Shabbat
Reading List

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Last weekend, after years of insistent recommendations from labor organizer friends and ahead of the annual Boston Dyke March, I decided to finally watch Pride. I had missed enough union movie nights over the years to have a vague idea of what the 2014 film was about: the true story of queer activists supporting the UK miners’ strike in the 1980s in a show of capital-s Solidarity.

Indeed, within minutes of the action starting, the film’s gay protagonist, Mark Ashton (based on a real-life activist by the same name), gives a speech that could be taught in Labor 101 classes to outline why solidarity matters. In conversation with his queer friends, Ashton notes that cops haven’t been harassing them lately—but it’s only because they’re too busy harassing miners. Solidarity, then, is not born of empathy for a completely separate cause, but a recognition that all struggles are connected. Fueled by this realization, Ashton spends nearly the entirety of the film’s run time convincing his fellow queer activists that the miners’ fight was also theirs (although his dedication to the cause might’ve been more believable had the movie not erased his communist credentials).

I admit I went into the film jaded. Years of labor organizing have made me suspicious of stories of solidarity, which can act as a kind of escapist fantasy—telling the weary organizer that even though she spends most days getting doors slammed in her face, there is light at the end of the tunnel. But if Pride is an escapist fantasy, it is an excellent one, really capturing the allure of unlikely alliances. There’s a quick montage of queer activists struggling to find miners who will accept their help, but after only a few slammed phone receivers, they find an open-minded miner who warmly invites them down to his Welsh village to thank them for their strike-fund donations. Once in Wales, the queer activists face some bigotry, but they quickly win many of the miners over with impassioned speeches, material resources, and sheer flamboyance (one burly miner quickly abandons his homophobic attitudes when he realizes that his gay comrades could teach him how to dance so he could win over the ladies).

This film is, of course, based on a true story, meaning that this alliance really did happen. But my inner cynic had to wonder, could have been so easy, and so tender, and so pure? Why did the miners not abandon their queer allies when it meant bad press for their strike? And why did gay people help miners so single-mindedly despite the near-constant homophobia? In the film, the characters seemed to make these decisions simply because solidarity is good, but few real people I’ve known work like that, and I wish the film dwelt on these dilemmas of solidarity rather than introducing them and then waving them away.

But ultimately, the film isn’t a documentary: it’s a feel good movement biopic, and on those terms, it succeeds. Even though I found the story unbelievable, I watched, longing to believe. I reveled in each victory, each conversation where miners and queer people connected on a personal level, each moment antagonists failed at breaking the alliance. I was moved by the triumphant ending and for a moment, pretended it were true: that the miners’ strike had actually ended in a way that merited soaring music, that pride parades had remained a scene of political struggle rather than becoming a corporate-funded equality theater, and that true solidarity was still possible.

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Maybe you too were unsettled by the cloud of smoke that settled over the Northeast this week. In an effort to abate my despair over the climate emergency already consuming us, as well as the dull headache that came on after biking through the smog, I turned back to one of my favorite books by Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The novel follows Janina, an older Polish woman who lives on a rural, windswept plateau near the Czech border, as she investigates a series of beguiling murders, apparently committed by Mother Nature herself.

The novel is ultimately an eco-thriller, concerned with the rights of animals and the natural world. It’s a genre I don’t particularly care for, but what attracted me to Tokarczuk’s take on the form—and kept me engaged until the last page—is its narrator’s fascinating, singular voice. Janina lives in a closed, remote world, and her psychology mirrors the circumstances of her social life. She operates in her own epistemological universe, re-naming everyone she encounters, capitalizing nouns as it pleases her, and charting the stars according to her own astrological system. (One subplot follows her attempt to translate William Blake’s verse into Polish—an amusing metatextual puzzle for the English-language reader, who has to parse Lloyd-Jones’s translations of Janina’s Polish renderings.) Tokarczuk’s careful depiction of Janina’s consumptive solipsism—as well as her miserly worldview and righteous anger, which fuel the novel—is vividly on display in her reaction to her neighbor’s corpse, which she stumbles upon in one of the novel’s opening scenes:

As I looked at Big Foot’s poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I’d been afraid of this Person. I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless. Just a piece of matter, which some unimaginable processes had reduced to a fragile object, separated from everything else. It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does? The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.

Needless to say, the novel does not make for lighthearted escapism—much of the action is gruesome, disgusting, and difficult to read—but the alternate world reflected through Janina’s consciousness is deeply absorbing. I regret to report, however, that like many mystery novels, Tokarczuk’s narrative runs out of steam by the final act. But if you’re thinking about what it means to live on this earth as systems of exploitation—and even certain individuals—work to corrode our natural world, then this might be the tour de force you’re looking for.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): With the exception of a few versions of his most iconic piece, 4’33”, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a recording of a work by John Cage. He’s certainly absent from my modest vinyl collection—which would have been fine by him. The preeminent 20th-century avant-garde composer was famously hostile to recorded music, which he once said “destroys one’s need for real music” and “makes people think that they’re engaging in a musical activity when they’re actually not”; he even remarked that “it would be an act of charity . . . to smash [records] whenever they are discovered.” But why? In a conversation that appears in For the Birds, a collection of exchanges between Cage and the philosopher Daniel Charles, the latter reflects that “records, according to you, are nothing more than postcards . . . ”; Cage responds: “which ruin the landscape.”

This quip lends musician and scholar David Grubbs’s fascinating 2014 book Records Ruin the Landscape its title. The core of Grubbs’s project is to investigate Cage’s and his peers’ antipathy toward records, as well as the music that exceeded the confines of the medium, which emerged just as the heyday of certain experimental genres came into focus during the 1960s. As Grubbs explains in the introduction, “Cage’s opposition to the fixed form of the record . . . is the expression of a pioneer of works that are indeterminate as regards performance, works that on the basis of their design change significantly with each iteration,” and the various kinds of avant-garde music the book explores are likewise “predicated on being experienced in live performance.” Nevertheless, most of the artists considered here did—however begrudgingly—record their music. While these recordings rarely circulated at the time, their release in subsequent decades earned the works an audience well beyond those who originally heard them in person. Grubbs shows how Cage, his contempt notwithstanding, “created unprecedented types of recordings,” finding surprising ways to contest the medium’s constraints.

Grubbs, himself a record lover, is a generous yet critical guide to the ideas of the musicians he studies. He takes their provocations seriously, using them not only to illuminate experimental works that escape documentation, but also to defamiliarize the phenomenon of recorded music and raise probing questions about its very nature. At the same time, he complicates Cage and others’ antagonism toward the form into a more fruitful ambivalence, while highlighting the elitism and racism that has often undergirded avant-garde attitudes. (The latter comes to the fore in Grubbs’s discussions of Henry Flynt—a practitioner of “avant-garde hillbilly music” whose folk roots Cage considered unserious—and of “free improvisation,” which sought to “obscure its relation to jazz improvisation” through what scholar and composer George E. Lewis calls “a notion of spontaneity that excludes history or memory.”) Despite the heady material, Grubbs’s style is pleasantly chatty and digressive, though the book’s structure is sometimes distractingly haphazard; we wouldn’t have lost much if he’d cut the deflating final chapter on online archives, and I sometimes longed for more synthesis of the insights scattered throughout the text. Still, Records Ruin the Landscape is both an engaging inquiry and a vivid introduction to a wealth of interesting music—which, ironically, we must now access through the medium its practitioners largely disdained.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Last fall, the Library of America published Frederick Douglass: Speeches and Writings, an essential collection of works by the great fighter against slavery and oppression. Unlike his autobiographies, many of Douglass’s occasional writings and addresses have not been readily available, and certainly not in such a comprehensive form as this. Included in this collection, edited by Douglass’s biographer David W. Blight, are more than a hundred pieces of various types from across Douglass’s long and active life. These letters, articles, and speeches—as well as a novella—are filled with the anger, intelligence, and clarity that make him such a singular figure. Every page of this generous anthology, the single largest volume of his works ever assembled, still packs a punch. Most could have been written the day before yesterday—a reflection on both Douglass’s genius and the enduring legacy of our wretched nation’s criminal history.

As many of these pieces show, Douglass excelled at making his militant points through acerbic humor. In an 1841 speech given in Massachusetts on “American Prejudice and Southern Religion,” he spoke cuttingly of Northern racism and Christianity’s role in its perpetuation and wryly related this tale: “Another young lady fell into a trance—when she awoke, she declared she had been to Heaven; her friends were all anxious to know what and whom she had seen there; so she told the whole story. But there was one good old lady whose curiosity went beyond that of all the others—and she inquired of the girl that had the vision, if she saw any black folks in Heaven? After some hesitation, the reply was, ‘Oh! I didn’t go into the kitchen!’ Thus you see, my hearers, this prejudice goes even into the church of God.” His wit comes through, too, in an 1845 letter to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in which he describes the sorry state of American “democracy”: “Yes, they actually got up a mob—a real American, republican, democratic, Christian mob—and that, too, on the deck of a British steamer, and in sight of the beautiful high lands of Dungarvan! I declare, it is enough to make a slave ashamed of the country that enslaved him, to think of it.”

Douglass was also a master of sober reflection. In another letter to Garrison, composed the following year, Douglass writes beautifully on a subject that was dear to him: his and his people’s relationship to America: “And as to nation,” he writes, “I belong to none. I have no protection at home, or resting-place abroad. The land of my birth welcomes me to her shores only as a slave, and spurns with contempt the idea of treating me differently. So that I am an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth . . . If ever I had any patriotism, or any capacity for the feeling, it was whipt out of me long since by the lash of the American soul-drivers.”

As this truly majestic collection attests, Douglass is still a vital presence. Writers who take up these same subjects today can only aspire to write like him.

This week, the Jewish Currents Slack was ablaze with takes on and responses to the series finale of HBO’s Succession. Is this the end of prestige television? Did the writers of this micro-generation’s most tweeted-about show stick the landing? This week, we’re bringing you four reactions to the series, which, unfortunately, do contain spoilers.

This week, news editor Aparna Gopalan expresses dismay in her colleagues’ ability to sample “different flavors of vileness;” executive editor Nora Caplan-Bricker reflects on the fourth season as a redemption of the show as a whole, even if the siblings themselves are irredeemable; associate editor Mari Cohen considers what it means for Succession to be, at its core, a show about the media; and editor-in-chief Arielle Angel apologizes to Shiv.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): You can’t escape Succession. I would know; I’ve tried. Mentions of the HBO show have clogged my social media for months, and for months, I’ve scrolled past them. But rejoining the Jewish Currents Slack destroyed my resolve. Quite apart from wanting to be part of the conversation, I became curious about the series that could impassion even my most sober colleagues. So I rounded up my housemates and pressed play on episode one of season one, just as Twitter buzzed about the series finale.

Unfortunately, the show was just what I expected: a prestige entertainment product about a bunch of scheming suits who, tiresomely, were also a family. It was capably executed, of course: well-paced, fluid, and full of shocking and memorable scenes (I still retch thinking of cousin Greg puking out of the mascot costume’s eye sockets). Production value aside, though, I just didn’t care about any of the characters on offer, let alone which of them would eventually sit the boring, corporate Iron Throne of their dad’s media empire. From reading reviews, I’ve gathered that each character is supposed to give us a different window into how plutocrats are fucked up, perhaps further fueling righteous outrage. But if you, like me, weren’t able to get past episode one because you aren’t all that interested in sampling different flavors of vileness, I’m just here to tell you that despite what the rest of this newsletter will make you feel, you are not alone.

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): At the beginning of this season, I was worried about Succession. After a third season that spun its wheels (at least until the redemptive finale), the fourth seemed at risk of leaning into what I considered the show’s worst impulses. Remember the scene in the first episode where the siblings work on the pitch deck for their start-up “The Hundred,” which Kendall describes as “Substack-meets-Masterclass-meets-The Economist-meets-The New Yorker”? In such moments, you could practically feel the show hamming it up for the audience, pitching its bons mots toward the chattering classes that sat, Tweetdecks open, just beyond the fourth wall. The pleasure of watching Succession always stemmed from its particular blend of pathos and comedy, but I think it sometimes wobbled when it went too far in the direction of satire. It was excellent at reflecting our brutal present with almost unparalleled verisimilitude—this season’s rightly celebrated election-night episode, for example, felt almost unbearably real—but it didn’t actually have much beyond the obvious to say about the gilded world of the .00001% and their anti-democratic chokehold on our society. On the level of political analysis, I think there’s truth in New Republic TV critic Phillip Maciak’s amusing suggestion that Succession is “a photo negative version of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing,” having “swapped out Sorkin’s pious centrist liberalism with a qualitatively better, but no less pious, left anti-capitalism.”

Happily, I think the show itself understood that if its sociological portraiture was merely convincing, its psychological dimension was richly compelling—never more so than this season. It’s hard to imagine a more inherently interesting topic than the sibling relationship, with its intrinsic solidarities and built-in forms of competition. And I could never get enough of the shifting alliances between the three (well, four) Roys, whose shared damage made them the only people capable of understanding each other even as it conditioned them to try to destroy one another. I would also contend that Succession’s tale of a patriarch who won’t retire has a particular resonance given the real concentration of wealth and power among senior citizens—not because the show’s hothouse flower protagonists captured anything new in a broad sense about that predicament, but because so much family conflict does indeed play out intergenerationally. (Please don’t read anything into this, Mom and Dad!)

Maybe that’s why the scene I keep going back to from the finale is the one in which Shiv and Roman, having temporarily agreed to join forces with Kendall, make him a disgusting smoothie—or what they all call, in a childlike sing-song, a “meal fit for a king.” As the siblings goof around in their mother’s kitchen, it feels almost like they’re tunneling back into their shared childhood—as if they could rewrite history, fusing themselves together at the primordial point where their father began splitting them. It’s a moment of sheer guilelessness unlike any we’ve seen before in this series—which is why its inevitable betrayal felt to me, when it came, like a point of no return. Even as Kendall drinks the strange brew his siblings have made for him, we know that this stunted trio and their fragile bond will surely be dashed against the shoals of the adult world, which they are so unprepared to take part in, or even perhaps to survive.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): For most of the time one is watching Succession, it’s easy enough to forget that the squabbling Roy siblings are engaged in a fight over inheriting what is specifically a media company—American Television Network, a rough analogy to Fox News, is the marquee product of Waystar Royco. Sure, there are a few hints as to what the hundreds of thousands of employees ruled by the Roy patriarch and his cronies are actually doing with their time—we see mentions of a popular Tucker Carlson like demagogue figure; a campaign against the network by a Bernie Sanders stand-in; a feud with the well-heeled Pierce family, who own a competing liberal news network. But otherwise, the world of Succession characters is siloed into private jets, boardrooms, chauffeured limos, and doormanned Manhattan lofts, distant from any average American home where ATN might be blaring day and night and mostly uninterested in the army of news vans ostensibly trawling the country at the family’s behest. The siblings have no grand vision for political change, no desire for public influence or even artistic vanity; they are negotiating over nothing more than access to corporate power and to the thrilling game of profit maximization. (It’s worth noting that they’re not really even negotiating over their ability to enrich themselves, since each kid already has access to 100 millions of dollars in cashable shares. Personal wealth is such a constant that it melts into air, no longer a meaningful motivating factor. Money, here, is a poker chip or Monopoly bill, simply something to up the stakes of the game.) Only occasionally are we reminded that decisions leak out from the boardrooms the siblings occupy, down the company chain, and into other people’s lives. In a famous and painfully on the nose season 2 scene, Kendall Roy shows up unannounced to Vaulter, Waystar Royco’s newly acquired digital news startup, and fires every single one of the company’s employees on the spot. This is corporate’s response to flagging traffic and an incipient staff unionization effort, he claims. Vaulter’s content, impact, and approach are irrelevant—the acquisition is a line item on a spreadsheet. For Kendall, if Vaulter means anything, it’s just an opportunity to impress his father.

The final stretch of Succession’s final season once again brings the Roys’ machinations in direct contact (though here only minimal conflict) with a news operation. This time, the show places us on the floor of ATN on presidential election night for an hour-long, anxiety-inducing episode that had me pacing around my living room. I found myself experiencing somatic echoes of November 2016 and 2020, sick to my stomach over whether a nationalist figure even creepier than Trump would successfully win a presidency in a fictional world. As vote tallies begin to roll in from various states, Succession reminds us that, even if a network like ATN has no official right to nominate the president, it certainly has outsized power to create a narrative that, once rooted, is hard to undo. In the last ten minutes of the episode, where we see different characters discuss how ATN’s call will influence court decisions and victory speeches, we realize how liable material events are to bend to a media narrative’s will.

In real life, the editorial side of news networks would probably be slightly more firewalled from corporate operations, but the fact that these decisions are made by insulated executives rings true. In this episode and the following ones, Shiv Roy becomes, alternately, the audience’s moral stand-in—a liberal genuinely horrified at the prospect of a Mencken presidency—and symbol of morality’s true and total irrelevance, as she later courts Mencken anyway in hope of gaining power. Yes, Shiv talks about wanting to clean up ATN and root out its right-wing fear mongers, but it’s never a core demand, never a clear vision, never something that can’t be compromised for the sake of the CEO seat. By the finale, fittingly, ATN’s political entanglements and the hordes of anti-Mencken protestors rallying against the network have mostly receded into the background, with Kendall, Roman, and Shiv back in their Upper East Side castles and Caribbean vacation homes, trying to outmaneuver each other. This is about them, not anyone else. The news is just any product, and the audience is just any consumer.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): The most reasonable read on the moment Shiv realizes that she’s going to vote “yes” on the GoJo sale and hand the family company over to a sociopathic Swedish edgelord is that Shiv has just made a quick power calculation: She thinks she’s going to have more power with Tom at the helm than if it’s Kendall. And if she can land the fatal stab in Ken’s heart, considering how dismissive and nakedly duplicitous he’s always been in relation to her ambitions, all the better.

But I saw this moment very differently: as a moment of grace, even care, for the men in her life, one that is all the more powerful for how rarely (if ever) these virtues appear in the show. After all, Shiv knows by now she can’t trust either of these men; Tom has fucked her over at least as many times as Ken, and if anything, Tom’s backstabbing has felt like an even deeper betrayal.

But remember, Shiv wants Tom. She explicitly asks him, in her own miserly way, if he’s willing to stay with her. And as much as she tries to pass it off as some kind of “arrangement,” her watery eyes make clear that the request is her attempt to mitigate some profound chasm of loneliness in her life, to have something resembling “family.” It’s easy to forget that Shiv wants Tom given how clearly she sees all that’s odious in him—and how often she expresses it, to his face and behind his back (her comment to Mattson about Tom’s alacrity to “suck the biggest dick in the room” seems relevant here). But if you see those acts as the compulsive behaviors of an abused child, and not necessarily as expressions of hatred or contempt, things start to shift. The truth is that while Tom might be capable of a loving relationship with another partner, Shiv, like all of the Roy children, is not. Tom is what she has, and he is wavering on whether she is what he wants. In that regard, I read her last-minute vote reversal as her gift to Tom, the ultimate olive branch, and a way she might push him, at least for the moment, to consider her shitty offer. Much has been made of the unclasped hand-hold at the end of the episode, but this is basically the marriage they had before. It’s not a deterioration: It’s back to the status quo.

I also don’t think this moment is without concern for her brothers. In fact, if I had to parse the look on her face in that boardroom scene—even before she realizes what she might give to Tom—it seems to be a kind of ineffable realization of how this whole saga has mangled the siblings from the moment of their very birth. That first look is a look of horror, and also the mask she has repeatedly had to wear to cover the horror. A “no” vote promises more of the same. Of course, Ken comes back to her with all the wrong reasons why she should stay the course: He makes it about him, and argues only glancingly that his success would also benefit her, which gives her the chance to consider Tom. The icing on the cake is when he skips to patriarchal entitlement: “I’m the eldest boy!” he shouts at her, as if that isn’t the expression of everything that harms her. And yet, when Shiv tells Ken that she doesn’t think he’d be “good at it,” I don’t see malice, but mercy. Ken thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t ascend the throne. He may very well die if he does. Roman recognizes the mercy—and the rightness—of Shiv’s decision. Ken may never recognize it, but I don’t think this is the end for the siblings. The truth is that their father and his empire has made them as lonely as they are brutal. But this has made their relationships surprisingly resilient; there is no one else who understands this like one another.

One last, somewhat unrelated thought: A friend asked me by text, “Why not Shiv? She could have done it.” I was baffled by this take, and then I had to step back to examine my own bafflement. Did I really think there was evidence that Shiv was a less serious contender than either of her brothers, or was I just told over and over by the men in the show that she was no good? Was she incapable of rising because she wasn’t savvy or cutthroat enough, or because, at the end of the day, the men were never going to allow her to ascend? One thing to admire in this season is the masterful way it plays with the complicity of the audience. Why do we root for our silly, evil, undeserving overlords? Personally, I’ve been sitting with the way I was recruited into the show’s misogyny. Sorry, Shiv.

Before you go: Our Spring issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon! We’re offering a special promotion for newsletter readers: Receive 50% off the cover price when you use the code “SPRING23” at checkout. Subscribe now to receive our award-winning magazine. You’ll receive 3 quarterly issues, and our winter gift, delivered to your door.

And Jewish Currents contributor and nightlight producer Fancy Feast is co-hosting an all-star, anything-goes, highbrow-meets-lowbrow burlesque and variety extravaganza on Sunday, June 4th at 7:30 at the Abrons Arts Center headlined by Drag Race winner Sasha Velour! The Fuck You Revue’s JEWTOPIA is co-produced by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and the Jewish Museum of Maryland as part of “Material/Inheritance,” an exhibition of boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art. You can buy tickets here, and if you’re in New York, you should check it out!

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): Before 2020, I went to see live music as often as possible. When the pandemic arrived, canceling tours and shutting down venues, it resulted in the longest stretch I’ve spent away from shows since I was 14. After catching two concerts in late 2021—when widespread vaccine availability made packing into a room of strangers feel reasonable again—I went back into lockdown at the beginning of 2022, with the premature arrival of my twin sons. Since then, I’ve settled for the occasional livestream, biding my time until I could return to the real thing.

I finally ventured out to a show on Monday night, when I caught Sunset Rubdown at the Fine Line in my home city of Minneapolis. One of my favorite bands since high school, Sunset Rubdown began in 2005 as the solo project of Spencer Krug, one of the two main singers and songwriters in Montreal indie rock mainstays Wolf Parade—he’s the one with the warbling voice you’ll hear leading songs like “I’ll Believe in Anything” and “You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son.” Krug, along with Jordan Robson-Cramer, Michael Doerksen, and Camilla Wynne Ingr (of the underappreciated indie pop band Pony Up!) made three excellent albums of increasingly elaborate art rock, marked by intricate, often bombastic compositions and Krug’s dense, surreal lyrics. The group disbanded unceremoniously in 2009, before I ever got a chance to see them, and reunited at the end of last year. (Fittingly for a band whose songs often traverse mystical terrain, Krug says the reunion was inspired by a dream.)

After more than a decade of hoping I’d have this opportunity and years of nearly no live music, my expectations were high, but the show exceeded them. The sound was pristine and the performers’ enthusiasm clear as they rocketed through a set list of tracks that spanned their brief catalog, from the anthemic desperation of “Stadiums and Shrines II” to the manic jubilation of “The Mending of the Gown.” The audience’s energy matched the band’s, as attendees bounced and swayed, mouthing or shouting along with Krug’s knotty lyric; it seemed that nearly everyone else had also been eagerly anticipating this day. Standing in the crowd, catching glimpses of those around me, I had the strange sense that something latent had been activated in all these neighbors I’d never met—that this band’s return from the dead had assembled a community that had been there all along, waiting.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): A few weeks ago—seemingly out of nowhere—I had the thought, “I’d love to get high and watch Fantasia.” I am an infrequent smoker, and I had not seen the animated classic since I was a kid, but I remembered loving it. Fantasia is a series of seven orchestral arrangements accompanied by cartoon vignettes, and the only dialogue in the film comes in between scenes, when the silhouette of a conductor, flanked by his orchestra, earnestly provides context for each piece in the program. I had not realized that it was first released in 1940, and that it was Disney’s third-ever animated feature (Snow White and Pinocchio were the first and second). Rewatching it now, it feels clear that Fantasia was created during a special, early period of experimentation in commercial studio animation. It’s artwork created for art’s sake, brought into the world simply because a group of people thought it would be beautiful.

I gathered a small group of friends to watch the movie last weekend. If you have seen Fantasia before and are planning a rewatch, I can’t recommend enough doing it with people who have never seen the film! It was fun to witness their joy at the moving images on the screen. One friend had been scared of it as a child, citing the violence of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the canonical vignette where Mickey Mouse, as the titular apprentice, brings a broomstick to life to help him fill a well—only for everything to go terribly awry. Truthfully, that’s my least favorite piece of the bunch; the logic of the story feels more disciplinary than compassionate. The group also agreed that it might have been more enjoyable had Mickey not been the lead. (Eighty years ago, his inclusion may have been a cute or winking addition; today, his figure feels overdetermined with the power of the multi-billion dollar Disney empire.)

My fond memories of the movie largely held up, and it was interesting to revisit some of my early impressions. My absolute favorite vignette remains the penultimate “Dance of the Hours,” which features hippos who, clad in ballet flats and tutus, daintily, playfully pirouette and drowsily float on bubbles. I have an analysis now for why I love it—having to do with the intersections of fat positivity, bodily autonomy, and gender performance—but I had none of that language then; I just knew that I loved it. Similarly, the gracefulness of the fairies in “The Nutcracker Suite”—as they turn the green leaves into autumn hues and, later, light their surroundings with frost and snowflakes—is as visually stunning as I remember. However, now that I’ve migrated from the West Coast to the East, the changing leaves are no longer an abstract concept, but a referent to part of my experience of the world.

There were places, too, where the film showed its age. In a piece set in prehistoric times, the music climaxes just its characters—a set of imposing dinosaurs—die out from a series of natural disasters, including a widespread drought. It had never occurred to me, really, that there was a time before scientists understood that it was a meteor strike that catalyzed prehistoric mass extinction. In a more damning mark of its era—as one of my friends showed us, pulling up images on his phone—the original film included a caricatured Black centaur in “The Pastoral Symphony,” who serves the other (lighter-skinned or pastel hued) centaurs, as they primp and preen in preparation to meet potential mates. According to our research, she was excised from the film as of the 1969 re-release. I feel my review would be incomplete without mentioning this, and pointing out the subsequent absence of any Black representation. The centaurs’ storyline was also, unsurprisingly, completely heteronormative, but that didn’t stop my friends and I from lovingly chatting about the trans and lesbian couples we spotted among them.

Overall, it’s incredible that the film remains legible and a pleasure to watch. Next up: Fantasia 2000, the sequel produced for the 60th anniversary of its predecessor’s premier. I remember adoring the vignette set to “Rhapsody in Blue,” which includes characters colliding with each other as they traipse and skate through a bustling New York City. Now, having lived here for almost a decade, I still catch myself enchanted by the dynamism and chaos of the urban landscape. I’m looking forward to seeing what feels familiar and what resonates anew.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 2011, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr retired from filmmaking after completing The Turin Horse, a brilliant account of the later life of the horse Friedrich Nietzsche embraced as he descended into his final madness, a film Tarr co-directed with his wife, Ágnes Hranitzky. Tarr was only 56 when he left cinema for good, and his final films stand at the heights of 21st-century cinema—among them Werckmeister Harmonies, also co-directed by Hranitzky. Originally released in 2000, the film is now showing at Lincoln Center in a newly restored version.

Like all of Tarr’s most important works, Werckmeister Harmonies was co-written by the novelist Lászlo Krasznahorkai (and is based on his book The Melancholy of Resistance). Their collaboration is perhaps the most important one between a great writer and cineaste there has ever been, except for the brief partnership between Peter Handke and Wim Wenders. In Werckmeister Harmonies—as in Tarr’s 1994 adaptation of Krasznahorkai’s classic novel Sátántangó—their visions blend perfectly. Tarr’s cinematic aesthetic is a correlative of Krasznahorkai’s literary one, and vice versa; they are artistic twins separated at birth. Both men are preoccupied with the brutal conditions of the Hungarian countryside and those who inhabit it, and Krasznahorkai’s bleak, winding prose matches Tarr’s visual style—his long takes, the stark chiaroscuro of black-and-white cinematography—as each portrays a desperate, degrading world.

In Werckmeister Harmonies, the main character, János, is a kind of naïf, a man who lives in an unnamed town in which he is clearly not accepted by those around him. His uncle György, the local intellectual, is a composer obsessed with the horrors inflicted on humanity by the imperfection of the musical scale. A circus arrives, displaying a preserved whale, which enthralls János and no one else. While he waits to be the first to visit the specimen, hostile locals—followers of another member of the circus, The Prince—fill the square, and we soon learn that they are bent on the destruction of their town.

The ignorant masses’ blind following of ignoble leaders is a theme dear to Krasznahorkai, and Tarr deepens the darkness of his own vision to accommodate it: Joyless, intoxicated revels feature prominently in his films, but here the scale is expanded from the usual crowd of local drunks at a bar. The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy shot of the residents marching together to sack the town, and as the camera moves along with the crowd, Tarr portrays them as a body acting as one, with their cries adding to the terror they inspire. (Sound is always brilliantly manipulated in Tarr’s films.) Inexplicably, the townspeople attack the local hospital, beating up patients and destroying equipment, before returning home sheepishly, their senseless dreams fulfilled. This violent outburst drives János—the representative of decency—mad, and his uncle abandons his war on classical tuning. Goodness and thought have been vanquished.

Before you go: Our Spring issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon! We’re offering a special promotion for newsletter readers: Receive 50% off the cover price when you use the code “SPRING23” at checkout. Subscribe now to receive our award-winning magazine. You’ll receive 3 quarterly issues, and our winter gift, delivered to your door.

And Jewish Currents contributor and nightlight producer Fancy Feast is co-hosting an all-star, anything-goes, highbrow-meets-lowbrow burlesque and variety extravaganza on Sunday, June 4th at 7:30 at the Abrons Arts Center headlined by Drag Race winner Sasha Velour! The Fuck You Revue’s JEWTOPIA is co-produced by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and the Jewish Museum of Maryland as part of “Material/Inheritance,” an exhibition of boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art. You can buy tickets here, and if you’re in New York, you should check it out!

Joshua Leifer (contributing editor): When I first read Adam Shatz’s essay “Writers or Missionaries” in The Nation, I was a 21-year-old intern at Dissent. It was the summer of Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza. The carnage wrought by the Israel Defense Forces was shocking; whole neighborhoods, like Shejaiyah, were obliterated. The activist part of me, which was still much more active at the time, demanded that I—that we—do something. Yet I was also learning to be an editor and a writer, and at a place like Dissent, that meant thinking long and hard about the meaning of political commitment and about how to be a Jewish critic of the occupation and Israel policy.

Shatz’s essay provided the language for a dilemma that I had felt but had not been able to express: “the tension between the writer, who describes things as he or she sees them, and the missionary or the advocate, who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the influence of a party, movement, or cause.” At the time, only nine months removed from a year of living in Israel, I did feel myself part of a movement—the Jewish anti-occupation movement. I was only beginning to understand, though, that if I wanted to be a journalist or a writer, I could not write firstly or primarily as a partisan: reality, eventually, would prove too complicated for that.

Published earlier this month, Shatz’s new book, a collection of pieces, shares the title of his 2014 essay. Shatz is a master of the intellectual profile—if you haven’t read his recent article in the London Review of Books on the storied counterfeiter and résistant Adolof Kaminsky, you should. Nearly all of the chapters in Writers or Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination center on thinkers, writers, and artists, and most (but not all) of them are on the left. There is, for instance, Shatz’s elegant sketch of Roland Barthes, and his heartbreaking piece on Juliano Mer-Khamis, the assassinated founder of the Jenin Freedom Theater. Israel/Palestine, France, and the scars of French imperialism in the post-colonial world—these are, roughly, the coordinates of Shatz’s subjects. I found it illuminating to read across the contexts, say, of Algeria and Israel/Palestine, and to see the divergences as well as the similarities.

Writers or Missionaries is a study of political writing as expressed within the unit of a human life—not just of Shatz’s subjects, of Shatz’s own. It is indispensable for anyone trying to think seriously about the ethical demands of writing and journalism against the backdrop of dark and even catastrophic times.

Nora Caplan-Bricker (executive editor): One of the perks of working at a magazine is that you can request copies of as-yet-unpublished books. The Late Americans, by Brandon Taylor—whose debut, Real Life, about a biochemistry PhD student drowning in loneliness at a midwestern university, was one of my favorite novels of 2020—doesn’t come out until Tuesday, but I got to spend last weekend ensconced in its world. I love the way Taylor captures the charged spaces that exist between friends and lovers, showing how incommunicable needs and resentments can cohere into something almost corporal, a third body in the room. In his latest novel, the characters who form the coordinates in such a force field are mostly graduate students at the University of Iowa (where Taylor received an MFA at the famed Writers’ Workshop); they include a poet, a pianist, a painter, a group of dancers, a business student driven to quit dance by his bad tendons, and a logician and his blue-collar boyfriend, who works (to his partner’s chagrin) at a meat-processing plant. Most of the members of this loose friend group are gay men who slip in and out of romantic entanglements with one another; many are Black or biracial, navigating experiences of race that differ starkly from one another’s.

More than perhaps anything else, every character in The Last Americans wrestles with questions of money and class. Most are in the position of struggling to make ends meet while they strive to prove themselves as artists—pulling long days at a coffee shop that leave them achy by the time they hit dance class, or avoiding unfinished poems by taking extra shifts in a nursing home kitchen. (Taylor is an excellent chronicler of the body; the book’s best passages include descriptions of what the much-hated job at the meat-processing plant does to the character’s skin, to his fingernails.) A few members of the group feel conscious of having too much money relative to the rest; relationships founder on asymmetrical backgrounds or unequal abilities to cover the rent. Through this broad cast, Taylor delivers a prismatic portrait of artistic ambition refracted through 21st-century precarity. Occasionally, the crushing conditions of American late capitalism produce unexpected results: Among the best artworks created in the novel, for example, are the elliptical, enigmatic pornographic videos that one character records for paying subscribers, to free himself from reliance on his rich, imperious boyfriend.

Unlike Real Life, which tunneled deep into its emotionally isolated protagonist, The Late Americans jumps from one point-of-view to the next; rarely does more than one chapter feature the same central figure. I occasionally found this frustrating—I fell in love with some of Taylor’s creations only to barely see them again. But I also appreciated the way that the constellated form of the novel pushed subtly against the logic of scarcity that dominates the lives of its characters. No matter how alone they feel, we encounter them embedded in one another’s stories. And even in a book pervaded by lack, love and connection blossom spontaneously. (It’s worth saying that Taylor sits alongside Sally Rooney on my very short list of novelists who are good at writing sex scenes.) Characters share a surprise kiss in a grocery store that acts as an apology for a day of unkindness, or fall into bed together out of sheer wonder at managing to write a truly good poem—or at finding such a poem amid the dreck of the workshop packet. They may be exhausted by their efforts to keep a foothold in what one wryly calls the last days of the bourgeoisie, but their world is not without a sense of possibility. As the group disbands in the novel’s final pages, I too felt wistful for a little more time together.

Ari Brostoff (senior editor): Los Angeles—where I’m from, and where I have spent the past few months—is often described as an industry town, a place centrifugally organized around its best-known commodity: entertainment. I’ve always thought my childhood illustrated this well, not because my family worked “in the industry,” but because the industry was omnipresent despite the fact that they didn’t: Simply by virtue of proximity, child actors and personal assistants and set designers made regular cameos in our lives, a presence both persistently glamorous and totally banal.

This month, which began with the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) calling a strike of film and television writers, I’ve been excited to witness how powerful that omnipresence can be in the context of a labor struggle. It’s easy, outside LA, to forget where television comes from. Here, though, the Netflix building with its big red logo looms over a stretch of Sunset Boulevard, and for the past few weeks, anyone driving by—or passing the Amazon building in Culver City, the Disney headquarters in Burbank, or several other film and TV complexes—has encountered the picketing writers, who are calling for these media companies to stop shrinking writers’ rooms, whittling down the screenwriter payments known as residuals, threatening to outsource scripts to AI, and generally turning their livelihood into miserable gig work. I’ve joined the Netflix picket twice with some screenwriter friends, and every time someone honks in solidarity, which happens constantly, I’m pleasantly shocked—they like us? They really like us?

I am being somewhat appropriative when I say “we,” since I have never set foot in a writer’s room, but on several accounts, I’ve felt an easy identification with the screenwriters on the picket line. For one thing, we share a union: Most members of WGA’s East Coast branch work for publications from Good Housekeeping to Jewish Currents, but some write for TV companies like HBO. For another, the first time I arrived I was delighted to find that there was an unofficial dress code—an open shirt over a closed shirt—and that I was already following it. Picketing is exhausting, yet everyone seemed sort of high on the novelty of being outside. Finally, it is perhaps an aspirational relationship, as I would one hundred percent take a screenwriting job if anyone offered me one in the glorious future once WGA members win a fair contract. In any case, I am excited to spend more time on the line, borrowing a charmingly high-concept sign quoting Michael Scott from The Office or threatening to “spoil Succession.” When we are there it feels true that, as the chant goes, “LA is a union town.”

This week, then, in lieu of recommending a movie or TV show, I encourage you to check out what the WGA is doing to make life better for the writers creating them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Victor S. Navasky’s brilliant history of the Hollywood blacklist, Naming Names, is still in print more than 40 years after its original 1980 publication not only because it’s a thorough history of that wretched time (which one of its victims, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, aptly called “the time of the toad”), but also because it’s a magnificently thought-provoking study of morality. Through his examination of how those involved in the Red Hunt of the decade following World War II—from the studios to writers to lawyers, unions, and Jewish organizations—Navasky demonstrates how even good intentions can be perverted to serve evil ends, how readily we can give our worst acts a positive coloration, and how fluid our notions of heroism and cowardice can be.

Navasky’s stance is clear from the start: The notion that in this time there were no “heroes or villains,” but “only victims”—the title of actor and scholar Robert Vaughn’s book on the blacklist, borrowed from a speech Trumbo gave decades after the events—is not to his taste. For Navasky, there were plenty of blameworthy perpetrators, who devised elaborate or simplistic justifications for informing on their peers, and he shows them all to have lacked any moral grounds for their actions. If they were motivated by political principle, why did they wait to attack communists until the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called on them to do so, threatening their jobs? Many thought that by giving HUAC a finger they would prevent it from taking an arm. But all learned that in conceding something, they ceded all—not least their honor and dignity.

Naming Names tells these moral tales through the experiences—and in the voices—of both the blacklisted and the informers. With a few notable exceptions, like director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, the informers came to feel some shame for their betrayals. (Kazan and Schulberg, for their part, made art out of their excuses; their 1954 film On the Waterfront is the greatest defense of snitching ever produced.) But even among the ashamed, most viewed themselves as the ones who suffered most through ostracism, which they painted as worse than the poverty, ruined careers, exile, and even deaths of those on whom they informed.

One of the highlights of Navasky’s book is his extensive and open-minded treatment of the debate between Trumbo and screenwriter Albert Maltz—two of the Hollywood Ten, a cohort of unfriendly witnesses who were jailed for refusing to answer HUAC when asked whether they were communists. Trumbo’s “only victims” line found no favor with his former comrade. In their lengthy correspondence, Maltz put forth a position that Navasky summarizes nicely: “that it is our duty to the ‘real’ victims of the blacklist . . . to honor their martyrdom by carrying on their fight. People who commit crimes, even moral ones, must be punished, and if the punishment is merely social ostracism, then all the more reason to maintain it.”

Before you go: Our Spring issue will be arriving in mailboxes soon! We’re offering a special promotion for newsletter readers: Receive 50% off the cover price when you use the code “SPRING23” at checkout. Subscribe now to receive our award-winning magazine. You’ll receive 3 quarterly issues, and our winter gift, delivered to your door.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Recently, I’ve been talking to my therapist about how the coming of the summer evokes intense feelings of “fomo,” or fear of missing out. Everything outside comes into bloom, but I’m still stuck indoors doing paid work, or house work, or care work, or just catatonic after all the working. But this year, I found myself with two weeks of precious personal time right before I (re)started at Currents, just as warm days were beginning to outnumber cold ones here in Boston. “How do I make the most of this time?” I asked my therapist. And like any good mental health practitioner, she helped me problematize my desire to optimize even this period of rest, asking me to explore the origin of the imperative to craft the perfect staycation. But along the way, she also gave me a decidedly mundane piece of advice, one that ultimately helped more than all the rest: get a guidebook. After all, what better way to assure myself that I would not miss any of the “best” spots to bike, walk, hike, eat, or lounge?

As soon as she suggested it, I knew the book I would get: A People’s Guide to Greater Boston by Boston natives and urbanists Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar, and Eleni Macrakis. While it’s still a guidebook—it’ll give you directions to Fenway Park, the Boston Harbor, and the Revolutionary War monuments that plague the city—A People’s Guide offers a very different experience of the Boston area than your standard tourist handbook. The authors seek to look at the city “from below,” in a perspective that privileges “the desires, hopes, and struggles of those on the receiving end of unjust forms of power.” To that end, even when the guide takes you to the usual tourist haunts, it’ll help you look at those spots differently.

So when I found myself once again at Boston Common, a park in the heart of downtown Boston, I walked in knowing the struggles that had forged the space. The Common was where Quakers, witches, and criminals were executed; it was also where 45 Native Americans were killed when 17th century English settlers annexed their land. Alongside religious and racial repression, the park was a site of class policing: working people who picnicked, gambled, and beat rugs at the Common throughout the early 18th century were soon driven away by the area’s wealthier inhabitants, who wanted parks to be for civilized leisure, not the lowly processes of social reproduction. Nevertheless, the rabble did not retreat quietly—the Common remained the place they gathered to protest the high cost of bread and the profiteering of merchants, and after the French Revolution, the streets around the park witnessed the largest victory celebrations anywhere outside Europe (much to the chagrin of the city’s ruling elite).

Despite my initial misgivings, I found that seeing the city through A People’s Guide didn’t just serve to depress me and make me hate all the spots I would otherwise have enjoyed (although it did so some of that—it’s hard to pick seashells on Castle Island, a beachy peninsula in south Boston, knowing that its titular “castle” was a prison for dispossessed Native Americans who were en route to enslavement in the Caribbean). Instead, the stories in the guide served to root me in place, and give me the sense of traversing time as well as space. I read the guide’s history of each spot on the train or bus ride over, then wandered around looking for signs of that past, and read the aftermath once I left: things like, that abolitionist meeting house is now a hotel; the bookstore that printed that bestseller of its time is now an office plaza; a parking garage now stands atop the headquarters of that socialist newspaper. Some of the places my eye would have just slipped by in the present seemed to have teemed with possibility once, and that made even a walk down a standard commercial street interesting.

I was only semi-faithful to my guidebook—ultimately, there were times I just wanted to get on a bike path and fly through the soft summer breeze for 10 miles without a thought in my head. What the guidebook did, though, was make the city around that bike path a mystery to me, something to wonder about and return to rather than just zoom by, a future destination rather than just scenery. One day, I’m going to do the book’s thematic tours to unravel some of those stories. There’s the “One Percent Tour” devoted to taking you to the shittiest rich people and places around (the stock exchange, Harvard Business School, art museums full of loot); on days you’d rather not be furious, you could opt for the “Bread and Roses Tour” of working class history landmarks, or the “Malcolm and Martin Tour” of the civil rights past and present, or the “Nature Tour” where you’ll see wooded trails as well as the city’s worst polluter (Logan Airport) and its most evil agro-capitalist enterprise (United Fruit Company).

I finished my staycation as much more of a Bostonian than I had been at the start, which (to my surprise) is a change for the better. And thankfully, this is not just a resource available to Boston residents! There’s A People’s Guide to New York City, of course, and there are guides to the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, and even Central Virginia. Whether you’re just visiting and want directions, or are looking to deepen your rootedness in time and place, these guidebooks are well worth a try.

Alex Kane (senior reporter): One of the key subplots in Israel’s horrifying bombing campaign in Gaza is Israeli officials’ insistence that their target is not Hamas, but rather another, smaller Palestinian militant group called Islamic Jihad. Nevertheless, in an attempt to project political and military importance, Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza that is currently responsible for collecting taxes and providing services, is emphasizing that they are in fact full participants in this round of fighting, even though they don’t appear to be firing any rockets. Hamas seems to want to have it both ways—by allowing Islamic Jihad to lead the firefight, they avoid direct retaliation from Israel, and by taking credit for participating in armed struggle, they preserve their own political legitimacy as the vanguard of the Palestinian armed resistance.

To the average American Jew who only pays attention to Gaza when there’s an armed conflict, this dynamic might be bewildering. American Jewish leaders have spent years calling Hamas an antisemitic terrorist group bent on Israel’s destruction. But this kind of rhetoric does absolutely nothing to further understanding of who Hamas is, the social context from which they emerged, and the political reasons for which they may be sitting out the fight right now.

To understand the full context behind why Hamas isn’t firing rockets, I recommend turning to Tareq Baconi’s 2018 book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. The book is a deeply researched chronicle of Hamas’s rise from Islamist social movement to a pioneer of armed resistance against Israel and manager of a Gaza under blockade. Well written, concise, and informed by a political commitment to justice and freedom for all, Hamas Contained provides an antidote to the American Jewish establishment’s hysterical renderings of Hamas and returns the group to the realm of politics, showing how Hamas is caught between the desire to hold on to power in Gaza and the necessity of being seen as a resistance movement. As more than two million Palestinians in Gaza continue to suffer from a devastating Israeli blockade that has only entrenched Hamas’s rule while further dividing the West Bank and Gaza from each other, these are critically important dynamics to understand. Baconi’s work is one of the best ways to start getting a grasp on the complicated entanglement of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Israel, and what it means for Gaza.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): I’m a big fan of cartoons. If I’m being honest with you, I’ll admit that I spend most of my lunch breaks rewatching episodes of a handful of shows that I’ve seen dozens of times over. Of late, I’ve been enjoying The Lucas Bros. Moving Co., streaming on Prime Video. Created between 2013 and 2015 by Kenny and Keith Lucas, two Black identical twin brothers who are comedians in Brooklyn, the show follows two Black identical twin brothers who are furniture movers in Brooklyn, also named Kenny and Keith Lucas. Each episode of the show’s two seasons is only 11 minutes long, and starts off in the regular world, such as in their truck, at their friend Jerrod’s bar, or out and about in the neighborhood. Then, over the course of the story, things get increasingly more otherworldly and fantastical. For example, in one of the initial episodes, a haunted AC unit turns their apartment building into an icy tundra, and they need to find a way to turn on the furnace in the basement to melt the ice.

The animated Kenny and Keith often move in lockstep rhythm together, and they are very chill. In dangerous situations or moments where a positive outcome seems hopeless, they are still level-headed and have made peace with any outcome. Even if this may in part be because they’re stoners, it’s honestly instructive to have an example of what it could look like to remain steady and calm—and even have a laugh—in the midst of a crisis. And across twists and turns, the show always lands them gracefully on their feet.

This is far from the only TV show—or the only cartoon show—in which the majority of the characters are Black: the leads, the side characters, and the “extras” who populate the background. But for the specific joy of its style of animation, its focus on insignificant, everyday encounters, and its casual forays into the mystical, The Lucas Bros. Moving Co. is a rare find and a lovely watch.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As I grow older and older, and believe less and less in anything possibly changing for the better, I am more and more drawn to books on the heroic period of the Comintern—or more specifically, on the men and women who devoted themselves to the Third International. These radicals, believing global revolution was imminent, devoted their lives to the communist cause, traveling wherever they were ordered, plotting and organizing, training and leading expeditions and military forces. How glorious they were in their youthful madness, compared to the draining, hopeless slog of politics today.

Christian Salmon’s The Blumkin Project: A Biographical Novel is the sweeping tale of the short but fascinating life of the Russian Jewish revolutionary Yakov Blumkin. The book—based on years of research Salmon did after being inspired by mentions of Blumkin in Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary—makes clear that Blumkin’s path was a dizzying one. He started out as a yeshiva bocher and student of the Yiddish writer Mendele Mocher Sforim, but by his mid-teens he had become a member of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. At 18, after the iniquitous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he and a comrade assassinated Germany’s ambassador to Russia. Here his life became truly bizarre: Lenin told the Germans that the Bolsheviks had executed Blumkin, but in fact they had shipped him to safety. One day, he appeared in a café in Moscow; upon seeing him, the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky exclaimed, “Zivoi!” (“He’s alive!”)—which became Blumkin’s nickname. (He was a friend of many of Russia’s finest poets, and a mediocre one himself.)

Blumkin became a member of the Cheka—the first Soviet secret police, led by the inflexible Felix Dzerzhinsky—and during the Russian Civil War he traveled in Leon Trotsky’s armored train, serving as his aide. But even this wasn’t enough activity. He attended the first Congress of the Peoples of the East in Azerbaijan, crossing paths with American journalist John Reed, author of the classic account of the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, just before the latter’s death from typhus. And on a mission to Turkey in 1929, Blumkin went to the island of Prinkipo, near Istanbul, where he visited the now-banished Trotsky and agreed to deliver a message to his family. After Blumkin’s lover informed on him that same year, he became one of the first to meet his end by way of a bullet in the back of the head in the cellars of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police.

Near the book’s conclusion, Salmon explains his interest in Blumkin, offering a moving tribute and a sad diagnosis: “I know now that I was clinging to Blumkin in an era that was so unheroic, the 1980s, an era of abandonments and betrayals of socialism’s ideals. That’s why this book is also the story of a failure: that of a generation, my generation, that wanted to change the world.”