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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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In the Golan Heights, her people have been marginalized, persecuted and brutalized. She just wants to play hockey.
The documentary On Thin Ice recounts the complicated lives and often contradictory experiences of the Syrian Druze community living in the Golan Heights, which was annexed by Israel in 1981.
An estimated 25,000 Druze live in a handful of hardscrabble villages flanked by mountains and long stretches of desert. They identify as Syrians, but they are not Muslims, and they have a long history of being marginalized, persecuted, if not brutalized by radical Jihadists.
Set in Majdal Shams, the film centers, at least initially, on Aya, a 19-year-old Druze ice hockey player who desperately wants to join Israel’s all-woman ice hockey team, its first. She is qualified and the coaches want her on board. However, to compete internationally she needs an Israeli passport, which means she’ll self-identify as Israeli and will be called to serve in the IDF, an idea she is more than open to.
When her father says, “A passport will prevent a normal life,” she responds, “A passport will give me a normal life.”
Her father and especially her beloved Uncle Ayoub, a farmer and journalist, are vehemently opposed, viewing her ambition as a betrayal of their Syrian roots. Uncle Ayoub argues that their reputations will be besmirched and, far worse, so will hers. She will be stigmatized and shunned within her own community and will end up without friends, an eligible husband, or children.
This is a familiar conundrum facing a protagonist: What takes precedence — social expectations or personal dreams? In the end, will the culture triumph or the individual, and at what cost? The implicit feminist elements here can’t be ignored either. The unspoken assumption, at least as intimated by the uncle, is that there is nothing more important to a woman than marrying the right man.
The patriarchy here is not villainous. Father and uncle are sympathetic figures. They understand how difficult a decision this is for Aya, while she, a shy and insecure young woman, whose self-worth is tied up with ice hockey, appreciates where they’re coming from. The film’s title works well on both a literal and metaphorical level.
Filmmakers Udi Kalinsky and Irit Hod do a nice job capturing the complex inter-relationships, the fluidity of identity and the inevitability of change.
Making the film took three years, and the filmmakers incorporated events into the narrative as they unfolded in real time. Among the most significant was the controversy surrounding Israel’s construction of wind turbines in the Golan Heights.
Though these are intended as a progressive alternative energy source, many angry inhabitants, including Uncle Ayoub, say the over-sized turbines will destroy agricultural lands belonging to the already exploited and vulnerable Druze. The Kibbutzim and other Israeli villages, he asserts, do not want the turbines either and, far more insidious, the turbines planned for the Golan Heights are much larger and more invasive than those sprouting up in other Israeli regions. Whether or not this is true remains unclear.
In one of the film’s more unnerving scenes, a raucous protest winds through the ancient cobblestone streets of Majdal Shams. Enraged residents, some in western-style clothes, others in traditional garb, some on foot, others riding horses, and still others balancing themselves atop moving cars are all shouting, many waving the four-striped Druze flag. Israeli police converge on all sides spraying the crowd with tear gas.
Towards the end, though, the story takes a 180-degree turn when ISIS perpetrates a massacre against the Druze. Uncle Ayoub and his wife watch on their cell phone as a victim is dismembered while still alive.
The film fails to provide context or details about the violence and the events are confusing. We suddenly learn that, for many years, the Druze have identified, at least on some level, with the Israelis especially in the post-Oct. 7 days. We witness hordes of Golan Heights Druze storming the Syrian border and planting an Israeli flag in its soil and hear Aya and a friend assert that the IDF would defend them if they were assaulted by ISIS.
In the closing scene, Ayoub, who is being interviewed by a reporter, is asked how he would feel if a child of his wanted to join the IDF. At one time, he would have been appalled, but now he admits his views have shifted. “At least Israel is a democracy,” he reluctantly concedes.
On Thin Ice successfully dramatizes how politics and self-interest have evolved over a 55-year span in a Mideast tinderbox. The cinematography throughout is impressive and the music by Alberto Schwartz is haunting. Still, the film is disjointed. By the film’s end, the story about Aya’s determination to join the Israeli ice hockey team has completely disappeared.
More serious, unless the moviegoer is conversant in Druze history, a lot of Googling is required.
On Thin Ice makes its US premiere at the Other Israel: New Perspectives Film Festival on Nov. 11.
The post In the Golan Heights, her people have been marginalized, persecuted and brutalized. She just wants to play hockey. appeared first on The Forward.
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In Israel’s mixed cities, the future of coexistence is already being tested
Human ingenuity has equipped us with technology to connect individuals in a way once unimaginable. But, in the past two decades, we have used that power to find ever more things that we hate about each other.
Since modern society has become remarkably proficient at manufacturing polarization, we need to learn from places where people already live alongside those they have been taught to regard as fundamentally different. Not because those places have solved the problem, but because they have no choice but to confront it.
Israel’s so-called mixed cities are among those places.
In Split: Life in the Israeli Mixed Cities, filmmakers Shady Srour and Dina Zvi Riklis examine the fragile arrangements through which Jewish and Arab Israelis inhabit the same urban spaces. The documentary focuses on five cities — Acre (Akko), Ramla, Haifa, Lod (Lydda) and Jaffa — that are defined as “mixed” by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics because “a significant majority of Jewish residents lives alongside a significant minority of Arab residents.” Each of these cities, though, has a distinct history, demographics and political reality which resists the reassuring simplicity of the official designation.
Mixed implies that ingredients combine to produce something new. These cities are, however, more accurately described as shared, contested or, as the film’s title suggests, “split.” (The full title is in Arabic and Hebrew — Fasl Mukhtalat: Chatzuyot.) Their residents live along the same streets but do not necessarily inhabit the same understanding of what those streets mean. According to Adam Raz, one of many experts and residents interviewed in the film, families living a mere 100 meters apart often have an entirely different worldview because they consume completely opposing narratives — with a Jewish home watching Israel’s Channel 12 while an Arab neighbor watches Qatar’s Al Jazeera.
Artistic collaborators, Samira Saraya and Neta Weiner make music together in Jaffa to try to bridge the gap. Saraya sings a fragment of Hayim Nahman Bialik poem “To the Bird” about the beauty of Israel while on a car trip with Weiner. It lands poignantly and defamiliarized, given her Arab identity. She says “the word ‘mixed’ is taking two things and putting them together, but ‘blended’ means people live together and speak the language of both groups.” She describes Jaffa as “truly a mixed city.”
“It’s the only place,” she says, “where I can breathe and just be.”
In a country whose population is roughly four-fifths Jewish and one-fifth Arab, the question of how these communities live together is not incidental to Israeli democracy; it is fundamental to its survival. Srour and Riklis ask experts, including politicians, professors and theater directors, about the history of the conflict and the challenges facing the cities. Mostly they cut between historical footage of events and interviews they have shot with Arab and Jewish experts as well as locals of all genders and ages on their streets and homes. This constant weave of testimony across lived, cultural and political experience leads to a rich density of overlapping concern and anxieties, though it does mean that the cities blur into each other.
One interview takes place in a Ramla kitchen where Jalal Habit discusses the situation and his life with energy and passion all while sporting an “Ich bin hummussexuelle” t-shirt and preparing the food for his restaurant. He seems angry at the Jews, but in a chef’s businesslike way. He recounts how he was complaining to his friend that the Jews have taken everything from the Arabs, land, hummus, falafel, and how his friend demurred, no they haven’t taken anything, they are “building everything for us and soon they’ll leave and they’ll leave everything to us.”
The Hebrew word du-kiyum, coexistence, is invoked throughout the film. Beyond the Kulna Yachad school in Jaffa where children learn together, however, it mostly describes a hope or a transient memory rather than a concrete way of being. What makes Split compelling is its attention also to the conversations that coexistence often requires people not to have. Jewish and Arab neighbors may work together, maintain friendships and cooperate on municipal initiatives. They can agree about schools, garbage collection, traffic and the everyday business of keeping a city functioning. Yet the larger questions — of history, dispossession, national belonging and competing loyalties — remain unspoken. Split gives those questions a tentative voice.
The alternative to such imperfect arrangements has sometimes been catastrophic. Split does not draw the comparison, but when British India was partitioned in 1947, over 15 million people were displaced, and massacres killed hundreds of thousands. Neither in India nor the Middle East did partition eliminate competing identities. It converted them into borders, refugees and inherited grievances. Despite accepting the partition plan and taking billions of dollars in aid from America and the West, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has lurched from military coup to corrupt civilian governance without ever safeguarding the rights of women, LGBTQ individuals, or religious minorities.
The relative economic success, and demographic tolerance of Israel’s mixed cities has led to their own challenges. They contain communities with their own histories of war, displacement, and social transformation, particularly from the aftermath of World War II. The filmmakers catch a Jewish resident of Acre as she’s inspecting an abandoned bomb shelter. In a perfect distillation of traumatized Israeli Jewish identity she explains how she sees herself descended from the Shoah and from Ottoman Jews:
My personal story contains the story of my grandmother from Germany and that of my grandfather from the Jewish Quarter in ’48 and it’s a story that passes down, and it’s in my DNA. The experience of the surviving Jew, it’s an existential experience of a people and the desire to annihilate us. And we’re facing it again all over the world.
Meanwhile, different Arab families explain in affecting terms how their families were dispossessed by the State of Israel during the Nakba, from Haifa which became a battlefield, from Acre, and from Jaffa. Ghassan Mounir from Lod gives an extended account of the ongoing challenges placed in his way by the Jewish state: from the attacks on his family in 1948, to the refusal to give him the same building rights as the army veterans and Haredim who surround him. This is the historical context of a state that was nominally set up establishing rights “without distinction of religion or race” and “without domination or subjugation”
We have been in Lod since the 12th century. I grew up on this street, this is my home. [In 1948] the Jews … gathered [the whole village] in the square of the church and the mosque and expelled them to Abdullah. That march — thousands, thousands of people [were forced to make it] in the middle of July while fasting for Ramadan. They walked to Ramallah, some survived and some died.
Nothing of the present situation can be understood without those histories, however differently their residents describe them.
Edited down from a three-episode docuseries that premiered in Haifa, to a 90-minute documentary, Split is unhurried but urgent. It traces family histories as exemplars of different communities’ experiences and also the history of eruptions of urban violence throughout the history of the state. It calmly shows what it’s like to be in a minority where the majority is blasé about its ignorance of your culture.
At times, the movie veers close to despair — the heartfelt testimony of Ilham and Omar Siksik in Jaffa leaves it teetering on the edge. But their hope along with the testimony of Danny Rabinowitz (a Jewish anthropologist) and Mustafa Abbasi (an Arab-Israeli historian of Palestine) holds out the possibility that somehow rival national narratives might coexist in the same physical space. Rabinowitz says he still longs for hope, but without knowing exactly where to look for it. He is waiting for “leaders of vision and courage” from both sides. In the words of Abbasi:
There are those on both sides who believe that there is no shared future. I tell them, the future belongs to coexistence, and there is no solution other than mutual understanding.
When Hanna Safran and Nabila Espanioly — two veterans of the feminist struggle, one Jewish, one Arab — argue about political agency, Espanioly points out how obvious it is in the feminist context that freedom to be yourself is a sine qua non of being free politically. It’s a clear point and one given further depth and richness later by the testimony of Ayat Abu Shamis who is a mother, a resident of Jaffa, and an Arab who writes poetry in Hebrew. She reads her poem in Hebrew about coexistence as part of her interview.
Watching Split and some of the ways Arab-Israelis were treated — specifically how former soccer commentator and MK Zuheir Bahloul talked of his constituents’ rights — reminded me of Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous statement of emancipatory racism. The identity prescribed by the State of Israel for Arab-Israelis carries a philosophical contradiction as old as modern Jewish citizenship. In December 1789, during the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre articulated the bargain at the heart of Jewish emancipation: Jews should receive full rights as individuals but no separate political rights as a nation. The promise was equality. The price was the surrender of collective difference in the public sphere.
Israel reverses that historical equation in fascinating and uncomfortable ways. It was established to make Jewish collective identity politically sovereign. Yet within that Jewish state live Arab citizens who — until the passage of the 2018 Israeli Nation-State Law downgraded Arab identity in Israel from “equal” to “special” — had full rights as individuals, but whose own collective identity, history and national aspirations were, by and large, proscribed. The challenge is not merely to grant equal rights to individuals, essential though that is. It is to imagine a democracy capable of accommodating communities whose understandings of the state itself may be irreconcilable with each other.
In last month’s elections, Arab representation in the Knesset reached a record high, approximately one-sixth of its membership. Finally, Arab MKs are at a level approaching the proportion of Arab citizens in the electorate. That political presence matters. But parliamentary representation cannot by itself resolve the contradictions visible on a street in Lod or Jaffa. The novelist Amos Oz famously described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as a struggle between good and evil but as a tragedy of “right against right.” In that formulation he recognized that competing claims can possess equal moral force, even when they cannot both be satisfied completely.
Split brings that abstract proposition down to the municipal level, where coexistence is less a philosophical ideal than a daily negotiation. The film’s deeper question is not whether Jews and Arabs can learn to like one another. Some already do. Nor is it whether they can avoid discussing everything that divides them. Evidently, they sometimes must. It is whether a shared civic life can eventually become robust enough to accommodate the disagreements it currently suppresses.
The chef Habit is given the last word: “But I don’t want the Jews to leave. If the Jews leave, it won’t be the same place. Jews and Arabs have to live together, they can live together. If I weren’t optimistic, I would’ve stayed in Ramla.”
As the world perfects the technology and politics of polarization, Israel’s mixed cities offer neither an easy inspiration nor a comforting warning but something more useful: evidence that people can remain profoundly divided while still sharing responsibility for the places they call home. The future depends on learning how to live with our differences — especially when the people across the street have every intention of staying.
“Split: Life in the Israeli Mixed Cities” has its U.S. premiere as part of the Other Israel: New Perspectives Film Festival. It will show on Mon, Nov. 9 at 7:30 PM at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and again on Wed, Nov 11, 7:30 PM at the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue.
The post In Israel’s mixed cities, the future of coexistence is already being tested appeared first on The Forward.
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A staunch supporter of Israel, Hakeem Jeffries would lead a Democratic majority pushing for change in U.S. policy
(JTA) — When the next Congress convenes in January with a Democratic majority, it will likely be Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the pro-Israel Democrat from Brooklyn, who leads the House of Representatives.
As House Speaker, Jeffries would play a key role in setting the House’s legislative agenda at a time when many Democrats have taken more critical stances on Israel and AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. Jeffries himself has asserted that a “change in direction is needed” for the U.S.-Israel relationship.
His support for Israel and ties to AIPAC have angered a number of progressives who want to see party leadership apply greater pressure on the Israeli government. Advocates have blasted Jeffries for opposing an amendment to end U.S. military assistance to Israel and pressured him to reject AIPAC’s support and criticize its election spending.
Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of the progressive group New Jewish Narrative, told JTA that Jeffries will have to navigate leading a caucus that includes “a much larger group of members who really care about this and feel like they need to deliver for their voters” on broader Israeli-Palestinian foreign policy.
Susskind pointed to the Stop the Settlements Act introduced by Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro as an example of where Jeffries will face more pressure than in past years to bring bills on the Israeli-Palestinian issue to a floor vote.
“He’s not the far left, he’s not rolling out a DSA agenda,” Susskind said. “But I think it is going to be a different agenda — not only than, of course, what we’ve seen from Republican Congress, but even than we’ve seen from past Democratic Congresses.”
But Jeffries, who would be the first Black House speaker in U.S. history, has retained AIPAC’s support and voted against an immediate cutoff of military aid to Israel. He has fostered close ties with a number of Jewish organizations and leaders.
The Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island’s executive director praised Jeffries’ role in securing $1 million for the organization in 2024. Jeffries also secured $850,000 for the Brighton Beach-based Shorefront Jewish Community Council.
Mark Treyger, CEO of New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, called Jeffries a “dear friend” in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is an individual who, in my opinion, has been an unwavering ally to the Jewish community from his first day in Congress when I got to know him as a City Council member,” Treyger said.
Rabbi David Niederman, president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, told Williamsburg 365 that his relationship with Jeffries “spans more than two decades, and throughout his rise to national leadership, he has remained firmly connected to his roots, his district, and the communities he serves.”
Jeffries grew up in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for the close proximity of Black and Orthodox Jewish residents. Motivated in part by the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, he decided to attend law school to fight for “liberty and justice for all, in the purest possible way.” He served three terms in the New York State Assembly representing Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and parts of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
When Jeffries ran for Congress in 2012, he courted Jewish voters and drew endorsements from a number of Jewish leaders — including Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring at the end of his term next month, and ex-Mayor Ed Koch. At the time, those leaders expressed concerns about his opponent Charles Barron, who in 2009 compared conditions in Gaza to Nazi death camps. The following year, Barron called Israel’s government “the biggest terrorist in the world.” Nadler specifically referred to Barron’s Nazi comparison in his endorsement of Jeffries.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, now the party’s leader in the Senate, lauded Jeffries as a “true blue friend of Israel” in his 2012 endorsement. Koch, meanwhile, taped an ad for Jeffries that played on post-Shabbos Jewish radio, the New York Observer reported at the time.
“Jeffries is great on the issues: job creation, affordable housing, protection of Social Security, Medicare, and education,” Koch said in the ad. “Oh, did I mention Israel? He’s a fierce defender of Israel.”
Jeffries arrived in Congress at an uneasy time for Jews in New York City. In 2013, teens were targeting Orthodox Jews with “knockouts,” an effort to knock victims unconscious with a single blow. As a freshman representative, Jeffries joined a group of Black and Jewish leaders in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to denounce the “game.”
The following year, Jeffries condemned the stabbing of a Chabad-Lubavitch man at the Hasidic movement’s Crown Heights headquarters, and urged people to “stand with” the Jewish community, which he called “an important part of the fabric of Crown Heights, where I grew up.”
Jeffries’ support for Israel has included a total of eight visits to the country, including at least once as an Assembly member with the JCRC, and six congressional delegations led by a nonprofit affiliate of AIPAC, the most recent of which took place in August 2023.
During the 2014 Gaza war, Jeffries spoke at a rally in support of Israel outside the United Nations, declaring, “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!”
About five weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack, he did not mention a ceasefire but called for “a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people” at the pro-Israel rally held at the National Mall in Washington. On numerous occasions, he has affectionately called Jerusalem “the sixth borough” of New York City.
Progressives have taken issue with Jeffries’ pro-Israel stance over the years and with his endorsement from AIPAC, which got him the nickname “AIPAC Shakur” from radio host Charlamagne tha God.
Multiple pro-Palestinian protests have been held outside Jeffries’ offices, including one NYC-DSA demonstration in November 2023 in which protesters demanded that he “stop supporting genocide.”
Some of the democratic socialist candidates who will enter Congress in January indicated that they would need Jeffries to back certain policies — including pushing the Block the Bombs Act — to secure their support in the election for House Speaker. But those politicians’ leverage diminished after Democrats secured a large House majority last week, giving Jeffries room to lose some votes from DSA and DSA-aligned members and still secure the majority of votes cast for named candidates to become Speaker.
Still, Jeffries is facing pressure from the left on issues including Israel, as well as what critics perceive as insufficient resistance to the Trump administration. Some House Democrats have been “inundated” with calls from constituents urging them not to elect Jeffries, Axios reported, while a petition calling for a different Speaker — which was shared by actor Mark Ruffalo, who has been a vocal advocate for Palestinians — has garnered more than 1 million signatures.
California Rep. Ro Khanna said last week that he would press Jeffries to commit to holding votes on eliminating military aid to Israel, defunding the Iran war and advancing Medicare for All. (Jeffries told CNN on Wednesday that Democrats will seek to end the Iran war as part of a sweeping affordability agenda.)
Treyger said he is confident that Jeffries, who voted against the Massie amendment to cut military aid to Israel this summer, will not waver.
“The person that I know is never a person that bends to pressure,” Treyger said. He pointed out that Jeffries’ vote came less than a month after left-wing supporters chanted “You’re next!” when Jeffries’ face appeared on screens at Rep.-elect Claire Valdez’s victory party.
In September 2025, J Street, the liberal Middle East advocacy group, endorsed Jeffries, just two years after the group’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami challenged Jeffries over the congressman’s comments that U.S. military aid should “remain ironclad” and not be conditioned over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical judicial reform efforts.
“Our concern is that U.S. tax dollars shouldn’t be funding material and arms that facilitate the deepening of occupation and the permanent demise of a possible Palestinian state. That’s not in anyone’s security interest,” Ben-Ami said at the time.
Now, Jeffries is one of a dwindling group of Congress members supported by both AIPAC and J Street, two groups that went head-to-head in a number of races this year and have conflicting visions for military assistance and the U.S.-Israel relationship. He is also backed by Democratic Majority for Israel, whose CEO Brian Romick called Jeffries “a gifted consensus builder and a steadfast champion of the U.S.–Israel relationship” in an email to JTA.
In a statement to JTA on Thursday, Ben-Ami said that Jeffries “has been clear that, for the good of both Israelis and Palestinians, it is time for U.S. policy toward the Middle East to change.”
“We look forward to working with him to make that change a reality, including by passing the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, ending Trump’s war of choice with Iran, and ending unconditional military aid to Israel to ensure it is consistent with American laws and values,” Ben-Ami said.
Though Jeffries voted against the Massie amendment, he said that he would not be telling his colleagues how to vote, and wrote in a letter that “there are good faith reasons that will result in Members voting in a variety of different ways with respect to the amendment.” His letter also suggested that a new security arrangement after the current Memorandum of Understanding expires in 2028 could end direct military subsidies. Trump last week said he would wind down defense assistance to Israel, and Netanyahu has indicated he is on board with transitioning to a relationship where the two countries’ militaries remain closely aligned, but in which Israel does not depend on U.S. money.
When reached for comment, AIPAC pointed to its statement on X congratulating both Jeffries and Schumer “on the resounding victories for their caucuses.” It did not respond to a question about his support from J Street or view on military aid.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A staunch supporter of Israel, Hakeem Jeffries would lead a Democratic majority pushing for change in U.S. policy appeared first on The Forward.
