The Hague Kid

The Nostradamus Kid (1992) by Bob Ellis follows Ken, a boy raised in Seventh-day Adventist Australia who expects the world to end at any moment. The soon coming of Christ shapes every decision. Ken falls in love, loses his faith, becomes a writer, and learns that the apocalypse his church promised has quietly failed to arrive, leaving him with the emotional furniture of an eschatology and no eschaton to furnish.
Imagine the film remade for the liberal Diaspora of the twenty-first century.
The boy is Daniel Rosen. His parents are professors at Columbia. His father teaches international human rights law. His mother runs a foundation-funded research center on transitional justice. Daniel grows up in Morningside Heights in the late 1990s and the 2000s. The family lives two blocks from the law school. The apartment has books on three walls and a photograph of his father shaking hands with Aryeh Neier in the hallway. The dinner conversations run on a vocabulary the boy absorbs before he can evaluate it. The rules-based international order. The responsibility to protect. Universal jurisdiction. The arc of history. The Hague. Geneva. Nuremberg. The names drop with the same weight that Daniel 8:14 dropped in Ken’s childhood.
The family attends B’nai Jeshurun. The politics are liberal Zionist shading to post-Zionist at the younger end of the Shabbat kiddush. His parents signed the Oslo-era statements. They signed the Geneva Initiative statement. They signed the J Street founding letter. They signed the letter against the Iraq war. They signed the letter on Guantanamo. The letters arrive in the mail with Daniel’s father’s name among the others, and young Daniel learns that to be a serious person is to sign letters that address themselves to a world that is about to listen.
The eschatology is not named as eschatology. Nobody says the kingdom is coming. Everyone behaves as though the kingdom is under construction. A world governed by law rather than force. A Jewish state that becomes fully democratic. An American foreign policy guided by human rights. A United Nations with teeth. An International Criminal Court that reaches the powerful. Each is imminent in the way the second coming was imminent to Ken’s parents. The dates are not set. The work is ongoing. The delay is the sign that the work matters.
Daniel’s bar mitzvah falls in 2008. Obama wins in November. His father cries at the watch party. His mother embraces a colleague and says the long arc is bending. The boy feels the charge the adults feel. The Clinton years produced Oslo and the tribunals and the Ottawa Treaty. The Bush years produced the setbacks that made the next cycle necessary. Obama will complete the work. The boy carries this into his teenage years the way Ken carried the soon coming into his.
The sermons at B’nai Jeshurun run on prophetic Judaism. Isaiah. Amos. Micah. The demand for justice. The critique of the powerful. The obligation to the stranger. Daniel is told that his Jewishness is the ethical demand that runs from Sinai through the prophets through the rabbis through Heschel marching with King through his own parents filing amicus briefs. The lineage is the thing. The coalition’s ancestors are the coalition’s moral authority. Ken had Ellen White and the pioneers. Daniel has Heschel and the Warsaw Ghetto partisans and the lawyers who drafted the Universal Declaration.
High school is Horace Mann or Dalton or Fieldston. The teachers are the adults who agree with his parents. The curriculum runs on the same vocabulary as the dinner table. The boy writes a senior paper on the Rome Statute. His college counselor sends him to Yale. His father makes two phone calls. The letters of recommendation come from men who sat on panels with his father. The admissions office recognizes the name. Daniel gets in.
He arrives at Yale in September 2024. The election is two months out. The campus is charged. His professors describe the stakes in the vocabulary he has known all his life. A Trump victory would mean the end of the rules-based order. The collapse of the postwar consensus. The triumph of illiberalism. He writes a column for the Yale Daily News quoting his mother’s colleagues. He attends a panel at the law school where a woman his parents know from the Open Society board describes what is coming if the wrong man wins.
The wrong man wins.
Daniel turns eighteen the week of the inauguration.
This is the scene Bob Ellis would have written. Ken learned his apocalypse when the date passed without the trumpets. Daniel’s apocalypse fails inversely. The trumpets sound, and his coalition tells him the wrong trumpets have sounded, and the boy discovers that his childhood furniture did not prepare him for either the sounding or his coalition’s response.
The first year at Yale is the Ken-in-love section of the film. Daniel falls for a girl in his philosophy seminar. Her name is Eliza. She is from Minneapolis. Her father is a surgeon. Her mother teaches high school English. The family votes Democratic but does not sign letters. Eliza has read the books Daniel has read but reads them differently. She listens to his father’s podcast and says the host sounds like a man who has been right about nothing for twenty years and does not know it. Daniel defends his father. Eliza does not argue. She lets the remark sit. Daniel cannot get it out of his head.
The Trump administration acts. It withdraws from agreements. It defunds agencies. It deports. It tariffs. It fires inspectors general. It ignores court orders. Daniel’s father writes op-eds. Daniel’s mother organizes a conference. The letters multiply. The signatures grow longer. The boy watches his parents work at the speed they have always worked, on the instruments they have always used, and nothing that they do touches what is happening in Washington. The coalition responds to the rupture the way Ken’s Adventist parents responded to the 1844 disappointment. The work continues. The arrival is delayed. The specialists read the signs.
A professor assigns Moyn in a seminar on human rights history. Daniel reads The Last Utopia over Thanksgiving break. He reads it a second time on the flight back to New Haven. He does not tell his father he has read it. He tells Eliza. Eliza says she read it in high school and had been wondering when he would get there.
The second year runs on the pattern. Daniel takes Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion off a friend’s shelf during finals and reads it in one night. He takes Duranti off a library shelf two weeks later. He reads Beinart. He reads Magid. He reads Hazony without telling anyone. He keeps reading. Each book names something he had felt and had no vocabulary for. His parents’ world presents itself as the world. The books show him that the world is one coalition’s description of itself.
He calls his father for advice on a paper. His father asks what the paper is on. Daniel says it is on the historical contingency of the human rights framework. His father pauses and says that framing is associated with a certain kind of right-wing revisionism and that the serious scholarship runs in another direction. Daniel says Moyn is not right-wing. His father pauses again and says Moyn is complicated. The call ends pleasantly. Daniel sits with the call for a long time afterward. He realizes his father has heard the argument and has a procedure for handling it that does not require engaging it.
The third year is the cornfield section inverted. Ken walked through a cornfield and felt the old world loosen. Daniel walks through Morningside Heights on a visit home during spring break. He passes the law school. He passes B’nai Jeshurun. He passes the office where his mother’s foundation has its suite. He sees the buildings the way a child sees the childhood house after he has lived away from it. The buildings still stand. The people still work inside them. The work has not stopped. The work does not touch the world outside the work.
Eliza has become the person he talks to about all of this. She is not a conservative. She is a liberal who has stopped believing her side is the side of history. She tells him that her mother voted for Trump in 2024 and did not tell the family until January. Her mother is not a monster. Her mother teaches Beloved and Faulkner. Her mother decided the people who speak the vocabulary Daniel grew up speaking are not her people and have not been for a long time.
Daniel tries to describe this to his mother on the phone. His mother listens. His mother says Eliza’s mother sounds like a woman who has fallen for the propaganda. Daniel says no. His mother says she does not want to argue on the phone and would like to have him home for Passover. The call ends. Daniel sits with this call too.
The Seder is the film’s climax. Ken’s climax was the Saturday that was supposed to be the end of the world. Daniel’s climax is the Seder at which his father delivers the dvar Torah about Pharaoh and about the strongmen of our time. The father reads the four children. He reads the wise child as the child who asks about the testimonies and the statutes and the judgments. He reads the wicked child as the child who excludes himself from the community. He reads the simple child and the child who does not know how to ask. Daniel sits through the reading and knows that his father is looking at him when he reads the wicked child.
Daniel does not leave the table. He eats the meal. He sings the songs. He goes back to New Haven after the holiday and calls Eliza and says he does not know what to do. Eliza says nobody knows what to do. She says the point is not to find the next salvation. The point is to stop needing a transcendent cause to tell him what his life means.
This is where the Ellis film would land. Ken at the end of The Nostradamus Kid is a writer who has lost his religion and has not found a replacement and is trying to write his way into whatever comes next. Daniel at the end of the imagined remake is a junior at Yale who has lost the world his parents built for him and has not replaced it. The family remains intact. The affection remains intact. The boy goes home for Rosh Hashanah and his father embraces him and his mother sets a place at the table. The eschatology is gone. The synagogue attendance continues. The Jewishness persists, changed. The boy is now the man his parents will not quite understand for the rest of their lives, and they will never have the conversation that would name what has happened, because the vocabulary his parents have is not a vocabulary that can name its own loss.
The film ends on a scene Ellis liked. A young man walks alone on a street in a city. The voice over is the older man he has become, remembering. The older Daniel says the soon coming of justice was the faith he was raised in, and when the faith failed to arrive on schedule, his elders told him that the delay was the sign that the work mattered, and he spent his twenties learning that the work was the coalition and the coalition was the work and neither was justice and neither was the arrival. He says he loves his parents. He says he does not share their faith. He says Eliza is still in his life and that they have a daughter now. He says he has not worked out what to teach the daughter. He says he suspects that the not working it out is the honest part, and that his parents’ certainty was the dishonest part, and that the father who knows he does not know may be the better father even if the child grows up without the furniture Daniel grew up with. The credits roll over a shot of a synagogue entrance. The man walks in with the child. The frame holds on the doorway. The doorway does not announce what is behind it.
Ellis would have cut to black there.