We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: The other day, I saw that I’ve sent out 102 editions of this newsletter. That includes regular posts (like the one you’re reading now), reading lists (a now defunct series), little essays about Czech movies, my monthly ET Ask Home questionnaire, and episodes of the podcast I co-host. If you’ve clicked on any of that: Thank you! It’s wonderful to write this and feel like people are actually reading and engaging with it.
This Monday, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Watch Home, a series I’m running in 2024 in which I write a little essay about a Czech New Wave movie and its director every month. To mark Women’s History Month, this month I wrote on Věra Chytilová and Something Different.
Paid subscribers also get the premium version of The Election Tricycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on this year’s elections in the United States, United Kingdom, and India.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For Slate, I wrote about Donald Trump declaring that American Jews who do not vote for him hate themselves, a thing he has basically been saying for five years.
If you are so inclined, you can watch the Haaretz-UCLA panel I mentioned last week on Israel-diaspora relations following Oct. 7 here. There is also a little article on it here.
For the New Republic, I reported on Slovakia’s domestic political situation and upcoming presidential election (the first round is this Saturday, March 23)—and certain parallels between what is happening there and what could soon happen in the United States.
This week on the Election Tricycle, I interviewed Dalibor Rohac on Slovakia’s presidential election. Rohan and Tom and I talked about parallels between developments there and in our own countries, and Tom told us about Penny Mordaunt.
Relatedly, the Financial Times has an interview with Slovak President Zuzana Caputova. This is the last thing in this week’s newsletter on Slovakia, I promise.
Also from the Financial Times, and on a very different note: This interview with Bill Nighy is very charming.
This is a good if upsetting piece on how and why there’s less of an appetite in newsrooms for aggressive journalism.
This piece by Sarah Wildman marking a year since the loss of her daughter is beautiful and devastating and generous.
MY VIEWS ON…
…Grand Budapest Hotel, 10 years later!
This is my second post this week on a movie, which I fear is perhaps too much, but this is the idea I had for this week and I thought it was worth writing about so here we are.
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of my favorite movies. I am not alone in this: On Letterboxd, the movie cataloging website, I have it named as one of my “four favorites.” I am one of 55,674 people who have it marked thusly on the site, where it’s been logged as watched over 2.4 million times. It’s also currently number 187 in the Letterboxd top 250. This is but one metric of success, of course, but my point is that movie-watching people are watching Grand Budapest.
In case you haven’t seen it: It’s inspired by the writing of Stefan Zweig and is a story within a story within a story. The main plot is about a lobby boy, Zero, who works for an eccentric and charming concierge, M. Gustave, in a grand hotel in a fictional European place that resembles the Austro Hungarian empire in its last days. An old and wealthy woman, Celine, who regularly visits the hotel, where she is doted on by M. Gustave, dies under mysterious conditions. Confusion, adventure, friendship, love, and tragicomedy ensue.
We rewatched it last month. I still find it utterly and completely charming and witty and sad. The part in the great manor where they’re reading Celine’s will and a fight breaks out and an old guy goes “where’s Celine?” and is answered with, “...she’s dead! We’re reading her will!” is, to me, one of the funniest scenes in cinema.
But this time I also saw something I couldn’t have when it came out ten years ago.
The movie—which, again, came out in 2014—is about the end of an empire that, in truth, died before people realized it. It’s about the fascism that rises in its place, and the people who tried desperately to hold onto, as they call them, “faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” M. Gustave, the concierge, at one point goes on a xenophobic tirade against his lobby boy, Zero, asking why he even left where he came from. “I left because of the war,” Zero answers. The least recognizable part of the scene is that M. Gustave is shamed and immediately apologizes.
“I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace,” we are told of M. Gustave toward the end of the film. How could I have known, when I first saw the movie, that he was talking about us, too?
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I really liked this JTA report on people this year who are facing and reinterpreting and reimagining the violent end of the Purim story. (And: Chag Purim sameach to those celebrating!)
Also from JTA: “American Jewish University last year hired a law firm specializing in investigations of gender-based misconduct following complaints against the two deans who have been running the university’s rabbinical school for more than two decades.”
This is a very thorough report from Haaretz on the attack on freedom of the press in Israel.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations was “distressed” by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s call for new Israeli elections.
Playwright Tony Kushner went on the Haaretz podcast and called Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars’ speech “unimpeachable and irrefutable.”
I really encourage you to read this thread by a Forward’s reporter who covers antisemitism on what (and who) is actually driving antisemitism on college campuses.
I also recommend this column from Haaretz on hasbara and why it does more harm than good.
-ET
Image from IMDB.