On Ms President
On Slovakia and a movie
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This is going out early this week because the rest of the week is busy for me! I hope that’s alright!
I think that, in 2026, we’re going to do two new features for paid subscribers: I’ll bring back ET Read Home, but instead of a reading list each month, I’ll write about one specific book (announced the month before in case you want to read along). And I was thinking of replacing ET Ask Home with ET Speak Home, in which I do a little mini profile of different foreign language learners. But if you are a paid subscriber and hate either of those ideas, please let me know (you can also let me know if you like them).
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
This piece is the best thing to come out of the whole Nuzzi-Lizza saga (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, good for you).
Relatedly, from the Guardian: “A reversal of a decades-long program of childhood immunizations, including a recommendation to scrap hepatitis B shots for newborn babies, could come as early as this week in a vote by an advisory committee of allies convened by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.” He is maybe the most dangerous person in an administration that includes Pete Hegseth.
From Politico: “Former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and one of the bloc’s most senior diplomats, Stefano Sannino, are in custody after Belgian police launched raids as part of a fraud probe on Tuesday, according to officials familiar with the case.”
From Axios: “Republicans are dramatically ramping up their anti-immigration rhetoric after the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C. by a suspect who is an Afghan national”
From CNN: “Larry Summers has been banned for life from the American Economic Association, a professional organization for economists with more than 17,000 members, over his ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…Prezidentka!
This weekend, while my baby napped on me (it turned out to be a long nap), I watched a documentary on Zuzana Čaputová, the former president of Slovakia. It’s called Prezidentka, or, in English, Ms President. It follows Čaputová through her election in 2019 to her decision not to run again and, finally, to her leaving the presidential palace in 2024. This is to say that it also follows Slovakia from a moment when it seemed like people were standing up against violence and disinformation and corruption. She was elected after the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová and ran on a platform of rule of law, anti-corruption, and decency. The prime minister, Robert Fico, had resigned. A new government came into power. But then came the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Čaputová decided not to run for reelection. Fico is prime minister of Slovakia again, a position achieved in part by lying about Čaputová, whom he accused of being an American agent. The movie takes us through all of this, too.
All of this is to say that some political documentaries follow a politician from the beginning and trace their rise to power. This one basically begins with her at the peak of her power and things get worse from there, even as she tries her best not to descend with them.
I have written before (several times, actually) about the parallels between Slovak politics and ours here, in the United States, so I wasn’t surprised at how relevant and moving and simultaneously hopeful and hopeless I found the documentary to be. But there are three moments in particular that I will think of often, I think.
The first is after texts come out revealing connections between an oligarch believed to be connected to Kuciak’s murder and some of the most powerful politicians in the country (the Slovak journalist Tomáš Madleňák has written a book about this that’s available in English if you’re interested in learning more, and I worked on editing and proofing the English version so I can tell you that it’s very good). The documentary shows Čaputová among her advisors debating what, if anything, to say. “When should I speak up,” she asks them, “if not as president?” I cried.
The second is after Peter Pellegrini, who replaced Fico as prime minister after his resignation in disgrace, is elected president and goes on television promising not to oppose the new Fico government, as he alleges Čaputová has done (Fico, since coming back to office, has set about attacking independent media and mechanisms of legal enforcement that could be used against him and those close to or loyal to him.) Someone asks one of her advisors whether people will blame her. If she had run, the thinking goes, this would not be happening. And the advisor says that that’s the wrong question. The right one is: If this is the result, what did the last five years mean?
I think about this all the time. Čaputová, in the movie, says that it doesn’t mean decency in politics has failed. Good governance and democracy—these things don’t rest on one person. And that’s true, of course. And if they do, that one person has failed. But what does it mean if a government can be disgraced and a country can demand better for itself and then, a handful of years later, the same people can be back in power but worse? What does that say about the society that vowed to itself it could be better?
And the third moment comes at the very end. Čaputová’s daughter, we learn toward the start of the film, was diagnosed with a brain tumor shortly before Čaputová’s inauguration. And at the end she says that everyone asks her how she stays strong without even knowing that there was a private battle that was unimaginably difficult and painful. You have to project positivity and confidence, she said. And I am paraphrasing but then she said something like, there is a void of insecurity within, but you can’t let that be what’s shown or what consumes you. And obviously if things were different in my family’s life that might not have resonated with me as strongly, but things are what they are so it did.
I thought about that this week as I thought about the week’s Torah portion and the ambiguity of the figure with whom Jacob struggles in the night before meeting Esau. I was thinking of how that allows you to sub in your own struggle, and how, in a way, it doesn’t matter what its name is because, to borrow from a therapist who told me all suffering is suffering, all struggle is struggle. And to borrow from Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers writing of Esau right before Jacob steals his blessing, everyone is playing their part, and all of this has happened before and will happen again. There is something very connecting about that. That across time and space, we struggle, and we suffer, and we reach out to one another and sometimes understand and sometimes don’t, and we hope—we do our very best to ensure—that we will come out the other side. We refuse the void.
We need to control our thoughts, Čaputová tells the camera. Because our thoughts shape who we are. And then she adds: and we need to be better people right now.
…AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
Marc Tracy of the New York Times with the Tom Stoppard obituary written for me and probably you, too: “Tom Stoppard, the playwright and screenwriter who died on Saturday at 88, set plays in imperial Britain, czarist Russia and Communist Czechoslovakia. He wrote movie lines for characters who included William Shakespeare and Indiana Jones. His work concerned love and divorce, poetry and rock ‘n’ roll. Yet, entering his ninth decade, Stoppard had not yet written directly about a core aspect of his own life, including a shocking revelation that he learned in late middle age: His Jewishness.”
From the Forward: “When OneTable, a nonprofit that helps organize and fund Shabbat dinners for thousands of young adults each year, introduced its new chief executive in May, things seemed to be on the upswing. Amid a national rise in Jewish engagement, OneTable board chair Julie Franklin said the organization’s community was ‘thriving and bigger than ever before.’ Internally, though, the organization was facing a decline in funding, and on Tuesday it laid off 14 employees — about a quarter of its staff.”
From the Guardian: “Israel has “a de facto state policy of organised and widespread torture”, according to a UN report covering the past two years, which also raised concerns about the impunity of Israeli security forces for war crimes.”
Also from the Guardian: “Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Israel’s president for a pardon for bribery and fraud charges and an end to a five-year corruption trial, arguing that it would be in the ‘national interest.’”
-ET
Image from IMDB