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‘Succession,’ ‘Barry’ and the very Jewish nature of unresolved endings
This story originally appeared on My Jewish Learning.
(JTA) — Over the past few weeks, a lot of sad faces were peering at their screens as two popular television shows came to an end. Two HBO staples, “Succession” and “Barry,” aired their season finales in late May. And as happens with all high-drama prestige television, the debates began the moment the episode was over. Did Kendall deserve what he got? Was justice served for Mr. Cousineau? Without revealing any details, it is fair to say that many fans were left with that gnawing feeling of an unresolved ending.
TV endings were not always this way. Decades before “The Sopranos” famously concluded with its cut to black, shows typically concluded with a nice emotional ribbon — loose ends tied up, characters discovering the promised land. On “Cheers,” Sam returned to his bar. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ended with an actual group hug. On “Friends,” Ross and Rachel finally got together. “M*A*S*H,” still the most watched television finale of all time, ended with the main character finally returning home, wistfully looking from a helicopter to the word “goodbye” spelled out in stone. The episode was aptly titled, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen.”
Then everything got darker and grittier. Today, TV fans have come to expect unsettling, unresolved and even unhinged endings to their favorite shows. I am here to say that such conclusions are quintessentially Jewish. The Torah itself is an ode to unresolved endings.
As you may already know, the Torah concludes (spoiler alert!) with the death of Moses on the edge of the promised land. I take it for granted now, but imagine reading this for the first time. What?! The leader of the Jewish people, who brought them out of Egypt, received the Torah on Sinai and led them through the desert for 40 years doesn’t live happily ever after in the promised land?
If the Torah were an HBO show, fans would have been outraged. Shouldn’t the final scene have seen Moses walking arm and arm with the Jewish people across the Jordan River, the sun slowly setting as the credits roll? Instead, we are left with our beloved leader buried right outside the land he yearned to enter. Why does the Torah end this way?
Franz Kafka — himself no stranger to unresolved endings (The Trial” ends with Joseph K. being beaten “like a dog”)— took an interest in this question. He writes:
The dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.
In Kafka’s reading, the Torah’s ending reflects the larger reality of human life itself, which is “nothing but a moment,” an exercise in incompleteness. Our personal narratives don’t fit neatly into a box. They don’t have ribbons on top and rarely end with group hugs. Human life ends unrequited, ever yearning, ever hoping. As Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg writes in her magisterial biography of Moses: “Veiled and unveiled, he remains lodged in the Jewish imagination, where, in his uncompleted humanity, he comes to represent the yet-unattained but attainable messianic future.”
And that is perhaps why I love abrupt endings most. They reflect the fabric of life itself. As David Foster Wallace once observed of Kafka’s narratives, they emphasize “[t]hat our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” What is more human than an ending that just recursively folds into another beginning of longing and hoping? Moses’ unrealized dream and legacy continues, and begins again, in the minds and hearts of those captured by his story.
So save your group hugs for sitcoms. Real life doesn’t have a neat ending. We continue the journey where the last generation left off. An ending that perpetually endures.
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The post ‘Succession,’ ‘Barry’ and the very Jewish nature of unresolved endings appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Poland’s Jewish museum director returns, 7 years after being pushed out by nationalist politics
(JTA) — The first director of Poland’s leading Jewish museum, squeezed out seven years ago by a nationalist government, is returning to the helm in a symbolic reversal.
Dariusz Stola steered the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw from its founding in 2014 to become a breakthrough in Poland’s recognition of its extinguished Jewish past.
But he clashed with the right-wing Law and Justice party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023. The former culture minister accused him of “politicizing” the museum through explorations of antisemitism in Poland, and in 2019, he was pushed out despite winning a competition to extend his tenure.
Now, Stola has been reinstated by the new culture minister Marta Cienkowska, who was appointed in 2025 by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk. His new term begins on March 1.
“In 2019, the then minister [Piotr] Gliński decided to ignore the results of the competition,” Cienkowska tweeted. “That appointment should have taken place six years ago. Dear Professor, good luck.”
Stola, a historian of Polish-Jewish relations and professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences, called his return to Polin “a victory of justice and rule of law.” When he was not reappointed in 2019, he chose to withdraw so that his deputy director Zygmunt Stępiński could take over. Stępiński will once again be his deputy.
“This confirms that the strategy we took in 2019 was right,” Stola said in an interview. “I lost only temporarily, and we have preserved the autonomy of the museum despite heavy political pressure.”
The Law and Justice government has made controlling Polish-Jewish history a core part of its platform, promising to revive Poland’s pride in its past and eradicate a so-called “pedagogy of shame.” That narrative stifled research on Polish antisemitism and Poles who killed Jews during and after the Holocaust.
Stola drew particular ire from party officials with a 2018 exhibit that documented Poland’s state-sponsored antisemitic campaign of 1968, which purged Jews from their workplaces and forced about 13,000 to emigrate. Former culture minister Piotr Glinski said afterwards that Stola imposed “very aggressive politics” on the museum.
In 2018, the country passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes. The infraction was later downgraded from a crime punishable with prison time to a civil offense, but critics say it had a chilling effect on historical research.
Stola’s reinstatement represents a gradual shift back to investigations of Polish-Jewish history, across cultural and academic institutions, that were dashed by the previous government. Only in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell, did Poland begin efforts to reconcile with the murder of 3 million Jews there and the intertwining of Jewish and Polish history.
Though a centrist coalition led by Tusk has governed Poland since 2023, Law and Justice clawed back a sweeping victory with the election of Karol Nawrocki as president last year. Nawrocki, a right-wing historian, has played a crucial role in the party’s efforts to rewrite Poland’s Holocaust history — making Stola’s reappointment a rebuke of the country’s largest political party by its governing coalition.
“The mission of the museum is even more important today, in the face of the dark forces distorting the memory of the Polish-Jewish past,” said Stola.
The post Poland’s Jewish museum director returns, 7 years after being pushed out by nationalist politics appeared first on The Forward.
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India’s Modi Visits Israel, Expresses Support for Jewish State as US-Iran Tensions Mount
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attend a welcome ceremony upon Modi’s arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Shir Torem
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Israel on Wednesday for a two-day visit that both countries have cast as a chance to deepen relations, as regional concerns mount over the risk of military conflict between the United States and Iran.
In an address to the Israeli parliament, Modi told lawmakers that India stood with Israel “with full conviction” as he shared his nation’s condolences over the October 2023 Hamas attack.
“Like you, we have a consistent and uncompromising policy of zero tolerance for terrorism, with no double standards,” he said.
Both Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also addressed the parliament, spoke of terrorist attacks that their nations had faced, with Netanyahu saying India and Israel both faced the challenge of confronting “radical Islam.”
Some opposition lawmakers briefly walked out of the special session, protesting at the speaker’s decision not to invite the head of the Supreme Court, but returned for Modi‘s remarks.
Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which the speaker belongs to, has had a confrontational relationship with the court.
Modi, a Hindu nationalist, became the first prime minister in India’s history to visit Israel in 2017, during which he and Netanyahu took a barefoot stroll on a beach in the northern port city of Haifa.
Both still in power nearly nine years later, the two leaders, who describe one another as friends, are expected to hold talks on artificial intelligence as well as defense at a time when Israel is seeking to increase its military exports.
An Israeli government official said Modi‘s visit would “pave the way for new partnerships and collaborations across many fields.” Bilateral ties were on the cusp of a significant upgrade, an Israeli foreign ministry official said.
US MILITARY BUILDUP NEAR IRAN
Modi is visiting as the United States deploys a vast naval force near Iran‘s coast ahead of possible strikes on the Islamic Republic, with the two countries at an impasse in talks over Tehran’s nuclear program. The Pentagon has also deployed an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean, bound for Israel‘s coast.
A US attack on Iran could draw Iranian retaliation against Israel as well as US military facilities in Gulf Arab countries, where millions of Indians live and work and send home billions of dollars of remittances each year.
In his speech to lawmakers, Modi vaguely spoke about the challenges facing stability in the region, acknowledging that the landscape had become more challenging in recent years, but made no mention of the US military build-up, or of Iran.
He backed the US plan to end the war in Gaza, telling the parliament that it could lead to peace “for all people of the region, including by addressing the Palestinian issue.”
“The road to peace is not always easy. But India joins you and the world for dialogue, peace, and stability in this region,” Modi said.
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CIA Launches Fresh Social Media Push to Recruit Iranians as Trump Threatens Military Action
The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency is shown at the entrance of the CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, US, Sept. 24, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The US Central Intelligence Agency has posted on social media new Farsi-language instructions for Iranians wishing to securely contact the spy service.
The CIA recruitment effort comes amid a massive buildup of US military forces in the Middle East that President Donald Trump could order to attack Iran if talks with the US set for Thursday fail to reach a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump began laying out the case for a possible US operation in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, saying he would not allow the Islamic Republic, which he called the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism, to have a nuclear weapon. Iran denies seeking a nuclear arsenal.
“They [Iran‘s leaders] want to start all over again, and are, at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he said, accusing Iran of restarting its nuclear program, working to build missiles that “soon” would be capable of reaching the United States, and of being responsible for roadside bombings that have killed US service members and civilians.
“The [Iranian] regime and its murderous proxies have spread nothing but terrorism and death and hate,” the Republican president said about 90 minutes into his annual address to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives.
The CIA posted its Farsi-language message on Tuesday on its X, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube accounts.
The message is the latest in a series by the CIA aimed at enlisting sources in Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia.
The agency urged Iranians wishing to make contact to “take appropriate action” to protect themselves before doing so and avoid using work computers or their phones.
“Use a new, disposable device, if possible” and “be aware of your surroundings and who may be able to see your screen or activity,” continued the message, adding that those who make contact, provide their locations, names, job titles and “access to information or skills of interest to our agency.”
Those individuals, said the message, should use a trusted Virtual Private Network “not headquartered in Russia, Iran, or China,” or the Tor Network, which encrypts data and hides the user’s IP address.
The CIA declined to comment. Iran’s delegation to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are scheduled to meet Iranian officials led by Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi in Geneva on Thursday for a new round of negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump has threatened military action if the talks fail to reach an agreement, or if Tehran executes people arrested for participating in nationwide anti-government demonstrations in January.
Rights groups say thousands of people were killed in the government crackdown on the protests, the worst domestic unrest in Iran since the era of its 1979 Islamic Revolution.