Features
“Also Here” – a granddaughter tells her grandmother’s story of surviving the Holocaust
By JULIE KIRSH, Former Sun Media News Research Director
(Exclusive to jewishpostandnews.ca)
My youngest daughter, who experiences frequent backaches and headaches, feels that the trauma of her survivor grandparents has been passed down to her. Some third generation Holocaust literature supports this thesis.
Brooke Randel’s recently published “Also Here, Love, Literacy and the Legacy of the Holocaust,” is a biography that feature Randel’s Bubbie and their close, though not always easy relationship.
Bubbie was illiterate and her granddaughter worked for an ad agency as a copywriter. Bubbie wanted her story told. However, she had no way to tell her story. In “Also Here,” Randel has fulfilled her grandmother’s wishes by putting Bubbie’s thoughts to paper.
The reader learns that Bubbie is always on the go. In her Florida condo, she shops, cooks, visits friends, plays cards, and does laps around the pool. “A woman who survives stays surviving.” However, at night when her hands were still, she was surrounded by the memories of the war and her lost family. Bubbie asked herself the eternal question of survivors: “Ehy did she survive when so many didn’t?”
The author’s ancestral family moved to Sighet in Romania which then became part of Hungary. Eli Wiesel, in his acclaimed book, “Night”, paints a vivid picture of the Jews of Sighet, 14,000 mostly religious souls. When Bubbie was six years old, the family suffered a tragedy. Bubbie’s father, the patriarch, died of prostate cancer. Her mother resorted to work as a travelling merchant. The two older siblings went to jobs in Budapest. Everyone had a role to play. Perhaps school was not a part of Bubbie’s upbringing or she had a learning disability, according to the author. In any case, Bubbie was permanently illiterate.
In order to discover Bubbie’s Holocaust story, the author sits with her grandmother and hears the words so that she, the wordsmith, can transcribe them. Providing an historical context, we know that the Nazis formalized their plans at the Wannsee Conference. “Evict, rob, deport, kill” were the words used, buried in obscure bureaucracy. “Words could lead the way to genocide and silence could let it happen.”
In a poignant chapter, the reader hears Bubbie’s words as she relives the road to Auschwitz in her head, telling her granddaughter what happened. In April 1945, 60,000 prisoners, including Bubbie and her sister were held in Bergen-Belsen. They had travelled by foot and boxcar from Auschwitz, covering more than 280 miles to get there. No food, no water, no clothes, no shoes and the winter was particularly bitter that year. In Bergen-Belsen there was typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and dysentery. Anne Frank and her sister Margot were taken and died there.
After the war, Bubbie married at 17 years of age to an older man. This was a typical rushed, survivor’s marriage. My own parents were 20 years apart. They would not have been a match before the war. Bubbie and her husband fought constantly. She was a go-getter with a good job. He was depressed and unsuccessful in his business attempts.
In trying to understand her Bubbie, the author refers to an Israeli study: Female survivors had high levels of avoidance behavior, intrusive thoughts, and an unresolved state of mind. Bubbie grew up in chaos before the war and in the camps. Logic was thrown out the window. She was scattered and impulsive.
From Windsor to Detroit, Bubbie and her family of three children and a sad husband tried to make a better life. However, post-traumatic stress was their constant companion.
In my own Holocaust survivor family, food was all important and came with certain rules set by my father. The chicken soup had to be boiling hot. Onions were to be feared and the plentiful food had to be cooked and served only by my mother’s hands. Restaurant food was considered suspicious, so we didn’t go out to eat very often.
Bubbie also exhibited a survivor’s anxiety around food. It was not to be wasted. She cooked constantly and fed her family delicious food. Without a language of words, Bubbie retained all the recipes in her head. What Bubbie did not have was the ability to read. All efforts to confront her illiteracy came to naught. Her granddaughter learned to see Bubbie differently from other people. In doing so, she unknowingly gained skills that her grandmother had: adaptation, creativity, stealth, and care. Bubbie taught her granddaughter to listen to the chaotic jumble of her memories and eventually the author learned how to write this book.
Being part of the third generation is not the experience of survival but an echo of survival. Bubbie’s journey and her very different American grandchildren emphasized their separateness.
This book could not have been written without the acceptance of that separateness and a willingness to listen to what could not be said.
“Also Here”
by Brooke Randel
published by Tortoise Books, 2024
Features
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Features
Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”
The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”
In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Discover Your Ultimate Smooth at Sets on Corydon: Nanoplasty vs. Keratin vs. Japanese Straightening
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The traditional choice for managing unruly texture. Keratin acts like a protective shield, filling in the cracks along a compromised or distressed hair cuticle (the protective outer layer).
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For those who want absolute, pin-straight hair that defies high humidity and never reverts.
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- The Big Benefit: It is completely permanent on the hair that is treated. Rain, humidity, and workouts will not change it. Only your new root growth will need touching up.
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Which One Is Right For You?
| Feature | Nanoplasty | Keratin Treatment | Japanese Straightening |
| Primary Goal | Deep cellular repair, sleek straightening, intense gloss. | Frizz elimination, volume reduction, softer texture. | Permanent, absolute pin-straight results. |
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