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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
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More Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, new poll finds
(JTA) — Another major poll has founded that sympathy has surged among Americans for Palestinians and now exceeds support for Israelis.
Gallup, one of the country’s most respected polling outfits, found that 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians, compare to 36% who sympathize more with the Israelis. A year ago, a Gallup poll showed a 13-point advantage for the Israelis.
The poll comes nearly six months after a national poll found for the first time that Americans’ sympathies had flipped. In a New York Times and Siena University poll released in September, 35% of registered American voters said they sympathized more with Palestinians compared to 34% with Israel. Prior to the war in Gaza, 47% of respondents said they sympathized more with the Israelis.
Both pollsters have asked about voters’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. They each said the sympathy gap in their latest polls was not statistically significant but that the trajectory of sentiments was.
Between 2001 and 2018, the Gallup poll found that Americans were more sympathetic to the Israelis by an average margin of 43 points. The gap began narrowing the following year but did not flip until now.
In both polls, the stark recent shift was driven by sharp shifts in sentiments among Democrats. The Gallup poll found that voters under 55 prefer the Palestinians by a wide margin, while older voters remain more sympathetic to the Israelis. The New York Times poll found that older, college-educated Democrats had seen their sentiments shift most harshly.
The polls add to the data points showing a sharp drop in sympathy for Israelis since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, for which the United States brokered a ceasefire in October. The Gallup poll is the first to demonstrate post-ceasefire sentiments among Americans.
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Is goy a slur, an antisemitic dogwhistle or a word for non-Jews?
Suddenly the term goy is trending. X is full of memes about “goy pride” and goyim “waking up.” People are debating whether goy is an antisemitic term, or, well, an anti-goyish term. Google Trends shows searches for the term have nearly quadrupled in the last four months.
Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with this bit of Jewish vocabulary?
Well, it’s not so sudden. Antisemites have been obsessed with it for decades. Memes on 4chan and other dark corners of the internet have long passed around quotes from the Talmud discussing goyim as though each use of the term was proof of a nefarious plot against non-Jews. They made up new terms, like “goyslop,” anything unhealthy supposedly created by Jews to weaken the world. White supremacists claim the term as one of pride, creating antisemitic groups like the Goyim Defense League.
Goyim broke into the mainstream discourse thanks to two events. One is the Epstein files, in which Jeffrey Epstein uses the term goy with a pejorative tone. The Epstein files have already birthed a network of conspiracy theories about Jewish cabals and government control, and goy was taken as just another example of Jewish scheming. Candace Owens talked about Epstein’s use of the term at length, incorrectly saying that it means “cattle.”
The other is a viral antisemitic YouTube video about a so-called “Jewish invasion” in New Jersey. The video’s creator, Tyler Oliveira, addressed his video to goyim and claims the label himself, aiming to inform the goyim about the supposedly nefarious threat of Jew moving into a town.
But is goy really such a problematic term? Literally, it just means “nation” — in the Torah, it is used in places to refer to the nation of Israel. In practice, it simply means “non-Jew,” or foreign nation which isn’t inherently insulting; Jews are far from the only group to have a term for outsider — think gringo in Spanish or farang in Thai.
This can, of course, be exclusionary. There is certainly the sense that outsiders cannot understand or participate in certain activities of an in-group — an idea that is not limited to Jews. And sometimes that is used to discriminate or insult.
Goy is used much more commonly among Jews to simply describe something that’s not Jewish. Think of the famous Lenny Bruce bit about pumpernickel being Jewish and white bread being goyish — is it a slur to observe that white bread is not part of Jewish culture? Thanks to a history of poverty and shtetl life, Jewish food is often more humble and less processed. That’s just history. It’s not an insult to white bread, or, for that matter, to pumpernickel.
The use of goy by non-Jews is similarly complicated. Someone can casually describe themself as a goy, simply because they are not Jewish or have little contact with Jewish culture. But the term is also used by neo-Nazi types as a dog whistle that signals familiarity with the world of antisemitic conspiracy theories. The phrase “the goyim are waking up,” which has suddenly entered the mainstream, echoes a much older antisemitic meme — “The goyim know,” which is used to imply there is something sinister to know or wake up to, namely the supposed Jewish control of society. (“Noticing” is another antisemitic meme, referring to the same phenomenon.)
This makes the debate about the term kind of silly. Tone and context is everything, just like with any term. “Jew” can be an insult, too, but it obviously is simply a descriptor as well; I call myself a Jew, because I am religiously and ethnically Jewish. If someone spat “Jew” at me on the street, however, I’d be insulted.
But the supposedly neutral valence of the word goy can make the antisemitism that often accompanies it hard to call out. If Jews use it neutrally, why shouldn’t anyone? Or so goes the defense online.
This is how Tyler Oliveira, the creator behind the “Jewish invasion” YouTube video, spins his use of the term. “Jews are trying to say I’m ‘anti-Semitic’ for using the word ‘goyim’ to describe non-Jews,” he wrote on X. “They can call you ‘goyim’ and it’s fine, but if you call yourself a ‘goy’ you hate Jews…? You can’t make this up.”
But watching Oliveira’s actual use of the term, the antisemitism is clear. He creates false binaries like dismissing antisemitism for the supposedly greater problem of “anti-goyism,” as though Jews, a minority, have outsize power to harm outsiders. He harps on the idea that Jews call themselves God’s chosen people as though it is akin to white supremacy, calling Jews “semite supremacists.”
It’s silly to pretend Oliveira’s use of goy isn’t obviously a loaded one; goy may not inherently be an insult, but when it’s deployed with a conspiratorial wink to antisemites, it’s antisemitic.
That’s really the simple rule for when goy is a slur, or when it’s antisemitic: If the person using it is a bigot, it’s bigoted. Otherwise, it’s just a word.
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A conservative Jewish professor who rejected Hitler comparisons now invokes one — for Tucker Carlson
(JTA) — In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Jeffrey Lax, a descendent of Holocaust survivors who has lobbied against antisemitism at the college where he teaches, criticized liberals who compared Donald Trump to Hitler.
Now Lax, a law professor who defines himself as center-right and appears frequently on Newsmax and Fox News, is rethinking the idea of modern-day Hitler comparisons. In fact, he’s ringing that bell on a key Trump ally: Tucker Carlson.
“I never, ever, thought this day would come, but for the first time in my life, I am going to compare a human being to Adolph Hitler,” Lax tweeted on Friday. “Understand that I am the grandchild of 4 Holocaust survivors. I’ve spent a lifetime urging people NOT to compare anyone to Hitler. But… Tucker Carlson’s views, rhetoric, and influence remind me of Adolph Hitler.”
Lax was responding to Vice President JD Vance’s favorable comments about the interview Carlson, a far-right pundit, did last week with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. The interview ignited new allegations of antisemitism, but Vance did not suggest any concern. That, Lax says, is a big problem.
“This situation is as dead serious as a heart attack and with @JDVance now expressly and abhorrently legitimizing Carlson’s views, we are in a national Antisemitism State of Emergency,” Lax continued.
It was a dramatic outlay of angst about antisemitism on the right for a figure who has campaigned against left-wing anti-Israel activism at the City University of New York, where he teaches. But Lax said in an interview that he could not remain silent.
“For me to get to this point, it had to be something that was so deeply disturbing on many levels,” he said. Carlson’s call for genetics testing for Jews, he said, crossed that line. “If anything I’ve ever heard is Hitler-esque, when you talk about Jews having to prove that they’re Jews with DNA — if DNA testing was available in the days of Hitler, do you not think that Hitler would have used it?”
Lax emphasized that he was speaking specifically of “early Hitler, the early years, before he took power, before he actually, physically caused anybody to be killed. I’m talking about the rhetoric. He could’ve been stopped at that point. People didn’t take Hitler seriously.”
While Lax has criticized Carlson before, he has in the past refrained from extending those critiques to Vance — despite a mounting record of the vice president minimizing antisemitism on the right. “I’ve had suspicions about Vance for a long time,” Lax said. “I wanted to be sure.”
Vance’s defense of Carlson’s interview provided the certainty he needed.
“Is he out of his mind?” Lax said. “By saying something like that, you are saying that what Tucker is saying is legitimate and needs to be discussed, including that Jews should have genetic testing done to be sure that they’re Jewish and have right to the land.” He described such a belief as “brain rot.”
Lax joins a growing line of other Jewish conservatives who have expressed alarm about Vance and his closeness to the White House. They include far-right activist Laura Loomer; conservative columnist and Newsweek editor Josh Hammer; Israeli conservative luminary Yoram Hazony; Orthodox right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro; Rep. Randy Fine; pro-Israel activist groups StandWithUs and StopAntisemitism; and publications with a conservative-friendly pro-Israel bent including Tablet, The Free Press and Commentary.
Their alarm comes as Carlson builds a formidable political network of his own ahead of the midterms, made up of figures with growing sway over young voters. He has given friendly interviews to several outsider GOP candidates, including Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, lover of antisemitic memes; Texas congressional candidate and pardoned Jan. 6 rioter Ryan Zink; U.S. Senate candidate Paul Dans, who is challenging pro-Israel Sen. Lindsay Graham; and Iowa gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn, who used his Carlson interview to disparage non-Christian elected officials.
Influential figures identified with the left are also increasingly coming to Carlson’s side on Israel and Jews. “Hey bitch, the goyim are waking the fuck up. Deal with it,” Ana Kasparian, a co-host on the progressive online network The Young Turks, tweeted as part of an extended defense of Carlson this week.
Amid a backlash, the next day Kasparian doubled down: “I do not regret this comment. I don’t apologize,” she tweeted. “Israel is evil, genocidal and has destroyed our country. They’re about to drag us into another war and all we hear from Israelis and their braindead supporters is ‘ANTISEMITE’ if you disagree with Israel’s agenda.” (Kasparian’s Young Turks colleague, Cenk Uyghur, is a regular Carlson guest.)
While antipathy toward Carlson has been all but fully cemented for Jews on both sides of the aisle, not every Jewish conservative has turned on Vance.
Matt Brooks, director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, harshly criticized Carlson and his defenders last fall after the pundit interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and the group’s most recent conference was marked by repeated denunciations of Carlson. Yet RJC has refrained from publicly pointing the finger at Vance, and its posts about him to date are uniformly complimentary — as on Thursday, when the group retweeted a speech from the vice president’s X account about Democrats and affordability.
A request for comment to the RJC was not returned.
“That is outrageous that the RJC would not criticize Vance,” Lax said. “That is self-destructive. That is insane.”
Also treading carefully on Vance are many establishment Jewish groups. Neither the Anti-Defamation League nor its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has publicly criticized the vice president since February 2025, when the ADL’s X account docked him for meeting with the head of Germany’s far-right AfD party. The American Jewish Committee, similarly, has critiqued Carlson’s rhetoric in the past but remained muted on Vance as he’s increasingly clarified that he believes the pundit is a valuable part of the Republican coalition. Comments to representatives for the two organizations were not returned.
Because Lax runs a registered nonprofit, the Zionist group S.A.F.E. Campus, he said he was hesitant to comment too specifically on electoral politics. But he said he believes Jews on the right are “coming around” to the problem of antisemitism on their side. And he’s deeply concerned about Vance running for president in 2028 without having distanced himself from Carlson.
“I could never support a candidate who says we need to have a conversation about genetically testing Jews,” Lax said. “What Vance said, I think people’s eyes popped out of their heads.”
And, despite his earlier defenses of Trump, he said the president must more forcefully condemn Carlson and Vance’s rhetoric now. “He can’t have his vice president say that it is an important conversation that we talk about genetically testing Jews to see if they come from Abraham,” Lax said. Vance himself once compared Trump to Hitler, prior to being chosen as his running mate.
Lax is also reflecting more on his 2024 piece decrying Trump-Hitler comparisons. If the president doesn’t issue a more forceful condemnation of his party’s antisemitic wing in the next month, the professor said, ”I may very well change my mind.”
By Friday afternoon, he had drawn a possible line in the sand, tweeting a call for Trump to demand Vance’s immediate resignation.
“Enough. This is a National Antisemitic State of Emergency. Only Trump can end it. And he must do so now,” Lax wrote. “It starts by booting JD and cutting Tucker out from all conservative and Republican orgs.”
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