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South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70
(JTA) — Jeremy Gordin, one of South Africa’s most prominent journalists, wrote repeatedly in recent months about burglaries at his family’s Johannesburg home.
In a weekly column, he expressed dismay at the rampant levels of crime, growing urban decay and regular power outages endured by South Africans as a result of mismanagement and corruption. In one — titled “It is getting dark, too dark to see” after the Bob Dylan lyric — he addressed his two children, both in their twenties.
“I’m not suggesting that you’re going to find yourselves in desperate flight across your own border, that your graveyard may be ploughed up and strewn with garbage. But there comes a time when things are clearly falling apart,” he concluded.
He added, with the allusion to his Jewish identity clear to anyone familiar with Jewish history, “And you, who have your whole lives before you (as they say), need to consider seriously going to live elsewhere. We’ve been doing it for centuries, after all.”
On March 31, Gordin’s worst fears came to pass: He was murdered during a night robbery at his home. He was 70.
South African police described the incident as “a robbery gone wrong” but did not describe the exact cause of death. Seven people were arrested in Johannesburg two weeks later; one was driving a car that had been stolen from Gordin’s residence.
It was a tragic end for Gordin’s 70-year South African story, which, as with so many of his country’s Jews, intersected sharply with both the story of Israel and with the struggle of Black South Africans. As a lifelong journalist, he had at times headed both South Africa’s version of Playboy and its storied working-class Black tabloid, and also ran an initiative that used reporting to prove the innocence of people who were wrongfully imprisoned. He won the country’s annual top journalism prize multiple times.
Gordin was also a friend to many, frequently opening his home in Johannesburg’s Parkview neighborhood to guests. (This reporter was one of them during a stint in Johannesburg for Efe, the Spanish newspaper.)
Gordin was born in Pretoria in 1952, in a Jewish family with Lithuanian and Latvian origins. After a spell in South Vietnam, where his pharmacist father worked for the United States, the family returned to South Africa. Gordin went to high school in Brakpan, a town in the industrial east of the Great Johannesburg emblematic of the country’s white Afrikaner working class to which he often referred in his articles.
Gordin obtained a scholarship to study in Israel and completed a bachelor’s degree while playing rugby at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Back in his country, he did his military service volunteering for the South African Defence Force’s elite 1 Parachute Battalion, then started a prolific career in journalism.
In a breakout moment, he published a book in 1998 based on his conversations with the apartheid government’s death squad leader Eugen de Kock. Then incarcerated, de Kock candidly told Gordin about his deeds, but most importantly about those who had ordered his crimes, for which they were hardly questioned and never tried.
Gordin authored another canonical book of recent South Africa history, his biography of South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma. Published in 2010, a year after Zuma took power, Gordin’s went beyond the usual assumptions about the Zulu former freedom fighter who learned how to read and write as an adult and was often underestimated by South Africa’s intellectual class.
Zuma left office in 2018 after a tenure marked by charges of corruption, cronyism and incompetence. Gordin’s biography has been criticized for being excessively indulgent with its subject, but it remains essential for understanding Zuma’s psychology and the motivations behind his actions.
In the early 1990s, after a period living in San Francisco, Gordin became the launch editor of Playboy South Africa. (He posed nude, with only a magazine as cover, to promote Playboy’s South Africa launch.) In a recent essay, Gordin recounted trying to land a then-unknown Charlize Theron for the magazine’s first cover. Invoking Yiddish terms, Gordin recalled journalists who had passed away, described the actress’s unembarrassed audition, and also managed to explore changing race and class dynamics in South Africa.
(Around this time, his friend Roy Isacowitz wrote in a remembrance published shortly after his death, the pair had successfully gotten a media executive censured for calling them “pushy little Jewboys” — though he said they accepted the description.)
Jeremy Gordin, at right, stands in front of covers of the Sun, the South African tabloid he oversaw for many years. (Courtesy Gordin family)
In 2012 he was named caretaker editor of the Daily Sun, a South African tabloid wildly popular among the Black working class. The paper lost much of its appeal after the death of its founder, larger-than-life Afrikaner media executive Deon du Plessis. Gordin brought back the pride, the punch and many of the readers to the paper. Or, as a headline made for him by his colleagues when he retired said, he “brought rock’n roll back to the Sun.”
The tabloid’s news largely relied on cases of violence, gossip and sex often featuring “tokoloshes,” fantastic creatures of popular African mythology whose encounters with the Sun’s readers were reported nationwide in the first person to its many correspondents. The readership and the paper’s foot soldiers were 100% Black. They collected the stories and sent them to the Johannesburg newsroom, where a group of experienced white male journalists including Gordin translated their texts in the characteristic Daily Sun language.
Gordin’s world couldn’t be further away from the one his newspaper reflected. But as his colleague at the paper Vincent Pienaar wrote after his death, “Not only did he understand the ethos of the publication, he embraced it.”
The tabloid took on serious stories, too. During his tenure as the paper’s editor the Daily Sun broke the story of the death at the hands of police officers of Mozambican immigrant taxi driver Mido Macias. A reader had filmed his gratuitously brutal arrest and sent it to the newspaper. Eight police officers involved in the victim’s death in custody were ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After leaving the Daily Sun, Gordin took on a role coordinating the Wits Justice Project, a journalism program focused on the plight of innocent or unfairly treated prisoners. In 2011 he helped secure the release of Fusi Mofokeng and Tshokolo Joseph Mokoena, who had served 19 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.
Gordin’s many friends say that his sympathy for the underdog was inextricable from the Jewish traditions and attitudes he inherited.
Although not religiously observant, Gordin peppered his articles with Jewish stories and jokes and Yiddish words and expressions. His sense of humor was strongly influenced by his Jewishness, as it was the combination of principle and humorous compassion that defined his personality. He was extremely well-read and voraciously curious, loved to share what he discovered with friends and indulged in sassy but harmless gossip both in private and in his articles.
Sometimes, his Jewish identity and his journalism entwined as when, in 2016, he reported from Johannesburg about the extradition hearing of a Hasidic rabbi, Eliezer Berland, wanted in Israel on rape charges. His final column, published the day before his death, explained, and condemned, the proposed right-wing judicial reforms in Israel.
Rabbi Sa’ar Shaked of the Beit Emanuel Progressive Synagogue in Johannesburg said Gordin as a friend and “wild spirit” who didd’t regularly attend services but was a repeat guest speaker at the synagogue to discuss weekly Torah portions and a variety of aspects of Jewish history and law.
Despite not attending services regularly, Gordin’s role in the community is described as “very active” by Wendy Ovens, a South African health professional in the NGO sector who served with him on the management committee of Beit Emanuel in 2011.
“His knowledge on Judaism and Jewish history was incredible,” Ovens said. She said his Jewish identity fueled his core mission: “He was community-minded and believed in justice and in what was right.”
Gordin is survived by his wife, Deborah Blake, and his children, Jake and Nina.
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West Point graduated more Jewish cadets this year than ever before, official says
The very first class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802 consisted of two graduates, one of whom was a Jew named Simon Levy who served briefly in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before passing away at the age of 33. Levy was accepted into the academy based on his skill in mathematics and the strength of his ”good conduct” at the Battle of Maumee Rapids, one of the last skirmishes in the Indian War in Ohio in 1794.
This year on May 23, according to Col. Benjamin Wallen, a lay Jewish leader involved in the West Point Hillel chapter and the academy’s Jewish choir, 30 Jewish cadets graduated from the academy. Though West Point’s Public Affairs Office said it couldn’t confirm the number of Jewish cadets because the military academy “does not track or maintain official data on cadets’ religious affiliations, Col. Wallen said the Class of 2026 had the most Jews in West Point’s 224-year history.
Asked what accounted for the upsurge in Jews at West Point, Wallen said the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the rise in antisemitism are likely factors.
“This is one place that none of that has reared its ugly head,” Wallen said of the ubiquitous campus demonstrations against Israel. “Not a hint of it. Because that’s just not who we are. There’s no place for hate of any kind at West Point.”
Wallen, a Jewish officer with 30 years in the Army, is a civil and environmental engineering professor at West Point and also serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development. He called West Point “a wonderful place to be Jewish and to serve your country.”
Two of the grads in the Class of ’26 are twin sisters from Millburn, NJ. Catherine Brodsky is headed to Duke Medical School to become an Army surgeon. Her sister Claudia is bound for Anchorage, Alaska, where she’ll serve as a logistics officer.
“I had the most amazing time at West Point,” Brodsky told me over the phone from Budapest, where she and her sister are visiting. “I’m very grateful for it. I think it was really instrumental in challenging me and making me grow as a person and as a leader.”
The newly minted second lieutenant said the Jewish cadets had a deep sense of community.
“We had a lot of events that kept us close-knit, like choir and various trips,” she said. “Celebrating the holidays together was really important.”
Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff, a professor of Judaic Studies at Stern College for Women in Manhattan who conducts extra-curricular classes at West Point, hosted the Jewish cadets at his home in nearby Monsey during Jewish holidays and Shabbat.
“They really are the most remarkable bunch of men and women,” Hajioff said. “From my talking to the students, I’d say there’s definitely been a shift of young men and women wanting to protect this country.”
Rabbi Hajioff posted photos on Instagram of the baccalaureate service for Jewish cadets at which the Jewish choir performed. One photo showed him standing next to Ron Chajmovic of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in his dress whites.
Lt. Chajmovic, who attended Georgia Military College before arriving at West Point, is headed to helicopter flight school, Hajioff said. His older brother Yoni is in the Israel Defense Forces and is currently stationed in Gaza according to their grandfather, Paul Chajmovic. The elder Chajmovic, who is about to turn 80, served in the Israeli air force during the Six-Day War.
“I miss it, believe it or not,” he told me. “I would volunteer again but I’m too old.”
Chajmovic’s other grandfather came from Israel to West Point for the graduation ceremony.
West Point’s Class of ‘27 and Class of ‘28 both have 27 Jewish cadets, according to Col. Wallen, though he said that Jewish representation is down in the Class of ’29, which he said has 17 or 18 Jews.
The Class of ‘30 will include an 18-year-old graduate of a Jewish day school in Nevada. Yonah Mowery arrives at West Point on June 29 to start six weeks of basic training. Mowery is a graduate of the Adelson School in Las Vegas, which was started by the late Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish casino billionaire and Netanyahu supporter. Mowery ran cross country, played basketball and swam on his school team. He took 10 advanced placement classes and participated in Moot Beit Din, a student competition based on rabbinical court.
“I know that by being in the American military, I will be defending not just Jews in Israel but Jews around the world because the United States is a major world power,” Mowery told me in a telephone interview.
The Mowery family has a long history of military service. His paternal grandfather served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. His grandfather’s uncle, Mowery said, was among the American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau. And there were 13 Mowery men who fought for the Union and perished at Gettysburg.
“The more Jews we have in the American military, the less alone we all feel,” Mowery said. “It’s an honor to be in the United States military as a Jewish kid, especially since this country is founded on Jewish and Christian values.”
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The visionary Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust but not its aftermath
Paul Celan: A Life
By Anna Arno
Translated by Soren Gauger
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $35
During a 1969 poetry reading in Israel, Paul Celan’s audience requested “Deathfugue,” his most famous poem. With its hypnotic images of death as “a master from Deutschland,” prisoners drinking the “black milk of dawn” and smoke rising to “a grave in the clouds,” it remains one of the most powerful artifacts of the Holocaust.
But like a rock star weary of endlessly repeating his greatest hits, Celan declined. Instead, he offered other poems, scorned by some commentators as “hermetic, esoteric, divorced from reality.”
So we learn from Anna Arno’s intelligent, intricate biography, Paul Celan: A Life, ably translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger. Interweaving literary criticism with Celan’s life story, Arno quotes liberally from Pierre Joris’ English translations. Even so, she can’t quite do the work justice. In translation and wrenched from their poetic context, Celan’s innovative verses, credited with a radical remaking of the German language, come across as cryptic and impenetrable.
Arno covers Celan’s schooling, wartime experiences, work history, travels, friendships, psychiatric ordeals and overlapping romantic interests, at times departing from strict chronology. Though defensible, the narrative strategy renders the book somewhat convoluted.
One thread is Celan’s intermittent, decadeslong involvement with the accomplished Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. That relationship, more passionate and enduring for Bachmann, preceded his mostly happy marriage to the French artist Gisèle Lestrange and continued during it. In an odd twist, Bachmann and Lestrange, bonded by both their love for Celan and their anxiety about his well-being, developed “a kind of impossible sisterly friendship.”
Despite Celan’s devotion to his wife, “other women,” Arno writes, “were always drifting through his life.” A chapter toward the end of the biography details some of Celan’s most important romantic relationships. Other chapters focus on his inventiveness as a translator and his worsening mental illness.
Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania (officially Cernăuți, and now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on the fringes of the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The French-sounding Celan is a pen name, an anagram of Ancel, a Romanian version of Antschel.
Celan’s parents were German-speaking Jews, and German was Celan’s native language. But he was a polyglot, a talent that shaped his poetry and enabled his career as a translator. Along with Romanian, in which he wrote some early poems, and French, the language of his postwar life in Paris, he learned Russian (under Soviet occupation) and English. He had at least “a passive knowledge of Yiddish,” picked up enough Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah and studied Italian, Latin and Greek. “His intellectual ease gave him a sense of superiority,” Arno writes.
World War II interrupted Celan’s medical studies in France, and back home he enrolled in Romance language courses. The Soviet occupation was brutal but, for Jews, the Romanian fascist regime that succeeded it was worse. Celan’s parents were deported and died in a Nazi labor camp. Celan, separated from them, survived forced labor, but remained “wracked with grief” over his parents’ fate. He would describe “Deathfugue,” written in 1945, as his mother’s epitaph and grave. The poem may have influenced Theodor Adorno, who famously described poetry after Auschwitz as “barbaric,” to modify his views.
After leaving a ruined Czernowitz for Bucharest, where Celan translated, wrote poetry, flirted with Surrealism and “bounced from one relationship to the next,” he traveled to Vienna. “Young, dashing, full of charm,” he eventually settled in Paris and became a naturalized French citizen. But he chose German as his poetic language, despite the emotional dissonance that entailed.
Over the years, he traveled to Germany to read his work and accept prizes. In the process, he developed relationships with leading postwar German writers, including Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. But the 1950s were a tricky time. “He could have crossed paths with a murderer at every step,” Arno writes.
Celan recoiled viscerally at what he saw as persistent antisemitic currents in German culture, which hadn’t yet reckoned with the magnitude of Nazi crimes. He interpreted bad reviews as instances of antisemitism, and Arno suggests that he wasn’t always wrong.
Even more traumatic were accusations of plagiarism leveled against him by Claire Goll, the widow of Yvan Goll, whose poetry he had translated. Arno describes the charges as both malicious and baseless, and “probably an act of revenge for her spurned advances.”
They nevertheless affected Celan’s reputation and threatened his health. “Claire Goll’s smear campaign was to become the main cause of the poet’s mental breakdown,” Arno asserts. It’s a strong statement. Certainly, he had endured other losses: the murder of his parents, the death of his day-old infant son, François, after a botched delivery.
On the cusp of middle age, Arno reports, Celan experienced bursts of paranoia. “He could not always separate justified precautions from obsessive mistrust, vigilance from a fit of persecution mania,” she writes. “His deeply buried despair, moral severity, and tempestuous personality all caused sudden and violent fits.”
In 1962, he had what Arno calls “his first bout of psychosis,” which included hallucinations and violent episodes. He was hospitalized and medicated and underwent psychotherapy. Insulin injections, a since-discredited treatment, damaged his motor skills. Even during his hospitalizations, he continued to write poetry. (His productivity in the throes of mental health crises calls to mind Sylvia Plath.)
Arno, noting that Celan’s medical records remain sealed and his journals unavailable, doesn’t offer a diagnosis. The hallucinations and paranoia suggest schizophrenia, but Arno also mentions mania and depression, along with numerous suicide attempts. He tried his best to stay connected to his only child, Eric. But his instability cost him many friendships and ultimately his marriage.
In 1970, the 49-year-old poet drowned himself in the Seine, joining a sad company of writers who survived the Holocaust but not its emotional aftermath. What exactly triggered Celan’s suicide is impossible to know. Arno says only: “He was no longer capable of supporting the weight of the past as it flushed to the surface.”
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‘The Naked Woman’ asks — what would Jewish Chekhov look like?
Earlier this year, a lauded revival of Anton Chekhov’s overlooked opus Ivanov occasioned the question: What if Chekhov, that great chronicler of overeducated depressives, was a bit more Jewish?
That show has a substantial Jewish subplot, with the title character’s wife subjected to antisemitic smears.
For Jewish Russians, Chekhov, like his great interpreter Stanislavsky, is a part of the culture they still claim. For that reason expat companies, like Igor Golyak’s Arlekin Players, have long been in the business of reinterpreting him. Novelist Gary Shteyngart, in his pandemic novel, Our Country Friends, took things a step further, transmuting Chekhov’s dachas into the Belleville bungalow colony where he, and many ex-Soviet Jews, would summer.
Allie Avital and Alia Azamat Ashkenazi’s The Naked Woman, now in a limited run at 154 Theater, returns this proposition to the stage with some usual markers of the Russian master: characters brought low by their own inertia, a love triangle, frustrated ambitions and failures to launch. Into the mix they add the following staples of first generation Jews: immigrant parents’ expectations and the tension between the generation that recalls the weight of repression and the rising one that has only ever known American freedom. There are obligatory references to rabbis; the word “mensch” is dropped, but this is not a Shabbat-observing crew. If you know this specific demographic, there’s no doubting the affiliation.
Misha (Ilia Volok and Roman Freud alternate the role — Freud played him my evening), a successful architect, who moved to the U.S. decades before for a better life. For the New Year, and his birthday, he has made camp at his upstate country home. Some creaky exposition — on Pili Weeber’s set of floating timber, the Empire State’s answer to birch trees — sets up the interpersonal tensions that will go off in later acts like Chekhov’s proverbial gun.
Misha’s 35-year-old daughter Dasha (MaryKate Glenn) tells him his last check for her grad school tuition bounced. She’s there with her all-American boyfriend and is secretly pregnant. His bohemian older brother Grisha (Dima Koan), ever-clad in funky sweaters and kerchiefs by costume designer Kostya Goncharuk, resents Misha for their parents’ decision to only pay for his higher education and for being dependent on him for income. Rina (Natasha Goubskaya), Misha’s long-suffering wife is quietly working to save the family from financial ruin.
With these pieces set in place, the holiday is interrupted by, as advertised, a naked woman, screaming for help. Dismissing her as a “druggie in the woods,” Misha does nothing, a choice that brings questions of insularity and assimilation to the fore.
Dasha can’t get over her father’s inaction.
Rina explains it: “This American obsession with caring about strangers It’s all words and ideas. It’s THEATER. It doesn’t mean anything.”
The play is based on a short film by Avital, an accomplished director of visually-striking music videos for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Olivia Rodrigo and Moses Sumney. In that more abridged version, with mostly Russian dialogue, the Naked Woman stands in for the forces of mortality.
As one character in that film notes, in Russian, the word for death is “in the feminine, and therefore death is a woman. When death doesn’t hide, doesn’t wear a disguise, then it’s naked.”
Here the character is a more elusive metaphor: an avatar for Misha’s selfishness, the rift between his and Dasha’s concern for others or maybe her perception of herself as vulnerable and in need of saving. She could also be Rina’s aching feeling of neglect.
Avital and Ashkenazi’s background in film — Ashkenazi has a long resumé as a script supervisor and directed the short Esther’s Choice — is evident in the drama’s pacing. The piece doesn’t have the patience of Chekhov, who lets the action settle around the samovar and steep in subtext. This makes the show more dynamic, but more superficial in its psychology.
“I’ve always wondered why no one can truly love me, why they always leave me,” Dasha tells her father, coming off a monologue that hits the ear like a stilted translation of The Seagull’s yearning actress Nina or Vanya’s tragically dutiful Sonya. “But now I understand why. Because I’m just like you.”
It’s a tidy thesis, from creatives whose film work lives on the power of suggestion, with cinematography and movement being the major narrative force. Though Avital’s staging is capable, the script is crying out for an injection of subtlety that perhaps only a closeup can deliver.
This play is something of a proof of concept for a forthcoming feature film to be directed by Avital. If the short is any indication, its words and ideas may translate better taking a step away from the theater.
It may not be the natural medium for Chekhov, but it’s well-suited to his heirs.
Allie Avital and Alia Azamat Ashkenazi’s The Naked Woman is playing through June 14 at Theatre 154 in Manhattan. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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