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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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My irrational, possibly problematic obsession with an $85 yarmulke
Growing up, we had a rule of thumb about yarmulkes: the closer yours was to your forehead, the more strictly religious you were. The frum bochurim placed theirs practically on their noses; the boys from Conservative families bobby-pinned their kippahs on the back of their heads, like climbers gripping a rockface. The cool kids, of course, stuffed theirs in their pockets.
The Jewish skullcap, in other words, was a signifier of much more than the religious precept it embodied. Over the years not only a yarmulke’s positioning but also its style, size and material have come to place its wearer somewhere on a continuum of Jewish identity. Trends in yarmulke wearing, then, may tell us a story about where Judaism is — forgive me — headed.
So what kind of Jew wears an $85 yarmulke, and what kind of Judaism demands it? These questions gnawed at me when I first learned about Rubenstein Paris, a new kippah couturier whose ads found me on Instagram. Available in a range of expensive-looking solid colors (copper, cream, sapphire) and fabrics (velvet, corduroy, even horsehair), these kippahs are here to replace your tattered souvenirs.
“Everybody’s just walking around with their kippot from — I don’t know, Mendel and Rachel’s wedding, 2019,” Jonathan Hirsch, Rubenstein’s German-Israeli founder, told me recently. “I was like, ‘It’s such a sacred item, you know? Why isn’t there any beautiful kippah, that you can really acknowledge for what it is?’”
He’s onto something. Even as an image-conscious, Shabbat-observant millennial, I had largely neglected the yarmulke; when I wanted to look sharp, I ditched it. I was not completely out on Jew-caps, to be sure — like every other frat boy who thought Mac Miller was Moses, I went through a vintage snapback phase in college. But when I’ve had to clip up, I’ve made do with whatever I had lying around — usually something suede, dark, and folded more times than an origami fortune teller.
Hirsch offered to send a freebie, but at $85, accepting it felt compromising. The loaner we agreed to instead came in a branded drawstring bag, which was accompanied by a sleek black storage box. Though I’d secretly hoped for the horsehair model, the kippah Hirsch sent was more utilitarian: a ribbed velvet, golden brown, with the rise and structural integrity of one of those dome-houses you see in Architectural Digest. Velvet piping twisted around its circumference; its cloth inner lining depicted a globe and a shofar.
I put it on.
Skullcap semiotics
The story of the kippah begins in the Talmud, when 3rd-century sage Rav Huna proclaimed that he never walked more than four cubits without his head covered to symbolize that the divine presence was always above him. After rabbinic law codified the practice in the 1500s, the kippah evolved into a marker of Jewish cultural mores.
For example, 20 years ago, most Modern Orthodox boys wore black suede kippahs, but today, as people debate whether Modern Orthodoxy is dead, suede is disappearing, replaced by black velvet, the standard among Haredi Jews, and the kippah sruga — the crocheted yarmulke associated with the Israeli Religious Zionist movement. Pluralism out, orthodoxy in.
But it’s also a fraught moment to be displaying any marker of Jewish identity. Wearing a kippah in public makes you subject to a certain type of attention these days: the glare of being Jewish at a time when the Jewish state is embroiled in enormously unpopular and destructive wars. Hirsch, who is 29 and lives in Berlin, knows this firsthand — these days he doesn’t feel safe wearing a kippah in public.
And yet I suspect that growing Jewish isolation also puts the lie to our assimilation fantasies; it makes us more likely to wear the things that attach us to each other. Indeed, there is a renaissance in Judaica today driven by new designers and younger consumers finding joy in their heritage. The name Rubenstein is a play on Hirsch’s middle name, Reuven. But he also just thought it sounded cool.
All about the Benyamins
First ironically, then with some resignation, I found that the Rubenstein was the only kippah I wanted to wear — my fancy kippah became my everyday kippah. Putting it on was a daily treat — I was humored by the upgrade. I began picturing how gloomy and shallow life would be without it. I debated the unthinkable — ponying up to keep the loaner.
I was still conflicted about the idea of the object, which felt like a metaphor for the sticker-shock that accompanies Jewish life, especially Orthodox life, in the U.S. today. There’s the skyrocketing cost of real estate in Jewish neighborhoods, the eyewatering day school tuition, even the price of kosher meat and grape juice. Was it an $85 kippah, or a yeshiva-league Sorting Hat?
I put the questions to Hirsch. There are very few ritual objects, he pointed out, from the kiddush cup to candlesticks to one’s tallit, that we pride ourselves on buying cheap. Why should kippot be the exception? “You’re giving your humility a bigger meaning,” he said, “by the fact that you’re wearing this on your head.”
It was true — I felt more humble than ever before, and expected others to acknowledge my commitment and my sophistication. I can see you are a man of taste, they would say, presumably lowering a monocle. (I would nod, then dip my double-dark chocolate Milano cookie into a steaming teacup.)
It was true my designer yarmulke was not the conversation starter I’d anticipated. Only one person complimented me on it unprompted — that singular infallible judge of quality, my mother. Everyone else, I’m certain, was stealing covetous glances. But they didn’t need to praise, ask about, or even notice my beloved yarmulke, which I’m sure I’ll return soon. The premium fabrics, the shofar in the lining and the devotion it all symbolized were between me and Hashem.
The post My irrational, possibly problematic obsession with an $85 yarmulke appeared first on The Forward.
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How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews
The prosecution of an Iraqi national in connection with thwarted alleged terror plots in the U.S. and Europe has put the behind-the-scenes role of Iran in the spotlight — part of what security experts say is a growing and hard-to-trace threat.
Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi national accused of ties to an Iran-backed militia, pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court this week to charges linking him to a series of attacks and alleged terror plots targeting American interests and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States.
Prosecutors allege Al-Saadi was connected to attacks, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in London’s heavily Jewish Golders Green neighborhood and an arson attack on a synagogue in North Macedonia. They also accuse him of attempting to recruit individuals online to firebomb synagogues in New York, Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona.
He also reportedly planned to attack Ivanka Trump, who is both the president’s daughter and an Orthodox Jew — making her a “double target,” in the words of Oren Segal, vice president at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.
Iranian attacks on Jewish and Israeli institutions abroad are not new. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran and its proxies have targeted diplomats, Jews, Israelis, political dissidents and others perceived as aligned with the West.
Matthew Levitt, director of the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, maintains a detailed database of such attacks. He told the Forward that since the current war began, such plots have significantly increased.
The Al-Saadi case is a prime example of what Levitt calls Iran’s “gig economy” model of terrorism. Rather than dispatching trained operatives directly from Iran, Iranian-linked actors and proxy groups are recruiting individuals online who live in the country they wish to target. Some are not even aware they are attacking on behalf of Iran or its proxies.
In court filings, prosecutors allege that Al-Saadi, who prosecutors link to the terror organization Kata’ib Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, sent maps and photographs of a prominent Manhattan synagogue and other Jewish institutions to an undercover agent he was attempting to recruit to firebomb them. He allegedly offered the agent $10,000 in cryptocurrency in exchange for carrying out the plot, and discussed whether the recruit should “set the place on fire” or use an improvised explosive device.
Iranian-linked operatives, who are either part of Iran’s security apparatus or within its network of terror proxies, reach out to potential recruits on encrypted platforms like Telegram.
According to Levitt, the operatives are ordered by “very senior” elements of the Iranian regime to find recruits. “It stretches the limits of credulity to think that plots like this in the United States could be done without very senior top-down instruction,” Levitt said. “These are not rogue actors.”
Those they manage to recruit online are often financially motivated, agreeing to carry out attacks like vandalism, surveillance, or assaults in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. Others appear driven by ideology or online radicalization. Over the years, Iran’s recruits have included teenagers as young as 13.
“These are inexpensive plots,” said Levitt. “It requires just a few people to sit at a computer and try to recruit people and direct people.”
For Iran, this method is particularly strategic amid wartime. “Iran can’t go toe to toe with the U.S. or Israeli militaries, but it can engage in these asymmetric plots to show that they can still reach out and touch us to increase the cost of continuing to prosecute the war and to make people feel afraid,” said Levitt.
By relying on online recruits and loosely connected operatives, Levitt says Iranian-linked actors can obscure their involvement and maintain reasonable deniability. The calculation, he explained, is that authorities will be satisfied with arresting and prosecuting the individual carrying out the attack, rather than blaming Iran. This allows Iran to limit the risk of direct military escalation with the United States while continuing to conduct operations against it.
The Online Battlefield
According to Segal, Iranian influence increasingly permeates online.
“The threat to Jewish communities right now is multidimensional — Iranian-linked plots, cyberattacks, online propaganda,” he said. “They’re all converging at once, making it one of the more complex threat environments for the Jewish community in a long time.”
For years, Iranian state media outlets such as Press TV have targeted Western audiences with antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial, claims that Zionists control world events and other extremist narratives. A 2023 report by the ADL and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Press TV receives roughly one million monthly visits, with more than half of its traffic coming from Western countries.
Segal said Iranian-linked propaganda networks also increasingly operate in online spaces that overlap with broader activist communities. One such example is Resistance News Network, a Telegram channel with over 150,000 subscribers frequented by members of pro-Palestinian activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. The channel is filled with official Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi propaganda that is then reshared by American activists on mainstream social media accounts.
“What that does is enable the exchange of ideas, of propaganda, and of narrative that we then see show up at actual events on the ground,” he said.
Segal argues that exposure to such propaganda can make recruitment efforts easier.
“Our concerns are not only from somebody who may have been placed here or somewhere in Europe,” said Segal, “but from individuals who are animated by the propaganda they ingest every single day.”
Levitt agreed, stating that rising antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment since the outbreak of the Gaza war has created a larger pool of individuals who may view attacks on Jewish or Zionist targets as justified.
“A lot of people are going to be much more willing to do something … especially if it’s not actually killing someone, but fire bombing something and/or targeting property that has symbolic value,” he said.
But the threat is not limited to physical violence.
Since the war began, Segal said Iranian-linked cyberattacks have “gone into overdrive.”
He says Jewish organizations and media outlets have faced hacking attempts on their websites, while Jewish individuals have had their identities stolen, with personal information being exposed online in mass doxxing campaigns.
Many such attacks are conducted by Iranian hacking collectives. One of the most notorious among them is Iranian hacker group Handala Hackers, which has conducted several attacks against Jews, Israelis and Americans. The FBI reported that in March, the group claimed to have stolen 851 gigabytes of confidential data from Sanzer Hasidic Jewish community members, which the hackers described as “documents of financial cooperation, witchcraft ceremonies, and secret correspondences with Netanyahu …” They added, “We warn the leaders and members of the Sanzer Hasidic community: No place is safe for you. Betrayal of the oppressed leads to nothing but disgrace and shame. Expect more documents to be revealed.”
Despite the growing number of plots, experts say the relative lack of successful attacks inside the United States reflects the effectiveness of American counterterrorism efforts.
Still, Jewish communities across the United States are investing heavily in security upgrades. Asher Lopatin, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, said synagogues in Michigan have increased security following a March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield by a Hezbollah-linked man. Communities are installing bollards, expanding surveillance systems, and hiring additional guards.
“People are definitely doubling up on security,” Lopatin said. “Everyone is traumatized.”
Levitt says that even after the war concludes, he does not expect the plots targeting American interests and Jews to cease.
“I do not think that when the war ends, these necessarily stop,” Levitt said. “The pace may change, but Iran has a distinct interest in exacting revenge for all the damage that was done to it.”
The post How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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They helped elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor; but to him, they were just Bob and Shirley
When Joshua Silverstein, a Black Jewish theater artist, was growing up in Los Angeles, he recalls one Ashkenazi couple, to whom he refers as Bob and Shirley, that had a particularly profound effect on him.
Bob and Shirley were the type of people who greeted everyone they saw on the street; Silverstein grew up going to their get-togethers that were welcome to everyone in the neighborhood. They loved music and literature, they were “way into Theodore Bikel,” and they had a plethora of Billie Holiday records.
Bob and Shirley were also instrumental in the fight to elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor, Thomas Bradley.
“LA’s Bob and Shirley,” which Silverstein wrote and is performing as part of a new theater compilation of Jewish stories, begins in 1946 when the couple moved to the west coast from New Jersey. Bob was a carpenter — he had wanted to be a professor, but his Jewish background made it challenging to get hired at a university. Instead, he constructed buildings across Los Angeles, only to find out that the same apartments he worked on didn’t allow Jews or other minorities to live there.
The couple ended up near Central Avenue, an epicenter of African-American culture where they rubbed shoulders with legendary Black performers and intellectuals — Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes and W.E.B Dubois. The neighborhood was in danger, though; real estate agents were pressuring residents to leave so their properties could be refurbished and sold to white homeowners.
Together, Bob and Shirley co founded the Alta Loma Democratic Club, where Thomas Bradley began to show up to meetings. At the time, he was a lieutenant in the police department who, as a Black man, experienced bigotry of his own. Bradley had a vision to preserve the neighborhood, and inspired by Bradley’s vision and spirit, Bob and Shirley encouraged Bradley to run for city council.
“At first he said no,” Silverstein said. But Bob told Bradley, “If you do it, we will get you elected.”
If it hadn’t been for the Alta Loma Democratic Club, “Tom Bradley would not have then gone on to be mayor,” Silverstein said. “LA being this place where we feel like it’s diverse took a lot of work, and this is because of what Tom Bradley did.” His 20-year term was the longest in Los Angeles’ history.
Silverstein’s piece is just one of the many stories told in L’Chaim America, a commemoration of the United States’ 250th anniversary produced by The Braid, a Los Angeles theater company with the mission of telling Jewish stories.
“Our show is really a celebration of the diversity that makes up what America is. It is this beautiful love letter to the hope for the future,” Silverstein told me.
The Braid is a story-telling theater, and L’Chaim America is a minimalist production. Armed only with binders and their words, performers share stories commissioned by writers or solicited from community members: Author Emily Bowen Cohen explores her dual Jewish and Native American identities, Solomon Dueñas, an El Salvadoran immigrant, reconnects with his Jewish roots. Silverstein is the only writer performing his own work.
Silverstein told me his mission was twofold: He hoped to share an untold piece of Los Angeles’ history and, having Black and Jewish identities himself, to shed light on the historic Black-Jewish alliance.
“What people don’t hear often is how there were Ashkenazi Jews who were radical in their support of Blackness and other marginalized voices,” he said.
Until he started researching his piece, Silverstein never fully understood the role Bob and Shirley played in Los Angeles’ history. For him, and for members of the audience who knew and loved people like Bob and Shirley, Silverstein’s piece was a way of appreciating what they managed to achieve.
“The coalition that came together to get him elected to mayor was a coalition of Jewish people,” Silverstein said. “This wasn’t about religion. It wasn’t about culture. It wasn’t about ethnicity. It was about human beings recognizing that this is a city they love and to come together to change it for the good.”
Silverstein believes his work is significant in how “it recognizes the ugly,” but does not shy away from it in order to reveal a more realistic, yet more inspiring, picture of America. This America requires looking “at the areas that have been challenging — at the areas that have been hard and terrible — and not closing our eyes to it, but promising to do better.”
“L’Chaim America” is being performed in theaters in and across Los Angeles through June 17. On June 7, the Skirball Cultural Center will host a special production of the performance as part of a community-wide celebration in partnership with other Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and the Jews of Color Initiative. Additional performances will be held in Irvine on June 28 and in New York City on July 12.
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