Reckoning
No. 12 | 2026
I want to think about Marty Supreme. It’s true…I’m interested in how Marty Mauser figures into a familiar lineage of Jewish masculinity: the wry self-effacement of Mel Brooks, the tightly wound intellectualism of Jesse Eisenberg, the inward, self-questioning presence of Jason Schwartzman, and the fragile resilience of Adrien Brody. Marty himself abrasive and unlikeable by design, straining against the narrow constraints that have made these representations legible in the first place, inviting a backlash that feels less about him than about those limits. I’m struck by the ways in which Jewish womanhood plays out. Rachel Milzner, his childhood friend and romantic interest, stretches herself to accommodate the arc of his becoming. His mother, Rebecca Mauser, is nagging, manipulative, exhausting, and inescapable; her love sustains and constrains him in equal measure. In both cases, Jewish female endurance is treated as a given. Elastic, inexhaustible, always available. I keep returning to my expectation that the film should more clearly critique this structure. To the realization that it stages it and moves on, leaving the discomfort unresolved.
All of that is smart enough and familiar, I guess. Like I said, I want to think about Marty Supreme. But what’s catching me off guard is that I’m not going to. At least not in that smart familiar way. Because I’ve got this gnawing discomfort, a kind of uncertainty that the analysis even matters. If you’re reading this, you likely know that I’m Jewish. And that I’ve long written about the representation of Jewish people, parsing the cultural meaning, lingering over how we are seen. But now, right now? That attention begins to feel indulgent, even insulated: a form of self-regard that no longer makes sense to me in the world as it is.
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (a book that demonstrates how language and moral frameworks of the West absorb and neutralize the ongoing violence against Palestinians, even as that violence is plainly seen), has me thinking that what Marty Supreme might “mean,” is irrelevant against the backdrop of the War on Palestine. As I try to untether my academic brain from my visceral knowing, analysis begins to feel less interesting than indecent, less insight than bystander posturing.
That is some hard shit to come to terms with. And I don’t think I can yet…not by way of argument, at least. So instead, I’m bringing in stories.
I. Food Math
In October 2023, Mosab Abu Toha, his wife, and their children evacuated their home in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, after Israel warned it would be bombed. They moved to the Jabaliya refugee camp, joining hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. In 2024, writing for The New Yorker, Abu Toha described what he called the “daily work of hunger.”
His days were organized almost entirely around food math: counting lentils, measuring rice, recalculating portions after another relative arrived. The writing lingered not on hunger as sensation, but on accounting itself. Who ate yesterday. Who didn’t. Whether a child should eat now or later to make the feeling of fullness last longer.
He described the moral drag of starvation: how eating registers immediately as a choice rather than a necessity; how swallowing food feels heavier when you know someone nearby will not eat at all.
That same year, speaking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, Abu Toha said:
“A famine is unfolding in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have resorted to consuming animal feed amid soaring prices and dwindling supplies of food. The United Nations has already begun reporting deaths from starvation and malnutrition… They are killing us every day. Where is the mind of the people in the world? How could you let this happen?”
More recently, he posted a short poem on Facebook:
Too many clementines in a love song
and the people of Gaza are dying from hunger.
Gaza, once famous for its oranges and clementines,
hasn’t tasted either in twenty-two months.
The orchards that once scented the air with citrus
are scorched, the trees burned or withered to death.
And the song is full of clementines.
Gaza has forgotten the taste—
and lost the fingers to peel them.
II. Waiting With Hunger
Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist based in Gaza, has reported continuously since October 7, 2023. Much of her diary-style reporting focuses on waiting. Waiting for flour. Waiting for bread. Hours marked not by bombs or sirens but by rumor. Someone hears a bakery might open. Someone else hears it has already run out. People stand, sit, drift away, return. Starvation appears not as spectacle but as decision fatigue: the exhaustion of constantly triaging care with nothing left to allocate.
In December 2023, she wrote:
“We have officially run out of food. We went to the market to look for something to eat… We are drained, dehydrated, starving, and cold. People in Gaza City do not even have the freedom to search for food. Anyone who moves risks their life. If death doesn’t come from airstrikes, it will come from starvation.”
On World Food Day (2025), she asked: “How do you soothe a child crying for chocolate when you cannot even make them bread?” She had no answer. Food choice no longer existed, she explained: “We eat what is available. I yearn for something sweet. It has been so long without anything that I have forgotten the taste of pancakes with bananas.”
III. Honey in the Camp
Béla Kletzki is not a real person. He is a fictional character in Marty Supreme, loosely based on the Hungarian Jewish table-tennis player Alojzy Ehrlich. Midway through the film (set years after the war), Béla recounts a story about surviving Auschwitz.
German officers have assigned him to munitions-disposal work outside the camp. On one of these outings, he notices a bee and follows it into the woods. He finds a hive. He breaks it open with his hands. Inside is an unexpected abundance of honey. He undresses and spreads the honey across his body—his chest, arms, legs—covering as much skin as he can. Then he dresses again and marches back to the camp.
In the barracks, he undresses once more. The other prisoners gather around him—skeletal, silent. They cling to him, licking the honey from his body.
When Béla tells this story, the people listening continue eating. Plates remain on the table. No one leans in ceremonially. The camera does not swell or cut away. Horror and survival are described where appetite still lingers.
There is one more reaction; the audience laughs.
Placed side by side, these scenes do not compare suffering. They share knowledge.
In Gaza, sweetness has become an absence remembered by name: bananas, pancakes, chocolate, clementines. Hunger is administered through math, rumor, waiting, and triage. It is slow, bureaucratic, humiliating. It is lived in the body and managed through care decisions that never end.
In Marty Supreme, sweetness appears as a brief, almost impossible surplus. Not enough to save anyone, but enough to circulate. Enough to be transferred from body to body.
For many Jews, this scene is already legible. The honey story exists precisely to make starvation visceral and transferable—to ensure that it can be recognized. Which is why it feels disorienting, even unbearable, to witness Palestinians describing hunger in the same register and not see recognition convert into refusal.
The rupture is not ignorance. It is containment.
The honey scene places starvation safely in memory, in testimony, in a past that can be revisited without interrupting the present. The Gaza scenes refuse containment. They are unfinished. They do not resolve. They do not end with survival.
What these scenes together expose is the unsettling truth that collective trauma does not automatically generate solidarity. It can just as easily generate exemption: the belief that one’s own historical knowledge need not apply outward.
In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad writes about the language the West uses to describe violence against Palestinians, language that does not deny what is happening, but renders it distant, procedural, and ultimately unreal. Atrocity is shown, even named, and yet made weightless, absorbed into euphemism and abstraction until meaning collapses under the guise of clarity. Language does not fail to describe violence; it succeeds in making it survivable for those who do not bear it.
Perhaps that is what makes the honey scene feel so dangerous here. Not because it teaches us nothing, but because it teaches us something we already know. We recognize the spectacle of suffering. We understand what we are seeing. And still, we have learned how to absorb that recognition without allowing it to reorganize our sense of responsibility.
And I, a Jewish American woman, am left with the question posed by Mosab Abu Toha: Where is the mind of the people in the world? How could we let this happen?
Next post soon.
In the meantime, email me at drcarala@gmail.com.
SO. MUCH. LOVE.
Cara
Works Cited
Abu Toha, Mosab. “My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza.” The New Yorker, 2024.
Abu Toha, Mosab. Interview by Amy Goodman. Democracy Now!, 2024.
Abu Toha, Mosab. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear. City Lights Books, 2022.
El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Knopf, 2025.
Khoudary, Hind. Reporting and diary entries for Al Jazeera English, 2023–2025.
**Marty Supreme*. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, A24, 2024.
