Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): “It is a fact,” the philosopher Martin Buber writes, that “several” Hasidic masters “attempted by means of theurgic or magic activities” to “make of Napoleon that ‘Gog of the Land of Magog’ mentioned by Ezekiel,” and thus hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Having idly opened Buber’s foreword to his novel, For the Sake of Heaven (1945), I do not know whether I was more surprised to learn this “fact” or that Buber had fictionalized this apocalyptic endeavor. Hooked by Buber’s explicit analogy between the story’s subject and World War II, in which he detected “false Messianism on both [!] sides,” I bought the book.

I recommend it, albeit with certain caveats. For instance, Buber is aware that there ought to be female characters, and that the Zaddikim may have occasionally mistreated their wives, but he cannot get beyond a few, fumbling passages about marital relations. More broadly, For the Sake of Heaven, originally published under the (much preferable, very metal) title Gog and Magog, is largely composed of associated, chronologically ordered anecdotes, like those collected in Buber’s famous Tales of the Hasidim (1933). (In fact, many of the anecdotes are simply taken from that anthology.) This is an odd way to write a book—one hesitates to call it a novel, and indeed, Buber’s term is “chronicle.” The reader is constantly pivoting between the larger plot, such as it is, and the local spiritual insights of one rebbe or another.

In a way, this formal tension expresses the book’s thematic question: can the saint enter into history? Buber saw the “sacred anecdote” as encoding “the oneness of inner and outer experience” in which the spiritual master sheds a flash of sudden, spontaneous light perfectly suited to the occasion. But what does such pure illumination have to do with larger social problems, with history that plays out over time, and with intractable political forces? Two camps of Hasidim debate, and battle over, this question. Those of Lublin employ “practical Cabala” (that is, magic) to aid Napoleon, who they concede to be a villain, to accomplish their messianic aims; the quietists of Pshysha, meanwhile, reject this instrumental use of evil means. The Pshysha faction faces an additional paradox: precisely the passivity they council prevents their leader, the so-called “Holy Yehudi,” from defying his teacher, the Seer of Lublin, and establishing his own court. Both Hasidic sociology and world history thus raise thorny practical problems for the spiritual master.

While Buber frames the book in terms of World War II, I wonder if he was also thinking of the Zionist project. Napoleon’s allure in the novel involves his campaign in the Middle East; rumors circulate that he seeks the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. Moreover, Buber reports that he finally finished the novel after dreaming of “a demon with bat’s wings and the features of a judaizing Goebbels.” My friend Sam Brody (conveniently, a Buber scholar) suggested that this monster of Jewish fascism might represent the Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Sam also speculated that the Seer’s enthusiasm might reflect mainstream Zionists’ joy at the Balfour Declaration, since Buber’s heterodox, binationalist group, Brit Shalom, was wary of sponsorship by the British Empire and hoped instead to ally with Palestinians. Pshysha’s position, with which Buber explicitly sides, also anticipates Hasidic anti-Zionist arguments, especially the insistence that collective repentance must strictly precede redemption, a claim which one finds in, for instance, the writings of the Satmar Rebbe.

Buber would certainly have repudiated any association with Haredi anti-Zionism. And yet, For the Sake of Heaven rejects the Seer’s messianic dealings with the devil, preferring the Yehudi’s pacifism. And its oddly diffuse, occasionally almost unreadable form thus acquires a historical plangency, the series of tenuously connected anecdotes levying a spiritual protest against a smoothly plotted, self-assured Zionist narrative of a Jewish return to history through the coherent agency of a nation-state.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator):Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is beautifully shot, raucously funny, and nail-bitingly suspenseful, but what ultimately sets it apart is how precisely it captures the calamity that is artificial intelligence––especially impressive given that AI only enters the film explicitly in its denouement.

Up until then, the plot is a well-crafted, if somewhat familiar, satire of global capitalism: Man-su, a mid-level manager at a paper manufacturing plant (played by Lee Byung-hun of Squid Game fame), has a perfect house and a perfect family, until an American company buys out the paper plant he works at and unceremoniously fires him. After 13 months of limited employment in manual labor jobs––despite his decades of experience and his “Pulp Man of the Year” award, there aren’t enough paper manufacturing jobs to go around––his wife declares that they must sell their house and move to an apartment. Emasculated and desperate, Man-su instead decides to take matters into his own hands by murdering his job competition.

Each killing is preceded by a moment of hesitation, as Man-su grapples with his conscience and recognizes himself in his victims: in their marital disputes, in their desperation to support their children, in their refusal to abandon the only work they know. Each time, however, he overcomes this sentimentality by repeating the same mantra used to justify his own firing: “No other choice.” His hesitation becomes progressively easier to overcome as he grows accustomed to murder––the first one is Chaplinesque in its absurdity and physical comedy, while the last is so efficient and brutal it belongs in Park’s Old Boy.

Finally, Man-su is offered a new job, and we come to the film’s pivot: his interviewers tell him that the manufacturing company will be trying out a new AI-run manufacturing system, and Man-su will be the only one in the factory, only there to make sure the AI is running properly. They ask whether he has any concerns. Man-su––who previously promised his own workers that he would categorically refuse to have them replaced by automation––laughs at the very idea of having any moral scruples.

In the film’s closing, we see Man-su driving to work, the only passenger car on a highway clogged with massive semi-trucks. We then see him walking through a factory emptied of people, populated only by enormous, whirring, inhuman machines. While he luxuriates in this hard-won isolation, the audience is forced to ask: how could this miserable fate have been worth it? The lights go out. As the credits roll, the camera cuts to a scene of automated machinery decimating a forest.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is the only other film I’m aware of that has featured the societal effects of AI this prominently. Whereas Aster depicts AI as a conniving force at work behind the backs of the characters, Park instead shows Man-su as a gleeful participant in enabling the AI regime, so long as it facilitates his family’s middle-class existence. Unlike with Aster, AI does not represent some new evil; it’s simply the logical endpoint of capitalistic atomization, toward which society trudges inexorably, and which appears to us as if it were our fate.

True, despite his mantra and the film’s title, there were always other choices for Man-su; true, there is also the choice for us in the real world to stop the mindless proliferation of AI at the expense of human welfare. But in our dog-eat-dog reality, who among us would forgo the logic of capitalism that sustains our lives of bourgeois comfort?

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Queen Kelly is the greatest film that ever wasn’t. Directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring Gloria Swanson, it’s best known to millions as the film from Swanson’s glorious past that is screened by her character, delusional has-been actress Norma Desmond, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The cruelty of that scene, in fact of the casting and the entire film, is made more extreme by the fact that Queen Kelly was the film that ended the directorial career of Stroheim, who plays Desmond’s ex-husband.

The new restoration of the film by Kino International has been in the works for 40 years, and provides us with as complete a version of the unfinished masterpiece as we’ll ever have. Stroheim was the great immoralist of the silent cinema, and in an oeuvre full of the cynical and sex-drenched, Queen Kelly is the capstone.

The existing footage, assembled according to Stroheim’s script and with new intertitles drawn for the screenplay, gives us all the more reason to regret Queen Kelly’s demise. Here we have Stroheim at his most extravagant, with crowd scenes so massive they almost take your breath away. The frank sexuality of the film, which would have become more obvious had it been completed, surpasses even Stroheim’s previous works: this is, after all, a film about a former convent girl, Sally Kelly, who meets a handsome prince who falls in love with her when her panties fall off at the moment of their meeting, and who becomes a madame of a brothel in Tanganyika in East Africa, where her regal manner earns her the title Queen Kelly.

The shoot was shut down by producer Joseph Kennedy, Gloria Swanson’s lover, shortly after the Kelly character’s arrival in Tanganyika, where she meets the “employees” and a Dutchman named Jan, played by Tully Marshall—as revolting a character as ever lit up a screen, his awfulness accentuated by the high-contrast lighting on his face and his incessant slobbering. Kelly is immediately betrothed to him, weds him, and swears never to sleep with him. Here the film ends.

Legend has it that the film’s two backers, Swanson and Joseph Kennedy, pulled the plug due to cost overruns, but this seems not to have been the case. Swanson in later years would claim she ended the film—at least Stroheim’s role in it—because a switcheroo had been pulled on her: she thought that the establishment in Africa would be a bar, and it was only during the shoot she learned she was about to become a madame. In fact, in every version of the script the business is a brothel.

The truth, found in her archives, was that after a number of disputes with Stroheim, the break came as a result of the introduction of Kelly’s husband Jan. As Swanson wrote in her memoirs, “Mr. Stroheim began instructing Mr. Marshall in his usual painstaking fashion, how to drool tobacco juice onto my hand while he was putting on the wedding ring. It was early morning, I had just eaten breakfast, and my stomach turned. I became nauseated and furious at the same time.” This was the last straw. Swanson called Kennedy, told her “the director is a madman,” and Stroheim was fired. What remains is still worthy of admiration, the slender remains of a masterpiece.