Jewish Currents

Nathan Goldman (deputy editor): There’s a book I’ve been shoving into friends’ hands for months: a novel that sets the bar for what American Jewish anti-Zionist fiction can do. And shockingly, it’s a comedy. Jordy Rosenberg’s uproarious and rigorously imaginative new novel, Night Night Fawn, unfolds largely as one long diatribe, delivered from Barbara, a ranting and raving Jewish mother whose disappointment is the fundamental quality of her being. What’s got her so pissed off? Her son, of course, who has spectacularly failed to meet her expectations, and who now, to her chagrin, has come to care for her after decades of estrangement, as she slowly dies at home, high on OxyContin. But if the Jewish son—a literary figure at least as old as Kafka’s lengthy 1919 letter to his domineering dad—is understood as errant, inadequate, a squanderer of affection and investment, Barbara’s disdain for her progeny goes further: She’s livid not just that he won’t marry a suitable partner or supply her with grandchildren or forswear Marxism, but that he will not embrace the gender he was assigned at birth. Indeed, Barbara has been struggling against her son’s identity since he was only three years old, when he wished to don a pair of men’s leather shoes; the struggle intensified when as an adolescent he showed a troubling interest in Flashdance (“a movie about women in Pittsburgh who took off their clothes”) and in his father’s corduroy blazer. “I grasped then very clearly the enterprise on which she [sic] was set,” Barbara informs us, “one against which I realized I would have to stake my own life.”

Subtly yet surely, Night Night Fawn draws us into the relationship between Barba’s transphobia and her other destructive beliefs—particularly Zionism, which she discovers in the glow of a 1970s revival of the film Exodus. Rosenberg shows us how each ideology manifests as a fundamental desire for something that exceeds but still centers on the self, an irresistible sort of transcendent immanence: If Zionism offers an identity-affirming continuity with the far-flung past, what her son’s transness—and ultimately, embrace of non-procreative queer life—disrupts is the biological futurity to which Barbara feels entitled. The novel explicitly connects the two, if not in these terms. When an opportunity presents itself for Barbara and her son to pop over for volunteer work supporting the Israeli army during the First Intifada, Barbara seizes on it. She has found the conversion therapy settler colony of her dreams, a world away yet right before her eyes the whole time: “In Israel—land of rigor, gender, and brutality—they’d take care of the gayness, the mannishness, the whole bit.” Zionism and what Barbara at one point calls a “mania for gender itself” thus become entangled expressions of the Jewish American family, here represented as a technology for the reproduction of fascism. Rosenberg ingeniously contorts and expands the archetypal features of the Jewish mother—overbearing concern and acerbic disappointment—until they become world-historical.

At the same time, Night Night Fawn brilliantly reimagines the complementary archetype of the Jewish son toward a figure of freedom. In her drug-addled state, Barbara has come to perceive her son as a literal monster—specifically, she believes he is in the process of slowly transforming into a giant bird. It’s a thrillingly unsubtle metaphor: “Maybe it had retracted like a flaccid penis back into your regular nose,” Barbara at one point speculates about her son’s apparent beak. Yet even as this conceit functions to portray his mother’s transphobic perception, Rosenberg lets us in on its redemptive valence: In a kind of skeleton key section told through the son’s teenage diary entries, we’re given Marx’s reading of the 16th-century German term “vogelfrei,” a category that describes “the urban and the rural poor” who capitalism frees from feudalism: “Bird-free, free as birds, but also free of any means of support in this life.” The trans bird, then, is at once terrifyingly ill-equipped to survive in a world that rejects him and electrifyingly free of that world’s constraints.

But does the bird really fly the coop? Even the eruptions of the son’s voice are ultimately contained within the mother’s, just as the image of freedom is one that emerges from the mother’s consciousness. And while the son—the real son, the author—has control, depicting his mother in the terms he pleases (and surely not the terms that she would choose), he has described his relation to the voice as a “melancholic possession,” suggesting a relationship less elected than demonically endured. (Even for someone who didn’t know her, it’s not hard to imagine the voice lingering in the ear: In Rosenberg’s representation, it crackles with old-world yenta Yiddishisms and at every moment carries an unmistakably Jewish syntax that, at least for this reader, is at times deeply and disturbingly comforting.) While Night Night Fawn adamantly and wisely refuses Barbara forgiveness, let alone redemption, it does seem that there’s a form of care for her both in the text of the novel and in the fact of it. Though what that care adds up to is a question the novel leaves unanswered, the book remains a gift to any of us reckoning with some form of inheritance we cannot condone yet cannot merely wish away.

Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): The late performance theorist Alice Rayner described the theater as “a ghostly place in which the living and the dead come together in a productive encounter.” I thought of her ideas—no, I somehow viscerally felt them—as I watched César Alvarez’s obstreperous and stirring musical, The Potluck.

The show takes its title from an annual memorial gathering of the comrades of five far-left labor organizers who were gunned down in broad daylight by the KKK and American Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979, with the collusion of local police. Every year since, those activists, their children, and eventually their grandchildren have met on a North Carolina beach for a potluck. It’s a fitting meal for erstwhile members of the short-lived Communist Workers Party— composed from each according to their means, consumed by each according to their need.

Alvarez has been part of these potlucks since infancy: their parents were members of the CWP, and while they didn’t attend the demonstration where their comrades were murdered, they were close friends with those who did. Alvarez, born the year after the massacre, was named after two of them, Cesar Cauce and Jim Waller (the others were Mike Nathan, Bill Sampson, and Sandi Smith). “The murders, and the fact that the perpetrators were never punished, are used as recruiting tools for white supremacist violence to this day,” we’re told at one point in the play.

“Potluck” also describes the show’s form: a marvelous mishmash of musical and theatrical styles that careen and collide through its two-and-a-half hours as it wrestles with questions of inherited trauma, the efficacy of activism, the burden of legacy, and the seeming impossibility of representing grave communal and personal loss as an entertainment. Indeed, almost the entire first act presents Alvarez’s avatar, the character César (Anthony Alfaro), a nonbinary parent of three (like Alvarez themself), struggling to create a musical about the Greensboro Massacre and earn their $15,000 commission. They open the show with a comic monologue, melting down over the impossible assignment.

When César realizes that a lot of musicals feature Nazis (Cabaret, The Sound of Music, The Producers), the opening number busts forth, functioning as both a parody and as a genuine action-initiating event accompanied by an upstage band and some singers cavorting behind cardboard cutouts of characters from those Nazi-laden shows. “Let’s make a drama,” they croak, with forced cheer. César’s pixielike intern, Moss (Jasmine Rafael) suggests they develop a documentary play. This becomes an opportunity for them to tell the audience the history of the five, using narration, projected photos, and a clip from a documentary Alvarez’s mother made decades ago with a colleague, which includes footage of the shootings. Audience members who don’t want to watch the violence are invited to head to the lobby for a guided ritual during its seven minutes.

But César still can’t get their writing to go. We stay with their frustration for a long time. There are phone calls with their supportive but anxious parents, cozy in their functioning kitchen stage right (in the second act, they make paella—the dish César’s dad brings to the potluck each year). There are yoga sessions with an online instructor. There are scenes (and later an indie-rock song) recounting their queerness and gender nonconformity since adolescence (the CWP decried homosexuality as a bourgeois distraction, but César assures, their parents “feel bad about” that now). Despite some great dime-store tinsel aesthetics—the campy yoga teacher carries a cardboard frame around their face to indicate a computer screen, for instance—the I-don’t-know-how-to-write-this trope becomes grating as the show trundles on.

But then, amazingly, it all pays off.

Moss and César decide to conjure the five murdered activists through a séance. They build an altar with objects relevant to each—an opportunity for some biographical exposition and then a strange, incantatory song for César (“There is a trap door on the floor of my need for things, and it opens onto oneness. . .”). Magic ensues: Rising nonchalantly from their posts in the band upstage, the five emerge from the afterlife.

After the ramshackle fabulosity of the first hour, director Sarah Benson now delivers matter-of-fact earnestness, and that contrast powers massive waves of emotion. While César wears raincoat-yellow billowing pants (and later, a lacy blouse and full skirt), the five ghosts are dressed in unfancy late-’70s street clothes (costumes by the divine Qween Jean)—bellbottoms, an “end apartheid” T-shirt, a denim vest. Though César is The Potluck’s protagonist, and it’s their personal development that describes its arc, the ghosts are the show’s heart. They close the first act arrayed along the lip of the stage, singing “The Ballad of the Five.” Set to the tune of the American folk song, “The Buffalo Skinners,” it’s a rousing account of how they stood up to the Klan “for your freedom and for mine,” that last phrase repeated again and again, the audience joining in (many of us crying).

The second act is driven more by songs—not that they advance the action in any conventional sense. César’s numbers become anthemic, with nonlinear, surreal waves of lyrics (“I need a sword made of rainbow light to cut the melon”). The parents, however, are given plaintive ballads that would be at home on Broadway. César’s Mom, contemplating her radical past, sings about how “It’s hard to mess with the myth you’re held up with.” In an absolute showstopper, Dad addresses his long-deceased best friend, Cesar Cauce, filling him in on all he’s missed in the last half-century: “You’ll never believe it, they ended apartheid in South Africa and elected Mandela president.” There’s AIDS, 9/11, climate change. It’s a gorgeous remembrance of a beloved friend, a celebration of a rare victory, and a rueful reflection on the quashing of almost everything the old comrades fought for. The show’s dialogue sometimes flattens when characters announce meaning: Maybe Cesar Cauce had a message for them, Moss tells César: “You can’t get it all right. But you still have to face it.” But the unfussy, compelling presence of the five makes up for any clunkers.

After half a dozen years of development, The Potluck has found a splendid full production—in a collaboration between Soho Rep and Intar—at a time when other children of ‘60s/’70s revolutionaries are reckoning with their parents’ youthful commitments. In Which Side Are You On, the novel by Ryan Lee Wong (also a child of CWP activists who has long attended the potlucks), the young Asian American protagonist wants to drop out of college to devote himself to Black Lives Matter as he is getting woke—“You sound like Adorno, if he, like, worked out his ideas on Twitter,” a friend tells him—even as he seeks to understand the lessons of his parents’ radical past. Zayd Ayers Dohrn (author of the searching memoir Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground) and Harriet Clark (author of the magisterial novel The Hill) had more immediate experiences of their parents’ allegiance to the cause. All of them, in different ways, in different genres, are seeking the meaning—the uses—of a past they had no choice but to inherit.

Alvarez has the advantage of working in the theater, a form, Raynar wrote, that “uniquely insists on the reality of ghosts.” The Potluck conjures them.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I devoured Sigrid Nunez’s magnificent new volume of short stories, It Will Come Back to You, in two sittings. I was riveted—enthralled by the simple direct prose and the author’s remarkable insights into human motivations. I don’t read much contemporary fiction anymore, and a single word explains why I love this book, these stories, these characters so much, why they stand apart from so much fiction today: “mature.” Fiction today belongs to the young. Perhaps it always did, but when I was young I saw nothing objectionable about this. I recognized myself in a certain type of contemporary writing. Most of the books I see reviewed or try to read now might as well be about people from another planet. The woes of young people today frankly leave me cold. There is little depth to anything in a world of hookups, annoying roommates, boring jobs, the struggles of surviving in the hipper (i.e. pricier) quarters of Brooklyn. It’s all thin gruel as far as I’m concerned.

A kind of generational kvetching appears briefly in It Will Come Back to You, when Nunez’s character Mo in “The Mother-Daughter Story” laments and puzzles over the omnipresence of tattoos. “It had always amazed Mo how tattoos had come to be so common. People who never expected to wear the same wardrobe or hairstyle for life—How could they think they’d want to be stuck forever with the same tattoos.” I think that too about my tatted son and daughter-in-law, and when I see my three-year-old granddaughter Sylvie proudly showing off temporary ones I despair for humanity. It’s ugly, but in the end, who cares? But this moment of literary weakness quickly fades. What Nunez’s years bring to this book is a wealth of experience, a way of seeing things, of expressing them, that is impossible for a younger person, and all the richer for that. The tangle that is family becomes more tangled as the years go by and generations pile up. Only someone on the grandparent end of a family knows, as Nunez does, the satisfaction felt when a child views the grandparent as an ally against her mother and father.

Who that does not have decades behind them could think to describe—as a character in the story that gives this collection its title does—atrial fibrillation by saying that “It feels like love”? It could be said that a young writer would have no reason to mention atrial fibrillation, but if that’s so, more’s the pity. Atrial fibrillation, as I know, can also feel like a headlong rush to death. If you survive it, if your mind is free and open, it grants you an insight into life (and death) that the young aspiring clock-watchers writing novels today lack.

The characters in these stories are almost all between their late forties and their seventies. They have lived through failed marriages, widowhood, and parenting. They’ve done the best they could, and it sometimes hasn’t been good enough. But Nunez’s characters all strive to be honest, if not with those around them, then at least with themselves. We are all haunted by the devils from our past, often located within our families. In “Mother-Daughter Story,” the mother wonders about her life: “She had been unlucky in her parents. But the luck of being born into love shouldn’t be like the luck of being born into money, should it?”

There is, however, a hitch. The honesty I praise here is often ruled by a product of memory, but for those of a certain age there is a difficulty: “As memory fails, imagination steps in.” And worse: “And aren’t we all unreliable narrators of our own lives?”

Nunez’s characters try to do the best they can with the information at hand. Sometimes they fail unknowingly. It Will Come Back to You is a deeply humane book. There is more life in its few pages than in many doorstops that clutter our shelves.

Jul

10

2026

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I’ve been meaning to read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for years—ever since I found out that one character says to another, “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” But I happened to finally tackle it the same year that Netflix announced a new adaptation, which means this spring I found myself oddly on-trend in reading a 74-year-old book.

As it turns out, the far more famous passage from East of Eden is a scene in which two characters do a close reading of the story of Cain and Abel. The conversation centers around the question of how much agency we have when it comes to “sin.” And at the heart of that question is a Hebrew word that Steinbeck spells “timshel.” He translates it as “thou mayest.”

I won’t get into the implications of this translation, since that would give too much away. But I will say that “timshel” is often cast as the most important word in the book. At a restaurant a few weeks ago, the man sitting next to me noticed my copy of East of Eden. He asked what I thought of it. Then he revealed that he had a timshel tattoo (!). When I got home and searched online, I discovered that in fact, quite a few people have a timshel tattoo (!!).

Which is a little awkward, because Steinbeck made an error in both the transliteration and the translation of the word. You can read a lengthy scholarly article on the subject here, or, if you’re me, you can ask JC associate editor Maya Rosen, who explained to me that since biblical Hebrew has no independent modal verbs, there is no specific word for “can” or “may.” Rather, “timshol” (not timshel) is the second-person masculine singular form of the verb “rule over”—as in, “thou mayest rule over it.” (Or, depending on who you ask, “can,” or “should,” or “will.”)

Which did make me wonder if all those people know what they actually have tattooed on them.

Linguistic riddles aside, East of Eden captivated me. It had been a long time since I walked home from the subway with an open book in my hands. Apparently Steinbeck received quite a bit of criticism for the novel’s heavy-handed symbolism, and I can see why; it’s a story about good and evil, and it makes no attempt to hide its thesis. But to reduce East of Eden to an allegory would be to miss its real gift. The most important part of this novel is not its most famous word, or the moral conclusion at the end of its 600 pages, but rather the epic, infinitely contradictory, infinitely human world that unfolds along the way.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When Eric Bentley’s 1972 documentary play Are You Now or Have You Ever Been began performances last month, its too-timely alarm was impossible to miss. Assembled verbatim from proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of show business, Bentley’s courtroom drama presents 17 “witnesses” called by the committee between 1947 and 1956, with the expectation that they would confess their own alleged subversive activities—activities that involved First Amendment-protected speech—and to finger others involved alongside them. The play’s title condenses the central question of these hearings: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Its characters—drawn from more than 100 witnesses called by HUAC in its investigation of alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood—include defiant refuseniks like Lionel Stander, Arthur Miller, and Paul Robeson, and stool pigeons like Jerome Robbins and Elia Kazan. Many were blacklisted—losing reputation and livelihood—simply for being subpoenaed. Some went to prison for refusing to cooperate.

In our own moment of criminalized protest, the production brought echoes of a shameful period when America squashed dissent in the name of protecting the Constitution. Lately those resonances have become even louder and more ominous. A couple of weeks into the run, protesters at the Prairieland immigrant detention center in Texas were handed draconian, decades-long sentences as “antifa terrorists.” Soon after, a Florida law, passed in April, went into effect, enabling state leaders to designate activist groups as terrorist organizations and to expel state university students who support them. Governor Ron DeSantis wasted no time in tagging the Council on American-Islamic Relations and “antifa”—which is not actually an organization.

By the time I caught the show last night, the mildest opposition to the Trump regime—that is, from the Democratic Party—was being threatened in terms that seemed to come directly from the play. Trump, standing at Mt. Rushmore last week, declared that Communism is currently “the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” perpetrated by “illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.” It was as if he had pulled a 75-year-old Joe McCarthy speech from a file. The modest reforms proposed by democratic socialists—like universal healthcare and affordable housing—are being besmirched, like the labor and anti-racist organizing of the Hollywood lefties of yore, as efforts to overthrow America. “This is not your granddaddy’s Democrat Party,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared on Fox News. “This is a full-blown communist revolution.”

Red scare tactics always surge when progressive movements gain ground in the United States. They’re as American as Fourth of July fireworks and their toxic spew. So, as I sat in the theater at City Center, watching director Anna D. Shapiro’s crisp, perfectly paced production featuring a top-notch rotating cast (a new group of guest stars takes over on July 13th) play out on a sleek set (two wooden tables on blue patterned carpet, a cyclorama onto which headlines about the hearings are projected, along with occasional background text that clacks into view with the sound of a typewriter), I couldn’t regard Are You Now as a history play, not when the specter of anticommunism is haunting America.

The audience seemed to concur. We all groaned at those who named names—though with sympathy as we watched actor Larry Parks gradually broken down over a grueling day of questioning. And we burst into applause for those who ridicule the three-man team of investigators—for instance, when they remind Stander of the committee’s duty to “investigate reports regarding subversive activities in the United States,” and he readily agrees. “I have knowledge of subversive action!,” he offers, amiably. “I know of a group of fanatics who are trying to undermine the Constitution of the United States by depriving artists of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without due process of law! I can cite instances! I can tell names. I am one of the first victims, if you are interested. A group of ex-[German American, pro-Nazi] Bundists, America Firsters, and antisemites, people who hate everybody, Negroes, minority groups, and most likely themselves.” (In his introduction to the published script, Bentley likens Stander to a “New York Jewish comedian.”)

Even more stirringly, the play ends with Robeson. An investigator tells him: “You are here because you are promoting the Communist cause.” Robeson rejoins, “I am here because I am opposing the neo-Fascist cause. Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be sitting here.”

Nowadays, many of us could be, too.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It’s thanks to my friend Abe’s interest in Jewish left-wing schismatics that I was led to finally, 56 years after its publication, read the great—no, the greatest—epic of the American left, Harvey Swados’ Standing Fast. Abe is researching the Shachtmanites, a Trotskyist split from other Trotskyite splits, of which Swados was a member. This is a tale of anti-Stalinist Marxists standing fast in their belief that the working class is the bearer of revolutionary hopes and will ultimately bring about a real socialist revolution; that the Communist Party is a servant of Stalin and a brake on real working-class struggles; that those who have been won over to the Communists can be converted to Max Shachtman’s sectarian Trotskyism; and that no matter how difficult things might be, there’s always a silver lining. Victory is inevitable.

Perhaps only Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle so accurately, so insightfully, and so sympathetically yet critically describes life on the assembly line, the picket line, the party meeting, and the union hall for dedicated men and women as they strive to leave their personal interests and lives behind in order to devote themselves body and soul to the revolution. The meetings, the ideological discussions, the splits, the solidarity, and the backstabbing that are endemic to all left-wing movements are here.

There are many Jews in Standing Fast, but also some non-Jewish whites and Blacks. In good Trotskyist style, everyone receives a party name upon joining the novel’s New Party, a stand-in here for Shachtman’s actual Workers Party. The characters come from across the country, but Swados has a special affinity for the Jews among them, and his transcription of New York Jewish speech approaches that of the great master of it, Richard Price. Swados takes us into the activists’ homes as well as their workplaces, and we can see and almost smell these homes of people who have given up all hope or desire for success in order to ensure the better tomorrow that they are certain will come.

The epic sweep of the novel takes us from the 1930s to the 1970s, placing the characters in the midst of the highs and lows of those decades. The revolutionary wave of the Depression years doesn’t appear; the Hitler-Stalin pact doesn’t bring them the wave of disaffected Communists they expect; serving as GIs in World War II doesn’t lead to their organizing the workers in the ranks for the revolution that their ideology dictates will inevitably follow the war. The postwar years see the workers’ increasingly enamored of the benefits of American life and unwilling to risk anything for any struggle that doesn’t get them something in the immediate present, while McCarthyism brings panic and isolation.

The characters evolve or devolve, as time passes, with some of them successfully selling out to become TV stars or consultants. Like the actual people this roman à clef is based on, some become disabused ex- and anti-Marxist intellectuals. Some feel they threw their lives away. Others stand fast. Swados’ genius is that the evolution of the characters is in keeping with the personality and tastes that first made them revolutionaries. Swados was something of a seer. He foresaw that the working class would be the spearhead of the far right. The tragedy of the Depression-era left is brilliantly and movingly personalized and detailed.

Standing Fast, though set in the distant past, is a necessary book. There is no complacency in it about the legitimacy of the dreams of socialists or the failings of both moral compromise and moral purity. It’s a book that demands to be read by the readers of this magazine. It is out of print, though available in ebook format. Secondhand copies are out there, though they are often expensive (ed. note from David Klion, who is also reading up on Shachtmanites: Tell me about it). I’ve politicked with the most likely publisher to bring it back, but due to problems with Swados’ heirs, I’ve been told this won’t ever happen. It’s never a bad thing to haunt secondhand bookstores. I recommend you make finding and then reading Standing Fast your task. It will be a highlight of your reading and political life.

Jul

3

2026

David Klion (contributing editor): The United States of America turns 250 tomorrow, and no one seems very happy about it. What exactly are we celebrating here? The US political system has rarely been in worse shape. Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is no less cruel for its incompetence—while the Supreme Court just narrowly rejected his effort to overturn the birthright citizenship explicitly guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, it also granted him the power to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees of their protected status so that Stephen Miller can satisfy his libidinal urge to deport them. Trump’s cartoonishly vulgar celebrations on the National Mall have drawn minuscule crowds that serve as an apt metaphor not only for his historically unpopular presidency, but also for national self-esteem at the semisesquicentennial.

Maybe we’ve always had it coming. Among the ostensibly righteous grievances Thomas Jefferson enumerated on July 4th, 1776 were the British Crown’s “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands” and “endeavour[ing] to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” Never mind taxation without representation; America declared independence in significant part so that settler-colonists could carry out a century-long genocidal rampage across an entire continent, slaughtering and dispossessing tribes that had negotiated treaties with London. It’s right there in the text. No wonder the Israelis have no patience for liberal American Jewish moralizing; they see our history more clearly than we do, and they aim to replicate it.

I’m trying to think of this weekend less as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and more as the 50th anniversary of the bicentennial, a weird little episode in the American saga. In 1976, Americans were also having a crisis of confidence, reeling from the triple humiliations of Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation. Despite all this, the nation embraced patriotic pageantry in an ideologically amorphous spirit of renewal that found political expression in Jimmy Carter’s outsider victory a few months later and in Ronald Reagan’s cheerfully reactionary campaigns four and eight years after that. Neurosis was out and naivete was in. Fifty years later, whatever sense of underlying tragedy America was processing now repeats itself as farce.

My first recommendation to mark the 250th is the current cover story of Harper’s, penned by my friend Chris Hooks and titled “Happy Fucking Birthday: An exhausted America turns two hundred and fifty.” Hooks is an uncommonly gifted prose stylist, and he brings his full talent to bear as he tours Washington, Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, and Philadelphia in search of a past worth honoring. The closest he finds is at the gravesite of Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican congressman who ceaselessly badgered Abraham Lincoln to emancipate the enslaved. In his final speech before Congress during the early Reconstruction years, Stevens proclaimed “man still is vile,” a prescient warning given the century of reversals awaiting the Black South. Hooks writes:

To note that man is still vile, though, is to leave open the possibility that someday man might not be, which is to say that it could be a kind of patriotic sentiment. Across the street from the tomb is an elementary school in the system that he helped preserve, where a fresh-faced and racially diverse group of kids was lining up. The anger Stevens felt about his country’s unrealized promise had been good for America.

My other recommendation is a film, Robert Altman’s Nashville, released just ahead of the bicentennial in 1975 and filmed on location in the titular Tennessee capital. A messy, rambling 24-character ensemble loosely organized around a concert gala fundraiser for a fictional populist presidential candidate, it’s a rare film that attempts—and largely succeeds at—encompassing the full scope of America. Nashville is better experienced than described; blending cynical satire of American media, politics, and capitalism with earnest celebration of the Black and white roots of American music, it resists any straightforward or didactic reading. All I can say is that the film channels the ambivalence that honest contemplation of American history demands—an unsparing look at an often disappointing country that must be doing something right to last 250 years.

Arielle Angel (editor-at-large): To get in the mood for our fall trip to Japan, my husband and I have been watching movies set there. We recently watched Perfect Days—written by Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki and directed by Wenders—which follows a cleaner of Tokyo’s famous high-design public bathrooms as he goes about his routine. For much of the film, we watch Hirayama (a divinely present Kōji Yakusho) from the moment he wakes at dawn to the sound of his neighbor sweeping the street below his window to the moment he dog-ears a page in a book (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Aya Kōda’s Tree) and turns off the lights. When we graduate to the weekend and a new routine comes into view, it has the force of a plot twist.

One can’t help but ask: Why is this so riveting? In the course of the day, our hero barely speaks to anyone; he scours and scrubs with the intention of a monk and the precision of a craftsman. Between toilets, he listens to American proto-punk—the Velvet Underground or Patti Smith—on cassette. He takes pictures of light coming through trees with a ’90s-era point-and-shoot camera. The film’s insistence on analog technologies offers a non-scoldy counterpoint to our smartphone-addled lives. The result is a love letter to attention.

Attention can be difficult; it leaves room for emotions. Isn’t that what we’re escaping when we disappear into our phones? And indeed, if Hirayama feels joy and wonder in his day-to-day, he also feels loneliness and sorrow. The force of his pain, without dilution or distraction, is like a brick to the face. And yet—and Perfect Days makes this cliché feel new and profound—tomorrow is a new day.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Ross McElwee’s classic 1985 personal essay/documentary Sherman’s March is back for a brief run at Film Forum. What a sheer delight it was to return to this film, a trip through the love life of the filmmaker as he seeks to reconnect with lost loves, connect with new ones, and rectify the mistakes of his past. This was not McElwee’s original intention. As the title indicates, the premise of the film was to retrace General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War. McElwee sort of does so, meandering through the Carolinas and Georgia. The ruins he comes across are rarely those of Sherman’s troops meting out justice to the rebels, but rather of his own love life, now in a state of total ruin. Everyone around him wants him to settle down, and he’s trying. But his enjoyment of the attempts overrides any such compulsion.

McElwee is self-effacing, reflective, and totally unable to set things right. Women he knows try to fix him up with their friends, sometimes with bizarre results. In one case, a beautiful divorcee leads him to a band of far-right survivalists, a premonition of our national future. McElwee isn’t interested in commenting on them and their evident political insanity. It’s love he’s after.

You will never see as goyische a film as Sherman’s March in your entire life. A trip down the Amazon couldn’t be any stranger for a New York Yid like me than this journey through the land of the bland that is the wealthy white South.

Remake, McElwee’s latest film, opening next Friday, is brilliant, too, but in an entirely different register. It’s called Remake because it starts out as an account of a plan to make a fictional version of Sherman’s March. The idea is strange, but the producers who want to carry it out truly love McElwee’s masterpiece, so maybe it’ll work out. We’ve learned early in the film that McElwee’s son Adrian is dead, though for the moment it goes unexplained.

What follows is another account of a journey, one with moments of joy as it begins, and which then spirals down through every kind of disappointment imaginable. McElwee had filmed his son countless times for his own enjoyment and included him in as he grew up in earlier films, particularly Time Indefinite (1993) and Photographic Memory (2011). We journey through the life of Adrian, a cuteish kid doing cuteish things. We hear about McElwee’s wife, who’s tired of appearing in his films, but at first it seems that the search for love that was the motor of Sherman’s March has been a success. The former bachelor has a wife and two kids and a nice house in Boston.

But all is not well, and Remake ends up as an account of all that can go wrong. The marriage disintegrates, McElwee’s health becomes an issue, and, worst of all, Adrian, his beloved first-born goes off the deep end, and the cheery documentary turns into a horror film about drug abuse and mental illness. Throughout the film, McElwee remains for the most part the stoic WASP, confronting issues as best he can, though there really is no best way to handle this. Remake is a dark film whose director seeks a way to find some light, some joy. His loss is immense, and so is his anger, which has many targets, himself among them. The two earlier films in which Adrian had featured foreshadow the horrors of this film. In them we watched the happy little boy turn into a surly adolescent and young man. Watching them after seeing Remake was a devastating experience for me, not only as a film critic, but as a father.

The pairing of these two films, I realized when I finished watching them, is as despairing as can be imagined. By film’s end McElwee has a new wife, and they seem happy. But the unspoken lesson of Remake is we can’t know if we’re really happy, or whether we really know our kids, or, especially, whether we really know ourselves…

Jun

26

2026

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): As an avid fan of TV and philosophy and poetry about extraterrestrial encounters, I was expecting to enjoy Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day—but I did not expect to adore it. In his 35th feature, which centers on a crew of deep state defectors aiming to release classified evidence of alien life, Spielberg is as unabashedly sentimental as he’s ever been. And while I’d rank Jurassic Park among my favorite films and have never reexamined my childhood fondness for E.T., these days I tend to prefer the deadpan and doomsaying to the wide-eyed and wondrous. But even as critiques buzzed in the back of my head—isn’t the movie’s thesis statement, that empathy can bring us back from the precipice of World War III, a liberal delusion?—from the delightfully dizzying opening shot on, I mostly gave myself over to its premise. Several times I even found myself weeping.

But why? Surely part of it is my own tenderness; I’ve been having a rough few weeks and caught a midday showing straight from therapy. Part of it is the mere spectacle, the gorgeous sensorium overwhelm of cinema. But there’s more to it than that. Spielberg is among the canniest pop art craftsmen we have, and here he has composed a perfect machine for pumping the blood and tugging the heartstrings. And the performances are pristine—especially Colman Domingo as a patient oracle and Emily Blunt as a meteorologist who finds herself carried toward a revelation she is only beginning to understand. (At one point, after a thrilling car chase, she collapses into a distressingly realistic panic attack; as Marie Bardi-Salinas points out, it’s a shockingly human response to a blockbuster set piece.)

As I left the theater, the movie I found myself weighing it against was not one of the innumerable other alien flicks (including several of Spielberg’s own), but a work I love by a younger Jewish auteur: Ari Aster’s depraved 2025 masterpiece Eddington. Like that pitch-black comedy, Spielberg’s film lives in the wake of the rupture of the 2020 pandemic, and the missed opportunity to unite in the face of the global catastrophe. Indeed, both films understand that year as a fundamental fracturing. “Would an actual disclosure day reunite what’s divided,” Spielberg has reflected, “or begin to repair what’s broken?”

Aster is less interested in the possibility of putting the pieces back together than running his hands over the shattered bits to produce a bloody inkblot. Yet there’s also a key formal parallel. Part of the genius of Eddington is its approach to screens—the way Aster, rather than try to movie-magic away what it’s like to stare at our phones all day, just represents it in all its ugliness. In Eddington, even when people are talking to each other in real life, it’s often through screens: planes of glass where people see only their own reflection. Spielberg employs the same trick to brilliant effect. In a way, Eddington and Disclosure Day are the same film, with two different answers to the question of the possibility of repair—one naively sanguine, the other crushingly cynical. I’m grateful to have both.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Boots Riley makes agitprop that actually agitates. His new film, I Love Boosters, looks and sounds like a washing machine filled with Brecht scripts and magic markers, then set to spin cycle. When I stood up at the movie’s end, I had no idea what to think, but I could not mistake the bounce in my legs. Two weeks later, I still find myself absentmindedly chanting the breathy, staccato monosyllables of its theme-song, “Hi Ho.”

The boosters of the title are a gang of clothing thieves in the East Bay, who steal and sell at discount the wildly overpriced wares of a San Francisco billionaire’s chain. Riley’s previous film, Sorry to Bother You, was the finest of several movies from the 2010s chronicling the Bay Area’s surreally rapid gentrification. If much of I Love Boosters feels comparatively placeless, that is sadly accurate to the no-there-there that tech has wrought. Thus the stores the protagonists rip off are named, generically, “Metro Designers.” When the billionaire villain rants, on Instagram, of the “urban bitches” robbing her, the racial euphemism captures how Oakland itself is being evacuated of both Blackness and cultural specificity. “Metro designers” and “urban bitches”: this is a city abstracted into class contradiction.

The abstraction also results from Riley reaching beyond the local, exposing the boosters to potential comrades in the Chinese sweatshop where Metro Designers’ clothes are manufactured. Conveniently, one of them has stolen top secret technology from the state and the bosses: a “situational accelerator” that allows teleportation, the hastening of ongoing historical processes, or the decomposition of objects into the social contradictions that produced them. In other words, the device, which resembles a life preserver, does the work of Marxist theory—and it is objectively thrilling to hear the words “dialectical materialism” enunciated onscreen by a union organizer. The ring also represents Riley’s art itself, which mixes analytic critique and gross, telling exaggeration: a corporate flunky, racing to bring his superior coffee, finds himself bearing his boss on his back in a covered canopy; retail employees must set up racing blocks to fit lunch into their truncated breaks; the billionaire’s San Francisco apartment floor is on a slant, on which she walks comfortably, while workers around her futilely climb and slide. Ironically, what the “situational accelerator” does—reveal process, change, and struggle lurking beneath apparently discrete commodities and persons—is contradicted by what it is: a static, magical object drawn not from radical theory but from Lord of the Rings.

The film does not seem fully in command of that irony, and its pivot from biting satire to revolution is not altogether convincing. Over time, the hilarious jokes thin out, replaced by more and more pointing and shooting of the One Ring. (As my wife pointed out, it’s not good when the labor organizer asserts that new workers will join her planned strike based not on one-on-ones, but on general principles; the logic of the film is that capitalist immiseration plus Marxist theory equals general strike, and never mind the messy work of organizing.) But then I remember all the smug critics who complained about the ending of Sorry to Bother You, which involved workers transformed into centaurs (“equisapiens”), a tech founder’s deranged cult, and such—misshapen gargoyles that turned out somehow, to furnish a historically precise account of how neoliberalism morphed into techno-fascism. And whatever my intellectual quibbles, I was moved to tears by I Love Boosters, which builds toward an unabashedly optimistic dream of international solidarity. One can only hope that this movie’s ending proves as prophetic as its predecessor’s.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón’s latest film, Romería, is in many ways a follow-up to her 2017 film Summer 1993. Both are nakedly autobiographical works, the experiences of the main character—the child Frida in the earlier film, the teenage Marina in the new film—tracking almost precisely, to the last detail, the filmmaker’s troubled life.

Simón’s parents were drug addicts, both of whom died of AIDS when she was a little girl. As Romería begins, Frida, the beautiful young stand-in for Simón, is played with cool charm and determination by Llucia Garcia. She has turned 18 and is seeking a government scholarship so she can attend film school. But her official documents don’t show her father’s identity, and the only way to have that lacuna filled is for her grandparents to officially correct the certificate. Frida sets off on a voyage into a world that by rights was hers, that of her father’s wealthy family, from which she was cut off.

She revisits a past she was too young to remember, or in some cases that occurred before she was born, using her mother’s diary as her guide. Frida attempts to recreate scenes from her parents’ life, imagining the past and then finally reliving it, inserting herself into it as either a witness or a participant. She’s told that she looks like her mother, so we see her making love to her father, who is transfigured in her imagination into a cousin she’d never previously known.

The slipperiness of the past is everywhere in Romería. Frida questions uncles, aunts, and cousins about her parents, and is unable to obtain a sure answer to the question of where they lived in the coastal city of Vigo. The diary, written in the flowery hand of the good bourgeois her mother was, is updated for her: Simón divides the film into diary-like chapters, the story advancing day by day as Frida attempts to get to the truth of her parents’ lives. Is it true her father was hidden in an upstairs room in the family mansion when he was diagnosed with AIDS? Who will know the truth, and will the truth be her parents’ version of it or the objective truth? Frida’s wealthy grandfather attempts to buy her off and put an end to her search by paying for her schooling, allowing him to avoid revisiting his fallen son’s life and death. But Frida and Simón refuse to hide from the truth in this brutally honest film.

Jun

19

2026

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Bea Lumpkin, a Jewish Communist, died last weekend at the age of 107. Her life was as remarkable for its commitment as for its duration. Like a leftist version of Woody Allen’s Zelig or Forrest Gump, she was curiously present for nearly every major political movement of her century: protesting the luxury liner S.S. Bremen when it docked in New York under a Nazi flag; organizing a militant union for laundry workers in the ‘30s; campaigning for Henry Wallace in 1948; enduring harassment and eviction during the McCarthyist blacklist; integrating movie theaters in Chicago and organizing neighbors in Gary, Indiana; visiting Cuba after the 1959 revolution; teaching at Malcolm X College (renamed in ‘68 from Theodor Herzl Junior College, a remarkable factoid about midwestern decolonization) as Black Power arose and was violently suppressed on Chicago’s South and West Side (she knew Fred Hampton, and among her works are several books on the African roots of mathematics); alongside her husband, organizing workers at Wisconsin Steel to hold their employer accountable for pensions after their plant was shuttered; and more. Of course, Lumpkin’s radical politics meant that, unlike Zelig or Gump, those icons of passive anonymity, Lumpkin was actively striving, fighting oppression, raising consciousness. I can think of few more inspiring memoirs than her Joy in the Struggle.

Though Lumpkin lived her final years a few blocks from me, I knew her only from her books, and from short videos a friend passed along. Nonetheless, even in small, mediated encounters, one got a strong sense of her character. For instance, upon being told that Chuck Schumer had capitulated to Donald Trump on this or that, she responded that the reward given to Jewish kapos who cooperated with the Nazis to liquidate their fellow Jews was simply that they were killed last. In some sense, there is not much difference between that centenarian and the teenager at CUNY who debated her physics professor’s account of the vacuum by asking, “Could you have a hole in the doughnut without the donut around the hole?” (The professor, remarkably, understood the dialectical-materialist import of her question and shouted her down; the 1930s were a magical decade of Modernist upheaval.)

Lumpkin was spunky and sharp. Smarter than most college professors, she wrote simply and pungently, for ordinary people; she was an organic, working-class intellectual. Like many Communists of her generation, she was both a disciplined Party member and pragmatically catholic in working with anyone who might advance the cause of liberation. A senior labor organizer told me that when Bea decided she passed muster, Bea gently touched her arm and said, “Have you read Marx yet?,” showing up to their next meeting with photocopies of the assigned reading. She was a committed optimist; she believed that socialism could and would be won, that racism could and would be defeated. In the book, she shares an observation by her husband, Frank Lumpkin, that his experience of the Great Migration from Florida to the North showed how white workers could change their attitudes to Black people very quickly in response to circumstance: “Education can be overnight.” She also describes, while the family toured Europe in 1963, arriving late to a dark campsite in Nuremberg; they woke to discover themselves standing inside “the stadium of the Nazi Party.” For her, the moral was clear: just as the night of fascism had passed, so “capitalism, too, would not last forever.”

On many Jewish gravestones, one finds the expression t’hei nafshah tzrurah b’tzror hachaim—may her soul be bound in the bundle of life. Lumpkin found little use for the Jewish religion, and in her case, the wish seems almost comically superfluous: there is no doubt that she was connected, that her link in the chain remained strong and unbroken. As the last of that generation passes, the prayer, which is to say the question, is really about us: With what will we be bound up, and how will we live committed lives?

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In the summer of 1971, Judith Malina, the co-founder and co-director of the Living Theatre, sat in a dark Brazilian jail cell reading Tess of the d’Ubervilles by resting the book on the windowsill so it could catch some light from the courtyard. Malina describes this incident in the last of four volumes of her diaries, just published by Northwestern University Press, edited and with contextualizing introductions by the theater scholar Kate Bredeson. The series offers a compelling and intimate portrait not just of a visionary artist, but of an artistic community and a fervent era. (Full disclosure: Though we met long after the period covered in the diaries, 1947 to 1971, I knew and loved Malina, who died in 2015 at 88.)

Like numerous layered scenes in the diaries, the one in the cell conveys much about Malina in a condensed, dramatic way. Along with other members of the Living, she is imprisoned by Brazil’s military dictatorship—ostensibly on trumped-up marijuana charges, but really for conducting lefty performance workshops in favelas. She reaches for Hardy because she must keep her mind occupied and it’s one of only a couple of books on hand. (She can “hardly bear to read,” one of the other two, Actors on Acting, and Martin Buber’s I and Thou “fills me with a religious emotion that’s almost unbearable in this environment.”) Reading Tess, she writes, “I identified with all of it.” And while she doesn’t spell out in this passage why, we know by this late point in the chronology of the four volumes that she despised hypocrisy, the second-class treatment of women, and the sexual double standard.

Malina doesn’t remark on the novel’s subtitle, either—“A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented”—but that could serve as the diaries’ subtitle, too. Not that Malina was “pure” in any pedantic or moralistically sexist sense, but you don’t have to read far into the diaries’ 1,600 pages to recognize her unwavering commitment, over some 70 years, to pacifist anarchism and to the search for theatrical forms that would hasten the arrival of a revolutionary future.

As for “faithfully presented,” well, one can never know for sure about diaries, but she doesn’t just record moments of artistic triumph and personal delight (a category into which I’d put her sharing a 30-day jail sentence in New York with Dorothy Day for civil disobedience.) With wit, insight, and unremitting self-scrutiny, Malina also bares faults and missteps in her work and turbulent love-life as she and her company—co-led by her husband, Julian Beck—endeavor to live their communal, anti-capitalist, free-love, fully vegetarian, non-violent, anti-nuke, anarchist ideals. Seeing her grapple with all the inherent conflicts and contradictions of that effort is one of the gifts of these volumes. We watch her raise two children while directing, writing, acting, reading, thinking, and touring. In one of many parenting-in-stride accounts, she tells of a border stop in France, where she reads her toddler daughter a story about a tiger while customs officials inspect every piece of paper in their car. She describes the experience of her mother’s early death and burial and shiva with spare, heart-wrenching clarity. Her father, a rabbi, had died years before, and now, an only child, she “felt no comfort” after the shiva; “it was like bursting into an implacable reality. I was alone. Earth was hard, unremitting.”

At the same time, like other great artist diaries, Malina’s brings us behind the scenes to reveal the creative impulses and impasses at the heart of The Living’s process. The second volume (1958-1968)—comprising previously unpublished material (like the fourth volume)—chronicles one of the most fruitful and influential periods in the Living’s long history, during which the company worked on plays by poets and European modernists and started experimenting with entirely new forms.

In Jack Gelber’s hyperrealist The Connection (1961), a group of jazz musicians comes together to jam and await their heroin fix. During one rehearsal, a cast member showed up late and high on the stuff. “Within five minutes everyone could see it,” Malina writes. “Even those who had never seen it before saw it. It was almost too painful. He faltered. He rose and fell. He perspired. His eyes quivered, dilated, closed. How does he feel while this is happening? I shall never know.” A few days later, she is focused on technicalities: “I do not like the tempo of the second act. I want to portray the horror, but I have only a terrible nervous activity.” For Kenneth Brown’s The Brig (1963), Malina tightly choreographed a troupe of Marines brutalized by fellow servicemen to create a parable of brute authority. (The Living Theatre has kept experimenting with new forms for more than half a century beyond the end of these diaries, and remains active today.)

In 1964, evading tax harassment, members of the Living exiled themselves to Europe and toured all over. In residence at Avignon in 1968, they worked on three pieces, including their most iconic—and explosive—(though not best) production, Paradise Now. An image from the show has, unfairly, come to serve as a shorthand for artistic excesses of the ‘60s: naked bodies groping each other and writhing around the floor. The company made an easy leap into the May 1968 student rebellion. They returned to the US and found it changed. “When we left America,” Malina writes, “everyone thought it a kind of humorous exaggeration when we said in answer to questions about our theatre’s aims: ‘To bring about the revolution.’ Now this word is on everyone’s tongue. The luncheonettes are full of people talking about the revolution.” But they soon found that the left had become more militant, even violent, in their absence, and felt ever more out of place. “And if the purpose of the revolution isn’t to feed all the people and stop all the violence it isn’t revolution,” she muses. “It’s just a reaction formation, a psychological spiritual assault on oppression, which is not enough, and belittles the effort and the glory of many.”

Malina never stopped ardently believing that a “nonviolent beautiful anarchist revolution” was possible and that theater could help make it happen; reading her diaries can just about make you believe it too.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): A quarter of a century since its initial release in 2000, the great Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros is still capable of shocking even repeat viewers with its sheer genius. The recently restored version is now showing in theaters around the country and will soon stream on Mubi. The film opens in the middle of a chase, with all the requisite thrills and chills, as a car driven madly by Gael Garcia Bernal weaves through congested city streets, a pickup truck in hot pursuit, the passenger in the latter firing wildly at Garcia’s vehicle. In the back seat, Garcia’s passenger is trying to staunch the blood flowing freely from a suffering canine. Suddenly, the car seems to explode in a brutal collision at an intersection. We’re only minutes into the film, and we’re already exhausted.

We’ve been treated to a skillful action film opening, but here Iñarritu leaves that vile and pointless genre behind. The high-impact collision is both trigger and metaphor for what the rest of the film provides: a tale of social, romantic, familial, class, and cultural collisions in Mexico. The car crash is the organizing principle of Amores Perros, as we are shown the lives of people affected by it, those in it, and those nearby. Iñárritu and his screenwriter Guillermo Arriagia don’t make the accident the endpoint of the story. Rather, it is part of a continuum, interrupting lives in midstream and sending out shockwaves that ripple far beyond it.

The film is told in three chapters, each focusing on a pair of characters. Octavio and Susana are star-crossed lovers at the lower end of the social scale. Octavio is a young man with no aim in life until he discovers his family’s pet dog is murderous in high-stakes dog fights. The driver of one of the other cars in the accident is the beautiful supermodel Susana, whose married lover has left his family for her, and who is obsessed with her own pet dog. Witnessing the accident—and profiting by it, as he steals the money Octavio has with him at the time—is Martín, a rundown wreck of a man who lives with his beloved dogs. He, we will learn, is a former professor who left his profession and family to engage in armed struggle against the Mexican state.

There are, then, two obvious connecting threads in Amores Perros, the accident and dogs. But there are so many others teased out over the length of the film: love and its disasters; family strife; the quest for gain in honest and dishonest, clean and dirty forms.

All their paths cross at the intersection, all their lives will take a turn because of the accident, and yet the characters will never be aware of each other. They are all residents of the same city, but of different worlds within it. Amores Perros is a fairly long film, clocking in at two and a half hours. Though it makes no references to the great Mexican muralists, it is in essence an homage to them—an enormous, brilliant, imposing fresco of Mexican life and society.