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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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An arsonist torched a Mississippi synagogue. It feels hauntingly familiar.
A Mississippi synagogue has just been destroyed by hateful actors – and it is not the first time.
I am talking about what happened Saturday morning. An arsonist set fire to the historic Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi. By the time the flames were extinguished, much of the building was destroyed and rendered unusable.
According to reporting by Mississippi Insider, the fire tore through parts of the building, damaging sacred objects, prayer books, and decades of communal memory. Firefighters were able to prevent a total collapse, but the synagogue — founded in 1860 and one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the state — will not be able to function as a house of worship for the foreseeable future.
I am experiencing historical déjà vu. On September 18, 1967, white supremacists bombed Beth Israel in retaliation for the civil rights activism of its rabbi, Perry Nussbaum. Rabbi Nussbaum was a visible ally of Black leaders in Jackson, including Medgar Evers, and his moral courage made him a target. Shortly thereafter, they bombed Rabbi Nussbaum’s home as well. He survived. The building was rebuilt.
Those attacks followed a grim and unmistakable American tradition. For several years, I served The Temple in Atlanta, and congregants still spoke in hushed tones about where they were on the morning of October 12, 1958, when The Temple was bombed by white supremacists angered by Rabbi Jacob Rothschild’s outspoken support for civil rights. That bombing is often remembered as the most infamous attack on a religious building in American history, but what many forget is that it did not stand alone. In the year leading up to it, synagogues in Miami, Nashville, Birmingham, and Jacksonville were also bombed.
Synagogues have succumbed to flames throughout Jewish history. On Kristallnacht, November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis and their collaborators burned or destroyed more than 1,400 synagogues across Germany and Austria. That night was not a spontaneous riot; it was a dress rehearsal for annihilation. And the line of fire stretches further back still, to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and before that to the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE.
Beth Israel is not just a building. It is a witness. It is a repository of Jewish persistence in a place where Jews have lived as a tiny minority for generations, carving out space for faith, community, and civic engagement in the Deep South. To see it burned is to feel a familiar Jewish nausea, the sickening recognition that this story has been told before — far too many times.
Beth Israel in Jackson burned on Shabbat, coinciding with the Torah portion of Shemot, as we read in the book of Exodus about the burning bush — a bush that burns but is not consumed by flames. Such is Jewish history.
An American tradition?
What disturbs me most is not only the act itself, but its familiarity.
I mentioned my time in Atlanta. I also served as a rabbi in Columbus, Georgia. When I look back on my career, I realize that I have spent no fewer than twenty years serving Jewish communities in the South — and yes, I include South Florida in that number.
During those years, I learned a profound respect for Jews in small Southern communities who tenaciously maintain their synagogues in the face of demographic shrinkage, economic pressure, and cultural isolation. When those synagogues close, as too many do, the community must make sure that there are homes for their Torah scrolls and ritual objects. This is sacred labor, often carried out quietly and without recognition.
Most Americans do not realize that a surprisingly large percentage of Reform synagogues in this country look far more like Beth Israel in Jackson than like the caricature of the large, affluent suburban congregation. The heart of Reform Judaism beats in small, struggling, historic communities. That is why the fire in Jackson sears the Jewish soul. It could be any synagogue. And in my darkest fears, I believe there will be more.
Right about now, some of you are saying, “Well, what did you expect? Look at what has happened in Gaza, and the Palestinians, and Netanyahu…”
If you are saying this, your foolishness betrays you. No one vandalizes Russian Orthodox churches in America because of Vladimir Putin. No one boycotts Chinese restaurants because of China’s persecution of the Uyghurs. And no one should ever suggest that victims of violent bigotry are responsible for the hatred directed at them. We would never say this about any other group. We must not say it about Jews.
The raw truth is what historian Pamela Nadell names so clearly in her indispensable new book, Antisemitism: An American Tradition.
Pamela does not only name and record the incidents of antisemitism that have occurred over the years. She shows that antisemitism is, in fact, an American tradition. It has always been with us, sometimes polite, sometimes lethal, often lying dormant like an autoimmune disease, flaring up when fear, desperation, and social change demand a scapegoat.
An issue for all faiths
Not only because of what has happened, but because of what I fear will follow — not only imitation, but silence. As I write these words, I do not know whether this arson will merit national attention, whether it will appear in The New York Times or vanish into the vast archive of shrugged-off hate. I hope my fears are wrong.
I also wonder who will speak. Will our most trusted chroniclers of American moral life take notice? I admire historian Heather Cox Richardson deeply, and I hope she will address antisemitism with the same moral clarity she brings to other threats to democracy. Because it cannot be that even in the warmest of hearts there is a cold spot for the Jews.
I often think of an artifact I have seen at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is a Torah ark ripped from the wall of a synagogue in Essen, Germany, hurled into the street. Carved into it are the words, “Know before whom you stand.” But those words were deliberately chiseled away by a vandal, as if to declare that there is no one before whom we stand, no God whose presence must be reckoned with — because we are destroying the place where that God so often comes to dwell.
That is why I am turning now to my readers who are not Jewish. I am calling on Christian pastors, Muslim imams, and religious leaders of every tradition to denounce what happened in Jackson this coming weekend. Because just as we rightly said when Black churches were burned, any attack on a house of worship is not only an attack on one community. It is an assault on the very idea that holiness has a place in public life.
And that, ultimately, is an attack on God.
The post An arsonist torched a Mississippi synagogue. It feels hauntingly familiar. appeared first on The Forward.
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Can Breads Bakery workers really demand that the Israeli owners cut ties with Israel? Labor experts weigh in.
(New York Jewish Week) — The news that workers at Breads Bakery, an Israeli chain in New York City, were demanding “an end to this company’s support of the genocide happening in Palestine” as part of a union push has triggered concerns among those worried about surging anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.
“This is going to spread,” Deborah Lipstadt, the former United States special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, wrote on X Thursday. “This is not spontaneous, This is part of an effort to marginalize Jews and Israel.”
But is an Israel boycott as a union demand even possible to achieve? Do workers have rights when it comes to protecting their beliefs about Israel? What role are unions playing in anti-Israel advocacy? And what might happen next at Breads?
To answer these questions, we reached out to two labor scholars — Harry C. Katz, the director of the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution at Cornell University, and Samuel Estreicher, an attorney and scholar on labor and employment law and arbitration law at New York University. We also visited a rally by Breads’ supporters on the Upper West Side on Friday afternoon.
Here’s what we learned.
Is it common for workers to press for political concessions as part of their unionization efforts?
The Breaking Breads workers are doing something unusual, Katz said. He said he was not aware of other examples of employees making demands related to Israel as part of a unionization effort.
“There are unions who have taken out political stances, but the stances are ‘we oppose the Netanyahu government,’ or ‘we oppose the invasion of Gaza,’ ‘we are sympathetic to BDS,’” he said. “They’re allowed to take that stance, but they have not done what you’re asking about.”
Of course, unions can and do use their might to advance political agendas. But that often happens in the advocacy space, with unions reminding decision-makers that they represent a powerful voting bloc, not in bargaining within individual units.
The insertion of Israel demands in a unionization announcement reflects an anti-Israel swing within swaths of organized labor in the United States and beyond.
In December 2023, United Auto Workers, the union that Breaking Breads has filed under, became the largest union to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. It was a sharp departure for the union, which had previously been staunchly supportive of Israel.
In March 2025, UAW came to the defense of two members at Columbia University who had been involved in pro-Palestinian protests there, including Grant Miner, who headed a union chapter representing 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students employed at the school before being expelled.
The “assault on First Amendment rights being jointly committed by the federal government and Columbia University are an attack on all workers who dare to protest, speak out, or exercise their freedom of association under the US Constitution,” UAW said in a statement at the time.
UAW national and the local group representing Breaking Breads, as the union is calling itself, both did not respond to a request for comment.
What are the chances of the Breads workers getting what they want when it comes to Israel?
Slim to none, Katz and Estreicher both said.
For one thing, it’s far from assured that Breaking Breads will even succeed in being recognized as a bargaining union. The employees announced that “over 30%” of Breads’ workers had signed onto the unionized effort, the minimum required under federal labor law — and far less than most unions announce themselves with.
The threshold allows the workers to petition the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union election. In an election, more than half of workers who participate must support the formation of the union for one to be created.
“Thirty percent is an extremely low level of support through the signing of authorization cards,” Katz said. “For them to say, ‘Oh, they have a bit over 30%,’ that suggests they’re going to have an extremely difficult time if this goes to an election.”
Then, even if the union does meet the legal threshold for recognition, Breads is under no legal obligation to engage on issues related to Israel.
“Workers don’t have a right to tell management what management wants to do with its own funds, or personal beliefs and political views regarding Israel,” Katz said. “The law requires bargaining in good faith about wages and other employment conditions. That’s the requirement.”
The workers are alleging a range of unfair employment practices, including low wages, irregular schedules and unsafe working conditions. If their union is recognized, Breads will have to negotiate a contract addressing those issues — and will have to comply or risk a strike.
But on the off chance that questions about Israel somehow make it to the bargaining table, “management can refuse to discuss it,” Katz said.
Breads has indicated that it does not believe political issues are appropriate fodder for negotiation.
“We’ve always been a workplace where people of all backgrounds and viewpoints can come together around a shared purpose, the joy found at a bakery,” it said in a statement responding to the announcement of Breaking Breads. “We find it troubling that divisive political issues are being introduced into our workplace.”
Estreicher put it simply: “They can say whatever they want,” he said about the workers. But Israel-related issues would never be considered a “mandatory subject of bargaining” like wages and working conditions, and workers could be fired if they strike over the issues.
Since there isn’t actually a union yet, can Breads just fire the workers making the anti-Israel demands now?
Some of Breads’ supporters have called for the company to fire the workers who are agitating against its ties to Israel.
“I don’t understand why the owners [don’t] simply fire the so-called unionizing staff. New York is an at-will employer. They’re creating a hostile work environment,” one commenter wrote on an Instagram post by pro-Israel influence Lizzy Savetsky decrying the workers’ demand. “There’s the door, ungrateful employees. Feel free to take a loaf with you on the way out.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTRF-49kXBW/?hl=en
But firing workers who joined Breaking Breads would be a problem, Katz said, even though they don’t formally have a union yet.
“Management often gets away, due to the weakness in the enforcement of our labor laws, … with the firing of union sympathizers and activists,” Katz said. “But that is technically illegal. It’s illegal for management to fire people because of their views towards the union or their activism within the union.”
Do workers have a protected right to refuse to work on a specific job that offends their beliefs, including about Israel?
One of Breaking Breads’ objections was to catering events that it said involved groups with ties to Israel or to producing custom loaves decorated with Israeli flags.
The question is not the same as the one that recently occupied the Supreme Court, when it ruled on cases about small-business providers — including a wedding cake maker — who declined to serve same-sex clients, citing religious beliefs.
Those cases were about whether the government could compel a business to create custom content that violates the owner’s beliefs — and the court ruled it could not. But workers do not have the same protections individually, nor do they have the right to impose their beliefs on their employer.
“It’s the employer’s business, not their business. That’s my position. I think that’s the legal position,” Estreicher said. “People have all kinds of views with different things. Anyway, an employer should be able to make clear that he makes the decision on who the customers are, and they can’t interfere with that.”
Workers would likely also have a difficult time seeking redress against their employer for serving specific customers against their beliefs, Katz said.
Contract violation claims go to third parties known as arbitrators, who rule whether management ran afoul of its contract with the union and what penalty, if any, should be applied.
As an example, Katz said, “A Palestinian employee says in this case: ‘I’m baking cookies that get eaten or sold at an event that supports Israel.’ I can’t imagine an arbitrator would say you have a right to refuse that kind of work.”
Estreicher said one Israel-related claim by Breaking Breads could be appropriate grounds for redress, if true. The workers said Breads had told workers they could not speak Arabic on the job — a demand that may run afoul of employment law.
“If they’re in public contact jobs, I think they can [have that rule], but there are legal issues about if they’re not in public contact jobs,” Estreicher said. “If they’re in the kitchen, having a prohibition would be problematic.”
What happens next at Breads?
When it comes to the unionization effort, it could be several weeks before there are clear developments. Employers can choose to recognize unions voluntarily, but if they do not, the National Labor Relations Board typically makes a decision about whether it will support an election within about 45 days. Elections are then held several weeks to months after that.
For now, the popular bakery appears to be reaping positive dividends from its workers’ dissatisfaction. Fans of the bakery and pro-Israel activists have asked the New York City Jewish community to buy their products, and even offered to work for Breads for free.
A few hundred showed up at a Friday gathering to buy a coffee or a snack and hang out at the Upper West Side location, called for by pro-Israel activist Shai Davidai.
“We are dealing with an ideological war, and that ideological war says that if you are a Zionist, if you believe that Israel has a right to exist, if you’re a proud Jew, then you don’t deserve to live here,” Davidai said.
Davidai stressed that the event was all about showing strength in numbers.
“We want to show here a Jewish, Zionist business, that we have their back, and they won’t be cowered by a loud and nasty minority that wants to ruin things for everybody,” Davidai said.
“This isn’t just about buying products,” he added. “So first thing, [almost] everyone who’s buying a product is wearing a sticker that says, ‘Zionist,’ right? So the cashier, the employees, the business owner, and everyone on the street sees that we are coming out as Zionists. We’re not hiding anymore.”
By about 12:10 p.m., the fast-moving line at Breads’ Upper West Side location had begun to wrap around the block. Parents had brought babies, and people of all ages waited in line, as new customers arriving at the scene ended their FaceTime calls — some in Hebrew, some in English — by describing the scene to the person on the other end of the line. Some customers came alone and met new faces while waiting in line; others came with friends.
“Today, they are not just trying to bite the hand that feeds them, they’re trying to gnaw it off,” said Judy, a longtime Upper West Side resident who declined to share her last name, about the workers. “That’s what I was thinking all last night. It’s preposterous. It’s ludicrous. It’s beyond reproach.”
Colleagues Marc Rodriguez and Max Lippman waited in the middle of the line, and, like many, were hoping to land one of Breads’ award-winning babkas.
Rodriguez, who is not Jewish or Israeli but whose wife is both and whose children are Jewish, said he felt obligated to support the store, which he is a fan of and had been to in Israel. He brought a small Israeli flag, and wore one of the “Zionist” stickers that Davidai had handed out.
“I want to support the store, support the owners, and I want to remind the workers over here who is supporting this store, and who is patronizing the store,” Rodriguez said. “I think it’s a nice, respectful way to show support. We’re not shouting, we’re here. We’re all smiling, happy, talking. And also, I’m so excited for carbs.”
Lippman, who is from the Upper West Side, heard about the call to head to Breads on social media.
“In general I’m pro-union,” he said. “But once part of that is saying that they’re anti-Zionist, that seems unnecessary. It’s an Israeli-owned bakery. We’re here to show our support. It seems unnecessary when forming a union to state your beliefs on Israel. It doesn’t matter who the owners are,” Lippman added. “We’re just here to support the bakery and the babka makes that easy.”
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From pop stars to tefillin pop-ups, Oct. 7 changed how Israel’s ‘somewhat observant’ practice Judaism
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — In the weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, religiously charged videos started circulating on social media. Dozens of young women posted videos of themselves cutting up their “immodest” clothing, jeans, crop tops, minidresses, vowing to replace them with modest skirts and head coverings.
In one viral TikTok clip, a young influencer solemnly shears her wardrobe to shreds, declaring it an offering for national deliverance. “Creator of the world, as I cut these clothes, cut away the harsh decrees against Israel,” she says, explaining that she would not even donate the garments lest she “cause someone else to stumble” by wearing them.
Other images circulated too, of tefillin pop-ups, neighborhood challah-bakes and, on both social media and the street, a noticeable rise in religious amulets and pendants. Hamsas, Stars of David and necklaces shaped like the map of Israel or the ancient Temple in Jerusalem appeared everywhere.
Two years later, as the grinding war in Gaza largely wound down, those early scenes have taken on the feel of a specific moment in time. Still, the spiritual jolt of those first weeks has not fully faded, and increased religious practice has become part of the country’s daily rhythm.
A poll released in November by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 27% of Israelis have increased their observance of religious customs since the war began. Roughly a third of Jewish Israelis say they are praying more frequently than before the war, and about 20% report reading the Tanach or psalms more often.
JPPI head Shuki Friedman said that many Israelis, and especially the young, felt the war had reconnected them to tradition and Jewish identity “not necessarily in a halachic way, but in a way that shows up very strongly in their lives and in the public space.”
Crucially, the shift has been most dramatic among Israelis who already had one foot in tradition — those raised in “masorti” or traditional but not strictly observant, homes. While the masorti category has its roots in Middle Eastern and North African (Mizrahi) communities, where religious observance was historically more integrated into daily life but less rigid than in European Orthodoxy, today masorti Israelis span all sectors of Israeli society. (The category is distinct from the Masorti movement, the name for Conservative Judaism in Israel and Europe.) Roughly one-third of Israeli Jews identify as masorti, with JPPI breaking the group into two categories: “somewhat religious” and “not so religious.”
The Jewish demographer Steven M. Cohen once quipped that masorti Israelis are those who “violate the laws that they do not wish to change” – meaning they accept traditional Jewish law, known as halacha, as valid, but selectively observe it in practice. Cohen also noted there’s no real American equivalent, though the closest parallel might be “non-observant Orthodox.”
Among young Jews who identified as “somewhat religious” masorti, 51% of respondents in the poll reported deepening their religious practices during the war.
David Mizrachi is one of them. Raised in a masorti home, Mizrachi had never been consistent about synagogue attendance, Shabbat observance or laying tefillin. Since Oct. 7, he said, he does all three — religiously.
For him, the change grew out of the shock of the attacks and the losses that touched his own circle. He personally knew the Vaknin twins, killed at the Nova party, and Elkana Bohbot, the hostage snatched from the rave who was released after two years in captivity. Those events, he said, pushed him into “cheshbon nefesh,” a Jewish reckoning with his identity.
“I understood that these enemies and terrorists came because we were Jewish, not because we were Israelis,” he said.
In some households the response went further still. Rozet Levy Dy Bochy, raised masorti and married to a non-Jewish Dutch man who decided after Oct. 7 to convert, said Oct. 7 drew her deeper into observance.
“It felt like we were in a horror film, but faith provided an anchor,” she said. “Knowing that everything was part of God’s plan and in the end something different, something good, was waiting for us was comforting.”
The dynamic experienced by Mizrachi, shaped by the violence that afflicted people he personally knew, aligns with another survey released in September by the Hebrew University, which found that direct exposure to the war, whether through bereavement or injury, was closely associated with changes in religiosity and spirituality. Roughly half of respondents reported higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, including a quarter who said they had become more religious and a third who described a rise in spirituality.
That trend has been reflected most vividly in the accounts of released hostages that have filled Hebrew media over the past year, with former hostages describing making kiddush on water, keeping Shabbat for the first time or rejecting pitas during Passover in the tunnels beneath Gaza.
It has rippled through pop culture, too. Actor Gal Gadot told her 106 million followers on Instagram that while she’s “not a religious person,” she had decided to light a candle and pray for the safe return of all the hostages.
Israel’s biggest pop star Noa Kirel, not known for religious observance, marked her November wedding with a mikveh immersion, a hafrashat challah (challah-separation) gathering, along with a henna party of the type that is common among Mizrahi Jews.
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Another of Israel’s most popular singers, Omer Adam, long considered secular, now wears tzitzit, studies Torah, and keeps Shabbat.
It’s now common to see Israeli celebrities sharing Shabbat candle-lighting rituals, including secular TV host Ofira Asayag, who, a year into the war, pledged to do so on-air until the hostages came home.
For sociologist Doron Shlomi, who studies Israeli religiosity, none of this is surprising, because collective crises often produce similar effects. Drawing on research from earthquakes, wars and the Covid-19 pandemic, he described the two years of war as “a kind of laboratory” for seeing how people turn toward faith.
“War always brings two things,” he said. “More religiosity and more pregnancies.”
Shlomi argued, however, that the hostages and their families sit apart from the rest of the population. For many of them, he said, a turn to religion was a survival tool, and he expects some will go on to live fully observant lives.
But in the broader public he sees two main patterns. The first is piety as a form of public service and solidarity that manifests in personal habits, like observing a single Shabbat or donning tzitzit in honor of the hostages, the fallen, and the soldiers.
The other pattern runs through institutions and organizations that seized on the moment, from ultra-Orthodox groups like Chabad hosting barbecues on army bases to Christian evangelicals joining support efforts.
Although increases outnumbered declines, the Hebrew University and JPPI studies both found a smaller counter-current. About 14% of secular respondents in both surveys said their religiosity had weakened, and 9% of Jewish respondents in the JPPI poll reported a drop in belief in God, a figure that rose to 16% among secular Jews.
The Hebrew University researchers framed their findings through a psychological lens, drawing on terror management theory, which argues that confronting mortality pushes people to double down on their existing worldviews — deepening religious practice for some and weakening it for others.
“During periods of prolonged stress, individuals may reorganize their religious or spiritual orientations by either increasing or decreasing their importance,” said Yaakov Greenwald, who led the study.
It’s not the first time war has nudged Israelis toward faith. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel experienced a notable uptick in people returning to religion, including high-profile secular figures. Film director Uri Zohar shocked the nation by becoming ultra-Orthodox in 1977. A year later, Effi Eitam, a decorated brigadier general and later a politician, did the same.
Historians debate how large that post-’73 wave really was, but at the time the narrative took hold that the near-death experience of the state — Israel was caught off guard and feared annihilation in the first days of that war — followed by an against-all-odds turnaround felt to many like a miracle.
Shlomi said it is still too soon to make firm predictions about how long the current trend will last, given that the country is only now emerging from the crisis. Even so, he believes the scale of the war and the religious wave it produced were deep enough that, a decade from now, it will still be there.
And if the experience of Rozet Levy Dy Bochy’s husband, Peter Griekspoor, is any indication, the war may leave the country not only more observant down the line but with more Jews altogether.
At first, Rozet said, her husband responded in a “very European” way, seeking balance and “both-sides-ing” the situation. She told him that was a luxury of not being Jewish, but that “for us, something in our DNA reacts in moments like this. We’ve been here before.”
But it did not take long for the balance to tilt. As protests spread across Europe and North America and conspiracy theories about Israelis and Jews circulated online, Peter said he was “starting to feel like part of the narrative.”
“I felt the antisemitism was personal,” he said. “Now I actually feel like I’m Jewish. I feel like I want to be part of this people. They are beautiful, they are strong, they are resilient,” he said, before adding with a laugh, “and they are horrible also. Always arguing, always fighting each other.”
Shlomi said that while much of the revival grew out of a real desire for unity and belonging, some of it acquired a coercive edge, with some rabbis and others treating “returning” to faith as the only legitimate response and investing significant funding in amplifying it. “Tefillin and barbecues cost a lot of money,” he said.
He also noted that the rise in religious practice often moved in tandem with a political realignment, with some public figures openly embracing observance. On Channel 14’s flagship “Patriots” current-affairs show, rightwing host Yinon Magal now speaks frequently about becoming more observant since the war, a change that links faith with nationalist politics.
A number of survivors from the traditionally left-leaning kibbutzim on the Gaza border that were attacked on Oct. 7 have described similar movement in their own lives, adopting more religious practices, like remarrying in an Orthodox ceremony, and identifying more strongly with the right. JPPI survey data shows the same trend among Jewish youth, with a clear rightward drift across most political camps.
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Mizrachi, however, bucks that trend. A peace activist and board member of Standing Together, a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement that campaigned against the war, he has grown more observant without changing his politics.
“I am a Jew first, then an Israeli, then a democrat, then a Mizrahi,” he said. “I see God in every aspect of life. But I also ask, until when will we live by the sword and be filled with hate for Gazans? This isn’t the Jewish way.”
For Griekspoor, the Jewish way meant the halachic way, and for the past six months he has been enrolled in an Orthodox conversion program under the Israeli rabbinate, a track that mandates full observance of Jewish law. He says he knows his choice in becoming Jewish defies logic.
“You have the persecution, the hatred, the antisemitism — and you can’t eat cheeseburgers,” he said. “But there is no rational explanation. It’s stronger than me.”
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