Новый документальный фильм рассказывает о важности профсоюзной солидарности в борьбе за права работников

Alex Kane (senior reporter): The Yale historian Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover is a monumental accomplishment—a compelling, rip-roaring tome that represents the defining portrait of a man whose tenure as FBI head spanned eight separate US presidents from both parties. The central conceit of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Centuryis that the story of his stewardship of the FBI is the story of the United States in the 20th century. As the power of the federal government grew to unprecedented heights during the New Deal, World War Two, and the Cold War, so too grew the FBI’s power, most notably in the realms of crime-fighting, surveillance and political repression. The book’s strength lies in the depth of its depiction of Hoover and his internal contradictions. The former FBI head is now a historical villain, known for COINTELPRO and for encouraging Martin Luther King to commit suicide. That is all in the book, of course, but how Hoover grew powerful enough to launch such invasive initiatives is not just a story of the advancing right. Hoover built alliances with everyone from FDR to the NAACP to the ACLU, whose leaders praised Hoover as someone who respected civil liberties and the Constitution (for instance, Hoover was opposed to the mass internment of Japanese Americans). Though personally racist, Hoover nonetheless submitted to the imperative to investigate lynchings, as well as the Ku Klux Klan, which he infiltrated as part of COINTELPRO. The contradictions of Hoover’s life also extended into the most intimate of realms: Hoover was widely thought to have romantic relationships with men, and he had to balance his personal desires with an intense atmosphere of homophobia that included FBI surveillance of gay men working for the federal government. If all you know about Hoover is his war on the left and his harassment of MLK, this book greatly complicates the popular narrative of the FBI chief, while also adding depth to those well-known episodes. It’s a tour-de-force. Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Coyote vs. ACME is making headlines this week for doing well at the box office, and—by doing so—embodying the underdog success story that it portrays onscreen. In 2023, the CEO of Warner Bros. had shelved it for a tax write-off. Ketchup Entertainment had picked it up after years of lobbying by fans and producers. Now, the box office success and the positive reviews are evidence of the fans’ judgment and the folly of corporate priorities. The film is in a mixed cartoon-and-live-action style, similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the late ’80s. Wile E. Coyote gets foiled yet again by a deficient ACME product in his quest to capture the Roadrunner. As he stares dejectedly at the mountain of broken products and schemes gone awry, a commercial comes onto his TV: A personal injury lawyer who will sue ACME for the impacts of deficient products. He heads into the big city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Watching the trailer gives a sense of what’s to come: The little guy putting up a fight against the giant ACME corporation. But within that plotline, the heart of the film is a character study in questions of failure, motivation, and friendship. The senior partner at the law firm, Kevin Avery, tries desperately to get out of the lawsuit that his firm brought. He doesn’t want to fight big—he wants to take home easy wins, for one broken product at a time. It’s Wile E.’s determination—and, to some extent, trickery—that moves the case forward, and that changes him. (Avery is played by Will Forte, who I know from voicing Wolf in The Great North; cartoon fans will also recognize Martha Kelly, the eponymous and deadpan Carol from Carol at the End of the World.) The film makes an existential argument that feels underrepresented in the contemporary moment. Often, trying over and over is framed as being the necessary key to success: If you try hard, or if you keep trying, you will eventually succeed. Wile E. posits a different lesson: You must try to do something over and over simply because you must, unrelated to whether you will succeed. He has pursued the Roadrunner for 30 years, not because he knows he will someday catch it, but because he hopes he will. What else would he do? There is a moment where ACME’s powerful lawyer (played by John Cena)—who Avery went to law school with and is intimidated by—says to Avery, “Do you really want to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail, over and over?” And it’s through Wile E.’s example that Avery develops a different perspective on the question than he had before. It’s a good lesson for leftists facing fascism and, frankly, it feels pretty Jewish. We yearn, at the heart of our ritual and study. Behavior is cyclical, and so is time; the point is not to accomplish something, but to perform it anew, again and again. The film tells a story that people recognize and crave—a little guy going up against a mega-corporation, aiming to reform the whole system. But the film also gets Looney Tunes humor right: Wile E. speaks with a series of rotating signs; Roadrunner winks at his would-be captors before dashing away; characters boing off the walls and freeze mid-air before dropping. We’ve seen many remakes where an attempt to capture a nostalgic tone or sense of humor misses the mark. Here, the filmmakers have taken an old cast of characters and made something that feels genuine and funny. It won’t change your life, but you’ll enjoy it! Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Many of us still bear within us the influence of the great “book” by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart How to Read Donald Duck. This magnificent and clever analysis of Disney helped us realize how widespread bourgeois ideology had spread, and to recognize its presence in the most unexpected places. I applied its methodology many years ago in examining the hidden Jewishness of the Three Stooges in my article “Moe, Larry, Curly and the Jewish Question” (this is a real article I wrote for a real magazine; copies available upon request). What none of us could have foreseen was the repurposing and redirecting of Disney products for radical ends without changing anything about their content. This is what we see in Runa Simi, the remarkable Peruvian film by Augusto Zegarra about the efforts of Fernando Valencia, a young Indigenous Peruvian, to dub The Lion King into Quechua. Spoken by around ten million people, Quechua is, like hundreds of languages, threatened with extinction. What better way to save and spread it, Fernando thinks, than to produce clips of popular films in Quechua—what he calls “Quechua Clips.” But he realizes what’s needed is a full film, and the ubiquitous Lion King is the work he settles on. Every child has a right to stories in his or her language, he says, and if no one else will do it, he will. No official organization will help him without Disney granting him the rights, and a large part of the film is taken up with Fernando trying to contact Disney one way or another to persuade them to allow him to move forward. Our hope, like his, is that life will turn out like a Capra film—that the little man will triumph over the corporation. Tireless in his efforts, Fernando finds a talented cast of Quechua-speakers. His mother bursts into tears of pride as her beloved son tries to save her mother tongue. In the end he both succeeds and fails. He risks falling afoul of corporate America, but he’s undaunted. The little man can win while losing by simply plowing ahead. He looks backward to his ancestral culture to make a radical change in the future: that of saving a language and a culture from obliteration. Struggle of a different kind is the subject of Yael Bridge’s stirring new documentary Who Moves America. This film is a kind of answer to Ken Loach’s 2019 Sorry We Missed You. Loach’s film revealed the misery of those who, deciding they prefer to be their own bosses, become “independent operators” for companies like Amazon, thinking this will lead to freedom, independence, and eventually great wealth. Loach shows that this is a mug’s game at which only the big guys win. Bridge’s film is all about solidarity, about what can be accomplished when instead of flying off on one’s own hook, workers unite behind their union. The film covers the negotiations and threatened strike of UPS workers in the Teamsters. It’s 2022 and they’re negotiating a new contract, attempting to correct for the bad contracts that followed a successful strike in 1997. Bridge’s focus moves in and out, covering the leaders of the union and the company as they position themselves for the fight, then moving in to show the lives of individual workers around the country involved in preparing for what could be a long, ugly strike. The victory of 1997 is brandished constantly by the more conscious workers and the union, but there are few remaining workers at UPS who were present for it. Is there still the necessary combativity to carry out a strike, should one occur? Bridge manages to present a fascinating account of working-class organizing without falling into hortatory or cheap Manicheanism. Who Moves America is enough to renew any flagging belief in the left-wing ideal of worker power. In keeping with this week’s theme, I’d like to strongly recommend that readers in New York pay a visit this weekend and next to the small gallery run by City Lore on the Lower East Side. The wonderful artist and filmmaker Zoe Beloff, a tireless and eccentric chronicler of working-class struggles, has a multimedia show on display called Life Forgotten, a film and exhibition based around the life of the early-20th century organizer Clara Lemlich. Beloff specializes in seamlessly blending the past and the present, with the former serving as inspiration for the latter. The film that the exhibit is built around skillfully integrates documentary footage and fiction, lending it all an air of reality. It will be on display Saturdays and Sundays through September 13th. Weekly Parshah Commentary Parshat Nitzavim-Vayeilech from Nathan Goldman Our double parshah this week opens with Moses standing before the Israelites, enjoining them to submit to God as part of the holy covenant. But wait—haven’t we heard this one before? Many chapters and years ago, in the Book of Shemot, God sealed a covenant with Moses and his people. So why the reenactment now? Back then, the Israelites were distant from the land they were to be given; now, they stand restlessly on the precipice of their inheritance. Perhaps a reminder is in order. Indeed, Moses’s words are harsh and unsparing regarding the Israelites’ possible transgressions. “Perchance there is among you some man or woman . . . whose heart is even now turning away from the Eternal our God,” he muses. These people, he cautions, “God will never forgive . . . Rather, God’s anger and passion will rage against them, till every sanction recorded in this book comes down upon them, and God blots out their name from under heaven.” Beyond the urgency drawn from the difference in temporal and physical proximity to the Promised Land, though, there’s another key and curious distinction between this iteration of the covenant and the ones that precede: the naming of strangers as part of the people bound by the covenant. Moses addresses his speech to “your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials—the entire body of Israel—your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp.” What do we make of his inclusion of foreigners in the Israelites’ midst? The medieval commentator Rashi claims that the line refers to converts: “This teaches,” he writes, “that some of the Canaanites came in Moses’s days to become proselytes just as the Gibeonites came in the days of Joshua.” Rashi here follows earlier Rabbinic texts, which often interpret “ger,” the word Moses uses for stranger, to mean what we’d now call a Jew by choice. Under this reading, the phrase complements a line later in our parshah. Moses declares: “I make this covenant . . . both with those who are standing here with us this day before the Eternal our God and with those who are not with us here this day.” The Rabbis reason that the latter category comprises “the subsequent generations, and the convert who will convert in the future”; thus all Jews, by birth or by choice, are members of the covenant. Yet in the plain reading of the Torah’s text, it does not seem that “ger” means “convert” at all. In fact, the very notion of conversion as we understand it is a later innovation. On its face, “ger” instead means a resident alien—a member of another nation who lives amidst the Israelites and according to their laws, renouncing certain practices of their people without adopting all the ways of the Israelites. If we take Moses’s reference in that sense, something remarkable emerges: The covenant between God and the Jewish people includes non-Jews. In this heterodox interpretation, the notion of Jewish peoplehood, understood as a category with firm boundaries, begins to come undone in the very moment in which it is enunciated. This passage then seems to presage scholar Shaul Magid’s recent critique of Jewish peoplehood. “Today,” Magid writes, “most American Jewish families are multi-ethnic . . . Most Jewish communities include non-Jews as members, tacitly or formally,” a reality that undermines the reigning notion of peoplehood, “which implies ethnic homogeneity.” He writes that “in regards to the new American Jewish constituency—one that includes biological Jews, half-Jews, non-Jews, spousal Jews, Jew-curious non-Jews, etc.—perhaps we need another model of thinking about collective identity.” Personally, I’ve long experienced Jewishness as a way of being inextricably intertwined with non-Jews. Though my partner is now a Jew by choice, before that she was for many years, to use Magid’s formulation, a “Jew-curious non-Jew”; as I’ve explained elsewhere in these pages, that relationship is in large part what brought me back into the fold of Jewishness (and—perhaps not coincidentally, since she was born an Irish Catholic and reared on strident anticolonialism—into anti-Zionism). As a teenager, it was a work of art by a non-Jew, Jeff Mangum of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, that inspired me to read Anne Frank’s diary and confront the horrors of the Shoah. And it was a pair of gentile teachers who helped me see the power of the Book of Job, the biblical text that has carried me through my darkest moments (and a book, I might add, in which a non-Jew is presented as the paradigmatic icon of suffering and granted a direct encounter with the divine). Most recently, I’ve been reflecting on the enmeshment of Jew and non-Jew as I’ve read Edmond Jabès, the French Egyptian poet whose deeply Jewish writing comes to us anglophones largely in the translation of Rosmarie Waldrop, herself not Jewish. In her rendering of his “Song of the Stranger,” we read: I’m looking for a man I don’t know, who’s never been more myself than since I started to look for him. Does he have my eyes, my hands and all those thoughts like flotsam of time? . . . Let us wrench thirst from the grain of salt no drink can quench. Along with the stones, a whole world eats its heart out, being from nowhere, like me. Here the entire cosmos, gentile and Jew alike, is made up of strangers, united in our being from nowhere. With Jabès’s and Wadrop’s words in our ears, perhaps we might venture that this is Moses’s reminder to us, the reason for the reinscription of the covenant at the threshold of the Promised Land: Any Jewishness ready to enter into sacredness—any Jewishness worth inhabiting at all—must be one in which we stand alienated from ourselves, entangled with others. Nathan Goldman is a senior editor at Jewish Currents. Want more Jewish Currents? Sign up now to receive new articles, reading recommendations, and more in your inbox.