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A Jewish expert on monuments on what Philly’s famous Rocky Balboa statue can teach us about memory
(JTA) — Paul Farber was shocked when he first watched “Rocky” and saw a Star of David on the grave of Rocky Balboa’s coach, Mickey Goldmill.
As a Jew and as the founder of the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, which has explored collective memory through art installations across the country for over a decade, Farber was well positioned to think about the deeper meaning of that brief shot.
“Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating,” he added.
That outlook lies behind Farber’s work as the host of the new NPR podcast “The Statue,” a deep dive into Philadelphia’s famed statue of Rocky Balboa, the fictional prizefighter at the center of “Rocky.” The series delves into what sports and society can convey about memory, and in his research, Farber discovered a few Jewish nuggets found in the film series — including the fact that Rocky’s love interest was originally supposed to be Jewish.
“They made an actual gravestone [for her character] and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is ‘buried,’” he said. “People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.”
In an interview with JTA, Farber shared his inspiration for the series, how his Jewish upbringing informed his life’s work and the role statues — such as that of Jewish baseball legend Sandy Koufax — do, and should, play.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: To start off, I’d love to hear about how you first got interested in studying monuments.
Paul Farber: I’m really interested in the ways that, in cities, we innovate toward the future, and also come to terms with our past, and it happens often in the same exact places. That could be a statue, a street, a corner store. And so that’s a big part for me.
What really inspired this project is a conversation I had with my mother, quite a few years ago. My mother is a lifelong Philadelphian. Her parents were Jewish immigrants in South Philadelphia. And when I told her I was teaching a class at the University of Pennsylvania about Philly neighborhoods, she asked me if I was covering Rocky. When I said, “Oh, it’s not on the syllabus” — and I may have said it in a way that felt dismissive — she gave me this look that I think a lot of us know: “How could you.” So for her birthday, we watched “Rocky” and we went to see “Creed.” My grandfather went to South Philly High and was in the boxing club. He shared stories in our family about what it meant to have sport and culture and belonging go together in South Philly. I started to see that across generations, from long before “Rocky” to this moment now, almost 50 years after the release of the film, many people’s family stories could be channeled through this statue, including my own, and that was enough of a prompt to go dive in.
“Rocky” is obviously not a Jewish story, but there are some nuggets. There’s the funeral scene, and you mentioned something about Adrian almost being Jewish. I’m curious what you think about the little Jewish pieces you can pull out of this famous story, and what those mean to you as a Philly sports fan.
It blew me away that Rocky’s coach, Mick, passes away and the character Rocky goes to his funeral, and you see a Star of David. Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story. And it just opened up a whole set of questions for me that blurred between art and life, between the film series and the city of Philadelphia.
In episode two, we showcase this monumental art book that Sylvester Stallone [who played Rocky] created. There was this passage in it that just blew me away, about the first draft of “Rocky,” where he says, “As for Adrian, she was Jewish in the first draft.” And he got feedback and cut that character. We never hear about Mickey’s Judaism. We never hear about Rocky’s bond across culture. But the fact that the first scene in the “Rocky” series is in a place called Resurrection Gym — that is obvious Christian iconography — and to put Jewish characters in is really fascinating to me.
There is another famous grave that is involved in the series. The character Adrian eventually passes away, and like the statue, which was made as a bronze sculpture, for the “Rocky” film series they made an actual gravestone and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is “buried.” People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.
People talk about representation on screen, and I’m not sure a Jewish funeral necessarily does that, but I would imagine for some people, seeing Rocky Balboa say the “Mourner’s Kaddish“ was maybe their first interaction with Judaism in some way. What do you make of that?
Every shot is deliberate. And it’s actually that kind of attitude and outlook that created the Rocky statue, because Sylvester Stallone was the director of that film, and they could have made a styrofoam version or a temporary one, but they spent over a year making a bronze version so that when the camera faced it, it would make contact. I think very similarly, this is part of the artistry of Stallone that plays out in our podcast series. We’re not with him when he sits shiva. We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating. And to see the coach Mickey, to have his Wikipedia page say he’s Jewish, all that we have is mourning.
I think about how for immigrant Jewish communities, there are gaps in our narratives. Throughout the series, and one of the reasons I wanted to share my perspective as a queer Jewish person who grew up loving sports in Philly, I’ve been informed by my own family’s history, and what we’re able to recall and what gaps there are. And I see that being echoed for so many people in the Rocky story.
It’s clearly a very personal story for you. Why did you think it was important to start the podcast with your own identity, and to include your Jewish mother?
I think it’s important that when we talk about sites of memory, we understand that there are shared and collective ways that we bring the past forward, and there are others that are incredibly personal. My hope was to find, in this case, to spotlight, a significant site of memory in the city, but ask questions about it. And I think it was important to note what position I would take, because I don’t believe there’s one story to the Rocky statue. To tell a biography of a statue, you actually have to tell it of the people who make meaning from it. So in the series, we do a lot of work where we want to know other people’s stories and backgrounds, whether they are refugees from Afghanistan, or community organizers in Kensington [a neighborhood of Philadelphia]. My hope was by positioning this from my perspective, almost as a memoir in a way, that it opened up space for others to have their experiences be valued and made meaning of.
The official artwork for Farber’s podcast. (Courtesy)
Both with the podcast and in your work with the Monument Lab, how do you feel that your Jewish identity informs what you do? Do you see overlap between your Jewish values and the values you work on in your organization?
I absolutely think so. I grew up in a Jewish community in Philadelphia, and tikkun olam was a constant refrain. The work of tikkun olam meant a worldview that necessitated building coalitions and understanding across divides, to not diminish or under-emphasize them, but to appreciate how we work in solidarity, whether that’s around racial justice, gender justice, in various struggles. I am a co-founder and director of an organization that focuses on memory, and that I really get from the stories of growing up in a Jewish household, in a Jewish community, where memory lived in different ways. We were always aware of the stories of trauma and loss, as well as reconciliation and transformation, and how you work with the gaps that you have, and you listen, and you learn and you carry the story with you. Because that is the way to bond generations. Jewish memory really grounds what I do, and I seek to use it as a tool to learn more and to feed connection across divides.
Rocky takes on this almost mythical, godlike status, and his statue in Philadelphia is a bit of a pilgrimage site. Do you see any tension there as a Jew, given the prohibition against idol worship?
I think about the importance of memory, against forces of violence and erasure. I also understand that, in a world that is full of pain and difficulty and loss, we seek places to release that. And so I understand the pull to monuments. What I would like to see, and what we try to do through this series, “The Statue,” and also with the work of Monument Lab, is to look on and off the pedestal, and really think about how history lives with us. As we say in the series and other places, history doesn’t live inside of statues, it lives with people who steward them, who create other kinds of sites of memory, who are vigilant in their modes of commemoration. What I try to do in this work is understand the ambivalence around monuments, the pull to try to remember and be enduring through time, and just that constant reminder that whenever you try to freeze the past, or freeze an image of power, you cut out the potential to find connection and empowerment, and thus forms of survival.
In sports, there are so many ways to honor people, especially different ways that, like a statue, take on the idea of permanence. When Bill Russell died, the NBA retired his number 6 across the league. On Jackie Robinson Day, every April 15, the whole MLB honors Jackie Robinson by wearing his uniform number. But statues just have a different level of oomph. Sandy Koufax has a new statue in Los Angeles that was unveiled last year; Hank Greenberg has one. What do you think it should take for an athlete to reach that status?
The pinnacle in sports is to have a statue dedicated to you outside of the stadium. And I do believe the cultures of social media have amplified that, because we grew up with the story of Sandy Koufax not pitching in the World Series during the High Holy Days, and that wasn’t because we learned it from a statue or a plaque. We learned it because it was carried forward and put into different forms of remembering and recalling its importance. I went to several Maccabi Games in the U.S. — I used to be a sprinter. And the culture of memory and sport, they were one in the same.
In professional sports, the pinnacle is the statue, but I think you brought up other really important ways of remembering that operate in non-statue forms that feel like they are living memorials. The idea of retiring someone’s number, and keeping their number up, is a way to acknowledge, in this really public of all public spaces, an intimacy and a care, and especially when an athlete passes away, how that transcends the lines of city geography. Jackie Robinson Day is something that did not occur immediately after Jackie Robinson was the first Black player to play in the major leagues, but was a product of a later moment when people around Major League Baseball sought to activate his memory. So yes, a statue outside of a stadium is like a particular kind of professional accolade. But the other forms are really meaningful.
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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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The post Donald Trump actually faced a few tough questions on ’60 Minutes.’ So, why does Marine Le Pen get a pass? appeared first on The Forward.
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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.
The post Israel’s parliament sworn in as leaders scramble to form a government appeared first on The Forward.
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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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