Shabbat
Reading List

Mari Cohen (associate editor): The novelist Sally Rooney, as Dwight Garner put it recently, takes as her “primary subject . . . love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive.” In the past, I might have quibbled with him. Even as a Rooney admirer, I’ve always found her romance plots hindered by their reliance on hackneyed tropes: Childhood sweethearts dance around each other in adulthood; a young woman enters an electric affair with an older man. But in her new novel, Intermezzo, Rooney evades this trap by freeing her main romantic pairings from cliché—and by moving them slightly out of the novel’s center. Indeed, the most important relationship in the book is not that of a couple but of a pair of brothers, Peter and Ivan, who have weathered their parents’ painful divorce and, most recently, their father’s death from cancer, and who are negotiating how to approach the distance that has grown between them. Both are fiercely intelligent, but are otherwise a study in opposites: The elder, Peter, is a charming debater-turned-lawyer trying to conceal his depression, while the younger, Ivan, is an awkward competitive chess player adjusting to adulthood. Ivan falls in love with an older woman separated from her alcoholic husband, while Peter is juggling relationships with both a dynamic college-aged woman and the ex-girlfriend who pulled away after a devastating accident.

Rooney zooms in on these brothers with prose that is precise and rhythmic, her long paragraphs transmitting the winding nature of their inner worlds, how thoughts repeat and morph and collide. She experiments, gently, with form: Peter’s manic energy is captured by staccato, incomplete, backwards sentences—“A proliferation of feeling he thinks. Disorder of sentiment. Remembering the way his father would write out on lined paper the doctor’s instructions, spidery handwriting, names of medications”—while Ivan’s quiet anxiety is slow, drawn out, and sprawling: “For a few minutes Ivan lies on the bed not knowing what to think, what task to feed into his brain, to go on analysing past events, his own mistakes and regrets, the wrongs he has done to others or the wrongs done by others to him, or the confusing events in his life that seem to involve both kinds of wrong.”

Rooney, of course, is known as a novelist not just of the romantic but of the political. Off the page, she speaks forcefully about Palestine and about Marxism; in her first three books, characters regularly DM each other about the nature of capitalism, attend rallies, and contemplate the confines of class. Often, though, the characters’ political obsessions seem immaterially discursive, a sprinkling of brightly colored frosting that endlessly fascinates critics but remains on the novel’s surface. This mode accurately depicts how left politics operate in the lives of a certain set of young literary professionals (the milieu from which Rooney generally draws her main characters), but doesn’t have a lot more to say than that. In Intermezzo, the characters’ political preoccupations are less central. This, however, doesn’t feel like a retreat: It just feels honest, an unabashed embrace of Rooney’s clear interest in the minutiae of small-scale intimate relationships. In her 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You, the tidy, domestic resolution of the love stories felt jarring after the characters spent the book emailing each other long meditations on the abyss of modern capitalism and climate change; here, the interpersonal relationships are less burdened by attempts to speak in a visionary political voice, more free to stand in their specificity. Along the way, Peter muses on how the realities of his job measure up to his ambitions to fight for justice, Ivan refuses to fly for the sake of the climate, and another character is evicted by her landlord; everyone’s life is, of course, structured by the realities of money and power and gender; the story, and thus the politics, speaks for itself.

Early in Intermezzo, Ivan’s love interest Margaret (the only other character, besides the two brothers, whose inner monologue is depicted) reflects on her first tryst with Ivan: “She has been contained before . . . by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now.” Throughout the novel, the characters struggle with how to cut open life’s netting, how to free themselves, and their relationships, from patterns and narratives that entrap them. They struggle toward a practice of love that is expansive and generous, that can help two brothers overcome years of mistrust and distance, that can hold partners together even in unconventional circumstances. It’s simple and yet complex; meticulous but alive; funny but deeply sad. It’s Sally Rooney’s best novel yet.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I confess that I have only read the “Jewish” parts of Marxism and Form (1971), my favorite work by Fredric Jameson, the great literary theorist who died this week. That is to say, I have read the chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács—all but the chapter on Sartre, which is, at least for me, a hundred pages of impenetrable, gentile boredom. The names of these theorists are emblazoned on the book’s cover as if they were a musical supergroup, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Jameson was trying to explain and defend Hegelian Marxism, which promised that historical materialism could approach literary texts not as propaganda or morality plays, but as complex forms, in whose development we could chart the course of an evolving, universal history. Somehow, the book he ended up writing consists of a series of mournful vignettes about Central European Jewish intellectuals.

It’s hard to know what Jameson would have thought of this observation, not just because his origins were WASPy and patrician, but because he largely avoided personal reflection, even as he built a superstar career defending, often single handedly, Marxism’s claim to primacy among High Theories. But the Jewishness of Marxism and Form is no coincidence. It reflects the “elective affinity” Michael Löwy would later trace between early 20th-century Central European Jewish writers, barred by antisemitic prejudice from academic postings, and thus institutionally marginalized and driven toward a utopian, romantic mode of left-wing politics. Löwy’s student Enzo Traverso later studied a cohort of doubly “heretical” adherents of what he called “Judeo-Marxism,” who rejected the vulgar, dogmatic scientism of Karl Kautsky and the Second International, as well as Orthodox religiosity and post-war Zionism. Often rebels against both Jewish and contemporary left pieties, these Judeo-Marxists produced eccentric, offbeat theories, probed the arcane troves of Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, and tended more toward modernist experimentation than by-the-book socialist realism. Thus, if one wanted, as Jameson did, to find sources for a Marxism that was intellectually rich, thick with ironies and paradoxes, and critically adequate not just to proletarian novels and folks songs, but to Balzac and Beethoven (and then, in Jameson’s eclectic, catholic, and massive corpus of writing, to pretty much any cultural artifact whatsoever), then of course one would end up writing about Jews.

And despite Jameson’s ideal of objective impersonality, there are hints he was aware of his Jewish focus. A section epigraph in his chapter on Ernst Bloch reads, “Next Year in Jerusalem! —Old Jewish Prayer,” the single pithiest distillation of the utopian longing that animates Jameson’s whole career. More telling, perhaps, is the uncharacteristically personal turn with which he concludes his discussion of Marcuse, writing that despite the bleak, unrevolutionary conditions of mid-century American capitalism, “it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom” in several minds, the last of which is that of Marcuse, the “philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing—from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of traffic of the freeways and the ominous shape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, as it were from beyond them, in the future—the almost extinct form of the Utopian idea.”

In Jameson’s hands, the paradigmatically Jewish condition of exile undergoes a double metamorphosis, first into Marcuse’s estrangement from the land of his birth by the Nazi catastrophe, which either killed or uprooted nearly all of Jameson’s book’s subjects, and then second, into the existential predicament of the social theorist lost in post-war consumer capitalism, adrift in a history that seemed to have lost its plot. That predicament, and his oft-repeated, defiant insistence that nonetheless, one must not, could not, forget Jerusalem and the dream of a redeemed future, was, of course, Jameson’s great theme. So it pleases me, in spite of his studied impersonality, to point out that in 1971, Jameson had only recently left Harvard for the University of California, San Diego, where he overlapped with Marcuse for several years—and that perhaps here is an autobiographical clue that Jameson was a quiet devotee of our exilic tradition, which he reimagined as the melancholy condition of the left intellectual in an unfriendly historical moment, struggling to transform his nostalgia into hope for a future, into a yearning for a world transformed.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): After reading the critic Philip Lopate’s latest collection, My Affair with Art House Cinema—a lengthy compilation of reviews and essays that I devoured in just a couple of days—I was struck anew by how close I feel to his sensibility. It’s not just that Lopate is, like me, a Brooklyn Jew, or that we share taste in books and films. It’s that neither of us has the desire, or perhaps the ability, to ignore the failings of even those we admire. (The title of one of his previous collections, Against Joie de Vivre, is more or less my credo.) For instance, Lopate’s short book on Susan Sontag, whom Lopate respected immensely, speaks unhesitatingly of her snobbery and scorn for anyone not part of her exalted world. (I experienced this directly on a couple of occasions, when I encountered her at film screenings. Never have I felt so like Gregor Samsa as I did under her disdainful gaze. “Who,” her expression said, “is this bug impinging on my sight?”)

It is this refusal of hagiography that makes My Affair with Art House Cinema so worthwhile. Lopate, who is especially fond of Japanese and Chinese cinema like the works of Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, also loves Akira Kurosawa, the most accessible of Japanese cineastes. But he readily critiques Kurosawa’s most famous film, Rashomon. “The fact that it is ‘iconic’ does not necessarily make it a masterpiece,” he writes, correctly identifying the various weaknesses that too many viewers and critics choose to ignore, such as the performance of Toshiro Mifune. Lopate even criticizes the work of friends, both filmmakers and critics. Yet unlike one of them—Jonathan Rosenbaum, who, he writes, “seems not to appreciate the difference between honesty and incivility”—Lopate never steps over the line into the land of churlishness.

He writes brilliantly about films both famous and lesser-known (including underappreciated works by prominent directors, like Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband) with great sensitivity for their writerly aspects as well as their strictly cinematic qualities. For those familiar with the movies he discusses, his readings are endlessly illuminating. But this book is also a wonderful guide to films the reader might have missed. While I had avoided Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty for reasons Lopate understands perfectly—a film that popular and critically acclaimed had to be crap—his case for it was so convincing that the day I read his review, my wife and I watched it. We were mesmerized for the entire two-hour-and-twenty-minute runtime, including the end credits. So consider this a recommendation not only of Lopate’s wonderful book, but also of the many films he so insightfully endorses.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): I’m not much of a rereader, but I’ve read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love four or five times over the past decade. Far more personal than the revered critic’s better-known works, the 1999 book details her experiences with a single therapist, beginning at age 42. Though their work together was prompted by Sedgwick’s diagnosis with breast cancer 18 months earlier (a disease from which she would die at age 58, ten years after the book’s publication), their conversations roam far beyond her lifelong “wish of not living” or her desire, following the initial cancer treatment, “to be realer.”

On first read, I was enthralled by the intimate details, at once ordinary and extraordinary, of a tremendous thinker’s inner life: her childhood memories, her relationship with her parents, her email correspondences and embarrassing dreams and fantasies about sex. I was captivated, too, by the invitation into the dynamics of therapy: Sedgwick’s initial fear that her new therapist might be “too dumb,” and the arguments, the affection, and the finely tuned shames that reliably burble up as their sessions continue.

My specific interest in therapy has waned over the years, but the book has continued to offer surprising gifts. For one, there’s its peculiar aesthetic: Drawing inspiration from the poet James Merrill, Sedgwick renders her narrative in the ancient Japanese form of haibun—blocks of prose punctuated by haiku—accompanied by a kind of “speaking spirit,” in the form of her therapist’s notes. Then, there are Sedgwick’s vulnerable and earnest attempts at parsing her own relationship to queerness. (“I know I want to talk about sex; it’s what I do for a living . . . But my own sexuality—do I even have one? It leaves me stony with puzzlement.”) In more recent rereadings, I have delighted, too, in the whispers of Jewishness that appear, a matter-of-fact part of Sedgwick’s otherwise wholly secular life. In her “handsome, provincial Jewish family” of origin, for instance, her mother refused to be called “Mom” because, Sedgwick speculates, it sounded either too uncultured or too American.

Sedgwick’s body of work resists “the idea / that you’re born sewn up / in a burlap bag with a / few other creatures, / and you have to claw / and fight inside that burlap / bag for your whole life.” Her sense of non-belonging in her family of origin, and the queer family she makes of her friends, are major themes throughout this book and her life more broadly. In those friendships, we get a taste of how, as she writes, “I recognize love.” In a recording of her reading an early excerpt of the book in 1998, the large audience’s love for her is evident in both their hush and their waves of delighted laughter. Generative, expansive pleasure, Sedgwick tells her therapist early on—the kind this book uncovers and enacts—is the only thing that might “bring me through to real change.”

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Each of the few times we’ve seen a sustained explosion of left protest in the past year—most notably during the student encampments of the spring—I’ve been reminded that I need to revisit the work of Rosa Luxemburg, which theorizes, among other things, the alchemical process which transforms local disruptions into a revolutionary crisis. But between work, organizing, and the constant witnessing of horror, my capacity for serious reading has been so reduced that instead of picking up The Essential Rosa Luxemburg as I ought to have done, I decided to start with Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg. It proved to be the perfect on-ramp.

Using text from primary sources, including Luxemburg’s published writings, speeches, and letters, together with intricate black-and-white sketches of her too-short life, Red Rosa offers a portrait of Luxemburg’s remarkable personal story and political thought. We see Rosa growing up as a Jewish, disabled girl in Tsarist Poland, reading Marx as a teenager, and quickly coming to situate her own experiences of discrimination inside a grander narrative of global racial-capitalist exploitation (“I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch . . . I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears”). We see her break gender barriers to study in Zurich; fall in revolutionary love; speak at the Socialist International; publish both propaganda newspapers and a dissertation on Polish industrialization; and eventually, move to Berlin and join the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, whose trajectory she quickly influenced with her writing and speeches.

Throughout this story, Evans rejects the biographer’s distance from the subject’s ideas, instead layering Luxemburg’s ideological and political insights into the telling of her life story. Panels featuring a tea kettle boiling over in Rosa’s kitchen are overlaid with her analysis of capitalism’s use of imperialism as a release valve; blackboard illustrations Rosa draws when teaching at the Party school lay out the doctrine of historical materialism; and in a memorable sex scene, Rosa’s bed covers are decorated with scenes depicting the history of labor action across the Russian Empire in 1905, culminating in quotes from her classic 1906 booklet “The Mass Strike.” The result of this masterful melding is that, unlike with most biographies, I finished this one oriented towards Luxemburg not just as a historical icon on a pedestal but as a strategist whose work offers weapons for the present struggle—if only we would pick them up. I’m ready to return to The Essential Rosa Luxemburg now.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): One should never pass up an opportunity to see a screening of a film by Robert Bresson. The great French director—whose rigor and uncompromising fidelity to his vision are nearly unrivaled—reinvented the medium, creating a cinematic language based on non-professional actors who are forbidden to “act” in the traditional sense. In a Bresson film, the characters’ speech is stripped of any histrionics; only the essential remains. (Anyone interested in the aesthetics of cinema must seek out not only his oeuvre itself, but also his treatise Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson, a collection of interviews, which give us access to the creative process of a genius who was sui generis.) I discovered Bresson in the early ’70s, when I first saw Four Nights of a Dreamer (showing in a restored version at this year’s New York Film Festival). I was so taken with this film that I sought out all the others—and later moved to Paris in the hope of meeting and working with him. I sadly failed in the latter, but I succeeded in the former; I recently found an account of my rendezvous with the legend, which I wrote and misplaced 45 years ago, and published it in Film Comment.

Over the next two weeks, Film Forum is screening two of Bresson’s late works. The Devil, Probably (1977), showing for a week starting today, is his most resolutely contemporary film, a meditation on disaffected youth and the collapse of civilization. It’s a dark film, one that holds out little hope for humanity—or the planet—and demonstrates much contempt for every aspect of modern life. It is also Bresson’s least successful film, its despair almost caricatural. His best films were adaptations of or modeled on works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or Bernanos. The Devil, Probably likewise probably has a certain value as a chronicle of the death of the spirit; more than that I can’t honestly say.

The following week, from September 27th through October 3rd, you can see Lancelot of the Lake (1974). This project, which Bresson pursued for decades, is both radically different from and radically continuous with the rest of his oeuvre. While the milieu is unlike any other in his filmography—the film is set in the Middle Ages and recounts the end of the court of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—the pared-down sets, the lack of outward emotion, the play of gazes, the strictly dictated rhythm of speech that gives the scenes an almost musical quality, and the austere framing we expect from Bresson are all here. The jousting tournaments, the failure of the hunt for the Holy Grail, the disintegration of King Arthur’s court, and the love between Lancelot and Queen Guinevere are all infused with the Bressonian spirit (the style that Paul Schrader, in a book he wrote before becoming a famous director and screenwriter, called “transcendental”). There can be little doubt that this enormously grave work exerted an influence on another film that is its polar opposite: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Indeed, when the knights hack away at each other in this comedy, it’s a direct homage to the opening scene of Bresson’s film. No stranger borrowing has ever occurred in the history of world cinema.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In 2017, the Whitney Biennial controversially presented “Open Casket,” a painting by the white artist Dana Schutz, based on a famous photograph of the lynched Black adolescent, Emmett Till. In response to sustained protests against the painting—at the museum and in reams of posts and articles—Schutz said that “Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection.”

Since then, at least, the critic and art historian Aruna D’Souza has been casting doubt on this steadfast liberal principle: that empathy for oppressed people drives progressive change. I first encountered her suspicion of this bromide in her 2018 book, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, a short volume of sparkling insights about the structural racism embedded in US exhibition spaces, and the Black resistance that has called them to account. Schutz’s artwork, and her defense of it, is one of the three case studies taken up in D’Souza’s book which, among other things, asks who is granted free speech—the common institutional defense of such exhibits—and who is denied it. On that saga, D’Souza reflects that “Where Schutz’s supporters heard in her words a brave attempt at empathy, her detractors heard her centering herself and her feelings—her white tears, as some would derisively describe it—at the expense of black viewers for whom Emmett Till was anything but historical.”

The limits and hazards of empathy—who is asked to feel it for whom, how it is elicited, what it ultimately produces—apparently kept gnawing at D’Souza, who has set about dislodging its teeth from discourses of resistance in the face of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. The result is the pamphlet-sized book, Imperfect Solidarities. Watching “the first genocide taking place on social media,” D’Souza considers the circulation of images by Palestinian documenters like Motaz Azaiza and Plestia Alaqad: People reposting them, she writes, “communicate their shock, their tears, their sense of grief, and encourage us to feel the same way in order to spur us to action.” But, she argues, such reliance on empathy puts the burden on those being victimized to perform what she calls the “traumatic labor” of making their circumstances known to audiences sitting in safety; second, empathy’s appeal comes from every direction, including the use of Israeli grief to justify obliteration of Palestinians; and third, it “often privileges the emotional response of those doing the witnessing, instead of the real conditions being experienced on the ground.” Witness, in short, becomes voyeurism; the obligation to act comes to depend on one’s self-satisfying feelings. Empathy, then, is a dangerous “prerequisite to political solidarity” and D’Souza calls, instead, for solidarity based on an ethics of care.

In such a short essay, D’Souza does not engage the considerable archive of such thinking (by, among others, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Robin D. G. Kelley, as well as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas); nor does she discuss current activist formations for whom care is an organizing principle and engine. Her unique contribution is instead thinking through the role of art in helping to produce a shift. Drawing on works spanning from the novelist Amitav Ghosh to artists Candice Breitz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Stephanie Syjuco, she shows how, contrary to old liberal pieties, artworks can deflect empathy. Rather than the translation and transparency that empathy insists on, D’Souza favors “context-specific alliances” that can appreciate opacity, “the right not to translate oneself into hegemonic terms.” Art, she shows, can open ways for us “to be able to act together without full comprehension, to be able to float on the seas of change.”

Jonathan Shamir (fellow): There comes a moment in the life of any post-punk band when it’s imperative to trade out angsty, low-fi garage rock for a more expansive, epic sound. They might get a new producer, or move to London—and there’s always a risk that they might lose their spark in making that leap. (I’m still reeling from Bloc Party’s decline.) I had high hopes that Fontaines D.C., the Irish five-piece whose three previous albums had so thoroughly charmed me with their affectionate and bristling portraits of their hometown (the initials in their name stand for Dublin City, not District of Columbia), would not let me down. Thankfully, their fourth album, Romance, released in August, shows that you can outgrow the warm but stifling embrace of your home while keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground.

For those of you who haven’t followed their meteoric ascent, the local lads got so big so quickly that their second record, A Hero’s Death, almost pipped Taylor Swift to number one on the U.K. album charts in 2020. They seem to have seen it coming. On “Big,” the opening track of their passionately restless and testosterone-fuelled debut album, Dogrel (2019), lead singer Grian Chatten screams: “My childhood was small, / but I’m gonna be big.” The band, with its rough-and-ready lyricism and thrashing riffs that recall The Libertines in their prime, soon proved him right.

Their third album, Skinty Fia, is a tough act to follow. It was probably my second-favorite album of 2022 (even the best rock group would struggle to dethrone King Kendrick). Its darker palette of haunting vocals and reverberating basslines fit its macabre subject matter: gravestones, abusive relationships, and suicides. There’s some romance in there, but the loftiest heights of love and deepest depths of loathing are reserved for Ireland itself, in songs that look unflinchingly back at home from the vantage of London. Most memorably, in the climax of “I Love You,” Chatten draws on a simile about the corrupted clergy to express his own conflicted patriotism: “And I loved you like a penny loves the pocket of a priest.”

Romance expands on the admirable mutability of Skinty Fia, delivering the band’s most sonically versatile album to date. Its sound spans nu-metal and anthemic rock: In the title track, the creepy clashing of the high keys on the piano conjure Radiohead experimenting with the occult; on the blithe “Bug,” Chatten’s stretched-out vocals channel the Britpop spirits of the recently revived. The album is also uncertain in its interests, even unmoored: It looks forward with morbid preoccupation, sideways at the all-consuming intensity of a toxic relationship, and backward at the musicians’ childhoods. But this restlessness may be the whole point. On the hip-hoppy “Starburster,” overstimulation is clearly the name of the game; Chatten rattles off all the abstruse and absurd things he is and wants to be (from “I want the preacher and pill” to “I am the pig on the Chinese calendar”) while the backing vocals repeat that “it may feel bad.” The sprawling lists are punctuated by the singer’s jolting gasps. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Chatten explained that the song is about a panic attack he had on the London underground. The dizzying options for self-creation in the modern metropole, or in love, are as debilitating as they are exciting. The album captures this spectrum of emotional states, from the aching viscerality of “retching with desire,” to a satisfied declaration of total numbness: “I don’t feel anything / I don’t feel bad.”

For all its panic attacks and death drives, Romance is also the group’s most accessible album to date, with cleaner mixing and bigger sounds. And that isn’t a bad thing. In perhaps the poppiest and best song of the whole album, the luscious dream rock number “Favourite,” the band waxes nostalgic about “bed radios” and “days playing football indoors.” In the ramped-up and often wild contrasts of modern life, the moments of simple tenderness that break through the clouds become especially bright, as when Chatten sings: “If there was lightning in me / you’d know who it was for.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Richard Behar’s Madoff: The Final Word was such a fun read that I did all I could to slow down my progress through its pages. Please don’t think that my describing an account of a Ponzi scheme in which thousands of people lost their life savings as “fun” makes me a heartless monster; it’s just that this portrait of a swindler, his swindle, and those who worked with or fell for it is executed with amazing brio, and with a point of view we’ve seldom heard in the years since the collapse of Madoff’s unprecedented scam in 2008.

According to Behar’s research, the scheme started in the 1960s, when Madoff, a fledgling investment advisor, lost $30,000 of his first client’s money. He borrowed funds to hide that loss and, like Max Bialystock in The Producers, discovered that there was an easy way to get rich: fraud. He took money given to him to invest and simply recycled it through all the investors. Year in and year out, through good times and bad, he paid out returns of 15%—or, for favored clients, even more—while profiting handsomely himself. The systems he used and the statements he sent out were all fraudulent. All told, $65 billion passed through Madoff’s hands.

What makes Behar’s book especially interesting is his insistence, backed by a number of experts, that there were no true victims; in fact, whenever he uses that word, he places it in scare quotes. His case: How is it that all of Madoff’s investors failed to question how it was possible to never, over the course of decades, lose any money in any quarter of any year? This is simply not within the realm of possibility. But who, after all, is going to question receiving thousands of dollars every few months? Everyone just cashed their dividend checks. For all parties involved, greed was the dominant force.

Jewish names appear on every page, and this is no accident. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was what is known as an “affinity crime”—that is, he focused on one particular group, in his case Jews like himself. One Jew brought in another Jew who turned their money over to a Jew who worked with other Jews at the highest level. (Italians occupied the middle ranks.) Among the innumerable defrauded Jews, one name stands out: Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel! What kind of Jew would knowingly involve the Jewish voice of conscience in a scheme he knew would ultimately cost him millions? Madoff told Behar that he took on Wiesel at the behest of mutual friends, adding, “I did have dinner with him once. You can’t even have a conversation with Elie . . . He’s full of shit, that guy. First of all, he didn’t lose any money [principal], like everyone else claims. He’s counting the profits.”

Madoff has a moral: You don’t have to be all that smart to make a killing in America. Being clever and immoral will do just fine.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): More than 1.9 million Americans are currently incarcerated in state prisons and jails, while 113 million have an immediate family member who has at one time been behind bars. Yet major literary fiction that directly and unsparingly takes up the prison remains rare. A welcome exception is Rachel Kushner’s 2018 novel The Mars Room, which conjures a California women’s prison in painstaking detail.

Drawing on deep relationships with incarcerated women as well as her own experience as a rebellious, free-range teen in San Francisco, Kushner centers the novel on the character of Romy Hall, a young mother raised in the Golden Gate City’s underbelly sentenced to two life sentences for killing her stalker. Alternating between Romy’s perspective and that of other figures from the prison, Kushner renders the building as a textured society with its own rich set of social codes: methods for passing items between cells in solitary confinement; canteen food recipes; and constant political negotiations with staff over privileges and rules. The narrative spares little in its frankness or its horror: An early scene involves a teenager going into labor in handcuffs while fellow prisoners are punished for coming to her aid.

The fictional prison called Stanville, based on a facility in Chowchilla, California that is one of the country’s largest women’s prisons, is presented as both continuity and contrast with its surroundings. Mountain lions shriek and gray foxes dart through rich yellow grasses in the Sierras above the facility, indicating an enduring natural beauty off-limits to its inhabitants. Yet on the valley floor, the prison’s sense of confinement extends to the eponymous town where it is located: The water is “poisoned,” the air is “bad,” and “people without cars walk the main boulevard in the hottest part of the day, when it’s 113 degrees. They amble along in the gutter of the road, scooting empty shopping carts, piercing the dead zone of the late afternoon with the carts’ metallic rattle.” In this sense, the prison and the world outside become a free-flowing and interdependent ecosystem, with the prison both resulting from and producing poverty and despair. But against this backdrop, Kushner’s narrative also shows how the prison, like all societies, encompasses a whole range of experiences: the characters reflect on their lot with dry wit, and Romy and her friends make each other laugh in the prison yard, walking past groups of women playing guitars, or having sex while lookouts watch for guards, or tanning slathered in cook oil and wearing homemade undershirts known as “slingshots.”

Given the sensitivity and depth I observed in the book, I disagree with diagnoses like that of critic Christian Lorentzen that The Mars Room foregoes literary beauty or complexity in its quest to make a noble political statement. While it’s true that the prose can be uneven—and Lorentzen correctly identifies that the voice of Romy, tasked with being our anthropological guide to the prison, can sometimes lose its independent spark—I didn’t find The Mars Room exceptionally didactic. On the contrary, I appreciated Kushner’s decision to draw characters with complicated pasts who have indeed committed grave harms, as opposed to others that could more easily win liberal sympathies such as the nonviolent drug offenders or the wrongfully convicted. The Mars Room refuses to tiptoe around its reader; it is confident it can tell full stories of incarcerated human beings without ever eclipsing the sharp edges of the prison walls that cage them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the history of the past half-century of Brazilian cinema is the story of the producer Luiz Carlos Barreto and his family. He and his wife and children have served as directors and backers of many of the country’s most important films and filmmakers since 1963, when he founded his production company. A man firmly on the left, he was a key supporter of the work of the Cinema Novo movement of the ’60s and ’70s, which brought Brazil to the forefront of world cinema. A small selection of the 50 films he has produced will be showing until September 15th for “Isso é Brasil,” a retrospective at Lincoln Center.

This festival includes a sampling of the full range of Barreto productions. The ’60s—the height of Cinema Novo—are best represented by two classics: Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth (1967) and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Barren Lives (1963). One of the most European of Brazil’s directors, Rocha made films radical in both form and content. Entranced Earth is an uncompromising satire of the political and intellectual classes in Brazilian society, highlighting their weakness and cowardice; none of those responsible for the injustices that reigned in the country escapes unscathed. Barren Lives is a harsh portrayal of the even harsher experience of the peasants of Brazil’s Northeast. Shot in gleaming black and white, it’s a tale of the callousness of the wealthy and the destitution of the poor—and the little hope they had for a better life. Like Barren Lives, Pereira dos Santos’s later, epic-length film Memoirs of Prison (1984) is based on a book by Graciliano Ramos—one of the most important Brazilian writers, a Communist arrested for his part in a 1935 left-wing uprising against President Getúlio Vargas. Sent to prison and then to a prison colony, his two-volume memoir of his incarceration is the basis for this film, a powerful tribute to the courage and tenacity of Ramos and his comrades.

This being a Brazilian festival, naturally there are two films about soccer stars: Garrincha, the People’s Joy (1963) and This Is Pelé (1974). Neither is a portrait of the men as men; Pelé’s support for the military dictatorship and Garrincha’s personal problems, which led to his drinking himself to death at age 50, are totally absent. Rather, we are presented with the magic of their play, with large chunks of both films dedicated to highlights from their careers, their amazing artistry with the ball at their feet. The retrospective also includes other popular cinema like the international smash hits Bye Bye, Brazil (1980) and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976), which made Sônia Braga an international star.

As we prepare for the arrival of two important new Brazilian films in the coming months—Walter Salles’s film on a political crime of the ’70s, I’m Still Here, and Petra Costa’s documentary on evangelical Christianity’s role in Bolsonaro’s rise, Apocalypse in the Tropics—“Isso é Brasil” provides us with crucial cine-historical background to understand the Brazilian filmmakers of today.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): My husband and I have been on the hunt for the perfect ’90s movie. By that we mean: original, fun, and action-packed, that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Think: Last Action Hero, Sneakers, Speed.) In discussing our quest with friends, people kept telling us to re-watch Twister (1996), which features a ragtag group of storm chasers getting way too close to tornadoes for the sake of science. It’s true: Twister got everything right: an ensemble cast (Bill Paxton; Helen Hunt; Carey Elwes; and Philip Seymour Hoffman!), romantic drama, world historical stakes, and CGI that holds up despite being almost 30 years old.

I cannot, unfortunately, say the same thing for Twisters, the paint-by-numbers remake released this summer. Every scene in the original has an analog here—the Big Trauma Backstory, the Twin Twisters, the Twister Hits a Community Event—in a way that punishes you, rather than rewards you, for having recently seen the original. There seems to be no discernible narrative connection between the original and the remake—no sense of whether or how this new team of storm chasers, using at least some of the technology that belonged to characters from the original, is related, or whether we’re even in a world where the first team existed at all. Paxton’s analog here is played by Daisy Edgar Jones, whose character’s Okie accent repeatedly slips into her Irish one. There is so much expository dialogue that it sometimes feels as if you’re reading the script doctor’s outline.

Both films are already somewhat ridiculous considering their villain is a natural disaster. (“This has to stop!” cries Hunt’s injured aunt in the original film. I burst out laughing.) But in that movie, at least it’s about understanding the tornadoes, collecting data to increase warning times. In the remake, it’s about dissolving them altogether by driving into them with some kind of chemical, which veers into techno-optimist Marvel movie territory. Skip Twisters, watch Twister instead.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): For several years, the director Nathan Silver has worked in a quiet corner of the cinema world, making small, sometimes intense DIY-style films like The Great Pretender (2018). His new film, Between the Temples, takes him in another direction. Even if this sweet comedy—a kind of Harold and Maude Have Shabbos Dinner—ends exactly where I could tell it would after the first ten minutes, it still provides a knowing and kindly mocking picture of the life of a Jewish cleric.

Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwarzman), the chazan at a shul in the Hudson Valley, is going through a crisis of faith following the accidental death of his wife (who, he never fails to point out, was an alcoholic). His despair is so profound that he can no longer sing. Schwartzman looks perfectly awful in the role, a total schlub, and his usually unpleasant edge is blunted just enough to make him sympathetic—but not sympathetic enough to avoid being socked in the face in a bar on a Friday night while wearing a yarmulke and carrying a tallis. He is rescued by Ms. Carla O’Sullivan (Carol Kane), his former music teacher, who visits him at shul the next week and announces that she wants to have a bas mitzvah. He’s resistant, but Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) tells him to prepare his new student.

I’ve not stepped foot in a shul in over 50 years (Baruch Hashem), but apparently nothing has changed in synagogue life. Smigel, who is brilliant in the role, has a ball with his portrayal of the sweet but sometimes silly rabbi and his entire modus operandi—aimed, as he says, at “putting Jews in the pews.” We see him carrying out his congregational responsibilities, which include running a bake sale to support the dedication of a Torah honoring victims of the Holocaust. (“Where bake sales meet the Holocaust is my sweet spot,” he quips.) He loves and is absolutely terrible at golf, at which he cheats. Early in the film we see him practicing putting in his office, sending the ball into a shofar placed on the floor; he warns Ben to tell anyone who opens the door that it’s not a kosher one. He tells terrible jokes and has a wife with heavily botoxed lips and a beautiful daughter, Gabrielle (Madeline Weinstein), whom he describes as “a mess.” In good Jewish parent fashion, he tries to make a shidduch between Ben and Gabrielle—it doesn’t go well. And of course, he must bend to the will of one of Ben’s two mothers (Dolly De Leon), a wealthy realtor and Filipina convert to Judaism who is more strict in her observance than anyone in the film born Jewish.

Silver shows himself to be a master at inserting brilliantly funny lines into unexpected places, none of them underlined and all of them much funnier for that. In a magnificent touch, the always excellent Keith Poulson gives a deadpan performance as a sneering bartender who also shows up as a waiter. Even the most over-the-top physical bit—Ben’s reaction when he learns that the burger he’s eating with Carla has cheese on it—is handled with great comedic flair.

So deft is Between the Temples that we don’t even realize that by the film’s end, Ben’s crises have only worsened. Maybe that’s what’s most Jewish about it.

Josh Lambert (contributing writer): 2024 has turned out to be a banner year for graphic narratives about the Holocaust. These texts take a wide variety of approaches to a familiar form, some more successful than others.

Replay—a graphic memoir by Jordan Mechner, who created the classic video games Karateka and The Prince of Persia—tells an intergenerational family tale but focuses on the author’s father, Francis, who fled Nazi-occupied Europe as a child in the 1940s. The book offers a sharply drawn and effective story, but there’s something jarring about the juxtaposition of Francis’s escape from a racist government and Jordan’s lack of self-consciousness about having gotten rich off the martial Orientalism of his video game narratives. While Replay doesn’t consider the link between trauma and the urge to violence, Leela Corman’s beautiful graphic novel Victory Parade is dazzlingly, distressingly attentive to this entanglement. In huge pages and gorgeous watercolors, the book slips between the Berlin of 1936 and the Brooklyn of 1943—and between dreams and reality—vividly evoking the pain of living through those nightmarish times. For its part, the long-awaited second volume of Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters interweaves this awful era with terrors of another kind. Like the acclaimed first book, it presents itself as the sketchbook of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old Latina girl growing up in late-1960s Chicago who is fascinated by horror comics (and always draws herself as a werewolf). The novel’s backbone is the more worldly horror of Holocaust testimony, recorded onto tape by Karen’s recently deceased neighbor, Anka Silverberg. While Ferris’s visual style is grotesquely exquisite, the book somewhat sensationalizes Anka’s experiences, raising urgent, difficult questions about pop culture’s fetishization of monstrous violence.

The two most recent entries in this genre are also the ones most interested in directly addressing the premises that underlie it. Heavyweight—the debut graphic memoir by Jewish Currents director of community engagement Sol Brager—delves into their German Jewish family’s dispossession by the Nazis and suffering during the war. But more than any Holocaust memoir I can recall, it also attends to the ways in which wealthy German Jews enriched themselves through complicity with European racism and colonialism. In Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz, out this week, CUNY professor Ari Richter likewise troubles oversimplified narratives of victimhood. The memoir explores his family’s Holocaust experiences and his own growing obsession with them. Richter’s aggressively unpleasant style—characterized by scratchy, dark drawings—conveys his visceral shame and anxiety, whose many causes include his own “internalized German supremacy” and his family’s “racial blind spots.” Like Brager, as Richter tells his family’s stories, he also grapples with an uncomfortable truth: that Jews’ suffering is more legible, legally recognized, and marketable than that of other people who’ve suffered brutal violence.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Some of my favorite TV and film over the last several years have been from Ireland (special shoutout to Normal People, which has a completely different kind of magic than the book). The North of Ireland in particular has had some hits, first with Derry Girls, an irreverent sitcom about the lives of a misfit clique of high school girls in the waning years of the Troubles, and now with Kneecap, a heavily fictionalized biopic about the real-life Irish language rap group of the same name, starring its actual members: Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí. I live with a Hibernophile who has a specific interest in the North and the history of the Troubles, so I was somewhat familiar with Kneecap’s music and story before going to see the film. As much as this movie is pure fun for everyone—Mo and Móglaí are two hard-partying, drug-dealing lads of the ceasefire generation and their debauchery makes up some of the most enjoyable extended sequences of the film—it is the politics of the indigenous Irish language that provides the heart of Kneecap. In the film (though not in real life), Móglaí’s IRA father instills in the boys a love of the language by drilling them on their irregular verbs in their youth, often repeating the maxim, “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.” Throughout the course of the film, proponents of the Irish language argue over whether Kneecap’s use of it to talk, for the most part, about sex, drugs, and FTP is a perversion of the language, or an assertion of its aliveness in the face of extinction. Detractors—mostly the police (or, as they say, “the peelers”), media figures, and local authorities—simply want it gone. These debates never play out didactically; if anything, the web of characters and their motivations sometimes feel overly contrived to make sure any such conversation is firmly in service of narrative.

This made me think of a conversation I had with a Yiddishist at a party a number of years ago, who said, essentially, that she got over her worry that she wasn’t speaking “properly” when she realized that almost no one else was. All Yiddish spoken today, after all, had been severed from a “pure, authentic” source, and was in development in a new context. I also found myself thinking of Sephardic studies professor Devin Naar, perhaps one of the only people on earth raising his young children entirely in Ladino—my father’s first language, and one he promptly abandoned. Though I have long been suspicious of revivalist projects, the film helped me to think differently about what changes politically when you embrace a language, however idiosyncratically, instead of letting it die. Indeed, as the band performs today in Irish at a major English music festival, backed by a message about the UK’s complicity in genocide, they are proving that such political commitments provide a firm basis for real global solidarity. And though the loss of language in my own family—as well as the genocide that abetted it—is more distant, they have succeeded in making me ask: What could Ladino mean to me, politically?