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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.

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.