On what makes 'Bad Shabbos' good
This is about a movie and also intermarriage and diversity
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This past Monday, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Leave Home, a monthly travel recommendation. This month, we went to Lisbon.
All subscribers now get The Political Cycle, the podcast I co-host. This week, Rohan Venkat and I discussed India and Pakistan and the threat of escalation. You’ll continue to get the podcast straight to your inbox, but if you like it, please also like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about events this week at Columbia and how Trump's plans to "fight antisemitism" — and going along with the farce that that is indeed what he's trying to do — have made matters worse.
From Politico: “The nation’s most influential anti-abortion groups have a new plan to roll back access to the procedure for millions of Americans in what they’re calling the “biggest opportunity for the pro-life movement” since toppling Roe v. Wade. The effort, which the groups have privately named “Rolling Thunder,” is the movement’s first concerted attempt under the second Trump administration to target abortion pills, and aims to convince the FDA, Congress and courts to crack down on their use.”I thought this, from RNS, was a smart piece on the role of the religious left in anti-Trump protests.
From the FT’s editorial board: “'The US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.”
“To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, award-winning director Wim Wenders (Wings of desire, Paris-Texas, Perfect Days, etc.) has shot a short film that takes us to the most secret place in Europe at that time: a map room in a school in Reims, France, which served as a war room for the Allies.”
Speaking of movies! I am very excited about a restored version of Days and Nights in the Forest being screened at Cannes.
And finally, if my referencing it repeatedly didn’t convince you to read Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement…it won a Pulitzer Prize!
MY VIEWS ON…
…Bad Shabbos!
My husband and I went to see Bad Shabbos at the Jewish film and music festival here in DC last night.
That festival, we learned, is traditionally put on with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that has been cancelled. It is not the only Jewish film festival that has lost a grant as a result of Trump cuts. I suppose there are a few things that one could conclude from this. My own personal conclusion is that every culture benefits when we as a society invest in diversity, and loses when we elect not to do that.
The plot of Bad Shabbos, per Letterboxd, is as follows: “An engaged interfaith couple are about to have their parents meet for the first time over a Shabbat dinner when an accidental manslaughter gets in the way.” This is technically true, but does not capture what makes this movie so much funnier than I, from reading the description, thought it would be. Part of it is the Waking Ned Divine-esque comedy of errors that see the characters get deeper and deeper into their own plot and personality-driven mess. But part of it is the specificity: the Upper West Side Jewishness of the whole thing. (This doesn’t mean that you need to be Jewish with family on the Upper West Side to enjoy the movie. Specificity often allows for appreciation of universality!)
And at the risk of being aggressively unfunny about a very funny movie, what I really liked about it is that the intermarriage and crossing of cultures, in this film, doesn’t threaten that specificity. If anything, it enhances it. The characters recognize this eventually, but the movie itself does from the start.
I want to be careful not to be paternalistic or condescending about this, because I’m the daughter of someone who converted and the wife of a person who is not Jewish, but this is, I think, true to life. It’s been true to my life, anyway. I am not “more Jewish” or anything since meeting my husband, but I do think more consciously about why it matters so much to me and what’s special about it and appreciate all of it so much more with this person I love who is not Jewish there beside me at synagogue and talks I give and, say, a screening of Bad Shabbos. And I guess the lesson there is the same as the one that I started with: that diversity is good, not bad, for individual cultures and the celebration thereof.
Also, Method Man is very good in it.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From JTA: “Israel’s government approved a plan on Sunday to conquer and occupy the Gaza Strip, a major expansion of its military campaign there and a sign that the war is far from ending.”
Also from JTA: “Rabbi Deborah Waxman, who leads the seminary and congregational union of Judaism’s Reconstructionist movement, said this week that she will retire in the summer of 2026, opening the top job at a movement that has been rocked by tension over a growing strain of anti-Zionism among its recent rabbinical school students and graduates.”
Over 100 Jewish clergy in the greater Washington, DC area signed a letter in support of the release of Dr. Badar Khan Suri (about whom you can read more in this Washington Post article).
Jews are the least likely people in the United States, including the religiously unaffiliated, to say we believe in an afterlife.
From the Washington Post: “Three dozen former leaders of major Jewish groups operating in the United States issued an open letter Thursday accusing American Jewish organizations of being “far too silent about the stunning assault of democratic norms and the rule of law.” The former leaders called on current leadership to issue a forceful rebuke.”
Congratulations to Ben Sales for finding the local angle for JTA: “Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was just elected as Pope Leo XIV, studied under a pioneer in Jewish-Catholic relations when he attended seminary in Chicago.”
-ET
Image via IMDB.