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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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I’m an empathetic Zionist. But it’s time for all of us to stop counting our dead.
There are, and always have been, several types of Zionism, as Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s Yom Kippur sermon reminded me. I first had to declare the type of Zionist I am in 1994 at a meeting at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles that brought together Arabs and Jews to create a speakers’ bureau that would advocate for Middle East peace at synagogues, churches and mosques in southern California.
Approximately 20 people gathered in a small room and a moderator asked each of us to speak briefly about what brought us to the meeting. One by one as the people in the room spoke, they listed the atrocities both Jews and Palestinian Arabs had suffered, including the Holocaust, the Nakhba, the mutual massacres that had taken place in British Palestine before 1948, the suicide bombings and the destruction of Palestinian homes. When it was my turn to speak, I began, “I am a Zionist.”
My Zionism was anchored in 20 years of conducting archaeological excavations in Israel, and a 1986 trip to the Soviet Union to help Jews emigrate to Israel, during which I was arrested three times by the KGB. I was an American, but an active Zionist.
I continued, “But it is time for all of us to stop counting our dead. Jews and Arabs both have enough suffering to go around. We don’t need to justify ourselves to each other by enumerating the terrible losses we have experienced. Let’s focus our attention on understanding and making peace with one another.”
My words had an impact. We moved forward to plan the bureau. I was paired with a leader of the Palestinian community in LA who looked like he could be my older brother. We spoke at universities, synagogues and churches for two years, at a time when the promise of peace was bolstered by the Oslo Accords. But when Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister in 1996, I felt I was no longer speaking about an Israeli government that shared my aspirations, and that phase of my life ended.
Today, in the post Oct. 7 world, I feel like I am sitting in that same meeting room, only it encompasses way more than 20 people. Often, when I hear or read about the present Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I hear about the 1,200 people killed on Oct. 7, and the tens of thousands killed thereafter. The death of every child is tallied and the sufferings of every hostage recalled. We can do better.
I am an empathetic Zionist. I support the Jewish state of Israel, and I also feel empathy for its victims. My definition of empathy bridges radical differences between individuals and forces a person to look through another person’s eyes. Sympathy allows one to feel the pain of someone closely related; empathy allows one to understand a thoroughly different person. As a Jew, I sympathize with the Oct. 7 victims, the hostages and their families; but I also empathize with the Palestinians who have suffered and died in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
I believe today, as I did in 1994, that the first step toward empathy is a cease fire, not only on the battlefield, but on the frontlines of the constant bickering about who has suffered more. After almost 100 years, the time has come to empathize with the victims instead of counting them.
And we should begin with the children. A child’s suffering can change minds, whether the trauma is witnessed firsthand or through a photograph or a written description. Who in my generation can forget the 1972 picture of the Vietnamese “napalm girl,” nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked and screaming after a South Vietnamese napalm attack on her village severely burned her back? The Pulitzer Prize-winning photo influenced public opinion and the anti-war movement. As Anne Frank had triggered worldwide empathy for Holocaust victims, Kim Phuc made the Vietnam war seem insupportable.
Who today are the children who can teach us about Gaza? I would choose three: Ariel and Kfir Bibas, four years old and nine months old respectively, and five-year-old Hind Rajab.
Kfir and Ariel Bibas were kidnapped along with their mother Shiri from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 and murdered in captivity; their bodies were returned to Israel on February 20, 2025.
Hind Rajab was five years old when she and her uncle, aunt and three cousins left Gaza City by car. Israeli shelling killed all in the car except Hind and her cousin, 15-year-old Layan Hamadeh. Layan telephoned the Palestine Red Crescent Society and was heard pleading for help and screaming as she was shot. Hind, still alive, stayed on the telephone for three hours. She died from IDF gunfire, and when the Red Crescent workers finally arrived, they too were killed.
Who are the adults today who can teach us to empathize with those children? I would choose two: Noam Chayut and Aziz Abu Sarah.
Noam Chayut was an Israeli soldier patrolling the West Bank. In his memoir, The Girl Who Stole my Holocaust: A Memoir, written in 2007, he describes an encounter with a 10-year-old “scrawny” Palestinian girl wearing “light colored clothes.” On the outskirts of a village there were children playing, she among them. With no particular intent, Noam approached and smiled at her, but she did not smile back. She was terrified, frozen for a second, which allowed Noam to look into her eyes. Then she ran away. But what he saw in her eyes was himself. He saw the soldier, the occupier and he saw someone else, someone evil. He did not see himself as evil, but she did. He empathized with her terror, and it changed his life.
As a young Palestinian man, in 1998, Aziz Abu Sarah visited Yad VaShem with trepidation. He felt if he “empathized with the enemy it would be a betrayal of his own pain,” he wrote in The Future is Peace. But he went anyway, and after he arrived at the underground chamber memorializing the death of one and a half million Jewish children he “walked out of the museum a different person.”
Both Noam and Aziz looked at children they were taught to regard as enemies. And the adversaries who populated their world became human. It is imperative that the deaths of Hind Rajab, Ariel and Kfir Bibas teach us about the trauma of our perceived foes. If we cannot empathize with them and their families, I doubt that Israelis and Palestinians can come to any understanding.
I recognize the very problematic long term political and structural problems inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But how will we ever learn how the other side thinks and feels if we do not try to understand each other’s pain? Seeking mutual empathy can be the beginning of a path to a new and peaceful community.
The post I’m an empathetic Zionist. But it’s time for all of us to stop counting our dead. appeared first on The Forward.
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Let my people grow: Jewish online cannabis retailer braces for new federal law to take effect
For the past several years, Jewish cannabis company Tokin’ Jew has offered a little something to take the edge off just about every Jewish occasion.
High Holidays have you feeling stressed? Try “High, Honey,” the company’s THC-infused honey stick. Passover Seder dragging on a little too long? An edible called “4 Cups,” the first officially certified kosher-for-Passover THC gummy, will help get you through it.
Now the company that brought the world cannabis-infused chocolate Hanukkah gelt and THC-laced hamantaschen is facing a decidedly less festive future. In a couple months, the products responsible for the majority of its business will no longer be legal due to a change in federal law.
And it’s not just Tokin’ Jew. The new restrictions, set to take effect in December, threaten to upend a multibillion dollar e-commerce industry that has flourished for nearly a decade.
For co-founders Ben Kraim and Will Cohen, who have spent years building a business around the unlikely intersection of Judaism and cannabis, the change threatens to undo much of their lives’ work.
“It’s not easy being a Jewish weed brand, Kraim told the Forward. “Our brand is incredibly niche, so the prospect of losing access to the customer base we worked hard to build up is especially upsetting.”
What began as a humble meme account has grown into a thriving online operation, selling everything from novelty Judaica gifts and smoking accessories to kosher-certified edibles with clever names like “Apple of My Chai” and “Guava Nagila.”
The company has also cultivated a devoted community, bringing together observant and secular Jews, along with cannabis enthusiasts of all backgrounds, through a shared appreciation for Jewish humor and high-quality kush.
Now, Tokin’ Jew Flower, the division of their company, which Kraim said accounts for approximately 60 to 70 percent of sales, faces an uncertain future.
The legal foundations for Tokin’ Jew dates back to the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized products containing no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight. That provision created an opening for companies to manufacture and ship hemp and hemp-derived products, including THC gummies, across certain state lines without needing to abide by the state-by-state licensing systems governing recreational marijuana use.
A booming industry followed. But Kraim acknowledges that the relatively lax federal regulations created opportunities for “bad actors” to sell questionable products.
“I think everybody in this industry knew things were a little too good to be true,” he said.
What he and many others expected, however, was tighter rules, not the effective elimination of their business model.
“We all thought eventually the federal government was going to create more regulation in this space,” he said, adding that he would have welcomed stronger oversight.
“We like to joke that it’s our Jewish guilt that keeps us from selling a subquality product. But we absolutely support stricter regulation – something that would have been entirely feasible.”
Instead, another provision tucked into the federal spending bill signed by President Trump in November 2025 dramatically narrowed the definition of legal hemp. Under the new rules, finished products containing more than 0.4 milligrams per container of total THC and similarly intoxicating cannabinoids will no longer qualify as federally legal hemp.
The restrictions were originally scheduled to go into effect November 2026, but Congress granted a brief extension that pushed the deadline back to December 11.
According to Kraim, it is not only companies like theirs that will be affected. Growers, manufacturers, packaging businesses and warehouses may have to shut down altogether.
“These are people’s entire livelihoods that they now have to just set ablaze,” Kraim said.
“At least we have this brand that can take many shapes and can live on in so many other ways,” he said. “But if you’re a hemp farmer, you are in big trouble.”
The news comes just as Tokin’ Jew has been experiencing explosive growth. According to Kraim, the company now has approximately 250,000 followers across social media platforms, with its Instagram content reaching between 18 million and 22 million people monthly. Orders have roughly tripled over the past year.
But the founders’ relationship with their customers goes beyond sales.
From the beginning, Kraim, who was raised modern Orthodox, and Cohen, who was raised in a Reform community, viewed their company as a way to connect Jews to their identity through humor, particularly those who may feel alienated from more traditional expressions of Judaism.
That same sense of community was on full display when they announced the impending restrictions.
“We were flooded with comments and DMs and emails,” Kraim said, describing messages of sympathy, appreciation and personal testimonials about the company’s products.
What struck him most were the offers of assistance.
“We got tons of messages from people willing to offer a hand,” he said. “‘How can I help? My uncle owns a dispensary. Let’s protest.’ People just coming in hot, trying to help in any way that they can, which is just so beautiful and so Jewish.”
Others began stocking up, taking advantage of the products’ long shelf lives. The company is even considering producing its popular kosher-for-Passover gummies early so customers can buy them before the ban takes effect.
For customers who rely on the products for more than recreation, but relief, Kraim worries about what will happen when home delivery is no longer an option.
He described phoning one of their biggest customers only to discover an elderly Jewish woman on the other end of the line. She told the team how much she relied on their products and how convenient home delivery was, particularly because multiple ailments and limited mobility made it difficult for her to get to a dispensary.
“We were tearing up by the end of the call,” Kraim recalled.
Gabrielle G, a Tokin’ Jew customer since 2024, who declined to give her last name, called the news “truly devastating for the Jewish stoner community.”
“Their Advent calendars were a highlight of my Jewish holidays,” she told the Forward. “I hope they find a solution because TJ feels like family.”
Regardless, TokinJew.com will continue selling accessories, apparel, home goods and Judaica, with plans to expand its offerings.
They’re also planning a gradual move into licensed dispensaries, beginning in New York and eventually New Jersey. But that involves developing separate production, distribution and regulatory requirements for each state, a daunting prospect for a company that spent years developing its national online operation.
“But us Jews are the masters of the pivot,” he pointed out. “We historically have troubles thrown our way, and we always have to figure out our next step.”
For a company whose product line is largely inspired by the Jewish calendar, the date of the new bill feels particularly poignant: The new restrictions are scheduled to take effect on December 11, the evening Jews around the world light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle, commemorating the miracle of a single day’s supply of oil burning for eight.
“We have our plan A, B and C,” Kraim said. “One of which is praying for a Hanukkah miracle.”
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Trump antisemitism official to visit Michigan synagogue weeks before midterms, backed by ZOA
(JTA) — DETROIT – The Trump administration’s antisemitism czar will speak to a Michigan synagogue on Wednesday for a Justice Department event that also doubles as a fundraiser for the state’s chapter of the Zionist Organization of America.
Leo Terrell, who chairs the administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, is attending on behalf of the department. The Justice Department touted the event on its website with a link to a ZOA registration page that solicits donations to become an event co-sponsor.
Federal ethics regulations restrict fundraising by government employees and prohibit the use of government property for unauthorized purposes, though they allow authorized official fundraising and certain official speeches at fundraising events.
Terrell is visiting Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, a Detroit suburb; the synagogue is also listed as a co-sponsor. Other co-sponsors include a local Jewish high school, Mothers Against College Antisemitism and pro-Israel advocacy groups.
It comes weeks before the midterm elections, in which rhetoric on Israel and Jewish safety from the state’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has put local Jews on edge.
The Justice Department is billing the event as the first stop on Terrell’s “American Tour Against Hate,” adding, “All faiths and backgrounds welcome.” Terrell will be in conversation with Mort Klein, national head of ZOA, a usual stalwart Trump supporter who has broken with the president at times on Iran policy.
On its registration page for the event, ZOA Michigan notes that it “brings the Department of Justice directly into dialogue with Michigan’s Jewish community.”
ZOA Michigan also alluded to current tensions between the state’s Jewish community and El-Sayed.
“Antisemitism is reaching across Michigan — in schools, in public spaces, and among political candidates,” the event page reads. “Confronting it requires our community to stand together.”
The ZOA is a hawkish pro-Israel organization that backs the West Bank settlement movement and Israeli right wing government policies. In the U.S., it has also endorsed some of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies.
Federal tax law prohibits tax-exempt houses of worship from supporting or opposing political candidates, but Trump has sought to loosen the restrictions.
Rabbi Aaron Starr, of Shaarey Zedek, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Conservative congregation’s co-sponsoring of the event should not imply that it was endorsing one candidate over another.
“We are looking forward to working with anybody and everybody who wants to combat hate, whether that hate is antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism or any other form of hate,” Starr said. He added that the congregation would soon welcome Jewish Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin for a veteran’s Shabbat.
Starr said the synagogue became a sponsor because it had been approached by ZOA to serve as an event host. “We’re mostly just serving as a venue for the event,” he said, adding that he personally would not be there.
Terrell did not return a JTA request for comment on the event. But he has promoted it extensively on social media and had hinted at the talk, and the ZOA partnership, in a previous email he sent to JTA reporters.
“We hope to see everyone there making it clear hate has no place in America a.k.a the greatest country on Earth,” he wrote at the time. He also thanked ZOA Michigan “for their tireless work on bringing our powerful message into reality.”
ZOA Michigan’s executive director, Kobi Erez, told JTA the event was nonpartisan, but added that he was aware of voters planning to switch parties — an allusion to Democrats who are considering voting for Rogers.
“We are not planning to discuss particular candidates or tell anyone how to vote,” Erez said in an email.
“We do encourage people to examine candidates’ records and statements concerning the safety of the Jewish community and consider whether they will take antisemitism seriously,” he said. “We feel that Jewish safety is at stake now more than ever. We know people who, because of these concerns, plan to vote for a party they have never supported before, and we understand their position.”
Erez said that the point of the event was not fundraising. “We are accepting voluntary sponsorships and donations to help cover expenses and support our work, but the purpose of this evening is to confront antisemitism and connect the community with the Department of Justice,” he said.
Frankel Jewish Academy, a private Jewish high school in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township, is also listed as a co-sponsor of the Terrell event. Frankel leaders did not return a JTA request for comment.
Terrell, an attorney, former O.J. Simpson supporter and ex-Fox News contributor, is a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. In that role, he oversees antisemitism taskforces that include staffers from the departments of Justice, Education and Health and Human Services.
Terrell’s visit comes as Trump, and Republicans more broadly, see an opening for Michigan in the midterms, in part via the Jewish vote. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance will be campaigning in Michigan in the coming days. During Vance’s previous stop in Michigan, he went after El-Sayed for his reaction to the Temple Israel attack earlier this year.
Hundreds of local Jews have signed a petition pledging to vote for El-Sayed’s GOP opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, over their fears of the Democrat’s “extremism” on Jews and Israel, including El-Sayed’s remarks earlier this year about the attack on Temple Israel in the state. He has since apologized for those comments.
A separate petition — spearheaded by Starr and other rabbis — outlines “non-negotiables” that some Jewish leaders have pushed El-Sayed and other candidates to agree to.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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