Eight thoughts for eight nights
A little list
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Paid subscribers will get the last ever (for now? probably?) ET Read Home next week. Next year, it will become ET Watch Home, movie recommendations for now.
Also, this newsletter will not be sent out on Dec. 28. But it will, of course, be back the week after that to ring in 2024 with you.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about President Joe Biden repeatedly saying that no Jew anywhere would be safe without Israel, and why he should stop doing that.
Also, I am now a contributing columnist for the Forward.
For Smithsonian, I wrote about Schindler’s List 30 years after its debut—how it’s critiqued and why it endures.
I enjoyed this interview with Lukasz Zal, cinematographer of Zone of Interest (and Ida and Cold War), which is to say (in my view) the person responsible for the most …interesting parts of Zone of Interest.
I encourage you to read this piece on the conditions under which journalists in Gaza are working.
Noema has a good piece on why Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is boosting Sikh separatism.
From the Washington Post: “Since 2020, an opaque organization calling itself the Disinfo Lab has published lengthy dossiers and social media posts claiming to reveal the personal relationships and funding sources behind U.S.-based critics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.” Don’t worry, their work involves unsubstantiated claims about George Soros.
Poland has a new government.
The European Union took the not uncontroversial step of unfreezing about 10 billion euros for Hungary.
Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron became “the first original anime title in history to top the North American box office chart.” I loved it and think you, reader, will, too.
MY VIEWS ON…
…eight thoughts for Chanukah!
Here are eight thoughts, one for each night of Chanukah.
It was funny—more sad than funny, actually—to me that there were people this year who tried to make the case that you couldn’t celebrate Chanukah unless you had a particular view of Israel, the nation state, and of the war it’s fighting. As though a story isn’t open to interpretation, and as though people wouldn’t have different interpretations even if it weren’t.
That said, I am, I will admit, less enchanted by the story we celebrate at Chanukah than I am by the one we celebrate for, say, Purim or Passover.
Why is Google Docs telling me that I’m spelling “Chanukah” incorrectly?
I loved Chanukah growing up because my mom would make latkes for us to take to our class in our mostly not Jewish school. It made me so proud every year.
I still think this album is one of the best holiday albums there is.
My friends Hannah and Ezra got us an elephant menorah as a wedding present and honestly it was a great gift.
On the seventh night, I went to a Chanukah party, and one of the speakers mentioned that it was the new moon, meaning you couldn’t see the moon at all, and that it was in that darkness that we could create light. This, too, of course, is open to interpretation.
I always get a little sad after lighting the candles on the eighth night. You have this little ritual for just over a week, and then you lose it again, until next year, when it begins anew.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
In a move that Hannah Arendt would almost certainly have something to say about, “The Heinrich Böll Foundation, ‘in agreement with the Bremen Senate,’ is withdrawing from awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, citing Gessen’s recent New Yorker essay ‘In the Shadow of the Holocaust’ as the reason for the cancellation.”
A far-right Polish member of parliament was expelled after spraying Chanukah candles with a fire extinguisher. (As an added bonus, here’s what the Jews of Lodz had to say about it…with dance.)
I’ve meant to include this for weeks now: Jonathan Kaplan has an interview with Israeli cyclist Guy Sagiv over on his Substack.
I thought this piece by Peter Beinart for Jewish Currents—on how antisemitism scholars and experts are being sidelined in universities’ antisemitism advisory boards etc for political reasons—was excellent.
The New York Times has a thorough report on how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to use Hamas for his own political purposes.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed Hadas Ziv, director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, on documenting gender-based violence carried out against Israelis on Oct. 7.
JTA has a look at some of the debates around what happens after this war. Relatedly, the Israeli government insists there will be no Palestinian state, while the Biden administration has long said they believe two states are the only solution.
That’s it for now. Hope to see you back here soon.
-ET