Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In the Q&A after the screening I saw of All That’s Left of You—Cherien Dabis’s intergenerational epic following a single Palestinian family from 1948 to the present day—the moderator, actor Morgan Spector, remarked on the film’s Hollywoodification of the Nakba: gorgeous actors, classic dramatic cinematography, big emotional storytelling. He meant it as a compliment, and Dabis excitedly received it as such. Indeed, this was exactly what she intended. Open Netflix and you cannot help but be overwhelmed by slick dramas dedicated to the Holocaust or World War II. That history has become a shared American cultural touchstone largely through film. Why hasn’t the Nakba, and the Palestinian story writ large, with all its inherent drama, ever gotten the big-budget Hollywood treatment? (A largely rhetorical question, considering the lengths that American media, especially Hollywood, has gone to suppress that story for decades, and the current maneuvering at networks and studios to make sure it stays that way.) Dabis wanted to correct for that lacuna, to make a film about the Palestinian experience whose formal conventions (confections?) might help it enter the cultural bloodstream before rousing the antibodies.

There is no caveat coming; it’s a beautiful film. Perhaps in a lesser director’s hands, these aims might have come with egregious compromises; the tragedy might have been reduced to melodrama, the broadly humanist messaging might have landed a little too pat. One might quibble with the convenience of leaving Palestinian armed resistance out of frame. But Dabis’s investment in character helps each beat feel earned. It is a testament to her craft that a great many elements of Palestinians’ oppression—from the seizing of property, farmland, and valuables in the Nakba, to the medical apartheid, permit regime, and military violence and humiliation that characterize the occupation of the West Bank—are dramatized for the audience without ever feeling heavy-handed or didactic. The film does not tell a single story about the affective strategies that Palestinians have employed to ensure their survival, on and off the land; a defeated quietism sits uneasily within families alongside strident nationalism and a will to confrontation. And though the plot builds toward a stunning act of generosity on the part of a Palestinian family toward Israelis, there is no feel-good coexistence narrative on offer. At a time when it seems that the horizon of American politics is linked to our ability to face the Nakba alongside other imperial catastrophes, Dabis has given us a tool wrapped in a work of art wrapped in a Hollywood movie.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Talene Monahon’s Meet the Cartozians—equal parts historical family drama and spiky contemporary satire—begins in a sumptuous living room in Portland, Oregon in the fall of 1923. An immigrant family is going through papers with an expensive lawyer, who is helping them defend their status in the United States. “Asīga īnč əsél é, ‘white person’?” asks the increasingly confused grandmother, speaking un-subtitled Armenian. The line drew boisterous laughter at the performance I saw, thanks in large measure to Andrea Martin’s masterful delivery: Spitting out those two English words with a sharply enunciated ‘t’ and ’p,’ she expressed the character’s innocent frustration even as she knowingly poked a 21st Century audience’s tender ribs.

You didn’t have to know that the first part of the line translates to “What does this mean?” nor recognize the words that follow—“As parə hokīs hanét͜s. Īnč əsél é?”—to sympathize with the grandmother’s bafflement and exasperation. (Translation, thanks to the playscript: “I am exhausted from this term. What does it mean?”) The shifting, shady, and often absurd concept of whiteness in the United States—one’s weariness of debating it and terror over its deployment—pounds at the heart of this hilarious and harrowing play.

The family in the first act are the Cartozians, and the case they are preparing for is based on the real-life United States v. Cartozian of 1925, a challenge to the US government’s effort to revoke the citizenship of a successful carpet dealer from Armenia named Tatos Cartozian (played by Nael Nacer with heartrending delicateness.) The back story is this: Congressional statutes revised after the Civil War allowed for the naturalization only of “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity” and “of African descent.” As early 20th Century immigration from Asia began to produce a wave of applicants for citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled in 1922 and 1923 respectively that people from Japan and from India were not white, and hence not fit for naturalization.

These cases paved the way for the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which barred even from entry to the US anyone who was ineligible for citizenship—a law that was not fully repealed until 1965 (and one for which Stephen Miller sounds maniacally nostalgic.) Though Armenians had been absorbed legally and culturally into America for decades, in this new climate—and in the wake of the Armenian genocide—the Cartozian suit was a high-stakes test case that hinged entirely on the question of whether Armenians are white. (It’s not just Jews who had been—as Eric Goldstein put it in The Price of Whiteness—“a racial conundrum.” Although, as far as I know, we never had to pull up our sleeves to show our skin to a judge, as Cartozian did.)

In beautifully paced domestic scenes, the family’s lawyer, Wallace McCamant, coaches them on proper comportment, urging them to cast off any evidence of suspicious foreignness, insisting that they replace ads for their rugs that bear images of camels and “Mohammedans,” that they shift their traditional Christmas celebration from January 6th (the Epiphany) to December 25th and commit other dispiriting acts of assimilation.

In Act Two, which takes place 100 years later in the affluent Glendale area of Los Angeles, we meet an accomplished group of Armenian Americans, whose ties to their heritage are felt but frayed. The living room in this home has been turned into a makeshift TV studio—furniture rearranged, standing lights glaring—for the shooting of a reality show, whose name gives the play its title. The group (same actors, new roles) has gathered for the Christmas episode in which they are to share aspects of their cultural observance with the show’s uber-famous star of Armenian descent. (If you have a pulse, you know the reference. And there’s more than one swipe at her skin tanner.)

The star is delayed “wrapping up glam,” the cameraman explains, so he asks the group to let him shoot as they introduce themselves to her empty chair—and they do, to uproarious effect. They end up squabbling over a movement to add “Armenian” as a subcategory of the Middle Eastern/North African classification in the 2030 census. Now, at a time when the simit one of them has baked for the occasion is gluten-free, some of the assembled argue that Armenians are not white. “My own lived experience is I’m not white at the airport,” notes one, who also reveals that he lost a promotion at his academic job because “they didn’t want to give tenure to another white man.” Now it is the cameraman—of Irish descent—who, standing in for the audience, is confounded by the slipperiness of racial classification. Monahan takes a couple of cheap shots here, but her aim is always sure, and it was moving to sit in a mainstream theater among a seldom-represented audience and witness them responding audibly to every recognizable reference and character from their community.

I laughed a lot through the play—but watching it as citizen ceremonies have been canceled, asylum and refugee processes paused, and immigration processing halted—it was the kind of laugh that stings the throat.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): On January 29th, 2024 the IDF murdered Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl, after returning to the scene where they had already killed six of her relatives and two ambulance workers. In its cruelty, cowardice, stupidity, and impunity, this single event can stand as a synecdoche of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. It stands to condemn Israel forever.

Hind was in her uncle’s car when the IDF killed her relatives, stuck in a kind of no man’s land into which no one could enter to rescue her. The Palestinian Red Crescent in Ramallah attempted to send an ambulance for her, but it needed to jump through a number of administrative hoops before dispatching a crew of rescue workers. The little girl was in a panic, so workers in Ramallah stayed on the phone with her to keep her morale up. The situation, though, was almost hopeless from the start. After all that circuitous bureaucracy, the ambulance sent to rescue her was inexplicably fired on and destroyed, the crew blown literally to pieces. Hind stayed in the family car and her dead body was only recovered 12 days later. Israel promised an investigation. We’re still waiting for the results.

The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s almost unbearable dramatization of the killings and the failed attempt to save the child, is concentrated in the Ramallah office, where the angry, impetuous Omar (Motaz Malhees), who first contacts Hind, attempts to speed up and even circumvent normal processes in order to rescue the child. He is opposed by his supervisor, Mahdi (Amar Hlehel), who, though a stickler for procedure, is being especially punctilious in order to avoid adding the ambulance crew to the day’s death toll. Hind is put off by Omar, and so she spends most of her time on the phone with Rana (Saja Khilani), who keeps her occupied and as calm as possible.

The film is made even more difficult to watch because of a choice the director made that underlined the horror of that day in northern Gaza. Ben Hania used the actual recordings of Hind’s pleas, which lasted for hours. The voices of the Red Crescent workers are usually those of actors, interspersed in moments of special drama with those of the actual dispatching crew. Hind is deathly afraid, caught in a car full of murdered, bleeding relatives, but the workers do a miraculous job keeping her hopeful.

It’s all for naught. The film ends with footage of the destroyed car and ambulance, and of old video of Hind playing in a water filled sand pit, the closest thing in her short life to the beach we hear her mother telling us she so wanted to see again.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): For years, Call It Sleep—Henry Roth’s 1934 autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century—languished in my pile of to-read books. It shifted from my dresser to my desk to my nightstand, nearly 500 pages long with small type.

I wanted to read it; it had been described to me as a modernist Jewish epic akin to Ulysses, or, as the cover blurbs reminded me every time I relocated my copy, “arguably the most distinguished work of fiction ever written about immigrant life” (Lis Harris) and “the most profound novel of Jewish life by an American” (Alfred Kazin). But the descriptions I’d heard from friends were not exactly enticing. They often used words like “brutal” and “depressing.” They frequently mentioned the ubiquitous portrayals of abuse and abject poverty. It didn’t seem, by most accounts, to be a particularly enjoyable read. (To say nothing of Henry Roth’s own troubling biography, which I only discovered far later.) In our current political context, where I find much to be horrified about every day, I was not eager to pick up fiction that would plunge me into fresh despair.

I was surprised when I finally read Call It Sleep earlier this year. Make no mistake: It is indeed a heavy book, and it does not shy away from the harsh reality that was life on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. But to define the novel solely on the basis of the suffering it depicts is, perhaps, the same trap we fall into when we define people based on their suffering. The gift of Call It Sleep is the remarkably rich world it portrays, complete with sights, sounds, and smells that are more than a century old. As the protagonist David Schearl wanders around the streets of the Lower East Side, we are wandering with him—and experiencing every mystery, mishap, and adventure along with him, too. Rather than feeling weighed down by misery during the month that I read Call It Sleep, I felt like I was living part-time in its universe—hitching a rollerskate ride on the back of a horse-drawn buggy, or walking along trolley tracks on Avenue D, only to look up and remember that I was aboard a smartphone-filled Q train car in Eric Adams’s New York.

(An aside for the New York City geography nerds among us: David lives on East 9th Street and Avenue D, in the neighborhood now called “Alphabet City.” As a native New Yorker who grew up with the notion that the Lower East Side ends at Houston Street—and who now lives in a part of Flatbush that the realtors have christened “Prospect Park South”—I was fascinated to encounter yet another example of the longstanding New York City practice of gentrification-rebranding.)

Roth made a few important stylistic choices that contribute to the immersive feeling of Call It Sleep. Probably the best known is that when the characters speak in English, their accented speech is rendered phonetically—for example, “I know sommbody wod he hoided his hand on de Futt f’om Jillai—wid a fiyuh crecker.” (I sometimes found myself reading aloud in order to figure out what was being said.) When they speak in Yiddish, however, the transcription is delivered in perfect English, and often poetic: “She was very small, my grandmother, very frail and delicate. The light came through her hands like the light through a fan.” The effect of this is to reverse the standard othering of immigrant languages—while Yiddish may be the “other” in the characters’ new land, in Call It Sleep it is the master tongue, the “correct” way of speaking as opposed to the strange, foreign English that David hears and speaks outside of his home.

Roth’s other choice that allows us so completely to enter the world of Call It Sleep is a simple one—so simple, in fact, that I didn’t notice it until I was halfway through. The entire novel is written strictly, and without aberration, from the limited perspective of a child. There are no dips into omniscience; for all 440 pages, we see only what David sees. As adult readers, this is somewhat like being dropped into an unfamiliar landscape and having our glasses taken away from us. We watch as David parses the strange and inscrutable, from sex to his father’s mental illness, and while we may put the clues together faster than he can, we are ultimately at the mercy of what he perceives. He is at the helm; we are passengers along for the ride of his experience, and what an astonishing experience it is.

I might argue that Call It Sleep is a novel as much about agency as about despair. David’s world is full of danger and even terror, but we are moving through it on his terms, and in doing so we remember that human beings—even children—are fundamentally agents of their own existence. I am thinking a lot these days about how we tell stories of suffering—stories that bend the mind in horror, but that sometimes erase the lives at the center. What does it look like to make a different choice?

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Before coming across Run and Hide while searching for Pankaj Mishra books at the library, I admittedly hadn’t even known that the political essayist also wrote novels. But I was drawn in from the first few pages of the 2022 book, which begins with an unsettling scene of the narrator and his two college roommates, Aseem and Virendra, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, undergoing the traditional hazing from upperclassmen, calibrated for their class and caste backgrounds. The college hostel setting is made immediate in its detail (“The walls of our room were distempered sallow, with marks where oiled heads had rested”) but the narration comes from a distance. There are frequent references to the pre-college past—in which the narrator and the other boys endured poverty while their parents put all resources into their education in the hope of upward mobility—and to some undetermined time in the future, in which Aseem, Virendra, and their upperclass tormenter Siva have apparently managed to rise to positions of wealth and influence, and have then experienced some type of disastrous downfall.

This is the setup for a sober, contemplative novel that makes use of Mishra’s facility with both prose and social critique. Each IIT student confronts the 21st century vision of a “New India”—the hope that, via increased economic and political liberalization and globalization, the giant country might become a hub of modernity, mobility, and financial power, with the spoils accessible even to those from the poorest backgrounds. Aseem has a vision of a New India that will allow him a chance at cultural cachet; on his path there, he makes an impressive commitment to social justice journalism, but also displays an unending appetite for status and a pernicious misogynistic streak. For Virendra and Siva, the New India means a chance for jobs at American hedge funds and untold riches, and the attendant temptations of corruption. Arun, the narrator, is more ambivalent, committed to escaping the one-room, unfurnished cabin and volatile father of his childhood, but exhausted by the social world of the Delhi cultural elite; he works as a literary translator and retreats to an almost monkish existence in a Himalayan village, where real estate speculators are slowly beginning to hunt for land. In the meantime, he learns that for many of his countrymen, the dream of a New India is increasingly synonymous with the Hindu nationalist vision of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Some readers might complain that most of the characters in the book remain archetypes, designed to flesh out a moment of complex political transformation rather than to stand alone, and they would not be wrong. Still, the novel remains propulsive, thanks in part to how the narrator continually addresses a mysterious “you”—a woman named Alia, apparently working on a book about the trajectories of men like Siva and Virendra, whom we eventually meet. When we finally do see Arun’s romance with Alia, who comes from a well-off family and is a rising name in leftist advocacy on Twitter, our narrator is initially caught up in the ease and excitement of her international lifestyle. Eventually, though, the sparkle wears off: Mishra paints an uncomfortably accurate portrait of the superficiality of a certain set of well-meaning affluent lefty literary types. (At one party in London with Alia, Arun records the chatter taking place around him, with someone saying, “Maybe Rebecca Solnit is an exception, but white feminists are the embodiment of neo-imperalism” as another comments, “Airbnb really should have a filter for smart TVs.”)

Arun, more and more, gravitates toward retreat into Buddhist meditation—a retreat, his monk guide promises him, from the “self” entirely. Mishra’s narrative successfully punctures the idealization of a New India, making plain how unevenly its benefits have accrued, and equally deflates any faith in the social media-inflected political response of Alia and her cohort. Yet if the book is often harsh on Alia, the finale, which I won’t spoil here, comes to complicate that picture, as Arun begins to recast some of her public activism as resolute and brave. Was Alia truly so shallow, or was he just too distant to fully see her? Her hypocrisies and stumbles may be embarrassing, but, the novel posits, not so shameful as Arun’s attempts to “run and hide.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy, on display at Poster House in Chelsea until February 22th, 2026, is a remarkable show for many reasons. It put me in mind of the former Communist turned Fascist Black Shirt Niccola Bombacci, who claimed that the two great revolutions were the Russian and Fascist revolutions. Bombacci, who was executed and whose body was displayed alongside Mussolini’s when the latter was killed by partisans, meant it in a political sense. But in this wide-ranging display of advertising posters, political messaging, self-praise on the part of the government, and exaltation of the Duce, I was reminded of nothing so much as Russian revolutionary posters—indeed, of radical posters and art from around the world.

Mussolini didn’t wage war on degenerate art the way Hitler, his student and later master, did. He might not have really cared for any avant garde literature or art, but he knew how to praise it and make use of it. Italy was a key player in modernist art, so cutting the country off from it would have been a foolish move, even more so in that so many of Italy’s most important artists, most famously the Futurists, were Fascists of the first hour. We are accustomed to being told how the geist of Futurist art was inherently fascist; in The Future Was Then we get the opportunity to see how that fascism manifested itself in directly political terms. Most striking is a strange bust, Renato Giuseppe Bertelli’s “Profilo continuo” (Continuous Profile), which on first glance looks like a pawn in a chess set, but when viewed from certain angles is the profile of Mussolini in motion. Mussolini and the masses are blended in posters like “L’Italia fascista in cammino” (Fascist Italy on the move) and a 1932 poster for an exhibition celebrating ten years of Fascist rule.

That Mussolini should be the focus of so many works, either his image or just in striking versions of the letter “M”, which in context can only stand for the name of the Duce, is hardly surprising. The man, his image, and his party were everything. The posters we see here express the totalitarian nature of the state in ways that are aesthetically surprising, but that are in many ways like the work produced in the early years of the Soviet Union, when the Russian avant garde placed its talent at the service of the new state.

The works cover a wide number of aspects of life in fascist Italy. The exaltation of aviation, that most modern means of transport, are stunning, and sport is shown to be a key part of Fascism. More surprising are simple advertising posters for fabrics and milk and cars (FIAT, of course) and chocolates, among other things. The art work on all of them is far from merely functional. It is, in fact, revolutionary.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In 1946, halfway through a Broadway play, a character called David, a young Holocaust survivor, broke the fourth wall and directly confronted the audience with a shocking accusation: “Where were you – Jews? . . . When the six million were being burned and buried alive in the lime pits, where were you? . . . You Jews of America! . . . Nowhere! Because you were ashamed to cry out as Jews.” The play—which ends with this hero joining a group of Haganah, Irgun, and Sternist soldiers marching to Palestine as they sing “Hatikvah”—was Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born. The actor playing David was Marlon Brando (a year away from his breakout performance in A Streetcar Named Desire).

David’s angry cynicism is contrasted in the play by two old pious survivors drawn from the world of Sholem Aleichem and played by veterans of the Yiddish stage, Celia Adler and Paul Muni (who had changed his name from Muni Weisenfreund when he crossed over to the English-language stage); Muni’s character was named Tevya. The elders die by play’s end, but David heads boldly into a new Jewish future, waving a makeshift flag: Tevya’s tattered tallis, to which David has affixed a Mogen Dovid. The soldiers tell him that as they “fight for Palestine,” they speak “a new Jewish language, the language of guns. We fling no more prayers or tears at the world. We fling bullets.”

The show ran for four months before embarking on a national tour. Hecht was already well known at that point for his Hollywood screenplays, among them The Front Page, His Girl Friday, and Scarface (as well as for some novels and countless works of journalism) but, as the theater scholar Garrett Eisler recounts in Ben Hecht’s Theatre of Jewish Protest, Hecht’s horror at news from Europe in the early 1940s prompted his calls to action in the columns he wrote for the left-leaning journal PM. Those articles caught the eye of Peter Bergson, the far-right Zionist organizer, who reached out to the writer. Hecht soon joined Bergson’s Committee for a Jewish Army. The Popular Front liberal and the Jabotinsky acolyte forged a heady partnership, seeking to win American hearts and minds—along with their dollars—for the cause.

Eisler calls A Flag is Born Broadway’s “first Zionist play” as well as the first Holocaust drama to address the trauma of World War II from the perspective of Jewish survivors. In it, Palestinian Arabs are barely mentioned—there’s just a line in which Tevya claims them as allies against their common British enemy—as the play’s point-blank message focuses entirely on the Jewish right to a homeland. In part, it does so, Eisler argues, as one of the first works to claim “the unfolding story of the Holocaust as a Jewish story, framing it as a ‘discrete’ and exceptional event,” in a period before the world had distinguished the violence as a “war against the Jews.”

A Flag Is Born was just one of four propagandistic works produced by Bergson and written by Hecht in the 1940s, and Eisler deftly places them within theatrical history in thematic and stylistic terms. The first and best known, We Will Never Die (1943), was subtitled “A Memorial Dedicated to the Two Million Jewish Dead of Europe.” Featuring music by Kurt Weill, the mass spectacle played at Madison Square Garden to sold-out audiences of 20,000 before touring to similar venues in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The pageant sought to raise American consciousness and to save the Jews of Europe while also, Eisler writes, “to change American perceptions of Jews as defenseless victims – a stereotype [the artists] believed only encouraged neglect of indifference toward their cause.” The tour reached Los Angeles shortly after the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and Hecht quickly added a new scene depicting “an action-driven war narrative,” writes Eisler, honoring how Jews fought back.

The other two Bergson-Hecht collaborations were A Jewish Fairy Tale (1944), a one-act comedy responding to the assassination of a British imperial officer by Jewish militants, and The Terrorist (1947), written for a Zionist benefit evening (and commissioned by then-Irgun commander Menachem Begin). The least known and most astonishing of the works, it is essentially a prison drama based on the real-life story of Dov Gruner, an Irgun fighter hanged by the British for his part in an attack on a British police station and celebrated by the most militant wings of the Zionist movement—and by the play—as a martyr.

In an appendix to his book, Eisler includes the scripts to all four works—some published for the first time—affording readers the chance to encounter for themselves these strange but influential specimens of political theater that played a major role in rousing America’s Zionist sentiments and shaping them for decades to come.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): The title story in Bennett Sims’s collection Other Minds is about a reader frustrated with the other readers whose traces he encounters in the form of e-book highlights. These “other minds” seem always to underline the same old maxims about love: “Love was …,” “Being in love meant…” The sense of isolation this induces for our reader—who prefers to underline “precise descriptions”—conjures a dinner party where, as he savors ice cream, his companions lick spoonfuls of ash.

I picked up Other Minds last winter and have turned to it repeatedly in a year when, for the first time, I caught myself handling a book the way I handle the internet, “scrolling” its pages in search of ideas I wanted to catch. In an era of both literary excess (more new books than ever) and literary scarcity (fewer resources and fewer risks), when far more reading happens online than in print, I found myself asking: What distinguishes a book? What really deserves to be printed and to be savored word by word?

The stories in Other Minds ensnare us in the haunted darkness of their protagonists’ private terrors. A series of calls from an unknown caller become a fixation that unravels a relationship. The ostensibly straightforward task of killing a backyard chicken turns into a harrowing battle for self-mastery. A philosophy adjunct’s fellowship application devolves into a convoluted (and hilarious) game of psychological chess. Each of these stories persuades us of its logics with fiercely focused attention and a Nicholson Baker-esque insistence on, yes, precise description. (As for that reader, if he reads so that “his own mind could be reflected and enlarged by the language of other minds,” does that mean their language will become his?)

My favorite of the book’s 12 stories opens with the descent of a single snowflake: “For as long as I focused on it,” says the mind we are lucky enough to briefly inhabit, “it came to seem creaturely and vibrant, because it was stirring inside of—being stirred to life by—the ray of my paid attention.” Indeed, the narrator’s observations—of the single flake, or of the windowpanes that produce the “momentary sensation that I was on a conference call with several snowfalls”—expand into a discussion of mourning and another on the wind as syntax: “The wind was arranging its grains the way a sentence arranges its words … as if there were something the wind wanted to say and kept erasing.” That snowflake, and the way it’s summoned “from out of the depths of its crystalline insentience,” encapsulates the action of Sims’s book—a reminder that tender, devoted attention can yield both mystery and magic.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz initiated a promising project. She asked her artist friends to describe all they’d done the previous day, and she recorded the results. The project was never completed and the tapes were lost. In 2019, however, a transcript of the tape of the photographer Peter Hujar’s account of his previous day was found in his archives, housed at the Morgan Library. Ira Sachs’ new film, Peter Hujar’s Day, is nothing but a recreation of that recording, drawn word for word from the transcript.

It is a tour de force of acting by the British actor Ben Whishaw, who plays Hujar and who carries the bulk of the dialogue of the film. Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz does a lovely job of hosting, listening, and occasionally commenting on or questioning Hujar’s account. But make no mistake about it, this is Whishaw’s film.

Making a film of one man recounting the details of an ordinary day is something of a gamble. The conversation film has its roots in Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre, which addressed big issues, whereas Peter Hujar’s Day is an account of a normal day in the life of a photographer. Yes, he photographs Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times. Yes, he is catty in his telling of how and where Ginsberg lives. Ginsberg, too, can be cutting, as Hujar tells us that Ginsberg advised him he could get an excellent photo of William S. Burroughs if he gave him a blow job. There are rare moments that would go in a biography of Hujar. But more typically, we hear about Hujar feeling he was cheated by a magazine that printed his photos of the theater director Robert Wilson without paying him; about a visit to a Chinese restaurant and the amount of the check ($7.43); of a silly telephone call with Susan Sontag; of his three naps; of the liverwurst sandwich he ate.

Hujar is concerned that he did nothing over the course of the day in question, though he realizes he’s actually done a lot that amounts to little. But as Rosenkrantz tells him, hearing him recount it all, it’s like a novel. And it is. Examined closely, we realize, every day is full of dramas, comic moments, and tragedies; we just don’t see them as such. It takes Hujar hours to tell of the hours he’d spent the day before doing so little.

The film reminded me of Borges’ greatest story, “Funes the Memorious.” Funes has so precise a memory that it takes him 24 hours to remember a day. Like Funes, if Hujar were to remember the day he recounted the previous day, he would be forced to say that the day after the day he recounted was a simple retelling of the day in question. Life then becomes a kind of matryoshka doll, each day nestled within another, though all the dolls are the same size.

Sachs’ direction is pointedly offhand. Clothes worn by the actors inexplicably change from shot to shot. There are flashes when film rolls end, a brief shot of the booms, weak lighting, and many purposely underexposed shots. Peter Hujar’s Day is a relatively short film, at 75 minutes. But in its focus on the daily nothing it turns into quite something. Incidentally, many of the photos discussed can be found online at The Peter Hujar Archive.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): In 2018, my friend Noam Shuster Eliassi quit her job as a UN peacemaker to try her hand at comedy. I was there the first time she performed in front of a Palestinian audience in East Jerusalem. She had them from her opening line: “Don’t worry guys, I’m only going to be here for seven minutes, not 70 years!” The packed courtyard burst into laughter. It was a beautiful thing to witness.

Amber Fares’ film Coexistence, My Ass!, which follows Noam’s journey, began its US tour last week. While watching the film, I couldn’t help being struck by how Noam’s embodiment of solidarity and multiculturalism echoes that of Zohran Mamdani, whose election victory this week has captivated the world.

Coexistence, My Ass! documents Noam as she sets off to Harvard to write a comedy special about growing up in Neve-Shalom/Wahat A’Salam, “the only place in Israel where Jews and Palestinians live together by choice.” Noam jokes about her leftist parents, her mixed Ashkenazi/Mizrahi identity, and the Israeli peace camp. Adored by audiences of all backgrounds, she charms with her fluency in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and even a sprinkle of words in Farsi, her mother’s mother tongue.

When the pandemic shuts down life in the US, Noam is forced to return home to Israel/Palestine. Noam’s personal story becomes a vehicle for exploring the failure of the “coexistence” project in Israel—the impossibility of equality under apartheid, or of peace with occupation, and now genocide. Weaving together scenes from Noam’s comedy special and from her daily life, the film manages to capture, with humor and nuance, insights about the reality of Israeli society that feel devastating, urgent, and timely.

When I first saw the film last spring, I found myself sobbing, along with Noam—overcome by the rising violence and fascism in Israeli society and the bleak future it portends. Watching the film again at last week’s premiere in New York, I found a hopeful resonance that I didn’t expect.

This week, New York elected Zohran Mamdani—a progressive Muslim socialist immigrant whose campaign promoted a hopeful vision of an inclusive, affordable city. At a GOTV canvas in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza on Tuesday, Naomi Klein told a group of volunteers with JVP Action: “Fascists love uniformity, sameness, top down.” That’s why, she explained, they hate everything this campaign stood for: a multiracial, diverse city that celebrates its difference and its togetherness. Zohran’s campaign was subject to hideous Islamophobic slurs and racist fearmongering. The attacks aimed, among other things, to scare Jewish New Yorkers out of voting for him, to make them believe that they would not be safe or welcome in his coalition. The racists were dealt a resounding rebuke this week—and it is surely being heard around the world.

I have no illusions that this vision is anywhere close to a reality in Israel/Palestine. But if there is any chance of beating fascism, it will be because, as Zohran has done here, people like Noam will do there—remind people that if they choose hope over fear, solidarity over division, there is a better way to live. As Zohran’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, told Vogue India this week, ​​”[Zohran] embodies the multiplicity of the worlds in him without apology, and actually with great celebration.” Noam is one of those people, too. We need more models of that in public life.

Coexistence, My Ass! is touring across the US in the coming weeks, and is playing at IFC in New York City through November 13th. On the film website, you can also invite the filmmakers to your community for a screening.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I would not have believed the great American movie about prison abolition dates from 1947, but that is in fact when Jules Dassin’s Brute Force was released. In the film, an attempted jailbreak runs into an ambitious, sadistic chief of security and explodes into outright revolution. I find it almost unfathomable how radical the movie is, especially given that it was produced under the censorious Hays Code and in the top-down Hollywood studio system. Dassin, a leftist who was later blacklisted, portrays the prison as a factory gone horribly wrong; he emphasizes the convicts’ work amid hellish machines, as well as the clock on the guard tower, which imposes its ruthless labor discipline. In one of the movie’s most arresting moments, another inmate suggests to the rebel leader, played by Burt Lancaster, that they wait and plan their escape; Lancaster replies that time is always against them, repudiating any vision of gradual progress and offering instead a radical, revolutionary break.

Decades before the rise of mass incarceration (and a full 60 years before Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s classic Marxist study of the phenomenon, Golden Gulag), Dassin already understood prison as a repository for surplus population; thus, the warden complains that he struggles to employ the inmates because of complaints from outside manufacturers and unions, and rebellious prisoners are punished by having to dig a drainpipe that symbolizes their own status as capitalist waste-product. Recalling the endless arguments, just a few years ago, about the propriety of “fascism” as a term for American reaction, it is telling that Brute Force’s villain, the security chief, is a Wagner-listening Nazi torturer who is installed by an unnamed, shadowy elite figure who visits the prison and deposes the feckless warden. Fascism thus represents not an aberration, but the logic of a broader system. In this movie, it can and certainly does happen here.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This year’s annual Other Israel film festival began last night, November 6th, and continues until November 13th. Its focus has always been on oppositional filmmaking in Israel. The films of the festival, and the festival as a whole, reflect a material contradiction, as the films are almost all funded by a state which in various ways they indict. That contradiction shapes the experience of attending and writing on the festival as well, requiring one to support art funded by the state in order to support artists that oppose the state. The tension was especially acute this year, as films and filmmakers opposed to Israeli policies and the standard Zionist version of history are in an especially difficult period, facing both physical and financial threats within Israel as well as a growing international movement to boycott all films that receive money from the Israeli government.

The dilemma was especially obvious in the opening film of the festival, Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, which is a throwback to the greatest Iranian films—particularly the early films of Jafar Panahi, like The White Balloon and The Mirror—as well as the gentle humanism of Italian neorealism, in this case De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. The Sea is a touching story of a young Palestinian boy who dreams of seeing the sea, but who can’t because he lacks a permit to cross from the occupied West Bank into Israel. The same holds for his father, who is unable to obtain legal work in Israel. Neither is deterred, and while the father is doing construction work the boy sneaks into Israel on his own and attempts to make his way to the beach in Tel Aviv. Things inevitably go south for both, and Carmeli-Pollak demonstrates that you can make a film that denounces injustice without banging the viewer over the head. And yet, when the film won the Ophir—Israel’s Oscar—for best film, the government announced it would cut off funding for the prize ceremony.

Coincidentally, another film on the region is also being released this week. In a just world, Fatme Hassona would be regarded as the Anne Frank of the genocide in Gaza. She is the heart and soul of Sepideh Farsi’s unbearably moving Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Like Anne Frank’s diary, Farsi’s film is centered around the day to day existence of one person, 24-year-old Fatme, a talented photographer, faithful Muslim, and proud Palestinian and Gazan. The film consists of nothing but the conversations between the two women over WhatsApp or Facetime. Fatme, indefatigable, smiles all the while as she recounts the daily miseries of a life under bombardment, of attacks by tanks and artillery and troops and planes and Apache helicopters. She talks of her dead, shows off her family, and tells of never having left Gaza in her life, and of her desire to see Rome. She speaks of her joy on October 7th, which showed that Gaza still had the ability to fight back, and of her mixed feelings about the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who Israel assassinated in October 2024. To read about at least 65,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza is too abstract; to spend nearly two hours in Fatme’s presence and to learn that she was killed along with her entire family when their building was bombed moves genocide from the realm of a legal question to the reality of an irreplaceable life. Like Anne Frank, Fatme’s story stands for countless real people with real dreams and hopes who were slaughtered by a murderous state.