Despite the progressive politics of early zombie films like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, modern narratives about zombies are often strikingly conservative, displaying a world that rewards rugged individualism and presents a pessimistic view of human nature. The recent HBO drama The Last of Us, based on the acclaimed 2013 video game of the same name, exemplifies this tendency. The show takes place two decades after an outbreak of a zombifying fungal infection triggers global societal collapse. In this post-apocalyptic world, a fascist government violently maintains order within walled-off “quarantine zones,” while a brutal resistance group called the Fireflies strives to overthrow them. The Last of Us follows the cynical smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) and a teenager named Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who is immune to the fungus, on their treacherous journey to meet up with a team of Fireflies who believe they can use her to create a vaccine. As Joel and Ellie bond against the backdrop of a dog-eat-dog world where no one can be trusted, the show presents a largely right-wing vision in which the only path to redemption is through caring for one’s immediate kin. According to Neil Druckmann—the co-creator of the series as well as the game and its sequel, who spent his early childhood in a West Bank settlement—elements of The Last of Us are informed by the politics of Israel/Palestine. On this week’s episode of On the Nose, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, managing editor Nathan Goldman, fellow Dahlia Krutkovich, and contributor Hazem Fahmy discuss the politics of the show, its relationship to Israel/Palestine, and its evocations of the Holocaust.

Note that this episode includes spoilers for the HBO series, as well as the game and its sequel, which will form the basis of future seasons of the show.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).” 

Articles Mentioned:

“‘The Last of Us’ Is a Very Conservative Show. Really,” Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

“The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of ‘The Last of Us Part II,’” Emanuel Maiberg, Vice

“The Evolution of Ellie,” Elise Favis, The Washington Post

“The Gray Zone,” Primo Levi (from The Drowned and the Saved)

“The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation,” Andrea Long Chu, Vulture

After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed his defense minister for calling for a halt to government plans to gut the power of Israel’s judiciary, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, participating in spontaneous mass protests and setting bonfires in the street. The next day, after a general strike brought the economy to a halt, Netanyahu backtracked, announcing the Knesset would not vote on the first part of his government’s judicial overhaul plan and that he would instead engage in negotiations with the opposition to forge consensus. To discuss these developments, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel spoke with senior reporter Alex Kane, contributing editor Joshua Leifer, and contributing writer Elisheva Goldberg. They talked about how anti-occupation activists are relating to the mass protests, why the Israeli right is so intent on curbing judicial power, and the future of Netanyahu’s coalition.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).” 

Articles and Tweets Mentioned:

“Huwara and the Dangers of Annexation,” Elisheva Goldberg, Jewish Currents

“The Laundromat of Dispossession,” Amira Hass, Haaretz (Hebrew)

“The Long Reach of Restraint,”Elisheva Goldberg, Jewish Currents

“What’s Next for Netanyahu’s Judicial Overhaul?”, Alex Kane in conversation with Edo Konrad, Jewish Currents

“Do Israeli Protesters Really Want Democracy”?”,  Orly Noy, +972 Magazine

“What American Liberals Can Learn from Israel’s Protests,” Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic

Noah Kulwin’s tweet on the Israeli protests as “Muellerism”

“A Color Revolution in Israel,” Liel Leibovitz, Compact

“American Jewish Committee, Other Jewish Organizations Welcome Suspension of Israeli Judicial Overhaul Legislation,” AJC

Kan News segment on the Histadrut’s links to Netanyahu (Hebrew) 

On episode 8, season 27 of The Bachelor, contestant Ariel Frenkel, who hails from a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant family in New York, is seen leading all-American Bachelor Zach Shallcross around New York City, feeding him cow tongue sandwiches and gefilte fish from Sarge’s Deli and telling him her family’s story of fleeing the Soviet Union. Such overt references to Jewishness are unprecedented on the franchise; though the show has featured a few Jewish leads, it tends to downplay contestants’ references to their minority identities and center stories of people using their Christian values to guide them toward love. On this episode of On the Nose, associate editor Mari Cohen and fellow Dahlia Krutkovich join Hannah Srajer, an organizer and PhD candidate in history at Yale University, and Xandra Ellin, a producer at Pineapple Street Studios, to talk about Frenkel’s improbable run on the show. They discuss how the portrayal of Frenkel’s as an exotic other illuminates the show’s identification with white Christian patriarchy, why the Jewishness of another contestant involved in a racist scandal flew under the radar, and what to make of a pro-Israel article Frenkel published in 2014. 

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).” 

Related Articles: 

“‘The Bachelor’ Has A Race — And Racism — Problem,” Emma Gray and Claire Fallon, The Huffington Post  

“Why Haven’t We Had an Openly Jewish Bachelorette?” Catherine Horowitz, Jewish Women’s Archive 

Former ‘Bachelor’ contestant Greer Blitzer apologizes for defending racist blackface, Jonah Valdez, Los Angeles Times 

“This ‘Bachelor’ Finalist’s Op-Ed Was Mysteriously Deleted Before Premiere,” Noor Ibrahim, The Daily Beast

In recent years, German state officials and media outlets have cracked down on Palestinian speech and activism. In 2019, the German parliament passed a nonbinding resolution declaring the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement antisemitic, and comparing it to Nazi boycotts of Jewish businesses. Early last year, a state-funded news outlet fired seven Arab and Muslim journalists for “antisemitism” that mostly amounted to criticism of Israel. And last May, Berlin banned several protests planned to mark Nakba Day, which commemorates the 1947–1949 expulsion of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians at the hands of Zionist militias. To discuss Palestine solidarity in Germany, the state’s intensifying assault on Palestinian speech, and the connections between the country’s targeting of Palestine activism and its post-Holocaust “memory culture,” contributing editor Joshua Leifer talks to Germany-based Palestinian American journalist Hebh Jamal and Palestinian German lawyer Nadija Samour. 

This episode is part two of a two-part series on Germany. Listen to the first episode here.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).” 

Articles, Books and Lectures Mentioned

“How Palestine became a ‘forbidden word’ in German high schools,” Hebh Jamal, +972 Magazine

“Deutsche Welle Firings Set Chilling Precedent for Free Speech in Germany,” Alex Kane, Jewish Currents

The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor

“Desiring Victimhood: German Self-Formation and the Figure of the Jew,” Hannah Tzuberi, lecture given at the Hijacking Memory Conference in Berlin

“Berlin Bans Nakba Day Demonstrations,” Human Rights Watch

Since early January, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have participated in weekly protests against the right-wing Israeli government’s proposals to weaken the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. The protesters have framed their efforts as a bid to save “Israeli democracy”—rhetoric that has alienated Palestinian citizens of Israel, who say Israel was never a democracy to begin with due to its repressive system of control over Palestinians. Senior reporter Alex Kane hosts a discussion with Palestinian activist Sally Abed of Standing Together and Iranian Israeli activist Orly Noy of B’Tselem and the newly formed Mizrahi Civic Collective about who is participating in these protests—and who is sitting them out.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Articles Mentioned:

“A Mizrahi Democratic Vision: No to the Constitutional Revolution and No to the Old Order,” Mizrahi Civic Collective (Hebrew)

A new Netflix-produced romcom by Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris tells the story of Ezra, a white Jew, and Amira, a Black Muslim, whose love affair is challenged by the patronizing, casual racism of Ezra’s progressive mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and the antisemitism and militant separatism of Amira’s Farrakhan-loving father (Eddie Murphy). Jewish commentators across the political spectrum have responded overwhelmingly negatively, accusing the film of everything from perpetuating harmful stereotypes of Jewish women, to trafficking in conspiracy theories, to inciting violence against Jews. Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, JC contributing writer Rebecca Pierce, critic and essayist Jasmine Sanders, and writer and Know Your Enemy co-host Sam Adler-Bell discuss these over-the-top critiques and explore why similarly cringe and stereotypical depictions of the Black family did not raise alarms among Black or Jewish critics.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).” 

ARTICLES, BOOKS, AND FILMS MENTIONED:

You People on Netflix

“In Jonah Hill’s offensive new movie, a Black-Jewish love story comes with a side of conspiracy theories,” Mira Fox, The Forward

“Netflix Hit 'You People' Branded 'Horribly Damaging' to Jewish People,” Ryan Smith, Newsweek

“‘You People’ Normalizes Farrakhan’s Views On Jews,” Allison Josephs, Jew in the City

“'You People' and the Tediousness of the Interracial Romcom,” Zeba Blay, Jezebel

We Charge Genocide

“Precious Angel,” Bob Dylan

Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris

Last month saw the release of two autobiographical films, now both Oscar nominees, about young artists growing up in complicated, 20th-century American Jewish families. In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg follows a precocious child filmmaker, Sammy Fabelman, as he turns his camera on his fracturing family. In Armageddon Time, James Gray meditates on Queens in 1980, where the intersections of school, family, and the police destroy a friendship between two boys, one Black and one Jewish. Do these movies have something new to say about the drama of upwardly mobile Jewish family life, or are they simply retreading familiar territory? Jewish Currents contributing writer Rebecca Pierce joined editors Arielle Angel, Ari Brostoff, and Mari Cohen on this week’s On the Nose to discuss the latest in Jewish film. 

MOVIES AND TV EPISODES MENTIONED:

8 ½, dir. Federico Fellini

Pain and Glory, dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Cinema Paradiso, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore

Lincoln, dir. Steven Spielberg

Star Wars, dir. George Lucas

Jaws, dir. Steven Spielberg

“Miami Mama-Mia/Pigeon on the Roof,” Animaniacs

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Chevruta is a new column named for the traditional method of Jewish study, in which a pair of students analyzes a religious text together. In each installment, Jewish Currents will match leftist thinkers and organizers with a rabbi or Torah scholar. The activists will bring an urgent question that arises in their own work; the Torah scholar will lead them in exploring their question through Jewish text. By routing contemporary political questions through traditional religious sources, we aim to address the most urgent ethical and spiritual problems confronting the left. Each column will be accompanied by a podcast and a study guide (linked below).

In our debut Chevruta podcast, rabbinical student Allen Lipson explores debt’s moral implications with Sparky Abraham and Eleni Schirmer—organizers from the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union. Lipson chose a rabbinic responsum from 14th-century Spain by Rabbi Isaac bar Sheshet Perfet, generally known as the Rivash, on the question of whether a debtor can be seized and imprisoned according to Torah law. By tracing the Rivash’s ambivalence about debt enforcement, Lipson, Abraham, and Schirmer consider questions about state force and economic consent raised by the text that still resonate today.

You can find the column based on this conversation and a study guide here. The full Hebrew text of the letter and Lipson’s translation are available here.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Tom Stoppard, perhaps the most famous living British playwright, learned only in his fifties that his mother’s family was Jewish and that nearly all her relatives were killed in the Holocaust—a fate his own immediate family narrowly escaped. Now in his eighties, Stoppard has turned these revelations into the material of his play Leopoldstadt, which tells the story of a bourgeois Viennese Jewish clan inspired by his own Czech family, and an assimilated British grandson’s discovery of their fate at the hands of the Nazis. The play, now a Broadway hit, has drawn accolades, but left several of us at and around Jewish Currents distinctly underwhelmed. Why is theater still treating the Holocaust as an object of dramatic irony? What are audiences looking for in stories of this kind? Where does Leopoldstadt fit in the long history of anti-Nazi theater, and what are its politics around Zionism? Alisa Solomon, who reviewed the play for Jewish Currents, and dramaturg Gabrielle Hoyt joined JC editors Arielle Angel and Ari Brostoff to discuss. 

Articles and Reports Mentioned:

“Review: In Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt,’ a Memorial to a Lost World,” Jesse Green, The New York Times

“Attention Must Be Paid,” Alisa Solomon, Jewish Currents

“Monuments to the Unthinkable,” Clint Smith in The Atlantic 

“Culture Under the Nazis,” Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

In the last two years, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have begun using the word “apartheid” to describe Israeli rule over Palestinians, marking a significant shift within the human rights establishment. But Palestinian intellectuals have been critiquing Israeli apartheid for decades—albeit in a different fashion. As scholars of international law Noura Erakat and John Reynolds wrote in an essay published in the summer issue of Jewish Currents, a rich archive of Palestinian writing from the 1960s and ’70s frames apartheid as “an inevitable outcome of Israeli settler colonialism,” and a key “vehicle for its continuance.” Erakat and Reynolds argue that if we understand apartheid as a tool of settler colonialism, it appears to “require the same remedies as other manifestations of colonial rule and foreign occupation: collective liberation and land restitution.” By contrast, the human rights organizations have advanced a more legalistic understanding of apartheid, and suggested accordingly that the solution  is to institute formal legal equality in Israel/Palestine—in other words, to extend equal rights to all who live in the land. Alex Kane discusses this and more with Erakat, Reynolds, and Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch.

Articles and Reports Mentioned:

“Understanding Apartheid,” Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, Jewish Currents

“A Threshold Crossed,” Human Rights Watch

“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity,” Amnesty International

“The Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid,” Michael Sfard, Yesh Din

“A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” B’Tselem

“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”