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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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Our greatest folksinger wrote about America, Dust Bowl refugees and Jewish identity
Woody Guthrie is best known as one of the giants of 20th-century American folk music. From the late 1930s through the early 1950s, he wrote thousands of songs, many of which became modern-day standards, including “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Tom Joad,” “Hard Travelin’,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and, of course, “This Land Is Your Land.” His songs gave voice to working people and Dust Bowl refugees. He wrote playful children’s songs and songs that railed against fascism and greed. He even wrote a protest song called “Old Man Trump,” about developer Fred Trump, the father of the current president of the United States, decrying the strict racial segregation he enforced in his housing projects.
Guthrie’s influence on generations of singer-songwriters cannot be overstated. His songs have been recorded by hundreds of singers around the world, including Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, Lou Reed, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Lila Downs, and Susan McKeown. The desire to meet Woody Guthrie, who was his hero, is what led Robert Allen Zimmerman to hitchhike from Minneapolis to New York City, where he subsequently fell upon the thriving Greenwich Village folk scene and reinvented himself as a rootsy singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan. The latter’s eponymous first album included an original song entitled “Song to Woody.”
As Steven Pressman makes clear in his new documentary film, Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie, there was another side to Guthrie and his songs. As his son, Arlo Guthrie, explains in the film: “My father studied Judaism and he knew something about it. He never exchanged his faith for something else; he added to his faith. And that something else he added … was a Jewish identity. He understood what that meant traditionally, historically, culturally. And he knew more about Judaism than my zeyde. And so, my bubbe was thrilled.”
It just so happens that Arlo’s bubbe — his grandmother — was acclaimed Yiddish poet and lyricist Aliza Greenblatt. When Guthrie married Aliza’s daughter, Marjorie Mazia (née Greenblatt), the two chose to raise their children in Coney Island, and Marjorie’s parents, Aliza and Isadore Greenblatt, moved from Philadelphia to be close to their expanding brood. And it was primarily through his close relationship with his mother-in-law that Guthrie became knowledgeable about and enamored of Jewish history and culture. Says Arlo, “My father saw something inside the Jewish tradition that inspired him.”
Pressman’s documentary traces the close links between Aliza Greenblatt and Woody Guthrie. “My father and my bubbe had a respect for each other as writers, as thinkers, as people of the heart,” says Arlo. Arlo’s sister, Nora Guthrie, echoes her brother’s comments: “Bubbe would share ideas and lyrics with Woody. So, they were able to form a relationship.” Nora’s daughter, Anna Canoni — seen in the film at the Guthrie family plot in a cemetery in Woody’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma — elaborates on the special relationship between her grandfather and great-grandmother: “Aliza and Woody were actually interestingly similar in terms of a hardship and displacement that happens at a young age. There were so many interesting parallels between the two of them, which is why there was so much understanding, empathy and love between the two of them.”
While Aliza Greenblatt took to Woody right away, her husband Isadore was not thrilled about his daughter marrying a Gentile. He did, however, give Guthrie a gift of a Hebrew-English version of the rabbinical text called Pirkei Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers). In the film, Nora Guthrie displays the book, which is filled with Woody’s notes and annotations — even drawings. Woody provided the cover illustration for one of Aliza’s poetry volumes.
The film includes interviews with dozens of people who either knew Woody Guthrie and Aliza Greenblatt or who became familiar with their story. Among them are Guthrie biographer Will Kaufman, who has written three books about the folksinger. Kaufman suggests that Woody and Aliza bonded over being artists and socialists. “[Woody] would have seen in Aliza and Isadore kindred spirits politically,” says Kaufman. “[As refugees], Woody would have seen in them a real fellowship with the Dust Bowl refugees that he had been championing….”
A who’s who of contemporary Yiddish musicians, including vocalist Eleanor Reissa, singer-songwriter Daniel Kahn, and Lorin Sklamberg, cofounder and lead vocalist of the Klezmatics, are among those who pay tribute to them and are heard performing Guthrie and Greenblatt songs. Kahn says, “[Woody] was a staunch anti-Nazi, which makes him Jewish in the most important ways to me.” When the U.S. became involved in the Second World War, Guthrie signed on with the Merchant Marine, and he was overseas for nearly two years. What he experienced there found its way into songs like “You Fascists Bound to Lose,” “Mister Hitler,” and “Ilsa Koch,” about the so-called beast of Buchenwald. In it he sang,
I’m here in Buchenwald.
My number’s on my skin….
The guards have shot a man.
Some more have starved to death.
Here comes the prisoner’s car.
They dump them in the pen.
They load them down the chute.
The trooper cracks their skulls.
He steals their teeth of gold.
He shoves them on the belt.
He swings that furnace door.
He slides their corpses in.
I see the chimney smoke.
I see their ashes hauled.
I see their bones in piles.
Lamp shades are made from skins.
Old Ilsy Koch was jailed.
Old Ilsy Koch went free.
The song was brought to life when Nora Guthrie, president of the Woody Guthrie Foundation, gave the Klezmatics a sheaf of lyrics with Jewish themes that Guthrie never put to music or recorded. The modern klezmer group released two albums worth of these songs in 2006, including “Wonder Wheel,” which garnered the group a Grammy Award, the only klezmer group ever to have received such honor. The album also included their version of the song “Mermaid’s Avenue,” a tribute to the very Jewish Coney Island neighborhood where the Guthries lived. The song even includes the Yiddish word meydele:
Mermaid Avenue that’s the street
Where the lox and bagels meet…
Where the prettiest of the meydeles
Leave their legprints in that sand….
Where the smokefish meets the pretzel
Where the borscht sounds like the seas….
The film also recounts the relationship between Guthrie and Moses “Moe” Asch, a Jewish-Polish immigrant whose father was Sholem Asch, the great Yiddish novelist and playwright. Moe Asch had a recording studio and record label based in New York City. In addition to recording and releasing many Guthrie songs, Asch encouraged Guthrie’s Jewish education and helped steer him to write songs with Jewish content, such as “The Many and the Few,” which retold the story of the Jews. The song was “basically the entire story of Hanukkah set up as an Appalachian ballad,” says Lorin Sklamberg, who recorded it with the Klezmatics on their album “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah.”
Woody Guthrie died in 1967. His ashes were scattered at the beach in Coney Island. “For a guy from Oklahoma, that was pretty unique,” says Arlo Guthrie. Aliza Greenblatt died in 1975 at the age of 87. With Pressman’s Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie, their common legacy is now cemented for all time.
Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie will screen at the Nashville Jewish Film Festival (Aug. 18), Circle Cinema in Tulsa (Aug. 20) and the Yiddish Book Center — where Marjorie Mazia Guthrie was a board member — in Amherst, Mass., on Sept. 27.
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Trump and Netanyahu’s positive spin on White House meeting can’t disguise growing distance
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing an uphill battle in his reelection bid and diminishing support in the U.S., concluded an 80-minute meeting with President Donald Trump with a simple one-word statement: “Excellent.” The White House called it “productive.”
The Oval Office sit-down felt very different than that and signaled far more uncertainty.
The meeting itself was largely kept out of public view; Netanyahu entered through the West Wing without cameras. The images released afterward by Netanyahu’s office showed a smiling Trump, but they also revealed that this was not an extended one-on-one conversation. Vice President JD Vance, the architect of the memorandum of understanding pausing the Iran war and one of the administration’s more skeptical voices critical of Israeli leadership, participated in the meeting alongside other senior officials.
The biggest sign of that changing dynamic came hours before the meeting even began.
Asked on Fox News about Israeli intelligence concerning renewed Iranian activity at an underground nuclear facility called Pickaxe Mountain, Trump brushed aside Netanyahu’s planned briefing. “I don’t need Bibi to tell me that,” Trump said. “Bibi is telling me that because he wants me to stay involved.” Trump went further, criticizing Netanyahu for discussing the intelligence publicly rather than privately. “I said, ‘Why don’t you just tell it to me? Why do you have to announce it to the world?’”
The meeting highlighted the new political reality, in which Trump and Netanyahu may still share strategic goals, but they no longer have the same political interests.
The political balancing act
For years, Trump and Netanyahu largely benefited from the same political incentives. A public show of unity helped both leaders. Netanyahu pointed to his unparalleled access to a Republican president delivering major strategic victories, while Trump presented himself as Israel’s strongest ally and protector.
For the first seven meetings between Trump and Netanyahu since last January, the choreography rarely changed. There were Oval Office photo opportunities, warm public statements that projected an unshakable alliance. Those meetings became political assets for Netanyahu, reinforcing his image at home as the one Israeli leader capable of preserving its security interests on the international stage. That culminated in the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran during Operation Epic Fury earlier this year.
Today, however, those interests have become more complicated. Netanyahu, the longest-serving Israeli leader, is fighting for his political life, while trailing in the polls for a seventh term. Trump is focused on holding Republican control of Congress in November by taming surging gas prices and balancing support for Israel with a growing isolationist wing of his party that wants to avoid another prolonged military conflict in the Middle East. By showing distance from Netanyahu, Trump signals to voters that he is guided by American interests first.
At the same time, Israel has become one of the defining issues dividing Democrats in the midterm elections, creating uncertainty over what future U.S. policy may look like after November.
A recent YouGov poll of 7,219 U.S. adults found that 46% of Americans, including 28% of Republicans, support the arrest of Netanyahu by U.S. federal agents to comply with an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. (The U.S. does not participate in the court.)
Where Trump and Netanyahu could still agree
That doesn’t mean their interests are at odds. Both men still want to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. In fact, both could still emerge from this meeting with political wins.
If diplomacy collapses and Trump ultimately concludes military action is unavoidable, Netanyahu could still emerge politically strengthened without appearing to have pushed the United States into another war. That would mirror February, when Netanyahu quietly left Washington only for the world to see the two countries carry out Operation Epic Fury together.
Even without another military strike, both leaders could claim success from the same outcome.
If Trump extracts additional concessions from Iran, he can argue that his “peace through strength” approach is working. Netanyahu, in turn, can tell Israeli voters that his close relationship with Trump continues to shape U.S. policy and keep pressure on Tehran.
However, if Trump reaches a deal that Israel views as bad, or publicly distances himself further from Netanyahu’s approach, the visit could become another marker of a relationship that is no longer managed entirely on Netanyahu’s terms. Opponents could argue that one of Netanyahu’s signature political advantages has turned Israel dependent on the U.S. rather than a sovereign ally.
Netanyahu has survived worse
None of this necessarily spells political disaster for Netanyahu.
Over three decades, he has repeatedly clashed with American presidents while surviving politically. His rocky relationship with Bill Clinton and disputes with Barack Obama became defining moments in U.S.-Israel relations. Even under Joe Biden, public disagreements over the judicial overhaul, the Gaza war and regional diplomacy strained ties.
Netanyahu often turned those confrontations into evidence for his base that he was willing to stand up to an American president when he believed Israeli security required it.
Trump may prove different simply because Netanyahu has invested so much of his political brand in being Trump’s closest foreign partner.
In the end, the most important photograph from Tuesday may not have been the one released by Netanyahu’s office. The real measure will be whatever decision Trump makes next on Iran.
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Antisemitic vitriol claims an unlikely new victim — a flamboyant and popular French DJ
The celebrated French DJ Barbara Butch, whose flamboyant performance at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris was condemned by Catholics and conservatives, is proudly lesbian and unabashedly Jewish. Last week, the latter quality sparked yet another flare up of antisemitism in France.
On the evening of July 18, about 20 minutes after Butch began a concert in the city of Grenoble, about 150 protestors who had entered the hall with the rest of the audience unfurled pro-Palestinian banners denouncing the brutal destruction of Gaza. Many of them began to fling antisemitic insults and glass bottles at Butch. Stunned by the sudden explosion of violence, Butch soon left the stage. At that point, the municipal authorities intervened. “Confronted by threats aimed at the artist Barbara Butch, and to guarantee the safety of both the audience and performers,” they declared, “the city of Grenoble has taken the decision to cancel the performance.”
This eruption of antisemitism parading as anti-Zionism was as predictable — and as predictably ignored by the local government — as are the fires now consuming swathes of western France. In the weeks leading up to the concert, a petition was launched by the local section of La France insoumise (France Unbowed), the extreme-left political party founded and led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has recently and plausibly been accused of flirting with antisemitism. The petition condemned Butch for supporting a proposed law in 2025 that penalized “new forms of antisemitism,” which potentially included expressions of anti-Zionism and even criticism of the Israeli government.
There were two problems, though, with the petition. First, there is the obvious issue of banning an artist from presenting or performing their work because one disagrees with their political statements. (Statements that do not, of course, inspire acts of racial hatred or violence.) Second, and no less obviously, Butch had almost immediately regretted and publicly retracted her initial support of the proposed law, one she realized could suppress legitimate criticism of Israel’s brazenly illegal and brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
All this was for naught, though. The tract distributed in early May by the local office of Unbowed France demanded the cancellation of Butch’s concert by the city government, which had sponsored the music festival it was part of. Fair enough. Not so fair, though, was the tract’s lurid montage, which placed Butch against the background of an LGBTQ flag spattered in blood and stamped with the Star of David, accompanied by the claim that she was “complicit with the genocide” committed in Gaza.
Equally startling was the role played by Allan Brunon, a parliamentary member of Unbowed France who is also president of the party’s local chapter. Not only did he lead the protestors at the concert venue, but he also insisted that, as far as he could see, their behavior never degenerated into violence, even though videos of the ruckus confirm that bottles and other objects hit the stage, as does the eyewitness testimony of Laurence Ruffin, the mayor of Grenoble, who was also in attendance. Brunon’s faux naïve explanation for the expletives shouted at the concert was equally insulting; they were aimed, he insisted, at Butch’s “political position and not who she is.”
Leaders from across the political spectrum, from the extreme right to traditional left, have denounced the role played by Unbowed France at the concert. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally who never misses an opportunity to bash Unbowed France and bury her party’s own antisemitic origins, decried “the antisemitism, repeated appeals to violence, and totalitarian nature and project of the extreme left,” while the former prime minister and centrist politician Gabriel Attal, in a mocking allusion to an earlier claim made by Mélenchon, observed that the party’s “antisemitism is anything but residual.” As for the leadership of Unbowed France, Mélenchon has kept silent while the leader of the parliamentary group, Mathilde Panot, spoke in the conditional case, stating that “we would never support, if they occurred, either flung insults or bottles.” (my emphasis).
Wittingly or not, Attal’s remark reaches much further back than last week. Ever since the late 19th century, the extreme right in France has not had exclusive dibs on antisemitism. Édouard Drumont, the author of the virulent antisemitic 1886 bestseller La France juive and editor of the La Libre parole, the newspaper that sparked the Dreyfus Affair, thought of himself as an anti-capitalist and man of the left. It required the immense reserves of eloquence and decency of Jean Jaurès, the Socialist leader, to persuade the rank and file to rally to Dreyfus’ cause. As late as the 1950s, the French Communist Party unhesitatingly followed Moscow’s lead during the late stages of Stalin’s paranoia, featuring spectacles like the “Doctors’ Trial” of 1953, that targeted Jewish “counterrevolutionaries” intent on undermining the Soviet Union.
Of course, the French left has come a long way since then. But to paraphrase Mathilde Panot, if Unbowed France’s apparently uncowed leader, along with a large contingent of his party, are suffering from more than a dollop of residual antisemitism, the future of a democratic and liberal France is at risk.
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