Gal Beckerman

In recent years, an impressive number of particularly charming actors have played rabbis on TV. Adam Brody, Sarah Sherman, Daveed Diggs, and Kathryn Hahn have all donned a kippah, wrapped themselves in a tallis, and shown how fun loving (even sexy) it can feel to carve a path between the rock of tradition and the hard place of modernity. I’m not sure why progressive rabbis are the clerics to whom pop culture tends to assign this role, as opposed to, say, quirky priests or wacky imams.

One of the stranger moments among many in yesterday’s White House presser turned grudge match with Volodymyr Zelensky was a query about the Ukrainian president’s outfit. He was in town to sign a deal that would give the United States a big stake in his country’s rare-earth minerals and, hopefully, some newfound motivation to help fend off Russia’s aggression.

During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed.

My local independent bookstore has a corner devoted to what it calls “Palestinian Stories.” The small display of books, which went up in October 2023, is a grim collection of mostly nonfiction titles, such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 and Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine.

Jimmy Carter couldn’t keep his hands still. As he began to speak to the nation on the evening of July 15, 1979, one hand lay on top of another on the Resolute Desk. But soon he was pumping his fist, chopping the air in front of his chest. He had a confession of sorts to make: He had been planning something else, yet another speech about the energy crisis, his fifth, when he realized that he just couldn’t do it.

The very last shot of Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, is identical to its first: a close-up of the tortured, weary face of Benji Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin with a frenetic intensity familiar from his work on Succession. That his sad eyes remain static despite all he has seen is significant, because this is, ostensibly, a Holocaust film, and everyone is supposed to be changed by the end of a Holocaust film.

The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The power to vote with your feet, to exit if you so choose, gave the individual a veto over the state.

Kamala Harris is not an anti-Semite. It feels absurd to have to say this. After all, she is married to an actual Jew, and I’m certain he would happily vouch for her. But in the days since she took over Joe Biden’s spot as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, there has been a surge of innuendo that Harris bears a secret antipathy for Jews.
Leave it to Donald Trump to utter the quiet part out loud—he always does.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Sickness, like love and grief, is a universal part of the human condition—but it also feels completely subjective, so much so that conveying the accompanying sensations and emotions can be hard. Doctors sometimes ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10: Are you at a 5 or an 8? My mind always freezes in such moments.

In 2015, PEN America, the organization devoted to defending free speech, chose to honor the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at its annual gala. A few months earlier, Islamic extremists had murdered 12 people at the publication’s offices in Paris. The rationale for recognizing the magazine seemed airtight: People had been killed for expressing themselves, and PEN America’s mission is to protect people targeted for what they express.

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Occasionally you read a book that changes your sense of what a book can do. For me, that title was Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, which recounts the history of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule over the Congo and how an early-20th-century human-rights campaign managed to bring world attention to the atrocities taking place in the name of profit.

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Until last fall, I had never heard of Helen Garner—something that’s hard for me to believe. The Australian author, now 81 and treasured down under, has barely been published in the United States. But over the past few months, the imprint Pantheon has been releasing new editions of her backlist, and these books are mind-blowingly good.

Join Atlantic editors Jane Yong Kim, Gal Beckerman, and Ellen Cushing in conversation with executive editor Adrienne LaFrance for a discussion of “The Great American Novels,” an ambitious new editorial project from The Atlantic. The conversation will take place at The Strand in New York (828 Broadway) on Wednesday, April 3, at 7 p.m. Tickets are available for purchase here.

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The idea of a settled canon, one that towers Mount Rushmore–like above us, is boring. I’ll admit that some books and authors, after enough centuries have passed and their influence seems without question, should have their names etched in stone (although even The Iliad and Shakespeare can occasionally stir up a fight).

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The temptation for a writer to turn their memoir into a self-help book must be strong. The author has looked back at her life, her choices, her blunders, her triumphs. And through this process of retrospection, she might see lessons learned that apply not just to her, but really, to everyone.

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The role of first lady couldn’t be stranger. You attain the position almost by accident, simply by virtue of being married to the president, but then it comes with punishingly high expectations.

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When you’re a parent who loves to read—or as the case is for me, happily, makes his living from reading—the first time you see your child become obsessed with an author is a genuine thrill. For both of my daughters, that author was Raina Telgemeier.

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Exile has always served as a powerful engine for fiction. To find yourself displaced, whether self-imposed or inflicted by a state, is to be simultaneously inside and outside; you gain intimate proximity to your new society while still standing at a distance from it, seeing things real insiders can’t.

Hamas’s attack on October 7 had the effect of stopping time. Many Israelis and concerned Jews I’ve spoken with describe a day that has not yet ended for them—a continuous nightmare from which they can’t wake, a reality compounded by the knowledge that so many of the kidnapped are still in captivity.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Nature writing has always been a little unsatisfying to me, I’ll admit. Unlike our relationships with other humans, which are tinged with friction and love and all the other ingredients of drama, our encounters with the natural world seemed fairly static. Nature exists out there: We walk through it, we enjoy its beauty, we sometimes feel its indiscriminate wrath.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The National Book Awards, a glitzy affair otherwise known as the Oscars for book nerds, took place on Wednesday night. One overwhelming motif pulsed through nearly all of the winning books: the will of marginalized people to have their suppressed stories heard and acknowledged.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The literary internet is full of lists that suggest books that will inform you about one subject or another—we just published one last week in this very newsletter (on what to read to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). But recently, we decided to go a bit deeper and asked Atlantic writers and editors for books that changed how they think.

George Orwell is forever the patron saint of language and the ways it can become degraded in times of war—when a split occurs between what is being inflicted on human beings, on human bodies, and the words of ideologues who want to keep us from seeing “what is in front of one’s nose,” as Orwell famously put it.

Updated at 3:12 p.m. ET on October 7, 2023 What a difference a week makes.Just eight days ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking at The Atlantic Festival, rattled off a long list of positive developments in the Middle East, developments that were allowing the Biden administration to focus on other regions and other problems. A truce was holding in Yemen. Iranian attacks against U.S. forces had stopped. America’s presence in Iraq was “stable.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.At my small liberal-arts college, the freshmen were taught on the first day to chant in ancient Greek the opening line of The Iliad.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.For many who were purged during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union, one erasure followed another. After being sent to the Gulag (if they weren’t shot in the basement of the Lubyanka building), the ousted person would suffer the further indignity of having their face crosshatched with frantic pen marks to make them disappear from family albums.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published to colossal success in 1852, has been in reputational free fall ever since.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Sylvia Plath lived only to the age of 30—this year marks the 60th anniversary of her death. When you consider all that has been written about her, and the writers still thinking of her, the shortness of her existence is shocking.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The precipitous arrival of artificial intelligence into our lives over the past year has provoked some very deep existential quandaries, such as: What is it that a human can do that a robot never could? When it comes to creativity and whether art is within the range of a machine’s capabilities, this question is not so academic.