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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Esmé Weijun Wang’s book of essays, The Collected Schizophrenias, is superb. Wang has schizoaffective disorder, about which a first-person perspective is rare. Her writing is nuanced and clear: The first essay begins, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” And her prose has personality; at one point, she describes the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which sets the national standard for understanding and diagnosing mental illnesses—as “the heavy purple bible-o’-madness.” The essays vary across topics, from reflections on pop culture, raising kids, and violence, to anecdotes on psychosis, school, and family.

Throughout the book, Wang wrestles with the common perception that, while a diagnosis of depression is likened to diabetes—“in other words, it’s not your fault if you get it, and you’ll be fine if you just take care of it”—schizophrenia, in contrast, is likened to Alzheimer’s, erasing the person beneath the illness and dooming them to live as a perpetual burden. She talks about the information that she circulates to strangers to demonstrate that she is trustworthy: that she’s married, has a good sense of style, and was admitted to Yale. She writes about psychotic episodes she’s had in which her sense of reality fractured—when she hallucinated the presence of demons, believed that there were cameras in her shower, or, for one prolonged period, was convinced that she was already dead. She discusses high-profile instances of violence, like the 1988 murder of Malcoum Tate by his sister and mother, after his schizophrenia repeatedly manifested in threats of violence against family members, and the attempted murder of 12-year-old Peyton “Bella” Leutner by two of her close friends—who were later diagnosed with schizophrenia and the more abstract schizotypy, and whose childlike fantasies had been spurred on by videos and chat forums about a ghoulish underworld figure. Through these stories, Wang explores questions around safety, trauma, the failures of available systems for treating the mentally ill, and the sometimes thin line between sanity and insanity. Her observations are sharp and cohesive; in many cases, she arrives somewhere at the end of an essay that feels unexpected—perhaps even to her—as if she is working through her thinking on the page.

I’ve been recommending this book to friends since I picked it up two weeks ago. For those who have a family member with schizophrenia, it can be very personal. For me, with my own mental illness—a mood disorder that is more manageable and less stigmatized—it has long felt clear that if my brain were wired differently, I, too, could have delusions. But this book feels relevant to everyone, whether or not they have personal ties to the subject matter. We all absorb stories of intense mental illness through the media and general cultural osmosis, and many of us interact with mentally ill, unhoused people in casual, daily ways on our commutes or city streets. Wang does not provide easy answers, but she offers a window into an experience that many of us cannot access otherwise—and perhaps a way to empathize and connect with others across this complicated terrain.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Much ink has been spilled about the sensationalist and exploitative nature of the true crime genre. But until reading the incarcerated writer John J. Lennon’s forthcoming book, The Tragedy of True Crime, I didn’t realize just how common it is for prisoners—both the household names and the less-well-known—to be approached to have their crimes rehashed on the true crime shows that air on channels like Investigation Discovery and HLN. Lennon, in prison in New York for murdering another man when he was a 24-year-old drug dealer in 2001, describes several of his friends and acquaintances receiving such overtures. He was himself featured on an HLN show in 2019. Producers promised that the show, hosted by Chris Cuomo, would be about prison “redemption stories,” and Lennon wanted the chance to demonstrate his rehabilitation to the man whose governor brother had the power to commute his sentence. Once filming was underway, HLN revealed the series was called Inside Evil, and depicted him as an unsettling menace— a portrait that may have later convinced New York officials to vote against his parole.

This ever-churning true crime ecosystem is the framing device for Lennon’s book, but he spends less time deconstructing the evident failures of such media than modeling an alternative form of reporting on violence. The book intersperses his own personal memoir with reported accounts of the experiences of three other men he knows who are in prison for committing murder: Michael Shane Hale, a white gay man from the South who murdered his abusive partner in New York City; Milton Jones, a Black man from Buffalo who, at age 17, was enticed by a friend to murder and rob two priests; and Robert Chambers, a white man from New York City also known as the “preppy killer,” famous for strangling a young woman he was dating in Central Park in the 1980s when he was 19. Each man’s story is told with exacting, novelistic detail. Frequently, Lennon invites the reader into the scene of his interviews, describing chats with Jones in the basement rec room as “weights clinked and slammed” in the background. Attica, Sing Sing, and Sullivan Correctional Center, the all-encompassing structures that color every aspect of Lennon’s interactions with his subjects, become characters in their own right.

Lennon opens the second part of the book with a Norman Mailer quote: “We won’t know anything about extreme acts of violence until some author makes such acts intimately believable . . . That is why we are likely never to know: Where is the author ready to bear the onus of suggesting that he or she truly understands the inner logic of violence?” Many true crime offerings promise to bring the viewer into the “mind of a killer” but end up simply acquiescing to the public’s desire to cleave the capacity for violence away from the average human and into a separate box for the aberrant and degenerate. Lennon knows that his own position gives him the opportunity to tell a fuller story about why people commit grave acts of violence, in order to better understand what we might do in such cases besides locking people up. This approach means that there’s no whitewashing. In recounting his own successful plan to murder a friend who had gotten in his way in the drug dealing business, Lennon is fully honest: “It feels much more treacherous and painful to write about my crime today than it felt to commit it more than 20 years ago. It’s why I have to write about it this way, in a declarative voice, without reflection, because it happened like that, swiftly and cowardly and instantly . . . In the minutes or hours after I killed, I was not thinking about my culpability or remorse.” He explores whether the instabilities of his childhood in New York City public housing with an absent father led to his decision, but is reluctant to rely on this as a full explanation for what he did, insisting that his mother worked hard to give him every possible resource she could and that he chose to squander his potential.

Lennon brings this same incisive lens to recounting his sources’ relationships to their crimes. Hale’s impulsive attack on the older man who had sought to control and dominate him in their relationship might be the most legible to readers; he even issued a full, heartfelt apology to his victim’s family at his guilty plea hearing. Jones, who struggles with mental illness and whose own father was injured by guard fire in the 1971 Attica prison uprising, is clearly remorseful for killing the priests, including one who was a prominent social justice activist in Buffalo. But he also can’t quite explain why he did it—a friend asked him to come along, and he just did. “I don’t know how you gonna make me look human,” he tells Lennon. Chambers, meanwhile, is depicted as an affable, gentle figure in the prison social scene who also deals with ongoing drug addiction: He works as an ASL interpreter for Deaf prisoners and is shown engaging with them patiently. But when he discusses his crime with Lennon, he appears to struggle with his own accountability. He insists, as he did at his trial years before, that his victim’s death was a total accident when he pushed her off him after she performed an aggressive sexual act; he didn’t mean to hurt her. But Lennon is skeptical that this is the full truth. “Look man, what I’m saying is you gotta clean your side of the street. Nobody believes you didn’t hold her neck,” Lennon shouts at him, frustrated. But Chambers remains silent. “My best guess is he still can’t understand how one minute he was walking into the park and talking with Jennifer and then, minutes later, strangling her. How do you explain something you can’t believe you did?” Lennon muses.

In airing such conversations, Lennon knows he has broached some ethical minefields. He acknowledges that the sister of his own victim has explicitly responded to his public writing by saying that she does not forgive him and wants him to stop using her brother’s name in his work. (He complies, referring to the man by only his initials.) Meanwhile, one friend cut off contact when she learned of his decision to write about Chambers, concerned that the book would become apologia for violence against women. (As part of his reporting process, Lennon, with the help of colleagues outside prison, reaches out to friends and family of his sources’ victims and showcases the perspective of those willing to speak.) In general, even as prison populations across the US have finally seen some decline, many Americans clearly aren’t ready for a story like Lennon’s. A recent op-ed Lennon published in The New York Times about how prisoners themselves can’t stop watching true crime shows attracted many comments questioning why a man guilty of murder should be allowed to publish his writing—and a handful deploring that guilty prisoners should get to have any time enjoying TV in their cells. For the rest of us, who are ready to think seriously about ending the violence of prison without resorting to partial truths or easy clichés about what drives humans to commit harm, Lennon’s book is an essential text.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As I walked through the Metropolitan Museum’s new show of the works of John Singer Sargent, Sargent and Paris, I felt like I was strolling through the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton—and perhaps even Proust’s masterpiece. I usually find Sargent’s signature lushness and elegance rebarbative. But this assemblage of his works allowed me to appreciate a painter I’d previously had little or no use for.

It’s hard, after all, to resist a massive painting like Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron (Portraits de M.E.P . . . et de Mlle L.P.), which shows the young girl and her slightly older brother staring intently at the viewer. Their placement—the little girl dead center, her brother to the side, leaning toward her—and disquieting gaze lends the figures a mystery I’d never noticed in Sargent. Especially well done is the section dedicated to the once-scandalous Madame X. The painting itself is executed with Sargent’s unequalled skill, the haughtiness of its subject augmented by the wealth expressed by her attire, with its daring decolletage upheld by flimsy metal straps. The exhibit supplements the piece with sketches and illuminating context about the ludicrous brouhaha it prompted. The right strap of Madame X’s dress had slid off her shoulder during the posing session, which is how Sargent initially rendered it. But to display a woman of her stature and status in such disarray was simply not done. After initially refusing to do so, Sargent ultimately agreed to redo the painting, putting the strap back in place.

Every room contains works of overwhelming beauty and subtle charms. Most surprising are the handful of paintings in which Sargent uses light and color to dissolve objects, people, and places into near-abstraction: the harshly sunlit steps broken up by shadow in A Staircase in Capri, or the study in shades of white that is Fumée d’ambre gris. When it comes to the portraits, at a certain point I started focusing on the hands, which are notoriously difficult to paint. Sargent often puts them to great use. (Recognizing this, the sumptuous and informative catalog includes several detailed reproductions of hands.) In The Spanish Dance, which features flamenco dancers, the darkness is illuminated only by their white dresses and one of the women’s arms; the rapidity of her motion is expressed in the tilt of her head and blur of her hands. In Sargent’s society portraits, the hands are an expression of the subject’s assured place in the hierarchy: the clenched right fist of the aforementioned Marie-Louise Pailleron; the crossed hands of her mother; the casually splayed fingers on the hips of her father. Perhaps most of all, the digits have an arrogance of their own in the grip of the right hand on the neck of the subject’s robe in Dr. Pozzi at Home.

Sargent and Paris is a festival of wealth—both that once located in its subjects’ pockets and the quality of the works. We can fully profit from the latter.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): For the last several years, I have been reading up on Jews and Native Americans. Motivated at first by mere curiosity, I have come to see it as a fruitful conjunction for thinking about land and nation, rootedness and diaspora. Much of this reading is scholarly and in my field of specialization (Renaissance Europe), material I would hesitate before recommending to outsiders. Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, by contrast, is quick-moving, contemporary, and lively.

Clarren, who has written journalistically about the American West for 20 years, tells her family’s story of emigrating from Eastern Europe to escape anti-Jewish pogroms—but with a twist. Her ancestors quickly migrated west, attracted in no small part by the promise of free land for homesteaders. As Clarren discovered in the course of her research, that land had been incrementally but systematically stolen from the Lakota people, through numerous, increasingly unfavorable treaties of dubious legality; outright massacres like Wounded Knee; paternalistic, exploitative, and opaque management of tribal lands by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; and forcibly assimilationist programs to suppress Native languages and practices. Thus, as her grandparents, uncles, and aunts acquired land, raised cattle, opened saloons and stores, bootlegged during Prohibition, and generally prospered and acculturated, they did so against a backdrop of slow-moving economic dispossession and cultural annihilation.

Troublingly, though these two stories were deeply intertwined, no one in her family seems to have reflected on the crime behind their good fortune. Among the few remaining signs of this intimate proximity is a faded photograph of Clarren’s uncle, dressed in a suit and carrying a pistol, shaking hands with Joseph White Bull, in a “feathered war bonnet” and holding a ceremonial pipe. Initially, Clarren hopes to explain this staged meeting through archival research, but the image proves ultimately illegible; instead, she meets White Bull’s grandson Doug, interweaving his family’s story with her own. The book thus turns forward, toward reparations and repair, rather than backward, to an elusive past. (In doing so, it also undoes some of the privatizing, individuating structure of family-history itself as a genre.) The Cost of Free Land can be painful reading, given the astoundingly horrific treatment of the Lakota. Nonetheless, in one, probably unintended sense, I found it a relief. Given how intensely American Jews are grappling with, or decrying the grappling with, settler colonialism far away in Palestine, Clarren’s sustained attention to the moral problematics of American Jewry in the place we actually, well, settled refreshingly re-orients us politically to our land of habitation. This, I would suggest, is a worthwhile and salutary exercise in doikayt.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When the late avant-garde playwright and director Lee Breuer hit on the idea of transposing a Sophocles play into the form of a Black Pentecostal church service some 40 years ago, he said he was testing his theory of Greek tragedy. The ancient genre had developed out of ritual practice, he reasoned, and, as the classical plays alternate between spoken text and choral interludes, they structurally resemble a gospel worship service. What’s more, Breuer told an interviewer in 1984, “I really feel that if you go one step further with cathartic theatre you might find pity and terror turning into joy and ecstasy.”

His Gospel at Colonus, with a rich and rousing score by Bob Telson, took that step, turning Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus into an exultant tale of redemption. A thrilling new production, directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is now running through July 26th at Manhattan’s Little Island, in its gem of an outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Hudson River. If catharsis means the purging of terrors that leaves one feeling spiritually restored, Breuer’s theory was right: This show provides the respair these trying times require.

In Oedipus at Colonus, one of Sophocles’s three Theban plays, the action picks up after the patricidal, incestuous tragic hero gouges out his eyes in Oedipus Rex, and before his sons battle to the death leaving their sister to bury her disfavored brother in Antigone. Breuer’s version follows the original play’s basic action: Led by his daughter Antigone, blind Oedipus, who has been exiled from his former kingdom of Thebes, makes his way to Colonus, on the outskirts of Athens, where he seeks and ultimately—after overcoming several obstacles—finds sanctuary.

Though Chowdhury has pared down Breuer’s 1983 staging (at 90 minutes, the current production is half the length of the original, and it has 24 rather than 60 performers), he still delivers a sumptuous experience, arguably, a more sumptuous one. Unlike the more staid, churchy staging in BAM’s proscenium opera house—with a preacher (then played by Morgan Freeman) standing at a podium and dozens of choir members arrayed on risers behind him—Chowdhury has created a more embracing configuration, thanks in part to the more intimate horseshoe seating at Little Island. Here, most of the band is set up center-stage, surrounded by a low, glossy red wall. The actors/singers sit in the first row of the audience, moving into the circle onstage or walking its perimeter as dictated by the action. The Preacher (Stephanie Berry, who also sometimes plays Oedipus) has her own perch, an upstage platform beautifully bedecked with tall grass and flowers. We, the audience, are the congregation. As the sun sets over the river, the red set seems to melt into the horizon and the cornflower blue costumes become dusk itself. It’s magical.

It’s the music, though, that is most enthralling. Telson’s score includes straight-up gospel, R&B, hymns, the blues, even some pop, and the cast—several career professionals plus members of the James Hall Worship and Praise choir—are virtuosos across these genres. Beyond the emotionally-infused, technically-adroit singing, the arrangements convey a powerful sense of interpersonal care and mutual dependency, which is a core theme of the show. Thus, when singers have star solo turns in which they can offer their own flourishes, they are always supported by—and in musical dialogue with—the chorus. Sometimes, a pair alternates lead and backup roles in duets, like when Oedipus’s daughters Antigone and Ismene sing together of their grief over his death (a change from the original, in which only one daughter spoke, while only the other sang). A similar ethos can be felt in the tender interactions between the two (and sometimes three) performers who portray Oedipus—Berry, as well as the young bass-baritone Davóne Tines and the older (and blind) jazz vocalist Frank Senior.

Like the Preacher, Theseus (the King of Athens) is played in this production by a woman, which creates an unexpected sense of rapport between them. That the woman portraying Theseus is the gospel star Kim Burrell adds a meta-theatrical parallel to the play: Having apologized for homophobic remarks she’d notoriously made in a 2017 sermon, she is finding grace as she now works among a cast that includes a number of queer colleagues.

Oedipus at Colonus departs most from Sophocles in taking a decidedly Christian turn, as the hero, a cursed sinner, finds forgiveness in the “love of God” (as one song puts it) and, as he dies giving a blessing to Athens, he becomes a kind of savior. Certainly, the gospel singers on stage are not out there as just contract performers; they are palpably praising the Lord with every glorious note. The spirit is infectious, even if one is not inclined to praise the same, or any, lord. Besides, even in this context, Theseus’s welcome to Oedipus when he arrives in Colonus, felt decidedly Jewish, too (not to mention, terribly timely): “I too was an exile,” Theseus tells him. “Therefore / No wanderer shall come to me / As he has done, and be denied.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): With great skill and economy, the documentarist Justin Schein manages to fit two films into the 86-minute runtime of Death & Taxes. It is, first of all, a film about the significance of inherited wealth in the United States, a country where the top 1% own as much wealth as the bottom 50%. As the writer Alissa Quart notes in the film, many among the rich began life on second or third base. Inheritance tax is thus the only way to even slightly level the playing field. The main voice disputing this is the filmmaker’s father, Harvey Schein; Death & Taxes begins with him fulminating against the idea that what he’s accumulated over the course of a very successful lifetime should be taxed “a second time.” This notion is one of the shibboleths his son Justin sets out to demolish. In doing so, the director also presents us with a sensitive portrait of his father’s ascent from working-class, immigrant Jewish Brooklyn to financial success.

Harvey’s prosperity was the result of a career working for various record labels, most significantly Columbia Records and then Sony Music, where he ran the international division. He was a driven and frugal man, but as everyone who knew him says in the film, he was also an unpleasant man—self-centered, with a ferocious temper. While his industriousness got him to the top, his brashness ultimately cost him his job at Sony, whose Japanese owners were not enamored of his audacious American style. (It also ultimately led to the ruin of his 40-year marriage.) Justin presents an unflinchingly honest depiction of his father, while still taking care to highlight the glimmers of a more decent human being that complicate the picture.

Given that the penny-pinching Harvey hated shelling out for a cab when a subway was available, or paying for the train when a walk was possible—and even spurned his wife by moving to Florida to avoid paying a state sales tax—it’s only natural that he despised the notion that anything he’d saved would go to the government rather than to his designated heirs. Justin considers this antipathy and its opposite by assembling an ideologically diverse crew of experts, ranging from Grover Norquist on the right to Paul Krugman and Robert Reich on the left. What the former view as confiscatory, the latter see as the key way to ensure the common good. While Justin’s sympathies with the left are clear, as with his father, he treats those on the other side with empathy and understanding.

Death & Taxes never loses the thread of the two intersecting stories—the one personal, the other political—integrating them or letting them play out separately as it suits the material. The end result is an eternally timely exploitation of the individual and societal damage wrought by enduring inequality.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): I must begin by admitting that I am a verified Hala Alyan stan. There are perhaps no books I have gifted and recommended more than her two novels: Salt Houses, a story about the ripples of the Nakba in one Palestinian family from 1948 to the present, and The Arsonists’ City (the better yet lesser-known of the two), an epic family drama centered in Beirut. I thus approached Alyan’s newest book, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, with admittedly high expectations. I was not disappointed: This wild and gorgeous memoir defies simple summaries and genre constraints.

The book tells the story of Alyan’s unconventional journey to motherhood via surrogacy, alongside a series of interwoven vignettes and reflections on her family’s exile from Palestine and then Kuwait, her childhood in Lebanon and America, her battles with addiction, her unraveling marriage, and the power of storytelling. Alyan wrestles with the stories, traditions, and lineages that formed her, and that she is passing onto her daughter. These are stories laden with pain, but Alyan is such a skillful writer that I couldn’t put the book down. There are no simple conclusions or resolutions, only raw honesty and an ongoing journey toward self-knowing and self-acceptance. In the face of the erasure of Palestinian lives and histories, as well as the pressure on women to conform to particular narratives, this refusal to self-censor or limit what counts as a worthy Palestinian mother’s story felt defiantly expansive. I am in awe of the courage and compassion contained in the pages of Alyan’s remarkable book.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): If you like your beach reading to have some teeth, you can’t do better than Sarah Wynn-Williams’s dishy memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. And it literally has some teeth: Wynn-Williams introduces herself in an early scene of this brisk workplace tell-all by recounting the time when, at age 13, she was attacked by a shark in her native New Zealand. It “locked its teeth around my torso” and was “shaking me the way a dog shakes a toy,” she writes. On the brink of death, she is helicoptered to a hospital where doctors find her bowel bitten through and her left lung collapsed. When she awakes from a coma a few days later, her mother praises the doctors who saved her. Unable to talk, Wynn-Williams gestures for a paper and pen and writes, “I saved myself.”

The metaphor couldn’t be blunter. With a background in diplomacy at the UN and high hopes for the impact she believed Facebook could have on “sav[ing] the world,” Wynn-Williams pursues a job that doesn’t exist at the company, and eventually—after showing the higher-ups the part Facebook played in the Arab Spring—she lands the position. Like that adolescent at the beach in New Zealand, she wades into the company enthusiastically and fearlessly—oblivious to the lurking sharks.

As the book was being published in March, Meta—never mind its bumptious claims as champions of free speech—sought to silence Wynn-Williams and persuaded an arbitrator to demand that she uphold the terms of a nondisparagement agreement she signed when she was fired in 2017 (after bringing a sexual harassment complaint against a superior). She was ordered to refrain from promoting the book, and from “amplifying or repeating” any “disparaging, critical, or otherwise detrimental comments.” However, her publisher, Flatiron Books (Macmillan), came under no such decree and the book leapt onto the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists, even as Meta dismissed it as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”

Although she often provides more appalling detail than previously revealed, readers are likely familiar with Facebook’s role in, for instance, the genocidal riots in Myanmar fomented by misinformation posted on the platform or about the company’s compromising efforts to break into China or how it embedded its people in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. But those stories about executives—in C-Suite offices, private jets, fancy overseas hotels, global leadership conclaves—make the jaw plunge lower and lower with each outrageous anecdote. (Despite Meta’s assertion of their falseness, there are no reported libel suits in the works.) There’s man-child Mark Zuckerberg, making an off-the-cuff promise at a UN meeting to supply free WiFi to refugee camps (which was never planned and never happens) or trying to cozy up to China’s Xi Jinping or yelling at his underlings because he forgot to bring his passport to an airport. COO Sheryl Sandberg, of lean-in fame, sees dollar signs after a terrorist attack in Paris puts the issue at the top of the agenda at the World Economic Forum. Now governments will get off Facebook’s back about privacy, she enthuses, and prioritize surveillance: Good for business! She demands that Wynn-Williams crawl into bed with her as they fly back from the conference, as she has demanded of other younger women in the company. (Wynn-Williams declines and finds herself “iced out.”)

When Wynn-Williams returns to work after a five-month maternity leave—which involved a dangerous postpartum loss of blood (related, perhaps, to the old shark attack)—her boss (illegally) calls her in for an immediate performance review. “You weren’t responsive enough,” he tells her. “In my defense,” she replies, “I was in a coma for some of it.”

Most harrowing is a scene in an open office space where a woman convulses on the floor, foaming at the mouth and bleeding, and no one does anything until Wynn-Williams and two others move sharp furniture out of the way and call 911. Trying to give the operator information about the woman, Wynn-Williams asks a nearby worker, “Are you her manager?” “Yes,” she answers, barely looking away from her screen. “But I’m very busy.”

Wynn-Williams seems for the most part like a reliable narrator, or at least a witty and vividly observant one. She does lose some cred with me by gratuitously pointing out (albeit by quoting an outside observer) that the top brass at Facebook are all “Jews who went to Harvard.” Because of this, “You’ll never be like them,” he tells her. The point seems not so much to note her perpetual peripheral status as to distinguish her from those avaricious Jews and their “lethal carelessness” (like Great Gatsby’s “careless people” Tom and Daisy, from whom she takes her title). If what makes her not like them is her moral compass, it notably takes seven years for that compass to inch toward true north.

As the book breezed on, I had to wonder: How many times can she describe scales falling from her eyes before there are any illusions left to lose? “I decided that until I walked out the door for the last time,” she writes near the end, “I would try to work the system, because for so long I still believed I could do more good inside than out.” With all the evidence she piles up, that belief comes to seem self-servingly naive. She may be thrashing in the jaws of reckless power and wealth, but she continually manages to save herself.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The irony of the title of the new film Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is evident from the very first shots. The movie—an adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s brilliant memoir about the final days of Rhodesia, directed by and starring Embeth Davidtz—opens on a white farm family beginning their day, with everyone, adult and child, carrying a gun as they see the father off to his military service combating the African “terrorists” fighting to end white rule. Things have most definitely already gone to the dogs for the whites, who live in mortal fear of the dispossessed natives glaring at them with hatred as they drive past.

The narrative unfolds during the run-up to the first free elections; the whites are pulling for the more moderate cleric Abel Muzorewa, running against the hardcore Robert Mugabe. (That Mugabe would turn out to be a frightful dictator is, for the moment, neither here nor there.) The story is told from the point of view of the family’s eight-year-old daughter Bobo—played by Lexi Venter, in a performance equaled only by such classic children as Victoire Thivisol in Jacques Doillon’s Ponette and Aiden Noesi in Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway. Venter perfectly embodies the duality of settler childhood. She’s fascinated by the Black Africans around her; she enthusiastically (if disrespectfully) explores African gravesites and loves hearing African tales from Sarah, the family’s beloved maid. But at the same time, she strides around the farm as if the world were hers, and talks to African children as if they were her servants. She is, of course, a product of the isolated and scarce whites who view every Black person as an enemy.

Bobo is a queasy-making combination of grown-up and child, forced into early adulthood not only by the instability of both the state and her impoverished family. Should they stay or should they go? Her father feels it’s all hopeless and wants to leave. Her alcoholic mother (played by Davidtz) insists on holding out. Davidtz skillfully presents the steely determination in the poor and lost cause of the white farmers, demonstrating grit and determination, even through her drunken haze. She’s a sad, frustrated woman living in a sad and frustrating situation. Enmity flows freely in all directions—and ironically, the threat of violence hangs as much over the faithful Sarah as over the white settlers. (Her affection for Bobo, she’s warned by a Black worker on the family’s farm, could lead to her death as a collaborator.)

Perhaps the most revealing scene in the film is a dance held by the farmers, just as their fate is pretty much sealed. Despite military call-ups, despite having to travel fully armed, despite the fear, the whites party on the edge of the grave of their world. But in Davidtz’s skilled hands, there is nothing elegiac about it. It’s a world that deserved to die.