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A Yiddish circus in a suitcase
Imagine aerial acrobatics accompanied by a dreamy melody on fiddle and cimbalom. A juggler maneuvering seven bouncing balls at once to the beat of a klezmer band. A saxophonist charming a suspiciously human-looking snake with a terkisher (a type of klezmer dance) — and all this interwoven with Yiddish songs and poetic stories of distant hometowns and faded Jewish circus traditions. Above all, suitcases, serving as seats, drums, and, of course, containers for circus equipment.
This is just a glimpse of the show “Tshemodan,” performed by what may be Germany’s first Yiddish circus company, Tsirk Dobranotch. The word tshemodan, Yiddish for “suitcase,” is the company’s second production. The ensemble consists of the klezmer band Dobranotch, joined by circus artists Sam Gurwitt and Eliana Pliskin Jacobs.
Jacobs, an aerialist and singer, has been dreaming of creating a klezmer circus ever since she entered the Yiddish scene in Berlin and other cities in Germany around 2018. In 2022, she met Sam Gurwitt, and they soon realized that they shared not only a background as circus artists but also a connection to the Yiddish and klezmer world: Gurwitt is trained both as a clown and as a klezmer fiddler. Creating a klezmer circus together was the obvious next step.
A few months later, Jacobs, a longtime fan of the band Dobranotch, pitched the idea to its members who have long been known for including comedy and stunts in their musical performances. “We like to do entertainment and eccentric, funny things, and with the circus company we tried to put it on another level,” said Mitia Khramtsov, the band’s fiddle player.
Tsirk Dobranotch’s first show, “Das Fliegende Balagan,” (Yiddishized German for “flying bedlam”) premiered in Dresden in 2023. For their second production, the group decided to incorporate a more coherent “thematic glue,” as Gurwitt calls it, focusing on the theme of migration as reflected in the title “Tshemodan” and to use the suitcase as a recurring element.
Migration — whether voluntary, pressured, or forced – is an experience that runs through all the ensemble members’ family histories or personal biographies. Jacobs and Gurwitt both grew up in the United States as grandchildren of German and Eastern European Holocaust survivors and moved to Germany in their twenties. Dobranotch members Mitia Khramtsov, Germina Gordienko, Ilya Gindin, and Evgenii Lizin are from St. Petersburg and fled to Germany after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They were joined by Paul Milmeister, who was born in Ukraine and migrated to Germany as a teenager. Some of the Tshemodan shows feature Bertan Canbeldek, an acrobat who was born in Germany to Turkish parents, as a guest artist.
Aside form the overall theme of migration and wandering, the company’s mission is to recall the almost forgotten history of Jewish circuses in pre-Holocaust Europe. In one of Jacobs’s solo acts, she tells the story of Jewish families, among them the Blumenfeld, Lorch, and Straßburger families, who had been running circuses in German-speaking Europe since the 17th century. She then asks herself whether her German-Jewish grandmother might have seen one of the pre-war Jewish circuses.
Comparing herself to “a ghost connecting the living with the dead, the past with the present,” Jacobs swings on a trapeze in a pensive, elegant aerial performance to the delicate sound of a slow hora played by Khramtsov and Gordienko.
Tsirk Dobranotch is aware, however, that these German and Western European Jewish circuses were historically not closely related to Eastern European Yiddish culture or klezmer music. This incongruence makes it difficult to justify why klezmer and circus would go together, Gurwitt admitted. On the other hand, as Jacobs pointed out, “the theme of wandering works well with both circus and klezmer.”
In fact, there is evidence that the klezmer musicians who played at weddings in different shtetls may have been accompanied by jugglers and acrobats. In fact, Khramtsov said, the old tradition of badkhonim (wedding jesters), certainly had historical connections to medieval Jewish jesters known as leytsonim.
While these links between Yiddish culture and the circus world did exist, Jewish culture and religion didn’t play much of a role in the Jewish circuses traveling throughout the German-speaking regions. As Jacobs put it: “They were normal circus performers who happened to be Jewish.”
According to Jacobs and Gurwitt, Jews joining and running important German circuses was evidence of their assimilation into the broader society, even though it eventually failed. Under the Nazi regime, Jewish circus artists were boycotted and persecuted; forced into hiding or exile, and many were eventually murdered.
But there was one circus performer that did not try to hide his Jewish identity. That was Siegmund “Zishe” Breitbart, also called the Iron King and allegedly the “strongest man on Earth.” Born in 1897 and raised in the Yiddish-speaking community of Lodz (at that time part of the Russian Empire), Breitbart overtly expressed his Jewishness on stage. Many of his advertisements and costumes, and even the chariot on which he entered the arena, were adorned with Magen David decorations.
In “Tshemodan,” Gurwitt brings Breitbart’s heroic figure to life by wittily constructing an entire mime act around a muscleman displaying his physical strength. Accompanied by a klezmer march, using only a kitchen towel as a prop, he keeps the audience in laughter and suspense, throwing an imaginary elephant up in the air.
As Tsirk Dobranotch celebrates its third year, it’s clear that audiences have come to love the show, as seen by their cheers and standing ovations. Many audience members even join in the dance leading the troupe offstage after the show.
As the company plans a new show for 2026, their fans can only guess what they’ll continue to unpack from their suitcases.
The post A Yiddish circus in a suitcase appeared first on The Forward.
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FBI charges 8 tied to U of Michigan pro-Palestinian movement with threatening officials, Jewish federation
(JTA) — The FBI arrested eight pro-Palestinian demonstrators connected to the University of Michigan Wednesday, charging them with conspiracy to threaten university leaders and their families as part of a pressure campaign to get the school to divest from Israel.
The charges were filed May 20 and unsealed Wednesday following arrests in multiple states. According to the charging documents, the defendants “used encrypted messages, social media platforms, and overseas collaboration platforms to research, target, and attack their victims.” The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit was included in the indictment as one target of the demonstrators.
The charging documents allege that the eight defendants hunted down information about multiple targets; described to each other how they would “kill,” “torment,” and “terrorize” their targets; and carried out some of their plans.
In one message, Ahmet Korkaya, who was at the time a medical student, allegedly wrote to another defendant about a member of the university’s Board of Regents that he would “poison her ass slowly.” His co-defendant allegedly replied that the group needed to “get into that house then burn it down.”
“In America, we rule by law not by fear. These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr., of the FBI’s Detroit office said in a statement.
The eight people charged include three men and five women all between the ages of 21 and 28. They were arrested in multiple locations in Michigan as well as in Chicago and Milwaukee.
The indictment alleges that the defendants were responsible for vandalism of the Jewish federation building on Oct. 7, 2024, the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.
In addition to the federation, the targets named in the indictment include the university’s former president, Santa Ono; its chief investment officer and provost; members of its Board of Regents and their businesses; a campus police officer; and multiple companies.
The TAHRIR Coalition, a pro-Palestinian collective at the University of Michigan that has coordinated much of the campus’s protest activity, rallied supporters Wednesday to protest outside courthouses in Detroit and Milwaukee where the suspects had been detained.
Jordan Acker, a Jewish university regent, is not named in the indictment. But one of the incidents described is the vandalism of his law office in June 2024. (Acker’s car was also vandalized with pro-Palestinian grafitti while he and his children were home, just a few months later.)
Acker did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment. A spokesperson for the Jewish federation declined to comment.
Federal and state authorities raided three homes belonging to campus protesters in April 2025 as part of a federal probe into acts of vandalism cited in the indictment.
The unsealed indictment represents the second major set of charges made against a group of pro-Palestinian protesters at the university. In May 2025, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped state charges she had filed against seven pro-Palestinian student protesters — a different group from those arrested Wednesday. Nessel’s charges, brought the previous September, were related to the protesters’ participation in university encampments in May 2024. The attorney who defended the protesters, Amir Makled, bested Acker for the state Democratic Party’s nomination for a university oversight position this spring.
Nessel’s office was listed by the FBI as having provided “assistance” on the investigation. Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the state attorney general told JTA the office “was not involved in today’s warrant operations.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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