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Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Earlier this week on the closing night of NewFest Pride, I saw Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which will open to wide release in August. Schoenbrun is exceptional at building a world within the world of their film. Within the first five minutes, a montage of (fictional) media coverage of the Camp Miasma slasher franchise establishes its rise and fall, setting into motion the actions of the film’s protagonists.
Hannah Einbinder, known for her role in Hacks and her outspoken support of Palestinian liberation, plays an awkward, insecure filmmaker who we first meet on her drive into the rural Pacific Northwest. The reclusive actress that she has traveled to see—played with charm and restraint by the fantastic Gillian Anderson—draws out the reason for the filmmaker’s visit, perhaps obscured even to herself, and convinces her to stay a little longer.
The film’s power lies, in part, in its seamless interplay of the real and the fantastical. At some moments, the film is visually beautiful to the point of surreality; at others, its hyperrealism exposes every pore and follicle. The slasher scenes comically overemphasize the gore; the point is not to experience horror as such, but to use the genre as a way into a different kind of conversation.
In a talk-back after the screening, the moderator asked Schoenbrun what had motivated them to make this film. Their previous two films—I Saw the TV Glow (which I recommended in our May 2024 newsletter) and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—had been born out of particular experiences in their early transition, and were more painful. After TV Glow was completed, their partner suggested that their next project should be “something fun and gay.” This film is extremely fun and extremely gay. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma basks in the freedom and attendant weirdness of healing and self-discovery. We are lucky to have a world in which Schoenbrun’s instincts, obsessions, and curiosities can manifest on-screen.
Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): In October 2025, I was working at a coffee shop in Tribeca when my phone began to light up with Signal messages, alerting me and thousands of other New Yorkers on various activist threads that ICE had descended on Canal Street and was rounding up street vendors. The request was simple: Get here right now. I almost never find myself randomly near Canal Street, but on that day, I was just a couple blocks south. I threw my computer in my bag and rushed over.
I arrived at one of several similar scenes unfolding concurrently in the area: some half-dozen ICE agents were preparing to arrest a West African street vendor while another half-dozen of us filmed and tried unsuccessfully to intervene. The crowd grew rapidly. Some of those arriving had clearly also received alerts about the situation. But many others appeared to be regular New Yorkers who had walked by and been drawn in. I was heartened every time someone wearing a suit or carrying a shopping bag stopped to ask, “What’s happening?”—and then, upon hearing “ICE is arresting someone,” immediately erupted with “Oh FUCK YOU, get the fuck out of our city!” Often, they put down their bag and stayed. But it was not nearly enough. What followed has been well-documented—despite the presence and attempted intervention of hundreds of New Yorkers, ICE kidnapped almost a dozen men, driving off with them in unmarked SUVs.
The Canal Street ICE raids were heavy on my mind when I arrived at a Sunday screening of Everybody to Kenmure Street, Felipe Bustos Sierra’s new documentary about a 2021 dawn raid in Glasgow, Scotland. The screening was at DCTV’s Firehouse, just a block and a half south of Canal Street, and the contours of the event depicted in the film—an immigration raid disrupted by the local community—are similar to what I witnessed last fall.
But Everybody to Kenmure Street tells a very different story. It is structurally simple—with few exceptions, the film unfolds chronologically over the course of one day. It’s composed almost entirely of footage from May 13th, 2021, shot by a mix of residents, news cameras, and documentarians. It begins with an upsetting and familiar image: an immigration van parked on a residential street, surrounded by a handful of scruffy-looking activists and an equal number of police officers. Not visible in the footage, but essential to the film’s story, is the man lying underneath the van, his arms wrapped around one of its axles. “Van Man,” as the anonymous activist has been called, made a crucial intervention when he crawled underneath the van early in the day. But part of the film’s argument is that this intervention was only one of many, equal in significance to the contributions of the eventually 2,500 residents who showed up to demand that their neighbors inside the van be let go. In other words: This is not a film about heroes. I’d argue that in our current era of celebrity worship on both the right and the left (I am nodding—warmly!—to our charismatic NYC mayor), that’s rare.
Felipe Bustos Sierra lives in Pollokshields, the Glasgow neighborhood where the film takes place, and yet he wasn’t among the crowds that day. As a result, he told The Guardian, “I missed out on that collective joy and expression of empathy which to me is happiness.”
It’s an unusual and fascinating way to describe a day that began with the kidnapping of two men by immigration forces. And yet, watching Everybody to Kenmure Street, it makes sense. Bustos Sierra is the child of Chilean exiles who fled the Pinochet regime. He told me that this sensibility—the joy that comes from acting in solidarity with our neighbors—is one he associates with the community of activists he grew up among. It’s familiar to me too. I grew up in a collective house of leftists in Brooklyn. It was a radical and clear-eyed household, but not a depressed one, perhaps because there was a shared understanding that working together for justice is the thing that keeps us tethered to our humanity. It is, therefore, an inherently life-giving practice.
That’s not just a metaphor, either. Protesting can feel like playing with fake money at the poker table; we’re going through the motions, sure, but we’re not taking anything home with us at the end of the night. But what if we were? Everybody to Kenmure Street reminds us that there’s a pot we could win. And the stakes are high. I’ll probably never forget the woman among the crowds on Canal Street wearing an Amazon Prime uniform who kept shouting, with real urgency in her voice, “Everybody has a right to live!”
Cynthia Friedman (managing director): When I was in my mid-20s, I listened to Democracy Now! as a primary news source every day. I was working as a personal assistant at the time, and could listen to podcasts during my routine cleaning and organizing. I hadn’t grown up listening to the news on TV or radio, and it was through Democracy Now! that I developed the habit.
I suspect that many leftists have their own personal relationship to Democracy Now! and its inimitable host Amy Goodman, who rapidly reads telecaster prompts for the first 15 minutes and stewards conversations with interview guests for the remaining 45. Goodman’s voice—metaphorically and physically—has been a staple of the progressive and radical reporting of the last three decades.
The new documentary Steal This Story, Please! follows the span of Goodman’s career and, by extension, the trajectory of Democracy Now!. Alongside current-day interviews with Goodman and other members of her team, past and present, there is a ton of footage from her work over the decades. It’s incredible to see her as a 20-something, as determined and persistent as ever. The documentary traces the major milestones of her career as a journalist. In 1991, she and a colleague were brutally assaulted covering a massacre of pro-independence demonstrators in East Timor; their testimony was instrumental in bringing international attention and pressure against Indonesia’s occupation of the now-independent country. In 1997, in its first year, Democracy Now! aired commentary from Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther Party member, calling in from death row—and many affiliates threatened to pull the show. In 2001, the Democracy Now! staff hunkered down in their lower Manhattan recording studio for several weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, knowing that if they evacuated, they wouldn’t be allowed reentry until rubble was cleared. In footage I recognized, in 2016, Democracy Now! brought attention to the activists in Standing Rock, North Dakota who were fighting against the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline through Indigenous land.
There is levity in the documentary, amidst the consistently depressing and devastating stories. We meet Goodman’s small dog Zazu, named after the anti-Nazi group in France (“I didn’t even know about the character in The Lion King until people started asking me if that was the reason for the name”). Goodman recounts a call with Bill Clinton during his 2000 get-out-the-vote campaign for Al Gore for president and Hillary Clinton for senate, in which she kept the president on the air for 30 minutes with her hardball questions; when White House staffers threaten to ban her, she shrugs and says, “He called me!”
One of the highlights of the documentary was seeing Goodman’s impact on other journalists who went on to create their own media platforms. Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept in 2014 and Drop Site News in 2024, got his start at Democracy Now! He recounts the early days—the office stacked with newspapers and documents, Goodman meeting deadlines by editing reels of interview clips mid-air, and tenacious investigative reporting trips that no other news program would have pursued.
At a time when national media is increasingly corporatized and aligned with business interests, independent news sources remain critically important for the health of the nation (in fact, last fall, Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion went on Goodman’s show to discuss the takeover of CBS News by David Ellison and Bari Weiss). Steal This Story, Please! will deepen anyone’s appreciation for Democracy Now!, and it’s a roadmap for how to build and sustain better journalism.
Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel, Offseason, opens with a scene I blanch to relate. The narrator, in her late twenties, wakes from dozing on a train and suspects she has been sexually harassed by her seatmate, a middle-aged man, who is now faking sleep himself. The twist is that she identifies the man, across from whom she is sitting by chance, as the father of her elementary school classmate, whom she has not seen in 15 years and who does not recognize her. How much of this is real? Usually, the discovery that a narrator is unreliable brings a reader a special joy, as if one were Sherlock Holmes cracking a case. But who could take pleasure in admitting to themselves they disbelieve a report of molestation?
This is the first of the novel’s many caustic perversities. Having dropped out of a PhD, the narrator (I don’t think we ever get her name) is teaching at a girls’ boarding school in an unnamed beach town on the Atlantic coastline. At a year-end performance review, the dean notes that she has covered exactly one novel (Bleak House); spent class time “sexualizing” Stalin (whose first name she insists on spelling “Iosif”), as well as discussing pedophilia and suicide; and asked students to rank the traumas of their life on the whiteboard. The title, of course, is a pun, playing on the forlorn, wintry feel of the town during the school year and the narrator’s prolonged depression.
Somehow, all of this is extremely funny, partly because, amid all her self-delusion and derangement, her style is consistently mordant and sparkling. For instance, the supposed friend’s father, Mr. O’Donald, dresses his daughter in a “special green crown,” and while she danced, the boy the narrator loved “stared directly up her skirt, panting.” The narrator confesses, “I did not at that time have the wherewithal to overcome my personal feelings for the sake of political solidarity with the cultural symbols of Irish nationalism, because I was eleven years old.”
Lying under the narrator’s ambiguous sexual traumas are familial dislocations and victimizations. Her mother’s family fled the Soviet Union for Israel, indirectly explaining the narrator’s attachment to Stalin. During a Hanukkah visit home, her family eats latkes in her parents’ “vast bathroom” to avoid damaging their remodeled floors, the father lectures them about his wife’s bravery in returning to Eastern Europe to confront the family’s Holocaust history (he wonderfully calls this “a beautiful and important Jewish decision”), and the narrator shouts about her commitment to the anti-Zionist Bund. Later, the narrator is crestfallen to learn that her condescending magnanimity toward her Argentinian psychiatrist, whom she believes to be descended from Nazis, is misplaced: he is actually Jewish.
Offseason is the freshest Jewish novel I’ve read in some time, though given the field, that feels like inadequate praise. Similarly, one of the blurbs compares Sharp’s novel to Ottessa Moshfegh’s works, presumably because of their shared subjects (anhedonic women and prolonged depressions, all rendered absurdly), but for my money, Offseason is more inventive, politically canny, and warm-hearted than Moshfegh’s cynical, stylized abstractions. It is a gem of a novel, and I hope it will be widely read.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): To mark 20 years since our graduation, my college roommates and I recently took a weekend trip away together. I have to admit, I was worried. We hadn’t spent significant time together in more than a decade. They’re both on the left side of the political spectrum, but I wasn’t super political in college—my Zionism made me fearful of leftist spaces—and so the friends I made at that time are not quite comrades. My companions on the reunion trip would be suburban career women, mothers of two. I didn’t know if I was going to spend the whole weekend listening to conversations about property taxes and soccer games, and trying to make my childless, assetless life legible to them.
There was a little of that, but for the most part, we fell into the easy togetherness we had in college. We laughed a lot. Sometimes you know that a relationship is dead when all you can do is “catch up” and then reminisce. But the quality of our conversations about the present were not matters of reporting, but opportunities for group analysis. We didn’t avoid politics, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that even the least overtly political member of our small group had been ostracized by friends for posting about Gaza, and that she had good questions about how to understand the responses she received from Zionist Jews in particular, which baffled her. I came away from the weekend feeling like some kind of miracle had occurred. I am old enough now that I have seen the different ways that friendships implode or disintegrate, even those that had once seemed lifelong. I have lost two of those friendships since October 7th. Here, suddenly, was some countervailing evidence: What was lost can be found again.
This is all a long-winded preamble to telling you about Happyend, a 2024 film about friendship and politics set in Japan in a not-so-distant fascist future, directed by Japanese American filmmaker Neo Sora. The film follows best friends Yuta and Kou; when we meet them, they are sneaking into an underground rave that quickly gets raided by the cops. There is something electric and tender between them; they are, it seems, in love, but the film never really suggests queer romance. This is the romance of teenage friendship, aided by the expanses of time available to pour yourself into another person. But the police raid reveals a difference between the two boys: While both are Japan-born, Kou is ethnically Korean—a foreigner in a society that is increasingly targeting foreigners. At school, an oppressive AI system is introduced to surveil their every move and hand out demerits for infractions. On the street, Kou is harassed by police using facial scanning technology; his mother’s shop is vandalized; the president calls a state of emergency on the basis of the foreign threat. Yuta is focused on music; he scarcely notices at first when his friend begins spending more time with Fumi, a girl with a staunch, precocious antifascist politics.
As Kou radicalizes, he becomes disgusted with his childhood best friend, who seems unwilling to face the political realities that are bearing down on Kou. It is not out of a deficit of love for Kou that Yuta doesn’t come along to protest, and indeed, some of the most heartbreaking moments in the film are ones where Yuta realizes that he is being slowly left and rejected. My sense is that Kou, with the zeal of the converted, is also missing something essential about Yuta, a character whose single quest in the film is to turn an abandoned construction site into a rave, and who steals the school’s AV equipment to do so: Yuta’s rebelliousness is itself an antifascist force, even without a coherent politics. I don’t want to give away the end, but suffice to say that Yuta finds a way to prove his love to Kou, but Kou has seemingly already moved on. Here’s hoping they find each other again.
Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): When I was young, I read and reread anthologies of jokes, especially Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor and Leo Rosten’s Giant Book of Laughter—both thick, musty tomes with hundreds of numbered jokes. I was a shy and studious child, and they promised formulae for social life, albeit ones that were half a century outdated. They also afforded access to the densely Jewish cultural milieu in which my parents’ generation had been raised, but which by the 1990s was largely confined to offputting, brined kiddush foods and kitschy television bits.
Imagine my surprised recognition in perusing the ur-source of these childhood secular bibles in the folklorist Mordekhai Lipson’s 1928 Yiddish volume, Di velt dertseylt, a selection of which has been translated by father-and-son team Jonathan and Jonah Sampson Boyarin under the title As The Story Goes: Funny, Strange, and Serious Stories of Yiddishland’s Jews. Many of the jokes I learned from Asimov and Rosten appear almost verbatim in Lipson’s book—like the one about the antisemitic Russian colonel who insists on calling his dog “yid” in the presence of a Jewish passenger; the Jew replies that it’s a pity the dog is Jewish, as otherwise he could have had a distinguished career in the Russian military. Lipson’s collection suggests that my curiosity and nostalgia had older objects than I’d thought.
While Rosten’s and Asimov’s books all feature anonymous, fictional characters, Lipson’s stories are all about specific, famous Jews—mostly rabbis, both Hasidim and mitnagdim, but also a few Enlighteners like Mendelsohn, famous converts to Christianity, and even a handful of Zionists. (A few lines are even, implausibly, attributed to medieval sages, like Abraham Ibn Ezra, who is reported to have complained about his luck in business, “Were I to sell candles, the sun would never set; were I to sell funeral shrouds, no one would ever die.”) While most of the stories must be apocryphal, the collection presents itself as documenting the verbal brilliance and pungency of the Ashkenazi elite. And where Jewishness in mid-20th century America signified an amorphous, witty ethnicity, here the stories capture ongoing and many-sided political and religious conflicts.
Lipson’s subjects generally articulate a non-dogmatic traditionalism; he celebrates rabbis’ extreme self-deprivation for charitable ends, legal flexibility to accommodate poor Jews’ material needs, or astringent critiques of wealthy businessmen. In their respective introductions, the Boyarins frame the work differently. Jonathan sees it as a window onto Eastern European Jewish life at a particular moment, one less sentimentalized than, say, Fiddler on the Roof; Jonah, meanwhile, sees it as a political resource, albeit a complicated one, which contains anti-capitalist critique and corrects for Christian hegemony. Maybe. For my part, I will say that many of the stories are in fact very clever, and several made me laugh out loud.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Paul Klee said of his artistic process that in basing so many of his creations on lines he was “taking a dot for a walk.” Seldom has an artist been as humorously clear about his practice, as is amply demonstrated in the terrific show Paul Klee: Other Possible Words, at the Jewish Museum through July 26th. It’s precisely the simplicity and possibilities inherent in the line, the simple stroke and its peregrinations, that is the basis for so much of Klee’s work. He constructed an oeuvre that, as we see in this show, was capable of abstract beauty and pointed political protest. Much of the exhibit is focused on Klee the enemy of Nazism and fascism. His politics, his modernism, and his Bauhaus background placed him on the Nazi enemies list, and even saw him falsely said to be a Jew. As a result, he spent his final years in exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1940.
In works like “Creators II” (1930) and “Departure of the Ghost” (1931), the lines weave and intertwine and multiply as shape with a hint of the human presence. These are lines that not only walk—literally, since in “Departure of the Ghost” they are poised atop two legs—they swoop, curl, and form intricate patterns as they cross paths. But his lines can be drawn into figurative service when need be, and Klee shows that they can be a weapon against fascism. Paintings like “Voice from the Ether” (1939) show a child converted into a radio, a passive recipient of the Nazi message being transmitted over the airwaves.
Klee was not devoid of a sense of humor, testimony for which is “Revolution of the Viaducts” (1937). Eleven viaducts of various colors, reduced to arches whose bases are in the form of human feet, have broken ranks and assembled in no order, refusing their assigned regimentation. “Mask of Fear,” a masterpiece from 1932, with its subdued colors, and its egg-shaped figure, looks to have been painted with fewer than 15 strokes, animated by fear and rage.
Most surprising in the show are a set of stark charcoal drawings, depictions of the daily horrors of Nazi rule. Drawn in 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to power, these small, seemingly hastily done works show people being shot down in the street; a man crawling; a stiff, bloated figure posed as a dictator; a manhunt; and people emigrating. These display cases are a mini-chronicle of the early years of Nazi rule.
Present also are the shaped and shapeless figures set against striking backgrounds that are Klee’s signature. But even the paintings of fruits, pears, figs, and apples are filled with foreboding, the fruits containing rotted spots.
Klee was fond of painting angels in his distinctive style, and there are some wonderful ones here. Sadly, Angelus Novus, his most celebrated angel and the one many of you will be anxious to see, thanks to its Walter Benjamin connection, is still blocked in Israel, a victim of Netanyahu and Trump’s war. In its place is an exhibition print, which at first glance has the aura of an original work of art spoken of by Benjamin, but which loses it upon reading the explanatory text that accompanies it. Benjamin still gets a nod. We arrive before it thinking we are seeing the Angel of History in an artistic work that once belonged to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Instead, we have an example of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
