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As long as there are movies about Nazis, there will be movies about the art they looted
Early on in Pascal Bonitzer’s film Auction, Andre (Alex Lutz). a self-serving and sleazy art dealer, is placating a condescending, cruel, and racist art owner. “You have to stop at nothing for a sale,” he tells his intern.
The French film vividly brings to life the deceptive and hypocritical high-stakes world of prestigious art dealers operating in a Parisian universe of money grubbing and bad faith.
Based on a true story, it recounts what transpired in 2005, when a major work by Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, “Wilted Sunflowers,” was discovered in a home in a suburb of Mulhouse, France.
The 1914 painting originally belonged to the Jewish Austrian collector Karl Grunwald and had last been seen in public at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1937. In 1938 Grunwald fled Vienna for Paris, saving as many paintings as he could in a storage unit. They were ultimately looted and auctioned off.
Grunwald made it to America, while his wife and children were killed in concentration camps. For the rest of his life he futilely tried to recover his stolen paintings. Following his death in 1964, one of his sons persevered in his late father’s pursuit.
Bonitzer places the Schiele in the home of Martin (Arcadi Radeff) a highly moral, arguably sentimentalized, young factory worker who has no idea of its monetary value or backstory. Concepts of “provenance” are alien to him; he could use some money and just wants to do the right thing. So do the rightful heirs.
The whole story ends on a positive note as the painting gets sold at auction and the young worker is given an equal share in the sale.
It is estimated that more than 600,000 paintings, decorative items and other aesthetically and culturally valued items were summarily stolen from Jews during the War. Approximately, 100,000 have never been recovered.
Auction is only the latest in a long line of works centering on Nazi-looted art.
Perhaps the best known film in this sub-genre is 2015’s The Woman in Gold, which starred Helen Mirren as the patrician Maria Altmann, who works in tandem with her dogged attorney to retrieve six paintings by Gustav Klimt, one of which was a portrait of Maria’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I.
The Klimts were ripped off by the Nazis during World War II and exhibited in Austria at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere until 2006. After a lengthy and byzantine legal battle, a number of the works were returned to the Altmann Family, which sold the Adele portrait for $135 million to Ronald Lauder who proudly displays the work in his Neue Galerie.
It would seem axiomatic that any stolen art should be restored to its original owners or, more usually, their heirs. For some, however, it’s a grayer area filled with moral and legal questions, starting with how the work was obtained. Was it purchased in good faith? If the current owners(let’s add “s”) truly didn’t know its origins should they be allowed to keep it? If not, how much compensation, if any, should they receive?
And, more broadly, who should own great art — a private collector or a museum? Doesn’t the public have a right to see great art? Wouldn’t it be better for a museum to have and display the work rather than a family who may hide it in its basement?
One of the most interesting elements in the “Gold” story, which was also addressed in the documentaries Adele’s Wishes and Stealing Klimt was the Austrian government’s contention that Adele, who succumbed to meningitis in 1925, had in fact left the painting to her husband with the stipulation that when he died it would go to the Austrian gallery. Therefore it was rightly theirs.
But if the will existed — and that was debatable — was it legally binding since Adele’s husband was forced to flee the country in the wake of Germany’s annexation of Austria, which Adele had no way of anticipating? Her will, if there was one, was predicated on the idea that he would die at home and that his art collection would remain intact and in his possession when he passed.
The Rape of Europa, a comprehensive and detailed documentary on pillaged art also touches on the dilemma surrounding Adele’s portrait, but it places the crime in a wider context, considering the questions that emerge when one country or culture appropriates the art of another. Still, it makes clear that the most egregious example is the Nazi seizure of Jewish art.
Much of the art in question, modern, abstract and acclaimed by the likes of Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, much of it owned by Jewish collectors, fell into the category that Hitler dubbed “degenerate,” which gave him the opportunity to further dehumanize those owners. Most of the paintings were destroyed while others were sold for enormous profits in order to underwrite a massive build up of armaments for the Third Reich.
The documentary, The Portrait of Wally, is a searing indictment of MoMA and other major American art institutions that supported MoMA in a less-than-exemplary 1997 episode.
The film recounts the brouhaha surrounding Egon Schiele’s painting of his mistress Wally, owned by Lea Bondi, a Jewish Austrian art dealer before it was grabbed by the Nazis in 1939.
Prior to landing at MoMA it was housed in Rudolph Leopold’s Austrian museum. Leopold was a classic double dealer, pretending to be on the side of the original owners and their heirs when in fact he had no intention of handing over the painting.
But when the painting was on loan to MoMA, the Bondi heirs demanded that it be returned to them. Rudolph refused, which led to a 13-year criminal investigation launched by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, during which time the painting was held by the United States government.
According to the film, MoMA and other art institutions sided with Rudolph because they were afraid that aligning themselves with the Jewish family would mean that museums across the globe would no longer lend their works to American museums for fear that they might potentially lose their art or have to pay big bucks to have it returned.
Ultimately in 2010 the Bondi heirs prevailed. The Leopold Museum paid them $19 million for the painting’s return. That case succeeded in opening the floodgates to many others. And a surge of films on the topic followed.
Movies centering on Nazi-looted art have been around for decades, such as John Frankenheimer’s 1965 action thriller The Train starring Burt Lancaster; and 39 years later George Clooney’s The Monuments Men, both loosely inspired by factual events.
Set in 1944, shortly before the end of the war, The Train is a suspenseful and well-acted account of a French resistance fighter (Lancaster) determined to intercept a train carrying Nazi looted art from France to Germany without destroying the art.
Set in the same era, the starry Monuments Men, co-written and directed by George Clooney and featuring Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and Cate Blanchett, among others, depicts a unit of historians and archivists on a mission to locate and salvage works of art across Europe before the Nazis had a chance to steal and destroy them.”
Despite the caliber of talent involved, e.g., the film was seen as problematic because of its failure to point out that many, if not most, of these art works had belonged to Jews and were brutally confiscated from the original owners, many of whom had been carted off to concentration camps to be killed.
Clooney and his Jewish co-writer said that their purpose was to explore not the experience of any one group but the profound significance of great art and the violation that’s perpetrated when it is stolen, or worse, destroyed.
Both Clooney and Frankenheimer’s films also touch on the moral quandary of whether a great painting is more valuable than a human life. If the risk to save the art is that high is it worth taking?
For me the most affecting film on lost art is Elizabeth Rynecki’s 2018 documentary Chasing Portraits, her freshman endeavor. Even though — perhaps precisely because — at times it feels more like a home movie than a professionally honed flick it reveals an emotional core that is unexpectedly moving.
Equally relevant, her film centers on paintings that were scattered after the War. They may or may not have been looted, but their fate was directly tied to the Nazi regime that forced Jewish residents to escape without their precious belongings.
Rynecki grew up surrounded by the art of her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki, who was murdered at Majdanek in 1943. His evocative expressionistic works portray the day to day life of Polish Jews prior to the Holocaust. Of his estimated 800 works, 120 remain in Polish and Israeli museums and private collections abroad.
Throughout her life Rynecki had wanted to see these works, not to reclaim them, but to uncover how they ended up where they were. She serves as a historian and witness, her great grandfather’s art a link to her family and Jewish heritage and a world that is gone forever.
The film follows her as she travels from Canada to Poland and Israel where she is, by turns, regarded with suspicion or more usually snubbed outright. Many owners, some Jewish, cannot believe that she is not there for restitution. In one of the strongest scenes, a Polish collector, a gentile, wraps up and hands over to Elizabeth one of her great grandfather’s paintings, unsolicited.
It’s a story that lingers and will no doubt continue to inspire more documentaries and feature films. Just this week, The Guardian reported that the heirs of a Jewish couple are suing The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over a Vincent van Gogh painting they say was plundered by the Nazis.
‘Auction’ is currently screening in New York at Film Forum.
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Yiddishkayt LA and New Lehrhaus merge — but is this good for Yiddish?
For most Jewish institutions, “partnership” might mean a shared event or a guest lecture. But for Yiddishkayt LA and the Bay Area’s New Lehrhaus — two organizations separated by 370 miles and decades of distinct histories — this merger represents something far bolder. They are fusing identities, communities and visions of what West Coast Jewish culture can become.
Rob Adler Peckerar, formerly a key figure at Yiddishkayt LA, has now been appointed director of New Lehrhaus. In an interview he said that the merger strengthens both institutions rather than diluting either one.
Aaron Paley, the founder of Yiddishkayt LA, agrees. “We’re not amplifying one approach at the expense of the other; we’re amplifying both,” he said, adding that he first encountered the Lehrhaus tradition as a UC Berkeley student in the 1970s. The merger, he added, “immediately felt like a homecoming.”
Officially launched November 1, the merger wasn’t born of crisis. It grew from two organizations with parallel instincts: Yiddishkayt LA’s eclectic cultural programming and New Lehrhaus’s commitment to text, dialogue, and community learning.
A celebration — but not without concerns
But some Yiddish fans are concerned about the merger. “We’re 114 neighborhoods in a trench coat pretending to be a cohesive city,” said Aaron Castillo-White, director of the Yiddish culture organization Kultur Mercado and a former member of the Forward’s development staff.
“Yiddishkayt LA was one of the few forces stitching its Yiddish community together.” Now that it will no longer be a separate institution, he’s worried that the “already fragile cohesion” might suffer even more.
The question is: If Yiddishkayt LA becomes absorbed into New Lehrhaus’s broader educational framework, what will happen to LA’s uniquely local Yiddish culture — the concerts, neighborhood pop-ups, cross-art collaborations, and street-level programming? They may not easily transplant into a text-centered institution.
But Adler Peckerar isn’t worried, noting that, in recent years, newer groups like Der Nister and Kultur Mercado have already begun organizing on-the-ground Yiddish programming. Yiddishkayt LA, on the other hand, had moved away from local, place-based events toward livestreamed programs, online archives, virtual learning and broader national audiences who would never attend in-person Los Angeles events.
To understand the stakes, it’s important to understand who these two merging organizations are.
Two genealogies, one experiment
Yiddishkayt LA, founded by Paley in the 1990s, helped define a distinct West Coast model of Yiddish culture: contemporary, experimental and rooted in doikayt — “being present” in one’s milieu. Its Helix Fellowship shaped young artists who saw Jewish culture not as nostalgia, but as creative raw material.
New Lehrhaus, launched in 2021 by Rachel and David Biale, has different roots: In the early 20th century, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig founded an informal educational institution in Frankfurt, Germany, called Lehrhaus, that brought assimilated German Jews into engaging Judaic study without demanding any background knowledge or religious observance.
In the new incarnation, based in the Bay Area, the New Lehrhaus became a home for Jews seeking text and dialogue across denominations and backgrounds.
Last year, after Rachel Biale stepped down as director of the New Lehrhaus, the incoming director, Adler Peckerar, saw the joining of forces as a natural evolution. “Merging two strong organizations isn’t about defeat or one absorbing the other,” he said. “It’s strategic thinking about how to build something that can weather today’s volatile nonprofit landscape.”
But that innovation also sharpens Castillo-White’s concern: What disappears when two distinct ecosystems become one?
Diverging visions of the merger’s impact
Castillo-White described Yiddishkayt as “one of the only cultural bridges” in Los Angeles. He worries that a merger, even one made in good faith, could dilute that hyper-local energy.
Adler Peckerar disagrees. Unlike Castillo-White, he argued the merger will expand — not shrink — opportunities for Yiddish. “We’re broadening the ecosystem,” he said.
Biale framed the merger around a larger question facing Jewish institutions: How do they stay relevant without losing depth? She believes that the merger could bring Yiddishkayt LA fans into a much larger orbit of learning, featuring sessions with scholars like the University of Toronto professor Naomi Seidman who writes about the relationship between Judaism, literature, gender studies, translation studies and sexuality.
The new organization plans to dive into an eclectic range of fields in contemporary culture — physics, poetry, Leonard Cohen — as a doorway into Jewish texts. Adler Peckerar believes this approach could make Jewish learning feel relevant for Jews who may otherwise have little or no connection to Jewish learning.
They’re also planning intimate reading circles on radical Jewish thinkers such as Isaac Deutscher, Rosa Luxemburg and Gustav Landauer; classes on endangered Jewish languages and Hasidic history and experimental Yiddish theater and new one-act plays.
What remains to be seen is how the new Lehrhaus-Yiddishkayt will balance its broadened reach with the local energies that shaped each institution. Many in the community will be watching to see which parts of the old ecosystems endure, and what new forms of Yiddish culture might emerge.
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At long last, a TV show captures the experience of multi-racial Jewish families like mine
The new CBS television series Boston Blue has achieved what I long thought impossible — something close to an accurate portrayal of a multi-racial Jewish-American family.
The show, which quietly debuted last month as a spinoff of the hit series Blue Bloods, centers around the Silver family — a clan of police officers and elected officials helping to maintain safety and order across Beantown. They include siblings Lena, who is Black, Sarah, who is white, and Jonah, who is bi-racial.
“We’re just one big happy kinda confusing family,” Lena declares in the pilot episode, as she explains that her mother married Sarah’s father — with Jonah arriving shortly thereafter. And by establishing the Silver family tree so early on, Boston Blue softens the audience up for its real wild-card: The Silvers are all loudly, proudly and unapologetically Jewish.
Their family reminds me of my own. And I think the show got just about everything about our experience right.
In the pilot episode, Detective Danny Reagan (Blue Bloods veteran Donny Wahlberg) arrives in Boston to care for his injured son — who happens to be Jonah Silver’s partner — and is invited by family matriarch, District Attorney Mae Silver, to the type of “family dinner” made famous by Reagan’s own family on Blue Bloods.
Which is how Reagan unexpectedly finds himself at a Shabbat dinner.
When Mae married Sarah’s father — District Judge Ben Silver — she and Lena converted to Judaism, Reagan learns. Jonah was raised in the faith. But Judge Silver was killed a year earlier, leaving Mae’s father, Rev. Edwin Peters, as the de-factor paterfamilias — a Black pastor at one of Boston’s oldest Black churches, kippah-clad and leading a family of Jews as they light Shabbat candles and recite traditional prayers.
It might all seem a bit far-fetched. Unless you know my own family.
We have white Jews, Black pastors, Asian uncles, Latino ex-husbands and mixed-race Jewish twins — that would be my sister and I. Separated on both coasts, it’s been awhile since we all came together for Shabbat like the Silvers. But if we did, our gathering would look a lot like theirs — minus the mansion on Beacon Hill.
This is what makes Boston Blue so refreshing and unexpected. The Silvers’ Jewishness never feels confrontational or contrived.
There are close to 1 million “Jews-of-color” in the United States today, but Boston Blue accurately understands that the family would still be an enigma to most American viewers. But rather than dwell on this potential narrative hiccup, the show’s writers cannily deployed it as a narrative device instead. These are folks who understand they must often explain their unique family dynamics, but ultimately have nothing to prove. They are both confident and casual in their faith.
As a Jew whom many other Jews often fail to recognize as one of their own, I’ve too often felt I’m not allowed to just be Jewish. So it thrills me to see the Silvers so matter-of-fact and well-adjusted in their Judaism — even if it’s only onscreen.
Two years after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war with Hamas in Gaza, I went into Boston Blue worried about how Israel, antisemitism, Zionism and anti-Zionism might unfold within the show. Owing to the burdens of identity politics and intersectionality, Jews of color are often tasked with bridge-building amid these fractious and conflicted arenas.
Would they be forced to do the same on TV?
Former Law and Order star Ari’el Stachel — whose Israeli father is of Yemenite heritage — speaks of this duty in his new one-man show Other, now playing in New York. Stachel’s parents are both Jewish. But owing to his darker skin, he possesses a fluency in the optics of ethnicity that often sees him forced to field questions about cross-cultural discourse — even when, like me, he so often wishes the askers would just leave him alone.
I think Stachel would be satisfied by Boston Blue, whose showrunners aptly decided to keep war and hate away from the Shabbat table. Rather than try to shoe-horn the current political climate into the narrative, they avoided it all together. I, for one, was relieved: it’s a gift to see a family like mine onscreen, just being together, without being forced to try and solve all our myriad cultural problems at the same time.
I’ve always been leery of the entire concept of “Jews of color”; I worry it can impede us from understanding that all Jews are equally Jewish. So I was nervous heading into Boston Blue. For so long, so many in Hollywood have gotten our stories wrong at best, and been downright offensive at worst. They’ve tokenized and politicized and fetishized our experiences, while failing to actually humanize families like the Silvers and my own. But Boston Blue got it right — and it’s a step, long overdue, in the right direction.
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Mamdani: Israel immigration event at NY synagogue misused ‘sacred space’
(JTA) — Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s team has responded to a protest targeting an event promoting migration to Israel at an Upper East Side synagogue on Wednesday night, suggesting that the event was an inappropriate use of a “sacred space.”
The protest was organized by a group called Palestinian Assembly for Liberation has drawn allegations of antisemitism from Jewish leaders in the city. During it, participants shouted phrases including “globalize the intifada” and “death to the IDF” as well as insults toward pro-Israel counter-protesters like “f—king Jewish pricks,” according to reports from the scene. Police separated the protesters and counter-protesters but did not halt the demonstration.
“The Mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so,” Mamdani’s press secretary, Dora Pekec, said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
She went on, “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
Pekec did not offer further comments about whether or why Mamdani believed the event at Park East Synagogue, a prominent Orthodox congregation, violated international law.
The event was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, the nonprofit that facilitates immigration to Israel for North American Jews. The organization bills its open house events as a chance to “get your questions answered, learn about the process, and discover what life in Israel could look like for you and your family.”
The group is considered a semi-governmental agency in Israel, receiving funding from the Israeli government and works closely with its ministries. It does not assign immigrants to particular communities, but has showcased West Bank settlements — which most of the world, though not Israel or the United States, considers illegal under international law — in events and on its website as possible destinations for new immigrants. (Previous protests in New York and beyond have targeted events at synagogues advertising real estate for sale in the West Bank.)
The organizing group suggested that all of the Jews who have moved to Israel with Nefesh B’Nefesh’s support are “settlers,” a term that some pro-Palestinian activists apply to all Israelis, not just those living in the West Bank.
“Nefesh b Nefesh is an affiliate of the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency for Israel, mainly responsible for the recruitment of settlers to Palestine from North America. Since 2003, they have recruited over 80,000 settlers of which over 13,000 served in the IOF,” Palestinian Assembly for Liberation said in an Instagram post advertising its demonstration, using an acronym by which anti-Israel activists refer to the Israeli army as the “Israel Occupation Forces.” It also called El Al “Genocide Settler Airlines.”
The demonstration is providing an early window into how Mamdani’s long- and deeply held pro-Palestinian views might influence his leadership of the city.
As a state Assemblyman, he sponsored legislation aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank that some, including critics of the settlement movement, decried as casting an overly broad net.
During the campaign, he initially declined to condemn the protest phrase “globalize the intifada,” drawing allegations of antisemitism. He later shifted to say that he would “discourage” the phrase’s use in New York City, saying that he had learned from a rabbi that many Jews interpret it as a call to violence against them.
Now, Mamdani’s response to the Park East demonstration offers a stark contrast to two robust condemnations of antisemitism he has offered up since being elected, after a swastika was painted on a Brooklyn yeshiva and after the words “F–k Jews” were painted on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Both times, he quickly offered a full-throated denunciation on social media.
This time, even as prominent Jewish voices in the city alleged antisemitism on the part of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, Mamdani did not make a public comment himself. His office’s statement did not address allegations of antisemitism.
Mayor Eric Adams, who is in Uzbekistan after a visit to Israel this week, said in a statement that he planned to visit Park East upon his return to the city. Calling the rhetoric shouted there “desecration,” he suggested that the protest augured a grim future for the city under Mamdani.
“Today it’s a synagogue. Tomorrow it’s a church or a mosque. They come for me today and you tomorrow,” Adams tweeted. “We cannot hand this city over to radicals.”
The event came the same day that Mamdani announced that Adams’ police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, would stay on once he becomes mayor. Tisch, who is Jewish, has previously criticized the conduct of pro-Palestinian protesters in the city.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, who has been staunchly critical of Mamdani and whose father is the longtime senior rabbi at Park East Synagogue, said he was distressed by how the police allowed the confrontation to unfold.
“What I find most disturbing is that the police, who knew about this protest a day in advance, did not arrange for the protesters to be moved to either Third or Lexington Avenues,” he said. “Instead, they allowed the protesters to be right in front of the synagogue, which put members of the community at risk.”
One of the demonstrators repeatedly shouted about the Nefesh B’Nefesh event attendees, “We need to make them scared,” according to video from the scene.
“This kind of intimidation of Jewish New Yorkers is reprehensible and unacceptable,” tweeted Mark Levine, the Jewish comptroller-elect. “No house of worship, of any faith, should be subjected to this.”
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, decried the demonstration as “reprehensible.”
“It is not a violation of any law, international or otherwise, for Jews to gather in a synagogue or immigrate to Israel,” he said.
“Using violent rhetoric and hurling antisemitic insults in front of a crowded synagogue was a direct threat to our community’s safety,” he added. “JCRC-NY reached out to city officials and we have confidence that the NYPD will thoroughly investigate this serious matter. No one should ever have to fear entering or leaving their house of worship and that includes our Jewish neighbors. We stand with the Park East community and with all New Yorkers who reject hate.”
In a statement from a spokesperson, UJA-Federation New York said they were “outraged by the demonstration outside Park East Synagogue.”
“We’ve been in contact with our partners at the NYPD, and they are taking this matter very seriously,” the statement reads. “Calls to ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘death to the IDF’ are not political statements—they are incitements to violence against Jewish people. Every leader must denounce this heinous language, and the choice to target a house of worship makes it especially vile.”
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