Shabbat
Reading List

This week, we welcome Fargo Nissim Tbakhi in a brand new role at Jewish Currents: artist-in-residence. Over the next year, Fargo will be creating and curating performances to be staged across the country, so watch this space!

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (artist-in-residence): Lately, I find myself seeking out art that takes disgust, cruelty, revulsion, and other ugly feelings seriously. So I’ve been spending time with the work of the experimental theater director Reza Abdoh, a queer, Iranian-born provocateur whose electrically confrontational theater expanded the possibilities for experimental performance in the United States. Abdoh’s body of work (and work of body) examined the jagged wounds of the American nation in the ’80s and ’90s and tore them open to wallow in the blood.

Quotations from a Ruined City, Abdoh’s last full piece before his death of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 32, is an astonishing piece of such brutality. It is, characteristically, a work of compounding and interweaving fragments, paired with text that moves from poetic to financial to musical. The play begins with two performers’ disembodied heads describing the titular ruined city; as the performance moves they reappear as Puritans, struggling actors, and businessmen, always drawn inexorably back to the city in spite of themselves. Across the work, Abdoh consistently focused on the ways that the body can exert itself on stage and serve as a translation of the various violences which make up the world. The performers of Abdoh’s theater company, Dar A Luz, physically and spiritually collide with one another across evocations of genocide, torture, and something like queer survival.

The play—which was written in collaboration with his brother, Salar—is impossible to describe and almost violent to experience, even with the low-quality video compressing its immediacy. Quotations moves at a frenzied pace, as though it’s trying to match or exceed the speed at which atrocities both daily and historical accumulate. Like all of Abdoh’s work, the performance is suffused with gallows humor, a few fart jokes, and occasional moments of near-sublime grace. In the video of the 1994 Los Angeles performance, someone releases a butterfly from a jar in the middle of the show. The performance ends with two men in dresses embracing one another, and the lines “Remember. Remember. We are bound to the past as we cling to the memory of the ruined city.” The lights go down, then back up as the two remaining performers bow, and then the butterfly flutters directly across the lens of the camera for just a moment. It’s a beautiful, unplanned testament to life somehow persisting inside the borders of a perpetually cruel place.

This interplay of violence and grace is characteristic of Abdoh’s work. In his 1990 evisceration of the Orpheus myth, The Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice, the title character repeatedly says “The place that you rip open again and again that heals is God.” It’s a fitting thesis statement for his project, and for why we might make art that hurts us. Sometimes the violence slows, and something tender flutters by, just in front of the lens.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): I can’t remember the last time I walked out of a theater feeling as emotional as I did on Wednesday after seeing Ossie Davis’s 1961 satire, Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, a profound and hilarious critique of racial capitalism.

The play—directed by Kenny Leon with unrestrained fervor—follows the tangled efforts of the eponymous hero (played by the charismatic Leslie Odom, Jr.), an itinerant preacher and folkish trickster who returns to Georgia to retrieve a $500 bequest from a deceased cousin, and with it, reclaim his grandfather’s church, where he plans to preach the gospel of freedom. He recruits a naïve young woman (the hilarious Kara Young) to impersonate the cousin—white people can’t tell Black folks apart, after all, he reasons—and demand the inheritance of Ol’ Cap’n (steam-out-of-his-ears blustery Jay O. Sanders), the cotton plantation owner who is holding the cash, as well as trapping local Black people in inescapable sharecroppers’ debt. Several relatives and household members round out the cast, each self-consciously enacting their expected roles to avoid the wrathful violence of Ol’ Cap’n.

When Davis wrote the play, he wondered if his effort to turn stereotypes “inside out and upside down” would go over. Could laughter be revolutionary? He found a satisfying answer when Black audiences howled happily at the original production in which he and his wife and activist comrade, Ruby Dee, starred, and when, in turn, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X attended the show and came backstage afterwards to offer their congratulations. The play also had me laughing throughout its madcap 100 minutes, and left me infuriated by the aptness of its scathing 62-year-old indictment.

Indeed, Davis had initially set out to write a tragedy exposing the “racist arrogance” he experienced growing up in the South. But his work on a play based on Yiddish stories—the surprise 1953 off-Broadway hit, The World of Sholem Aleichem—inspired him to turn “from anger and revenge toward laughter.” Both its writer, Arnold Perl, and director, Howard da Silva, had been blacklisted and barred from their respective jobs in radio and Hollywood movies, so they shifted to the theater to give themselves and other dis-employed leftists some work. Da Silva met Dee at a rally for the Rosenbergs, where she spoke against the death penalty, and offered her a role. Davis came along as stage manager.

Being a comedy, Purlie ends with the hero victorious. In the final scene, the set (designed by Derek McLane) morphs magically from the family’s ramshackle hut into the beautiful light-filled Big Bethel Church of the New Freedom—“part Baptist; part Methodist; part Catholic—with the merriness of Christmas and the happiness of Hanukkah.” Presiding over Ol’ Cap’n’s funeral, Purlie ends his sermon with a timely benediction: “Now, may the Constitution of the United States go with you; the Declaration of Independence stand by you; the Bill of Rights protect you; and the State Commission Against Discrimination keep the eyes of the law upon you, henceforth, now and forever. Amen.” Much of the audience echoed the affirmation, and I was no different. As tears gushed out of me, I heard myself shout “O-meyn.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Has there ever been a book as fascinating, well-designed, informative, and historically important with as dull a title as Data Portraits?

I discovered this book, which was published in 2018, earlier this year, thanks to a recent show at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, “Deconstructing Power: W.E.B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair.” This revelatory exhibit featured some of the charts and visualizations on Black life in the United States—with a particular focus on Georgia—that the famed sociologist created with his students and presented at the fair in Paris. Data Portraits, which collects these graphics as well as some displayed elsewhere, is an irreplaceable snapshot of the African American experience.

Each chart in this volume displays important demographic information, from the shifts in the Black population of every state to the comparison of the percentages of white and Black people working in various fields. Some of the graphs have clear and essential political purposes. For instance, one reveals that Black illiteracy, near total under slavery, had dipped lower than the rates in Romania, Serbia, and Russia; Du Bois’s intent was to rebut the “scientific” racist theories of the time, which held that Black people were inherently inferior, rather than merely deprived of opportunities. The images themselves are augmented by informative scholarly essays and, more importantly, by captions that explain the genius behind each, from the selection of chart type to the brilliant use of color. The book makes clear that Du Bois refused to be bound by the normal rules governing graphic display of information. In some graphs—like one showing how many more Black students in Georgia were taking industrial courses (2252) rather than studying education (383) or business (12)—the longest bars snake around the page, rather than simply extending vertically or horizontally, to emphasize the data’s meaning.

Viewing the Cooper-Hewitt show and reading Data Portraits led me to finally read David Levering Lewis’s majestic two-volume biography of Du Bois. All of this has convinced me that he ought to be held in higher regard today. This strange and fascinating man—a founder of the NAACP, an elitist who turned Communist—was also a writer of much unreadable purple prose and an advocate of some terribly incorrect positions, like his support for US entry into World War I (which he believed would open the way for returning Black soldiers to put an end to Jim Crow) and his support for Japanese imperialism (which he viewed as a counter-force to Europe and white America). But he was a man who never wavered in his fight for Black equality, and whose example and scholarship are worthy of enormous respect.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): On the cover of her new memoir, writer, director, and former actress Jennette McCurdy stands in a bright yellow frame, dressed in pink, holding a pink urn overflowing with pink confetti. The image is as provocative as the title: I’m Glad My Mom Died. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted to read it.

For much of the book—through McCurdy’s upbringing and twenties—her life and purpose revolve around her mom. Six-year-old McCurdy thrills at their close connection. At that age, she feels frustrated that her dad and brothers seem oblivious to subtle changes in her mom’s mood and mannerisms. She alone jumps up to do what will make her mom happy, and she feels a sense of accomplishment for nailing it most of the time.

Amidst accounts of narcissistic personality disorder, McCurdy’s clarity and perspective feel unique. Writing as her younger self, she often observes, without any judgment, the distance between what she wants and what she does—that is, what her mom wants. She hates having butterfly clips in her hair, but her mom loves it, so she wears them. She hates acting—being on stage makes her feel exposed and deeply uncomfortable—but she goes through intensive training, grueling background roles, and a career in the field to please her mother.

Her mom’s influence only gets darker as the book goes on. She introduces pre-teen McCurdy to anorexia, and the two share restrictive eating practices for years. When doctors and classmates’ parents air their concern, she feigns innocence. A few years later, when she finds out that McCurdy has been lying to her about having a boyfriend, she lashes out in classic abusive fashion: with 37 missed calls and a string of emails full of accusations and name-calling.

When—halfway through the book—her mother passes away, McCurdy turns to alcohol to cope with the sudden void at the center of her life. Yet, despite the heaviness of the subject material, McCurdy’s candidness and sharp humor make the book easy to read and hard to put down.

For many readers, the intensity of McCurdy’s experiences will resonate on subtler levels. The deference to someone else’s desires, big or small, prevents a young person from learning about their own instincts—a crucial step in the development of a sense of self. Later on in the book, through the intervention of a caring partner, McCurdy begins (and then quits, and later takes back up) therapy. For anyone who is also doing that sort of hard introspective work, this memoir may be a useful companion

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): An acquaintance of mine once suggested that all of us aging leftists have a favorite Communist-ruled country. He explained that he was especially fond of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and showed me his belt buckle with the nation’s state seal. I couldn’t contest his point. I, too, had long maintained a special interest in and even affection for the GDR. I had even visited with my then-five-year-old son in the summer of 1989—not knowing that the Berlin Wall would fall just months later, and the GDR would soon be no more.

Since then, the country has been written about almost exclusively as a gray, joyless police state in which everyone spied on everyone else and couldn’t wait to join the West. Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall is the first English-language book for the general readership to give a full picture of life in East Germany. Hoyer—herself an Ossi, or former citizen of the GDR—refuses to accept the West German version of events. In her view, the GDR, though imperfect, nevertheless provided its citizens with a decent life over the 41 years of its existence. Almost no country in the world did more for its women; the vast majority of women in the GDR were working by 1989, thanks in part to the availability of free daycare. Social mobility was also high since the working class had access to a college education. And unlike capitalist countries, the GDR did not later cut back on these subsidies for education, childcare, or housing, a decision that—combined with the withdrawal of Soviet resources—eventually led to financial woes. In short, Hoyer argues, it was socialism that killed socialism in the GDR.

Hoyer does not deny the harsh realities of many aspects of life in the GDR. The two men who led the country through almost all of its history, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, fought against the Nazis and lived through the Stalinist era of communism, and their fear and suspicion informed the state’s extensive security apparatus. But Hoyer shows that the security forces were not as large as is commonly believed, and that popular voluntary organizations assisted them in their work. Even while dissent was growing in the country’s final years, she argues, “attempts to open up the GDR were by no means attempts to destroy it—on the contrary, many young intellectuals and workers saw it as a means to strengthen the state and socialism.”

Beyond the Wall is a much-needed corrective to the self-congratulatory attitude of most Western historians who have written about East Germany. Indeed, socialism failed and failed miserably. But as Hoyer shows, its failure was, in many ways, a noble one.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): A few weekends ago, I binged the 2021 Netflix show Maid, which follows 25-year-old Alex as she flees her abusive boyfriend, moves into a domestic violence shelter, and begins working as a house cleaner to support herself and her daughter.

The show’s unflinching depiction of gendered poverty has been correctly lauded. Alex’s desperation is palpable as she battles abusive men, backbreaking work, and a broken welfare system trying to take away her agency. A particularly affecting motif includes Alex’s bank balance popping up on the screen and starting to tick down everytime she fills a few dollars of gas in her car, purchases cleaning supplies for work, or gets her kid a dollar store mermaid doll. Indeed, throughout the first episode it was that ticking bank balance, rather than even Alex herself, that seemed to be the true protagonist, so riveting did I find it, so harrowing its slow decline from $18 to 35 cents.

However, eventually this unflinching portrait of poverty . . . flinches. Even this has been celebrated by reviewers, who give the show props for finding a way to be “gritty” without devolving into misery-porn. But as a longtime student of racial capitalism, and a true cynic, I was less than convinced when—after attuning us to the vice grip of poverty on Alex’s life—the show suddenly lifts all such mundane constraints in the final few episodes. After struggling to arrest her fall with a tattered social safety net, Alex suddenly finds individual success. After losing her job as a maid, she quickly gains a rich patron. Her child starts attending an elite preschool, even though Alex is shown to be unable to afford residence in the school’s very wealthy catchment area. The domestic violence shelter provides her a phone with seemingly unlimited minutes that she can use to apply to college. When Alex’s unstable mother is admitted to a psych ward, no insurance statements populate the screen.

Normally, I would’ve been fine with all this; I don’t usually need to see a character’s bank balance to care about their story. But it was jarring to see Maid so completely abandon its dark, sociological beginnings in favor of a fairy-tale resolution. The showrunners seemed to be saying, “look, you get our point. Being a poor single mother and living through domestic violence is tough. Now wouldn’t you like to see Alex happy?” And don’t get me wrong: I’m glad Alex got a happy ending. But somewhere along the way, Maid went from showing us the ravages of structural injustice to telling us that (white) women can overcome even this if they really believe in themselves. So while I recommend Maid for its Barbara-Ehrenreichian first half, beware the Hallmark card ending.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Two things have happened recently: The first of my classmates from high school and college turned 40, and I got bangs. (Coincidence? You decide.) Strangely, these disparate events have prompted different people to recommend the 1978 movie Girlfriends, both as an investigation into curly bangs and the changing nature of friendships into adulthood. I was charmed by the film’s episodic portrait of Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayhew) as a young, broke, sexually liberated, Jewish photographer in New York City. Written and directed by women (Vicki Polon and Claudia Weill, respectively), it leans into the small drama of relationships—primarily Susan’s relationship with her remarkably slender and blonde roommate Anne (Anita Skinner), an aspiring writer who abandons their dyad to get married and have a baby. If this sounds a bit like Frances Ha or Girls, it’s because both of them clearly owe Girlfriends a debt. (In a direct nod, Weill even directed an episode of Girls, the one where Adam and Ray go to Staten Island.)

Despite these comparisons, I found myself wondering whether a movie like this could be made today—and finding it surprising that it was made then. For one thing, the last several decades hasn’t brought as much progress when it comes to women directors as one would hope. Indeed, in a familiar tale, Weill herself quit filmmaking due to sexual harassment and creative interference from a male producer during the making of her second film. But for another, the film feels almost politically allergic to dramatics, as if branding it a masculine enterprise. Though there is some talk of men, Girlfriends is basically a movie-length object lesson in passing the Bechdel test: The women ply one another for feedback on their artwork and gripe about being broke. Though there is one heated argument between them, the conflict is less a full-blown confrontation, but a study of that slow, diffuse way we lose people. A brief affair with a much older, married rabbi never graduates to full-blown theatrics. Susan gets a gallery exhibition in that breezy way that one imagines everything happened for boomers. It’s not really about all that. Girlfriends seems instead to be about representation in the simplest sense: a loving gaze on the life of a woman-artist in the big city after the sexual revolution. Its representation of Jewishness, too, as a dimension of the portrait’s specificity is refreshing—perfectly natural and embodied, not overladen with meaning or trying to be anything other than itself. In that way, it feels almost like a sociological study with suspiciously good lighting. In other words, it’s a vibe. And a good one.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Ulises de la Orden’s new documentary, The Trial, is an engrossing, horrifying, and heartbreaking chronicle of the 1985 trial of members of the Argentine military junta. After overthrowing President Isabel Perón in a 1976 coup, the junta oversaw state terror that included the disappearance and murder of thousands of leftists and other Argentines. The nearly three-hour film is built entirely from trial footage which has been preserved in international archives out of fear that a future Argentine regime might destroy it. The Trial reveals not just the material reality of that era, but also the depths of evil that made it possible.

The documentary tells the true story of the events featured in Santiago Mitre’s excellent 2022 fiction film Argentina, 1985. Prosecutor Julio Strassera, that movie’s hero, fades into the background; he mostly sits quietly, occasionally asks questions, and eventually gives a summary that earns him a standing ovation from the audience. De la Orden shifts the focus onto the victims. The director provides us with no explanatory voice-over, background information, or even the identities of the people testifying. We are instead left with the stories of those who were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in what the military called “the final solution.” The survivors and their families display immense heroism by having the courage to recall the horrors that were inflicted on them and their loved ones. Women speak of the omnipresence of rape, of babies born in captivity and taken from their mothers, or killed to prevent raising another generation of subversives. But the victims also recount touching moments of solidarity: One survivor describes a Maoist leader shouting “Long live Argentina! Long live the Working Class!” at his tormenters; another tells of a prisoner touching the shoulder of an unknown comrade, on his way to a torture session from which he will never return, and bidding him farewell.

Over and over again, de la Orden shows the bottomless shamelessness of the junta—and of those defending them. The defense lawyers waver between denial of any disappearances—claiming that those who have vanished simply fled and are living under assumed names, a thesis that echoes Holocaust deniers—and justifying the deaths as acts of war, since the military understood the advocacy of Marxism as a casus belli. (The prosecuting attorneys point out that even in an actual war, the acts carried out by the military are forbidden.) The sight of the defendants and their attorneys smiling and laughing at moments throughout the trial is more chilling than any horror film.

It was not until two decades after 1985, under President Néstor Kirchner, that Argentina began to officially commemorate the murders and disappearances. Today, the main torture center at the Navy School of Mechanics is a moving memory museum, while other torture centers around the country display the names and photos of some of the victims for all to see. Like these monuments, The Trial is a tribute to those who died, and to those who fought to make the perpetrators pay.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Recently, The New Yorker published two articles focused on US liberal communities that attempted to buck the 20th century trends of redlining, white flight, and segregation, seeking instead to create integrated neighborhoods.

The first is staff writer Jay Caspian Kang’s review of Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, a new book by Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler which follows integration efforts in an affluent suburb bordering Cleveland, Ohio. In the ’50s, groups of Black and (mostly-Jewish) white families organized to integrate the town of Shaker Heights, in part by encouraging more white people to move into its Black neighborhoods. Yet both Black and white liberals of Shaker Heights were ultimately as well organized in trying to keep poor people out as they were in combating segregation. “It’s . . . clear that the dream of Shaker Heights—expressed, as in so many places like it, through the cause of ‘good schools’—is primarily one of upper-middle-class solidarity,” Kang writes. “It is interesting and even commendable that such solidarity could cross racial lines in one suburb of Cleveland, but the latter part of the Shaker story is far more instructive: the dream falters once poorer people move into town.”

The second New Yorker article is an essay by the writer Jonathan Lethem on his childhood in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. When Lethem was born in 1964, the neighborhood had just been given its name by a group of locals trying to revitalize its old, crumbling brownstones and create a flourishing, and multiracial, middle-class community. The Boerum Hill brownstoners vocally supported integration. They fought the forces of redlining banks and of urban renewal—a controversial program in which cities seized and demolished supposedly “blighted” old homes and businesses, often to create suburban-esque structures like highways and shopping centers. But some of their poorer neighbors viewed the brownstoners as condescending agents of displacement. Lethem acknowledges the brownstoners’ good intentions and yet notes that they drew an invisible line between their new neighborhood and the public housing complex just blocks away, mostly sidestepping the larger moral and political questions of the day. “The boundary [between Boerum Hill and the public housing projects] was a recipe for cognitive dissonance, for a preëmptive turning aside, in favor of more solvable matters, like how to restore a ceiling’s crumbling plaster scrollwork,” Lethem writes.

I found the themes of both of these pieces reminiscent of undergraduate research I did on the neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago, which in the ’50s became one of the first communities in the country to implement an urban renewal program. I studied the papers of Jacob Weinstein, a local Reform rabbi who was nationally recognized as a pro-integration civil rights advocate, yet enthusiastically supported the urban renewal program that ultimately displaced many poor and Black Hyde Park residents. As Hyde Park rapidly integrated, Weinstein actively lobbied his congregants to stay in the neighborhood, even as many other local Jews were decamping to the suburbs. Weinstein believed that convincing well-to-do whites like his congregants not to flee required urban renewal, which would preserve the orderly, upper-middle-class character of the neighborhood. Perhaps, this vision suggested, the white Jews of Hyde Park could have it all: the comforts of suburbia and the richness of diverse city life, as well as the pride of living up to their political commitments.

Like the liberals of Shaker Heights, Weinstein and other Hyde Park activists prioritized class homogeneity in order to try to maintain racial heterogeneity, failing to see how racial inequality was tightly bound up in economic factors. And like the brownstoners of Boerum Hill, Hyde Park integrationists seemed to conceptualize their neighborhood as an island cordoned off from the rest of the metropolis. Weinstein believed, naively, that simply building an integrated Hyde Park might influence other communities to follow its model. Yet when the wrecking ball dust settled, the result was a relatively integrated Hyde Park, but one within a city that remained devastatingly segregated.

Before you go: Reuven Abergel is one of Israel’s pioneering activists: He founded the Black Panther movement in Israel and has advocated for an intersectional struggle with the Palestinians. Abergel also authored the Israeli Black Panthers Hagaddah, published by Jewish Currents Press. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, left-wing activists are coming together to grant him the crowdfunded “People’s Award,” which you can donate to here.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In some ways, my experience of blindness is radically different from Andrew Leland’s, recounted movingly and insightfully in his new memoir, The Country of the Blind. Leland suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that takes years or decades to obliterate the sufferer’s vision, while my trip to blindness was a rapid one: Over two nights, each of my eyes was partially blinded while I was sleeping due to non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (a stroke of the eyes). And while Leland’s condition will gradually take him into total darkness, mine goes no further than the original damage. But for now, both of us are, as Leland so aptly puts it, “too blind to be sighted, too sighted to be blind.”

Leland does a magnificent job situating his own experience within the politics of the blind community. He thoughtfully examines contested features of that world, such as the white cane—the most obvious marker of blindness, which some are reluctant to use out of shame. At one point Leland, who describes himself as proudly “out” as a blind man, relates an incident in which he was mocked as a phony for using the cane when he has partial sight; he reacts angrily, though not as forcefully as I have on the handful of occasions when people have questioned my legitimacy as a “truly” blind person. The Country of the Blind considers the way canes have become a disputed object, showing how the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the largest organization fighting for the blind, considers foldable canes, like the one I carry, to be anathema. “A sixty-inch long, unfoldable white cane is impossible to hide,” Leland writes. “And that’s a good thing. Because blindness isn’t something to be hidden!” And canes are not the only embattled aspect of blind life. The Country of the Blind traces the ins and outs of the debates between advocacy organizations and blind individuals over accommodations like audible pedestrian signals, which some support but others call belittling. I was shocked to find that many of the people Leland meets, for whom independence is paramount, proudly reject assistance when out and about. I have written elsewhere about the callous indifference I experience from the sighted; I think it’s the least anyone can do to offer to help me, say, at busy street corners, where I experience sheer terror.

Throughout his book, Leland avoids the saccharine tone adopted by Frank Bruni in his acclaimed but insipid The Beauty of Dusk, in which the author’s partial blindness is framed positively, as a source of goodness. For Leland, blindness is far more complex. The obstacles it produces allow him to experience his strength in overcoming them—sometimes with enjoyment, like the pleasure he has found in learning Braille. But he does not obscure the difficulties, and he is clear about his immense sorrow that the day will come when his wife and son will disappear from his sight. Like Leland, I haven’t let my blindness prevent me from living as fully as I can, and the experience has taught me that I have internal resources I’d never otherwise have accessed. Even so, I’d gladly sacrifice that lesson to regain the ability to read physical books, to see paintings of all sizes and media, to read subtitles without special glasses, and to simply cross the street.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): On at least three recent subway trips, I’ve been subjected to Tinder’s “It starts with a swipe” campaign, a peculiar effort at rebranding Tinder, the original hookup app, as a marriage factory. The ads feature gender-ambiguous, race-ambiguous bodies doing normative relationshippy things, underneath taglines like “Finally Having Kids,” “Hanging Out in the Daytime,” or “A Toothbrush at Their Place.” These unambiguously young and thin bodies pose in a landscape that—with its cars, furniture, and pastels—evokes the 1950s. The taglines are styled after the 1950s, too, in a syrupy cursive script. “Comfortable Silences,” “Proving Astrology Right,” “Someone to Go to Heaven With” (because why leave out that sweet sweet Christian flavor?). It’s Tinder wrapped in old-fashioned nostalgia and denuded of sex, as though to say, “You think this is the heyday of Gen Z? Fooled ya. You’re all cast as actors in Grease.”

And then there’s the one tagline that, I admit, never fails to elicit an emotional reaction from me: “Realizing You’re Not Dead Inside.” Whoever came up with the idea of making every unpartnered subway rider wonder if the life they are living is one in which they are DEAD is a cruel genius.

As an antidote to all this, and on the topic of feeling dead inside, I’d like to recommend Ruth Madievsky’s newish novel All-Night Pharmacy, in which a lost twenty-something follows first her sister and then a madcap series of mysterious characters to disentangle from her family, face her Soviet Jewish history, and become her own person. I admit I’m partial to any American book featuring Kishinev, home of Madievsky and also my dad. I’m also partial to novels written by poets, which tend to be full of zingers, as All-Night Pharmacy is. But this is also a novel where relationships evolve and dissolve, where a pleasing chaos chases our protagonist through hospitals, countries, drugs, and bars, and where her queerness and eventual pursuit of relationships that are realer than romance are what save the protagonist from feeling internally dead. Like a couple of other recent books (Milk Fed, The Golem of Brooklyn; is this a trend?) All-Night Pharmacy offers us a golem—“Silence creates golems,” one character opines. But, blessedly, there is no marriage plot.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): Some television shows become burdened with the purpose of defining their generation. For many now-creaky millennials, that show was Lena Dunham’s Girls, both an homage to and a critique of the gender and sexual politics and character and plot tropes of classic screwball comedies, Nora Ephron’s work, and Sex and the City. Over six seasons, we watch self-important aspiring writer Hannah, played by Dunham, and her friends, navigating young chaotic life in 2010s Greenpoint, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. They fall in and out of love, embrace and then abandon creative obsessions, fuck and fuck over one another, grow and regress, discovering varying degrees of grace and foolishness in the process. Through it all, the thread that binds the characters, both major and minor, is a tendency towards self-combustion: they live “the dream, one mistake at a time,” as the season-one tagline promises.

Dunham’s a masterful provocateur, directing arcs suffused with chaos, meanness, and revelation, from Hannah’s increasingly intolerable selfishness in the wake of her editor’s death to Adam’s twisted sexual relationships and Marnie’s awful treatment of multiple beaus. The resulting show is frequently shocking, sometimes moving, and often quite ugly. The series’ superb bottle episodes feel like short plays or films, burning through short fuses that keep the dramatic tension high and character revelations coming fast and furious. While the jokes didn’t always didn’t land for me and the plotting often seemed meandering and chaotic—perhaps mirroring what it is to Be Young—I stayed with Girls. Watching unlikeable characters failing over and over again, slouching further and further towards sociopathy, has its pleasures.

Over time, however, it became less enlightening to watch this cringey dramedy. Jessa’s descent into darkness, Shoshanna’s irrationally sunny innocence, and Marnie’s capacity for self-delusion began to feel less like hallmarks of layered, three-dimensional people, and more like a potpourri of quirks and ephemeral manias. It didn’t help that the ‘boys’—Adam, the terrifying-but-charismatic aspiring actor and recovering alcoholic, and Ray, the curmudgeon-with-a-heart-of-gold barista—appeared to deepen in complexity and nuance at the expense of the titular girls, who often came to feel like shards of Dunham’s rich, provocative personality rather than autonomous, flesh-and-blood humans. (Among the girls, Shoshanna may be the exception: her journey from naive and invisible among the clique to confident, capable, and fully actualized, is a triumph.)

To my mind, the show’s animating impulse was the experience of experience—of writing, of acting, of copious casual sex, of moving to Japan, of watching a parents come out, of substance abuse, of being intentionally bad at your very normy job, of flaming out of a world-class writing workshop, of motherhood—without an effort to turn those experiences into something narratively coherent and organic. Maybe this was Dunham’s real project: to interrogate whether Having The Experience can serve as an adequate substitute for Becoming A Person with a real, earned sense of responsibility for the emotional wreckage you cause.

As someone who spent most of his 20s mired in self-loathing and disgust over his perceived creative shortcomings, watching Girls felt like a bit of an attack, but the show tempers its vitriolic mockery with just enough empathy. So come for the mess, but stay for the stink of shame hanging on all the characters like a bad hangover.

A quick note before we get to this week’s recommendations: The Jewish Currents staff takes the last week of August off to recharge, so there will be no newsletter next week. We’ll see you all in September!

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Tara Booth (on instagram @tarabooth) is an artist whose work is full of color and has a subtly deadpan quality that is hard to explain: honest and a bit unruly, the drawings often portray experiences that most of us either gloss over or may hesitate to share publicly. In the self-portrait I have in my bathroom—a print called “Peeing in a Romper,” which I coveted for years before purchasing—Booth depicts the physical and emotional process of taking off a romper, showing herself wrestling with the garment until it’s eventually around her ankles as she sits, naked, on the toilet. In the final panel of the series, having succeeded at the task, she stares blankly at the viewer. It’s an ordeal that anyone who has worn a onesie, romper, or jumpsuit has gone through, a private moment of indignity or strangeness that typically goes unobserved. Happily for me, my roommates like—or at least don’t mind—looking at the drawing when they, too, are on the toilet.

I also have a slim book of drawings Booth and co-illustrator Jon-Michael Frank created as a way to “work through our own experiences with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation,” as they write in the introduction. Titled Things to Do Instead of Killing Yourself, the recommendations on each page are illustrated in a way that, as is typical of Booth’s work, invites a sense of the messiness and randomness of being alive. Some of the pieces of advice are genuine, like “change your sheets.” Some are whimsical: “Step on a jelly filled doughnut” or “borrow someone else’s baby and appreciate being alone.” Some are impossible: “Swap bodies with a mannequin”—or, conversely, widely relatable: “Get the most expensive and intensive gym membership and never go.” Other entries capture the mood of a heavy depression familiar to anyone who has experienced it, albeit with a bit of levity: “Make a quilt out of squares for each year in your life that was worth living,” or “float your birth certificate down a river in hopes that someone else will get more use out of your life.” This book sits on my night table, atop a stack of other art books and beneath a shofar. In recent years, therapy and medication have alleviated my own cycles of depression, but I still imagine a day when a friend or young cousin, whether they talk to me about their struggle or not, might come over, flip through its pages, and feel companionship.

Whether you purchase a print, book, or apparel for yourself or a loved one, or just follow her on social media, Booth’s artwork will add small doses of relief and intrigue into your routine.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Last week, I caught the opening night of Annie Baker’s newest play, Infinite Life, which runs until October 8th at the Linda Gross theater in Chelsea. I was first introduced to Baker’s work in 2013, when I saw her Pulitzer prize-winning play The Flick, about three employees of a movie theater struggling to connect. I remember being almost confused by the amount of silence in the play but impressed by its willingness to lean into these pauses until they became chasms. Silence is a much-discussed feature of Baker’s work, and it’s often meted out in very specific increments in her stage directions. In the text of The Aliens, she specifies that nearly a third of the play should be silent, “uncomfortably so”; in The Flick and elsewhere, the stage directions note when a certain kind of silence becomes another kind (“A happy pause in which they realize they’ve broken the tension, and then an awkward pause following that happy pause.”) and stage directions often come with time markers, prescribing 20 seconds of this and then another ten seconds of that.

This impeccable sense of timing is on display in Infinite Life, which runs an hour and 50 minutes with no intermission. Like Baker’s other plays—which often take place over a longer period of time in a single location—the lens of Infinite Life is fixed on a row of reclining outdoor chaise lounges, like you might find poolside at a hotel. But there is no pool, and this is no hotel. Though the largely older women we’re introduced to first appear to be on some kind of vacation, we quickly learn that they are at a pseudo-health facility in a strip mall a few hours north of San Francisco. They are there to participate in “water fasts” of varying lengths, an unorthodox treatment for various painful maladies that the women—strangers to one another, but companions for the fast—are desperate to resolve.

I have talked about Baker’s silences, but not her dialogue. Her plays are as talky as they are quiet, and the conversation has that incredible quality of being believably naturalistic, as well as poetic, hilarious, and heartbreaking in turns. The sharpness of the dialogue is what saves this play, perhaps one of her funniest, from replicating for the audience the monotony of the women’s days and nights while on the fast. Slowly, in its own meandering way, the play begins to ask questions about the nature and meaning of pain—questions that are both existential and strikingly concrete for the women sufferers.

Baker’s plays are never big, dramatic affairs. The drama is in the peaks and valleys in conversation; the viewer recalibrates to find it there. This can be an extremely rewarding experience, as the viewer becomes attuned to the drama of everyday connections and misses. But Infinite Life, perhaps astute as a comment about the narcissistic qualities of suffering, features far fewer moments of genuine connection. And though I enjoyed it immensely—and particularly Marylouise Burke’s show-stealing performance as the frail, midwestern Eileen—in retrospect, I felt frustrated by how committedly withholding Baker was with her characters, especially because the closing scene, which features one such moment of connection and care, is so breathtaking.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Two very worthwhile—and wildly different—films on Jewish themes are opening today at Film Forum: Michael Roemer’s nearly lost comedy classic The Plot Against Harry and Israeli director Michal Weits’s documentary Blue Box.

Shot in 1969 and first shown in 1971, The Plot Against Harry initially played in a single theater for just one week. Forgotten for nearly two decades, it finally got a wide release in 1990 after appearing at the New York and Toronto Film Festivals. The film centers on Harry Plotnick—a member of a dying breed, the Jewish gangster—who has made his living in the numbers racket and is newly released from prison. At first, Harry works to re-establish his racket, but after encountering his ex-wife on the outside, he decides to abandon his life of crime and win her back. Roemer sets this comedy against a magnificent and riotous portrayal of middle-class Jewish life in the late ’60s, with its brassy marriage banquets and bar mitzvahs featuring swans made of chopped liver. May the film never fall into oblivion again.

Michal Weits’s Blue Box, first released in 2021, is an intensely personal film about the links between the afforestation of Israel—paid for by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which collected coins in the once ubiquitous blue boxes (pushkes, as we called them) in synagogues across the diaspora—and the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland. Much responsibility for both projects fell on one man: Yosef Weitz, the director’s great-grandfather. Blue Box, which is constructed around the director and her family members’ reactions to her great-grandfather’s activities, considers how generations of Israelis might reckon—or fail to reckon—with their ancestors’ crimes.

In the film, Weits speaks about how childhood visits to the forests planted by the JNF under her great-grandfather’s leadership were a source of great pride for her. But once she came to understand how and why the land on which they were grown was acquired, the trees no longer seemed to be cause for celebration. Her great-grandfather, Weits comes to understand, is known not only as “the Father of Israel’s Forests,” but also as “The Architect of Transfer.” Before Israel was founded, he arranged an overwhelming majority of the purchases of land from effendis (landowners under the Ottoman feudal system) that led to the exile of the fellahin (peasants) who worked them; and in 1948, he was a key player in the expulsion of the Arab population during the Nakba. After the war, the Israeli government sold now-unpopulated land to the JNF, which planted the famous forests in order to render the land uncultivable, to prevent the return of refugees. As Blue Box makes disturbingly clear, the trees planted in Israel in my honor over the course of my early life—when I was born in 1952, when I graduated from Hebrew school at Flatbush Park Jewish Center, and when I was bar mitzvahed—make me an accomplice in the dispossession of a people.

The film draws on archival discoveries and Josef Weitz’s voluminous diaries, which include naked admissions of the crimes he didn’t understand as such; presented with these, the director’s family members’ reactions vary greatly. The youngest generation is willing to listen to her, and sympathize with her perspective; her elders refuse to do so. After all, the myth of Josef Weitz is the myth of the purity of the founding of the Jewish state. Like all myths, it dies hard—or refuses to die at all.