Sep

13

2024

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In 2017, the Whitney Biennial controversially presented “Open Casket,” a painting by the white artist Dana Schutz, based on a famous photograph of the lynched Black adolescent, Emmett Till. In response to sustained protests against the painting—at the museum and in reams of posts and articles—Schutz said that “Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection.”

Since then, at least, the critic and art historian Aruna D’Souza has been casting doubt on this steadfast liberal principle: that empathy for oppressed people drives progressive change. I first encountered her suspicion of this bromide in her 2018 book, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, a short volume of sparkling insights about the structural racism embedded in US exhibition spaces, and the Black resistance that has called them to account. Schutz’s artwork, and her defense of it, is one of the three case studies taken up in D’Souza’s book which, among other things, asks who is granted free speech—the common institutional defense of such exhibits—and who is denied it. On that saga, D’Souza reflects that “Where Schutz’s supporters heard in her words a brave attempt at empathy, her detractors heard her centering herself and her feelings—her white tears, as some would derisively describe it—at the expense of black viewers for whom Emmett Till was anything but historical.”

The limits and hazards of empathy—who is asked to feel it for whom, how it is elicited, what it ultimately produces—apparently kept gnawing at D’Souza, who has set about dislodging its teeth from discourses of resistance in the face of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. The result is the pamphlet-sized book, Imperfect Solidarities. Watching “the first genocide taking place on social media,” D’Souza considers the circulation of images by Palestinian documenters like Motaz Azaiza and Plestia Alaqad: People reposting them, she writes, “communicate their shock, their tears, their sense of grief, and encourage us to feel the same way in order to spur us to action.” But, she argues, such reliance on empathy puts the burden on those being victimized to perform what she calls the “traumatic labor” of making their circumstances known to audiences sitting in safety; second, empathy’s appeal comes from every direction, including the use of Israeli grief to justify obliteration of Palestinians; and third, it “often privileges the emotional response of those doing the witnessing, instead of the real conditions being experienced on the ground.” Witness, in short, becomes voyeurism; the obligation to act comes to depend on one’s self-satisfying feelings. Empathy, then, is a dangerous “prerequisite to political solidarity” and D’Souza calls, instead, for solidarity based on an ethics of care.

In such a short essay, D’Souza does not engage the considerable archive of such thinking (by, among others, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Robin D. G. Kelley, as well as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas); nor does she discuss current activist formations for whom care is an organizing principle and engine. Her unique contribution is instead thinking through the role of art in helping to produce a shift. Drawing on works spanning from the novelist Amitav Ghosh to artists Candice Breitz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Stephanie Syjuco, she shows how, contrary to old liberal pieties, artworks can deflect empathy. Rather than the translation and transparency that empathy insists on, D’Souza favors “context-specific alliances” that can appreciate opacity, “the right not to translate oneself into hegemonic terms.” Art, she shows, can open ways for us “to be able to act together without full comprehension, to be able to float on the seas of change.”

Jonathan Shamir (fellow): There comes a moment in the life of any post-punk band when it’s imperative to trade out angsty, low-fi garage rock for a more expansive, epic sound. They might get a new producer, or move to London—and there’s always a risk that they might lose their spark in making that leap. (I’m still reeling from Bloc Party’s decline.) I had high hopes that Fontaines D.C., the Irish five-piece whose three previous albums had so thoroughly charmed me with their affectionate and bristling portraits of their hometown (the initials in their name stand for Dublin City, not District of Columbia), would not let me down. Thankfully, their fourth album, Romance, released in August, shows that you can outgrow the warm but stifling embrace of your home while keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground.

For those of you who haven’t followed their meteoric ascent, the local lads got so big so quickly that their second record, A Hero’s Death, almost pipped Taylor Swift to number one on the U.K. album charts in 2020. They seem to have seen it coming. On “Big,” the opening track of their passionately restless and testosterone-fuelled debut album, Dogrel (2019), lead singer Grian Chatten screams: “My childhood was small, / but I’m gonna be big.” The band, with its rough-and-ready lyricism and thrashing riffs that recall The Libertines in their prime, soon proved him right.

Their third album, Skinty Fia, is a tough act to follow. It was probably my second-favorite album of 2022 (even the best rock group would struggle to dethrone King Kendrick). Its darker palette of haunting vocals and reverberating basslines fit its macabre subject matter: gravestones, abusive relationships, and suicides. There’s some romance in there, but the loftiest heights of love and deepest depths of loathing are reserved for Ireland itself, in songs that look unflinchingly back at home from the vantage of London. Most memorably, in the climax of “I Love You,” Chatten draws on a simile about the corrupted clergy to express his own conflicted patriotism: “And I loved you like a penny loves the pocket of a priest.”

Romance expands on the admirable mutability of Skinty Fia, delivering the band’s most sonically versatile album to date. Its sound spans nu-metal and anthemic rock: In the title track, the creepy clashing of the high keys on the piano conjure Radiohead experimenting with the occult; on the blithe “Bug,” Chatten’s stretched-out vocals channel the Britpop spirits of the recently revived. The album is also uncertain in its interests, even unmoored: It looks forward with morbid preoccupation, sideways at the all-consuming intensity of a toxic relationship, and backward at the musicians’ childhoods. But this restlessness may be the whole point. On the hip-hoppy “Starburster,” overstimulation is clearly the name of the game; Chatten rattles off all the abstruse and absurd things he is and wants to be (from “I want the preacher and pill” to “I am the pig on the Chinese calendar”) while the backing vocals repeat that “it may feel bad.” The sprawling lists are punctuated by the singer’s jolting gasps. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Chatten explained that the song is about a panic attack he had on the London underground. The dizzying options for self-creation in the modern metropole, or in love, are as debilitating as they are exciting. The album captures this spectrum of emotional states, from the aching viscerality of “retching with desire,” to a satisfied declaration of total numbness: “I don’t feel anything / I don’t feel bad.”

For all its panic attacks and death drives, Romance is also the group’s most accessible album to date, with cleaner mixing and bigger sounds. And that isn’t a bad thing. In perhaps the poppiest and best song of the whole album, the luscious dream rock number “Favourite,” the band waxes nostalgic about “bed radios” and “days playing football indoors.” In the ramped-up and often wild contrasts of modern life, the moments of simple tenderness that break through the clouds become especially bright, as when Chatten sings: “If there was lightning in me / you’d know who it was for.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Richard Behar’s Madoff: The Final Word was such a fun read that I did all I could to slow down my progress through its pages. Please don’t think that my describing an account of a Ponzi scheme in which thousands of people lost their life savings as “fun” makes me a heartless monster; it’s just that this portrait of a swindler, his swindle, and those who worked with or fell for it is executed with amazing brio, and with a point of view we’ve seldom heard in the years since the collapse of Madoff’s unprecedented scam in 2008.

According to Behar’s research, the scheme started in the 1960s, when Madoff, a fledgling investment advisor, lost $30,000 of his first client’s money. He borrowed funds to hide that loss and, like Max Bialystock in The Producers, discovered that there was an easy way to get rich: fraud. He took money given to him to invest and simply recycled it through all the investors. Year in and year out, through good times and bad, he paid out returns of 15%—or, for favored clients, even more—while profiting handsomely himself. The systems he used and the statements he sent out were all fraudulent. All told, $65 billion passed through Madoff’s hands.

What makes Behar’s book especially interesting is his insistence, backed by a number of experts, that there were no true victims; in fact, whenever he uses that word, he places it in scare quotes. His case: How is it that all of Madoff’s investors failed to question how it was possible to never, over the course of decades, lose any money in any quarter of any year? This is simply not within the realm of possibility. But who, after all, is going to question receiving thousands of dollars every few months? Everyone just cashed their dividend checks. For all parties involved, greed was the dominant force.

Jewish names appear on every page, and this is no accident. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was what is known as an “affinity crime”—that is, he focused on one particular group, in his case Jews like himself. One Jew brought in another Jew who turned their money over to a Jew who worked with other Jews at the highest level. (Italians occupied the middle ranks.) Among the innumerable defrauded Jews, one name stands out: Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel! What kind of Jew would knowingly involve the Jewish voice of conscience in a scheme he knew would ultimately cost him millions? Madoff told Behar that he took on Wiesel at the behest of mutual friends, adding, “I did have dinner with him once. You can’t even have a conversation with Elie . . . He’s full of shit, that guy. First of all, he didn’t lose any money [principal], like everyone else claims. He’s counting the profits.”

Madoff has a moral: You don’t have to be all that smart to make a killing in America. Being clever and immoral will do just fine.

This week’s parshah, Ki Teitzei, features the commandment of “shiluach haken,” or “sending away the mother bird.” “If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs,” Deuteronomy instructs, “do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.” It’s an unusual edict in that, unlike most mitzvot mentioned in the Torah, it includes an assurance that one will receive a concrete reward for performing the stipulated action. But what happens when such a promise is broken?

The Talmud takes up this very question. “There was a boy whose father said to him: ‘Climb up this building and fetch me chicks,’” the rabbis tell us. “And he climbed up the building and dispatched the mother bird and took the young, but upon his return he fell and died.” The text wonders: “Where is the goodness of the days of this one, and where is the length of days of this one?” In other words, how could the boy die while performing the very mitzvah meant to guarantee him a long and happy life? The sages offer several potential resolutions to this theological problem—for instance, that the boy was being punished for “contemplating idol worship.” But the text also suggests that the event was so destabilizing that, for some people, no answer would be satisfactory. Referencing the Talmud’s paradigmatic heretic—“Acher” (literally “Other”), formerly known as Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya—the text indicates that witnessing this scene caused this former leading sage to give up on his belief in and commitment to Judaism. Maybe it was not only the horrifying event itself but also the fact that his fellow rabbis sought to justify it that caused him to turn away.

However, despite his reaction to this traumatic experience of betrayal, Acher did not give up on the Jewish community altogether. Elsewhere in the Talmud, we meet him again, this time publicly demonstrating his repudiation of halacha by riding a horse on Shabbat. Following him on foot is his devoted student Rabbi Meir, speaking to him about matters of Torah. Acher suddenly tells Rabbi Meir to stop; he has been counting his horse’s steps and has noticed that they have reached the “Shabbat boundary,” a limit outside the city beyond which travel, even on foot, violates the Sabbath. Acher felt so betrayed by the Torah’s broken promise—and perhaps by the other sages’ attempts to excuse it with theological and moral explanations—that he left the rabbinic community, previously the center of his world. But he still cares deeply about Rabbi Meir and his student’s dedication to halacha.

As we enter the High Holiday season, leftist Jews are in a moment that echoes Acher’s experience of anger and disillusionment. For nearly a year, we have watched so much of the organized Jewish community turn its back on basic values we thought we shared—even a principle as fundamental as the infinite worth of all human life—while justifying this abandonment in the language of Jewish ethics. We have responded to this betrayal in various ways. Some of us have stepped away from all Jewish spaces. Others have turned to new spaces that share our values but sit at the fringes of the Jewish world. Still others have chosen to stay and push our communities through our pain. (And some of us do each of these on different days.) But we all still find ourselves, like Acher, somehow entangled with fellow Jews.

However we choose to navigate these bonds, and whatever we may decide about when we can and cannot pray and study and cry alongside other Jews, we can hold fast to our sense of betrayal. We can ask how we might bring this disillusionment with us into these relationships and spaces—and what new possibilities doing so might open up.

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.