Notebook of Influences #3

Plus: A Yiddish Scholar Who Lost His Home in the LA Fires

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Marv Zuckerman sings “Song of the Peat Bog Soldiers”, an antifascist German ballad translated into Yiddish

Thousands of people lost their homes in the LA fires. My friend Marv Zuckerman was one of them.

Marv is ninety three years old, a Bronx socialist and a scholar of the Jewish Labor Bund who translated the text on my Yiddish Bernie Sanders poster when I stumped for his campaign. He mentored me on my book — in fact, I probably wouldn’t have done the book without him. His glamorous wife Kathy is the real-life model for sixties surfer babe Gidget (her dad wrote the books). Between the two of them, their home in the Palisades was a refuge of history. I remember the golden light in his study as he showed me his treasures. Songbooks from the Jewish Labor Movement. Brochures for the garment workers’ union’s resort (yes, unions once had resorts for their members!) where he waited tables as a teen. Crumbling documents saved from the conflagrations of twentieth century Europe. These papers were sacred — ways for the past to speak directly to the present. I felt grateful for every moment with them.

There are so many fires these days. The fires that the IDF unleashed upon Gaza, that incinerated not just tens of thousands of lives but also history — every university, the Great Omri Mosque, the library that poet Mosab Abu Toha had so carefully built. At a time when people are shredded into meat, it’s understandable to dismiss this mass destruction of heritage. Yet I mourn it all. Books are the crystallization of the irreplaceable hours that made up our ancestors’ lives, hours that they spent writing, as opposed to eating or fucking or staring at the ocean, so that they could convey themselves to us.

If you want to support Marv’s work after the fire, I recommend his invaluable translation of Warsaw milita leader Bernard Goldstein’s memoir, Twenty Years in the Jewish Labor Bund.

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Watch

I had the great honor of illustrating the story of Keith LaMar, a writer and musician sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. The state is due to murder Keith in January 2027. Despite the horror of his incarceration, Keith is a brilliant, hilariously funny guy, and I am so grateful that he trusted me and my animation collaborators at Sharp as Knives.

Here is a petition for his freedom.

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Read

• The extremely in-the-weeds in the best way story of OpenAI, the motherfuckers trying to shove AI down all our throats in the name of creating their own bullshit-engine god. The writer is

  Brian Merchant
  , whose book on Luddites will change how you see the history of technology.
  

• Mother of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji is asking for an FBI investigation of her son’s death. I wrote about Balaji in December.
  

• Sharif Abdel Kouddous interviews five journalists in Gaza on the eve of the ceasefire.
  

• “The lobbies of Cairo’s five star hotels are filled with international businessmen, diplomatic delegations, sex tourists, arms traders, gunrunners and mercenaries all wetting their beaks at the watering hole, the staging post into the South.” - Omar Hamilton
  

• Jake Hanrahan staring at his own face
  

• “Through repeat encounters, I somehow determined that, whether rapt or hostile, attention surrenders power in the form of another’s time, emotion, fixation, trained on you like a stage light. Once I walked through the Toronto gay village tonguing, I swear to god, a lollipop and watched the heads swivel in my direction.” - Kay Gabriel, Butt Magazine
  

• “If you apply yourself to this kind of reading, you will eventually construct a jukebox in your mind, from which you can pilfer at will. Like any jukebox, it will be filled with hooks.” - “All Gods Children Got Rhythem” by Lucy Sante.
  

• In the interest of staring less at your motherfucking screen, you can make these essays into cute little zines by using Ourzine

• Two print pieces I loved, that you’ll have to buy to read. Jay Le Soliel’s messily stapled punk rock socialist meditation What Else is There to Live For and Liara Roux’s ode to Mapplethorpe’s New York, in the impossibly sleek Erotic Review

• Some husky blonde from Missouri torched three restaurants in Puerto Rico because they kicked her out for being a sloppy drunk

Listen

Bad Bunny, obviously.

What are you reading, watching, or otherwise allowing into your brain?