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An astonishing history of wartime Berlin that reads like a thriller
Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945
Ian Buruma
Penguin Press, 400 pages, $35
World War II Berlin had its share of fanatical Nazis, along with a handful of courageous resisters. But it is the people navigating between these two moral poles that seem to interest Ian Buruma the most — those trying, against the odds, to remain “decent in a criminal state.”
It’s an idea that surfaces repeatedly in this wonderful book, whose title, Stay Alive, embodies the era’s other imperative. By 1943, Berlin was suffering mightily under Allied bombardment. Food, fuel and housing were growing scarcer. Civilians were spending nights and eventually days, too, underground. Facing annihilation, the regime was executing its own citizens for desertion, dissent or “defeatism.” In lieu of Heil Hitler or simply auf Wiedersehen, Buruma writes, Berliners commonly greeted one another with the admonition Bleiben Sie übrig (stay alive).
This detail was new to me, one of many small revelations in this immersive chronological account of a capital city in the vise of both Nazi tyranny and wartime privations. Buruma’s impressionistic cultural and social history touches on government propaganda, escapist cinema, the dilemmas of Germany’s artistic class, the courtroom dignity of Hitler’s opponents, the rigors of life in the bunkers, the desperation of the city’s last remaining Jews, and more. Stay Alive manages to be at once panoramic and intimate, dispassionate and deeply moving. It reads much like a thriller, albeit one where the ending is never in doubt.
With short, punchy sentences, Buruma, a chaired professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College and a prolific author, stitches together a variety of first-person sources to depict the city’s evolving routines and attitudes. Some, such as the journalist William Shirer’s Berlin Diary and the Berlin Diaries of the Russian aristocrat Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov, are familiar. Others, including the recollections and correspondence of Buruma’s own father, Leo Buruma, a Dutch forced laborer in the city from 1943 to 1945, are unique or surprising.
It was his father’s wartime letters home, written cautiously to elude Nazi censorship and avoid causing his parents anxiety, that inspired the book, Buruma says. Leo, who had been a law student, worked at a brake and machine gun factory, enduring vile living conditions, limited food and, as the Third Reich’s fortunes turned, the threat of death from Allied bombs. But he was not entirely a prisoner. For a while, he was able to enjoy some of the city’s cultural life and even pursue a romance with a Ukrainian forced laborer. Seven years after the war, he would marry a Jewish woman, Ian Buruma’s mother.
Two themes play out in Stay Alive. The first is Buruma’s consideration of the range of reactions and moral choices, from the bravest to the most craven, provoked by an immoral regime. “Not everyone is cut out to be a hero; and even heroes are not always morally pure,” he writes. “Compromises come with a price, however, some of which are more acceptable than others.”
The German officers and others involved in coup attempts against Hitler had varying degrees of involvement in the Nazi regime. Some had led the war effort; others were conservative nationalists, abhorring the Third Reich but still loyal to Germany. When it came to Berlin’s Jews, a minority of Berliners protested their treatment or offered protection. Far more looked away, or worse, as their neighbors disappeared. Many German actors, musicians and others — including Berlin Philharmonic conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler — swallowed their ideological objections to keep performing.
Buruma’s second narrative thread traces the disintegration of the city, from a thriving cultural redoubt to a battered hellscape, and the responses of its resilient but ultimately despairing residents. Buruma makes the somewhat questionable claim that terror bombing in itself failed to shatter morale. But, certainly, morale collapsed as German defeat appeared inevitable, and Nazi images and insignia were consigned to the flames.
From 1941 up until the war’s end, most of Berlin’s Jewish population was deported to concentration camps and murdered. Some Jews chose a dangerous, peripatetic underground existence instead. Among these “U-boats” was Marie Jalowicz, a lawyer’s daughter, whose ordeals Buruma describes. In her case, as well as others, shelter sometimes required sexual transactions. When the lecherous husband of a woman offering refuge showed up at her bedside, Buruma recounts, Jalowicz pragmatically “let him have his way.”
Jewish spouses in “mixed” marriages to non-Jews and the Mischlinge, generally children of such marriages, mostly escaped deportation. Buruma interviewed one such Mischling, Horst Selbiger, detained in 1943 with other Mischlinge and Jewish spouses in a former welfare office for Jews on Rosenstrasse. The wives of the Jewish detainees (and some others) famously gathered in protest, called out for their husbands’ release and refused to leave. The prisoners were eventually freed – a rare instance of successful public protest in Nazi Germany (or of any public protest at all).
Buruma also tracked down other Germans, in their 80s and 90s, who recollect childhood under siege in Berlin. Jörg Sonnabend, an ex-engineer, remembers a semblance of normal life, succeeded by a fear of British bombers. He, like Buruma’s father and other survivors, was left with lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder.
In the end, neither Nazi triumphalism, willed ignorance nor moral scruples proved a match for Allied firepower. And surrender brought no immediate relief. As many as 100,000 Berlin women and girls were raped by Soviet soldiers, Buruma reports, including Marie Jalowicz. Widespread hunger was calamitous, but the postwar situation rapidly improved.
One of Buruma’s messages is about the dangers of conformity, “the temptation to look away.” But he also describes Stay Alive as a love letter to Berlin, which in recent decades has become a potent memorial landscape. “The city itself is a monument,” he writes, “not only to man’s blackest depravity, but to its capacity to be reborn and live again.”
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Molly Crabapple’s book is well researched but ideologically biased
Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a captivating read. Drawing on the biographies of both major and lesser-known activists, Crabapple tells the history of almost 130 years of the Jewish Labor Bund. Her crackling, imaginative prose brings dry, documentary materials to life, and makes long-ago personalities feel contemporary.
Crabapple chooses Sam Rothbord , her great-grandfather, as a guide to the vanished world of Jewish Eastern Europe. Though Crabapple was born many years after his death, her family saved his photos and papers. Crabapple turns to these items to reconstruct a detailed picture of his life.
Born in the town of Volkovysk (now in Belarus), Sam joined the Bund as a young man. He soon immigrated to America, where he became an artist. His first exhibit was held at the former headquarters of the Forward on East Broadway.
Many well-known Bundists make an appearance in the book: Vladimir Medem, Arkady Kremer, Raphael Abramovitch, Mark Lieber, Sophie Dubnova-Erlich , Henryk Erlich, Viktor Alter and others.
Crabapple takes her readers through the cataclysmic events in which the Bund took part: the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, World War I, the establishment of the Polish republic and, finally, the Holocaust. Despite her great reverence for the Bundists’ heroism and sacrifice, Crabapple acknowledges that these heroic figures could also have difficult personalities. She often compares her own experiences as an activist on the left with the struggle of radicals around the world today.
The Bundists left behind a rich legacy of memoirs and documents. Crabapple synthesizes these sources into a lively narrative full of color and emotion.
Crabapple makes liberal use of graphic cliches, and she doesn’t hold back when it comes to representing the ‘bad guys.’ Describing the 1905 pogrom in Odessa, she writes: “Blood-smearedRussian mothers loaded their pushcarts with the spoils from looted Jewish houses, then had their kids torch their homes behind them as they left.” ”
Crabapple is well-versed in Marxist theory, having learned it from her father who, she writes, is a professor of political economy. She clearly explains the ideological differences between the Bund and other leftist parties. Unfortunately, her relationship to historical facts is occasionally a bit loose.
Czar Nicholas I, for example, did not limit the number of Jewish students in Russian universities; at the time there were simply nearly no Russian Jews who would have liked to study there. The so-called “percent norm” (quota) was first introduced by his grandson, Alexander III in 1887, over 30 years after Nicholas’ passing in 1855.
Crabapple also writes that “Tsar Nicholas I wrote his policies with the declared aim of forcing a third of Jews to die, a third to emigrate, and a third to convert to Christianity.” But Nicholas I never declared this; in fact, he strictly prohibited emigration from Russia. Many popular books on Russian Jewish history attribute this statement to Alexander III’s official, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, although no documentary source exists for this.
On the whole, Crabapple paints a historical landscape of the time in black and white. The good guys are the Bundists. The bad ones are various governments, the Bolsheviks and, of course, the Zionists. At fault for all the world’s ills is the West, with its capitalist, imperialist regimes.
The book is prominently anti-Zionist in its politics. This ideological direction must have been a motivating factor for Crabapple as she undertook this project — and she’s successfully conveyed it to her readers, reviving the old fighting spirit of Bundist polemics.
For all this, Crabapple isn’t blind to the political weakness of the Bund. “The Bund had accomplished many things in the areas of mutual aid, cultural production, and armed self-defense. But there was one thing that the Bund had neglected: the necessity of taking power.” A question lingers, however: did the Bund ever have that option, besides a handful of times in 1905, in Russian or Polish cities?
Here Where We Live Is Our Country offers a major intellectual resource for today’s generation of radical activists protesting Zionism and the State of Israel. There’s ample historical and theoretical ammo here for their arguments. At the same time, Crabapple’s book shows that far from every critic of Zionism is an anti-Semite (although many of them are).
Historically, it was Zionism that won out over the Bund, and the State of Israel is an undeniable fact. Indeed, Israel became a new home for many Bundists who survived the Holocaust. For Crabapple, however, that was their bad luck: “The lucky ones got visas for refugee communities in Melbourne and Johannesburg, Paris and Montevideo. Others were not so lucky. In the years after the Holocaust, hundreds of Bundist survivors left for Palestine.” Their party, she adds, meaning the Bund, “had given them fairy tales. Zionists offered a place where they could rebuild their lives.”
There’s a sense of mixed feelings here: disdain for the Zionists, coupled with the acknowledgement that the Bundist project had come to nothing and Zionism did a better job for the Jews. In keeping with Crabapple’s anti-Zionist attitude, she makes no mention of the Bund’s vibrant afterlife in Israel, which included figures such as Isaac Luden and Mordechai Tsanin, and the Israeli magazine Lebns-Fragen, which was highly critical of the Israeli government.
But perhaps the book’s greatest weakness is its deeply caricatured portrayal of Zionism. Not a single word is said about the major role of the Zionist program in Europe and America to support Jewish life in the diaspora. Compared to the Bundists, the Zionist activists were often less dogmatic in their perspective on Jewish culture.
Crabapple clearly demonstrates the ideological divide between the Bund and Zionism. However, she doesn’t seem to acknowledge what these two movements shared: a commitment to the future of the Jewish people. Both emerged from the political environment of late 19th-century Eastern and Central Europe, where various ethnic communities were seeking to reinvent themselves as nations.
The Bund and the Zionists offered two different responses to this challenge. One centered on diasporic nationhood, the other on the creation of a nation state. For both, however, Jewish peoplehood remained the primary concern.
Crabapple concludes her book on the Bund by thanking “the people of Palestine.” It’s a provocative and predictable call in today’s radicalized climate. What remains unclear, however, is who exactly these people are: do they include Israeli Jews? A Bundist answer, I suspect, would be “yes.”
The post Molly Crabapple’s book is well researched but ideologically biased appeared first on The Forward.
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At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America
On the National Mall Sunday, Christian worship music boomed from giant speakers as “Adonai” and other names of God flashed across jumbo screens behind a praise band. Pastors invoked America’s biblical destiny. Sadie Robertson, the Christian social media personality and granddaughter of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, preached from both the Old and New Testaments.
And then Rabbi Meir Soloveichik — the lone Jewish speaker at the planned nine-hour “Rededicate 250” rally called by President Donald Trump, billed as a national “jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving” — stepped to the podium and began talking about Irving Berlin.
Soloveichik, 48, a scion of one of modern Orthodoxy’s most revered rabbinic families and a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, used his remarks to offer a Jewish case for American exceptionalism, a contrast to the explicitly Christian vision of the nation’s founding that defined the day.
Recalling how Berlin wrote “God Bless America” as fascism spread across Europe and antisemitism consumed the continent, Soloveichik described the song as both a patriotic anthem and a prayer of gratitude from a Jewish immigrant who found refuge in the United States. The hymn, he said, represented “a plaintive prayer to God that America continue to be blessed.”
The four-minute speech fit squarely within Soloveichik’s broader worldview. A senior scholar at the conservative Tikvah Fund and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, he has long argued that America’s civic ideals are aligned with traditional Judaism and biblical morality. His 2024 book, Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship, examines Jewish political leadership through the lens of faith and moral responsibility.
For Soloveichik, the connection between Judaism and American identity culminated in the Second World War. He noted that “God Bless America” was first broadcast publicly the day after Kristallnacht, when Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and synagogues across Germany. “At the very moment when darkness deepened,” Soloveichik said, “America raised its voice united in the song that Irving Berlin wrote.”
He added that “in the years that followed 1938, the prayer that is ‘God Bless America’ was carried by American soldiers who defeated evil, liberating Europe and the world.”
Then came the line that drew some of the loudest applause of his remarks: “It is a reminder, as hatred of Jews makes itself manifest again, that antisemitism is utterly un-American.”
Separation of church and state
The moment captured the complicated role Jews increasingly occupy within the Trump-era religious right: embraced as part of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, even as critics warn that the broader movement surrounding events like Rededicate 250 blurs the line between religious pluralism and Christian nationalism.
Rachel Laser, the Jewish CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, denounced the rally before the event. “If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country,” she said in a statement. “Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian Nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans.”
Sunday’s event — part revival meeting, part patriotic pageant — was the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s religious programming tied to this year’s 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson were slated to appear alongside evangelical pastors, worship leaders and conservative Christian influencers. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance were scheduled to address the crowd by video, while Trump himself spent the weekend golfing after returning from an overseas trip to China.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” Johnson said Sunday on Fox News, dismissing criticism that the rally blurred the separation of church and state. Those objecting to the event, he added, “want to erase the history of America.”
No Muslim speakers appeared on the lineup. Organizers promoted Trump’s declaration of a national “Shabbat 250” observance the day prior as evidence of interfaith inclusion.
One of the Sunday event’s chief promoters, Trump spiritual adviser Pastor Paula White-Cain, had reassured supporters beforehand that the gathering would celebrate America’s Christian foundations without “praying to all these different Gods.”
Soloveichik did not address those tensions. Instead, he closed by returning to the image of America as a nation uniquely capable, in his telling, of transforming a Jewish refugee into the composer of one of the country’s most enduring patriotic hymns.
“To sing this song,” he said, “is to be reminded that America’s story is unique.”
“GOD BLESS AMERICA IS NOT JUST A SONG. IT’S A PRAYER.” 🇺🇸🙏
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik delivers a powerful reminder that America’s love of liberty has always been tied to faith — tracing its story and why anti-Semitism is fundamentally un-American. pic.twitter.com/aKMg42nS2I
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) May 17, 2026
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Israel to Establish Defense Offices in Former UNRWA Compound
A man handles fallen cables at the Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as the headquarters is dismantled by Israeli forces, in East Jerusalem, January 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Israel’s cabinet on Sunday approved a plan to build a defense compound on the site of the recently demolished premises of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem.
Israel in January demolished structures inside the UN Palestinian refugee agency’s East Jerusalem compound after seizing the site last year, in an act condemned by the agency as a violation of international law.
In a joint statement, the Defense Ministry and Jerusalem Municipality said the new compound would include the establishment of a military museum, a recruitment office and a defense minister’s office.
Defense Minister Israel Katz called the decision one of “sovereignty, Zionism, and security.”
UNRWA, which Israeli authorities accuse of bias, had not used the building since the start of last year after Israel ordered it to vacate all its premises and cease its operations.
A UNRWA spokesperson declined to comment on the Israeli plan.
The agency operates in East Jerusalem, which the U.N. and most countries consider territory occupied by Israel as it was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel considers all Jerusalem to be its indivisible capital.
UNRWA also operates in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East, providing schooling, healthcare, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians.
“There is nothing more symbolic or justified than establishing the new IDF recruitment office and defense establishment institutions precisely on the ruins of the former UNRWA compound — an organization whose employees took part in the massacres, murders, and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7,” Katz said.
Israel has alleged that some UNRWA staff were members of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and took part in the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 Israelis and led to Israel’s war against Hamas.