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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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A great Jewish intellectual understood the Kafkaesque horror of Tennessee’s botched execution
Two days ago, the state of Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike, the Death Row prisoner who, in 1995, was found guilty of the torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. After spending more than 30 years on death row, Pike was strapped to a prison gurney and, as journalists watched through a window, an execution team cycled through at least a half-dozen syringes before finding a vein suitable for the injection of pentobarbital.
Or so they thought.
After Pike herself tried to help the team find a vein, they injected her with a supposedly lethal dose of the barbiturate. Though it caused an intense burning sensation in Pike’s arm, the dose failed to do its job, leading the executioners to empty a second dose into what they thought was a vein but turned out to be the surrounding tissue. Shortly thereafter, a curtain was drawn across the window and, for an hour, the journalists heard Pike continue to breathe and snore. Pike’s legal team eventually learned that their client, barely but still stubbornly alive, had been rushed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
While Pike’s physical prognosis is uncertain, there is nothing uncertain about the ethical diagnosis of this event. At least this would be the case for two earlier journalists who wrote at length on the death penalty: Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus. Long after they both became celebrated novelists and intellectuals, the two men each wrote essays on state-sanctioned killing, which were combined and published in France with the title Réflexions sur la peine capitale, or Reflections on the Death Penalty.
These reflections are as relevant in our own age of drug-induced executions as in Koestler and Camus’ era of where the delivery system of death was a noose or the guillotine.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Budapest, Koestler was, as the phrase goes, a child of his century, one convulsed by catastrophic wars, murderous ideologies, and multiple genocides. Described by his friend George Orwell as an “outstanding figure” of his time, Koestler, like Orwell, fought in and reported on the Spanish Civil War. As a member of the Spanish republican forces, he was captured by Franco’s intelligence service and sentenced to death — a fate Koestler escaped when, after several months of imprisonment, he was released in a prisoner exchange.
Yet this experience deeply marked him. In the mid-1950s, he rallied to the campaign to end capital punishment in Great Britain, penning the essay “Reflections on Hanging.” Serialized in two newspapers, the essay galvanized public opinion and played a pivotal role in the parliamentary vote that, while not entirely abolishing the death penalty, severely limited it. Given the clarity and ferocity of Koestler’s writing — which, Rebecca West observed, was as historically misleading as it was rhetorically moving — this sea change in the public’s attitude and parliament’s position is not surprising.
One passage seems especially relevant for the recent events in Tennessee. “There is indeed a Kafkaesque horror attached to an execution,” Koestler writes, “which goes beyond the mere fear of death or pain or indignity. It is connected not with the brutality but with the macabre, cold-blooded politeness of the ceremony, in which the person whose neck is going to be broken is supposed to collaborate in a nice, sensible manner, as if it were a matter of a minor surgical operation…it is present in the delinquent’s knowledge that in the embarrassed stares of the officials he is already mirrored as a dead man with a blue face and ruptured vertebrae; and that what for him is the final, violent termination of life is for them merely an unpleasant duty, followed by a sigh of relief and a plate of bacon and eggs.”
Did the unnamed doctor, I wonder, stare with embarrassment as he repeatedly tried but failed at killing the — perhaps this is not the best word — patient? How, I also wonder, should readers respond to the description of Pike’s attempted execution? (With embarrassment, I admit while I was revulsed, I also continued sipping from a mug of coffee as I read the New York Times’ account.)
We can guess how Lucien Camus might have responded. His son, Albert Camus, told and retold the story in his writings of his father who, having witnessed a public execution by guillotine, returned to the house, vomited in the sink, and never spoke about the experience. In the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” which accompanied Koestler’s, Camus suggested that rather than telling the condemned man or woman that they will pay the ultimate price or their debt to society for their crime, they instead be told the truth. “If you kill you will be imprisoned for months and years, torn between impossible death and constantly renewed terror, we shall slip into your cell…tie your hands behind your back [and] bind your arms with a strap to that you are forced to stoop [and] then carry you through the corridors [and] seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you on a board [then] let fall from a height of seven feet a 120 pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor.”
What, then, did the judge overseeing the 1995 trial tell Christa Pike when the sentence was rendered? The delivery system for death then was the electric chair and, to the judge’s credit, she did inform Pike that she would be subjected to a degree of electroshock sufficient to kill her. I do not know when the agent of death shifted from electroshock to pentobarbital nor do I know if a judge explained to Pike how the drug would act on her brain and organs to bring about her death. But I am pretty certain that none of the judges informed Pike of one legal scholar’s assessment of this form of death: “It is not the most humane, it is the most humane-looking.” I am even more certain they did not inform her, in case she survived another botched execution by the state of Tennessee, which boasts a history of such botches, that her brain would be irreversibly damaged.
Finally, I am most certain that, whether strangled by a tightened noose, decapitated by a sharpened blade, or injected by what was possibly an expired dose of pentobarbital, the sheer barbarism exercised by officials wearing white coats remains constant.
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‘East of Eden’ was my family Bible — until I read the real one.
I didn’t know until recently whether the house I grew up in had a Bible, but I always knew we had a first edition of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
It’s my mother’s, gifted to her by her boss at Brattle Book Shop, an antiquarian book store in Boston, where she worked in college. Its dustjacket shows a pastoral scene, a simple rendering of a valley in greens and ochres. Were I to inherit it, and were it in better shape, it would be the most valuable thing I own. (In 1975 it went for $25.)
I never picked it up to actually read it: too precious. My own copy was a paperback with deckle edges. I left it behind on a communal shelf at a hostel in London for some other traveler 12 years ago during my first trip to Europe.
The novel, about three generations of the Trasks and how they struggle to earn their father’s approval, urges us to consider what we carry with us and what we discard. The question of legacy was certainly in the mind of Steinbeck, who considered it his masterpiece. While the author includes his mother’s side of the family, the Hamiltons, as characters, I’m not quite sure if he consciously linked his biblically-inspired epic to his paternal side’s short residence in the Holy Land.
Steinbeck’s grandfather Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck helped to establish an agricultural community, Har Hatikvah, outside of Jaffa in the 19th century. The community, made up of Christians who believed the end times were at hand, disbanded in 1858, after Johann’s brother Friedrich was killed in a raid by the locals.
Zoe Kazan’s Netflix adaptation of the book is hyper-aware of her own paternal grandfather, Elia Kazan, who adapted the film in 1955 with a smoldering star named James Dean. At the heart of her response is the word “timshel,” absent from her grandfather’s adaptation but central to Steinbeck’s book.
It’s not a real Hebrew word, but a poor transliteration that Steinbeck incompletely translated as “thou mayest.” To the characters, reading it from a verse in Genesis, it signifies an open path. In reintroducing the word to the story — a more holistic, and by my lights better, telling — Kazan has said she is showing that we have choices.
We can choose, for example, not to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee as Elia Kazan did and, more to the point, we can opt to be different from our families and learn from their mistakes.
One line, spoken by the character Lee and tweaked slightly for the series, earns a new dimension with Zoe Kazan penning the script: “It’s easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry, but whatever you do, it will be you who does it.”
Steinbeck, for his part, did not follow his forebears in settling Ottoman Palestine as a messianic Christian. He visited in 1966, when it was Israel, on assignment from Newsday to document the development of the new country. (His impressions, coming a year before the Six-Day War, were highly favorable; his pitstops included Masada and the remnants of his family’s settlement.)
My own differences from the older generation —I was the one who told my disappointed mother that Steinbeck botched his Hebrew — has been a process.
I hadn’t yet read Genesis when I first read East of Eden. Now that I have, I see many biblically mixed metaphors. The first patriarch Cyrus Trask — who perhaps ironically, given his inflated record as a Union soldier, shares the name of the king who liberated Jews from Babylon — lost a leg in the war, which could recall the injury Jacob sustained fighting the angel. In accepting the gift of one son and not the other, Cyrus also stands in for God the Father.
His sons are Adam and Charles (the first letters of their names tell us who’s Abel and who’s Cain), who are in fact half brothers like Isaac and Ishmael. Adam’s wife, Cathy, is the serpent — and Eve, Lilith, Satan, Jezebel and perhaps simply the concept of evil.
Adam and Cathy’s sons, Caleb and Aron, are twins, like Jacob and Esau, but their story replays that of Cain and Abel. The book’s title, taken from Genesis, refers to where Cain was cast out, is misleading. The book begins in Connecticut, Adam moves West to Salinas, California. Charles stays put and dies at home, never experiencing exile.
I didn’t grow up knowing all these beats from the Tanakh, and it’s beside the point, really, and yes, pedantic. Steinbeck’s genius is not in how closely he hews to the biblical narrative, but in how he finds the echoes that are there in the origin story of mankind and the Jewish people.
The dynamics we see in Cain and Abel travel down to Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. In each of their stories is betrayal, favoritism and the common theme, as expressed by Sam Hamilton, the character modelled on Steinbeck’s grandfather, that when it comes to love “no one ever had enough,” a feeling that can induce even fratricide.
I never felt I lacked love, but there are less dramatic ways to disappoint one’s parents. I might have left my mother’s first edition in London instead of my ratty paperback. I’m sure I’d have been forgiven, but it’s better as an inheritance.
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Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots
Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, can feel a little abstract for Jews like me who live in big cities, far removed from the agricultural cycle that gave rise to the holiday. Typically, the extent of my fall harvest consists of buying a pumpkin from Trader Joe’s.
But last weekend, sleeping in a tent at Living Tree Alliance, a Jewish farm and co-housing community in rural Vermont, I found myself much closer to Sukkot’s agrarian roots. Rows of colorful produce stretched across the 93-acre property, much of it destined for the “stone soup” that would become our dinner the following night. Plants grown on the farm formed the sukkah’s schach, or roof covering.
“I forgot scissors,” Melanie Grubman, one of Living Tree’s founding members, told me as she cut yellow flowers off their stems with her teeth for material to decorate the sukkah.
About 16 people, including a few families with children, live on this bucolic property year-round, in what may be the closest American equivalent to an Israeli kibbutz. Residents are expected to volunteer between 8 and 16 hours per month, doing farm chores, serving on committees, managing the on-site AirBnB and keeping common spaces clean. All disagreements are resolved through a system of “sociocracy,” a governance model based on consent; decisions are made only when no one objects. On Shabbat, that work ceases, and chickens raised by residents are butchered kosher-style for dinner.
By living closer to the land, their food supply, and each other, residents say they feel closer to Judaism, too.
“It’s hard for me to pray not in the garden,” Grubman said. “I have no desire to sit inside when holiness is blowing on me.”
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Sephirah Oshkello, 54, barefoot and wearing a long purple tie-dye dress, swayed back and forth with the rhythm of prayers. As we went around the circle naming those in need before reciting the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, she offered, “Mama Earth.”
Oshkello, a Hebrew priestess, or kohenet, also works as a holistic nutritionist when she isn’t gardening or leading prayers.
This free-spirited lifestyle is a far cry from the environment in which she grew up. Oshkello was raised in Great Neck, New York, where she attended Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue.
But after college at University of Maryland, she joined a community service program in Tzfat, Israel, where she got a taste of Jewish communal living, studied Jewish tradition, and spent her days hiking. From there, she spent a year living on an Israeli kibbutz.
“From then on, I felt like, I want to create something like this in the States,” Oshkello said. “Because when I went to Israel, my mom said, ‘OK, go, but you better come back.”
She returned to Great Neck and attended an Orthodox synagogue, but quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit.
“Judaism is connected to the land, and when the Jews got kicked out of their land, it became a culture of the book,” Oshkello said. “I do love to study words, but it only serves one part of our being, right? In Kabbalah, we talk about body, mind, spirit.”
The idea for Living Tree took shape on Oshkello’s second date with her now-husband, Craig, at a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle in 1997, when she told him about her dream to create an intentional Jewish community. The couple moved to secular co-housing in New Hampshire, where they began scouting property in Vermont and making plans for their own Jewish community.
In 2015, she and Craig bought the 93-acre Living Tree property in Moretown, Vt., then just a field with trees and a sugar shack, and moved there about a year later.
Grubman, a 47-year-old Waldorf teacher and owner of an all-women stonemasonry business in Vermont, was among the first residents. Like Oshkello, Grubman grew up in a suburban Jewish community — in her case, a “ritzy” Conservative synagogue outside Philadelphia. But she never connected with the idea of praying while sitting still inside.
“I was one of these angsty teenagers who was like, ‘Nature is busting through the concrete!’” Grubman said. “‘My heart is crying!’”
At Wesleyan University, Grubman became president of the environmental club and wrote her own eco-Haggadah for Passover. She later helped jumpstart Wilderness Torah, a program reconnecting Jews with the agricultural context of the Hebrew calendar, in Berkeley and Oakland, California.
Along the way, she encountered spiritual leaders who helped her understand that Jewish practice could look different from the Judaism of her childhood.
She remembered one rabbi who arrived for Yom Kippur “in white pajamas, covered in dirt.”
“And we were like, ‘Oh, what’s he doing?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I was davening in the woods,’” Grubman said. “That’s the opposite of suburban Philadelphia Yom Kippur — when you show up in some fancy dress [that] you went to the mall to buy and gossip.”
Living Tree, Grubman said, offered a way to make Judaism a part of daily life beyond prayer and study.
“I felt like Judaism and like the world in general can be very intellectual. And I am a very intellectual person,” Grubman said. “But the more I link it to what I’m doing with my body and my hands, it just feels like it makes more sense to me.”
‘Shtetl Vibes’
There’s a long history of Jews who have sought to build communal, self-sufficient communities. But turning that ideal into a sustainable way of life has always been complicated.
The first kibbutz was established in Ottoman Palestine in 1910; the movement expanded after Israel’s founding in 1948. But the kibbutz system largely collapsed during the country’s financial crisis in the 1980s, when the utopian socialist model slowly gave way to a privatized version. Kibbutzim retained many of their collectivist values, but residents no longer pooled their incomes, raised their children together, or lived completely off the land.
American Jews experimented with communal living, too. During the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ’70s, tens of thousands of young, college-educated city dwellers moved to rural Vermont as part of a countercultural movement. While few communes were explicitly Jewish, residents included many Jewish hippies. (Sen. Bernie Sanders, who briefly lived on an Israeli kibbutz in his twenties, was kicked off a Vermont commune for allegedly loafing around and talking about politics rather than working the land.)
But few of those experiments lasted as fully communal settlements.
Today, efforts to revive Jewish communal living are taking new forms. Young Jews live together through organizations like Moishe House, where residents get subsidized rent in exchange for planning Jewish community events. In Berkeley, an urban Jewish cohousing community called Berkeley Moshav is under construction; residents will own condos and make collective decisions about shared spaces.
Living Tree Alliance, which operates as both a nonprofit and a homeowners association, has seemed to stand the test of time — it has been hosting residents for over a decade. But like the modern kibbutzim, it’s not a full escape from the trappings of capitalism: Residents, most of whom have day jobs outside their farming responsibilities, don’t share income, and they own their own homes while co-owning the surrounding land.
Grubman, who works three jobs, cringed when I asked if Living Tree sometimes felt like utopia.
“It actually is a lot of work. It’s really really challenging,” Grubman said. “But what else are you going to do? Look at your screen?”
Many of the residents I spoke to were attracted to Living Tree as an escape from modern malaise.
Gil Ben Moshe and Ella Sutherland moved to Living Tree a few months ago with their three children, ages 2, 5 and 14. The couple met at an anarchist community in northern California and co-founded an intentional community in Virginia. After deciding they wanted a Jewish co-housing community instead, they found Living Tree online and moved.
Ben Moshe, wearing a kippah over his long hair, a plaid flannel, and no shoes or socks, has fond memories of living on an Israeli kibbutz until he was 4, when his family moved to the city of Eilat. The transition to urban life was jarring, he said, and he vowed to eventually return to the pastoral life of his early childhood.
“I’ve been so shocked at the discrepancy between people really believing that community is the right way to live, but not actually meaning it when they say it,” Ben Moshe said. “People’s relationship with spirituality is one that resembles more of their shelf with porcelain knickknacks … it’s not their daily bread.”
Arielle Sabot, a 28-year-old who uses they/them pronouns, worked as an apprentice at Living Tree for a year beginning in 2023. They now live in the Boston area, where they attend a traditional egalitarian synagogue and work as an outdoor Jewish educator.
While at Living Tree, they lived in a tiny cabin that lacked running water. During the winter, they chopped their own wood to heat the cabin with a wood-burning stove.
The arrangement wasn’t always idyllic. There were no flush toilets. Dishes, which Sabot had to boil water to wash, could pile up. And living alongside neighbors who were also co-workers could get tense sometimes.
But that proximity, Sabot said, also made some aspects of Jewish life feel more manageable.
“I think it’s easier when your community is right outside your door,” Sabot said. “You don’t have to go somewhere. It was shtetl vibes.”
Getting Outside
Since Living Tree was founded more than a decade ago, organizations explicitly linking Jewish spirituality and the natural world have been “growing exponentially,” Oshkello said.
A 2014 national study helped document the growth of what it dubbed Jewish Outdoor, Food and Environmental Education, or JOFEE, and found more than 2,400 people had participated in immersive Jewish outdoors programs the previous year. In 2025, Adamah, one of the movement’s largest organizations, reported more than 45,000 participants in its programs, including almost 10,000 Jewish teens and college students.
Vermont is especially fertile ground for this kind of experiential Judaism. On Shavuot, Living Tree and the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe hike Mount Mansfield, the state’s tallest peak, carrying a Torah for a small taste of what Moses may have felt ascending Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. On Tu B’Shvat, Jewish Vermonters snowshoe beneath the full moon, stopping at different trees for reflection, poetry and song. And then there’s “Ski Ride Purim,” when skiers and snowboarders hit the slopes in costume, eating hamantaschen along the way.
“Vermonters are going to be outside as much as we can,” said Beth Liberman, executive director of Jewish Communities of Vermont, the state’s Jewish umbrella organization. “We’re bringing Judaism where it connects for so many people.”
There may be an even larger Jewish constituency to capture: In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 51% of American Jews said they derived a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from being outdoors — more than twice the share who said the same about their religious faith.
The Jewish connection with the outdoors was a major draw for Talia Wilk, a 20-year-old spending two weeks at Living Tree through a fellowship program. Wilk said she grew up going to Jewish summer camp, where Judaism felt intertwined with being in nature. Now living in Toronto, she works as a Hebrew school teacher and an educator at an outdoors school. When she heard about the Living Tree fellowship, she jumped at the chance.
“I’ve always had that kind of longing for a space where Jewish holidays and rituals are really connected to the seasons and to the land,” Wilk said.
For Sabot, residing at Living Tree changed their relationship to the Jewish lunar calendar. In Vermont, where the seasonal changes are particularly dramatic — lush greenery in summer, brilliant foliage in fall, mud in spring, and snow in winter — Jewish holidays timed around an agrarian cycle feel more tangible, Sabot said.
Younger Jews in particular, Oshkello said, connect with the idea of getting outside over sitting in pews.
“This next generation, they don’t want to be bored and sit and listen to other people preach,” Oshkello said.
At Living Tree, I began to understand what that connection could feel like. I awoke in my tent around 6 a.m. to the sunrise and roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing as my alarm. Meditating in the sukkah, we took deep breaths and placed our hands on the earth. Eating potluck dinner, we were invited to reflect on the journey of our food, from seed to mouth. On my last day, we learned how to press apples to make hot cider and pickle cabbage.
After three days immersing myself in nature, I headed back toward New York City, eager to take a hot shower and sleep in my own bed.
But the next morning, I found myself missing the fresh air and the feeling of being outside. All weekend, residents had talked about getting Judaism out of their heads and into their bodies. Crammed into the subway on my morning commute, I understood what they meant.
The post Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots appeared first on The Forward.
