RSS
Mitch Albom enters new Jewish territory with Holocaust novel ‘The Little Liar’
(JTA) — For more than two decades, Mitch Albom has been perhaps the best-selling Jewish author alive — even as his books tend to embrace a much broader and more amorphous definition of “faith.”
But now, Albom says he’s ready to embrace his “obligation” as a Jewish writer: to publish a novel set during the Holocaust.
“The Little Liar,” which comes out on Tuesday, follows an innocent 11-year-old Greek Jewish boy named Nico, who is tricked by Nazis into lying to his fellow Jews about the final destination of the trains they are forced to board. It was written before Oct. 7 but comes at a time when Jews are again grappling with the aftermath of tragedy in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing war against the terror group in Gaza.
Albom is a Jewish day school alumnus, and Judaism has featured in his prior books, if less centrally. “Tuesdays With Morrie,” his 1997 memoir that rocketed up the bestseller charts and made him a household name, focused on his relationship with Morrie Schwartz, his Jewish mentor at Brandeis University. A follow-up memoir, 2009’s “Have A Little Faith,” discussed Albom’s relationship with his childhood rabbi, interspersed with his friendship with a local priest. He has also involved Jewish faith leaders in his many charities, including an orphanage he runs in Haiti, to which he has flown Rabbi Steven Lindemann of New Jersey’s Temple Beth Sholom.
In his fiction, though, the Detroit author, sportswriter, radio personality and philanthropist has taken a more ecumenical approach to morality and the afterlife. Sometimes Albom’s characters wander through heaven, which can be a physical place (“The Five People You Meet In Heaven” and its sequel). Sometimes they are granted the ability to spend time with their dead relatives (“For One More Day”), are admonished for turning their backs on Godly ideas like living each moment to its fullest (“The Time Keeper”), or are asked to put their blind faith in figures who may or may not themselves be God (“The Stranger In The Lifeboat”).
“The Little Liar,” by contrast, is a squarely Jewish story. Like the 1969 Holocaust novel “Jacob the Liar,” by Jurek Becker, the story pivots on a Jew lying to his people about the Nazis. But unlike other Holocaust novels, Albom traces the repercussions of that moment for decades following the events of the Holocaust itself, through four central characters who wrestle with the trauma and violence of their past.
Even as it includes a great deal of historical detail — from the descriptions of the thriving prewar Jewish community of Salonika, Greece, to several real-life figures such as the Hungarian actress and humanitarian Katalin Kárady and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal — the book also has plenty of Albom-isms. It’s largely structured as a giant morality tale about the nature of truth and lies, and is narrated by “Truth” itself. Aphorisms like “Truth be told” abound throughout the text.
“I didn’t want to write a ‘Holocaust book’ per se,” Albom told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during a phone conversation earlier this fall. “With each one of my books, I tried to have some sort of overriding theme that I wanted to explore and that I thought might be inspirational to people.”
Yet he admits that, “as a Jewish writer,” he felt compelled by the subject matter to create “a small, small, small contribution to getting people not to forget what happened.”
This interview was conducted prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and has been edited for length and clarity.
JTA: You’ve written two memoirs about Jewish mentors of yours, but this is the first time you’ve incorporated Judaism so openly into your fiction. Can you tell me about your own Jewish upbringing?
Albom: I was raised in South Jersey and Philadelphia. Growing up I had what I think would be kind of a typical Jewish upbringing of that time, during the 60s and 70s. [At] 11 years old, I was sent to a Jewish day school. Half the day was just Jewish studies in Hebrew. And in fact, it was mostly done in Hebrew, and so for from sixth grade until 11th grade, with the exception of one year where I left and went to public school, I went to that school.
So I had a very deep and thorough Jewish education. We learned everything from not only Hebrew and Jewish studies and Jewish history and things like that, but we learned to read the commentary on the Torah… I had to learn those letters. Don’t ask me to do it now, but I was pretty in-depth: Moses, Maimonides and all that. So I graduated and I went to Brandeis University, which was a still predominantly Jewish school.
At that point, having spent so much time with my Jewish roots and education, I kind of put a lid on it, and said, “OK, that’s enough.” And I wasn’t particularly practicing from that point for a couple of decades. It wasn’t really until I wrote the book “Have A Little Faith,” [when] my childhood rabbi asked me to write his eulogy, I got more drawn back to my Judaism.
Why did you decide to tell a Holocaust story now?
I think as a Jewish writer, I almost felt an obligation, before my career was over, to create a story that hopefully would be memorable enough, set during the Holocaust. That it would be a small, small, small contribution to getting people not to forget what happened. And people tend to remember stories longer than they remember facts. I think people remember “The Diary of Anne Frank” longer than they remember statistical numbers of how many Jews were slaughtered or how many homes were destroyed by the Nazis.
But it took me until now to find a story that I felt hadn’t already been done. There’s so many books now. And even there’s been a recent rash of them over the last five to 10 years, you know, “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” and “The Librarian of Auschwitz,” many other things, all of which are great books and wonderful reads. But I just felt like so much ground had been covered that I couldn’t really come up with an original setting, original idea, until “The Little Liar.”
Something that sets this book apart from the others you mentioned is the setting of Salonika, the Greek city where the vast majority of its 50,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. What drew you to that as a setting?
Two things. One, I lived in Greece when I got out of college. Through a series of weird and unfortunate events, I ended up as a singer and a piano player on the island of Crete. I could just spend my days in the sunshine and eating the amazing food and being amongst the amazing people. So I’ve always loved Greece. And number two was, I didn’t want to tell a story that began in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto, all the familiar backdrops. I just didn’t want to tell a story that people said, “I’ve kind of seen this before.” So I thought, well, this will be fresh. I’ll be able to at least get people to, if nothing else, when they close the book, say, “I had no idea that the largest Jewish majority population sitting in Europe was Salonika, Greece, and even that was wiped out by the Nazis.”
If there was ever a city that looked like it was impenetrable, it would have been that one. Go back to 300 BCE, and there are Jews. They have been there for so long, and yet the Nazis wipe them out in about a year or less.
Crafting entirely fictional narratives around the Holocaust is pretty fraught territory. I’ve interviewed John Boyne, the author of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” about some of the backlash he’s gotten. What was your own approach to doing this in a sensitive way?
First of all, there’s no such thing as “purely fictional” when you’re coming to a Holocaust story, because you’re setting it during a real event. So you have to rely on real accounts, from people and books, in order to create a world that feels real. I don’t think anybody could write a Holocaust story and never have read a Holocaust book, never have listened to a Holocaust survivor, just sat in a room and imagined what this event might be like — just as you don’t set a book during the Civil War and not study the Civil War.
For me the premise of the book was what came first, and I should point out, I didn’t want to write a “Holocaust book” per se. With each one of my books, I tried to have some sort of overriding theme that I wanted to explore and that I thought might be inspirational to people. And the theme with this one had to do with truth and lies, and that actually goes back to the original inspiration of it, which was a visit to Yad Vashem.
You know, they have the videos on the walls and different people telling stories, and there was a woman who was telling the story about the train platforms, and she said that the Nazis would sometimes use Jews to calm the people on the train platforms and to lie to them to say everything’s going to be alright, you can trust these trains, you’re going to be OK. And that stayed in my mind, more than anything that I saw. Just the idea of being tricked into lying to your own people about their doom. I thought, one day I want to write a story that centers on someone who had to do that, and what would that do to their sense of truth.
You don’t end the narrative with the liberation of the camps; the story continues decades later. There are scenes of a Jewish character trying to reclaim his old home, of America sheltering Nazis after the war. These are the parts of the history of the Holocaust that I think are harder for people today to come to terms with.
Yeah, that was another way I wanted to make the story more fresh. I didn’t want it to begin with the night that the house was invaded and end with the day that the camps were liberated. I wanted to begin it before that, which I did, and I wanted to end it way after that.
I went to Salonika and I talked with people there about what happened when the Jews came back and, did they get their businesses back? Did they get their houses back? No, the businesses were gone and were given away. The houses, most of the time, were already sold off to somebody else. And I thought, sometimes we think the whole story, the Holocaust, the price that people paid, it ends on the day of liberation, and everybody runs crying and hugging and kissing into each other’s arms and now we’re free. We’re free. In many ways, that’s when the problems began, you know, and a whole different set of problems.
I’ve known survivors all my life. I grew up with them in my neighborhood and interviewed many of them over the years, and they’ve told me about their haunted dreams and sometimes in the middle of the night they just wake up, or in the middle of the day, just start crying, or how certain things they don’t want to talk about. And so I tried to be respectful and reflect some of those challenges in the years after the Holocaust, because I don’t think you can tell a complete story, at least not one about survivors, if you don’t talk about what happened to them after they tried to resume their normal lives.
In the book you point out that the Holocaust was built on a “big lie.” You’re framing truth as the ultimate ideal. But of course your Jewish characters are also surviving the war in part by lying about their identities. And we know that’s true of many real-life Holocaust survivors as well. Do you see that as a contradiction?
No, I see it as fascinating. You know, it’s a fascinating interwoven web of truth and deception. There is nobody who has never told a lie on this earth. And that’s why Nico was kind of a magical character to begin with. He’s 11 years old and has never told a lie — he’s almost an angel. And that’s where the parable feel to the story comes in.
Your writing has become associated with the concept of “faith,” and in your fiction you often render heaven as a physical place where the dead are finding ways to interact with the living. Is that a more Christian outlook on the afterlife, even though you say you were inspired by a vision an uncle of yours had about his own relatives? How do you think about your own depictions of heaven?
Well, the books that I’ve written about heaven, there was “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” “The Next Person You Meet in Heaven,” which was a sequel to it, and “The First Phone Call From Heaven,” which, if you read that book, you know that it isn’t what it seems. You know, I always looked at “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” as kind of a fable. My uncle Eddie, who was the main character — it wasn’t a true story but he inspired the character. He had told me a story that he had had an incident where he had died on an operating table. For a brief moment, he remembered floating above his body and seeing all of his dead relatives waiting for him at the edge of the operating table. So I always had that story in mind whenever I would think of him. It was meant to be a fable about how we all interact with one another.
A lot of Christians have embraced your work, right?
A lot of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and atheists.
I’ve seen evangelical writers refer to your body of work as part of a “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which is a term a lot of Jews have different kinds of feelings about. Do you think about the faith of your readers at all, or how they are perceiving your faith?
I write for anybody in the world who has a desire to read my book. I welcome them. I would never make a judgment on any reader. I’m happy to have someone pick up my book and read it.
—
The post Mitch Albom enters new Jewish territory with Holocaust novel ‘The Little Liar’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.
CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.
Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.
Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.
In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.
Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”
Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.
According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””
Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.
The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”
This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”
“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said.
Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine.
“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”
In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.
The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The post Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.
The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.
“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”
Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.
She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.
“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”
In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”
“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”
Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.
“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”
Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.
“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”
The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.
Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.
In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”
“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.
Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.
Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.
The post Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login