Shabbat
Reading List
Raphael Magarik (contributing editor): At a moment of excitement about radical unionism, and since the United Auto Workers (UAW) seems to be emerging from a half-century stupor, I’ve been reading about leftist and labor movements. Last year, I read Detroit, I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, an excoriating account of Black workers rebelling against the UAW’s racism and complacency in the late sixties and early seventies. The book is remarkable for the Black Marxist tradition it chronicles, which differs considerably from the more media-friendly (and nationalist) Black Panthers; for its prophetic linking of deindustrialization and militarized policing; and for the spunk of its protagonists, as when they take over the student newspaper of Wayne State University and convert it into a radical medium.
Perhaps less famous, if only because newer, is Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge, a comprehensive and moving history of the Farm Equipment Workers union (FE)—a brilliant and brief-lived experiment in radical unionism. Though formally organized in the 1930s, the union derived its militant traditions from the deep hatred workers at International Harvester felt for their managers, and especially the McCormick family of robber-baron owners. Indeed, Gilpin’s title comes from Nelson Algren’s phrase for the subterranean resentments that lingered in Chicago after the Haymarket affair: in 1886, after Chicago police killed strikers at the McCormick reaper plant, at an otherwise peaceful labor rally, someone threw a bomb at the police; the anarchist August Spies and three of his comrades were framed for the crime and executed. The FE drew on these longstanding grievances, partly because its leadership (including the author’s father, DeWitt Gilpin) were mostly committed, if hardly doctrinaire Communists, who understood unionism as class struggle.
In its brief institutional existence, the FE’s militant striking exacted remarkable concessions from International Harvester: contracts with good wages, an impressive system of shop-stewards who addressed workplace grievances, and all without making many concessions on the union’s right to strike. Moreover, as early as the 1940s, the Communist organizers insisted on racial equality within the union: this having Black union leaders, bargaining for Black workers’ interests, and, in the case of the Louisville local, even making daring attempts to integrate public parks and hotels.Sadly, the FE was crushed in the anti-Communist repression of the late forties and early fifties—targeted for “raids” by Walter Reuther’s much larger, much less radical UAW. The union was eventually summoned before the House Un-American Committee and forced to testify as they were waging a 1952 strike, during which they faced an ugly, falsified murder charge against one of their Black leaders in Chicago. By the 1950s, they had given in to Reuther and were folded into the UAW, where staff organizers were permitted to hold their positions so long as they renounced their links to the party, and the the tradition of unremitting war against the boss gave way to a top-down, liberal, and bureaucratic union.
The Long Deep Grudge ends on a plangent note: even in the fifties, IH was starting to close its Midwest plants to move to cheaper and less unionized locales. By the seventies, the liberal UAW’s dream of shared prosperity gave way to a long, slow series of union concessions, and the mismanaged International Harvester was sold off to private equity as part of the long dismantling of American industry. Despite this bitter ending, the book is nonetheless a delightful read. Gilpin thoroughly revised her decades-old dissertation into zippy, narrative history, rich with colorful characters. By writing labor history as a tense drama of class struggles, Gilpin lets us feel the power and excitement of radical ideas. And most importantly, she shows how the disciplined, Communist thinking of the FE’s core leadership and a more diffuse, anti-authoritarian anarchism that suffused the base delivered material victories for workers.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Across her lengthy career, the great French director Catherine Breillat has had one great theme: sex. While cinematic depictions of sex have usually focused on men’s experiences, Breillat is unflinching in her portrayal of the act—and the relationships around it—from the woman’s point of view. The ironic title of her 2002 film Sex Is Comedy fits precisely nothing in her catalog, which spans five decades. Her approach is more fittingly summarized by the title of her 2004 film Anatomy of Hell, in which she underlined both the centrality of sex and her refusal to prettify it by giving the lead male role to a porn star, Rocco Siffredi. Sex in Breillat’s work is sometimes ugly and clumsy, as we see in her early films about young women entering the sexual fray like 36 Fillette (1988), and even more so in more recent work like Fat Girl (2001). After suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in 2004, Breillat was sidelined for several years; during her recovery she was victimized by a con man, an experience that became her 2013 film Abuse of Weakness. Her weakened state has slowed down her production. But in Last Summer, her first film in a decade, Breillat’s vision has not in any way softened.
Anne, played by the radiant Léa Drucker, is a successful lawyer married to a successful businessman, living in a palatial home with their two adopted daughters. The husband’s troubled teenage son, Théo, moves in with them; he’s a typically hostile adolescent who is also—not incidentally—quite handsome, in a rather bedraggled way. This being a Breillat film, we know what to expect: The teenager and the woman twice his age soon move from hostility to an affair. Breillat understands her characters and their motivations perfectly. In addition to Théo’s unsurprising attraction to the beautiful Anne, he hates his father, so what better way to strike out at him than sleeping with his wife? And while Anne loves her husband, the affair offers a respite from a life that has come to bore her. The morality of it all never enters into anyone’s considerations. The play of these various elements is skillfully executed, and the way Breillat represents the headlong nature of their affair—as well as its conversion into anger and hatred and then back again—is both troubling and natural.
The film is full of perfect Breillat moments, exemplary of what makes her and her films so extraordinary. The first time the couple has sex, for instance, the camera focuses on Théo’s face and its contortions; this is sex from the woman’s point of view. When we see them together the second time, the camera is in an extreme closeup on Anne—but it’s not from the man’s point of view. Rather, it shows the woman taking pleasure in her own pleasure.
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Stage lore has long maintained that all theaters are haunted by the spirits of deceased performers. They come out and play to empty houses in the wee hours by the glow of the “ghost light”—a single-bulb floor lamp left on for them in theaters all night. (A duller interpretation insists these lights are there to prevent folks from tripping on the scenery.) In my adolescent stage-struck, Hebrew-school years, I conflated the ghost light with the ner tamid, the eternal flame that hangs above the Torah ark in synagogues across the world. To me, both represented spiritual connection with my far-flung peoples—past, present, and future.
The performance artist/comedian/songwriter Morgan Bassichis made that connection flesh in their poignant and hilarious show, Can I Be Frank?, which channels, claims, frames, and honors the performance artist/comedian/songwriter Frank Maya, who died of AIDS in August 1995 at age 45. Best known as the first out gay comic to have a half-hour special on Comedy Central, and for his chill responses to cringey questions about “homosexuals” on The Dick Cavett Show in 1991, Maya fronted a band, performed streamy “rants” and comic bits in mainstream gigs and in downtown spaces like Dixon Place, PS122, the Kitchen, and the very stage at La MaMa where Bassichis just conjured him. I saw Maya–and so many artists lost to AIDS, who also haunt these venues–perform there decades ago. Ever since, I have been scampishly quoting his joke about Anne Frank–which I won’t spoil here–and was delighted that Bassichis landed it, and that an audience still guffaws at its truthy irreverence.
Bassichis opens his show with one of Maya’s rants on the reverence owed to the dead, but stops and starts over several times, cutting in to offer commentary, some of which purposely misses the point, in a droll demonstration of both the necessity and impossibility of summoning up one’s ancestors. In presenting some of Maya’s material, refashioning his routines, and performing a couple of his songs alongside their own, Bassichis exposes the distance between Maya’s world and today’s, and tenderly builds a queer bridge across them.
I hadn’t remembered that so much of Maya’s material was about death, ghosts, afterlives—maybe because everything was about death in those terrible times. I did remember how much was about sex, an aspect Bassichis also grabs onto. How inspiring, they suggest, that even as ACT UP was lying down in the streets to protest the state’s murderous indifference to AIDS, Maya was ranting about a guy too tired to have sex with him or joking that if it hadn’t been for his scout leader “I wouldn’t have had sex till I was 16.” Insisting on life’s lusts and joys–everyone, everywhere, even in the direst circumstances—Bassichis shows, is what keeps the lights on. Bassichis played a handful of sold-out performances earlier this month, but keep an eye out: I can’t imagine they won’t land a longer run somewhere soon.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Josh Lambert (contributing writer): About 15 years ago, when I was researching my book on Jews and obscenity law in the United States, a kind historian told me about a Polish Jewish immigrant to the US, Chava Zlotchever, who changed her name to Eve Adams, ran a lesbian tea house in Greenwich Village, privately published a book called Lesbian Love in 1925, was entrapped by the New York police and deported to Europe, and was finally murdered at Auschwitz. I spent a decade searching for Adams’ book, scouring archives and contacting rare book dealers, and the only copy anyone had heard of was the one at Yale that had gone missing in the 1990s. I gave up hope. Then, miraculously, the historian Jonathan Ned Katz convinced a woman in Albany, who had discovered a copy of Lesbian Love in her apartment building, to share it. As an appendix to his excellent book on Adams, Katz published the complete text of Lesbian Love in 2021.
I’ve been thinking about this story recently because it helps to explain why I am so very excited about Hannah Levene’s debut novel, Greasepaint, a quasi-historical, experimental novel about lesbian bars in midcentury New York. To my utter delight, Levene’s fiction reads like what we might have gotten if Eve Adams had lived in New York into the 1950s, staying involved in the lesbian bar scene while getting into jazz and experimental poetry, maybe even started slicking her hair back and wearing white t-shirts. The novel wheels wildly through the lives of the people she could have met, including the daughter of a Yiddish poet, a “butch belle juive,” and many “Jews whose anarchism was like a layer of grease on them, like it’d come from cooking.” (Levene has said, about her research, “I couldn’t see the difference between butch and Yiddish anarchist after a while.”) Embracing these characters, Greasepaint worries very little about plot or how to get from one scene to another, and much more about folks making music, eating food, and talking, talking, talking.
It would be easy to situate Levene’s book within a recent wave of LGBTQ+ fiction that recovers and reimagines the lives of queer Jews in a variety of historical settings. But unlike many other historical fantasias of queer yiddishkayt, Greasepaint doesn’t feel creakily nostalgic, but rather deeply and sweetly alive. As Agnes Borinsky noted in the latest issue of The Anarchist Review of Books, Levene understands that “it is in the shuffling, fumbling, unfolding tenderness and conversations that accompany any larger political project that some version of a new world gets built.” With her winning characters and her electric, inconsistently punctuated prose style, Levene offers hope that such new worlds might still be possible for us, and redresses, a little, what we’ve lost in centuries of brutal suppression of writers like Adams.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): I recommend the documentary film Queen of the Deuce, a modest, engrossing portrait of the larger-than-life, chain-smoking, hard-gambling, deal-making Chelly Wilson, who owned most of the porno theaters on 42nd St.—known as “the Deuce”—during its heyday in the late ’60s and ’70s.
Wilson, born Rachel Serrero in the Greek port city of Salonika, escaped to New York City before the Jews were deported to death camps, leaving her young children in hiding with gentile neighbors. Her rags-to-riches story starts with selling chestnuts and ends with a porn empire that sees the industry through its explosion—from “soft core” to “beaver” to “beaver and pickle” to “hard core.” The business is not altogether legal—Wilson’s daughter, Bondi, who works in distributing their films, is eventually arrested on felony obscenity charges. But Wilson, a twice-married lesbian who lived with her lovers but kept her husbands in the family, remains uncowed and unapologetic, holding court from her packed apartment above one of her theaters.
My grandparents were also Saloniki; they did not get out and were deported to Auschwitz. I always wondered, more so after their deaths, if we were reducing them to their tragedy, if we forced them to wear their “survivorship” like a forever hospital gown. It is for this reason that I appreciated the treatment of the Holocaust in the filmmaker’s telling of Wilson’s story—a significant part, but not the whole; neither the beginning, nor the end. In Queen of the Deuce, Wilson gets to be all of who she was.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Green Border, the new film by the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland, wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a cri de coeur and a call to action in the face of European indifference to the fate of the refugees who attempt to immigrate to the continent, a flight that has cost 30,000 people their lives since 2014. A film with so clear a message is bound to be flawed, weighed down by an excess of good sentiments—and to be sure, at almost two and a half hours, Green Border goes on a tad too long. But its excesses are almost justified by the scale and severity of the horrors—the baseness, cowardice, and racism—of the crisis. The film is set largely at the border between Belarus and Poland in 2021, when the vicious governments of both countries were treating refugees like ping pong balls, expelling them back and forth across the border; Belarus, certain that Poland and its ruling far right Law and Justice Party would refuse to respect European Union laws governing the acceptance of asylum seekers, had the express aim of embarrassing the EU. The callousness of both countries—and specifically of their border forces—is represented precisely as it played out then and continues to this day. We see the refugees beaten, robbed, and abused as they wait on one side of the border to be sent to the other, only to be beaten, robbed, and abused.
The film unfurls in chapters. We first travel with a group of mainly Syrian refugees as they fly into Minsk and are transported to the border, where they expect to cross into the freedom of Europe. But they have no such luck, and every glimmer of hope is crushed almost as soon as it appears. Holland then switches focus to Janek, a border guard whose wife is expecting a baby, and who clearly has no stomach for the dirty work he’s been given. And yet he carries it out all the same. We then meet a group of good-hearted Polish activists attempting to assist the refugees while respecting the laws not respected by the government. Their moral and strategic dilemmas are perhaps the strongest element of Green Border: Doing what’s legal might save a life here and there; breaking the law might do more, but could jeopardize everything. Just when the film seems to have gone on too long, Holland finds a striking new way to express the brutality and hypocrisy of what we’ve seen: The same Poles who could find no room in their hearts or their country for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, or Africa welcome 2 million Ukrainians in 2023.
Green Border is a very European film. But any American viewing it can only think of the cruelty of ICE during the Trump regime—much of which has remained with Biden’s own border restrictions, and will surely worsen should the felon-candidate be elected again. So far we haven’t reacted much better than most Poles.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): On the street, my husband found Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary—assembled from notes he began taking the day after his mother’s death in October 1977—and he brought it home to me, a chronicle of grief to place alongside my own. Barthes hand wrote on slips of typing paper cut into quarters and piled on his desk; the dated entries are short, often devastating. “This morning, thought continually of maman. Nauseous sadness. Nausea of the Irremediable.” Simple entries like this one sit alongside more abstract attempts to capture the terrible, ineluctable feeling: “What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units.]” Yet Barthes soon rejects the word “mourning.” “Too psychoanalytic,” he writes. “I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.” I recognize from my own diary the selection of a simple, personal metaphor to signal the recurrence of acute emotion. For Barthes, it is a “stone (around my neck, deep inside me).” For me, it is a well. “I am in the well,” I write, again and again, a shorthand, a marker.
In the weeks after my father died, I was terrified by my inability to conjure him. It was as though he had been flattened like paper, cut into a million pieces and scattered to the wind. Flesh was the whole of reality; it was all or nothing. I see myself in Barthes who, within a week of his mother’s death, is unable to hear her voice, “the very texture of memory . . . like a localized deafness.” But within a few months, she returns to him. In watching a film, he notices a lampshade similar to ones that she made of batik, and “all of her leaped before my eyes.” Indeed, five months in, I can hear my father again. I can almost speak with him. Sometimes it is too much, and I have to leave the bar or the party early. To capture this sensation, Barthes—eight months into his grief—writes in his own hand an excerpt from a letter that Marcel Proust wrote to a grieving friend in 1907. I, in turn, copy it into my own journal:
“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power . . . that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 1934, H.G. Wells published his two-volume Experiment in Autobiography, an examination of his own life that takes over 800 detailed pages to get the job done. Novelist Jill Ciment has now written two memoirs—Half a Life (1996) and the newly published Consent—that, in barely 400 pages combined, constitute the most daring experiment in the genre I’ve ever read.
Half a Life tells the story of her family and her efforts to free herself from them—especially her father, a man so odious that he almost defies belief—as she finds her own way as an artist. This journey led to a disastrous move from California to New York, where she lived in a squat and was forced to work in a photo studio where she posed nude. But the book is also the story of her meeting and affair with Arnold Mesches, her art teacher in California. When they met, he was 47 and she 16; when they began having sex, she was only 17. (She calls it a May-December romance, but in this case April-December seems more appropriate.) Shortly thereafter, Mesches left his wife for her, and they soon married. When that book appeared, they had lived together for more than two decades, and they remained married until his death in 2016, at the age of 93.
In her new memoir, Ciment boldly returns to the story she had told positively, which she now views with new eyes formed by a new era. There’s no doubt that the couple had a happy life together, but huge questions hang over it. “Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning?” she asks in Consent. “Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that begins with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” In 1996, she painted their relations with a certain glow; she now admits that the whole thing was more than slightly off. Consent rigorously reexamines the beginning of their relationship and her portrayal of it, considering not only ethical questions but the basic details of her experience. She writes, for instance, that the way she described their initial lovemaking hid the disgust she felt for her lover’s flabby, middle-aged physique. She also revises Half a Life’s account of their first kiss, writing that it was he rather than she who initiated it. (This remained in dispute between them throughout the decades they were together.)
Reading the two memoirs consecutively—so the feelings evoked by the first volume are fresh and then immediately challenged in the second—was one of the most thrilling and unsettling reading experiences I’ve had since I started reading 66 years ago, when I was six. These books are a brilliant proof that there is no mystery greater than the internal world of a couple, and a moving testament to the instability of memory and self-knowledge. As Climent writes in Consent of her earlier book: “I had intended to write the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but I could not find it, or else I found it everywhere.”
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Lately at bedtime, my twin toddlers ask me to sing them the same song over and over; their new favorite is what they call “Back of Me” (Guided By Voices’ “Game of Pricks,” a perfect pop song). Sometimes I miss the days when they would snuggle up happily for whatever series of tunes I’d select from the repertoire of those I have memorized, entertaining myself with the variety as they began to drift off. But there’s also something powerful in the repetition, as I try to inhabit and express the same words and melody differently with each iteration.
A new record by Bonnie “Prince” Billy (Will Oldham), Tyler Trotter, and Nathan Salsburg—a Jewish Currents contributor and the musician behind the song that opens and closes our podcast—draws from this same experience. Hear the Children Sing the Evidence was inspired by Salsburg’s practice of soothing his daughter to sleep with a rendition of “The Evidence” by the post-punk band Lungfish, repeated for as long as an hour. The album features this song and another Lungfish track, “Hear the Children Sing,” each performed enough times to fill one side of a vinyl record. The experiment beautifully weds the gentle intimacy of a lullaby—a communion between parent and child at the precipice of sleep—with the lively camaraderie of a jam session. The strict, ritualistic structure allows the songs to open up and transform. In a recent interview about the project with Aquarium Drunkard, Oldham explains, “I know I’m going to be strict with the lyrics. I’m not going to improvise . . . If my mind is changing and my perspective is changing about what I’m saying, I always have to go back and find it in the lyrics.” The songs’ abstract, ambiguous poetry perfectly serves this purpose. As the repetitions unfold, they begin to seem like commentaries on the recursive process itself: “What’s taking form / is not a lifetime . . . What’s circling / is not circular . . . What’s coming into view / is not old or new.”
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Daniel May (publisher): I first watched an episode or two of Severance when it came out in 2022, but it didn’t do it for me. At the time I found it too weird, too unsettling. I was looking for the comforts of a conventional television show, and this was something else. Based on a friend’s recommendation I recently came back to it, and found myself engrossed rather than repelled by its relentless weirdness.
The show follows Mark Scott—a recent widower going through the motions in the long shadow of grief—but its main character is actually his workplace, Lumon Industries. The company has developed a novel technology for the workplace in which employees undergo a procedure to “sever” them from their daily lives, producing a worker that has no knowledge of the self outside the workplace (known as an “innie”) and a person who has no knowledge of their lives as a worker (an “outie”). For Mark, this arrangement allows him eight hours of the day in which he is freed from sorrow. In between mornings and evenings beset by depression, he spends his days happily leading the four-person “macrodata refinement” (MDR) team, identifying scary-looking digits on a screen of swirling numbers, and dragging them into a digital trash can (yep, that’s it). The world of Lumon is shaped by a corporate “culture” that is its own religion, complete with memorized doctrine, totemic worship, and punitive practices of forced confession.
The plot is put in motion by the sudden disappearance in the work world of Mark’s closest friend, Petey, and his appearance in the outer world to a Mark who has no idea who he is. Petey’s sudden and unexplained departure at work prompts Mark, as an innie, to reconsider that his workplace may not be all it seems, which sets Mark as outie on a quest to discover what it is that he actually does all day at Lumon. Over the nine episodes of its first season, we watch as Mark the outie crawls himself out of his sadness to try and unravel the mystery, while the band of innies at MDR transform their workplace banter of grudging affection into the conspiratorial plotting of revolutionaries that together set out to uncover the truth of both what they do and who they are.
For all of its immediate pleasures of fantastic acting and immaculate aesthetics, the show is more ideologically ambitious than any I’ve seen in years. The central theme of Severance is the alienation of labor. In his classic reflection on the subject, Karl Marx argued that modern labor has become increasingly alienating due to the isolation of work into discrete and repetitive tasks, disconnected from both a finished product and the market in which that product might be sold. Alienation from the product that one produces soon leads to an alienation from oneself as a worker, and culminates in an alienation from oneself as a human being in community with other human beings. The scandal of alienation, then, is that what we produce out of our own power acquires such power over us that we disappear under it. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it in his reading of Marx, the alienated person is “a stranger in the world that he himself has made.”
Severance pushes this idea to its limits. The workers at Lumon are ignorant both of what they produce and of the selves that exist outside of their workplace. Meanwhile, the outies that send their innies to work each day are ignorant both of what it is they do and of the “severed” self that does the production. Both are doubly alienated, strangers to one another and therefore to themselves. But it is the show’s portrayal of the quest out of estrangement–out of grief, loneliness, confusion–and into a world of community forged through collective struggle, that makes it so rousing and, ultimately, so moving.
Solomon Brager (director of community engagement): Last summer, when I started listening to the audiobook of Stephen Markley’s 880-page climate apocalypse epic, The Deluge, the skies over New York were red with forest fire smoke and choked with hazardous particulates. Then again, the weather in New York these days is always weird, foreboding, unseasonal, disconcerting, often inconvenient and occasionally deadly.
The Deluge starts off in a near-future that is very much like our present: The weather is growing increasingly deadly, people are getting poorer, the government is getting more authoritarian, and there are more “natural” disasters and mass casualty events. Climate catastrophe is exacerbating conflicts and driving desperate migrations. Obvious solutions to world-ending problems are deferred, stonewalled, declared impossible. Even as people are dying in ever-greater numbers in ever-worsening weather events, people maintain that climate change is a hoax. Over the course of his hyper-realistic novel, Markley unfolds the bleak futures we might expect if things continue in this direction.
The scariest thing about the end-of-days scenario in The Deluge is how mundane it all is. We are in the room for the ignored climate science, the failed policy proposals, the creeping starvation, the slowly rising waters. This isn’t the spectacular, ridiculous end of the world of The Day After Tomorrow. Instead, The Deluge is about the unremarkable and astounding choices people might make under the most appalling conditions, both to survive and to try and pull the world back from the brink. Mild-mannered scientists become terrorists, teenagers self-immolate, cops mow down peaceful protestors, desperate people do terrible and brave things. I couldn’t stop listening. I occasionally burst into tears. It kept me up at night. A year on, as we slowly crawl toward climate catastrophe, I’m still thinking about it.
One of my favorite genres to read and to teach is the obsolete dystopia, like Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 novel Swastika Night, a nightmare warning of a Nazi empire that never came to be. I hope that one day people revisit The Deluge as a near-miss: we almost fell into the abyss, we lost a lot of people and habitats and species of animals, but we somehow came back from it. Even Markley, not to spoil the ending, gives us a taste of hope at the end of the book. It’s not an easy hope, but it’s better than nothing.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): June 3rd marked the hundredth anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka. That century was Kafkaesque (when it wasn’t Orwellian), and he’s long been treated as a seer. When we search for meanings in his works, we must bear in mind that he was first of all a frail Jew from Prague, many of whose personal problems—with his father, with women, with Judaism—were transmogrified into literature. All of this made him an extraordinarily difficult person. Kafka—a new, six-part German miniseries, now streaming on Chai Flicks—gives us a far from hagiographic portrait of the man, one that’s refreshing precisely for that reason.
Star Joel Basman bears a remarkable resemblance to Kafka, and one cringes at his performance of the writer’s neurotic habits. He was full of crackpot ideas, among them an attachment to “fletcherizing,” the act of chewing every mouthful of food until it becomes liquid in order to extract all possible nutritional value. This proclivity is described in every book about Kafka, but to read about it is one thing; actually watching him do this at the dinner table, one almost sympathizes with his father’s annoyance at his eccentric son. The show prominently features Kafka’s indecisiveness with women—his inability to make decisions about marriage—which has made many theorize about the role this part of his life played in his writing (on this matter, read Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial). But in the series, Kafka’s actions are all too human, clearly the behavior of a confused young man more than anything else.
German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s script, based on Reiner Stach’s definitive three-volume biography, skillfully integrates excerpts from Kafka’s own writing without drawing attention to this fact. His dreadful relationship with his father, so brilliantly dissected in his famous letter to the man—my particular favorite among his writings—is correctly placed at the center of his life and its woes. But why oh why did he not just leave his family behind? In remaining so close to his father he added to his own misery to such an extent that we can only conclude it was essential to him. The show portrays the women in his life as likewise mostly rather unpleasant—except for Milena Jesenská (played by Liv Lisa Fries), his Czech translator, with whom he had an affair. The episode focusing on their relationship is shot and acted unlike any other in the series, with the atmosphere of a love story. Fries plays Milena as relaxed, open, and clearly attracted to her writer, with no complexes about the matter. (Among the women he knew, only the prostitutes he frequented were so at ease with their bodies.) Kafka, for his part, is overcome with doubts and fears.
The hero of the series, aside from Kafka, is of course Max Brod, the mediocre but prolific writer who was Kafka’s closest friend, and who refused to burn his manuscripts after he died, ignoring the writer’s request. Had Brod listened to his friend, he would have left an unimaginable hole in world literature. Though Brod’s own books are largely out of print and forgotten, a case can be made that he thus remains one of history’s most important literary figures.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Over the holiday weekend, I spent every spare moment alone buried in Patrick Nathan’s The Future Was Color, out next Tuesday from Counterpoint Press. This rich, scintillating novel—the follow-up to Nathan’s debut, Some Hell (2018), and his essay collection, Image Control (2021)—traces the life of György Kertész, a queer Jew who abandons Budapest for New York as a teenager in 1944, just ahead of the German occupation of Hungary. When we meet György in 1956, he has transformed himself into George Curtis, a Hollywood hack churning out scripts for monster movies, treading lightly in an era and industry when letting the wrong person in on any aspect of his identity, with their‘ associations with communism, might imperil him. In Los Angeles, he has successfully disguised himself and sublimated his artistic ambition to capture the violence of modernity into the debased container of popular film, transmuting the horrors of the 20th century into giant radioactive spiders and other such ciphers. (He takes care not to violate the mandated patriotism of Cold War cinema, but a rare slip-up earns him a rebuke from studio executives: “Before the script that would become Death from Above!,” Nathan writes, “he’d proposed a film about an ancient monster deep beneath the Nevada desert, awakened by radiation. Why, they’d demanded, wasn’t the monster hidden beneath Siberia?”)
As the Hungarian Revolution erupts a world away, George begins to despair at the triviality and insufficiency of his work, what he calls “his bedtime stories.” So he takes an opportunity to hide out at the offensively lavish home of his friend Madeline, a famous actress who collects “interesting” people like curios, to hammer away at a sprawling essay on destruction, hope, and the meaning of the moment. But George is soon distracted from his writing and from events back home. He finds himself swept up—along with with a studio colleague he adores and a young lover he met manning the ticket booth at a film screening, both named Jack—in a life of endless leisure manufactured by Madeline and her husband Walt, and gradually torn apart by the dissonance between the sunlit facade and the darkness roiling beneath it. In lush and achingly precise prose, drenched in loneliness and longing, Nathan masterfully renders George’s struggle to reckon with the relationship between spectacle and violence, artifice and self-knowledge, remembrance and possibility.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Open Roads—Film at Lincoln Center’s annual festival of new Italian cinema, which began yesterday and runs through June 3rd—is always a welcome event. But this year it’s especially so, as the schedule includes the latest work by Nanni Moretti, one of the greatest Italian filmmakers of the last 50 years. A Brighter Tomorrow, showing on June 1st and 5th, revolves around two of Moretti’s main concerns throughout his oeuvre: as described in the film, “the death of art and the death of communism.”
Moretti stars as Giovanni, a director who is making a film about a Hungarian circus troupe’s visit to Italy in 1956, at the invitation of the local section of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). During the shoot, his longtime wife and producer declares that she has had enough of his difficult personality and is preparing to leave him. To make matters worse, she is producing someone else’s movie for the first time—a ridiculously violent gangster film. Giovanni is horrified that his wife would participate in the further degradation of the cinema, and in a brilliant scene that only Moretti could imagine, he interrupts the filming of the final shot—the image of a man with a gun pointed at his head—for eight hours, deconstructing the ethical values contained in it and calling in a varied cast of intellectuals for support (among them the architect Renzo Piano). But Giovanni’s case for a real art of the cinema falls on deaf ears. Later, his—and Moretti’s—despair at the state of film and the public is underlined when we see the final scene of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), watched by a mostly young, indifferent audience.
Of even greater importance to Moretti is the death of communism, which plays out in Giovanni’s film. Shortly after the Hungarian performers’ arrival in Italy, the uprising against communism breaks out in Budapest, the Soviets invade, and the local PCI comes out in support of the uprising, attempting to convince the national party to do the same. They fail, and the crisis that swept world communism at the time hits Italy as well; the PCI is discredited and the local communist paper editor commits suicide. Moretti’s attachment to the PCI has been clear for decades: In 1990, he released La Cosa, a heartbreaking documentary about the party’s auto-dissolution. Within Italy, the PCI was an alternative to the dominant culture, rooted in justice and solidarity. But that glorious past is now all but forgotten, as demonstrated in A Brighter Tomorrow by the young actor who thinks that when Giovanni says there were once 2 million communists in Italy, he means there were that many Russians.
A Brighter Tomorrow ends with Giovanni determined to exhibit a more positive attitude by concluding the film he’s making with a great hypothetical: What if the national PCI had opposed the Soviet invasion of Hungary? The film—and the film within the film—thus ends with masses of Italians marching behind red flags, flags bearing the emblem of the PCI containing the hammer and sickle, and a huge portrait of Trotsky. In Giovanni’s and Moretti’s imagined perfect world, the PCI’s position paves the way for Italian socialism, with the party remaining in power to realize the “communist utopia” of Marx and Engels. In the grim times in which we live, there’s almost no other way to be optimistic than to imagine such a counterfactual.
Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Living with a kid for the past decade, I’ve colored in my fair share of coloring books, from cute animals to complex mandalas. Like much parenting, these coloring sessions required tuning out from work and organizing—in other words, my real and enduring concerns—to inhabit a space of childlike fantasy. That escape has at times been relaxing, but it has also been exhausting, especially at moments (like this one) when real world horrors become unrelenting and unforgettable.
That’s where From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book comes in. Beautifully illustrated by Soweto-based artist Nathi Ngubanem, the book—aimed at kids between ages six and 10—depicts the story of Palestine from the early 20th century all the way to the present. The illustrations include iconic Palestinian symbols like the Dome of the Rock, olive and fig trees, and keffiyehs; maps that show the erasure of the Palestinian presence between 1946 and 2012, juxtaposed with a Palestinian elder holding a key; images of Palestinian icons past and present (including Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Shireen Abu Akleh, Wael al-Dahdouh, Lama Abu Jamous, and Refaat Alareer); scenes of resistance from the Intifadas; and drawings of Nelson Mandela and George Floyd which try to capture Palestine’s resonances with global anti-colonial struggles. Each image is accompanied by a short caption, a coloring scheme that can help you along, and a blank box where you can draw out your own understandings of home, exile, resistance, and solidarity. While I have not yet colored in it, I can already envision that this book will provide a way for me to still spend time with little family members while still thinking, talking, and teaching about Palestine and all that it represents.
Predictably, the book has already drawn backlash from pro-Israel groups, including the South African version of the Anti Defamation League, over the charge of “indoctrinating” children with pro-Palestine messaging; mainstream bookstores in that country have also refused to stock the book for these reasons. The least we can do to resist this silencing—and to pass on the truth to the next generation—is to order a copy today.
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Weekly Parshah Commentary
Over the course of each year, Jews read the Five Books of Moses in their entirety—covering one parshah, or section, every week on Shabbat morning. In this moment when many in our community have expressed an unprecedented alienation from most Jewish institutions, alongside an urgent need for spiritual fortification, we’ve begun a series of brief commentaries on the weekly parshah, written by a rotating group of Jewish Currents contributors and appearing here in the Shabbat Reading List. The Hebrew word “lidrosh” means both “to interpret” and “to demand,” suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe.
As this experiment unfolds, please reply to this email to let us know what you think.
