Bosker offers some sage advice: Don’t go through a museum looking at everything, and instead stand for minutes or hours before each work. Ignore the panels and immerse yourself in the work. Understand it. Question it. And after reading Get the Picture, be grateful that you love art but don’t live off it.

***

Weekly Parshah Commentary

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Jul

2024

David Klion (contributing editor): The New York Intellectuals—a heavily Jewish scene, formed around Cold War liberalism and high modernist literary tastes, that profoundly shaped everything from art criticism to foreign policy—have both generated and received a ton of press in the decades since their postwar peak. Their lingering influence over our contemporary political discourse runs from left-wing publications like Dissent and The New York Review of Books to right-wing publications like Commentary and Tablet. Neoconservatism, the subject of my ongoing book project, essentially began as a dissident branch of the New York Intellectuals. Jewish Currents, though it has its earliest roots in the Moscow-aligned Communist Party that the New York Intellectuals abhorred, nonetheless owes an immense debt to the forms of argumentation they pioneered.

It can be hard to find a fresh angle on such a well-trodden topic, but Ronnie Grinberg, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, has succeeded with Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, published earlier this year. A rare work of academic history with crossover appeal to more mainstream readers, Write Like a Man is also the first book to give full attention to the fraught gender dynamics that shaped the New York Intellectuals. Most of the group was male, defined by names like Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe. Grinberg not only gives fair due to the most prominent women in the group—chiefly Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter—she also ingeniously demonstrates how gender shaped the actual writing produced by both male and female New York Intellectuals.

The title comes from a killer 1963 quote from NYRB co-founder Jason Epstein: “With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.” To Grinberg, “writing like a man” refers to a mode of rigorous, swaggering, aggressive argumentation rooted in the legendary cafeteria alcoves of then all-male City College, where many of the future New York Intellectuals spent the 1930s engaged in verbal duels with Stalinists. It’s a style still recognizable today, and Grinberg portrays it as a means of assimilation for the sons of poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants trying to assert their masculinity in an America that stereotyped Jews as meek and effeminate. Grinberg’s female subjects, as the Epstein line suggests, held their own in the group because they were able to master this style—though as Grinberg also shows, the women in the scene who came from different backgrounds (either as gentiles or, in Arendt’s case, as a German Jewish emigre with formidable Old World academic credentials) received more deference from their male peers than the shtetl-descended women who were often treated simply as wives.

Diana Trilling, who along with Decter was one of the few representatives of the latter type who gradually asserted her own reputation as a public intellectual, is Grinberg’s most compelling character and something of a test case for her argument. Resented and often dismissed by the men and women of the group alike, and not always without reason, Diana Trilling’s most enduring legacy might be as an astute critic of her own social milieu.

Whether or not one is fully persuaded by Grinberg’s definition of masculine prose, Write Like a Man is among the most enjoyable and impressively researched books on its subject, brimming with colorful anecdotes and unexpected insights on every page. Grinberg has both redefined and reignited interest in the New York Intellectuals, and I look forward to citing her often.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): If you are in New York City before July 28th, I highly recommend that you see the Met’s exhibit on The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. The show collates a breathtaking variety of art to explore how Black artists in Harlem, then at the vanguard of creative production, depicted different areas of life during the political and cultural upheavals of the first half of the 20th century. The exhibit rooms—each themed on a broad subject—provide nuanced framing that is instructive in guiding the viewer through the breadth of work included.

In the room about family and society, the curators point out the artists’ portrayal of elders with dignity and interiority, in contrast to popular national media depictions; the presence of queer networks; and the complex coexistence of the radical fight for racial justice alongside the community’s push for assimilation and conservative social values. In another set of works dedicated to artistic freedom, the curators insist on the importance of spaces and mentors—often in historically Black colleges and universities—that supported Black artists in creating nonfigural art, such as landscapes and still life paintings, in defiance of societal expectations for their work to consistently be overtly political.

As I walked through the different rooms, I began to recognize the names and distinctive styles of the artists. In some of his portraits—including of writer and philosopher Alain Leroy Locke and renowned civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois—Winold Reiss used pastel to mix detailed realism with minimalist sketch. Archibald J. Motley, Jr. painted social scenes, such as jazz clubs, picnics, and the streets of Chicago and Paris, with dynamic movement and smooth, vivid colors. Laura Wheeler Waring’s portraits of young women, such as “Girl in a Green Cap,” are done with soft brush strokes that invite a sense of intimacy; the same is true of a still life of roses, set on a table in a transparent vase. William H. Johnson, whose portraits and scenes unfurl boldly along one flat plane, invites the eye to linger on each detail. This is just a small fraction of the array of techniques and themes on display, and it doesn’t capture the sense of significance and beauty in wandering through the comprehensive whole. For that experience, I recommend seeing for yourself.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is enjoying something of a moment. While their most famous work, The Red Shoes (1948), has been popular since it premiered, many of their lesser-known films have been re-released over the past couple of years and garnering more attention. For instance, The Small Back Room (1949), a study of a tormented explosives expert, is currently showing at Film Forum in a new restoration. Unlike their best-known movies, it features all the elements of a postwar film noir—the dark shading of both the cinematography and the characters’ actions. (If you miss its theatrical showing, you can watch it on the invaluable Criterion Channel, along with several of their other films.) The duo’s entire oeuvre is also the subject of a fascinating new film essay, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. Though directed by David Hinton, it’s really the work of Martin Scorsese, who has played an enormously important role in promoting the pair. Indeed, Made in England consists of Scorsese sitting center-screen and discussing clips from every film in the Powell-Pressburg canon with great insight and enthusiasm.

They were, in many ways, an unlikely couple. Powell, who was born in England, started working in film as a young man, taking on various roles for big-budget silent spectacles shot in France, until he was promoted to direct British films called “quota quickies”—cheap movies produced to fulfill the requirement that a certain percentage of films shown in Britain were made by native filmmakers in native studios. After a few years of this he met Pressburger, a Hungarian who had worked as a screenwriter in Germany until forced to flee when Hitler assumed power; he escaped to France, and then to England. Their earliest films, shot during the war, were mainly expressions of love for Britain, its people and its ways. The greatest of these works—and one that Scorsese explains influenced his own filmmaking—was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). Its epic length belies its movingly personal story of friendship and love across a lifetime.

Once the war ended, they needed to move beyond propaganda films, and they truly hit their stride with The Red Shoes—a film that, as unlikely as it might sound, Scorsese tells us influenced the making of his movie Raging Bull (1980); apparently Scorsese considered De Niro’s boxing moves to be the counterpart of the dance that dominates The Red Shoes. Scorsese is especially good on films like Black Narcissus (1947), the team’s only film based on an outside source (Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel of the same name). He points out the brilliant and subdued use of color, as well as the influence of great painters on its palette.

While Made in England is a gift to fans of the works it considers, it can be appreciated even by those not familiar with them. Scorsese gives a master class in how to watch a film, and how every choice made by a director matters. A hardened auteurist, Scorsese is a believer in the director as the sole author of a film, even if here he relents a bit by granting Pressburger—primarily a screenwriter—some agency. As a result, he fails to discuss the films’ fabulous ensemble casting and give proper attention to the actors who appear and reappear, like the great Anton Walbrook. But Made in England can be forgiven for this. It is a warm and intelligent tribute to two masters of the seventh art.

***

Weekly Parshah Commentary

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Jul

2024

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Sorry/Not Sorry, a new documentary by Cara Mones and Caroline Suh, is an examination of the Louis C.K. Affair. The comedian’s career famously came crashing down in 2017, when The New York Times reported on accusations of sexual misconduct from five women, including two young comedians who said that he had masturbated in their presence after inviting them to his hotel room. The facts of the case are not in question, since C.K. fessed up and issued a public apology. But, this film asks, how sincere was the apology? And what is the correct penalty? Is eternal banishment too much, or just right?

In the aftermath of the revelations about C.K., a film he’d written and directed was shelved and shows were canceled; he claims he lost $35 million. During his time in the desert, he was horribly ill-served by some of his defenders—most notably Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle, both of whom mocked his victims. And nine months later he was back, performing in venues large and small, though now he had to personally shell out the rental fees for the big ones like Madison Square Garden. Sorry/Not Sorry features footage of him joking onstage about his hiatus, and we’re supposed to find him callous—but he’s a comedian, and isn’t that what comedians do? Perhaps the most honest response to C.K.’s comeback in the film is that of a young man about to see him at the Garden: “We all allow ourselves a certain amount of hypocrisy, and this is mine.”

Along with the question of how long a sinner ought to spend in purgatory, there is the quandary of what to do with his prior existence. Sorry/Not Sorry uses old clips to demonstrate that C.K.’s proclivities were a secret to no one—that masturbation was the core of his sexuality is amply demonstrated even by a not especially careful examination of his work on the stage and on his TV shows. So should his oeuvre now be discarded? Most of it has been removed from streaming services: His FX show Louie, for instance, can now only be found on the comedian’s website, where you have to pay to watch it (which I did). Just as I recalled, it’s a brilliant series, in which the difficulty of relationships, of parenting, of confronting our personal devils is addressed with amazing insight and admirable frankness. The self-loathing of men of a certain type—and the clumsiness and worse this leads to—have never been so clearly delineated; his dictum that “men are the worst thing that has happened to women” is borne out in almost every episode, as it has been in his life. (This was a series, after all, with an episode where C.K.’s avatar defends the practice of masturbation against the attacks of a beautiful Christian crusader—and ultimately retires to her hotel room bathroom to masturbate.) There’s no question about it: Knowing what we know now, the show is impossible to watch without a deeply queasy feeling.

Jacob Plitman (former publisher): For all the growing interest in labor organizing, there aren’t enough good books about it. Dr Jane McAlevey, who just passed away, wrote four. All four are characteristically savage, direct, and biting manifestos, ranging in form from memoir (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)), to academic study (No Shortcuts), to political roadmap (A Collective Bargain), to technical manual (Rules to Win By). Part of why, I think, there aren’t enough good books on organizing is that it is grinding, unpredictable, sometimes boring, and often hard to describe. When you’re organizing, everything is possible yet nothing feels under your control. Organizers haunt doorways where workers clock in. You have to try to look casual while speed-walking up to exhausted workers clocking out, and smile to try and make the whole thing slightly less awkward. You’re not a canvasser, but you are waving down strangers. You’re not a salesman, but you do want to discuss the matter of the workers’ health insurance. The goal, basically, is to meet a worker, strike up a conversation, and ten minutes later secure an invitation to their home. When you do manage to get a phone number, type it in and hit call immediately. If it doesn’t ring you know it’s fake. Don’t act weird. You’re the one coming off like a manic bible salesman; the worker is just trying to get home. Approach 15 workers a day in this manner for six days a week for two months and, if you’re lucky, you will start getting somewhere. Then the easy part is over.

Her main lesson is that you must not give up: Workers will empty their hearts to you, take on public roles, display astounding courage, and then won’t answer your phone calls. The boss will start “fighting back,” which literally means illegally harassing, disciplining, interrogating, surveilling, or maybe firing worker leaders. And at the next shift change, the sight of you will strike the bravest leaders mute. If your leaders get fired, you file lawsuits with the labor board. Eight months later, they will eventually win and get wages repaid. At that point, the leader may have been in a homeless shelter for weeks. It’s up to you to figure out how to tell them they won, because their cellphone got cut off a while ago.

In organizing work, bluntness is a virtue, and McAlevey was a hammer in a world of nails. She specialized in commandments:. You must build workers into a fighting organization, and teach them to wield that organization to extract the maximum from the employer. You must refuse convenient strategies that remove agency from the worker leaders, even when there are strong arguments for doing so. You must seek maximum participation from the worker unit even when that will make things complicated. You must struggle towards majority decision-making. You must get close to the workers, and stay close to them. You must win.

McAlevey’s voice—at turns drill sergeant, dreamer, historian, tactician—will endure. So must we. 18/10.

Carrie Shapiro (board of directors): It’s been almost 10 years now since I started taking the classes at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), a unique concept of seminar-style adult education that is taught at a sophisticated level by brilliant young academics on everything from Faulkner to Numbers Theory. The classes in New York City are held in Manhattan and Brooklyn, twenty or so people around a table in cultural spaces, backrooms of bars, or the BISR headquarters in Dumbo. And since Covid, there are plenty of courses taught over Zoom as well.

I normally get enough satisfaction from just reading BISR’s beautiful course catalog, perusing all these ideas without committing to anything. And then one class will connect perfectly to what I’ve been noodling alone in my mind. At present, that’s Suzy Schneider’s online class on risk, which could not be more relevant to my summer conversations on swimming in the ocean, heat waves, and elections. For those of us far from university days, our dinner conversations are fun and noisy, jumping from topic to topic, but generally pretty low on facts and theory. This is made up for by a BISR class, which involves hours of reading original sources and big thinkers followed by three hours of freewheeling and in-depth conversation with much younger people each week for a month. In the spring, I took Suzy’s class on the modern history of Palestine. Even though I’ve been immersed in this topic for years, I’ve never actually read the essential documents from the late Ottoman era through to the British Mandate documents and up to the best academic thinkers of today, such as Rashid Khalidi and Avi Shlaim. The course joins the long list of subjects that I’ve delved into over the past decade: the Frankfurt School, subways, psychoanalysis, monuments, non-profits, President Jackson, Robert Moses, William Morris, Primo Levi, Socrates. It has made the world so much bigger and understandable for me.

***

Weekly Parshah Commentary

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

Jul

2024

This week, we welcome Naomi Gordon-Loebl in her new role as the deputy publisher at Jewish Currents.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I first met Alessandra Lacorazza a few years ago when she directed my friend Julia Weldon’s music video, “Til the Crying Fades,” honoring the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. I remember her telling me that she was writing a film about the summers she spent with her father as a child. That film is finally out, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

In the Summers, which I saw last month at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows two sisters as they visit their loving, adventurous, and also flawed father in New Mexico every summer. The sisters are played by several actors who shift as the characters age; the father, Vicente, is played by René Pérez Joglar, who incredibly has never acted in his life—though he has spent quite a bit of time on stage as the Grammy-award winning musical artist Residente. The acting is one of the film’s several strengths; the intimacy, pain, and at times rage on screen is so tangible that it is hard to believe that these people were ever strangers to each other.

In the Summers is also visually stunning; the haunting landscape of Las Cruces is almost a character in and of itself, and the film is full of slow, artfully lit scenes whose emotional weight lingers. The image of Pérez Joglar’s shaking fingers, lighting a cigarette as he waits for his daughters, will live in my mind for a long time. But the biggest reason that In the Summers has stayed with me is that it is a portrait of human complexity. Vicente is the consummate fun, playful father; when he challenges his daughters to a hands-free spaghetti-eating contest, or teaches them to play pool at the local bar, there’s something almost pure and innocent about him. At other moments, he is cruel, callous, even terrifying, as is the case on one nighttime drive that I won’t spoil here. Lacorazza has said in interviews that she made the film for “children of complicated but beautiful parents,” and it feels as though the film embraces both versions of Vicente as wholly true, neither canceling out the other. It’s the kind of complexity, and even paradox—cruelty and innocence, intimacy and distance, love and harm—that, when words fail us, art gives us a way to understand.

Marc Jonathan Costello (art and design director): Marshall McLuhan’s decisive treatise on media has a long tail. Published in 1967, The Medium is the Massage has its Cold War anchors, but it still feels like it could have dropped on the eve of 2024. The book anticipates the seismic change brought on by our digital age—centering on mediated life, but ultimately discussing cybernetics and computing as well. The strategic misspelling of “message,” functioned within the new era McLuhan was theorizing. The misspelling gave the book a decisive something “off,” and operated to psychically fill the book with meaning, giving it a memetic quality. (Charli XCX is cashing in on precisely this memetic effect, using intentionally distorted and blurred typography from a cool Type Foundry in such a way that it just looks like condensed Arial. The move is impressive, and I expect at least 70% of our core audience are enjoying Brat summer.) Quieten Fiore’s editorial design is the perfect fit for McLuhan’s text: The book feels like a zine, composed of considered graphic layouts, each simultaneously a cultural referent and clip art. The work makes use of contrast to communicate confidence in its irony, accompanied with repeating thumbnail art, and strong yet self-aware modern typography. As the title suggests, the work of the author, editor, and designer blurs thanks to the new technologies which McLuhan, Fiore, and the producer, Jerome Agel clearly demonstrate.

There’s always something eerie about seeing the cultural and technological soothsayer’s prediction from the past reflected in the present. In the section titled “your neighborhood,” we see the arrival of the global village, a term analogous with globalization: “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all men.” Simultaneously, we see within that statement the conventional critique of social media. What is often missed is the bluntness of electric circuitry. The virtual global village lives in fiber optic cables and remote data centers, rendering affects, and assuring the smooth flow of supply chains with a complex series of zeros and ones.

In the section titled “your job,” McLuhan asks, “When this circuit learns your job, what will you do?” He’s a tad optimistic about the potential of this new regime to free labor from work. The creative industry is currently holding its breath about artificial intelligence (AI). A perverse anxiety flows across LinkedIn dot com, as well as the creative studios, mapping Soho and Dumbo. Some creative directors see the potential of AI—maybe, as McLuhan suggests, as a way to overcome being forced to “do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old,” or as a progression of the tendency of authorship to dissolve against the tide of technology. But for the rest, the stakes are more existential: Can taste really just be reduced to data points? I say that with a tinge of irony because the regime of zeros and ones already has more sinister consequences than making bad advertisements. McLuhan’s cold war foresight that “real, total war has become information war” aligns disturbingly well in our social media landscape constituted in a frictionless scroll of real and fake atrocities, customized to your silo. Likewise, algorithmically-generated kill lists in Gaza, executed by unmanned drones, show us the military version of making work at the intersection of art and technology, that McLuhan, concerned with nuclear winter, didn’t anticipate.

Perhaps McLuhan and Fiore have a debt to pay for their role in aligning counterculture to cybernetics, but their work reading the tea leaves, and ultimately acting on a collective intelligence, can’t be denied. McLuhan’s most prescient proposition is that the global village created by the market and its electronic circuits established a new figure of youth that flees its individualism, and is drawn to roles over goals or specialized jobs. He saw this in the growth of the counterculture and its rejection of a mass subject. We see the evolution of this pattern today in the rise of so many niche subcultures, driven by memetic language and attended to by parasocial relationships—each with their own evolving niche markets. Here we come full circle to our era. If we’re all just data points, it’s a losing game, and all our dystopian fears are probably true. The puke green background could be filled with whatever charli-meme generated type you want—it could be an atrocity, a scene from a porn, or your favorite recipe. It doesn’t matter. However, if we can see in McLuhan’s predictions what is yet incomplete—the potential of cracking open the tools of culture, of technology, and the self—then maybe we can see what is possible when we all have our fingers on the pulse.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The dreadful spectacle that is American politics today can be traced to many different moments in our nation’s past. Was it the ’60s and the reaction to the anti-Vietnam War movement, or perhaps the Goldwater candidacy? Was it McCarthy in the ’50s, or the isolationists and America Firsters of the ’30s and ’40s? Or should we seek the source further back still, in the Civil War era? After all, reading William Freehling’s magnificent two-volume opus on the secession crisis, The Road to Disunion, reveals that many then felt the same paranoia about federal designs on freedom that haunt us still. Or should we go even further back? If we read Freehling’s Prelude to Civil War—his history of the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833—we have to ask how much of our system’s rot is owed to John C. Calhoun.

John Ganz’s brilliant and compelling debut, When the Clock Broke, focuses mostly on more recent precedents for the present insanity. The book centers on the early 1990s and the policies, people, and ideas that exploded into prominence during those years. Some of the individuals discussed are more familiar or obvious than others; Ganz’s originality and intelligence is manifest in his ability to make us see that the cult of the Mafia boss John Gotti represented as important a cultural and even political inflection point as Rush Limbaugh, whom he also discusses. Little-known thinkers like the fascist-leaning Sam Francis and the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard are shown to be important and influential thinkers: To read Francis’s fulminations against modern culture and democracy and his advocacy of the cause of “middle-American radicals,” and Rothbard’s critique of government involvement in our lives as a form of tyranny, is to confront the politics of the modern Republican Party. Ganz gives a detailed recounting of the 1992 campaign of Ross Perot, in which an inchoate, incoherent rage at the political class found its perfect representative in a man who had no real program, demonstrated authoritarian tendencies in his professional dealings, and had nothing to boast of but a largely bogus reputation for campaigning to save POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War. Angry middle-class middle Americans needed no more than that to choose him to show their discontent.

The Gotti chapter, which also outlines the beginnings of Rudy Giuliani’s career, places the popularity of Gotti and of the fictional Corleones in a social context that explains not only their popularity, but a widespread sense of the degeneration of America. For the right, Ganz argues, “the famiglia in The Godfather stood for an earlier, more wholesome and integrated social form fighting to keep itself intact in an American culture that threatened to dissolve it.” The supposed superiority of the Mafia to the American government is demonstrated in the first scene of The Godfather, when the undertaker Bonasera turns to Don Corleone for assistance. Ganz cites the aforementioned Francis, who wrote that “America, as the Don describes it and as Bonasera has experienced it, does not behave like the Corleone family after all, and the differences between the two societies do not favor America.” The Mafia, Francis argues, is what sociologists call a gemeinschaft, a society based on honor and deference, while America is a sterile gesellschaft based on cold rationality. For the insurgent far right, the former is always to be preferred.

To speak of the degeneration of America assumes it once had a certain majesty. But America is not France; we never had a moment as sparkling as the French Revolution, or the Popular Front of 1936, or May ’68, and so its descent into political idiocy has been a steep one. Our history has played out against a backdrop of economic and racial inequality, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and boobocracy. The fall Ganz describes in When the Clock Broke, which indeed accelerated in the 1990s, was thus a fall from a height that was never more than ankle-high.

Weekly Parshah Commentary

As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.

← 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 →