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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 Indeed, quite literally repressed—for another major theme of Balthaser’s work is that— while often eulogized as an outdated alte kaker, wasting away in a nursing home—the Jewish left is better described as Bruce Willis in one of the Die Hard films, repeatedly bludgeoned by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.
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.
