Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): As an adult, I’ve unfortunately developed a short and ever-decreasing attention span—I blame it on technology destroying all my best neural pathways—and one of the side effects of this is that sitting through a movie is hard for me, especially in a theater where I can’t take a pause. One of the side effects of that is that I rarely see movies twice, which is why it’s so unusual that I saw Sentimental Value twice within a week at the end of 2025 (and would be happy to watch it with you a third time, if anyone is looking for a companion).

When I think about the works I’ve recommended over the past year in the Shabbat Reading List, it occurs to me that most of them have something in common: They’re complicated stories where no one is wholly good or wholly bad, where people do terrible things and repair is messy. It’s not that I think there aren’t morally simple questions in our current moment—in fact, there are many (genocide is wrong, kidnapping people because they don’t have paperwork that gives them permission to remain in their home is wrong, etc). But there are also complex ones, and our culture’s inability to distinguish between the two often leaves me depressed. What revives me is art that captures how capacious and contradictory human beings actually are.

Sentimental Value tells the story of a Norwegian family that, in its contours, is perhaps not so unusual. The parents are divorced; the father (Stellan Skarsgård), a well-known filmmaker, is disconnected and self-involved. The sisters are emotionally close, but constitutionally opposite—the younger, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), leads a stable life as an academic with a husband and son, and the older, Nora (Renate Reinsve), is a free-spirited actor with intimacy issues. The surprise main character at the center of the story is the family house itself, which the film anthropomorphizes into a being with wants and desires, feelings and memory. The house is sad when it’s empty, happy when it’s filled with noise; it stands quiet, constant witness to suicide, divorce, loneliness, and all the far subtler joys and traumas that define the lives unfolding within its walls.

When the arc of a story leads us toward warmth for a person we started out despising, it can feel like a cheap trick. Redemption narratives bankroll Hollywood, and most of them are vapid, unearned, and unmemorable—junk food in movie form. Importantly, Sentimental Value is not a redemption story. No one has really transformed by the end of the film, at least in terms of their inner core. What has transformed, though, is what we understand about each character, and what they understand about each other. Watching them see each other for the first time—as the house has seen them all along—is beautiful.

In one of the film’s early scenes, Nora leaves her sister’s house in the middle of a visit without explanation, seeming suddenly and mystifyingly sad. After Agnes closes the door behind her, she returns to the couch and tells her husband that she’s worried about her sister. It is hard not to be moved by this mundane moment of tenderness, rendered so quietly and out of view. It is even more moving when finally, far later in the movie, Nora finally sees it too.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): I couldn’t quite make out the white-lettered slogan on playwright/performer Anne Gridley’s black t-shirt from my back-row seat at Watch Me Walk. But early on, she made a point of telling us what it said: “No, I am not an inspiration.” The line is just one of the hilarious retorts with which Gridley schools the audience—presumably able-bodied and clueless—as she describes her late-onset hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), a neurological disorder that affects her mobility, requiring her to use aids to walk. (In press photos, Gridley’s shirt reads, “Not All Who Stumble are Sauced,” and on the night a friend saw the play, “Look out, it’s contagious!”)

The show is didactic, yes, but in such a disarming, sometimes self-ironizing, and often whimsical way that one wants to lean forward and earn straight A’s. Part of its humor comes from the seeming contradiction between Gridley’s sweet, girlish appearance—slight build, short kilt, dark tights, Doc Martens-like boots, an open zipper hoodie over that t-shirt—and her badass acerbity. If a random stranger, she tells us, demands to know, “What happened to you?” she replies, “My parents were anti-vaxxers.” In response to “God bless you”: “God did this to me.”

In fact, DNA did it to her. Gridley’s mother and grandmother had HSP. While we hear about an abundance of heartache in Gridley’s upbringing, Watch Me Walk veers away from becoming a traditional autobiographical one-woman show. There’s no wallowing here, nor any redemption narrative. The play is more interested in disorder—neurological, socio-political (“viva Luigi,” Gridley declares after describing her insurance company’s refusal to cover vital aids), and even theatrical. While this is Gridley’s first work as a playwright, she comes with a storied background as an actor in the wildly experimental troupe Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the show’s director, Eric Ting, is part of the leadership of the fiercely adventuresome Soho Rep. Little surprise that Watch Me Walk mixes together, among other things, satirical songs, a pair of chiseled male backup singers, medical exegesis, a man in a duck suit, and a big number with Gridley dressed as a magenta, many-tentacled, degenerating upper motor neuron.

Chiefly, the play makes the demand of its title. Gridley requires us to do the thing typically considered inappropriate, but essential to the bodily fact of theater: to stare at her for nearly two hours. We do watch her walk, back and forth again and again and again near the top of the show, across the long, white, narrow stage floor. In a sort of disability-rights inversion of the Brechtian estrangement effect, Gridley makes what is too often considered strange, familiar. And from there, she launches a witty—and scorching—critique.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 1988, the historian Arno J. Meyer published his controversial take on the Holocaust, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? In it, Meyer placed anti-Communism at the center of the Judeocide, for it was when the war against the Soviets went bad that the Final Solution really took wing. We now have Jochen Helleck’s World Enemy No. 1, which, though it only mentions Meyer and his work (dismissively) in a footnote, makes a strong and important case that the history of the Holocaust has been only a partial one—that for political reasons that should have nothing to do with serious study, the primacy of the Nazi war on Communists and Communism has been elided. As Helleck writes, “The fact that the Nazis rose to power and generated enormous backing across Germany and throughout Europe on the strength of their stridently anti-Communist politics and their ability to fuse Communists and Jews into a single monstrous threat is lost” in the dominant narrative.

For all too obvious reasons, hatred of Communism and Marxism is often treated as a secondary factor in the rise of the Nazis. Left out is the milieu in which the Nazi Party was born and grew, in the rise of violent Freikorps groups that combatted the various Communist-led failed revolutions in post-World War I Germany. During the Nazi rise to power, the street fights across Germany were between Nazis and Communists, with killings committed on both sides.

The Nazis’ foundational hatred of Marxism and the Communist Party earned it, as Hellbeck makes clear, the support of large segments of the Western world, and of course of huge swathes of the German population. When the campaign against the Jews picked up in Germany after the Nazi rise to power, the government would occasionally downplay or deny it, whereas the murderous attitude toward Communism was a constant. There are debates about what the Pope did or didn’t do to help the Jews; what is known for certain is that he had no problem with Hitler’s (and Mussolini’s) war on the Communists and the Soviet Union. Hellbeck explains a large part of the reason the anti-Communist was has been occulted: “Imagine a US government having to explain to millions of Americans and visitors from all over the world that the Soviet Communist order was Nazi Germany’s defining target and that the Holocaust was the culmination of a policy that persecuted Communists as subhumans.”

Hellbeck’s task is not to downplay antisemitism; rather it is to show that the Nazi hatreds of Jews and Communists were intertwined. Bolshevism was hated as a “Jewish” ideology; Jews were hated as the alleged bearers of Bolshevism. Jews were killed as bearers of the Communist bacillus. Jews and Communists were singled out by the Nazis during the period of the war on Soviet soil. Hellbeck’s work in no way diminishes the horrors of the Holocaust. His descriptions of the mass murders of Jews in the death camps are unflinching in their brutality. It is instead a rectification of a lacuna in the remembrance of the event.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): I have long thought of the scholar and author Tareq Baconi as one of the sharpest minds on Palestine. His book Hamas Contained is the best book on the Islamist organization that I have read, and Baconi is a frequent source of mine whenever I write on Gaza and Hamas. But, like many of the people I call up to help me understand contemporary politics, I knew very little about his personal life.That changed in November, when Baconi published his astonishing memoir, Fire in Every Direction.

Baconi’s new book is a stunning, intimate, and beautiful coming-of-age tale, in which his awakening as a queer boy and then man in the Middle East unfolds against the backdrop of war and dispossession. Structured around a series of letters he receives from his childhood love, Baconi gives his readers a bracing look at what it meant to grow up gay in Amman. The book transported me to moments in his life in ways that I am grateful for—it allowed me, to the extent possible, to understand his upbringing and the forces that shaped his life. I loved the intimate moments detailing conversations with his parents, his awkward middle and high school days, and his departure from the Middle East for college. He never allows the political to disappear, weaving in the Nakba, the Second Intifada, and the US invasion of Iraq without any of it seeming incidental to his personal story, subtly making it clear just how much the politics of the region have shaped his life without the book splitting into irreconcilable genres.

The book also stands as a rejoinder to hackneyed and propagandistic descriptions of queer life in the Arab world that aim to depict it as a homophobic backwater. While Baconi’s book never shies away from discussing the repression of queerness in the region, his frank discussion of the issue allows us to see queer Palestinians for the humans they are, with all their hopes, fears, and loves, instead of as props in a battle to depict Arab and Palestinian society as barbaric outposts that need dominating.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Twenty-some-odd years ago, I don’t remember the season, my friends and I ended up in the narrow backroom of an Italian restaurant in the East Village, where a three-person band stood in a little clearing at the front, carved out from the jumble of wooden tables and chairs. Zack Djanikian (known for his work with Graham Nash) on sax, Solomon Dorsey (Brandi Carlile, Amos Lee) on upright bass, and, standing at the mic with a guitar, Krystle Warren—slender, hair shorn close to the head, with a deep, sonorous voice that in some moments had the rich, romantic quality of the cry of a freight train. To watch her sing was to understand what it meant for the body to be an instrument; she sang with all of it; she played it.

We were only supposed to stay for a few songs—I remember I was having a party that night, and was expecting guests not long after. And indeed, I reluctantly left early, though later than I should have, so as not to keep anyone waiting. But I lost two of my friends to that room: drummer Michael Riddleberger (Bleachers, Maya Hawke) and engineer and producer Ben Kane (D’Angelo, Emily King). They were fixed in place. Soon, they too would join the band, and make some of the most achingly poetic, exquisitely arranged records as Krystle Warren and the Faculty.

But to experience Krystle Warren’s music you have to see her live, which I did a hundred times in the early aughts, back before Bowery Poetry Club had tablecloths (or tables) and was full of freaks. One feels her musical intelligence at work, sampling from other songs in the crescendos or breakdowns of her own, riffing, dialing up the intensity, making the room electric with the feeling that one is witnessing a moment that will never happen quite the same way again.

For the first time in seven years, Krystle Warren, who now lives in France with her partner, is coming back to New York for a show on February 7th at Public Records, with the now rarely-assembled Faculty, in a shuffled lineup and with a handful of Grammys between them from other projects. I highly recommend you check it out.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): My discovery of the work of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck was an accidental one. I was visiting the room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art containing the only painting on display by the great Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi, when I saw on the wall opposite it a simply stunning painting by Schjerfbeck, whom I’d never heard of. The painting, “The Lace Shawl” (1920), is an almost otherworldly work.The woman wearing the shawl has a strange, greenish, elongated face, with boldly red lips. She looks dolefully to our right, her outsized eyes staring numbly across the green background into the void. It’s a work I would return to on every subsequent visit to the museum, wondering who the artist was and what the rest of her work was like.

The Met has satisfied my curiosity with the exhibition Seeing Silence, the first Schjerfbeck show in the US since 1940. It is a feat, a rare opportunity to experience the work of an ignored genius. It is also a chance to see and almost feel how the painter freed herself of the strictures of academic style and found her way to an extremely personal form of modernism, while living on the outskirts of European art.

Such progress in a painter isn’t rare, but in Schjerfbeck’s case it occurs in a curious way. Already, at around the time she was painting patriotic scenes from Finnish history in the purest conformist style, she was also producing strange canvases like “Drying Sheets,” in which all forms of storytelling are absent. All that’s left are the almost abstract shapes of sheets on grass. It’s a work about color and form, a hint of much that was to come.

The influence of Hammershoi in leaving behind narrative work is obvious, and it is a useful one, as it freed her of the anecdotal. An empty room, a mother holding her baby, her face turned from the viewer—all of it of enormous beauty both in itself and as signposts of the artist’s future.

Not that the anecdotal disappears; rather, it becomes more subtle. Schjerfbeck often painted her elderly mother, seated and reading or performing domestic tasks. In a simple, pared down 1902 work, her mother is seated in a room with a simple blue wall, reading in her rocking chair, her back turned to the painter, uninterested in her artistic endeavors.

The catalog for the show is a beautiful one, filled with enlightening essays, but however good the reproductions, they are unable to show us a key element in many of Schjerfbeck’s paintings: the way she layered the paint and worked with the canvas. The texture of the works, the lightness of the brush strokes, the abrading of the paint, even—as in the beautiful “Fragment” from 1904—the areas of the canvas left untouched, are an integral part of her vision.

The show ends with a series of self-portraits from the artist’s final years. The horrors of aging and of impending death are the true subjects of these works. The artist’s face, mouth tightly puckered, is painted with a limited palette or monochromatically. She stares at us, her eyes wide open. The immediate thought when viewing these works is of their resemblance to the character screaming on the bridge in Munch’s painting, and there’s certainly that. But her ears seem to be pointed, as if she were Nosferatu. The end of life is a vampire, sucking out what little juice is left in us.