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What I learned about antisemitism from a remarkable new archive about Jewish Civil War soldiers
(JTA) — Max Glass, a recent immigrant from Hungary, had an unhappy Civil War.
Tricked out of his enlistment bonus when he joined the Eighth Connecticut Infantry — recent arrivals were soft touches for scam artists — Glass was then “abused for reason [sic] that I never understand” by men in his regiment. “It may have been,” he speculated,
becaus I did not make them my companions in drinking, or as I am a Jew. If I went in the street or any wher I was called Jew. Christh Killer & such names. I also had stones, dirt thrown at me.
He complained to his commanding officer, begging to be transferred, because “no man that had feeling could stand such treatment,” but to no avail. Finally, Glass fled his regiment, hoping to receive better treatment if he enlisted in the Navy. Instead he was tried as a deserter and sentenced to hard labor.
Glass was not the only Jewish soldier to be cruelly mistreated when serving in the Union Army. But as the new Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the Civil War demonstrates, his experience was far from typical.
I explored the Shapell Roster while working on my new book, on the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Union army. What I learned from the vast collection of documents and data was that indifference, benign curiosity and comradeship appear to have been much more common than conflict for the majority of Jewish soldiers in the Union army.
For every Max Glass there was a Louis Gratz. Born in Posen, Prussia, Gratz scraped by as a peddler before the war. Enlisting in April 1861 — just days after the war started — he took to military life. By August he had become an officer. As he proudly wrote to his family,
I have now become a respected man in a respected position, one filled by very few Jews. I have been sent by my general to enlist new recruits so I am today in Scranton, a city in Pennsylvania only twenty miles from Carbondale, where I had peddled before. Before this no one paid any attention to me here; now I move in the best and richest circles and am treated with utmost consideration by Jews and Christians.
In contrast to Max Glass, his letters whisper not a word about prejudice. As my new book on the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Union army demonstrates, Gratz’s experience was not unusual.
Max Glass ultimately escaped his sorry start in the army through the intercession of General Benjamin Butler. After reading Glass’ tale of woe, the general pardoned the hapless Hungarian. In doing so, Butler seemingly followed Abraham Lincoln’s lead when confronted by antisemitism within the Union army. The president, after all, had quickly countermanded Ulysses S. Grant’s General Orders Number 11 expelling Jews from the districts under his command, the “most notorious anti-Jewish official order in American history,”
But alas this story does not have a redemptive ending. Beyond the rank and file, Jews felt the sting of prejudice. The damage done in wartime left a legacy of antisemitism that continues to this day.
For even as General Butler was pardoning Max Glass, he was locked in a heated public exchange that reveals how wartime warped attitudes towards Jews. The imbroglio began when Butler took special note of the fact that a small group of smugglers, recently detained by the Union army, were Jewish. When challenged, the combative general refused to apologize. Instead, he countered that deceit and disloyalty were among the defining characteristics of Jews, and that avarice was a particularly Jewish avocation. According to his logic, Jews could never become loyal Americans because they preferred profit to patriotism.
An 1877 cartoon from the satirical newspaper Puck illustrates the antisemitic practices of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York. The cartoon compares the corrupt gentile clients favored by the hotel, center, with respectable (albeit stereotypical) Jewish figures, including Jesus. (Library of Congress)
Butler’s corrosive claims reflected a steady drip of acid on the home-front that began in 1861. In the first year of the war, Jews felt the sting of prejudice as the “shoddy” scandals captured the public imagination. Military contractors were publicly accused of fleecing the army by supplying substandard uniforms and gear, even as soldiers shivered in the field for want of decent clothing.
In seeking to explain the profiteering and corruption that attended the rush to war, the press summoned the specter of the venal and disloyal Jew. Cartoonists delighted in identifying Jews as the archetypal cunning contractors, who not only refused to enlist but also actively undermined the war effort. Jews were also imagined as the speculators who profited at the expense of the common good and as smugglers who traded with the enemy. Butler, in other words, was drawing on calumnies that became common currency during wartime.
The contractor, smuggler, speculator and shirker, however, were more than just figures of scorn. Jews and other “shoddy aristocrats” came to be seen as the creators and beneficiaries of the new economic and social order produced by the war. This “shoddy aristocracy” — whose morals and manners marked them as undesirable, whose profits were ill gained, and whose power derived from money alone — was imagined to lord it over a new and unjust social heap summoned into being by the chaos and disruption of war.
Even as the heated rhetoric of the war years receded after 1865, these ideas remained primed for action. They were returned to service in the Gilded Age.
It was no coincidence that the episode traditionally identified as initiating modern antisemitism in America — the exclusion of Joseph Seligman by Henry Hilton from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs on May 31, 1877 — had at its center a man who had made a fortune as a contractor and banker during the Civil War. Seligman, a friend of President Grant, was viewed as an exemplar of the new capitalism that was remaking America.
Henry Hilton slandered Seligman as “shoddy—false—squeezing—unmanly,” a social climber who “has to push himself upon the polite.” Hilton drew upon themes familiar from wartime antisemitism: the Jew as speculator who trafficked in credit and debt; the Jew as obsequious ingratiator who attached himself to the powerful; the Jew as profiteer who advanced by improper means; the Jew as vulgarian who flaunted his (and her) obscene wealth and did not know his (or her) place; and the Jew as overlord whose money allowed him (or her) to displace others. In short, the “Seligman Jew” was the “shoddy aristocrat” by another name.
In an age of inequality and excess, the antisemite imagined the Jew as embodying all that was wrong with American capitalism. And during an age of mass immigration from Romania and the Russian Empire, they soon added another theme familiar from General Butler’s wartime diatribe: The Jew could not be trusted to become fully American.
Sadly, even as Louis Gratz, Max Glass and many other Jewish soldiers became American by serving in the Union army, the Civil War produced a range of pernicious ideas about Jews that have proven remarkably durable. We have escaped the everyday torments that afflicted Max Glass, but are still haunted in the present by the fantasies of Benjamin Butler and Henry Hilton.
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Senate rejects effort to rein in Trump’s power to fight Iran alongside Israel
(JTA) — The Senate late Wednesday rejected a measure that would have required President Donald Trump to get congressional approval to continue fighting against Iran.
The measure was initiated by Democrats, who have raised questions about the process by which Trump initiated the war alongside Israel on Saturday. The War Powers Act requires U.S. presidents to seek congressional approval for wars in advance or shortly after their start unless there is an imminent threat to the United States. Trump and his administration officials have given mixed signals about whether a threat was considered direct and imminent.
The vote took place along largely partisan lines, with two exceptions. Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, who tends to oppose international intervention, backed the measure. John Fetterman, the pro-Israel Democrat from Pennsylvania, voted no.
The House is expected to vote on a similar measure today. The House also has a slim Republican majority.
The votes come as multiple polls have shown that a majority of Americans, about 60%, oppose U.S. participation in the war.
The post Senate rejects effort to rein in Trump’s power to fight Iran alongside Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Broadway opus debuts in the U.S. — nearly 80 years late
In 1954, the Oscar-winning composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold staged a European homecoming with a new operetta. How this came to pass — and how his planned comeback failed to materialize — is even more convoluted than the piece’s farcical plot.
Korngold, a wunderkind and Jewish refugee from Vienna, first came to Hollywood to adapt Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Until then Korngold, a piano prodigy who began writing music at age 7 and had his first hit with a ballet he wrote at 11, had mostly composed for concert halls and opera houses. His ensuing career in Hollywood transformed film music by treating motion pictures as if they were “operas without singing.”
Korngold’s work on the swashbuckler Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and later King’s Row (whose fanfare John Williams lifted for Star Wars) created a template for symphonic scores. But by the late 1940s, chafing under the Hollywood system, he set to work writing an original operetta, The Silent Serenade, that he hoped would premiere on Broadway.
The show collapsed. It’s never had a full staging in the United States or even in English.
As chronicled by the Korngold Society, the composer went through a litany of librettists to refine this tale of a love triangle and its improbable political fallout. After passing through a number of hands in English, Korngold returned it to Raoul Auernheimer, Theodor Herzl’s nephew and the original writer of the story on which the operetta was based, to translate it back to German. Korngold disagreed with the excessive demands of the producers, the Schubert Brothers, and left the project, leading the Broadway impresarios to fruitlessly search for a new composer.
Korngold, who with Reinhardt had previous success on Broadway with arrangements of other composers’ work, decided to resume a career in Europe with the piece. After delays owing to his health — a 1947 heart attack — a German version debuted on radio in 1951 and was followed by a staging in Dortmund in 1954. It bombed.
“We’re not exactly sure who it was for,” said Cris Frisco, music director at the Mannes School of Music at the New School, who is conducting the U.S. debut of The Silent Serenade at Mannes Opera. “It seems like it was given to the wrong public.”
That Germans in the post-war weren’t attuned to the piece’s sensibilities speaks poignantly to Korngold’s journey, which began at the center of Austrian high culture, orbiting names like Mahler and Artur Schnabel. “We thought of ourselves as Viennese,”said Korngold, the son of a music critic father. “Hitler made us Jewish.”
His exile in Hollywood realigned his sonic universe. As much as he changed film music, it — and America — left an impression on him.
“It is obviously influenced by Hollywood. It’s obviously coming out of those ’30s and ’40s musicals,” said director Emma Griffin, Mannes Opera’s managing artistic director. “It is a piece that is living between film and theater and opera and musical theater and operetta. It’s so emblematic of Korngold’s life, of how many different pieces of the 20th century he influenced, and this particular show is a crazy quilt of all of those influences.”
The plot of the show is, in Griffin’s words “daffy,” focusing on a Neapolitan actress, her would-be dress designer lover and her fiancé, the prime minister. Singing shopgirls, a tabloid journalist and a media circus round out the cast who perform tuneful numbers imbued with an MGM je ne sais quoi, while remaining rooted in Korngold’s post-romantic, classical mode. While Korngold’s symphonic stylings beefed up adventure films, the orchestration here is sparer, hinting at the Broadway pit for which the piece was devised.
The Mannes staging is part of a resurgence of interest in Korngold in the classical world, following decades of dismissal for his contributions to Hollywood.
It’s ironic that Korngold, who died at the age of 60 in 1957, had in Silent Serenade a profound professional frustration, given how buoyant and frothy the work is.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that he did not fully perceive the massive impact of his artistry,” said Griffin. Though he lived through hard times, Griffin says, his music has been a balm for the performers.
“The students have talked about it several times,” Griffin said, “how happy they are to be working on something where the source is joy.”
Mannes Opera’s production of The Silent Serenade debuts March 13 and 14 with an on-demand recording to follow. Tickets and information can be found here.
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Shower, shelter, swipe: Israel’s ‘startup nation’ meets Iran war with a wave of apps
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Smartphones have become as essential as shelters for Israelis riding out Iran’s missile attacks, with internet traffic up 25% since the war began on Saturday. From the screaming alerts of the military’s official app that, as one comedian put it, sound like a “baby dragon giving birth,” to bomb-shelter Tinder to multiple apps that tell you when it’s safe to shower, the startup nation is trying to digitize the panic into something more manageable.
At the serious end of the wartime app stack is Home Front Command, the Israeli army’s app available in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. It uses GPS to figure out where you are and only pings you when your area is at risk, with separate alerts for rockets, missiles and terror incidents. In this war, Iran’s long-range fire has come with an extra layer of notice, a warning-before-the-warning that can buy people a few more minutes. The shorter-range threats from Hezbollah, which joined the fray on Tuesday, do not come with that same courtesy.
Bomb Shelter Locator turns shelter-seeking into a map exercise, listing around 20,000 official sites, offering offline city maps and walking routes, and estimating the time it will take to reach the nearest protected space.
For anyone who cannot sprint, Purple Vest tries to close the gap. People with disabilities or older residents can register in advance and request help during alerts, with volunteers using the app to locate them and assist with shelter access or urgent supplies.
For others, shelters are turning into accidental social spaces where people can meet-cute on a mattress. The Hooked app, originally built for speed-dating at events, now doubles as a bomb-shelter icebreaker. Shelter-goers post a QR code at the entrance, and singles who scan it can see who else in the same bunker has the same relationship status. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee — who has not been single since high school — shared it on X alongside the caption: “Someday they will tell their kids ‘we met on a dating app in a shelter while dodging ballastic [sic] missiles.’”
But for some, even showering has become its own risk calculation. Martine Berkowitz was one of many who vented after her attempts to scrub up were interrupted by missiles no less than five times on the second day of the war.
For software developer Ben Greenberg, a father of teenagers, Berkowitz’s complaint was familiar, so he built an app called Best Shower Time that spits out a percentage risk score on whether a shower is likely to be interrupted by an alert.
Posts about it spread on social media and what began as a tool for his family is now drawing about 5,000 visitors a day. Greenberg, a California native who immigrated to Israel from New York in 2018, insists it’s “not a joke app.”
“Sirens are just the ultimate example of lack of control in one’s life,” he said, describing the app as a way to “restore some level of control and predictability … in a time when that feels most vulnerable and most taken away from us.”
The app uses real-time alert data from the Home Front Command, and the score is based on four inputs: how long it has been since the last alert, the average gap between alerts over a six-hour window, whether the frequency is trending up or down, and the total alert count over the past 24 hours. Those are weighted into a single score that appears when you open the app.
Users can then set their own parameters, including how long a shower typically takes and how much buffer time they want afterward to dry off and reach shelter.
And for those who have a penchant for extended bathroom breaks, Greenberg added a separate option that relies on the same logic.
It’s not the only app homing on issues of basic cleanliness to emerge this week. Another app, Can I Shower Now?, has developed a following of its own.
Berkowitz said she was “grateful” for apps to help her navigate the question of whether to jump in the shower. After checking and seeing a 13% chance of a missile alert on Wednesday afternoon, she decided to risk it.
“I took a full 20-minute hot shower and washed my hair. It was lovely. And the next warning only came when I was finished and getting dressed,” she said.
Greenberg is piloting a new app, called Best Walking Time, based on the same principle and prompted by his wife, who regularly walks around the neighborhood during work calls but has been afraid to stray from home lest a missile head their way.
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