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Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): On a summer trip to Montreal, I stopped in to the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore, connected to the graphic novel publisher of the same name, which is responsible for putting out some of the greats of the field (Lynda Barry, Shigeru Mizuki, Chris Ware). The guy behind the counter recommended Acting Class by Nick Drnaso, whose sophomore effort Sabrina was the first graphic novel ever nominated for a Man Booker Prize.

The book follows ten people in a small town who, for one reason or another, respond to flyers for a free acting class. The teacher is waving a collection of red flags, from the fake name (John Smith), to his frequent negging of certain students, to his boundary-pushing exercises, to his broken teeth. But the novice actors, as we learn in the collection of vignettes that open the book, are all, well, struggling. They just need the class and its escape. The graphic novel proves the perfect medium for this story, as it depicts the acting exercises in full verisimilitude, such that you begin to lose track whether you’re in real life or in a scene—a move that becomes more and more unsettling as the characters drift further from reality and deeper into fantasy. Adding to the unease is Drnaso’s flat, doll-like depiction of faces and expressions, which makes an uncanny valley of the world of the book.

I can’t say I was satisfied with the resolution of the plot—the book’s series of abrupt, stacked endings left me mostly confused—but it hardly mattered. Drnaso manages to swallow the reader in his eerie little world. Acting Class invited me to read it slowly. Closing the book every few pages, I found I had trouble shaking off its disquietude, that my reality suddenly felt a little more unstable, permeable at the edges. And for whatever reason, that strange, anxious feeling felt generative and interesting, and introduced some distance between life and its observation.

David Klion (contributing editor): John Updike died in 2009 and has been falling out of fashion since at least that long ago. “You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling,” Patricia Lockwood wrote in a posthumous reappraisal in the London Review of Books, which took particular delight in skewering the late novelist’s legendarily bizarre sex scenes. Even in the postwar heyday of white male literary misogynists, Updike was always a bit of an aberration—a small-town Pennsylvanian of old Protestant stock who saw the likes of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth as competition, his admiration for their virile Jewish masculinity tinged with both fascination and envy.

I’ve spent the past few years immersed in the history of the 20th century New York intellectual and cultural scene, which has led me on an unfortunate number of digressions—including, mostly for my own entertainment, a series of novellas and short stories Updike wrote between 1970 and 2001, when they were collected in one convenient volume as The Complete Henry Bech. Though Henry Bech tends to be overshadowed by Updike’s best-known recurring protagonist, Rabbit Angstrom, I’d been intrigued by him ever since I first learned years ago that Updike had conceived of a Jewish alter ego—a fellow postwar writer whose inconsistent fictional output and equally inconsistent personal life draw inspiration from all the aforementioned rivals as well as Updike himself. Rabbit is Updike’s provincial side and Bech is his cosmopolitan side, and I admit the latter appeals to me more.

If the Bech stories were merely affectionate sendups of Roth or experiments in whether a goy can channel a Jew persuasively in fiction, they might just be amusing—and for my purposes, dayeinu. But I became fully invested in Bech as a cranky, horny, self-absorbed, self-effacing, skeptical, and occasionally wise antihero, rendered through Updike’s always lyrical prose. Taken together, the stories constitute an extended comic meditation on bookish fame (or semi-fame), inspiration (or lack thereof), and frustration, complete with a fake bibliography and fake reviews from the likes of Alfred Kazin and Ellen Willis. They also form a kind of travel guide, with Bech bouncing between the former Eastern Bloc, the Upper West Side, an unnamed island that is clearly Martha’s Vineyard, Ghana, Australia, and many other places around the world, often on State Department junkets.

And yes, of course, he goes to Israel. “The Holy Land,” first published in Playboy in 1979, sees Bech at odds with his Episcopalian wife, who finds herself unexpectedly moved while retracing the footsteps of Jesus. She is baffled that Bech couldn’t care less about his own nominal religious connection to the land (“Israel had no other sentimental significance for him; his father, a Marxist of a theoretical and unenrolled sort, had lumped the Zionists with all the Luftmenschen who imagined that mollifying exceptions might be stitched into the world’s cruel and necessary patchwork of rapine and exploitation”) and is instead weirded out by his settler-colonial distant relations, and increasingly by his wife too. “His marriage was like this Zionist state they were in: a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on an earth where there was no safety,” Updike writes, sizing up Israel better than Bellow ever did through the eyes of a Jew who is accustomed to living in a permanent state of alienation. Reviewing the first Bech volume in Commentary in 1970, Cynthia Ozick accused Updike of dreaming up a false and essentially parodic Jew—but this Jew, for one, found Bech welcome and familiar company.

There’s plenty of cancelable material in here, though it’s up to the reader to determine how much of the casual racism and misogyny is the real Updike’s and how much is the fictional Bech’s, but I doubt the Bech stories are read widely enough anymore to be worth canceling (if “cancel culture” even means anything now, if indeed it ever did). Regardless, for a certain niche of reader—perhaps a niche overlapping with Jewish Currents subscribers?—Bech offers nostalgia for a literary era that, like the ascendent American empire that fostered it, is rapidly fading into the past.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer arrived in the United States from France in 1972, I was 20 years old. I’ll let no one say it was the best time of life—I was a loveless, miserable young man, disgusted with politics, burying myself in James Joyce, Symbolist poetry, and pre-Raphaelite art, and developing an interest in film. On the advice of some reviews, I went to see Four Nights. There on the screen was my story, that of a young man who roams the streets dreaming of love and who, in his solitude, finds the woman he’s been seeking. She is unavailable, waiting for the return of a man to whom she has promised herself, who has gone for a year to study at Yale. Jacques, the lonely young man, lends Marthe, the abandoned young woman, his shoulder, support, and love. It seems as though things could work out for Jacques and Marthe, but then the student returns, and Marthe leaves Jacques on a crowded Parisian street. All of my outdated romanticism was here, and I soon came to regard Bresson as the greatest filmmaker in the history of cinema.

Four Nights is a perfect entry point to Bresson. He is commonly referred to as the Jansenist of Cinema, the author of rigorous films revolving around the questions of God’s Grace, of death, of human ugliness and despair, and sometimes of redemption. But in this film, based on the Dostoevsky novella White Nights, Bresson focuses his eye on the not so simple matter of young love.

Bresson is known for his unique cinematic language, which includes the word he uses for his kind of film, “the cinematograph.” He didn’t use professional actors and he drained his performers of all that is theatrical in order to get to the purest heart of his scenarios. Bresson’s characters even walk in a way unseen in other peoples’ films. He explained his ideas on film in two fascinating books published by NYRB Classics, Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson. Beginning Bresson with Four Nights is a way of easing yourself into his more demanding work—but more important, it is a chance to see a film of rare, pure beauty.

Though the film was dismissed as “Bresson light” it is, in fact, the equal of his better known films, like Au hasard, Balthasar, or Diary of a Country Priest. As in those films, Bresson casts his gaze on something essential in human life. He presents the hopes, hesitations, strengths, and weaknesses laid bare by love; this is a film about the intermittences of the heart.

Years ago, Four Nights vanished from the US when its distributor went bust. It’s now showing in a restored version, distributed by the estimable Janus films. This is the film that eventually led me to move to Paris so I could meet Bresson. I did, and it took 45 years for my account of that meeting to appear in print. It was in Paris that I met my first wife, with whom I had a son, so Four Nights truly transformed my life.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Stepping in to moderate between the divergent movie tastes of me and my husband (me: ’90s buddy comedies; him: long, plotless arthouse films), a friend recommended The Plot Against Harry. Readers, I’ve rarely been so excited to recommend something to this list. The film—a dramedy about a Jewish bookie just out of prison and pushed into a more honest lifestyle by the changing demographics of his New York City turf—was made by Michael Roemer in 1969 but went entirely unrecognized and unreleased in its time. When Roemer retrieved it from the drawer in 1990, it hit its mark. It screened at Cannes that year and was later picked up by the Criterion Collection.

In his 2023 review of the film in the New Yorker, coinciding with a run at Film Forum, Richard Brody praised the swift pacing, the “breathless rush of action . . . brought to life with a teeming cast of clamorous characters who infuse frame after frame with hectic energy.” Though there is always something “happening” on screen, the plot feels somewhat tangential to the core of the film—a quality that reminded me, in some ways, of the Coen brothers’ masterpiece The Big Lebowski. “Roemer unleashes his lurching panoply of dramatic incidents in a rapid succession of scenes with no breathing room between them. The result is like a piece of music with the rests taken out . . . producing a nerve-jangling cluster of dissonances,” Brody writes.

The film’s portrayal of mid-century Jewishness—gleaned as we accompany Harry to weddings, bar mitzvahs, and even a bris, where he attempts to reconnect with his estranged family—is refreshingly straightforward and unsentimental. More significant to the portrait, and to Harry’s bottom line, is the fact that white flight has destroyed his customer base, as Jewish neighborhoods have become largely Black and Latino. This gives Harry’s former henchmen, who better reflect the new demographic, the chance to pull Harry’s business out from under him. That Harry doesn’t want to make good or go straight only makes his definitive turn in that direction more delightful, the product of surrender rather than an attack of conscience.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): When I picked up Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman from my local bookstore, the cashier called it“wacky and fantastic.” I can think of no better way to describe it myself.

I’m tempted to compare it with other, more canonical works of Irish modernism, and The Third Policeman does indeed share the sort of existential bleakness that can only really be captured via metaphor—the taste of black coffee, or maybe gin. The commonalities with Beckett in particular run deep: there’s the delight in absurdly unproductive dialogue (here often between the narrator and Joe, his soul), the eerie flatness of landscapes (a police barracks is described as literally two-dimensional), the obsession with man’s collapse into the mechanical, even the focus on bicycles. While these similarities are striking, to stress them too strongly would be to minimize the book’s most peculiar and interesting elements.

The substance of the story is that the narrator has murdered a rich old man for money, which is plainly stated in the first sentence. The first-person account that follows begins as a typical noir-style telling of the crime and its aftermath, then verges into a surrealist landscape where the narrator—now nameless, having forgotten his own name, must embark on a mostly nonsensical quest to find the black box that contains his victim’s cash.

The narrator is a scholarly disciple of a fictional obscure philosopher, de Selby—the book’s central crime was primarily motivated by a need to secure funds to publish his De Selby Index, a comprehensive commentary on the philosopher’s work. Throughout his travels, the narrator is given to long discourses on de Selby’s arguments against the existence of time, his schemes to replace houses with roofless, tarp-constructed “habitats,” and his conception of a sausage-shaped world. These digressions feature footnotes, often many pages long, addressing nuances, complexities, and even the arguments (and scandalous lives) of other fictional commentators. What becomes clear through these insertions is that de Selby is little more than an eccentric quack, and that the narrator, despite his years of study and singular devotion, is a scholar in the worst possible sense—a pedant.

There’s a pathetic sense of almost getting it which runs throughout the book. The narrator tries, over and over, to manipulate, reason with, and evade the policemen of the story, but despite their apparent ineptitude, they always end up on top. They may seem benign and rather simple to the narrator, but these policemen understand the backwards, unjust, paradoxical governing principles of this fantastical world, and he does not. Even when he “escapes” from them, he ends up right back in their clutches at the story’s conclusion—the obvious implications of which the narrator does not seem to grasp (and which I’ll leave unspoiled).

I don’t mean for my melancholy reading to undersell the playfulness at the core of The Third Policeman. Another shared trait with Beckett’s best work: jokes are the engine of the book, and the tragedy at its core only exists through the unremittingly comic nature of its scenes. Maybe a better comparison here is to Kafka’s novels, where you get the sense that the whole situation is a cruel joke that almost everyone is in on—except the protagonist.

Yet, unlike in Kafka, this protagonist’s crime is real and obvious. He has murdered not just for greed, but for scholarly self-aggrandizement. An interesting development with this in mind: when the black box is rediscovered—having disappeared for much of the plot, despite being the narrative lynchpin—its contents have metamorphosed into “omnium,” a mysterious substance which can, through obscure means, be turned into anything. Money has gone from a material to a quasi-metaphysical motivator.

In a failed bid to publish The Third Policeman during his lifetime, O’Brien proposed a new title: Hell Goes Round and Round. Though the mention of hell may introduce an unwelcome bit of moralizing, I’d argue this would have been a better title. Perhaps the most arresting image in the book is its depiction of “eternity” as a series of long, steel-plated hallways covered with wires and pipes and clocks and dials, going on and on and on, leading only to more machines and more hallways. You’re left with a sense of unending tedium, a feeling that the world is a vast mechanistic system always perceptible, its details always right in front of you, yet its workings floating just beyond your comprehension. You have to hope that your own eternal fate—or, in the broadest sense, your history—is not so bleak.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Julia Loktev’s brilliant, disturbing, depressing, exhilarating documentary on Vladimir Putin’s opponents, My Undesirable Friends, is five hours long. I would hope that length wouldn’t deter Jewish Currents readers from seeing a film about people—mainly Russian women journalists in their twenties working at an opposition TV station—who have dedicated and risked their lives to fight a level of tyranny America has not yet reached, nor even approached. It’s a film that, by the fourth hour, had me shedding tears of rage at the cowards in US media and academia who have bent the knee to Donald Trump and his goonish followers when merely criticized and threatened with fines. Meanwhile, the women Loktev films face arrest at any moment, are followed by the security forces, and see their loved ones locked up for treason just for reporting on Putin’s crimes.

The film begins with the young journalists learning to deal with the fact that they’ve been designated foreign agents and will have to label all of their reports as such. They joke about how hard it will be for them to find romantic partners unless those partners also bear the label. Still, they carry on doing their work, expressing fear alongside optimism that the dictatorship can’t possibly last. Some talk of leaving Russia, but they’re determined to stay and see out the fight as long as possible.

Then comes February 2022 and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. As one of the star journalists, Anya, says just before the invasion, she feels “nausea, shame, and disgust.” She goes even further: “I no longer have a country.” The journalists are detained by the intelligence agencies—the FSB and the GRU—but they continue to criticize Putin. Their isolation within an indifferent country doesn’t prevent one reporter at the station from admitting his feeling of guilt over not having done enough to stop the “monster,” as he says, from ruling for more than 20 years. Putin is the only leader they’ve ever known, as he assumed office when most of them were in kindergarten.

The war makes their continued lives in Russia untenable, and many of them flee. They can’t be faulted—this is the government that murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose martyrdom is referenced several times.

“Nausea, shame, and disgust” is what many of us feel here in America too. Our collective failure to prevent Trump means that we, too, bear responsibility for our country’s descent into authoritarianism and degradation. In a perverse way, My Undesirable Friends is an inspiring film. Watching it, one wants to measure up to the young people on the screen. Normally I hate any film that is inspiring, but I exempt this one from my blanket disdain.

We are seeking questions for a special mailbag episode of On the Nose. What would you like to ask the staff of Jewish Currents? You can send your questions—either written or recorded—to editor@jewishcurrents.org with the subject: Mailbag.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): Public opinion polling over the past 60 years shows a relatively steady erosion of Americans’ trust in government. In 1958, 73% of Americans said they “trust the government to do what is right.” As of last May, the number of Americans who say the same is at 22%. But somehow, the Central Intelligence Agency—the subject of Tim Weiner’s excellent 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA—has fared better. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 52% of Americans held a positive view of the CIA. But if more Americans read Weiner’s book, their views would likely change.

In 600 pages of matter-of-fact prose, Weiner convincingly shows that the CIA’s history is one of failure after failure after failure. This poor record stretches all the way back to the CIA’s earliest years—in the 1950s, the agency tried to penetrate the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, and instead wound up sending hundreds of men to their deaths. The CIA’s spies repeatedly failed to pass themselves off as locals, imperiling their ability to collect intelligence. The CIA has also never been able to predict, or even make educated guesses about, future events: The agency was repeatedly caught off guard by developments such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Even when the CIA has nominally succeeded in fomenting a coup, the consequences have been bloody. These overthrows have often ended in results not to the CIA’s liking, such as when the CIA helped oust Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as Shah, only for the Shah’s murderous and corrupt rule to lay the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic revolution.

My one frustration is that Weiner appears to be a believer in the basic legitimacy of the CIA. He urges the US government to invest billions of dollars in making the CIA better. “If we want American fortunes to prosper in the future, we will need the best intelligence. Teaching a new generation how to know the enemy is the place to begin,” he writes. Weiner’s book does not stop to consider that the CIA is a core part of a rapacious empire that has immiserated millions of people around the world, and thus should perhaps be abolished, rather than reformed to be made more efficient. Still, the details of Weiner’s book remain important to learn. They provide more than enough reason to reconsider the hallowed place of the CIA in the American imagination.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Many of you have no doubt already seen Ari Aster’s Eddington. Why I went to see it is partly a mystery to me, since longtime readers may have noticed that popular American films are foreign to me. I think it’s because I have come to doubt many of the precautionary measures of the time of Covid. I thought Eddington would give me much to think about along these lines. It didn’t. I didn’t know what the hell was going on in the last quarter of the film, though I thought it a magnificent portrayal of what Philip Roth called in another context “the American Berserk.”

All of this is a lead-in to another film about the lockdown that does allow us to reflect on that period, Olivier Assayas’ lovely and elegiac Suspended Time. It is a very French film, set in a very French old house, in a very French countryside. The house is inhabited by two very French couples—Paul, a filmmaker, his filmmaker girlfriend Morgane, his rock critic brother Etienne, and Etienne’s partner Carole. The latter couple is newly established after years as lovers during Etienne’s marriage. The story is, as Assayas told me when I interviewed him last week, all true. The disputes and the conversations were all taken from life. Suspended Time was shot in Assayas’ family’s country home, with its book-lined walls featuring the library of his father, a screenwriter. The situations in the film and the activities of the character are exactly how Assayas and his brother—a filmmaker and a rock critic, like the male characters—acted as they lived through what Assayas told me was the first real historical event of his life.

There were many of us who had a good lockdown, my wife and I among those fortunate. Paul, Carole, Morgane, and Etienne are having a very good lockdown as well. They are finally removed from the world and are able to concentrate on those they are with and whom they love. They can read, play tennis, discuss Abelard and Heloise, play “name that tune,” and lament the deaths of musicians they love, like John Prine (this is, after all, a very French film, and the love of American musicians is very French).

Paul is more than a bit of a maniac when it comes to Covid mitigation measures. He insists, for example, that groceries be left outdoors for four hours before being brought into the house. This exasperates Etienne, who, for his part, believes in respecting the recommended measures, but only those he considers reasonable. Paul, along with his mania that leads him to watch videos on handwashing, is also obsessed with scraping the bottom of a newly purchased pot in which he has burned fresh strawberries. All of this, Assayas assured me, was what happened, and he admitted to me that at the time he was surprised to see his neuroses manifest themselves in his obsession with the ruined pot. In the closed-in circumstances of the lockdown, it is all utterly plausible.

But the film is ultimately about the many ways in which life went on. The housemates are in touch with their work, continue to write, and see their psychiatrists via Zoom in the woods. Their love for each other deepens.

France went through much torment during the pandemic, but none of it appears in Suspended Time. Assayas told me he thought people would change their lives as a result of the pandemic, but they didn’t. As Michel Houellebecq predicted, after Covid life is the same, only worse. But as Suspended Times shows us, for some, perhaps many, Covid forced us to live within ourselves and with those we love. For the characters here, it was a good pandemic, indeed.

Dick Flacks (JC Council member): Soon after October 7, Josh Waletzky, a key figure in the decades-long project to nurture Yiddish culture, led a Yiddish songwriting workshop at the Yiddish New York Festival. Many of the songs were emotional responses to Israeli actions in Gaza and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. That creative outburst has culminated in a remarkable, multi-layered collection of 17 songs, called Lider mit Palestine: New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love. The work is available for digital streaming and downloading at Bandcamp, with proceeds going to Gaza Birds Singing—a musical, educational, and therapeutic project in Gaza.

Waletzky wrote and performed one of the songs in the collection and helped shape several of the others. His co-producers are Isabel Frey, a noted performer and scholar of Yiddish song based in Vienna, and Joe Dobkin, a Brooklyn-based audio producer and poet. Frey and Dobkin perform as well. They’re joined by other seminal figures in the Yiddish song movement, including Michael Alpert, Daniel Kahn, and Jordan Wax.

Many of the songs are politically and artistically bold. Frey co-created the remarkable Goles-Himen (diaspora hymn) which sets bluntly anti-nationalistic lyrics to the melody of the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah. The lyrics, which quote the Labor Bund slogan, “here where we live is our homeland,” reject the need for a state and armies—“out of the prison of all the nation-states, all around is Yerusholaim.”

There are songs that agonizingly lament genocide, that call on the Jewish history of resistance to urge protest against apartheid and genocide, and that are addressed to friends and brothers who deny Palestinian humanity in the name of Jewish survival. All of this is expressed in Yiddish, and while my Yiddish is quite minimal, I was much moved by each of the songs before reading the translations.

The intent of this project is, of course, to present a strong Jewish denunciation of the Israeli assault on the Palestinian people—and it does so with force. It’s also a remarkable work of art: a fusion of several song traditions—tkhine and hasidic chants, partisan and labor anthems, folk ballads—to make new Yiddish songs that I find transformative.

We are seeking questions for a special mailbag episode of On the Nose. What would you like to ask the staff of Jewish Currents? You can send your questions—either written or recorded—to editor@jewishcurrents.org with the subject: Mailbag.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): A few years ago, some friends and I decided to watch all the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. We convened for Blood Simple (1984) and Raising Arizona (1987) before life got in the way, and the project languished. So when the podcast Blank Check, which explores directors’ complete filmographies, began covering the Coens, I took the opportunity to dive back in with my first-ever viewings of Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991). They’re wildly different films: the former a gangster pastiche mixing manners and mania, energy and elegy; the latter a slow-burning, surrealist buddy comedy whose black humor gradually flickers into horror. But one thing they share, besides the Coens’ trademark verbose wit and cinematographic precision, is Italian American John Turturro brilliantly portraying an insufferable Jew.

In the delightful Blank Check episode about Miller’s Crossing—on which co-hosts Griffin Newman and David Sims are joined by director Ari Aster, whose uproarious new film Eddington undoubtedly owes a debt to the Coens—Aster reflects on the famed fraternal team’s early reception, noting that “Jewish critics like J. Hoberman accused them of being antisemitic.” That was news to me! Sure enough, Hoberman, a titan at The Village Voice, accused Barton Fink of choreographing a “sadomasochistic embrace” of “America’s two most potent Jewish stereotypes . . . the vulgar Hollywood mogul and the idealistic New York communist”; he repeated the charge nearly verbatim in a 2009 letter to The New York Times, in which he wrote that the Coens give no “hint that their minstrel-show battle royale was occurring at the acme of worldwide anti-Semitism.” (He also affirmed his interpretation of the pivotal scene in Miller’s Crossing, in which Turturro’s character begs for his life, as “disturbing” for its portrait of “a whimpering Jew down on his knees.”)

I actually appreciated Hoberman’s ridiculous disdain, which made me reflect on the films’ use of Jewishness. Miller’s Crossing certainly turns on the fate of the pitiable Bernie Bernbaum, yet the scene in question finds Turturro imbuing the irritating character with wrenching pathos—and on his designated executioner, along with the viewer, not relishing but longing to prevent his demise. Barton Fink, meanwhile, repeatedly highlights how antisemitism shapes perceptions of the characters Hoberman decries as mere stereotypes. When the titular playwright—who, like his real-life inspiration Clifford Odets, is struggling to achieve a new high art for the common man within the constraints of the studio system—is interviewed by a pair of homicide detectives (one German, one Italian) at the rundown hotel where he’s living, they ask if his name is Jewish. Barton confirms it, and one of the cops replies, “I didn’t think this dump was restricted.” Earlier, in his rambling introductory monologue, studio exec Jack Lipnick (played by Michael Lerner) alludes to what he and Barton share. “I mean I’m from New York myself—well, Minsk if you wanna go all the way back,” he rambles, “which we won’t if you don’t mind, and I ain’t askin’.” The urge to connect over a traumatic inheritance, to express it, suppress it, escape it—all stashed into a single evanescent aside. In that same scene, Jack grandly dubs himself “bigger and meaner and louder than any other kike in this town,” lording over Barton, bonding with him, and rejoicing in the fact of his alterity all at once. By the end of the film, when Barton has failed him, Jack strips the slur of affection and turns it on the writer: “You think the whole world revolves around whatever rattles inside that little kike head of yours.” It’s no coincidence that this indictment, which marks the end of any ethnic solidarity, comes just as Jack has donned a fake military uniform and announced his intention to enlist after the attack on Pearl Harbor; now he’s the brave, virile American, Barton the lowly, cerebral Jew.

This is not to say that it’s wrong to call Jack or Barton stereotypes—or, as The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum put it, “broad, comic-book style Jewish caricatures.” The point is that there’s nothing inherently noxious about Jews playing with those paradigms. But Jewish accusations of irresponsible representation have long dogged Jewish artists—most memorably Philip Roth, whose Alexander Portnoy was described by Gershom Scholem as “the loathsome figure whom the anti-Semites have conjured in their imagination and portrayed in their literature.” In the Blank Check episode, Aster remarks that he himself is “a Jewish filmmaker who has seen that tradition playing out before his very eyes.” Perhaps he had in mind PJ Grisar’s review of his messy masterpiece Beau Is Afraid (2023) in The Forward. “To accept this film as Jewish,” Grisar wrote, “is to buy into the most strained tropes about overbearing Jewish mothers.” I’d counter that Aster self-consciously heightens that archetype—and the corresponding figure of the anxious, impotent son—to a nearly theological extreme, conjuring a thrillingly absurd secular Jewish mythology. If the basic material is superficial and familiar, its manipulation into an ambiguous and irreverent engagement with Jewishness is anything but.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Roman Polanski had to know that in making An Officer and a Spy, his 2019 account of the Dreyfus Affair—which is screening at Film Forum in Manhattan for the next two weeks—people all over the world would assume that a film about a Jew unjustly accused of a heinous crime was intended as a barely veiled attempt at its director’s exculpation. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who in 1894 was found guilty of espionage both by a court martial and by a large section of the French public, was sentenced to prison on Devil’s Island; Polanski, of course, never stood trial for allegedly raping a minor, and far from spending years on a dreadful isle, he has lived a fairly good life in Parisian exile since fleeing the United States in 1978, aside from his 2009 arrest and brief incarceration in Switzerland.

Polanski made an interesting choice not to focus the film on Dreyfus, who is played with steely stoicism by Louis Garrel, but who is all but absent. We see his degradation—the stripping of his rank—as the film opens; there are occasional shots of him in his island prison, suffering from malign and unnecessary supplementary punishments, like being forced to sleep while chained. He appears at his trials and asserts his innocence, but Dreyfus was not the main actor in his own cause. Those who were formed a diverse group, and the most militant of them were left-wing Jewish intellectuals. Dreyfus’ brother Matthieu immediately set out to spread the word of the injustice of his brother’s condemnation, and the first Dreyfusard was the anarchist Bernard Lazare. The three wealthy Reinach brothers were especially tireless in their support of Dreyfus. There is mention in the film of a shadowy “Jewish syndicate” that is alleged to be financing the Dreyfusard cause. In fact, there was such a syndicate, wealthy Jews who remained silent in public so as not to attract the ire of French antisemites, but who contributed large sums to propaganda in support of the cause. Socialists defended Dreyfus, as did Catholics like Charles Péguy.

Polanski concentrates above all on one figure: Colonel Georges Picquart, a high-ranking officer in the French military’s intelligence bureau and a ferocious Jew-hater, who nevertheless placed his career on the line to defend Dreyfus and uncover the true spy. Polanski’s focus on Picquart, who had no ethno-religious dog in the fight, turns the case into one where the only concerns are truth, justice, and equity. Picquart, aside from his antisemitism, is the image of probity. The cause he defends is just because what has been done to Dreyfus, regardless of his background, is unjust.

An Officer and a Spy is a still, somber, sober film, with occasional outbursts of rage. Music seldom intervenes to heighten the mood. Polanski guides us through the events with a firm hand. Antisemitic riots did, as is shown in the film, occur throughout France at the time. Polanski models them on similar riots in Hitler’s Germany, an experience he knows in his flesh. Less than half a century after the Dreyfus Affair, France’s Jews would suffer their terrible fate, but only when French antisemites were empowered by the occupying Germans to act.

Polanski, in focusing on Picquart and not the active Dreyfusard movement, both simplifies the case and makes it more comprehensible to less historically savvy viewers. Dreyfus, when we see him at the end of the film demanding his due from Picquart—the latter now minister of war, while Dreyfus still holds the same rank he held at the time of his degradation—is what he was in life: rigid and not entirely sympathetic. Polanski has given us a stirring film about the affair, and a reminder, in these days of regnant, bogus anti-antisemitism, of what real Jew-hatred looks like.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl, deputy publisher: I’m not gonna lie: I think I may have willed the most recent iteration of Morgan Bassichis’s show, Can I Be Frank?, into being. I missed the show’s first run at La MaMa (recommended in this very newsletter a little over a year ago by Alisa Solomon), but I wanted to see it so badly that when my mother’s birthday rolled around a few months ago, I gave her an IOU for tickets, hoping for no logical reason that Bassichis would reprise their show. It worked! And while I suspect that this won’t be Can I Be Frank?’s final run (especially if director Sam Pinkleton’s other work—including that once-tiny Off-Broadway show Oh, Mary—is any indication), my suggestion is that you catch it at the SoHo Playhouse while you can.

Can I Be Frank? is Bassichis’s exploration of their obsession with Frank Maya, a gay comic and performance artist who died of AIDS in 1995, just months before the introduction of the AIDS cocktail that likely would have saved his life. When Bassichis first learns about Maya at an artist residency (i.e., “when you go to a different place to have sex with people,” and that’s the only zinger I’ll spoil from the show, I promise), they’re struck by the similarities between their work, and troubled by the fact that Maya is largely unknown today. What, they wonder, would Maya have gone on to create if they had lived?

It’s an angst that resonates with me—my uncle David died of AIDS in 1993, and I spent much of my teens and twenties wondering how my life would have been different if I’d known him. Like Bassichis, I’ve tried to grapple with that question in my work. It’s hardly a unique subject (there’s a great joke in the show that, as promised, I won’t ruin for you)—but I’d argue that what’s impressive about Can I Be Frank? is the ambition with which Bassichis tackles it. Dark humor about horrifying events is the bread and butter of Jewish queer artists. So, too, are sincere and moving elegies. A piece of art that boomerangs from Grindr to the Holocaust, from cum puddles to genuinely felt rage about genocide, seems to me a far greater risk. There were many moments in Can I Be Frank? when I couldn’t tell whether Bassichis was about to deliver a line that would make me choke on my own laughter or sit back in devastated shock. Which is, again, a risk! But it’s also making a point: Frank Maya wasn’t a symbol. He was—like all of us—at times self-involved and at times brilliant. Resisting the erasure not just of his work, but of his messiness, is the radical act.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): I can still remember my first introduction to the Lebanese satirist, playwright, and musician Ziad Rahbani, who passed away last week at the age of 69 after a half-century-long career. In the winter of 2019, my friend Amir was driving us north from Haifa to what remains of the Palestinian village of Iqrit. As is customary for that time of year, he was listening to Fairuz’s Christmas jingles, and he asked me if I knew about her son Rahbani. When I told him “no,” my education began. He put on Fairuz’s Al Bostah (The Bus), a nine minute orchestral arrangement of funky flutes and cutting violins that was unlike anything I’d ever heard by her, or heard at all. In contrast to Fairuz’s more ethereal tracks, Rahbani’s lyrics were gritty and grounded. Sitting with a puffa jacket in the cold, I felt like I was in the choking heat of the bus in Lebanon, just on the other side of the border. I could almost hear the roar of the engine, the strange yet memorable cast of passengers munching on figs and lettuce; I could almost see Alya’s dark eyes.

Rahbani was a singular force in the history of Arabic music. Using traditional Arabic instruments with jazz scores, he created “Oriental jazz,” most perfectly realised in his 1978 two-track funk album Abu Ali and his 1984 follow-up Houdou Nisbi (Relative Calm). The opening track of that latter album, Bala Wala Chi (Without Anything At All), is perhaps Rahbani’s most famous song. (What sheer chutzpah to open a mostly-instrumental album with one of the most beautiful love songs of all time!) Bala Wala Chi talks with great sincerity about a love that rises above material and social constraints. But the chorus retains Rahbani’s quintessential wry political style as the speaker invites his love outside the realm of private ownership, singing “come let’s sit in the shade, nobody owns the shade!”

Unlike his mother Fairuz, who cut a unifying figure above the parapet in Lebanon and the Arab world, Rahbani was an avowed communist and outspoken champion of the Palestinian cause. The title track of his 1985 album Ana Moush Kafer (I’m No Infidel) opens with the line “I’m no infidel, but hunger is an infidel” and the album pulls no punches about who Rahbani holds responsible: the corrupt political class he mocks in the album’s penultimate track Bhaneek (I Congratulate You) where he unleashes mocking praise for the “purity of [their] stances.” Today, Rahbani remains as popular and relevant as ever in the Arab world because his decades-long diagnoses persist, and the justice he sought so unrelentingly was never done.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): “All our struggles are connected” is a rallying cry of the contemporary left. But Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity—the retrospective on display at the Jewish Museum until October 12th—highlights that the notion is an old one. Shahn (1898–1969) embodied it consistently throughout his artistic career, targeting racism, capitalism, imperialism, and fascism as intertwined evils. Accordingly, almost every cause that mattered to the American left from the 1920s through the 1960s is reflected in this exhaustive, generous exhibition.

Shahn’s earliest and perhaps most famous series in the show is The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, which chronicles the case of the two Italian anarchists accused of murder during a botched robbery at a factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920, at the height of the First Red Scare. The left took up their cause, but to no avail. Produced a few years after their 1927 execution, Shahn’s paintings served as a memorial to the martyrs. His stylized gouaches of the men and those who surrounded them during their trials (both literal and figurative) include those who supported them as well as those who participated in their judicial murder. In a lesser-known but no less evocative series, Shahn’s brush pays homage to Tom Mooney, the labor leader accused of bombing a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, killing six people.

Elsewhere, we see works promoting Popular Front leftism (those supporting the war effort as well as FDR and the New Deal); the industrial unionism of the CIO, where Shahn worked; and the rights of Black Americans, many made well before the civil rights movement sprung to the fore. When that struggle exploded onto the scene, Shahn placed his art at its service, producing movingly simple portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, the activists murdered in Mississippi by the KKK. Though best known for his paintings, Shahn was also a skilled photographer—and in many cases his camera was the source for his work with the brush. The exhibition lets us linger over his images showing the labors and poverty of Southern workers and farmers, both Black and white, and scenes of daily life among the Jews of the Lower East Side and the Italians of the neighboring Greenwich Village.

The show concludes with a key component of Shahn’s worldview: his Jewishness. We see biblical scenes, artfully calligraphed Hebrew passages (a nod to the prohibition against images), and a variety of figures from Maimonides to the combatants of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. For Shahn, Jewishness and the fight for justice were one.

A. Gopalan (news editor): On the eve of the end of the world, what will you do? As the inevitable approaches, will you still try to save something—your children, your city, your continent—or just lay down your arms and hope it comes quickly? These questions are the cornerstones of countless dystopian novels and TV shows, but the piece of media that I think has done them the most justice come from a completely unexpected corner of online storytelling: Dungeons & Dragons.

A few years ago, when a friend introduced me to the roleplaying game, I quickly understood its appeal. Collaborative improvisational storytelling where you and your friends create characters, fill in backstories, go on adventures, cast spells, navigate complex plots and thorny social dynamics—all using just a couple of sheets of paper and some dice? Yes please! But while I enjoyed playing the game, I still didn’t understand the appeal of watching others play it—and so could never get into the “actual play” D&D shows that are so popular in the community.

That changed this year, when I discovered the incredible four-episode D&D show called Calamity. It belongs to the extended universe of Critical Role, probably the most popular D&D entertainment franchise around. But thankfully, you don’t need to have watched CR’s hundreds of hours of content, or even know much of its lore, to get into this 10-ish hour prequel series. The premise is simple: The world is ending. A “Calamity” approaches that will last hundreds of years, causing untold amounts of death and destruction. We know it’s unstoppable—most CR stories are set in the centuries after the cataclysm, grappling with its long aftermath—but of course, the people living before the Calamity, or in its first moments, have no idea. Far from it: The six players around the table each embody a character living in the mythic “Age of Arcanum” immediately preceding the disaster, a gilded age of hubris when the continent’s wizards believed that the sun would never set on their magical ambitions, and that there would never be a price to pay for their rapid acquisition of godlike power.

Knowing this premise, I had expected it to be at least somewhat satisfying to watch these arrogant mages get their comeuppance, but of course it wasn’t. Like any good story, Calamity makes you care about these power-hungry, compromised people: It shows you their bonds with their spouses and children, many of whom are not going to survive what is to come and reveals their better angels time and time again—especially as they begin to realize what they’ve unleashed and fruitlessly scramble to stop it. It was amazing to watch the players, who know where the story will most certainly end, nevertheless portray characters who earnestly try to redirect the course of history, or, failing that, to save this one child; that one neighborhood; delay the devastation from reaching other cities, confess long-withheld loves; renounce private wealth and status to try and save the collective; and do all the other things we would do if we were all preparing to die. Even more astonishing was the game master’s ability to imbue the story’s foregone conclusion with profound dramatic stakes, so much so that while I initially tried to listen to the show on my walks, I quickly gave that up after I repeatedly found myself standing in the middle of the sidewalk staring at my phone, riveted.

Ultimately, of course, what gave the show its emotional force was the resonance with our present. I realized this most clearly when I read an article in the most recent issue of Acacia, which quotes the hadith that goes, “if the Hour comes while you are planting saplings, and there is a sapling in your hand, still plant the sapling.” Calamity may be the best depiction of the pain and joy of following that edict, planting the last sapling even as the fires break out around you.