I am writing this on Yom Kippur of 2025. I have just turned off my livestream because the rabbis have interrupted our standard atonement services to say criticizing Zionism is inhumane, which is bitterly ironic, because this morning, Israel intercepted yet another flotilla trying to help the occupied people of Gaza. I am fasting today, which means I’m starving but only in the theoretical sense of the word, because I’m doing this all by choice and will eat at sundown. The people the temple have just criticized for criticizing (also ironic) are starving in the literal sense of the word…yet another painful irony. 

I am reading Godard’s “What is to Be Done,” a manifesto that reflects on idealism against Marxism, and how we must embrace a concrete view of the world instead of a metaphysical one. I am also pondering the very Jewish, very tragic holocaust documentary Shoah and how its director, Claude Lanzmann, another left-wing French revolutionary, had a famous disagreement with Godard in 1998. Lanzmann said he would’ve destroyed archival footage of gas chambers had he found any, but Godard believed he should preserve this film. Ironically, Godard’s argument is far more idealistic because he’s arguing for the theoretical power of images, without really acknowledging how those specific, concrete images would feel. 

That being said, I wonder: what is to be done about Shoah? In a time where a ceasefire already feels like a broken promise, where the very concept of Palestinian liberation is demonized, and the Jewish experience is more politically and spiritually fragmented than it’s ever been? 

Using Godard’s structure, I have come to the following conclusions: 

• We must analyze Shoah as a political film. 

This is because Shoah is a timeless political work. It is both a moving portrait of resilience and a trenchant demonstration of the banality of evil. You could cut virtually any minute of dialogue out of its staggering nine-and-a-half-hour runtime, overlay clips of modern ICE raids or IDF soldiers doing TikTok dances, and be left just as speechless as the late Roger Ebert when he saw it in theaters four decades ago. It is arguably this spine-chilling timelessness that earned it its reputation, according to Ebert, as “one of the noblest films ever made.”

2. We must analyze Shoah as a film politically.

This noble reputation has, however, also shielded Shoah from a lot of necessary scrutiny. Due to the sensitivity of its subject matter and severity of its length, most critics and scholars have defaulted to an attitude of “words will never do it justice” and/or “it transcends film and thus film criticism itself.” And, those who haven’t, have had their insights lambasted as “so grotesque as to seem willful.”

But this speechlessness also reeks of bitter irony because nearly every minute of Shoah consists of people talking. The film isn’t merely about discussion; it’s about the importance of discussion: how the duty of memory, compassion, and hope all erode away if we do not engage in discourse. We must reckon with Shoah., because Shoah is a Jewish film and Judaism is a religion of reckoning. 

3. 1 and 2 are not antagonistic. In fact, one ceases to exist without the other.

I’m going to be honest. Godard’s essay reads a little WASP-y (sorry if that sounds glib, but I process trauma the Mel Brooks way; if you want completely earnest Jewish criticism, go read Chomsky). The idea that the world exists on such a linear, black-and-white spectrum is too alienating (and Jews like to save our feelings of profound alienation for God.) If Godard were Jewish, “What is to be done?” would not read “1 is x; 2 is y.” It would be more Talmudic: “1 is x and 2 is y, but 2 is also sometimes xy except on Thursdays when 3 deconstructs y and opts for xyz.” Shoah, being a deeply tragic and deeply Talmudic film, requires the same treatment. In fact, I’d argue juxtaposition and irony are the two tools Lanzmann uses most often. Equal parts moving memoir and borderline satiric criticism, Wiesel and Kafka, it recognizes that Judaism requires an embrace of incongruities. For example…

4. Shoah rejects the metaphysical idea of Holocaust cinema. 

Lanzmann, by no means, made the first Holocaust film, but every major release prior was created through the prism of dramatization. They were re-imaginings of the world’s conceptual understanding of genocide, either adapted from novels (Exodus, The Pawnbroker), sanitized to win the idealistic and deeply bourgeoise triumph of Academy Awards (Julia, Sophie’s Choice), or they made use of genre conventions that broke the reality of history altogether (Singing in the Dark, Cabaret.) By opting for a more formally experimental approach, the whole movie is basically just first-person accounts of survivors about anything and everything that occurred during its namesake, Shoah reconfigures both tragedy and cinema about tragedy at the same time. 

Every film professor I had in college subscribed to the belief that images and economy were the two most important parts of filmmaking. Shoah proves that they’re not: you can make a sprawling, nine-hour piece composed almost exclusively of words, and it can still be incredibly poignant and deeply urgent.

5. But Shoah is still a metaphysical movie. 

The testimonies of Shoah spare no detail. We hear what shade the sky was with human smoke against it, what pair of scissors were used to clip Jews’ hair before they arrived at Treblinka. One survivor hauntingly states: “If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.” The language of the film is so intricate and exhaustive, it takes on an almost abstract, imaginative quality.

To continue the Kafka comparison: when editors were making illustrations for The Metamorphosis, Kafka was insistent that the audience never see the bug. Such a visual would be manipulative; he wanted the absurdist horror of the story all to play out in the reader’s mind. Lanzmann takes on a similar attitude with his viewers. Ironically, with no concrete visuals to anchor us, the nightmarish incomprehensibility of it all becomes more visceral in our imaginations.

Even more ironically: Godard tells us that “to carry out 1 [making political films] is to make descriptions of situations” and “to carry out 2 [making films politically] is to make concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” Meanwhile, Lanzmann shows us that by carrying out 1, you carry out 2 regardless. While Godard’s dualism leads to abstraction, Lanzmann’s doublethink creates solidarity because…

6. Shoah is a film about class conflict and class solidarity. 

For example, around the second hour of the film, we are introduced to Czeslaw Borowi, a farmer with land near the death camps. The farm he speaks on is in shambles. His only vehicle is a horse and carriage. His friends wear the frayed sweaters and tattered hats of Victorian-era chimney sweeps. The imagery is clear: these are deeply poor people. But all of Lanzmann’s questions seem to place them in a position of higher social status, of privilege. He’s not wrong to do so. Compared to the Jews, these people’s lives were nowhere near as immediately threatened. When prisoners were being asphyxiated, these farmers weren’t rounded up; they just “worked…but not as willingly as usual.” But, free “will,” even existing under nazi rule, feels like a gross oversimplification. 

Some might argue that Borowi is anti-Semitic because his only effort to help those who “spoke Jew” (his words…not great) was to gesture that they would be killed as the train passed.

But they never really answer “what is to be done?” otherwise. In the irony of all ironies, Borowi asks that exact question regarding the Jews in this very film. Speaking of will…

7. Class contradictions can be studied with images and sounds, but the ethics are determined by the will of the viewer. 

Again, Shoah often feels like a work inspired by Kafka. It captures the labyrinthine, often tragic absurdity of modern Jewry and places a tremendous amount of decision-making on the audience rather than the creator. 

Obviously, the Kafkaesque horror falls mainly on the survivors of the camps, may their memories be a blessing, but Lanzmann also slyly showcases the horrors of bureaucracy. Take the way he interviews Henryk Gawkowski, a worker at the Treblinka railway station. The guy says he drank vodka relentlessly because it was the only way to make his job bearable amid the long hours and smell of burning corpses. He sounds like a real-life Gregor Samsa: “condemned to work” even as he’s “so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind.”

Or, take Lanzmann’s interview with former SS officer Franz Suchomel, who gives a painstaking logistical portrait of the administrative procedures that happened in the camps. This entire interaction is filmed via hidden cameras, but Schumoel is cagey, even when he’s assured his anonymity is protected, like he feels a surveillance in his bones. A man who assisted a genocide by hawkishly watching his victims is now afraid of being watched? Is this the most bitter irony of the scene? Or is it that Lanzmann lies, and tells Schumoel he isn’t being recorded? That undermines the “ethics” of the project, right? But that also forces us to investigate why we would expect journalistic integrity as a tool to protect a literal nazi in the first place.

When I watch Shoah, I feel deep empathy for both Gawkowski and Suchomel. And I get angry that I feel this empathy, because, metaphysically, I don’t think they deserve it. But empathy is the True North. Again, it is Yom Kippur, a day we take responsibility for all of our fellow men, not just the ones we like. We can’t be dualistic about this because—

8. Life and death, good and evil, are not antagonistic but co-existent.

Lanzmann proves this by splicing long, wheezing pastoral images of beauty at multiple concentration camps. Even over unmarked graves, green continues to grow. Snow continues to fall. Nature is as old an entity as it gets, but Shoah manages to undercut its ancient grace with the eerie horrors of modernity. With nothing but dialogue and context, we are reminded of the unspeakable atrocities. The film turns the most innocent images of life into grotesque symbols of death. 

Or at least…they feel like images of death. Shoah also makes me ask myself: what is objective reality, and when does my own morality cloud my viewpoint? When it comes to cinema, especially cinema that is this relevant to modern politics, is there such a thing as moral viewing? 

9. Shoah shows how our social existence creates our morality.

Take the scenes with Simon Srebnik, one of only seven survivors from the Chelmno concentration camp. Lanzmann returns with Srebnik to his village and asks if his townsfolk are happy to see him again. They are, but they’re also very quick to upstage his suffering. One villager quite literally cuts him out of frame to explain that, when the Jews were being marched to the vans, a rabbi in the town square encouraged his congregation to die as punishment for their ancestors killing Christ 2,000 years ago. Other townsfolk chant, “Many Poles were also exterminated! Even priests.” Lanzmann steadily zooms in on Srebnik’s face during this altercation. Srebnik makes direct eye contact with the camera, as if to communicate he shares our same nauseating revelation that the bigotry is so socially ingrained, genocide is not just a horror of the past; it is an active threat of the present. This cuts even deeper when you realize that…

10. Lanzmann’s legacy feels like it undermines the revolution as much as it promotes it. 

While Shoah is a nondualist film, Lanzmann had a reputation, especially among anti-zionist scholars, as a deeply black-and-white thinker. He accused those who disliked Shoah of anti-semitism rather carelessly. He strategically excluded French witnesses from the film, keeping his home country’s role in extermination at a distance. He was an outspoken zionist, and less than a decade later, he created a sort of anti-Shoah in the form of the five-and-a-half-hour documentary Tashal, which not only permits, but celebrates Israel’s presence in Gaza. In true opposite form, his later films invert images of industrialized death and surveillance: computerized checkpoints, tanks, military jets, into symbols of life and liberation.

Like I said, Judaism is both spiritually and politically in crisis. My very act of prayer today feels like the unintentional polishing of a weapon for extermination. Last Passover, my aunt added an olive to the Seder plate to pray for peace, for stability. The great Psalm of stability (125:1) quite literally states we, who believe, “are like Mount Zion; [we] shall not be moved,” which, read metaphorically, is a message of resilience, but read concretely, is a declaration of the ideology we are actively seeking to resist. In a world of such cruel ironies, I often ask myself if making films politically has any sort of sustainable future…because if even the visionaries who oppose war eventually end up condoning it, what is the point?

Ironically, Lanzmann’s filmmaking philosophy might actually be the very tool we can use to answer this question. Part of what made Shoah so groundbreaking was that it avoided the very theoretical  question of “why?” (as in, “why” did we allow such horror to occur?) and focused on the very tactile inquiries of  “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how.” Jewish philosophy is very interior; we are constantly asking ourselves why. If we are to make films politically and effectively, we must resist this instinct and instead prioritize the Jewish principle of service. We must look outward and support others in their mission rather than debating how to do it ourselves. In other words: stop asking “why is this happening?” and instead ask “what is to be done?” (Huh. Maybe Godard’s question wasn’t so WASP-y after all.) Sometimes, I forget Yom Kippur is as much about action as it is about reflection. When I remember to ask myself that key “what can I do?” question, I become flooded with hope–for the future of art, politics, and beyond. In fact, I believe…

11. True Marxist filmmaking exists right now, and it exists in Palestine

Like I said, Lanzmann was an ironist, but not always intentionally. I think the greatest irony of all is that Godard and Lanzmann’s artistic legacies are being carried out more effectively than ever in the cinema of Gaza. 

Last year’s No Other Land has Godard written all over it. It’s guerrilla; it’s socially conscious. It breaks the fourth wall, then repairs it, then breaks it again. Plus, given the fact that every distributor, including Cannes (which Godard famously protested in the 60s) is now petrified of platforming it, it achieves his mission “to use images and sounds as teeth and lips to bite” with a silver tongue. Meanwhile, Mohammed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin: a film made almost entirely of testimony about the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp, has the same grieving construction of collective memory that Shoah does. It’s yet another bitter irony that the filmmaker of Shoah holds partial artistic responsibility for its creation. 

12. If we hope to continue politically making films, we must start by supporting Palestine. 

Godard and Lanzmann both reconstructed the act of viewing cinema while making it. The artists of Gaza are doing the same. Not only has their very expression added a new sense of urgency to the integrity of film itself, but the severe censorship over the distribution of their films, there is a new responsibility on the viewer to engage with what they are creating at all costs. Godard says the act of making films politically is “to struggle for the showing of BRITISH SOUNDS on English television.” Gaza isn’t just making British sounds. They’re making the sounds of the world. And, thanks to a far more decentralized system of media, no television now has to show the cinema of Gaza for our eyes to reach it. It’s TikTok. It’s YouTube. It’s “all eyes on Gaza” both literally and metaphysically because…

13. Filmmaking is one small screw in the revolution, but also the revolution itself.

Jews believe your life is your art. The Yom Kippur act of Teshuvah, of repentance, of reconstructing oneself to be better, is an inherently creative one. It is also a revolutionary one, but to engage in that revolution, one needs the yetzer: the impulse to create. Filmmaking is the yetzer. And making films politically creates Teshuvah.

It is Yom Kippur 2025. I am reflecting on how Claude Lanzmann’s yetzer inspired him to make Shoah, a documentary about horrid atrocities. That same yetzer caused him to make a subsequent film that promoted the atrocities that the world must pay Teshuvah for. The yetzer of Gaza, as a reaction to Lanzmann’s yetzer is what’s making my Teshuvah feel like a more creative process. My yetzer is helping me see how these yetzers can coexist. Their coexistence is ironic, but then again, Judaism requires an embrace of incongruities.