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A Holocaust survivor and her family saw ‘Leopoldstadt.’ The Broadway play told their story.
(New York Jewish Week) — On a Wednesday evening last month, three generations of a Jewish family made their way to their seats at the Longacre Theater to see “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s epic Broadway play about the tragedies that befall an extended Jewish family in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna.
The date of the family gathering was a significant one: Nov. 9, the 84th anniversary of the Nazi pogroms known as Kristallnacht. And in the audience was Fini Konstat, 96, who lived in the once thriving Jewish neighborhood after which the play is named, and witnessed the horrors it portrays first-hand. Alongside her were her daughter and her son-in-law, Renee and James Akers, and her oldest great-grandchild, Lexi Levin, 23.
When Konstat was a child, she lived in a “nice apartment” in Leopoldstadt. But exactly 84 years to the day of their theater date, “I was running with my father, seeing all the Jewish stores with all their windows broken,” she told Levin in a short video her great-granddaughter filmed before the curtain rose.
“It’s such a blessing for me to be here with you,” Levin said to her great-grandmother in response. “Ninety-six years old, survived a pandemic, at a Broadway show in New York City.”
Left: Fini as a child on the balcony of her apartment in Leopoldstadt. Right: Fini with her three children in front of the very same building, pictured in 2015. (Courtesy)
Since the beginning of its Broadway run in mid-September, “Leopoldstadt,” with its depiction of a prosperous Viennese family on the brink of destruction, has moved audiences to tears and inspired deep reflections on the Holocaust. Based on the celebrated playwright’s own family history — of which he was barely aware while growing up in England — it has provided a stark counterpoint to news about rising antisemitism and the celebrities who have been purveying it.
But for Konstat, the play was much more personal. “When I heard the word ‘Leopoldstadt,’ this alone gave me lots of thrills and memories,” Konstat, who is known in her family as Mimi, told the New York Jewish Week in accented English. She recalled how Levin, who recently moved to the city, invited her to fly to New York to see one of Broadway’s hottest tickets.
“Leopoldstadt,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “The second district. That’s where we lived.”
At the end of Stoppard’s five-act play, audiences learn that most of the Jewish characters had perished under the Nazis — of the four generations in the show, just three cousins survive to carry on the family’s legacy.
For Konstat too, she and her parents were among the very few in their extended family to survive the Holocaust. “Almost all of them went to Auschwitz or other camps,” Konstat said. “My mother was a twin and only the twins remained alive. [My mother’s] five other siblings and my grandmother perished.”
L-R: Renee Akers, James Akers, Lexi Levin and Fini Konstat at the Longacre Theater to see Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt on Broadway,’ Nov. 9, 2022. (Courtesy)
In a Zoom conversation held over Thanksgiving weekend, Konstat, surrounded by two of her daughters, two of her granddaughters and three of her great-granddaughters, shared what the play meant to her — and how her family has restored what she lost.
In the months after Kristallnacht in 1938, Konstat and her parents hid in a neighbor’s apartment; Konstat recalls hiding under the duvet when German soldiers showed up. Eventually the family fled to Turkey, and then to India, before settling down in Mexico City. There, the teenage Fini met her husband David, also a survivor who escaped Poland. The two of them began to write the rest of their story — starting with the birth of the first of their three children in 1948.
Unlike many Holocaust survivors, Fini and David Konstat were open about their experiences during the war, instilling a sense of pride and duty to remember in their children — something that eventually extended to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“They were proud to speak about how they survived this,” said the Konstats’ middle child, Renee Konstat Akers. “Their life was an odyssey. They had the courage to do things that you would never think were possible. We grew up grateful knowing how our family survived in that incredible way.”
Each child moved to different places as they grew up and got married. Manuel, the oldest, stayed in Mexico. Renee married an American and moved to the Midwest, and Denise, the youngest, to Houston. Each became deeply involved in their Jewish communities, sending their children (Konstat’s grandchildren) to Jewish day schools, celebrating Jewish holidays and participating in synagogue life.
“The word ‘miracle’ really does not feel like an understatement in this scenario,” said Sherry Levin, one of Konstat’s grandchildren. “When we think about what it took for my grandmother and grandfather to survive and how they were able to intersect in Mexico, and such an amazing multi-generational family has come to fruition, it feels miraculous.”
Pictured here on their 40th anniversary, Fini and her husband David met in Mexico City after both had fled Europe. They were married 54 years before David died in 2001. (Courtesy)
Reviews of the show have ranged from rhapsodic to resistant, with some critics suggesting the play is simplistic and obvious in its story-telling or that it is less a well-crafted play than a well-meaning lesson on the Holocaust.
But just as the Merz family clashes and argues about everything from antisemitism to intermarriage to socialism in “Leopoldstadt,” each generation of the Konstat family that saw “Leopoldstadt” that night came away with something different — a reaction influenced by their age, their Jewish identity, their nationality and their relationship with their family.
For Konstat, the arc of “Leopoldstadt” was so familiar that it hardly stirred her. “It was just very happy watching it and enjoying it and enjoying my children with me, “ she told the New York Jewish Week. “I didn’t think about anybody else.”
Akers, too, felt an intense familiarity with the story, and, perhaps toughened by her own family history, didn’t experience an intense emotional reaction. Her own parents’ lives gave Akers a sense of purpose in her life — for example, in the 1990s, she was passionate about helping resettle Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union. With her own children, she instilled in them a strong sense of Jewish purpose in their work, their education and their family.
“I was a sandwich in between seeing my mother and my granddaughter,” she said of her “Leopoldstadt” experience. “I was emotional thinking of my mom who went through it, but I was more emotional about seeing my granddaughter be so moved. It really hit her at her core.”
Indeed, it was the youngest member of the family present that night who was most shaken by the play.
“It really felt like a gift to my family and to me, specifically, to be able to see what Mimi’s life looked like before the war,” Lexi Levin said, surmising that, as a fourth-generation survivor, she is among the first in her family to be able to start processing the loss on a grander scale.
“For the first time in my life, I really felt the magnitude of her loss,” she added. “I’ve known her story and I’ve been inspired by her story to be involved with my own Jewish causes, but I have never been able to access and truly empathize with her grief and what it meant that she lost the entire family she had before this one that she created.”
Turning to her great-grandmother, as if trying to make her understand the exact precision of the show, Levin explained, “It’s a play about generations and the family was large and then it was small.”
“You made it large again,” she said, referring to the generations of family that had assembled — in the Broadway theater and again over Thanksgiving weekend. “Look at this room.”
Pictured on her 90th birthday in 2017, Fini Konstat now has three children, ten grandchildren and twenty great-grandchildren. (Courtesy)
There was a coda for the family after the curtain went down. The day after the show, the family wanted to see the 1907 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” one of Gustav Klimt’s most famous paintings, which currently hangs at the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. A version of the portrait’s true story — how a painting of a socialite from a prominent Viennese Jewish family was looted by the Nazis and the family’s efforts to get it back — features in the plot of “Leopoldstadt.”
The gallery, however, was closed on the only day the family could visit. After a call to the management at the gallery, which showcases the German and Austrian art collections of Jewish philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder, the gallery’s director arranged a private tour.
“It felt like we were in a puzzle and everything was finally coming together,” said Akers. “It was an emotional, emotional time.”
When the week was over and the emotions were spent, Konstat and the Akers returned home with a reignited passion for their family story. But there was yet another twist: In addition to the whirlwind trip Levin planned for her grandparents and for Mimi, she had been undergoing the laborious process of applying for Austrian citizenship. Six members in Konstat’s large family have undertaken the process over the last two years.
“Part of the motivation was knowing Mimi’s story, and knowing that she survived because her mother had citizenship in Turkey,” Levin said. “That story was just inspirational to me, knowing that dual citizenship was what saved our family.” She convinced her brother and mother to apply for Austrian citizenship as well.
The day after her grandmother and great-grandmother left New York, Levin called them with news from her small apartment in Manhattan: An Austrian passport had arrived in the mail. The curtain was rising on another act.
Konstat was surprised at how interested her family was in getting Austrian citizenship. “I feel very good,” she said. “I’m very happy.”
“Does it make you emotional?” Levin asked her during the Zoom call with the New York Jewish Week.
“It does — of course it does. I used to love Austria,” she said. “I was sad to leave. I was disappointed. We never thought of coming back. I was happy to be able to escape. Thank God we made it out of hell.”
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The post A Holocaust survivor and her family saw ‘Leopoldstadt.’ The Broadway play told their story. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections
(JTA) — For American Jews who follow Israel closely, one of the hardest things to understand about Israeli politics today is the gap between the severity of settler violence in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, and the relatively limited role it plays in the election campaign.
The phenomenon is not being ignored altogether. Israeli politicians across the political spectrum condemn acts of violence by Jewish extremists, and security experts have warned that Jewish terrorism and nationalist crime have become a serious threat to Israel’s security and democratic institutions. Yet the issue has not emerged as a major dividing line in the elections.
Why? Part of the answer is that Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria is politically inconvenient for both major blocs. On one side stands Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. On the other stands the loosely aligned “change bloc” seeking to replace it. That bloc includes parties with markedly different ideologies: Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and Yair Golan’s Democrats. They agree on the need for political change, but they do not share a common position on the future of the settlements, Palestinian statehood or the long-term status of Judea and Samaria.
The reason settler violence has not become a defining campaign issue becomes even clearer once two different questions are separated. The first is straightforward: How should Israel deal with violence committed by Israeli Jews against Palestinians? The second is much broader: What should Israel do about the settlements, its control over Judea and Samaria and the long-term future of the territory? These are not the same question.
Distinguishing between these two lines of thought matters because the Israeli opposition may be united in its condemnation of settler violence, but it remains deeply divided over the settlements themselves. Yashar does not advocate for a general evacuation of settlements. B’Yachad supports Jewish settlement and opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yisrael Beiteinu supports strengthening Jewish settlement and Israeli control in parts of Judea and Samaria. The Democrats take a substantially different position, including opposition to illegal settler outposts and an explicit commitment to fighting what they call “Jewish terrorism.”
There is, however, potentially a much broader consensus around law, order and state authority. That is where the political framing becomes important.
The Netanyahu camp does not entirely deny the existence of Jewish violence. After recent incidents in Samaria, Netanyahu condemned what he called a “handful of rioters” and called on law enforcement authorities to prosecute them. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described those responsible as criminals who should be dealt with severely.
This framing treats the problem primarily as one of law enforcement: Extremists are committing crimes, and the state must enforce the law against them.
That approach is also reflected in a significant proposal by Defense Minister Israel Katz. In August, Katz instructed the IDF to prepare a plan for transferring civilian enforcement involving Israelis in Judea and Samaria to the Israel Police, in part to reduce the military’s involvement in civilian law-and-order incidents.
This position is coherent: If Israel regards itself as sovereign over the territory, Israeli civilians who violate the law should be dealt with by the police, while the military should concentrate on security threats.
But this logic is not inherently a right-wing argument. It can serve the change bloc just as well. The change bloc can describe Jewish violence as evidence of governmental failure, loss of control and the erosion of state authority. That allows parties with very different views about the future of Judea and Samaria to agree on an immediate principle: The state must enforce its laws.
For politicians such as Bennett, Lieberman and Eisenkot, this is a much easier political proposition than making the future of the settlements and their legal status the central issue.
This is where Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, stands out. Golan does not limit himself to terms such as “rioters,” “criminals,” “extremists” or “lawlessness.” He repeatedly uses the term “Jewish terrorism.” While the change bloc party leaders have on occasion used that phrase in English, they do not often use it in Hebrew. Golan is the one who uses the term repeatedly.
In August, Golan said explicitly: “What we are seeing today is Jewish terrorism that is receiving legitimacy from the Israeli government.” He has also presented the fight against Jewish terrorism as one of the issues on which he believes the change bloc can agree.
This choice of language is more consequential than it may initially appear. Once the phenomenon is called terrorism, difficult questions follow: If this is terrorism, should Israel not fight it with some of the tools it uses to fight other forms of terrorism? If Palestinian terrorism is understood as a national security threat requiring intelligence, organized investigation and preventive measures, what should happen when the perpetrators are Jewish Israelis?
Israel has developed extensive counterterrorism mechanisms for dealing with Palestinian terrorism: intelligence gathering, investigations by the Shin Bet internal security and counterintelligence service, administrative detention, military and security operations and other exceptional legal tools.
That does not mean those tools should automatically be applied identically to Israeli citizens. There are important legal and practical differences. But calling settler violence “Jewish terrorism” inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as more than ordinary criminality, and is important to harnessing the attention and power of the state to address it even as it labels it something that is an outlier.
The future of Judea and Samaria may be one of the most consequential questions facing Israel, but voters appear to be focusing more immediately on security, the economy, military service and Netanyahu’s political future. Here’s the dilemma all the parties are facing: The issue of settler violence can be important enough to condemn, but too politically complicated to campaign on.
For the Netanyahu bloc, emphasizing the systemic nature of settler extremism risks highlighting failures within a political constituency that is central to its coalition. For the change bloc, emphasizing it as a distinct political problem risks reopening the much larger argument over the settlements — an issue on which the change bloc itself remains divided.
Nevertheless, ahead of the elections, politicians can demand vigorous enforcement against violent settlers without supporting the dismantling of settlements. One can oppose illegal outposts without opposing the settlement enterprise as a whole. And one can regard Jewish violence primarily as a security, governance and even terrorism problem without having a position on the ultimate political status of Judea and Samaria, as important as that may be.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why both sides are ducking settler violence ahead of Israel’s elections appeared first on The Forward.
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How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’
It’s long been unfashionable to refer to the United States as a “melting pot.” Identity politics and multiculturalism have undermined the ideal of an assimilation so complete that it obliterates ethnic distinctions. Now the persistence of difference is hailed, at least in some quarters, as enriching rather than estranging, even if the associated metaphors — “salad bowl,” “kaleidoscope,” “mosaic” — lack poetic vigor.
The first reference to the U.S. as a melting pot is said to date to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Framer, in which he wrote: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” Similar notions surfaced in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. But it was Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, that injected that industrial metaphor into the national consciousness.
Set in New York City, the play is a love story between a musically gifted Russian Jewish immigrant of Sephardic extraction and a gentile settlement house worker from the pogrom-wracked city that he fled. Its backdrop is the turmoil of an early 20th-century America trying to make sense of massive waves of Eastern European, and particularly Jewish, immigration. The playwright was an English Jew, a disillusioned Zionist who had begun looking to the U.S. as the promised land.
After its debut in Washington, where it was praised by President Theodore Roosevelt, The Melting Pot moved to Broadway in 1909 and has since enjoyed occasional revivals. Crescendoing debates around immigration, antisemitism and who deserves to be an American seem to lend it renewed currency.
So, at least, was the reasoning of Jesse Bernstein, producing artistic director of Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel, whose focus is Jewish-themed work. Bernstein adapted and directed Zangwill’s play, and has teamed with the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which produces rarely seen classics, to mount it. Their streamlined, modern-dress version, part of the America250 celebration, opened Wednesday at Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meeting House.
Bernstein said in an interview that he pruned as much as half an hour from the original (it now runs about 95 intermission-less minutes) with an ear to modern sensibilities. He also has made some additions that undercut the play’s triumphalism. The Melting Pot nonetheless remains an odd fusion of melodrama and polemic, interesting mostly as an historical curiosity.
Bernstein’s direction does the piece no favors with a stiff, presentational style, in which characters frequently address the audience rather than one another. On the other hand, when they turn away, the meeting house’s unfavorable acoustics make them more difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear. Offstage characters sit in chairs behind the action awaiting their cues. Meghan Jones’s spare set, representing both the Quixano family home and different locations within the settlement house, is draped with oriental rugs and strewn with steamer trunks and valises.
The protagonist, David Quixano, played with endearing sensitivity by Adam Galloway, survived the infamous 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which all his immediate family were murdered and he himself was shot and left for dead. After that trauma, America has become both his dream and his salvation. In New York, he lives with his cynical uncle, Mendel, also a musician; his Yiddish-speaking grandmother; and an Irish American housemaid, Kathleen (Jessy Gruver), who wrestles comically with Jewish customs and dietary laws.
Through a violin concert, David meets and falls for the lovely Vera (Lexi Thammavong), a former Russian “revolutionist” who now combats poverty through settlement house work. David is composing an American symphony that will convey his rapturous views of his adopted homeland. He finds a ready admirer in the German conductor Herr Pappelmeister (Adam Pelta-Pauls, speaking convincing German).
Standing in David’s way, personally and professionally, are two villains — the wealthy, unscrupulous nativist Quincy Davenport (Eli Lynn), a married man who lusts after Vera, and Vera’s estranged father, Baron Ravendal (Brian McCann), a reactionary Russian military commander who turns up unexpectedly. McCann brings a strangely mannered intensity to a role that is already a caricature.
Zangwill’s characters represent a spectrum of early 20th-century attitudes. Ravendal and Davenport, brutal in different ways, both give free rein to their antisemitism. Frau Quixano (played by a bewigged McCann) and Mendel Quixano (J Hernandez, appropriately world-weary) reflect the resistance of older immigrants to assimilation — and especially to its culmination in interfaith romance.
The Melting Pot is deadly serious at times, larded with apocalyptic symbolism and images of Jewish suffering. But it also has its share of comedy, including the maid Kathleen’s gradual embrace of Jewish traditions and some playful digs directed at critics.
It is up to David, the musical prodigy, to articulate the famous message at the play’s core. Early on, he declares his fealty to a new American ideal:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! …A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. The real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you — he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.
David returns repeatedly to this soaring rhetoric, lauding American greatness born of industrial-grade homogenization, and seeking to embody it in his symphony.
The original play ended exuberantly, with both love and David’s melting pot vision of “the glory of America” conquering all. Bernstein’s adaptation, with its insistence on relevance, duly complicates that vision. He wraps the action with supporting characters challenging David’s view of American harmony, and with the future of the betrothed couple clouded in doubt.
The Melting Pot runs at the Arch Street Meeting House, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia, through Nov. 8.
The post How a Jewish play from 1908 enshrined the idea of America as a cultural ‘melting pot’ appeared first on The Forward.
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‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man
(JTA) — A Utah man accused of possessing explosive devices, searching online for nearby synagogues and making online threats to kill Jews is due in court Friday to face charges including attempting to commit a hate crime.
A federal grand jury indicted Skyler AJ Rose, 22, on Wednesday, the Department of Justice said in a release.
Rose allegedly made threats on social media, including “I wanna blow up a synagogue,” leading the FBI to join the Ogden City Police Department in a search of his home, where they allegedly discovered six pipe bombs, two rifles and ammunition.
A review of a cellphone seized from the home allegedly showed that Rose had searched online for a nearby synagogue, according to the Department of Justice.
The charges Rose faces include possession of an unregistered destructive device, threats to kill and injure people and to destroy a building, and attempting to commit a hate crime.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘I wanna blow up a synagogue’: Online posts lead to hate crime charge against Utah man appeared first on The Forward.
