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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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Map of Israeli targets goes up in Tehran as tensions simmer ahead of Netanyahu’s White House visit
(JTA) — Iran has erected a map showing Israeli targets for potential strikes in a prominent propaganda spot as another week dawns with uncertainty over whether it will face a U.S. attack.
The map went up over the weekend in Tehran’s Palestine Square, a frequent site for billboards meant to broadcast the Islamic Republic’s bravado when it comes to Israel and the United States. It includes the words “You start, we finish!”
It comes as President Donald Trump continues to weigh military intervention against Iran and as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to visit the White House to press for his demands in Trump’s negotiations with Iran.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to meet with US President Donald Trump this Wednesday in Washington, and will discuss with him the negotiations with Iran,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Saturday. “The Prime Minister believes any negotiations must include limitations on ballistic missiles and a halting of the support for the Iranian axis.”
A will-he-or-won’t-he air has pervaded for weeks as Trump has considered different strategies for dealing with Iran, which has said it would view both U.S. and Israeli targets as legitimate if the United States strikes to curb its nuclear ambitions, less than a year after the last U.S. attack on Iranian sites, which came during a war between Iran and Israel.
On Friday, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East advisor, and Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, met directly with Iran’s foreign minister in Oman. The foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, said the talks had gotten off to a “good start” but that Iran was willing to negotiate only about the nuclear program, not the missiles that concern Israel.
Trump, too, told reporters that there had been “very good talks” that indicated that Iran was prepared to make more concessions than it had offered in the past. Still, he said, “They know that if they don’t make a deal the consequences are very steep.”
The next day, Kushner and Witkoff also visited a U.S. naval carrier that has been moved to the region as part of what Trump has called an “armada” that would enable U.S. military action in the event that Trump decides it is needed. Netanyahu has moved up his planned White House visit — which will be his fourth since Trump retook office last year — to advocate for Israel’s interests in the negotiations. It was at a previous visit, last April, that Trump disclosed for the first time that the United States had opened direct talks with Iran. Just over two months later, Trump joined Israel’s campaign against Iran with a bombing attack that came a day after he said he had not decided whether to strike.
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The PBS series ‘Black and Jewish America’ gets it right — except the Black and Jewish part
The opening scene in the first of four episodes of the PBS series “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History” captures a truly wonderful event: a Passover Seder led by culinary genius Michael Twitty that also includes his fellow rock-star Jews of Color Jamaica Kincaid and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, among others. Rabbi Shais Rishon regales the group with a brief accounting of his Black and Jewish ancestry going back to the 1780s — an origin story that would seem to offer a natural entry point into the history of Black and Jewish life in America, at least through the 20th century.
Except we never hear from him again — or any other Jew of Color seated at that table.
What we do get in the four-hour series presented by Harvard historian and “Finding Your Roots” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a reductive depiction of the histories of Blacks and Jews as two separate groups. That’s despite the incessant reminder that I, and countless other Jews of Color, including those seated at that Seder table, have been making for decades: “Blacks and Jews” is a misnomer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Jews can be Black and Blacks can be Jews — and you cannot talk about the relationship between the two without acknowledging those who inhabit that intersection and have been influencing each group’s attitudes about the other for millennia.
Someone who has lived in both of those spaces all his life is University of Connecticut philosophy professor Lewis Gordon, who describes the binary as endemic in academia.
“They’re really invested in an ongoing stereotypical discourse, in which Blacks are represented by Christians and Jews are represented by whites,” he said. “Ultimately, they’re always talking about it as ‘Blacks and Jews,’ even when Black Jews are in the room.”
To be sure, there are other Black Jews in the program’s interview rooms, including Rabbi Capers Funnye of Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. But Funnye is one of many luminaries asked to comment on facts, incidents, or dynamics specific to one or both of the communities, rather than on the history of his own: a historically rich congregation that has served as a bridge between largely Black Israelite groups and predominantly white Jewish denominations.
And Funnye aside, Israelites aren’t mentioned at all, even as Israelite communities have crossed paths with mainstream Jewish congregations around the country for more than 150 years — a history the producers told me they were aware of but didn’t have the time or space to address.
“The Hebrew Israelite community is so complicated in and of itself that it felt almost like we could only bite off just the smallest piece of it,” co-producer Sara Wolitzky told me over Zoom. “We didn’t want to get that wrong, because it’s such a complicated set of experiences in its own right.”
That may be, but that’s like saying Jerusalem is claimed by both Jews and Palestinians; let’s talk about Tokyo instead.
As for that binary discussion, the series is competently told and offers deep dives into areas not widely covered in other Blacks-and-Jews works. In particular, it recognizes that Black and Jewish allyship wasn’t always a one-way street, in which more privileged Jews came to the aid of downtrodden Blacks. In the early 20th century, it notes, Black newspapers editorialized against pogroms in Europe and against the rise of Nazism.
The vein continues with the recording of Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching standard, “Strange Fruit,” though in a curious understatement it describes its Jewish songwriter Abel Meeropol — writing as Lewis Allan — as a schoolteacher, rather than as the fiercely progressive adoptive father of the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who also wrote lyrics for Paul Robeson.
A lesser-known story the series does allow room to breathe is that of the other Brown v. Board of Education: Esther Brown, a Jewish housewife in Merriam, Kansas, whose successful school-desegregation efforts in partnership with African American parents helped lay the groundwork for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case — named, as it happens, for a different Brown.
To each of these peaks of progress and partnership are valleys of dispute and discontent. Jewish support of Black entertainers was often accompanied by economic exploitation; Jews fighting against restrictive covenants were undermined by others building whites-only Levittowns.
The alliance reached its zenith, of course, in the Civil Rights Movement, though the program largely confines that story to the 1960s, omitting crucial Black-Jewish collaborations that preceded it — including that of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Jewish adviser and fundraiser, Stanley Levison. And while it briefly mentions one Black Jewish civil-rights leader, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Chuck McDew, he’s described as a “Jew by choice” — a moniker not used in reference to Jews in the program void of melanin.
At least he’s included. Sammy Davis Jr., who was also intensely involved in the movement, is nowhere to be found.
“Sammy Davis was a convert, right?” Wolitzky said, suddenly imposing a standard that apparently wasn’t a problem when talking about McDew, whose Judaism very much informed his decision to become a movement leader. “When you’re talking about Black Jews or Jews of African descent, there are so many different versions of that. Highlighting only one example like a Sammy Davis Jr. can misrepresent that.”
I’m sorry. You can laugh at, laugh with, or make one-eyed–Black–Jewish–Nixon-loving jokes all you want about Sammy, but you can hardly deny he was a major force in bringing awareness to the entire world — let alone to Blacks and Jews — that a person could be both, and proud of it. There is no way to deny his existence shaped the attitudes of both Blacks and Jews about the other.
Following the movement came the inevitable breakup, with Civil Rights morphing into Black Power and white activists expelled. A particular flare-up is highlighted in New York’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville school dispute between largely Jewish teachers and Black parents. Yet again, a key figure in that conflict who would later become a Black Jewish darling of mainstream Judaism is missing: Julius Lester, who during the dispute was accused of stoking antisemitic flames on his radio show before his Conservative conversion two decades later.
The series finally does return to Black Jews in the final episode, briefly, to recount Israel’s airlift of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s, an act presented as if a more than 2,000-year-old community had suddenly been discovered. That segues into the revelation that there are Black Jews in America, and that it is suddenly acceptable to be one — a conversation that is quickly swallowed up by euphoria over the biracial phenomenon of Barack Obama.
If it sounds like I’ve been incessantly harping on where are the Black Jews?, co-producer Phil Bertelsen expressed exactly that.
“Do you have any questions beyond that?” he asked.
I did. I was curious about the mechanics of the production, and whether or not he and Wolitzky had documented how many times they showed the alliance holding hands versus reaching for each other’s throats.
“I didn’t count them,” he said.
Viewers don’t have to either; we get the point. It’s “I love you,” “I never want to see you again!” “I love you…” and on and on. And in that, the series is instructive. What’s missing is a strong summation that countless others who have written about the perpetual Black-Jewish makeup-and-breakup ritual have noted: If the two communities didn’t truly care for each other, they wouldn’t be talking about each other so much.
That’s something nearly every Black Jew I’ve ever met would tell you — including the ones at the Seder table. It’s too bad they didn’t get the chance.
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Proposed laws aim to test the Supreme Court’s ban on public school-sponsored prayer
Public schools have been barred from sponsoring official prayer since the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, a landmark decision that cemented the principle of church-state separation in American law.
Now, lawmakers in several states are advancing measures that aim to bring prayer back into public schools — with potential to reverse decades of precedent as politicians push for Christian prayer to return as a commonplace part of the school day.
In Tennessee, a bill introduced last month would require public schools to set aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of “the Bible or other religious text.” Students would opt in to the prayer period by getting their parents to sign a consent form, which also requires participating students to waive their right to sue.
Texas enacted a nearly identical law last year, empowering school boards to institute prayer and Bible-reading periods in schools across their districts by March 1 — a move more than 160 religious leaders urged school boards to reject in an open letter last month.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton encouraged students to use the time to recite the Lord’s Prayer “as taught by Jesus Christ.”
In Florida, a proposed amendment to the state constitution would allow students and teachers to lead prayer over a loudspeaker at school-sponsored events — even though the Supreme Court ruled student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games unconstitutional two decades ago.
Meanwhile, a federal bill introduced by Rep. David Rouzer (R-N.C.) last month would withhold federal funding from public schools that “restrict voluntary school prayer,” and new guidance from the Department of Education released last week allows teachers to pray with students.
Nik Nartowicz, lead policy counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the Supreme Court’s church-state separation precedents like Engel v. Vitale aren’t in immediate jeopardy — but they are steadily being undermined.
“Teachers have a little bit more right to pray in public schools than they did last time. And then it just kind of slowly builds,” Nartowicz said. “The very principles of religious freedom in public school are very clearly under attack.”
A Jewish plaintiff
In 1951, the Board of Regents of New York proposed that public schools start the day with what it called a “non-denominational” prayer. Students were able to opt out with a parent’s signature.
“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen,” the prayer read.
Five families sued, arguing that the school-organized prayer violated their constitutional rights. They came from a range of religious backgrounds, including Judaism, atheism, Unitarianism and humanism.
But the case quickly took on a Jewish character, as a Jewish parent named Steven Engel became the lead plaintiff, and a broad cross-section of Jewish organizations became involved with the case. The American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith and the Synagogue Council of America — which represented 70 Jewish organizations spanning Orthodox, Conservative and Reform — all filed briefs urging the court to strike down school-sponsored prayer.
According to Bruce Dierenfield, author of The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America, when the court released its decision the blowback was intense — and, at times, antisemitic.
The Supreme Court received the largest amount of hate mail in its history. Politicians called to amend the Constitution and impeach the justices, and 15 states refused to immediately discontinue prayer and Bible reading in their schools. An angry protester burned a cross in plaintiff Lawrence Roth’s family driveway.
“Some people say this case produced more of a backlash than almost any other case in American history,” Dierenfield said. “It seemed to be the death knell of ‘Christian America.’”
A changing landscape
In the decades after Engel, the Supreme Court repeatedly reinforced the ban on school-sponsored prayer, controversially ruling that even required moments of silence could be unconstitutional if intended to encourage prayer.
That line shifted in 2022. The court sided with Joe Kennedy, a high school football coach in Washington state who had been placed on leave for praying at midfield immediately after games, sometimes joined by players.
The school district’s actions “rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”
The Kennedy ruling “was kind of a slap at the absolutism of Engel,” Dierenfield said. “It epitomizes somewhat of a new day.”
The decision also hinged in part on disputed interpretation of facts: The majority argued that Kennedy had engaged in “short, private, personal prayer,” while the dissent said he prayed with students in a setting where they could feel pressured to participate.
The case highlighted the often-blurry line between voluntary and coercive prayer, a tension made more complicated by peer pressure and the authority teachers and coaches hold over students.
According to Nartowicz, teachers and students are free to pray or read religious texts as long as they don’t disrupt or pressure others — but that boundary is crossed when teachers pray with students. Even though new policies make prayer and Bible-reading periods opt-in, he said, the practice can still feel coercive.
“If a teacher’s praying, because teachers have so much control over students, a student might say, Oh, I need to pray in order to make sure I’m in the good favor of so-and-so to get a good grade in their class,” he said.
Rabbi Michael Shulman of Congregation Ohabai Sholom in Nashville, Tennessee, who wrote an op-ed speaking out against his state’s school prayer bill, shares similar concerns.
He said children at his congregation are often the only Jewish students at their schools, and a school-sponsored period for prayer would only worsen their feelings of alienation.
“Anytime religion and government mix, there’s a danger of signaling that this is what the state is promoting — which beliefs are normal, which ones are not,” Shulman told the Forward. “So when public schools, that are state institutions, promote this, it really changes the meaning of what ‘voluntary’ is.”
‘Exactly the right time’
School prayer advocates are explicit about their goal: They want the Supreme Court, which currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, to take up their case.
It’s unclear if the court will choose to weigh in. In November, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in a case where a lower court had upheld a ban on broadcasting a pregame prayer over the loudspeaker at a high school football game.
But proponents of school prayer aren’t giving up. The Tennessee bill states that “the idea of separation of church and state departs from the religious liberty guaranteed by the Constitution of the State of Tennessee” and lists 11 Supreme Court decisions, including Engel, as examples of rulings that it says conflict.
“I think this is exactly the right time to have this issue brought back into the public square, both because our Supreme Court has, I think, more properly aligned in most recent decisions and because I think we just need to have prayer back in our schools,” Rep. Gino Bulso, the bill’s sponsor, told The Tennessee Conservative.
Meanwhile, Paxton has pledged to defend in court any school district that implements a voluntary prayer period.
For those who remember how fiercely Engel divided the country, a new showdown at the Supreme Court feels almost inevitable.
“I sit on tenterhooks all the time about seeing that somebody’s going to bring a suit saying that they have the right to have organized prayer in public schools. I would not be the least bit surprised to see a case — see the Engel case come up again in the Supreme Court,” Jonathan Engel, Steven Engel’s son, said in a 2023 documentary. “So we may have to fight this battle again.”
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