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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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The post A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Author R.F. Kuang addresses backlash over Israeli character in newest book
The bestselling author R.F. Kuang has broken her silence over backlash to the inclusion of a minor Israeli character in her newest novel, Taipei Story.
The book, published last week, follows a Chinese-American student, Lily Chen, who studies abroad in Taipei hoping to reconnect with her cultural roots and perfect her Mandarin. But she quickly finds that bridging the gap between her Chinese heritage and American upbringing will be more difficult than she imagined.
In May, before the book was published, an excerpt from Taipei Story which included the unnamed Israeli character was leaked online. In a scene that lasts barely two pages, Lily attends a concert featuring a pianist “from Israel” who is described as “a big deal.” The vignette has little bearing on the plot beyond showing how Lily finds catharsis in the music.
Social media critics accused Kuang — who has previously donated special editions of her books to raise money for humanitarian relief organizations in Gaza — of “normalizing Israel” by depicting an Israeli character in a positive light. The topic trended on BookTok (for the uninitiated, TikToks about books), with some users calling on readers to cancel their preorders of the novel and bombard Taipei Story’s GoodReads page with one-star ratings. (So-called “review-bombing” violates GoodReads guidelines.)
Kuang did not comment on the social media-fueled controversy for months.
But in an interview with USA Today and at a book tour stop last week at Sixth & I, a historic Washington, D.C. synagogue, Kuang pushed back on her critics, saying the backlash reflected a misinterpretation of the passage. Video from the event was posted to TikTok, and the Forward independently confirmed with Kuang’s publisher that the recording accurately captured her remarks.
“I want to read charitably the person who’d seen the words ‘Israeli pianist’ and immediately been so afraid that this book was condoning these practices,” said Kuang, who didn’t specify what “these practices” referred to in the clip. “But the fact of the matter is that’s just not what that scene does. That’s not how it was intended, and that’s not how it reads.”
Kuang seemed to say that the scene, which takes place as Lily is in the midst of a personal cultural identity crisis, was actually commentary on the political dynamics underlying cultural encounters.
“I instead wanted to invite the reader to ask questions about what’s going on in this scene, what is this character noticing based on what we know about where she comes from, in the position of an arrogant American study abroad student,” Kuang said. “This scene raises a lot of questions about who gets to move through the world, who is received in what ways, what are geopolitics that undergird something as innocent as a concert.”
The subtext
Kuang, a PhD student at Yale in East Asian Languages and Literatures, has made a name for herself writing critiques of colonialism, imperialism and racism. She has also engaged politically beyond her written work, participating in the charity auction “Unbound for Gaza” in Sept. 2025. A few months later, she withdrew from a literary festival in the United Arab Emirates, citing her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call to boycott the UAE for allegedly supplying weapons to paramilitary groups in the brutal Sudanese civil war.
Kuang’s historical fantasy novels, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence and The Poppy War trilogy, take on British imperialism and the legacy of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Kuang’s foray into literary fiction, Yellowface, critiques cultural appropriation through a satirical account of a white author who passes off her dead Chinese friend’s manuscript as her own.
Taipei Story is an inner monologue that toggles between the narrator’s mundane problems — boy trouble, mosquito bites, unbearable heat — and her musings on colonialism and geopolitics.
Lily notices the “ghosts of Japan everywhere” — remnants from the Japanese occupation of Taiwan following its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War.
Yet Lily also acknowledges Taiwan doesn’t fit neatly into the framework she learned in history class that “colonialism was bad,” noting that Taiwan never experienced a “decolonial transition” and remains caught between the influence of China and the U.S.
“Taiwan had only ever been passed from occupier to occupier — indeed, to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, the Han Chinese themselves were occupiers,” Kuang writes. “So who was I to say any occupier was better than the last?”
Lily is also grappling with her own sense of being an outsider in Taiwan — a country her parents, who are from mainland China, have never visited. She hopes that learning Mandarin will help her reclaim a connection to her family’s past, but her grandfather’s death forces her to confront how much of that past she never really knew.
It’s against this backdrop that, roughly three-quarters of the way through the book, the unnamed Israeli pianist comes on stage. The reader is given only a few details about him: It was “his first time in Taiwan,” and he was “a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded.”
Later, Lily returns to the concert hall. She remarks that “the audience was not always as well behaved as they had been for the Israeli pianist. That had been a special occasion, it turned out. I rarely saw foreigners in the concert hall after that. Never again did I see a full house.”
Some online have suggested that the scene is “an allegory for the issue of watching Israeli occupation unfold.” Others read it as a commentary on the prestige afforded to foreign artists while Taiwanese artists are overlooked — and, by extension, on which conflicts around the world command our attention. Or perhaps the pianist’s nationality is significant simply because the narrator has a habit throughout the novel of identifying people by where they are from: “an Italian undergraduate,” “a German girl,” a “Hong Kong director.”
If the scene is meant to carry a hidden meaning, Kuang isn’t spelling it out.
Kuang told USA Today she was getting more comfortable moving away from “didactic” modes of storytelling, leaving room for readers to interpret for themselves.
“The risk of that,” she said, “is somebody runs away with the total opposite conclusion of what you’re putting on the page.”
The post Author R.F. Kuang addresses backlash over Israeli character in newest book appeared first on The Forward.
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How can Yiddish fans in Israel benefit from the growing Yiddish scene abroad?
דער הינטערגרונט
די באַציִונגען צווישן ייִדיש-אינסטיטוציעס אין ישׂראל און אין אַמעריקע איז אַ בכּבֿודיקע, אַקטועלע טעמע וואָס דאַרף הײַנט באַהאַנדלט ווערן מיט אַ פֿרישן צוגאַנג. אויף אַלע אַנדערע געביטן ווי זיכערקייט, ווירטשאַפֿט, געזונט און אַקאַדעמיע קאָן מען פֿעסטשטעלן אַז די אָ באַציִונגען זענען ברייט פֿאַרנעמיקע און מ׳קאָן אַפֿילו צוגעבן אַז די שטיצע פֿון אַמעריקאַנער ייִדנטום לטובֿת ישׂראל איז אין אַזאַ מאָס, אַז מ׳וואָלט זיך נישט געקאָנט פֿאָרשטעלן ווי אַ סך פֿון די אינסטיטוציעס וואָלטן פֿונקציאָנירט אָן דעם ריזיקן פֿינאַנציעלן אָנשפּאָר אויפֿן אַמעריקאַנעם ייִדנטום.
און ווי אַזוי זעט עס אויס אויפֿן געביט פֿון ייִדישע קולטור-באַציִונגען? וואָס שייך אַקאַדעמישע אויסטוישן און צוזאַמענאַרבעט אויף וויכטיקע אונטערנעמונגען אין אַמעריקע און אין ישׂראל איז דער מצבֿ אַ נישקשהדיקער. מע קאָן צוגעבן אַז דער תּחום נעמט אַריין אין פֿאַרלויף פֿון די יאָרן אַ פּאָר הונדערטער אַקטיווע אַקאַדעמיקער און אַוואַנסירטע סטודענטן.
ווען מיר טראַכטן זיך אָבער אַרײַן אין דער פֿראַגע, וואָס געשעט מיט דער ברייטערער געזעלשאַפֿט, איז דער מצבֿ אַ גאָר סטאַטישער. דאָס איז אַן אויסדרוק פֿון אַ גאָר באַגרענעצטער, לאָקאַליסטישער באַציִונג צו דעם פֿענאָמען פֿון ייִדישער קולטור אין אירע פֿאַרשידענע אויסדרוקן. אָט די פֿעסטשטעלונג איז גילטיק נישט נאָר לגבי אַמעריקע און ישׂראל, נאָר אויך לגבי אַ סך אַנדערע ייִשובֿים איבער דער וועלט. אין ישׂראל, אויסער דעם אָרטאָדאָקסישן סעקטאָר, זענען מסתּמא כּמעט אַ מיליאָן תּושבֿים אין די לעצטע פּאָר יאָר אַרײַן אינעם קרײַז פֿון ייִדיש-טעטיקייט אַ דאַנק דער אַקטיווער מעדיאַ, פֿייסבוק, פֿילמען און ייִדיש-קרײַזן. אַ ביסל אונטער דעם ראַדאָר, געניסט מען פֿון קונסט, הומאָר, כּלי־זמר-מוזיק. און די צאָל וואַקסט פֿון יאָר צו יאָר. קיין אַנקעטעס האָט מען ביז איצט, צום באַדויערן, נישט געפֿירט — דער עסטאַבלישמענט האָט קיין אינטערעס נישט אין אָט דער דערשײַנונג — און ס׳איז אַ שאָד, ווײַל אויב מ׳וואָלט געקאָנט באַקומען אָביעקטיווע באַווײַזן דערפֿון וואָלט מען געקאָנט נאָכפֿאָלגן די אָ פּראָצעסן און פּרוּוון ווירקן אויף זיי.
דער ברייטער, שוואַך אָרגאַניזירטער ציבור וואָס איז גענייגט צו ייִדיש, ווייסט אַפֿילו נישט, אַז אין 1996 איז אין לאַנד אָנגענומען געוואָרן דאָס געזעץ אויפֿצושטעלן „די נאַציאָנאַלע אינסטאַנץ פֿאַר ייִדישער קולטור“ וואָס איז גאָר טעטיק הײַנטצוטאָג, כאָטש, צום באַדויערן, מיט אַ מינימאַלן בודזשעט. דער דאָזיקער ציבור איז גלײַכגילטיק און כּמעט אין גאַנצן אומבאַוווּסטזיניק פֿון וואָס עס קומט פֿאָר אויפֿן געביט פֿון ייִדיש אין אַמעריקע און אַנדערע לענדער. ספּאָראַדיש, ווען די מעדיאַ גיט איבער וועגן אַ פֿעסטיוואַל, אָדער וועגן אַ קינסטלער וואָס האָט אַרויסגעגעבן אַ קאָמפּאַקטל, הערט מען עפּעס. אָבער דאָס איז אַ טראָפּן אין ים און מען ווייסט גאָרנישט פֿון דער וואַקסנדיקער, קוואַליטאַטיווער ייִדיש-טעטיקייט אין אויסלאַנד. ס׳איז לײַכט זיך פֿאָרשטעלן אַז אַזוינס געשעט אויך אין אַמעריקע און איבער אַנדערע קהילות. גאָר אַנדער איז דער מצבֿ לגבי דער טעמע פֿון חורבן, אָבער דאָס דאַרף נישט גערעכנט ווערן, ווײַל מיטן לערנען די געשיכטע פֿונעם חורבן באַנוצט מען זיך מיט אַ צאָל שפּראַכן ווי ענגליש, רוסיש, שפּאַניש, דײַטש וכדומה אָן זיך אָפּשצוטעלן און אַרײַנקלערן אין דער ראָלע פֿון ייִדיש, ייִדישער קולטור און אַשכּנזישן באַוווּסטזיין.
וואָס טוט מען כּדי צו פֿאַרבעסערן די לאַגע?
היות ווי כ׳בין אַ תּל-אָבֿיבער איז מיר לײַכטער אָנצוהייבן פֿון מײַנע אייגענע קאַנטן און פֿאָרלייגן אַן אַרבעטס-פּלאַן כּדי משפּיע זײַן אויפֿן ענגן, היגן לאָקאַליסטישן ייִדישיזם און פּרוּוון עס אויפֿלעבן. און די לייזונג איז אַ פּשוטע. וואָס מער די אינסטיטוציעס אין וועלכע כ׳בין טעטיק וועלן פֿאַרשפּרייטן ידיעות פֿון וואָס ס׳קומט פֿאָר אין דער ייִדיש-וועלט אין אַמעריקע און אַנדערע לענדער דורך אַלע קאָמוניקיר-מיטלען וואָס מיר האָבן, וועט דער עולם אין ישׂראל, דווקא דער טייל וואָס איז שוין נאָענט צו ייִדיש, אַנטפּלעקן פּלוצעם אַז מיר זענען אַ טייל פֿון אַ ברייטער און רײַכער ווירקלעכקייט. עס וועט אָפּשאַפֿן ס׳געפֿיל פֿון איזאָלאַציע און פֿאַרשטאַרקן ס׳געפֿיל פֿון אָנגעהעריקייט צו אַנדערע קהילות מיט טיפֿע אַשכּנזישע וואָרצלען (נישט נאָר דורכן חורבן.) תּכלית הייסט עס, מיר זאָלן אין ישׂראל פֿאַרשפּרייטן דעם פֿאָרווערטס, ווי אויך די פֿילצאָליקע פּראָגראַמען פֿון ייִוואָ, אַרבעטער-רינג, ייִדיש-בוך-צענטער אאַז״וו, נישט ווי עפּעס וואָס איז ערגעץ-וווּ ווײַט פֿון אונדז, נאָר ווי אַ ווירקלעכקייט וואָס געהערט צו אונדז. מיר נעמען אויף אַלע ייִדישע איבערלעבונגען פֿון אויסלאַנד און מיר ווילן אַז דער ישׂראלדיקער ציבור זאָל אויך געניסן דערפֿון.
שטעלט זיך די פֿראַגע, אין וועלכער מאָס וועט אָט דער צוגאַנג נישט זײַן אויפֿן חשבון פֿון אונדזערע אייגענע טעטיקייטן און ידיעות וואָס מיר מוזן כּסדר פֿאַרשפּרייטן כּדי צוציִען אַן עולם? מע דאַרף געפֿינען דעם גלײַכגעוויכט און לייזונגען כּדי דעם ים פֿון ידיעות זאָל זײַן אויסגעסדרט און דינען די אינטערעסן פֿון יעדן איינעם. צומאָל דאַרף מען זײַן אויסקלײַבעריש און געפֿינען די ריכטיקע מאָס און דעם ריכטיקן ווינקל פֿאַר יעדן תּוכן. דער פּועל-יוצא פֿון אַזאַ שפּאָגל־נײַער סטראַטעגיע וועט העכערן די נײַגעריקייט, די בילדונג און אַקטיוויזם פֿון אונדזערע אָרטיקע מענטשן. זיי וועלן וואַקסן אין צאָל און זיך אַנטוויקלען אויף אַ מער שעפֿערישן אופֿן. ס׳איז אַ סך עפֿעקטיוועער ווי זאָגן „ישׂראלים, זײַט נישט קיין פּראָווינציעלע ייִדישיסטן. ווערט גלאָבאַלע ייִדישיסטן.“ נאָר דאָס קאָן נישט זײַן. ס’קאָן נישט זײַן געצוווּנגען. מען דאַרף ברענגען אין מויל אַרײַן פֿון פּובליקום די אַלע צוציִענדיקע דערשײַנונגען וואָס קומען פֿאָר אין אַמעריקע און איבעראַל. אַזוי אַרום וועלן די ישׂראלים ביסלעכווײַז לאַנדן אויפֿן באָדן פֿון רעאַלן, לעבעדיקן ייִדישיזם פֿון אונדזערע טעג.
פֿון אַ שלל ידיעות ביז אַ בשותּפֿותדיקן הויפּט-באַגריף
אינפֿאָרמאַציעס און פּראָגראַמען זײַנען נישט גענוג. מע מוז אײַנפֿירן פֿרישע באַגריפֿן וועלכע סדרן אויס די אַלע דערשײַנונגען און גיבן זיי אַ ווערט פֿאַרן יחיד. ווען די אָפּנעמערס פֿון אַזוי פֿיל אינפֿאָרמאַציעס אין אייגן לאַנד און אויך פֿון אויסלאַנד וועלן באַגרײַפֿן די ברייטע דימענסיע אין וועלכער זיי טרעטן אַרײַן, וועלן די באַגריפֿן אַשכּנז, איר געשיכטע און ווערטן, פֿאַרוואַנדלט ווערן אין אַ ממשותדיקן יש וואָס יעדער איינער, וווּ נאָר ער געפֿינט זיך, קאָן פֿאַרקערפּערן אין דער טאָג־טעגלעכקייט. ס׳דאַרף פֿאָרקומען אַן אידענטיטעט-מעטאַמאָרפֿאָזע; אַנדערש וועט דער רעזולטאַט בלײַבן גאַנץ כאַאָטיש, אַפֿילו קאַרנאַוואַליש.
למשל, ס׳איז שיין וואָס דער ייִוואָ און אפֿשר אַ געוויסער אוניווערסיטעט לייגן פֿאָר דעם סטודענט און דעם אַלגעמיינעם ציבור פּרטימדיקע פּראָגראַמען וועגן דער אַשכּנזישער ציוויליזאַציע. פּרעכטיק! נאָר וואָס? די אָ פּראָגראַמען באַנוגעגען זיך דערמיט און ציִען נישט צו צו דער עיקר־פֿראַגע, וואָס טוט מען הײַנט מיט אָט דער ציוויליזאַציע? וואָס איז די אַחריות פֿונעם יחיד, פֿון דער משפּחה? ווי אַזוי גיט מען איבער דעם ייִדישן לשון צוזאַמען מיט אַ ברייט-פֿאַרנעמיקן געדאַנק וואָס ענטפֿערט אויף אַ סך פֿראַגעס, גיט אַ געפֿיל פֿון אָנגעהעריקייט און אינספּירירט צו נײַע, שעפֿערישע מעשׂים.
נאָך אַ ביישפּיל. דער אַרבעטער-רינג אין ניו-יאָרק, מיט אַלע זײַנע פֿיליעס אין פֿאַרשידענע שטעט, פֿירט דורך ערנסטע פּראָגראַמען זיך צו לערנען מאַמע-לשון, פֿײַערן יום-טובֿים און אויך, לויט זייער וועלט-אָנשויונג, אַנטוויקלט אַ געזעלשאַפֿטלעכן אַקטיוויזם וואָס שפּיגלט אָפּ די ווערטן און בירגערלעכע התחייבֿות כּלפּי דעם לאַנד וווּ ייִדן געפֿינען זיך. די דאָזיקע שטעלונג ווערט ליידער נישט דערגאַנצט מיט אַן ערנסטן אַקטיוויזם לטובֿת דער אייגענער ייִדיש-אַשכּנזישער אידענטיטעט. דעריבער איז זײַן השפּעה אויפֿן אַלגעמיינעם אַמעריקאַנער ייִדנטום זייער אַ באַשיידענער. אויך דער פֿאָרווערטס, וואָס שפּילט אַ צענטראַלע שליחות אין צונויפֿברענגען ענגלישע און ייִדישע לייענערס פֿון אומעטום, טוט עס אָן דעם ציל צו אַקטיווירן די רײַכע קוואַלן פֿון דער אַשכּנזישער אידענטיטעט. עס באַקומט זיך, ווי אַ האַלבע אַרבעט און מען מוז טראַכטן וואָס דאַרף דרינגענדיק געטאָן ווערן כּדי איר השפּעה זאָל וואַקסן און ווערן מער רעלעוואַנט.
אַ לעצטער בײַשפּיל. וואָס קאָן זײַן שלעכט, אויב דער YBC אין אַמהערסט וועט זיך פֿון צײַט צו צײַט דערלויבן איבערזעצן אויף ענגליש אויסגעקליבענע ווערק פֿון הײַנטיקע ייִדישע פּּאָעטן און שרײַבער פֿוֿן פֿאַרשידענע לענדער? פֿאַראַן אַ חשש צוליב די האָנאָראַרן וואָס מ׳וועט די מחברים דאַרפן צאָלן? כ’מיין אַז דער YBC איז שוין גובֿר געווען אויף מער ערנסטע, פֿינאַניעלע פֿאַרמעסטן. ס׳וועט אויך זײַן יושרדיק כּלפּי די מחברים וואָס זייערע ווערק ן זענען נישט זוכה צו קיין סטימול אָדער וועלכע-עס-איז סטיפּענדיע.
אויסווירקונג אויפֿן אַמעריקאַנער ייִדישיזם
אין מאָמענט ווען ייִדיש-אינסטיטוציעס אין אַמעריקע וועלן עפֿענען אַ פֿענצטער צו דאָס וואָס געשעט אויפֿן געביט פֿון ייִדיש אין ישׂראל און אין אַנדערע לענדער, וועט עס בהדרגהדיק פֿאַרבעסערן דעם מצבֿ און באַרײַכערן זייער אייגענע טעטיקייט. ס׳רעדט זיך נישט וועגן פֿאַרקלענערן איין פֿאָקוס אויפֿן חשבון פֿון צווייטן, נאָר גיכער וועגן שאַפֿן אַ נײַעם פֿאָקוס וואָס וועט נערן דעם נײַגער פֿון די אַמעריקאַנער ייִדישיסטן. דאָס וועט עפֿענען אַ ריזיקן פּראָצעס פֿון קעגנזייטיקייט. אַנדערש באַקומט זיך, אַז די הײַנטיקע ייִדיש-טעטיקייט באַקומט אַן עליטיסטישן פּראָפֿיל, און ווען מ׳ווענדט זיך שוין יאָ צו ברייטערע קרייזן פֿון דער באַפֿעלקערונג איז עס על-פּי-רובֿ מיטן פּנים צו דער פֿאַרגאַנגענהייט. הײַנט רעדט מען אָפֿט אין אַלגעמיינע, כּוללדיקע באַגריפֿן, נאָר ס׳איז נישט פֿאַראַן אַ קלאָרער אַדרעסאַנט, דאָס הייסט די אַשכּנזישע-אַמעריקאַנער ייִדן און וואָס דערוואַרט מען פֿון זיי.
די וואָרצלען פֿון אָט דער פּראָבלעמאַטיק ליגן אין דער טראַדיציאָנעלער אידעאָלאָגיע פֿון ייִדישיזם. היסטאָריש האָט זיך די אָ אידעאָלאָגיע אַנטוויקלט צוזאַמען מיטן באַגריף פֿון וועלטלעכקייט. די פֿירנדיקע כּוחות פֿון ייִדישיזם — בכלל, נישט נאָר אין אַמעריקע — האָבן זיך דערווײַטערט פֿון דער אָרטאָדאָקסיע און אויסקריסטאַליזירט אַן אידעאָלאָגיע וואָס שפּיגלט אָפּ ס׳ייִדישע לעבן זינט דער השׂכּלה ביזן סעקולערן ייִדישיזם וואָס הערשט הײַנט. און דאָס איז זײַן שוואַכקייט. דער כּוח פֿון דער אַשכּנזישער וויזיע שטעקט אין דעם, וואָס עס ברענגט צוזאַמען רעליגיע און וועלטלעכקייט, און שטיצט זיך נישט נאָר אויף מאָדערנאַ. דאָ ליגט דער הויפּט-מכשול וואָס באַשווערט די ייִדישיסטן זיך באַוועגן אויף די גאָר ברייטע שליאַכן פֿון אַשכּנז. אמת איז, אַז עס הערשט נישט הײַנט צווישן די ייִדישיסטן די אַקטיווע אַנטי-רעליגיעזקייט ווי אַ מאָל. אָבער דאָס מיינט נאָך נישט אַז ער האָט דערגרייכט די רײַפֿקייט צו אַקצעפּטירן אַלע טיילן פֿון ייִדישן קיום ווי זייער אייגענע קולטור־ירושה. אַ ייִד קאָן דערקלערן אַז ער איז אַ סעקולערער און דערצו אויך אונטערשטרײַכן די וואָגיקייט פֿון רעליגיע אין דער ייִדישער געשיכטע און אין זײַן הײַנטיקן באַוווּסטזיין.
דער ייִדישיזם אין אַמעריקע פֿאַרמאָגט שטאַרק אײַנגעפֿונדעוועטע אינסטיטוציעס. דאָך פֿעלט אים אַ ברייטער געוועב מיט פֿעדערלעך וואָס זאָל אים פֿאַרבינדן מיט ברייטע ייִדישע קהילות, סײַ אין אַמעריקע און סײַ איבער דער וועלט. ווען דער ייִוואָ איז אין ווילנע געשאַפֿן געוואָרן אין 1925 האָט ער פֿאַרמאָגט די העכסטע אינטעלעקטועלע כּוחות פֿון ייִדישיזם און גלײַכצײַטיק איז ער געווען געקניפּט און פֿאַרבונדן מיט הונדערטער קהילות איבער אייראָפּע. כּדי עפּעס ענלעכס זאָל איצט אויפֿקומען, מוז דער ניו-יאָרקער ייִוואָ אָנהייבן באַטראַכטן דעם מצבֿ אַנדערש, און צו דעם וואָס ווערט שוין געטאָן אויף די געביטן פֿון פֿאָרשונג, לימוד, השׂכּלה און קונסט, אַנטוויקלען אויך אַ סענסיטיווקייט צו אַלע געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע- און קולטור-דערשײַנונגען וואָס קומען פֿאָר אויפֿן געביט פֿון ייִדיש אין ישׂראל און איבעראַל.
לאָמיר האָפֿן אַז אַ נײַע דינאַמיק וועט זיך אין דער נאָענטער צוקונפֿט אַנטוויקלען און פֿון אַלע מעגלעכע ריכטונגען וועלן מיר זײַן עדות צו אַ גרויסן צונויפֿגאָס פֿון שטרעמונגען, און אַ מער אָנזעעוודיקער שעפֿערישקייט פֿון דער ייִדיש-קולטור אין אַ וועלט-מאָסשטאַב.
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The cancellation of Macklemore: A Yom Kippur reflection
In the Jewish calendar, this week is dedicated to reflection, introspection, and review of one’s thoughts and actions. The shofar has been sounded on Rosh Hashanah; Yom Kippur is on its way. Whether in traditional, theistic forms or less traditional, psychological ones, the Jewish tradition invites us to look inward.
It is in that spirit that I am reflecting on the latest tempest in the American Jewish teapot: the decision of billionaire Robert Kraft to ban the rapper Macklemore from performing at his stadium because of a statement he made onstage in support of Palestine — a decision echoed by other politically conservative stadium owners, which in turn caused superstar Ed Sheeran to boot Macklemore from his latest tour.
To be sure, this is hardly the most important chapter of the Israel/Palestine story. Just this week, bombs are still falling on Gaza, B’Tzelem released a must-read new report on Israel’s eliminationist policies in the West Bank, and an actual neo-Nazi is likely to win a seat in the Florida house of representatives. If anything, Macklemore’s cancellation will probably have a net-positive ‘Streisand Effect’ on his well-past-its-prime career.
But this relatively small controversy is nonetheless a fascinating prism on how we see differently, hear differently, and talk past one another on moral, political and ultimately spiritual matters of importance. And that has much to do with the themes of the Days of Awe.
My focus is not on who was right. Ultimately, I think Macklemore’s comments were lacking in depth and sophistication, but clearly not “hate speech,” which is how Kraft — the self-appointed macher of the widely-mocked ‘Blue Square’ anti-antisemitism campaign — described it. And I will explain why I believe that to be the case.
But I also don’t believe Kraft’s actions to be in bad faith. It is possible that he is simply using his wealth and power to ban political speech that he doesn’t agree with. And in practice, that is what he has done. But reviewing his comments, and those of friends of mine on social media, I am inclined to take Kraft and my friends at their word: that they experience Macklemore’s words as hateful. And because I disagree with that, I’m interested in why.
The rapper’s entire statement took two minutes. I encourage you to watch it now, since the tone and context are important, and since it’s faster to watch than to read:
A full transcript is here.
Two other bits of context, not present in the vieven if no such threat was present in that moment, video are relevant: First, images from the Gaza war were projected on a screen behind him, and second, back in 2014, Macklemore once wore a costume that looked, to many of us, like an antisemitic caricature, though he issued a persuasive (to me) and detailed apology, saying that this was not intentional.
In response, Kraft issued a (longer) statement saying that his venue, Gillette Stadium,
has a longstanding commitment to providing a welcoming environment for all guests and ensuring that events held at our venue do not provide a platform for hate speech. Based on Macklemore’s recent actions, material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community, we determined that his participation in the September 25th and 26th concerts at Gillette Stadium would cross that line.
Kraft added that his decision “is not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians or denying anyone the right to advocate on their behalf… but only sharing selective information and ignoring the actions of Hamas is not honest and only advances more divisiveness and hate… I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with Macklemore and discuss the facts, because ultimately our goal is the same — peace for all people, an end to suffering, and an end to all hate.”
I admit, my first response was amazement that any reasonable person could find what Macklemore said to be antisemitic. He spoke only about Israel’s actions, not its existence. He didn’t attack Zionism. He specifically distinguished between Israel and Jewish people. What more could he do?
Sure, the statement had its shortcomings. It didn’t mention Oct. 7 or condemn Hamas. It didn’t forcefully condemn antisemitism, or emphasize that strong criticism of Israel should not be taken out on Jews. The guy is a rapper, not a politician — even when he says nice things (e.g. the 2012 song “Same Love”), he’s often been clunky about it.
But hate speech?
Kraft didn’t really elaborate into what, exactly, ‘crossed the line’ for him. The best I can find in his statement is “only sharing selective information and ignoring the actions of Hamas is not honest and only advances more divisiveness and hate.” That seems preposterous to me. Maybe Macklemore’s statement was incomplete, but that doesn’t make it hate speech.
Others, in my own social media feed, have been more articulate. Echoing the statements of several prominent rabbis, some said that Macklemore’s uses of ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ are themselves so inaccurate, extreme and vitriolic as to themselves be antisemitic. Others referred to the 2014 incident. Some even argued that saying ‘Free Palestine’ is equivalent to saying ‘Destroy Israel.’
To me, the most trenchant criticisms focused on context. Imagine, one person said, what it would be like to be a Jewish person in the stands, suddenly confronted with political speech that has been used to incite violence against Jews; even if no such threat was present in that moment, it’s easy to imagine being scared by it. One friend of mine pointed out that this wasn’t even Macklemore’s show; it was an opening act for Ed Sheeran, who is relentlessly apolitical. The comments would’ve been a surprise, even a shock.
These comments point to the real issue here, which is American Jewish pain and fear. And there are many sides to this experience.
On the one hand, I get it. I have personally experienced this sense of unsafety and exclusion in queer spaces where I have been confronted with much farther-left statements than Macklemore’s. I’ve heard calls for Zionists (whatever that word means) to be banned from my queer community, even expelled from queer spaces. I’ve heard (and written about) the most incendiary possible rhetoric directed at Israel, full of self-righteousness, certitude and rage. And I’ve seen a lack of accountability for the stochastic terrorism that language represents, including from the mayor of New York City.
On the other hand, I also know that the censure is one-sided. At the recent ‘Jewish American Summit,’ a speaker made wildly bigoted, anti-Muslim comments and was applauded by the crowd; no condemnation followed, even from the ADL, which cosponsored the event. Pro-genocide minister Itamar Ben Gvir shared an AI video of Palestinians being marched, concentration-camp-style, into an Israeli jail, where they emerge starved an emaciated; mission accomplished, Ben Gvir crowed. Crickets from the Jewish Establishment.
Mayor Mamdani was criticized for not marching in the Israel Day Parade, and then Bezalel Smotrich, who has unambiguously called for genocide against the Palestinian people, was welcomed by it. A relatively anodyne pro-Palestinian statement by a rapper is grounds for national cancellation, but calls for mass expulsion (or murder) by people without actual power are part of the ‘big tent.’
Some in the community have been clear on this: They are going to support the Jewish state because that is what good Jews do. So, yes, there’s a double-standard, they might reply, because one person is attacking us and the other is not.
Admittedly, there is ample Jewish textual support for this position. But there are plenty of proof-texts I can bring for the opposing point of view: that we must judge people fairly, that all humans are created in the image of the Divine, that being biased toward our own group is a shortcoming, not a virtue. And that when injustices are committed, even by those who are in our community, it is our duty to oppose them.
The Torah doesn’t say “justice, justice shall you pursue — except when it comes to Jews versus Palestinians.”
Most importantly, just because words can make us feel scared, angry, attacked, or unsafe does not mean that they constitute hate speech. This is what Kraft and others like him seem unwilling to see: that we can feel attacked without actually being attacked. That words can be painful but not hateful.
Admittedly, the ‘wokeness’ of the early 2020s has played a role in this confusion. At the peak of that period, we were told that impact mattered more than intent — that even if a comment were made innocently, if it caused someone to feel unsafe, it was deserving of censure. And then, in 2023, many Jews picked up the same thread. Sure, “From the River to the Sea” could be interpreted in a benign way (e.g. as wanting freedom for all people in the area) but if I hear it as a call for annihilating Israel and/or the Jews, then the phrase is hate speech.
But this principle was always misguided. People can say difficult, disagreeable, and wrong things without those things being actual hate speech. People may perceive threats without there being actual threats.
This is not unique to Israel/Palestine, or to politics. Fear and anger can block the better angels of our nature. I struggle with this every day; if there is one theme that recurs every Yom Kippur, it is working with anger and reactivity in my own life. Might that not apply to our public as well as our private lives? Is what seems like ‘righteous indignation’ sometimes just… indignation?
In fact, maybe some of the reason I feel unsafe is that I know that Israel has behaved in appalling and immoral ways, and I feel implicated by it. I grew up loving Israel, and it has been painful to watch its decline into vulgar, jingoistic and often racist ethno-nationalism. But that pain might not be a bad thing. On the contrary, it merits some reflection on the Day of Atonement.
As Yom Kippur insists, we can do better than reacting, half-unconsciously, to our emotional perceptions. As Viktor Frankl famously said,
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.
Teshuvah, the Jewish practice of ‘repentance’ and return, is designed to enlarge that space, to grow our capacity for freedom. We can do better, teshuvah insists.
I believe Robert Kraft, and many of my own friends, sincerely feel threatened by statements like Macklemore’s. I have felt similarly, at times, myself. But without more evidence (and one idiotic act in 2014 is not that), we owe it to one another and to the hope of a civil society to pause in that space between stimulus and response, and reflect on what is really being said.
What I see is a celebrity championing the cause of an oppressed population. He is misguided in various ways, but he is coming from a place of genuine concern, not bigotry. Would not the better response have been for Kraft to invite him into a conversation first, rather than campaign to have him banned across the country? Had Kraft done better here, might Macklemore also have done better in the future, even if the two continue to disagree?
This incident will likely not be remembered much in the future. It is less important than a single life lost in Gaza or Israel. But it is a window into how our human capacities and failings perpetuate cycles of conflict and miscommunication. On Yom Kippur this year, I’ll be reflecting on how I am part of those cycles myself, and how I can do better. I invite you to join me.
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