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A new film brings to life ‘the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust’
(New York Jewish Week) — While hiding from the Nazis, the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon began a series of autobiographical paintings and texts with a painfully simple description of her aunt, and namesake’s, suicide: “Scene 1: 1913. One November day, a young girl named Charlotte Knarre leaves her parents’ home and jumps into the water.”
Intense and memorable, that image is the launching point for “Life? or Theatre?”, a series of hundreds of gouaches Salomon made between 1940 and 1942. Best described as an “autobiographical play,” it features personal stories illustrated with vibrant paintings and cues for music. Salomon, in her 20s when she made the body of work, called it a “singspiel,” a play with music.
And now, a new film directed by French sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, delivers a cinematic representation of her best-known work. “Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden” will make its world premiere at Lincoln Center on Weds., January 18 as a centerpiece of the New York Jewish Film Festival.
The film lies somewhere between cinema and art installation: Aside from a brief opening and conclusion, Salomon’s expressive paintings take up most of the screen time. Sound design brings the paintings to life, as does the music Salomon indicated in her original script, along with text read by the actress Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread,” “Corsage”), who plays protagonist Charlotte.
“We didn’t want to make a pure documentary of her,” co-director Delphine Coulin told the New York Jewish Week. “What had never been done was to make a true film with the painting, the music and the text, and to imagine what Charlotte was visualizing when she was painting… Because the neighbors said they could hear her singing while she was painting.”
French sisters Muriel Coulin, left, and Delphine Coulin are co-directors of “Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden.” (Richard Schroeder)
These days, Salomon — who died at Auschwitz at age 26 in 1943 — is something of a cult favorite among art lovers and Jewish historians. In a 2017 New Yorker article, writer Toni Bentley notes that “Life? or Theatre?” is “the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust.” She is also sometimes compared to Anne Frank. Critics have noted this comparison does neither artist justice, distinguishing between the youthful directness of Frank’s writing as an adolescent in hiding with the more mature, sophisticated representations made by Salomon as a young artist.
Born in Berlin in 1917, Salomon grew up in a cultured German Jewish family. Her mother died when she was 8. She studied at the German capital’s prestigious Academy of Arts until the Nazis’ rise to power made it impossible for her to continue. In 1938, her father spent a brief period in an internment camp — after his release, he sent his daughter to stay with her grandparents in the south of France, where he hoped she’d be safe.
After Salomon’s arrival at Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1939, her grandmother attempted suicide and eventually died. Only then did Salomon learn that her mother had died by suicide as well, and that the women in her family had a history of depression (though it isn’t covered in the film, there is some evidence that her grandfather may have been abusive).
In “Life? or Theatre?” Salomon writes: “My life began when my grandmother ended hers, when I learned that my mother too had ended her life, and that deep down I felt the same predisposition to despair and death. I thought to myself: either I kill myself too, or I create something really crazy and extraordinary.”
For the next two years, Salomon did just that, creating some 1,300 paintings about her life in exile. She accompanied these paintings with text and musical cues that included Bach, Schubert, Mahler and the German anthem “Deutschlandlied,” creating an entire multimedia body of work.
As the Nazi grip tightened in France, Salomon, realizing the danger she faced, brought a box containing all her paintings to a friend, the town’s doctor. The film recounts what she tells him: “Take care of it. This is my whole life.” Just weeks later, Salomon, five months pregnant, was sent to Auschwitz, where she died on Oct. 10, 1943.
While Salomon’s work includes depictions of Nazis, antisemitism and persecution, the majority of “Life? or Theater?” — and therefore the film — is dedicated to the explosive inner life and autobiography of its creator. She explores suicide, Freudian lust, psychological distress, music, philosophy and her own artistic impulses.
Yet “Life? or Theatre?” is unmistakably a product of its time, and as such the film includes historical images of Hitler’s rise. Though the French filmmakers don’t identify as Jewish themselves, Delphine said that she and her sister have some Jewish family, and she noted the film’s content is more relevant than ever. “Antisemitism never did end, but now in France and in Europe, it is stronger and stronger than ever, since 1945,” she said. “We really see it and we talk to it nearly each day. We can’t ignore it.”
“With all these strange times we’re living in, Charlotte gives you strength, because she really crossed the times with a strong belief in art and love,” she added.
The film ends with astonishing footage from the early 1960s of Salomon’s father and stepmother, who survived hiding in the Netherlands, looking through their daughter’s paintings as they are interviewed about her. “I was surprised when I discovered her work,” says her father Albert Salomon. He had known nothing of his late daughter’s project until the couple visited Villefranche-sur-Mer after the war, hoping to find some traces of Charlotte’s life.
“The work is very, very vivid — very expressive of life in all its aspects,” said Delphine of Salomon’s art — and the Coulin sisters, in turn, were inspired to bring the work to a broader audience. In 2019, Muriel directed her first theater piece, “Charlotte,” a rendition of Salomon’s work for the stage that played in Paris at the Théâtre du Rond Point. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the production, the Coulins transposed their medium to film.
Delphine added that they were also drawn to what she called the “poignant story” of Salomon’s brief life, now immortalized by her singular creative impulse in the face of adversity.
“In difficult times — and her times were probably the most difficult times ever — she really believed in art,” she said. “How art makes you survive. How it can give you a piece of eternity. We wouldn’t speak about her this way if she had not been able to make this wonderful work.”
“Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden” will screen on Weds., January 18 at 12:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater at 165 West 65th St. For additional information on the New York Jewish Film Festival, which runs through Monday, January 23, click here.
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Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher
The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.
This phrase has been invoked by political pundits and leaders, including the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, over the past few days as the world was plunged into Donald Trump’s fever dream of the conquest of Greenland. Yet what they neglected to mention is the quotation’s source and context in which it was uttered.
But both are crucial if we are to fully appreciate the troubling relevance of the phrase and the somber light the German-Jewish thinker Leo Strauss cast on it.
The phrase first crops up in the History of the Peloponnesian War, the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of one of the most consequential events in the history of the West. In the midst of their war against Sparta, an Athenian fleet lands on the small island of Melos, which they have been ordered to annex or annihilate. The dialogue that follows is entirely the creation of Thucydides, who strips away what he believed were the pleasant fictions we tell to blind ourselves to the reality of human nature.
Despite the Melian delegation’s appeals, the Athenian commanders are unmoved. “Nature always compels men to rule over anyone they can control,” they tell the Melians.“We did not make this law…but we will take it as we found it and leave it to posterity forever, because we know that you would do the same if you had our power as would anyone else.”
Yet the Athenians are tragically blind to the corollary: Human beings will always resist and rebel against those who try to invade them. When the Melians refused to submit, the Athenians were as good as their word; upon breaching the city walls, they slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Shortly later, full of their conviction that might makes right, the Athenians decide to invade Sicily — an act of hubris which leads to a catastrophic defeat and a fate like the one they meted out to the Melians.
These world-altering events bring us to Leo Strauss, the man who Harold Bloom once described as a “political philosopher and Hebraic sage.” Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1899, by the 1930’s Strauss had won the reputation as a brilliant and not always orthodox political theorist. With the rise of Nazism, Bloom had the means and foresight to quit his native country in 1937. He became something of an itinerant intellectual, finding a series of academic appointments at Columbia University, University of Chicago, and the New School while writing many of his best-known books, including Natural Right and History and Thoughts on Machiavelli.
Over time, Strauss also became known as the éminence grise of neo-conservatism, the hawkish postwar ideology that viewed foreign policy through the harsh lens of political realism and has been credited with influencing the Bush Administration’s cataclysmic decision to invade Iraq. For his critics, it hardly helped that Strauss was influenced by the writings of the Nazi-adjacent and antisemitic legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who favored strong executive authority and believed that the politics of a nation and policies of the state must respond to the distinction between friend and enemy.
An advocate of “reading between the lines,” Strauss basically sets the traditional interpretation of Thucydides and the significance of the Melian dialogue on its head. Most students of Thucydides believe he sides with Pericles, the Athenian leader who, in his famous funeral oration, declares his city as the school for all of Greece. And why not? Thanks to its openness to ideas and debate, Athens excelled in the arts and sciences. No less important, thanks to its sense of civic responsibility, the city’s citizen army excelled in military prowess and power.
That this shining example of democracy should, at the end of a two-decade war, have been defeated and occupied by brutish if not barbaric Sparta marks one of history’s great tragedies. And yet, Strauss suggests we misunderstand the nature of the tragedy. The Periclean vision is inspiring, he allows, but it was also the reason why Athens lost the war. Strauss claims that Thucydides knew this as well. Just like his contemporary Plato, the ancient historian instead thought the best of all models was the closed society of Sparta rather than the open society of Athens.
By “best,” what Strauss meant is that cities like Sparta are best positioned to maintain the endurance and stability of the state and those who look to it for their security. In turn, this requires such states to embrace what he called the “Athenian thesis” which boils down to the claim made by the Athenian commander at Melos: The strong, indifferent to justice or moderation, do what they can while the weak suffer what is meted out to them. After all, Athens was itself an expanding empire that absorbed other cities into its alliance whether they wished to join or not.
Of course, we have no idea what Strauss would have thought about Donald Trump’s efforts to slap tariffs on islands inhabited only by penguins and annex other islands inhabited by people who have made clear they have no desire to become American. But I suspect that Strauss would remind us that the relentless pursuit of power and property is not unique to narcissistic sociopaths. Instead, states are almost always and necessarily driven by the will to expand. And therein lies the true tragedy.
The post Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher appeared first on The Forward.
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120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief”
מזל־טובֿ! דעם 20סטן יאַנואַר 2026 איז געוואָרן 120 יאָר זינט דער גרינדונג פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“ — דער עצות־רובריק פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס. די רובריק איז פֿאַרלייגט געוואָרן פֿונעם גרינדער און לאַנגיאָריקן שעף־רעדאַקטאָר אַב קאַהאַן אין 1906.
כּדי אָפּצומערקן דעם יום־טובֿ ברענגען מיר אײַך צוויי זאַכן:
• ערשטנס, אַן אַרטיקל וועגן אַ טשיקאַווען בריוו וואָס איז אָנגעקומען אין דער פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקציע אין יאַנואַר 1949, פֿון אַ לייענער וועמעס זון האָט חתונה געהאַט מיט אַ קריסטלעכער פֿרוי
• צווייטנס, אַ פֿאָרווערטס־ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“, מיטן געוועזענעם פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלער און דער פֿאָרווערטס־אַרכיוויסטקע חנה פּאָלאַק.
The post 120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief” appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Khamenei Moved to Underground Bunker in Tehran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in a televised message, after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, in Tehran, Iran, June 26, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Amid tense expectation of US strike on key assets of the Islamic regime, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was moved into a special underground bunker in Tehran, the Iran International website reported on Saturday.
The report further added that the supreme leader’s third son Masoud Khamenei has taken over day-to-day management of the leader’s office, functioning as the de facto main channel for coordination vis-à-vis the executive branches of the government and the security forces.
The report describes Khamenei’s hideout as a “fortified site with interconnected tunnels.”
On Thursday US President Donald Trump said that a “massive” naval force was heading toward Iran.
“We have a lot of ships going that direction just in case. We have a big flotilla going in that direction. And we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters.
“We have an armada. We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it. We’ll see,” Trump added.
The USS Abraham Lincoln, along with three destroyers, was spotted making its way to the Middle East from Asia, according to ship-tracking data.