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From the Editor: The Audacity of the Jews to Survive
The annual ‘March of the Living,’ a trek between two former Nazi-run death camps, in Oswiecim and Brzezinka, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: Maciek Jazwiecki/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
History has returned for the Jews. For 78 years following the end of World War II, the Jewish people enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace and calm globally. There were rocky periods over this time and plenty of instances of antisemitic violence, from the Munich massacre to the AMIA bombing, but Jews overall were not suffering anywhere near the same pervasive persecution of previous eras. Then came Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel and perpetrated the biggest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, broadcasting their savagery for the world to see. The Oct. 7 atrocities awoke a dormant beast: What followed, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, was a ferocious surge in antisemitic incidents — harassment, intimidation, and violence — around the globe.
Many observers, including Jewish leaders, have described this rise in hostility as a new phenomenon, with antisemitism reaching record levels. But the cold truth that Jewish communities need to recognize is that the world is returning to its pre-1945 norm, when bigotry against Jews was a far more common element of daily life. Of course, now there’s Israel, serving as a place of refuge with a standing military to protect Jews. And today most societies, both elites and the masses, don’t want to be seen as overtly antisemitic, unlike past eras when blatant prejudice and discrimination were more socially and culturally acceptable — often even a point of national pride. But make no mistake: Antisemitism will continue to be normalized and tolerated in a way that no other bigotry would be, including in the West.
If 2023 was the year history returned for the Jews and 2024 was when antisemitism began to normalize once the initial shock went away, then 2025 marked the moment the intifada went global. From Washington to Boulder, from Manchester to Sydney, calls from anti-Israel activists to “globalize the intifada” came to fruition with murderous antisemitic attacks.
Despite the gravity of this moment, discussions of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism, even among friends, have missed key fundamentals about the underlying dynamics of what led us here. Specifically, few people seem to understand what antisemitism really is and why it has proven to be the most enduring form of bigotry in the history of civilization. The answer illuminates why Jews must remain vigilant, practical, and appropriately cautious on one hand while simultaneously maintaining and sharing a deep sense of pride and comfort in the fact that they have faced much worse before and will endure this too. The Jewish people will live on, as their opponents of today fade into the distance.
Israel’s First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (C) stands under a portrait depicting Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, as he reads Israel’s declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948, in this handout picture released April 29, 2008, by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO). Photo: REUTERS/Kluger Zoltan/GPO/Handout
An Unprecedented Story
The rabid opposition to Israel and steep rise in antisemitism we’ve seen worldwide over the past two years serve as a reminder that a sizable chunk of humanity deeply resents the will of the Jewish people both to survive and thrive in the face of intense persecution.
Indeed, a key reason for the persistence of antisemitism through millennia is that the story of the Jewish people seems too improbable to believe without invoking the conspiracy theory of the all-powerful Jew.
For the last 2,500-plus years, at least since the Babylonian exile, Jews have been expelled, slaughtered, and scapegoated in such a consistent and widespread way that is unique to the human experience of persecution. In short, antisemitism is civilization’s oldest, most entrenched hatred.
And yet, the Jewish people have endured and survived, collectively forming much of Western civilization’s moral, legal, and spiritual foundation with their ideas and teachings. More than that, Jews have thrived amid unparalleled adversity, becoming disproportionally successful in fields as diverse as law, medicine, and the arts.
To drive home the point, Jews have won about a quarter of all Nobel prizes, despite making up less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
How can such a tiny spec of humanity be so extensively persecuted but somehow, despite the obstacles, excel to such a degree? It doesn’t make any sense.
Israel’s story is similar. Only in the Jewish state are the same people worshiping the same God and speaking the same language that they did 3,000 years ago. Many people simply cannot understand that the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was the ultimate decolonization project, the return of an ancient people to their homeland in which they always maintained a presence and to which they never gave up deep connection.
Everything about the Jews and Israel seems to defy possibility and common sense: Such countries are not resurrected in history, and dead languages such as Hebrew are not revived.
And then consider the land itself: a tiny sliver of earth with a limited supply of natural freshwater, surrounded by larger enemies bent on the Jewish state’s destruction.
But rather than die, Israel survived to become the vibrant democracy, military juggernaut, and high-tech hub that we know today — a mini superpower surpassing its neighbors (and most of the world) in virtually all aspects of state power and quality of life.
The stories of Israel and the Jewish people are puzzles, and the pieces do not fit according to the typical rules of history. For too many people, antisemitic conspiracy theories provide a comforting answer to fill in the blanks to these mysteries.
Car in New South Wales, Australia graffitied with antisemitic message. The word “F**k” has been removed from this image. Photo: Screenshot
What Antisemitism Actually Is – and Why the Jews Are so Hated
Antisemitism isn’t bigotry as we typically understand it. Bernard Lewis, the late and preeminent historian of the Middle East, explained how “it is perfectly possible to hate and even to persecute Jews without necessarily being antisemitic.” How? Because “hatred and persecution are a normal part of the human experience.”
Antisemitism has two special features, Lewis argued, that make it a distinct form of bigotry. First, “Jews are judged by a standard different from that applied to others.” Second, and more importantly, is the “accusation of cosmic, satanic evil attributed to Jews,” the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else. The latter point is why, historically, it was rarely enough just to subjugate the Jewish people and force them to submit to a certain authority. No, the Jews had to be either expelled or slaughtered — after being scapegoated for society’s ills.
While racism is emotional, antisemitism is explanatory, an epistemic failure of the highest degree using a veneer of logic to promote a false version of reality. This is why podcasters and university professors get away with antisemitism but not racism: They can portray the former as a serious intellectual exercise. What they don’t say is that the lies of blood libel and Jewish control are what have always led to pogroms and even genocide.
Antisemitism is a virus of the mind that has gone through three historical mutations. In the Middle Ages, hatred and persecution of Jews were based on their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, hatred and persecution of Jews were based on their race. Today, hatred and persecution of Jews are more often based on their nation-state, Israel. As the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks argued, “anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism.” With each new phase, antisemitism adapted to what became morally and intellectually acceptable — religious persecution fell out of fashion during the Enlightenment, and the same happened to racial persecution in the mid-20th century. Persecuting the Jewish state, however, is perfectly acceptable today, especially among cultural and political elites.
In the ancient world, Jews were initially hated for introducing monotheism to the world, practicing a system of laws and values requiring a level of discipline to which others were, frankly, unwilling to commit. And then through the years, Jews continuously refused to conform to the ruling empire of the day, maintaining their identity and practices. Naturally, this built resentment.
At the same time, Jews never sought to proselytize; they were content with their own community, happy to live among others but not particularly interested in expanding the tribe. This too built resentment.
To the gentile, Jews were an exclusive club — one could say a chosen people — which would neither submit to nor express much interest in outside forces. The former is a prime explainer for the prevalence of Islamic antisemitism; the latter helps explain the endurance of Christian antisemitism, with Jews never accepting Jesus.
After thinking about these issues for years, I have come to the simple conclusion that antisemitism is so persistent because people believe Jews are the “chosen people,” and they see in Israel that same chosenness. And they resent them for it.
There is a striking moment in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, when the Nazi leader concedes that the Jews might just be the chosen people — and seems to fear that his antisemitic plans may be doomed to fail.
“When … I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people,” Hitler wrote, “suddenly there rose up in me the fearful question whether inscrutable destiny, perhaps for reasons unknown to us poor mortals, did not, with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little nation.”
Whether Jews actually are a chosen people isn’t the point. The antisemite sees the Jewish story and doesn’t express admiration but rather resentment and paranoia. To them, there is something particular about the Jews that simply defies explanation. They are worthy of unique hatred and scorn. Yes, Jews are often hated in specific situations for their God, or for being a successful minority, or other reasons that are often put forward. But underneath these explanations, often subconsciously, is the fear, hatred, and awe that the Jewish people have a divine spark. Many groups, from the West to East Asia (for example, China calling itself “the Middle Kingdom”), make a claim to chosenness, but bigots only single out the Jews for scorn as a result. Because deep down, they believe it.
If this argument sounds a bit vague and irrational, that’s the point. There’s a supernatural element of antisemitism that can’t be explained by logic, reason, or history. As Sacks wrote, antisemitism “is not a coherent set of beliefs but a set of contradictions. Before the Holocaust, Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung tenaciously to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.”
Because antisemitism is not simply about hatred of Jews but, rather, reflects an even more irrational belief that Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills, antisemites apply their views in such absurd, contradictory ways. It’s a shape-shifting virus that reveals more about the host than the Jews. As the journalist Vasily Grossman observed in his book Life and Fate, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of — I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
The Line Between Criticism of Israel and Antisemitism
Anti-Zionists — those who either outright call for Israel’s eradication or, more cleverly, advocate policies that would ultimately lead to the same result — like to argue that people accusing them of antisemitism are simply trying to stifle their right to free speech in order to advance a political agenda. Therefore, it’s worth taking a moment to clarify that criticizing Israel is not antisemitic. Contrary to what certain dishonest voices may say, no Jew or Israeli or Zionist has actually made that argument. It is 100 percent fair game to oppose the actions and rhetoric of the Israeli government.
However, it is antisemitic to argue that Israel is an illegitimate entity whose very existence is a crime. Jews have always defined themselves — and historically were defined by others — as a people, not just a religion. To deny this reality and Jewish self-determination, to oppose Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation, is to attack the heart of Jewish identity. Unfortunately, this is the core message of the pro-Palestinian movement, whose leaders do not preach two states for two peoples but instead describe the world’s lone Jewish polity as a cancer to be eradicated.
To be more specific, criticism becomes bigotry when it involves demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. Accusing Israel of genocide or running an apartheid state is a demonstrable lie that can’t be labeled legitimate criticism. The same goes for describing Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, as a human rights abuser on the level of China and North Korea.
Those who support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel employ such rhetoric as part of their campaign of economic warfare against the country. Such efforts seek to destroy the Jewish state through international pressure, undermining Israel to the point that it effectively ceases to survive. Think about the implications for Israeli Jews, who live in a region in which most governments and peoples have shown indifference to if not support for slaughtering Jews.
Moreover, now that the Jewish people have Israel and are not prepared to surrender it after 2,000 years of exile and persecution, the only way to replace Israel with Palestine is by forcibly taking it. That would mean killing or expelling millions of Jews. Those who know this but continue to advocate the anti-Zionist cause are antisemitic. And those anti-Zionists who do not realize this reality shouldn’t simply be able to plead ignorance and absolve themselves.
Imagine if someone demonized and sought to de-legitimize another country — say, Ireland — with the same obsessive hatred that the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Ilhan Omar, Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, and the leaders of Iran show Israel. Would they not be bigoted against the Irish? Of course they would.
But no one targets Ireland, or any other country, like so many people target Israel, despite its love of life, democratic system, commitment to freedom, and equal treatment under law. That’s the double standard of antisemitism in action.
Separating antisemitism from criticism of Israeli policy is not difficult. As with pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
But if that’s not enough, there are two simple tests to help decipher the difference.
A good rule of thumb is that, if you can take a statement and replace the words “Israel,” “Israeli,” and “Zionist” with “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Jewish people,” and that statement then sounds like it came straight out of the Dark Ages or Nazi Germany, it is probably antisemitic. The same goes for replacing “Zionism” with “Judaism.” Just try it and see if that person calling to eliminate “vermin Zionists” or using the term “zio” or “israeli” — both always lowercased — is really just critical of Israeli policy.
Another test is to ask the following question: Is it just a coincidence that Israel happens to be the world’s only Jewish state? When someone accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza but pays little attention to any other conflict in the world, ask this question. When someone claims Israel has no strategic value to the US as an ally and should be cut off, ask this question. And when someone repeatedly promotes conspiracy theories involving Israel without evidence, ask this question. Eventually, it will become obvious when it is not just a coincidence.
Pro-Israel rally in Times Square, New York City, US, Oct. 8, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
The Will to Endure
The Jewish people have overcome great empires seeking to destroy them for millennia. Today, they have both reestablished their ancient homeland in the Land of Israel and thrived in the diaspora.
In short, Jews are no longer victims, which much of the world has become accustomed to and known them to be. This reality triggers bewilderment, which can lead to admiration. “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” Mark Twain wrote with wonder in an 1899 essay. Often, however, bewilderment with the Jewish story is combined with envy and resentment, paving the way for antisemitism.
The post-Oct. 7 world, one in which virulent opposition to Israel and rampant attacks on Jews have surged, marks the latest chapter of an old story.
Tragically, Jews around the world must face a harsh reality: The alarming surge of antisemitism over the past two years is not a new phenomenon but rather a return to the historical norm.
Education and exposure to Jews in one-on-one or small group situations can help combat antisemitism on an individual level, but ultimately there is no cure for the larger virus. Jews have always been, and continue to be, a scapegoat for the full spectrum of radicals — from Islamists, to far-right white supremacists, to far-left activists who blame Israel for all problems.
But the Jews will once again have the audacity to survive. And Israel, the haven for history’s most beleaguered people, isn’t going anywhere.
What does all this mean? In a sentence, antisemitism will endure, and so too will the Jews.
Aaron Kliegman is the executive editor of The Algemeiner.
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What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel
The one time I got to talk to Muhammad Ali was a summer evening when I was working at one of my favorite college internships — in the McClurg Court newsroom of WBBM Newsradio 78, the Chicago affiliate of CBS Radio.
The scene came to mind earlier this week when I released a new audio documentary called Broken Hologram about Ali and his brief stint as a Broadway star. But back then, I was one of a quartet of interns who included a cool girl from Hyde Park named Gwen Billings with whom I occasionally took lunch at a nearby hot dog stand and discussed important news figures like, say, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. There was also Linda, a hard-nosed news reporter in the mold of Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. Sometimes she came around to my cubicle and took sips of my Dr. Pepper. Not in a flirtatious way, more in a proto-Daniel Day-Lewis “I drink your milkshake” kind of way. There was a fratty guy named Scott who wore a class ring from (redacted). He went on to a lucrative career, just not in journalism. There was one other dude; he was from Crown Point, Indiana, but that’s just about all I remember.
My job consisted of answering phones, ripping wire copy from the AP and UPI machines, getting sources on the phone and calling every major fire and police station every night to see if there was a story to be reported (“Hi, Sergeant Kupka, it’s Adam from WBBM: Do you have anything working in your area?”).
Even though every sergeant told me the same thing every night, I kept calling because that’s what journalists do: You keep making the calls. In fact, I did pretty much whatever was asked of me, and turned feisty only when one of the few asshole reporters tried to get me to run downstairs to the loading area to fetch him a “Green Streak” edition of the Tribune so he could check on his stocks or intimated that my job description should include making him coffee.
“Sure could do with a cup o’ coffee right now, Adam.”
“Cool, why don’t you make yourself one?”
Note: The individual referred to is decidedly not John Cody, a truly great man who remains a friend to this day. (Fun fact: During Vietnam, John worked for Stars & Stripes alongside Seth Lipsky, founder of the English language edition of the Forward)
Nor am I referring to sports reporter Rich King, a prince of a man who always offered to get people sandwiches from the White Hen Pantry (“Anyone need anything from ‘The Hen?’”).
Sometimes, when the news day got super-slow — for example, when Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz was in the studio doing a live call-in show — I passed the time by trying to guess the usually ridiculously easy passwords for the WBBM staff’s new computers and snooping in the reporters’ early version of email in a futile effort to find anything interesting. Apologies to the late Dale McCarren (DMC123).
I was working the evening shift when the top news story was about Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Catholic priest from Joliet, Illinois, who had been taken hostage in Beirut while he was working for a relief agency. Muhammad Ali was part of a delegation that had flown to the Middle East to try to arrange his release.
Meet Broken Hologram | RSS.com
My supervisor was a terrific guy named Duane Gray, an African-American Conservative who was big on conspiracy theories (“You should read this book. It’s called The Terror Network.”). He was a great manager and colleague who made sure that we kept to the schedule and that traffic, weather, sports and news headlines always came right when they were supposed to. On this particular night, Duane gave me a mission: “Get ‘The Champ’ on the phone.”
“Uh, how do I do that, Duane?”
“Call every hotel,” he said.
He scrawled a list of hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on a legal pad and I started calling Information to get their numbers. Advantage of working for a CBS affiliate: You got to make all the long-distance calls you wanted.
How many calls did I make? What were the names of all the hotels? I have no idea. But I do remember that one of them was the King David Hotel in Jerusalem because this time, when I asked to be transferred to Ali’s room, no one said, “Sorry, no one here by that name.”
Ali picked up. His voice had that raspy quality it got after he retired from boxing. “Hullo?”
“Hi, I’m calling from Newsradio 78. I was hoping one of our anchors could speak with you.”
“You’re calling from Chicago?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Man,” Ali told me, sounding weary but amiable. “It sounds like you’re calling from right next door.”
Duane could be a wise-ass and a cynic, but now he was star-struck. He sprang to his feet. “Is that the Champ?”
I nodded.
Duane grabbed the phone. “How’re you doin, Champ? You’re gonna be on with Dale McCarren. I’m gonna patch you through, Champ.” He gave me a hearty high-five.
Some time later — perhaps after a week, perhaps after two — when Madonna was in town for some concert, movie junket or photo shoot and Duane told me he wanted to get her on the air, I knew exactly what to do.
After I got her on the phone at her hotel and transferred the call to Duane, he shouted: “This kid,” he said, complimenting both me and his own managerial talent, “has the best news instincts of anyone in this newsroom!”
“Hello, Madonna?” Duane said into the phone. “You’re gonna be on with Dale; let me patch you through.”
The post What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel appeared first on The Forward.
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Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education
(JTA) — Steven Van Zandt is worried about the Jews.
“There is that pre-Holocaust vibe,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently about what he sees on social media, where he is a prolific user. “They spread lies around year after year after year, and if you say something often enough, people start to believe it.
“And that’s what happened that led to the Holocaust in the first place, and that’s what’s going on now.”
For a man equally beloved for his longtime work with Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band and his role as Silvio on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” such a detour might seem unusual. But Van Zandt is looking to make his own mark in the world of Holocaust education, via his education initiative TeachRock, which since 2013 has provided K-12 lesson plans on a range of subjects built around popular music.
Titled “Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust: Exploring an Enduring Culture Through Music,” the initiative’s four-day lesson plan, launched this week, includes the onset of antisemitism in prewar Europe, survivor testimony and Jewish values. Anchoring the lessons are rock songs from the likes of KISS, the half-Jewish glam metal band, beloved Jewish folk singer Leonard Cohen and contemporary New York pop band Lawrence, which is fronted by two Jewish siblings.
It’s a departure from the somber tone of most Holocaust education programs, a space that the Jewish community has heavily invested in despite mounting questions about the effectiveness of such lessons in curbing antisemitism. Other contemporary Holocaust learning initiatives have employed video games, artificial intelligence and similarly novel approaches as educators struggle to adapt to a near future without living survivors to share their testimonies.
For Van Zandt, the lessons aren’t just teaching about the Holocaust, but also about highlighting positive Jewish influence in the world of popular culture. He rattled off a list of Jewish artists he admires, including Bob Dylan and the pop songwriting team Lieber and Stoller.
“I have a lot of gratitude for what they have contributed to my life, just in terms of enjoyment,” he said. “Show business doesn’t exist without the Jewish contributions.”
The guitarist founded TeachRock in 2013 alongside other big names from the world of music and the arts, including Springsteen, U2 frontman Bono, Jackson Browne and the director Martin Scorsese. On Thursday, the organization piloted its new Holocaust education lesson plan to 50 high school students at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, timed to the state’s Holocaust Education Week. Florida’s Holocaust education task force is promoting the material to districts across the state.
“We always want to be educating in a way that feels like you’re not being taught. And I think this captures that,” Michael Igel, a contributing author on the TeachRock lesson plan who also chairs the statewide task force, told JTA.
For Igel, a descendant of survivors, the project fits neatly into his own efforts to bring Holocaust education into unconventional spaces. He’s planning future courses that incorporate food and theater.
“It’s still standards-based Holocaust education. But it’s being delivered to students in these different portals,” he said.
It was through Igel’s promotion of such nontraditional methods that he was approached by a member of TeachRock’s leadership council a year ago. TeachRock had recently been looking to offer lessons on Jewish heritage, and saw an opportunity to broach the subject of the Holocaust through Igel.
A huge E Street Band fan, Igel laughed as he recalled how the council member asked him if he had ever heard of Van Zandt.
The first of the curriculum’s four days opens with students listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite,” the 1975 hit by rock band KISS, before segueing into Jewish life in prewar Europe and the rise of antisemitism.
Igel noted the unique nature of the lesson. “When Gene Simmons with his tongue out is the first thing you see, you’re wondering, ‘What the heck happened to Holocaust education?’” he said.
Gradually the link becomes clear: The lesson explains that KISS frontman Gene Simmons is the son of a Holocaust survivor. Much of the curriculum is built around similar ideas of Jewish survival and resilience, as students are asked to contemplate how Simmons’ family background may have informed his outré stage persona. (Co-founder Paul Stanley is also Jewish.)
Such concepts, he said, help expand the idea of a Holocaust lesson beyond Jews as “victims in a snapshot of time.” In teacher training sessions, educators have responded well to the musical framing and excitedly discussed which songs they would want to pass down to future generations — a positive sign for Igel, who hopes to convince teachers to use the curriculum even outside of the state-mandated Holocaust Education Week lessons.
While Van Zandt, who is not Jewish, doesn’t craft the curriculum himself, he is friends with Simmons and the two have spoken before about wanting to use music to teach Jewish history. Max Weinberg, the E Street Band’s longtime drummer, is also Jewish.
The initiative comes at a moment when the world of popular music, like many other cultural sectors, has become engulfed in controversy over Israel. A recent dustup involved Ed Sheeran and Macklemore, in which Jewish venue owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to drop the rapper from his tour over his onstage pro-Palestinian activism. That prompted many artists to support Macklemore, including Jewish actor Ilana Glazer, who spoke at one of his “Free Palestine” tour stops. Several leading musicians, including Lorde, Paramore and Björk, have also signed pledges to boycott Israel over its conduct in Gaza, while others including Pink and Boy George have taken opposite tracks.
All of this discourages Van Zandt, who famously led an international artist boycott of the South African resort venue Sun City in 1985 to protest Apartheid. The artists now backing the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement targeting Israel have cited the Sun City protests as a direct inspiration. (Sun City itself was founded by Sol Kerzner, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.)
But Van Zandt says the two causes are different.
“Yes, I am known as the boycott king of the world,” he said. “It’s not the same situation. Trying to deny weapons for Israel to defend itself is obscene. It’s ridiculous. It’s terrible.”
He has feuded with Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist, over BDS.
“I wrote him a very nice, detailed letter saying that it was misconceived, it’s a mistake, it’s not going to accomplish anything,” Van Zandt recalled. “I was very nice to him. Very diplomatic, very respectful. And then he starts just calling me names in the press.” (Waters has directed expletives at Van Zandt and other contemporaries who disagree with him about Israel in interviews.)
Igel, too, is thinking about how TeachRock’s lessons can address contemporary discourse over Israel, a subject that many Holocaust educators often are reluctant to bring up in the classroom even when students press the topic. His curriculum defines what a genocide is — “for a generation that needs to know what that word means, and what it doesn’t mean,” he said.
Following this week’s pilot program, both Igel and Van Zandt hope states beyond Florida will take an interest in their lessons. The rock star has ambitious goals for the initiative: to try to change the national conversation around Jews and Israel that has filled his social media feeds, which he describes as “lies on top of lies.”
“Eventually there’s got to be a national public conversation about this, which is not taking place,” he said. “So eventually it’s going to have to be. At that point, all bets are off.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education appeared first on The Forward.
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Were Leopold and Loeb inspired by Nietzsche, or Jewish self-loathing?
Any production of Patrick Hamilton’s popular thriller Rope, like any game of Clue, can be reduced to props, setting and culprits.
The central prop is a large chest, containing a freshly-murdered body. The setting can vary: Mayfair in Hamilton’s 1929 original, Manhattan in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 screen adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart. The names of the players are sometimes different, but there are always two students in their finely-appointed apartment with the titular murder weapon.
Gordon Greenberg’s new adaptation, now playing off-Broadway at the New Group’s space at St. Clement’s, presents a novel clue as to what prompted the crime: a Christmas tree upstage right. In his take on this “well-made play,” which Greenberg believes has its deficiencies, the central characters, inspired by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, are once again Jewish, but doing their best to conceal that fact.
Hamilton, who wrote his play shortly after Leopold and Loeb’s conviction, was struck by the men’s alleged lack of motive, beyond a desire to pull off the perfect crime based on their nihilistic misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Greenberg doesn’t buy that the killing was dispassionate, and believes a crisis of identity was at play.
“What drew me to it was thinking about what the factors might have been that went into this murder that I personally find hard to believe was just theoretical,” said Greenberg, a director and playwright, who recently revived Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife off-Broadway. “I don’t think anyone does anything for purely theoretical reasons. We can extrapolate them later, but in the moment we are going on gut impulses and human needs and sexuality and jealousy and all of these fiery emotional poles that make us human.”
Greenberg, who is gay and Jewish, had long been fascinated by the Leopold and Loeb case, wondering what led two well-bred, cerebral Jews to commit a supposedly “motiveless” murder. (In the real crime, notably fictionalized in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed a 14-year-old boy, Robert Franks; in Rope, they kill a wealthy classmate.)
Hamilton’s play, which Greenberg found to be “antiseptic,” de-Judaized and stripped of queerness, is not concerned with the “why” of the killing.
His murderers, Brandon, described as “tall, finely and athletically built, and blonde” and Granillo, “a Spaniard” with the “shrug of the shoulders characteristic of his race,” are in it for the thrill. They convene a dinner party and serve the meal on the chest containing their victim, certain they won’t be caught.
In Greenberg’s version, set in 1957 Manhattan, Brandon is Garret Stern (Cameron Monahan), a working-class striver who declaims, in a break of the fourth wall, that he “wants to be mistaken for the son of assimilated German Jews, not the shtetl Jews with bent vowels and calloused hands from whom he actually descends.” (As part of the ruse, he’s abandoned his given name of Gary.)
Granillo is now Nate Singer (Corey Fogelmanis), the Yekke scion of a garment district macher who, to his upwardly-mobile mother’s delight, “can almost pass for gentile.” Both are students at Princeton and plan to drop the body back in Jersey after their macabre dinner party.
Like the real Leopold and Loeb, they are also involved sexually and sadomasochistically. Greenberg says he was partially inspired by Tom Kalin’s 1992 film Swoon, which revisited the killers through a queer lens.
Nate’s instilled self-hatred likely feeds into his desire to be dominated by Garret, whose rough upbringing as a Jew in postwar Skokie taught him the utility of violence. (His school principal praised him for breaking a boy’s nose, saying “your people aren’t exactly known for defending themselves.”)
Greenberg, who said that, as an actor he played “every Herb Gardner and Neil Simon play around,” chose to move the action up to the era Lavender Scare and a resurgence of casual, clubby antisemitism following the “chemotherapy of World War II” that briefly put it into remission.
Nate and Garret’s guests, for their post-Christmas shindig, whose centerpiece is a chest containing a corpse, include a polished, pedigreed classmate; a droll Sarah Lawrence student; their closeted professor, who will catch them in the lie; and a Mayflower-descendant judge who happens to be the father of Ronald Kentley, the deceased.
Driving the boys’ motive and cue for passion is Nate’s tormented attraction to Ronald, who he fears might out him and land him on McCarthy’s list. Garret is jealous, but sees an opportunity: In bumping Ronald off, he hopes to take his place as the judge’s surrogate son, gaining entry to the patrician world to which he aspires.
But their guests’ routine macroaggressions show the futility of trying to overcome their backgrounds. The Christmas tree is fooling no one. Greenberg is similarly unconvinced that Leopold and Loeb’s murder was merely a Nietzschean performance, undertaken to prove that morality need not apply to superior intellects.
“No one really knows what was going through their mind, and no one ever will,” Greenberg said of Leopold and Loeb’s crime. “But taking one of these fascinating true crime stories and positing what the humanity is behind it, what’s all the flesh on the bone, is to me the fascination and the fun exercise.”
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