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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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‘Long overdue’: Henry Ford home to confront his antisemitism
(JTA) — DEARBORN – The bust of Henry Ford looked on sternly as hundreds of Jewish professionals flooded his pool room.
The visiting Jews admired the views of the Rouge River from Ford’s windows and strolled through his immaculately maintained garden. They studied a mock-up for a Navajo rug in his basement woven with a particular pattern — one that appeared to resemble a Nazi swastika.
The staff at Fair Lane, the historic Dearborn home of Henry and his wife Clara, welcomed the Jewish educators, historians and museum staff. Why they did soon became clear during a panel discussion in that pool room. When the home reopens to the public in June 2027, after a 17-year closure for restoration, staff will teach visitors about Ford’s antisemitism.
This facet of the pioneering industrialist’s life was hardly incidental. The onetime richest man in America published venomous conspiracy theories in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, for years. Hitler was a professed admirer, and Nazi Germany awarded him a medal.
Leaders of Jewish groups greeted the news that the home would address Ford’s antisemitism with optimism.
“We applaud Fair Lane’s commitment to addressing Henry Ford’s antisemitism publicly,” Catherine Cangany, CEO of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement. “This history happened, it caused harm, and it continues to have consequences we all must confront.”
Cangany, who has research expertise on the Dearborn Independent, sat on the June panel with Fair Lane’s curators but is not involved in the antisemitism initiative itself. Local Jewish groups including hers have been pushing for Ford’s enterprises to acknowledge his antisemitism for years.
“The reckoning is long overdue, and we all will be better for it,” she said.
The curators did not broach specifics of their plan with their Jewish audience in June. For the rest of the summer, as Fair Lane proceeded with its renovations, most of the Detroit area’s Jewish leaders were kept in the dark.
More than two months after the conference, top staffers Austin Eighmey and Hannah McCready sat down with JTA in Ford’s library to outline their educational plans in more detail.
Surrounded by replicas of books on German race science that helped to inform Ford’s attitude toward Jews, they explained that they viewed discussions of antisemitism as core to the revitalized Fair Lane’s statement of purpose. Such information would sit, they said, alongside other unflattering aspects of Ford’s character, such as his union-busting activities.
“Our mission is to illuminate the lives and legacy of Henry and Clara Ford,” Eighmey, senior director of historic resources, said. Part of that legacy, he said, was noting that “he was an ignorant man, fed a lot of poor information that he himself sought out.”
“It’s our job to tell a more full picture and give people a lens with which to view history,” added McCready, the site’s director of interpretation and education.
In the Detroit area, where Ford’s name still looms large nearly 80 years after his death, such a commitment is notable. In 2023 the former president of the Ford Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, acknowledged and condemned its namesake’s antisemitism. Other local institutions devoted to historic purveyors of antisemitism have reckoned with their own legacies in recent years, including the church founded by demagogic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin.
But as Ford the man continues to be heavily mythologized today, by new generations of entrepreneurs and gearheads — and white supremacists — the physical museums and educational institutions in the region that bear Ford’s name and have connections to his family largely have not broached his antisemitism.
Those include The Henry Ford, a museum built around his personal collections; Greenfield Village, a historic reenactment village that includes a restoration of the mogul’s childhood home; and the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, a Detroit heritage site where Ford’s Model Ts were built.
For a long time Fair Lane, too, didn’t touch the subject. After Ford’s widow Clara died in 1950, the property was turned over to the Ford Motor Company, which brokered a deal with the University of Michigan to build a Dearborn satellite campus on the site.
For decades the university offered tours of the grounds on a largely volunteer basis, also using it as an events space. The house has been closed to visitors since 2010, as the team undertook an extensive restoration project with an eye toward reopening for the public.
Eighmey said the plan to teach about antisemitism had been the goal since the restoration’s early days. The staff met with representatives from the Zekelman Holocaust Center, the state’s flagship Holocaust museum, to discuss how such a project would look.
“They were straightforward about Henry Ford’s antisemitism and hope that it will be incorporated into the interpretive narrative where appropriate but, at the same time, they respectfully acknowledged many of Henry Ford’s strengths and expressed a deep regard for Fair Lane’s stories, physical spaces, and current restoration work,” reads one executive summary of the focus group that a consultant shared with JTA.
A spokesperson for the Zekelman declined to comment to JTA for this article.
Local controversies in the interim called such educational commitments into question. In 2019 the city of Dearborn — where the Ford Motor Company is the largest employer — quashed a planned historical magazine that would have discussed Ford’s antisemitism, tied to the 100th anniversary of his acquisition of the Dearborn Independent.
In what Eighmey today refers to as “the whole fiasco here in Dearborn,” the city’s then-mayor, John “Jack” O’Reilly, fired the magazine’s editor, prompting outcry. O’Reilly died last year. His son, Devon O’Reilly, now serves as Fair Lane’s CEO.
Despite this history, the younger O’Reilly is supportive of the plan to teach Ford’s antisemitism on the site, the curators said. “We have not talked about his personal life, really, and his familial connections at all,” Eighmey said of O’Reilly.
The team has developed talking points about Ford’s antisemitism as part of their “non-negotiables,” museum terminology for facets of history that every visitor will encounter. Donna Braden, a museums consultant who formerly worked with The Henry Ford and who is Jewish herself, was hired to give her feedback on the plan and drafted her own proposed “non-negotiables” for the subject.
“Explaining the true story of Henry Ford’s antisemitism to non-Jewish people will help them understand why it is so important to the Jewish community,” Braden told the Fair Lane team in a report on their efforts.
In a summary she shared with JTA, Braden also advised the team to “be aware of many people who are unaware of Henry Ford’s antisemitism, and it will surprise them.”
Braden drew from “The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century,” an acclaimed 2006 biography by Steven Watts. Unlike other Ford biographers before him, Watts tackled his subject’s antisemitism head-on. His approach would later find surprising admirers within the Ford dynasty, leading to him presenting on the subject in 2018 to a room full of The Henry Ford staff and Ford family members.
“It was, I must say, quite an experience, because I spoke pretty frankly about all of this,” Watts, an emeritus history professor at the University of Missouri, recalled to JTA about his 2018 talk. “Most of the staff that talked to me about it actually indicated that they were a little relieved, I think, to have this brought out into the open in a fairly frank way.”
The talk, co-presented with the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, did not lead to change — at least not at The Henry Ford, which has a separate ownership structure from Fair Lane. Today, no mention of Ford’s antisemitism can be found in The Henry Ford’s physical museum space, despite efforts from Braden and others to add such material. Some pages of its website now include some brief words on the subject.
Amid new efforts to push Ford’s family on the subject, Watts returned to Dearborn in 2024, partially to address Fair Lane at Braden’s invitation.
“I hope that they will move forward to bring Henry Ford’s antisemitism to the public,” he said, of both Fair Lane and The Henry Ford. “I got the idea when I was there that they were thinking strongly about a more frank and open approach to all of this, and I guess I would hope that is the approach that they take, and not the ‘sweep it under the rug’ maneuver.”
He told JTA that Ford’s antisemitism became most pronounced in the 1920s, shortly after the height of his business success.
Watts traces Ford’s antisemitism not to any one specific root cause, but rather to a confluence of factors, including the mogul’s economic populism; his failed efforts to send a “Peace Ship” of dignitaries to Europe during World War I, which he came to blame on a “Jewish financial interest in Europe”; and his embrace of conservative cultural signifiers, including square dancing.
“He basically begins to argue that Jews lay behind the corruption of that old-fashioned kind of rural, WASP cultural virtue, that Jews were behind jazz music, Jews were behind Hollywood movies, and that there was a kind of moral degradation that was at work,” Watts said.
Fair Lane has a separate ownership structure from The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village, both of which are largely built around other subjects Ford was passionate about, such as American innovation, rather than the mogul himself. Fair Lane, its curators say, is the natural place for visitors to learn about the Fords’ personal lives and beliefs.
Ford descendants still weigh heavily on Fair Lane’s board — including chair Edsel Ford II, Henry’s great-grandson, whom Eighmey refers to as “the Deuce.”
The family was onboard for this reappraisal, the curators said. Fair Lane’s models in the museum space include Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia that has taught visitors about his slaveholding; and the Frick museum in Pittsburgh, where industrialist Henry Clay Frick comes under scrutiny for his fierce anti-union stance.
Visitors to Fair Lane, Eighmey promised, will “never leave here thinking, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that big of a deal.’”
The Fair Lane team chose to restore the house to its condition in 1919 — in part because the home was photographed for an architectural magazine that year, allowing the curators to use it as a visual reference.
The date is significant for another reason. 1919 was also the year that Ford acquired the Dearborn Independent, which he would soon use to publish a series of antisemitic conspiracies called “The International Jew” as well as the Russian forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to outline secret Jewish plans for world domination.
Ford would require his dealerships to distribute copies of the paper with every automobile purchase, making the Independent, for a brief time, one of the country’s highest-circulated newspapers. Ford’s role as newspaper publisher was, in Watts’ estimation, the most notorious and seismic way the mogul’s antisemitism manifested in his lifetime.
The choice to reset his home to the year he launched the paper “is further bringing all of this together as a narrative throughline,” McCready said.
After the paper shut down in 1927, owing in part to a libel suit brought against Ford by Jewish attorney and labor activist Aaron Sapiro, Ford — with the help of Jewish community figures — publicly apologized for spreading antisemitism. Around the same time, the celebrated Jewish architect Albert Kahn helped renovate Fair Lane.
The planned 90-minute Fair Lane tour, which is currently being workshopped, touches on the Peace Ship and Ford’s wielding of the Dearborn Independent. McCready described the tour’s intended arc: “He fails with the Peace Ship. He decides that there is a hostile press that’s controlled by financiers that’s against him. He purchases this failing local newspaper and starts getting really obsessed with his image in the media, and we kind of take it from there.”
It does not get into the Sapiro trial, though tour guides will discuss the topic if visitors bring it up. They also don’t plan to discuss the medal Ford received from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s when Hitler publicly expressed admiration for him, noting that it falls nearly two decades after the time period represented by the house’s restoration.
Watts, the Ford historian, told JTA that Ford had suffered two strokes at the time he received the medal, and “was in very bad shape” — possibly impairing his judgment.
“I think Ford’s got a lot to answer for, but I don’t think he was a Nazi,” Watts said. “I think things kind of went off the rails there.” By 1942, Ford was again publicly renouncing antisemitism, calling it “a distinct disservice to our country.”
At the Jewish museums conference, Cangany, the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan CEO, suggested the Fair Lane team should display copies of the Dearborn Independent around the house to demonstrate the effects of Ford’s worldview. That’s not part of the plan, Eighmey said: “It’s not on the site, and it never was.”
But the house does have other eye-catching artifacts. A room in the basement, in keeping with historic specifications, will be outfitted with a Navajo rug stitched with the ancient “whirling logs” symbol, which the Nazis later co-opted as the swastika. Ford had acquired the rug and displayed it in his home beginning in the 1910s, well before the Nazi swastika was popularized.
Maintaining an honest assessment of its founder’s troubling history is a tall order for any museum in modern times. Even Monticello, which Fair Lane held up as a model, has faced right-wing backlash from figures who want the site to minimize discussions of slavery.
Meanwhile, Ford’s legacy continues to shape the modern era as new conservative cultural figures from the business world push similar brands of populism.
In 2022, amid a dispute with the tech mogul Elon Musk over the prevalence of antisemitism on his social network X, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, called Musk “the Henry Ford of our time.”
Greenblatt later apologized for the comparison -– but some commentators noted that it was even more apt than he may have meant. “Twitter is to Musk as The Dearborn Independent was to Ford,” the writer Parker Molloy wrote at the time.
Last month in Dearborn, which today has a large Arab/Muslim community, neo-Nazi activists wearing swastika armbands staged an anti-Muslim rally. Their choice of venue carried historical echoes: They organized outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library.
The Fair Lane team is aware of the modern significance of Ford’s antisemitism, they said.
“Populist movements, they always end up using antisemitism as some sort of way to recruit people to their cause,” Eighmey told JTA. “And it’s a reality that I hope, after people leave their experience here, they do reflect on it and see, ‘Wow, wait a minute. Is this happening right now around me?’”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘Long overdue’: Henry Ford home to confront his antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish artists face a relentless culture war over Israel. Some are building a way around it.
The pop star P!nk went into Rosh Hashanah explaining herself.
After sharing a post calling for rapper Macklemore to be dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour over his pro-Palestinian performances, the Jewish singer faced a backlash of her own. On Friday, she clarified that she supported Palestinian humanity, opposed silencing artists and wanted room to express Jewish fear without being accused of endorsing Israel’s war.
Macklemore, meanwhile, said his criticism of Israel was not directed at Jews. Their exchange captured how quickly an argument about a performance can become a fight over identity — and who gets to define someone else’s.
Nearly three years after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, those fights are becoming part of the ordinary business of culture: promoting a movie, booking a concert, selling a manuscript. And some Jewish artists and executives are responding by building new places to take their work.
Consider Gal Gadot. While promoting her new Prime Video thriller, The Runner, the Israeli actress and former IDF soldier appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last week, where she and Kimmel blew shofars for Rosh Hashanah. “Why platform her?” read a typical comment under the video on social media. Even sharing an episode became a point of contention: A member of MUNA, the musical guest, subsequently said the band’s performance had been prerecorded and that it hadn’t known who else would appear, adding a message supporting Palestinian freedom.
Artists critical of Israel face their own confrontations. Last month, Paramount accused Mark Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes after he attacked the Ellison family’s corporate interests and Oracle’s work with the Israeli military. Ruffalo rejected the accusation, saying he was criticizing executives and government policy. The disputes involve different conduct and different stakes, but they keep returning to the same contested boundary between political criticism and prejudice.
In publishing, the consequences can be harder to see. Jewish and Israeli authors told The Wall Street Journal that agents had dropped them, editors had sought to remove Jewish or Israeli elements from manuscripts, and overseas publishers had become unwilling to buy their work. Some agents explicitly reject submissions from Zionists.
The picture is uneven: Jewish writers across the political spectrum continue to produce bestsellers, and a rejected manuscript alone cannot establish discrimination. But the accounts have helped spur new businesses.
A wave of new publishers has emerged to give Jewish and Israeli writers a home after agents and editors say mainstream houses have quietly frozen them out since Oct. 7: Neil Blair, best known as J.K. Rowling’s literary agent, launched High Line Publishing Studio last week to publish authors he says have been shut out elsewhere; Canary Publishing opened this month with the same mission; and Meg Keene Books, a new fiction imprint, will publish the American edition of Howard Jacobson’s Howl, which struggled to find a U.S. publisher despite its Booker Prize-winning author.
A similar response is taking shape in Hollywood. Former NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman is among the backers of SHOOQ, a new platform connecting Jewish filmmakers with investors and philanthropists. Its founders say talented storytellers need help finding the funding to get their projects made.
These ventures offer something practical to people exhausted by defending their right to participate: a publisher, a financial introduction, a way to keep working. They also raise a question that will outlast the latest celebrity argument: Can new Jewish cultural institutions help artists reach a wider public, or will an increasingly divided industry leave them speaking mainly to their own?
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‘We return changed’: Michigan synagogue reopens for Rosh Hashanah six months after a gunman forced them out
Six months after he was injured protecting his synagogue, Danny Phillips helped carry a Torah back into its sanctuary. The security director was still recovering. So was the congregation.
On Friday evening, the Jews of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, returned to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in the sanctuary they had been forced to leave after a gunman attacked their synagogue in March. The Torah scrolls came home to their ark. Familiar prayers filled the room again. And the High Holidays’ ancient invitation to return took on a meaning no one there could have anticipated a year earlier.
“This room holds more than our services; it holds our memories,” Cantor Neil Michaels said in his welcome, recalling the weddings, coming-of-age ceremonies and farewells that had taken place there.
Throughout the service, clergy and congregational leaders spoke openly about what it meant to enter a sacred space where their sense of safety had been shattered. They described gratitude alongside grief, and the effort of caring for others while still struggling themselves. Returning to the building was one step toward learning to feel at home again.
The congregation’s co-presidents, Debra Gordon and Jodi Neff, gave that work a plainspoken expression: “How do you lead others when you are trying to steady yourself?” Gordon asked.
The answer, in the stories shared from the bimah, was that others helped carry the weight.
The prayer books came from other congregations. Temple Israel’s machzors had been destroyed in the attack, and the edition it used was out of print. Synagogues around the country sent replacements. Rabbi Harold Loss told worshippers that the book he picked up bore another congregation’s initials — a small reminder, held in his hands, of the community that had sustained them.
The children had already made their own return. Earlier that week, students came back to the early childhood center and received teddy bears marking the occasion with the Shehecheyanu, the blessing of gratitude for reaching a significant moment. An educator recalled a parent saying that, after six months in which nothing had felt normal, the first day back finally did.
Their neighbors had helped make the journey possible. On the day of the attack, the Chaldean Christian community’s Shenandoah Country Club across the street sheltered children and teachers. The following evening, it hosted the congregation for Shabbat. At the holiday service, Temple Israel’s leaders again thanked those neighbors, along with the staff, first responders and restoration workers who helped sustain and rebuild their community.
Coming home still required protection. The March 12 attacker drove a truck into the synagogue and exchanged gunfire with security personnel while preschoolers were inside. The reopening included additional security measures. Temple Israel’s Rabbi Josh Bennett has also spoken about the emotional and financial difficulty of making a synagogue secure while preserving its welcome — a challenge facing Jewish congregations far beyond Michigan.
Near the end of their remarks, the co-presidents described teshuvah, the season’s work of return, as something that allowed room for everything the congregation had endured.
“We return changed,” Neff said, “but still rooted.”
This essay first appeared in our Forwarding the News morning newsletter. Subscribe here.
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