- Monologue about the 2001 Durban Conference narrated by Mary Robinson who is trying to use the conference as a rally to mastermind herself into becoming the first ever woman UN Secretary General and justifies everything to herself by what she can do once she gets the job. Tom Lantos is a character, starts by being friendly and diplomatic, promising to support Robinson no matter what, but after the conference starts, Lantos explodes in private and then in public: Robinson views this as a betrayal. Colin Powell is a character passively over the phone, Hanan Ashrawi is a character trying to convince her that the demands of the conference members are sensible. The story ends with an analyst for Qadaffi reviewing her statement like a deposition for the review of Durban conducted by Qadaffi and Ahmedinejad in 2009.
- One of the Charlap kids is a poor art student in Vienna around 1907 who has affairs with his models. At times he's homeless and lives in 24 hour coffeehouses. He goes about the coffeehouses, tries to listen to the famous coffeehouse writers pontificate but all he can hear is everybody's hysterical laughter at their witticisms. He goes to the opera and sees Mahler conduct Salome, the next day he gets an invitation to a morning rehearsal of Tristan, it starts with the prelude and Mahler shouts "Too Loud" "...but Herr Mahler..." "TOO LOUD!!" "We haven't even begun Herr Doktor!" "You must play the silence and you are PLAYING IT TOO LOUD!" Everyone comments on what a profound artist Mahler is with this wisdom. At break he meets another painter in the bathroom who calls himself Ah. Ah speaks worshipfully of Mahler and his Jewishness and the way he madly gesticulates at the podium and the aura he conjures for the audience. Ah compares this Charlap's looks to Mahler and John the Baptist in Salome and keeps referencing Charlaps hair like Salome reference's John's. Ah starts reenacting the monologue of Salome when she talks to the head of John the Baptist and tries to kiss the very straight Charlap. Charlap runs out of the bathroom.
- Edward Said having to schmooze at a Columbia faculty party right after the Six Day War where everybody is Jewish and he's promised no one would talk to him about Israel. A drunk Diana Trilling deliberately provokes him to talk about the Six Day War and yells at him after he says what he says but he realizes if he says what he really thinks his bid for tenure will be over. People all around the room shout him down anyway in ways that have an ambiguous whiff of racism. Lionel later apologizes for his wife's behavior but the apology is, to Said's ears, condescending. Nevertheless he smiles and accepts it.
- The Robert Jackson prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials, where Raphael Lemkin coins the term genocide. Written from the point of view of a young WASP lawyer, well meaning but with a few antisemitic notions that come out when dealing with the notoriously provocative Lemkin--perhaps thinking to himself that the Holocaust was provoked by men as combative as Lemkin. Jackson is extremely passionate in front of the jury but very practical and jokey in the chambers and is utterly exasperated by Lemkin's zeal.
- In London or the US, early 90s, two blind German men are put in a nursing home in adjacent rooms and become friends. One was blinded in Dachau, one was blinded while fighting the Americans outside of Dachau. The survivor does not realize that the other man is the camp guard who blinded him, the soldier does not realize he was the one who blinded the camp survivor. The camp survivor has a very fulfilling family life, the camp guard has lived his life alone and terrified. It is only when the survivor tells the story that the guard realizes he was the perpetrator. At night, the Nazi tries to smother the Jew with a pillow. A nurse comes in and sedates them both, the Jew thinks its a dream and the both go on as though nothing happened.
- Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan are rehearsing All My Sons. It's last months of 1946 when Richard Nixon is taking over HUAC. Narrated by Kazan. Kazan feels incredibly out of place because most of their actors are Jewish, most of their stagehands are Jewish, most of their audiences are Jewish, most of the women they sleep with are Jewish and the women go home with Miller first before they go home with Kazan and Kazan thinks they're all fantasizing about Miller. Everybody is making fun of the anticommunist hysteria but Kazan reads every day about the Greek Civil War and starts getting angry at the hypocrisy of nobody talking about what the Communists are doing over there. He brings up the idea to Miller of a play that denounces the excesses of socialism as well as capitalism, Miller is not angry, just confused 'why would we do that?' Kazan: "we always talk about what's wrong here, what about what's wrong over there?" Miller: "They're not who buy tickets..." Kazan: "I just made a fucking picture about antisemitism! You think Alabama's gonna buy tickets to that? I'm happy to do works standing up for Jews. Why can't we do one for the Greeks?" "I can write circumcision, I can't write pederasty," ...Kazan punches Miller. Miller responds: "I deserved that..." Ends perhaps with Miller going home with a beautiful woman named Norma because she feels sorry for Miller's black eye, and Kazan stuck with a copy of the Herald-Tribune where Greece is the headline, and a copy of the New York Times where Israel is the headline.
- Abraham Accords: Narrated by Avi Berkowitz, who has to provide the policy framework while watching Jared Kushner shuttle around the world having to assuage the egos of Trump, Netanyahu, MBS, King Abdullah, King Hamad of Bahrain, Steve Mnuchin, Mike Pompeo, David Friedman, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. Not much more description necessary is there? It ends with MBS or King Abdullah saying "we've finally demonstrated to the world that dictatorships can cooperate just as well as democracies" at which Netanyahu's eyes widen broadly.
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