Jewish Currents

Allison Brown (managing editor): I’m writing this recommendation for Transcription as I sit on a beach in Rhode Island, lightly hypnotized by the waves rushing and breaking and throwing patterns of seafoam on the shore before withdrawing back into the expanse. A friend had given me a copy of Ben Lerner’s latest as a gift to take with me from NYC to the Ocean State. I imagine the Providence setting of its first section inspired my friend’s selection; most probably, too, the book was easy to reach for, as it seems to be ubiquitous, at least in certain quarters—hence our special all-Transcription edition of the Shabbat Reading List.

In many ways, this slender novel makes an excellent beach book. At 130 pages, it can be read in a day, and although it’s erudite, the sentences go down smoothly. Its dreamy quality, the way its characters slide between past and present as their associations unspool, pairs well with the way the sun and sea tend to loosen time. And there’s plenty in the novel’s drama to relate to—especially if you’ve recently become middle-aged, or become a father, or have ever been a son, surrogate or otherwise.

In other ways, however, Transcription feels made by and for an MFA classroom, where it can be analyzed and celebrated for its dazzling hall-of-mirrors treatment of what our narrator calls, in a word, “fiction”—a “quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion.” This driving concern with art and the nature of representation gives the book a cleverly self-reflexive quality.

In my classroom days, such formal achievement would have been enough, but as I myself have settled into middle age, I am increasingly drawn to writing that feels less composed and more yielding to its oceanic wild side. Fortunately, Transcription exceeds its formal accomplishments. It may domesticate the uncontainable ocean into the metaphor of a cup of water, but that bit of water is enough to destroy the cell phone that the novel’s narrator relies upon as a stabilizing tether and, crucially, as the recording device for his anxiously anticipated interview with his aging, ailing mentor. We may, like the narrator, be unable to admit we have arrived at the scene of contact ill-prepared. But even as Transcription pronounces contact “impossible,” it insists on wrestling with the broken mediums through which we try to reach ourselves and each other, and through which we reach for the past and it reaches out to us. The resulting record may be unstable and unreliable, but the intimacy and love it transmits make Transcription vibrate—to use a key concept from the book—on many powerful frequencies.

A. Gopalan (senior editor): Several years ago, I had the opportunity to interview a famed scholar in my field. I started the Zoom call with jitters, notebook in hand and focus sharp. But as soon as I turned on the recording software, I experienced a numbing hit of something like serenity: The technology, I realized, was preserving her answers for posterity, so I didn’t have to focus on the conversation—or at least, not as intensely. I could instead half-listen while fretting about my next question, compulsively click around on my computer, resist the pull of my phone, and try to arrange my features into a sufficiently intelligent expression. Halfway through the interview, however, a scary pop-up emerged: “Connection unstable.” The bright-red recording button started blinking in and out and the audio waves began flatlining. But my respondent was deep into an answer about the origins of capitalism, and it was beyond my grad student social skills to interrupt her. Heart in hand, I led us through another half-hour of pre-scripted discussion, and only then, with a thousand prayers, did I log into the interview folder. The worst had happened: There were no files saved, no record of the conversation.

In the months to come, I went through the mortifying ordeal of emailing the professor to let her know of my fuckup, appealing to her for a second interview, and eventually securing it. But I could not shake the feeling that our second conversation—which I recorded on three different devices, and with handwritten notes—was stilted, not as rich as the first. I took what I could get, of course, but the whole encounter jarred me. It turned out technology could not be relied upon after all. My anxieties could not all be dulled by the promise of a permanent record, a “later” when I could revisit a present I could rarely tolerate as it unfolded.

This extended prologue is meant to say: I devoured Ben Lerner’s Transcription in one sitting. The book’s “plot,” if you can call it that, is an intensified version of the experience I have recounted above. The book’s unnamed narrator is scheduled to interview his longtime mentor Thomas, a world-famous scholar of something-or-other, but right before the session, our hero drops his phone into the sink. Tech support thus squandered, he is left with no choice but to fake his way through the interview, first trying to defer the “real” conversation, then—after failing to pause Thomas’s elliptical retelling of his life—simply pretending to record on his dead phone. Unlike in my case, this narrator is not afforded a do-over: Thomas dies shortly after the interview, and the conversation is preserved only in the narrator’s recollection.

The book’s themes—the unstable nature of memory, the singular and fleeting arc of time—are familiar, but in Lerner’s masterful hands, they become something electric. Transcription reads like a mystery novel, only the reader is the detective. What really happened in the conversation between Thomas and the narrator? What was the actual substance and significance of Thomas’s life? What was the full truth of Thomas’s relationship to the narrator, and to his son, who emerges as a protagonist in the final third of the book? We can never really be sure, but throughout the book’s three acts, there are scattered clues—lines and phrases that repeat, motifs that recur, stories that mirror one another—and despite myself, I found myself gathering them in yellow and pink highlights, bookmarks, notes. I could not shake the feeling that this spare story was the result of Lerner smashing a pane of glass against the book’s spine, and I was wandering among the shards, picking them up, trying to fit them together into some sort of coherence.

But the quest was doomed. The glass is there not to reconstitute, but to reflect. Ultimately, this is the gift of Transcription: starkly drawn, intensely relatable moments of close observation. When Lerner’s narrator writes of his “withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication” at being severed from his phone; his need to hold a device so as to “not only, not fully, be where I was”; his “glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level,” I felt seen. When, later, Thomas’s son speaks of how the device “takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear”—I felt understood. What was this, if not a description of my experience of turning over to a device the task of listening to a scholar I so admired, with whom I had for months dreamed of intellectual exchange? What, in fact, are any of the moments of failed connection in Transcription if not reflections of the times when we fail to make contact with our mentors, fathers, and children, because we are moving toward them with instruments of mediation in hand, brandished like shields?

Mari Cohen (senior editor): Once upon a time, I read all my favorite books more than once, because I sped through my stacks of plot-heavy middle-grade fiction from the library faster than I could replenish them. Of course, as I grew up, my free time shrank while the quantity and complexity of books I wanted to read—and the share of my attention devoted to screens—ballooned; getting through something one time now feels like enough of a feat. But with Ben Lerner’s Transcription, the stars aligned for a double-dip. It’s a petite, propulsive book, just 144 pages, and it came out during my four-month sabbatical, the most time I’ve ever had for reading in my adult life (thank you, Jewish Currents Union!). The first time I read it, last December, I stayed up till 3 am at my parents’ house finishing my galley ebook. I raced through the last few pages marveling at how Lerner had managed to collect the book’s varied narrative and conceptual threads into a single, shimmering final image. I remember falling asleep in a haze of awe, smug in the knowledge that I was having a full-body “profound experience of art” that Lerner famously found so elusive in his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. By March, when the book’s publication date arrived and the rave reviews were rolling in, I already struggled to remember the texture of the book and what had led me to deem it such a perfect novel. So I took a few hours to read it again. I was happy to be re-immersed in Lerner’s smooth prose and sly humor, but at the end I no longer could locate the exact moment that had produced such aesthetic ecstasy the first time around. Was the effect just diminished upon repeat, the magic of first recognition impossible to recapture? Or had I overzealously willed myself into it the first time, seeing something that wasn’t exactly there?

In a way, this dilemma was a fitting accompaniment to the new Lerner novel, which itself takes up questions of memory, repetition, technology, and cultural transmission. The narrator—as usual a rough stand-in for Lerner—visits his alma mater in Providence to record an interview with Thomas, his intimidating, aging academic mentor. When his phone breaks, he’s too embarrassed to tell Thomas and ends up having a lengthy conversation with the nonagenarian that he pretends to record and must, presumably, reconstruct from memory later. As readers, of course, we are left wondering if the scene we are reading is the narrator’s experience in media res or its own fudged reconstruction, though, of course, what would it mean for us to access the “real” scene, if it what we are talking about, at the end of the day, is a piece of fiction? (Lerner is not subtle in guiding us here: “I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on . .eventually, I’d call this ‘fiction.’”) Later, this “Ben” confronts the anger of Thomas’s family and colleagues when they discover that he has indeed presented a scene out of memory as a veritable interview transcript. By the end of the novel, without giving away too much, we’ve witnessed the inverse of the scene, in which another character admits to having once actually recorded a conversation with Thomas without telling him. The secretly unrecorded and secretly recorded conversations become most legible when considered as a porous pair, with language and memories weaving between them.

Transcription joins a long list of novelistic attempts to make visible the small penciled decisions that create what we call fiction, and thereby induce a sort of destabilizing vertigo as to the nature of reality. (See Atonement by Ian McEwan, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura, and many more.) By foregrounding the trappings of the digital age, Lerner heightens this sense of instability, since the virtual world is at once only virtual and yet inescapably bound up in the material world. As one character says of the nurse whose cell phone he called to say goodbye to his gravely ill father, “It’s silly, but I felt connected to her because I’d said those things on her personal phone . . . So strange to think I’d said what I’d said on a device that she’d take home, that she would touch with her hands and face, that she would charge behind her bed.”

As always, Lerner manages to distinguish his take on this trope through his singular command at the line level. Before he was a novelist, he was a poet, and in his work I’ve always been drawn most to his attunement to the rhythm of a sentence. Here, the patterns often echo Lerner’s most recent poetry collection, The Lights, in which he frequently plays with iteration and repetition (from the prose poem “The Voice”:“My father was a / poet: He made a world for me, a toy folk tradition Or my / father was a fraud: How else had he deceived me? Or my / father was a comedian: He knew I’d figure it out in the end / and find it funny”) and often lines up disparate subjects next to one another, using parallel forms to describe contrasting content, and then eventually blends these separate ingredients together. Transcription takes this intra-poem trick and expands it to the scale of the novel. It presents consciousness as a collage of push notifications on an iPhone: the absurd, mundane, weighty, and trivial; the father and the mentor; the present and the past; all atop one another, inside one another, inside every moment.

Jun

5

2026

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.

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): I just finished out the school year at Pratt, where I teach literature classes in the architecture school. This semester, the best novel we read was Passing by Nella Larsen. The Harlem Renaissance classic from 1929 follows the reunion of two light-skinned Black women who grew up together and have since chosen drastically different life paths. Irene, the protagonist, is an active member of the Black community in Harlem, though she occasionally passes as white to access segregated spaces of comfort. Clare spends her daily life passing, and is even married to a racist man who believes her to be white. The more Clare insists on spending time with Irene, the more doomed she is to be caught.

I hadn’t read the book since my own high-school days, and it’s easy to see why it has fueled nearly a century of conversations. Larsen doesn’t moralize either woman, but portrays complex decisions around race and survival. Judith Butler is one of many who has read Irene’s obsession with Clare as repressed queer desire. And the tragic ending—no spoilers—is dramatic and ambiguous enough that a student emailed me after 10 pm to weigh in. If you don’t have a classroom of undergrads to think with, I still recommend you get someone to read it with you—at a tight 200 pages, it’s not a big ask. The 2021 film adaptation, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, offers another way to engage, though the movie certainly has a more unequivocal interpretation of the final scene—I think they’ve tipped the scales too far, but feel free to email me after 10 pm if you have a strong feeling about who’s to blame.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It’s film festival time in New York, and Alicia Scherson’s disquieting film of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich will be premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival and doubtless soon elsewhere around the country. Set in a seaside town in Chile, the film follows American board-game journalist Udo Berger as he returns, accompanied by his girlfriend, to a hotel he regularly stayed at during his childhood. He is seeking signs of his own past, most specifically in the person of the hotel owner, Mrs. Else—the object of a childhood crush from which he’s still not recovered. Officially, though, he is there to play and review a strategy board game called The Third Reich. While replaying, and seeking to rewrite, history through the game, Udo also tries to replay and fulfill his own past dreams. Past and present blend, and obsessions take him over as he lives through the final days of the Pinochet dictatorship, the gloom and menace of which still hangs in the air. Not even the iron logic of the rules of the game can set things in order. The Third Reich was not Bolaño’s best novel, but Scherson creates a disturbingly moody piece out of it.

May

29

2026

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!”

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): In an era of mealy-mouthed, PR-firm-produced public statements calibrated to offend as few people as possible, there’s something wonderful––almost magical––about hearing “Fuck Keir Starmer / Netanyahu’s bitch and genocide armer / Better off as compost for farmers” in a major album release. Thus runs “Liars Tale,” the lead single off Irish rap trio Kneecap’s high-octane sophomore album, Fenian.

Kneecap has never been shy about controversy, most notably in the wake of performer Mo Chara’s terrorism charge last year for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag thrown onto the stage during a performance. “Carnival” consists of the most direct reply on the album––set in a courtroom, its verses are withering speeches from the defense––but the whole album is shot through with the righteous anger of the wrongly accused. “Calling me sceimhleitheoir [“terrorist” in Gaelic], / Never heard that said before,” Mo Chara raps in “Smugglers and Scholars.”

What emerges throughout is an effortless connection not just between the Irish and Palestinian liberation movements, but between these movements and gangster rap as a form. As with the classics of N.W.A.-era rap, there’s an self-conscious effort to be outrageous (“Soon as you’re outraged, we’ve won,” Mo Chara tells us on “Big Bad Mo”)––yet the ultimate aim here is not to be subversive for its own sake, but to make the experience and rage of the oppressed as obtrusive and unignorable as they should be.

To overlook Fenian’s political content would be to misunderstand it as a project, but to reduce it to agitprop would be to miss an aesthetic achievement. Producer Dan Carey has done an exceptional job in creating the thrumming trap beats that characterize the album (most prominent on “Palestine”), and is at his best when he brings in his rock expertise for the infectious dancey guitar riffs of “An Ra” and the scintillating chord hits of “Cocaine Hill.” Perhaps most unique is the album’s atmospheric opening of “Éire go Deo,” which manages to integrate an ethereal treble pulse and soaring vocal sample with industrial-sounding breakbeats, all washing over speeches about Irish independence.

None of this is even to mention the group’s frequent blend of English and Gaelic––lines in one language will often veer off into turns of phrases in the other. Combined with the spat-out delivery of Mo Chara and co-performer Móglaí Bap, the effect alternates between a sensory assault and a delightful flow as rhymes switch between languages.

Fenian stands out to me as one of this decade’s best rap albums so far. Even if that doesn’t sell you on it, you should at least give it a listen to learn your cúpla focal.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The series DTF St. Louis, now streaming on HBO and Hulu, came and went, getting some merited attention in The New Yorker and The New York Times. It wasn’t one of those series that was given a roundtable discussion the morning after each episode in the aforementioned Times, as were Succession or Game of Thrones. But it was a far more insightful, perspicacious, and—dare I say—relatable show than so many others. DTF St. Louis disguised itself as a murder mystery and a portrait of suburban emptiness and depravity. It had generous doses of sexual shenanigans, affairs, voyeurism, and experimental homosexuality. These trappings cleverly served as misdirection, obscuring its true subject—loneliness.

Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), a big bear of a man who is a sign language interpreter, becomes friends with a TV weatherman, Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman). In the first episode, Floyd is found dead in the locker room of the local ballfield, next to a magazine open to a picture of a naked man with his face scratched out. The two police officers assigned to the apparent murder are a grizzled white former Chicago cop and a young Black woman from the local special crimes unit, each bringing very different styles and assumptions. At several points, the solution seems to be clear, but as the story unfolds—told in flashbacks out of chronological order—the obvious solutions are cast aside. Clark, unhappy in his marriage, is having an affair with Floyd’s beautiful but dissatisfied wife, played icily by a stunning Linda Cardellini. That’s a clear trail—too clear. The two friends, both experiencing romantic solitude, are on the hookup app “DTF [Down to Fuck] St. Louis.” This provides suspects and leads, all red herrings. There’s an insurance policy taken out for Floyd, his death thus being a source of profit for his wife, but this is another red herring. Floyd’s wife acts suspiciously, for a reason we hope will be explained, but which never is; under interrogation, she constantly asks the police investigators to speak louder. Yet another red herring.

Instead, DTF St Louis takes us to what is at the heart of so many lives: crushing loneliness, a loneliness for which marriage and supposed friendships are no cure. Floyd and Clark are, for a moment, suspected of having been lovers, and even make a move in that direction. In fact, what they have found in each other is what everyone seeks: someone to whom they can say anything and everything, however intimate and ugly. They join the app together and it is only with each other they can discuss it. Their fears—romantic, sexual, and professional—are their subjects. More than in their sexual hunt, more than in the acting out of fantasies that Clark and Floyd’s wife indulge in, and which Clark allows the cuckolded husband to watch while hidden in a closet, it is their time together, their sharing with each other of the self they don’t dare show the world, that makes their relationship essential to them both.

In DTF St. Louis we see a truth seldom discussed in film, TV, or literature: the love two men can feel for each other that is a result of and the producer of openness and that has nothing to do with homoeroticism. It is, instead, a feeling as profound as any two people can feel for one another. It’s the love described by Montaigne in his essay “On Friendship”—“because it was he, because it was me.” As DTF St. Louis shows us, it can be every bit as pure, selfless, and tragic as any romantic love.

May

22

2026

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.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Miserabilisme doesn’t get much more miserable than in Brazilian director Marianna Brennand’s Manas. Set among the wretchedly poor population that lives along the Amazon River, the film is not a call to action to save the forests from the predations of white Brazilians. Executive produced by, among others, Oscar winner Walter Salles and the Belgian Dardenne brothers, it eschews the warmth and humanism of the films of Salles. In all regards it bears the earmarks of the Dardennes, whose films almost invariably feature the lowest strata of society struggling to survive financially and morally. The social problem Manas deals with is incest, which seems to be rampant in this part of the world. The filmmaker João Moreira Salles—co-founder, with his brother Walter, of the production company Videofilmes—told me that “It’s very hard to do what Marianna achieved: a film about sexual abuse in which you don’t see anything but know exactly what’s happening. She was able to turn something ethically unfilmable into the core of her film. It’s a woman’s movie, a woman’s sensibility, a woman’s gaze into something we men are still unable to deal with visually.”

Thirteen-year-old Tielle is the heart and soul of the film. She lives with her parents, two brothers, and a sister. She misses her older sister Claudia, who has left their miserable riverside hut and the grinding poverty for some city somewhere. The family, despite its difficult situation, seems to be a happy one. Tielle has an artistic bent, attends school, and goes to her evangelical church where she performs in a youth dance company. The hammock on which she sleeps is broken, so she must share a bed with her father, replacing her pregnant mother on the mattress. The suspicions raised by this are confirmed on a hunting trip she takes with her father.

Manas from that point on is a pointed exposé of incest, a problem so widespread that it is spoken about directly and indirectly everywhere in the village, even in church. It’s simply something that is, something the victims are told to accept. The problem is eternal and omnipresent, passing from mother to daughter, from sister to sister. Beyond that, the desperate poverty makes the possibility of sex for pay with passing bargemen a constant opportunity, even for girls like Tielle who are little more than children.

The horrors of this life are made all the more vivid by Brennand’s choice to shoot the film entirely with a handheld camera, which lends it all a documentary feel; in fact, the film was originally planned to be a documentary. So awful is the world in which Tielle and her peers move that an authority figure like the police social worker is presented as a caring, wise woman who truly wants to help Tielle escape her vanished sister’s fate. But in fact there is no hope, no escape save one, and Tielle takes it when she suspects that her father has designs on her little sister.

Manas is a chilling portrait of an isolated society that offers no opportunities besides ever deeper degradation. The cost of Tielle’s ultimate escape is unimaginable.

A. Gopalan (senior editor): The Devil Wears Prada has been my guilty pleasure since college. In low moments, when exhausted from the drudgery of work, or just on bad hair days, I could turn the movie on and be assured of a couple of hours of garden-variety escapism—makeovers! parties! Paris!—that nevertheless came with a sharp commentary on how work won’t love you back. Did I have to sit through triggering comments on weight and body size, the ceaseless objectification of women, and badly aging jokes? Yes, yes I did. But these off-color bits seemed part of the movie’s skewering of the fashion industry, so I was okay to put up with them, content in the knowledge that even if the movie wasn’t great, it was still great fun.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, out this month after a 20-year interval, takes an opposite approach. It is certainly fan service (it offers an almost frame-by-frame, outfit-by-outfit homage to the original), but it also takes itself seriously. No longer are the filmmakers content to expose the tyranny of one fashion industry “devil” and her minions; they are going after the whole structure—sweatshop-contracting firms, clicks-obsessed conglomerate owners, McKinsey consultants, AI-pilled billionaires, and various other magazine-destroyers. I was happy, of course, to watch the red sun rising over the media industry, and watching Anne Hathaway cry her Oscar-winning tears about private equity stripping everything for parts was more cathartic than I would have expected.

But still, there is something stilted about this sequel. Maybe it is the much looser writing and the strangely jarring cuts—a few more rounds of editing would have helped—or maybe it’s just that the movie is trying so hard to Say Something Big. The late-capitalist disasters facing Andy Sachs (Hathaway) and her colleagues at Runway are realistic, and their efforts to try and save their jobs equally so, but their emotional journeys are not. Some of this is because the characters’ rough edges have all been rounded out: Andy is no longer desperately needy, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) isn’t an anorexic mean girl, and worst of all, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) isn’t diabolical. You’re a beast who is chained, one odious Harvard MBA tells Miranda at one point. You need to be unleashed. I was sad to agree with him. I wanted a Miranda who ranted and raved as she lost her empire. I wanted her lashing out at everyone around her, instead of being policed out of her rude zingers by a head-shaking PA, or having to—gasp—quietly put her own coat away because HR said so. I wanted her, in short, to feel as unhinged and almost dangerous as she did the first time around, so that by the time the movie lets us get closer to that enigmatic, damaged character, it feels meaningful—armor cracking open, only to reveal more complex rot within.

Perhaps it is wrong to expect a sequel to employ the same formula that its predecessor used to such great effect. Perhaps it’s good that mainstream movies are getting better, the characters less offensive, the themes more serious. But I had more fun when our screen devils were more-or-less irredeemable, the bad workplaces unendurable, and the conclusions something other than what Miranda and Andy agree on at the end: God, I love working, don’t you?

May

15

2026

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.

Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): If you’re in New York—and have a couple hundred bucks to spare—you still have a chance to catch Wally Shawn performing his astonishing 1990 play, The Fever. There are two more performances, the last on May 24th at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan.

If you know Shawn as a Jewish Voice for Peace comrade or fellow canvasser for Zohran Mamdani, the radical challenge of this play will not surprise you. (If you know him only as the nerds and ne’er-do-wells he plays in works like The Princess Bride or Young Sheldon, you’ll simply recognize his elfin charm and the reedy, rising timbre of his voice.)

Sitting in a chair, wearing street clothes, Shawn’s character—an unnamed traveler to an unnamed “poor country where my language is not spoken” and where a revolution is underway—delivers a mesmerizing two-hour monologue in which he recounts how he has undergone a crisis of class consciousness. The text winds among past recollections of the speaker’s cushy life at home and earlier trips to poor countries, his delirious hallucinations, and his present circumstances: sitting on the bathroom floor of his hotel room puking his guts out. His nausea is Sartrean—as existential as it is visceral—but his sickening realization isn’t that life itself lacks predetermined purpose, but that one’s place in the social order one is born into is as random as it is unshakeable.

The piece lives entirely in its incredibly vivid language. We are there with the narrator on the cold tile floor watching a water bug slither into a crack; we recoil with the kick “a tall revolutionary guard in an undershirt” delivers to his head in a scene he imagines; we feel the lustrous chill of a cold urban night on which “it seems that at a certain moment every car and face and pane of glass is suddenly covered in a delicious wetness, like the wetness you see on a frozen cherry”—a beauty, he says, “that is the sort of thing that the communists will never understand, just as human decency is the sort of thing that I will never understand.”

What he has come to understand is the inextricable link between the privileged and the poor: “if food is produced for the hungry children, then certain operas will not be performed; if certain performances are in fact given, then the food won’t be produced, and the children will die.” But it’s not this recognition that is the crux of the play; Shawn isn’t rubbing anyone’s face in the extractive and exploitative practices that produce their comfort. Rather, we see how, despite this knowledge, the speaker justifies his wealth and advantages. The play invites us into that seemingly irreconcilable struggle—to feel our own sweats and chills as we examine our culpability and contemplate how to break open a seemingly closed system.

Some 35 years ago, Shawn originally performed The Fever in private homes for well-to-do audiences before expanding its reach by presenting it in theaters. His idea was to speak directly, without artifice, to people of his own comfy class. The airline-like dynamic pricing that has pushed ticket costs to $229 as demand rises for these last performances, may deliver that audience, but the piece addresses anyone who hears echoes of the character’s self-justification in the brazen boasting of our country’s current leadership, for whom the immiseration of others for personal gain is not a problem, but a triumph.

Shawn has been playing The Fever in the same space where his exquisite new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days—an exploration of human decency from a more personal angle, also highly recommended—has been running. It closes after a matinee performance, also on May 24th, and as of this writing, there are still some $65 seats. (More on this play coming to Jewish Currents soon.) To round out this spring’s marvelous Wally Shawn moment, you can catch him in some of his more serious film roles in a series at the Metrograph. Don’t miss his brilliant performances in two modern masterpieces—Vanya on 42nd Street and A Master Builder.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some book recommendations…

Top of the list is Arnoud Visser’s expansive history of the hatred of intellectuals, On Pedantry. As he writes, “A longue durée perspective has revealed that intellect and irritation have never been far apart.” Visser provides this perspective, taking us through ancient Greece, Rome, the Patristic Period of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Enlightenment Europe, and that most benighted of lands, America. Visser looks at more than the pedantry of grammar sticklers, who are easy targets. He looks at the image and presentation of philosophers and intellectuals throughout the ages, and how they’ve been mocked for their appearance (disheveled, bearded, homely), for having poor manners, for being disruptive, for being all head and no heart, and just for being generally unpleasant. Intellectuals have been attacked by other intellectuals for their pedantry, but that has been a self-contained internecine fight of little wide consequence. More alarming are the attacks from without, which have fed the most reactionary movements, both religious and secular, over the centuries. Visser writes of the ways Socrates has been viewed, but also of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. There is nothing pedantic about On Pedantry. It’s a demonstration that ideas can be exciting, as can intellectual history.

Leslier Fiedler’s classic volume of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, originally published in 1960 and newly reissued by NYRB Classics (of course), is an indictment of the classic American novel’s failure to properly come to grips with adult subjects, i.e., with relationships between men and women. Roaming widely, examining the course of the novel as a form from 18th century England to mid-20th century America, Fiedler conclusively demonstrates that all of American literature derives from works like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, which “presides over the birth of the American imagination.” Since Irving’s creation of the upstate Dutchman, the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been “a man on the run into the forest and out to the sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization’ which is to say, the confrontation of man and woman.” For Fiedler, the ultimate and exemplary love story of classical American fiction is that of Huck and Jim. A stunning book that is still pertinent and that illuminates extra-literary corners of American life and thought.

Daniel Okrent’s biography Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, a new addition to the great Yale Jewish Lives series, presents us with yet another genius whose work is among the most remarkable in the field of American popular music and about whom no reader can come away saying, “It would have been great to know him.” Sondheim was moody, touchy, rancorous, mean-spirited, slovenly, and often malodorous. Those of us who had the good fortune not to know him up close can revel in Okrent’s insightful, critical, yet fair evaluation of Sondheim’s shows and their impact on theater and musical life in general. This is a Jewish life, yet Okrent points out that only three Jewish characters appear in Sondheim-authored shows. But despite having no real contact with Jewish life, Sondheim’s personal language was filled with yiddishisms. Not having known him, never having confronted his unexpected and unjustifiable rages, we can all sit back and enjoy the music and lyrics of the author of Sunday in the Park With George, Pacific Overtures, Company, and Into the Woods, and in particular of the songs “Someone in a Tree,” “A Derby Hat” (both from Pacific Overtures, the former Sondheim’s personal favorite among the songs he wrote), and “Being Alive” as sung by Larry Kert. Okrent gives readers all the essential information they need to appreciate his subject’s accomplishments.