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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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The post A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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There’s a new Judaism in town — or maybe it’s very, very old
In a townhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a gathering for Tu B’Av was underway. There was chanting and breathwork, singing and ceremony. Several Brooklyn-based Jewish communities, including Temple of the Stranger and Lab/Shul, had come together for the experience.
These vibes are usually associated with Eastern traditions, paganism or indigenous American practices; most Westerners who want that form of spirituality go looking for it at Buddhist meditation centers or ayahuasca retreats, forms of engagement more often associated with the 1960s or ’70s counterculture movement than with a synagogue.
But a group of rabbis, leaders and spiritual seekers believe drum circles, chanting, meditation and mysticism are, in fact, just as core to Judaism as any rabbinic text — a sort of lost magic that has impeded vibrant, direct spiritual experience.
“I get this sense that my family believed God is dead, God died 2000 years ago when the Temple burned. Everything could only be archaeology,” said Rav Jericho Vincent, who grew up Haredi and now leads Temple of the Stranger, a Brooklyn based Ivri community. “I don’t accept God’s death.”
Instead, Vincent wants to teach a Judaism that is more alive, and more connected to the divine — one that can offer wisdom to Jews and non-Jews alike. To that end, at the Tu B’Av event, Becca Goldstein, a 34-year-old cultural entrepreneur and spiritual practitioner who is helping to build the new movement, announced a new name for what they were doing to those gathered for the ceremony: Ivri.
For some of the attendees, this was a word they’d already been using to describe their spiritual identity, and the announcement was met with celebrations. For others, it was confusing. Ivri is one the oldest words in the Torah for the ancestors of the Jewish people; it’s the Hebrew word for Hebrew. Weren’t they already Ivri?
Defining the term is complicated, not least because the burgeoning movement is more of a loose web of teachers and spiritual seekers than a clearly defined organization with official values or tenets; every single person I spoke to for this story used the word “mycelial” to describe it. (A mycelium is the underground network of thread-like connections between mushrooms.)
“There’s been something happening, certainly in American Judaism for a while now,” said Vincent, who has a book on Ivri Judaism coming out next year. “This mycelial network of a different way of doing and being Jewish that’s embodied and mystical.”
Because of this diffuse nature, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what Ivri is; there are commonalities — a desire to cultivate a more spiritual and mystical Judaism, an emphasis on the feminine aspect of the divine, a tendency toward participatory rituals, and a strong sense that they are reaching back to ancient or lost Jewish practices. But there’s no central structure meting out decisions or defined set of tenets, and each group operates independently.
There is Vincent, and their Brooklyn-based community, Temple of the Stranger, and Amichai Lau-Lavie and Shira Kline of fellow Brooklyn-based Lab/Shul; their organizations lean into queerness and often incorporate theater into their services. There is Rabbi Zvika Klein in Berkeley, the spiritual leader of the congregation Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, and Adena Phillips, founder of a group called Kimu that serves “Jewish spiritual seekers” — both also lead Shabbat at the Burning Man festival as part of a camp called “Milk and Honey.” There is Rabbi Jill Hammer, who co-founded the Kohenet Institute, which ordained Jewish priestesses from 2005 until it closed in 2024 due to leadership changes and the pandemic; she now leads Beit Kohenet, an organization offering classes and retreats on Jewish witchcraft and the divine feminine. There is Shefa, an organization that cultivates psychedelic use and exploration for Jews.
But whatever the throughline is, it’s magnetic, powerful and popular.
Chochmat HaLev’s membership has tripled in the past three years, regularly maxing out their sanctuary’s 300 person capacity on Friday nights. Their yearlong intensive Jewish learning course, “Go Deeper,” planned for 30 participants, had to cap its first cohort at 90.
The Big Jewish Gathering, a sort of coming-out event for the Ivri movement in Brooklyn, organized by Goldstein, sold out with a waiting list of well over 100 people. The Burning Man Shabbat draws at least a thousand festivalgoers each year to pray in the dust. Vincent has nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram.
Yet Ivri offerings are also controversial. The rituals are so unrecognizable to what people expect Judaism to be that several people I spoke to wondered whether the Ivri movement was really Jewish at all — or whether they wanted to be.
“It’s a totally post-halachic model,” said Shaul Magid, professor of modern Jewish studies at the Harvard Divinity School. (He attended, spoke at and wrote about the Big Jewish Gathering.) “If you write something about this, people will be scratching their heads like, ‘This is crazy.’”
Roots and branches
At the Big Jewish Gathering in January, dozens of Jewish thought leaders and groups came together for a weekend event in Brooklyn. Though the event didn’t advertise the term Ivri, in practice, it was a kind of coming out party for the movement.
The event had some more familiar forms of engagement, such as panel discussions. But there was also drumming and breathwork. Hammer led “Heelooleem,” a vineyard ritual based on biblical descriptions of ancient Jewish celebrations; participants sang and danced as they stomped grapes in a wooden basin.
These rituals may sound New Age-y, but Ivri practitioners argue they are in fact callbacks to Jewish practice that was lost.
“We can read about the libations in the temple. They’re like, ‘OK, why don’t we just do them — if they’re so powerful and so important, then why don’t we just do them?’” said Magid by way of example.
It’s clear that Jewish practice has changed over time. Women’s rituals and folk rituals were rarely recorded, meaning they were lost over the years. Centuries of persecution forced Jews to gather more quietly. And, after the Temple’s destruction, rabbis had to form a new tradition that could survive without being anchored to a particular land; in creating a new, portable religion, they shaped Jews into the people of the book.
Those in the Ivri movement feel that something important was lost in that process, including the wisdom of women, an ecstatic joy in prayer and Judaism’s connection to the earth. And, to critics who believe they are departing too far from tradition, they say that Judaism has always changed; they’re simply participating in that custom.
“When I hear those kinds of questions, I imagine them being asked of the rabbis who were forming what became rabbinic Judaism. How can you not have animal slaughter? How can you not have priests?” said Vincent. “I imagine the rabbis must have gotten that pushback, because they remade Judaism more than anything.”
The Ivri movement doesn’t want to get rid of existing wisdom — “I’m always trying to balance like, give me that quote from Rabbi Akiva, and also give me the wisdom of the mothers and aunties,” said Vincent. But they do want to add to it.
That said, many of the teachers I spoke to voiced a deep suspicion of preserving what was done purely for the sake of preservation, a tendency toward nostalgia-driven practice that they believe has reified.
“Too many people say, ‘I come to prayer services not because the prayer services are meaningful in any way but because it reminds me of the prayer services of my youth — even though I was bored out of my mind as a kid, and remain bored out of my mind,’” Krieger said. “I’m saying no, spiritual practice should be meaningful! It’s not just preserving tradition for the sake of preserving tradition.”
Hammer voiced a similar stance. “Ultimately rituals survived to support people. They exist to help people live in meaningful ways. And what can happen if you hold the rituals too tightly is that they become a kind of museum, like we’re going to do this thing to remember what our ancestors did,” she said. “And we forget what that was meant to do. We forget that the ritual was meant to transform.”
Making the old new again
Some of the boldness these leaders feel in designing rituals that are so different from what most Jews might expect may spring from the fact that many of them grew up more religious than the average American Jew. Krieger grew up Orthodox, as did Adena Phillips, who leads the Burning Man Shabbat with him. Goldstein went to a Conservative day school and an Orthodox synagogue. Vincent grew up Haredi.
Each felt unsatisfied with the Judaism they were raised with — restrictions around gender norms and limitations, a culture of social conservatism. And they felt the Judaism they were given was too cerebral, focused on studying texts instead of practicing them.
As Goldstein put it, “My experience is that it’s very hard to have a direct experience of the divine from your mind.”
Yet they also didn’t feel as though established progressive movements, like Reform Judaism, had the depth they were seeking.
“Their way of being progressive is watering down Judaism and making it as thin and vanilla as possible,” said Krieger. “There’s this myth that if you want to make Judaism accessible to people, lower the bar of what you’re asking of them.”
But, he pointed out, plenty of Jews and non-Jews alike are seeking a demanding spiritual practice, turning to rigorous practices like meditation or yoga that require specific diets and strict observance but also offer a deep experience of the divine. The issue isn’t that kashrut or Shabbat are too difficult; the issue, Krieger said, is that these people aren’t finding the transcendent experiences they crave in Judaism. But they want to.
“The folks I think of as being involved in this movement are folks who really don’t want the weak tea Judaism, the bagels and lox Judaism, or summoning in Native American teachers because we don’t have our own wisdom,” said Vincent. Instead, those drawn to the Ivri movement want to find that kind of spirituality within Judaism, without having to be an outsider appropriating or visiting another practice.
This has emboldened Ivri thinkers to look to the past, mining from folk tales, Kabbalah and biblical descriptions of celebrations to find what they seek within Judaism. On Shavuot, Krieger led a grief ritual based on the Shalosh Regalim, part of ancient Temple pilgrimage rituals in which pilgrims circled those grieving and ostracized. It was deeply based on real practices, but innovated to fit the modern moment; participants chanted the words to an ancient mourning song, stopping to share their stories and embrace. For Rosh Hashanah last year, Vincent designed a ceremony around the story of the binding of Isaac in which participants put Abraham on trial to interface with the tale’s traumatic themes.
And Magid pointed out that however woo-woo these rituals — often full of theater, witchiness and connection to the spirit world — might seem, they could arguably be seen as part of a Hasidic ultra-Orthodox tradition. To most people, an image of the black-hatted Orthodox Jew symbolizes the most Jewish kind of Jew, the most religious form of practice. But, the professor pointed out, the Judaism practiced in Hasidic sects is full of spirits and magic.
“If you grow up in a modern Orthodox world or a Conservative world, it’s very different. It doesn’t have that very aesthetic, mythical flavor to it,” he said. “The ultra-Orthodox world is a very magical world — all of these mythic stories about demons floating around.”
But Vincent, for their part, rejects a framework of comparison; they don’t want to cede an automatic legitimacy to the Judaism of the Haredi world.
“There is this pandemic of a spiritual inferiority complex. Even rabbis will tell me: ‘I don’t know enough, I’m not a good Jew,’” said Vincent. “We’re letting it be defined by ultra-Orthodoxy. Those of us who have seen the wizard behind the curtain understand that actually ultra-Orthodoxy is a post-Holocaust version of Judaism. We understand the ways in which it is different than the Judaism of a hundred years ago.”
The birth of a name
The Ivri movement is far from the first to try to build a new, more spiritual, more embodied, more radically open practice of Judaism. Many of the hallmarks of what the Ivri teachers point to in their spiritual practice might be familiar from both the Renewal movement, the Kohenet movement and even the neo-Hasidut of Martin Buber or Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Indeed, many of the Jewish communities and teachers in the greater Ivri movement identify, or previously identified at least loosely, with Renewal Judaism; Krieger and Vincent were both ordained through ALEPH and Vincent has studied with Hammer, of Beit Kohenet. So why the need for a new name?
To Hammer, the difference between Ivri and what came before is a cultural one. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Renewal movement, died over a decade ago and his work grew out of 1960s counterculture. The Kohenet movement, too, was born decades ago now. Ivri feels like the product of a new generation.
“I also identify as a Kohenet, and I also identify as part of the Jewish Renewal movement. It’s not that Ivri would define me as a person or practitioner, but I’m finding it helpful,” she said. “Maybe if you think of a movement more as pieces of music that go together, but one comes after the other.”
Goldstein, who organized the Big Jewish Gathering, said meeting the cultural moment is a big focus of the movement — and one that draws funders.
“My bubbie’s voice comes to mind, she always says: ‘Why does your generation think so much and ask so many questions? Why can’t you just be and live and let live?’” she said. “We’re forced to right now because of identity. The Jewish identity signifiers that held up in our parents generation and grandparents generation aren’t working right now.”
Hammer echoed the sentiment, saying that many American Jews are too focused on “replicating the spiritual practice exactly,” becoming so rigid about both identity and prayer that they have forgotten that religion is supposed to be a living vehicle to create meaning and transformation.
Goldstein wants to find a Judaism that can speak not only to Jews, but show the rest of the world that Judaism has more to offer than the highly politicized identity that dominates today, an identity which is breaking down as Jews debate what their relationship to Israel, to the Holocaust and to persecution really should be. She believes the growing Ivri movement — which she is working to find funding and create new events and avenues to develop — can offer Jews a new way to relate to their Judaism that they feel joyous and proud to participate in.
Showcasing Jewish practices that have a spiritual appeal, and speak to today’s concerns — like climate change, a non-dual understanding of gender and a need for meaning — could make Judaism more accessible and appealing to Jews and non-Jews alike. (Most Ivri spaces welcome non-Jews to participate.) And it could give Jews a new way to relate to their Jewish identity, one that isn’t rooted in a Judaism these teachers see as rooted in a closely-held trauma that is doing damage.
Of course, the emerging school of Ivri Judaism won’t speak to everyone; however well-grounded in ancient traditions and practices it may be to stomp on grapes or chant in a circle, it just feels too woo-woo for some.
“Ideally we want people to follow a practice because it is transformative, and we can only find out what’s transformative if we experiment,” Hammer said. Even the changes that don’t end up sticking or stay on the fringes, she believes, get shape Judaism over time.
Of course, every Ivri leader acknowledged, not everyone wants to experiment. But that’s fine — there are already plenty of people who do. Their biggest problem is finding a space to fit them all in one room.
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How the Kefalonia killings led to the World War II massacre of Greece’s Jews
The Holocaust in Greece has always occupied a strangely small place in the broader memory of World War II. This is despite the fact that Greece lost somewhere around 80 to 90 percent of its prewar Jewish population, one of the highest proportions in occupied Europe, and that Thessaloniki had been one of the great Jewish cities of the continent. The destruction was so complete that it is easy today to visit Greece, even repeatedly, without quite appreciating what disappeared.
I was reminded of this on Kefalonia, an Ionian island where we spent part of this summer. We try to get to a Greek island most years, but this trip unexpectedly led into a history that connected the collapse of Fascist Italy, a largely forgotten German massacre of Italian soldiers and the final destruction of much of Greek Jewry.
In September 1943, two months after Italy overthrew Benito Mussolini — then abandoning its alliance with Hitler and signing an armistice with the Allies — German forces on Kefalonia turned against their former partners. The roughly 12,000 men of the Italian Acqui Division resisted German demands to surrender their weapons. After defeating them, the Germans executed thousands of Italian prisoners in one of the largest massacres of prisoners of war of World War II.
But Italy’s defeat had another consequence that was ultimately more important for Greece. Much of the country had been under Italian occupation since 1941, and Italian authorities, despite being Fascist occupiers, had generally resisted German efforts to deport Jews from the territories they controlled. This produced the strange situation in which Jews could sometimes find relative safety by moving from German-occupied Greece into Italian-held territory.
On Sept. 8, 1943, that protection effectively disappeared.
As German troops moved to disarm and, on Kefalonia, massacre their former Italian allies, they also took control of Italy’s occupation zones. Jewish communities that had survived the first years of the war were suddenly exposed to the machinery of the Holocaust. The German takeover of Italian Greece thus links two histories that are usually remembered separately: the slaughter of the Acqui Division and the destruction of the remaining Jews of Greece.
The Ionian islands show with unusual clarity what followed.
Corfu, north of Kefalonia, had a Jewish community stretching back centuries. In June 1944, the Germans rounded up nearly all of its roughly 1,800 Jews and deported them, principally to Auschwitz. Few survived. On Zakynthos, just south of Kefalonia, the Germans also demanded the Jews. There, Metropolitan Chrysostomos and Mayor Loukas Karrer refused to provide the requested list, while local residents hid their Jewish neighbors. All 275 Jews survived.
Kefalonia had once had a Jewish community of its own, but most had left before the war, so there was no comparable population remaining when the Germans took over. Within a short distance, then, three Ionian islands produced three different Jewish outcomes: a community destroyed on Corfu, an entire community saved on Zakynthos and a community on Kefalonia that had largely departed before the Germans arrived.
Behind these island stories was the much greater catastrophe of Thessaloniki, the largest city in northern Greece. Before the war, roughly 50,000 Jews lived there, descendants largely of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. They had helped make Thessaloniki one of the great Jewish centers of Europe, a city whose Jewish identity was woven deeply into its commercial and cultural life. Beginning in 1943, the Germans deported the overwhelming majority to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most were murdered.
This is part of what makes the Greek Holocaust so striking. Jews had lived in the Greek world for more than 2,000 years. The Romaniote communities were among the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, predating the arrival of the Sephardim by many centuries. In a few years, most of that world was destroyed. Of roughly 72,000 to 77,000 Jews in prewar Greece, a small fraction survived.
On Kefalonia, some memory of the Italian killings still survives. Kosmas Theodoratos, a 30-year-old islander, told me a story passed down through a friend’s grandmother. Older villagers had claimed that after the massacre they could “smell the blood all the way to the village.”
How far away was it? “A few kilometers,” he said. Even he was skeptical. “It sounds unreal, to be honest,” Theodoratos said. “But that’s the quote my friend’s grandmother had said to us when we were younger.” The witnesses are almost all gone now. “The older generation that lived a little closer to it” talked about the massacre, he said. “There’s not a lot of them left now.”
The same, of course, is increasingly true of the generation that remembers the Jewish communities of Greece before their destruction.
Kefalonia therefore seems worth revisiting not simply because of what happened to the Italians here, extraordinary as that story is. September 1943 was a hinge in the occupation of Greece. Italians who had been occupiers became victims of the Germans; Jews who had found a precarious refuge under Italian rule lost it; and communities that had existed for centuries suddenly found themselves facing deportation and extermination.
The results can still be traced from island to island: Kefalonia, Corfu, Zakynthos. And beyond them stands Thessaloniki, where an entire Jewish civilization was almost erased. Europe seems placid today. But evidence of the tempest is never far from view, for anyone willing to look.
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How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again
At the end of the 1941 school year, 13-year-old Yitshkok Rudashevski went to meet his friend from the Soviet youth movement. Their confab, and that clear summer day, was soon disturbed by the howl of a siren and the raining down of bombs.
“The street was full of smoke,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary. “It is war.”
On Sunday June 22, Nazis mobilized Operation Barbarossa and began their push toward Vilnius. That Rudashevski was determined to fight back could be credited, at least in part, to the book he had with him at the start of the offensive, which he planned to share with his comrades.
“I carry with me Der Giber in Keytn [The Hero in Chains],” the Yiddish translation of Les Misérables, Rudashevski wrote, “from which we will read together about Gavroche, the child of the Paris proletariat who fell on the barricades alongside the adult fighters.” (Gavroche died in the street fighting of the 1832 June rebellion in Paris; Rudashevski would survive Lithuania’s June uprising, and its ensuing antisemitism, to be murdered by Nazis in the Ponary massacre of 1943.)
It makes sense that Rudashevski, a dedicated Marxist and product of the Lithuanian Yiddish school system, would find a kind of role model in Victor Hugo’s gamin.
That Les Misérables in translation was popular among Yiddish-speaking socialists — it was serialized in the Forverts in our first year of publication — is itself unsurprising, given the book’s preoccupations with social justice. That its ethic was a fundamentally Christian one seemed to matter less than its overall message: a universal concern for “the wretched” and vulnerable, particularly children, women and the formerly incarcerated. This last factor may have resonated deeply with Baderekh, a Yiddish theater troupe composed of displaced persons, who staged the story in 1946 Berlin.
I’ve been reading Les Misérables for about a year now (it’s long and brimming with Hugo’s commentary on post-Napoleonic revolts, essays on the argot of the underworld and digressions on Parisian city-planning) and was successfully influenced to buy a nosebleed seat to the arena tour of the musical at Radio City last Friday. Watching the megawatt melodrama, it occurred to me that in much the same way Jews conquered the Christmas song catalogue, the Jewish creative team behind Les Miz brought Hugo’s doorstopper to the world — and arguably made it more Christian.
Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, born in France to Hungarian refugee parents who lost much of their family in the Holocaust, and the Tunisian-born Sephardic lyricist Alain Boublil created a concept album and early stage version that was Gallic in the extreme, and so more concerned with Enlightenment concepts than an enlightened human soul.
But when the show was brought to British shores, Boublil, Schönberg and original directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn reimagined the structure, adding a prologue with Valjean and the bishop, who gifts him silver candlesticks to restart his life after 19 years slaving as a convict at the shipyard in Toulon.
The revamp, which brought on journalist Herbert Kretzmer as lyricist, gave the bloodhound Inspector Javert a new solo — beloved by Ben Shapiro — where he connects his unyielding policing to the watchful stars and the God who punished Lucifer for his challenge to the heavenly order.
Valjean prays. A lot. And it ain’t the Shema.
The key innovation of the musical may well be how it sets Valjean and Javert in opposition. Whereas in the novel, Javert seems to have no God save the rigid rule of law, in the show his dogma derives from what its creatives recently, and reductively, referred to in a New York Times interview as an “Old Testament” form of justice. His foil, Valjean, the redeemed man of mercy, stands in for the New Testament’s core of forgiveness, which the show clearly favors.
If it’s odd that the presentation of this false binary was trusted to a Jew named Herbert Kretzmer, it hasn’t seemed to deter many Jews from embracing the show as they once did the novel.
A couple of years ago, I attended a virtual Rosh Hashanah service that used the musical’s final takeaway, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” as its thematic thrust. (It was a bit much for me.) It would make just as much sense — though it would be cringe in the extreme — to deploy the show for a Yom Kippur sermon on atonement.
The Jewish affinity for the material is helped by that Hugo, unlike so many — probably most — of his contemporaries is not marred by antisemitism. He inveighed against pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, warning in an English paper that “Christianity is martyrizing Judaism” and publishing a not-so-subtle allegory about the Spanish Inquisition to drive the point home. I’d say he was doing the Emile Zola thing before it was cool, but it was never particularly popular to speak out in this way in the French Third Republic.
While Kretzmer was born in South Africa to refugees from a later wave of Tsarist pogroms, he and the other Jewish writers of the Les Miz musical do not seem to have been particularly observant. The strongest hint of the cultural inheritance is in the klezmeresque intro to “Master of the House,” a theme of the penny-pinching innkeeper Thénardier. (If that’s problematic, Thénardier later makes an antisemitic remark when the tune is reprised, implying he’s not Jewish himself.)
The show nonetheless points to universal values legible to Jews and, indeed, the world. Like Fiddler before it, Les Misérables is a global phenomenon not on the merits of its specificity, but for how it draws on a common humanity. The Yiddish left of the 20th century read the book; protesters in Hong Kong and China can now be heard singing the musical’s anthem of angry men.
As Hugo wrote in his introduction to the book, “so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.”
It may be immodest, but history, and his own adapters, have proven him right.
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