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Created in hiding during WWII, a Jewish artist’s underground ‘zines are finally rising to the surface
What do you do when you finally admit to yourself that you’ve had something akin to Anne Frank’s diary in your living room for your entire life?
Simone Bloch mostly ignored it. The four bound volumes were like all the other antiques in the Queens home furnished by her parents, who traveled to Europe on buying trips for their Midtown store, Continental Antiques — nothing to see there. Occasionally, her father pulled one of the old-timey looking books down from a shelf and read a poem aloud. In German. WTF?
Here’s WTF: Simone’s father, Curt Bloch, a wicked satirist, wrote those poems. He also wrote songs and essays and wartime updates. Hundreds of them. He made collages of Nazis — Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, all the biggies — depicting them as babies, animals, buffoons. He somehow managed to corral all of this into 96 postcard-sized magazines while hiding from the Germans and their Dutch collaborators in an attic crawl space in Enschede, Holland, from August, 1943 to April, 1945. He produced them at a pace of one per week.
To be clear: Curt didn’t print his magazines; how could he? There was, and still is, a single copy of each which circulated among 30 or so of the Jews hiding in Enschede. Het Onderwater Cabaret, or The Underwater Cabaret, was Curt’s answer to the untenable situation he, his family, and the rest of Europe’s Jews had found themselves in. The title is a play on the Dutch expression for hidden Jews: “Onderduikers.”
Divers.
I: Going Down
In 1933, Curt Bloch was in his early 20s and living in his native city of Dortmund. He was a Jewish lawyer with a promising career in the judiciary when the Reich decreed that no Jew could hold a position in the civil service, and he was forced to resign. A non-Jewish co-worker sent a gang of Nazis to beat him up, and soon after, as more Nazis were knocking at his door, he escaped out of an attic window, crossed the German border, and rode into the Netherlands on a bicycle.
Curt stopped first in the Hague and then settled in Amsterdam, working odd jobs, including selling carpets and antiques. He slipped back into Germany just once, to submit a death certificate for his father, a veteran who’d fought for Germany in World War I. In May 1940, the German Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, and the disenfranchisement of Jews proceeded much as it had in Germany. Dutch Jews carried ID cards stamped with J, were forbidden from holding civil service jobs, and were barred from schools, universities and public facilities. By May 1942, they were forced to sign over their assets to the Reich, affix yellow stars to their clothes, and were now eligible for “resettlement,” a process that began in a crammed cattle car and ended in a concentration camp in Poland. Curt went into hiding.
II. Dry Land
Simone Bloch is a therapist and sometime playwright who lives in a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her mother, Ruth, a survivor of several camps, is 100 years old and lives in her own apartment on the ground floor. Simone shares the rest of her house intermittently with her three children and four grandchildren, an ever-changing number of dogs, plus the occasional traveler. Currently, her elder daughter, Hannah, a lawyer like her grandfather, is ensconced with her husband, children and dog while she teaches law at a local university.
I know all this because Simone is a friend. We met in Central Park when my dog, Otis, was a puppy, and her dog, Manny, still roamed the earth. Since then, we have been two-thirds of a weekly writing group . Even when we don’t have any writing to discuss, we meet and talk, and Simone, in her therapist’s guise, comes in particularly handy. Over the past 11 years, we have watched Simone, now in her mid-60s, midwife her father’s work, which miraculously survived the journey from Enschede to Manhattan, back out into the world.
What took so long?
Simone had to do all the other life things before she did this. And, as she puts it, it wasn’t so appealing to have this story. Really, nobody wants to hear it. But Simone never had the luxury of not knowing about death. Other people had grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins. What is a grandmother? young Simone wanted to know. Where was hers? Her parents told her. After that, she assumed everyone else must know about death, too. There were a few kids in high school whose parents had survived the Holocaust, but talking about it wasn’t a thing back then.
As if that wasn’t enough, when Simone was 10, her 22 year-old brother, Stephen, died by suicide. He was born in Amsterdam and made the journey to New York with parents when he was just one. It was the 1950s, a time of conformity, and his German-speaking, Holocaust-surviving parents distinctly did not conform. The transmission of trauma is real, says Simone. Being the child of survivors had a profound effect on her brother’s emotional health. Simone, herself, was a quiet child who cried easily, but as she became more aware of her parents’ past and processed her brother’s death, she was determined to be the tough one, the one who got her shit together. Then, when she was 15, Curt died.
Simone had had a difficult relationship with her father. She was a wild teenager who didn’t consider her own trauma until quite recently, having spent the better part of her life diminishing the sadness to herself, to other people, and eventually, to her children. She acknowledges the fury she felt towards her father when he tried to rein her in, though she didn’t realize what brand of dangerous behavior Curt imagined she might be engaged in until she was in her 50s and saw the German television series Babylon Berlin.
Curt tried to keep Simone safe because he could not do that for his sisters. Erna, the elder, was deported with her husband, Max, and both were murdered in the camps. Curt’s younger sister, Leni, along with their mother, had followed Curt to the Netherlands and gone into hiding separately from him. The two women were discovered and deported. They were murdered at Sobibor. Leni was just 19.
Simone used our writing group sessions as a kind of psychoanalysis. Curt became a character she had to contend with. Like her father, Simone is both furious and funny, and Curt’s gift for satire — that particular admixture of anger, fear and humor that is a common Jewish coping mechanism — has been his legacy to her. For Simone, it is her defense against the world, most particularly from ending up like her brother.
III: Surfacing
Simone’s daughter Lucy became interested in The Underwater Cabaret when she was an undergraduate at Grinnell studying history and German. She asked Simone what the little magazines were, exactly. Simone replied: “Your grandfather made them while he was in hiding.” Did other families have something like them? Lucy wanted to know. (“As though everyone in hiding was doing craft projects,” Simone told me over the phone.) Simone said no. Lucy got a grant to go to Germany and see if there were non-Jewish equivalents to Het OWC, as Curt sometimes called it. There were not. But her advisors, along with the German Academic Exchange Service, found the magazines compelling. Simone thought, Huh.
This was the beginning of The Underwater Cabaret’s journey back to the surface. It went in stages. First, Simone and Lucy, who was also an artist, considered co-authoring a graphic novel of Curt’s life. After a bit of work they abandoned that idea, because, well, the writing and art for the work already existed. Simone then started speaking to friends, to academics, and to publishers with whom she was acquainted about how to get the story out. She has a gift for emailing and calling people she barely knows and asking for their assistance. There were emails back and forth with a Dutch publisher and two years talking to an art historian.
After hundreds of calls and emails, she met Thilo von Debschitz in a Facebook group called Jews Engaged Worldwide in Social Networking. It has the unlikely nickname of “Jekke,” a word coined by Israelis referring to German-born Jews who’d made aliyah. Thilo is not Jewish, nor does he live in Israel. He is a graphic designer in Wiesbaden whose grandfathers were Nazis. His maternal grandfather died by suicide when he learned Hitler was dead. Thilo has an interest in bringing lost stuff to light, particularly Jewish stuff, so together he and Simone re-approached the Jewish Museum Berlin, where, 10 years earlier, she had pitched The Underwater Cabaret.
IV: Up for Air
Finally, in February of 2024, after a nearly 13-year journey, the JMB presented an exhibit of The Underwater Cabaret and made it part of their permanent collection. I traveled to Germany for the first time to attend the opening, and despite a deep knowledge of Curt’s story, I was alternately heartbroken and astonished.
The evening began with a presentation in a large atrium, packed with people, where the museum director, the curator, and Simone spoke. An actor performed a poem in the original German to great effect; the irony in his tone as he landed on the tight rhymes brought Curt’s writing to life. A young woman played and sang pieces Curt called songs in the magazines, accompanying herself on the piano with music she had composed for the occasion.
The audience then moved on to the exhibit, where the magazines were placed in a chronological timeline of history and of Curt’s life. There were also copies of the original magazines from which Curt had taken clippings for his collages and a decades-old video recorded by the Shoah Foundation of Karola Wolf, a woman who had been in hiding with Curt and with whom he had fallen in love.
I have thought a lot about what Curt’s work might have meant to his fellow “divers.” I imagine that waiting for The Underwater Cabaret each week helped them mark the time and reading it made them laugh in the face of gut-churning terror. Passing it along to each other, despite the grave danger of doing so, gave them the courage to persevere. Maybe even to hope. Het Onderwater Cabaret was a social media platform of its time, creating community, spreading the truth, using visuals to depict the indescribable, and channeling fear into action. At a time when one in five Americans do not believe the Holocaust happened at all, a new generation of divers is hiding in cities across the country, communicating with each other on smart phones, and depending on their neighbors for support. The reemergence of Curt Bloch could not be more apt and unsettling.
A coda: Curt made many trips back to Germany as part of his work as an antiques dealer. In 1972 he returned to Dortmund to attend his 45th high school reunion. There he was hailed by old friends, many of them former Nazis. One greeted him like this: “Curt, we weren’t expecting you.”
The post Created in hiding during WWII, a Jewish artist’s underground ‘zines are finally rising to the surface appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Says Talks With US in Oman Were ‘Good Start,’ Will Continue
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is welcomed by an Omani official upon his arrival in Muscat, Oman, in this handout image obtained on Feb. 6, 2026. Photo: Iranian Foreign Ministry/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s top diplomat said on Friday that nuclear talks with the US mediated by Oman were off to a “good start” and set to continue, in remarks that could help allay concern that failure to reach a deal might nudge the Middle East closer to war.
But Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said after the talks in the Omani capital Muscat that “any dialogue requires refraining from threats and pressure. [Tehran] only discusses its nuclear issue … We do not discuss any other issue with the US.”
While both sides have indicated readiness to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West, Washington wanted to expand the talks to cover Iran‘s ballistic missiles, support for armed terrorist groups around the region, and “treatment of their own people,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday.
Iranian officials have repeatedly ruled out putting Iran‘s missiles – one of the largest such arsenals in the Middle East – up for discussion, and have said Tehran wants recognition of its right to enrich uranium.
For Washington, carrying out enrichment – a possible pathway to nuclear bombs – inside Iran is a red line. Tehran has long denied any intent to weaponize nuclear fuel production.
“It was a good start to the negotiations. And there is an understanding on continuing the talks. Coordination on how to proceed will be decided in the capitals,” Araqchi told Iranian state TV. “If this process continues, I think we will reach a good framework for an understanding.”
TALKS WERE ‘VERY SERIOUS,’ SAYS OMAN
Mediator Badr al-Busaidi, Oman’s foreign minister, said the talks had been “very serious,” with results to be considered carefully in Tehran and Washington. The goal was to reconvene in due course.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership remains deeply worried that Trump may still carry out his threats to strike Iran after a US naval buildup in seas in the region.
“The lack of trust is a huge challenge during the talks, and it should be overcome,” Araqchi said.
Last June the US struck Iranian nuclear targets, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign. Tehran has since said it has halted uranium enrichment activity.
The naval buildup, which Trump has called a massive “armada,” has followed a bloody government crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran last month, heightening tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Trump warned the Iranian regime not to use violence to crush the nationwide anti-government protests. According to several reports, however, Iran’s security forces killed tens of thousands of demonstrators during what appears to be one of the bloodiest crackdowns in modern history.
Trump has warned that “bad things” will probably happen if a deal cannot be reached, ratcheting up pressure on the Islamic Republic in a standoff that has led to mutual threats of air strikes.
World powers and regional states fear a breakdown in the negotiations would ignite another conflict between the US and Iran that could spill over to the rest of the oil-rich region.
Iran has vowed a harsh response to any strike and has cautioned neighboring Gulf Arab countries that host US bases that they could be in the firing line if they were involved in an attack.
Negotiators in Oman will have to navigate Iran‘s red line on discussing its missile program to reach a deal and avert future military action. Tehran has flatly ruled out talks on its “defense capabilities, including missiles and their range.”
In a show of defiance, Iranian state TV said hours before the talks that “one of the country’s most advanced long-range ballistic missiles, the Khorramshahr-4,” had been deployed at one of the Revolutionary Guards’ vast underground “missile cities.”
However, Tehran is willing to show “flexibility” on uranium enrichment, including by handing over 400 kg of highly enriched uranium – refined closer to bomb-grade – and accepting zero enrichment under a consortium arrangement as a solution, Iranian officials told Reuters last week.
Iran also demands the lifting of US sanctions, reimposed since 2018 when Trump, during his first term in the White House, ditched Iran‘s 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers.
The United States, its European allies, and Israel accuse Tehran of using its nuclear energy program as a veil for efforts to develop the capability to produce atomic bombs. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Israel has likened the danger of Iran‘s missiles to its nuclear program. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in January that Iran‘s “attempt to build atomic weapons” and “20,000 ballistic missiles” were like “two lumps of cancer.”
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‘You Will All Burn!’ Haverford Bans Pro-Hamas Hecklers From Campus Over Event Disruption
Masked woman disrupting Middle East talk held at Haverford College on Feb. 1, 2026. Photo: Screenshot.
Haverford College in Pennsylvania has identified and banned from campus at least two members of a pro-Hamas group that disrupted an event featuring Middle East scholar Haviv Rettig Gur on Sunday.
As seen in footage shared on the X social media platform, one of the individuals, who concealed her face with a keffiyeh scarf in the style popularized by the Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, screamed “When Gaza has burned, you will all burn too.”
“Shame! Shame! Shame!” she continued while being escorted out. The individuals continued to scream unintelligible statements outside the lecture hall while banging on its door, prompting Rettig to comment on the incivility of political speech in contemporary higher education.
“It amazes me that this happens most intensely at institutions in America,” he said.
On Wednesday, a public relations official for Haverford College shared with The Algemeiner a statement the college issued to signal that it is not hesitating to respond to actions it described as “clear violations of Haverford’s Policy on Expressive Freedom and Responsibility.” The statement noted that there was also violence during the disruption, noting “at least one physical altercation between attendees.”
“We have gathered sufficient evidence to identify both the individual who used a bullhorn and the audience member who initiated physical contact with them,” the statement said. “We can confirm that neither of the parities is a student, nor are they members of the Haverford College community. As we conclude our investigation, the persons in question will be considered persona non grata, which bans them from our campus indefinitely. If they are found to be on Haverford’s campus, their presence will be considered trespassing, and the college will contact local police.”
On Monday, Haverford president Wendy Raymond condemned the group’s conduct, saying, “Shouting down a speaker whom one does not agree with is never acceptable and stands outside of our shared community values.”
Raymond added, “We strive to be a campus where all experiences and opinions matter … the fact that this event proceeded with nearly three hours of thoughtful and constructive discussion illustrates how valuable these types of learning opportunities are to our educational mission.”
The 2025-2026 academic year has seen a number of similar disturbances on colleges campuses, with anti-Zionist activists continuing to disrupt events and stage demonstrations even after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza.
In October, masked pro-Hamas activists breached an event held at Pomona College in California to commemorate the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists raped, murdered, and abducted women, children, and men during their rampage across southern Israel.
Footage of the act circulated on social media showed the group attempting to raid the room while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas dogma. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they mounted on their own as campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance, according to video of the incident and witnesses who spoke to The Claremont Independent.
Following the incident, an anonymous group claimed credit for storming the event in a disturbing open letter.
“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” the note said, which the group released on social media, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. “Immediately, zionists [sic] swarmed us, put their hands on us, shoved us, while Viloga retreated like he did on October 7th, 2023.”
Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”
In January, a sophomore and right-wing social media influencer at the University of Miami verbally attacked a Jewish student group, leading the school to defend free speech while saying that “lines can be crossed” in response.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” Kaylee Mahony yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair. “That’s what these people follow.”
She continued, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
Mahony could also be heard in video of the incident responding to one of the SSI members, saying, “Because you’re disgusting. It’s disgusting.”
Later, Mahony, whose statements were first reported by The Miami Hurricane student newspaper, took to social media, where she has more than 125,000 followers on TikTok, and posted, “Of course the most evil (((country))) in the world is filled with (((people))) who hate Jesus [sic].”
The “((()))” is used by neo-Nazis as a substitute for calling out Jews by name, which, given the context in which they discuss the Jewish people, could draw the intervention of a content moderator.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Free Speech Advocacy Group Walks Back Condemnation of Israeli Comedian’s Shows Being Abruptly Canceled
The Israeli national flag flutters as apartments are seen in the background in the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the West Bank, Aug. 16, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
An organization dedicated to protecting free speech has withdrawn a statement in which it condemned the last-minute cancellations of two performances by Israeli comedian Guy Hochman, after he faced backlash over his support for Israel.
Two venues, in New York and California, canceled Hochman’s scheduled performances last month.
Hochman’s show in New York City was canceled by its venue due to safety concerns after anti-Israel protesters picketed outside of the establishment.
The Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, California, then called off Hochman’s gig after receiving pressure from anti-Israel activists, including threats of violence. The theater said it made the decision also after Hochman declined the venue’s demands to publicly condemn his home country of Israel for the alleged “genocide, rape, starvation, and torture of Palestinian civilians.”
PEN America initially condemned the cancellations of Hochman’s shows in a statement shared on its website on Jan. 29. At the time, Jonathan Friedman, the managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America, said, “It is a profound violation of free expression to demand artists, writers, or comedians agree to ideological litmus tests as a condition to appear on a stage.”
“People have every right to protest his events, but those who wish to hear from Hochman also have a right to do so,” Friedman added. The statement accused Hochman of “dehumanizing social media posts about Palestinians” but also noted that “shutting down cultural events is not the solution.”
On Tuesday, however, PEN America removed the message from its website and replaced it with another statement explaining the move: “On further consideration, PEN America has decided to withdraw this statement. We remain committed to open and respectful dialogue about the divisions that arise in the course of defending free expression.” A spokesperson for PEN America did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment to further explain the organization’s change of heart.
In 2024, a campaign was launched to boycott PEN America after the group was accused of being apologetic to the alleged “genocide” of Palestinians and “apartheid” in Israel, as well as of “normalizing Zionism.”
Members of PEN America include novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, according to its website. The organization has a page on its website dedicated to information about “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” which begins by claiming that the “Israeli government has cracked down on free expression of writers and public intellectuals in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.” The webpage is highly critical of the Jewish state and its military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, which started in response to the deadly rampage orchestrated by the US-designated terror organization across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The same webpage highlights a list of “individual cases” of Palestinian activists and writers that Israel has allegedly detained, arrested, or convicted, but there are no specific details shared about their offenses. The list includes Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who was convicted of incitement to terrorism for a poem she wrote and comments she made on social media during a wave of Palestinian attacks against Jews.
The list also includes Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, but the provided description about Tamimi does not mention that she was convicted on four counts of assaulting an IDF officer and soldier, incitement, and interference with IDF forces in March 2018.
A third writer on the list is Mosab Abu Toha, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist who tried to justify Hamas’s abduction of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.