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A new film brings to life ‘the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust’
(New York Jewish Week) — While hiding from the Nazis, the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon began a series of autobiographical paintings and texts with a painfully simple description of her aunt, and namesake’s, suicide: “Scene 1: 1913. One November day, a young girl named Charlotte Knarre leaves her parents’ home and jumps into the water.”
Intense and memorable, that image is the launching point for “Life? or Theatre?”, a series of hundreds of gouaches Salomon made between 1940 and 1942. Best described as an “autobiographical play,” it features personal stories illustrated with vibrant paintings and cues for music. Salomon, in her 20s when she made the body of work, called it a “singspiel,” a play with music.
And now, a new film directed by French sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, delivers a cinematic representation of her best-known work. “Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden” will make its world premiere at Lincoln Center on Weds., January 18 as a centerpiece of the New York Jewish Film Festival.
The film lies somewhere between cinema and art installation: Aside from a brief opening and conclusion, Salomon’s expressive paintings take up most of the screen time. Sound design brings the paintings to life, as does the music Salomon indicated in her original script, along with text read by the actress Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread,” “Corsage”), who plays protagonist Charlotte.
“We didn’t want to make a pure documentary of her,” co-director Delphine Coulin told the New York Jewish Week. “What had never been done was to make a true film with the painting, the music and the text, and to imagine what Charlotte was visualizing when she was painting… Because the neighbors said they could hear her singing while she was painting.”
French sisters Muriel Coulin, left, and Delphine Coulin are co-directors of “Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden.” (Richard Schroeder)
These days, Salomon — who died at Auschwitz at age 26 in 1943 — is something of a cult favorite among art lovers and Jewish historians. In a 2017 New Yorker article, writer Toni Bentley notes that “Life? or Theatre?” is “the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust.” She is also sometimes compared to Anne Frank. Critics have noted this comparison does neither artist justice, distinguishing between the youthful directness of Frank’s writing as an adolescent in hiding with the more mature, sophisticated representations made by Salomon as a young artist.
Born in Berlin in 1917, Salomon grew up in a cultured German Jewish family. Her mother died when she was 8. She studied at the German capital’s prestigious Academy of Arts until the Nazis’ rise to power made it impossible for her to continue. In 1938, her father spent a brief period in an internment camp — after his release, he sent his daughter to stay with her grandparents in the south of France, where he hoped she’d be safe.
After Salomon’s arrival at Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1939, her grandmother attempted suicide and eventually died. Only then did Salomon learn that her mother had died by suicide as well, and that the women in her family had a history of depression (though it isn’t covered in the film, there is some evidence that her grandfather may have been abusive).
In “Life? or Theatre?” Salomon writes: “My life began when my grandmother ended hers, when I learned that my mother too had ended her life, and that deep down I felt the same predisposition to despair and death. I thought to myself: either I kill myself too, or I create something really crazy and extraordinary.”
For the next two years, Salomon did just that, creating some 1,300 paintings about her life in exile. She accompanied these paintings with text and musical cues that included Bach, Schubert, Mahler and the German anthem “Deutschlandlied,” creating an entire multimedia body of work.
As the Nazi grip tightened in France, Salomon, realizing the danger she faced, brought a box containing all her paintings to a friend, the town’s doctor. The film recounts what she tells him: “Take care of it. This is my whole life.” Just weeks later, Salomon, five months pregnant, was sent to Auschwitz, where she died on Oct. 10, 1943.
While Salomon’s work includes depictions of Nazis, antisemitism and persecution, the majority of “Life? or Theater?” — and therefore the film — is dedicated to the explosive inner life and autobiography of its creator. She explores suicide, Freudian lust, psychological distress, music, philosophy and her own artistic impulses.
Yet “Life? or Theatre?” is unmistakably a product of its time, and as such the film includes historical images of Hitler’s rise. Though the French filmmakers don’t identify as Jewish themselves, Delphine said that she and her sister have some Jewish family, and she noted the film’s content is more relevant than ever. “Antisemitism never did end, but now in France and in Europe, it is stronger and stronger than ever, since 1945,” she said. “We really see it and we talk to it nearly each day. We can’t ignore it.”
“With all these strange times we’re living in, Charlotte gives you strength, because she really crossed the times with a strong belief in art and love,” she added.
The film ends with astonishing footage from the early 1960s of Salomon’s father and stepmother, who survived hiding in the Netherlands, looking through their daughter’s paintings as they are interviewed about her. “I was surprised when I discovered her work,” says her father Albert Salomon. He had known nothing of his late daughter’s project until the couple visited Villefranche-sur-Mer after the war, hoping to find some traces of Charlotte’s life.
“The work is very, very vivid — very expressive of life in all its aspects,” said Delphine of Salomon’s art — and the Coulin sisters, in turn, were inspired to bring the work to a broader audience. In 2019, Muriel directed her first theater piece, “Charlotte,” a rendition of Salomon’s work for the stage that played in Paris at the Théâtre du Rond Point. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the production, the Coulins transposed their medium to film.
Delphine added that they were also drawn to what she called the “poignant story” of Salomon’s brief life, now immortalized by her singular creative impulse in the face of adversity.
“In difficult times — and her times were probably the most difficult times ever — she really believed in art,” she said. “How art makes you survive. How it can give you a piece of eternity. We wouldn’t speak about her this way if she had not been able to make this wonderful work.”
“Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden” will screen on Weds., January 18 at 12:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater at 165 West 65th St. For additional information on the New York Jewish Film Festival, which runs through Monday, January 23, click here.
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DSA racks up wins in Congress as Democratic party shifts on Israel
The Democratic Socialists of America is expected to grow its influence within the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, picking up at least five seats in the House, according to unofficial election results on Tuesday night. The gains mark major progress for the organization that is credited with the rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fierce critic of Israel.
Before Tuesday night, the organization had just two members in Congress: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Both are members of the Squad, the group of young, outspoken progressives formed in 2018 that challenged the party’s establishment and criticized U.S. support for Israel.
DSA members Chris Rabb, Donavan McKinney, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Melat Kiros were projected to win their House seats Tuesday night, preliminary election returns show.
A larger DSA caucus could give progressive Democrats greater leverage to pressure leadership into holding votes on Israel policy, an issue that has divided the party since Oct. 7, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, with intensifying concern over the war with Iran. The DSA gained influence during a period when Democrats had little power, as the minority in both the House and Senate, to shape the foreign policy of the United States. Regaining control of the House, and potentially the Senate, those divisions will become much harder for party leaders to avoid.
All of the DSA members heading to Congress have described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide and support cutting off military aid to Israel — positions increasingly held by Democrats outside the DSA as well.
President Trump announced Tuesday that the U.S. will end nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of the year, while still allowing Israel to buy U.S. weapons. But the national DSA goes further, leading a campaign for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel and passing a 2025 resolution explicitly opposing Zionism.
The victories follow a string of DSA wins over longtime incumbents during the Democratic primaries, buoyed by the victory of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor last June. Two of the DSA candidates that Mamdani endorsed, Avila Chevalier and Valdez, cruised to victory in their heavily blue New York City districts.
Avila Chevalier is a former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist who has repeatedly defended her attendance at a pro-Palestinian rally on Oct. 8, 2023.
Rabb in Philadelphia; McKinney in Detroit, Michigan; and Kiros in Boulder also won comfortably in their heavily blue districts.
Kiros drew condemnation from some Colorado Jews after declining to call the 2025 firebombing of a walk for Gaza hostages in Boulder antisemitic, instead calling it a “political attack” targeting Zionism. The attacker was heard yelling “Free Palestine” as he threw Molotov cocktails, injuring 13 people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died from her injuries.
In California, DSA candidates faced tighter races in the general election, facing off against Democratic incumbents. The nail-biter races were the result of California’s unique primary process, where the top two candidates advance to the general election regardless of party. Several key California races were still too early to call, including two House races featuring DSA candidates and the Los Angeles mayoral election featuring DSA candidate Nithya Raman.
Two other DSA mayoral candidates won Tuesday night, David Morales in Providence, Rhode Island, and Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C.
But the DSA did not win everywhere. In Florida, Republican incumbent Ashley Moody defeated DSA member Angie Nixon Tuesday night, early results show.
Had Nixon won, she would have become the first DSA member in the U.S. Senate. (While Sen. Bernie Sanders has long identified as a democratic socialist, he is not an official DSA member.)
But Moody was widely expected to win the race, leading Nixon by an average of 6 percentage points in polls.
The post DSA racks up wins in Congress as Democratic party shifts on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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This Georgia Democrat stood by Israel and criticized her party. She is expected to win another term.
Esther Panitch spent Tuesday evening the way she spends every election night since holding office: on her couch at home in an Atlanta suburb, watching The Campaign, the 2012 comedy in which Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis play rival candidates for Congress who will stoop to anything to win.
It looks likely that the Georgia Democrat will have a third term in the state Georgia House of Representatives, where Panitch has been the only Jewish member since 2023. With 72% of precincts reporting, she is leading 67%-33% over her Republican challenger, Keith Gettmann. She may be joined in the state legislature by some additional Jewish members after Tuesday night’s vote.
Panitch is a pro-Israel Democrat in a party where support for Israel is increasingly contested. She has built her time in office on issues around antisemitism and Holocaust education, and she has criticized her own senator, Jon Ossoff, in public over Israel. Ossoff endorsed her this fall anyway.
Panitch has been warning for years that her party is drifting away from Israel, and she said she’s grateful Georgia’s Democratic leaders haven’t gone along. This summer she felt the pull at home. A local Democratic youth group told her to “mind her own business” after she asked a county party to move a fundraiser from Rosh Hashanah to another date. The Jewish Council of the Democratic Party of Georgia, where she’s first vice chair, condemned the group, and Panitch says the state and county parties did too.
She also survived a primary challenge from her left this spring. Aaron Baker, a fellow Jewish Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, called her a “DINO,” or Democrat in name only. Panitch won by a 13% margin.
Her complaint about Ossoff goes back to 2024, when he voted for resolutions to block some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, and Panitch criticized him publicly at the time. But she still voted for him in the midterms. “I’m not going to bite my nose to spite my face,” she said.
Ossoff’s Republican opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, is a “non-starter,” she said. Collins has faced scrutiny over a son-in-law who posted antisemitic videos and a former staffer who posted Nazi imagery. He has said he doesn’t share those views. Ossoff was reelected Tuesday.
Laws she’s passed
Much of Panitch’s record in office has been a response to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Georgia already had a hate crime law, she said, but it didn’t define antisemitism. She co-sponsored the bill that did — adopting a widely used, though controversial, definition — which the governor signed into law. She had been arguing for it before Oct. 7, but her colleagues, she said, “really couldn’t understand that until they saw it on Oct. 8.”
This past session, she co-sponsored a first-in-the-nation measure requiring public schools to disclose foreign funding, which she said grew out of research showing Qatar had funded Fulton County Public Schools and Georgia State University. She also backed a requirement that the state monitor complaints of antisemitism and other discrimination, from public schools through colleges. Previously, she said, parents had complained about incidents, but whether anything happened depended on the principal. A separate bill she led, creating one-stop family justice centers for victims of domestic violence and trafficking, passed unanimously and was signed into law.
The monitoring requirement puts her in the middle of the debate over where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. Asked whether she considers anti-Zionism antisemitism, Panitch said, “Not all of it. But there’s enough crossover that any of it should be examined.” Her line is a legal one. “They can hate Israel and Jews all they want,” she said. The issue is “if they commit a crime because of it.”
A tree for every critic
She’s also been targeted. On the morning the antisemitism bill was signed into law in January 2024, she discovered a threatening postcard in her mailbox containing antisemitic slurs, including a reference to “gassing the Jews.” A local rabbi who had backed the bill received a similar postcard. The man who sent the cards, Ariel Collazo Ramos, was convicted last fall and sentenced in February to five years in prison, the maximum. Panitch testified at his trial and sentencing.
“Jews have a right to participate in civic life in the United States, just as any other American,” she said, “and I’m not going to allow anybody to stop that.”
She has a lighter response to online critics. In 2024, she was at the University of Georgia for Israel Week, walking a student in a yarmulke to another building so he wouldn’t be alone, when protesters followed and chanted at her. “Esther, Esther, you can’t hide,” she recalled. “We charge you with genocide.”
Her response: Donate a Jewish National Fund tree in Israel in the name of the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and post the receipt online. She has since sent trees in the names of individual trolls and other pro-Palestinian activists. “Okay, you get a tree! You get a tree!” she recalled in her best Oprah Winfrey impersonation. The harassment, she said, “really stopped bothering me after that.”
Her Jewish roots
Panitch grew up in a Jewish household in Miami, where she went to a JCC day camp and later spent a couple of summers at Camp Ramah in Massachusetts. She’s a lifelong member of Hadassah, the third generation of her family in the organization. Her daughter is the fourth. She met her husband on a 1997 trip to Israel organized by the Jewish Federation of Miami, and they married the next year. Their three children went through Camp Judaea in North Carolina.
This summer she toured Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka with a group of teachers on a trip to concentration camps in Poland. They also visited Kielce, a city where survivors who had returned after the war were attacked by a mob in 1946 after a rumor that a Christian boy had been kidnapped. Dozens of Jews were killed.
What stunned her was how deep the roots went. “Jews had been there for 1,000 years before the war,” she said, “and were turned on in the blink of an eye. They were always othered, so I’m not going to allow that to happen in my country.”
She wants to bring that message home. Panitch is a legislative liaison for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and plans to push mandatory Holocaust education in her next term, especially given foreign money she believes has been used to create anti-Israel sentiment.
“I want to be able to show students what happens when mobs go after Jews, which is what is starting to happen now,” she said. “Everybody needs to know their history, Jews and non-Jews, and the ugly parts too, because we have to figure out how not to repeat them.”
Criticize Israel as much as you want, she said, but when it’s singled out for criticism “that they wouldn’t hold any other place to,” it can cross into antisemitism. “The result of antisemitism, unchecked, turns into atrocities.”
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Republican Israel supporter Ashley Moody projected to beat DSA candidate Angie Nixon
(JTA) — Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, a supporter of Israel, is projected to beat Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialist of America member, in a special election on Tuesday that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
With 96% of the vote counted, Moody won by a 2.7 percentage points. according to Associated Press.
The incumbent, Moody, was formerly the state attorney general, and was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Ron DeSantis in January 2025 after Marco Rubio vacated the seat to become secretary of state.
She was endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and President Donald Trump. She is a staunch supporter of Israel who has said she wants the U.S. to be “the most pro-Israel country in the world.” She also said that she “worked to make Florida the most pro-Israel state in the nation” as attorney general.
She has been critical of pro-Palestinian campus protests, and introduced a bill last year that would “claw back federal funds” when universities “violate students’ civil rights.” Too many “woke schools prioritize support for Hamas over their duty to protect the civil rights of ALL students,” she added.
Moody supported Trump and Rubio’s move to deport green card holders for their activism last year. “It is time for Hamas agitators to go,” she wrote.
Nixon is a progressive state legislator, with a campaign focused on universal healthcare and free childcare. She became a DSA member this year, but was not endorsed by the left-wing political organization. She did draw endorsements from a number of major progressive figures and campaigned alongside Vermont independent Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama.
She accuses Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and opposes sending military aid or American weapons to Israel “at this moment.” In November 2023, she introduced a statewide bill advocating for “de-escalation and cease-fire in the state of Israel and occupied Palestine,” which was defeated 104-2 in the Florida House. She has condemned Hamas and the “violent terrorist attacks” that it committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Nixon’s Israel stance raised questions over whether it would affect her performance among the state’s substantial Jewish minority. Some Jewish Democrats and independents in the state said they were hung up on her Israel views, while others said they are counting on the Democrats flipping the Senate and that Nixon has toned down her harsher talk about Israel.
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