Uncategorized
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.
—
The post A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
ADL and JCPA clash over teachers union, exposing a divide over how to fight antisemitism
(JTA) — Two leading Jewish civil rights groups stepped up after Jewish teachers reported antisemitic harassment last year at the National Education Association’s annual convention, only to devolve into disagreement ahead of this year’s convention.
The unusual public dispute between the Jewish Council of Public Affairs and the Anti-Defamation League brought to the fore a simmering tension over how to fight antisemitism within schools and unions. Should Jewish groups promote collaboration with the institutions on solutions — or prioritize confronting them over their failings?
Two days before the assembly, the JCPA and the NEA’s Jewish Affairs Caucus heralded new rules and policies it had developed in collaboration union leaders to “ensure the safety of Jewish members and educators at the [Representative Assembly] without undermining the union’s vital commitment to free speech and democracy.”
A day before the assembly, the ADL, which had worked with caucus members over the past year, told Jewish Insider in an unusual line of attack that it was “extremely frustrated about a so-called ‘agreement’ with JCPA that was reached without all NEA JAC leadership and delegates at the table.”
It also took aim at union leaders: “NEA’s inconsistent enforcement of its own protections has sent an unmistakable message: Jewish educators are not a priority. That must change now.”
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, responded to the ADL’s criticism in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“When you can’t criticize substance, you find reasons to criticize process,” Spitalnick said in an interview. “In this case, we’re both very proud of the substance and the process, and the results underscore that.”
JCPA has emphasized working directly with school leaders and public officials to combat antisemitism, and opposed the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus pro-Palestinian protests.
“It is both possible and necessary to fight antisemitism — on campus, in our communities, and across the country — without abandoning the democratic values that have allowed Jews, and so many other vulnerable minorities, to thrive,” the group wrote in an April 2025 joint statement condemning the crackdown.
That letter spurred behind the scenes pushback from another legacy group, the Jewish Federations of North America.
The ADL, meanwhile, has taken on a more confrontational approach to universities, assigning them “report cards” for campus antisemitism and also empowering Jewish educators to advocate for themselves.
Notably, progressive-leaning groups like the JCPA and centrist groups like the ADL and the JFNA flip strategies when it comes to addressing Trump administration policies that undercut Jewish civil rights advocacy. The centrist groups have at times retreated from confrontation with the government, while the JCPA has been more directly critical. In one instance, the JCPA was more outspoken about a Trump administration attack on the ADL than the ADL was.
“There are absolutely those on the right who think that we should just be burning it all down, and that is not an approach that’s going to make you safer or democracy safer,” Spitalnick said. “We believe deeply that the only path forward is one that confronts antisemitism wherever it exists, and does so in a way that recognizes our safety as Jews is tied to our democratic institutions, which includes unions and public education.”
The ADL and the JCPA found common cause last year after the NEA delegates narrowly passed a measure barring the union from using, endorsing or publicizing any materials from the ADL, which boasts a comprehensive library of anti-bias education materials. (The measure was ultimately rejected by the NEA’s board of directors.)
The JCPA at that time signed onto a letter led by the ADL describing “deep concerns about the growing level of antisemitic activity within teachers’ unions,” including reports that Jewish teachers were verbally accosted during the proceedings.
The harassment, including a reported case of NEA members appearing to cheer at a mention of the 2025 attack on a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, during the convention last year, last month sparked a new antisemitism investigation into NEA by the Trump administration.
Shira Goodman, the ADL’s vice president of advocacy, said in an interview the group “immediately had to take an adversarial advocacy position to address” last year’s conference.
The ADL centered its approach on engaging with Jewish teachers who had sought their help, including the incoming president of the Jewish Affairs Caucus. Goodman said that while the ADL had “some ongoing conversations with leaders at the NEA,” the bulk of its advocacy had been to “support teachers who are doing their own advocacy.”
“Working just with leadership wasn’t going to do it, but we also wanted to be there to support grassroots folks who felt like they wanted to be and remain within their union,” Goodman said.
Goodman added that she did not feel that JCPA and the ADL were working “in tandem.”
“JCPA has said publicly that they have relationships with AFT, with NEA. Different organizations in the Jewish community have different lanes and do different things,” Goodman said. “I just want to make sure that the teachers are represented, and that if somebody is speaking for the teachers, that the teachers have been part of that.”
Spitalnick said JCPA had engaged with JAC leadership and other Jewish organizations, including the ADL, throughout the negotiations with NEA. Last year, JCPA also led a workshop at NEA’s annual convention about antisemitism.
“All I could speak to is our approach, which has been to — instead of hammering the union with constant critique and framing a sort of zero sum dynamic in which it’s the union versus the Jewish community — making clear that the union’s success and Jewish safety, inclusion, are one in the same right, and that has led to the partnership we have with NEA,” Spitalnick said.
The ADL and other legacy groups have in the past expressed qualified support for Trump administration disciplinary actions targeting educational institutions. Spitalnick was adamant that was the wrong course, including in the most recent government investigation into the NEA.
“The question that everyone should be asking is what is motivating this, and at a time when we’re seeing – whether it be Republicans in Congress or others — use our real fears of antisemitism to fundamentally try to kill the unions by going after their charter and their fundamental existence, I would ask real questions about the motivation for this investigation,” Spitalnick said.
The ADL, meanwhile, wrote in a post on X that the federal government’s investigation “underscores what many Jewish educators have been saying for the last two years: no union member should be made to feel excluded, targeted, or unwelcome because of a core part of their identity.”
Alyson Brauning, the outgoing chair of the Jewish Affairs Caucus, who had collaborated with JCPA ahead of the convention, said the difference between this year’s conference earlier this month and last was “night and day.”
“I actually got to enjoy parts of the [Representative Assembly],” Brauning said. “Our table did not experience any harassment or intimidation in the hall at all. It was actually enjoyable and fun, and we got to do the business of the RA on the floor.”
Naomi Rodriguez, the incoming chair of the Jewish Affairs Caucus who had participated in the ADL’s “Hazak” program, said she “wasn’t aware” of all the work that JCPA had done behind the scenes ahead of the assembly.
“Maybe Alyson was, and she is the chair of the caucus,” she added. “As the incoming chair, I’ll be more on top of those things.”
Rodriquez, who is currently participating in a JCPA cohort to support teachers, said that as the incoming chair she would “accept support from anybody who wants to support us.”
‘This issue with antisemitism is a huge problem, and it’s only getting worse, and I really think we all need to work together, and collaborate and coordinate to ensure that we are as effective as possible in fighting it,” Rodriguez said.
In a statement to JTA, an NEA spokesperson said that the union had “enhanced our work to counter antisemitism and ensure all of our members are respected and supported.”
“That effort included extensive consultation with the Jewish Affairs Caucus, Jewish NEA members, and partners in the Jewish community, including the JCPA,” the spokesperson said.
Following the assembly, which took place in Denver from July 3 through 6, the ADL as well as several other prominent Jewish groups that had also lent support to the Jewish Affairs Caucus published a statement saying that the results of the assembly “provides reason for optimism.”
“We commend the important steps the NEA took to foster a more inclusive Representative Assembly this year,” the groups wrote.
They added a caveat: “Yet that experience does not yet reflect the reality facing many Jewish educators in their own communities. We continue to hear from educators across the country who report marginalization within their unions, hostile rhetoric, intimidation, and exclusion…That reality requires continued attention and action at every level.”
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations also joined the ADL’s statement, which did not include JCPA.
The JCPA “chose to have their own press release in the beginning and kind of break with what we had already decided as a group, and so that was why they weren’t part of this press release,” said Stephanie Hausner, the Conference of Presidents’ chief operating officer. The JCPA, like the ADL, is a constituent member of the conference.
Hausner said she felt the dispute between the organizations ahead of the conference “took away from the real issue at hand, which is how do we support Jewish teachers.”
“For the last year I’ve been working with all the organizations on this work, and I really thought we were in that place, and I hope that tomorrow we can get back to that place where everyone’s working together because I do think that it is better for the Jewish community,” Hausner said.
The ADL and JCPA “sometimes reach out to different audiences,” she said, but “in an ideal world, we all speak from the same notes and be able to to move together and work together on a regular basis, and we wouldn’t have some of this going on, some of this back and forth.”
“There are no two organizations that operate in this space and do things exactly the same,” Hausner added. “Hopefully, some of their efforts can complement each other moving forward.”
The post ADL and JCPA clash over teachers union, exposing a divide over how to fight antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
JD Vance tells Joe Rogan that Jeffrey Epstein had ‘connections’ to Israeli intelligence
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance claimed that the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the “highest levels” of Israeli intelligence.
“He clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels, of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” Vance told Joe Rogan, one of the country’s most popular podcasters, in a three-hour interview released Wednesday.
Vance also told Israelis purportedly behind attacks on his efforts to broker a ceasefire with Iran to “go to hell.”
The remarks from Vance, who described himself as “one of the O.G. Epstein conspiracy theorists,” marked a notable embrace by a Trump administration official of theories about Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence, which have proliferated in the years since his death and often have veered into antisemitism. No evidence supports the claim, and Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former prime minister, last year publicly denied allegations that Epstein worked for Israel or its intelligence agency.
During the interview, Vance went on to theorize about Epstein’s ties to Israel, particularly his ties to the Israeli political left. Epstein had an association with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister. Barak, whose politics in recent years have veered to the center, has denied wrongdoing and said he regrets the relationship.
“As much as I know, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu, not a particularly popular person in the United States of America right now, Epstein seemed to be connected to the elements of the Israeli deep state that were left of center,” Vance said. It was not clear what Vance meant by “deep state,” a catchall frequently deployed by right-wingers peddling conspiracy theories.
Vance continued that, in the United States, Epstein was “connected across the board, he had Republican friends, he had Democratic friends. He had much deeper connections to the Israeli left of center than right of center. I don’t know what that means.”
The interview with Rogan was not the first time that Vance had flirted with conspiracy theories about Epstein.
“I am frankly kind of a conspiracy theory on the Epstein stuff,” Vance told the hosts on “The View” last month. “I think that it’s crazy that you have this guy who is clearly a sex predator who is hanging out with a lot of wealthy and powerful people.”
During the interview with Rogan, Vance also said that there was a “separate conspiracy that hasn’t gotten covered as much,” saying that Epstein was the “tax guy” of Les Wexner, the Jewish billionaire philanthropist whose decades-long relationship with Epstein has shadowed his philanthropic legacy.
“I think there’s an underreported, underexplored story of, was Epstein doing a lot of tax stuff that was not on the up and up, and is that one way in which he gained blackmail,” Vance said. “It’s not opposite of the sexual blackmail story, but in some ways you could imagine both things being true.”
Epstein’s relationship with Wexner has been extensively reported. Wexner, too, has denied wrongdoing and said he cut off relations with Epstein after learning about his misconduct.
“There’s so much bulls–t out there,” Vance said, referring to a recent report that Israelis are behind a paid campaign to discredit the Iran deal he brokered last month.
Vance said he did not care if Israel or any other country tried to influence outcomes — it’s “the nature of the beast,” he said — but was irked by Americans he claimed were taking Israeli money to oppose the deal.
“Many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know my response to that is ‘Go to hell!’ I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people,” he said. “I represent Americans first.”
Vance’s deal with Iran, which has come under fire for its unprecedented concessions to the country regarding its role in controlling Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuz, is in abeyance. Trump resumed the war against Iran this week.
The post JD Vance tells Joe Rogan that Jeffrey Epstein had ‘connections’ to Israeli intelligence appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The first synagogue inside a U.S. prison reopens — no conviction required
As prisons go, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was unusually luxurious. For one, it had flush toilets — beating out even the White House in making the upgrade, museum exhibit developer Beth Tinker told me on a recent tour.
But if plumbing reflected the penitentiary’s commitment to prisoners’ physical well-being, its biggest innovation was more spiritual. Eastern State housed the first synagogue inside a U.S. prison, complete with a Torah ark and ner tamid, or eternal light. That restored sanctuary — a short walk from gangster Al Capone’s former cell — is now newly open to the public in a museum exhibit, Freedom through Faith: Judaism at Eastern State and Beyond.
“It’s a place really of humanity, when you’re not getting a lot of humanity in this space,” Tinker said.
The synagogue, founded in 1922, hosted holiday celebrations and weekly Shabbat services. Outside volunteers brought in kosher meats. A circus performer visited and provided entertainment. After a prisoner gave birth to a baby boy, they brought in a mohel and held a bris.
Compare that level of institutional support with modern-day prisons, where there are often multifaith chapels, but a separate, dedicated space for a synagogue is rare, according to Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski, the first full-time Jewish chaplain in the history of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
The exhibit comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that makes it more difficult for prisoners to obtain a remedy when their religious rights are violated. Last month, the Court ruled that a Rastafarian man, Damon Landor, could not sue prison guards for monetary damages after they forcibly shaved off his dreadlocks, which he kept as part of his faith. When he entered the prison, Landor carried with him a copy of a 2017 court decision that required the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices — which a guard threw in the trash, according to court records.
But while Landor couldn’t sue the guard, the Supreme Court did agree that Landor’s rights had been violated. His case led the Louisiana Department of Corrections to update its prisoner grooming policy to prevent similar violations.
Eastern State, meanwhile, was accommodating Jewish religious practice decades before those legal protections existed, Tinker said.
“That’s part of what makes this synagogue and this Jewish congregation so amazing, is because they didn’t have to do it, legally,” Tinker said. “It was able to not just sort of secretly start up, but thrive.”
The synagogue’s history
Eastern State didn’t exactly start as a model of restorative justice. Opened in 1829, the state-funded prison pioneered solitary confinement in the U.S., with the idea that solitude would force prisoners to reflect on their sins and find redemption.
That philosophy shaped the prison’s design. A wagon-wheel shaped, panopticon-esque layout allowed for centralized surveillance of prisoners. Skylights in each cell represented the “Eye of God,” suggesting to prisoners that they were always being watched. Cells were attached to small outdoor exercise yards, enclosed by high walls to discourage communication between prisoners. Guards placed hoods over prisoners’ heads whenever they left their cells to prevent them from seeing each other.
But overcrowding made isolation difficult to enforce, so Eastern State abandoned solitary confinement in 1913. That same year, Jewish prisoners gathered to pray for the first time together in the prison’s emergency hospital.
The idea for a more official synagogue came from the top: Alfred Fleisher, the Jewish president of the prison’s board of trustees, advocated for the construction of a sanctuary, partly over concerns that Jewish prisoners would be pressured to convert to Christianity, according to Tinker.
In 1922, prisoners and outside volunteers built the ornate sanctuary. Lights in the shape of menorahs surrounded the ark, and a gold Star of David was affixed to the ceiling next to a skylight.
“It was a chance for the Jewish congregants to have a space that really resonated with their religion, and was a little fancier than the rest of the prison,” Tinker said. “It has sort of the gravitas that you might really find in a synagogue.”
Most of the congregants were serving time for petty crimes, Tinker said, and their stays at Eastern State lasted no more than a few years. For instance, Sydney Bleecher, a prisoner and congregant at Eastern State, was serving time after pleading guilty to stealing 542 suits and overcoats from a store. But for many congregants, the synagogue’s impact lasted beyond the lengths of their prison sentences.
“It is not easy to find words that can say what we feel about you,” Bleecher wrote in a 1948 letter to Joseph Paull, one of the synagogue’s most devoted volunteers. “You have done so much for us that we are far and away indebted to you. Maybe we can repay in part by becoming decent citizens and, like you and your wife, reach out a hand to those who need help.”
The synagogue was also unusually integrated with the outside community. Fleisher attended every service at the synagogue until his death in 1928. Sabato Morais, the spiritual leader at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, simultaneously served as a chaplain at Eastern State.
All that support occurred despite the prison’s small Jewish population, which never rose above 80 in a prison that held roughly 1,800 people in the 1930s.
Yet according to Tinker, the synagogue never faced much pushback from people of other faiths.
“When they started it, it’s also World War I, World War II, and all that antisemitism that’s happening,” Tinker said. “It could have easily gone another direction.”
Jewish life behind bars
Most prisons today hold Jewish services in multi-faith chapels rather than separate Jewish sanctuaries — a practical arrangement that allows facilities to accommodate prisoners of many faiths in a shared space.
After Eastern State closed in 1971, its successor, Graterford Prison, also featured a dedicated synagogue. But after Graterford closed in 2018, its replacement, SCI Phoenix, opened with a multifaith chapel instead.
Today, Kolakowski, chaplaincy program director at the State Correctional Institute at Waymart, Pa., conducts services in a multifaith chapel or, when it’s occupied, a classroom shared with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There, he leads regular services and holiday celebrations, including Passover seders and Hanukkah candle-lightings. During Sukkot, he hosts services in a makeshift sukkah.
“It’s meaningful to every inmate that practices a religious tradition,” Kolakowski said. “I remember one inmate in particular — he expressed how much he appreciated having the opportunity to have the lulav.”
But accommodating religious practice inside a prison often requires balancing spiritual needs with security concerns. When Kolakowski advocated for a Sikh prisoner to be able to wear a turban, for example, prison officials had to consider that the traditional head covering could be used to hide contraband, he said. Kolakowski ultimately got the item approved by suggesting a small turban with less fabric.
Modern-day prisons are legally required to accommodate prisoners’ religious practices unless they can demonstrate a compelling reason not to, such as a risk to staff or other prisoners’ safety. How those accommodations are carried out, however, can vary from prison to prison.
In 2023, for example, Jewish inmate Riley Benjamin sued the D.C. Department of Corrections after officials required him to produce outside proof of his Judaism before providing him with kosher meals. The jail later agreed to change its policy.
“Today, it’s really prison by prison, warden by warden, how they are defining religious freedom,” Tinker said. “One thing those laws really do is they sort of let the prison decide and the staff decide what it means to a certain extent.”
Still, there have been some successors to the Eastern State synagogue — including at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, where Rabbi Irving Koslowe convinced the prison administration to let him convert a basement storage room into an exclusively Jewish place of worship in 1959.
Koslowe died in 2000. But his great grandson, Benjamin Koslowe, visited the prison years later and wrote about the experience for Yeshiva University’s student newspaper.
In an interview with the Forward, Koslowe recalled one of his great-grandfather’s favorite jokes: “They’re the only synagogue that hopes that they don’t have a quorum.”
The post The first synagogue inside a U.S. prison reopens — no conviction required appeared first on The Forward.
