Search Results for: religion

The Many Acts of Keith Gordon

Keith Gordon circa 2008. (Photo: Rachel Griffin.)

David Obuchowski | The Awl and Longreads | January 2018 | 34 minutes (8,481 words)

Our latest feature is a new story by David Obuchowski and produced in partnership with The Awl.

“When I first met him the only thing I really remember is that he looked familiar to me,” cinematographer Tom Richmond told me about Keith Gordon, the director and former actor. “We would walk down the street…and people would recognize him all the time,” said Bob Weide, an executive producer, writer, director and one of Gordon’s oldest friends. “He has one of those faces where it would be, ‘Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you, but don’t I know you?’ …Keith would always give them the benefit of the doubt and say, ‘Um, I don’t know. Do we know each other?’ They’d say, “Did you go to Brandeis?’ And Keith would say, ‘No, no, no, I didn’t.’ …They’d say, ‘Wait a minute, did you grow up in Sacramento?’”

“You know what it’s like, when you see him from that time,” recalled Gordon’s wife, Rachel Griffin, a film producer and former actress. “He looked like somebody you knew.” And it was often true, sort of: many people know what he looked like in the mid 1980s, because Gordon had been a very visible, successful actor in teen comedies and thrillers.

“They would rarely say, ‘Oh my god, you’re the guy in Christine, or you’re the guy in Dressed to Kill or whatever,” Weide said. “Sometimes I would actually just jump in and say, ‘He’s an actor, you’ve probably just seen him in one of his films.’ …It was just really painful for him. People thought they knew him, but he was always way too embarrassed or humble to say ‘I’m an actor, maybe you’ve seen one of my movies’.”

Maybe you have seen one of his movies, and not just one he’s starred in. Gordon has directed five feature films, as well as some of the most prestigious of prestige television, including but not even remotely limited to “Fargo,” “The Leftovers,” and “Homeland.” Read more…

Jesus Is Everywhere in Port-au-Prince, but So Is Vodou

(Daniel Morel/AP Photo)

The massive earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010 left thousands homeless and desperate, struggling to find the strength to rebuild their lives. As usual, opportunistic preachers emerged to sell them comfort and make sense of it all. Ecclésias Donatien at Tabernacle de Louange and André Muscadin, founding pastor of Shalom Tabernacle de Gloire, are two of Haiti’s biggest and richest. People say Muscadin is connected to the police, that he’s Mafia, has political ambitions. People fear him. He said he based his religious business off of “the McDonald’s model.”

For the newly relaunched Believer, Susana Ferreira reports on the way Haiti’s booming evangelism business deals with Vodou, Haiti’s African Creole spiritual practice. Violent tensions and distrust have existed between Vodouisants and missionary Christians for centuries, but these tensions are not only about religion. They’re about autonomy, about whether native Haitians get to determine their own religious identity and success, and about missionary evangelicalism’s continued colonial power over Haiti, be they crooked megachurch pastors or well-meaning American teens volunteering in the cleanup efforts.

“Evangelicals arrive, and the first thing they do is destroy trees. They say that in that tree there is the devil,” he said, practically spitting his words. The act of desecrating the kingdom below for the sake of the kingdom above, he said, went beyond sacrilege. Josué told me he wasn’t anti-Christian, but he classified the actions of the Jeunes and many foreign missionaries as anti-Haitian.

“The words that the evangelicals bring discourage peasants from working for the earth, but to work for heaven. That’s the sin. It’s the missionary that’s in sin,” Josué said, his voice tired, body slumped in a plastic chair, the lingering dusk casting sharp shadows across the angles of his face. “The real paradise is here on earth. In our Vodou tradition, this is your paradise, where you live.”

Josué is one of several high-profile people from Haiti’s Vodou communities pressing the state to declare August 14 a national holiday—not for its religious significance, but specifically to mark the role of the gathering at Bois Caïman in the abolition of slavery and the end of colonial rule. Of this fact Josué was sure every Haitian could be proud, regardless of their faith. His fact-finding mission with the ethnography staff would go toward preparing a proposal for facilities to be built to receive groups of international tourists at the site and a permanent memorial to the twenty-one nations who came together to buck the course of history—the same number of evil spirits the Jeunes claimed to have exorcised.

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From One Friendship, Lessons on Life, Death, AIDS, and Childlessness

Left to right: Dan, the author, and Michael. (Photo courtesy of the author)

S. Kirk Walsh | Longreads | January 2018 | 27 minutes (6,711 words)

 

I first met Dan Cronin on an early spring evening in 1993. Michael, my new boyfriend, introduced us. We were standing on the southwest corner of 12th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A stream of cabs, city buses, and cars surged toward the illuminated marble arch of Washington Square. The changing twilight danced through the rustling, pale-green leaves of the trees that shaded the grounds of the nearby church. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” Dan said to me. His smile was angelic and mischievous, his eyes, a striking slate blue. He lit a Newport cigarette, a wisp of smoke releasing from the corner of his mouth.

That night, we decided on dinner at a family-run Italian restaurant in the West Village. The three of us talked about books (J. M. Synge, E. L. Doctorow), Catholicism (the religion of our childhoods), Arthur Ashe’s recent death from AIDS, Dan and Michael’s strong allegiances to Upper West Side. It was a memorable night. As I said goodbye to them at the 14th Street subway stop, I felt a kind of certainty and contentment as if I already knew that Dan and Michael were going to be a part of my life for a long time.

Prior to that night, Michael had also told me a lot about Dan: He was a professional tenor, who had performed on Broadway and national tours around the country. He was a voracious reader of American history, passionate about all things Abraham Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. He was religious in his daily purchasing of lottery tickets. (He always played the same numbers; the street address of his childhood home.) He was employed as a waiter at the famed Russian Tea Room. (He was the shop steward of the union, and the powerful position allowed him to work only when he felt up to it.) Having recently visited his ancestral town in County Kerry, Ireland, he told a story of encountering a man who could recite passages of Ulysses in Gaelic.

Over the past year, Dan and Michael had become close friends. They had many lively discussions about sports and politics, but their true bond centered on their experiences with recovery, addiction, pain, and abuse. “He’s a remarkable man with many talents,” Michael said when he first told me about Dan. “It’s sad because he’s HIV positive.” Shortly after his diagnosis seven years earlier, Dan started taking high doses of AZT (zidovudine, the first antiretroviral drug approved by the FDA in 1987) as a part of his treatment protocol.

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Responses

We’re delighted to share three responses to Scott’s essay “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story” from Paul Bloom, William Gatewood, and Daniel Raeburn.

Jump to responses by Paul, William, and Daniel.

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The Arrogance of Empathy by Paul Bloom

I don’t regret calling my last book, Against Empathy, even when people tell me they are embarrassed to read it in public. But this in-your-face title does force me to do a lot of explaining.

The first problem lies with “empathy” — a word with far too many meanings. Some people take it to refer to morality and kindness and love, to everything good. And so I spend a lot of time explaining that I’m not against that — I’m not a psychopath! Empathy also has to do with understanding other people, and I’m not against that either, though we often forget how much damage this sort of understanding can do in the hands of a bully, a con man, or a sadist. Empathy in this sense of understanding is morally neutral; it is a form of intelligence and like any other form of intelligence, it can be used for good or evil.

The notion of empathy that I’m interested in is more visceral. It involves experiencing the world as others do, when you feel the pain of others. This capacity has a lot of fans, but I argue that it is a moral train wreck. It is narrow and biased and innumerate, giving rise to selfish and irrational and often cruel decisions. I won’t make the argument here; it’s in my book and elsewhere.

The second problem with the title has to do with the word “Against.” I’m against empathy, sure, but only its moral effects. It has other merits, and I end my book by describing one of them:

Empathy can be an immense source of pleasure. Most obviously, we feel joy at the joy of others. I’ve noted elsewhere that here lies one of the pleasures of having children: You can have experiences that you’ve long become used to—eating ice cream, watching Hitchcock movies, riding a roller coaster—for the first time all over again. Empathy amplifies the pleasures of friendship and community, of sports and games, and of sex and romance. And it’s not just empathy for positive feelings that engages us. There is a fascination we have with seeing the world through the eyes of another, even when the other is suffering. Most of us are intensely curious about the lives of other people and find the act of trying to simulate these lives to be engaging and transformative.

In the last couple of sentences, I was talking about the pleasure of stories, and this brings me to Scott Korb’s fascinating discussion. I’m pleased to see that my work has had such an influence on his thinking — now it’s mutual.

Korb distinguishes between empathic engagement and “the sympathetic imagination.” Empathy is all about the other, while sympathetic imagination implicates the self; we lose ourselves in empathy, while the sympathetic imagination lets us retain some valuable distance — it gives rise to “an aloofness about the self that makes possible the very self-implication or dramatic irony, or what have you, that turns life into art, our ideas into stories.” In life and in art, such aloofness is better than the selfish immersion of empathy.

Korb talks about the moral problems of empathic engagement, and I agree with him too much to have a good discussion on this issue. But his analysis leads me to look at another worry about empathy, nicely illustrated by his remarkable quote from the novel Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee. Much of the book is about a controversial lecture series given by Costello — an elderly Australian novelist — and Coetzee’s book includes long excerpts from Costello’s lectures, including one in which she justifies her claim about appreciating the inner lives of animals.

“If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Elizabeth Costello is an arrogant character, and this is an arrogant claim. How does she know that she has succeeded in thinking her way into the existence of Joyce’s character? She thinks it’s obvious from the fact that she has been invited to present in such a prestigious lecture series, but this just pushes the question back — how can she know that her audience knows that she got things right? But it’s the final sentence that really shocks. Perhaps we can have some success figuring out what it’s like to be someone very much like us (perhaps even someone imaginary), but it hardly follows from this that we can think our way into the mental life of bats or chimpanzees or oysters. (If I were in the audience, I’d ask, “So, fine, answer Thomas Nagel’s question: What’s it like to be a bat?”)

I’ve written about this arrogance elsewhere, describing psychological research by Nicholas Epley and his colleagues showing that while people are often highly confident in their ability to appreciate the thoughts of others — even highly similar others — they are wrong much of the time. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book Transformative Experience, takes this further, arguing that it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a person who has had certain deeply significant experiences that you haven’t yourself experienced, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. You not only can’t successfully think your way into a similar other, then, you also can’t even think your way into your own future self. Even the best descriptions won’t do the trick — you really have to be there.

I’m a fiction skeptic, then. I think novels and short stories and movies and the like can give us some glimmerings of the minds of others, some approximation of the inner life of — to give some examples from my favorite recently-read books — an autistic teenager, a black boy growing up in the South, or a small-town sheriff. But this understanding is nowhere near as much as we would hope. As for the claim that reading fiction somehow makes us better people, well, anything is possible, and the right fiction might lead certain moral qualities to flourish. But we should be mindful of Richard Posner’s point that there were no better readers than the Nazis.

With all of my cynicism about empathy, one might think, then, that I would resonate with Nabokov’s advice on how to read, quoted by Korb: “We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy — passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers — the inner weave of a given masterpiece.”

But I’m not. Such advice reminds me of this series in Slate called “You’re Doing It Wrong.” (Typical article: “Stop Pretending Banana Bread Can Be Healthy. It Is Basically Cake”). It turns out that we love doing precisely what Nabokov tells us to avoid, becoming immersed in the lives of others, imagining ourselves (or better, foolishly believing that we are imagining ourselves) as Anna Karenina or Tony Soprano or Nabokov’s own Humbert Humbert.

Maintaining aloofness may be excellent advice for writers, and is likely the better moral stance. But as readers we are naturally compelled to ignore this advice and lose ourselves in the minds of others. We like our cake and we should be left alone to enjoy it.

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Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.


Nothing But the Writing by William Gatewood

I’ve long operated under this assumption: not only is empathy inherent in good writing, but writing itself will make you more empathetic. Empathy is like a muscle, teachers, students, and blogs say (e.g., “Why Empathy is Key to Story”— the first Google result!). It can be trained, built up. Strengthened until the whole world fits on your shoulders. And writing, real high-minded literary writing, is the best way to get your reps in. Unfortunately for all of us, these beliefs are dogmatic in the purest sense, both in that they seem right and good, and that there’s no evidence to support them.

The idea that writing is empathy is so pervasive that I’ve yet to meet the beginning writer immune to its charms. I was especially guilty of this. For years, I wanted to believe that the more I wrote, the better person I’d become: less self-obsessed, more communal, hell, friendlier. So I wrote fiction that made it look like I was these things. I still do.

After two years engaged in an MFA, I’ve learned that what a writing workshop really teaches you is how to portray empathy. Whether the work is actually empathetic (can work even be empathetic?) is impossible to know. Peers and teachers in workshop can only judge and react to the performance. “This seems lived,” someone might say. Or, “You really captured this person’s essence.” And the tricks are always the same (they’ve been standardized over the last hundred years): specificity, proper names, the sensorium — “A Tropicana and a Kind Bar.” This is mimicry wearing empathy’s boots. But that doesn’t make it less beautiful, less meaningful, or less moving art.

There’s a fantastic moment in “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass”: “when we write, we’re engaged in another sort of activity, tapping into a different…mode of being.” Yes, we are, if we’re lucky, but terms like “sympathetic imagination” lean too close to those value judgments meant to validate writing, to explain the why of it all: after-the-fact explanations. Instead, what happens to me once in a while is what Paul Bloom has described experiencing himself: a “flow state,” wherein all that exists is the next word, the next sentence. Gone is the self, gone the room. Gone, especially, are other people. My mind amalgamates its stolen ideas wildly, haphazardly, rearranging them piece by piece. How could any kind of relationship survive in this vacuum? Sure, everything comes back, but for a time: nothing but the writing.

I suspect that “aloof detachment” (to the self, to others, to the work) is only truly possible following a lifetime of obsession and isolation. It’s the best possible outcome (and there are a million terrible ones). The swordsmith folds steel for decades until they’re lost in folding. The baker in baking. The painter in painting. So too should it come for the writer, lost in her verb. That trick Scott recommends at the end, “resisting whatever need I have to know immediately what a thing means to me” — this is important. Since hearing this line when he first delivered his talk, it’s become my standard definition of artistry. This is how you lose yourself in the work, and it is the getting lost that matters.

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William is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, with his wife and Cocker Spaniel.


Can Empathy Lead to Theft? by Daniel Raeburn

Before I read Scott’s piece I felt certain I’d start my response with my long-standing distinction between sympathy and empathy, one I explain to my writing students. Sympathy, I always say, is fellow-feeling. Commiseration. Empathy, on the other hand, is understanding. It’s not only putting yourself in another person’s shoes, but her head, as well. It allows you to see her point of view without necessarily sharing it. It allows you to have shared emotions — despite, perhaps, not knowing whether the emotions are actually shared — but it’s ultimately more cerebral than sympathizing, and I’ve long maintained that it’s what you’re really after in writing.

But after reading “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story,” I think I might have it backward. Perhaps my confusion boils down to semantics: if you draw a Venn diagram of sympathy and empathy there’s a lot of overlap. The two are like fraternal twins, similar enough that their differences seem magnified by comparison. I’d call it the narcissism of minor differences except that Scott’s a) making a crucial distinction and b) clearly arguing on behalf of a mindset that’s the opposite of narcissism. When he says empathy I think he means what’s sometimes called emotional empathy: feeling, almost against your will, what the other guy is feeling — which is what I meant by the word sympathy. When he argues on behalf of what he calls sympathy I think he’s arguing for what’s sometimes called cognitive empathy: thinking what the other guy is thinking. Grasping his perspective. Going from reading the words on the page to reading someone’s mind — which is what I want in writing, and what I meant by empathy.

In other words, Scott and I agree. At least I think so. I think he’s arguing on behalf of Coetzee’s “sympathetic imagination” for the same reasons that Bloom argued, in Against Empathy, the book that apparently started all this, for replacing emotional empathy with rational compassion. With a cooler, more distant care and concern. Caring that keeps your identity, and thus your ability to function (and write), intact. One of the many problems with purely emotional empathy is that that way lies identification with or, God help you, confusion of your self with the other. That way lies all kinds of sins, including Rachel Dolezal — remember her? — and other white people with dreadlocks.

I think this is what identity politics is pointing out, at least in literature: the inherent limits of empathy. People pride themselves on it a bit too much, and readers and writers are especially susceptible. Especially so-called liberal readers and writers like me. I think what traditionally marginalized writers are saying is that you may think you feel me, Straight Man or White Woman, and therefore may in fact feel me, but you don’t know me. You can’t. Try as you might, you can’t, and that’s why you need to listen to me and my story. Writing it required less empathy of me, its author, than your version of it would, and that’s why it’s better. No, not better: more integral. More authentic. Truer.

Or not. Any diehard believer in imaginative truth — what Tim O’Brien famously called story-truth — can and perhaps should come back at the identity politicians with Elizabeth Costello’s maxim: “There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. I can think my way into the existence of . . . any being with whom I share the substrate of life.” The problem is, that way lies others’ sins, including Lionel Shriver — remember her? — and other white people in sombreros and glue-on Zapata mustaches.

So where do we draw the line? When does the sympathetic imagination become a kind of minstrelsy? The truth is that I don’t know and probably never will. Which is the most exciting place to be, as Scott pointed out, and I’m grateful to be put in it by his piece. If I had to draw one conclusion, and I guess I do, this being a response, I’d say that some kinds of empathy are arguably theft. Let’s take fiction, for example. It’s theft to write what you don’t know, to pretend to be someone you’re not. Which isn’t a bad thing—fiction is lying, after all. The question is whether or not you can get away with it, and that depends on how good you are, not just technically but morally. By morally I mean tonally. Tone makes the difference between borrowing and stealing. When Walt Whitman said, in 1855, in Song of Myself, that he was a runaway slave, it was cultural appropriation, sure. But it was also an act of radical empathy:

I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

This is appropriation insofar as Whitman’s borrowing the African-American’s experience, but his horrified—and horrifying—tone makes it plain that he’s repaying that debt with interest. With empathy. As Whitman put it one line later, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” That’s what happens when we read, and it’s radical.

Then there’s Lionel Shriver. When I read her speech on paper her words seemed reasonable; it wasn’t until I listened to her speak them aloud that I understood why people were upset. Her tone wasn’t just snarky, it was sneering. Whitman’s tone made it clear he was inhabiting someone else, but when Shriver put on that sombrero, her body language made it clear: she wasn’t advocating becoming a Mexican, she was advocating impersonating him. Using him. It was the difference between emulating someone and plagiarizing him. Between good writing and bad writing.

Speaking of which, I’m off now to draw up my own course on empathy, called On Empathy, to teach my writing students next year. Because this is a debate that should never die.

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Daniel Raeburn is the author of Vessels: A Love Story and the monograph Chris Ware.

My Daughter Died, But I’m Still Mothering Her

neo8iam via Pexels

Jacqueline Dooley | Longreads | January 2018 | 20 minutes (5,067words)

In July 2016, when we got the results of my 15-year-old daughter’s CT scan, my friend Babs introduced me to a new term: “anticipatory grief.” The scan showed that tumors in Ana’s lungs were noticeably larger than they’d been three months earlier, and masses in her abdomen had multiplied. Having been through this eight years earlier with her then 16-year-old son, Killian, Babs recognized that what we were dealing with wasn’t just a bad scan. It was a turning point in Ana’s disease — the Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumor, a rare form of pediatric cancer, she’d been diagnosed with four years earlier.

Medicinenet.com defines anticipatory grief as “the normal mourning that occurs when a patient or family is expecting a death.” As if there was anything normal about preparing to mourn my child’s death.

I didn’t like the term. I wasn’t ready to start grieving.

Babs suggested I reach out to a local hospice organization. I recoiled at the thought. Ana looked and felt good. I was sure her oncologist would find a drug to slow her progression until some miracle of modern medicine revealed a cure. It seemed impossible that Ana would die. I had no frame of reference or spiritual foundation for the enormity of that kind of loss.

Ana’s oncologist switched her to a new medication, but made it clear that this likely would only slow things down. Although it was disappointing, we still had hope. Ana glowed with health, at least outwardly. Maybe this new treatment would work better than the others had. Maybe.

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A Muslim, a Christian, and a Baby Named “God”

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, painting by Homunkulus28/Getty

Rachel Pieh Jones | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,733 words)

 

“And sometimes it’s the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.”Karen Armstrong, author of several books on comparative religion.

When God and his mother were released from the maternity ward they came directly to my house to use the air conditioner. It was early May and the summer heat that melted lollipops and caused car tires to burst enveloped Djibouti like a wet blanket. Power outages could exceed ten hours a day. Temperatures hadn’t peaked yet, 120 degrees would come in August, but the spring humidity without functioning fans during power outages turned everyone into hapless puddles. I prepared a mattress for Amaal* and her newborn and prayed the electricity would stay on so she could use the air conditioner and rest, recover.

In 2004 when my family arrived in Djibouti, I needed help minimizing the constant layer of dust; Amaal needed a job. I needed a friend and Amaal, with her quick laugh and cultural insights became my lifeline. My husband worked at the University of Djibouti and was gone most mornings and afternoons, plus some evenings. We had 4-year-old twins and without Amaal I might have packed our bags and returned to Minnesota out of loneliness and culture shock.

I hired Amaal before she had any children. She wasn’t married yet and her phone often rang while she worked, boys calling to see what she was doing on Thursday evening. To see if she wanted to go for a walk down the streets without street lights where young people could clandestinely hold hands or drink beer from glass Coca-Cola bottles. She rarely said yes until Abdi Fatah* started calling. He didn’t drink alcohol and didn’t pressure her into more physical contact than she was comfortable with in this Muslim country. She felt respected. She said yes.
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Finding My Identity By the Light of My Mother’s Menorah

motimeiri/Getty, Mahmoud Maghraby/EyeEm/Getty

Santi Elijah Holley | Longreads | December 2017 | 10 minutes (2,481 words)

 

Every year it was the same thing. My mother and brother and I would trim the Christmas tree, place our presents underneath, and then gather around the kitchen table to light the menorah. My mother was Jewish, but non-practicing and certainly not Orthodox. She didn’t care much for the faith, either as a religion or a culture, but she’d been raised by two Jewish parents and she wanted to instill in my brother and me some modicum of respect for the tradition. But she also didn’t want to deprive us of Christmas. My mother may not have believed in ancient scripture, but she did believe in family.

On each of the eight nights of Hanukkah, the three of us spun the dreidel and read stories recounting the triumph of the Maccabees and the miracle of the lights. We ate latkes and applesauce and gave each other chocolate gelt, while our Christmas tree blinked in the living room behind us.

Another tradition of ours — at least of mine and my brother’s — was making a mockery of the menorah-lighting blessing. Neither of us spoke Hebrew, but the lighting ceremony involves a nightly recitation of blessings and praise to the Lord. My mother would light the shamash candle, then begin to recite the Hebrew aloud, urging my brother and me to follow along. Rather than mimic these unfamiliar and strange words, we made up our own words, routinely replacing “kidshanu” with “kitty condo,” in tribute to the elaborate piece of furniture frequently occupied by our two cats. My mother glared at us every time and told us to knock it off, though she knew we would do the same thing the next night, and the night after that, and each and every one of the eight nights.

Our menorah was a cheap and simple one. It hadn’t been passed down through generations; it wasn’t forged by a Hasidic blacksmith, nor smuggled through continents and across oceans into the New World. It was plated a gold color, but it didn’t have the heft of solid gold. In all likelihood, my mother bought it at a discount at Kmart during the one and only week they sold Hanukkah items. After the holiday she would put the menorah back in storage, along with the dreidel and books, and we’d then direct our attention exclusively to Christmas. My brother and I knew ours was an atypical holiday tradition, but that knowledge only bound us closer as a family and provided a temporary adhesive to our otherwise fractured family.

My brother, Nathaniel, is eight years older and has a different father. His father is white; mine is black. That makes me two halves — a half-brother and half-black. Since my mother is Jewish, I’m a full-Jew, in accordance with the centuries-old law. (According to another old law, from 19th and early-20th century racial classifications, one drop of African blood makes me full-black, but I’ve never been able to discern which side — the black side or the Jew side — prevails.)

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Assertiveness Training

Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa via AP Images

Susan Sheu | Longreads | December 2017 | 23 minutes (5,862 words)

In the early 1980s, my mother took a class at the local Wisconsin university’s student psychology center called “Assertiveness Training.” She was awakening belatedly to a version of the mind-expanding youth she had missed by marrying and dropping out of college at age 20 in 1967, during the Summer of Love. The class was taught by Dr. B, who told the students to use “I” statements to ask for what they wanted in plain terms during work and family interactions. (“I am unhappy that you said that to me. I feel that I am not heard when I speak to you.”) The idea was to learn to be assertive but not aggressive, to stop being a silently suffering martyr or someone who holds in all their anger and resentment until it boils over into inappropriate and ineffective rage or self-destructive behavior. It goes without saying that the class was all women. As she immersed herself in college again, my mother began to tell me that when I grew up, I could be anything I wanted — a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist. Even though the Equal Rights Amendment had not been ratified, she wanted me to believe that my future was up to me. Perhaps that was one reason she took Assertiveness Training, to be the kind of mother who raised a daughter who wouldn’t need a class like that.

My grandmother was the model of someone who regularly displayed inappropriate anger, someone my mom was trying to avoid becoming. My grandma Violet had once been docile, and my mom believed that she made the rest of us pay for that false submissiveness for the rest of her life. The short version of my grandmother’s story is that she didn’t marry the man she was in love with because he was Catholic and she was Protestant (this was Nebraska, circa 1928); she didn’t attend college despite receiving a debate scholarship because her mother feigned illness to keep her youngest child at home; and she tried to be a good wife in a marriage with a decent, practical man with whom she was not in love. She ran my grandpa’s restaurant while he was serving in World War II, and when he returned, no longer had any day-to-day responsibilities in the business operations.

By the time I knew her, my grandmother was smoking, alternating between Camels and Newports, drinking gin and, if she was feeling moderate, Mogen David wine (“The Jews” drank it. And Sammy Davis, Jr., “that talented Negro,” was a Jew. It had a screw top. And it was sweet.). She told off anyone who stood in her way, and for decades after her death, my mother made me pretend she was still alive, because it was the memory of my grandma’s fiery temper more than the restraining order that kept my father away. My grandma also took Valium, prescribed by the psychiatrist she began seeing shortly before her death in 1978. I was 9 when she died, but I already knew that her outspokenness and self-medication were a great source of shame for my mom and grandpa.

I’ve since come to understand that my grandma had the appropriate response to her circumstances.

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An Interview with ‘Call Me By Your Name’ Author André Aciman

Andrè Aciman attends a screening of "Call Me by Your Name" during the 55th New York Film Festival in New York City. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

Jessica Gross | Longreads | November 2017 | 20 minutes (4,900 words)

I spend the first day in any new place, particularly when I’m traveling alone, feeling massively out of sorts and wondering if I should turn right back around and come home. By now, I know that by the end of my stay that initial despair will feel almost unreal. But last summer, on a trip to Vienna, my sense of dislocation was so acute I didn’t know if I’d last. I’d spent the long train ride over from Paris re-reading my great-grandmother’s autobiography—as told to my grandmother—which details my Jewish family’s flight from Vienna in 1938. Arriving in the city so many decades later, I still couldn’t shake the sense of terror they’d described. No matter how much I tried to talk myself down, I couldn’t seem to stop conflating the cold stares of the Austrians I passed on the street with the fact that this country had wanted my relatives dead.

So: It was fraught. Until, that is, a friend sent me an essay by André Aciman. In “Parallax,” the epilogue to his essay collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, Aciman—a Jew and an exile from Egypt to Europe, who now lives in New York—writes of the dislocation that seems by now intrinsic to his personhood. He cannot, he writes, appreciate one place unless through the projection of another. “What we missed was not just Egypt. What we missed was dreaming Europe in Egypt—what we missed was the Egypt where we’d dreamed of Europe,” he writes. “Parallax is not just a disturbance in vision. It’s a derealizing and paralyzing disturbance in the soul—cognitive, metaphysical, intellectual, and ultimately aesthetic. It is not just about displacement, or of feeling adrift both in time and space, it is a fundamental misalignment between who we are, might have been, could still be, can’t accept we’ve become, or may never be.” I can’t remember whether reading this made me abruptly stop crying or, in the way that transcendent literature can, made me sob even harder.

Since then, I’ve read enough Aciman—a memoirist, essayist, and novelist—to know that dislocation is one of several central and vital themes. He also grapples with evasion of the present, and of pain; with ambivalence; and with desire. These last two are on particular display in his masterful novel Call Me by Your Name, which has now been adapted into a gorgeous film. Aciman expresses what it’s like to inhabit a human mind with more intricacy, subtlety and lyricism than almost any other writer I’ve read. We met at a café on the Upper West Side, where I tried to keep my reverence in check, and spoke about his distaste for realism, mitigating joy, trying to induce a sense of immersion in the reader, his respect for editors, and the new film. He began by telling me there was only one question I couldn’t ask: whether he thinks it did justice to the book.

Are there any other questions you absolutely loathe?

No.

How do you generally answer when people ask that question?

“I loved it!” Okay, now you’re asking the question. [Laughter] Okay, fine, I’ll answer.

As a writer, you have two choices. You can be very proprietary—in other words, you own the book, you own the story, and the movie has to follow, otherwise you get upset, you go crazy.

Or, you can say, “I’ve written the book. You want to make a movie, you want to make a play, you want to make an opera out of it? Do with it what you want. And if you want my opinion, I’ll give it to you; if you don’t want to hear it, I won’t give it to you.” I’m probably the easiest author to edit because I feel that an editor knows what they’re doing.  So if they say, “This sentence is horrible,” I’ll listen. I disagree one percent of the time. Read more…

Feeling the Wind in Their Beards

Teresa Mathew for BuzzFeed

Sikhism is the world’s fifth largest religion, but these peaceful people are greatly outnumbered and misunderstood in America. Uninformed people assume their turbans mean they’re Muslim, and racists continue to attack and harass them. The first hate crime after 9/11 was perpetrated against a Sikh man. Yet a group of Sikhs in New Jersey have embraced one of the most iconic pieces of Americana — the motorcycle — to pursue their own piece of the American dream on the country’s back roads.

At BuzzFeed, Teresa Mathew spends time with The Sikh Motorcycle Club Of The Northeast to report on these motorcyclists of faith. Club members fly the American flag and the Sikh flag on the back of their bikes. For them, riding is centering, creates brotherhood and reaffirms their commitment to Sikh values and ways of life. In the American imagination, bikers are associated with drinking, lawlessness, and rebellion. As Mathew points out, Sikhism was partly formed from rebellion against Hinduisms’ inequalities and India’s caste system, but members of The Sikh Motorcycle Club do not drink or smoke. And instead of defining themselves in opposition to authority, they submit to their ultimate authorities: family, faith, and god.

The members of the Sikh Motorcycle Club love to ride, to practice what KJ Singh, another founding member, calls “wind therapy.” One bright morning in early June, three members met in front of a gurudwara in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. In true Indian fashion, the other half of the group trickled in slowly. As the early arrivals waited, they prayed and ate the rotis and lentil curries provided as part of the gurudwara’s langar, a vegetarian meal cooked by volunteers. Once the whole crew was assembled, the riders helped one another program location details into iPhones and clambered aboard their bikes.

They rode for hours, past large swaths of rolling green fields and Shell gas stations and dappled, densely wooded back roads. As they drove their Harley Davidsons through small, sleepy suburban towns, the scene could have made for an edgy take on a Norman Rockwell painting. When they wear their helmets, clad head-to-toe in jeans and leather, the riders’ beards are the only thing that make them identifiably Sikh.

Harjot Singh Pannu doesn’t twist or tuck his beard away when he rides; it flies in the headwind like gray gauze. “I love it,” Harjot said. “People look at my beard and wish they have a beard like that.” When he rides, and the wind runs through his hair, he said, “to me, that’s like living with nature.”

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