A Movie about Two Jews Exploring Their Family’s Past Endorses a Limited Understanding of History

Jan. 21 2025

“Theodor Adorno said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz,” writes Emil Stern, “but he didn’t say anything about buddy movies.” Stern was moved to this observation by the recent film A Real Pain—written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who also plays one of the main characters—about two Jewish cousins who visit Poland to learn about their family history. Stern comments:

For a film about emotional inheritance and the gap between personal and ancestral pain, A Real Pain seems determined not to dig too deeply. It feels warmly toward its solipsistic characters, but the film’s warmth and self-effacement come at the expense of any larger point. It doesn’t just depict its characters who have a limited understanding of the past; it endorses it.

Eisenberg, in interviews, has described the film as a “love letter to Poland.” Well, as Woody Allen might say, the heart wants what the heart wants. I understand how many Jewish customs and attitudes come from the Jewish people’s time in Ashkenaz. And I myself loved my time (and even felt at home) in Munich, where my mother was born after the war—but I also felt the obvious historical complication of that affection, an ambivalence the film might have expressed or explored. My grandparents talked about the beauty of Polish forests, but this did not negate the brutality of much of the local population or what sometimes happened in those forests.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Film, Holocaust, Jewish history, Poland

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict