Mitchell Abidor Archives - Public Seminar

NAZA Gives A Name to the Machinery of Killing

The documentary turns Israeli soldiers’ testimony into an indictment of a system whose victims have been telling its story for years

October 13, 2026 • by Mitchell Abidor

When NAZA, the new documentary on the genocide in Gaza directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival it was reported that it set a festival record for the longest standing ovation ever at 24.5 minutes. When I saw the ...

NAZA Gives A Name to the Machinery of Killing

Activism

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

An eyewitness report from Israel

March 4, 2026 • by Mitchell Abidor

I spent the summer of 2025 in a state of rage about events in Israel. Every day, I read in the liberal daily Haaretz of settler attacks in the West Bank on Palestinians and the Israeli activists who were defending them. Rage has long been my normal state, but I ...

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

Film & Performing Arts

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, La Grazia

An interview with the Italian film director on ordinariness, doubt, and jealousy at the heart of his new film

December 8, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Paolo Sorrentino

Editorial note: This interview contains spoilers. Paolo Sorrentino’s films are grand affairs, with elaborate camerawork and stunning settings underscored by memorable music. The plots match the grandeur of the mise-en-scène. In his new film, La Grazia, the purely cinematic elements of the film remain grand—and at times knowingly bizarre, like the ...

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, La Grazia

New York City

A Mayor Who Promises the Moon

Canvassing for Mamdani

October 29, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

In the run-up to this year’s election for New York City’s next mayor, I’ve spent several days canvassing for Zohran Mamdani. On every occasion I’ve been as much as a half-century older than the rest of my young, white comrades. Unlike most of them, I’m also a native New Yorker, ...

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Film & Performing Arts

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

A conversation with German novelist Daniel Kehlmann

June 17, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Daniel Kehlmann

Mitchell Abidor interviews Daniel Kehlmann about examining the curious saga of Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst in his new novel, THE DIRECTOR....

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

History

Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction

“An exploding form in an exploding world”

November 22, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Edwin Frank

In the years that Edwin Frank has been at the head of New York Review Books Classics, he has revived forgotten or out of print novels like John Williams’s Stoner and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. He has also made available the work of previously unknown authors from America and ...

Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction

Interviews

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

A conversation with Ronnie Grinberg about her book Write Like a Man

October 8, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Ronnie Grinberg

In this biographical study of the New York Jewish intellectuals behind journals like Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, Grinberg focuses on prominent post war writers and editors like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Kristol, many of them native New Yorkers and graduates of City College....

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

Film & Performing Arts

A Love Affair Without Sex?

Slow, the latest film by director Marija Kavtaradzė, is a heartfelt portrait of a couple on terra incognita

May 2, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Marija Kavtaradzė

Slow, the latest film by director Marija Kavtaradzė, is a heartfelt portrait of a couple on terra incognita...

Middle East & North Africa

The Moral Failure of My Left

I wrote as a leftist against the Left, which has discarded the values that have sustained it for over two centuries

January 10, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor

If it was incumbent on the left to condemn attacks on civilians by Israel, it was equally so to condemn attacks on Israeli civilians. ...

Activism

Andrew Leland in Conversation about The Country of the Blind

For some blind people, a white cane must be brandished with pride, never folded or disguised

October 23, 2023 • by Andrew Leland and Mitchell Abidor

In The Country of the Blind, Leland describes his experiences among the blind, including a course in which he artificially lives in the total blindness that will one day be his. ...