Shabbat
Reading List

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In 2021, I recommended Botte di Ferro, a play by Ben Gassman about a tumultuous love affair between two Queens kids moving into early adulthood. The sequel, Adult Relationships, which runs at The Tank in New York City from November 1st–21st, is well worth your time.

Here, Jess Barbagallo and Layla Khoshnoudi reprise their roles as Noah and Negeen, two not-meant-to-be high school sweethearts—though that term is far too innocent to capture the way these two hurt and mock each other, crossing boundaries that might otherwise lead to restraining orders—who can’t seem to let it lie. They’re middle-aged now, both married with kids, and, in a classic dramatic setup, have been brought together by the death of a troubled friend. They haven’t spoken in many years—they’re wary of one another, and also moths to the flame. The pleasure of the show is in their chemistry, as we watch their old intimacy creep back in—and combust.

While Botte di Ferro was told with a shuffled chronology, almost in the form of memory, Adult Relationships feels more immediate, following the erstwhile lovers over the course of a single night, as the funeral gives way to a raucous, regressive (in the Freudian sense) high school reunion. The dancer Lena Engelstein stands in for the crowd of third-culture adult classmates as they blur around and intrude on and provoke our leading non-couple. (This was the most experimental and unfinished piece of the readthrough I saw, so I’m excited to see how it settled in the fully staged show.)

Through the course of these two shows, Noah and Negeen have joined my personal pantheon of dramatic couples. As in another personal fav, Normal People (the show adaptation, more so than the book), the relationship becomes a prism to explore the passage of time—both the imprint of young love and its long wake.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Despite my deep and abiding love for my wife, I’ve never been able to share her admiration for Gertrude Stein, whose writings have always been little more than gibberish to me. When Edwin Frank, in his splendid account of the 20th century novel, Stranger Than Fiction, included Stein’s Three Lives as one of the central books of the period I decided to give it an umpteenth try, and discovered that he and my wife were right. It was a remarkable book, and a surprisingly enjoyable read.

And so I was led to read Francesca Wade’s Gertude Stein: An Afterlife, out this month from Scribner. Wade’s vibrant volume is several books in one. First of all, it’s an astute, honest, and open-minded account of the subject’s life. Stein, to put it bluntly, was not a nice person. She was quick to take offense, displayed little loyalty to friends and admirers, and was jealous of the success of others—James Joyce being a particular bête noire.

Wade’s book is also, and necessarily, an account of the life of Alice Toklas, Stein’s devoted partner. It’s also necessarily an examination of the couple they formed, one that was admired by some, and derided by many more who found the power dynamic between them baffling and upsetting. What made that dynamic especially odd, as Wade very clearly shows, is that while most people thought Stein all but crushed Toklas, who surrendered all of her individuality and talent on the altar of Stein’s genius, there were others, like Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, who found Toklas’ denigration of Stein repellent.

Wade doesn’t fall into either of these camps, and finds that the strange balance the two women found was necessary both to their thriving and lasting as a couple and for the nurturing of Stein’s genius. One can be convinced by Wade on this point or not, but it’s never a good idea to assume the right to judge another couple from the outside. They were what they were, and their partnership and love lasted decades, so who are we to judge?

Finally, the book reminds us of the impact Stein has had on modernist and post-modernist culture, from John Cage to The Living Theater to Frank O’Hara.

With great care and intelligence, Wade makes Stein’s writings appear to be far more coherent, far more full of human meaning and significance than many have found in them. Wade’s affection for The Making of Americans, Stein’s magnum opus weighing it at well over 1,000 pages, is infectious. In Wade’s hands this is not the assemblage of disjointed sentences and words it might seem to be, but rather a way of understanding humankind. Wade makes it all seem so attractive that I went as far as downloading The Making of Americans onto my Kindle. That I’ve gotten even that close to reading the book is a tribute to Wade’s persuasiveness as a critic and biographer.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): I’m dashing off this recommendation early in the week, as I prepare for Yom Kippur and its attendant cycles of emotions, because I want to take a moment to put Ira Khonen Temple’s music in front of you while they’re beginning their East Coast tour. Temple (a recent guest on On the Nose) is a songwriter, musician, and cultural organizer, and their forthcoming album, Strange Tongue / Mistame-Loshn, is one in which, in their words, “queer, trans songwriting meets the urgent, living breath of Yiddish culture.” Elsewhere, they describe it as being “about heartbreak, courage and rebellion.” I always delight in hearing Temple’s accordion when I chance upon it, including, memorably, alongside Morgan Bassichis’s singing in Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah on a triangle of Manhattan pavement.

In their new music video, “Change My Shoes,” their playfulness and ingenuity come through—and we can glimpse, but not fully appreciate, the depth of their historical knowledge of Yiddish and folk music and culture. When they perform live, their music roots me to the spot; it blends past and present, sorrow and chaos and radiance. I’m excited to listen to the full album when it drops. And for friends in Brooklyn, I’ll see you at the Jalopy on Monday.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): In many Near Eastern creation myths, a sky god does battle with a giant sea-monster. In Genesis 1, by contrast, God casually creates such leviathans, alongside other aquatic creatures, on the fifth day. A host of mid-20th century apologetic biblical scholars saw in this demotion the passage from primitive pagan polytheism to civilized Israelite monotheism. Yet, as I once heard from Rabbi David Silber, the joke is in Genesis 2 and 3: the Lovecraftian oceanic depths may have been naturalized into mere serpents, but then one lowly snake single-tonguedly overturns the divine plan. You cannot keep a good chaos-monster down. (In a sense, though Silber was too frum to say it, the Christians were thus correct to read the snake as Satan.)

I was reminded of this hidden continuity reading Benjamin Balthaser’s new history, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left. Balthaser is a genius of unexpected continuities. His book is devoted to the proposition that the mass rebellion of ordinary Jews against Israel’s ongoing genocide only looks like a radical novelty because of the poverty of our historical vision. Contextualized by the vast disproportion of Jews in the 1930s Communist Party and then in New Left organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the revolt against Zionism today is instead recognizable as a return of the repressed. Indeed, quite literally repressed—for another major theme of Balthaser’s work is that— while often eulogized as an outdated alte kaker, wasting away in a nursing home—the Jewish left is better described as Bruce Willis in one of the Die Hard films, repeatedly bludgeoned by assailants (fascists and, it must be said, liberals), yet stubbornly refusing to die. When Balthaser compares Jewish Voice for Peace to the Communist Party, he refuses the official account, the liberal coroner’s report in which the antisemitic persecution of the Red Scare is euphemistically redescribed as Communism’s death by natural causes.

The point here is not just that the Jewish left is precedented, that we have roots and ancestors. Such a yichus would be itself worthy of attention, but the bigger claim is that leftist Jews’ diasporism was once simply Jewish common sense. The Jewish Left was anti-Zionist reflexively, rather than pointedly. Because of their global consciousness of political struggle and their dialogue with other oppressed American groups, Jewish radicals viewed Israel with a quizzical mistrust. (In the Jewish Communist Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money, Balthaser points out, the Zionist is a middle-class huckster, selling proletarian Jews on dubious suburban houses, a wonderfully deflationary diagnosis of settler-colonialism as, at its heart, a real estate scam.) Israel wasn’t the Death Star it is for many of us today, louring over our communities as the baneful omen of Empire. It was just a far-off “ideology,” as the Chicago leftist Myron Perlman, whom Balthaser interviewed before his death, had it—a confused distraction from the here-and-now of real, urban politics. Not unrelatedly, leftist diasporism expressed and sharpened attitudes that were widely held among American Jews, filtering through into mainstream liberal writers like Philip Roth and Woody Allen. Indeed, Balthaser suggests that much of the feisty vitality of American Jewish liberalism lies precisely in its proximity to and citation of a radical culture.

I would not be honest if I said all this sits so easily with me. My imagined lineage, unlike Benjamin’s, runs not just through labor lawyers and radicals but also through rabbis, academic biblicists, and other such bourgeois figures. I often found people I admire—my teacher, Robert Alter, or the Renewal Rabbi Arthur Waskow—evoked here as enemies, or at least as objects of exasperation. And the excavation of unappreciated antecedents carries as its corollary a frustration with left-wing Jews today who don’t know their roots and who—as I’m doing above, with my forced analogy to Genesis—feel the need, as Balthaser would have it, to dress the Jewish left in religious language and traditions, a maneuver as unnecessary and absurd as bedecking Emma Goldman in a sheitel. (Indeed, the revivers of this magazine come in for a certain amount of criticism for forgetting their own past.) Of course, anyone who has spent any time at all with Jewish leftists of earlier generations knows that such prickliness is inescapable, indeed is part of the draw. These were not people who suffered fools lightly.

If you’ll permit yet another contrived biblical analogy, I am reminded of a flailing Saul summoning the spirit of Samuel to seek advice, only to have his question answered with a question (“Why do you consult me now?”). A small part of me, reading Balthaser’s book, felt like Saul, berated for my previous failings in precisely my hour of need. Yet far more often, I felt like the reader of that biblical scene, who can, I think, only laugh at this untimely prophecy, at Saul finding religion late in life only to discover it offers no pastoral balm but rather means the same, cantankerous gadfly he had long dismissed. If, in other words, Citizens of the Whole World occasionally abrades, that is not its least Jewish quality—and regardless, the book, through its archival witchcraft, has summoned up prophetic spirits we can ill afford to ignore.

David Klion (contributing editor): This is not an Andor recommendation—for that, you can read our publisher Daniel May’s from 2022, or any number of critical raves for Tony Gilroy’s improbably sophisticated Star Wars spinoff, including mine. But one of the show’s many strengths is its frequent allusions to cinema about political violence, revolutionary struggle, and espionage, to the point where you could craft a whole filmography out of Andor’s non-Star Wars inspirations. The Battle of Algiers, The Conformist, Army of Shadows, Z, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and other John le Carré-derived productions, The Godfather Part II, and of course Gilroy’s own Jason Bourne movies and Michael Clayton are all in Andor’s DNA.

Recently I checked another of these off my list: Conspiracy, a 2001 made-for-HBO movie I’d somehow never seen or even heard of before Gilroy acknowledged it as an influence on a Season 2 sequence in which a gathering of Imperial officers plot a planetary genocide in secret. Though stars Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci won an Emmy and a Golden Globe respectively at the time, Conspiracy is underappreciated relative both to its overall artistry and its unsettling relevance to current events. At roughly 90 minutes, the film is the same length as the 1942 Wannsee conference, which it dramatizes in real time based on the only documentary records that survive from the meeting where Nazi Germany formulated its Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Branagh plays SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, who chairs the conference, and Tucci plays his retroactively better-known secretary, Adolf Eichmann. Something like a dozen other men are seated around the table at a grand lakeside villa on the outskirts of Berlin, where a lavish banquet accompanies the unholy proceedings.

The script, by the late playwright Loring Mandel, manages to wring suspense out of a conference attended exclusively by monsters, the outcome of which will be familiar to anyone watching. As we come to see, the Final Solution had already been settled on before the conference as far as the SS was concerned, with the Führer’s tacit approval. The real function of the conference was to loop in all of the Third Reich’s major internal factions, to generate unanimous support for the SS’s plan, and to ensure that the entire machinery of the Nazi state would be aligned when it came to exterminating European Jewry.

Though Heydrich kicks off the meeting determined to produce this exact result, it requires a certain amount of wrangling. Again, every single man at the table is a high-ranking Nazi, but that doesn’t mean they all start out on the same page. The brilliance of Conspiracy is to illuminate how even the most evil men can have clashing interests and priorities, and how bureaucratic turf wars are a perennial feature of even the most totalitarian states. Some of the attendees are highly educated and cultured, while others are thugs and philistines who crack grotesque jokes. Some question whether slaughtering unarmed Jews is really a better use of the Reich’s resources than securing military victory on the bloody eastern front; some suggest Jewish slave labor is too valuable to squander; some are simply insulted that their own agencies are being stampeded by the SS and that they are expected to endorse a plan they had no role in shaping. A single participant is made physically ill by what Heydrich is proposing, though he attempts to maintain his composure.

The most memorable dissent comes from Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), a leading Nazi jurist and coauthor of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which painstakingly defined who counts as a Jew and how to separate Jews thus defined from German society. Stuckart takes personal pride in the antisemitic legal regime he helped craft, and is furious that Heydrich wants to define Jews more expansively and arbitrarily, and to mass-murder them instead of, say, mass-sterilizing them and waiting for them to die out naturally within a generation. In the context of the Wannsee conference, this is what counts as the moderate, even humane position, and of course it gets ruthlessly shot down. Heydrich and Eichmann are not interested in negotiating; they have called this meeting to manufacture consent for their maximalist approach.

At the end of the conference, and the film, a montage of text informs us of the fates of each of the individual participants at Wannsee. Heydrich was assassinated by British-trained Czechoslovak operatives a few months after the conference, leaving Eichmann to carry out their plans in his memory; you probably know what became of Eichmann. Some of the attendees were killed during the Allied invasion of Germany, and some were hanged in its aftermath, but a disturbing number basically got off scot-free and went on to live banal postwar lives, in some cases for decades.

Conspiracy is not the only worthwhile film centered on Nazi officials—Downfall (2004) and The Zone of Interest (2023) both come to mind, among others—but it is particularly apropos for anyone trying to make sense of the current fascist turn in the United States and many other countries. That the Nazis were genocidal racist killers isn’t exactly news, but the specific ways different power centers within the regime conceived of their roles, butted heads, and ultimately reached consensus are rarely portrayed with this degree of nuance outside of historical debates over functionalism versus intentionalism. Unfortunately for all of us, such debates are far from academic.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As summer ends, I’d like to recommend some museum exhibitions that will still be on display for another few weeks, and in some cases more. All of them deserve fuller treatment than the capsules I’ll be allotting them, and all are very much worth a visit.

The most important of them is not in New York, but at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World, is dedicated to the underrated late 19th century Frenchman Gustave Caillebotte and allows us a rare extensive view of this magnificent artist. The Art Institute owns his most famous painting, Paris Street; Rainy Day, which is on permanent display, but there is so much more to him, though all that is important about Caillebotte can be found in this work.

Working in the youthful era of photography, which freed painters from strict realism, Caillebotte chose to take advantage of one element of the new art form: its fidelity to a radical form of perspective and deep focus. Even in simple Impressionist scenes like his 1877 Skiffs, depth plays an essential part. In all the artist’s best work, thanks to this depth of focus the impressionist and realist are blended. Full shows in the US dedicated to Caillebotte are rare things. This one, which has already been to Paris and Los Angeles under a different title—Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men—is unlikely to be equaled for quite some time. It’s open in Chicago until October 5th.

An eerily timely exhibition can be found at the New York Historical—Blacklisted: An American Story, on view till November 2nd. Originally organized by Milwaukee’s Jewish Museum, Blacklisted, which focuses on the Hollywood blacklist, illustrates the Red Scare of the 1950s, when a baseless accusation could end a writer, director, or actor’s career. The show contains a treasure trove of original documents—letters and texts of speeches delivered and undelivered, magazine articles, and film clips. Included are pages from one of the many magazines that provided the public and studio heads with the names and political sins of entertainment figures. Rare is the document of any kind where you will find the names of the beautiful actress Rita Hayworth and the creator of the immortal sitcom Car 54, Where are You?, Nat Hiken, sharing space, but this pair was considered a threat to the American way. The Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters who went to jail for refusing to answer questions about their membership in the Communist Party, feature prominently. Especially moving is the text of the remarks Communist screenwriter Sam Ornitz never got a chance to give at his HUAC hearing, in which he specifies that it is as a Jew that he is defending his rights to his opinions. Cowardice is also on display here, as stars who initially supported their blacklisted colleagues later backed off. It was, as Dalton Trumbo called it, the Time of the Toads. As is ours.

The Brooklyn Museum has two truly wonderful exhibitions right now. The first is Excerpts from “Ruckus Manhattan” (up until November 2nd), an abridged version of Red Grooms’ wonderfully wacky 1975 reconstruction of New York City. On display here is a mock Staten Island Ferry, complete with cars, passengers, crew, and countless details, all in Grooms’ cartoonish style. Also on display is a full-size Times Square porn bookstore, including models of seedy customers, (painted) magazine racks, and even a backroom for private viewings. For those of us who saw the original versions in 1974 and 1975, this is a tremendously entertaining trip back to a city that was a good deal seedier than it is today. For the rest of you, it’ll just be a delightful little show.

Also at the Brooklyn Museum is Christan Marclay’s 54-minute film Doors (through April 12th, 2026). I wrote some time ago about Marclay’s brilliant 24-hour film, The Clock, which was composed of shots with every minute of the day appearing on a clock. Doors is built around thousands of shots of people entering or leaving through doors or looking through keyholes. One person opens a door, and seamlessly, someone else enters a completely different room. But if you follow closely, it all turns into one continuous story, and each shot feeds into the one next to it in some significant way, telling a story that is never constantly begun and never completed.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): In many Near Eastern creation myths, a sky god does battle with a giant sea-monster. In Genesis 1, by contrast, God casually creates such leviathans, alongside other aquatic creatures, on the fifth day. A host of mid-20th century apologetic biblical scholars saw in this demotion the passage from primitive pagan polytheism to civilized Israelite monotheism. Yet, as I once heard from Rabbi David Silber, the joke is in Genesis 2 and 3: the Lovecraftian oceanic depths may have been naturalized into mere serpents, but then one lowly snake single-tonguedly overturns the divine plan. You cannot keep a good chaos-monster down. (In a sense, though Silber was too frum to say it, the Christians were thus correct to read the snake as Satan.)

I was reminded of this hidden continuity reading Benjamin Balthaser’s new history, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left. Balthaser is a genius of unexpected continuities. His book is devoted to the proposition that the mass rebellion of ordinary Jews against Israel’s ongoing genocide only looks like a radical novelty because of the poverty of our historical vision. Contextualized by the vast disproportion of Jews in the 1930s Communist Party and then in New Left organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the revolt against Zionism today is instead recognizable as a return of the repressed. Indeed, quite literally repressed—for another major theme of Balthaser’s work is that— while often eulogized as an outdated alte kaker, wasting away in a nursing home—the Jewish left is better described as Bruce Willis in one of the Die Hard films, repeatedly bludgeoned by assailants (fascists and, it must be said, liberals), yet stubbornly refusing to die. When Balthaser compares Jewish Voice for Peace to the Communist Party, he refuses the official account, the liberal coroner’s report in which the antisemitic persecution of the Red Scare is euphemistically redescribed as Communism’s death by natural causes.

The point here is not just that the Jewish left is precedented, that we have roots and ancestors. Such a yichus would be itself worthy of attention, but the bigger claim is that leftist Jews’ diasporism was once simply Jewish common sense. The Jewish Left was anti-Zionist reflexively, rather than pointedly. Because of their global consciousness of political struggle and their dialogue with other oppressed American groups, Jewish radicals viewed Israel with a quizzical mistrust. (In the Jewish Communist Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money, Balthaser points out, the Zionist is a middle-class huckster, selling proletarian Jews on dubious suburban houses, a wonderfully deflationary diagnosis of settler-colonialism as, at its heart, a real estate scam.) Israel wasn’t the Death Star it is for many of us today, louring over our communities as the baneful omen of Empire. It was just a far-off “ideology,” as the Chicago leftist Myron Perlman, whom Balthaser interviewed before his death, had it—a confused distraction from the here-and-now of real, urban politics. Not unrelatedly, leftist diasporism expressed and sharpened attitudes that were widely held among American Jews, filtering through into mainstream liberal writers like Philip Roth and Woody Allen. Indeed, Balthaser suggests that much of the feisty vitality of American Jewish liberalism lies precisely in its proximity to and citation of a radical culture.

I would not be honest if I said all this sits so easily with me. My imagined lineage, unlike Benjamin’s, runs not just through labor lawyers and radicals but also through rabbis, academic biblicists, and other such bourgeois figures. I often found people I admire—my teacher, Robert Alter, or the Renewal Rabbi Arthur Waskow—evoked here as enemies, or at least as objects of exasperation. And the excavation of unappreciated antecedents carries as its corollary a frustration with left-wing Jews today who don’t know their roots and who—as I’m doing above, with my forced analogy to Genesis—feel the need, as Balthaser would have it, to dress the Jewish left in religious language and traditions, a maneuver as unnecessary and absurd as bedecking Emma Goldman in a sheitel. (Indeed, the revivers of this magazine come in for a certain amount of criticism for forgetting their own past.) Of course, anyone who has spent any time at all with Jewish leftists of earlier generations knows that such prickliness is inescapable, indeed is part of the draw. These were not people who suffered fools lightly.

If you’ll permit yet another contrived biblical analogy, I am reminded of a flailing Saul summoning the spirit of Samuel to seek advice, only to have his question answered with a question (“Why do you consult me now?”). A small part of me, reading Balthaser’s book, felt like Saul, berated for my previous failings in precisely my hour of need. Yet far more often, I felt like the reader of that biblical scene, who can, I think, only laugh at this untimely prophecy, at Saul finding religion late in life only to discover it offers no pastoral balm but rather means the same, cantankerous gadfly he had long dismissed. If, in other words, Citizens of the Whole World occasionally abrades, that is not its least Jewish quality—and regardless, the book, through its archival witchcraft, has summoned up prophetic spirits we can ill afford to ignore.

David Klion (contributing editor): This is not an Andor recommendation—for that, you can read our publisher Daniel May’s from 2022, or any number of critical raves for Tony Gilroy’s improbably sophisticated Star Wars spinoff, including mine. But one of the show’s many strengths is its frequent allusions to cinema about political violence, revolutionary struggle, and espionage, to the point where you could craft a whole filmography out of Andor’s non-Star Wars inspirations. The Battle of Algiers, The Conformist, Army of Shadows, Z, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and other John le Carré-derived productions, The Godfather Part II, and of course Gilroy’s own Jason Bourne movies and Michael Clayton are all in Andor’s DNA.

Recently I checked another of these off my list: Conspiracy, a 2001 made-for-HBO movie I’d somehow never seen or even heard of before Gilroy acknowledged it as an influence on a Season 2 sequence in which a gathering of Imperial officers plot a planetary genocide in secret. Though stars Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci won an Emmy and a Golden Globe respectively at the time, Conspiracy is underappreciated relative both to its overall artistry and its unsettling relevance to current events. At roughly 90 minutes, the film is the same length as the 1942 Wannsee conference, which it dramatizes in real time based on the only documentary records that survive from the meeting where Nazi Germany formulated its Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Branagh plays SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, who chairs the conference, and Tucci plays his retroactively better-known secretary, Adolf Eichmann. Something like a dozen other men are seated around the table at a grand lakeside villa on the outskirts of Berlin, where a lavish banquet accompanies the unholy proceedings.

The script, by the late playwright Loring Mandel, manages to wring suspense out of a conference attended exclusively by monsters, the outcome of which will be familiar to anyone watching. As we come to see, the Final Solution had already been settled on before the conference as far as the SS was concerned, with the Führer’s tacit approval. The real function of the conference was to loop in all of the Third Reich’s major internal factions, to generate unanimous support for the SS’s plan, and to ensure that the entire machinery of the Nazi state would be aligned when it came to exterminating European Jewry.

Though Heydrich kicks off the meeting determined to produce this exact result, it requires a certain amount of wrangling. Again, every single man at the table is a high-ranking Nazi, but that doesn’t mean they all start out on the same page. The brilliance of Conspiracy is to illuminate how even the most evil men can have clashing interests and priorities, and how bureaucratic turf wars are a perennial feature of even the most totalitarian states. Some of the attendees are highly educated and cultured, while others are thugs and philistines who crack grotesque jokes. Some question whether slaughtering unarmed Jews is really a better use of the Reich’s resources than securing military victory on the bloody eastern front; some suggest Jewish slave labor is too valuable to squander; some are simply insulted that their own agencies are being stampeded by the SS and that they are expected to endorse a plan they had no role in shaping. A single participant is made physically ill by what Heydrich is proposing, though he attempts to maintain his composure.

The most memorable dissent comes from Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), a leading Nazi jurist and coauthor of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which painstakingly defined who counts as a Jew and how to separate Jews thus defined from German society. Stuckart takes personal pride in the antisemitic legal regime he helped craft, and is furious that Heydrich wants to define Jews more expansively and arbitrarily, and to mass-murder them instead of, say, mass-sterilizing them and waiting for them to die out naturally within a generation. In the context of the Wannsee conference, this is what counts as the moderate, even humane position, and of course it gets ruthlessly shot down. Heydrich and Eichmann are not interested in negotiating; they have called this meeting to manufacture consent for their maximalist approach.

At the end of the conference, and the film, a montage of text informs us of the fates of each of the individual participants at Wannsee. Heydrich was assassinated by British-trained Czechoslovak operatives a few months after the conference, leaving Eichmann to carry out their plans in his memory; you probably know what became of Eichmann. Some of the attendees were killed during the Allied invasion of Germany, and some were hanged in its aftermath, but a disturbing number basically got off scot-free and went on to live banal postwar lives, in some cases for decades.

Conspiracy is not the only worthwhile film centered on Nazi officials—Downfall (2004) and The Zone of Interest (2023) both come to mind, among others—but it is particularly apropos for anyone trying to make sense of the current fascist turn in the United States and many other countries. That the Nazis were genocidal racist killers isn’t exactly news, but the specific ways different power centers within the regime conceived of their roles, butted heads, and ultimately reached consensus are rarely portrayed with this degree of nuance outside of historical debates over functionalism versus intentionalism. Unfortunately for all of us, such debates are far from academic.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As summer ends, I’d like to recommend some museum exhibitions that will still be on display for another few weeks, and in some cases more. All of them deserve fuller treatment than the capsules I’ll be allotting them, and all are very much worth a visit.

The most important of them is not in New York, but at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World, is dedicated to the underrated late 19th century Frenchman Gustave Caillebotte and allows us a rare extensive view of this magnificent artist. The Art Institute owns his most famous painting, Paris Street; Rainy Day, which is on permanent display, but there is so much more to him, though all that is important about Caillebotte can be found in this work.

Working in the youthful era of photography, which freed painters from strict realism, Caillebotte chose to take advantage of one element of the new art form: its fidelity to a radical form of perspective and deep focus. Even in simple Impressionist scenes like his 1877 Skiffs, depth plays an essential part. In all the artist’s best work, thanks to this depth of focus the impressionist and realist are blended. Full shows in the US dedicated to Caillebotte are rare things. This one, which has already been to Paris and Los Angeles under a different title—Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men—is unlikely to be equaled for quite some time. It’s open in Chicago until October 5th.

An eerily timely exhibition can be found at the New York Historical—Blacklisted: An American Story, on view till November 2nd. Originally organized by Milwaukee’s Jewish Museum, Blacklisted, which focuses on the Hollywood blacklist, illustrates the Red Scare of the 1950s, when a baseless accusation could end a writer, director, or actor’s career. The show contains a treasure trove of original documents—letters and texts of speeches delivered and undelivered, magazine articles, and film clips. Included are pages from one of the many magazines that provided the public and studio heads with the names and political sins of entertainment figures. Rare is the document of any kind where you will find the names of the beautiful actress Rita Hayworth and the creator of the immortal sitcom Car 54, Where are You?, Nat Hiken, sharing space, but this pair was considered a threat to the American way. The Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters who went to jail for refusing to answer questions about their membership in the Communist Party, feature prominently. Especially moving is the text of the remarks Communist screenwriter Sam Ornitz never got a chance to give at his HUAC hearing, in which he specifies that it is as a Jew that he is defending his rights to his opinions. Cowardice is also on display here, as stars who initially supported their blacklisted colleagues later backed off. It was, as Dalton Trumbo called it, the Time of the Toads. As is ours.

The Brooklyn Museum has two truly wonderful exhibitions right now. The first is Excerpts from “Ruckus Manhattan” (up until November 2nd), an abridged version of Red Grooms’ wonderfully wacky 1975 reconstruction of New York City. On display here is a mock Staten Island Ferry, complete with cars, passengers, crew, and countless details, all in Grooms’ cartoonish style. Also on display is a full-size Times Square porn bookstore, including models of seedy customers, (painted) magazine racks, and even a backroom for private viewings. For those of us who saw the original versions in 1974 and 1975, this is a tremendously entertaining trip back to a city that was a good deal seedier than it is today. For the rest of you, it’ll just be a delightful little show.

Also at the Brooklyn Museum is Christan Marclay’s 54-minute film Doors (through April 12th, 2026). I wrote some time ago about Marclay’s brilliant 24-hour film, The Clock, which was composed of shots with every minute of the day appearing on a clock. Doors is built around thousands of shots of people entering or leaving through doors or looking through keyholes. One person opens a door, and seamlessly, someone else enters a completely different room. But if you follow closely, it all turns into one continuous story, and each shot feeds into the one next to it in some significant way, telling a story that is never constantly begun and never completed.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): Aly Halpert’s song Ayeka opens with the following words in Hebrew:

what have you done?

the voice of your brother’s blood

cries out to me from the ground

where are you

where is your brother

where are you? Ayeka?

In English, she continues:

from the ground I

hear them calling

your brothers’ blood

what can grow here

what have we done?

The words are drawn directly from Genesis 4:8-12, when Cain kills his brother Abel—the first instance of murder in the Torah. The song, a meditation on Israel’s genocidal devastation in Gaza and across the Middle East, invites us to sit with the horrors, and with our own complicity in them.

I learned the song this summer with Aly at Let My People Sing!, a cultural project that is reclaiming and transmitting diasporic Jewish communal singing traditions. Singing these ancient words, over and over, thinking of all the blood crying out to us from the ground, asking over and over, “where are you my people, what have we done?” cracked something open in me—a new round of tears, anger, grief, an antidote to numbness and alienation.

We are entering the high holiday season as the genocide escalates and worsens. For those looking for Jewish voices of moral clarity, connected with our ancient traditions, I invite you to take five minutes with Halpert’s song. Ask yourself: Where are you? Where are we? What can we do? Perhaps even invite her to teach the song in your community.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Dreams is the final episode of Dag Johan Haugerud’s brilliant Oslo Trilogy, Love-Sex-Dreams. In its original form, the trilogy was differently ordered (Sex-Dreams-Love), and the change results in some subtle shifts in the overall effect, but does nothing to undermine the unquestionable brilliance of these films. Though each film stands alone quite well, I can’t recommend enough watching the whole trilogy—an extraordinary cinematic accomplishment.

Haugerud is a novelist, and Dreams is the most novelistic of the three films. Johanne, the main character, is a teenager who develops an infatuation with her female French teacher. It becomes all-consuming, obliterating all of her other outside interests, and she takes to visiting the teacher, Johanna, in her sublet flat in a section of Oslo previously unknown to the adolescent. It’s clear that the teacher both senses her student’s feelings and feels something in return. In the film’s telling, it doesn’t seem anything happens between them, however strong their sentiments. But Johanne, the granddaughter of a writer and a child very much in love with literature, writes a confessional novel in order to make it all clear to herself. Then she shows the manuscript to her grandmother, who, after discussing it with Johanne and her mother, sends it to her publisher, who publishes it with great enthusiasm.

But the discussions of what is in the book don’t match what we have seen. From what we learn of the novel, it’s clear that at least in her imagination, Johanne went further than we have been led to believe. Or is it that we’ve been shown a story that doesn’t match reality? Is it Haugerud who’s an unreliable narrator, or is it Johanne? Much of the story is told in voiceover, which Haugerud didn’t use in any of the other films in the cycle. As a result, almost the entire film takes place in Johanne’s head. When it doesn’t, it’s a matter of other people discussing what goes on in her head.

As in the other two films, Oslo itself is not just a backdrop, but a character. The shift in the city—from Love’s social democratic focus, represented by the concentration on City Hall and its progressive architecture and friezes, through the city under reconstruction in Sex, to the modernist money-centered city of the Barcode District in Dreams, where Johanna lives and which Johanne admits to not knowing—provides a mini-history of Oslo urbanism.

Dreams is a woman’s film, and this, as Haugerud told me over the course of a series of interviews, was always his intention. Only one male character really has anything to say: Johanne’s therapist Bjorn, who appeared also in Love and was mentioned in Sex. Here, what he has to say to his patient is dismissed by her completely. Three female generations of the same family—the pressures, doubts, and desires they face—are the motor of the film.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): Austin Butler is easy on the eyes. That’s really what drew me to the baseball-themed action flick Caught Stealing—that, and the fact that my baseball-obsessed girlfriend was leaving for a couple weeks, and we wanted to watch something fun rather than our typical diet of sprawling foreign films where very little happens. Caught Stealing was fun, and, shockingly, good.

The broad strokes of the plot encompass variations on the common theme of action movies. Hank (Butler), our all-American country-boy protagonist who frequently calls home to his single mom, finds himself thrust into New York’s underbelly of crime due to his mere proximity to a mohawked Brit punk neighbor. We learn of his tragic backstory (a star baseball player in high school, he almost played “real ball” before his career was cut short by a tragic drunk-driving accident which injured his knee and took his friend’s life); we root against the villains who cross the moral threshold by harming a cat (the cold-blooded execution of Hank’s almost-girlfriend wasn’t enough to establish their evilness, apparently); we watch some exceptionally well-shot chase scenes and fight scenes through the gritty streets and bars of 1990s New York (complete with anti-Giuliani graffiti).

What makes Caught Stealing stand out, though, is its revelry in excess. It is properly campy, and, for all his possible shortcomings, director Darren Aronofsky is very good at camp. The baseball theming is absurdly, superbly executed, with Hank wielding baseball bats where a gun would be more appropriate, performing ridiculous sliding techniques during chase scenes, diverting his pursuers to Shea Stadium and siccing a crowd of Mets fans on them for wearing his stolen Giants hat, and punctuating every single call to his mother––including one which comprises the movie’s emotional climax––with “Go Giants!” The catchphrase morphs into a sort of comedic––but earnest––prayer; baseball morphs into a kind of kitsch epic myth, the exploits of its starring heroes dominating the gritty reality of Hank’s life.

The spirit of excess extends to the movie’s gritty crime circles as well. Aronofsky does not content himself with one shadowy criminal circle; the villains range from Russian (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin) to Puerto Rican (Bad Bunny) to Hasidic (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio) to the aforementioned British neighbor (Matt Smith) to an NYPD detective (Regina King), each hailing from their own syndicates, each having formerly coexisted in an uneasy, too-convoluted-to-follow alliance forged by the great equalizer: money.

There’s an allegorical reading to be had from the fact that, unlike in most crime movies, the gratuitous violence doesn’t start from someone reneging from a deal––instead, a large sum of money doesn’t get distributed only because one of the villains has an honest-to-god family emergency. Ultimately, that doesn’t matter; as soon as there’s a suspicion that the money won’t be paid out, the capitalism-forged multi-ethnic coalition crumbles instantly, and the bodies start piling up as everyone involved becomes a target for their would-be conspirators.

Aronofsky’s obsession with effluvia plays well with this theme. The world of Caught Stealing is filled with blood, vomit, and shit––never touching the money itself, but strewn about on the path to it. Hank is baptized into the world of criminal greed through an encounter with the Russians, which leaves him squirming in a pool of his own blood, and his proper indoctrination into the plot comes from finding a key stashed in a cat’s litterbox. Only through a katabasis of abjection is Hank able to acquire the money himself and find a happy ending.

The most haunting moment of the movie comes from a scene with Lipa and Shmully Drucker, two Hasidic mobsters, who have just committed acts of violence on a jaw-dropping scale––Hank, despite his trauma and over his objections, is their getaway driver, since it’s Shabbos (and they already have enough to answer to Hashem for). The two brothers decide out of the goodness of their heart to give Hank some money and let him leave with his life––after all, Hashem’s love is infinite, and their Bubbe was fond of Hank anyway. During these negotiations, someone asks Hank for a light, handing him the lighter lifted off of his executed almost-girlfriend. Uneasily, they explain to him that it simply had to be done to show him they were serious. “It’s a broken world,” they lament of their own brutal murder.

Caught Stealing is undeniably pulpy, but the ensuing shot of Hank wrapping the car around a steel pillar––stunningly aesthetic in itself, especially rich for mirroring an earlier scene of his traumatic crash––encapsulates the film’s darker and more beautiful aspect, sitting in delightful tension with its frenetic action movie campiness.

Allison Brown (managing editor): When the police invade the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, the liberated clifftop campus in the 1960s California of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the description of the violence they unleash upon the students jolts the reader from the rhetorical delights of what so far has been a psychedelic romp through Northern Californian weird. Witnessing the scene, math professor Weed Atman is also jolted—“The true nature of police was being revealed to him”—and he is transformed by this new visceral knowledge. The awareness of the power of the state (with its corporate partners) binds together Vineland’s cast of revolutionaries, both those who submit and turn collaborator and those who refuse to be disciplined and live at society’s margins or underground. It also binds the contemporary reader’s present to the past: For those of us who watched clip after clip of the massive militarized police invasions of Palestine solidarity encampments across US campuses, the state repression brought to bear upon Vineland’s student radicals who have organized their own alternative society is breathtakingly familiar.

This binding historical consciousness is built into the novel. Published in 1990, Vineland opens its narrative in 1984 as the Reagan administration’s anti-drug campaign is underway, reopening old fronts of COINTELPRO and reinvigorating its suppressive tactics. This renewed campaign of repression against any revolutionary remnants—and the investigative journey it sets teenager Prairie Wheeler on when she finds herself among the former comrades of her estranged, radical-turned-collaborator mother, Frenesi Gates—occasions Vineland’s reconstructions of the late 1960s. These come in the form of recollections from Frenesi’s former comrades and lovers, footage from the archive of her revolutionary film collective, and the third-person narrative’s own dreamy temporal shifts. And through Prairie’s maternal genealogy, we glimpse that before COINTELPRO lay McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

At the time of its publication, Vineland disappointed the many readers and critics who had long been waiting for another Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). But recent years have brought reassessments, and more are likely to come after Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another, which takes inspiration from Vineland, comes out in theaters at the end of this month. Perhaps in 1990, the violence of American fascism that today jumps off the page was less discernable amid Vineland’s cascade of language play and stoner humor (including, but not limited to, scenes involving Porsche-fucking, a Ninjette monastery, and the Marquis de Sod lawncare company). And perhaps it’s hard, at any time, to reconcile the novel’s discursive levity with the seriousness of the danger it depicts. But reading Vineland in 2025, this mix feels exactly right: The narrative’s accretion of playfulness serves as a bulwark of humanity and creativity against the casual cruelty and vacuousness of its agents of fascism.

Such a mix is also consistent with Vineland’s overall embrace of the unruly and ajumble. Most salient, or at least most interesting to me as a Gen Xer, is Prairie Wheeler’s mixed inheritance of both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary family histories. When Vineland’s creeping, tangled narrative comes to a close, the path she will take remains uncertain. From our present vantage point, we know Generation X as a whole will turn away from radical politics. But Vineland reminds us that history continues, the wheel turns again. The children of Prairie’s generation are among those college students whose encampments across campuses last year staked out zones of liberation, galvanizing rebellion against a political order that normalizes genocide and prefiguring a world in which Palestinians, and all people, are free.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): If you were going only by the online reviews of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s new film, Honey Don’t!, you’d conclude that it is not worth watching. Critics have mostly concurred that it is “an empty shell ornately decorated with eyecatching camera angles, an acidulously sun-bright palette, and whimsical dialogue,” “phony, inert, and oddly effortful,” and “doesn’t add up to much.” But truthfully, the slate of men who have made their careers on reviewing movies have missed the essential things about this film.

The lead, Honey, is a hard-boiled private investigator played by Margaret Qualley. She’s known throughout the police force and the town, and has the stubbornness, sex appeal, and mystery classic to the film noir genre. She flirts and sleeps with women voraciously—including a police officer played fantastically by Aubrey Plaza—and is wary of settling down. We meet some of her family members and glimpse a bit of her backstory, but the film is not interested in mining her past to find out what led her to be this kind of a detective; it lets her simply exist as a character, as is traditional for male leads and rare for women. A central plotline revolves around a self-obsessed pastor who exploits women in his congregation and runs some kind of drug trafficking business, and we watch as Honey slowly pieces together clues about why women in the town keep turning up dead. The ending brings together disparate threads within the film, but in a way that defies—or perhaps completely ignores—Hollywood norms. It creates something fun and freeing in doing so. I won’t say more, because I recommend going in without knowing too much.

This is the second in a promised trilogy of lesbian films by the husband-wife duo. This blog post articulates some of my points better than I can—but be warned, it has spoilers. (I also enjoyed reading this interview with the filmmakers, which helped me understand why I liked Charlie Day’s side character as much as I did.) Honey Don’t! is over-the-top in a way that, for me, made the violence in it palatable; the bright colors and dramatic poses create a welcome separation from the all-too-real violence of the off-screen world. This may not be stylistically or substantively for everyone—but please, don’t take mainstream publications’ underwhelming response as the whole story.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, features prominently in Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant novel The Director, a fictional account of the tragic period when the great director G.W. Pabst made films in Nazi Germany. Pabst’s situation was the result of the terrible decision to return to his homeland for family reasons after making a single unsuccessful film in the United States. The opposite pole from him, that of an ideologically committed Nazi director, is represented by Riefenstahl, director of two of the most thrillingly Nazi films of the Third Reich, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. When I interviewed Kehlmann earlier this year, he admitted he didn’t stint in his negative portrayal of Riefenstahl: “I treat her like a cartoonish villain, and I think you can do that with minor characters in a novel. You shouldn’t do that with your main characters, but you’re allowed to have cartoon villains as side characters. And I think she was pretty much like a cartoon villain.”

The new documentary on this cartoon villain, Riefenstahl, is intended as a dagger in the heart of what little reputation the titular director still has. This is not the first documentary on her, and excerpts and outtakes from a previous film, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, are used to great effect. The earlier film was made during Riefenstahl’s lengthy lifetime (she died at age 101 in 2003), and she gladly participated in what she attempted to turn into a whitewashing of her life and career. The new film’s director, Andres Veiel, assembles excerpts from a variety of TV appearances in Germany, Canada, the US, France and the United Kingdom, in which Riefenstahl repeats ad nauseam her claims that the films she made to the glory of Hitler and the Thousand Year Reich were nothing but jobs.

At one point, she claims that had she been asked by Stalin or Roosevelt to make films for them, she’d have done it and aimed for the same high quality she attained in her famous hymns to the New Germany and its leader. That Nietzschean Nazism permeated her entire aesthetic even before the war is undeniable, and she never addresses it. Despite the extensive record of her frequent contacts with Hitler, despite the photos showing him greeting her with great affection, she denies there was any such connection between them. And anyway, she didn’t know of any of the horrors inflicted by the Germans. Her constant repetition of that claim earned her the support and affection of fellow Germans of her generation, amply demonstrated by taped phone conversations with ordinary viewers of her appearances that are preserved in her archives.

Most damning of all is a moment shown from early in World War II, in September 1939, when Riefenstahl was accompanying the invading Wehrmacht into Poland and filming its activities. In a well-documented incident, she was present for the murder of 22 Polish Jews, after she complained they were interfering with a shot she was setting up. There even exists a photo, published in magazines after the war, of her screaming in horror as the mass killing ends. And yet, she claims, she was never there.

Riefenstahl the film is a perfect representation of Riefenstahl the person—a moral coward, lacking in any remorse, unable to accept her responsibility for any of her acts. She was in all this, very much a German of her generation.