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For the first time since Hitler, a Hebrew publisher sets up shop in Germany
In his job as a publisher, Moshe Sakal often needs to communicate with Israel about his books’ bar codes. Sometimes these phone calls sound like an Abbott and Costello routine.
Encountering an error, Sakal will tell the agent for the International Standard Book Number — used to identify a title in global book sales — the system won’t let him enter his address, as he’s based in Berlin. The guy on the other line will tell Sakal to enter his business’s Israeli address (it doesn’t have one, he’ll respond). The agent will then ask him what language his book is in. When Sakal answers “Hebrew,” the man responds, “So put your address in Israel,” not understanding how a press outside Israel could publish a Hebrew book.
The back and forth needs some explanation: Since the founding of Israel in 1948 — and until 2024 — there hadn’t been a major Hebrew publishing house outside of the country.
This wasn’t always the case.
Modern Hebrew has roots in 19th-century Europe, where Russian-born lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda lived and worked before joining the First Aliyah in 1881.
There were flourishing presses in the language, including the original Schocken Books, founded in Berlin in 1931 and boasting authors like future Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon. Hitler’s rise and the Holocaust, underscored by book burnings on the streets, put an end to the industry on the continent. Israel became the national home for Hebrew, and for Hebrew books on its founding in 1948, with many of the early, European-born luminaries of the revived language based there. By 2021, when author Sally Rooney cut ties with her Hebrew publisher but left open an opportunity for translation by a non Israel-based Hebrew press, none existed.
Sakal, a novelist, and Dory Manor, a poet and editor of the literary journal Oh!, are partners in life and business. They were born in Israel but have lived abroad for much of their adult lives, settling in Berlin in 2019. The couple are part of a vibrant Israeli expat community in the city. (When they arrived in 2019, NPR published an article estimating 10,000 Israelis had moved to Berlin in the last decade — the trend shows no sign of slowing.)
Over the years, as they mixed with journalists, writers and artists, they would occasionally mention how the Sapir Prize, the Hebrew language’s answer to the Booker, has since 2014, when New York-based novelist Reuven Namdar won, been closed to authors living outside of Israel.
“Everybody who heard that said, ‘So you should start an ecosystem of global diasporic Hebrew and have your own prize,’” Sakal recalled.
Sakal and Manor at first demurred, but the idea wouldn’t die. In 2023, they started developing Altneuland Press, based in Berlin and printing work in Hebrew, German and English. They established the company early in October 2023 — right before Oct. 7 — and began operations in June of 2024.
To date, Altneuland has published six books in Hebrew and two in German with two more titles on the way. Their authors include Hillel Cohen, author or Between the River and the Sea: My Travels in Israel and Palestine, which they published in Hebrew and German; Maya Arad, with the German translation of her novel Lady of Kazan; and journalist Ruth Margalit, whose forthcoming book will be their first in English.
The company prints books in Tel Aviv and their home base in Berlin for the Israeli and European markets.
“Berlin represents the possibility of Hebrew literature,” Manor said. “Hebrew culture that’s open to the world, rather than closed off or isolated or nationalistic, as is the case more and more in the current political climate in Israel, where democratic spaces are shrinking. We have here the possibility and the freedom to publish voices that might be silenced or marginalized back in Israel.”
The name “Altneuland,” taken from Zionist leader Theodor Herzl’s 1902 speculative novel about a future Jewish state in what is now Israel, is ironic, given the press’ desire to serve as a hub for the Israeli diaspora. But Manor says it speaks to an ideal in the spirit of Herzl’s book — really a utopian novel that imagined Jews and Arabs living together peacefully in a kind of Vienna of the Middle East.
“We think of Altneuland, old-new land, not as a territory,” Manor said, but a language and culture. He likened his vision of their work to Heinrich Heine’s description of the Torah as a “portable homeland.”
In a time of cultural boycotts, Sakal and Manor say being based outside of Israel helps to bypass some of the political minefields. Their books, like Gish Amit’s Cedrick, about the author’s investigation into the life of his former student, a Filipino-Israeli who died serving in the IDF in the Gaza War, have been well-received in Europe and Israel, though Sakal and Manor say they’ve had trouble finding a U.S. partner for the title.
Being outside of the Israeli system offers other freedoms.
In Israel, it is customary for authors to pay publishers to take on their first book — Manor and Sakal don’t take money from their writers. Selling their books in Europe, they also aren’t bound by the infrastructure of Israel’s bookstores, which, apart from a handful of independent shops, is a duopoly of Steimatzky and Tzomet Sfarim, who dictate the terms of the market. As for the titles they can take on, they noted some publishers in Israel may choose not to pursue books that are too anti-government for fear of losing help from public institutions.
It also opens the door for new stories to be told — ones that can center experiences had by Hebrew speakers outside of Israel. Sakal mentions the works of early modern Hebrew poet and novelist David Vogel, whose prose he says was different from the Hebrew he grew up with. Sakal, who is Sephardic, is also hoping to promote more writers with his background.
Some in the Israeli press have been skeptical of Altneuland, with publisher and editor Oded Carmeli writing in Haaretz that, “there aren’t enough Hebrew readers outside of Israel to support a publishing house – not even a bookstore, not even a shelf in a bookstore – and even if there were enough readers, no store in Berlin or Madrid would maintain such a shelf, for fear of repercussions.”
Manor responded, in his own Haaretz article, that Carmeli mischaracterized their operations and the vitality of the Israeli diaspora.
Maya Arad, who publishes with the Israeli press Xargol and went to Altneuland for the German translation of Lady of Kazan, wrote in an email that Hebrew literature still depends on Israel as a center.
“I would agree to admit that it is unlikely that a generation born outside Israel will arise in the Diaspora and begin writing in Hebrew, as Hebrew writers did at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth,” Arad, who was born in Israel but who has lived abroad since 1994 and is based in the U.S., wrote in an email.
But, at the same time, she said it’s undeniable more Hebrew literature is coming from beyond the Jewish State and the subject of Israelis abroad has been attracting growing interest in Hebrew letters.
“The fact that about ten years ago it was decided to restrict the Sapir Prize to writers living in Israel paradoxically attests to the Israeli literary establishment’s recognition of a literary community outside Israel,” she said.
Altneuland, navigating the differing tastes of their global, trilingual markets, have a full slate for 2026, and are now exploring translating Yiddish literature into English, German and Hebrew.
For Manor, the thrill of seeing their Hebrew books on German shelves, for perhaps the first time since the 1930s, can’t be overstated. He recalled a story about an IDF delegation that visited Auschwitz in 1995. On that occasion, then-chief of general staff Ehud Barak said “We’ve arrived 50 years too late.”
“I found that remark chilling,” Manor said. “That idea that Jewish victory should be imagined as an Army arriving at Auschwitz. For me, the true victory lies elsewhere: in Hebrew books being printed in Germany again. That is a victory of culture over violence and over destruction. Victory, joined by hope, not by death.”
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Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother
Roll the Calls: A Memoir
By Ari Emanuel
Knopf, 432 pages, $35
It must be exhausting to be super-agent Ari Emanuel: rising before dawn for a workout regimen, ingesting live worms to consume bacteria, and then placing hundreds of daily phone calls to clients and network honchos. It is, frankly, exhausting just to read about it, notwithstanding the clever, staccato narrative by (uncredited) ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer.
The point of it all, Emanuel keeps insisting in Roll the Calls, is not the dollars.
“Money isn’t the thing that makes me get up at 4:00 a.m.,” he says. “I’m just not sure yet what that thing is.”
Perpetually on the precipice of bankruptcy, he takes bold entrepreneurial risks to survive in an industry wracked by labor discontent, cutthroat infighting and technological change.
The goal, if there is one, seems to be simply to win — to bend everyone around him to his will. And, for the most part, he does. From the mailroom, Emanuel has ascended to the summit: executive chair and CEO of TKO and executive chairman of WME Group, “two companies,” his biographical blurb says, “that sit at the center of sports, entertainment and culture.”
Emanuel is probably best known as the model for the abrasive Ari Gold, the talent agent played by Jeremy Piven in the HBO show Entourage (2004-11). The show’s protagonist, Vincent Chase, is loosely based on one of Emanuel’s clients, the actor Mark Wahlberg. Emanuel says that he could never bear to watch the series, but notes that it helped turbocharge his career.
In his telling, the entertainment-industrial complex is a transactional, amoral, brutish and (though Emanuel doesn’t use this phrase) testosterone-fueled world, where the key players are nearly all men. It seems impossible to imagine any woman getting away with — let alone prospering from — the unhinged, profanity-laced approach that has become Emanuel’s trademark.
Even in this milieu, there are, in his view, particularly loathsome players. Among them is Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, whom Emanuel indicts for his slovenliness, bullying tactics and editorial interference. Even without a mention of the producer’s alleged track record of sexual harassment and assault, Emanuel’s assessment of Weinstein is withering. “Empty at his core,” Emanuel writes, “Harvey’s sole motivation is to thwart and mess with other people.”
Emanuel expresses contempt, too, for other bold-faced names, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chair of Walt Disney Studios and cofounder of the film studio DreamWorks, and Hollywood scribe Nikki Finke, with whom Emanuel had a codependent relationship. He takes on Donald Trump as a client, doesn’t vote for him for president, and drops him, without regret, when he wins and can no longer generate commissions. None of this necessarily makes Emanuel a reliable narrator.
The memoir begins with the word “rage,” which Emanuel observes is also the first word of Homer’s Iliad. The allusion sets Roll the Calls up to be similarly epic. But its angry protagonist is, at best, an antihero, and the stakes of his success surely are less than mythic.
What are the origins of Emanuel’s rage? He points to his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the bullying and humiliation that resulted. The Emanuel family ethos was unsparingly competitive. In life, he learned, “loser gets fed to lions,” so “keep your fists clenched and your head on a swivel.” And roughhousing with his older brothers, whom he jokingly calls “two violent psychopaths,” may have left Ari bruised and resentful.
Both Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and former Chicago mayor and prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel are known for their combative personalities. Ari suggests that the family is tight-knit and loving. But one of the book’s quietly shocking reveals is Rahm’s mockery of his brother’s dyslexia when they share a stage during Chicago Ideas Week.
Emanuel argues that his anger, which can turn threatening, provides a bargaining advantage by intimidating adversaries. He cites a study showing “that angry negotiators had the edge.” In a bar, he calls out Michael Moore as an [expletive deleted] antisemite for views the director expressed about Israel; Moore denies the charge, they keep talking and Emanuel ends up with a new client.
“You’ve got to be a little psychotic in this town,” Emanuel argues. To succeed, “you need to show that you can color outside the lines, and that, once in a while, you might eat the [expletive deleted] crayon.” The memoir doesn’t delete the expletives.
Yet Emanuel understands the personal costs of his anger enough to have devoted years to psychotherapy aimed at moderating it. (The results seem mixed at best.) Emanuel also admits to a habit akin to stalking: calling potential clients, business partners and others constantly until they succumb to his sales pitch.
This incessant hounding landed him the mailroom gig at Creative Artists Agency, from which he quickly rose — until he departed, with allies, to start his own company. Similar persistence won him the business (and, later, friendship) of the famously curmudgeonly Larry David, who said, over lunch, that he would sign with Emanuel — if only the agent would stop calling.
After his first marriage (unsurprisingly) dissolved, Emanuel deployed his telephone tactics in courtship — not a method, one imagines, that would have worked for a lesser man. In Emanuel’s case, relentless pursuit led, after some drama and heartbreak, to his second marriage, to a much younger woman who had initially resisted his overtures.
None of this is to say that Roll the Calls isn’t worth a read, especially for anyone interested in an unabashedly jaundiced insider account of how Hollywood operates. The book is quick-paced, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and filled with acidic observations and gossip. It is also horrifying.
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NY Jewish Democrats defend Mamdani after Netanyahu calls him a Hamas supporter
(JTA) — Some top New York Jewish Democrats are defending New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him an “antisemite” and said he is “buddies” with Hamas.
Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, and the outsized role Mamdani played in it, were the culmination of escalating criticism of Mamdani from Israeli officials in recent weeks.
Mamdani is an avowed anti-Zionist who during his campaign to be the mayor had pledged to arrest Netanyahu. Over the summer, he conceded he didn’t have the power to do so, though he criticized the Israeli government over Gaza in the run-up to the prime minister’s visit.
But while his full-throated criticism of Israel has alarmed some local Jewish officials, many felt that Netanyahu’s attacks on Thursday from the U.N. plenum went too far.
“It’s scurrilous to suggest that the mayor voices support for Hamas,” Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish, said Friday in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, also a Jewish Democrat, has opposed Mamdani on some legislation related to protests outside houses of worship — a sensitive issue in the wake of protesters picketing outside synagogues that were holding Israeli real estate events. Menin said in a press conference on Thursday that Netanyahu’s remarks were “not helpful at all” because “we need to turn the temperature down.”
“This idea of what the prime minister said can really incite violence. We cannot have this,” Menin said.
Mamdani, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate, has condemned Hamas as “a terrorist organization” and has denounced antisemitic hate crimes committed in New York.
The mayor responded with a statement of his own, saying that Netanyahu “used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”
“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said. The United States is not a party to the ICC and has no obligation to carry out its warrants on U.S. soil.
Netanyahu’s remarks at the U.N. General Assembly came amid a reelection campaign in which Netanyahu’s Likud Party has made Mamdani a villain. Hoylman-Sigal called Thursday’s speech a “political ploy” and a “deflection by someone who has a lot of domestic turmoil, political and otherwise.”
“Clearly, Netanyahu is fighting for his political life,” said Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish.
Netanyahu’s arrival in New York sparked a wave of demonstrations in Manhattan on Thursday, including multiple organized by Israeli expatriate groups who emphasized the Oct. 27 Israeli election date. Rallygoers chanted “Vote him out!” at a protest held by the Israeli anti-Netanyahu group UnXeptable.
Even before his visit, Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed back on comments Netanyahu had made. Calling Mamdani a “supporter of the Hamas monsters” was false and “hurt his own credibility,” Hochul said in an interview with the radio station WNYC earlier this week.
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, which is supportive of Netanyahu and has been harshly critical of Mamdani, called Netanyahu’s remarks “Churchillian” and his “greatest speech.”
“Importantly, he also called out Mamdani as a dangerous antisemite who has endangered Jews in New York City,” Klein said in a statement.
The U.N. speech came as Israeli officials have escalated their rhetoric against Mamdani.
Last month, Ofir Akunis, the Israeli consul general in New York, compared Mamdani’s support for the boycott Israel movement to Nazi Germany. A Mamdani spokesperson told JTA the comparison was “offensive, completely unhinged and detached from reality,” and said Akunis “should be ashamed of himself.”
The statement was Mamdani’s first time weighing in on the Israeli consul general, who had accused Mamdani of being directly responsible for anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city.
Republican City Council member Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and a staunch Mamdani critic, took issue with the mayor’s response.
“When Mamdani cleans his own house, then he can criticize Jewish leaders,” said Vernikov, pointing to Mamdani’s wife’s anti-Israel views and his vetoing of a bill on protests around schools.
Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, blasted both Akunis’ and Netanyahu’s attacks on Mamdani.
“Netanyahu and Akunis are cynically weaponizing accusations of antisemitism for their own narrow, selfish political purposes,” said Lander, one of Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish allies, in a statement to JTA. “They are making Israelis, American Jews, Palestinians, and the whole world less safe.”
Lander himself was the recipient of a Nazi Germany comparison when Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York governor, said that Lander “would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could.”
Hoylman-Sigal called the comparisons “outrageous,” and said that he is more worried about a rise in far-right parties, including Germany’s AfD.
“We should be very careful, no matter what our background is, to draw such extreme comparisons,” he said.
Phylisa Wisdom, who heads Mamdani’s office to combat antisemitism, told JTA that it is “appalling that some leaders have resorted to comparing their political opponents to Nazis.”
“We can and should disagree — sometimes deeply — but we must be able to do so without debasing public discourse,” she said.
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a group that leads outreach to non-Jewish community organizations, told JTA in an email that comparisons to Nazis should be out of bounds.
It is “particularly concerning given that our own community frequently, and rightfully, calls out those using dehumanization and/or making inappropriate Holocaust comparisons,” she said.
As a case in point, Spitalnick pointed to the Anti-Defamation League’s article on inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, which includes COVID-19 vaccine requirements and free speech complaints.
The ADL did not return a request for comment on Akunis’ Nazi Germany comparisons.
“Disagree with the Mayor on his policies or rhetoric — I certainly have — but comparisons like this are deeply offensive and wrong, in addition to undermining the very relationships and engagement necessary to ensuring Jewish safety in New York and beyond,” Spitalnick said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’
Adam Brody, the Jewish actor who plays a “hot rabbi” on the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, called the war in Gaza a genocide in a new interview, making him one of just a few Jewish celebrities to speak out publicly against the Israeli campaign.
The comments came in an interview with GQ about Brody’s efforts canvassing for Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms.
“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine,” he said. “It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”
The claim of genocide in Gaza is heavily disputed. Several international bodies, human rights organizations and academic institutions have concluded Israel’s actions in Gaza since Oct. 7 fit the description, including a United Nations Commission of Inquiry. Other similar groups, like the International Court of Justice, have not applied the term.
Brody’s comments were surprising in part because he had previously kept his feelings about the war private, even as other leading Hollywood figures openly criticized it. He does not maintain a public social media presence, and he did not participate in pin-wearing campaigns or sign various petitions related to the war — an approach he indicated he might change going forward.
“I’m not wearing a pin, so I’m not inviting a certain question, and perhaps I should,” he said. “I really admire people who do. But 99% of what I’m asked about is about the show. I’m not trying to plead ignorance—here we are doing a political interview, so it makes sense that we wade into this territory—but I’ve never ducked a question, really, not a political question anyway.”
Brody — who came to fame in the 2000s as the teenager Seth Cohen on The O.C. — joins Hacks star Hannah Einbinder and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) as perhaps the most high-profile Jewish actors to publicly call the war a genocide. Other Jewish entertainment figures, like Mandy Patinkin and The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, have criticized the war but stopped short of calling it a genocide.
Yet Brody’s comments are perhaps especially notable because of the character he plays on TV. In Nobody Wants This, Brody plays a rabbi dating a non-Jewish woman — introducing her to the beauty and foibles of Jewish faith and culture. Israel has been conspicuously absent from the show, with its creator, Erin Foster, saying she deliberately avoided geopolitics.
Season 3 of Nobody Wants This releases to Netflix October 22.
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