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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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Is Lionel Messi a Zionist? The Argentine soccer star’s long history with Jewish and Israeli life, explained
(JTA) — Argentine soccer icon Lionel Messi, widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, has built one of football’s most decorated careers.
Throughout his illustrious career, Messi has cultivated a measured public image, rarely commenting on politics or becoming involved in major public controversies. But the 39-year-old has occasionally made headlines for expressing support for Jewish causes and Israeli companies — and at times for being pulled into the tense geopolitical landscape of the Middle East by no doing of his own, including when a grandmother originally from Argentina credited him for saving her life when her Israeli kibbutz was attacked on Oct. 7, 2023.
Messi’s past has roared into public view during this year’s World Cup, in which Argentina plays Switzerland in the quarterfinals on Saturday. Some critics of Israel have surfaced his past activities and affiliations to make the case that opposing Argentina is the anti-Zionist choice. Many Israelis, meanwhile, favor the team.
Ahead of the game, here’s a look back at 10 moments from Messi’s career — presented chronologically — where he and his fame intersected with Jewish and Israeli culture through public appearances, peace initiatives, controversies and more.
1. In July 2013, Messi sent a message to the Argentine Maccabiah team, a greeting before the national delegation departed for the “Jewish Olympics” in Israel. It wasn’t the first time he demonstrated support for his country’s Jewish community — in 2011, he participated in a campaign for justice and memory of the victims of the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing that killed 85 people in Buenos Aires.
2. One month later, he visited the Western Wall on a “peace tour” with Barcelona F.C., the famed Spanish team with which Messi spent the majority of his career. The club hosted skills clinics for Israeli and Palestinian children and met Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
FC Barcelona player Lionel Messi controls a ball passed by Israeli President Shimon Peres during a training session on Aug. 4, 2013 in Tel Aviv. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
3. In September 2014, Messi supported a “match for peace” in Rome organized by Pope Francis to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but he did not play due to an injury. Fellow Argentine great Diego Maradona and Israeli player Yossi Benayoun also participated, alongside stars from Russia, Cameroon, Italy, France and Brazil.
4. In 2016, Messi was slammed as “Jewish” and a “Zionist” by Egyptian officials after donating his soccer cleats to a charity in Egypt. Then-Egyptian Football Federation spokesman Azmi Mogahed phoned in to the show to criticize Messi: “I know he’s Jewish, he donated to Israel and visited the Wailing Wall and whatever. … We don’t need his shoes and Egypt’s poor don’t need help from someone with Jewish or Zionist citizenship.”
5. In June 2018, Argentina’s national team canceled a friendly match with Israel’s national team following pressure from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. A boycott campaign sponsored by BDS Argentina was launched using the motto “Argentina don’t go,” or #ArgentinaNoVayas. The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires tweeted that the match was canceled due to “the threats against Messi that logically generated the solidarity of his teammates.”
Lionel Messi, then with FC Barcelona, puts a paper with wishes in a crack in the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in Jerusalem during a team trip to Israel and the West Bank, Aug. 4, 2013. (Oliver Weiken/AFP via Getty Images)
6. Two months later, FIFA suspended the head of the Palestinian soccer body for threats against Messi. Jibril Rajoub, who had lobbied for action by FIFA against Israel, was suspended for a year after he urged supporters to burn photos and player jerseys if Messi or the Argentinian national team had shown up for the friendly match that was canceled.
7. In 2019, Argentina’s national soccer team announced it would play a friendly match against Uruguay in Tel Aviv that November, following the cancellation a year prior. The match was again targeted by the BDS movement, with protestors demonstrating outside a training camp in Barcelona and calling on Messi not to participate. Despite the opposition, the game went on as planned, with Messi scoring a goal in front of a sold out crowd of 29,000 fans — including Israeli President and soccer fan Reuven Rivlin — at Bloomfield Stadium. (Messi would return to Israel twice with Paris Saint-Germain in 2022, beating Maccabi Haifa in two Champions League matches.)
8. In 2020, Messi signed a three-year contract to become a brand ambassador for the Israeli company OrCam, which makes devices to help the visually impaired. It wasn’t his first time promoting an Israeli company: in December 2017, the Tel Aviv-based Sirin Labs hired him as its global ambassador.
90-year-old Ester Cunio says in a new Fuente Latino documentary that she bonded with a Hamas terrorist over the soccer star Lionel Messi on Oct. 7. (Screenshot)
9. On Oct. 7, 90-year-old Kibbutz Nir Oz resident Esther Cunio name-dropped Messi to a Hamas terrorist who had come to kidnap her, likely saving her life. During the attack, Cunio asked the assailant if he liked soccer before telling him, “I’m from where Messi is from.” Cunio then made an appeal to Messi to help rescue her grandson.
10. Last month, after Messi scored a hat trick in a 3-0 Argentina victory over Algeria in the World Cup, an Algerian broadcaster blamed the “Jewish lobby” for a controversial non-call on a potential penalty that could have penalized Messi. “Messi is protected by the Jewish lobby,” analyst Mustafa Mazzouzi said. “This lobby controls the world, they run it however they want as if they were the mafia. [FIFA President] Infantino doesn’t want us to do well.” He added, “We have political stances regarding Western Sahara and the Palestinian issue, and therefore they don’t want us to do well.” Elsewhere, a Palestinian TikTok content creator with over 350,000 followers suggested that Argentina deserved to lose the World Cup because of Messi’s numerous associations with Israel.
Messi wears No. 10 — typically reserved for the best player on a soccer club — but since there are 11 players on the pitch, we’ll add a bonus.
11. The World Zionist Organization used a play on words involving Messi in a 2020 Hebrew educational video, explaining that the Hebrew word “mesibah” means “party,” or “fiesta” in Spanish. In Spanish, it sounds like “Messi va,” or “Messi goes.” In other words, “if Messi goes, it’s a party.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Is Lionel Messi a Zionist? The Argentine soccer star’s long history with Jewish and Israeli life, explained appeared first on The Forward.
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I read George Eliot’s Zionist epic — the Jewish bits are the worst part
If I’m being honest, I did not enroll in a course on famed English novelist George Eliot’s final book, Daniel Deronda, out of any particular interest in the book. The last Victorian novel I read was Wuthering Heights, and that was for English class in high school. I’ve never attempted Middlemarch.
I just missed the classroom, the ability to dig into and discuss texts with a group. I was hungry to read something longer and harder than I might without some structure. The Daniel Deronda class, taught by comparative literature and Judaic studies scholar Danielle Drori at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, was simply the most reading-heavy course on offer in the month of June.
But Daniel Deronda, it turns out, introduced the idea of Zionism — or a sort of early version of it — to England, and to Europe. I had no idea that Eliot was so early to the idea of Zionism that she beat Theodor Herzl, the man hailed as the Father of Zionism, to the idea by two decades. Some of Israel’s early leaders loved the book so much they kept copies of it with them at all times. On the flip side, Palestinian scholar Edward Said was so frustrated by the novel’s depictions of a Jewish homeland as a noble aspiration that he wrote a lengthy aside on it in his own book, The Question of Palestine.
Daniel Deronda follows the story of the titular character, a young man raised as the ward of a member of the English gentry, who discovers his real parents were Jews. (I’ll apologize here for spoilers, but the book is 150 years old so I hope you’ll forgive me.) Except the novel is actually mostly about someone else altogether: a deeply flawed, self-centered and very compelling young English woman named Gwendolen Harleth who is grappling with the clash of her own desires against the boundaries and expectations of society, womanhood and marriage.
For the first half, I was confused about how this novel could possibly have anything Jewish to say. Gwendolen was fascinating, but Deronda gets far fewer pages and less emotional depth; his main character trait is being the Good Guy. Deronda is so famously flat and unconvincing that famed literary critic F.R. Leavis argued he should be excised from the novel and it should be republished as Gwendolen Harleth, freed from “the insufferably boring stretches” — those are the Jewish parts — that “loom so large.”
And then there are the other main Jewish characters. A beautiful damsel in distress named Mirah is very sweet and dainty but has no other personality to speak of — a manic pixie dream girl before her time. And the spiritually zealous Mordecai is so obsessed with the idea that Jews must return to Israel that he literally speaks of nothing else.
Most of the argument for Zionism, and Judaism more generally, is delivered via Mordecai’s didactic monologues in which he makes unconvincing grand statements like “Israel is the heart of mankind.” At the end, Daniel and Mirah wed and sail off to Jerusalem to save Judaism, and perhaps all of Europe. (How, exactly, one man who only recently discovered he was Jewish will affect such great change upon arriving in the Holy Land is so left so mystical and unclear that Henry James joked that for all anyone knew, Deronda and Mirah were simply having tea parties once they got to Israel.)
I’m not saying I agree about cutting out all the Jewish characters, as Leavis proposed. But I do think that they’re boring, unconvincing and didactic — as did my entire class. This is the case for Zionism that inspired Eliezer Ben Yehuda to resuscitate the Hebrew language? This is the novel Golda Meir kept on her bedside table?
Jews today are still writing about how her book helped inspire and affirm their own Zionism and Jewish identity. It’s true that some of her descriptions of Jewish history, and the yearning for a national identity, are moving. And Eliot painted an impressively prescient vision of the debate over Israel’s founding that would unfold over the next century.
Yet Eliot’s portrayal of Jews feels more than flat: It’s antisemitic. Of course, Eliot is a product of her era, so it’s unsurprising that some of her Jewish side characters are depicted as lowly and ugly, even as some of the other more minor Jews are human and well-rounded. But the real antisemitism is Eliot’s fetishization of Jews.
Her Jewish characters aren’t allowed to be real people; they’re figureheads. Eliot did her research — she was well-versed in biblical studies thanks to her evangelical education, and in Jewish mysticism thanks to her translation work. The book is peppered with references to Jewish sages like Ibn Ezra. But the Jewish characters speak far more of grand spiritual and political aims than they do of daily life, like prayer or keeping kosher. The Jewish characters serve as an instrument to inspire Gwendolen to live a more meaningful life. And Gwendolen stands in for England more generally — the message being, seemingly, that Jews will inspire Christian England to find its own grand national identity.
Reading Daniel Deronda, I was struck by its similarities not with founding Zionists of yore, but with today’s Christian Zionism. Eliot’s interest in Jews seems to stem from her worries about the vacuousness of English life, and her hope that Jews might somehow save Western society — Christian society, that is. She describes Judaism’s ancient roots as inherently noble, almost mystically powerful. But ultimately, it’s the same vibe as the preachers today who wrap themselves in Torahs or blow the shofar; they want to co-opt some mystery of Judaism to elevate their own beliefs and messages.
We’ve come a long way in social acceptance since Eliot’s time, yet this misconception is surprisingly sticky. Reading Daniel Deronda — or at least its Jewish parts — felt not dissimilar from watching the hit Christian TV show The Chosen, which mines Judaism for a sense of mysterious authenticity, or Amazon’s House of David, which gives Judaism an esoteric Game of Thrones-adjacent magnificence.
That exalted depiction might seem flattering on the surface, but Judaism isn’t mysterious or ancient; it’s very much alive. It’s the everyday practice and identity of millions of people who live in the U.S., and in Israel and in Europe. And as is so clear in Daniel Deronda, the more magical you make us, the less human we get to be.
The post I read George Eliot’s Zionist epic — the Jewish bits are the worst part appeared first on The Forward.
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What I learned from 180 pounds of Yiddish books, one ‘interesting and complicated’ Jewish man, and Jorge Luis Borges
I’ve never met Harris Saltzberg, but one day last summer, I went to his house to abduct 180 pounds of his Yiddish books. He lived in a sturdy brown-brick co-op in Chelsea. In the lobby, there was Roz Chastian aroma of long-simmered onions and mothballs, with a subtle undertone of feet.
I took the elevator to the eleventh floor. Once I’d infiltrated Harris’ apartment, I began to get a sense of his personality. From the posters on the kitchen walls, I deduced that Harris liked Van Gogh and Martha Graham. From his box of cassette tapes, I got a taste of his cultured, klezmer-forward musical palate: Puccini Famous Arias sat next to Miriam Kressyn’s Yiddish Folk Songs. Pavarotti and Marilyn Horne kept company with Sidor Belarsky and Jennie Goldstein.
Before I go further, I should clarify: I did not burglarize Harris’ house. I was there as a “zamlerin,” a volunteer collector and schlepper of Yiddish books for the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. I joined the international legion, some 160-zamlers-strong, at the end of a summer internship at the Center two years ago. Since then, every few months or so, I get a call or an email from an older Jew. Some Yiddish books have fallen into their hands, or maybe the books have been in the family for a long time. We tend to meet at their houses. (Once, though, I met a guy at his synagogue and sat through a full service for the first time in Hashem-knows-how-long.)
Wherever we meet, the pass-off process always feels ceremonial, more like the adoption of a child than the transfer of objects. We schmooze a bisl in Yiddish, a bisl in English while we load up the books, stacking them inside cardboard boxes like a game of 3D tetris. Sometimes, like a Yiddish-speaking Neanderthal, I’ll sound out the title of a book, and my host will light up like an electric menorah, turn the book over, rub its spine up and down, and tell me all about it. This? Oh, that’s Di Yeshiva. See, you can even see Chaim Grade’s autograph on the inside flap. That? Oh, that’s the Yiddish Kalevala. Naturally.
But zamling for Harris was different from zamling for other people, because for one thing, Harris was dead. His niece told me that Harris’ close friend, Andy, would be there to help me pack up the books. Andy was waiting in the lobby when I got there. He was a tall and weathered man of Irish extraction, about 75. His hooded blue eyes and the smoke on his deep, gravelly voice gave me the impression that he’d seen a lot in his time, like a hardbitten reporter in a noir novel. Except, Andy clarified, he was actually in publishing.
He didn’t say much after that.
Harris’ Yiddish bookshelf was right by the front door, so while I did a preliminary inventory, ooing and cooing in a way that would have annoyed me if another person were doing it, Andy shuffled through Harris’ living room and kitchen, shifting his chairs, stacking his dishware, emptying his cabinets. Even with Harris gone for months, the apartment hadn’t lost the ascetic spareness that only monks and longtime bachelors seem capable of cultivating. Dust had already settled over the few wooden tables and shelves. The rugs looked frayed, and a thin white light seeped into the room from in between the vertical blinds. There was a bottle of Cinzano Rosso sitting on the kitchen counter, forever half-finished. It seemed like a place Bernard Malamud might have cooked up for a story about an erudite bachelor character.
But what sort of erudite bachelor, exactly? Before I’d come over, I’d found a few clues on the internet. A Facebook obituary from Camp Kinderland described Harris as “an interesting and complicated person,” adding that he was “often very funny, often thoughtful and generous and warm.” He sounded prickly-sweet, not unlike a jackfruit. I’d also found a LinkedIn profile for one Harris Saltzberg who described his job as “Observer of aging,” employed at “Life.” That sounded about right.
But it was the books that brought Harris into focus. On the shelf, I found at least three Yiddish textbooks. “Harris was insecure about his Yiddish,” Andy told me later, when we were lugging boxes to the lobby. But from the looks of it, he shouldn’t have been. He had the big names on his shelf — Y.L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem (who, by the way, is so abundant at the Yiddish Book Center that you can sometimes get a copy of his collected works for free). But Harris was hardcore. He was a proper Yiddish junkie; he’d bought books that would have been challenging to get through even in English, like Klassenkamfn in Altertum, Class Struggles in Antiquity, by a man named Kalman Marmor. He’d collected landsmanshaft periodicals from tiny Besarabbian shtetls, school almanacs from 1929, an instructional book on Yiddish stenography, song books, and one baffling, proto-woke rhyming tale about a white thug with notably sharp elbows (“sharfn elboygn”) who torments a Black boy with sad eyes (“troyerike oygen”).
Sometimes, I would find signs of a bygone reader— maybe Harris, maybe somebody else —scrawled on a book’s inside cover, or tucked away on a scrap of paper. “To Rivke with Love — May you two get well acquainted!” wrote Manya on Jan. 30, 1959. I found grocery lists, and one detailed pencil sketch of a dog. I found a scrap of paper where Harris had scrawled in cursive ciphers, “Tammy Baker,” “Uniforms,” and something that might have been “human want,” or maybe “human meat.”
I had never met Harris and never would. But even as I stuffed the boxes to busting, I felt reluctant to throw anything out. When somebody is alive, odd bobs like scratch paper are replaceable junk. But when somebody is gone, everything becomes evidence that they lived. Maybe that is why Harris saved all those periodicals from towns that could no longer be found on any map, advertisements for pamphlets of essays and satire by long-dead Jews in the Bronx, stenography manuals, children’s books. So long as even one witness to a fading world remained, that world wouldn’t truly be gone.
There is a story by Jorge Luis Borges called “The Witness,” or “El Testigo” that I have thought about several times since visiting Harris’ apartment. It is about the last pagan in England. As church bells ring, he lies dying in a stable in the shadow of a new stone church. This man is the last living person to remember worshipping the wooden idol of the pagan god Woden. “Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites,” Borges writes. “The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.”
In the moment, though, I was not thinking much about books beyond how many of them I could cram into one box. As Andy and I hauled the book boxes down to an extremely patient Uber driver — six boxes total, around 30 pounds each — he told me how Harris had loved opera. He talked about his own two brothers, and about his upcoming trip to the motherland, Donegal, which he taught me to pronounce “Don-ee-GAL.” In the car to the UPS store, we kvetched about how hungry we were. At the curb, he helped me unload the boxes. Then he bent down and hugged me goodbye. I was sorry to see him go. I wondered if we would ever see each other again.
It’s been over a year since that day. Harris’ apartment probably belongs to someone else now, and as for the books, they are living a literally chilled-out retirement in the temperature-controlled vaults of the Yiddish Book Center. I wonder whose fingers will touch those pages next. And whose will be the last. After all, Borges muses, there is a last for everything. There was a day when the last eyes to see Christ closed forever. When the last man to have loved Helen of Troy died. When the last person to remember the Battle of Junín was buried. “Something, or an infinite number of things, dies in each death,” he writes. “What will die with me when I die?”
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