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A glimpse of the Jewish left in 1920s Palestine
Boom and Chains
by Hanan Ayalti, translated by Adi Mahalel
Wayne State University Press, 312 pages, $34.99
Boom and Chains, by the Yiddish writer Hanan Ayalti, is a sweeping, morally urgent novel of Mandate-era Palestine that marries socialist ambition, Zionist dreams and the lived terrain of Arab dispossession.
First serialized in Warsaw in 1940 and now translated into English by Adi Mahalel, the book reads less like a period curiosity than a dispatch from the very core of 20th-century Jewish history. Its cadences are elegiac and insurgent at once, never letting the reader forget that every utopian project is built on contested soil.
This edition includes a prologue — reprinted at the back as an appendix — that looks back at kibbutz life in Poland and traces how Ayalti’s characters first took shape ideologically. The prologue is not essential to the plot, but it frames the psychic foundation of utopian commitment: how a generation could inherit the dream of community, sacrifice and labor long before setting foot in Palestine. The translator’s glossary and notes guide readers through dense terms of socialist-Zionist vocabulary, from halutzim, which means pioneers, to the nuanced phrase, “building through work.”
The main narrative unfolds in three parts: “Kibbutz,” “Land and Work” and “God and Money.” These sections map not only the external struggles of settlement but also the inner fractures of its pioneers. When Zalmen, the central figure, lands in Jaffa, the novel enacts collision immediately — Arab boatmen unloading cargo, British officials announcing strikes, Jewish pioneers hammering tents into soggy terrain.
Every logistical failure becomes a metaphor: each collapsing tent points to the wider chasm between idealism and ground. The storm sequence in the early kibbutz chapters — especially “Lying in the Mud and Barking at the Moon,” where the settlement nearly washes away — dramatizes that elemental struggle. You feel the land itself resisting its would-be redeemers.
By the time the narrative moves into Part II, the Arab perspective emerges not as backdrop, but as voice. Mustafa, once a peripheral figure, becomes a frustrated agitator whose sermons — half economic, half prophetic — speak of debt, dignity and land. His words register with painful clarity, even if the pioneers cannot or will not hear them.
The 1929 riots arrive with terrible inevitability. In one of the most wrenching scenes, Moshe Milner, a Jewish pioneer from Poland, is beaten for trying to raise funds for both Jewish and Arab victims. Solidarity itself is punished. In moments like this, Ayalti insists that the reader confront the impossibility of innocence.
Part III takes the novel toward collapse. Ideological certainties falter, comrades turn on one another, and even the land that promised redemption becomes charged with betrayal.
Comrade Gamzu, part zealot and part tragic figure, embodies this unraveling. At one point, he sits in his office writing an article for the Hebrew socialist newspaper — a small moment that crystallizes the novel’s insight: Labor is fought not only in fields and factories, but in words. The stormy conclusion leaves characters battered and arrested, and gives readers the sense that history itself has not yet chosen its verdict.
Ayalti’s place in Yiddish literature is unusual. While contemporaries often looked back at the shtetl or outward to immigrant life, he brought Yiddish to the frontier of Palestine. The result is a language of tension, where sacred vocabulary intermingles with slogans of socialist struggle.
It’s a reminder that Yiddish was not only a vehicle for memory but also for imagining futures — even ones later suppressed. (After moving to the United States, Ayalti set the novel aside for years, only completing Boom and Chains after returning to Israel.) In its ambition, Boom and Chains recalls the scope of the Soviet-Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson and the ideological searching of I. L. Peretz, but it’s more direct, more politically uncompromising.
The translation is mostly smooth, though a few idioms fall flatter than the Yiddish likely sounded. For instance, a phrase like “to break one’s back for the land” feels more awkward in English than the fierce irony it probably carried in the original. Still, the glossary is a gift: Terms like Shomrim (guards, or members of the Labor Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair) and shekhine — the Yiddish form of Shekhinah, the Divine Presence) — are defined in ways that illuminate not just vocabulary, but the ideals behind it. You can feel, even without direct citation, how carefully Mahalel has rebuilt the novel’s world for English readers.
One recurring weakness is that some characters lapse into long ideological speeches. Ayalti, at times, can’t resist the pamphleteer’s impulse. Yet even these stretches reveal the emotional urgency of an age when politics was lived from the trenches when the modern State of Israel was still years from being founded. The heaviness that results is, paradoxically, part of the book’s honesty.
What makes Boom and Chains remarkable is how current it still feels. The struggle over land and labor, the ethical crisis of building renewal at another’s expense, the oscillation between hope and despair — all of it reads less like distant history than like a mirror. The book refuses the easy consolation that redemption can be clean. Instead it presses its readers: No soil is free of debt, no vision immune to fracture.
For Jewish readers today, this translation is a gift. It restores a lost voice of Yiddish modernism and places before us a stark question: Can a dream of justice survive when its ground is contested from the start? Boom and Chains doesn’t settle the question, but it forces us to live with it. And perhaps that is the deepest service a novel can offer.
The post A glimpse of the Jewish left in 1920s Palestine appeared first on The Forward.
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Mike Johnson denounces Young Republicans’ group chat that praised Hitler as JD Vance downplays uproar
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday said Republicans “roundly condemn” a leaked group chat in which Young Republican officials joked about gas chambers, praised Adolf Hitler and used racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs, as well as an American flag with a swastika that was found in a Republican congressman’s office.
When asked whether he feared extremist or pro-Hitler views among young Republicans, Johnson replied, “No.”
“Obviously, that is not the principles of the Republican Party. We stand for the founding principles of America,” Johnson said in a press conference. “We have stood against that. We fought the Nazis. We roundly condemn it, and anybody in any party who espouses it, we’re opposing that.”
Johnson’s remarks capped two days of intensifying fallout from a Politico exposé that published thousands of messages exchanged over months by rising Republican operatives around the country.
In the cache reviewed by Politico, participants joked “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber,” celebrated “Great. I love Hitler,” and traded demeaning references to Black people, Jews and LGBTQ people.
State and local leaders appeared in the chat, including one Vermont state senator. The revelations have already cost several participants their jobs and prompted the deactivation of the Kansas Young Republicans chapter, with the Young Republican National Federation itself calling for implicated officials to “immediately resign from all positions” within the organization.
Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell, who heads the Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, reacted saying, “Antisemitism on the right is just as dangerous as antisemitism on the left.”
Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance has sought to downplay the severity of the situation.
Vance posted on X with a screenshot of texts in which Jay Jones, a former Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, suggested a prominent Republican deserved “two bullets to the head.”
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance wrote. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
Vance later said in an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” “The reality is that kids do stupid things. Especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is the cause of ruining their lives.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Republican leaders who condemned the messages, which he called “offensive and very concerning.”
“I’m also glad that many leaders, including @EliseStefanik and @RepMikeLawler, spoke out strongly and swiftly against these hateful statements,” Greenblatt wrote on X.
Gov. Gavin Newsom urged Congress to investigate the scope of extremist sentiment within Republican-aligned youth networks, arguing that the chat logs were “neither fringe nor humorous.” In a letter to the House Oversight Committee chair, Newsom contrasted GOP scrutiny of campus antisemitism with what he characterized as muted responses to hate inside party infrastructure.
Reactions to the messages were building up as a separate controversy ricocheted through the Capitol: a photograph circulating online showed a swastika integrated into the stripes of an American flag displayed in a Republican lawmaker’s office. Capitol Police opened an investigation after Rep. Dave Taylor called the image “vile and deeply inappropriate” and suggested it was the result of vandalism.
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The post Mike Johnson denounces Young Republicans’ group chat that praised Hitler as JD Vance downplays uproar appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The new Anne Frank musical wants you to laugh at ‘woke culture’ — but is it funny?
Reactions to Slam Frank, Andrew Fox’s musical satire in which Anne Frank is rewritten as a Latinx pansexual girl named “Anita,” have been mixed. Some have called it a timely, comedic takedown of cultural hypersensitivity while others see it as a shonda to the memories of Holocaust victims. In interviews, Fox has refused to break the character of a playwright obsessed with woke culture, so there is no insight from him to understand the musical. Somehow, the show resists fitting neatly into any understanding of humor, making it hard to know exactly who — or what — you’re supposed to be laughing at.
In his 1655 book The Element of Law Natural and Politic, Thomas Hobbes explains humor through what he calls “superiority theory,” which argues that “laughter is nothing but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”
There’s also self-deprecating ethnic humor, where one makes jokes about their own ethno-racial group, often highlighting historically demeaning stereotypes or characteristics. In his book Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, scholar David Gillota describes it as a “psychological defense mechanism” that takes the power of aggression away from the dominant group since jokes about a minority community are being made by its own members.
Then there’s “culturally intimate humor” which SUNY Farmingdale professor Evan S. Cooper defined in his dissertation “I don’t get It?: Culturally Intimate Humor and Its Audiences,” as a familiar use of culturally specific stereotypes in a positive manner. Contemporary scholars have argued that some ethno-racial humor is a way for minorities to create group solidarity and make fun of the dominant culture, a tactic which Cooper calls “protest humor.”
Because Slam Frank pokes fun at so many identities using a diverse cast and crew, it is impossible to put it neatly into any one category of humor.
Take the scene where the cast members, wearing black hats and plastic hook noses, rub their hands together under red lights as they sing about colonizing Palestine and being able to charge high rent. Is it self-deprecating humor — a Jewish writer making fun of those who have turned the search for a holy land into a capitalist cash grab? Is it protest humor, using a caricature of how some anti-Zionists might imagine a Jewish cabal making fun of the ridiculous fantasies of antisemites? Is it superiority humor that is painting religious, Zionist Jews as somehow morally inferior? It’s impossible to know — and that’s part of what makes it so hard to know how to react, making for an awkward viewing experience.
If you understand the jokes about neurodiversity and pronouns as a form of protest humor against “woke culture,” does that mean the playwright sees political correctness as the dominant narrative in our society right now? In an age where diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are being targeted by the federal government and political lobbyists have suggested trans people should be considered a terrorist group, the idea that fighting inclusive culture is punching up feels ignorant. But at the same time, even among the left and among those whose identities are under attack — people who make up the cast and crew of Slam Frank — there seems to be an exhaustion with identity politics’ overpolicing of who can say what.
The jokes take on a whole new life in some of the merchandise. Among the items available for purchase in the lobby are t-shirts featuring a photoshopped image of Anne Frank as a nightclub DJ, trucker hats that say “Problem Attic,” and kippot with the Slam Frank logo — a yellow Star of David where the top point has been replaced with a silhouette of Frank, a la Hamilton’s iconic symbol. Unless you confront a wearer on the street, it will be hard to know why the person feels the need to advertise the show. Did they love the musical so much because of its mockery of antisemitism? Or were they enthralled by the takedown of Zionism? Or are they just celebrating a show that made them laugh?
When it comes to Slam Frank, it seems that the only true conclusion is that there is no certain message, which is frustrating for audiences who want to understand what they’re watching. It is particularly hard when we’re living in a time where society seems to constantly demand we proclaim a socio-political opinion on everything.
As a musical, Slam Frank actually holds its own, with pretty catchy — if not politically correct — songs and good performances. But every time I was compelled to laugh with the audience, my amusement was mixed with apprehension and guilt. I knew why I thought the overdone Black American Accent and caricatured Jewish stereotypes were funny; but it’s hard to relax when you don’t know if the rest of the audience is laughing with you or at you.
The post The new Anne Frank musical wants you to laugh at ‘woke culture’ — but is it funny? appeared first on The Forward.
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Gallery in Australia Returns Painting Sold Under Nazi Duress to Heirs of German Jewish Family
The skyline of Melbourne, Australia, the capital of Victoria. Photo: Alex Proimos/Wikimedia Commons.
Australia’s oldest gallery has returned a Nazi-looted painting to the descendants of a German Jewish family whose members were forced to sell the artwork before they fled Nazi-occupied Germany in the 1930s.
The heirs of Henry and Bertha Bromberg have been fighting to reclaim “Lady With a Fan,” by 17th century Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch, from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) for 20 years. The gallery told The Jewish Independent that it decided to return the artwork to the Bromberg family after discovering new evidence that proved the painting belonged to the family. NGV did not disclose information about the new evidence regarding the painting’s provenance.
The painting is no longer on the gallery’s website and is instead mentioned on the website for the Lost Art database that is part of the German Lost Art Foundation.
“After thoroughly assessing the painting’s background and origins, the NGV determined that the work had been owned by Dr. Henry Bromberg and was subject to a forced sale in the late 1930s, and that the heirs of Dr. Bromberg were the rightful owners of the painting,” the gallery told The Jewish Independent. “The painting was subsequently deaccessioned from the NGV Collection in 2025 and returned to the Bromberg family.”
“Lady With a Fan” was part of the NGV’s collection for 80 years, since it was purchased by the gallery in 1945. The painting was part of art collections owned by German Jews Max Emden, who left Germany in the 1920s, and Bromberg, his cousin, according to The Jewish Independent. The latter was a judge in a magistrate’s court in Hamburg who fled Europe for the US in 1938 with his wife Bertha after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany, according to the Smithsonian magazine. In the 1930s, Nazis seized or sold the art collections, including “Lady With a Fan,” owned by Emden and Bromberg.
The French government returned a total of four 16th-century paintings to the Bromberg family between 2016 and 2018, and an art museum in Pennsylvania returned another 16th century artwork to the family last year. The Emden family previously reclaimed two 18th-century artworks that were seized for Hitler’s personal collection.
NGV’s return of “Lady With a Fan” is reportedly only the second time in history that an Australian museum has restituted a Nazi-looted piece of art, following the gallery’s restitution of “Head of a Man” in 2014.