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Journey to the north.

2022 ‘北游记之仙魂下凡’ Directed by Mai Guanzhi

The story begins with the reincarnation of two immortal souls of the Heavenly Emperor, one good and one evil. Conspiracies and tricks come one after another, leading the two wisps of soul to kill each other.

Merxat Lai Yu Meng Xiao Xiangfei Wu Chunyan Shen Feifan Liu Tao

Director Director

Mai Guanzhi

Alternative Title

Journey to the North: The Immortal Souls Descend to the Mortal World

Releases by Date

29 jul 2022, releases by country.

83 mins   More at TMDb Report this page

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• South Korea
• Philippines
• Adapted From A Novel
• Adapted From A Manga
• Gay Character
• Love Triangle
• Older Woman/Younger Man
• Time Travel
• High School
• Strong Female Lead
• Male Chases Female First
• Gay Relationship
• College Life
• Multiple Couples
• Childhood Friends
• Adapted From A Webtoon

Journey to the North 2022 (China)

Journey to the North 2022 (China), also known as Bei You Ji Zhi Xian Hun Xia Fan, 北遊記之仙魂下凡 is China drama premiere on Jul 29, 2022

Plot Synopsis by DramaWiki Staff ©

Two spirits of the Celestial Emperor, one good and one evil, reincarnate in the Mortal World. The good one, reborn as Chang Sheng, the God of War, can survive even with his heart cut out. The evil one, reborn as Yun Huang, is imprisoned by the King of the Netherworld in the Demon Hell for a hundred years, tortured everyday by Soul-eating Nails. Conspiracies come one after another, making the two spirits fight against each other. Cheng Huang, the divine beast, turns into a pretty young girl to seduce the God of War and kills him for Yun Huang. The seal of the Netherworld gets destroyed and demon soldiers break into the Mortal World, massacring people. What secrets are hidden in the Demon Hell? Can the two spirits survive the calamity in the mortal world and return to the Celestial Emperor? (Source: WeTV, edited by MyDramaList) Edit Translation

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Chang Sheng is the god of war. Xing Xue is a mythical beast able to take human form in the service of Yun Huang, prince of the Demon Kingdom. He orders him to get closer to Chang Sheng in order to steal his jade heart which would allow him to reach immortality.

Released: 29/07/2022 (China)

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Chinese Asian Movie , Asian-Film , AsianMovie , bande annonce vf , Bei You Ji Zhi Xian Hun Xa Fan , Dvd , Film Asiatique , Journey to the North , Journey to the North (2022) , Lai Yu Meng , Mak Kun Chi , Mi Re , trailer hd , VAD , vod , Wang Jiao , Wu Mo Tong , Xiao Xiang Fei , 北游记之仙魂下凡

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Eye For Film >> Movies >> To The North (2022) Film Review

To the north.

Reviewed by: Amber Wilkinson

Tension throbs like a ship's engine beneath Mihai Mincan's fiction feature debut. Moral values are also all at sea in his tale of a stowaway aboard a container ship heading from Spain to Canada. The mood is more of that of a western than a chamber piece, after Romanian Dumitri (Niko Beker) and his Bulgarian friend Georgi (Dimitar Vasilev) sneak aboard the vessel, which they believe is bound for America, their hope of a new life almost heartbreakingly simple.

Georgi, whose American Dream is to become a cowboy, is first to break cover, approaching one of the Filipino crew with a sweet smile and the word "amigo". The troubled look he receives from bosun Joel (Soliman Cruz) immediately creates tension and, though he is initially given food and water, the hierarchy on the ship soon becomes apparent, with a Taiwanese captain and his officer crew much less welcoming to their unexpected guest. When Dumitri takes his turn to come into the light, he again crosses paths with Joel, whose religious beliefs make him inclined to try to help this hapless kid.

The fear is stacked, like the decks of the ship, as Joel takes Dumitri down to the engine room, locking him into the darkness with the promise that he'll return with food and water the next day. One layer of anxiety concerns Dumitri, stuck and dependent as he is on a single man, who could be his saviour or his slayer. That is matched by the second layer of fear that sits heavily on Joel, lest his secret stowaway be revealed to his Taiwanese bosses by one of his less than eager Filipino co-conspirators.

Intensity burns through almost every interaction, whether it's Joel instructing Dimitri to pray or Joel's boss (Alexandre Ngyuen) engaging in philosophical small talk with a barbed underbelly. The director often lets faces completely fill the frame so it feels as though there's no escape, a sensation added to by the measured delivery and even tone that carries with it an unspoken threat or, in Joel's case, simply feels as though something more may be hidden beneath.

Mincan, whose background is in documentary, makes us hyper-aware of the spaces on the ship, as the score from Marius Leftarache glowers broodily beneath and sound design from Nicholas Becker (The Sound Of Metal) draws on the groans, beeps and creaks of the ship to stoke the mood. The containers and decks are like a warren, with Dumitri the frightened rabbit at its heart but Joel's position is barely any more enviable - he may be able to move anywhere on board but he can't get off until port. Morality is a game of chess here, something Mincan lays out almost literally as Joe's boss patiently explains to him his perceived difference between what is "good" and what is "fair". We'll soon come to see that roles are not as fixed as they appear, a hero could be a villain in the right circumstances, a victim might turn predator - by the end we root for everyone and no one, caught as they all are between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Director: Mihai Mincan

Starring: Alexandre Nguyen, Soliman Cruz, Nikolai Becker, Emmanuel Sto. Domingo, Bartholome Guingona, Olivier Ho Hio Heen

Runtime: 122 minutes

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April 18, 2024

Current Issue

Journey to the North

June 8, 2023 issue

Javier Zamora; illustration by Sol Cotti

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Back in the early 2010s, when I was writing my first dispatches from the US–Mexico border and volunteering as a humanitarian worker, I would stand on a hill in Nogales, Mexico, and watch as migrants, mostly young men, ducked alone through a hole in the old border fence. They would then dart from bush to bush, sometimes army-crawling through the arroyo. If a Border Patrol truck rolled by, the migrants would freeze, make a run for it, or dash back into Mexico. They were crossing within a stone’s throw of the official port of entry, and though they still had many more armed agents and checkpoints to contend with on the American side of the fence, some made it far enough north that I lost sight of them.

Such solo crossing attempts are rare these days. An increased Border Patrol presence, reinforced with high bollard walls, surveillance towers, and blimps, pushes migrants farther into remote desert stretches or toward less monitored bends in the Rio Grande. The businesses of bordering and border crossing—governments spending billions, much of it going to private contractors, to try to seal the border; criminal organizations, sometimes working directly with law enforcement, kidnapping, extorting, or simply charging migrants for passage—have exploded over the past decade, and migrants who have had all legal routes closed to them have little chance of making it across safely unless they turn to professional guides.

While the Biden administration has rolled back some of the anti-immigrant excesses from the Trump era, it has imposed numerous other regulations to block people from seeking protection. Even if migrants merely want to turn themselves in and ask for asylum—an act that the administration has made surpassingly difficult for many—they almost always have to pay off or contend with smugglers. It has been reported that the people who were being held in the immigration detention center in Juárez at the time of the horrific fire on March 27 of this year—when forty died after guards heartlessly walked away from the locked cell door the migrants were kicking at as they tried to escape the flames—had yet to be released because they didn’t have enough money to pay off the guards. 1

At least 20 million migrants have crossed the US–Mexico border without authorization so far this century, and the number is likely much higher. The northward march, mostly from Mexico and Central and South America into the US, is one piece of what is now the largest human migration in world history. Due to war, political instability, hunger, and climate crises, more than 100 million people across the globe have been forcibly displaced from their homes, according to a United Nations calculation from last year. While numerous books have been published on the subject, including histories, journalistic accounts, novels, and an abundance of immigration memoirs, there are fewer migration memoirs—books that describe the journey itself rather than life after arrival.

“I overheard Abuelita say there’s more violence now, so more and more people need coyotes,” Javier Zamora writes in his memoir, Solito . The book is an intimate retelling of the punishing, almost lethal nine-week, three-thousand-mile journey he took from El Salvador to the US in 1999, when he was nine years old. His writing is filled with detailed sensory observations, which give his account an extraordinary immediacy:

The only sounds are the crunch under our feet and the occasional grasshopper buzzing out of our way. The slight breeze. Bushes recoiling when we brush past them. Rocks in our shoes. The backpacks and the empty water gallons moaning like frogs.

“Solito” would be a good colloquial translation of the title of his first book, Unaccompanied , a collection of poetry published in 2017. But while Unaccompanied explores Zamora’s life both before and in the United States, and includes poems on the Salvadoran Civil War and its legacy for subsequent generations, Solito is all road, all now. Even the opening chapters, set in the small Salvadoran town of La Herradura, where Javier was born, focus almost exclusively on anticipation of and preparation for the trip north.

Zamora’s parents grew up in El Salvador during the civil war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992. His father, seeking to escape the violence, left for el norte right before Javier’s second birthday. His mother followed when Javier had just turned five. They meant to bring him to the US shortly afterward, but with stepped-up immigration enforcement, the cost and the dangers of migrating had spiked, and then the years dragged on—his parents toiling in California and Javier pining for them back in El Salvador, where he lived with his grandparents and an aunt named Mali.

Zamora devotes little space in Solito to the question of what compelled his parents to leave El Salvador: “Mali says they left because before I was born there was a war, and then there were no jobs.” He says more, though cryptically, in Unaccompanied : “The war is or isn’t over, but coffee still brews.” We get other snippets in other poems, such as bullet casings mistaken for cormorant beaks and a notorious assassin splitting open watermelons. One poem calls out the complicity of Jimmy Carter and “Tío Reagan,” Uncle Reagan, both of whom sent weapons to support a brutal military dictatorship in the country. He also recreates a diary entry from his father in which he recounts witnessing a helicopter dropping bodies onto a field.

In the memoir , Zamora writes entirely from the viewpoint of his nine-year-old self, including nothing but what he knew and worried over at that age. In first grade he was the only child in his class who wasn’t living with both of his parents, but by fourth grade, most of the pupils have been left behind: “It’s because our parents are not here and we’re not there that Mays and Junes are sad. For most of us, our grandparents are the ones who show up for Mother’s and Father’s Day assemblies.” He similarly boils down the departure of his fellow students, sucked north to reunite with family in the distant metropoles: “One day we’re playing soccer at lunch, playing tag at recess, and then, poof, they never come back.” He has no information about the details of their journeys—or about his father’s. All he knows about his mother’s trip is that it took two weeks and she traveled with the help of a coyote named Don Dago.

Javier has long been fixated on what he refers to as the “trip.” His parents have been telling him that “one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure. Like the one Simba goes on before he comes home.” After various promises to depart go unmet, and “when my parents said they didn’t have enough money to bring me to them,” he cracks open his Super Mario piggy bank. “Abuelita cried when I told her why I broke it. I cried because she was crying and because she told me it wasn’t enough.”

And then, finally, Don Dago darkens the doorway. When he comes to town, wearing a baseball cap, ironed polo, and multiple gold chains, the local cantina owner plugs in a fan to keep him cool. At once trusted, almost revered, by the community and feared for his connections to the underworld of human smuggling, he is considered the best coyote in central El Salvador, as Javier learns from gossipers at the local pupusa stand. Which means he’s also expensive. He is the coyote the family is hoping to hire to accompany Javier to the US, as he accompanied Javier’s mother. The original deal they strike is that Don Dago will guide Javier, along with six other Salvadorans, into Mexico, where different unnamed guides will take over. Plans on the migrant trails, however, are about as steady as a skiff in the Pacific.

In order to get from El Salvador to the US over land, it is necessary to pass through Guatemala and Mexico. Javier is accompanied by his grandfather as far as the Guatemalan town of Tecún Umán, on the border with Mexico, and from there he will travel in Don Dago’s care. Throughout the book, the hypnotic rhythm of the world he is passing through slows, quickens, jags, or stalls depending on whether Javier is walking, on a bus, bouncing over waves, arrested, or consigned to a purgatorial safe house. Zamora describes the beginning of the trip through Guatemala:

We walk toward the bus. The air here is dry, it’s hot, but Grandpa says we’re about to go up mountains…. We leave the river. The road is flat at first, then we get elevation. I see a lake, coffee fields, pupuserías, tamaleras, lake, volcano, banana trees, bus stops, gas stations…. I never knew roads could be built so far up, so close to the sun.

Once they reach Tecún Umán, the group is waylaid for over a week due to some unexplained logistical stratagem of the coyotes. Javier and his grandfather pass the time by memorizing the route that Don Dago has said the migrants will be taking:

“In case you get lost, you’ll know exactly where you are,” he says, pointing with his thick index finger to each town with his nail he keeps long only on that finger and his thumb: Tapachula, Arriaga, Oaxaca, Puebla, México DF , Guadalajara, Culiacán, Ciudad Obregón, Hermosillo, Tijuana . The names, underlined neatly in blue ink from the blue-capped Bic pens Grandpa swears by.

Finally, Don Dago announces that they’re ready to cross into Mexico. Javier says good-bye to his grandfather and boards a bus with the other migrants to the seaside town of Ocós, where Don Dago almost immediately announces a “new plan”:

We’re crossing into México aboard boats. We’re skipping Tapachula, Chiapas. Grandpa’s blue line on the map is being revised and stretched into the Pacific Ocean toward Oaxaca, but Grandpa doesn’t know. None of my family knows. They think we’re taking the bus to cross the river on a raft. All the adults here thought that también.

After another six days of delays, Don Dago wakes them before dawn and hustles them down to the water. He puts them on a twenty-foot-long motorized fishing boat, and at the last minute opts not to board it himself, promising instead to meet them in Mexico. They never see him again. Javier is left in the charge of Marcelo, a tattooed local tough who has grudgingly agreed to watch over him.

The change in plans is one of many to come, unsettling Javier and leaving him mostly incommunicado from his family for weeks at a time. Marcelo does little to protect Javier and eventually shirks his promise altogether, robbing the group of food and water and abandoning them in the Arizona desert. Two of the other migrants—Patricia, who is traveling with her adolescent daughter, Carla, and Chino, an earnest twentysomething whose face bursts with acne—reluctantly take Javier under their guard. They become a pretend family, which serves both as partial protection from the police and immigration authorities, who might be less likely to extort or detain a family than individuals, and as succor for the brave-faced but terrified young Javier.

While Solito contains many harrowing moments, it is also full of waiting. In a safe house outside Guadalajara, the group stays indoors for over a week, watching soccer games and telenovelas on TV as Javier times his breathing to the head-turning of a swivel fan. In Acapulco, they cram into a cheap motel with a view of the sea, and the men sneak out for a night on the town. Despite the TV and the novelty of new food, new people, and new words— migrante remains hard for him to pronounce—the boy is bored: he wants to be with his parents, and he desperately needs a hug. And yet, as Javier’s Aunt Mali puts it, “Coyotes take their time, like tortoises, tontito.”

Zamora frequently refers to his younger self’s vulnerabilities—not only his obvious youth and lack of protection during the at times terrifying journey, but also the shame he feels about his own body, including his struggle to poop on a toilet and his inability to tie his shoes. Each shower is filled with anxiety:

I don’t want her [Carla] to see me naked. To see my boobs. My belly…. I close the plastic curtain and the metal rings make their noise….

I hand her my shirt through the curtain, making sure she can’t see anything.

In front of the reader, Zamora bears no such shame. Nor is there any shame, or even much introspection, about his journey. The emphasis is on description. His migration is a fact and a necessity—and presented plainly as such—which is something many politicians and nativists across the world seem to refuse to believe, or think they can undo with threats or walls.

The group’s first serious ordeal is the exhausting motorboat ride in the Pacific that takes them from Guatemala to Mexico. Bouncing violently over the waves and sucking in diesel fumes, the passengers periodically lean over the inflated gunwales to vomit. Deep into the night, a dozen or so hours in, one man begins to hallucinate and desperately shouts for them to stop. The coyotes in charge of the boat ignore him.

“¡Here it is, cabrones!” an unnamed martinet of a coyote yells a little while later, slowing the boat in the middle of the ocean and turning off the motor. “¡Your one and only stop! ¡Shit, piss, puke, but do it fast!” The migrants do so, although the waves cause more vomiting, and then they hunker down again, the engines roaring back to life. Shivering, soaked, terrified, Javier is eventually beckoned by Chino and crawls into his lap, getting zipped into Chino’s jacket for warmth.

“I can’t believe we haven’t seen islands,” Javier thinks in a typical wide-eyed stream of sentences earlier in the boat ride.

I want to see one. I want to see a lighthouse. Maybe we can stop. Maybe we will poop there. Maybe then I’ll throw up. I want it to get dark to see how far from land we are. To see the stars. The moon. I’m less afraid. I want to see more birds. I want to get there already.

This waist-high view of the world is one of the wonders of Solito . Readers see or know enough to recognize the very real dangers on the journey, which are brought into sharper focus by Javier’s curious gaze. The boat journey lasts twenty pages, with the reader almost falling into a hull-slapping trance before the migrants finally reach the coast of Oaxaca. But we are quickly brought back to reality when they hit land. The next series of coyotes corral and prod them, yelling “¡Get in a truck, get in a truck, the back, the back!” “Everything is happening so quick,” Javier thinks. “Against the sand, the tires sound like they’re about to rip open.”

The group is hustled into a safe house for hurried showers, fed Bimbo donuts and conchas (packaged sugary treats that are a staple on the voyage), and then loaded onto a public bus. At an immigration checkpoint somewhere farther north in Oaxaca, government soldiers board the bus to screen for undocumented migrants (a practice now outlawed by Mexico’s Supreme Court, which deemed such stops racist, discriminatory, and unconstitutional in a landmark ruling last year). One of them asks Patricia, Javier’s “pretend mom,” for her papers, looks at Javier and Carla in the seat next to her, and asks: “¿Your children?”

“Patricia pretends she’s sleepy and nods so much I feel her body shaking,” Zamora writes. “A minute. Two minutes. The sweat is now a puddle in my armpits, but I don’t move. I keep breathing. Normal. Normal.” The guard flicks through their papers, hands them back, and lets them continue north. The scene soon repeats itself: another checkpoint. By now Javier has figured out how to crack his eyelids just enough to see the jackboots as the soldiers board the bus. This time, another rider fingers the group. “¡Take them ! They are not Mexican,” she says.

Immigration officials pull them off the bus and force them to kneel and then lie down on the ground. “The Boots,” as Javier refers to the officials, “their guns pointed at us, like mouths, like eyes,” shake them down, rob them of the little money they carry, and threaten them until their coyote forks over more. Eventually they’re released to continue their way north, though the bus is long gone and they are left afoot.

The book takes on an even darker tenor when they get to La Línea, the Line—the US–Mexico border—and the gap between what the reader sees approaching and Javier’s youthful point of view widens. As the scholar Kelly Lytle Hernández has written, “The migrants’ journey of unsanctioned entry into the United States reached its climax rather than its beginning along the US–Mexico border.” 2 (“Nadir” might be the more accurate term.) The reader knows it, and so, in some way, does Javier:

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this: there’s nothing around. Just yellow-red dirt. Rocks. Some cactuses. A lot of bushes. Dogs barking. Roosters crowing….

There’s no fence and no asphalt road with a McDonald’s parking lot on the other side. There’s nothing. ¡Not even big trees! Just cactuses and bushes.

There are echoes of Hemingway in such descriptions, as when For Whom the Bell Tolls focuses on the squirrels scampering in the pine canopy outside Segovia before the bombs start thundering down. But instead of a battle Javier faces yet another wait. The group hunkers at another safe house for a few days, this time near Nogales, eating and drinking as much as possible to strengthen themselves for the crossing. Finally, with a larger group of about fifty people, they get the green light from their new coyote—like Don Dago, he’s the mero mero , the best—and “con todo a los Yunaited Estais.”

As they head out, the coyote gives Javier and Carla each a pill, which tastes “weird, bitter” and makes his head throb and his legs start shaking: “I’m so awake. It’s almost eleven, the latest I’ve stayed up since the boats, and I’m not tired at all.” It’s unclear what the pill is, but coyotes regularly dole out various forms of stimulants to their charges. At migrant staging areas, where groups wait out the sun, passing patrol cars, or the next order from a guide, it’s not uncommon to find empty pill tabs flecking the dirt like confetti.

Zamora does something striking in these drawn-out scenes: you expect to finally reach that climax of the crossing, but he maintains his focus squarely enough on the minute-by-minute—the deer he spots, the dust, the swish-noise of pants—that the horrors seem mundane. The horrors are mundane, in that thousands of migrants are forced to suffer them every day. Ask someone on the migrant trails how their trip has been. “All good, gracias a Dios ” is a typical answer. Talk to them more, however, and you might soon find out they were kidnapped, repeatedly robbed, nearly drowned, or had to tromp alone for days through a jungle—or worse. It’s not that they are shy about it, but simply that such dangers and indignities are expected, that people deal with adversity by normalizing it, absorbing it.

“We walk an hour that way,” their latest coyote tells them, “then it’s Gabacholandia”—slang for the United States. “Don’t. Get. Lost,” he warns. “Whoever stays, stays. We. Will. Not. Wait for you.” He adds, “If you get lost, it’s your fault.” But anybody can get lost in the southwestern deserts, especially when they’re exhausted, dehydrated, and often purposefully scattered by Border Patrol.

No More Deaths, a migrant aid organization I used to volunteer with, has extensively documented that the Border Patrol not only intentionally pushes people into the most distant and dangerous reaches of the desert, but that it also intentionally separates them, dusting them with helicopters or otherwise frightening groups so that they split up and are left isolated and disoriented. The tactic is one of many in the US’s arsenal of anti-immigrant measures collected in a policy called “Prevention Through Deterrence,” which has been in place since the 1990s. The idea behind it is that if the Border Patrol makes crossing painful or deadly enough, migrants will just quit—either by turning themselves in or by not trying in the first place.

As Zamora writes in a poem called “June 10, 1999,” from Unaccompanied , “I’ve always known this country wanted me dead.” What Solito shows is that despite numerous and expensive government efforts to block migrants from finding their way forward toward family, freedom, and safety, those who need to migrate won’t quit. Not quitting is how they save themselves. Not quitting is how they arrived at the border in the first place.

One thing apparent in Solito , which is often lost in the headlines about catastrophes, is that people remain people while they migrate, and make themselves at home as much as they can. They laugh, goof around, and forge friendships. Journalists, myself included, rarely focus on what migrants seem to spend most of their time doing while migrating: not wallowing or rending their shirts, but just doing regular stuff. At most migrant shelters I’ve been to, somebody procures a soccer ball—I’ve played in high-spirited, often shoeless matches with migrants as they wait for the next train or recover from a grueling walk. Sometimes they fall in love. One couple I still keep in touch with met each other at a migrant shelter in 2015 in southern Mexico. They’re now married and raising their son together in Tijuana.

Javier first crosses the US–Mexico border outside Nogales, where at the time there was no wall or fence at all. He downplays the moment in typical fashion:

Our steps sound like eating cereal. All of our steps on the ground. Crunch. Our clothes rustling. Crunch. I can hear people’s water bottles sloshing. Some carry plastic bags, and they rustle louder than backpacks or clothes. The stars are out.

Days later, after being arrested by Border Patrol, jailed, and then sent back to Mexico, they are heading north again somewhere in the desert south of Tucson, and Javier can’t walk anymore. Chino picks him up and starts carrying him on his back. “I haven’t cried,” Zamora writes.

I don’t want to cry. My heart pumps fast. The fastest. Faster than when I saw the helicopter. My stomach hurts. My legs. Everything. My skin is sunburned. My lips are ripped. And then—I can’t stop. I try keeping the sobs in by crunching my belly. My chest pops up. I can’t breathe.

A truculent American rancher sees them and, wielding a shotgun, threatens to shoot them. Instead, he calls Border Patrol and the migrants are shoved back into Mexico. If they want to arrive, if they want to survive, they’ll have to risk their necks again.

Toward the end of Javier’s trip, he learns another term for smuggler: pollero . His new pollero —not unlike Don Dago, he is overpromising, domineering, and as vulnerable to the shifts of luck as all of the guides—refers to the migrants as his chickens, and Javier recalls the same nursery rhyme my wife often sang to our infant son: Los pollitos dicen pío pío pío. Cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío . “The little chicks say pío, pío, pío . When they’re hungry, when they’re cold.”

“We are like chickens,” Javier writes. And after the pollero gets them jackets for the cold, they will “walk across into La USA with our warm feathers.”

June 8, 2023

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John Washington is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria . His first book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US–Mexico Border and Beyond , was published in 2020. (June 2023)

See Luis Chaparro, “Migrants Died in Detention Fire Because They Couldn’t Pay $200 Bribe to Be Released,” Vice World News, April 6, 2023.  ↩

Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra!: A History of the US Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), p. 95. For more on her work, see Francisco Cantú, “ An American Story ,” The New York Review , March 23, 2023.  ↩

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Winter holidays at the university. Eikichi visits a city in the north of the country, the hometown of Yuko, a classmate for whom he has feelings. However, Yuko, having returned home, has just become engaged to a local young man, and the sudden appearance of Eikichi makes others worry that their good relationship will be spoiled. An epic about pure love, which tells the story of a man who leaves his beloved woman, praying for her happiness.

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Flight to the North

• Episode aired Oct 1, 1955

Future TV western star Chuck Connors appears in this classic episode as a gangly hillbilly who happens to be named Sylvester J. Superman. Arriving in Metropolis to seek his fortune, the clue... Read all Future TV western star Chuck Connors appears in this classic episode as a gangly hillbilly who happens to be named Sylvester J. Superman. Arriving in Metropolis to seek his fortune, the clueless Sylvester answers a classified ad for the "real" Superman (George Reeves), and before... Read all Future TV western star Chuck Connors appears in this classic episode as a gangly hillbilly who happens to be named Sylvester J. Superman. Arriving in Metropolis to seek his fortune, the clueless Sylvester answers a classified ad for the "real" Superman (George Reeves), and before long has been hired by a woman named Marge (Marjorie Owens) to deliver a lemon meringue p... Read all

• George Blair
• David T. Chantler
• George Reeves
• Jack Larson
• 7 User reviews
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• 'Leftover' Louie Lyman
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Marge Holloway : Well I'm convinced you're Superman. But I certainly didn't expect you to look like this. I mean.

Sylvester J. Superman : Well shucks I don't look like this all the time ma'am You should see me in my Sunday overalls.

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• Aug 12, 2006
• October 1, 1955 (United States)
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Edinburgh film festival expands under partnership with fringe festival including new venues and competition strands, prime video unveils ‘the narrow road to the deep north’ first-looks featuring jacob elordi.

By Max Goldbart

Max Goldbart

International TV Co-Editor

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Prime Video has unveiled first-look images of its T he Narrow Road to The Deep North adaptation starring Jacob Elordi , which has wrapped production in Australia.

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A set of new castings have also been announced including Essie Davis (Lynette), William Lodder(Rabbit), Eduard Geyl (Jimmy), Christian Byers (Rainbow), Sam Parsonson (Rooster), Reagan Mannix (Bonox), Fabian McCallum (Sheephead), Caelan McCarthy (Chum), David Howell (Tiny), Taki Abe (Colonel Kota), Masa Yamaguchi (Lieutenant Fukuhara), and Akira Fujii (Kenji Mogami). 

In the series, Elordi ( Euphoria, Saltburn, Priscilla ) and Young are joined by Ciarán Hinds ( Belfast ) as the older Dorrigo Evans, and Olivia DeJonge ( Elvis ), Heather Mitchell ( Love Me, Upright ), Thomas Weatherall ( Heartbreak High ), Show Kasamatsu ( Tokyo Vice ), Charles An, and Simon Baker ( Limbo, Breath ).

The Narrow Road to the Deep North  is produced by Curio Pictures, and will be distributed internationally by Sony Pictures Television. Jo Porter and Rachel Gardner from Curio Pictures both serve as executive producers. Justin Kurzel, Shaun Grant and Richard Flanagan are also executive producers, with Alexandra Taussig producing. Major production investment has come from Screen Australia, with assistance from the NSW Government through Screen NSW’s Made in NSW and PDV Funds. 

Prime Video is releasing the title in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In other territories, it is distributed by Sony Pictures Television.

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Chuck Schumer on His Campaign to Oust Israel’s Leader

The senate majority leader, chuck schumer, explains why he decided to speak out against benjamin netanyahu, the israeli prime minister..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today, in a speech without precedent, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for Israelis to hold an election and vote out their current leader. Soon after, my colleague Annie Karni sat down with Schumer to understand why he did it. It’s Friday, March 13th.

Annie, this story begins with a speech. So let’s start there. Tell us about this speech.

I rise to speak today about what I believe can and should be the path forward to secure mutual peace and lasting prosperity for Israelis and Palestinians.

So last Thursday, without much warning, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority leader took to the Senate floor and started delivering what ended up being a really personal, really meaty speech about his Jewish identity and about Israel.

I speak for myself, but I also speak for so many mainstream Jewish-Americans, a silent majority whose nuanced views on the matter have never been well represented in this country’s discussions about the war in Gaza.

So he starts by describing himself and giving a sense of why he sees himself as a guardian of the people of Israel.

Of course, my first responsibility is to America and to New York. But as the first Jewish Majority Leader of the United States Senate, and the highest ranking Jewish elected official in America ever, I also feel very keenly my responsibility as a Shomer Yisrael, a guardian of the people of Israel.

But he quickly turns to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and describes some of the suffering and displacement there.

Entire families wiped out, whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, mass displacement, children suffering.

And he gets to his point very quickly that Israel has a moral obligation to do better.

Palestinian civilians do not deserve to suffer for the sins of Hamas. And Israel has a moral obligation to do better. The United States has an obligation to do better.

And that this is not in line with Israel’s values what’s happening in Gaza.

What horrifies so many Jews especially is our sense that Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear. We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.

That Israel’s approach to its war against Hamas in Gaza is not in sync with what he sees as the very meaning of being a Jew and what Israel is supposed to represent.

That’s right. And he also kind of frames it as this is not only hurting the Palestinians, but it’s hurting Israel.

Support for Israel has declined worldwide in the last few months. And this trend will only get worse if the Israeli government continues to follow its current path.

He thinks that when they’re prosecuting the war in this fashion, they are quickly losing global support, American support, their reputation on the world stage. And he thinks that Israel’s future is in jeopardy if it doesn’t have public support from the rest of the world.

The existence of Israel, he’s saying, is in jeopardy.

We cannot let anger or trauma determine our actions or cloud our judgment.

So Schumer in the speech carefully lays out that he thinks the only path out of this is a peace deal. He specifically says they need to work towards a two-state solution.

The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution, a demilitarized Palestinian state, living side by side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity, and mutual recognition.

And then he goes through four obstacles to such a peace deal.

Right now, there are four — four major obstacles standing in the way of two states. And until they are removed from the equation, there will never be peace in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank. The four major obstacles are — Hamas and the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways; radical right wing Israelis in government and society.

The most shocking one that he lists —

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas —

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

— Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

I will explain each in detail. The first major obstacle —

And what specifically does Schumer point to about Netanyahu?

Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take the precedence over the best interests of Israel.

He has filled his government with far right extremists that Schumer called out by name in the speech.

He has put himself in coalition with far right extremists like Minister Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. And as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.

And Netanyahu has ruled out what Schumer is saying is the answer, which is a two-state solution.

And he has shown zero interest in doing the courageous and visionary work required to pave the way for peace even before this present conflict.

The way he’s carrying out this war, even the Biden administration has criticized him for not doing more to mitigate civilian deaths.

He won’t commit to a military operation in Rafah, that prioritizes protecting civilian life. He won’t engage responsibly in discussions about a day after plan for Gaza and a longer term pathway to peace.

In Schumer’s view —

The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7th.

He is stuck in the past.

Nobody expects prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, to preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage, and to work towards a two-state solution.

And can’t do the things necessary to move Israel into the future past this war.

Five months into this conflict, it is clear that Israelis need to take stock of the situation and ask, must we change course?

Then he gets to what becomes the real big headline of this speech and makes it kind of the bombshell moment in US-Israeli relations that it became.

I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel.

He says that as the war winds down, Israel should have a new election. And he makes it clear that he thinks Netanyahu should be removed from power.

I also believe a majority of the Israeli public will recognize the need for change. And I believe that holding a new election, once the war starts to wind down, would give Israelis an opportunity to express their vision for the post-war future.

The reason he is saying this now is because Israel doesn’t have to hold an election until 2026.

Two years from now.

Yes. That’s a lot of time for Netanyahu to stay in power. And according to Schumer, watch Israel’s reputation abroad erode. So what Schumer is saying is, hold that election much sooner, as soon as this war is over, and get rid of Netanyahu so Israel can correct course.

I mean, everything about that is highly unconventional.

It’s unprecedented. And this is why Schumer is really careful with his language in this section of the speech.

Of course, the United States cannot dictate the outcome of an election, nor should we try. That is for the Israeli public to decide.

Making it clear that Israeli voters will decide. He’s not trying to decide for them.

If Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down —

But then later in the speech, he also makes it clear that if Netanyahu stays in power, the US will have no choice but to take additional measures to pushback on him.

Then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.

And he is not specific about what those are, but makes clear that there will be more pushback from America if Netanyahu stays.

The United States’ bonds with Israel is unbreakable. But if extremists continue to unduly influence Israeli policy, then the administration should use the tools at its disposal to make sure our support for Israel is aligned with our broader goal of achieving long-term peace and stability in the region.

Right. And I was listening to this section of the speech. And he uses the word, “tools.” And it definitely felt to me, and I wonder how you heard it, that the word “tools” meant money, American aid to Israel.

Almost certainly. The US sends several billion of military aid to Israel every year that is underpinning this war in Gaza. Schumer’s critical to moving that aid through Congress. And this is him sort of saying that — not explicitly, he doesn’t say money, he says tools. But that they have a lot of leverage over Israel. And this is also what makes the speech so remarkable in the first place, because Schumer is calling for these new elections and then following it up by saying we have other tools if this continues in the direction it’s going right now.

From the ashes, may we light the candles that lead to a better future for all.

Right. And what did feel so historic about this speech I think to so many of us is that Schumer is saying so many quiet things out loud, the first being that the US sees Bibi Netanyahu as a problem that needs to be removed, big enough saying that. And on top of that, he says, we are willing and ready, if we need to, to essentially turn off the US financial spigot to Israel if the Netanyahu government doesn’t leave or significantly change. And both of those just cannot be overstated for their enormity and their unprecedentedness.

It was a huge, historic, risky speech that Chuck Schumer made. I mean, I think this was probably one of the riskiest moments of his career, that he is putting himself out there to make this call and ramp up this pressure on Netanyahu.

The people of Israel at home and in captivity deserve America’s support.

Immediately after Schumer leaves the floor, Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, takes to the podium and blasts the speech.

It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel.

Republicans try immediately to say —

We need to be standing with Israel. And we need to give our friends and allies our full support.

Democrats aren’t being anti-Bibi, they’re being anti-Israel.

Chuck Schumer speech was an act of courage, an act of love for Israel.

Democratic response is mixed. Some said he did a great job. He did something brave. And others —

I’ve got full faith and confidence in the Israeli people to make the right determination about what their future should look like and —

Said he crossed a line, and this was inappropriate. President Biden was brief in responding, but he called it a good speech.

I’m not going to elaborate on his speech. He made a good speech. And I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him, but by many Americans.

Many people interpreted that as the administration thinking that Schumer speaking out was helpful to their aims. And then there’s Trump.

Because he was always pro-Israel. He’s very anti-Israel now.

— who called any Jew who votes for Democrats to be self-hating and hate Israel.

Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel. And they should be ashamed of themselves.

And finally on Sunday, Netanyahu made the rounds on some of the Sunday shows here.

I think Schumer’s statements are wholly inappropriate. I think we’re not a banana republic. The people of Israel will choose when they’ll have elections who they elect. And it’s not something that will be foisted upon us.

And in fact, he continues to say we’re going to invade Rafah. We’re going to keep up the aggression in Gaza. So clearly, he doesn’t feel the need to react in terms of his policies to the speech in any way.

But we have to finish the job. We need total victory. There’s no substitute for total victory.

Netanyahu’s message to Schumer basically is, go fly a kite. I don’t care what you say to me. I am not changing a thing about my approach to this war.

That’s right. This is a watershed moment for Schumer and a turning point in the US relationship to Israel in the middle of this war. And in part, because the reaction to the speech was all over the place, I was left with a lot of questions about why Schumer decided to do this in the first place. And that’s how I ended up sitting with him in Brooklyn on Sunday afternoon to ask him, why did you give this speech? What were you hoping it would do? Who is it for? And how does it fit in with your long standing relationship with Israel and with your own Jewish faith?

We’ll be right back.

So Annie, tell us about this interview you end up having with Schumer in Brooklyn.

So we end up meeting at James Madison High School in Midwood, Brooklyn.

Nice to see you. Thank you. Want me to sign? Great. Thank you.

We walk in together. And he has to sign in at the front desk.

This is his alma mater a few blocks away from the house he grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s.

What a moment to come back here.

To where it all began.

Sort of. I guess that’s the golden nights.

It was a heavily Jewish neighborhood at the time.

OK. Now we can go — this is the library.

So as we’re walking around the school, he’s reminding me of what it was like to grow up in this neighborhood.

It was right after World War II. And America was advancing.

As a Jew in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Recent memory. There were ladies on my block who would show you the numbers on their arms from the camps. And I remember —

That was a very present reality for him.

And yet at the same time, for the Jewish people, for me, so much part of my existence, Israel was there. Well, out of the Holocaust came Israel. And we were so proud of Israel.

And he talked about how exciting and enamored he was with the creation of a Jewish state that came out of the Holocaust.

In the Holocaust, Jewish people, we didn’t fight back enough. And here is Israel fighting to create a homeland against overwhelming odds.

And in 1967, when Israel was fighting a war with Arab neighbors and was nearly wiped off the map, he was very invested.

When I walked around the halls of this high school, Madison High School, in 1967, I was walking with a transistor radio — it’s June, we’re ready to graduate — attached to my ear because I thought Israel would be pushed into the sea. That’s the connection. This is long before politics.

This was part of his identity in these formative high school years.

Right. The story he’s telling, which is familiar to many American Jews, is of growing up at a time when the Holocaust is still casting a very long shadow. And Israel is such a potent symbol of Jewish survival and strength. And for somebody like Schumer, the very idea of Israel, its very existence, tugs at their heart. They don’t live there, but it is a source of extraordinary inspiration.

That’s right. Absolutely. And by the time he gets into politics in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he’s also very aware of the fact that Israel is a bipartisan issue. Democrats and Republicans alike steadfastly support Israel. They’re committed to the close relationship and giving aid and military support to Israel. And he is really proud of the fact that he said, whenever I carried legislation for Israel, I always had a Republican. That was a credo. And that, he thinks, is key to Israel’s success, that it’s bipartisan.

So how do I know Bibi? I’ve known him for a long time. I didn’t know —

It’s around this time that he first crosses paths with Bibi Netanyahu. He had gone to Harvard with Bibi’s brother, who was an Israeli war hero who died in combat and became a huge national figure. They didn’t know each other personally, but he said that kind of helped foster a connection with Bibi.

And in the beginning, Bibi did a lot of good things for Israel. He was the economic minister and created almost an economic miracle. We were so proud that Israel was doing startups and tech and all these things. When he first became prime minister, he was fine. Look, he was to the right, but not far right.

And when Netanyahu becomes prime minister, he wanted to back him. His gut was to stay with him and back Netanyahu even as other Democrats thought he was moving too far to the right.

Right. And Bibi’s rightward drift becomes extremely pronounced, so much so that he opposes President Obama’s plan to make peace with Iran through a nuclear deal. And Netanyahu actually travels to the US Congress to give a speech asking Congress, asking someone like Schumer, to reject that nuclear deal.

Exactly. And Schumer at the time was the rare Democrat who broke with Obama over the Iran deal.

You sided with Netanyahu against Obama.

Yes. And I talked to Netanyahu quite a lot.

He must have been thrilled with that vote.

And said it was a matter of conscience to protect Israel. And he voted against that deal.

I mean, suffice it to say, for a very long time, Chuck Schumer is a supporter of Bibi Netanyahu, so much so that he is even willing to break with his own Democratic president because he agrees with Netanyahu that policies like the Iran nuclear deal are bad for Israel.

Yes. I’d say that maybe he had some criticisms, but Chuck Schumer was Netanyahu’s best hope in terms of Democratic leadership in the United States.

But somehow, Bibi drifted way to the right. And one of the turning points was when he just embraced Trump so completely.

For Schumer, his views on Bibi start to change when Donald Trump is elected here. And Netanyahu becomes extremely close with him and starts to pursue policies that Democrats see as not at all in keeping with their values. So Bibi, together with Trump, pursues diplomatic deals between Israel and its Arab neighbors that do not take into account the future of Palestinians. His government expands settlements with Trump’s support. And basically what this means is that Israel is taking the land that would be essential to creating a two-state peace deal in the future.

And all of this infuriates Democrats who think these policies are making a two-state solution impossible, and taking away the leverage that Palestinians might have had.

He has now become so interested in self-preservation that he does —

Bibi also faces corruption investigations, which force him to bring very right wing politicians into his government.

And Schumer told me that he thinks he never would have made these alliances 10 years ago. So really, what happens during the Trump years, in Schumer’s mind, is that Bibi just gives up on Democrats and what they want for Israel and the Palestinians, and just wants to be aligned with Trump.

— and I’ll tell you in a meeting I had. He comes in to see me. It’s about 2018/2019. And I said, Bibi, I agree with you. The greatest short-term threat to Israel is the rockets Iran gives Hezbollah, and they put them in Lebanon and shoot them at Israel. But the greatest middle and long-term danger is you lose America, particularly the half of America that’s more progressive and/or the half of America that’s young. And by your embracing Trump, you are making that happen.

So in his mind, Bibi chooses Republicans and walks away from this history of bipartisan support.

That’s right. And that becomes even more of a problem after October 7th.

Well, just explain that, Annie.

Well, after October 7th, there’s broad support for Israel, who was just the victim of a terrorist attack against defenseless citizens. But as the war continues and the Netanyahu regime starts to take these aggressive actions in Gaza, that support starts to dwindle.

— United States, because I look at the numbers, and they’re rapidly decreasing. When you ask people, do you support Israel or the Palestinians, it’s getting all too close.

And in his mind, his fear that Israel will lose the support of America seems to be playing out in a really acute way. He can see it in his party, who’s really divided over what’s happening in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there.

I am worried, if Israel loses support from America, its future could well be over. I want —

And his fear, what he fears is that there could come a tipping point when the majority of this country does not support Israel, and it’s alone in a hostile goal Middle East without the necessary financial backing from the United States.

So as the highest elected Jewish official in America, and one of the leading Jewish — whatever you want, people in America, I felt an obligation to do this. This was not political.

And this is why he says he ultimately sat down to write this speech.

This is so part of my core, my soul, in Yiddish, my neshama —

In his mind, the goal here is to try to save Israel from Bibi’s actions, which he thinks imperil its future.

Once Schumer decides to write this speech, Annie, and to encourage Israelis to hold an election, and in that election vote out Netanyahu, I’m curious, how does Schumer tell you he thinks about the precedent that that sends, that the US will try to influence a foreign country’s decision about who should lead it?

I asked him about that. And he said he was aware that this section of the speech was the most delicate line he had to toe.

Did you consider — did you consider not personalizing it with Netanyahu and just calling for policy changes?

I didn’t think that would be enough. And he’s the fount of the problem. To just call for policy changes, I thought it wouldn’t pierce, it wouldn’t do anything.

It wouldn’t do anything. It would forgettable.

Yes. It’s so urgent and so important. I didn’t think it was appropriate to call for him to step down. But I thought the next step thing over, and say why I think he’s a bad leader.

And did you think —

So he was writing this speech with the notion of being careful about appearing to interfere front of mind. And he thought where he landed, going further than simply calling for policy changes, but stopping short of calling for her resignation and calling for new elections, he thinks he toed the line and didn’t cross it.

Got it. Now clearly, many people, including Netanyahu, disagree about whether Schumer crossed a line. But I’m curious if those people were his audience. I mean, who is Schumer really talking to with this speech? Does he think he’s speaking directly to Israelis and asking them to demand a new election and that they’re going to listen? Or actually, is he really talking to a more domestic audience, in particular his fellow Democrats, who are increasingly upset about this war, and potentially, it looks like willing to hold it against their party’s leaders?

He put this pretty simply when I asked him.

It’s intended for all people who love Israel and feel so conflicted by what’s going on there. The purpose of the speech is to say, you can still love Israel and feel strongly about Israel and totally disagree with Bibi Netanyahu and the policies of Israel.

He said that it was aimed, above all, at American Jews and non-Jews who love Israel. And what he wanted to do here was separate Netanyahu from Israel and make it crystal clear to people that you can be anti-Netanyahu, you can totally disagree with how he’s conducting the war in Gaza, and you can still be as pro-Israel as ever. He wanted to create this separation between Netanyahu and Israel and make Jews and non-Jews alike feel like it’s still OK to be pro-Israel.

This is kind of important, so I want to linger on it for a second, Annie. Schumer is telling you that what he’s really trying to do is give Americans a kind of new structure and vocabulary for thinking about Israel in this moment. And that structure and vocabulary is there is an Israel separate from Netanyahu. And so if you’re angry at Israel in this moment, you should really be angry at Netanyahu, not Israel.

That’s right. He’s asking them to blame Bibi, not Israel. That Israel is better than this, is better than Bibi, and to see it that way. It’s almost the same way that people who love America but hate Donald Trump would have felt during the Trump administration. That they still believe in this country, but they don’t believe in Trump.

That feels like a very complicated request that Schumer is making. Because the reality is that Israelis have repeatedly made Bibi Netanyahu their leader. So much so that if you’re an American, especially a younger American, and Schumer wants those younger Americans to separate Bibi from Israel, that would be pretty hard to accomplish. Because he’s been leader of Israel for as long as some of these young Americans have been alive. So how is Schumer thinking about whether what he’s asking for is really possible?

I mean, yes, it’s a little bit of wishful thinking. It’s true that a lot of Americans don’t really know the Israel of Schumer’s childhood that he’s able to remember. But they are not. He’s doing this in the middle of a six-month long war, where people are just horrified by the conditions in Gaza. And the Israeli government is the one that is carrying on this offensive.

But a lot of Jews, a lot of American Jews are really conflicted, because at the same time, they understand that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas. And I think that Schumer is trying to give voice to these conflicted, maybe middle-of-the-road politically American Jews who don’t know what to think about Israel right now, and do probably love Israel the way he does, but also feel awful about the images they’re seeing from Gaza.

So this call from Schumer for a new leader of Israel is kind of his way of resolving that internal conflict that people are feeling. But of course, it’s not clear if that election will be called. And even if it were called, it’s not clear whether Israelis would elect a new leader.

So I guess my question is, what then? Schumer’s speech does mention these other tools that the US has at its disposal. When would Schumer be willing to use those tools?

Yeah. I asked him about the question of, what then?

You don’t want a ceasefire, but is there like 30,000 more Palestinians dead —

Well, I wouldn’t I’d say — look, Israel — no, I have to, I just feel —

I said, what’s your red line? What is the civilian death toll that would have to be reached for you to say we’re pulling this funding?

You said in your speech, if something doesn’t change, then there’s the threat of American —

I didn’t say conditions and I didn’t say leverage. I just said America is going to look at it as a thing —

And you didn’t say exactly what —

No, because I didn’t want to.

You didn’t want to. But what would the scenario be where that would —

Well, you’d have to see. I couldn’t speculate on the future.

And he didn’t want to say.

Well, then why even give the speech if Schumer is not willing to talk about the real consequences for Israel, if there are no elections, and if Israelis don’t end up removing Netanyahu from office? If he can’t explain that, why give this speech?

I asked him that. And he kept coming back to the fact that, for him, this came from a deeply personal and emotional place, and a moral obligation that is central to him, to speak up for Jews and to stand up for the State of Israel. And he really dreads that Israel’s future, its very existence could be vulnerable, in the same way that it was when he was growing up, and in a way that he’s worked throughout his entire career to help fend off, and in a way, now Schumer at the pinnacle of his power as Senate Majority Leader, could be incapable of helping to fend off in the future.

No, I couldn’t look myself in the mirror if I didn’t do it. And then three, four months from now, the US has turned on Israel, and people, even my colleagues, are putting things, conditions and stuff, which will hurt Israel. I can’t do it. Couldn’t do it.

And I think that’s his deep terror about Israel’s future. And that’s why he felt called to do this speech now, he said, before it’s too late.

Well, Annie, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you, Michael.

On Thursday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that in the coming days, he plans to invite Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, an invitation that would first have to be approved by Senator Schumer.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

Apple has maintained monopoly power in the smartphone market, not simply by staying ahead of the competition on the merits, but by violating federal antitrust law.

On Thursday, the US government sued Apple for violating antitrust laws through practices that it says were designed to keep consumers reliant on Apple’s iPhone and unlikely to switch to a competing device.

We allege that Apple has employed a strategy that relies on exclusionary anticompetitive conduct that hurts both consumers and developers.

The lawsuit alleges that Apple has blocked rival software developers and mobile gaming companies from offering better options on the iPhone, resulting in higher prices for consumers. In response, Apple said it would vigorously defend itself in court and warned that if successful, the government’s lawsuit would hinder its ability to make the technology that customers want.

Today’s episode was produced by Will Reid and Michael Simon Johnson, with help from Eric Krupke. It was edited by Marc Georges and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

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Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Annie Karni

Produced by Will Reid and Michael Simon Johnson

With Eric Krupke

Edited by Marc Georges and Paige Cowett

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

In a pointed speech from the Senate floor this month, the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, called for Israel to hold a new election and for voters to oust the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Soon after, Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent for the Times, sat down with Mr. Schumer to understand why he did it.

On today’s episode

Annie Karni , a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading

Mr. Schumer, America’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official, said he felt obligated to call for new leadership in Israel .

His speech was the latest reflection of the growing dissatisfaction among Democrats with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

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The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

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Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership. More about Annie Karni

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