Shabbat
Reading List

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.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): One of the best things I’ve read since Zohran Mamdani’s momentous win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary was this essay by Abdaljawad Omar in Mondoweiss, which explores the shifting role of Israel in American politics. Since Andrew Cuomo conceded to the 33-year-old socialist Tuesday night, much of the left has been in a state of euphoria; everyone I know is gorging on hope, stuffing it into their cheeks like chipmunks before a long winter. I’m not generally the hopeful sort—I find it more bearable to resolve to keep on without it—but I have rationed myself some happiness this week, and I have felt irritated by the rumblings of those for whom nothing is ever good enough. There were many who criticized Mamdani for what I believed to be a brilliant solution to that age-old shibboleth, the question of Israel’s “right to exist”; Mamdani asserted that he believes Israel has a right to exist “as a state with equal rights,” an unassailable answer that is only enhanced by the way it undoes itself, exposing the impossibility of such a prospect. Others were annoyed with the space he devoted to validating Jewish fear, even as he maintained his commitment to Palestinian freedom. Yes, this whole setup is irredeemably racist! Mamdani shouldn’t be dogged by this question everywhere he goes. But he is, and it’s refreshing to see him handle it with grace, and then win.

Omar never equivocates on the significance of Mamdani’s victory. On the contrary, he identifies it as a “monumental” sea change in American politics. But he also helped me better understand the anxieties of those who are not sated by Mamdani’s performance, who critique “not out of cynicism but historical memory,” while also offering an illuminating analysis of just what has changed. This is not an overnight transformation from the hegemony of support for Israel to the embrace of Palestinian liberation, but rather a gradual arrival to a place where the issue has become “contested terrain—one in which candidates can engage, hedge, affirm, or deflect without automatic disqualification.” If there is opportunity here, there is also a risk: that “the system, unable to fully neutralize Palestine as a politics, will instead absorb it as discourse—sanitized, defanged, and made legible only through the grammar of ‘balance.’”

Where the piece shines brightest is in its apt descriptions of Zionist excess, and the symptoms we are witnessing of an America increasingly chafing under its weight. “When every critique becomes a potential hate crime, when every call for ceasefire is labeled incitement, and when every protest is framed as an antisemitic gathering—something begins to shift in the symbolic order. The very machinery meant to preserve Israel’s hegemonic position in American moral life begins to unravel it,” he writes. The electorate is exhausted by the badgering about “Israel’s right to exist,” by “the politician’s obligatory fealty, the ritualistic declarations of support.” They have become stale in repetition, drawn too much attention to the coercive machinery. We are not, Omar asserts, “in the presence of a victorious counter-hegemony, but in the ruins of a narrative that exhausted itself by insisting too much, too often, and at the expense of everything else.”

This analysis resonates, and while it comes as some relief, it also opens onto some anxiety of my own. Omar leaves mainstream American Jews outside the frame of his analysis, and yet they are everywhere in the piece, insisting on narrative supremacy. Since Tuesday, many of them have been caught in an embarrassingly public racist meltdown, expressing hysterical delusions that the principled Mamdani is going to do 9/11 or shut down all the synagogues. It is not hard to see how an exhaustion with the demands of Zionist fealty inevitably leads to exhaustion with those Jewish communal enforcers who are requiring it, often at the expense of a focus on the material issues that immiserate their neighbors. This is exactly what right-wingers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are picking up on when they offer up anti-interventionism with a side of antisemitic conspiracy. But the appeal is not limited to the right. It is a condition ripe for the proliferation of antisemitism, and for its utter disregard, from which all of us will suffer.

Daniel May (publisher): No one knows how to make magazines work. The algorithms that once had a knack for getting articles you might want to read in front of your scrolling eyeballs now just feed you “influencer content” and advertisements for whatever shoe you last looked at. As traffic has slowed, online advertising that once generated real money has dwindled. Growing a substantial subscriber base requires putting content behind a paywall, which makes the work less accessible, which means it gets to less people, which makes it harder to grow a subscriber base. To say publishing is not a business I would recommend implies it’s a business. But magazines do not make money, almost ever. They lose money, which means that magazines, especially smaller magazines, exist because people with excess capital believe that they should. But magazines are a hard sell for philanthropists. It’s hard to measure the “impact” of a magazine, and any serious one is likely to publish at least some work that any donor, just like any reader, is sure to take issue with—a truism that is even more true for magazines of the left.

All this to say that a rather small number of donors enable most magazines to exist. Many of the good ones rely on one supporter in particular, the Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundation, which seems to have taken upon itself the charge of single-handedly keeping alive the world literary political journalism: the work of places like n+1, Lux, The Baffler, Africa Is A Country, and some dozen others (including, of course, Jewish Currents). In doing so, the workshop has made itself indispensable for those invested in such enterprises. Recognizing the potential inherent in its role as a hub of literary criticism and analysis, in the fall of 2023 they launched The Ideas Letter, a newsletter/online magazine that brings together work by the prodigious network of writers, editors, and intellectuals connected to the workshop.

It sounds like faint praise to say that The Ideas Letter is way better than it needs to be, but it’s way better than it needs to be. Most foundations highlight the work they support, and every biweekly issue does feature a selection of curated essays, some of which are written by authors or appear in publications supported by the workshop. But each issue also includes two or three (or sometimes, in special issues, more) original essays and reviews. While issues contain a certain eclecticism, there is, I think, a central preoccupation that guides the Letter as a whole. Both befitting and betraying its host, perhaps the single most influential (and controversial) liberal philanthropy in the world, many of the issues and essays touch in some way on how to understand the collapse of the liberal order as we have known it over the last half-century. You might encounter a probing essay by longtime Amnesty International senior staffer Nicolas Bequelin on whether the infrastructure of human rights can survive the end of the Western hegemony upon which it is built—and whether it should; or Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion on whether liberalism can survive the decline of liberal institutions (including the aforementioned world of magazines); or the Tunisian political psychologist Nadia Marzouki on the limitations of anti-imperial politics in her home country.

For perhaps obvious reasons, I took special note of last week’s issue, which featured the best review I’ve read of my colleague Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, by Jewish Currents contributing writer Linda Kinstler. In that review, Kinstler puts Beinart’s book in conversation with Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza, and wonders whether in all their darkness both books might not in fact be overly hopeful. Both, she notes, implicitly assume that the devastation in Gaza marks a definitive break; but what if the lesson we end up learning is that there is no lesson, that the world will in fact accept such violence and move on to the next horrific episode?

In that issue, Kinstler’s essay sits alongside a personal essay by Liberties managing editor Celeste Marcus on a lifelong attempt to understand the nature of the Jewish God, and an analysis of Beinart’s work and career by longtime Nation columnist Eric Alterman. As a trio, the pieces offer a good example of the publication’s (and the workshop’s) approach to its term of self-description: “Heterodox.” Consistently surprising in form and rigorous in content, The Ideas Letter invites readers into the extended community of the Ideas Workshop; in doing so, it makes a strong case for all the “little magazines” the workshop supports, including its own.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Let me begin by saying that the Catalan director Albert Serra’s documentary Afternoons of Solitude is a film that not only is not for everyone; it’s a film that will morally upset many of you. Its subject matter, bullfighting, toward which Serra takes no clear position, is a sport—if I might call it that—that is viewed by many as the equivalent of cockfighting, an undisguised form of animal cruelty. In come places the rules and the cruelty have been modified, but Afternoons of Solitude is about bullfighting in its purest form, in Spain, during the day, with the matador facing the possibility of death and the bull, after being stuck with banderillas, facing near certain death.

Serra, whose films until now I’ve found pretentious and dull to the point of suffocation has, with this film, produced a mesmerizing work, a film that does nothing to disguise the murderousness of tauromachy on both sides. The focus of the film is the young Peruvian torero Andres Roca Rey. We are told nothing about him, his antecedents, or the trajectory of his career. We join him and his team of toreros as they are on their way to a corrida, with the discussion mainly about the route. Several of them are in costume, the famous traje de luces. These occasional scenes in the van going to or from an arena are our only moments of respite from the deadly artistry of the bullfight.

Serra’s cameras place us right in the heart of the action. Every cry, every shout of advice from Roca Rey’s people, his cuadrilla, can be heard—their warnings, their encouragement, their counsels to the matador as to how the fight should progress through its foreordained stages and when it’s time to end it. In two of the fights, Roca is butted but not gored by the bulls, and in both cases, he returns to the arena. Machismo can reach no more crazed or exalted heights. The posturing of the matador during the fight, his almost insane taunting of the animal, as if it can understand it’s being taunted, are shown to us in closeup. After especially successful corridas, his cuadrilla praise his cojones. An entire society’s vision of masculinity is laid out for us. And yet, Roca Rey, preternaturally slim, is wearing the absurdly ornate bullfighter’s costume. We are shown all that is required in order for him to don it: with pantyhose as a foundation, pink knee socks, and the donning of the knickers requiring him to be lifted off the ground by his wardrobe master.

Roca Rey is full of bravery and bravado; his bulls only occasionally explode in rage. The traje de luces ends a bullfight covered in blood, none of it Roca Rey’s. Afternoons of Solitude is a film from which you will at times want to look away, but won’t be able to. I expected, even wanted to hate this film. I didn’t. Not in the least. As much as any deep film on human relationships, this film has led me to question why I didn’t and what that says about me.

We want to remind you that our Summer issue will be here soon—in fact, subscribers can already read it online—and until June 23rd, we’re offering 50% off print subscriptions. Sign up now and enter code SUMMERFIFTY at checkout to get the discount.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): This year, some friends and I took on Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald’s meditation on memory, loss, and the haunted continent that is Europe. It concerns an unnamed narrator’s meetings with Jacques Austerlitz, a historian of architecture, who, over the decades, tries to come to terms with his life as an orphaned Czech Jew in the shadow of World War II. He grows up in Wales under the care of a Calvinist preacher, then travels to Prague and beyond to learn about his parentage. We follow Austerlitz and the narrator’s meanderings through the majestic, haunted train stations, old fortresses and castles, libraries, and concentration camps that dot the old continent, all built on the human remains and ravages of Europe’s colonial past.

Sebald interrogates questions of quiet profundity around the reliability of memory, the power or futility of art, symbols, and photos in wrestling with the traumas of the past. (On the latter subject, the narrator recalls an observation made by a close friend of Austerlitz’s parents: “One has the impression, she said, of something stirring in them, as if one caught small sighs of despair. Gemissements de desespoir was her expression, said Austerlitz, as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives.”)

The book’s formal innovations, of “going the full Proust”—long, unbroken, paragraphs, a fearlessly stream-of-consciousness style that produces sentence that coil and swoop back in on themselves, the unforgettable imagery, enigmatic symbols (those moths) and metaphors within metaphors, the sense of a man at the end of his rope, grasping for something to make his life of loneliness legible—make it one of more unnervingly moving reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Some of the questions around narrative reliability may chafe. Is Austerlitz a creation of the narrator, a means of coping through a breakdown? (Sebald—Fight Club fan?) Seeing Austerlitz through the eye of our narrator, we are, I think, meant to consider if the former is perhaps a vessel for the latter, if some authorial mischief is at play. It’s all in service of a grand yet still poignant idea: Reaching out across time for a sense of self-resolution, connection, comfort—peace, even—no matter how futile. As the late Richard Eder wrote in a sublime 2001 review: “Sebald’s past is a parabola. It arcs up to meet us, and when it arcs down it pulls us with it.”

Ari M. Brostoff (contributing editor): Last weekend I participated, along with a group of collaborators, in a sort of conclave for artists and other practitioners who work with groups—often either assembling them as organizers, unsettling them through performance, or both. The program was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the performing arts complex better known as BAM) and included a number of screenings; many of the films we watched were made by collectives from around the world and documented the usually unseen work of group formation that precedes an uprising.

The most astonishing film came at the end: Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans), a 2013 experimental feature directed by the Algerian filmmaker Narimane Mari, which follows a ragtag group of Algiers tweens who raid the kitchen of a French colonial army barracks on a quest for foodstuffs beyond their usual paltry bean rations, and wind up capturing a soldier. In an interview with Film Comment, Mari explained that she recruited the film’s 20 young actors from the Algiers neighborhood where the film was shot; because “much of the film wasn’t scripted yet,” they “decided together who was best at which part.” The semi-improvised work of this acting troupe has an arrestingly unassuming quality even in the film’s early scenes of the kids making fart jokes on the beach; later, as the kids descend into a labyrinth of surreal colonial infrastructure and morph into an ad hoc guerilla organization, it becomes genuinely shocking. It also makes the film—the debut of which coincided with the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence—historically unplaceable, or impossible, a self-conscious artifact of the scrambled timescape of postcolonial city life. The way the kids talk and dress and gesture in the presence of a digital camera’s harsh lens marks them vividly as children of the present era, even as their escapades place them in a dream-logic version of The Battle of Algiers and the loopy soundtrack (a contribution from the French prog rock duo Zombie Zombie) lends their adventure the darkly propulsive retro optimism of Stranger Things. Watching the film last weekend, it was impossible not to think of the children risking their lives for bread in Gaza—and of the devastating brilliance of the way these children have already begun to document the burning world around them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As summer approaches, Berlin is almost certain to be on the menu for some of our readers. I thought I’d share ways to see a Berlin that is neither a touristy Cold War/Nazi/Holocaust museum, nor the all-English-speaking sub-Brooklyn that so many cities are or aspire to be. My son and I went to the German capital recently in search of the remnants of socialism—of the communist Berlin that was crossed by a boulevard bearing the name Karl-Marx-Allee, originally Stalin-Allee.

The DDR Museum (DDR are the initials for the official name of East Germany—Deutsche Demokratische Republik) is the place to start. Though aimed at tourists, it gives a pretty fair overview of life in the former German Democratic Republic, covering daily life as well as the country’s politics and culture. Its gift shop includes objects like rubber duckies dressed in the uniform of the VoPo, the People’s Police who guarded the country. What’s not to like?

There are still statues and monuments dating from the vanished country, including the centrally located one at Marx-Engels-Platz. But if you walk along the avenues around Alexanderplatz, you’ll find tile murals on the outside of buildings, like that at 29 Alexanderstrasse, the Haus des Lehrers, commemorating the work of teachers. A bit further down at 29 Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, on the face of the Presscafé is another mural honoring communist journalists, which features Marx looking over the shoulders of the writers. The most moving monument can be found near Zoo Bahnhof: the monument to Rosa Luxemburg. The sculpture, consisting simply of her name, rises from the waters of the Landwehr Canal where her body was thrown after she was murdered.

Providing inexpensive housing for all was a prime goal of the government of the DDR, and you can travel to outer neighborhoods like Marzahn and walk around Helen-Weigel-Platz or the Allee-der-Kosmonauten to examine the beautifully brutalist (not oxymoronic) apartment blocks that in no way resemble or feel like American projects. Or just walk down Karl-Marx-Allee from Alexanderplatz and look around you. At Strausberger Platz you’ll find a wedding-cake apartment building on the order of a majestic Soviet palace, covering two blocks on both sides of the boulevard, containing 5,000 apartments. The variety of exteriors within the sameness of the prefab buildings, with their slashes and dashes of color, is a real lesson in urbanism and architecture.

Soviet-style socialism being dead, two cemeteries are essential visits. In Friedrichsfelde Cemetery there is a large and moving section dedicated to the socialist and communist dead. You’ll find the resting places of figures from both the Social Democratic and Communist parties in a beautifully designed walled area. On the other side of the wall is a section housing the panjandrums of communism, including the Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, the family of the martyred Karl Liebknecht, the head of East German espionage Markus Wolf, his brother the filmmaker Konrad Wolf, and the physician Georg Benjamin, brother of Walter Benjamin. Interestingly, all the Jews buried there have pebbles placed on their graves. The cemetery tells another, uglier story: the plaques have been brutally removed from some graves, and the death masks from another, as they were vandalized by fascists in March.

On Chauseenstrasse in downtown Mitte is what’s known as the French Cemetery, the final residence of the cultural elite of the DDR, including the composer Hanns Eisler, the writer Anna Seghers, and the turbulently married couple Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. Not coincidentally, next to the cemetery is the Brecht-Weigel Museum (reservations required), located in their house. The visit is only to Becht’s part of the house (they lived separately in the same building), so his interests, particularly in Chinese culture, are obvious everywhere you turn.

Outside of socialism, a visit to the house in Wannsee where the Final Solution was negotiated is well worth the long ride on the S-Bahn. The magnificent manor provides a beautiful view of the lake, and also has a café serving babka and bagels, which a sign advertises—correctly—as Jewlicious. Before heading out from Wannsee, those who love literature should pay tribute to Heinrich von Kleist, whose grave is on a low hilltop overlooking the lake, on the precise spot he committed suicide after shooting his companion, a willing accomplice in the venture.

A final note: Berlin is enormous and the public transport is as bad as New York’s. Be prepared to travel an hour to get anywhere.