In The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s misbegotten follow-up to the generational classic The Social Network, there is, amid a cascade of exposition on algorithms, a decent Yiddish joke.

“Jeff, you would know this, settle a bet,” a coworker asks Jeremy Allen White’s Jeff Horwitz, a real journalist known for his 2021 Wall Street Journal series “The Facebook Files.” “Is spatula a Yiddish word?”

The question, a variation of which is found in Portnoy’s Complaint, is a nod, surely, to the protagonist’s heritage, one thing Aaron Sorkin has in common with his latest stand-in. The other features, which may well be true but I suspect are authorial projection: a love of old-school musical theater, a confounding Luddite disposition for a technology reporter and, in a kind of pre-Meta metafiction, a past career covering politics in D.C. (Sorkin admits to only joining Facebook to write his two films — when a source asks Horwitz “aren’t you a tech reporter?” he replies, “ish.”)

The actual Horwitz, a 2026 Pulitzer recipient, is an investigative reporter who also covered finance (no sports as far as I can tell) before arriving at the tech desk of the Wall Street Journal. His habit of appearing with a headband on Meet the Press goes unanswered for, but suggests a missed opportunity in casting (Matt Johnson, anyone?).

Sorkin, it seems, can’t help but write some version of himself: either the boy scout neoliberal or the edgier man of his youth, who was too busy writing in a coke frenzy to be told “no.”

That brings us to Zuckerberg, here an antagonist played by Jeremy Strong, who is at a considerable handicap for a couple of reasons. Jesse Eisenberg was such a perfect union of character and actor as to make an indelible performance he’s still trying to break away from (hence his refusal of a big payday to reprise the role here). The other factor is Zuckerberg the real man, who since The Social Network, has cut a public persona at odds with the first film’s characterization of him as a bitter loner with incel potential. Rather, he’s a dorky guy who wore a Benson Boone jumpsuit and cut a cover of “Get Low” for his wife. He slathers on too much sunscreen and Sweet Baby Ray’s. He’s a meme, if a wealthy one with a crazy amount of power.

Throughout this film, there are glimmers of a plausible engine that drives him beyond profit and his calling as a “free speech absolutist.” Facebook juices positive comments on videos featuring him and buries anything negative. His insecurity, which in the first film left off on him refreshing a friend request to his ex, lingers. At one point, he says of upcoming testimony before Congress, that it’s his opportunity to be liked.

But it is within that context, squaring off against AOC, that the real man revealed himself as a mumbling mess unequal to Sorkin’s dialogue. What remains of the figure in The Social Network? Take away the iconic score, the original actors and the conventions that made that film so effective and all that’s left is a quippy, moralizing husk. Without another director to take the helm (David Fincher’s taking on a Tarantino script), Sorkin’s tics have nowhere to hide.

“Something happened,” Horwitz says when he takes the job covering Facebook — after failing to find the Journal’s office on his car’s GPS.

We learn what that something is, as Mikey Madison’s Frances Haugen, an employee for Facebook’s civic integrity team slowly works her way up to blowing the whistle. The social network fed us outrage for clicks, funelled users toward extremist groups and ravaged the self-esteem of middle school girls on Instagram. Naturally, in the film, the platform’s penchant for sending amygdalae into overdrive and peddling disinformation culminates in Jan. 6.

Haugen insists, at one point, that she is not a Frank Capra character. It’s true — she’s a Sorkin invention, but unlike Mr. Smith, she is based on a real person. Her conviction is that Facebook could be a source for good. Sorkin may not believe this, though he was right to think there was a good movie in the revelations surrounding it since the first film. This just isn’t it.

“Spatula,” by the way, is not a Yiddish word (it’s Latin), though Meta, the new name Facebook took on shortly after Haugen’s damaging testimony, is both a Hebrew and a Greek one. In the language of the Bible, it is the feminine form of “is dead.”

Sorkin may have done well to take this as an omen: When it comes to a film property that needed no resurrection, it’s best to let the dead bury the dead — with or without a spatula.

The post Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to ‘The Social Network’ has a pretty good Yiddish joke — too bad about the rest of the movie appeared first on The Forward.

Anne Carson, today awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, can be a difficult poet. Much of her work is erudite, complex and genre-defying; it is poetry and prose and criticism and translation and, occasionally, a kind of theology. But Carson’s work is also profoundly spiritual and richly rewarding, especially for those of us prone to introspection, intellection, melancholy, and, as Carson once described the task of a writer, “noticing small things.”

There are many facets of Carson’s work, and many lenses through which one might relate to it. Born in 1950, Carson was trained as a classicist, and spent much of her career teaching Ancient Greek; in addition to her translations of Sophocles, Sappho, and others, her own poems are often saturated with classical references. Her essays on a wide variety of subjects are similarly erudite and rich. Many have written on these aspects of her work.

Personally, though, as a contemplatively-inclined Jewish reader, I have found her to be a literary as well as spiritual role model. I use the word ‘spiritual’ with hesitation. I doubt Carson would like it much, and what I mean by it is not the cultivation of certain warm feelings but the choice to pay attention, in a certain way, to both the surfaces and the depths of things; to refuse the pat dichotomy between the head and the heart; to dwell in the interiority of experience that, paradoxically, arises from “noticing small things.”

When Carson does turn explicitly to religious and spiritual subjects (she was raised Catholic), she excels, perhaps more than any other writer I have read, in avoiding the clichés that make writing about ‘spirituality’ so challenging.  Her long poem from 1992, “The Truth About God” begins:

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves

Carson isn’t speaking conventionally here, I don’t think — this isn’t quite the Israelites saying, in Sinai, Na’aseh v’Nishmah, we will do and [then] we will understand. But it is a contemplative version of it; a devotional attitude toward the particular. In another section of the poem, entitled “God’s Justice,” she writes:

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.
On the day He was to create justice
God got involved in making a dragonfly

and lost track of time.
It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

So this is why there is no justice in the world, or why we must always pursue it anyway: because God was so busy with beauty. The poet, too, gets distracted; the rest of the poem is about the dragonfly. (Like Mary Oliver, Carson is a sublime poet of nature.)  As indeed is true in our world — alongside all the evils and injustices of the last few years, the shimmering of tree branches in the breeze, the light refracting into my study, remain as resonant as ever.

When I heard the news about Carson’s Nobel, I came across a post by Florida State University Professor Martin Kavka, whom I’ve known for many years and who, it turns out, is also a Carson fan. Like me, Kavka was elated to hear the news, and we chatted for a while. “Sometimes we think of poetry as something that expresses the way the world is, that pierces the mystery of the world and gives us True Knowledge,” Kavka told me. “But for me, Carson’s poetry, in its odd recombination of words, expresses how we so often feel askew when relating to the world, as if it will always be mysterious, as if its mystery were just there to taunt us.”

“We all know that when we feel askew,” Kavka continued, “authority figures make us feel that it’s our fault. This is true of religious authority figures — and Jewish texts, given that Deuteronomy suggests that we are at fault when we are not thriving — but also of political and educational authorities. Carson gives us all armor for those moments…  And for so many of us who are (over)educated, we value assembly too much and beauty not enough. I feel recalibrated whenever I read her, as if I’ve just visited some sort of emotional chiropractor. “

I love that insight. Carson is definitely, in some ways, a nerdy writer. Her work is intellectual, dense, and sometimes opaque. (I find myself reaching again for the word ‘erudite.’)  But that is not at the expense of emotional depth. A recent essay, for example, describes Carson’s heartbreaking loss, due to Parkinson’s Disease, of her ability to write legibly — but along the way discusses the Roman poet Catullus, the painter Cy Twombly, composer David Lang, psychiatrist Norman Doidge, as well as Roland Barthes, John Keats, John Cage, Gertrude Stein, and attending a boxing class for people with Parkinson’s. In it, she writes:

Let’s start with life, your life. There it is before you — possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map — let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor, a pirate, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you glanced over from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

Similarly, Kavka’s favorite Carson poem, “Merry Christmas from Hegel,” begins with the poet “wretchedly lonely with all my family dead”:

It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel.

Yet she doesn’t stay in the armchair. She is “overjoyed” at Hegel’s language, at “this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another,” and she goes outside to stand in the snow:

I went to the middle of a woods. Fir trees, the teachers of this, all around. Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world subtracts itself in layers. Outer sounds like traffic and shoveling vanish. Inner sounds become audible, cracks, sighs, caresses, twigs, bird breath, toenails of squirrel. The fir trees move hugely. The white is perfectly curved, stunned with itself. Puffs of ice fog and some gold things float up. Shadows rake their motionlessness across the snow with a vibration of other shadows moving crosswise on them, shadow on shadow, in precise velocities. It is very cold; then that, too, begins to subtract itself, the body chills on its surface but the core is hot and it is possible to disconnect the surface, to withdraw to the core, where a ravishing peace flows in, so ravishing that I am unembarrassed to use the word *ravishing*, and it is not a peace of separation from the senses, but the washing-through peace of looking, listening, feeling, at the very core of snow, at the very core of the care of snow.

This is the consolation of the intellectual life, in the best sense: the abstruse philosophical language of Hegel liberates the poet from her melancholy, sends her out into the woods where she has an encounter with the numinous, rendered in perfect, concrete prose without a single platitude of religious or spiritual writing.

Said Kavka of this work, “I learned how to be a widower — how to relate to the world so that death does not govern my existence — from her.”

I am delighted that Carson has won the Nobel, not only for the recognition (and money!) that she deserves, but because it might win  her some new readers, including those of us in the Jewish spirituality world for whom Carson’s “noticing” is at the center of our religious lives. I’ll  give her the last words, once again taken from the poem “The Truth About God”:

God’s Work

Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
The kind of sadness that is a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own navel and which the Buddhists call

“no mindcover” is a sign of God.
The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like lashes are a sign of God.

God’s own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.

From these diverse signs you can see
how much work remains to do.
Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.

 

The post Anne Carson — a poet of spirituality and ‘small things’ — has won the Nobel Prize appeared first on The Forward.

If you ask historians to name the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, you’ll generally hear variations of the same responses. Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state; Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden defended Zionism; George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have all, at various points, been dubbed “the first Jewish president.”

Gerald Ford almost never makes the list. He is usually lumped in with Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush as a president who was hostile to Israel. I would argue, contrary to the popular perception, he belongs at the very top. In Israel’s hour of need, Ford provided what only a true friend can offer: tough love.

After the 1973 Yom Kippur War shattered Israel’s self-confidence, Ford perceived what many in Israel could not: Militarism as a substitute for diplomacy is self-destructive.

Much like today, the wars of 1967 and 1973 involved remarkable technical feats on the part of Israel; they also nearly triggered global nuclear conflict. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the U.S. and Soviet Union as being a “hair’s breadth” away from war in 1967. In 1973, with Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev drinking heavily, the CIA reported that the Soviets had moved nuclear weapons to Alexandria, Egypt; the U.S. subsequently went to DEFCON III. What made 1973 so deeply troubling was that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had secretly attempted to avert war and pursue peace. Still more troubling is the fact that King Hussein of Jordan had personally flown to Israel to warn of the imminence of an Arab attack.

Even after Ford took office, Israel’s government did not take Sadat seriously. But Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, a Holocaust refugee and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, did. If Nixon and Kissinger brought out the worst in each other — from supporting the coup in Chile to prolonging the Vietnam war — Ford and Kissinger brought out the best in each other, at least when it came to Middle East diplomacy.

In March 1975, after Israel continued to resist compromises with Egypt, Kissinger advised Ford to take a tougher line with Rabin. On March 21, Ford wrote one of the harshest letters in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, indicating that he had ordered “an immediate reassessment of U.S. policy in the area, including our relations with Israel.” Ford subsequently suspended or deferred new arms deliveries, including F-15 fighter jets. These were extremely risky political moves with very little domestic upside. But Ford was not simply another politician looking to the next election; he was a statesman looking to the next generation.

More importantly, Ford was acting as a true ally. Friends do not let friends squander a fleeting chance for peace with a mortal enemy. The Sinai II agreement was signed in 1975, committing Israel and Egypt to resolve their differences through diplomacy rather than warfare, laying the groundwork for the 1979 Camp David Accords. Jimmy Carter rightly gets credit for finishing the job with the former Irgun leader Menachem Begin as Israeli prime minister; but it was Ford who enabled the breakthrough. Six years after Sinai II, Sadat became a martyr for peace; two decades after the agreement (and two years after the first Oslo Accord), Rabin met the same fate.

For nearly half a century, that peace has served as the cornerstone of American and Israeli security in the region. It has survived wars, revolution, and terrorism. Peace with Egypt broke the taboo on Arab-Israeli pacts, demonstrating that coexistence was indeed possible; it paved the way for a treaty with Jordan and, ultimately, the Abraham Accords. To this day, Egypt remains one of Israel’s most vital intelligence partners.

What Ford can teach today’s leaders

Israel’s current leaders appear oblivious to this history. Highly credible reports have indicated that Israel was warned of war by Egyptian and other officials prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, which were themselves strikingly reminiscent of 1973. Remarkably, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel is even said to have flown to Israel days before the slaughter to warn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s claim that he only learned of these warnings from the media raises profound questions.

Oct. 7 and what followed have demonstrated the absolute bankruptcy of the “escalate to deescalate” doctrine and also the centrality of the Middle East conflict to regional and global security. So, in this world-historic moment, what can we learn from Gerald Ford?

First, like Ford, we must be realistic about the severity and trajectory of the crisis. It is clear that one or more players are inching closer toward the deployment of an unconventional weapon, ground forces, and/or a major conventional attack that would destroy critical infrastructure. Any such action would certainly be reciprocated, taking the global economy off a cliff.

Second, we must insist on known solutions. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed to me that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never said no to the map he proposed in 2008. This is because the two men were essentially in agreement. Instead of sending Israel 40,000 one-ton bombs, Trump should do what Ford did. Freeze weapons shipments until Netanyahu negotiates with Abbas in good faith to conclude an agreement along the lines of the Olmert parameters. As its name suggests, the “Axis of Resistance” would be severely undermined by peace with the Palestinians.

Third, we are faced with a simple truth: military escalation in the Persian Gulf cannot achieve what global diplomacy can. We must ask ourselves why China and Russia both supported the first Iran deal. While both countries would love to see the U.S. weakened in the region, does anyone really believe either power desires Iranian nuclear weapons in the Strait of Hormuz any more than the U.S. would desire them in Venezuela’s oil fields or the Panama Canal? History and economics suggest otherwise: Russia, once dubbed the “lesser Satan” by Iran, attempted to dismember the country after World War II, and China currently purchases roughly 90% of Iran’s exported oil. Ford, who used diplomacy with Egypt to weaken the USSR in the Middle East, would recognize these underlying frictions and use them to turn China and Russia against Iran. Today, we have accomplished the exact opposite.

Ford paid a profound political price for his courage, but he did the right thing anyway. When he took the oath of office, his hand rested on the wisdom of Solomon: “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” Many of our leaders today lean on little else.

The most pro-Israel thing an American president can do today is exactly what Ford did: Get some good advice and then administer tough love.

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