Greetings from the Far Left Coast where I suffer from a deficiency of discipline. Summer has never been a productive season, this year more so than ever. I am easily distracted, scrolling through the same headlines at online news sites throughout the day, compulsively turning to social media, playing a stupid computer game, reaching for a mystery novel when there is a stack of more substantive fare I intend to read.
Then there is Yaroslava Antipina’s diary from Kyiv at Bluesky. Each morning my spirit brightens when I find she has made it through the night and is still here to share her country’s culture, history, and news about the war while drinking warcoffee, black, no sugar. She shows that Ukraine is more than the war with videos of people going about their lives in spite of it all, strolling through the streets and plazas of her city, coffee shops, cafes, bookstores, cultural centers, works of art, her cat Victory gazing out the window. More extended essays about culture, history, and life in Ukraine can be found at her Patreon site. Someone like Yaroslava gives someone like me reason to keep at it.
Memo from the Literary Desk. Speaking of reason to keep at it, the Rectified Spirits: Tommy Gaffney Book Tour hits Hawthorne Hideaway on Wednesday, July 23, at 7:30 pm, hosted by Benjamin Fisher, founder and host of the In Memory Reading Series. The tour celebrates the newly published second edition of Tommy’s poetry collection Whiskey Days.
“Sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, always bleak, Whiskey Days speaks from the place Tommy Gaffney came from, a saloon that lies between the projects and the trailer park.”
Whiskey Days Thoughtcrime Press 128 pp, $15.00 (paper)
Hawthorne Hideaway 2221 SE Hawthorne Portland, OR 97214
Memo from the Cinema Desk.
The Other Widow (2022). Dir. Maayan Rypp. With Dana Ivgy and Ania Bukstein. Trailer.
Dana Ivgy is one of Israel’s most celebrated actresses. I found out why toward the end of 2023 when I discovered her in Or (My Treasure) (2004), Zero Motivation (2014), and Cinema Sabaya (2021).
In The Other Widow Ivgy is Ella, costume designer for a theater group and, as backstory, for four years mistress of the group’s playwright, Assaf. She learns of Assaf’s death when other members break off rehearsal one afternoon to attend his shiva. They do not invite Ella to accompany them because her presence would be awkward. She follows anyway.
That afternoon and on following days when she is compulsively drawn to return, Ella meets Assaf’s wife, Natasha, his somewhat scruffy brother, and his mother who seems to be suffering from dementia and is not aware, or not always aware, that her son is dead. The encounters are indeed awkward, and distressing because Ella cannot reveal her relationship with Assaf, only that she worked with him at the theater. Her personal mourning must be hidden.
She learns from the brother that everyone knew Assaf had a mistress, but not her identity. He thinks it might be the catering waitress. From Natasha she learns that he died from choking on pad thai takeout, which explains the film’s strange opening scene when an order of pad thai takeout is mysteriously delivered to Ella’s apartment. She thinks it must be from Assaf and is puzzled when he does not show up or answer his phone. Moments after she decides to go ahead and eat it herself, the delivery guy is at her door frantic because he delivered the order to the wrong address. He scrapes it off the plate and back into the box, packs it up, and bicycles away.
Ella is distraught, at times almost robotic in her movements, subject to nose bleeds, strange reveries, disturbing dreams, her conduct at the theater increasingly erratic with the pressure of making last-minute costume adjustments for opening night of Assaf’s play that retells the story of Medea. Encounters with Natasha, an elegant, icelike beauty and accomplished classical musician, are unsettling. Is Natasha intrigued by Ella? Or indifferent? Puzzled as to why she keeps coming around? Does she suspect Ella was her husband’s mistress? Each woman speaks only obliquely about herself, her feelings, and Assaf. Ella remains alone in her grief.
As Ella returns day after day it can seem she is courting revelation of her relationship with Assaf. The final scenes are wrenching. We are left only to guess where she might go from there. I may watch this one again.
Hannah Brown, ‘The Other Widow’: A complex story of two women, The Jerusalem Post, March 11, 2024
Love Sarah (2020). Dir. Eliza Schroeder. With Celia Imrie, Shannon Tarbet, Shelley Conn. Trailer.
Love Sarah opens with Isabella (Conn) calling her friend Sarah who is supposed to be meeting her at the rundown storefront where they plan to open a bakery. The scene shifts back and forth from an increasingly agitated Isabella to a woman, presumably Sarah, furiously pedaling a bicycle through the city. Sarah never makes it.
Those left behind by Sarah’s death struggle to pick up the pieces. For Isabella, the loss of her best friend is compounded by the end of the bakery dream. They met at culinary school in Paris, but it is Sarah who is the genius baker. Isabella’s role was be more on the managerial end. Now she is stuck with a lease she cannot afford and no baker.
Sarah’s estranged mother Mimi (Imrie) has her own burden of grief and regret. A note to Sarah, an attempt to repair the breach that arose when Mimi refused to help finance the bakery venture, lies unsent in a drawer. Clarissa (Tarbet) is an aspiring dancer who never knew the identity of her father and now has lost her mother. Her passion for dance fades, she becomes distant and remote, and her boyfriend dumps her. A self-described mess who stays out too late, is terrible with money, and smokes way too much weed, Clarissa of course becomes obsessed with opening the bakery her mother dreamed of and hounds her reluctant grandmother and Isabella to go for it with her.
The matter of the baker appears to be resolved when Mathew shows up. Now a somewhat celebrated baker, he had an affair with Sarah when they were all in school together in Paris. Isabella is less than enthusiastic about his appearance despite the desperate need for a baker, some history there she only hints at. Mathew was a womanizer, but there may be more to it. Clarissa meanwhile suspects Mathew might be her father (her mother had said she did not know who the father was). And Mimi remains dubious about the whole project.
Predictably they pull together, spiff up the place, put in tables and an espresso machine, open the doors, and nobody comes…until Mimi hits on the idea to market their baked goods to immigrants because London is after all a city of immigrants. Customers are invited to request a favorite from their home countries and Love Sarah will bake something to remind them of home. “Around the World in 80 Bakes,” as their sign puts it.
Predictable ups and downs follow, not least the challenge of learning on the fly how to prepare desserts and pastries they had never heard of before. Also predictable is the evolution of the relationship between Isabella and Mathew. It has some ups and downs. Then there is the odd, eccentric inventor who lives across the street. Mimi finds him intriguing. And will Clarissa’s passion for dance return?
Love Sarah courts toward sappiness here and there without surrendering its charm, a tribute to director and actors alike. This is a sweet film. We need those too. The intrepid cineaste does not live by Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa alone.
Now, alas, downward, into the muck. And it gets muckier by the day. After reading the latest round of reports from Gaza and the West Bank, I am almost ready to start chanting “from the river to the damn sea.” Israel is not defending itself when a 20-year-old Palestinian-American is brutally beaten by Israeli settlers while visiting relatives in the West Bank. Settlers prevented ambulances from reaching him for three hours. He died before reaching the hospital. Another Palestinian man was fatally shot during the attack and bled to death. The Israeli military said it is aware of reports and will look into the incident.
A spokesperson for the US Department of State said that it was aware of reports of the death of a US citizen in the West Bank and that it was “ready to provide consular services,” declining to comment further “out of respect for privacy of the family.”
In Gaza on Sunday six children and four adults were killed while waiting to fill water containers when a drone fired a missile into a crowd at a water tanker in al-Nuseirat refugee camp. The Israeli military attributed this to a “technical error.” An Islamic Jihad terrorist was, well, somewhere. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) claims that it works to mitigate civilian harm “as much as possible” and “regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians.” As the saying goes, that dog won’t hunt.
Israeli human rights activist David Shulman writes bluntly, again, in his latest article in The New York Review of Books (Netanyahu’s War):
For many years Israeli human rights activists in the occupied Palestinian territories have been saying, as vociferously as we could, that the intricately intermeshed system of the occupation—settlers, soldiers, police, military courts, the media, and, behind it all, the government—has been committed to a single overriding goal: ruthless ethnic cleansing in all of Area C (the 60 percent of the West Bank under Israeli control) and, more recently, in parts of Area B (the 22 percent under joint Israeli-Palestinian control) as well. Stealing vast tracts of Palestinian land has been the primary mechanism. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have usually gone along with it. Brutal settler violence against Palestinian villagers has become routine, as I have documented frequently in these pages.
“Let there be no mistake. This is the second Nakba, by now in full gear. We are seeing war crimes and crimes against humanity on a large scale.”
Who are these violent settlers? Many of them are disturbed adolescents who have found refuge, and some meaning to their lives, in the cancerous outposts spread throughout Area C. They have been brainwashed and trained to hate and kill…It’s more or less impossible to break through the barriers that have been erected in their minds. They are also fanatically religious, if one can even use that word for the nefarious vision they have nurtured.
But among them there are also older men (hardly any women), some of them second- or third-generation residents of the Israeli settlements in Palestine. They are the ones who indoctrinate and who give the orders. You wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley, let alone on the rocky hills of South Hebron or the Jordan Valley. They have been armed with guns by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the convicted criminal who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s minister of national security.
Netanyahu, he writes,
is a weak man without any trace of moral fiber but with an incomparable talent for destruction. The state he in theory governs is coming apart at the seams. In practice, what is left of it is now in the hands of the two linchpins of the Likud-based coalition: Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the messianic ideologue of Jewish supremacy who is minister of finance.
A prevalent misconception defines Netanyahu as a cynical opportunist, when in fact he is a hardcore ideological extremist like his late father, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich. His entire life has been committed to the idea that it is possible to annihilate the Palestinian national movement forever.
More blunt words come from Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert:
“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” he said, when asked about the plans laid out by Israel Katz last week. Once inside [the “humanitarian city” to be built on the ruins of Rafah], Palestinians would not be allowed to leave, except to go to other countries, Katz said.” (Graham-Harrison, ‘Humanitarian City’)
Where might they go? To other Arab countries, which express no enthusiasm for the idea, nor do Palestinians. Africa is next suggested, the failed state of Libya frequently mentioned. Maybe they could join Trump’s deportees in South Sudan. The US appears to be amenable to any of these contemptible scenarios. Meanwhile, Trump basks in the glow of his Nobel Peace Prize nomination by Netanyahu.
Rushdi Abualouf, Maia Davies, Gaza officials say children killed in strike as Israeli military admits 'error', BBC News, July 13, 2025
William Christou, Sufian Taha, Joseph Gedeon, Israeli settlers kill American-Palestinian visiting relatives in West Bank, says family, The Guardian, July 12, 2025
Emma Graham-Harrison, ‘Humanitarian city’ would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM, The Guardian, July 13, 2025
Emma Graham-Harrison, Israeli plan for forced transfer of Gaza’s population ‘a blueprint for crimes against humanity’, The Guardian, July 7, 2025
David Shulman, Netanyahu’s War, The New York Review of Books, July 24, 2025 issue
Video of the photo op at Alligator Auschwitz (official name: “Alligator Alcatraz”) show Trump, DeSantis, and Noem chortling over the fate of detainees who might encounter alligators while trying to escape like juvenile bullies laughing about much fun it will be to set the cat on fire.
The big bonkers bill provides roughly $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security efforts, including $75 billion in extra funding for ICE, making it by far the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. ICE is no longer just about customs and immigration enforcement. This is a national police force whose mission is to quash dissent.
Reports of dissatisfaction in the ranks at ICE are heartening. A career ICE official told Atlantic staff writer Nick Miroff, “It’s miserable” and called the job “mission impossible” (Miroff, Trump Loves ICE).
At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”
Another former investigative agent told him, “Morale is in the crapper. Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.”
Career officials have been pushed out of leadership roles. Some have quit in frustration.
Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney who resigned from ICE’s legal department last month, told me he left because the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats. “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd said. He told me that he saw frustration among ICE attorneys whose cases were dismissed just so officer teams could grab their clients in the hallways for fast-track deportations that pad the stats.
Maria Briceño, Louis Jacobson, Amy Sherman, Fact-checking Trump at Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz about immigration, One Big Beautiful Bill, PolitiFact, July 1, 2025
Nick Miroff, Trump Loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable, The Atlantic, July 10, 2025
Michael Feinberg is a former Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was given the option of demotion or resignation after making a terrible mistake. He remained friends with someone on Kash Patel’s enemies list. Feinberg resigned, “the latest of a great many senior FBI special agents to walk out the door.” He writes that “far from being some sort of leftist deep state operative,” he generally leans right: “I was vice-president of my law school’s most conservative organization, and my first clerkship was with a libertarian public interest firm.”
Laura Barrón-López, Jan. 6 prosecutor says firing of investigators, Trump’s pardons send ‘dangerous message’, PBS News Hour, July 10, 2025
Michael Feinberg, Goodbye to All That, Lawfare, July 3, 2025
If, like me, you have not yet read all 900 pages of Trump’s big bonkers bill, Lisa Desjardins broke it down last week at the PBS News Hour. The bill is cleverly constructed. Tax breaks, many geared to the middle class, take effect immediately, cuts in the social safety net not so much. Many kick in only after next year’s midterms and most not until after the 2028 election.
Lisa Desjardins, Breaking down what’s in Trump’s big policy act and how it will affect Americans, PBS News Hour, July 9, 2025
And Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. It is entertaining to see Dan Bongino and Laura Loomer snarling at Pam Bondi. Beyond that, well, Trump’s character is matter of record for all to witness, files or no files.
Keep the faith. Hold the line. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt