We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This Monday, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Ask Home, featuring December’s guest…my mom.
ET Ask Home will remain as a feature for paid subscribers in 2024, but the questions will change. I think ET Read Home, a monthly reading list sent out on the third Monday of each month, will become ET Watch Home, a monthly list of movie recommendations for now.
But that is the future and we remain here in the present. So for now, onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
I’m now helming the Critical State newsletter for Inkstick so if you’d like yet another weekly newsletter by me you should sign up here.
I helped with the editing of this VSquare piece on the people smuggling Ukrainian men out of the country to avoid conscription.
I thought this piece on Ireland’s roots of support for Palestinians was very well done.
The New Yorker has a report on faculty responding to the suspension of pro-Palestinian student groups at Columbia University.
A new crossing opened on the Polish-Ukrainian border, which “Kyiv hopes will offer relief as Polish driver protests blocked other land corridors, Ukraine's border service said on Monday,” per Reuters.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that the European Union should not begin to discuss Ukrainian EU accession.
A Russian supreme court declared that the LGBTQ movement is “extremist” and so police raided Moscow gay bars.
The Washington Post union is doing a one day walkout today. Don’t cross that picket line!
MY VIEWS ON…
…Cassandra Cat!
Last week, a friend and I went to Suns Cinema and watched Vojtech Jasny’s The Cassandra Cat. Jasny was a Czech New Wave director (as a teenager, he fought as part of the resistance against the Nazis after the latter took his father to Auschwitz). I had previously only seen his movie All My Good Countrymen, which is beautiful and moving but not particularly playful, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from a movie about a cat who wears sunglasses and exposes people in their true colors by looking at them when the glasses are off (this is to say, if the cat, shades off, looks at you and you are a hypocrite, you’ll turn purple; if you’ve been unfaithful, you’ll turn yellow; if you’re in true love, red).
This is one of the most special movies I’ve ever seen in my life.
First of all, the use of color in this movie is remarkable given that it was made in 1963. (The person who worked on color in this movie also worked on Daisies, and you can see some of the techniques and style that define that movie being played with here, too.)
Second of all, the movie manages to straddle the line between hyper-realistic and having a fairytale-like quality. The cat is part of a traveling circus that comes to a town and causes chaos. The protagonist is a popular teacher, played by Vlastimil Brodsky (he was in many, many movies from this period, including All My Good Countrymen), who is trying to balance the need to respect authority (even if that authority is corrupt and mendacious) with the desire to hold on to honesty, friendship, courage, and beauty. The character who plays the closest thing the movie has to a narrator is played by Jan Werich, who is at once silly and serious, weary and whimsical.
And third of all, given that it’s an hour and a half movie about a cat, it’s pretty profound? It was banned by authorities after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia for being unacceptable and subversive, and on the one hand that goes to show the intellectual fragility of the regime, but on the other hand, I get it. If you’re the type of person who wants to ban movies, you’d want to ban this one. Beyond having something to say, it’s giving people something about which to think and feel.
Anyway! By happy coincidence, The Cassandra Cat is now streaming on Criterion. I really recommend it. It’s the kind of escapism that plants you back more fully in the here and now when you’re done with it.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
The House of Representatives passed a resolution equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. 92 Democrats, including eight of the House’s 24 Jewish members, voted “present.”
You should read this piece on campus antisemitism and why Rep. Elise Stefanik is not the hero of the hour for those worried about antisemitism (even if she is being hailed as one) by Ben Samuels at Haaretz.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer: “University of Pennsylvania student organizers who screened a film critical of Israel on campus against the university’s direction face potential disciplinary consequences. The screening of Israelism by Penn Chavurah, a progressive Jewish student group, occurred Tuesday without incident with about 60 students and faculty members in attendance.” I may write about this at some point but: I have seen this movie. I disagree with much of its presentation about American Jews, but the idea that it is offensive or dangerous is, in my opinion, completely absurd.
From JTA: “Elected officials and Jewish groups are decrying a rally by pro-Palestinian activists in Philadelphia that targeted a restaurant founded by the Israeli-American celebrity chef Michael Solomonov. ‘Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,’ a crowd of dozens of people chanted outside the Rittenhouse Square outpost of Goldie, Solomonov’s kosher falafel chain.”
From the Times of Israel: “A reservist soldier suspected of killing a man he had apparently mistaken for a terrorist during a shooting attack in Jerusalem last week was arrested Monday by Military Police, the Israel Defense Forces said.” For more context on this infuriating incident, I recommend this thread by Dimi Reider.
From Haaretz: “On Thursday evening, around 200 Jewish far-right activists are set to join a police-authorized march through Jerusalem's Old City. Their aim is to advocate for Jewish oversight of the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa compound, calling for an end to the control exercised by the Islamic endowment, the Waqf.”
From NBC: “More than 500 employees of dozens of synagogues and Jewish groups signed a letter calling for a cease-fire. Most signed anonymously for fear of their jobs.”
I hope that those of you celebrating Chanukah have a very happy holiday (a very freylekhn khanike, if you will, though it’s okay if you won’t).
That’s it for now. Hope to see you back here soon.
-ET
Image from Janus Films.