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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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The post A new film brings to life ‘the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New York Jews Don’t Need Rhetoric; They Need Equal Justice Under the Law
Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor of New York City at Old City Hall Station, New York, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: Amir Hamja/Pool via REUTERS
New York City’s new antisemitism czar, Phylisa Wisdom, has introduced herself with the language of inclusion: “expanding the communal table,” “pulling up additional chairs,” convening stakeholders, listening and learning.
But New York Jews do not need metaphors. They need clarity. They need enforcement. They need a city government willing to name antisemitism plainly and confront it without evasions — because the issue at stake is not communal symbolism. It is the most basic obligation of a liberal democracy: equal justice under the law.
Antisemitism in New York is not an abstract dialogue problem. It is not a misunderstanding that can be resolved through facilitated conversation. It is a civic emergency: assaults on visibly Jewish New Yorkers, threats against synagogues, harassment on public transit, and a permissive ideological environment — especially in elite progressive spaces — that treats Jewish identity as uniquely suspect.
The numbers alone should end any confusion. In 2025, the NYPD recorded 330 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City — more than all other bias categories combined, representing roughly 57 percent of all reported hate crimes. Jews make up about 10 percent of the city’s population but are targeted far more often than any other group. No other minority in New York is attacked so disproportionately and no other hatred is so often explained away.
And the crisis is accelerating. In January 2026 — Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office — the NYPD recorded 31 antisemitic hate crimes, a 182 percent increase over January 2025. Jews were targeted, on average, once per day.
And the threat is not theoretical.
Orthodox Jews have been punched, kicked, and harassed in broad daylight simply for looking Jewish — attacked on sidewalks, on buses, and in subway stations. New Yorkers have watched video after video of Jews being targeted in the one city that claims, more than any other, to be a capital of pluralism.
On January 28, 2026, a car was deliberately rammed into the Chabad–Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, one of the most significant Jewish religious sites in the city. The driver was arrested at the scene and charged with multiple hate crimes; security was increased around Jewish institutions across the city in its aftermath. No one was killed. But the message was unmistakable: even the most iconic Jewish spaces in New York are targets.
This is the environment the city’s antisemitism office must confront. Yet so far, the public has been offered almost nothing beyond process language: listening tours, bridge-building, stakeholder engagement.
That is not strategy. That is atmosphere.
And it raises a deeper concern: the modern “czar” is often less a leader than a buffer — a bureaucratic layer designed to absorb outrage, issue statements, and manage optics while avoiding the harder institutional decisions that real enforcement requires. Cities appoint “czars” when they want to signal seriousness without exercising it.
The first question for any antisemitism czar is not: How many chairs are at the table? It is: What counts as antisemitism?
If the office cannot answer that, it cannot enforce anything. It cannot uphold the law. It cannot even speak honestly about what is happening.
But this question is not hypothetical. On his first day in office, Mayor Mamdani revoked the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism — the most widely adopted definitional framework for identifying when anti-Israel activism crosses into anti-Jewish hatred through demonization, double standards, or delegitimization. The definition has been adopted by over 1,200 entities worldwide, including 46 countries. And Wisdom herself has signaled agreement with Mamdani’s decision to discard it.
Without such a standard, the office is left without a diagnostic instrument. And the questions it must answer remain urgent:
Is “Globalize the Intifada” antisemitic? Is calling Zionists Nazis antisemitic? Is telling Jewish students they are foreign colonizers unless they renounce Israel antisemitic? Is treating the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate antisemitic?
These are not academic puzzles. They are the daily realities of Jewish life in New York’s institutions.
To be clear: criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate in a free society. But the targeting of Jews as Jews — or the delegitimization of Jewish national existence — is not. A city that cannot draw that line is not combating antisemitism. It is managing it.
And here is the central danger of this moment: antisemitism is increasingly laundered through the language of justice. It does not always arrive wearing a swastika. It often arrives wearing the idiom of liberation, insisting that it cannot possibly be antisemitic because it locates itself on the “right side of history.” The most corrosive antisemitism today is the kind that insists it is morally impossible.
This is why definitional clarity matters.
The Jewish community has watched, again and again, as institutions respond swiftly to some forms of hatred while proceduralizing antisemitism into ambiguity. The result is moral incoherence: Jews are told they are protected, but only so long as they do not name what is happening too clearly.
That pattern is now visible on New York’s campuses.
At Columbia University, protest activity during the Gaza war escalated into harassment and intimidation so severe that a campus rabbi publicly warned Jewish students to leave campus for their own safety. That is not “difficult dialogue.” That is exclusion and fear, unfolding at one of America’s most prestigious universities.
Similar dynamics have appeared across parts of the CUNY system and other New York campuses: ideological litmus tests, demonization of Zionism as racism, and a climate in which Jewish students are told — implicitly or explicitly — that full belonging requires political renunciation.
A city serious about antisemitism cannot treat this as a mere communications challenge. It must confront the ideological ecosystem that makes antisemitism socially permissible again, especially among the educated classes.
There is also a basic credibility test. The Mamdani administration has repeatedly elevated figures who have trafficked in extremist rhetoric. His initial director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned within 24 hours after posts surfaced in which she wrote about “money hungry Jews.” A transition adviser, Hassaan Chaudhary, was flagged for calling Israel a “barbaric” nation. Another appointee, Alvaro Lopez, described people tearing down Israeli hostage posters as “heroes.” The previous head of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, Rabbi Moshe Davis, was abruptly fired and replaced with Wisdom; he told reporters he believes the administration found his identity as a “proud Zionist” incompatible with its direction. And Tamika Mallory — forced out of the Women’s March for lionizing Louis Farrakhan and reportedly claiming Jews bore responsibility for the exploitation of Black Americans — was appointed to Mamdani’s Committee on Community Safety.
And just this week, a New York City Health Department staffer, Achmat Akkad, was exposed for posting that “1 Israeli left in this world would be one too many!” and that “Jews that don’t support apartheid are safe. Zionists aren’t!” This from a city employee tasked with community engagement. It follows revelations that the city’s Health Department convened a “Global Oppression Working Group” that accused Israel of genocide while making no mention of Hamas’s October 7 attack.
The pattern is not incidental. It reflects an administration in which hostility toward Israel — and, increasingly, toward Jews who support or identify with Israel — is a background condition of employment rather than a disqualifying one. An administration that cannot vet its own staff for eliminationist rhetoric cannot plausibly present itself as the guardian against antisemitism.
New York does not need symbolic appointments designed to manage headlines. It needs leadership willing to draw bright lines — in hiring, in public language, and in enforcement — and to say clearly that those who flirt with eliminationist slogans have no place in city government.
New Yorkers do not need another figurative office. They need measurable commitments: a clear definition, explicit condemnation of eliminationist rhetoric, coordination with law enforcement and the Department of Education, and regular public reporting of incidents and prosecutions. Equal justice is not a metaphor. It is a duty.
Because antisemitism is not defeated through convenings.
It is defeated through moral seriousness: clear definitions, institutional backbone, consistent enforcement, and the courage to confront hatred even when it comes from one’s political allies.
That last part is crucial.
The most urgent antisemitism crisis in New York today is not a fringe rally in a distant borough. It is the normalization of anti-Jewish ideas inside the very institutions that claim the mantle of justice: universities, activist coalitions, cultural organizations, and parts of the political left that have decided that Jews — or at least Zionist Jews — are fair game.
If an antisemitism czar cannot confront that reality, then the office is emblematic by design and functionally useless.
New York City is the largest Jewish city in the world outside Israel. It should be setting the national standard for confronting antisemitism with seriousness and resolve.
Instead, it is offering rhetoric. The task is not to expand the table. The task is to ensure that Jewish New Yorkers receive what every citizen is owed in a constitutional republic: equal justice under the law.
A city that cannot define antisemitism cannot fight it — and a city that cannot fight it is telling its Jews that equal justice is no longer guaranteed.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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How We Should Respond to Attacks Against Jews: Be Ready to Respond with Strength
Arsonists heavily damaged the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, on Dec. 6, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
Two Jewish men in California were recently attacked after being heard speaking Hebrew. A normal conversation in a native language suddenly became the trigger for violence.
For Jews, Hebrew carries far more than vocabulary. It holds memory, culture, prayer, and identity. It connects Jewish life today with thousands of years of history. When someone is attacked for speaking Hebrew, the attack is not about language. It is about the people speaking it.
I speak Hebrew every day. It is the language I grew up with and the language I use with my children. I speak it with friends and with members of the community. I do not lower my voice when I speak it in public spaces. Cultures survive because people carry them openly. A language that endured exile and persecution did not survive because Jews whispered it.
At the same time, reality requires clarity.
Jewish identity has again become visible in ways that sometimes attract hostility. Under those conditions, preparation is a responsibility.
I have been attacked more than once in my life. Those encounters did not end in tragedy because I had the ability to respond without losing control of the situation. Training changes how people behave under pressure. It allows a person to stay present and act with purpose.
That is the role of self defense training. It is one of the most basic life skills a person can develop. A person learns to swim in case they fall into deep water. A person learns to respond to medical emergencies in case someone collapses in front of them. Learning how to protect yourself serves the same purpose.
Jewish history has long understood this.
During the 1930s, Jewish communities in Europe faced violent attacks in the streets. Jewish athletes and community leaders began developing practical ways to defend themselves. Those efforts eventually became the foundation of Krav Maga, a system built to help ordinary people survive dangerous encounters.
The philosophy behind Krav Maga is straightforward. Avoid violence when possible. Respond decisively if violence becomes unavoidable. Return home safely.
Training produces another important effect that many people overlook. Individuals who feel capable of defending themselves often behave more calmly during confrontation. Awareness replaces panic. Confidence replaces impulsive reactions.
People who know how to fight often avoid fights.
My own willingness to protect myself and the people around me makes it harder to drag me into violence. Preparation allows restraint. The ability to act gives a person the freedom to choose when not to act.
Preparation is far safer than improvisation.
Jewish tradition often speaks about compassion and responsibility for others. These values are sometimes described as speaking the language of love. If we speak the language of love, we must also be able to speak the language of strength.
Strength protects the values that communities hold dear. Self-defense begins with protecting oneself, but it quickly expands to protecting family, friends, and neighbors. I cannot imagine watching another Jew or someone I love being attacked and doing nothing. That instinct is not about heroism. It is about responsibility.
Courage in those moments rarely comes from fearlessness. It comes from understanding that action and inaction both carry consequences.
Fear exists in those moments. I feel it when I see attacks like the one that happened in California. I think about my children. I think about Jewish communities that once believed they were fully secure in the societies around them.
What motivates me is not the absence of fear. It is the awareness that silence and hesitation often carry a higher cost over time.
For my children and for the Jewish community around them, shrinking our identity is not an option. Jews should be able to walk through any city and speak Hebrew freely.
Preparation makes that possible.
Self-defense does not encourage violence. It allows people to live openly without surrendering their dignity.
Speaking Hebrew should never require courage.
Until that reality exists everywhere, Jews must remain ready to protect what they love.
Do something amazing.
Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.
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I’m going to miss the ‘Marty Supreme’ press tour
Lately, the internet hasn’t been able to stop talking about Timothée Chalamet. First, an account clipped a dismissive statement he made during a town hall event about opera and ballet. The next was a video of him, in China, playing an elderly woman in ping-pong. Then, there was a clip of him serving tofu from a street stand using a ping-pong paddle.
All of these moments were absurd elements of his press tour for Marty Supreme. And every piece of this has been so fitting for Chalamet’s louche and chaotic ping-pong star, Marty Mauser that it almost feels as though he is still doing some sort of Method acting.
Fittingly, a lot of this press tour has made people mad.
Take the opera and ballet comment, in which Chalamet said that “no one cares” about those art forms. In context, he was stating an objectively true fact — indeed, opera and ballet are not popular mass entertainment. Out of context, however, he sounded like an anti-intellectual who hates the fine arts. Yes, Chalamet, who went to the renowned Manhattan performing arts school LaGuardia, and who comes from a family steeped in ballet.
“I’m just taking shots for no reason,” he laughed after dissing ballet.
This kicked off a truly absurd news cycle in which operas and ballets across the country projected “We Care” across their stages in response to Chalamet’s comments, used his name as a discount code for tickets to their performances or otherwise threw shade.
As this was unfolding, Chalamet was ignoring the drama to focus on what really matters. Which is to say he was in China playing ping-pong against elderly people who seemed to generally be kicking his ass. People presented him with gifts emblazoned with “Sweet Tea,” his nickname in China. In honor of that nickname, he drank some sweet tea. He cut tofu with a ping-pong paddle.
It’s just so pitch perfect. Mauser, in the movie, is charming, yes, but wildly arrogant. He also leaves a trail of injuries — both physical and emotional — in his wake all in the name of pursuing greatness. Chalamet is pursuing an Oscar. Potato, po-tah-to.
This year, the complaints about the opera and ballet comment are not the only things that have plagued the Marty Supreme Oscars bid. The movie has been catching strays in the general discourse that has grown since Oct. 7, with a whole host of viral posts accusing the film, which is very Jewish in feel but makes basically no mention of Israel, of being Zionist propaganda.
One could rail against this, point out all the ways it is both stupid and antisemitic. Like that Marty is a fairly despicable character so as far as propaganda goes, it wouldn’t be very effective. Or that making a movie by and about Jews doesn’t mean anything about a movie’s political message. Have people totally lost the ability to watch and interpret movies? Maybe Jewish stories are in just as much trouble as opera and ballet, though obviously in a different way. They are so constantly read as a metaphor for or commentary on Israel that people can no longer appreciate them for their own merits.
Chalamet, however, has simply been ignoring the noise and having fun. The actor has become somewhat famous for his oddball press appearances. Before Marty Supreme even came out, he dropped a nearly 20-minute long surreal parody of his own marketing tour, in which he spent a video call pitching his team on ideas such as dyeing the Statue of Liberty orange.
It’s an unusual strategy in an era of constant statements, apologies and explanations. Whether or not it will be successful we will find out this weekend at the Academy Awards. It wasn’t last year, when he made sports predictions during his press tour for A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic; Adrien Brody ultimately won for The Brutalist, a movie I still have not seen. (I want to, truly, but it is just so long.) Brody had a much more traditional press tour, giving interviews about the importance of his role, of the Holocaust, of art. He generally took himself very seriously in both his defense of his art, and of his Jewish identity and Jewish movie.
That’s all well and good, and probably appropriate for The Brutalist. But it’s far more fun to watch Chalamet play ping-pong against China’s elderly. And I think it’s a better way to handle the criticism, whether it’s about Zionism, Judaism or um, anti-opera-ism. Chalamet refuses to dignify his critics; he simply carries on enjoying himself. And I, for one, have enjoyed watching him do it. I’ll miss him when this press tour ends.
The post I’m going to miss the ‘Marty Supreme’ press tour appeared first on The Forward.