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Mitch Albom enters new Jewish territory with Holocaust novel ‘The Little Liar’
(JTA) — For more than two decades, Mitch Albom has been perhaps the best-selling Jewish author alive — even as his books tend to embrace a much broader and more amorphous definition of “faith.”
But now, Albom says he’s ready to embrace his “obligation” as a Jewish writer: to publish a novel set during the Holocaust.
“The Little Liar,” which comes out on Tuesday, follows an innocent 11-year-old Greek Jewish boy named Nico, who is tricked by Nazis into lying to his fellow Jews about the final destination of the trains they are forced to board. It was written before Oct. 7 but comes at a time when Jews are again grappling with the aftermath of tragedy in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing war against the terror group in Gaza.
Albom is a Jewish day school alumnus, and Judaism has featured in his prior books, if less centrally. “Tuesdays With Morrie,” his 1997 memoir that rocketed up the bestseller charts and made him a household name, focused on his relationship with Morrie Schwartz, his Jewish mentor at Brandeis University. A follow-up memoir, 2009’s “Have A Little Faith,” discussed Albom’s relationship with his childhood rabbi, interspersed with his friendship with a local priest. He has also involved Jewish faith leaders in his many charities, including an orphanage he runs in Haiti, to which he has flown Rabbi Steven Lindemann of New Jersey’s Temple Beth Sholom.
In his fiction, though, the Detroit author, sportswriter, radio personality and philanthropist has taken a more ecumenical approach to morality and the afterlife. Sometimes Albom’s characters wander through heaven, which can be a physical place (“The Five People You Meet In Heaven” and its sequel). Sometimes they are granted the ability to spend time with their dead relatives (“For One More Day”), are admonished for turning their backs on Godly ideas like living each moment to its fullest (“The Time Keeper”), or are asked to put their blind faith in figures who may or may not themselves be God (“The Stranger In The Lifeboat”).
“The Little Liar,” by contrast, is a squarely Jewish story. Like the 1969 Holocaust novel “Jacob the Liar,” by Jurek Becker, the story pivots on a Jew lying to his people about the Nazis. But unlike other Holocaust novels, Albom traces the repercussions of that moment for decades following the events of the Holocaust itself, through four central characters who wrestle with the trauma and violence of their past.
Even as it includes a great deal of historical detail — from the descriptions of the thriving prewar Jewish community of Salonika, Greece, to several real-life figures such as the Hungarian actress and humanitarian Katalin Kárady and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal — the book also has plenty of Albom-isms. It’s largely structured as a giant morality tale about the nature of truth and lies, and is narrated by “Truth” itself. Aphorisms like “Truth be told” abound throughout the text.
“I didn’t want to write a ‘Holocaust book’ per se,” Albom told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during a phone conversation earlier this fall. “With each one of my books, I tried to have some sort of overriding theme that I wanted to explore and that I thought might be inspirational to people.”
Yet he admits that, “as a Jewish writer,” he felt compelled by the subject matter to create “a small, small, small contribution to getting people not to forget what happened.”
This interview was conducted prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and has been edited for length and clarity.
JTA: You’ve written two memoirs about Jewish mentors of yours, but this is the first time you’ve incorporated Judaism so openly into your fiction. Can you tell me about your own Jewish upbringing?
Albom: I was raised in South Jersey and Philadelphia. Growing up I had what I think would be kind of a typical Jewish upbringing of that time, during the 60s and 70s. [At] 11 years old, I was sent to a Jewish day school. Half the day was just Jewish studies in Hebrew. And in fact, it was mostly done in Hebrew, and so for from sixth grade until 11th grade, with the exception of one year where I left and went to public school, I went to that school.
So I had a very deep and thorough Jewish education. We learned everything from not only Hebrew and Jewish studies and Jewish history and things like that, but we learned to read the commentary on the Torah… I had to learn those letters. Don’t ask me to do it now, but I was pretty in-depth: Moses, Maimonides and all that. So I graduated and I went to Brandeis University, which was a still predominantly Jewish school.
At that point, having spent so much time with my Jewish roots and education, I kind of put a lid on it, and said, “OK, that’s enough.” And I wasn’t particularly practicing from that point for a couple of decades. It wasn’t really until I wrote the book “Have A Little Faith,” [when] my childhood rabbi asked me to write his eulogy, I got more drawn back to my Judaism.
Why did you decide to tell a Holocaust story now?
I think as a Jewish writer, I almost felt an obligation, before my career was over, to create a story that hopefully would be memorable enough, set during the Holocaust. That it would be a small, small, small contribution to getting people not to forget what happened. And people tend to remember stories longer than they remember facts. I think people remember “The Diary of Anne Frank” longer than they remember statistical numbers of how many Jews were slaughtered or how many homes were destroyed by the Nazis.
But it took me until now to find a story that I felt hadn’t already been done. There’s so many books now. And even there’s been a recent rash of them over the last five to 10 years, you know, “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” and “The Librarian of Auschwitz,” many other things, all of which are great books and wonderful reads. But I just felt like so much ground had been covered that I couldn’t really come up with an original setting, original idea, until “The Little Liar.”
Something that sets this book apart from the others you mentioned is the setting of Salonika, the Greek city where the vast majority of its 50,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. What drew you to that as a setting?
Two things. One, I lived in Greece when I got out of college. Through a series of weird and unfortunate events, I ended up as a singer and a piano player on the island of Crete. I could just spend my days in the sunshine and eating the amazing food and being amongst the amazing people. So I’ve always loved Greece. And number two was, I didn’t want to tell a story that began in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto, all the familiar backdrops. I just didn’t want to tell a story that people said, “I’ve kind of seen this before.” So I thought, well, this will be fresh. I’ll be able to at least get people to, if nothing else, when they close the book, say, “I had no idea that the largest Jewish majority population sitting in Europe was Salonika, Greece, and even that was wiped out by the Nazis.”
If there was ever a city that looked like it was impenetrable, it would have been that one. Go back to 300 BCE, and there are Jews. They have been there for so long, and yet the Nazis wipe them out in about a year or less.
Crafting entirely fictional narratives around the Holocaust is pretty fraught territory. I’ve interviewed John Boyne, the author of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” about some of the backlash he’s gotten. What was your own approach to doing this in a sensitive way?
First of all, there’s no such thing as “purely fictional” when you’re coming to a Holocaust story, because you’re setting it during a real event. So you have to rely on real accounts, from people and books, in order to create a world that feels real. I don’t think anybody could write a Holocaust story and never have read a Holocaust book, never have listened to a Holocaust survivor, just sat in a room and imagined what this event might be like — just as you don’t set a book during the Civil War and not study the Civil War.
For me the premise of the book was what came first, and I should point out, I didn’t want to write a “Holocaust book” per se. With each one of my books, I tried to have some sort of overriding theme that I wanted to explore and that I thought might be inspirational to people. And the theme with this one had to do with truth and lies, and that actually goes back to the original inspiration of it, which was a visit to Yad Vashem.
You know, they have the videos on the walls and different people telling stories, and there was a woman who was telling the story about the train platforms, and she said that the Nazis would sometimes use Jews to calm the people on the train platforms and to lie to them to say everything’s going to be alright, you can trust these trains, you’re going to be OK. And that stayed in my mind, more than anything that I saw. Just the idea of being tricked into lying to your own people about their doom. I thought, one day I want to write a story that centers on someone who had to do that, and what would that do to their sense of truth.
You don’t end the narrative with the liberation of the camps; the story continues decades later. There are scenes of a Jewish character trying to reclaim his old home, of America sheltering Nazis after the war. These are the parts of the history of the Holocaust that I think are harder for people today to come to terms with.
Yeah, that was another way I wanted to make the story more fresh. I didn’t want it to begin with the night that the house was invaded and end with the day that the camps were liberated. I wanted to begin it before that, which I did, and I wanted to end it way after that.
I went to Salonika and I talked with people there about what happened when the Jews came back and, did they get their businesses back? Did they get their houses back? No, the businesses were gone and were given away. The houses, most of the time, were already sold off to somebody else. And I thought, sometimes we think the whole story, the Holocaust, the price that people paid, it ends on the day of liberation, and everybody runs crying and hugging and kissing into each other’s arms and now we’re free. We’re free. In many ways, that’s when the problems began, you know, and a whole different set of problems.
I’ve known survivors all my life. I grew up with them in my neighborhood and interviewed many of them over the years, and they’ve told me about their haunted dreams and sometimes in the middle of the night they just wake up, or in the middle of the day, just start crying, or how certain things they don’t want to talk about. And so I tried to be respectful and reflect some of those challenges in the years after the Holocaust, because I don’t think you can tell a complete story, at least not one about survivors, if you don’t talk about what happened to them after they tried to resume their normal lives.
In the book you point out that the Holocaust was built on a “big lie.” You’re framing truth as the ultimate ideal. But of course your Jewish characters are also surviving the war in part by lying about their identities. And we know that’s true of many real-life Holocaust survivors as well. Do you see that as a contradiction?
No, I see it as fascinating. You know, it’s a fascinating interwoven web of truth and deception. There is nobody who has never told a lie on this earth. And that’s why Nico was kind of a magical character to begin with. He’s 11 years old and has never told a lie — he’s almost an angel. And that’s where the parable feel to the story comes in.
Your writing has become associated with the concept of “faith,” and in your fiction you often render heaven as a physical place where the dead are finding ways to interact with the living. Is that a more Christian outlook on the afterlife, even though you say you were inspired by a vision an uncle of yours had about his own relatives? How do you think about your own depictions of heaven?
Well, the books that I’ve written about heaven, there was “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” “The Next Person You Meet in Heaven,” which was a sequel to it, and “The First Phone Call From Heaven,” which, if you read that book, you know that it isn’t what it seems. You know, I always looked at “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” as kind of a fable. My uncle Eddie, who was the main character — it wasn’t a true story but he inspired the character. He had told me a story that he had had an incident where he had died on an operating table. For a brief moment, he remembered floating above his body and seeing all of his dead relatives waiting for him at the edge of the operating table. So I always had that story in mind whenever I would think of him. It was meant to be a fable about how we all interact with one another.
A lot of Christians have embraced your work, right?
A lot of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and atheists.
I’ve seen evangelical writers refer to your body of work as part of a “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which is a term a lot of Jews have different kinds of feelings about. Do you think about the faith of your readers at all, or how they are perceiving your faith?
I write for anybody in the world who has a desire to read my book. I welcome them. I would never make a judgment on any reader. I’m happy to have someone pick up my book and read it.
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The post Mitch Albom enters new Jewish territory with Holocaust novel ‘The Little Liar’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Clark University Adopting BDS Measures Pushed by Student Government
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone during a demonstration held on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The student government of Clark University in Massachusetts is enacting a series of policies based on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — despite their failing to receive the support of the majority of the student body.
According The Scarlet, the university’s official campus newspaper, the Undergraduate Student Council (CUSC) will enforce student clubs’ “compliance” with BDS, which includes coercing them, under the threat of defunding, into purchasing goods exclusively from vendors the BDS movement deems acceptable. This effort reportedly has the support of the university’s office for Student Leadership and Programming, as it has supplied student clubs with “tax-exempt vouchers” for making purchases while CUSC orders their leaders to “regularly check the BDS Movement’s website to ensure compliance.”
So far, The Scarlet added, only the university’s food vendor, Harvest Table, has resisted CUSC’s edicts, arguing that it has no “political stance” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or any issue. However, it was still forced to go along, The Scarlet said, having agreed to “buying from local vendors and providers to better comply with the movement.” It is not yet clear how the BDS policies have affected the university’s kosher vendors.
BDS proponents in the CUSC await the endorsement of the university administration, but it has not come, The Scarlet reported.
The university’s president, David Fithian, as well as its dean, Kamala Keim, reportedly held a meeting with members of the pro-BDS party during the summer to “begin charting a path toward divestment,” but they have not corresponded with them since. Additionally, Clark University’s board of trustees has declined a formal request for a discussion on BDS — which aims to destroy Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, by crumbling its national security, alliances, and economy.
The Algemeiner has reached out to Clark University for comment for this story.
Several CUSC Equity and Inclusion Representatives — Molly Joe, Jordan Alexandre, Melissa Bento, and Stephen Gibbons — told The Scarlet in a statement which alluded to conspiracies of Jewish influence and control that their efforts, despite achieving some successes, have been stymied by hidden forces.
“We as representatives have limited power so long as those above us are unwilling to change,” the group said in a statement to the paper. “We, like you, are only students navigating an opaque and bureaucratic system that is designed to protect certain interests. Our goal will only be achieved if enough of us are unwavering and persistent.”
CUSC’s actions were, on paper, mandated by a spring referendum which asked students if they want the university to divest from Israeli companies and those that do business with it and apply BDS to campus dining options. Eighteen percent of the student body, or 772 students, ultimately “participated” in voting, a phrase CUSC has stressed, and of them an average of 658.6 students, just 15.8 percent of students, voted to approve those items. Even fewer students voted to approve two more on mandating clubs to “adhere” to BDS and initiating a boycott of Amazon. However, in its public statements, CUSC has manipulated student enrollment data to describe BDS as the expressing the will of the students, intentionally excluding from its count the number of graduate students who were enrolled at the university during the 2023-2024 academic year.
For months, CUSC has employed double-speaking in discussing the student body’s reaction to the BDS movement, saying at once that enthusiasm for it is “overwhelming” while also acknowledging that the referendum saw “low voter turnout” and “low engagement numbers.” It has never addressed its disenfranchising 84.2 percent of the student body, which includes the Jewish students who will be affected by the imposition of a political movement which is widely denounced for being antisemitic.
Clark University Hillel, a chapter of the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, has already denounced CUSC’s polices.
“While it may not have been the intention of CUSC and the student body, there are serious consequences of adopting this referendum,” the group said in April, following the vote. “BDS referenda claim to be about changing university policy, but they ultimately discourage dialogue, normalize extreme hatred of Israel, and empower the targeting of Israeli students and those for whom Israel holds cultural or personal significance.”
It continued, “We will not allow Israeli-affiliated products to be banned from the Kosher Kitchen and we will not tolerate our funding being bound to BDS Movement principles. We will do everything in our power to ensure that discriminatory practices are not implemented on our campus.”
The BDS movement is threatening to take hold at other universities.
Yale University will soon hold a student referendum on the issue of divestment from Israel, an initiative spearheaded by a pro-Hamas group which calls itself the Sumud Coalition (SC). According to the Yale Daily News, students will consider “three questions” which ask whether Yale should “disclose” its investments in armaments manufacturers — “including those arming Israel” — divest from such holdings, and spend money on “Palestinian scholars and students.”
The paper added that a path for the referendum was cleared when a petition SC circulated amassed some 1,500 signatures, or “roughly 22 percent of the student body.” Despite that over three-fourths of Yale students did not sign the petition, its proponents — including a representative of the Yale College Council (YCC), an ostensibly neutral body — have taken to describing it as “so popular.” The final vote could wind up being even less representative of the opinion of the student body, as it only has to be approved by “50 percent or more of respondents” who constitute “at least one third of the student body.” Should that happen, Sumud Coalition will — as has happened at Clark University — claim victory and forward the results to Yale University president Maurie McInnis, with a note claiming that SC has received a mandate from the people.
Beyond ideological concerns, the BDS movement could wreak havoc on the financial health of the schools which adopt it. JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), published a report in September showing that colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to its demands.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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US Cautions Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire Close but Not Finalized as Truce Announcement Expected Imminently
Israeli tanks are being moved, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, in the Golan Heights, Sept. 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
A ceasefire to halt fighting between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah is close, but an agreement has not yet been achieved, according to the US State Department.
“We don’t believe we have an agreement yet. We believe we’re close to an agreement. We believe that we have narrowed the gaps significantly, but there are still steps that we need to see taken. We hope that we can get there,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters during a press briefing on Monday.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby expressed similar sentiments.
“We’re close,” he told reporters, but “nothing is done until everything is done.”
Miller and Kirby’s comments came not long after a senior Israeli official told Reuters that Israel’s cabinet would meet on Tuesday to approve a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamist group that wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon.
Reuters also reported on Monday that US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron are expected to announce a ceasefire in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel within 36 hours, citing four senior Lebanese sources. The US and France have been seeking to broker a truce for months.
The news cite Axios reported separately that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to the terms of a deal, citing a senior US official.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has declined to comment on reports that both countries had agreed to the text of a ceasefire agreement.
Hezbollah has been launching barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel from neighboring Lebanon almost daily since Oct. 8 of last year, one day after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of the Jewish state from Gaza to the south.
The relentless attacks from Hezbollah have forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes in the north, and Israel has pledged to ensure their safe return.
Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah but drastically escalated its military operations over the last two months, seeking to push the terrorist army further away from the border with Lebanon.
Diplomacy has largely focused on restoring and enforcing UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for Hezbollah’s withdrawal to north of the Litani River (around 30 km, or 19 miles, from the Israeli border) and the disarmament of its forces in southern Lebanon, with the buffer zone under the jurisdiction of the Lebanese army and UN peacekeeping forces.
Israel has insisted on retaining the right to conduct military operations against Hezbollah if the group attempts to rearm or rebuild its infrastructure — a stipulation that has met resistance from Lebanese officials, who argue it infringes on national sovereignty. Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon has said Israel would maintain an ability to strike southern Lebanon under any agreement.
Retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi — who leads the Israel Defense and Security Forum, a group of former military commanders — recently warned The Algemeiner that any deal must include Iran’s “full exit” from Lebanon and Israel’s freedom of action to prevent any future build up of Hezbollah. Otherwise, he added, the agreement would be “devastating” for the Jewish state.
Lebanon’s deputy parliament speaker, Elias Bou Saab, told Reuters the proposal under discussion would entail an Israeli military withdrawal from south Lebanon and regular Lebanese army troops deploying in the border region, long a Hezbollah stronghold, within 60 days.
He added that a sticking point over who would monitor compliance with the ceasefire was resolved in the last day, with an agreement to set up a five-country committee, including France and chaired by the United States.
Nabih Berri, the Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese parliamentary speaker, has been leading the Iran-backed terrorist group’s mediation efforts.
Miller told reporters that US officials are pushing hard for a ceasefire but the final steps to reaching a deal can be the toughest.
“Oftentimes the very last stages of an agreement are the most difficult because the hardest issues are left to the end,” Miller said. “We are pushing as hard as we can.”
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Palestinian Media Lambast Casting of Israelis in Netflix’s Upcoming Biblical Movie ‘Mary’
Scene from Netflix’s show “Mary.” Photo: Screenshot
Palestinian media outlets have castigated the new biblical epic “Mary” coming to Netflix next month because of the film’s Israeli cast, falsely accusing Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” against Palestinian Christians.
Netflix announced earlier this month the coming release of “Mary,” which according to a synopsis provided by the streaming giant “tells the story of one of history’s most profound figures and the remarkable journey that led to the birth of Jesus.”
Notable in the cast are Noa Cohen in the titular role as Jesus’s mother and Ido Tako as her husband Joseph — two Israeli actors under the spotlight in a large-scale production depicting Jewish life during a period when Jews were the primary ethnic group of the region.
Director DJ Caruso previously defended casting Israeli actors for the roles.
“It was important to us that Mary, along with most of our primary cast, be selected from Israel to ensure authenticity,” he told Entertainment Weekly last month.
Nonetheless, the castings were met with derision among anti-Israel activists on social media and elsewhere upset with the choice of selecting Israeli actors. Critics called for a boycott of the film, claiming that Mary and Joseph were “Palestinian” despite them being Jewish and living in modern-day Israel.
Among those expressing outrage was Quds Media Network, the self-described “largest independent youth Palestinian news network,” which lambasted the production, publishing an article tying “Mary” to what it called the “ongoing genocide of Christians in Palestine.”
The article, quoting Father Abdullah Julio of the Melkite Greek Catholic Monastery in Ramallah, alleged that one of Israel’s goals is “the eradication of Christian presence in the region.”
On Aug. 3, Julio filmed a statement on TRT Arabic mourning Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, calling him “a martyr of our Palestinian people and nation.”
In its recent article, Quds Media Network cited the deaths of Christian residents of Gaza amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war as evidence of “ongoing violence and Christian persecution,” and included a note to readers that “Israelis are not native to Palestine, the birthplace of Jesus.”
Both Jews and Christians boast an age-old presence in the southern Levant — a land sacred to both faiths and central to their peoples’ histories. The early Jewish people underwent an ethnogenesis in the region as a monotheistic people who formed a united kingdom in the late Bronze Age (around 1000 BCE), and remained the primary civilization there until their dwindling numbers under Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic persecution in the early medieval period.
During the Roman period, Jesus — an Aramaic-speaking Jew from the Galilee in modern Israel, then Roman Judea — led a sect of Judaism that would morph into modern Christianity in the decades following his storied execution. Palestinian Christians (culturally Arab local Christians who identify with Palestinian nationalism) likely represent the oldest continuous Christian community, as descendants of the first converts during the Roman occupation.
Genetic studies have confirmed the relationship of both Jewish diaspora groups and Palestinians of all faiths to Iron Age peoples of the region. Likewise, Jews and Palestinian Arabs each claim competing indigenous status, based on a combination of continued settlement and a culture inextricably connected to the Land of Israel.
Critics of “Mary” on social media maintained “Jesus was Palestinian,” or “a Palestinian Jew,” seemingly conflating residency in ancient Judea with Palestinian nationalism — which emerged much later in the early 20th century as a local expression of pan-Arabism and was hostile to local Arabic-speaking Jews (who consequently allied themselves with Zionism) from its outset.
Anti-Israel activists also cited the fair olive complexion of Cohen and Tako as evidence of their foreignness, ignoring that many Palestinians look similar and that skin tone does not necessarily equate to ancestry or claim to territory.
Palestinian Christians’ numbers in the West Bank and Gaza have dwindled in the past decade, from 11 percent of the Palestinian population in 1922 to 1 percent in 2017.
Meanwhile, in Israel proper, where Christians compose 6.9 percent of the Arab minority, they are among the best educated and most successful of Israel’s citizens.
“Mary,” which was shot in Morocco, is set to air on Dec. 6 to a wide audience.
The post Palestinian Media Lambast Casting of Israelis in Netflix’s Upcoming Biblical Movie ‘Mary’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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