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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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Hebrew Union College claims Ohio’s charity-law suit violates its First Amendment rights
(JTA) — The Reform movement’s central rabbinical seminary filed a motion to dismiss the state of Ohio’s lawsuit against the school Friday, claiming the suit violates “foundational Jewish religious doctrine.”
It was the latest escalation in a pitched battle between Hebrew Union College and the state attorney general’s office, which has accused HUC of violating nonprofit law by shuttering degree-granting programs on its historic Cincinnati campus.
The suit, HUC argues, “violates the First Amendment by entangling government and religion.”
The suit was originally filed in April by then-Ohio AG Dave Yost — his second against the college related to its controversial plan to wind down its Cincinnati operations in favor of its New York and Los Angeles campuses. Yost claimed HUC’s actions in Cincinnati misled its donors by leaving a city where they were actively fundraising to support operations, and also violated its charter, which states that the school would “permanently maintain” a residence there.
The state seeks to seize HUC’s assets in Ohio and redirect them to a new, yet-to-be-decided nonprofit with a similar mission; an upstart rabbinical school founded by HUC alums says it wants them.
Such a move “is an unconstitutional and illegal governmental assault upon religion,” HUC’s strongly worded motion reads.
It continues, “The Attorney General has no role in dictating the religious affairs of institutions like HUC. The Court should reject his overreach into religious matters and should dismiss the Complaint because it is unconstitutional and unlawful.”
HUC also argues its vote to shutter the Cincinnati campus was done in full compliance with the law, adding that it intends to maintain the campus’s other assets, including the Klau Library, the American Jewish Archives and the Skirball Museum. In addition, citing a passage in the Torah that states “God will come to his people wherever they welcome him,” the school argues that considering “Jewish demographic realities” is part of its religious mission.
“These decisions were made thoughtfully and responsibly to ensure the long-term success of the institution and our ability to continue graduating strong Jewish leaders,” HUC president Andrew Rehfeld said in a statement accompanying the motion. The lawsuit, he added, “improperly seeks to interfere in the decisions of a religious organization, and this cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.”
Yost himself resigned as AG this week to join the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that, in 2022, represented a Tennessee adoption agency that refused to foster a child to a Jewish couple. The suit against HUC continues under the state AG’s office.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hebrew Union College claims Ohio’s charity-law suit violates its First Amendment rights appeared first on The Forward.
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6 months after her father was killed at Bondi Beach, Sheina Gutnick has become a leading antisemitism advocate in Australia
(JTA) — MELBOURNE — Six months ago, Sheina Gutnick was a 31-year-old mother of three at the end of her maternity leave. She had degrees in social science and psychology, and several years of experience worked at a Jewish school. She was an average mother looking to get back into a 9-to-5 routine after her baby started daycare.
Then, on the first night of Hanukkah, everything in her life changed.
Gutnick was at a Hanukkah party in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband and three children when she crossed paths with a friend from Sydney. He looked ghostly white and told her there had been a shooting at a Hanukkah party in Bondi. Her parents, who were visiting Sydney from their home in Melbourne, had been planning to attend.
“I immediately called my dad, but he didn’t answer. Then I called my mum and she answered and I could hear shooting, and she was screaming and told me they are shooting people on the beach and that my dad is running after the terrorists,” said Gutnick.
Her father, Reuven Morrison, would be one of 15 people murdered on Bondi Beach that night. Before he was killed, Morrison was filmed throwing a brick at the terrorists, charging toward them with whatever he could find, trying to shield his community with his body. The footage of his bravery against the terrorists would be seen around the world within hours. After diverting the terrorist’s attention from others, Morrison bled out on the beach after being shot 11 times. He was 62.
“At 7:13 p.m. I found out that my dad is no longer alive, and my first reaction was to tell my husband to get me on a plane to Sydney,” she said. “As I was standing at the doorframe to leave the house before I went to the airport, I turned to my husband and said, ‘This is the day our lives have changed.’”
Gutnick boarded the last flight from Melbourne to Sydney that night. She couldn’t stop crying, and a flight attendant asked what was wrong. “I told her that my dad had just been killed in Bondi,” she recalled. “She didn’t really know what to say, but told me, if you need vodka let us know, we’ll sort you out.”
Six months after the attack, the deadliest antisemitic incident in Australia and one of the bloodiest anywhere in recent history, Australia is still reeling. A royal commission is unearthing searing allegations of antisemitism and accounts of Jewish fear, and has started rolling out recommendations designed to shore up public safety and cohesion.
Gutnick, meanwhile, has vaulted into public view not just at home but abroad. This week, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt posted a picture of himself with Gutnick on social media.
“I was honored to meet with Sheina Gutnick, daughter of Bondi hero Reuven Morrison z”l,” Greenblatt wrote. “Since Sheina’s father and 14 others were murdered by terrorists on Bondi Beach during Hanukkah, Sheina has tirelessly and relentlessly demanded that Australia take action against antisemitism. She is an inspiration.”
After throwing herself into speaking about her father, her experience and the challenges facing Australian Jews, Gutnick has now joined an international coterie of advocates transformed by their proximity to historic antisemitic violence.
“I get people saying to me, ‘Aren’t you exhausted?’” she said. “But the truth is, I get energy from it. I’m not a person that can sit when something has happened to me.”
The path that made Gutnick who she is was forged first in the former USSR, which Reuven Morrison left at 14 for Australia. Like many Soviet Jewish emigres, he knew little about Judaism when he arrived and for a time did not have much connection to Jewish practice in his new country, either.
But he became more religiously observant later in life, affiliating with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement that emphasizes outreach to Jews of all levels of observance. He became heavily involved in building Chabad of Bondi, a synagogue and community center in Sydney’s iconic beachfront neighborhood, helping to fight several legal battles while getting the building permits approved.
More than a decade ago, he moved to Melbourne. But the Sydney Jewish community, and especially Chabad of Bondi, remained close to his heart and he visited regularly. Its Chanukah by the Sea celebration, he decided, was one he would not miss.
Gutnick arrived in Sydney at 10 p.m., just a few hours after two men opened fire on the celebration, killing 15. Her father’s body still lay on Bondi beach, covered by a sheet, unable to be released for burial until all evidence had been collected from the scene of the massacre by Australian homicide detectives. She made her way to her uncle and aunt’s home, where her traumatized mother was waiting.
That night, nobody slept — and stories began trickling in.
“When I got there, we began hearing that my dad threw a brick at the terrorists. A lot of people started messaging me that he saved their lives based on actions that he took that night,” Gutnick recalled. “My mum had been on the beach and saw him running, and she saw when he went down, and she saw no one was helping and he ran to step in, but she hadn’t seen what he had actually done.”
An Australian homicide detective arrived at 1:30 a.m. to formally advise Gutnick and her mother Leah that Reuven had been murdered, and to explain the process for releasing his body back to the family for burial. It was slightly complicated, the detective told them, because this was Australia’s first major terrorist attack. The protocol was still being clarified.
“At this point, pure adrenaline and pure rage was running through my body, that this had actually happened. The fact that it was Bondi and it was my dad,” Gutnick recalled.
Gutnick returned to the apartment her parents owned in Sydney, situated right behind the Chabad of Bondi building, to collect a few things her mother needed. Outside, members of the Sydney Jewish community stood on the footpath alongside news crews and photographers. People on the street were crying.
Inside, Gutnick found her parents’ dog Simba who had come to Sydney with them, hungry and bewildered that he had been left alone since the night before. According to Jewish law, a Hanukkah menorah must be lit by each person in the place where they are spending the night. Reuven Morrison had set his up before leaving for the beach. On the table, it sat exactly where he had placed it, ready, unlit.
All the while, Gutnick’s phone kept ringing, with journalists asking her for comment. She felt, she recalls, like she was floating outside her own body.
“My mum was completely broken. Her world was torn apart; she has been with my dad for 42 years,” she recalled. “Every semblance of normal life was gone, she’s all of a sudden alone, she’s impacted in this way that is not humanely possible to comprehend.”
With dozens of media requests already flooding her phone, Gutnick ignored all of them — until she spotted one that was framed very differently.
The message came through Facebook from a producer at CBS News in the United States on Monday night, more than a day after the massacre, and it changed her life.
“I still hadn’t spoken to any media. They prefaced their message and said that they needed to help tell the world about my dad’s bravery, that they had seen the footage of him throwing a brick at the terrorists and they wanted to publicise it, so everyone knew about him and what he had done,” Gutnick recalled.
She felt compelled to respond: “It hit me so crushingly hard there is no one else to tell my dad’s story but me, so if I don’t do this, no one will hear about him and his bravery.
She messaged back, saying they could come to interview her the next morning. But CBS suggested they come right over immediately, in the middle of the night, so her interview could be aired on American prime time news. At 1 a.m., a full media crew arrived and Gutnick sat in front of lights that made her room feel like it was the middle of the day.
In the hours that followed, she wrote a personal reflection about what she believed her father’s death represented: a direct result of an Australian government that had been weak on antisemitism. After she circulated it, a prominent local Jewish figure whom she did not then know, the former treasurer of Australia, Josh Frydenberg, shared it on X, and it was republished widely. More media requests started flooding in and Gutnick started speaking about her dad.
“I realized how much I have on me to carry on my father’s legacy,” she said.
In between the interviews, she and her husband were on the phone to the Australian coroner and the chevra kadisha, the Jewish burial society, demanding that Australian authorities release her father’s body. A family friend, not knowing when the body would be released, flew his private plane from Melbourne to Sydney, ready to accompany Morrison home the moment his body was released. When that finally happened, a special flyover was arranged with the air controllers in Sydney so that the private plane with Morrison’s body could circle over Bondi Beach, in a final farewell to the place where Morrison had met his wife 42 years earlier.
Nobody who knew Sheina Gutnick Dec. 14 would have predicted what she’s done since. She says wouldn’t have predicted it either.
When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese initially declined to call a royal commission into the Bondi attack and the broader rise of antisemitism in Australia, Gutnick, alongside other victim families, went to the front page of all of Australia’s major newspapers and called on him to reconsider. After weeks of lobbying, the prime minister relented.
When the royal commission convened, Gutnick was the first witness called to testify.
She described hearing “Free Palestine” shouted on the streets of Melbourne, chants that she said “not political expression but is explicit, targeted hatred and is designed to intimidate.” She recalled fearing the treatment her child would receive while undergoing surgery at a hospital where nurses had been fired after posting a viral video saying they would not treat Israeli patients. And she recounted being called a “f—ing terrorist” by a man she said had pointed at her Star of David necklace.
It was only one of countless stops to share her story. In the last six months, Gutnick has taken dozens of flights to meet with parliaments and groups to speak about her father and about Australian antisemitism. She has written in major national and international newspapers about her father and spoke at the Sydney reception for Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
She and her mother received condolence letters from across Australia and beyond. The one from King Charles, she said, was especially comforting. “He has an excellent team around him clearly, because it was such a beautiful, personalized letter, the one we received,” she said.
Her advocacy has been noticed at some of the highest levels within Australia’s Jewish community. “Sheina Gutnick never sought the public spotlight. She was thrust into it by the horrific murder of her father, and has responded with remarkable courage, dignity and moral clarity,” Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, told JTA. “Her advocacy has resonated because it is authentic.”
Alex Ryvchin, the co-chair of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the peak body for Australian Jews, knew Reuven Morrison for years before he was killed. “He was an outstanding human being and now Australia knows him as a hero who gave his life to save others,” he told JTA. “Sheina honours his memory and legacy and I’m proud to stand with her in the fight against antisemitism.”
Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, the rabbi of Chabad of Bondi, whose son in law Rabbi Eli Schlanger and many close friends and congregants were murdered Bondi Beach also has deep appreciation for Gutnick’s advocacy.
She “emerged as one of the most compelling and eloquent new voices in Australia’s fight against antisemitism, transforming personal tragedy into sustained public advocacy,” he said.
After booking dozens of engagements independently, Gutnick was offered a role as the first public affairs officer of the recently established Australian branch of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an international advocacy organization.
The group’s supporters argue that CAM is responding to a genuine rise in antisemitism and see it as trying to address problems that existing Jewish groups have failed to solve. They also argue that the group’s efforts to push back against anti-Israel sentiment are justified because anti-Zionism is often used as a vehicle for anti-Jewish prejudice.
CAM has indeed attracted criticism from other Jewish groups and civil liberties advocates who argue that it takes an overly broad approach to antisemitism and too often conflates anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
In Australia, the organization has also faced scrutiny over its political alliances, including relationships with some conservative and right-wing groups, as well as criticism that it imports American culture-war politics into debates about antisemitism.
Gutnick is aware of some of this criticism but isn’t really bothered by it. “Every organization has its controversial moments, so this stuff — it doesn’t really concern me,” she said. “The work CAM is doing now is so relevant in our lives in a post Oct.-7 world and a post-Bondi world,” she said.
In fact, she is grateful for the many connections they have helped her with both in Australia and around the world as well as their extensive research into antisemitism. “They gave me the ability to tell my dad’s story in many public spaces,” she said. “I continuously say, as Jews, we need to know the facts and figures on the ground about antisemitism, and what resolutions and legislation we need to have in place, and as an international org, CAM has the ability to help me do this.”
The royal commission has presented its first recommendations, designed to improve the processes that left the Bondi Hanukkah celebration with inadequate police protection despite the known threats. Soon, it is expected to say more — with a backlash to follow from those who believe that antisemitism is getting outsized attention and who say that efforts to address it will likely inappropriately constraint anti-Israel protest.
Gutnick doesn’t know exactly what the future will hold for her, but she knows that she will never return to where she stood six months ago — a spot that, in retrospect, feels like it may have been on the sidelines of the fight for Jewish security.
“As Jews, we are being faced with so much darkness,” she said. “I have gone through the worst thing — my father was killed for antisemitism — so I have become stronger, wanting to spread the message that no matter what happens, as the Jewish people we are one people, part of one faith, and although it’s terrible, this is something we have faced before.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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13,000 Jews were driven out of Poland in 1968. Now, some are returning to tell their story.
(JTA) — In March 1968, Rachelle Halpern walked into her university in Szczecin, Poland, and found a group of her classmates gathered around a newspaper. She asked what they were reading about. The answer came: “Zionists.”
Halpern didn’t understand. Who were the Zionists? One classmate said, “The Jews.”
“But I’m a Jew,” said Halpern. Her classmates looked at her in disbelief. She couldn’t be, one said. She had no horns.
Halpern was about to be swept up in a spiral of social and political crises in communist Poland, culminating in a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign that stripped Jews of their jobs, schools and citizenship, forcing some 13,000 to leave the country. Within months, Halpern would find herself renouncing her Polish nationality and leaving everything she knew for a new life in the United States.
At that moment, when her classmates read the word “Zionists” and looked up at her with horror, she felt a shift.
“It sort of evoked a lot of distrust and fear, that somehow there were all these people around that were going to do some harm to the Polish people,” Halpern told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Now 79 years old, Halpern joined a group of Polish emigrants and their children who traveled to Poland in April to unwind the trauma of 1968. Their meeting was organized by the Engaged Memory Consortium, a collection of organizations dedicated to Polish Jewish heritage, and funded by Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It was the first time that the government paid for a trip to reckon with the events of 1968 and invited the Jews whose lives were upended, according to the program’s coordinator, Patrycja Dołowy.
The nine participants came from Sweden, Denmark and the United States. Over eight days, they visited Jewish sites and community groups in Warsaw, Wrocław and Łódź. These three areas hosted the largest groups of Jews who remained in Poland after the Holocaust, where they decided to rebuild — and where their communities were decimated again in 1968. Though the members of the trip had never met, their memories overlapped, patching together a dark open wound in the history of Polish Jews.
It’s a chapter that remains obscure among many Poles and Jewish communities around the world, partly because of a myth that Jewish life was wholly extinguished by the Holocaust, according to Karen Auerbach, a historian of Polish Jews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“There’s such limited understanding of the fact that there was a Jewish population in Poland after the Second World War, that this doesn’t rise to the surface,” said Auerbach.
The Jewish flight of 1968 started with two words from Władysław Gomułka, then the leader of communist Poland. Days after Israel’s victory over Soviet-supported Arab countries in the Six-Day War of 1967, Gomułka said that Poland would not tolerate a “fifth column” of Polish Jews. The phrase signaled that Jews could be loyal to Israel and treasonous to Poland. Soon after, the communist secret police purged Jews from state and party apparatuses, especially the army.
This campaign exploded after Poland, like other countries across the globe, was rocked by youth uprisings in March 1968. Polish students demonstrated against state censorship and the growing restriction of their civil liberties under Gomułka. Thousands were detained, expelled from universities and dismissed from their jobs in the ensuing government crackdown. Some of the students were Jewish. That became the pretext for Polish authorities to accuse them of “Zionism,” pinning the demonstrations on a global Jewish conspiracy.
The government organized “anti-Zionist” rallies and stoked fear of “Zionists” in official propaganda, avoiding the word “Jew.” Newspapers outed “Zionists” to their neighbors. A new wave of purges expelled thousands of Jews from their jobs and exposed them to antisemitic attacks in their cities and towns. Jews were pressured to leave the country, and when they applied for exit documents, they were forced to renounce their Polish citizenship.
The purges were not only executed by government order, but also by ordinary Polish citizens who took advantage of the campaign and antisemitic sentiment to further their careers, said Dariusz Stola, director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
“It was opening opportunities for many people for advancement,” said Stola. “Say you compete for a position in your institution, and you have a Jewish colleague, why not accuse him of being a hidden Zionist? Or you have some accounts to settle from the past — you don’t like someone — let’s accuse him of Zionism, because the burden of proof he is not is on him.”
By the early 1970s, half the country’s Jews were gone, crushing a community that was tenuously growing back decades after the Holocaust. The campaign effectively ended organized Jewish life in Poland.
Fifty-eight years later, Dołowy guided Polish emigrants and their descendants through cultural institutions that have emerged to preserve Jewish history, culture and communal life since the fall of the Soviet Union, from the Polin Museum in Warsaw to the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She also introduced them to Jews, like herself, whose families remained in Poland after 1968.
Rachelle Halpern, right, and other participants in the Miszpucha Foundation trip visit the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. (Adam de Kaminski)
Dołowy is the former head of Warsaw’s Jewish Community Center and the founder of the Miszpucha Foundation. A part of the Engaged Memory Consortium, this foundation aims to strengthen ties between Jews in Poland and Jews who left, particularly those driven out in 1968. Dołowy arranged meetings between the emigrants and Jews who stayed in Poland — artists from the Kultur-Lige network in Wrocław, cultural event organizers for the nonprofit HaKoach in Łódź, and Jews in Warsaw who ranged from academics to entrepreneurs to JCC coordinators.
In 1968, Dołowy’s father was expelled from his university and lost permission to continue his PhD. The question of whether to stay or leave Poland split her parents from their families and friends. Half the Jews they knew chose to leave, dividing what she called the “miszpucha” — the Polish spelling of the Hebrew “mischpacha” and the Yiddish “mishpokhe,” meaning “family.”
Despite this rupture, Dołowy said she rarely saw the antisemitic campaign reflected in Polish history, beyond the hushed stories in Jewish families. Shame and confusion swirled around the events of 1968 for many Jews who considered themselves Polish, but were told by their government and their neighbors that they were not.
“I believe that this generation’s story is still something really silenced,” said Dołowy. “We don’t really talk about 1968, or if we talk about it, we don’t really know the words to describe what actually happened to us, to our community.”
Halpern was 22 when her family left in December 1968 to join a relative in Boston. Despite the Soviet propaganda that said Polish Jews harbored a suspicious bond to Israel, only some 3,000 actually went there. Most of the 13,000 emigrants fled to Sweden, Denmark and the United States, where Cold War-era programs welcomed political refugees from the communist bloc.
Waves of Polish Jewish survivors had migrated to Israel after the Holocaust. But many of those who remained by 1968 were secular and committed to life in Poland, with dwindling ties to Jewish religion, Israel and Zionism, according to Stola. Many were dedicated communists or socialists.
“We know that only a minority of them went to Israel, despite attempts to convince them,” he said.
To obtain exit permits, Halpern and other Jews were forced to declare the intention of going to Israel. Then they received a travel document that rendered them stateless.
“It looked like a regular identity document — a photograph, first name, family name, date of birth,” said Stola. “And the most important part of the document were letters at the bottom of the page saying, ‘The bearer of this document is not a citizen of the Polish People’s Republic.’ To my knowledge, this is the only identity document that says who you are not.”
Halpern gave up her Polish nationality together with her sister in an emigration office. She remembers everything as “gray” — the day, the Polish official and the room with a small window.
“We were looked at as if we were hostile people, enemies,” she said. “We had to stand there, and you had to raise your hand and say that you are renouncing your Polish citizenship. We cried and cried and cried.”
Still, Halpern almost stayed in Poland. Just before her family left Szczecin on an overnight train to Warsaw for the first leg of their journey, she ran away. Seized by fear and anxiety about losing the world she knew, she slept at a friend’s house that night. She woke up in the early hours with the realization that she had nothing left in Poland — no citizenship, no money, no university and no family. She caught up with her parents just before their next train departed from Warsaw to Vienna.
Halpern went to medical school in Boston and made her career as a doctor in California, then Colorado. She did not visit Poland again until 2007, nearly 40 years later.
Other young Jews leapt at the opportunity to leave in 1968. Wladimir Mietek Szpirt, another participant in the Miszpucha Foundation trip, was just starting medical school in Szczecin at 18 years old. He found a hostile environment at the university. When he heard Gomułka threaten the “fifth column,” he decided to apply for asylum in Denmark. For him, leaving the Soviet Union meant the chance to freely study medicine, develop his career and build a stable life.
But Szpirt’s parents were stuck. They lost their jobs as accountants at state institutions, and authorities said they knew too much state information to leave the country. Szpirt emigrated alone, uncertain when he would see his parents again. Nearly two years later, they managed to follow him to Denmark.
Szpirt recently retired from his long career as a doctor in Copenhagen. Like Halpern, he returned in April to the place where the first chapter of his life closed. Now in his later years, Szpirt reflected on growing closest to his origin by leaving it behind.
“In Denmark, I was always accepted as a Pole,” said Szpirt. “The funny thing is that for the first 18 years of my life, I was not accepted as a Pole in Poland. But in Denmark, I became a doctor who was born in Poland. I was not a Jew from Poland.”
Wladimir Mietek Szpirt at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland. (Shira Li Bartov)
Many Jews never went back to Poland after the antisemitic campaign. Eliza Fishenfeld grew up in New York City with parents who fled in 1969 and 1974. The Miszpucha Foundation offered her first trip to Poland as the child of emigrants who were “very angry and very hurt,” she said. They decided not to return.
Fishenfeld lived in a displaced Polish Jewish world in New York. All of her parents’ friends were other Polish Jews affected by 1968, she said. They connected through the network of Jewish schools and camps from their childhood in Poland.
“I know they loved Poland before ‘68, because they told me so many stories about it and they were always so happy, and all their friends were from Poland,” said Fishenfeld. “Our community was the Polish Jewish emigré community.”
Fishenfeld said that arriving in Poland felt like a “homecoming of sorts,” though it was nothing like the communist country her parents remembered. She called them daily to describe the trip, but at their age now, she said they no longer travel.
The campaign didn’t only destroy Jewish communities. It also hollowed out Poland’s cultural and intellectual life, as Jews disappeared from universities, medical schools and hospitals, according Joanna Podolska, the former director of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She said their absence left visible holes in the city.
“We didn’t have so many well-educated people, so it was a difficult moment,” said Podolska. “Young people who could work for the city, for Poland, they became citizens of other countries. They were doctors, filmmakers, advocates, chemists, researchers, artists. Probably, Poland would be much richer as a country — more important — with these people who left.”
Decades after the 1968 campaign, it remains a sensitive subject in Polish politics. From 2015 to 2023, Poland was governed by the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, which promised to revive Poland’s pride in its past and eradicate what officials called a “pedagogy of shame.”
The narrative stifled research into Poland’s Holocaust history, particularly concerning instances of Polish antisemitism and Polish people who killed Jews or cooperated with the Nazi regime. Poland passed a law in 2018 that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.
But the government also lashed out at a 2018 exhibition about 1968 in the Polin Museum. The exhibition called “Estranged” closed with a wall of quotes, which combined antisemitic and xenophobic statements from 1968 and 2018. Though the quotes were unattributed, two belonged to members of the ruling party.
The exhibition infuriated government officials, and former culture minister Piotr Gliński accused Stola of imposing “very aggressive politics” on the museum. Stola was pushed out as the director in 2019 despite winning a competition to extend his tenure. (In March, he was reinstated under Poland’s new government, led by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk.)
Anat Plocker, a historian of Eastern Europe at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, said that Polish officials in 1968 defined a form of antisemitic rhetoric that echoes among Polish nationalist politicians to this day.
“The way they talk about the memory of the Holocaust, Jewish power, questions of who is really behind what’s going on in Poland — it’s really the Jews or it’s really a conspiracy of the West against Poland — all of this discourse became so important in Polish politics in ‘68,” said Plocker. “So what we see is that politicians are repeating, really sometimes word by word, the same phrases that were used against Jews in ’68.”
Eight years after the backlash to “Estranged,” Dołowy said she was proud to have garnered funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She hopes to arrange more trips for 1968 emigrants, so they can share their long-obscured stories while they still have the chance.
“These emigrants from 1968 became the generation of grandparents, so this is actually a very good moment for them to tell the story to be listened to by our children,” said Dołowy.
In 2007, Halpern learned about the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków and went to Poland for the first time since leaving home. She has returned since then to attend the festival and Holocaust commemoration events, but she found that most of the other attendees were also visiting from abroad. “They are not people that are actually being Jews here,” she said.
That was why Halpern joined the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She was not interested in rehashing her parents’ Holocaust survival or reliving her own loss in 1968. Instead, she wanted to meet people like Dołowy — the other half of the “miszpucha” who stayed and created new lives.
“I didn’t really want to repeat the story of what happened to my mother, what happened to my father, what happened to the families,” said Halpern. “It was all more walking on people’s destroyed lives. So I wanted to see what is alive.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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