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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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I come from a long line of Jewish Bundists. Now, Molly Crabapple is part of our family.
My grandparents live in a small apartment in Santa Monica. It has white walls and wood floors and is full of light. The living room window faces the street, and my grandma, Kathy, likes to poke her head out and talk to her neighbors, many of whom moved here after the Palisades fire, just like them.
To me, the Palisades house where my grandparents lived for 60 years always felt frozen in time. While opulent mansions sprung up on their street, their house served as a reminder of the days when a humble community college English professor (my grandpa, Marvin) could buy property in those idyllic, quiet, near-enough-to-smell-the-ocean streets. It was filled with books and family photographs. The living room mantle was covered in beach glass, sea-shells and surf paraphernalia, reminders of Kathy’s 1950s Malibu surf career that was immortalized in my great-grandfather’s novel Gidget, which inspired a series of books, a movie and a TV show.
Marvin’s office was filled with hundreds of Yiddish books with multi-colored spines and black-and-white photos, some of which showed his Bundist father in Polish prisons. As a child, I would scan the spines of fat history books with frightening titles like The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 and Never Say Die! Printed out and pinned to the wall was a quote by Marek Edelman, the Bundist second commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed & never the oppressors!”
The Bund was a socialist Jewish political party, at one point the most popular in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. The party was founded on the premise of doikayt, or hereness, the belief that Jews deserved to live in freedom and dignity wherever they happened to be. In practice, this meant that the Bund ran a complex network of schools, self-defense squads, athletic clubs, literary journals, unions and local courts, designed to celebrate Jewish life and protect Jews from ever-surging antisemitic hostility. Knowing that my great-grandfather and namesake, Rubin Zuckerman, was a Bundist meant knowing that he was secular, proudly Jewish, believed firmly in egalitarian values, and was critical about the founding of Israel.
During the pandemic, I would sit in Marvin and Kathy’s overgrown garden, six feet away next to a rusted exercise bike. I would practice my Yiddish by reading aloud postcards sent from some young woman Marvin thought was the greatest — Molly Crabapple.
Molly began interviewing Marvin for her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, seven years ago. She has a resume that would make anyone’s head spin. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and her journalistic output has covered Occupy Wall Street, Syrian rebels, and Guantanamo Bay. She’s won two Emmys and was nominated for a National Book Award.
Marvin told me about her with glowing eyes, and I responded with the type of disinterest reserved for recommendations from elder family members. OK, yes, there’s this young woman, she cares about the Bund, she makes art. But I too was a young woman who cared about the Bund and made art, and the narcissism of small differences precluded any real enthusiasm.
In 2026, with my grandparents’ Palisades sanctuary in ashes, I came to their house with a galley copy of Molly’s book. I had received it in the mail a few days earlier, and was quickly stripped of any skeptical haughtiness. Molly was describing a world, an ideology and a sensibility I knew so dearly and intimately from Marvin and Kathy. I had never seen this world so well described, neatly explaining concepts I have failed to adequately convey to even my closest friends.
I was eager to show Marvin the book, hear what Molly had gotten right or wrong, and share in the strange melancholic joy that comes from jewels of truth surviving over time, even as the physical, lived experience is washed away. With our personal archive up in smoke — the letters written by my great-grandparents, the stray notes, the marginalia in books toted from Poland to the Bronx to the Palisades — Molly’s book had a lot to live up to.
We sat on the couch and Marvin licked his finger to flip through the first pages. He went down the opening “Cast of Characters,” which outlines major players in Bundist history.
“Rafael Abramovich — I met him,” he said. “Meyer London — my father was in a picture with him.”
At 93, Marvin struggles to read without reading glasses and a dentist-grade clip-on magnifying glass. I read the introduction aloud to him and he recognized himself as the “octogenarian Yiddish scholar” who sang “partisan hymns” to Molly.
I continued to read aloud — about Molly’s own connection to her Bundist great-grandfather, her experience with leftist organizing, the overwhelming outpouring of support when she wrote about the Bund for the New York Review of Books, and her travels to the former Pale of Settlement, Ukraine and Gaza.
Despite my best intentions, my voice broke when I read this line: “The Bundists built alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today.”
I turned to Marvin and he was weeping as well.
“It’s true,” he said, “they were beautiful, beautiful people.”
“Are you two crying?” Kathy called in disbelief from the kitchen.
In Santa Monica, my grandpa’s office is inside of a closet. When I first got the news that the Palisades house had burned down, I emailed David Mazower, the curator at the Yiddish Book Center. I wanted to know if he could help me replace Marvin’s Yiddish books. Over the course of several months, he generously mailed nearly 100 books to us. They have strangers’ names written on their inside covers.
Feteshizing books
Family history embeds itself in your psyche through roundabout means. Marvin picked me up from school every Wednesday from the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated high school. He would buy me ice cream and listen to my favorite CD’s — The Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel, which sounded brand new to him since he stopped listening to popular music after Benny Goodman and prefers classical to anything else. He was my caring friend, who prioritized my own curiosity over anything else. Words like Bund, Yiddish, democratic socialism, Poland, the Holocaust, Zionism entered my subconsciousness, but I didn’t recognize the particular bent of Judaism I was born into until my later teens, when I started to seek out my own community.
Marvin urged me to attend the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program for high school students in 2015. Stepping inside their shtetl-inspired wooden building deep in lush Western Massachusetts was the first time my Yiddishist, Bundist history had a context. I recognized a Jewishness based in literature. A Jewishness based in solidarity and multiculturalism, without borders or armies. Today, my great-grandparents, Manye & Rubin, are featured in the permanent exhibit curated by David Mazower. Their picture stands above a bookshelf with Yiddish translations of Darwin, Marx and George Brandes’ literary criticism, and a full set of Guy de Maupassant and Jack London. Next to the books is a video of Marvin, describing how his parents, although they had no formal education and were garment workers, read all the time. When I tell friends that my great-grandparents are in an exhibition, they ask what they achieved.
“They liked to read,” I say, with my heart full of pride. Their values speak to me as loud as any accomplishment.
“Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together,” Molly writes in her book, “until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions.”
“Jews fetishized books,” Molly writes elsewhere, describing the “gluttony” for knowledge most working class Eastern European Jews nourished.
Marvin is often critical of any work describing his history, but as we read the first 30 pages of Here Where We Live Is Our Country aloud, he had little to say other than brief exclamations of excitement and agreement. Molly’s writing style is full of delicious and evocative details that allow us to fully inhabit this vanished world. As we read about how Polish borders were drawn and re-drawn, Marvin told me about how he would fill out forms for his parents when he was a child.
“The forms would ask when were you born,” he said, “well, they didn’t really know. OK. Then, the forms ask where you were born. They would shrug and look at each other, saying, ‘Poland? Russia? Was it Russia then? Was it Poland?’
“Then the form would ask, what is your profession. They would say ‘operator.’ They meant sewing machine operator, but as a boy, I just thought, what’s wrong with these people? They don’t know when they were born, they don’t know where they were born, and they’re telling me ‘operator’ is a real job?”
Molly and I share the same generational gap from our Bundist great-grandfathers. Both of us have parents who are not Jewish. And we are both women. Her perspective about female psychology, sexuality and experience allowed me to relate to Bundist history from a new axis. She writes about women who lost their virginity or had sex with multiple men in one day while surviving in the Warsaw Ghetto. She brings Pati Kremer to the forefront over her better known husband, the official founder of the Bund, Arkady Kremer, starting with Pati’s abandonment of her bourgeois upbringing and ending with a visit to her unmarked mass grave in Poland. Molly articulates the pull that many women, including myself, feel to “[subsume themself] in the domestic sphere that takes so many women out of historical record, while sometimes compensating them with private joys”
Women in Here Where We Live Is Our Country crush on their “family maid with sapphic fervor,” have long noses that “a male comrade mentioned unkindly in his memoirs,” make men their projects, sustain relationships with incarcerated men, or sometimes, “never married… had no lovers… just worked for the Bund.” She describes Sophia Dubnova’s efforts to disseminate birth control and lecture series about a woman’s right to orgasm. A non-Jewish Polish Socialist ally woman hides a message in her lipstick case. Abortion happens inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where many women were unwilling to risk bringing a life into such terrifying circumstances. It’s thrilling to hear these subjects written about so candidly, with no sense of shame or secrecy. I realize that in some ways, only a woman from my generation can do this.
A family affair
This past New Year’s Day, my parents and siblings crowded into Marvin and Kathy’s cramped living room. We ate the pastries Kathy had carefully assembled until the atmosphere abruptly shifted from friendly to tense. My father, a sociology professor, admitted he was planning on going to an academic conference in Israel. Although all of our family leans heavily left, my father feels a more profound connection to Israel. He lived there and worked on a kibbutz for several years.
My dad and I fell into the kind of argument many children have had with their parents since Oct. 7th, 2023. Despite fully knowing our shared values, we couldn’t help accusing the other of representing extremes: My dad must believe war crimes and genocide are legitimate means of self defense; I must believe Jews don’t deserve their own country. Marvin intervened thoughtfully, trying to bring our commonality to the forefront. Repeatedly, he referenced the Bund.
The Bund’s story is able to sidestep so many claustrophobic tropes around Zionism. Their devotion to Jewish safety and cultural autonomy leaves no room for accusations of antisemitism. If nothing else, they prove a point that bears urgent repeating for Jews and non-Jews alike — there has never been a singular Jewish consensus on the necessity of our own ethnostate. Like the Warsaw Ghetto fighters Molly resurrects in her book, like my own family, Jews have always argued about the best way forward.
I take enormous comfort reading Bundist leader Henryk Erlich’s 1933 speech, one that Marvin shared with me a few years ago when I was full of desperation about the atrocities unfolding in Gaza. Reprinted in Molly’s book, his words are clear as ever: “Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all nations.”
A strange sense of ownership
A few days after finishing Molly’s book, I met her at Canyon Coffee, and the two of us sat on the sidewalk while the east side creatives meandered by.
“I feel this strange sense of ownership over your book,” I said.
“You should,” said Molly, “without your grandfather’s encouragement, I would have never been able to finish it.”
I was overwhelmed by a new feeling. Here we were, chatting about the hectic nature of her upcoming book tour and the stress I’ve been feeling as a bridesmaid for my friend getting married next month. Against all odds, the movement that united our great-grandparents created a thread strong enough to find us sitting together. I felt that Molly was family.
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‘Center of Gravity for Global Terrorism’: US Lawmakers Spotlight Surging Jihadist Terror Threat in Africa
Islamic State – Central Africa Province released documentary entitled “Jihad and Dawah” covering group’s campaigns in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and battles against Congolese and Ugandan armies. Photo: Screenshot
US lawmakers this week raised alarm bells over the rising terrorist threat from Africa, advocating for continued American support for African nations fighting Islamists as the continent becomes the center of global terrorism.
The US Senate Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy, which is part of the larger Foreign Relations Committee, held a hearing in which legislators highlighted the importance of combating terrorist groups in Africa while jousting over President Donald Trump’s approach to the continent.
“Today, the center of gravity for global terrorism has shifted to Africa. It has shifted partly and in fact precisely because of the export of violent Islamic terrorism from the Middle East as well as because of incredibly complicated and specific local dynamics,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs the subcommittee.
“Across the Sahel in West Africa and in East Africa, terrorist groups are expanding, embedding, and operating with increasing capability,” Cruz added. “ISIS affiliates and al-Qaeda-linked groups are growing, controlling territory, and exploiting weak governance.”
The Sahel region runs 3,360 miles across the African continent, dividing the Sahara Desert to the north from the tropical southern savannahs. Terrorist hot spots in recent years in the region have included Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, where, Cruz noted, “JNIM [Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin], and Islamic State in the Sahel have all expanded. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, ISIS West Africa, and Fulani extremists are mass slaughtering Christians.”
In November, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point released a study documenting that in 2024, 86 percent of all terrorism-related deaths occurred in just 10 countries, with seven of them in Africa and five in the Sahel. The researchers identified JNIM as being behind 83 percent of the killings.
Describing the threats in the Horn of Africa region, Cruz said that, in Somalia, al-Shabaab “targets Americans and threatens US personnel and partners in East Africa, all while receiving support from the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.”
“In region after region, terrorist groups are outpacing the ability of local governments to respond,” he added. “The failures threaten our interest globally and endanger the American homeland. The threat is rapidly growing and demands attention.”
The Texas senator also took time in his opening remarks to criticize former US President Joe Biden’s approach to Africa.
“For too long, however, Africa was treated as a theater where we didn’t have interests. Presidential administrations either ignored it or used it as a playground for self-indulgent ideological experiments,” Cruz said. “The latter problem was particularly acute during the previous administration. That mismatch allowed terrorist groups to expand and global adversaries, in particular Russia, China, and Iran, to intervene and undermine American interests. Those dynamics now threaten US interests, our allies, and ultimately the American homeland.”
After concluding, Cruz allowed Sen. Cory Booker (NJ), the top Democrat on the subcommittee, to offer his own assessment.
“What we are discussing today is not far away. It’s not disconnected from American life. It’s not some side issue we can afford to regulate to the margins of our senatorial and administrative focus,” Booker said. “Africa is not peripheral to the national security of the United States and to the urgencies we face.”
Booker added that, earlier this year, “the US intelligence community assessed that Africa has become ‘a focal point for the global Sunni Jihadist movement.’ That is not a passing warning. That is a flashing red light.”
Echoing Cruz’s concerns, Booker noted that “al-Shabaab remains a deadly and determined force who has killed civilians, killed Americans, threatened US interests, and plotted a 9/11 style attack against the United States.” He also described how “ISIS Somalia is emerging as a more significant node in the broader ISIS network with demonstrated intent and capability to threaten beyond the region, including against the United States.”
The senator went on to discuss the Sahel, pointing to how “in the Lake Chad Basin, IS West Africa and Boko Haram continue to exploit borders that are weak, states that are strained, and communities that have been failed by their governments for far too long. So, let’s be clear, counterterrorism in Africa is not charity. It is not a distraction. It’s not optional for our country. It is a core American national security interest.”
Booker named the factors that fueled terrorist groups in the region, saying, “They feed on corruption. They feed on broken governance. They feed on despair. They feed on the absence of state legitimacy, the weakness of institutions, the pain of exclusion, and the vulnerability of young people who see too few pathways to dignity, work, and hope.”
Emphasizing that “military strikes alone cannot prevent extremist groups from returning the moment attention shifts and the dust settles,” the New Jersey Democrat argued that combating the threat takes “strategy, patience, partnerships, diplomacy, development, and security working together.”
Booker then criticized the Trump administration for its approach to Africa, describing it as “retreat dressed up as resolve,” in part due to “diminished diplomatic presence” across the continent.
“The Trump administration is not delivering a whole-of-government strategy. It is delivering a whack-a-mole policy dressed up as counterterrorism,” Booker argued. “It is fragmented. It is reactive. It is too often militarized and under-strategized. Because the future of American security is bound up with the future of the stability, prosperity, and partnerships we have on the African continent, we need a strategy that reflects the true conditions on the ground and not only frames Africa as a problem but actually sees the real framing that it is an extraordinary asset.”
Cruz defended the Trump administration’s efforts in Africa.
“As I’ve said, one of the reasons for these hearings is to ensure that the administration officials have the opportunity and the platform to articulate President Trump’s approach to Africa. For too long, US policy has treated Africa as a secondary theater,” Cruz said. “The Biden administration withdrew US forces from Niger, which was a key foothold in the region that is the epicenter of global terrorism. That assumption is no longer tenable for a range of reasons.”
Cruz said that Trump “personally met with 13 African heads of state in his first year in office. But too often there is nonetheless a lazy assumption that the US is disengaging from Africa.”
Nick Checker, senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Africa Affairs, testified before the committee.
“Africa will play an important role in America’s economic future. The continent holds vast critical minerals, energy resources, and tremendous human capital,” he said. “However, these opportunities cannot be fully realized amid persistent instability in parts of the continent, including terrorist threats, which continue to affect US interests.”
Checker described the limited nature of the administration’s approach.
“Our counterterrorism posture in Africa is narrowly focused and aligned with US national security priorities. The primary objective is clear: We will protect the homeland from threats while safeguarding US citizens and commercial interests abroad,” Checker said. “Groups affiliated with ISIS and al-Qaeda remain active in the Sahel, Nigeria, and parts of East Africa. These threats are real, but our response must be disciplined.”
On April 16, troops in Nigeria killed 25 fighters in the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terror group during a failed attack in the Borno state.
“We will not pursue large-scale, indefinite military engagements, or nation building efforts,” Checker said. “Instead, we are adopting a targeted approach that emphasizes intelligence sharing and limited, high impact security cooperation with partners who demonstrate both capability and political will.”
Regarding the Sahel, Checker said “a region that accounted for 5-10 percent of terrorism-related deaths a decade ago, now represents more than 50 percent. Despite significant American engagement, the strategic picture demonstrates that open-ended, aid-centric approaches have not delivered sustainable security outcomes. This is why a fundamental rethink is necessary.”
In his conclusion, Checker noted that “our approach is grounded in respect for sovereignty and realism about political conditions on the ground. We engage governments as they are, not as we wish them to be.”
Monica Jacobson, senior official for the Bureau of Counterterrorism, also testified and explained how the administration’s approach was guided by three core principles: neutralizing terrorist threats before they reached the US, supporting regional partners instead of replacing them, and defending critical supply chains.
“Moroccan forces previously trained by the Bureau of Counterterrorism now train Sahelian forces across sub-Saharan Africa, using US-provided curricula,” Jacobson said. “This is precisely the model we seek to expand, with regional partners leading and sustaining regional security efforts.”
Jacobson continued, “We also recognize that, in many parts of Africa, radical Islamic terrorists target civilians based on their Christian faith. As President Trump and Secretary Rubio have made clear, we will respond to atrocities and violence against Christians, including those who knowingly direct, authorize, fund, support, or carry out violations of religious liberty. Our counterterrorism efforts have included directly targeting the terrorists responsible for this violence, and we likewise hold governments’ feet to the fire when they fail to address terrorist threats that undermine religious freedom.”
Former Nigerian Information Minister Lai Mohammed responded to the hearing on Wednesday when speaking at Abbey College in Cambridge.
“Now, people say that there is religious persecution in Nigeria and that there is genocide against Christians,” Mohammed said. “It’s not true. It is fake news.” He defended Nigeria as fostering a culture that promotes interfaith tolerance.
Chigozie Ubani, a fellow at the Institute of Security Nigeria, has discussed Boko Haram’s attacks.
“Their target is to terrorize, maim, and displace people,” Ubani told Nigeria’s Punch News. “Once they displace them, of course, they occupy the space. So, for as long as that is not achieved, they can only retreat and come back.”
Last month, multiple terrorist attacks in Nigeria’s Maiduguri killed 25 people and injured more than 200.
“Their goal is to take over our territories,” Ubani said. “When they take over, everybody there will submit to their religious authority. That’s what it is.”
Earlier this week, officials from both Mali and Niger accused their neighboring countries of supporting terrorism. At the sidelines of a security forum in Senegal, Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop claimed that other countries were “harboring terrorist groups” and allowing them to operate against Mali. Niger officials have previously accused France of backing terrorism and faced criticism for allegedly concealing the severity of Islamist terror attacks.
On Saturday, US Africa Command released a statement announcing strikes had occurred on Friday, targeting Islamic State terrorists in the mountain regions of Puntland, the Easternmost state of Somalia. The attacks targeted territory approximately 30 miles southeast of the port city of Bosaso in the Bari region. No casualty numbers were announced.
On Wednesday, Puntland forces displayed the corpses of more than 10 suspected Islamic State fighters killed in the strikes on the Jaceel Valley area of the Calmiskaad mountain range.
Video shared from the scene showed bodies in what appeared to be a crater from an airstrike.
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Iran’s Foreign Minister Arrives in Pakistan, Trump Expects Offer Satisfying US Demands
Army soldiers patrol a road as Pakistan prepares to host US and Iran for the second round of peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, April 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Waseem Khan
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi arrived in the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Friday to discuss proposals for restarting peace talks with the US, offering some optimism for an end to the eight-week war that has killed thousands and sown turmoil in global markets.
US President Donald Trump told Reuters on Friday that Iran plans to make an offer aimed at satisfying US demands, but said he did not yet know what the offer entailed.
When asked who the US was negotiating with, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that, but we’re dealing with the people that are in charge now.”
It remained unclear whether Araqchi would meet this weekend with US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, or whether a meeting would happen later.
After a US bombing campaign and Iran‘s blocking of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the two countries are at a costly impasse, with Iran‘s oil exports blocked and US gasoline prices at multi-year highs. The US and Israel also destroyed most of Iran’s navy and air defenses, killed much of the regime’s leadership, and significantly degraded its nuclear, missile, and drone programs.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Witkoff and Kushner would leave for Pakistan on Saturday morning for talks with Araqchi. Pakistani sources said Araqchi was not slated to meet US negotiators in Islamabad, a message echoed by an Iran state television reporter, who said Pakistan could convey Iran‘s concerns for ending the war.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry confirmed Araqchi’s arrival in Islamabad, where a heavy military and paramilitary presence was visible across the central parts of the city.
Araqchi went straight into a meeting with Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar at the Serena Hotel, where the first round of talks with the US was held, two government sources said.
Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani pledged his country’s support for mediation efforts by Pakistan in a phone call with Trump, Qatar’s state news agency reported.
Leavitt struck an upbeat tone, saying the US had seen some progress from the Iranian side in recent days and hoped more would come this weekend.
She added that US Vice President JD Vance, who earlier this month led a first round of unsuccessful talks with Iran to end their war, is ready to travel to Pakistan to join the negotiations if they prove successful.
Araqchi wrote on X that he was visiting Pakistan, Oman, and Russia to coordinate with partners on bilateral matters and consult on regional developments. The tour will include consultations on the latest efforts to end the war, Iran‘s Foreign Ministry spokesperson later told state media.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a briefing earlier on Friday that Iran had a chance to make a “good deal” with the United States.
“Iran knows that they still have an open window to choose wisely,” he said. “All they have to do is abandon a nuclear weapon in meaningful and verifiable ways.”
Reports on Araqchi’s trip in Iranian state media and the Pakistani sources made no mention of Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of Iran‘s parliament, who was the head of its delegation at the talks earlier this month.
The Iranian parliament’s media office denied a report that Qalibaf had resigned as head of Iran‘s negotiating team, and added that there was no new round of talks scheduled yet.
Pakistani sources said earlier that a US logistics and security team already was in place in Islamabad for potential talks.
The last round of peace talks had been expected to resume on Tuesday but never took place, with Iran saying it was not yet ready to commit to attending and a US delegation led by Vance never leaving Washington.
Trump unilaterally extended a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday to allow more time to reconvene the negotiators.
Oil prices remained volatile on Friday, as traders weighed potential disruption from the worst oil shock in history amid the prospect for further talks.
Brent crude futures settled at $105.33 a barrel, about 0.3% higher, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were down 1.5% at $94.40.
HEZBOLLAH DISMISSES LEBANON CEASEFIRE EXTENSION
On Thursday, Israel and Lebanon extended a separate ceasefire for three weeks at a White House meeting brokered by Trump.
The war in Lebanon, which Israel invaded last month to root out Iran‘s Hezbollah allies after the terrorist group fired across the border, has run in parallel with the wider Iran war, and Tehran says a ceasefire there is a precondition for talks.
There was little sign of an end to the fighting in southern Lebanon. Lebanese authorities reported two people were killed by an Israeli strike and Hezbollah downed an Israeli drone.
While the ceasefire that came into force on April 16 has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in southern Lebanon, where Israel has kept soldiers in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
“It is essential to point out that the ceasefire is meaningless in light of Israel’s insistence on hostile acts, including assassinations, shelling, and gunfire” and its demolition of villages and towns in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Fayyad said in response to the extension of the ceasefire.
Israel’s military said it had killed six armed Hezbollah members in southern Lebanon on Friday.
STRAIT OF HORMUZ BLOCKADE
Trump on Thursday said he wanted an “everlasting” agreement with Iran, while asserting the US had an upper hand in the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy shipping route.
The US has yet to find a way to open the strait, where Iran has blocked nearly all ships apart from its own since the start of the war eight weeks ago. Iran showed off its control this week by seizing two huge cargo vessels there.
Trump imposed a separate blockade of Iranian shipping last week. Iran says it will not reopen the strait until Trump lifts his blockade.
“Our blockade is growing and going global,” Hegseth told reporters on Friday.
“No one sails from the Strait of Hormuz to anywhere in the world without the permission of the United States Navy,” he said.
Only five ships crossed the strait in the last 24 hours, shipping data showed on Friday, compared to around 130 a day before the war. Those included one Iranian oil products tanker, but none of the vast crude-carrying supertankers that normally feed global energy markets.
Container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd also said one of its ships had crossed the strait, without giving details.