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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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Lawn signs for Abdul, door knocking for Haley: Michigan Jews split in Senate Democratic primary
(JTA) — OAK PARK, Michigan – Karen Bick has spent the days leading up to Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary fielding calls from Jewish friends urging her to vote for U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
Despite the pressure, Bick, 69, said she plans to sit out the race altogether. As much as she is compelled by the campaign of Stevens’ progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, his accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza have kept her from voting for him. Stevens’ campaign, she said, hasn’t given her enough reason to vote for her instead.
“I am very pro-Israel. I’m not pro-Netanyahu, which is part of the whole thing. A lot of my friends who are Jewish have been calling me, trying to get Haley, but it’s like they’re looking at one issue,” said Bick, a Jewish resident of Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit. “I don’t think that Israel should take precedence over all the other issues just because somebody’s pro-Israel.”
Bick’s ambivalence reflects a divide among Michigan Jews in a primary where Israel has emerged as one of the sharpest contrasts between the candidates. Stevens has served in the House since 2019 as a reliable supporter of Israel, while El-Sayed, a former county health official, has made opposition to U.S. support for Israel and AIPAC’s spending in the race a hallmark of his campaign.
That doesn’t mean El-Sayed is without Jewish supporters.
Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a longtime Detroit resident who helped found the city’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, has been campaigning for El-Sayed since the beginning of the race, including organizing fundraisers, phone banking and canvassing. She also helped organize “Jews for Abdul,” a group of Jewish supporters working to elect him.
Weinberg Barefield, 76, said that El-Sayed’s use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza was an essential component of her support for him.
“We are trying to let people know that there are many Jewish people that support Abdul and support his objectives and support his voice,” Weinberg Barefield said. “Justice, equality, and freedom are part of the fabric of me being a Jew and the message that we put forth for ‘Jews for Abdul:’ that he is a candidate that represents our morality, our ethics, and frankly, I think these are the things that most people in this country want.”
Suzanne Levin, an 83-year-old Jewish Michigander, initially supported Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, whose withdrawal from the race left progressive Jews in the state facing a political dilemma.
For Levin, the choice quickly became clear. She got an El-Sayed lawn sign and “Jews for Abdul” t-shirt and threw her support behind his campaign.
In doing so, Levin has rejected accusations from Stevens and some Jewish Democratic leaders in the state that El-Sayed’s rhetoric and associations have crossed the line into antisemitism.
“They believe all this crap about El-Sayed, that he’s antisemitic, and I have listened to so many of his talks, and when they ask him ‘should there be an Israel,’ he says there should be a place where people could all be safe and and people should be okay,” Levin said.
Other Jewish Democrats have reached a starkly different conclusion about El-Sayed, who has said the Israeli government is as “evil” as Hamas and often accuses Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza while advocating that U.S. aid to Israel be diverted to domestic priorities.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Stevens, said that she had been “concerned” by El-Sayed’s response following the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
At the time, El-Sayed sparked outcry by putting out a statement that discussed Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker’s brother was killed. Soifer said she believed El-Sayed “equivocated and provided a justification for a situation, which there was no justification.”
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population, he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism,” Soifer said. “On that issue in particular, Haley has been a leader in Congress.” The state has close to 130,000 Jews.
Soifer said her group’s volunteers had put out close to 10,000 calls to Michigan voters urging them to back Stevens.
Zach Nessel, a 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and the secretary of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, shared many of Soifer’s concerns as he knocked on doors for Stevens in Oak Park Monday.
“I’m absolutely concerned about his rhetoric,” said Nessel, whose mother is Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. “I think he’s spending more of his time trying to ostracize pro-Israel Democrats than he is looking to fight Trump, and that’s what I see amongst a lot of his allies.”
Nessel said he had been especially concerned by El-Sayed’s campaign event at his alma mater in April alongside Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel streamer whose rhetoric has been called antisemitic by many Jewish groups and leaders.
“The fact that my former Dem Club is hosting an antisemite that has positive things to say about Hezbollah, a U.S. designated terrorist organization that has killed Americans, that’s horrifying,” Nessel said. “And the fact that you know Abdul is campaigning with someone like that is insane.”
Nessel said that he had visited over 500 homes across the Detroit area to champion Stevens. During his visits, he said voters rarely brought up Israel or AIPAC on their own.
But Nessel said he worried that a potential El-Sayed victory Tuesday could encourage other candidates to adopt similar tactics, with consequences for Jewish participation in the Democratic Party.
“Most people, they want to fight Trump and they want to make things more affordable,” Nessel said. “And if this sort of commotion is successful, then they’ll keep on doing it, and that’ll make it hard for members of the Jewish community to continue to participate in our party.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In a world of AI run amok, Yiddish folktales are making these theater wizards ‘cranky’
A unique theatrical performance inspired by Yiddish folk tales features dead Jews dancing at a cemetery, a prophet appearing in the form of a bunny rabbit and a stone-munching worm named Shamir. It all takes place within the confines of a 2’ X 4’ box known as a cranky and it’s coming to New York later this month as part of the International Puppet Fringe Festival.
For those unfamiliar with the decidedly low-tech medium, crankies are portable stages through which a panorama is scrolled by cranking a pair of wooden dowels. The characters and scenery on the scroll are usually accompanied by narration and music, in this case a live klezmer trio. In backlit crankies, shadow puppets can also be used for characters.
The cranky performance of Shterna and the Lost Voice was created by the Magid Ensemble, a far-flung interdisciplinary collective that includes a storyteller, a graphic artist and three former members of the Boston klezmer band Mamaliga. The members met when they were all living in Northampton, MA, which was described in one review of the ensemble as a “queer Yiddish diasporic hub.”
The decision to create a cranky grew out of the group’s frustration when they tried to keep performing a silent Yiddish film score they had composed. The score was played at a Toronto Jewish Film Festival screening in 2023. The cost for the rights to subsequent screenings of the silent film was prohibitively expensive, so the ensemble decided to create its own show. Accordion player Mattias Kaufmann said they really wanted to do a multimedia project that combined a concert, storytelling and visuals. Kaufmann had worked on some crankies years earlier and saw them as an exciting way to tell a story.
“I feel like they’re really powerful, especially the backlit crankies,” said Kaufmann, who composed the music for Shterna. “It’s not really full-fledged theater, but in many ways it is. It’s a cool in-between space of performance.”
Artist Kiah Raymond had done several crankies and violinist Rachel Leader had seen some.
“I just loved their portability,” Leader told me. “They’re quite small and we can travel with them.”
And travel they have. Shterna and the Lost Voice has been performed more than 50 times around the U.S. and Canada since April 2024. Many of the shows have been sold-out.
Into the cranky-verse
Painted moving panoramas date back many centuries but emerged as a popular form of entertainment in the 1800’s. They were constantly on tour in the U.S. and a number of European countries. The cranky is a smaller scale version of the panoramas and its revival in America is traced back to the mid-2010’s. Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater is widely credited with sparking the resurrection of the cranky.
Jenny Romaine, a Bread and Puppet alumnus who works with the Great Small Works theater collective in New York, praised the work of the Magid Ensemble.
“They’re taking the crafts of performance and visual theater and puppetry to new heights,” Romaine said. “I love their work.”
To consider how the cranky craze has spread in recent years, consider the Seattle-based cranky maker Sue Truman’s experience joining a Facebook group devoted to crankies in 2014. There were 30 people in the group at the time. It now has 4,500 members worldwide. Truman, who teaches people how to make crankies and runs the Crankie Factory website, estimates there are currently between 15 and 20 cranky festivals in the U.S. every year.
“It’s incredible how it has exploded,” she told me. “I get emails every week from people all over the world.”
As if to illustrate how quirky the cranky universe is, Truman is collaborating with a couple of Seattle’s old-timey musicians on a piece about a meteor storm in 1833 and its impact on quilters in the Pacific Northwest.
Or there’s Katherine Fahey, one half of the Baltimore cranky team known as The Lantern Sisters. which did a show about Baltimore’s horse-drawn street peddlers known as Arabbers.
Fahey ran into the Magid Ensemble at a cranky festival in New Jersey where each performer had ten minutes to strut their stuff. She was impressed with the excerpt of Shterna they presented.
“Their narrator was such a good storyteller,” Fahey told me in a phone interview after returning from a performance in Ohio. “And I liked how they kept the artwork simple. Just did paper cuts, all one color on the scroll. They told the story in this straightforward, beautiful way. I thought it was really lovely.”
A talent for cranking
Kiah Raymond, a Portland, Oregon-based tattoo artist and muralist, made the cranky for Shterna and the Lost Voice on a long roll of 24” wide butcher paper. It took them between four and six months to cut the characters and scenery into the paper and laminate the finished cuts with clear packing tape. Raymond pulled designs and patterns from a book about traditional Jewish paper cuts and used them as borders and backgrounds. Additional inspiration came from ketubas.
Raymond operates the cranky during the performance, which involves a lot more than just mindlessly cranking the two scrolls.
“You’re holding it taut but turning it at the same time,” Raymond explained. “You turn it faster or slower, depending on what’s happening in the story.”
There’s another quirk to cranking: At times you’ll be turning one hand considerably faster than the other, depending on where in the scroll the story is.
The lost voice in the Shterna story belongs to a man whose beautiful davening is cherished in his shtetl. After he loses the ability to daven, a woman named Shterna goes on a quest to retrieve it. Her sojourn takes her through the physical world, the underworld and the heavens.
A.C. Weaver, a scenic carpenter and Yiddish translator based in Northampton, came up with the story in collaboration with the ensemble’s members. Weaver narrates the show.
Weaver said their connection to traditional Jewish storytelling is thanks to their childhood rabbi, Steve Sager, at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, NC. Weaver said the late rabbi was an “incredible extemporaneous storyteller.”
The story line for the cranky emerged, Weaver said, during the COVID pandemic’s dark days when a lot of friends and neighbors were becoming sick or disabled.
“I felt motivated to make up a story having to do with disability and what it means to lose something around which a lot of your identity is based,” Weaver told me.
Storytellers and teachers
The word magid can mean storyteller, itinerant teacher or preacher. The role of the magid has been documented as far back as the 16th Century and there have been some major magids, including the Dubner Maggid of the late 18th Century and the Kelmer Maggid, who was a big macher in Musar, a spiritual practice focused on living a meaningful and ethical life.
The Magid Ensemble likes to define the word magid as “storyteller,” but the group also serves as a teacher and preacher to some degree.
Though not overtly political, Shterna does project values with a distinct world view: a woman as the hero and a nod to compassion for the disabled. The ensemble has also raised funds for a family from Gaza.
The production was created with start-up funding from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston and local cultural councils in Massachusetts. Leader said that altogether around $15,000 came in, including a $3,000 New England States Touring grant.
Analog in a digital world
Many in the cranky scene say one of the medium’s appeals is its analog nature at a time when so much of our entertainment is digital — and increasingly AI-generated.
More than one practitioner has likened cranky performances to “telling stories around a fire.” It’s an immersive experience, said Raffi Boden, a Brooklyn-based cellist in the ensemble.
“I think that there’s something really beautiful about seeing everything happening before your eyes’” he told me. “I think people are moved by witnessing something that comes together created in front of them in this beautiful, complete way.”
The immersion that audiences experience is likely why children as young as preschoolers have sat and watched the entire 50-minute show without interruption.
“I was a little worried going in because I was wondering, what if everybody starts screaming after 10 minutes because they’re bored?” Boden said.
Despite the embrace of the crankies’ intrinsic analog nature, more and more cranky festivals are providing live video projection if the performance is taking place in a big hall. It’s counterintuitive, concedes Truman, but on the other hand, “If you can’t see it, that’s not good. In the festivals where I’ve performed, nobody is complaining about them providing live video projection.”
Shterna and the Lost Voice will be performed during the International Puppet Fringe Festival August 13, 15 and 16 at Teatro LATEA on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that.
(JTA) — Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.
In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” in the words of The New York Times, with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge.
On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.
Since Bush’s loss in the district representing the St. Louis metropolitan region, AIPAC has become a bogeyman in the Democratic Party and Israel a major campaign issue. Other anti-Zionist members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in blue districts across the country throughout the 2026 primary season.
The changing winds might have given Bell incentive to shift to the left instead of leaving himself vulnerable to a challenger whose background and political stances are otherwise similar. But Bell has held firm in his support for Israel, enjoying the backing of mainstream Democrats and a continued financial infusion from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the tune of more than $1 million this cycle.
As a result, Tuesday’s rematch is one of the most striking tests of whether AIPAC still has traction in Democratic strongholds or whether Bush and other DSA candidates have subdued the once-powerful lobby.
“The war is a lot different today than it was two years ago,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist, told JTA, referring to the Israel-Gaza conflict that unfolded following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. “Sentiment inside the Democratic Party, even among the establishment, has changed.”
In the past few years, the AIPAC has faced growing hostilities from ultra-left-wing politicians, who have denounced Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“AIPAC is now a household name in Democratic politics,” Payne noted.
But heading into Tuesday’s primaries, it wasn’t clear that the anti-AIPAC activism had moved the needle for St. Louis voters. While the polymarket prediction platform has given Bell a 66% chance of winning, compared to Bush’s 34%, there’s a dearth of nonpartisan polling. Bush’s campaign commissioned one of the few publicly available survey results, an April HIT Strategies poll that declared the candidates “statistically tied,” with Bell in the lead at 44% and Bush at 40%.
On paper, the two candidates have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, Bell and Bush are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
After protests for police reforms surged across the area for about a year, Bell won a seat on the city council and worked on enacting such changes. In a 2018 race for St. Louis County prosecutor, he defeated Bob McCulloch, a 27-year incumbent who had come under national scrutiny for failing to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown. Bell is now serving his first term in Congress.
Bush, meanwhile, first became engaged in politics as a participant in the Ferguson protests. Though she lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, success in 2020 led her to serve Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for two terms. But in 2024, Bush fell short, losing in the primaries to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates agree on most of their political platforms, both of which prioritize issues like reproductive freedom, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as reducing the costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they diverge when it comes to the Middle East, with Bush’s campaign promising to “stand for justice in Palestine.”
Like other DSA candidates in New York, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, Bush’s campaign accuses Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza with the backing of “U.S. weapons and U.S. dollars.”
Following her loss to Bell in 2024, Bush threatened to tear down AIPAC’s “kingdom” after it spent nearly $9 million on her takedown, in one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history. Federal Election Commission records show that of that total, AIPAC invested about $3.4 million in support of Bell and about $5.2 million in opposition of Bush, through the lobby’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
“People are beginning to understand that — much like the crypto industry, AI, Big Oil, and Big Pharma — AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement.
“In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us,” Bush added.
Throughout her current rematch against Bell, Bush has gone after her opponent for his ties to AIPAC.
“Wesley Bell is a former Republican campaign manager who is bought and paid for by AIPAC,” Bush posted last month on X. Bush was referring to a 2006 period when Bell served as campaign manager for a conservative, which he has maintained was no more than a favor for a friend.
“We’re going back to DC, and we’ll do it with no corporate cash or AIPAC funded-trips,” Bush added, referencing Bell’s trip to Israel with the lobby group last year.
Yet compared to 2024, AIPAC has spent much less on the current race. Through its UDP super PAC, the lobby has invested in the neighborhood of $3 million in the rematch, with the vast majority spent opposing Bush, according to FEC data. Overall in this race, the candidates themselves have also raised fewer funds than they did two years ago, according to the FEC. Bell has secured $3.6 million and Bush $1.3 million, as opposed to $5.4 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in 2024.
Deryn Sousa, spokesperson for AIPAC, told JTA in a written statement that his group was proud to support Bell’s campaign.
“Bell is a principled fighter for the people of St. Louis, while Cori Bush spent her time in Congress missing votes and demonizing a key democratic ally,” Sousa added.
Bell did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
However, on the campaign trail, Bell said he was “proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, and support Israel, particularly in a time that has been very tumultuous,” in a March video posted by AIPAC.
“When we see what has happened in the last few years, I think it’s even more apropos to stand with our friends and one of our greatest allies,” he continued. “Oftentimes, what gets lost is yes, we support Israel, but Israel also supports us.”
And in Congress, Bell voted last month against an amendment that aimed to cut military aid to Israel. He has also previously co-sponsored a bill to increase defense partnerships with Israel, while also voting in favor of legislation that would have sanctioned the International Criminal Court for seeking to arrest U.S. allies, including Israeli officials.
David Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, which does not endorse candidates, said the recent Iran war transformed “a national conversation about the Middle East into something more common.”
“The sheer number of conversations on this topic compared to the last race look different,” Cohen said. “The confluence of conspiracy theorists from the left and the right have blown out of proportion since the war started.”
Within these national conversations, which he described as “catchy” talking points and “black and white” discussions about AIPAC and Israel, Cohen warned that certain campaigns are “playing that dangerous game of demonizing Jews.”
Cohen said he believes that Bush’s campaign decided to focus on Israel because “they thought it would get her traction,” as opposed to focusing on the “many issues that people in Missouri care about.” Payne echoed Cohen’s sentiments, stressing that he “wouldn’t consider the Israeli-Hamas conflict as the top issue” at the ballot box amid higher-priority concerns like the “insane” cost of living. He noted that Bush’s “central campaign issue is AIPAC money,” a message that “motivates her base” but might not sway the everyday voter.
Jewish leaders and activists in the state have followed the race closely. Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, president of the Coalition for Jewish Values – Missouri, told JTA in an email that his organization also doesn’t endorse candidates. But the difference between Bell and Bush, he said, was obvious to his regional chapter of a national Orthodox rabbinic group.
While Bell “supports Israel’s right to self-determination” and to exist as a Jewish nation, Bush has “established an adversarial relationship with Israel abroad, as well as with the overwhelming majority of her Missouri constituents,” according to Smason.
“At home in her district, Cori Bush was a ‘no-show’ for her Jewish constituents,” Smason stated. “She regularly refused requests for interviews from the local Jewish press, and was shockingly absent from the dedication ceremony of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, with no explanation.”
Cohen, whose JCRC branch serves 36 Jewish groups from “liberal to Conservative to Orthodox,” said that “almost none of them believe what Cori Bush believes about Israel.” Jews made up 4.1% of the population in the district as of 2024, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank.
On the other hand, Michael Berg, a volunteer for St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace, which is not a JCRC member, is among a minority of organized Jewish voices who oppose Bell due in large part to the candidate’s support for Israel. It was upsetting, Berg said, that Bell was “perfectly willing to take $15 million from the interests of a foreign government that’s committing a genocide.”
For Berg, the Israel-Gaza conflict is by no means a fringe concern. He praised Bush for her “unwavering advocacy” for a Gaza ceasefire and support for “multi-ethnic democracy,” as well as her refusal to accept corporate funds, her commitment to fighting climate change and her history of standing up for the interests of St. Louis’s people.
Bush has also earned the support of a second local Jewish group, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, who described her as “a champion for our St. Louis community and a brave leader in the fight for justice and peace for all people, regardless of where they call home.”
Out-of-state Jewish groups have also been vocal about their stances on this race, with the vast majority backing Bell, but some groups, like the IfNotNow movement, advocating for Bush. The Washington, D.C.-based IfNotNow, which calls for “a thriving future for all Israelis and Palestinians,” praised Bush for leading “the call for a ceasefire in Congress.”
In contrast, Jacob Spiegel, communications director of the Washington-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, recounted his organization’s grassroots action in favor of Bell. A network of volunteers, he explained in an email, is working to “elect the candidate we believe aligns with our Jewish values.”
Nonetheless, Berg maintained that even if Bell wins this race, the future “of the Democratic Party is only going in one direction,” which he said is the “direction of Democratic socialism.”
“The United States is increasingly becoming an anti-Zionist country,” Berg said. “The people understand they do not want the United States to continue to fund and support an ethno-national state in the Middle East that oppresses half of its people.”
Regardless of who is victorious, Payne predicted that the outcome would give “fodder” to the triumphant side. Payne, who noted his position as a non-Jewish “outsider,” said he believes that a fear of antisemitism will be motivating many Jewish voters as they head to the polls.
“To be frank, I think it’s a fear that it’s not ill-placed or unfounded,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that. appeared first on The Forward.
