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A new portrait collection showcases 90 Holocaust survivors who lived long and full lives
(JTA) — Werner Reich had his opening line ready when he sat down for B.A. Van Sise to take his portrait.
“Before I could say anything, he said, ‘Everybody comes to me and they want me to talk about the Holocaust. What am I supposed to say? I went to Auschwitz. It was lousy,’” Van Sise said, recalling that Reich’s comment felt like a joke, not a lament.
But instead of dwelling on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp, the two men spoke about magic, a refuge for Reich as a Jewish teenager trying to survive. The resulting portrait shows a man in his 90s wearing retro glasses, a cloud of smoke floating a few inches above his open palm, in a picture vibrating with life and with enchantment.
Van Sise’s portrait of Reich is the first in “Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust,” his new portrait collection of 90 Holocaust survivors. The accompanying text acknowledges Reich’s experience at Auschwitz, but it focuses more on Reich’s life after the war and his long career in magic — striking a balance that Van Sise says is core to his project.
“This is not something that people are inclined to talk about because it’s not always bombastic. It’s not the part that you sell movie tickets to,” Van Sise said. “You can make, and people have, a hundred movies about Jewish people being imprisoned, tortured, and enslaved. Why doesn’t anybody talk about them thriving afterwards?”
Holocaust survivor and hiking enthusiast Sam Silberberg poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
Van Sise is far from the first photographer to capture the faces of survivors in the decades following the end of the Second World War. Famed portrait photographers Martin Schoeller and Mark Seliger, both known for their iconic celebrity portraiture — Schoeller for his uniform, stylized close-ups and Seliger as a magazine photographer who also recently photographed Jerry Seinfeld in a fashion shoot — have also set their cameras in front of Holocaust survivors. Countless other photographers have done the same. But what Van Sise says is sometimes missing from survivor photography is a focus on the postwar lives, many of them joyous, that the subjects have experienced over the last 70-plus years.
“I suspect that one person might see these folks and see victims,” Van Sise said. “And I see them as survivors.”
Holocaust survivor and Park East Synagogue Rabbi Arthur Schneier poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
“Invited to Life” was inspired by a 2015 photo assignment Van Sise took on for the Village Voice. Motivated by the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee rhetoric of then-candidate for president Donald Trump, he realized that a particularly cohesive cohort of refugees to come to the United States had arrived more than 75 years ago, at the end of the Second World War, and a photographic retrospective on their lives in America could be a valuable project. He reached out to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to be put in touch with a dozen survivors for the story. He ended up taking more than 30 portraits. When the alternative newsweekly ceased publication in 2017 (it was revived in 2021) before he could publish the photos, the museum invited Van Sise to turn the portraits into a solo exhibition, in what became the museum’s first-ever public art installation.
Then the pandemic arrived, and like many photographers whose everyday work required travel, Van Sise was out of a job.
“It had never been a marquee project for me,” said Van Sise, who is Jewish but has no familial connection to the Holocaust. “I kept coming back and thinking about them, and about the fact that these people had been through the worst there ever was, the worst that ever has been, the worst there ever might even be.”
Holocaust survivor and painter Fred Terna poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
Van Sise spent the better part of 2020 driving around the United States, getting COVID swabs every three days so he could safely photograph 140 elderly survivors, 90 of whom ended up in the book. (He was insistent with his publisher that the final number of portraits in the book be a multiple of 18, the Jewish numerical symbol for “life”.)
The photos are all in black and white, but beyond that, they are as diverse as Sise’s subjects. Some incorporate backgrounds, some are solo portraits; some are serious, some are silly; some include children, grandchildren, husbands, wives, props; some are in profile, and some are shot straight on. The subjects are Nobel Prize-winning chemists and homemakers; pilots and psychologists; haberdashers and teachers; famed rabbis and partisans-turned-conmen.
All of them, Sise says, were photographed with a sense of generosity.
“A person who wants to be critical of me — which is fair — might say that I’m overly charitable,” Van Sise says of his own work, acknowledging that no photographer can avoid bias completely while behind the camera. (It didn’t help that many of the survivors he photographed were eager to feed him cookies, as he frequently recalls.)
In the nearly three years since Van Sise began photographing the subjects of his book, the reality of working with more than 100 elderly people set in. Several of the survivors, including Holocaust educator René Slotkin, Budapest-born legal secretary Kathy Griesz and Reich died before they got the chance to hold a copy of the book in their hands, much to Van Sise’s dismay.
“As a writer, you carry them with you,” he said. “So for me, there were a few where I got pretty rattled.”
Holocaust survivor and educator René Slotkin poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
The photographs reflect acknowledgment by all involved that the survivors in the pictures are all nearing the ends of their lives. Many of his subjects chose to include their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren in their portraits, and the photographer was intentional in closing the book with a portrait of Irving Roth, a longtime Holocaust educator, with his 3-year-old great-granddaughter Addie sitting on his lap. In the text, Roth remarks on the origins of his Hebrew name, Shmuel Meir, which came from his great-grandfather and imagines what life will be like for Addie when she turns 103, and what she will remember of him.
Roth passed away in February 2021 at age 91.
“Those stories don’t end in 1945,” Van Sise said. “These people have lived for, now, 77 years since and have done plenty with that time. And that’s worth exploring, because that’s the part they have control over.”
Reflecting on different styles of Holocaust survivor portraiture at a discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the original home of Van Sise’s portraits, German photographer Martin Schoeller remarked on his own preference for images of older faces.
Holocaust survivor and educator Irving Roth and great-granddaughter Addie pose together for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
“They have more life in them. You see the wrinkles and you feel that there’s more to discover in the face, in an old face. So they almost feel like they’re telling the story of the suffering of the Holocaust more visually, because they’re older faces,” Schoeller said.
“But then, it’s been 75 years since the end of the war,” he added. “So these people have lived 75 years; so to say, ‘Now I see the horror in this old man’s face’ feels a little bit — I don’t know if that’s really true. I leave it up to the people looking at the pictures.”
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Trump Plans to Appoint US General to Lead Gaza Security Force: Report
A drone view shows Palestinians walking past the rubble, following Israeli forces’ withdrawal from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, Oct. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
The Trump administration is planning to appoint an American two-star general to command the International Stabilization Force in Gaza, Axios reported on Thursday, citing two US officials and two Israeli officials.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the report.
A United Nations Security Council resolution, adopted on Nov. 17, authorized a Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish a temporary International Stabilization Force in Gaza.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, who visited Israel this week, told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials that the Trump administration is going to lead the ISF and appoint a two-star general as its commander, Axios said.
The White House and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that an announcement about which world leaders will serve on the Gaza Board of Peace should be made early next year.
The resolution, drafted by the US, described the Board of Peace as a transitional administration “that will set the framework, and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” in line with Trump’s 20-point peace plan to end the war with terrorist group Hamas.
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Al Jazeera’s Academic Arm Denies Hamas Sexual Violence and Other Crimes
The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon
Al Jazeera Centre for Studies — the research arm of Qatar’s state-backed media giant — co-hosted an academic conference last week in Qatar’s Education City that whitewashed Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, and dismissed UN-verified sexual violence and other terrorist acts as Israeli fabrications.
Al Jazeera partnered with Hamad Bin Khalifa University to host the November 29-30 gathering, titled “International Media and the War on Gaza: Modalities of Discourse and the Clash of Narratives,” which drew academics to “deconstruct Western narratives” and the alleged role of Western media outlets in producing “propaganda manipulating international public opinion.”
In a seven-page concept note describing the goals of the conference, Al Jazeera’s organizers charged the Western media with justifying “Israel’s right to self-defense” and spreading “propaganda” about terrorist groups like Hamas, which they refer to as a “Palestinian resistance faction.” The organizers also attacked media outlets for writing about what it refers to as “false reports” about Hamas terrorists “raping Israeli women.”
During Hamas’ assault on Israel, terrorists systematically employed sexual violence as a weapon of war, including rape against women and girls. A New York Times investigation detailed at least seven locations where Hamas terrorists committed such acts, including gang rape and genital mutilation. In December 2023, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Hamas’ use of sexual violence and described it as “beyond anything I’ve seen.”
According to the Dina Project, an Israeli group of legal and gender experts, Hamas used sexual violence in its massacre “as part of a genocidal scheme” meant to “dehumanize Israeli society.”
The organizers’ concept note and the conference’s program made no reference to Hamas’ genocidal charter, its embedding of military assets in civilian areas, or the terrorist group’s responsibility for prolonging the conflict. The conference instead provided a platform for Al Jazeera journalists and academics to explain away Hamas terrorism and denigrate Israel.
While it operates under strict Qatari media laws that limit free speech and freedom of expression, making criticism of the Emir and his policies punishable by law, Al Jazeera’s Centre for Studies refers to itself as an “independent research institution that aims to present a balanced understanding of the geopolitics of the MENA region and the Arab world in particular.” While it seeks to appeal to an audience with Western sensibilities, the center is far from the public-facing independent institution that it presents itself to be.
The center was established in 2006 to “provide research support to the editorial teams, correspondents and departments of Al Jazeera’s news channels.”
Al Jazeera Organizers and Speakers Push Hamas’s Agenda
Arafat Madi Shoukri, who works as a senior researcher for the Centre for Studies, organized the conference. In 2013, Shoukri was designated as a Hamas operative by Israel for his work with the Hamas-aligned Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR).
Shoukri has been photographed with Ismail Haniyeh, one of the architects of the October 7 massacre. He also directed the London-based Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), an organization with extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has national branches that promote violent jihad and Hamas. In 2010, then-Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared the PRC an “illegal association,” referring to it as a “Hamas affiliated organization” that engages in “terror affiliated activities.”
The conference featured as its keynote speaker Wadah Khanfar, a former director general of Al Jazeera, who has been linked to Hamas fundraising efforts, with evidence suggesting he helped coordinate Hamas paramilitary activity in South Africa. According to the Raya Media Network, a Palestinian outlet, Khanfar was “active in the Hamas movement” and a “leader in the movement’s office in Sudan.”
In May 2024, Khanfar praised Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack, proclaiming it “came at the perfect moment for a radical and real shift in the path of struggle and liberation.” Khanfar had a close relationship to the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who leveraged Al Jazeera’s global reach to endorse terrorism against Jews, Israelis, and Americans and spread antisemitic narratives. Khanfar eulogized him at his funeral.
“There is a betrayal of the values of justice through capitalist savagery,” Khanfar said during his lecture, titled “The Grand Narratives of Western Media in Covering the War on Gaza: Manifestations of Political and Ideological Domination.” His lecture attacked Israel for “hastening the fall” of Western civilization, while ignoring Israel’s strategic role as a democratic anchor for the West in a mostly volatile and authoritarian region of the world.
Campus Reform reports that professor Ibrahim Abusharif, who spoke at the conference, co-founded and served as treasurer of the Quranic Literacy Institute, which was “later found by a federal jury to have laundered more than $1 million to Hamas” in a terrorism financing case. The publication reported that Abusharif taught the mandatory “Doha Seminar” for all American exchange students at Northwestern’s Qatar campus.
Mutaz al-Khatib, director of the Master’s Programme in Applied Islamic Ethics at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Islamic Studies, spoke at the conference on “professional ethics” in war coverage. On the day of Hamas’ October 7 massacre, al-Khatib posted on Facebook that, “What happened was merely a rehearsal that shows that liberating Jerusalem is possible.”
Fatima Alsmadi, a researcher at the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, moderated a session and presented on Hamas spokesperson Abu Obaida’s “impact on international public opinion.” Abu Obaida, who was killed in an IDF strike in August 2025, reportedly employed “psychological warfare games against Israel” and attempted to make Westerners more “sympathetic” to Hamas.
Alsmadi claimed in her lecture that Israel has somehow “benefited” from Nazism. She praised Hamas propaganda efforts employed by Abu Obaida that weaponize Nazi imagery against Israel, seemingly endorsing a media strategy that perversely brands Israel as a Nazi state to legitimize Hamas terrorism and invert historical truth.
In the same session, Manal Mazahreh, an associate professor of mass communication at the University of Petra, in Jordan, claimed that, “The Jews are largely controlling the media in the world,” repeating an antisemitic trope used to justify hostility toward Jews.
In one session, Eman Barakat, an associate professor at the University of Science and Technology in Yemen, described the Israeli government’s social media presence as “digital warfare” and claimed it has manipulated public perceptions by labeling Hamas as “pure evil” and an “illegitimate group.”
Barakat focused her presentation on Israel Speaks Arabic, a Facebook page with more than three million followers. She assessed that the page described Hamas as “morally degraded,” “lowly,” and “cowardly,” and highlighted the group’s involvement in criminal and murderous activity. She warned her audience that such language “makes you imagine things” and might lead users to believe that “maybe what they are saying is true.” Barakat dismissed Hamas’ history of brutality and terrorism not only against Israel but against Palestinians and others.
Freedom House evaluates Qatar as “Not Free” in its annual Freedom of the World report.
Al Jazeera sells its content to major wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters. Al Jazeera has resource-sharing agreements
Until Doha stops using its universities and state media to whitewash terrorism, American institutions and companies need to reconsider their relationship with all platforms in Al Jazeera’s vast ecosystem. Continued partnerships and collaboration from Western organizations only emboldens the next denial and further justification for violence.
Toby Dershowitz is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Asher Boiskin is an intern. Follow them on X @TobyDersh and @asherboiskin
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US House Backs Massive Defense Policy Bill, Senate Next
A US soldier keeps watch at an Afghan National Army base in Logar province, Afghanistan August 5, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Omar Sobhani/File Photo
The US House of Representatives passed a massive defense policy bill on Wednesday authorizing a record $901 billion in annual military spending, paving the way for the must-pass measure to become law for a 65th straight year.
The tally was 312-112 in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, sending it for consideration by the US Senate, which is expected to pass it next week.
The $901 billion in defense spending is $8 billion more than President Donald Trump’s request earlier this year.
The NDAA also provides $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine in each of the next two years and includes other measures reinforcing the US commitment to Europe’s defense, reflecting most lawmakers’ continuing strong support for Kyiv as it fights Russian invaders.
The sweeping 3,086-page bill unveiled on Sunday includes measures to make life better for the troops, including a 4% pay raise and improvements in base housing. But it does not include insurance coverage for military families to get fertility treatments, including embryo transfers for in vitro fertilization, something opposed by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a social conservative.
The legislation is a compromise between versions of the NDAA passed earlier this year by the Senate and House, both controlled by Trump’s Republicans. Members of both parties urged lawmakers to support it even if they objected to individual provisions.
“I do support this bill. This does not mean that I do not have concerns. I do,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, in a speech before the vote.
SPENDING LEVELS
Trump in May asked Congress for a national defense budget of $892.6 billion for fiscal year 2026, flat compared with 2025. The House bill set spending at that level, but the Senate had authorized $925 billion.
The NDAA authorizes Pentagon programs, but does not fund them. Congress must separately pass funding in a spending bill for the fiscal year ending in September 2026.
In addition to the typical NDAA provisions on defense acquisitions and competition with rivals like China and Russia, this year’s bill focuses on cutting programs reviled by Trump, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion training.
The NDAA is one of a few major pieces of legislation to make it through Congress every year and lawmakers take pride in having passed it annually since 1961.
This year’s process was a bit rockier than usual.
The rule paving the way for the House vote passed earlier on Wednesday by only 215 to 211 after a long delay in which a few Republicans changed their votes from “no” to “yes.”
Trump has said he will sign the NDAA into law once it reaches the White House.