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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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Germany’s far-right victory in eastern state election portends ‘disaster’ for centrists
(JTA) — The far-right Alternative for Germany’s victory in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, its second in the region in as many weeks, underscores the growing popularity of the anti-immigration, nationalist party at the expense of the country’s political center.
The center-right Christian Democratic Union, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, had its worst result in any state or federal election with just 4.9% of the vote, falling short of the 5% minimum needed to enter the legislature. It’s the first time in history the party was shut out of a state parliament.
Merz himself admitted the result was a “disaster” for the CDU, saying he would remain chancellor and press on with his economic reform agenda.
The AfD won 38.2%, according to preliminary results in the sparsely populated state on the Baltic Sea, home to some 1.6 million people. The AfD’s result on Sunday more than doubled its 16.7% share in the state’s last election in 2021.
The party’s rise in the east signals it is breaching the consensus of Germany’s liberal, multicultural order and meticulously built barriers against the far right since the Nazi era. Two weeks ago, the AfD crushed its opponents in Saxony-Anhalt, sending shockwaves through Europe.
At the same time, the socialist Left Party swept to victory on Sunday in Berlin, challenging centrist coalitions from the other side of the political spectrum. Such coalitions have long dominated the country but are now fighting to keep alienated voters amid economic stagnation and global instability.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD was followed closely by the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) with 35.5% of the vote. The SPD outperformed opinion polls under the leadership of state premier Manuela Schwesig, who cast herself as a bulwark against the AfD while promising to strengthen the economy, education and social services. The Left Party trailed with 6.5% and the Greens with 5.7%.
Despite winning the largest share of votes, the AfD could struggle to form a government without an outright majority in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Other large parties have refused to work with the AfD, which advocates for deporting refugees, opposing multiculturalism, protecting “German identity,” abolishing current public broadcasting and ending sanctions on Russia. The SPD could form a left-leaning coalition with the Left Party and the Greens.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD also fell short of a majority with almost 44% of the vote, but has a greater chance of forming a government. The party is currently negotiating to govern with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a populist party with left-wing and right-wing positions that won 5.3% of the vote.
Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD’s candidate for state premier in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said on election night that his party had a “mandate to govern.” He later acknowledged to the public broadcaster NDR that the AfD is ultimately unlikely to be part of a governing coalition, but said he expected the other parties to be “open to dialogue.”
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s national co-chair, celebrated the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania result in an interview with the broadcaster ZDF.
“We are the strongest force and have reached the mainstream of the population, and we are the new people’s party in Germany,” said Weidel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Coexistence is the only way and one state is a fantasy
For some time now, right-wing Zionists and left-wing Anti-Zionists have been mirror images of one another, both insisting on a one-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. To be sure, the visions are different: one is of a Jewish-dominated ethnostate with a permanently subjugated non-Jewish minority, the latter either a utopian democratic fantasy or a violent, forced reversal of 1948.
As different as they are in some respects, though, both visions are delusions.
Clearly, many on the left still want to reverse 1948, to remove the “settler-colonialist Zionist entity” from the land and return control of it to its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. (Never mind that the boundaries of Palestine and their demarcations of identity are, themselves, relics of colonialism.) Setting aside the virtues of these goals, it would be entirely unprecedented for a state to self-destruct in this way.
The model, of course, is apartheid-era South Africa. But whatever similarities Israel does or does not have to that state, there are critical differences as well. Most importantly, apartheid ended because of a combination of factors: international pressure (the original Boycott / Divestment / Sanctions campaign); the moral leadership of figures like Nelson Mandela; but also the fact that, by the late 1980s, nearly half the white South African population was itself opposed to apartheid, and elected a leader, F.W. de Klerk, who pledged to end it and did.
There is no analogue in present-day Israel. The upcoming Israeli elections are about many things, but the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state is not one of them. Nor is the maximalism, ferocity, and one-sidedness of the left likely to somehow persuade Israeli Jews that erasing the Jewish state would be a good idea. Quite the contrary.
Which means that the only way to return to 1947 would be by force: an international military campaign against a nuclear power that has no intention of removing itself from the map and whose population believes it has nowhere else in the world to go. Needless to say, this scenario is as implausible as it is evil.
Of course, BDS advocates would claim that economic sanctions, the suspension of foreign aid, and international opprobrium would be enough to cause the Jewish state to voluntarily evolve into a non-Jewish, binational democracy. But the vast majority of Israel’s seven million Jewish citizens are resolutely opposed to such a change, and without military force, externally-mandated ‘regime change’ rarely happens: just look at Iran, North Korea, and occupied Tibet.
And what about the Palestinians? Does anyone truly believe that seven million Palestinians, most of whom understand themselves to be occupied, displaced, subjugated, and repressed by the state of Israel, are interested in joining hands with the same Israelis who have oppressed them for seven decades to create a new state free from ethno-nationalist trappings? Of course not. They want a state of their own, which they deserve. They, like Israelis, want to be in charge of their own destinies, to promote their own cultures, to build a society that reflects who they are and who they aspire to be.
Now, ‘two states’ may take many shapes: geographical contiguous entities, or a confederation of two governmental authorities, or others. But in some form, Palestinians and Israelis must be in charge of themselves.
This may not be an ideal arrangement, but it is the only pragmatic one. In principle, I am sympathetic to the arguments that any kind of ‘special’ nationalism, including ethno-nationalisms like Zionism, will inevitably lead to the extremism we now see in much of Israel, Europe, and the United States. In the Israeli world, such arguments were made by Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Adin Steinsaltz decades ago, and were recently discussed in a fascinating online back-and-forth between Shaul Magid and Irwin Kula. Perhaps, in retrospect, a ‘thick’ patriotism like Zionism was a mistake and Israel should only have aspired to be, as many of its initial founders wanted, a state like any other. Maybe, as soon as Zionism became religiously significant (to Israelis and non-Israelis alike), the stakes became too high.
But as the Talmudic rabbis said, avar zmano batel korbanо — basically, the horse has left the barn. Israel as a Jewish state is a reality and the overwhelming majority of Israelis want it to continue. It is not South Africa, and the dream of one democratic state from the river to the sea is a pipe dream with no tether to the actual realities of the 14 million people who live there.
And then there’s the fantasy on the Right, which is even darker.
The Right, too, wants one state from the river to the sea, only this state is an ethno-nationalist, non-democratic Greater Israel built on repression and minority rule. And (as Abdul El-Sayed aptly noted) unlike the Left, it has been building that reality on the ground for three decades now, most recently in its sociocide of Gaza and its policy of hachraah (compulsion) in the West Bank, which a recent BTzelem report describes as an “elimination project.” As B’Tzelem leader Yuli Novak put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, these policies are creating “a new phase of the political project to make Israeli Jewish control permanent while dismantling the conditions for Palestinian collective life.”
Here, too, it is hard to adjudicate between implausibility and immorality, but I’ll focus on the former. Already, Israel has lost the support of around a quarter of Americans, and a clear majority of American Jews disapprove of Israeli policies even as they do believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state. Do the likes of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich really believe that the world will simply stand by and watch Israel ethnically cleanse the West Bank without, at the very least, disastrous economic and political consequences?
Israel is a small state that, for now at least, depends on American foreign aid and the (limited) support of the world community. Even if it were militarily and morally possible to institute formal apartheid in Greater Israel, it is simply unrealistic to believe that the world will simply allow Israel to do so. Nor do half of Israeli Jews want such a dreadful, dystopian, and endlessly violent future.
These fantasies on Left and Right are not idle delusions. They are impeding the real work that is necessary to move, however slowly, toward sustainable coexistence.
First, Israelis will hopefully soon elect a new government that will rein in the extreme nationalists and take a more realistic, ethical, and constructive stance toward the Palestinians. There is not an Israeli-Jewish majority that is ready for an independent Palestinian state tomorrow. But there is, it seems, a majority that wants the ethnic cleansing, ultra-nationalism, and settler-extremist vigilantism to end, and that, at least, is a step toward coexistence — a step toward normalization.
Will the next Israeli government be as progressive as I, personally, would like? Almost certainly not. But will it be more progressive, or at least less regressive, than the current one? This is what I pray for. Contrary to what the Left and Right insist, there are many kinds of Zionism. Even if only for pragmatic reasons, I support the more progressive, just, and coexistence-oriented kind.
But American one-staters on both sides have obstructed it.
On the Right, hundreds of millions of American dollars have put thumbs on the Israeli-electoral scales for decades, while AIPAC and others have obstructed reasonable steps toward coexistence, such as conditioning military aid on Israeli compliance with international legal norms.
Meanwhile, on the Left, the insistence that all Zionism entails racism, colonialism, and genocide makes pragmatism more difficult, as any deviation from the anti-Zionist line renders progressive politicians treyf. And then, of course, is the rhetoric: blood libel, genocide, antisemitism, apartheid. Everyone on the other side is evil: musicians, politicians, artists, filmmakers, rabbis, and activists are all either Jew-haters or genociders, with no other options in between.
I think I speak for a majority of American people and American Jews when I implore everyone to tone it the f—k down.
If it isn’t clear by now, reasonable, non-hateful people profoundly disagree about how to understand what happened in Gaza, how it relates to what happened on Oct. 7, and how to negotiate living with people who strongly disagree with one another.
And I think a majority of American Jews are sick to death of the extremism. I’ve been canceled by both sides, personally, and I can testify to the exhaustion. I think we are sick of both sides’ ignorance, intolerance, and the inability to listen to multiple narratives.
We’re sick of the Left ignoring Israeli security and the Right only talking about Israeli security. We’re sick of the Left talking only about Palestinian safety and the Right never talking about Palestinian safety. We’re sick of the Right failing to acknowledge Palestinian dispossession and the Left failing to acknowledge the UN resolutions of 1947, the Holocaust, or the ancient Jewish ties to the land. We’re sick of the Right refusing to watch videos and films about Gaza, and the Left refusing to watch them about Oct. 7. (And no, we’re not trying to compare, equate, or measure the horror in one way or the other.)
Closer to home, we’re sick of the hypocrisy, hysteria, and weaponization of overheated rhetoric on all sides. We’re sick of how the Right refuses to call out (in the last month alone) concentration camp imagery, Islamophobia, and actual genocidal rhetoric on its side while harping on any insufficiently-apologetic apology by an accused antisemite. And we’re sick of how the Left refuses to call out voices who say that supporters of Israel are making themselves into targets of violence or that Bibi Netanyahu is an Emmanuel Goldstein-George Soros style puppetmaster of everything wrong with the world. Everyone in this rhetorical battle is living in glass houses and throwing stones at the other side.
Most of all, we’re sick of the incitement, the self-righteousness, the certainty, the maximalism, the rage-bait, the bullying, the demonization, the good guys/bad guys narratives, the harassment, the ‘de-normalization’ and the inability to tolerate disagreement. All, again, on the Left and the Right alike.
Most of us know that the Israeli government has behaved appallingly over the last few years. What happened in Gaza began as a defensive war but became a war of annihilation, with horrifying amounts of death and an aim, among some at least, to destroy Gazan society. But most of us also know that Israel is not a colonialist enterprise because Jews have no home country to which they can return, that Hamas is evil, that Jewish ties to the Land of Israel date back thousands of years, and that the Jewish state, for better or for worse, has been a reality for almost 80 years and is not going to self-destruct.
At the end of the day, whatever some left-wing activists or right-wing billionaires might like to happen in the Middle East, neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere. Eventually, in ten years or a hundred, these groups will have to live alongside each other, in one form or another. The clock cannot be turned back. Coexistence is the only way.
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Ontario Jewish community saddened, but not shocked, by shootout outside synagogue
(JTA) — TORONTO – Doug Warren, 56, was attending Kol Nidre services at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario on the eve of Yom Kippur on Sunday. Prayers were just about to begin when he heard the gunshots.
“The rabbi had just started to call us into the sanctuary. We were stepping inside, and we heard this loud bang, and we all stopped,” Warren, a member of the congregation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It sounded like someone was banging the window or the door.”
It was a 29-year-old former Canadian soldier exchanging gunfire with a police officer stationed outside the synagogue. The shooter, Sean Ward 29, of Quinte West, Ontario., died from his wounds on Tuesday. The officer, Const. Jeff Smith, a 13-year veteran of the force, remains in the hospital in critical condition.
Little is known of Ward, who served in the Canadian military from 2017 to 2022, and was never deployed.
“We knew this was going to happen,” Warren, a member of Sons of Jacob and a resident of Belleville. told JTA. “We’ve been saying as Jews that we’re very concerned with the rise of antisemitism. What did you think was going to happen? People weren’t taking it seriously.”
As the gunfire continued, congregants scrambled to find safety. “Some people suggested we should go to the basement, others said we should go out the back door,” he recalls. “At the same time, you’re just frozen because you don’t know what’s going on or what to do. Eventually the shots stopped.”
Warren said the congregation is extremely grateful to Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue in an unmarked vehicle. “This guy’s a hero. I can tell you the gunman was coming for us inside, and he was trying to take out our armed protection first,” he said. “We’re praying for [Smith’s] recovery.”
Once police arrived at Sons of Jacob, they instructed everyone to wait inside until the area was clear. Congregants were then taken to the Belleville police station, where they were offered donuts and coffee, which Warren said they politely declined on account of fasting for Yom Kippur.
Richard Marceau, General Counsel and Senior Vice President of The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, echoed Warren’s concerns. “I wish I could say that I was surprised or shocked, but I was not,” says Marceau. “Unfortunately, in 2026 in Canada, we’ve come to expect this type of thing. It just tells us that the promise of Canada has been broken.”
The Belleville shooting came two days after the arrest of 19 year-old Alexander Parfitt after posting online threats to shoot up a synagogue in Southern Ontario.
Marceau said that Canadian politicians have not sufficiently addressed the threat of antisemitism. “There has been an all-level failure in the political sector and in law enforcement,” he said. “It is a failure to understand the threats that Jews are facing.”
According to Marceau, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist discourse have also contributed to rising antisemitism and endangered Canadian Jews. “Anti-Zionism is driving violence against Canadians, and the double standard against Israel is playing a role,” Marceau said. “Politicians need a clear plan, not just to talk about extremist ideologies, organizations and foreign state actors. There needs to be a meeting of all levels of government to ensure that the extremist networks are disrupted.”
Anti-Israel sentiment was a point of contention Sunday evening. Canadian Jewish politician and leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) Avi Lewis posted on X shortly after 8 p.m. that on Yom Kippur he was “reflecting on the fact that we have not done our part to stop an ongoing genocide being committed in our name.”
About an hour earlier, Ward opened fire outside Sons of Jacob. It was not clear whether Lewis knew the shooting had occurred when he had posted. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Canadian Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather responded to Lewis’ post, stating that “holding Canadian Jews and Jews across the world collectively responsible for events over which they have no control is despicable.”
Lewis said in an post the following day that the attack “is yet another reminder of the work that remains to create a Canada that is truly safe for people of all faiths, including Jewish people – to worship, to come together, to live without fear.” In a press conference he rejected claims that he was collectively blaming Jews for Israel’s actions.
Despite the events Warren witnessed on Sunday evening, he remains assured in the resilience of his local Jewish community. Unable to access their synagogue, Warren says the Sons of Jacob congregation gathered at a Best Western hotel on Monday evening for services.
“We want to keep going, but we know it’s not going to be easy. We might get emotional when we first get back inside the synagogue, and we’ll just have to work through that,” he says. “This will not stop us.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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