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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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Ford was the most pro-Israel president in US history, and we need his playbook now
If you ask historians to name the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, you’ll generally hear variations of the same responses. Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state; Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden defended Zionism; George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have all, at various points, been dubbed “the first Jewish president.”
Gerald Ford almost never makes the list. He is usually lumped in with Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush as a president who was hostile to Israel. I would argue, contrary to the popular perception, he belongs at the very top. In Israel’s hour of need, Ford provided what only a true friend can offer: tough love.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War shattered Israel’s self-confidence, Ford perceived what many in Israel could not: Militarism as a substitute for diplomacy is self-destructive.
Much like today, the wars of 1967 and 1973 involved remarkable technical feats on the part of Israel; they also nearly triggered global nuclear conflict. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the U.S. and Soviet Union as being a “hair’s breadth” away from war in 1967. In 1973, with Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev drinking heavily, the CIA reported that the Soviets had moved nuclear weapons to Alexandria, Egypt; the U.S. subsequently went to DEFCON III. What made 1973 so deeply troubling was that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had secretly attempted to avert war and pursue peace. Still more troubling is the fact that King Hussein of Jordan had personally flown to Israel to warn of the imminence of an Arab attack.
Even after Ford took office, Israel’s government did not take Sadat seriously. But Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, a Holocaust refugee and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, did. If Nixon and Kissinger brought out the worst in each other — from supporting the coup in Chile to prolonging the Vietnam war — Ford and Kissinger brought out the best in each other, at least when it came to Middle East diplomacy.
In March 1975, after Israel continued to resist compromises with Egypt, Kissinger advised Ford to take a tougher line with Rabin. On March 21, Ford wrote one of the harshest letters in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, indicating that he had ordered “an immediate reassessment of U.S. policy in the area, including our relations with Israel.” Ford subsequently suspended or deferred new arms deliveries, including F-15 fighter jets. These were extremely risky political moves with very little domestic upside. But Ford was not simply another politician looking to the next election; he was a statesman looking to the next generation.
More importantly, Ford was acting as a true ally. Friends do not let friends squander a fleeting chance for peace with a mortal enemy. The Sinai II agreement was signed in 1975, committing Israel and Egypt to resolve their differences through diplomacy rather than warfare, laying the groundwork for the 1979 Camp David Accords. Jimmy Carter rightly gets credit for finishing the job with the former Irgun leader Menachem Begin as Israeli prime minister; but it was Ford who enabled the breakthrough. Six years after Sinai II, Sadat became a martyr for peace; two decades after the agreement (and two years after the first Oslo Accord), Rabin met the same fate.
For nearly half a century, that peace has served as the cornerstone of American and Israeli security in the region. It has survived wars, revolution, and terrorism. Peace with Egypt broke the taboo on Arab-Israeli pacts, demonstrating that coexistence was indeed possible; it paved the way for a treaty with Jordan and, ultimately, the Abraham Accords. To this day, Egypt remains one of Israel’s most vital intelligence partners.
What Ford can teach today’s leaders
Israel’s current leaders appear oblivious to this history. Highly credible reports have indicated that Israel was warned of war by Egyptian and other officials prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, which were themselves strikingly reminiscent of 1973. Remarkably, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel is even said to have flown to Israel days before the slaughter to warn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s claim that he only learned of these warnings from the media raises profound questions.
Oct. 7 and what followed have demonstrated the absolute bankruptcy of the “escalate to deescalate” doctrine and also the centrality of the Middle East conflict to regional and global security. So, in this world-historic moment, what can we learn from Gerald Ford?
First, like Ford, we must be realistic about the severity and trajectory of the crisis. It is clear that one or more players are inching closer toward the deployment of an unconventional weapon, ground forces, and/or a major conventional attack that would destroy critical infrastructure. Any such action would certainly be reciprocated, taking the global economy off a cliff.
Second, we must insist on known solutions. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed to me that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never said no to the map he proposed in 2008. This is because the two men were essentially in agreement. Instead of sending Israel 40,000 one-ton bombs, Trump should do what Ford did. Freeze weapons shipments until Netanyahu negotiates with Abbas in good faith to conclude an agreement along the lines of the Olmert parameters. As its name suggests, the “Axis of Resistance” would be severely undermined by peace with the Palestinians.
Third, we are faced with a simple truth: military escalation in the Persian Gulf cannot achieve what global diplomacy can. We must ask ourselves why China and Russia both supported the first Iran deal. While both countries would love to see the U.S. weakened in the region, does anyone really believe either power desires Iranian nuclear weapons in the Strait of Hormuz any more than the U.S. would desire them in Venezuela’s oil fields or the Panama Canal? History and economics suggest otherwise: Russia, once dubbed the “lesser Satan” by Iran, attempted to dismember the country after World War II, and China currently purchases roughly 90% of Iran’s exported oil. Ford, who used diplomacy with Egypt to weaken the USSR in the Middle East, would recognize these underlying frictions and use them to turn China and Russia against Iran. Today, we have accomplished the exact opposite.
Ford paid a profound political price for his courage, but he did the right thing anyway. When he took the oath of office, his hand rested on the wisdom of Solomon: “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” Many of our leaders today lean on little else.
The most pro-Israel thing an American president can do today is exactly what Ford did: Get some good advice and then administer tough love.
The post Ford was the most pro-Israel president in US history, and we need his playbook now appeared first on The Forward.
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She left Russia as a Jewish refugee — she returned to tell the stories of a new group of undesirables
Julia Loktev left the Soviet Union with her family in 1979, when she was 9, during a brief window when Jews were allowed to emigrate.
The pretext, in this time of refuseniks, was to go to Israel and practice their religion: only her family had no intention of going to Israel, and the last person in her family who went to temple was her great-grandmother.
“My mom sort of did it on a whim,” Loktev, 56, the film director, recalled in a Zoom interview from her home in New York. “She said ‘We have friends who applied for many, many years and were being rejected,’ and they said, ‘Oh, why don’t you try applying?’” When she did, the answer came back almost immediately: “Get out.”
“We left not knowing what country we were going to,” Loktev said. They were, effectively, refugees.
They spent time in Vienna, then a suburb of Rome before ultimately arriving, with sponsorship from HIAS, in Loveland, Colorado. Loktev’s experience of immigration, and of her own Jewishness, was bound up with state-sanctioned antisemitism.
“It was in my passport, it was in my school papers, it was on my face,” she said. “My parents couldn’t go to certain universities. They couldn’t get certain jobs, like literally, it was a state policy.”
Decades later, in 2021, she flew to Moscow to document a new policy for undesirables. The Russian government declared a number of journalists “foreign agents,” and they were forced by law to disclose themselves as such. She filmed the fallout, not knowing it was just the start of a larger story of displacement.
“When you were named a foreign agent, you had to put a paragraph-long disclaimer that had to be in a type larger than anything else, like larger than the headline, saying in very legalistic terms, ‘This was brought to you by a foreign agent,’” Loktev said. “This had to go on everything: on all your articles, on your podcast, your TV shows. It had to go on your Instagram puppy pictures. It had to go on your comments on a friend’s baby on Facebook — anywhere you were in public, even if you walked into a court of law, if you were in a parents’ chat, you had to present yourself as a foreign agent.”
The plight of these foreign agents, documented in her 2024 film My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, had glaring historical parallels of past regimes that made citizens identify themselves as “other.” In early 2022, the situation of her characters began to mirror her own journey as a refugee.
One week into Russia’s war in Ukraine, the young reporters at TV Rain, one of the last bastions of the free press under Russian president Vladimir Putin, were tipped off that their studio was about to be raided. Loktev filmed the moment. From there they left the country within a few hours, booking tickets on whichever plane had seats to whichever countries didn’t require visas.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile starts with this mass exodus and ends a few months before the film debuted at Venice in September. To follow her characters, Loktev travelled light and racked up passport stamps, filming on her iPhone in Istanbul, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Riga and New York. Situated in new countries, the journalists regrouped in ad hoc offices to continue reporting on the motherland from a distance. Their work became even more vital, providing their fellow Russians an alternative to state media that only ever referred to a war of aggression as a “special military operation.”
The film grew even more personal for Loktev in part two, but she’s quick to distinguish her subjects’ experience of exile from her immigration.
“When I was 9, I was told ‘Say goodbye to your grandparents, say goodbye to your aunts,’” said Loktev. “But that was part of the deal. I grew up in a closed world of the Iron Curtain where going to America was going to Mars. There was no return flight.”
Loktev’s characters, the youngest of whom are in their early 20s at the start of the film, had grown up with the internet and Zara and H&M down the street. They were unaccustomed to the scale of repression with the outbreak of Putin’s war: tellingly, they liken their predicaments not to life under Stalin or his successors, but to the totalitarian campaigns of villains from Harry Potter.
“None of these people chose to leave,” Loktev said. “They literally had to be put in a situation where they were like, ‘I can go to jail, where I won’t be very useful. I can shut up, or I have to leave the country.’ And at that moment, they chose leaving the country.”
Many — a number have prison sentences waiting for them — don’t anticipate returning anytime soon. If there’s a part three, she and her subjects have pledged, it will likely arrive only after the death of Putin.
My Undesirable Friends is a sprawling portrait of reporters weathering the whims of foreign governments and the aggression of their own abroad. (One writer, Elena Kostyuchenko, known for her longform work, was poisoned over the course of filming.)
Loktev’s film had its U.S. premiere at New York Film Festival last month. Among her festivalmates were Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, whose documentary NAZA, alleging war crimes by the Israeli Defense Force, has led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to threaten to revoke Abraham and Szor’s citizenships.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Rachel and Yuval, whom I don’t know personally, but who are now very much in a similar position as my characters, where they have been targeted by the government, targeted by hateful, angry mobs and are now facing the possibility of being in exile,” said Loktev, who recalled an interview where Abraham said he had “nothing to do abroad.”
She thinks Abraham, himself a journalist, must find it difficult to be “cut off” from his home, in no small part due to his desire to report on the ground. But she still distinguishes between the “flavors of the threats” in Israel and Russia.
“With Russia most of the threats are somehow government-related,” Loktev said. “You are able to print some things in Israel without going directly to jail. Haaretz still operates. Like in Russia that would be shut down in a hot second.
“What Russia doesn’t have, I suppose, which is what I fear most, I think, in the case of Rachel and Yuval, is the messianic mobs.”
Loktev sees events in Russia, Israel and America all trending toward a reality where those in power won’t countenance any story critical of their country. While Trump tries to ban news outlets from the White House briefing room and Putin cracks down on demonstrations, the war in Ukraine no longer makes headlines.
Within Russia, she describes a climate of fear and paranoia. She mentions a friend who used to go back to film events like Navalny’s funeral on the street but says it’s no longer possible. “She said ‘everyone is so suspicious. People are just terrified.’” At the same time, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of stopping. Much of the media has its eyes elsewhere, though she believes Russia will intensify its offensive this winter.
Apathy and numbness are not feelings Loktev’s characters can afford, though they naturally have their share of fear.
Dispersed among countries with no extradition agreement with Russia — a surprisingly limited club — they continue to try and speak the truth to their viewers in Russia relying on workarounds like VPNs. The fatigue of an unchanging story is real, but Loktev says the reality must not be normalized.
Lately, Loktev’s heard that potential audiences are tired of stories about freedom of the press and authoritarianism. To this, she has a ready response: “It’s not tired of you.”
The post She left Russia as a Jewish refugee — she returned to tell the stories of a new group of undesirables appeared first on The Forward.
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Eva Marie Saint was born Quaker, but found her ‘Exodus’ in Jewish stories
Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint, who has died at age 102, preferred mishpocheh to political posturing.
Her stance was akin to that of author Albert Camus, who during a press conference in 1957 after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, commented on strife in his native Algeria by opining of the terrorism used to liberate the nation from French colonialism, endangering his family still in his homeland: “If that is justice, I prefer my mother.”
Born to a Quaker family in Newark, Saint likely followed that religion’s wartime and immediate postwar concern for the fate of Europe’s Jews. Yet by 1951, when she married the American Jewish television director and producer Jeffrey Hayden (born Raphael Levine), to whom she would remain wed for 65 years, Saint apparently diverged from the official Quaker line.
By that year, previous collaborations between Quakers (officially the Religious Society of Friends) and Jewish communities during the Holocaust were halted by conflicts ensuing from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Traditional Quaker pacifism and historical Christian theology which downplayed Jewish presence in the Middle East opposed Israeli nationalist aims.
Instead, a policy purporting to favor balanced partiality claimed Quaker neutrality between Israeli authorities and Arab populations. Later, intense Quaker advocacy would make observers such as the historian Nancy Gallagher consider that the historic alliance with Jewish organizations was compromised.
Not so with Eva Marie Saint, who won acclaim in such early career explorations of Yiddishkeit as Paddy Chayefsky’s 1954 television production, Middle of the Night, which centered on a romance between Jerry Kingsley, a 53-year-old widowed Jewish garment manufacturer, who falls in love with Betty Prieser, his 24-year-old receptionist.
Nominated for an Emmy for her turn as Betty, Saint played opposite E.G. Marshall, but when the play transferred to Broadway two years later, the veteran of the shmatta trade was played by Edward G. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg) with such heart-wrenching emotion that some theater mavens considered his work to be the single finest performance seen on the modern New York stage.
By then, Saint, replaced on Broadway by Gena Rowlands, had already conquered cinemagoers in Budd Schulberg’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, widely seen as an onscreen argument for betraying fellow Jews by naming names to political authorities. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan had given friendly testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era, decimating the lives and careers of many creative Jews in Hollywood. Among those cited in 1951 by Schulberg as dangerous Communist Party associates were the writer-director Herbert Biberman and screenwriter Albert Maltz. Meanwhile, in speaking to HUAC in 1952, Kazan singled out the writer Clifford Odets; actors Morris Carnovsky and J. Edward Bromberg; and actress Paula Strasberg.
In On the Waterfront, the protagonist played by Marlon Brando was shown breaking a code of silence to testify against mob-controlled union bosses. The result incensed Arthur Miller, who had originally written an unproduced screenplay about corruption on the Brooklyn docks, which Kazan had agreed to direct. At this point, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn demanded that the villains be altered from corrupt union bosses to Communists. Miller demurred, left the project, and was replaced by Schulberg. In 1955, Miller’s play A View from the Bridge was considered a response to Schulberg, in which informing was shown to be a destructive betrayal driven by jealousy, rather than noble whistleblowing.
Saint transcended this tzimmes pitting Jew against Jew by delivering an Oscar- winning performance in her first screen role. As the younger sister of a murdered dockworker, Saint demanded justice for her brother’s death and challenged the conscience of the character played by Brando.
Saint was later cast in Otto Preminger’s Exodus, whose overblown and boring nature is best summarized by a legendary historical burn: At a preview of the film in 1960, the Canadian Jewish comedian Mort Sahl rose from his seat and supposedly pleaded, “Otto, let my people go!”
The film was based on Leon Uris’ melodramatic novel about the founding of the State of Israel, which historians Matthew Silver and Deborah Dash Moore diagnosed as more redolent of shoot-em-up cowboy films than Jewish history. Nevertheless, once again Saint surpassed the limitations of a script given her, as a widowed American nurse toiling in Cyprus with Jewish refugees who becomes enamored of a Palestine-born Haganah leader, Ari Ben Canaan (played by Paul Newman).
Newman’s character tells Saint’s nurse, “I just wanted you to know that I’m a Jew. This is my country,” as Brandeis professor Stephen J. Whitfield notes in American Space, Jewish Time. Shortly afterward, she is seen wearing a khaki uniform and holding a gun, joining her betrothed and other Jews to resist an Arab attack. Film maven Tony Shaw asserted that, during the movie’s production, Saint made it a personal mission to recount to the international press “stories of Israel’s steadfastness” and “democratic spirit.” She also lauded the Jewish State’s “stoicism in the face of constant Arab invasion threats” and, further, spoke of the “opportunities Israeli women had” compared to “their Arab counterparts.”
In less fraught contexts, Saint continually proved that she was a mensch, as recalled by Brooklyn-born actor Bernie Kopell, a mainstay as Dr. Adam Bricker on TV’s The Love Boat. When the cast of one 1983 episode was temporarily outside the Parthenon in Athens, Kopell stated, Saint saw him studying his lines for a forthcoming stage role and offered her partnership to help him memorize the words. This solidarity from an Oscar-winning actress to a humble Love Boat actor impressed Kopell, but Saint told him with egalitarian zest that she did the same for all her friends.
On a more somber note, Saint’s personal steadfastness and Camus-like preference of family to debates on current events extended to portraying Marilyn Klinghoffer, the widow of Leon Klinghoffer who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the sea-jacking of the Italian cruise ship in a 1990 two-part miniseries, Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair.
Saint incarnated the resolve of Marilyn Klinghoffer, who although fatally ill, had the fortitude to travel to Italy to testify against the four terrorists after her wheelchair-bound husband was separated from other passengers as a Jew during the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, murdered, and thrown overboard. It was a noble and compelling performance, like all of her work during a long acting career inspired by Yiddishkeit.
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