Sep

5

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): On a summer trip to Montreal, I stopped in to the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore, connected to the graphic novel publisher of the same name, which is responsible for putting out some of the greats of the field (Lynda Barry, Shigeru Mizuki, Chris Ware). The guy behind the counter recommended Acting Class by Nick Drnaso, whose sophomore effort Sabrina was the first graphic novel ever nominated for a Man Booker Prize.

The book follows ten people in a small town who, for one reason or another, respond to flyers for a free acting class. The teacher is waving a collection of red flags, from the fake name (John Smith), to his frequent negging of certain students, to his boundary-pushing exercises, to his broken teeth. But the novice actors, as we learn in the collection of vignettes that open the book, are all, well, struggling. They just need the class and its escape. The graphic novel proves the perfect medium for this story, as it depicts the acting exercises in full verisimilitude, such that you begin to lose track whether you’re in real life or in a scene—a move that becomes more and more unsettling as the characters drift further from reality and deeper into fantasy. Adding to the unease is Drnaso’s flat, doll-like depiction of faces and expressions, which makes an uncanny valley of the world of the book.

I can’t say I was satisfied with the resolution of the plot—the book’s series of abrupt, stacked endings left me mostly confused—but it hardly mattered. Drnaso manages to swallow the reader in his eerie little world. Acting Class invited me to read it slowly. Closing the book every few pages, I found I had trouble shaking off its disquietude, that my reality suddenly felt a little more unstable, permeable at the edges. And for whatever reason, that strange, anxious feeling felt generative and interesting, and introduced some distance between life and its observation.

David Klion (contributing editor): John Updike died in 2009 and has been falling out of fashion since at least that long ago. “You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling,” Patricia Lockwood wrote in a posthumous reappraisal in the London Review of Books, which took particular delight in skewering the late novelist’s legendarily bizarre sex scenes. Even in the postwar heyday of white male literary misogynists, Updike was always a bit of an aberration—a small-town Pennsylvanian of old Protestant stock who saw the likes of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth as competition, his admiration for their virile Jewish masculinity tinged with both fascination and envy.

I’ve spent the past few years immersed in the history of the 20th century New York intellectual and cultural scene, which has led me on an unfortunate number of digressions—including, mostly for my own entertainment, a series of novellas and short stories Updike wrote between 1970 and 2001, when they were collected in one convenient volume as The Complete Henry Bech. Though Henry Bech tends to be overshadowed by Updike’s best-known recurring protagonist, Rabbit Angstrom, I’d been intrigued by him ever since I first learned years ago that Updike had conceived of a Jewish alter ego—a fellow postwar writer whose inconsistent fictional output and equally inconsistent personal life draw inspiration from all the aforementioned rivals as well as Updike himself. Rabbit is Updike’s provincial side and Bech is his cosmopolitan side, and I admit the latter appeals to me more.

If the Bech stories were merely affectionate sendups of Roth or experiments in whether a goy can channel a Jew persuasively in fiction, they might just be amusing—and for my purposes, dayeinu. But I became fully invested in Bech as a cranky, horny, self-absorbed, self-effacing, skeptical, and occasionally wise antihero, rendered through Updike’s always lyrical prose. Taken together, the stories constitute an extended comic meditation on bookish fame (or semi-fame), inspiration (or lack thereof), and frustration, complete with a fake bibliography and fake reviews from the likes of Alfred Kazin and Ellen Willis. They also form a kind of travel guide, with Bech bouncing between the former Eastern Bloc, the Upper West Side, an unnamed island that is clearly Martha’s Vineyard, Ghana, Australia, and many other places around the world, often on State Department junkets.

And yes, of course, he goes to Israel. “The Holy Land,” first published in Playboy in 1979, sees Bech at odds with his Episcopalian wife, who finds herself unexpectedly moved while retracing the footsteps of Jesus. She is baffled that Bech couldn’t care less about his own nominal religious connection to the land (“Israel had no other sentimental significance for him; his father, a Marxist of a theoretical and unenrolled sort, had lumped the Zionists with all the Luftmenschen who imagined that mollifying exceptions might be stitched into the world’s cruel and necessary patchwork of rapine and exploitation”) and is instead weirded out by his settler-colonial distant relations, and increasingly by his wife too. “His marriage was like this Zionist state they were in: a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on an earth where there was no safety,” Updike writes, sizing up Israel better than Bellow ever did through the eyes of a Jew who is accustomed to living in a permanent state of alienation. Reviewing the first Bech volume in Commentary in 1970, Cynthia Ozick accused Updike of dreaming up a false and essentially parodic Jew—but this Jew, for one, found Bech welcome and familiar company.

There’s plenty of cancelable material in here, though it’s up to the reader to determine how much of the casual racism and misogyny is the real Updike’s and how much is the fictional Bech’s, but I doubt the Bech stories are read widely enough anymore to be worth canceling (if “cancel culture” even means anything now, if indeed it ever did). Regardless, for a certain niche of reader—perhaps a niche overlapping with Jewish Currents subscribers?—Bech offers nostalgia for a literary era that, like the ascendent American empire that fostered it, is rapidly fading into the past.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer arrived in the United States from France in 1972, I was 20 years old. I’ll let no one say it was the best time of life—I was a loveless, miserable young man, disgusted with politics, burying myself in James Joyce, Symbolist poetry, and pre-Raphaelite art, and developing an interest in film. On the advice of some reviews, I went to see Four Nights. There on the screen was my story, that of a young man who roams the streets dreaming of love and who, in his solitude, finds the woman he’s been seeking. She is unavailable, waiting for the return of a man to whom she has promised herself, who has gone for a year to study at Yale. Jacques, the lonely young man, lends Marthe, the abandoned young woman, his shoulder, support, and love. It seems as though things could work out for Jacques and Marthe, but then the student returns, and Marthe leaves Jacques on a crowded Parisian street. All of my outdated romanticism was here, and I soon came to regard Bresson as the greatest filmmaker in the history of cinema.

Four Nights is a perfect entry point to Bresson. He is commonly referred to as the Jansenist of Cinema, the author of rigorous films revolving around the questions of God’s Grace, of death, of human ugliness and despair, and sometimes of redemption. But in this film, based on the Dostoevsky novella White Nights, Bresson focuses his eye on the not so simple matter of young love.

Bresson is known for his unique cinematic language, which includes the word he uses for his kind of film, “the cinematograph.” He didn’t use professional actors and he drained his performers of all that is theatrical in order to get to the purest heart of his scenarios. Bresson’s characters even walk in a way unseen in other peoples’ films. He explained his ideas on film in two fascinating books published by NYRB Classics, Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson. Beginning Bresson with Four Nights is a way of easing yourself into his more demanding work—but more important, it is a chance to see a film of rare, pure beauty.

Though the film was dismissed as “Bresson light” it is, in fact, the equal of his better known films, like Au hasard, Balthasar, or Diary of a Country Priest. As in those films, Bresson casts his gaze on something essential in human life. He presents the hopes, hesitations, strengths, and weaknesses laid bare by love; this is a film about the intermittences of the heart.

Years ago, Four Nights vanished from the US when its distributor went bust. It’s now showing in a restored version, distributed by the estimable Janus films. This is the film that eventually led me to move to Paris so I could meet Bresson. I did, and it took 45 years for my account of that meeting to appear in print. It was in Paris that I met my first wife, with whom I had a son, so Four Nights truly transformed my life.

The name of this week’s parashah, Ki Teitzei, is taken from the first two words of our reading’s opening phrase: “when you go out to war.” The verses that follow complete a set of instructions that began last week, in Parshat Shoftim, regulating the Israelites’ wartime behaviors during the conquest and settlement of the Promised Land. But for millennia, these laws had no practical application. This is due in part to a technicality: Halachically, the Jewish people cannot wage a collective war without the approval of the Sanhedrin, the most authoritative ancient Jewish legislative and judicial body whose presumed political authority waned with the destruction of the Second Temple. Without the possibility of halachically sanctioned war, there was no need for various halachic regulations surrounding warfare. Moreover, the early rabbis, in their brief analysis of these verses, established near-impossible criteria for what constitutes a divinely mandated war, which, on a practical level, legislated such laws out of existence. As one scholar describes it, “The rabbinic sages simply avoided engaging in meaningful discussion about holy war, thus effectively removing it from the mainstream rabbinic discourse . . . [and] placing it deeply in the stacks of the library so that it could not be easily removed for detailed scrutiny.”

Several key treatments notwithstanding, halachic material addressing both theoretical and practical war-waging is scant, and, as Michael Walzer, a leading scholar of Jewish just war and political theory, laments, this means that such writing is “never a reflection on actual responsibilities and consequential decisions.” Jewish just war theorists are thus left to emphasize biblical material alone—particularly these verses in Devarim. This approach may be born of necessity, but it is uncharacteristic of, and even antithetical to, Jewish legal discourse, which typically weaves together biblical texts, rabbinic writings, and later codes, commentaries, and responsa, creating an evolving conversation that spans millennia and brings many generations of Jewish practice and thought to bear on a given question.

Walzer sees the dearth of Jewish texts on war and military conduct as a deficiency within halachah. But we might instead view this lacuna as a positive feature of the Jewish legal tradition. Writing at the end of World War I, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, a towering giant in the development of Religious Zionism, articulates such a position, arguing that Jewish statehood would only be possible once the war was over, since he believed this would usher in a new era of global peace and pacifism. Reflecting on the thousands of years during which Jews were absent from international geopolitics, he notes that “the delay is a necessary one; we were repulsed by the awful sins of conducting a nation in an evil time . . . It is not worthwhile for Jacob [the Jewish people] to engage in statecraft when it must be full of blood, when it requires an ability for wickedness.” Though Rav Kook’s views on war varied—and his teachings elsewhere helped to inspire the messianic militarism of contemporary Religious Zionists, especially in Israel—here he suggests that the reality of nationalist violence necessitated Jewish abstention from statehood. Thus, what Walzer sees as a gap that must be filled, Kook understands as an intentional silence in the face of profound evil.

Theorists who jump to fill in “holes” in the Jewish canon regarding the necessary violence inflicted by statehood should consider the words of the preeminent Modern Orthodox scholar Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who posited in 1959 that “the pages of history are bloody with the acts of European society—especialy in feudal times. Judaism is not better because we are better than them, but because we never had to face the challenge. A private person cannot do the injustices that can be done by a state. What if our history had been different, with a Jewish state in the Middle Ages? Would we have been just like the feudal law?” We now unequivocally know the answer to Soloveitchik’s question. In Israel’s self-described “defensive” war in Gaza, the idea of just war itself has normalized and made acceptable mass civilian death. Our absence from national warfare—both in our texts and in practice—was neither a failure nor a strength of Jewish life and thought; it was the result of a historical accident. We must work now to make it intentional.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.