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This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel
(New York Jewish Week) — In May of 1937, 7-year-old Inge Eisinger lived in a luxurious Vienna apartment with a pantry stocked with favorite foods and a staff to keep her company. Though she had a strained relationship with her mother and an absent father, Inge, who was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother Anna, was living a charmed life.
This is the scene that opens “Running for Shelter,” a young adult novel about the Holocaust written by a young adult herself: 16-year-old Suzette Sheft, who is a junior at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. In the novel, Sheft retells her grandmother’s story of surviving the Holocaust.
Published by Amsterdam Publishers, which specializes in Holocaust memoirs, the book is a delicate and powerful reminder of the importance of recording one’s family history. It’s a lesson Sheft learned too early in life: Her father died of pancreatic cancer when Sheft was just 13 and she soon realized she was forgetting all the stories he told her about his childhood.
“I fantasized about rewinding time, so I could go back and record my favorite stories about his childhood,” Sheft writes in an author’s note. “I wished I had taken the time to write these stories down when I had the chance, because his death allowed me to understand the vitality of preserving the stories of our loved ones before it is too late.”
In memory of her father, Sheft recorded the story of his mother, her grandmother Monique Sheft, who was once the Viennese school girl Inge Eisinger.
In pre-war Austria, Eisinger had been living a completely assimilated life — so much so that her parents never even told her that she was Jewish. Following the Nazi takeover of Austria, her mother managed to whisk the two of them away to Switzerland, then Paris, but soon abandoned her. After a twisting and tragic story, Eisinger eventually reunited with her grandmother and moved to a village in Central France to wait out the war, changing her name to the more French “Monique.”
Sheft’s novel ends in 1946, when the two are on the boat to New York after the war and Eisinger’s grandmother reveals to her that she and her family are actually Jewish.
In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Sheft, who lives in Manhattan with her mom, her twin brother and two dogs, is very committed to her Jewish identity. “Although my grandmother never really practiced Judaism, my dad was very involved in the Jewish world,” she said. “He was very passionate about Jewish causes and just Judaism, in general. So I felt very connected to the Jewish world because of him.”
The New York Jewish Week talked with Sheft about what the book means to her, why its subject matter is important and what she learned in the process of putting it together.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: What was the process of writing the book; how did the idea begin and how did you collect your grandmother’s story?
Suzette Sheft: I had heard a lot of my grandmother’s stories from my dad. I always had an interest in the Holocaust — I would go to Holocaust museums in every city I visited, and I almost exclusively read books about World War II and the Holocaust growing up. So I kind of knew in the back of my head that I wanted to do something like this, but [my father’s death] sparked and ignited the necessity of doing it as soon as possible.
As for the process, a few summers ago I spent a week with my grandmother, interviewing her every day about her escape from Austria to France. At first she shared physical elements of her life, like her apartment and her family dynamics and her school life, but then she began to talk to me about the time leading up to the war — the years before the Germans invaded Austria. As she spoke, I recorded everything she said in bullet point form and I would periodically stop and ask for more detail. The next day, at the beginning of the conversation, I would recap what we had talked about, and then allow her to elaborate or clarify the story.
Later, I wanted to widen my perspective and uncover other stories and details that she may have forgotten, so I watched an interview she did with the USC Shoah Foundation. This was really helpful because there were some details that she had forgotten or that she had left out.
Even though the book is about your grandmother’s life, you wrote it as fiction. How much of the story came from your grandmother’s details, and how much did you have to research or create on your own?
Every event that happens is true, and everything actually happened to her, but there are some small details that I embellished. For me, it was really helpful because, while I love creativity and writing, I sometimes struggle to pick an idea. So the fact that she had all these little stories, and I could expand from those, was something I loved while writing this. I had to use fiction when describing the atmosphere of certain places and also to write the dialogue because I can’t know exactly what they said or how they said it.
Do you have a favorite story your grandma told you that you made sure to get in the book?
Inge goes to a boarding school [in France] with her host family and there the children play a game where they pick someone to be the “torturer,” who is usually whoever they think the ugliest person is. My grandma had red hair and green eyes, and I guess she wasn’t the traditional standard of beauty. They picked her to be the torturer and she would have to pull people’s hair and scratch them. There would also be a queen, who was usually the prettiest girl with blond hair and blue eyes, and she would be protected. I thought it was interesting because to me it was the children’s way of understanding what was going on in the world around them. It’s a bit complicated, but when she told me this story I was completely shocked. It was really fascinating.
For people your age, why do you think Holocaust education is still relevant and important?
Some people my age don’t know anything about the Holocaust. I recently came across a statistic that talked about how little Gen Z knew about the Holocaust. There’s also been a spike in antisemitism and a decrease in awareness of history. For example, with Kanye West, who has a lot of followers, saying antisemitic remarks, a lot of people are going to just go along with what he says. There’s also just been a lot of hate crimes towards Jewish people, especially during COVID.
Lastly, the number of living Holocaust survivors is diminishing by the day. Gen Z is the last generation probably that is ever going to have the ability and the opportunity to speak with Holocaust survivors before they’re all gone. It’s important that we share this book now and then we educate people now before it’s too late.
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The post This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Leaves the Left Party Over Anti-Israel Stance, Lack of Support Amid Death Threats
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s antisemitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has resigned from the Left Party, citing a rise in antisemitism within the ranks, relentless personal attacks, and a party climate that has become intolerable.
“I struggled with this decision for a long time, as I have felt a deep connection to the party over many years,” Büttner wrote in a letter to the party leadership, as reported by German media.
“But I have reached a point where I must acknowledge that I can no longer remain a member of this party without betraying my own convictions,” he continued.
According to several German media reports, the commissioner, who had been a member of the Left Party since 2015, said he was resigning over the party’s handling of antisemitism, internal expulsion proceedings aimed at removing him, and relentless personal attacks.
“The fight against antisemitism is a task that transcends party lines,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to witness within my own party for years.”
He criticized the Left Party’s rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, noting that the party falsely regards it as a tool to repress protest while continuing to relativize antisemitic rhetoric.
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016.
Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.
In his letter, Büttner also condemned the Left Party in Lower Saxony, a federal state in northwestern Germany, for its position on Zionism, insisting that challenging Israel’s right to exist is unacceptable — especially after the state convention passed resolutions branding Israel a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state.”
“These resolutions are no longer acceptable to me,” he said.
In recent years, Büttner has faced not only external threats but also a sustained campaign of insults and defamation from members within his own party.
“The way my own party has handled attacks against me is particularly troubling,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “Instead of clear solidarity, I have too often experienced silence.”
Federal party leader Jan van Aken expressed regret over Büttner’s resignation but rejected any accusations of antisemitism within the Left Party, reiterating that the party “stands unequivocally against antisemitism.”
Earlier this year, Büttner endured two personal attacks within a single week, the second escalating into a death threat.
The Brandenburg state parliament received a letter threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
A former police officer, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
In the week prior to this latest attack, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red, inverted Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking what was at the time latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
In August 2024, swastikas and other antisemitic symbols and threats were also spray-painted on his personal car.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to newly released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in the country reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials have noted that the real number of antisemitic crimes registered by police is likely much higher, as many do not get reported.
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Over 100 Groups Call on University of California to Address Campus Antisemitism
Illustrative: Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect
Over 100 Jewish advocacy groups have signed a petition imploring the University of California (UC) system to confront faculty antisemitism amid the fallout over a new AMCHA Initiative report which argued that professors accelerated the campus antisemitism crisis by promoting the use of their platforms to promote anti-Jewish tropes in the name of opposing Israel and Zionism.
“We urge the [UC Board of Regents] to act now: stop faculty and academic units from using UC authority, resources, classrooms, and UC-branded platforms to advance political advocacy as institutional practice by strictly enforcing UC’s existing rules, and strengthening them where needed,” said the petition, which has so far amassed 124 signatures from groups, as well as 4,000 individuals. “This is not about policing faculty speech. It is about enforcing the crucial boundary between private speech and institutional advocacy.”
It continued, “When that boundary disappears, academic norms break down and students face harassment, intimidation, and exclusion. We call on you to protect students, restore the university’s academic integrity, and rebuild public trust in the University of California.”
The petition’s signatories include Alums for Campus Fairness, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, The Lawfare Project, Zionist Organization of America, and Students Supporting Israel (SSI).
The AMCHA Initiative report, titled “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California” examined the “antisemitism crisis” across UC campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. It included dozens of examples of faculty antisemitism, including their calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; founding pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters; and endorsing institutional adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, the AMCHA Initiative explained in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focused on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.
“The report documents how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization,” the report said, adding that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) alone holds at least 115 faculty endorsers of the BDS movement, according to the report. Meanwhile, dozens of its academic departments issued statements of support of the pro-Hamas encampments which struck college campuses during the 2023-2024 academic school year and became the hubs of antisemitic assault and discrimination.
It also said that FJP chapters offered more than supportive words, “defending and helping orchestrate boycott-aligned activism (including encampment demands), seeking to deplatform Israeli speakers, and filing an amicus brief … that denied Zionism’s place within Jewish identity and defended exclusionary encampment conduct toward Zionist Jewish students, including expulsion from campus spaces.”
UC Office of the President spokesperson Rachel Zaentz reportedly said the UC system was taking AMCHA’s report “seriously” and reviewing it. However, UC spokesperson Dan Mogulof expressed concerns about the methodology used to compile the data.
“While we appreciate this organization’s dedication to confronting antisemitism, it is unfortunate that no apparent effort was made to seek information directly from the campus and/or confirm information, some of which appears to have been gathered from unreliable sources,” Mogulof told The Daily Californian.
The AMCHA report followed previous studies revealing the extent of faculty misconduct in higher education promoting anti-Israel animus and even outright antisemitism.
In February, The Algemeiner learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”
Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: a Cornell University professor praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University FJP chapter shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.
The AMCHA Initiative has explored faculty antisemitism before.
In September 2024, the organization published a groundbreaking study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
FJP, AMCHA’s researchers added, also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. They said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty — who, they noted, spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools — were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students.
Additionally, FJP facilitated the proposing and adopting of student government resolutions demanding acceptance of the BDS movement — which aims to isolate Israel culturally, financially, and diplomatically as the first step toward its destruction. Wherever FJP was, the researchers said, BDS was “4.9 times likely to pass” and “nearly 11 times more likely to be included in student demands,” evincing, they continued, that FSJP plays an outsized role in radicalizing university students at the more than 100 schools — including Harvard University, Brown University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University — where it is active.
“One of the important functions of these groups is to give academic legitimacy to the notion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that’s a hugely important trope being trafficked on campuses right now,” AMCHA Initiative executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Support for Israel Craters Among US Democrats, According to New Poll
“Hands Off Lebanon & Iran” Protest, March 8, 2026, Chicago, Illinois. Photo: Screenshot
A new national poll reveals the extent to which support for Israel among Democratic voters in the US has dropped dramatically since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of the Jewish state, a trend that has raised alarm among analysts and pro-Israel advocates who warn that the long-standing bipartisan foundation of the US–Israel alliance may be weakening.
According to a new NBC News survey, just 13 percent of Democrats now have a positive view of Israel, a massive dip from 2023, when the figure stood at 34 percent before the war in Gaza. As for those who view the Jewish state negatively, the percentage skyrocketed from just 35 percent in 2023 to a majority, 57 percent, today.
In contrast, the poll indicates that Republican support for Israel remains overwhelmingly strong, although not to the same extent as before the Oct. 7 attack. According to the survey 54 percent of Republican voters continue to view Israel positively, a nine-point drop from 2023. The percentage of those who view the Jewish state negatively increased slightly from 12 percent to 18 percent,
The poll also reveals a sharp generational divide in attitudes toward Israel, with support declining across every age group but falling most steeply among younger Americans. Among Americans aged 65 and older, support for Israel slipped modestly over the past three years, declining from 64 percent in 2023 to 55 percent in 2026. During the same period, negative views toward Israel rose from 12 percent to 21 percent.
The drop was more pronounced among Americans aged 50 to 64. In that group, support for Israel fell from 59 percent in 2023 to just 37 percent in 2026, while unfavorable views doubled, climbing from 15 percent to 30 percent.
Among those aged 35 to 49, support declined from 34 percent in 2023 to 20 percent in 2026. At the same time, 43 percent of respondents in this age bracket reported negative feelings toward Israel.
Younger Americans expressed the most critical attitudes. In the 18–34 age group, only 13 percent said they support Israel, while 63 percent reported unfavorable views.
The results highlight a growing partisan and generational divide in American attitudes toward the closest US ally in the Middle East, with Republicans largely framing Israel’s recent military actions as a legitimate exercise of self-defense against terrorism. Analysts note that this alignment reflects broader trends within the Republican Party, where support for Israel has become an increasingly central element of foreign policy identity and where sympathy for Israel significantly outweighs sympathy for the Palestinians.
For decades, Israel enjoyed broad support across the American political spectrum. While Republicans have generally been more strongly aligned with Israel in recent years, Democratic leaders historically remained supportive of the Jewish state’s security and its strategic partnership with the United States. The latest polling, however, suggests that this bipartisan consensus is under growing strain.
Some supporters of Israel argue that the polling shift reflects the success of a sustained global campaign to delegitimize Israel following the Oct. 7 massacre. They note that Israel’s military operations in Gaza are aimed at dismantling Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that openly calls for Israel’s destruction and continues to embed its fighters within civilian areas.
The political implications could be significant. US military aid and diplomatic support for Israel have historically depended on bipartisan backing in Congress. If Democratic public opinion continues to move away from Israel, analysts say it could influence future policy debates over arms transfers, diplomatic support at the United Nations, and the broader US approach to the Israeli-Palestinian
At the same time, many Democratic lawmakers remain firmly supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself.
A major analysis of Democratic voters released last week suggests that despite increasingly vocal criticism of Israel in some activist circles, especially among the party’s youth, the broader Democratic electorate remains largely supportive of the US–Israel relationship.