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U.N. exhibit remembers when the world turned its back on stateless Jewish refugees
(New York Jewish Week) — In 2017, Deborah Veach went back to Germany, looking for the site of the displaced persons camp where she and her parents had been housed after World War II. They were in suspension, between the lives her parents led in Belarus before they were shattered by the Nazis, and the unknown fate awaiting them as refugees without a country.
To her dismay, and despite the fact that Foehrenwald was one of the largest Jewish DP centers in the American-controlled zone of Germany, she found barely a trace. A complex that once included a yeshiva, a police force, a fire brigade, a youth home, a theater, a post office and a hospital was remembered by almost no one except a local woman who ran a museum in a former bath house.
“It was sort of an accident of history that we were there in that particular camp in Germany, of all places, with no ties, no extended family, no place to call home,” said Veach, who was born at Foehrenwald in 1949 and lives in New Jersey. Now, “they renamed it. They changed the names of all the streets. There is nothing recognizable about the fact that it had been a DP camp.”
Veach is part of a now-aging cohort of children born or raised in the DP camps, the last with a first-hand connection to the experience of some 250,000 Jewish survivors who passed through them at the end of the war. To make sure memories of the camps survive them, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the United Nations Department of Global Communications have staged a short-term exhibit, “After the End of the World: Displaced Persons and Displaced Persons Camps.”
On display at U.N. headquarters in New York City Jan. 10 through Feb. 23, it is intended to illuminate “how the impact of the Holocaust continued to be felt after the Second World War ended and the courage and resilience of those that survived in their efforts to rebuild their lives despite having lost everything,” according to a press release.
Residents of a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, Austria. Undated, post-Second World War. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
Among the artifacts on display are dolls created by Jewish children and copies of some of the 70-odd newspapers published by residents, as well as photographs of weddings, theatrical performances, sporting events and classroom lessons.
The exhibit is “about the displaced persons themselves, about their lives and their hopes and their dreams, their ambitions, their initiatives,” said Debórah Dwork, who directs the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center-CUNY, who served as the scholar adviser for the exhibition.
“There’s no point where the residents of these DP camps were just sitting around waiting for other people to do things for them,” she told the New York Jewish Week. “They took initiative and developed a whole range of cultural and educational programs.”
As early as 1943, as the war displaced millions of people, dozens of nations came to Washington and signed onto the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority. (Despite its name, it preceded the founding of the U.N.) After the war, the British and U.S. military were in charge of supplying food, protection and medical care in hundreds of camps throughout Germany and Austria, and UNRRA administered the camps on a day-to-day basis.
Early on, Jewish Holocaust survivors — some who suffered in concentration camps, others who had escaped into the Soviet Union — were put in DP camps alongside their former tormentors, until the U.S. agreed to place them in separate compounds. Unable or unwilling to return to the countries where they had lost relatives, property and any semblance of a normal life, they began a waiting game, as few countries, including the United States, were willing to take them in, and Palestine was being blockaded by the British.
Abiding antisemitism was not the only reason they remained stateless. “Jews were [accused of being] subversives, communists, rebels, troublemakers, and the world war quickly gave way to cold war, and with it the notion that Hitler had been defeated and what we have to worry about is the communists,” David Nasaw, author of “The Last Million,” a history of the displaced persons, told the New York Jewish week in 2020.
In 1948 and 1950, Congress grudgingly passed legislation that allowed 50,000 Jewish survivors and their children to come to the United States. The rest were eventually able to go to Israel, after its independence in 1948.
The U.N. exhibit focuses less on this macro history — which includes what became another refugee crisis for the Palestinians displaced by Israel’s War for Independence — than on life in the DP camps.
“The exhibition illustrates how the displaced persons did not shrink from the task of rebuilding both their own lives and Jewish communal life,” said Jonathan Brent, chief executive officer at YIVO, in a statement.
Among those rebuilding their lives were Max Gitter and his parents, Polish Jews who had the perverse good luck of being exiled to Siberia during the war. The family made its way to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, where Gitter was born in 1943. After the war ended, his parents returned to Poland, but repelled by antisemitism sought refuge in the American zone in Germany. They spent time in the Ainring DP camp, a former Luftwaffe base on the Austrian border, and at a small camp called Lechfeld, about 25 miles west of Munich.
Dolls made by stateless Jewish children residing in a DP camp near Florence, Italy, known as “Kibbutz HaOved.” The dolls are attired in local costumes based on the districts of the Tuscan city of Sienna. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
“I was there until we came to the United States when I was six and a half, so I have some very distinct memories and some hazy memories,” said Gitter, emeritus director and vice chair of the YIVO board. One story he hasn’t forgotten is how his father and a friend were walking through the camp when they came upon a long line of people. “They were from the Soviet Union, so they knew that when there’s a line that it might be of interest.” It turned out to be a line for the lottery that would allow them to get into the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948.
The family came to the United States in 1950, to “pretty shabby lodgings” in the Bronx, before his father bought a candy store and moved to Queens. Max went on to attend Harvard College and Yale Law School, and became a corporate litigator.
Gitter’s brother was born in one of the camps, and the exhibit includes a poster depicting the population increase between 1946 and 1947 at the Jewish DP center Bad Reichenhall. The birthrate in the camps has often been described as evidence of the optimism and defiance of the survivors, but Dwork said the truth is somewhat more complicated.
“There was a very high birth rate among the Jews in DP camps. This is the age group of reproductive age, at 20 to 40,” she said. “However, this image of fecundity hides what was rumored to be a significant abortion rate, too. And women had experienced years of starvation. Menstruation had only recently recommenced. So many women, in fact, miscarried or had trouble conceiving to begin with.”
A chart by artist O. Lec depicts the natural population increase of the Jewish Center Bad Reichenhall, Germany, 1946-1947. There was a very high birth rate among the Jews in DP camps. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
“There is no silver lining here,” she added. “People live life on many levels. On the one hand, DPs look to the future and look with hope; at the same time, they carry tremendous burdens of pain and suffering and trauma and trepidations about the future.”
Veach, a member of the YIVO board, hopes visitors to the exhibit understand that such trauma is hardly a thing of the past.
“I think the real lesson is that history keeps repeating itself,” said Veach, growing emotional. “Basically we have DPs on our border with Mexico, you have DPs from Ukraine. I don’t think people realize the repercussions for these people who are trying to find a place to live. These are good people who are just placed where they are by history.”
Gitter, who like Veach will speak at an event Jan. 24 at the U.N. marking the exhibit, also hopes “After the End of the World” prods the consciences of visitors.
“A lot of the countries, a lot of places, including the United States, would not accept Jews after the war,” he said. “The issue of memory, the issue of statelessness, the issue of finally there was some hope for the Jews in their immigration to Israel and the United States — that part of the story also needs to be told.”
“After the End of the World: Displaced Persons and Displaced Persons Camps” is on view from Jan. 10-Feb. 23, 2023, at the United Nations Headquarters, 405 E 42nd St, New York, Monday-Friday, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Entrance to the United Nations Visitor Centre in New York is free, but there are requirements for all visitors. See the United Nations Visitor Centre entry guidelines.
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American Jews can’t agree about anything — except Iran
Jews around the world have set aside their deep differences and come together in support of the protests in Iran.
“This never happens,” Rachel Sumekh, an Iranian-American nonprofit consultant in Los Angeles, told me. “You never had a coalition this diverse, because people get so stuck in politics.”
It’s easy to see why the protests — which began in response to a plunge in the value of Iran’s currency, and have ballooned into a widespread outpouring of rage at the Iranian regime — have drawn together all parts of the Jewish world. For the left, it’s a human rights struggle; for the right, it’s a chance for the regional balance to reset in favor of Israel.
But it’s difficult to say with certainty that unity between left and right, Zionist and anti-Zionist, will survive the tough decisions the protests will demand.
‘Progressives should care about human rights’
Since the 1979 revolution that brought the religious Islamic mullahs into power, Iranians have seen their rights and freedoms stripped away.
Millions took to the streets in the 2009 Green Movement to dispute a rigged election. Regime forces killed at least 550 protesters during the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” marches for women’s rights.
The brutality of the new crackdown has been on full display during the new protests; thousands are feared dead, with accounts of many killed by direct shots to the head. Amid that environment of fear and violence, protesters “deserve the support of progressives,” wrote Peter Beinart, an outspoken anti-Zionist, in his Substack newsletter, “because progressives should care about human rights.”
Many on the left are leery of supporting a cause that may lead to U.S. military intervention — or one they see as covertly backing Israel’s interests.
That may explain the silence of many so-called human rights activists who have stayed mum. But Jews are bucking that trend. “I have anti-Zionist Jewish friends who are posting in support of Iran, even though they know the base doesn’t like it,” said Sumekh.
Beinart, who has written that he “no longer believes in a Jewish state,” reminded his hundreds of thousands of followers of something that, well, should be pretty obvious.
“It’s as wrong to give countries a pass when they brutally violate human rights because they’re anti-American,” he said in a posted video, “as it is to give them a pass when they brutally violate human rights, because they’re pro-American.”
Not ‘death to Israel,’ but ‘long live Iran’
For many Jews, any revolt against Iran’s theocratic government is personal. The majority of the 60,000-odd Jews who lived in Iran at the time of the 1979 revolution fled, settling mostly in Israel and the United States. In both countries, those exiles have become integral to the Jewish community.
Some have family still in Iran, where about 15,000 Jews remain. In sharing their culture, stories and concerns, they have made Iranian freedom a tangible and pressing Jewish cause.
Plus, an overthrow of the regime could be a reason for relief in the Jewish state. The Iranian opposition, said policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour on the Call Me Back podcast, “is trying to replace, ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ with ‘Long Live Iran.”
The human rights issue matters to the right as well. But Israel’s staunchest supporters are also hoping for the downfall of a regime that has sworn to achieve Israel’s destruction.
Iran has funded the terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas and pursued a missile and nuclear weapons program that threatened and attacked Israel — even at the cost of crippling Iran’s own economy. The regime also funneled funds to Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian government in Syria, which served as a conduit to supply weapons to Hezbollah.
Republican Jews are saying a successful regime overthrow would expiate the original sin made by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, whom they blame for not supporting the Shah of Iran during the 1979 revolution, which swept the mullahs into power.
President Donald Trump, to them, is the anti-Carter. Trump has publicly supported the protesters, and threatened to use American power to protect them. Trump has not ordered any military intervention, but on Tuesday he posted a message on his Truth Social platform, “KEEP PROTESTING! TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!”
As Elie Cohanim, Trump’s former deputy envoy to combat antisemitism, said on Fox News, Trump is the first president to threaten the Iranian regime that if they kill protesters, “we’re going to hit you hard and we’ll hit you where it hurts.”
‘We actually have the same enemy’
If the U.S. does intervene militarily, the Jewish response is likely to be less unified.
We have been bitterly divided over Iran policy in the past. Slightly more than 60% of American Jews supported the 2015 agreement then-President Barack Obama spearheaded to limit Iran’s nuclear development, but the opposition was organized and vocal, leading to deep fissures in the community.
Those cracks may reappear if America intervenes militarily.
“When the United States gives itself the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another country,” Beinart cautioned, “that emboldens other powers, China and Russia in particular, to do exactly the same thing.”
Yet many liberal American Jews backed Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. Those strikes made “Israel, the Jewish people and the world safer, ”Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told the Forward at the time.
What will decide the extent to which Jews agree on the wisdom of intervention? Probably the duration of any operation; a long-term involvement in Iran would likely be much more controversial than any quick, one-time strike.
A worse outcome, said Sumekh, would be for Trump to attempt to negotiate with the regime, ultimately leaving it in place. The mullahs would likely use negotiations as a way to buy time and reassert control, making waste of the rare opportunity for real change.
It is too early to tell if the courageous Iranians facing bullets and batons will bring down their repressive regime. And should that happy day come to pass, we will surely find ways to argue over who should get credit, who should get blame, and how we can best help a free Iran repair its economy and find stability.
But for now, Jews know that overthrowing the regime is the most important goal. Iranians deserve liberation, and that freedom will be beneficial for the entire Middle East, if not the world.
“Through what’s happening right now, people can finally understand and see the connection between the Iranian people and the Jewish people and the people of Israel,” Natalie Sanandaji, an Iranian-Israeli survivor of the Nova massacre, said in a video posted to X, “They can see that not only are we not enemies, but we actually have the same enemy, the Islamic regime of Iran.”
The post American Jews can’t agree about anything — except Iran appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish creators made a satirical cartoon. Then the Mississippi synagogue arson supsect shared it
Stephen Spencer Pittman, who confessed to setting fire to Beth Israel Congregation in Mississippi, shared a cartoon on Instagram mocking Jews on the day of the attack. What Pittman may not have realized: He was sharing a satirical cartoon made by Jewish creators.
The video clip Pittman posted shows a character named Princess Clara, who spots a Jewish caricature holding moneybags. She exclaims, “A Jew in our backyard! I can’t believe my Jew crow didn’t work!” The camera pans to a scarecrow with a sign that reads “Tips, please.” Princess Clara then pushes the figure into a swimming pool, adding, “You’re getting baptized right now.”
That clip came from the cartoon Drawn Together, an animated parody of reality TV shows and cartoon tropes, which aired on Comedy Central from 2004 to 2007. Its creators, Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein, were both raised in Jewish families in Bergen County, New Jersey. Jeser has described himself as coming from an ardently Zionist family.
Pittman reposted the cartoon from an Instagram account that had been sharing the same clip daily for upwards of 90 days and had shared other antisemitic content. The clip has also been used to justify attacks on Jews: In December 2024, someone posted the cartoon as the thumbnail and closing footage on a video of Hamas executing an alleged Israeli collaborator. The Forward also found the clip shared in antisemitic contexts on social media going back to 2023.
Had Pittman shared the next piece of dialogue in the episode, the satire would have been more evident.
“I can’t swim!” the character, wearing peyot, or sidelocks, and a kippah, yells out.
“Don’t worry, you’re a Christian now! Jesus will be your life preserver!” Princess Clara responds.
A Jesus character then says, “Look at that heeb pretending to drown. Ha, those Jews kill me.”
Deliberate offensiveness is arguably the whole point of Drawn Together which, in addition to caricaturing Jews, includes stock characters that stereotype the LGBTQ community, Black community and nearly every other protected class. They all share a house in the show, and the friction of their dynamics, as in Big Brother, is played for laughs. The original tagline for the show, a play on the one from MTV’s The Real World, was “Find out what happens when cartoon characters stop being polite … and start making out in hot tubs.”
While critics have at times accused the show of straying from satire into cruelty, its intent to be parody is clear.
“Most of the racism on the show is coming from people who are so obviously stupid about it; it really isn’t that threatening,” actor Jess Harnell, who voices the character Captain Hero, a toxically masculine riff on Superman, said in commentary accompanying the show’s DVD.
Jeser and Silverstein did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The show also found itself embroiled in controversy in 2010, when Comedy Central created an online game titled “I.S.R.A.E.L. Attacks!” The game was based on Drawn Together: The Movie, with a female robot character who attacks people. The film features Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane voicing the character “I.S.R.A.E.L.,” which stands for Intelligent Smart Robot Animation Eraser Lady, and a character named “Jew Producer” — inspired by Jeser and Silverstein.
The game drew backlash from Honest Reporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog, and the Anti-Defamation League, which cited “offensive antisemitic and anti-Israeli stereotypes.” Comedy Central took down the game.
But Jeser defended the movie as parody and said people should watch the whole film before casting judgment — the character “I.S.R.A.E.L.,” he said, actually ends up saving the day.
“It’s less a comment on Israel and the world than a comment on the silliness and stupidness of the characters on the show and their unwarranted fears of the unknown,” Jeser told Jewish Standard at the time, later adding, “The last thing we wanted to do was make fun of everyone but not ourselves and our own people. Laughter’s the best medicine, and we’re all very sick and need more of it.”
PJ Grisar contributed writing and reporting. Andy Carvin contributed reporting.
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Iran Warns of Retaliation if Trump Strikes, US Withdraws Some Personnel From Bases
Flames engulf cars following unrest sparked by dire economic conditions, in a place given as Isfahan, Iran, Jan. 9, 2026, in this screengrab from Iran’s state media broadcast footage. Photo: IRIB via WANA(West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
The United States is withdrawing some personnel from bases in the Middle East, a US official said on Wednesday, after a senior Iranian official said Tehran had warned neighbors it would hit American bases if Washington strikes.
With Iran‘s leadership trying to quell the worst domestic unrest the Islamic Republic has ever faced, Tehran is seeking to deter US President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to intervene on behalf of anti-government protesters.
A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States was pulling some personnel from key bases in the region as a precaution given heightened regional tensions.
Britain was also withdrawing some personnel from an air base in Qatar ahead of possible US strikes, British media reported. The British defense ministry had no immediate comment.
“All the signals are that a US attack is imminent, but that is also how this administration behaves to keep everyone on their toes. Unpredictability is part of the strategy,” a Western military official told Reuters later on Wednesday.
Two European officials said US military intervention could come in the next 24 hours. An Israeli official also said it appeared Trump had decided to intervene, though the scope and timing remained unclear.
Qatar said drawdowns from its Al Udeid air base, the biggest US base in the Middle East, were “being undertaken in response to the current regional tensions.”
Three diplomats said some personnel had been told to leave the base, though there were no immediate signs of large numbers of troops being bussed out to a soccer stadium and shopping mall as took place hours before an Iranian missile strike last year.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to intervene in support of protesters in Iran, where thousands of people have been reported killed in a crackdown on the unrest against clerical rule.
Iran and its Western foes have both described the unrest, which began two weeks ago as demonstrations against dire economic conditions and rapidly escalated in recent days, as the most violent since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that installed Iran‘s system of Shi’ite clerical rule.
An Iranian official has said more than 2,000 people have died. A rights group put the toll at more than 2,600. Other reports have said the number could be 12,000 if not higher.
Iran has “never faced this volume of destruction,” Armed Forces Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi said on Wednesday, blaming foreign enemies.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot described “the most violent repression in Iran‘s contemporary history.”
Iranian authorities have accused the US and Israel of fomenting the unrest, carried out by people it calls armed terrorists.
IRAN ASKS REGIONAL STATES TO PREVENT A US ATTACK
Trump has openly threatened to intervene in Iran for days, without giving specifics. In an interview with CBS News on Tuesday, he vowed “very strong action” if Iran executes protesters. He also urged Iranians to keep protesting and take over institutions, declaring “help is on the way.”
The senior Iranian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tehran had asked US allies in the region to prevent Washington from attacking Iran.
“Tehran has told regional countries, from Saudi Arabia and UAE to Turkey, that US bases in those countries will be attacked” if the US targets Iran, the official said.
Direct contacts between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff have been suspended, the official added.
The United States has forces across the region including the forward headquarters of its Central Command at Al Udeid in Qatar and the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
GOVERNMENT DOESN’T SEEM NEAR COLLAPSE, WESTERN OFFICIAL SAYS
The flow of information from inside Iran has been hampered by an internet blackout.
The US-based HRANA rights group said it had so far verified the deaths of 2,403 protesters and 147 government-affiliated individuals, dwarfing tolls from previous waves of protests crushed by the authorities in 2022 and 2009.
The government’s prestige was hammered by a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign last June – joined by the US – that followed setbacks for Iran‘s regional allies in Lebanon and Syria. European powers restored UN sanctions over Iran‘s nuclear program, compounding the economic crisis there.
The unrest on such a scale caught the authorities off guard at a vulnerable time, but it does not appear that the government faces imminent collapse, and its security apparatus still appears to be in control, one Western official said.
The authorities have sought to project images showing they retain public support. Iranian state TV broadcast footage of large funeral processions for people killed in the unrest in Tehran, Isfahan, Bushehr and other cities.
People waved flags and pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and held aloft signs with anti-riot slogans.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, an elected figure whose power is subordinate to that of Khamenei, told a cabinet meeting that as long as the government had popular support, “all the enemies’ efforts against the country will come to nothing.”
State media reported that the head of Iran‘s top security body, Ali Larijani, had spoken to the foreign minister of Qatar, while Iran‘s top diplomat Araqchi had spoken to his Emirati and Turkish counterparts. Araqchi told UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed that “calm has prevailed.”
HRANA reported 18,137 arrests so far.