Jewish Currents

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For fans of the Florida issue of Jewish Currents, I recommend Sasha Wortzel’s new film River of Grass, a meditation on the Everglades. The film braids the writing and activism of environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who died in 1998 at 108; the struggles of those currently fighting the environmental degradation of the area by the likes of Big Ag and others; and the author’s own personal recollections of growing up amid the unique ecology of South Florida. While it provides a useful, cogent portrait of current political action—most prominently through the work of Miccosukee activist and educator Betty Osceola, whose indigenous-led “prayer walks” have recently targeted the notorious detention camp Alligator Alcatraz—it is not afraid to slow down, to let the filmmaker think aloud, remember, dream.

Having myself grown up on the dredged swamp that is South Florida, with evidence of its wildness always threatening to come in—the storm leaking through roofs and window frames, the alligators in swimming pools, the gnats and mosquitoes in swarms—I felt that potent mix of despair and love that is sometimes called “climate grief” in Wortzel’s close attention to the landscape, and to the people who are trying to stave off the destruction one Burmese python at a time. The necessity of this work in a circumstance perhaps past hope is what lends the film its spiritual core.

There are upcoming showings of River of Grass in Miami and New York City, including one sponsored by JC, and moderated by me.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Early in Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, in the year 1998, our then-15-year-old protagonist Bunny Glenn finds herself in an apartment in Baku, in conversation with Fuad Bay, her Azerbaijani neighbor, and Eddie, a crushable British documentary filmmaker. The setup gives Eddie an opportunity to enlighten both Bunny and the reader about the political economy of the oil trickling beneath the “knobby paved streets” of Baku that Bunny, a lonely Foreign Service brat, wanders for hours each day. He rehearses the story of “Mr. Five Percent,” a man who happened to get in just on time on the “Contract of the Century” for Azerbaijan’s oil rights as the Soviet Union was dissolving. The conversation also gives Bunny, sporting freshly blow-dryed hair and a new pink dress, the opportunity to fantasize: “Bunny let herself imagine that she and Eddie were a couple, say a royal couple, going off to a state dinner . . . Eddie had recently come from the shower, Bunny knew from his damp hair, the visible smoothness of his cheek, some faintly herbal smell.” So established are the two overlapping frames of Mobility. Always hovering in the background is the oil industry, the awe-inspiring feat of transporting the substance beneath oceans, the billions of lives powered by its byproducts, the unfathomable wealth earned along its path. In the foreground is the more manageable story of one Bunny Glenn as she confronts the vagaries of adolescence and early adulthood: vexing men, family drama, postgrad drift, calorie counting, the corporate ladder. Kiesling writes deftly in both registers, precise and descriptive but never overwrought.

After the early scenes in Baku, Bunny once again finds herself shoulder-to-shoulder with the world of oil a few years after college when she winds up back at the family home in Beaumont, Texas, nursing a breakup and navigating bleak career prospects. Hired as a temp admin at a local engineering firm, she impresses her boss with her copy-editing skills and finagles her way into a communications position at his in-laws’ family oil company. An Obama devotee who “believes in global warming,” Bunny has some discomfort with her new field—“the flares, the sour gas, the oceans slicked with crude”—but not enough to overcome her relief at finally being able to move into her own apartment, to afford health care and Zumba classes. She takes heart in promises that she will eventually get to work on the company’s burgeoning “renewables” division (an attempt to fortify the business against shifting political winds) and aligns herself with campaigns to diversify the racial and gender makeup of the oil industry, allowing her to feel that she is fighting some dragon after all. And, industry compatriots and her consultant fiancé remind her, what might society look like for a woman like her without oil? Wouldn’t she be reduced to giving birth “outside in a shed,” rather than a hospital full of machines?

While Bunny is a shallow and oblivious character, Kiesling is gentle enough with her that she sometimes still earns the reader’s affinity, especially given how often the accurate political rebukes to her line of work come dripping in misogynistic condescension, whether from the dirtbag muckraking journalists in ‘90s Baku or, later, from her older brother John, who runs free in leftist intellectual circles in Ukraine while Bunny gets stuck in suburban Texas supporting their newly divorced mother. The exception is Sofie, John’s girlfriend, a Swedish environmental journalist whose cocktail of kindness, coolness, conviction, and intellect most unsettles Bunny’s confidence in her path. During one political argument with bystanders, Bunny observes that “Sofie was like a man in that she could speak confidently and at length, but like a woman in that she could read and direct the energy produced by the things she said.” And still, Sofie’s terms of articulating political resistance rarely connect with Bunny in ways she could imagine applying to her own life. “I’m not having children . . . the world does not need another child of affluent people in the West,” she tells Bunny, who “had never heard anyone say this before.”

On the whole, as it tracks years of such discussions amid its main character’s pursuit of career mobility, Mobility is a novel about the temptations of complicity, and how difficult they can be to resist when the negative externalities are still a few years and miles away, less tangible than health insurance or a nice hotel on the company card. And, in its final pages, in a turn towards somber speculative mode, it becomes a novel about what it might look like when those compromises finally catch up with us.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Iranian director Jafar Panahi is world cinema’s symbol of resistance. Arrested and banned from making films by the Islamic Republic, he has, since his release from prison, remained in Iran. During the years-long ban he found clever and successful ways to continue producing films, including one called This is Not a Film. He had other people direct his films for him at his ultimate direction, or instead of making a film shot on film or digitally, he would make one with his phone. Through all this, a humanist refusal to submit to repression and a mocking resistance to the state has been a constant in his work.

It Was Just an Accident is his first film under the new dispensation. One might think Panahi would avoid controversy his first time out, but instead he has produced his fiercest, most directly political film. Resistance to the mullahs is everywhere present in It Was Just an Accident. Women go scarfless, and a couple is preparing to wed even though the bride is already pregnant—proof of the crime of premarital sex. The petty criminality and venality of Iranian society is laid bare. Bribes are demanded by everyone in the film: police, gas station attendants, nurses, everyone. Iran’s ostensibly Muslim society is rotted and rotten.

The focus of the film is Vahid. He’s a schlubby nobody who is first presented as a side character in what looks like it will be a story about a family who, on their way home through a dark night, accidentally run over a dog. Is this the accident of the title? The car breaks down in front of a warehouse, where one of the workers fixes the car. The boss, Vahid, drives into town in his van and suddenly he stops, swings open the passenger door, and knocks out a pedestrian, who he loads into the van. He drives to the desert and digs a grave, into which he throws the pedestrian and proceeds to bury him alive.

What follows is a tale of resistance, and a reflection on revenge and retribution. Vahid, we learn, was a prisoner of the regime, arrested for participating in a strike. He recognized the pedestrian, whose car had broken down in front of his shop, as his torturer. Or is he? Vahid drives around picking up people who shared his time in jail in an effort to have his suspicion verified.

With the supposed torturer locked in a crate, the former prisoners, two of them in their wedding attire, attempt to definitively determine if their captive is Pegleg, the man who tortured and raped them. Panahi, almost in the style of Hitchcock in The Trouble With Harry, treats the progress and process of judgment with a light, at times comic touch. The former prisoners want to kill Pegleg, but is this Pegleg? Justice must be done, but it won’t be meted out unless they are certain the right man will pay for the crimes.

Throughout the film the former prisoners, resisters all, maintain their humanity. They refuse to act in the arbitrary fashion they know from their dealings with the state’s repressive apparatus. They even assist their captive’s wife when her labor begins and pay for her admission to the hospital.

Panahi’s final message in It Was Just an Accident is that those who resist the theocrats and pay dearly for their refusal to submit will never become like their foes. The inhuman treatment they have received has not dehumanized them. Panahi’s return to making actual films is a tribute to his bravery and decency.

Oct

10

2025

Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): When Zalmen arrives in Mandate Palestine at the beginning of Hanan Ayalti’s astonishing 1936 novel, Boom and Chains, he and the other passengers on board a ship from Europe must wait before disembarking. A general strike among Arab workers has brought everything to a halt. “It’s a strike against the British and against the Balfour Declaration,” explains an official from the Jewish Agency. The next day, when the passengers manage to leave, Zalmen grabs a ride to Tel Aviv in a car with five halutzim and three English policemen wielding guns. “How strange,” he thinks to himself. “I came to fight British imperialism together with the Arab masses, and here I am getting protected and escorted from the harbor by armed English soldiers.” Ayalti continues: “He bit his lip and uttered, ‘Nu, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens.”

The roughly 250 pages that follow show exactly that—and a lot happens. Zalmen labors in a kibbutz among fellow leftists who sink knee-deep in mud to dig canals to drain swamps, sweat and shiver through bouts of malaria, plow scrubby ground into fecund fields to pave new roads, and never stop debating how to bring about the glorious revolution. The book is more atmospheric than plot-driven at first, and Ayalti evokes landscape, insects, and bone-soaking rain in beautiful impressionistic strokes as he brings to life the characters’ erotic yearnings and ideological fervor. A wry, mirthless humor breaks through from time to time. “Spring continued,” Ayalti writes. “Nights of white moons. The kind of nights described in fundraising speeches by the Jewish National Fund.”

The main event is internal: the process of disillusionment. “We’ve always regarded the kibbutz as the exemplar of the new society,” Zalmen tells his comrade, Motke, after a year or two trying to build and live that new society. “It turns out, it is actually the vanguard of expelling Arabs from their work and from their land.” This recognition requires them to take sides, heightening the action—and shining a rare, riveting light on joint Jewish-Arab resistance.

Zalmen reflects a good measure of Ayalti’s own experience. Born in 1910 in the Grodno region, then part of the Russian Empire, the author arrived in Palestine in 1929 as a teenage zealot of the socialist movement Hashomer Hatzair, and soon abandoned Zionism for the nascent Arab-Jewish Communist party. Although he had published his first novel in Hebrew, Ayalti wrote Boom and Chains in Yiddish because, as the translator Adi Mahalel explains in an illuminating introduction, no Hebrew publisher would have touched an anti-Zionist novel. Arrested by the British for his own political activity, Ayalti ended up fleeing Israel for Paris after a short stint in prison. He covered the Spanish Civil War for a Yiddish paper, fled Hitler’s rise, found safety in Uruguay, and eventually settled in New York, where he joined the students protesting at Columbia University in 1968 with his good friend, Hannah Arendt. He died in 1992.

Mahalel notes that Ayalti repudiated Boom and Chains in his later years, citing his change of political allegiances—more because of the book’s pro-Soviet implications, it seems, than because of its critique of Zionism. Either way, one result has been decades of obscurity, even among Yiddish scholars. Mahalel has retrieved this enthralling dissident work at a crucial moment.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): For those of us who find some relief from the abundant horrors of reality in ones that are merely imagined, the hour is upon us. Since I adored Mike Flanagan’s Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass, I started my spooky season with his equally moody The Haunting of Hill House. The show, inspired by more than adapted from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name, follows five adult siblings who spent a formative childhood summer in the eponymous mansion, which ended in their mother’s tragic death amid mysterious circumstances. Despite an often overwrought script and sometimes tropey depictions of trauma, its energetic performances, carefully crafted atmosphere, and imaginative scares make it perfect October viewing.

Less familiar—if also less coherent—was Tilman Singer’s recent film Cuckoo. In a promising first venture into scream queendom, Hunter Schafer stars as an American adolescent reeling from her mother’s death who must move to a remote resort in the German Alps to live with her father and stepmother, who’ve designed an expansion for the creepy hotelier. She’s soon unsettled by a pattern of female guests inexplicably vomiting, her stepsister’s sudden onset of seizures, and a strange screeching from the woods that causes time to stutter and loop. Insanity ensues.

Readers with no stomach for on-screen horror may still appreciate the podcast I’ve been bingeing, Too Scary; Didn’t Watch. The premise is simple: One host recaps recent releases or genre classics for the other two—who are, as they say in the intro, “too scared to watch scary movies”—with ample interjections and digressions. For someone interested in seeing the films themselves, it works well as a chat show with a lightly spooky flavor rather than a substitute for watching, and I’ve been using it to relive movies I enjoyed earlier this year like Weapons, Final Destination: Bloodlines, and Late Night with the Devil. But for anyone for whom that’s still too much (or anyone with small children) I’d heartily recommend Raahat Kaduji’s I’m Not Scary, which my kids picked up from a free books table at the farmer’s market last weekend. It’s the adorable tale of a bat who hopes to convince his fellow woodland critters that he’s not the monster his shadow suggests; he’s just a little guy who loves to bake. Autumnal, cozy, and totally fright-free.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I don’t, as a rule, read history or fiction for the lessons they can teach us about today, but reading Antonio Scurati’s M: Son of the Century, I frequently felt chills of recognition running up and down my spine. M is a tetralogy of novels about Mussolini, beginning in 1919 with the founding of the fascist movement and continuing on until Il Duce’s death in 1945. Only the first volume is available in English, but polyglots like me can read the remaining volumes in Italian, or volume two in French.

Scurati is a competent though not a great writer, but in his hands the mere recounting of Mussolini’s life and deeds is a compulsive read. Scurati doesn’t dwell on Mussolini’s political beginnings as one of the most radical of Italy’s socialists, a phase that covered his first decades and ended when he became a militant supporter of Italy’s entry into World War I. Mussolini’s betrayal of everyone and everything in his life is a constant theme of M. True beliefs are seldom taken on, or are cast aside with ease. Fascism was not an ideology; it was a punch in the face.

Betrayal existed in every sphere of Mussolini’s life. He cheated both on his wife and on his primary and most important mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who was Jewish. He cast aside friends and allies—anyone who got in his way or was no longer of use to him.

And yet, Scurati shows that Mussolini—despite the fanatical anti-leftism of his fascism, the beatings and murders of socialists and Communists, the burning down of left-wing meeting halls, the constant reign of terror—was haunted by his socialist past. Among the few people to whom he was loyal was Nicola Bombacci, a Communist Mussolini befriended in his youth when both were socialist teachers and who, after being expelled from the Italian Communist Party, was the foremost left-fascist, insisting on fascism’s socialist nature. Bombacci was among the four people other than the Duce himself who were killed by partisans and left hanging on Piazzale Loreto in Milan.

Scurati presents an unvarnished portrait of Mussolini, a man moved by ego, animal needs, and a sick desire for power and for national and personal aggrandizement. Reading his insane diatribes, his boastful style, and his constant belittling of others certainly struck a familiar chord.

The first volume builds to a conclusion that is undeniably a warning to us. It recounts what should have been the end of Mussolini’s career, the murder of the reformist socialist politician Giacomo Matteoti in 1924. Despite his moderate politics, Matteotti was a ferocious foe of fascist rule. While other politicians and intellectuals like Pirandello and Benedetto Croce were lining up behind Mussolini, Matteotti was speaking and writing scathing attacks on Il Duce. Mussolini and his fascist squads finally had enough of him, and he was kidnapped in broad daylight and murdered behind the closed curtains of the getaway car.

It was obvious who was behind his disappearance and murder, and Mussolini looked to be doomed. But cowardly opposition politicians did little, and the king stood by and didn’t remove Mussolini from office. His back seemingly to the wall, Mussolini stood in the chamber of deputies and, knowing he had the support of a significant segment of the public and that politicians lacked backbone, said “Well, then, gentlemen, I declare here, before this assembly and before the people of Italy, that I and I alone assume the political and moral responsibility for everything that has happened…If fascism has been a band of criminals, I am the leader of the criminal band.” Like the man who claimed he could shoot someone on the corner of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, he read his country well, and was in power for over 20 more years. We already have a wannabe Mussolini in our present. Is there a Matteotti in our future?

Oct

3

2025

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.

Sep

26

2025

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.