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Far-right Israeli minister finds enemy in JDC, the mainstream American Jewish aid group
(JTA) — An American Jewish group that has provided aid to Jewish communities in crisis for more than a century has become the target of one of Israel’s newly empowered far-right ministers.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who serves as national security minister, said on Wednesday that he was shutting down a program dedicated to reducing violence in Arab Israeli towns. His reason: The program is operated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which he called a “leftist organization.”
“JDC is a nonpolitical organization and has been so since our founding in 1914,” Michael Geller, a spokesperson for JDC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Ben-Gvir’s characterization baffled many across the Jewish communal world who know the JDC as a nonpartisan group with an extensive track record of providing humanitarian aid to Jews in distress.
To them, Ben-Gvir’s criticism of the group is the latest sign that the rupture of political norms in Israel extends beyond the judicial reforms advanced by the government, which have drawn unprecedented protests.
“To call the JDC a left-wing organization is a joke. It is not political in any way,” said Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, co-CEO of the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that works toward an “equal and shared society” for Jewish and Arab Israelis.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, who is Jewish, said he anticipated changes by the right-wing government, which was inaugurated in December. But he was surprised by Ben-Gvir’s announcement.
“I could expect revisiting collaboration with organizations that are branded as civil rights or human rights or Israeli-Palestinian organizations,” he added. “But the JDC — it’s very strange.”
Founded in 1914 by the American Jewish banker Jacob Schiff to aid Jews living in Palestine, the “Joint” has distributed billions of dollars in assistance across 70 countries — including, over the last year, to 43,000 Ukrainian Jews amid the war there. It played a central role in aiding Holocaust survivors following World War II, as well as in the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union.
Among its biggest sources of support are Jewish federations, the nonpartisan umbrella charities found in nearly every major North American Jewish community.
“JDC is an apolitical organization that has worked with every government since the establishment of the State of Israel, providing critical services to the elderly, youth-at-risk, people with disabilities and other underserved populations across all sectors, including Haredim and Arab-Israelis,” the Jewish Federations of North America said in a statement. “JDC’s activities are a living and breathing example of the Jewish values of tikkun olam and tzedakah that guide Jewish Federations’ work every day,” Hebrew phrases that connote the Jewish imperative to repair the world, as well as charity.
JDC staff packing matzahs and haggadahs for online seders in Odessa, Ukraine, April 7, 2022. (JDC)
In Israel, the group funds and operates efforts to help needy populations — including immigrants, the elderly, people with disabilities and people living in poverty. Those efforts often involve working with the government, which in 2007 gave the JDC Israel’s most prestigious prize for its work. This year, according to a spokesman, the group is spending $129 million on Israel initiatives.
The JDC’s government-funded programs include the anti-violence effort that Ben-Gvir is targeting. It was made possible last year due to nearly $1 billion in funding to curb crime in Arab communities by the previous governing coalition, which was centrist. The allocation followed lobbying by Arab and civil society organizations, including the Abraham Initiatives, which is now monitoring how the money is being used as well as its impact.
Arab citizens of Israel make up 84% of crime victims despite comprising just 20% of the population, according to government data released last year that showed a sharp rise in the proportion of Arab Israelis who had experienced violent crime.
Many in Arab communities have called for heightened law enforcement and have charged Israeli police with making inadequate efforts to keep their communities safe. This week, commenting on the shooting death of an Arab Israeli woman, Arab Israeli opposition lawmaker Ahmad Tibi accused Ben-Gvir of being “occupied with other matters,” such as clashes with the attorney general and police officials in Tel Aviv. “Maybe the time has come for senior officials to demonstrate responsibility when it comes to crime organizations and weapons running rampant,” Tibi said.
Other initiatives have aimed to tackle the violence in ways that go beyond policing. The program that Ben-Gvir said he is shutting down is one of them. Called Stop the Bleeding, it involves multiple government ministries as well as local community groups and education efforts and has operated in seven cities with large Arab populations, including a Bedouin town and Lod, a city with significant Arab organized crime networks that also has a large Jewish population.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said the program was already starting to bear fruit and had contributed to a slowdown in a multi-year rise in murders. Canceling the program, he said, reflects the current government’s general approach to tackling Israel’s problems.
“It’s not about collaboration. It’s not about hearing the concerns and pain and hopes and needs of the Arab community,” he said. “It’s about doing everything unilaterally, and really without a lot of care for the lives of those people. I think that’s what we are watching.”
MK Ahmad Tibi attends a meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem, Dec. 6, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
A year ago, around the time when the previous government awarded the Stop the Bleeding contract to the JDC, Bezalel Smotrich, a key Ben-Gvir ally who was then an opposition lawmaker and now serves alongside Ben-Gvir as finance minister, proposed that Israel create a “command center” of “all of the relevant entities” that provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian Jewish refugees. Included on his list, alongside the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Red Cross: the JDC.
The JDC is not the first mainstream group to be targeted by far-right members of Israel’s new right-wing government, whose signature legislative effort aims to sap the power and independence of the country’s judiciary. That legislation has given rise to a sweeping protest movement and to grave warnings about Israel’s future from a broad range of public figures — including elder statesmen, foreign governments and religious leaders.
Avi Maoz, the leader of the anti-LGBTQ Noam Party who briefly held a leadership role in Israel’s Education Ministry, compiled a list of American and British groups that he believes are trying to impose their liberal values on Israeli schoolchildren. “We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said. Maoz has since resigned from that role, saying that he did not think he was being sufficiently empowered to fulfill his goals by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
But Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said he remains concerned about civil-society programs, especially those falling under the purview of far-right ministers including Ben-Gvir or those funded by American Jews, whom some on the right perceive as universally liberal.
People who are paying attention to local governance in Israel expect further tensions around initiatives that do not match Ben-Gvir’s attitudes about harsh policing. Ben-Gvir wants officers to have the right to shoot Arabs who throw stones, has called for a crackdown on anti-government protesters and is increasingly clashing with police officials who believe his orders could jeopardize public safety. Multiple former police commissioners have called for his dismissal.
“Ben-Gvir has his own political agenda and he has his own ax to grind, and at the moment, I think he’s not keen on developing services of the Arab population, either in security or juvenile delinquency or education,” said Amos Avgar, who worked for the JDC in Israel, Russia and the United States for 30 years until 2010, including as chief programming officer.
Avgar emphasized that the JDC has always studiously avoided political activity. “If there’s one thing that the JDC is not, it is not political,” he said. “It always shied [away] from anything that had the smell of politics and never dealt with any project by political agenda.”
It’s unclear how quickly Ben-Gvir’s announcement, made during a government meeting and first reported by Israel’s public broadcaster, will ultimately translate into changes. Geller, the JDC spokesman, said the organization had learned about the criticism only from the media, not from Ben-Gvir’s office. Later, amid an outcry, Ben-Gvir’s office said the funding decision had followed a review of contracts that revealed missing documentation from the JDC, a charge that the JDC denied.
Amnon-Sulitzeanu said he didn’t have high hopes for the program’s future.
“I think the first [characterization] is unfortunately going to be the correct one — that he is actually intending to stop it, which is very unfortunate because it is among the more serious programs that are willing to deal with this catastrophe,” he said. “And it shows again that the current minister is not so much interested in saving lives of Arab citizens.”
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The post Far-right Israeli minister finds enemy in JDC, the mainstream American Jewish aid group appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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An organ divided a synagogue. The fallout helped create Reform Judaism.
A new musical traces the origins of Reform Judaism to a question that, on paper, seems more likely to produce a subcommittee than a schism: Should a synagogue have an organ?
In 1840, a synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina, voted 46 to 40 to install a pipe organ in the sanctuary to accompany services.
The vote triggered a scandal: Organs were commonplace in American churches, but unheard of in synagogues, since rabbinic law traditionally holds that musical instruments should not be played on Shabbat.
The instrument caused such an uproar that those who opposed its installation started a breakaway congregation and fought for control of the synagogue in civil court. The case paved the way for a Reform Jewish movement that would embrace music as a key element of religious life.
Happyland, a musical based on those events, will debut Thursday at the same congregation where the real events took place, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim — today, still an operating Reform synagogue with an organ in its sanctuary. As the musical progresses, the organ becomes a vehicle for exploring broader questions of progress, including the uncomfortable reality that many Jews owned slaves in the antebellum South.
“It really embodies this tension in Reform Judaism, which is how much do you adapt to the wider culture around you, versus how much do you maintain your identity and your tradition?” said Elijah Siegler, co-producer of the show. “There’s no easy answer, and the organ is a perfect example of that.”
Charleston as happyland
The idea for Happyland came from an unusual pair in the theater world: a former synagogue president and a professor of religious studies.
Rob Turkewitz, a civil litigation attorney who had led Kahol Kadosh Beth Elohim, and Siegler, a synagogue member who teaches at the College of Charleston, thought that their congregation’s dramatic history had theatrical potential.
The duo set out to write historical rap songs emulating the Broadway show Hamilton. But they discovered they were out of their depth.
“We realized pretty quickly that we probably are not the right people to be writing a musical,” Turkewitz said. “Because we have no musical talent.”
Instead, they recruited Toby Singer, the congregation’s former music director and a Brooklyn-based composer, to write the script and songs.
The resulting show follows the arc of the real-life Kahol Kadosh Beth Elohim cantor, Gustavus Poznanski, who had been hired by the congregation in 1836 partly for his traditionalist bona fides.
But Poznanski ended up aligning with those who sought to modernize the synagogue. He supported the installation of the organ, conducted services in English rather than Hebrew, and advocated for observing just one Passover Seder instead of two.
Born in Poland and educated in Hamburg, Germany — where a Reform Jewish movement had already taken root — Poznanski saw the New World as a place where Jews could shape a distinctly American Jewish life.
That vision was captured in a famous speech Poznanski gave in 1841 — the inspiration for the title of the show. “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine,” he said, later adding, “America is our Zion and Washington our Jerusalem.”
But not everyone in Charleston shared his vision. Appalled by the reforms championed by Poznanski, a group of congregants took the dispute to state court.
A judge ruled in favor of the organ’s installation — not because he necessarily agreed with playing music on Shabbat, but because the synagogue had voted for it. According to Turkewitz, it was one of the first appellate rulings in American history that affirmed the separation of church and state.
“The court basically held that judges can’t determine for a religion how to practice,” Turkewitz said. “How could the judge tell the Jewish community how to practice their religion when the Jewish community doesn’t even agree?”
Reckoning with slavery
For Singer, the organ controversy was only part of the story. As congregants argued over what progress looked like inside the sanctuary, the nation outside was hurtling toward civil war.
“I just couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a story about religious freedom couched within a larger story about not freedom, because this was taking place in antebellum Charleston,” Singer said. “I needed to write a story that dealt with that and sat with the fact that the Jewish community of the South was complicit in the slave trade and was involved in it.”
Many of the founding members of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim came to Charleston to participate in the slave trade. And after the congregation’s first synagogue was destroyed in a fire, enslaved people built the replacement in 1840 — the grand Greek Revival structure that still stands today.
That history is woven throughout Happyland. In the musical, Poznanski grapples with the fact that his wife, Hetty, owns slaves. The second act takes place during a Passover Seder on the eve of the Civil War, as the characters confront the hypocrisy of celebrating Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt while slaves labor in their own home.
“Some people in the audience are going to see their great, great, great grandparents depicted on stage, because we still have Charleston Jews who are descendants of those Jews of the 1840s,” Siegler said. “I think some Jews don’t necessarily want to watch a musical about their ancestors owning slaves.”
Poznanski eventually resigned from his position, unable to bridge the divide between the traditionalist and reformist factions of the synagogue. A century later, in the 1960s, Rabbi Burton Padoll was forced to resign from the congregation after members objected to his support for the Civil Rights movement.
Today, the synagogue has made efforts to acknowledge that painful past, erecting a monument outside the congregation commemorating the enslaved people who built it.
For Siegler, the conflicts over slavery and religious reform share a common thread: how communities respond when long-held practices are challenged.
“One is a public fight over the organ, and then the other is this kind of family argument at the Seder table about owning enslaved people,” he said. “They actually are narratively linked by this idea of, what do we do to feel safe and secure?”
The post An organ divided a synagogue. The fallout helped create Reform Judaism. appeared first on The Forward.
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A conference in Warsaw focuses on Jewish languages
דער ייִדישער מוזיי „פּולין“ אין וואַרשע האָט לעצטנס דורכגעפֿירט אַ קאָנפֿערענץ וועגן ייִדישע שפּראַכן, אין שײַכות מיט דער צײַטווײַליקער אויסשטעלונג אויף דער זעלביקער טעמע, „דער כּוח פֿון ווערטער“.
כאָטש די קאָנפֿערענץ, וואָס איז פֿאָרגעקומען פֿונעם ערשטן ביזן דריטן יוני, האָט אין פּרינציפּ באַהאַנדלט אַלע ייִדישע לשונות, האָט דער מוזיי אין וואַרשע — די אַמאָליקע הויפּטשטאָט פֿונעם אייראָפּעיִשן ייִדישלאַנד — באַשטימט, אַז די פֿאָרשערס זאָלן רעדן מערסטנס וועגן ייִדיש. 14 פֿון די 27 רעפֿעראַטן האָבן באַהאַנדלט די ייִדישע קולטור אויף ייִדיש; 3 וועגן העברעיִש; 2 וועגן לאַדינאָ; 2 וועגן פּויליש, און נאָר 1 וועגן אַנדערע שפּראַכן: דזשוהורי (די שפּראַך פֿון די באַרג־ייִדן אין די קאַווקאַזן), עספּעראַנטאָ, ייִדיש־אַראַביש אין מאָראָקאָ, דײַטש, רוסיש און סערבאָ־קראָאַטיש.
אַלע רעפֿעראַטן האָט מען געהאַלטן אויף ענגליש.
לויט מײַן מיינונג וואָלט געווען אינטערעסאַנטער צו הערן וועגן ייִדיש דווקא אין אַ ברייטערן קאָנטעקסט, ווען מע נעמט אויך אַרײַן אַנדערע ייִדישע און נישט־ייִדישע שפּראַכן און קולטורן. עס זענען פֿאַראַן אַ סך פּאַראַלעלן און קאָנטראַסטן, וואָס וואַרפֿן זיך אין די אויגן, ווען ייִדישיסטן קוקן אַרויס פֿון די אייגענע דלתּ אַמות.
די הויפּטרעדע האָט געהאַלטן חנה פּולין־גלאַי (אוניווערסיטעט פֿון אַמהערסט), וועגן דער טעמע פֿון איר נײַ בוך: חורבן־ייִדיש, ד״ה די נײַע ווערטער און אויסדרוקן וואָס זענען אויפֿגעקומען אין די געטאָס און לאַגערן. כאָטש די לעקציע איז געווען אינטערעסאַנט האָט זיך מיר געפֿילט אַ ביסל אומהיימלעך צו הערן וועגן די דאָזיקע ווערטער אין „פּולין“־מוזיי, וואָס געפֿינט זיך ממש אויפֿן שטח פֿון דער אַמאָליקער וואַרשעווער געטאָ.
עס איז נישטאָ קיין אָרט צו דערציילן וועגן אַלע רעפֿעראַטן, אָבער וועגן עטלעכע לוינט זיך אָפּצוגעבן אַ באַריכט.
מאַטשעי ראַטאַיטשיק (פּויזנער אוניווערסיטעט) האָט גערעדט וועגן עטלעכע פּרוּוון במשך פֿון דער געשיכטע צו שרײַבן העברעיִש מיט לאַטײַנישע אותיות. איתּמר בן־אַבֿי (בן־ציון בן־יהודה), דער זון פֿונעם גרויסן באַנײַער פֿון העברעיִש, אליעזר בן־יהודה (אליעזר יצחק פּערלמאַן), איז געווען דער ערשטער געבוירענער רעדער פֿון העברעיִש אין דער מאָדערנער תּקופֿה. אין די 1920ער און 1930ער יאָרן האָט ער אַרויסגעגעבן עטלעכע ביכער און זשורנאַלן אויף טראַנסליטעראַציע, אַרײַנגערעכנט אַ באַנד זכרונות, „אַבֿי“ (ד״ה „מײַן טאַטע“; געשריבן „Avi“). זאבֿ זשאַבאָטינסקי, דער באַרימטער פֿירער פֿון די רעוויזיאָניסטן, האָט אין אַ געוויסער תּקופֿה געשטיצט די רעפֿאָרעם — אָבער צום סוף האָט זיך עס נישט אָנגענומען. העברעיִש איז געבליבן העברעיִש — מיטן ייִדישן אַלף־בית.
הילה שלם בהרד (תּל־אָבֿיבֿער אוניווערסיטעט) האָט דערציילט וועגן די שפּראַכן פֿון די „מעברות“ (די פּליטים־לאַגערן), וווּ עטלעכע הונדערט טויזנט נײַע עולים קיין ארץ־ישׂראל האָבן געוווינט, ווען זיי זענען ערשט אָנגעקומען אין לאַנד אין די יאָרן 1948־1951. אַזוי ווי די ייִדן זענען געקומען פֿון אַ סך פֿאַרשידענע לענדער, האָבן זיי אָפֿט נישט געהאַט קיין בשותּפֿותדיקע שפּראַך. אַ מאָל האָט איין געוויסע שפּראַך דאָמינירט; למשל, אין איין לאַגער איז די הויפּטשפּראַך געוואָרן בולגאַריש, דערפֿאַר ווײַל עס האָבן דאָרט צופֿעליק געוווינט אַ סך ייִדן פֿון בולגאַריע. אין אַנדערע לאַגערן האָט מען גערעדט אַ מין העברעיִש. אַ מאָל האָט זיך אַנטוויקלט אַ מין פּידזשין, אַ געמישטע שפּראַך, אָדער ייִדן האָבן גערעדט מיט די הענט.
חיה־רחל נאָווע, אַ לינגוויסטקע בײַם פֿאָרדהאַם־אוניווערסיטעט, האָט פֿאַרגליכן די עפֿנטלעכע שילדן אויף ייִדיש און לשון־קודש אין די חסידישע ייִשובֿים אין מאָנסי און קרית־יואל. קרית־יואל איז געשאַפֿן געוואָרן ווי אַן אָפֿיציעל חסידיש שטעטל און די עפֿנטלעכע שפּראַך און אַ סך שילדן זענען פֿון תּמיד אָן געווען אויף ייִדיש. מאָנסי, ווידער, איז אַ געמישטע שטאָט; פֿריִער האָבן דאָרט געוווינט אַ סך „מאָדערנע“ ייִדן, נישט קיין חרדים, זענען אַלע שילדן במילא געווען אויף ענגליש. צו ביסלעך איז די שטאָט געוואָרן וואָס מער חסידיש, און אין די לעצטע 10־20 יאָר האָט מען אָנגעהויבן הענגען שילדן אויף די געשעפֿטן און אויף די ווענט אין ייִדיש און לשון־קודש. דאָס איז אַ סימן פֿונעם נײַעם שטאָלץ פֿון די חסידים דאָרט, וואָס פֿילן, אַז זיי דאַרפֿן זיך מער נישט באַהאַלטן הינטער ענגלישע שילדן. די געגנט איז געוואָרן זייערע.
שפּעטער האָט נאָווע באַמערקט, אַז אין דער ייִדישער געגנט אין אַנטווערפּן, למשל, זענען כּמעט נישטאָ קיין שילדן אויף ייִדיש אָדער לשון־קודש. דאָס ווײַזט מסתּמא אַרויס די אומזיכערקייט פֿון די אַנטווערפּענער חסידים, וואָס ווילן זיך נישט וואַרפֿן אין די אויגן.
שירה פֿריד, וואָס האָט נאָר וואָס פֿאַרענדיקט אַ דאָקטאָראַט בײַם העברעיִשן אוניווערסטטעט, האָט געלייענט אַ רעפֿעראַט וועגן די „בית־יעקבֿ“־שולן פֿאַר פֿרומע מיידלעך, וואָס שׂרה שנירער האָט אָנגעהויבן שאַפֿן אין קראָקע אין 1917. שנירער האָט איבערגערעדט די גרויסע רבנים פֿון איר תּקופֿה, די פֿירערס פֿון דער „אַגודה“, די נײַע אָרטאָדאָקסישע פּאָליטישע פּאַרטיי, און זיי האָבן באַשלאָסן צו שטיצן „בית־יעקבֿ“. שנירער און די לערערינס אין די שולן האָבן די גאַנצע צײַט באַקעמפֿט די לינגוויסטישע אַסימילאַציע, ווײַל אַ סך פֿרומע מיידלעך האָבן דעמאָלטס שוין גערעדט צווישן זיך אויף פּויליש. אין זייער קאַמף פֿאַר ייִדיש האָבן זיי אַדאָפּטירט דעם „אָרטאָדאָקסישן אויסלייג“ פֿון שלמה בירנבוים, דעם באַקאַנטן בעל־תּשובֿה און ייִדיש־פֿאָרשער פֿון ווין, וואָס איז געוואָרן דער ערשטער ייִדיש־פּראָפֿעסאָר אין האַמבורג אין 1922.
קלמן ווײַזער, אַ היסטאָריקער און ייִדישיסט בײַ יאָרק־אוניווערסיטעט אין טאָראָנטאָ, האָט ווײַטער גערעדט וועגן בירנבוים און וועגן זײַן אויסלייג. נאָך דער מלחמה, איז בירנבוים געוואָרן אַ ביסל אָפּגעפֿרעמדט פֿון זײַנע אַמאָליקע פֿרײַנד אין דער אַגודה און „בית־יעקבֿ“. די אַגודה האָט געפֿירט אַ מער פּראַגמאַטישע פּאָליטיק לגבי מדינת־ישׂראל און עבֿרית. די אַגודיסטן זענען געווען צופֿרידן זיך צו באַטייליקן אין דער ישׂראל־רעגירונג און צו נעמען די מלוכישע געלטער פֿאַר זייערע אינסטיטוציעס. דערפֿאַר האָט ייִדיש גיך פֿאַרלוירן זײַן חשיבֿות בײַ זיי און דער יונגער דור איז גיך אַריבער אויף דער לאַנדשפּראַך: עבֿרית אין ישׂראל, און ענגליש אין אַמעריקע. בירנבוים, ווידער, איז געבליבן אַ שאַרפֿער קעגנער פֿונעם ציוניזם און פֿון עבֿרית. אָבער צוליב עפּעס אַ סיבה האָט ער נישט געזוכט קיין קאָנטאַקטן מיט די אונגערישע חסידים (למשל, סאַטמאַר), וואָס האָבן געהאַט אַן ענלעכע שטעלונג און וואָס האָבן ווײַטער גערעדט ייִדיש.
הגם די רעפֿעראַטן זענען געווען אויף אַקאַדעמיש ענגליש, נישט אויף קיין ייִדישער שפּראַך, האָט מען די שמועסן אין די קאַווע־הפֿסקות געפֿירט אויך אויף עבֿרית, פּויליש און אַוודאי — ייִדיש. שלמה בירנבוים וואָלט געווען שטאָלץ.
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In David Baerwald’s epic tale of espionage and wartime horrors, family history is stranger than fiction
“When I started out writing this book, my model wasn’t James Clavell,” David Baerwald said with a laugh, as he paused for a smoke break at a waterfront picnic table in his current hometown of Kingston, New York. “It was more like Bernard Malamud, or something; it was this kind of interior, depressing thing about a family coming to grips with its crimes — the hazards of epigenetic traumatic memory in a family, and what it does to people. It was a much more personal tale, you know? I wasn’t really thinking of this huge, swashbuckling thing.”
The Fire Agent, Baerwald’s debut novel, is indeed a huge, swashbuckling affair, an epic, massively entertaining and often gut-punchingly horrifying tale of international espionage spanning four continents, two world wars and countless collisions between heartfelt idealism and the harsh realities of human behavior over its 600 pages. Though some of its characters and most of its conversations are fictional, The Fire Agent is firmly grounded in actual historical events and figures both well-known and obscure — some of which are truly stranger than fiction.
“I would not have dared to make up most of this,” Baerwald said with a shrug. “Some of the characters are so over-the-top, they’re like super-villains from a Bruce Lee movie or Get Smart. The Black Dragon Society? Treasure hoards of Chinese gold? That all sounds ridiculous, like something out of Terry and the Pirates, or fucking Indiana Jones. But it all happened! I really wanted to provide people with clues, so that they could look into the actual history, because I found it so interesting.”
Much of The Fire Agent’s plot is based around the life and career of Ernst Baerwald, the author’s actual grandfather, a German Jew who spent several decades in Japan — ostensibly working as a liaison for the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, though the position served as cover for his extensive and deeply impactful espionage activities on behalf of the German (and later the United States) government. Long dead by the time his grandson was born in 1960, Ernst rarely came up in family conversation. “He went largely unrecognized in his lifetime,” said Baerwald. “Nobody ever really talked about him, and from what people would tell me about my grandfather, I had the impression that he was this kind of bum that sold ink on the streets in Tokyo. I had no idea that he’d led this crazy life!”
It wasn’t until about eight years ago, when Baerwald was cleaning out his parents’ wildfire-threatened West Los Angeles home, that he got an initial glimpse at Ernst’s actual occupation. “There were two boxes with a bunch of his papers that were in his office when he died,” Baerwald said. “They’d just been packed up and put away and buried under, like, 1960s-era skis and gardening equipment. In fact, I was gonna throw them away without looking at them; I was like, ‘Well, I’ve lived long enough without them.’ But this woman that was working with me, archiving the things in the house, she was like, ‘Well, let’s have a look.’”
Along with Ernst’s diaries and letters, Baerwald found maps and photographs of Japan, a Samurai sword and a miniature spy camera from the 1930s, and a speech that his grandfather had given to a U.S. government-run spy school in San Francisco in 1943. “I realized that there was, in fact, a huge story here that I needed to uncover,” Baerwald recalled. “That speech to the spy school was really the map to a huge portion of what I was soon to be researching. I didn’t know where it would take me, I didn’t know what it was for; I just knew that that was what I had to do, and suddenly that became my only thing in life.”
Baerwald is singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and film and TV composer best-known for Boomtown, his platinum-selling 1986 album by David & David, his duo with musician and producer David Ricketts, as well as his Golden Globe-nominated song “Come What May” from the Moulin Rouge! Soundtrack. His songs have been recorded by such disparate luminaries as Waylon Jennings, Sheryl Crow, Susanna Hoffs, Fishbone and Olivia Newton-John, but Baerwald said that writing a novel felt surprisingly natural for him.
“My first role was research, not writing,” he said. “But I did write some scenes just to see if I could do it, to see if I could actually write longform without meter or rhyme schemes, and it was like stepping into a warm, welcoming seat. You can get to feeling pretty claustrophobic as a songwriter; I’d accumulated a lot of rules for myself over God knows how many decades of doing that, just to survive — practices that I had acquired, mindsets — and I was happy to let them go, frankly. And I realized that there were a lot of things that I learned from not just lyric writing, but composition, that applied to writing a novel. When you’re composing for monophonic instruments like flutes or strings, they play the chords together as a group, but they’re each playing individual lines; and when you’re structuring complicated human interactions, that kind of muscle memory is really handy.
“To me, plots are like chord changes,” he continued. “They’re signifiers for change, but the real change is happening within the chord. It’s actually like a thousand minnows swimming in vaguely the same direction, rather than these monolithic events that proceed one after the other; there’s always a certain individuality in their movement. So if you think about characters like, ‘Here’s the cello section, and here’s the percussion,’ or whatever, it enables you to structure these sort of complicated scenes where everybody’s got some agenda, and everybody’s got their own melody that they’re singing.”
And as Ernst’s improbably cinematic life gradually unfolded for Baerwald through the diaries and correspondence of his grandfather and other family members (including Baerwald’s father Hans, who taught political science and Japanese studies at UCLA for 30 years), the plot of The Fire Agent fell into place. “I didn’t really need to outline the plot, because I already had the outline. It was his life — and it was like, ‘Wherever he goes, I go,’” he said with a laugh. “I just did research along the way to find out what he was doing and what was happening around him. Whether there’s a huge earthquake or whether there’s a plague or whether there’s a war, it kind of gives you the plot point, right there.”
Far more challenging for Baerwald was dealing with the “emotional rollercoaster” of researching the many soul-crushing horrors that his grandfather witnessed (and, in some cases, was directly involved in) as a soldier, citizen and spy. “I would find myself just weeping more than once,” he said. “You just find yourself coming across these artifacts that really take you into the historical moment, and it’s really powerful. I remember I was in the rare books library at Columbia, looking at my uncle’s papers, and there was a letter from one of the soon-to-be-dead fighters during the Lublin Massacre, and it’s 28 pages of just savagery. So I’m sitting there, reading the details of this doomed-yet-heroic effort, and I feel this little tap on my shoulder, and this girl says, “Excuse me, Sir, I’m sorry — there’s no crying on the manuscripts.’”
Indeed, one of the major themes running through The Fire Agent is mankind’s innate ability to solve a major problem while creating even worse ones with the solution. Early on in the story, Ernst is present at the unveiling of the Haber-Bosch process, the revolutionary industrial development which enabled man to produce synthetic ammonia on a grand scale — a discovery which then allowed the industrial synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers, which were desperately needed by farmers across the globe at the beginning of the 20th century. Unfortunately, while this discovery saved humanity from worldwide famine, the industrial-scale production of ammonia and ammonium nitrate also resulted in tremendous carnage on the battlefield and elsewhere.
“I knew that there was going to have to be some reference in the book to the transformation from life-giving fertilizers to life-taking gunpowder and phosgene gas,” said Baerwald. “The Haber-Bosch process has made the lives of the probably 7 billion people alive today possible, but it’s bleached the coral in the ocean, and the high-pressure tests that emerged from it ultimately fueled the Nazi air force and tanks and trucks…
“There are a lot of scientists in my family,” he said, “and one of them said something to me once that I put in Albert Einstein’s mouth in the book: ‘Look at us — we’re in the dreamiest of sciences, astrophysics, and what are we doing? We’re making missile trajectories and warheads.’ And that’s been a kind of a refrain in my family for my whole life, this awful feeling of being trapped in a sociopathic system that takes everything beautiful and turns it into a weapon somehow, that takes brotherhood and camaraderie and turns it into teams and armies, and takes love and turns it into prostitution.
“One of the reasons I chose the music business was that I didn’t want to be part of all that. I thought, ‘Even at its very worst, at least I’m not making weapons!’” Baerwald said. “But apparently, I am! Ultimately, the record companies started merging with multinational corporations who made fucking nuclear weapons, and now Spotify has gobbled up all my friends’ livelihoods and is investing in AI weapons. You can’t get away from this shit!”
Though he’s currently busy promoting The Fire Agent, Baerwald says that a sequel is already in the works, one which will include material cut from the first novel. “I’ve been like a guy chasing a piece of paper across a windy field for like seven years,” he said. “The full story was always just slightly out of reach — for the 600 pages that I ended up with, I wrote probably 1400. I wanted to take The Fire Agent up to 1980, but I realized that there was no way I’d physically able to do it; I honestly thought I was going blind by the end of it. But now I’m really looking forward to working on the next one.”
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