The Maris Review, vol 38

I'm so, so sorry but I used the word "gaslighting" in this newsletter and I might do it again.

What I read this week

Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) by Colette Shade

“So much of liberal politics amounts to yelling ‘Moooom! Daaaaad! He’s cheating.’ But even as a child myself, I could see that no one was coming to save us.” Lord, how apt this line from Colette Shade’s excellent new essay collection resonates this morning, the day after Inauguration Day and all of the appointments and executive orders that came with it. The quote comes from her reaction to the success of a satirical children’s book called Good Night Bush and other anti-Bush children’s books published in the early aughts, how Democrats liked to position Republicans as dumb children while they were the adults in the room. How apt.

Colette defines the Y2K era as the period of unabashed between 1997 and 2008, a time when “capitalism had, for the first time in its short history, taken over every part of the world and every part of life. It merged fully with politics, and it shaped how people saw themselves.” I’m both daunted and delighted to realize how Shade’s analysis of the time period shares so many similar themes with my own upcoming book: we both talk about what we were taught as children and how our life experiences made us reconsider just about everything, using a heavy touch of nostalgia for both products and pop culture. But we revisit that past with open eyes, not to glorify it so much as to use as a jumping off for talking about political radicalization.

I had coffee with Colette last week and gushed to her about her book and talk about similarities. What we came upon was we both remember the hope that we once felt for the country, the world, the future, and how much we longed to get some of that back. Finding new ways to feel hope is the project of our current time, I think.

Karma Doll by Jonathan Ames

This is the third novel in Jonathan Ames’s series about a private eye named Happy Doll (no, really). As a longtime Ames fan, these books give me just about everything I would expect from him, with his off-kilter sense of humor and his dark, dark, view of the world with a bent toward self-destruction, but also tinged with small glimmers of hope (hope!). In the Doll series it’s Ames’s descriptions of the everyday that draw me in, especially the way Happy talks about his dog, George. It’s the most tender depiction of a human/dog relationship I’ve seen in literature, and I am very much a connoisseur of the category. But for all of that sunshine, things get dark and twisted in Happy’s world. There’s always some enormous guy or two or three who splits open his face or his head, goes beyond regular thriller violence and veers to something like a horror novel. But Doll is a bit like an unkillable superhero, if superheroes smoked a lot of weed and had once been in Freudian talk therapy four times a week. He may be broken and battered by the end of a book, but he always manages to get himself home to walk George.

A note on antisemitism in the book world and beyond

Ever since October 7, 2023, I’ve spent a good chunk of every day thinking about what it means to be Jewish. I was never very religious; this was the first time in my life that my religion and ethnic background dominated my thoughts. As a child my religious teachings focused on Never Again, with our boomer parents having been born in the shadow of the Holocaust. When you’re told from early childhood that the world wants you dead and Israel is the only safe place for Jews, well, you tend to believe it.

But as the remaining survivors return to what’s left of their utterly eviscerated homes after an incredibly deadly, hideously cruel war on Gaza and beyond, it’s impossible, for me, at least, to feel much unity with a great majority of American Jews. In the past year and a half I’ve criticized Israel, I’ve criticized the Jewish Book Council and their antisemitism-in-the-literary-world reporting initiative, I’ve criticized a bookfluencer who positions herself as a perpetual victim of antisemitism even though her billionaire father voted for (and funded) Trump and the chaos that he would bring. It’s been lonely, and I’m so grateful for the solidarity I’ve found with other American Jews who feel the same way.

Yesterday, for the briefest moment, when I first saw video of the world’s richest man doing a Nazi salute (twice!) at a presidential inauguration, I thought, finally here is a common enemy that American Jews can fight together. Perhaps that’s how I’d reconnect with the parts of my religion I’ve felt detached from for a long time. I’ve divested from Twitter like I’ve divested from Israel, and so maybe here we would find some common ground.

And then the reactions hit. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that the Anti-Defamation League, the supposed protectors of American Jews against hate, has taken hypocrisy to new limits with an impressive new piece of gaslighting. What we saw right before our eyes wasn’t real, they say.

I’m thankful to Jewish Voice for Peace for their reaction:

Not a few minutes after the Nazi display seen round the world, Chuck Schumer posted about how important it will be to work with the other side in the future. Schumer is the author Antisemitism in America: A Warning (Lol, I’m not linking to it) which will be published in March by Hachette, the publisher that recently launched a new “conservative” imprint with the a member of the Heritage Foundation, the organization that authored Project 2025. From the marketing copy: “In very personal terms, it will engage with debates over the purpose and meaning of Israel, and help draw a line between legitimate criticism of its government and when criticism of Israel as a Jewish homeland verges into antisemitism.” No comment on Elon Musk and the bold-faced embodiment of the hatred of Jews he displayed in front of the entire world.

It’s galvanizing and so terribly depressing to have confirmation of how hollow and petty the Zionist project is. For the past year and a half I’ve been called a kapo and a self-hating Jew for speaking out against the devastation in Gaza. And now here is American Judaism complying in advance, saying nothing when this new (old) administration has become so very clearly emboldened to nakedly show their hatred of us. Never again, indeed.

New releases, 1/21

The Wickedest by Caleb Femi

Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe

The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood by Kristen Martin

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, trans by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

Something Rotten by Andrew Lipstein

A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner