Work work work work work

On productivity, creativity, and what I learned binging a Czech director's movies

And we’re back!

Housekeeping notes: Next week, paid subscribers get October’s ET Ask Home, my monthly questionnaire. The guest this coming month is extremely fun. If you’re not a paid subscriber…perhaps you would like to become one?

Also for paid subscribers: I’m thinking about what paid-only features to offer next year, in 2024. If you have any opinions on this—if you like the monthly questionnaire but not the reading list, for example, or if you think I should keep both, or if you’d rather something entirely new—please do feel free to let me know either in the comments or via email. 

And anyone else should feel free to email (polite, constructive) feedback, too.

And now onto news, views, and Jews.

THE NEWS

• For the New Republic, I wrote about the alliance between US Republicans and Hungarians, and how it papers over some very real differences, which both sides have decided to overlook. 

• For the Nation, I looked at Slovakia’s upcoming elections (they’re this Saturday!), and what Americans who care about rule of law and anti-corruption efforts should learn from it. 

• For JTA, I wrote about Vilnius’s twin anniversaries—Vilnius 700 and 80 years since the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto—and what their respective commemorations tell us about remembrance. 

• Could religious conservative American lobbyists please leave the Czech Republic alone?

• The Financial Times has a good piece on how the US et al foreign policy regarding India is running into India’s own policies.

• A Ukrainian veteran was given a standing ovation by Canadian Parliament but it turned out he was a veteran of, whoops, the SS. Now Poland may seek his extradition. 

• Speaking of Poland! Agniezska Holland’s movie Green Border had the best opening weekend of the year for a Polish film despite, or because of, political backlash. 

• The Biden administration has announced that Israelis will be allowed visa-free entry into the United States. Some have called this “premature” As Americans for Peace Now put it in a statement, “Although the US administration and the government of Israel have yet to release the full details of their understandings regarding the VWP, it is clear that important obstacles, which have been standing in the way of establishing US-Israeli reciprocity, have not yet been lifted. These problems will now be discussed by a joint committee, which will attempt to reconcile the rights of US citizens with Israeli security concerns related to its rule over the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.”

MY VIEWS ON…

…productivity!

This week’s newsletter is mostly to share this essay I wrote for the LA Review of Books about how, in the throes of professional angst, I decided to cope by watching every movie I could find by the late Czech director Jiri Menzel. It’s about the experience of doing that and about what I learned from it. 

I am writing this little blurb about it in part because I am really proud of this piece. I kind of feel like Joseph in Joseph Had a Little Overcoat, a children’s book about a man who makes something from his shoddy old coat, or the characters in Something From Nothing, a children’s book about how the things we carry with us can keep be turned, again and again, into something new. (Actually, now that I think about it, they’re basically the same book. I think we owned both of these illustrated tomes about old Jewish men when I was growing up. But I digress.)

I am also sharing this because this little project kind of changed my own relationship to work, creativity, and productivity. It let me shift, ever so slightly, in what I consider being productive and creative. I came to understand that you’re not only making whatever it is you’re trying to make when you’re, for example, reporting/writing/editing/publishing. You’re also doing it when you’re living. And living is the more important activity, anyway. 

I, of course, hope that people read the published work I link to every week. But I really hope you read this. I hope it makes you think. I hope it makes you feel better if you’re in a place where that’s applicable. And, if nothing else, I hope it encourages you to seek out some of Jiri Menzel’s very good movies. 

AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS

• From the New York Times: “Three museums in Zagreb have returned artworks looted from a Jewish businessman, giving them to his grandson after court decisions that resolved a 70-year dispute and paved the way for the first reported Holocaust-era art restitution in Croatia.”

• Concentration camp memorials in Germany are reportedly facing an increasing right-wing threat.

• Haaretz put together a Yom Kippur package on the direction of Israel.

• Hamburg’s historic synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis eight decades ago, is set for reconstruction.

• Tens of Jewish activists called on advertisers to drop the artist formerly known as Twitter.

• In case anyone reading this is near the Yiddish Book Centre: It’s opening a new permanent exhibit next month.

That’s it for now! Hope to see you back here soon.

-ET