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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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Donald Trump actually faced a few tough questions on ’60 Minutes.’ So, why does Marine Le Pen get a pass?
Last Sunday, the news show “60 Minutes” hosted an outgoing president of one country and, quite possibly, the incoming president of another. While falsehoods and fatuities flowed from President Donald Trump, his interviewer, Ross Douthat frequently, if futilely, tried to push back. Yet when Marine Le Pen, running for the presidency of France, also fibbed or fudged the truth, her interviewer, Trevor Phillips, did little more than arch an eyebrow.
This split-screen experience was unsettling for a few reasons. First, it reminded us that our president’s famous “weave” reflects a mind that is declining as surely as his poll numbers. A glance at the interview transcript reflects the deepening incoherence of the man who occupies the world’s most powerful office. This made all the most startling the cogency of his reply to a question Douthat posed at the end of the interview: whether he could stop hating his enemies if that was the price to enter heaven. To a flabbergasted Douthat, Trump replied, “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”
While no one can say whether Trump is destined for heaven or hell, Le Pen’s remarks in her interview suggest that she will make life hell for those men and women who fail to qualify, in her eyes, as French.
Yet, in his interview, Trevor Phillips, formerly of The (London) Times and a recent Bari Weiss recruit, failed to make this as clear as a Mike Wallace, a Dan Rather, or a Scott Pelley would have. Nattily dressed and well-spoken, Phillips presented a segment on the violence that has “erupted in Paris’ romantic boulevards” where “the scent of warm croissants and fresh baguettes has been overwhelmed by the whiff of tear gas.”
Overwhelmed by the weight of silly clichés, Phillips could not help but add “They used to call Paris la ville de l’amour — the City of Love. But there hasn’t been much amour on show lately.” While Phillips does not state who “they” are — given the hoariness of the clichés, perhaps they asked to remain anonymous — he should think twice about his assertion that there is not much love. Of course, the protestors are expressing their anger towards the government of President Emmanuel Macron, but they are also expressing their deep attachment, even love, to the republican tradition that has made Paris la ville de la révolution.
More important than his potted account of the social upheavals in Paris, however, was Phillips’ problematic interview with Le Pen. “In 2011,” he explained, “Le Pen took over leadership of what was then a fringe movement from her father, a tough army veteran convicted and fined for Holocaust denial and hate speech.” Yet nine years earlier, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of this “fringe party” then called the National Front, made it into the second round of the presidential election. Though Le Pen failed to make it into the second round in 2007, that more than 4 million French voted for him suggests that his party and person were hardly fringe. It is also odd that while Phillips noted Le Pen’s Holocaust denialism, he omitted Le Pen’s confession that he had tortured Algerian captives while serving in French Algeria.
No less stunning was Phillips’ description of Marine Le Pen’s decision to banish her father from the party in order “to rid it of its stain of bigotry.” If only it were mere bigotry. The National Front was founded, in part, by former members of the French division of the Waffen SS and sympathizers of the wartime collaborationist regime of Vichy. While the daughter has largely succeeded in removing these elements from the party, which she rebranded as the National Rally, she has not removed the “stain” of antisemitism. Little more than a month ago, the French newspaper Mediapart revealed that Le Pen’s second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, was trafficking in antisemitic bilge even after he joined the party as a teenager.
Time and again, Phillips posed questions but had not adequately prepared for Le Pen’s predictable replies. When he asked, in his opening question, “What is happening in Europe? Has politics here just become more radical?” Le Pen answered that “the extreme left creates chaos. They generate violence against people.” If Phillips had done his due diligence, he would have confronted Le Pen with the recent study by the historian Nicolas Lebourg revealing that while six murders in France since 1986 were “generated” by the extreme left, nearly sixty were “generated” by the extreme right. Phillips might also have mentioned last month’s mass killing and wounding of French Muslims in the town of Trappes by an individual who marinated in the literature of the extreme right.
Finally, when Le Pen made the jaw-dropping claim that “discrimination does not exist in France” and, moreover, is “the least racist country in the world,” Phillips did, in fact, raise an eyebrow while repeating her words. But it would have been more effective, perhaps, to raise the findings of various organizations, like the Defenseur des droits, which concluded in 2024 that the “perceived origin” of a job applicant weighs more than any other factor in hiring decisions in France.
As for his lack of follow-up questions to Le Pen’s assertion that France is the world’s least racist country, Phillips’ professional malfeasance was made fully manifest. In every presidential campaign, Le Pen has committed to establishing the law of national priority, which in effect would constitutionalize a racist agenda. Based on the extreme rightwing hobbyhorse of the “great replacement” — namely, that France’s white population is deliberately being replaced by third world immigrants — the law will limit employment opportunities, social and housing benefits to French citizens. Such a law not only runs counter to the laws of the European Union, but also to the humanist and universalist grounding of France’s constitution.
Phillips failed to contest this claim. Ironically, he closed the interview with Le Pen’s assurance that “French people have got to know me.” If only Phillips had done so, as well.
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Israel’s parliament sworn in as leaders scramble to form a government
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s 26th Knesset, or parliament, was sworn in on Tuesday, even as national elections two weeks ago produced no clear winner or indication of who will be Israel’s next prime minister.
On Sunday, President Isaac Herzog officially tasked former IDF chief and political novice Gadi Eisenkot with forming the government after a majority of newly elected lawmakers said they would prefer him as prime minister.
Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority in the vote, even though his party, Likud, remained the largest of those entering the Knesset with 27 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Netanyahu has called on Eisenkot to join him in forming a national unity government, but in his ceremonial toast in the Knesset on Tuesday he ended up pushing Eisenkot’s change bloc even further away from the idea of a unity government under his leadership by casting suspicions on all of their potential partners in a future government.
Eisenkot and his bloc of four parties – his own Yashar Party, B’Yachad headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, and the Democrats led by Yair Golan – have campaigned on a promise to change the current government and the prime minister. Following Netanyahu’s speech, Eisenkot said in a statement that now he was even more certain that change was needed.
Eisenkot’s bloc garnered 48 seats in the election, and since then has drawn additional support from the two Arab parties, which together hold 19, and an expression of support from United Torah Judaism, an ultra-Orthodox party previously aligned with Netanyahu. The extra support gives him a shaky majority in the Knesset.
Eisenkot has reiterated that any party, including Likud, is welcome to join him as long as they embrace his four conditions: Recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, acceptance of the values of the Declaration of Independence, mandatory military or civilian service for all, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Ilana Shpaizman, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that even though a new government has not yet been formed, “the Knesset can act on everything.”
“The Knesset can do oversight, the same thing as it did before; it can also pass legislation… but only private legislation and not government legislation,” she said, adding that the current government under Netanyahu will continue to function until it is replaced, just without the majority it had previously.
Shpaizman added that even if Eisenkot does not succeed in forming a government, and the country goes to another election, the Knesset sworn in on Tuesday will have at least six months to legislate as it chooses.
“This is a lot of time to legislate, so this is very important, and especially things like the finance committee, which can control the budgetary transitions of the government,” she pointed out.
Opening the Knesset swearing-in ceremony, Herzog called on the new Knesset members to “do everything possible to avoid another round of elections.”
“The people who chose you long for routine, security and tranquility,” the president said, outlining many of the challenges that Israel has faced over the past three years.
“The people you represent here yearn to see an outstretched hand that will bring unity to the nation and hope,” Herzog said. “A people that carries within it pain, devotion, and sacrifice longs to see you translate those strengths into cooperation, into unifying dialogue, and into listening.”
He added: “I ask of you: be measured toward one another. Reach out a hand for compromise, even between rivals. Look upon one another with generosity. There is much work to be done here, and it requires the ability and experience found in every part of this House.”
Before the swearing-in ceremony, each of the 11 elected parties held its first faction meeting in the Knesset. Eisenkot took the opportunity to announce that his bloc had reached agreements on nominations for key Knesset positions.
Former minister and incoming MK Matan Kahana from Yashar is slated to be the next Knesset speaker, a powerful position that sets the Knesset plenum’s daily agenda. MK Roy Folkman, also from Yashar, will be nominated as chairman of the Arrangements Committee, which is responsible for organizing the Knesset’s work at the beginning of its term.
In addition, Liberman will take over as chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and MK Liran Avisar Ben-Horin from B’Yachad, will be nominated head of the Finance Committee, another powerful role.
As soon as the swearing-in ceremony concluded, Eisenkot’s party announced that it had submitted a series of bills that would reverse some of the more controversial laws passed by the previous government, including those relating to the judicial overhaul plan.
In addition, a bill was submitted calling for the establishment of a State Commission of Inquiry to investigate Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and how it was allowed to happen.
Of the 120 Knesset members sworn in on Tuesday, 46 are new to the parliament and roughly one in ten members has buried a loved one lost to terror or war, including Eisenkot whose son and two nephews were killed in combat.
According to statistics shared by Herzog in his speech, the most veteran Member of Knesset is Netanyahu, who has served in 15 Knessets since 1988, while MK Yonatan Shalev, a member of B’Yachad, is the youngest MK. At 24 years old, Shalev breaks a 66-year-old record.
In addition, the 5050 Initiative of the Centers for Social Justice, an Israeli non-profit, said in a statement that the new Knesset would set “an all-time record for the number of women serving in the Knesset: 33.”
“Today is a very good day for democracy because the new Knesset is being sworn in,” Shpaizman said. “It means that the election was fair and was peaceful.”
“I think the previous Knesset got to a point where the trust in it as an institution was the lowest ever, so it is a very good thing that new people are entering, new people who come in good faith from both sides who want to bring change and to make Israel better,” she added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Evan Gershkovich survived the terrors of prison in Putin’s Russia. Not every journalist was equally lucky.
This Cursed Beautiful Land
By Evan Gershkovich
Crown, 432 pages, $34
In Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, the Wall Street Journal reporter relives his ordeal to give readers a firsthand account of how Russia’s prisons and its repressive legal system operate under Putin’s wartime regime.
Gershkovich survived 491 days in the Russian prison system and was released as part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. His story echoes the way in which Dostoevsky escaped death by firing squad at the last minute. Tsar Nicholas I had already commuted his death sentence to four years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by military service, but ordered the execution to be staged anyway, right up until the soldiers took aim (one of the men condemned along with Dostoevsky lost his mind as а result). In July 2024, after a closed trial, Gershkovich was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years, only to be freed less than two weeks later.
In February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, Gershkovich was at a high point in his career. He had just joined The Wall Street Journal and, he writes, “was itching to get into the action.” Russia can be especially cruel to this kind of daring.
Gershkovich calls his work as a foreign correspondent a kind of “voyeurism” — and his time in captivity “the ultimate voyeurism” — and admits that he was addicted to the adrenaline. The notion that he was being tailed by Russia’s security service felt energizing. The more action happened around him, the more alive he felt.
In his memoir, he describes how the Russian authorities’ attitude toward reporters for foreign media outlets changed drastically. For years, he writes, the unspoken rule was that foreign reporters could cover topics Russian journalists couldn’t, and would be safe doing so. After Russia’s invasion, the government passed a whole raft of new laws against free speech; independent Russian journalists had three options: go underground and work anonymously (and many are still doing exactly that despite all the personal risks), leave the country, or go to prison.
An ‘undesirable’ journalist
For my part, I tried to stay in Russia for as long as I could. I worked anonymously as a reporter for the investigative outlet Proekt, the first Russian media outlet labeled an “undesirable organization” (this status means that anyone who takes part in its work can be prosecuted and face up to four years in prison). While all my colleagues had already been forced to leave the country, I stayed to report from the inside of Russia on the corruption inside Putin’s inner circle and among the elites that supported the bloodbath in Ukraine. I also reported on the human and economic cost of the war for other Russian banned media.
As a volunteer, I tried to help Ukrainian war refugees, collecting and driving donated clothes, medications, hygiene products and other essentials in the temporary shelters, where people were forced to live with no money and no way to rent housing or find proper work.
On Feb. 4, 2023, I found my name on a Moscow court’s website: An administrative case had been opened against me for “discrediting” the Russian army. The evidence, I learned later, was an interview I had given to TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV channel, which was banned by the authorities. I had gone on air to encourage more people to help refugees, and I talked about my anti-war tattoo, which I got as a reminder that “love and friendship are stronger than war” – those very words discredited the Russian army, according to the case files. A second such case led to a criminal charge that could have resulted in up to five years in prison. I knew I had done enough as a journalist to be charged under a whole range of other articles, including treason. By 5 a.m. the next day, I was in Tbilisi, Georgia. Less than two months later, Gershkovich was arrested.
‘How could I be so naive?’
Gershkovich writes that he believed he “had a responsibility to carry out since Russian citizens could no longer do the kind of reporting he could” and that the Russian authorities would more likely expel than arrest him: “The fact that I didn’t have a Russian passport gave me added confidence,” he says.
In early 2023, the WSJ reporter was working on several stories at once, including one on whether Russia’s war machine could sustain a long war, and another on Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin caterer-turned-warlord, whose Wagner Group had been recruiting prisoners into its ranks and posed a threat to the state’s monopoly on violence.
Gershkovich’s arrest in March 2023 officially marked the end of the period when foreign reporters could consider themselves immune. In wartime, they are seen as enemy spies and potential pawns in hostage diplomacy. As FSB (Putin’s trusted security service and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB) investigator Dmitry Sapunkov told Gershkovich, if they hadn’t gathered enough evidence to arrest him, they would have simply “poisoned” him: “In every country there are enemies that need to be put in prison or be eliminated,” an FSB investigator said.
That was no idle threat: Putin’s regime has a long history of poisoning its enemies. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was poisoned twice — the second time fatally, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle.
The FSB alleged that Gershkovich had been gathering classified information “on instructions from the CIA” about Uralvagonzavod, a major Russian defense plant that manufactures and repairs military equipment.
According to Gershkovich, union activist Pavel Sergienya had told him that he might be able to get information about the factory’s projects. They met at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals, and Sergienya showed Gershkovich notes about the increase in tank production. Moments later, a group of men in balaclavas descended on Gershkovich, handcuffed him, pulled a black sack over his head and forced him into a van. He tried to explain that he was a journalist, but one of them cut him off: “What would your government think if our journalists were working on this kind of article in your country?” they asked.
At the closed trial, as Gershkovich describes it, Sergienya, the prosecution’s key witness, testified that he had begun cooperating with the security service before meeting Gershkovich. In September 2025, the independent Russian media Mediazona identified Sergienya, a Uralvagonzavod employee and representative of the trade union Solidarity, as an FSB provocateur: He was also a key figure in the “terrorism” case against Andrei Vogel, a 65-year-old opposition activist from Nizhny Tagil.
Gershkovich berated himself for trusting Sergienya. “How did I not see it? How could I be so naive?” he asked himself. “‘’You can’t tell the story if you’re dead,’ a colleague had once told me,” he writes, “and now I thought of a coda: You can’t tell the story if you’re in prison either.”
Fortunately, he managed to tell it.
‘A valuable commodity’
Gershkovich is the son of Jewish immigrants who left the Soviet Union in the 1970s. His great-grandfather vanished after he was arrested in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Terror.
Among Russian journalists there is a shared understanding: In prison, you are of no use as a journalist; you become a burden and source of constant pain for your loved ones. Gershkovich shares similar thoughts from Lefortovo prison, where he is consumed with doubts about whether he’ll ever be swapped. He realizes that he might never again see his mother, who managed to provide him with kosher food (ahead of the start of Passover) even though he was “in a prison cell in the country she had chosen to leave.” “In that moment, I felt like I had done something unspeakably cruel,” he writes.
Gershkovich quotes Vasily Grossman on how an oppressive regime can dwarf a person: “Only people who never felt such force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it.” The WSJ reporter couldn’t be absolutely certain an exchange would ever happen or how many years he might have to spend in the prison cell; he was aware of the fate of Paul Whelan, a former US marine, convicted of espionage (charges he denied) and waiting for a swap since 2018.
In his small cell, the reporter is caught in the grip of a thousand-eyed Leviathan that keeps peering in at him: “With time, I would learn to recognize the eyes of each guard checking in on me, six times an hour, more than a hundred times a day.” Yet Gershkovich manages to reveal the human faces behind the function they play in the repressive system; he even makes conversation with his FSB investigator about the corruption of the Russian political system.
To protect the identities of his cellmates, he merges them into a composite character he calls “Seryoga,” who was accused of running an illegal weapons shop and had admitted his guilt. “On the outside, we would never have been friends,” Gershkovich writes. “But here, in these circumstances, we got along and he made me laugh.”
Seryoga, who considers himself an alpha male, tries to educate Gershkovich about the proper way to enter a cell (or khata in Russian prison jargon, which is also the Ukrainian word for a house): Never step over the threshold without wiping your feet on the rag by the door (hygiene is essential; as Seryoga put it, “we shit where we eat”), and be ready for the first questions: “What’s the trouble?” or “Is everything even in your life?” Both phrases mean “What are you in for?” That is, which article of the Russian Criminal Code were you charged under? The “uneven” articles, the so-called 130s, cover sex crimes such as rape and child sexual abuse. They automatically put a prisoner at the very bottom rung of the prison: Most likely, he will eat last and be subjected to sexual violence.
Seryoga also teaches his American cellmate the saying at the heart of the prison brotherhood in Russia: “From the soul, soulfully, into the soul. Hugged you, picked you up, and put you back down.” Gershkovich already knew the phrase “from the soul” when he was on the outside. It is shorthand for “thanks” — a vivid example of how prison slang has seeped into the Russian language and culture.
Gershkovich understood that in state custody he was seen as a “valuable commodity,” and that he hadn’t faced any real FSB interrogations: no beatings, no electrocutions, no waterboarding, no stringing up, no harassment. “They want to present a humane face to the world. They took a journalist who they know will write about the experience, so in the meantime they will treat him well,” he remembers thinking.
Gershkovich was kept safe because he was seen as leverage to secure the release of Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin, convicted for life in Germany of shooting dead an exiled Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park in August 2019. In the last part of the memoir, Gershkovich that he felt “guilty” that because of him Krasikov was now free, and Putin was able to show the security services that if they committed to executing dangerous operations for him, he would have heir back.
Not every journalist swallowed up by Russia’s repressive machine is as lucky as Gershkovich. Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was tortured to death in Russian custody. When her body was returned to Ukraine, her eyeballs, brain and part of her larynx were missing.
Another brick in the wall
Gershkovich calls Russia both “cursed and beautiful” and the country undoubtedly means a great deal to him. It’s where he found love (his girlfriend, Maria, is a well-known Russian journalist), made close friends, and did some very good reporting.
A Russian journalist would never tell an FSB interrogator that “people will rally in their support,” as Gershkovich did, but fortunately, he turned out to be absolutely right.
His defense lawyers, Tanya, Maria and Andrei, went through every procedural step, even though they knew a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. “What’s the point?” Gershkovich once asked them.
“One day all of this will come crumbling down,” Andrei told him. “Right now, we’re trying to preserve some semblance of a foundation from which to rebuild.” The stubborn work of the lawyers was a powerful form of a protest — perhaps the only one possible, without being locked away, in a dictatorship.
Maybe Gershkovich’s book will be one of the bricks in that rebuilding, too.
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