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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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Jewish farmers planted an ancient seed. Now the fruit is making its American culinary debut.
On a recent Thursday in his experimental kosher kitchen, Noah Clickstein was brining, roasting and assembling local seasonal fruits and vegetables on plates for his diners – not uncommon tasks for the head chef at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern and house of learning in Somerville, Massachusetts.
But one of the vegetables made what Clickstein was doing unprecedented — at least in recent centuries.
Lehrhaus is the first North American restaurant to serve the qishut (key-shoot) — an oblong, light-green fuzzy melon that resembles a cucumber and hasn’t been on Jewish dinner plates since biblical times. Clickstein has found a variety of ways to pair the melon with local produce to highlight its versatility and flavor profile.
“We love telling stories, and we love introducing new things to people,” Clickstein told The Forward. “We hope people can learn something while being here, even if it’s just eating the food.”
Thousands of years ago, Jews stewarded qishuim, a fruit that thrived in the arid regions of Egypt, Italy and Israel. The fruit’s numerous mentions across the Torah and Talmud point to how popular the produce was for Jews at the time. But as exile and assimilation transformed Jewish life in the diaspora, the rooted connection between Jews and the qishuim withered, leaving other communities in those lands to cultivate the plant.
That changed in 2021 when the Jewish Seed Project — a research initiative of the Jewish Farmer Network — sought to connect Jews in the diaspora to the ancient plant.
Cross-pollinating contemporary descendants of the qishuim in gardens across the United States and Canada, a handful of growers have inched the plant closer to its biblical description, restoring a once-lost relationship with the fruit.
Planting a seed
The Jewish Seed Project began as a collaboration. Prolific seed keeper K Greene, who runs a seed company in New York’s Hudson Valley, had long been unraveling the story of seeds, making a career of researching and preserving plants from Black and indigenous communities. But he had yet to explore seeds that connected him to his own Jewish heritage.
He approached the Jewish Farmer Network with the idea of cultivating a Jewish cucumber, or qishut.
“As a perennially displaced and shunted-from-here-to-there people, the stories of seeds that are connected to our story” have been lost, said Shani Mink, the executive director of Jewish Farmer Network, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the agrarian roots of Jewish tradition.
In modern Hebrew, the word qishuim is used to describe a Middle Eastern variety of zucchini known in Arabic as a kusa squash. However, this variety only arrived in the region a few hundred years ago, ruling it out as the qishuim mentioned in 2,000- and 3,000-year-old biblical texts.
To piece together the puzzle of qishuim, Mink called on long-time peer, Noah Weinberg, a Jewish farmer and Torah scholar who founded Gann Farm in Newton, Massachusetts.
Weinberg turned to the National Library in Jerusalem and an ethnobotanist to uncover the vegetable’s biblical lineage and mysterious disappearance from Jewish life.
They found the first clues in the Torah, in Numbers 11:5-6: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now, our bodies are dried out, for there is nothing at all; we have nothing but manna to look at.”
“The children of Israel are in the desert, and they’re having a common experience that many of us have, which is ‘I miss the food from home,’” Weinberg told the Forward. “For them it was a bunch of alliums — leeks, onions and garlic — and it was the qishuim and watermelons. So clearly this was a staple crop that people loved and was important to them in Egypt. “
From throughout the Torah and Talmud, Weinberg collected instructions for growing, harvesting and eating the fruit.
Talmudic discourse detailed an oblong vegetable with a fuzzy exterior that grew on a vine. Pale green in color, it is best picked on the early side, before it swells and develops a bitter taste. When eaten raw, qishuim taste quite similar to a cucumber: crisp and aqueous, though with an added tinge of melon sweetness.
Weinberg even uncovered mentions of the Shomer Qisu’im (watchman of the qishuim), a person whose sole job it was to ensure the plant’s proper ripening.
Harvesting an ancient cucumber
With a textual grounding established, the Jewish Seed Project began collaborating with farmers across North America to grow “diaspora gardens,” plots where research growers would cross-pollinate contemporary qishuim seed descendants from Italy, Egypt, Israel, West Bank and Gaza in the hopes of reaching back in time through their DNA to reconnect with the crop their ancestors once sowed.
The first few years of the project yielded fruits that were quite bitter, lacked the vegetable’s signature fuzzy exterior, or failed to meet other core traits.
In 2023, after a few years of selection and cultivation, the organization released a diasporic seed mix for individuals not associated with the project to steward themselves.
Now, in its sixth year, the Jewish Seed Project is honing in on taste, with many of its growers beginning to share the fruit both with and beyond their local Jewish community.
At a Rosh Chodesh Shabbaton in Alliance, Ohio, research grower Celeste Tannenbaum offered a brief lesson about the qishut’s history and brought 18 varieties of the ancient cucumber for participants to taste and help her select which plants to reseed next year.
“The more mature ones tasted like melon and were kind of sweet,” Batya Reed, 29 told the Forward, “But I actually liked the cucumber-flavored ones more.” Reed said she tasted one so bitter that Tannenbaum announced she would not plant it again.
Edda Mendes, 29 said the plant gave them “more context for my place in the world.”
“It’s hard not to feel alienated from so much of the world, in this country, in this time period,” they said. “So I’ve been increasingly digging into local history and ecology.”
In Colorado, where the plant is grown at a farm attached to the Boulder JCC, qishuim has become one of the many produce items shared with the city’s food pantries and nutrition programs.
“We donate it, and we tell our sites to think of it as a cucumber,” Becca Gan Levy, the Boulder JCC’s Farm and Sustainability Director, told the Forward.
‘The perfect vegetable’
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the fruit has made its way into a commercial kitchen.
Clickstein has had the chance to experiment with the unusual vegetable each year since Lehrhaus opened in 2023.
The first year, Clickstein simply pickled the fruit. The following year, because the fruit had a dense texture similar to a squash, he sautéed it and added it to a quinoa salad layered with thinly sliced radish and roasted peppers.
This year he’s created the biggest selection to date, in what has been dubbed “Qishut-fest.” The spread features a qishut shirazi salad with tomato and red onion, blistered shishito peppers and qishuim plated on a bed of shipka pepper labneh, a savory tart filled with qishut, sautéed Swiss chard, and goat cheese spread, and of course, the time-honored vinegar-brined pickle.
“It was cool to get to see how this plant has changed,” Clickstein said.
Already, the salad and blistered pepper medley have sold out, with plans to continue serving the pickle and tart versions of the vegetable well into late October, or for as long as supplies last.
Just as its stewards have come to understand the plant more — its optimal maturity and growing conditions to ensure a pleasant flavor — so too has Clickstein come to acquaint himself and his customers with the vegetable’s versatile flavor profile.
“I really like this year’s crop and the direction it is going: meaning less bitter and more knowledge from the farmers on how to pick it correctly,” Clickstein told the Forward. He plans to lean further into cooked preparations of the crop and explore more ways to roast and sauté the vegetable to further unlock the qishut’s melon-like flavor notes.
“This was the perfect vegetable,” Clickstein said. “We serve it raw, pickled, roasted, and baked. Having tasted it these last few years, we really got to see the versatility and flavor of it, knowing it can be delicious raw as well as baked.”
Qishuim traditionally grow from April to November. As its season reaches its end, The Jewish Seed Project is already looking ahead to 2027. Using the data from the 11 participating research growers, the project will select which seeds will be grown again.
“Eventually we hope that through cross-pollination and selection for certain traits we will stabilize a variety of revived qishuim,” Mink said, “cobbled together from the genetic material stewarded by our neighbors and others over millennia.”
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In the Southwest, public libraries are becoming Yiddish hubs
Think of Yiddish today and you might picture Hasidic Brooklyn, Haredi neighborhoods in Israel or scholars working to preserve a language too often falsely written off as “dead” or “dying.”
But Texas? Ikh ken es nisht gleybn! (I can’t believe it!)
Sebastian Shulman, director of partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center, has spent the past year traveling around the U.S. and working with communities interested in Yiddish. Through the program, public libraries establish reading groups focused on English translations of Yiddish literature. Libraries in small towns across the Southwest, the Deep South and rural Michigan and Illinois have participated.
In Dallas, one library organized a daylong Yiddish festival that drew more than 500 people.
In Austin, Shulman gave a talk about Yiddish history during the city’s huge annual event, South by Southwest. The room for his lecture filled up, in spite of having to compete with the popular festival.
“There were young people and old people and Jewish people and non-Jewish people,” Shulman said. “It was such a deep hunger and a deep interest.”
At the end of the talk, a young Indigenous woman approached him and described similarities she saw between Yiddish and the culture and storytelling tradition of her own Cherokee Native American Nation. He was moved by the encounter, which served as a testament to the bridges forged by Yiddish literature and history.
“Yiddish kind of blows apart the concept of the unexpected place,” Shulman said, calling it “a language of everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.”
In a Santa Fe, New Mexico public library, Yiddish literature and history is preserved by those who didn’t necessarily inherit the language from their grandparents. Many of them aren’t even Jewish and encountered it for the first time in libraries, archives, classrooms, festivals and books.
Yiddish culture in New Mexico got even more of a boost last year when Jordan Wax, a Santa Fe-based composer and performer of Yiddish and New Mexican regional music, released an album of original secular Yiddish children’s songs.
Letters from history
David Katz, a longtime Texas resident who has spent years collecting and translating Yiddish archival material from the state, said he’s found a life-long mission of preserving not only the language and idioms – but also the human stories of Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated to towns across Texas.
Katz regularly receives requests from families around Texas, asking him to translate Yiddish letters and documents that are between 70 and 150 years old. He’s also assisted in translating materials donated to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Some contain ordinary family news. Others document poverty, illness, migration and the desperate search by Jews in Europe for a way out, as antisemitism intensified in the 1930s.
One letter from Germany from the early 1930s particularly stayed with him. The family wrote to relatives who’d already resettled in the U.S. about trying to obtain a visa to settle elsewhere, debating whether Canada, the United States or somewhere in South America might be the best destination.
Katz found it distressing that the family who wrote the letter seemed, ironically, to be unaware of the dangers facing them under the Nazis.“They’re debating about which climate might be better,” Katz recalled. “From their standpoint, they don’t know how bad things are about to get; it’s tragic to read that history so intimately.”
For Katz, translating these letters creates a connection to their senders and recipients.
“You read them, and even though the letters are maybe 100 years old, 80 years old, they very much make an impression on you that this is very understandable or approachable, because it’s Jewish life, not that different from today,” he said.
But that preservation work is only part of the story.
Susan Bronson, president of the Yiddish Book Center, said the center has increasingly worked with public libraries and Jewish communities around the country, and was inspired by the cross-generational and interfaith excitement to engage with Yiddish.
Many people attending these programs don’t speak the language. But translated literature, music, theater and lectures can provide an entry point.
Bronson has seen this among younger people through the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program, which introduces high school students to Jewish literature, including Yiddish works. Some students have said the experience helped them feel closer to a grandparent or better understand their family’s background.
The Yiddish Book Center’s oral history work has found Yiddish speakers in places people don’t typically associate with the language, including towns across the South and among Jewish farmers in New Jersey.
“It’s unexpected only because our perception of Yiddish became, in some ways, so narrow, but reality is more complicated and this narrow image obscures the breadth of Jewish life in America,” Bronson said.
Back in Texas, Katz is excited about the future possibility for Yiddish in the state, in the form of thousands of letters that remain untranslated and the old Texas Yiddish newspapers sitting on microfilm at university libraries.
“There are stories still waiting to be read,” he said, building on the state’s rich history.
Jewish immigrants spoke mame-loshen in homes and synagogues in Galveston, Dallas and San Antonio. They published newspapers in it, built community institutions around it and gathered to hear visiting writers and Jewish leaders speak the language.
In 1921, the Russian-born Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger traveled to Dallas and delivered a lecture in Yiddish to hundreds of people. A few years earlier, David Grün — better known as David Ben-Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel — visited San Antonio, Texas twice where he addressed a packed room in Yiddish. He was meeting members of the Texas Labor Zionist chapter of Poale Zion (the Socialist Zionist movement), advocating for a sovereign Jewish state and raising money for Jewish immigrants to settle in Eretz Yisroel (The Land of Israel),
A lesser known historic Jewish community, deep in the “Bible Belt”, Waco, Texas had its first Jewish immigrants arrive in the mid-19th century. The first wave was Sepahardic, the second — Ashenazi. They built an Orthodox synagogue and later established an active chapter of the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, holding meetings in Yiddish.
A century after Ben-Gurion addressed Texan Jews in Yiddish, the language is still moving through the state — and far beyond it— not simply as a relic, but as a phenomenon people can continue to discover.
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These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide.
A quarter of college students who view Israel favorably also believe its government is committing genocide.
That’s according to a Brandeis study published earlier this month, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 303 colleges in fall 2025 about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concluded views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more nuanced than often portrayed.
So how do students reconcile those views?
Researchers can’t say for sure, but one possibility is that students are distinguishing between supporting Israel’s existence and the actions of its current government.
The fact that many of the same students who say Israel is committing genocide also affirm its right to exist is not a contradiction, according to the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. In an Instagram post referring to the Brandeis study, the group lauded the nuance of the report.
“Collapsing both views into a single all-encompassing camp of ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ erases the gray area where most students actually live,” the post said.
Another explanation, the study says, is that the “genocide” label has less to do with actual views on Israel than political affiliation. Respondents who identified as liberal were much more likely to agree that Israel was committing genocide than those who identified as moderate or conservative. In fact, political ideology was a better predictor of whether someone said Israel was committing genocide than their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the study found.
Overall, condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza is the more popular position on campus. Close to three-quarters of all students agreed with the statement that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
Students may also have different interpretations of the term “genocide,” said Graham Wright, first author on the study and an associate research scientist at Brandeis.
“It’s possible that some of them think, ‘I do generally support the Israeli government, but I don’t like some of the things they’re doing,’” Wright said. “The word genocide is just a stand-in for, ‘I don’t think they’re doing a good thing.’”
The very word genocide has also been a subject of debate.
Some Jewish groups, such as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have argued genocide is an accurate term to describe what they see as the deliberate destruction of Palestinian society.
Meanwhile, many pro-Israel advocates loathe the word genocide, legally defined as the intentional destruction of any national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza following Oct. 7, 2023. They argue that Israel is seeking the destruction of Hamas, a terror group that states its intent to destroy the Jewish state.
Here are two other key takeaways from the study.
1. Most students differentiate between governments and their citizens — but not all
The study divided students into four groups based on their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The largest group, 49% of students, supported civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Those students viewed both the Israeli and Palestinian people positively, while they expressed disdain toward the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
“This suggests that most people are able to make that distinction and have fairly nuanced views about a lot of these conflicts,” Wright said.
The vast majority of students, 85% of those surveyed, had unfavorable views of the Israeli government. But those views did not always extend to hostility toward the Israeli people. Students were split about half and half between favorable and unfavorable views of Israeli citizens.
Out of the 20% of students who held strong anti-Israel views — meaning they were likely to view both the Israeli government and its people unfavorably — half also viewed Hamas favorably.
“Certainly, I think that’s concerning,” Wright said. “You have a relatively small number of students who have very extreme views on Jews in Israel, and that seems to be contributing to a lot of the hostility that Jewish students are experiencing.”
Those students may make headlines, Wright said, but most undergraduates aren’t thinking about Israel day-to-day. In fact, 56% of surveyed students said they had low knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the topic was of low to moderate personal importance to them.
2. Jewish students have diverse views on the conflict, but they were also more likely to view Israel favorably than their non-Jewish peers
The survey included responses from 743 Jewish students. About 29% of those respondents viewed Israel favorably, the largest share of any ethno-religious identity surveyed.
That higher support for Israel among Jewish students held across political divides. Both politically liberal and politically conservative Jews were less likely to hold anti-Israel views than their non-Jewish peers, the study found.
The largest proportion of Jewish students, 56%, were “civilian sympathizers” — the group that views both Israeli and Palestinian civilians favorably while disliking both governments.
A minority of Jewish students, 9%, held unfavorable views of both the Israeli government and its people and favorable views of Palestinians.
Overall, the results show subtleties in how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the media rarely captures, Wright said. “You only detect the nuance if you ask about it specifically.”
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