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He committed murder today. Or maybe yesterday. He doesn’t know.
In the spring of 1940, two French Algerians, the brothers Raoul and Edgar Bensoussan, got into a rumble with two Arabs on a beach near the city of Oran. The reason is unclear, but not the result: One of the Arabs, Kaddour Betouil, pulled out a knife and stabbed Raoul in the arm and mouth. The latter, bloodied and retreating to his beach cottage, returned to the crime scene armed with a pistol. A second fight occurred between the two men, ending not with a pistol shot but instead with the arrival of French gendarmes.
It happens that the Bensoussan brothers were Algerian Jews whose family were beneficiaries of the Crémieux Law, which in 1870 extended French citizenship to the Jewish community that had lived for centuries in Algeria. That same law, however, did not extend to the several million Arabs and Berbers, who, like Kaddour Betouil, were condemned to remain subjects, not citizens, under the French republic.
If this story sounds familiar, it is not at all absurd. This same strip of beach, the historian Alice Kaplan reports, is still known to locals as la plage de L’Étranger, or The Stranger’s beach. The story of this altercation, bien évidemment, made its way back to a friend of Bensoussan brothers, Albert Camus.
In both the novel and in François Ozon’s new film adaptation, this scene, though it arrives midway through the story, is in fact the climax. On a beach in Algiers, there is a confrontation between a Frenchman, named Meursault, and an Arab, left unnamed. The latter, reclining on the sand, holds a knife, while Meursault, standing above him, holds a pistol. This time, though, as waves crash and the sun blinds, the pistol does go off. There is a single shot, a pause, then four more shots.
“It was like knocking,” Meursault observes, “four quick times on the door of unhappiness.”
Ozon has Meursault, played by the actor Benjamin Voisin, speak these words in a voice-over once he fires the shots. He repeats this use of the voice-over, reciting the final lines of the novel as the film approaches its conclusion. As for the rest of the screenplay, also written by Ozon, it bears an unwavering fidelity to the lean yet lyrical cadence of Camus’ own language, famously described by the literary theorist Roland Barthes as the “zero degree” of writing, one that strove to be utterly transparent.
Yet there are also dramatic departures from the novel, not to mention the even more faithful adaptation by Luchino Visconti in 1967, which starred Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault. In part, the Visconti version was more faithful because it was filmed in color. How could it be otherwise for a novel in which the startling colors of the sea, sand and sky play such a crucial role? Yet Ozon chose to film in black and white, perhaps reflecting Hollywood film noirs, and the crime novels by the likes of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, that knocked the socks off Camus and fellow existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre. While the images captured by cinematographer Manu Dacosse often vibrate with sensuality, they nevertheless smack of skilled artifice and not Meursault’s reality.
Moreover, Ozon refashions the role of Marie Cardona, the woman who falls for Meursault. In the novel, she is little more than a prop — a woman as attracted to Meursault’s physical beauty as she is alienated by his emotional blankness. Here, Marie, played by the young stage actor Rebecca Marder, assumes a central role. Marder is mesmerizing, but that is precisely the problem; it risks turning an iconic account of the absurd into a love story. And, to paraphrase Tina Turner, love’s got nothing to do with this story.
Ozon introduces other wrinkles — for example, the thrum of homoeroticism that accompanies the scene with Meursault and the Arab — but they pale in comparison to his most dramatic departure from the novel. In effect, Ozon names not just the Arab, but also his sister. The latter works as a prostitute and is beaten by her pimp, Raymond Sintès, who also befriends Meursault. It is this unromantic triangle that leads to their confrontation on the beach — and, of course, to the reader’s confrontation with the perennial question: Why did Camus leave them nameless?
Rather than try to answer this question, the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud decided to give the Arab not just a name, Musa, but a history. In Daoud’s stunning novel Meursault, Contre-enquête, or The Meursault Investigation, Musa’s brother, Harun, cannot forgive the injustice that Meursault won undying fame while Musa was condemned to nameless obscurity. “Good God, how can you kill someone and then even take his own death away from him? My brother was the one who got shot, not him! There’s something I find stunning, and it’s that nobody…ever tried to find out the victim’s name.”
In a couple of simple and scintillating scenes of his own invention — one with Musa’s sister Djemila visiting his gravestone, the other an encounter between Djemila and Marie — Ozon repairs this omission by giving names and voices to those who had been nameless and speechless. No less importantly, he has given us a film that reminds us of the elusiveness of meaning and strangeness of life in a world as absurd today as it was in Camus’ day.
The post He committed murder today. Or maybe yesterday. He doesn’t know. appeared first on The Forward.
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With a Kennedy Center honor under Trump, David Mamet enters his final, tragic act
There was a time when David Mamet being honored at the Kennedy Center wouldn’t have raised eyebrows.
His contributions to American theater and film transcend an affinity for four letter words (let’s call them “the F— Variations”). His tough-talking, desperate men gave splenetic voice to the indignities of a capitalist system in Glengarry Glen Ross, evolving sexual mores in Sexual Perversity in Chicago and, in a movie like The Verdict, the justice system.
Cut to 2026 and Mamet’s scripts are but an afterthought to his grievance. When he makes headlines now, it’s for his reactionary conservative streak and his role as a partisan in the culture war. Together with a run of flops, numbering a Harvey Weinstein #MeToo comedy and a Broadway show not even Al Pacino could save, his esteem has cratered among the liberal circles that once embraced him, and to which he once belonged but now prefers to eviscerate.
He has made the transition from dramatist to pundit, first at HuffPost, lately at The Free Press. Reading too much into Oleanna, perhaps, he has called teachers pedophiles on Fox News, written screeds on cancel culture and, a prerequisite for the Kennedys at this moment, praised President Donald Trump.
In the honor, there is a strain of tragedy. Mamet has strayed so far from where he started — what he called his “brain-dead liberal” era — that he makes perfect sense for this appointment, under a regime that tried to slap its leader’s name onto a tribute to a slain president meant as a bipartisan shrine to art. (Due to the Center’s closure amid turmoil and legal battles, the ceremonies will take place at the Capital One Arena, which is only too perfectly bleak.)
A younger Mamet would have looked askance at such a figure as our current Commander-in-Chief, a character who is on the make with all sorts of half-baked schemes. The Iran War may be his latest play on a Buffalo nickel.
It’s enough to make one wonder if we’ve been misreading Mamet all along. Are the men breaking-and entering to steal the Glengarry leads meant to be admired? Are the Hollywood sleazes in Speed-the-Plow aspirational? Is Al Capone the real hero of The Untouchables?
Perhaps the evening, which tends to include career retrospectives, will elucidate. But if the Kennedy Honors could once be said to be for closers, it may now be only for a particular kind of sellout.
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Why is Britney Spears studying Hebrew?
It’s Britney, Yitz!
Continuing a curious social media trend that has previously seen appreciation for the beards of chess-playing Chabadniks and the Zohar hidden among baby clothes, Britney Spears took to Instagram Sunday to post a Hebrew Book of Psalms and the Lekutei Amaraim, or Tanya, a Hasidic book of sayings.
The caption reads: “I’m extremely bored !!! Learning Hebrew reading right to left !!! Beautiful language !!!” (A previous caption, posted Sunday, was more cryptic, concluding “God speed little man !!! I love u !!!,” perhaps indicating the presence of a havruta or someone in her life who keeps his mitzvot.)
What exactly is happening here? Is Spears, like Marilyn before her and Sydney Sweeney now, about to dip her toe into the mikveh?
The best clue we have isn’t from Spears’ page, but from Israeli model Natalie Dadon, who tagged the “Hit Me Baby One More Time” singer in a selfie with the Tanya. “Finally, it’s possible to tell,” Dadon posted, in a gallery with Hebrew language news coverage of the posts. Dadon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dadon’s social media presence involves Tanya study, which itself is a cornerstone to Lubavitch philosophy (so perhaps is connected to the Chabad chess players whose beards Spears so admired) and adjacent to Kabbalah.
Spears is no stranger to Jewish subjects. Around the time she locked lips with Madonna at the 2003 VMAs, she started, like so many others, to look into Kabbalah, as this handy timeline from Hey Alma notes. She has a Hebrew tattoo of letters that signify healing in kabbalistic texts and was apparently once attached to star in a Holocaust-time-travel-romance film called The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton, which now that I’ve heard of it I will never shut up about.
She has credited Kabbalah with helping her through a difficult time in her life and has been spotted wearing a star of David.
But we should approach Spears’ dalliance with Judaism, now sandwiched on her Insta page between a call-out of her sister Jamie Lynn and a NSFW video of her dancing with a rose Emoji as a fig leaf, with some healthy skepticism.
Her Instagram bio currently reads “Pray Every Day” with a prayer hands emoji next to a Bible emoji with a cross. She’d still appear to be Christian — or, at the very least, waiting for the new iOS update with the Tanya emoji.
The post Why is Britney Spears studying Hebrew? appeared first on The Forward.
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Haley Stevens cheered at Jewish day school after endorsing GOP Senate candidate
(JTA) — Democratic Michigan U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens was given an extended ovation at a fundraising gala for a Detroit-area Jewish day school Sunday, hours after her endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers for Senate.
Stevens, a longtime pro-Israel stalwart, was celebrated at the Yeshiva Beth Yehudah annual dinner as many members of her party across the country spoke out against her decision to break with Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
Video of Stevens’ minute-long standing ovation was shared on social media by representatives of Agudath Israel of America, a major Orthodox advocacy group. Strongly pro-Israel Jews have largely lauded her move to Rogers, which she said came about in part because of her objections to El-Sayed’s past relationship with anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker.
Also on Sunday evening, Stevens struggled to explain the timing of her decision in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. One consistency in her response was her belief that she was helping Democrats beat back antisemitism within their own party.
“I’m trying to help the Democratic Party. I felt the same way about Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo,” Stevens said, referencing the Maine Senate candidate who ultimately stepped down from the nomination. Asked if she believed El-Sayed is antisemitic, she responded, “I think some of the actions have certainly been antisemitic, Anderson, but I’m just sick of who he stands with.”
She named Piker and “the uncle,” referring to Piker’s uncle Cenk Uygur, whose PAC produced an ad supporting El-Sayed that blamed Israel for the price of groceries. After Stevens publicly pressured El-Sayed to condemn the ad’s contents, the candidate appeared to do so on Saturday night, which Stevens celebrated in a statement — hours before endorsing Rogers.
To Cooper, Stevens suggested that many other Democrats felt the way she did.
“I’ve been hearing from a ton of Dems, Anderson, who have said, ‘Thank you. This is how we felt.’ They haven’t liked this campaign. It’s painful,” she said. A growing number of Michigan Jewish Democrats have pledged to vote for Rogers, though more than 1,000 have also signed a letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed.
Yeshiva Beth Yehudah is spread across multiple suburban Detroit campuses and is the largest Jewish day school in the state. Its annual fundraising dinner, “An Evening of Unity,” is known for drawing big national names in politics and the media, usually from both major parties.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was the evening’s keynote speaker, and the gala program also featured personal letters from President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
But it was Stevens, a regular supporter of the school, who turned the most heads. She was also presented with what the emcee called “a specially designed, illuminated book of the five scrolls of our prophets, which remind you all of our heartfelt esteem and appreciation for who you are.”
The yeshiva’s leadership also extended warm wishes to Stevens’ Jewish fiancé, Democratic megadonor Jason Turkish, whom the yeshiva’s emcee described as “our dear friend.” Turkish’s own endorsement of Rogers came days before the congresswoman’s.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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