My Weekend with Books and Films

Substack

So what do I do while everything--absolutely everything--is teetering on the existential edge and the most profound violence commands the day?

Well, first I study a little Torah--every single chapter moves at a divinely driven pace. It is often hard for mere humans to keep up with it. I read commentaries about it. This week I consulted Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z"l, Nachmanides z"l, and various midrashim in the Jewish media about parashat Vayera. One can spend one's entire life on a single chapter.

Second, I also read books--lots of them. This past weekend an unexpected gift arrived in the mail, a book written by Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon, a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. She is a colleague (we once shared a publisher, Transaction). Pilon has many other books to her credit, including An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left. This lovely little memoir is titled Notes From the Other Side: From Communism to a Fragile Freedom. It was just republished for the fourth time in September of 2026 and also in Romanian. It is beautifully written work.

Pilon has a quirky, whimsical, and masterful way with the English language. Here, she remembers her Bucharest ancestors who either escaped or were murdered by the Nazis; her childhood in Romania; and, finally, her own and her family's departure from communist Romania in 1974 when she was a teenager. In a 2026 Afterword, Pilon described what life is like under totalitarian communism, and it is, alas, all too timely. She writes about:

"The onslaught of untruths, the inevitable erosion of trust, and the lacunae of knowledge caused by censorship and corruption...Growing up in Romania's one-party system, I was used to all that...Living under a government that controlled its citizens lives, where the rule of law meant rule without law, was bad enough. Outlawing emigration by declaring it tantamount to treason was--and is--the last resort of totalitarianism."

Sounds too much like the ideas and behaviors of all those Marxist maniacs who are setting the West on fire, doesn't it? No dissent tolerated; whistleblowers are immediately silenced, punished, forgotten. Pilon continues:

"My father's childhood villa, having already been expropriated by the Nazis, was automatically ‘nationalized.’ As would happen everywhere else in occupied Europe, the new dictators of the proletariat ‘resettled’ themselves inside the mansions belonging to former aristocrats. My father immediately applied for emigration."

Pilon is exceptionally eloquent as she describes how the authorities humiliated every such emigrant, allowing them very little money and practically no clothing, toys, photographs, or books to take with them. This was also pro forma for all the Jews who were thrown out of Egypt and out of other Muslim Arab countries. Leave if you dare, leave if you must, but you leave penniless and with nothing of sentimental value.

Pilon was astonished by how easily Americans were seduced by the "likes of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mao....” They still are. It is an astonishing phenomenon. I've just dealt with a pack of ferocious feminists in terms of their psychotic hatred of Israel and their passionate embrace of Hamas and Gaza. It defies all reason. And it also happened over this last weekend. But, happily, other feminists had my back and spoke up on principle. A redemptive moment indeed.

Juliana and I have corresponded over the years. However, I did not understand why she sent me, of all people, this quietly wise and important book. And then it hit me. I, too, had written about Romania. First, as a way of sharing Ruth Aliav Kluger's heroic rescues of Romanian and other East European Jews--and then, more recently, about my son's grandparents who came from Romania and from Bessarabia and, rather heroically, got the hell out before it was too late.

But this is not all that I did as the world teetered on its axis, and all the political tectonic plates sounded an alarm.

I watched Umberto Passolini's 2024 film The Return; it was his version of The Odyssey. Passolini's Odysseus is shamed that only he, and not a single one of his men, lived to return to Ithaca. Shamed that he left his young bride, Penelope (she could not have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old) and their infant son, Telemachus, behind for twenty years. Twenty years! Whatta guy this "complicated" trickster was. "Complicated" is how Emily Wilson begins her fine translation:

"Tell me about a complicated man,

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy..."

We seem to be in the midst of a mania for Odysseus. But it is also very clear: The Odyssey celebrates killer-warriors; their taking of slave women; male lust (Paris just had to have the beautiful but married Helen--well, she did not seem to mind); the complete but "manly" abandonment of home, wives, and children, both for the sake of treasure and high-risk adventure. Macho Men, whose definition of honor has everything to do with killing and male bonding and little to do with kindness, wisdom, loyalty, love. Leaving womenfolk as the only way to become a "man"--how Freudian. Such a definition of "honor" is not mine. These beloved figures are not exactly philosopher kings or protectors of the hearth, are they?

I am glad that so many female classical scholars and great novelists have been re-interpreting the women in this story: Penelope (Margaret Atwood), Circe (Madeline Miller), Clytemnestra (Costanza Casati), etc. There are many more.

But then, in order to avoid all the opinions that are meant to pass as news, I also watched a gripping Israeli detective movie, The Eleventh Body, up at Izzy TV. The lead character is a tough, determined, rather wild Israeli woman (Iris Abramov), a detective of Moroccan ancestry who is trying to solve and/or stop a vicious, Haifa-based blood feud between an Arab crime family and an equally badass group of Jews. As warnings or as revenge, children and other family members are being systematically murdered, kidnapped, threatened, or shot at. The shots of Haifa are dazzling ( it is a jewel of a city), and the complexity of the characters is a refreshing departure from most crime thrillers. However, by the seventh and final episode, the film lost some of its rather thrilling tension--I dare not say anymore. Watch it. It will keep you on the edge of your seat.

In short, my friends, I can no longer bear to keep watching, at least not 24/7 as I've previously done, the "political" news--so many manufactured lies--nor can I keep reading about all the local incidences of parents torturing, even murdering, their children, madmen stabbing strangers, lunatic women physically assaulting their pro-Israel female "enemies"--oh, and yes, the fearfully impending world war, and the Western delusion of making peace with radical political Islamists.

So: How did you spend the last three days?