Leah Libresco's Blog, page 8

Sing Out, America! An appreciation of Listening for America

One of my favorite books I read this year was Rob Kapilow’s Listening for America, a tour through the genius of American musical theater. I was delighted to get to write an appreciation for Fare Forward.

Reading Kapilow took me one step further into appreciation. He has a gift for worked examples and teaches by rewriting the songs he’s showcasing. He changes just one small detail at a time to show how it supports the song. He might remove a bluesy swing, a shift up the octave, a chromatic note, to come up with a more pedestrian variant he calls the “Kapilow version.” None of his rewrites have a wrong note, but they lack inventiveness.

Playing his rewrites side by side with the originals, you can hear how the expected version might sound good enough, but the real version is sublime. […]

The composers build up their songs layer by layer, so that each small choice is marked by how it harmonizes with what has come before. I can’t capture the chord by having a friend guide my fingers to ring out those final measures in isolation.

Our institutions and connections to each other are similarly built piece by piece. Here, my mistake of trying to play just the finale looks a little different. We try to remix or excerpt the cultural traditions that have sustained us, pulling out the single element that seems necessary. But, cut from the full tapestry, it unravels in our hands.

Read the whole thing at Fare Forward.

Defending Dependence

My essay, “Dependence: Toward an Illiberalism of the Weak” is part of Plough‘s Family issue. Everyone is dependent (at least some of the time) but women have a much harder time than men pretending not to be. Hiding dependence hurts us all.

On January 21, I’ll be joining Ross Douthat, Sarah C. Williams and Peter Mommsen for a Plough-hosted event on Douthat’s piece in the issue “The Case for One More Child.”

So long as we are not currently weak in body, we are tempted to view ourselves as whole. In the absence of visible blemish, we blunt our longing to become whole. And, lest we be tempted to consider the truth, we need only look at how far from us we have pushed those who are weak. We imagine that we can’t possibly be discardable, like they are, and therefore our souls must be unspotted.

A society that cannot imagine placing the weak at its center, that forgets that society exists for the weak, will be drawn towards the Manichaean modes of cancel culture. We see sin but not grace – we try to find and throw out the bad apples, whom (we think) no one can restore to righteousness. Or we see ourselves mirrored in the most notorious sinners, and work to deny sin, since we don’t want to be cast out with them.

[…]

To give an honest accounting of ourselves, we must begin with our weakness and fragility. We cannot structure our politics or our society to serve a totally independent, autonomous person who never has and never will exist.

Read the whole thing at Plough

And continuing conversations on this kind of topic is why I’ve started a new newsletter, Other Feminisms, for discussing the dignity of dependence.

Discussing Evangelization with Bishop Barron

In my day job, I was very happy to get to facilitate a conversation between Bishop Barron and the students of Princeton University. The event was hosted by the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Life at Princeton, and Bishop Barron fielded student questions about their challenges in evangelization for an hour.

Bridging the Divide Within Feminism

At Newsweek, I’m discussing some of the tensions within modern feminism, and where we can find common ground across the abortion divide.

Women are divided over how to respond to a world that treats us as defective men. Do we try to elbow our way in by adjusting our lives to a norm that may not fit us—bringing in a lap blanket, dropping apologies from our speech or freezing our eggs to delay childbirth? Or do we fight to reject or broaden the norm? Both tactics have their place, but the latter is the more powerful. Often, expanding the norm benefits men, too, who may have found themselves chafing under narrow expectations.

Some of the divisions between mainstream feminism and what Ross Douthat describes as the “conservative feminism” symbolized by Amy Coney Barrett come down to how women respond to the Procrustean pressure to fit uncomfortable norms patterned on men, especially as they pertain to fertility and childbirth.

For instance, are women aiming to overcome our biology to achieve the same liberty as men—to only live as a parent through an active, affirmative choice? Are the burdens of pregnancy a design flaw we aim to overcome, whether through gestation in Brave New World-style artificial wombs or through classifying pregnancy as “care work” and hiring other women to do it—following the model that shifted elder care to poorly compensated, overworked women?

You can read the whole thing at Newsweek.

I’ve also set up a listserv (Other Feminisms) for people who feel like an awkward fit in mainstream feminism but who want to advocate for women. It’ll be a motley crew, but here’s how I see our aim:

Often, our equality is premised on remaking ourselves to be more like the median man, whether that means changing our style of speaking to exclude apologies, changing our breastfeeding plans to keep up with work’s minimal accommodations, or changing our bodies to suppress fertility and destroy our children.

We say no, and that, instead, the world must remake itself to be hospitable to women, not the other way around. That means valuing interdependence and vulnerability, rather than idealizing autonomy.

If you’re interested, you can sign up here.

Cheering on Superman Smashing the Klan

My husband and I were guests together on God and Comics to talk about Gene Luen Yang’s Superman Smashes the Klan. The book is great, and I really enjoyed talking about it with the three nerdy clergymen of God and Comics.

Yang is updating a Superman radio serial (“Clan of the Fiery Cross”), which was based on the reports of a reporter undercover in the KKK. Stetson Kennedy shared the secret practices he observed, and when they were woven into Superman’s story, they helped weaken the Klan’s recruitment efforts.

In the the original story, Superman defends a Chinese-American family from the Klan’s persecution, and Yang expands the depth of the Lee family. To preview our podcast, I’ll just mention two themes Yang weaves in well.

He tells the story of a Klan that is a mix of true, hateful believers and cynical grifters—and the second is wickeder.

He keeps front and center Superman’s particularly American story—someone who was not born here, but who became American when his parents sent him to our country for refuge.

Finally, I can’t discuss Yang without mentioning how much I love his Boxers & Saints duology. I strongly recommend it.

Listen to the whole thing on God and Comics.

‘Cuties’ Is Dangerous, Even If It Wasn’t Meant To Be

At The American Conservative, I’m talking about why visual representations of exploitation are almost always pulled into a kind of exploitation themselves.

The initial advertising for Cuties presented the hypersexualization without any hint of critique. It showed the young actresses in provocative poses, and made it appear that the intended audience for the film was people who wanted to see prepubescent children sexualized.

To an extent, Netflix was right about the audience—though the goal of Maïmouna Doucouré, the writer and director of the film, was to unsettle these people, not titillate them. She drew inspiration for the story when she was shocked and sickened by seeing a group of eleven-year-old girls perform risqué dances. She interviewed pre-teen girls to make her film, learning from them the double pressure they felt: first, to exploit themselves for social media attention and second, to call their experience of exploitation liberation.

I’m very sympathetic to her critique, and I appreciate that she grounded her film in real experiences, but I’m profoundly skeptical of offering that critique through film. Critiquing hypersexualization through visual art is very difficult. How can you show the exploitation of a child to critique the exploitation of children? How can you expose the ugliness of a culture that’s entered the mainstream without being even uglier than what people have already acclimated themselves to?

I go on to discuss the show I love that arguably glamorizes what it criticizes: Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. You can read the whole piece at The American Conservative.

Bad Art Warps Our Vision

At First Things, I take a crack at explaining why smutty art is bad in the way airbrushing and CGI Yoda are bad.

It’s the same reason we should object to airbrushed skin and photoshopped waists. It’s the same reason we should object to sending barely pubescent girls or anorexic teens down the catwalks to model clothes ostensibly being sold to adult women. False images distort our vision, and they feed misogyny. Fashion designers openly admit that their collections presume that “the ideal body shape [is] a female on the brink of hospitalization from starvation.” Why should we give them the benefit of the doubt that their destructive vision is merely thoughtlessness rather than an active war on women?

These works are marked by a sense of unreality—they take important things lightly. They treat human relationships and loves in an uncanny way. 

Read the whole thing at First Things…

Tiny Book Club: My new newsletter

I’ve started a newsletter on Substack, called Tiny Book Club.

Every month, I pick a good essay or article, invite in a special guest for a dialogue, and then host a discussion with all of the subscribers. It’s a book club for readings much much shorter than a book.

We kicked off in August with John Ahern’s essay “Contrapuntal Order” from First Things. The special guest is Micah Hendler, the founder of the YMCA Jerusalem Youth Chorus, and my conversation with him drops tomorrow.

You can sign up here to receive our full conversation tomorrow, but here’s a preview for now:

Micah: The piece that instantly came to my mind upon finishing the article is a mashup I arranged for the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, an Israeli-Palestinian music and dialogue project which I founded and artistically direct. The piece is a mashup of two different songs from different musical traditions in different languages that share similar themes—birds, singing, and freedom.  

One song is by Marcel Khalife, “Asfour Tal Min Al-Shubbak,” an iconic protest song in Arabic that tells the story of a bird who escapes from a cage and flies to the house next door, coming in through the window and asking for shelter. The chorus itself is a dialogue between the bird and “Nunu,” the young child who ultimately brings the bird back to health, freedom, and song. This song was suggested to me by one of my singers, Sofia, who thought it would be a good fit for the Jerusalem Youth Chorus.  She was right.  

As I was learning the song, another song came to mind—a round written by Linda Hirschhorn, a Jewish composer from the Bay Area, who set a translation of some of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry to music absolutely brilliantly: “I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart, singing freedom.” The thematic resonance was stunning, and the intersections of identities involved in the different origins of the songs to arrive at the same point just made things more fascinating. So I began to see whether these songs could actually work together, musically, and how they could comment on, amplify, and enrich one another in the process. The result is the Jerusalem Youth Chorus arrangement of which I am most proud.  

There’s lots I could say to guide you through the arrangement—different musical elements, textual elements, etc.—but for now, I’ll just say, take a listen!  And enjoy the gorgeous ‘oud accompaniment by my Arabic music teacher in Damascus, who literally recorded that oud track in one take in between bombing raids near his home, where he still lives, in Damascus.  Talk about birds, song, and freedom.

Leah: Thank you so much for sharing that song (and pointing me to your chorus’s spotify album, which I’ve been listening to). I’m glad you unpacked both songs for me a little, so I wouldn’t lose the resonances. 

There’s something very fruitfully unsettling about finding an image you love being admired in a similar way by your enemy. In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis talks about friendship as a love that’s ignited by discovering a shared love. When he contrasts eros and philia, he says that lovers of the former type face inward, looking at each other. Friends look outward, at their shared object. So there must be a little grain of friendship sprouting, even amid enmity when we discover a shared love.

We have more to say, including on songs from Sondheim to Moana, and you can read the whole thing tomorrow if you sign up here.

Keeping Vaclav Benda’s Door Open

At Mere Orthodoxy, I laid out my problems with some of Rod Dreher’s recent writing on race and soft totalitarianism, drawing on his own Live Not By Lies for an alternate model of witness.

The most serious danger Woke Capital poses isn’t to the people forced to adopt nonsensical cant or take implicit bias tests that have no proven relationship to real racial bias. The real danger is that these corporations and spokespeople redirect activist energy to stupid causes while letting real injustices persist.

Think of the realtors who pledge to eliminate “master bedroom” from their listings when the real problem is that realtors are still refusing to show houses to Black, Asian, and Hispanic customers. (Kudos to Newsday for carrying out a three-year investigation to substantiate what many Long Island homebuyers had suspected).

The faddish and foolish solutions proffered in lieu of real reform mirror the way that minority communities are simultaneously both over- and under-policed. Minority communities don’t get the help they deserve and are instead offered something worse than neglect. There is a double injustice, as when the wrong person is sent to jail for a crime. There is an injustice to the person falsely condemned, as well as an injustice to the whole community, who have been denied justice for the original offence.

Where should Christians be in this struggle? As the prophet Amos tells us, we must “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream,” (Amos 5:24). We aren’t called to carp on the sidelines about tactics, but to involve ourselves directly. If we have fraternal corrections to offer, they can only come after we’ve lived as a brother to our neighbor.

Read the whole thing at Mere Orthodoxy. And for more on this topic, you can also read my essay “Fear and the Benedict Option” at First Things.

Will the Real Mrs. America Please Stand Up

I reviewed Hulu/FX’s Mrs. America for The American Interest. The show turns on one question: Who gets to claim the mantle of a women’s movement?

In episode four, Schlafly and Friedan square off in a debate. Both women relish the fight—Friedan more obviously, exclaiming “God, I’d like to burn you at the stake,” just as she did in real life. But their attacks on each other reveal a potential for common ground that neither admits to. Both activists acknowledge the limits of law to protect women if the broader norms of the culture are misogynist.

Friedan makes her case by taking on Schlafly’s ideal of the homemaker who would rather keep her special privileges than have equal rights. Schlafly likes to hold up the example of a mother, who is supported by her husband and whose work in the home is treasured and protected. But, as Friedan points out, a widowed woman enjoys no such privilege. And, as the viewers have seen, Schlafly’s mother is one such woman. Neither private charity nor government support came through to support her or her children. The homemaker’s privileges are precarious, ERA or no.

Schlafly fires back, by arguing that the ERA isn’t really important as a matter of law to the Women’s Libbers. It’s more of a cri de coeur, a way to push back against a world that’s hurt them. But, Schlafly says, the law won’t stop your husband from leaving you or a man from being a pig. In the show, it’s clear this is a personal jibe at the divorced Friedan.

In the debate, both sides are focused on using the law to make a claim about who women are. But both of their campaigns are incomplete without a corresponding moral or cultural revival. The push to fix culture through law has only grown more intense in our present day. Congress is gridlocked, and many representatives seem to relish being freed of direct responsibility to legislate. Their authority is devolved onto administrative agencies, the courts, and the increasingly imperial presidency. To get anything done, activists have to look for a constitutional angle to justify taking the fight to the courts.

Read the whole thing at The American Interest…