Decades ago, Elie Weisel unloaded on the practitioners of Holocaust filmmaking. He felt that their efforts were juvenile and disgusting, a disgrace to the enormity of the event itself.

It would be better, he felt, not to speak at all than to somehow diminish the horror of the Sho’ah. Its impenetrable evil was beyond depiction, at least by most artists (Weisel excepted?) who embraced the task.

A smart man I know recently asked about Tulsa. “If you had to take a guess, what’s our moon shot? What’s the next big project that will put us on the map?”

There’s a lot of valuable talk going around, all on the subject of the next big thing. Austin did it. Nashville did it. The accelorationists among us figure that it’s now our turn, suggesting everything from drones to dirt bikes to data farms. All we need is for the holes in the cheese to align, which generally means big philanthropic support.

Two names for the same place? Not a problem. It took centuries to stabilize “Istanbul” and displace the name that came before it. I’d still be happy with Constantinople and use either name on alternate days.

My guess is that there are some people who continue to slip, in much the same way that they never made it from “Prince” to the unpronounceable hieroglyphic we were supposed to adopt. The two continued to be used interchageably.

Kevin Stitt, Governor of Oklahoma, has been a ramrod Republican from the very start. Hardcore progressives (like me!) have been frustrated by his program of kneejerk fealty to MAGA orthodoxy. Imagine the love child of Cruz and DeSantis throwing back his head to sing about the wind on the plains.

He has several peeves that endear him to conservatives, including taxes, public schools, and native Americans. The fact that the state is at the bottom of every list that measures health, education, and fundamental welfare, doesn’t seem to faze either Stitt or his allies.

There’s a gorgeous scene in the Book of Exodus that should be photocopied and distributed to Congressional Democrats.

It’s arguably the climax of the whole ancient narrative. Moses and the People Israel have reached the Sea of Reeds with the officers of Pharaoh in white hot pursuit. Another moment and the bloodbath will begin. I imagine it right out of the Colosseum scenes in “Gladiator,” with big swords affixed to the spokes of the chariot wheels.

Ryan Walters is the mole of Oklahoma politics. Whack him when he buys curricular materials from a sketchy conservative blowhard, and the next thing you know he’s snapping up Bibles for classrooms. Whack him for the Bible thing and he’s threatening to take over your schools.

He already demanded the head of Tulsa’s superintendent on a platter and extracted compliance in a show of brute force. The result was a sorry episode of scrambling disruption and pointless pilgrimages to appease a petty tyrant.

Montgomery, Alabama has the feel of an idea struggling to take shape. Despite the fact that it is the capital of the state, it has too many empty buildings to signal energy and initiative. We went looking for something between Charleston and Atlanta, but kept bumping into the wall of stalled renewal.

You could be forgiven for thinking that its day is done, except for the fact that it has achieved something miraculous: a cluster of institutions focused on slavery and its aftermath that are vivid, sophisticated, and deeply moving.

The stench of the new administration is now seeping through the floor boards. But before we have to evacuate the house, I’d like to take us back to 1938, the point of origin for so much of what we are now experiencing. In that year, another authoritarian regime, reacting to its own nativist fears of contamination, decided to remove foreign-born Jews, and shove them across the border into neighboring Poland.

I have enormous affection for my fellow Oklahomans, even when we disagree about the basics. It’s one of the many reasons I live in this state. I don’t want to suffocate in any kind of bubble, least of all a religious or social monoculture. It’s better for all of us when we rub shoulders with one another and learn to speak across the barrier of upbringing. That’s right at the center of the American Dream.

Anniversaries come and go, but before last fall recedes forever, I hope that you’ll make a mental note. At the risk of sounding full-bore ethnocentric, last year was the three-hundred-seventieth anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America. On September 7, 1654, twenty-three Jews landed in New Amsterdam after being expelled from Recife, Brazil.

They were probably heading back to Europe, but their ship was blown off course as it headed north. Trouble enough, not to mention the pirates of the Caribbean.

The repatriation of stolen art is never a sidebar issue. It raises critical issues about what the world community will tolerate, along with the workings of atonement long after the fact.

The latest notable case involves a canvas by Pissaro, born into a Jewish family on the island of St. Thomas in what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Adam Schiff, the new senator from California, always has my attention. Enormously well spoken, with simpatico politics, he’s the kind of person who rings many of my bells.

But it was a recent decision that really sealed the deal. As many of you have read, he took his senatorial oath of office on a twelfth-century edition of the Mishneh Torah. That would be the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, one of the first post-Biblical codes of law in Jewish history.