“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.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.