Sep

26

2025

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): In many Near Eastern creation myths, a sky god does battle with a giant sea-monster. In Genesis 1, by contrast, God casually creates such leviathans, alongside other aquatic creatures, on the fifth day. A host of mid-20th century apologetic biblical scholars saw in this demotion the passage from primitive pagan polytheism to civilized Israelite monotheism. Yet, as I once heard from Rabbi David Silber, the joke is in Genesis 2 and 3: the Lovecraftian oceanic depths may have been naturalized into mere serpents, but then one lowly snake single-tonguedly overturns the divine plan. You cannot keep a good chaos-monster down. (In a sense, though Silber was too frum to say it, the Christians were thus correct to read the snake as Satan.)

I was reminded of this hidden continuity reading Benjamin Balthaser’s new history, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left. Balthaser is a genius of unexpected continuities. His book is devoted to the proposition that the mass rebellion of ordinary Jews against Israel’s ongoing genocide only looks like a radical novelty because of the poverty of our historical vision. Contextualized by the vast disproportion of Jews in the 1930s Communist Party and then in New Left organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the revolt against Zionism today is instead recognizable as a return of the repressed. Indeed, quite literally repressed—for another major theme of Balthaser’s work is that— while often eulogized as an outdated alte kaker, wasting away in a nursing home—the Jewish left is better described as Bruce Willis in one of the Die Hard films, repeatedly bludgeoned by assailants (fascists and, it must be said, liberals), yet stubbornly refusing to die. When Balthaser compares Jewish Voice for Peace to the Communist Party, he refuses the official account, the liberal coroner’s report in which the antisemitic persecution of the Red Scare is euphemistically redescribed as Communism’s death by natural causes.

The point here is not just that the Jewish left is precedented, that we have roots and ancestors. Such a yichus would be itself worthy of attention, but the bigger claim is that leftist Jews’ diasporism was once simply Jewish common sense. The Jewish Left was anti-Zionist reflexively, rather than pointedly. Because of their global consciousness of political struggle and their dialogue with other oppressed American groups, Jewish radicals viewed Israel with a quizzical mistrust. (In the Jewish Communist Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money, Balthaser points out, the Zionist is a middle-class huckster, selling proletarian Jews on dubious suburban houses, a wonderfully deflationary diagnosis of settler-colonialism as, at its heart, a real estate scam.) Israel wasn’t the Death Star it is for many of us today, louring over our communities as the baneful omen of Empire. It was just a far-off “ideology,” as the Chicago leftist Myron Perlman, whom Balthaser interviewed before his death, had it—a confused distraction from the here-and-now of real, urban politics. Not unrelatedly, leftist diasporism expressed and sharpened attitudes that were widely held among American Jews, filtering through into mainstream liberal writers like Philip Roth and Woody Allen. Indeed, Balthaser suggests that much of the feisty vitality of American Jewish liberalism lies precisely in its proximity to and citation of a radical culture.

I would not be honest if I said all this sits so easily with me. My imagined lineage, unlike Benjamin’s, runs not just through labor lawyers and radicals but also through rabbis, academic biblicists, and other such bourgeois figures. I often found people I admire—my teacher, Robert Alter, or the Renewal Rabbi Arthur Waskow—evoked here as enemies, or at least as objects of exasperation. And the excavation of unappreciated antecedents carries as its corollary a frustration with left-wing Jews today who don’t know their roots and who—as I’m doing above, with my forced analogy to Genesis—feel the need, as Balthaser would have it, to dress the Jewish left in religious language and traditions, a maneuver as unnecessary and absurd as bedecking Emma Goldman in a sheitel. (Indeed, the revivers of this magazine come in for a certain amount of criticism for forgetting their own past.) Of course, anyone who has spent any time at all with Jewish leftists of earlier generations knows that such prickliness is inescapable, indeed is part of the draw. These were not people who suffered fools lightly.

If you’ll permit yet another contrived biblical analogy, I am reminded of a flailing Saul summoning the spirit of Samuel to seek advice, only to have his question answered with a question (“Why do you consult me now?”). A small part of me, reading Balthaser’s book, felt like Saul, berated for my previous failings in precisely my hour of need. Yet far more often, I felt like the reader of that biblical scene, who can, I think, only laugh at this untimely prophecy, at Saul finding religion late in life only to discover it offers no pastoral balm but rather means the same, cantankerous gadfly he had long dismissed. If, in other words, Citizens of the Whole World occasionally abrades, that is not its least Jewish quality—and regardless, the book, through its archival witchcraft, has summoned up prophetic spirits we can ill afford to ignore.

David Klion (contributing editor): This is not an Andor recommendation—for that, you can read our publisher Daniel May’s from 2022, or any number of critical raves for Tony Gilroy’s improbably sophisticated Star Wars spinoff, including mine. But one of the show’s many strengths is its frequent allusions to cinema about political violence, revolutionary struggle, and espionage, to the point where you could craft a whole filmography out of Andor’s non-Star Wars inspirations. The Battle of Algiers, The Conformist, Army of Shadows, Z, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and other John le Carré-derived productions, The Godfather Part II, and of course Gilroy’s own Jason Bourne movies and Michael Clayton are all in Andor’s DNA.

Recently I checked another of these off my list: Conspiracy, a 2001 made-for-HBO movie I’d somehow never seen or even heard of before Gilroy acknowledged it as an influence on a Season 2 sequence in which a gathering of Imperial officers plot a planetary genocide in secret. Though stars Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci won an Emmy and a Golden Globe respectively at the time, Conspiracy is underappreciated relative both to its overall artistry and its unsettling relevance to current events. At roughly 90 minutes, the film is the same length as the 1942 Wannsee conference, which it dramatizes in real time based on the only documentary records that survive from the meeting where Nazi Germany formulated its Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Branagh plays SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, who chairs the conference, and Tucci plays his retroactively better-known secretary, Adolf Eichmann. Something like a dozen other men are seated around the table at a grand lakeside villa on the outskirts of Berlin, where a lavish banquet accompanies the unholy proceedings.

The script, by the late playwright Loring Mandel, manages to wring suspense out of a conference attended exclusively by monsters, the outcome of which will be familiar to anyone watching. As we come to see, the Final Solution had already been settled on before the conference as far as the SS was concerned, with the Führer’s tacit approval. The real function of the conference was to loop in all of the Third Reich’s major internal factions, to generate unanimous support for the SS’s plan, and to ensure that the entire machinery of the Nazi state would be aligned when it came to exterminating European Jewry.

Though Heydrich kicks off the meeting determined to produce this exact result, it requires a certain amount of wrangling. Again, every single man at the table is a high-ranking Nazi, but that doesn’t mean they all start out on the same page. The brilliance of Conspiracy is to illuminate how even the most evil men can have clashing interests and priorities, and how bureaucratic turf wars are a perennial feature of even the most totalitarian states. Some of the attendees are highly educated and cultured, while others are thugs and philistines who crack grotesque jokes. Some question whether slaughtering unarmed Jews is really a better use of the Reich’s resources than securing military victory on the bloody eastern front; some suggest Jewish slave labor is too valuable to squander; some are simply insulted that their own agencies are being stampeded by the SS and that they are expected to endorse a plan they had no role in shaping. A single participant is made physically ill by what Heydrich is proposing, though he attempts to maintain his composure.

The most memorable dissent comes from Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), a leading Nazi jurist and coauthor of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which painstakingly defined who counts as a Jew and how to separate Jews thus defined from German society. Stuckart takes personal pride in the antisemitic legal regime he helped craft, and is furious that Heydrich wants to define Jews more expansively and arbitrarily, and to mass-murder them instead of, say, mass-sterilizing them and waiting for them to die out naturally within a generation. In the context of the Wannsee conference, this is what counts as the moderate, even humane position, and of course it gets ruthlessly shot down. Heydrich and Eichmann are not interested in negotiating; they have called this meeting to manufacture consent for their maximalist approach.

At the end of the conference, and the film, a montage of text informs us of the fates of each of the individual participants at Wannsee. Heydrich was assassinated by British-trained Czechoslovak operatives a few months after the conference, leaving Eichmann to carry out their plans in his memory; you probably know what became of Eichmann. Some of the attendees were killed during the Allied invasion of Germany, and some were hanged in its aftermath, but a disturbing number basically got off scot-free and went on to live banal postwar lives, in some cases for decades.

Conspiracy is not the only worthwhile film centered on Nazi officials—Downfall (2004) and The Zone of Interest (2023) both come to mind, among others—but it is particularly apropos for anyone trying to make sense of the current fascist turn in the United States and many other countries. That the Nazis were genocidal racist killers isn’t exactly news, but the specific ways different power centers within the regime conceived of their roles, butted heads, and ultimately reached consensus are rarely portrayed with this degree of nuance outside of historical debates over functionalism versus intentionalism. Unfortunately for all of us, such debates are far from academic.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As summer ends, I’d like to recommend some museum exhibitions that will still be on display for another few weeks, and in some cases more. All of them deserve fuller treatment than the capsules I’ll be allotting them, and all are very much worth a visit.

The most important of them is not in New York, but at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World, is dedicated to the underrated late 19th century Frenchman Gustave Caillebotte and allows us a rare extensive view of this magnificent artist. The Art Institute owns his most famous painting, Paris Street; Rainy Day, which is on permanent display, but there is so much more to him, though all that is important about Caillebotte can be found in this work.

Working in the youthful era of photography, which freed painters from strict realism, Caillebotte chose to take advantage of one element of the new art form: its fidelity to a radical form of perspective and deep focus. Even in simple Impressionist scenes like his 1877 Skiffs, depth plays an essential part. In all the artist’s best work, thanks to this depth of focus the impressionist and realist are blended. Full shows in the US dedicated to Caillebotte are rare things. This one, which has already been to Paris and Los Angeles under a different title—Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men—is unlikely to be equaled for quite some time. It’s open in Chicago until October 5th.

An eerily timely exhibition can be found at the New York Historical—Blacklisted: An American Story, on view till November 2nd. Originally organized by Milwaukee’s Jewish Museum, Blacklisted, which focuses on the Hollywood blacklist, illustrates the Red Scare of the 1950s, when a baseless accusation could end a writer, director, or actor’s career. The show contains a treasure trove of original documents—letters and texts of speeches delivered and undelivered, magazine articles, and film clips. Included are pages from one of the many magazines that provided the public and studio heads with the names and political sins of entertainment figures. Rare is the document of any kind where you will find the names of the beautiful actress Rita Hayworth and the creator of the immortal sitcom Car 54, Where are You?, Nat Hiken, sharing space, but this pair was considered a threat to the American way. The Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters who went to jail for refusing to answer questions about their membership in the Communist Party, feature prominently. Especially moving is the text of the remarks Communist screenwriter Sam Ornitz never got a chance to give at his HUAC hearing, in which he specifies that it is as a Jew that he is defending his rights to his opinions. Cowardice is also on display here, as stars who initially supported their blacklisted colleagues later backed off. It was, as Dalton Trumbo called it, the Time of the Toads. As is ours.

The Brooklyn Museum has two truly wonderful exhibitions right now. The first is Excerpts from “Ruckus Manhattan” (up until November 2nd), an abridged version of Red Grooms’ wonderfully wacky 1975 reconstruction of New York City. On display here is a mock Staten Island Ferry, complete with cars, passengers, crew, and countless details, all in Grooms’ cartoonish style. Also on display is a full-size Times Square porn bookstore, including models of seedy customers, (painted) magazine racks, and even a backroom for private viewings. For those of us who saw the original versions in 1974 and 1975, this is a tremendously entertaining trip back to a city that was a good deal seedier than it is today. For the rest of you, it’ll just be a delightful little show.

Also at the Brooklyn Museum is Christan Marclay’s 54-minute film Doors (through April 12th, 2026). I wrote some time ago about Marclay’s brilliant 24-hour film, The Clock, which was composed of shots with every minute of the day appearing on a clock. Doors is built around thousands of shots of people entering or leaving through doors or looking through keyholes. One person opens a door, and seamlessly, someone else enters a completely different room. But if you follow closely, it all turns into one continuous story, and each shot feeds into the one next to it in some significant way, telling a story that is never constantly begun and never completed.

This week, we are sharing a dvar Torah for VeZot HaBerakhah, the final parshah of the Torah, which is read this coming Wednesday morning on Simchat Torah. On Shabbat, which falls during Chol HaMoed (“intermediate days”) of Sukkot, we break the regular Torah reading cycle and instead read a selection of verses from Shemot. For reflections on that parshah, as well as on the holiday itself, see Rabbi Lexie Botzum’s reflection from last year.

Our parshah, Vayelech, finds Moses modeling a kind of time travel. In one of his last speeches to the Jewish people, he repeatedly envisions them doing evil and experiencing evil, suffering and causing suffering. Moses is prophesying, but he is also predicting the future based on his own experiences: “Well I know how defiant and stiffnecked you are: Even now, while I am still alive in your midst, you have been defiant toward God; how much more, then, when I am dead!” Contemplating the connection between what has been and what will come to pass also compels him to offer a resource for days to come: Throughout this address, Moses repeatedly urges the Jewish people to write down these words for the time ahead. Through the suffering that will be their lot, he asks them to nevertheless hold fast to the Torah, which will be “a witness” for them, tying their past experiences to future possibilities.

This approach to temporality mirrors the great medieval scholar Maimonides’s instructions for performing teshuva. He states that a key step of repentance, referred to by later thinkers as “kabbalah al ha’atid” (“acceptance for the future”), is that the penitent “resolves in their heart never to commit [the sin] again.” Indeed, they must be able to declare with confidence that they have looked back on the past so thoroughly and done such serious internal work in the present that even “the One who knows the hidden”—the all-knowing God—“will testify concerning them that they will never return to this sin again.” Just as Moses stands at the edge of the Land of Israel and looks back into the past, looks at the Israelites in front of him in the present, and then looks out and imagines a future, so too one who seeks to do teshuva must engage with their past misdeeds, where they stand at the present, and the possibilities and commitments of the future.

This high holiday season, many Jews are striving for collective as well as personal repair, asking: How did we get here? What are the structures that enabled our institutions to support a genocide, that made it so hard for organizations, leaders, and individuals to name and speak out against the truth of what is happening in Gaza? But the work is stymied by the awful continuity between past and present; the war machine grinds on. Hundreds of thousands of people have had their futures stolen, through murder or through the closing-off of possibilities even for the living. Many in our communities still support or tolerate this destruction. In this moment, looking ahead can feel hopeless or futile. How can we even conceive of a future that is different from the horror of today and yesterday?

In her 2023 book Everyday Utopia, Kristen Ghodsee insists that “we must imagine the future that we want . . . no matter how outlandish or impossible” it may appear from the present. She invites us to think of this as “learning to ‘remember’ the future using a similar set of mental acuities as those we use to remember the past.” This injunction to use the skill of memory—so well honed by Jews—as a way of orienting toward the future highlights the necessity of imaginative time travel for fundamental transformation. Moses, too, offers a vision in which the work of changing course requires a method of remembrance; for him, it’s our enduring rootedness in Jewish text. These calls share an insistence that memory of a deeply broken past can guide us toward something better, even if we can’t yet see how. Communal teshuva must likewise remain honest about the past and nonetheless committed to imagining the future.

Our distance from justice might incline us to set our sights on the ground before us, rather than the far-away horizon. But if full, deep teshuva requires a reckoning that reaches into the fullness of the past, it also asks us to picture what comes next, and what comes beyond what comes next. We must, in the words of Becca Leviss, founder of the Judeo-Futurism Project, envision the shape of our communities “not just ten weeks from now, but ten years from now, one hundred years from now.” As we stand at the start of a Jewish year where nothing feels new, we must be brave enough to dream and demand a completely different world—and then to move toward building it.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.