In the zone or zoned out
For our last newsletter of the year, some thoughts on Zone of Interest
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This Monday, paid subscribers got ET Read Home, a monthly reading list. In 2024, this feature will become ET Watch Home. I was originally going to just make it a monthly movie list, but I had a different idea.
Over the past year, I have become mildly obsessed with Czech (or, if you prefer, Czechoslovak) New Wave films. And in addition to watching a bunch of them, I’ve also read a few books and articles and watched documentaries about various figures and filmmakers. And so this coming year here is what we will do: Each month, I’ll let you know what movie I’m going to write about in advance. On the third Monday of that month, paid subscribers will get a little essay on that movie and its director and others involved and where it sits in the Czech New Wave canon.
January’s movie will be Intimate Lighting by Ivan Passer. You can watch it on Criterion (or Eastern European Movies dot Com). I am looking forward to writing about it for you and hope you’ll join me in watching! (And paid subscribers can comment, so you’ll be able to offer your own thoughts, too.)
Anyway! This is the last newsletter of the year and so I wanted to say thank you again to everybody for subscribing. An extra thank you to those of you who decided this was worth seven dollars a month (or the low, low price of $70 a year). I appreciate it, and you, so much. I am a freelance journalist, and the time I spend writing this is time during which I’m not doing other paid work, and the fact that some of you are like, “You know what? Sure. Here’s something for that” means a lot to me. So thank you.
With that! For the last time in 2023! Onto news, view, and Jews.
THE NEWS
Bad Jews is out next month in Polish! Please tell your Polish-reading friends!
The New York Times has a piece on how Russian President Vladimir Putin used the departure of “Western” companies to his benefit.
The Washington Post has a look at lives upended over “Florida’s book wars.”
Here’s friend of the newsletter Chris Geidner, aka Law Dork, on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that former US President Donald Trump can’t be on the state’s 2024 primary ballot.
From Akbar Ahmed at HuffPost: “U.S. diplomats are finalizing a démarche ― a diplomatic initiative ― to their Swiss counterparts that Washington hopes will scuttle plans for a meeting to discuss violations of the Geneva Conventions in the current war between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza-based militant group, according to State Department documents seen by HuffPost.”
The Dial has a neat piece on how politicians around the world are rethinking diaspora politics.
MY VIEWS ON…
…Zone of Interest!
I saw Zone of Interest recently. It’s Jonathan Glazer’s new movie about noted Nazi Rudolf Höss and his wife (played by Sandra Hüller, who runs away with the movie) creating their family’s dream home—and really, in some ways, dream life—right next to Auschwitz.
The movie was shot by cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who also shot Ida and Cold War, and who did, I think, an extraordinary job with this. His interview on the movie and how they shot it is worth reading, if you’re interested. The most compelling thing about this movie, to me, is how it was shot. How beautiful it is. How lovely it is, the shot of the the garden, backing up onto a wall over which you can see smoke.
The other thing that I found interesting about this movie has been its reception. As far as I’ve seen, people either think that it’s a masterpiece, or that it’s “hollow.” Most baffling, to me, was the pan by the New Yorker, which took issue with the movie not showing more of Höss’s work, as though it isn’t totally clear by Höss’s discussion of crematoria, or his delight in preparing to round up the Jews of Budapest for extermination. As though we needed to see him yelling at Jews in Auschwitz to connect the two. If the reviewer did need to see that—why? (I also feel that the pans of the movie have confused the phrase “banality of evil,” which was never meant to imply that the people doing these acts weren’t committing horrible crimes, but that they were carrying them out without moral revulsion or indignation. I had a moment watching the movie when I thought, “If your uniform has a skull and crossbones on it, don’t you realize you’re the bad guy?” But of course that isn’t how most people think of themselves. They’re their own protagonists.)
I think there are criticisms to be made of the movie. There were points at which I wasn’t sure if the movie was sure how much of an art house film it wanted to be. Parts were nicely ambiguous, but there were a couple moments at which I was so confused as to what was happening as to be distracted. And insofar as there is a criticism to make about this movie’s failure to wholly depict complicity: I think it is interesting that a certain segment of Poland’s politics responded very differently to this than it did Zal’s earlier work dealing with the Holocaust, Ida).
But mostly I think that some of the criticism so far—that the movie didn’t show enough, that the movie isn’t clear enough how evil Höss was, that it’s “hollow”—comes from the fact that this doesn’t make the viewer feel the way she has come to feel in watching a movie about the Holocaust.
I cry at everything. I did not cry at this. I didn’t cry as Höss’s wife brags to her mother that her husband calls her “Queen of Auschwitz,” or as her mother says that she wanted the curtains of the Jewish woman for whom she once cleaned. I didn’t cry as Höss excitedly calls home to discuss mass extermination of Jews, or as he happily kneels down to pet a dog on his way to his job, which is being an officer in the SS. I mostly appreciated the cinematography and felt repulsed.
Then my friend and I went across the street and had a drink and talked about the movie, and sort of tossed versions of “huh!” back and forward at one another. And we went back to DC and I kept thinking about what a movie about the Holocaust, and specifically about the people who carried it out and their families, is “supposed” to make you feel.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
The New York Times has an interview with Chen Goldstein-Almog following her late November release. She was taken captive on Oct. 7 along with three of her children. Her husband and eldest daughter were killed.
The Böll Foundation reversed its position and awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen. You can read the talk they delivered at the ceremony here.
Speaking of reversals in Germany: A Berlin club refused to host a Purim party because of the “current state of affairs” but then backtracked, offering to donate the proceeds to organizations fighting antisemitism and “promoting reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians.”
Jewish Women’s Archive has a nice interview with Isabel Frey, the Vienna, Austria-based Yiddish singer and social justice activist.
JTA has a piece on how the “quiet middle” of American Jews is growing increasingly uncomfortable over Israel’s war.
Hundreds of synagogues across the United States received bomb threats this past weekend. Meanwhile, here in Washington, DC, police arrested a man in connection with an antisemitic attack outside of Kesher Israel Congregation in Georgetown.
From Haaretz: “Twenty-seven prominent former-leaders of the Jewish community urged U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday to declare his intention to pursue a post-war peace initiative that ‘establishes a path to end Israeli governance of Gaza and the West Bank.’" This comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, per the Times of Israel, boasts about his role in blocking a Palestinian state.
From eJP: “As nearly 1,000 members of the Reform movement— the largest Jewish denomination in the U.S.— gathered over the weekend at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., to mark the Union for Reform Judaism’s 150th anniversary, the three-day celebration also unintentionally highlighted a rift among liberal Jews about how to respond to Israel’s war with Hamas and what it means to be a Zionist.”
That’s it for now. Hope to see you back here soon. Wishing all of you who celebrate a very merry Christmas, and everyone a happy new year.
-ET
Photo credit: Brandon Tensley