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Harry Belafonte, singer and civil rights activist who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96
(New York Jewish Week) — Barrier-smashing singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who once boasted of being “the most popular Jew in America” because of his rendition of a Hebrew classic, died Tuesday at his longtime Upper West Side home. He was 96.
The New York City native was the one of the first Black artists to achieve widespread commercial success in the United States, and while he was raised Catholic, his life frequently dovetailed with Jewish causes, values and people. Among Belafonte’s many Jewish connections — which included brokering a meeting between Nelson Mandela and Jewish leaders in 1989 — was his marriage to his Jewish second wife, dancer Julie Robinson. The couple, who were married from 1958 to 2004, raised two children, Gina and David.
In 2011, Belafonte revealed in his autobiography, “My Song: A Memoir” that his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Belafonte’s parents were both Jamaican immigrants: his mother, Melvine, was the child of a white mother from Scotland and a Black father, and his father, Harold George Bellanfanti, who later changed the family name, was the son of a Black mother and white Dutch-Jewish father. In his book, Belafonte describes his paternal grandfather, whom he never met, as “a white Dutch Jew who drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all.”
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr., in Harlem on March 1, 1927. His father was largely absent during his childhood; his mother, who struggled with finding work, forged a relationship with a Jewish tailor who taught her how to mend garments. “That tailor gave me my first sense of kinship with Jews, which would deepen over time,” Belfonte wrote in his memoir. He spent a portion of his childhood with his grandmother in Jamaica, but he returned to New York to attend George Washington High School in Washington Heights — where Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger were also educated — before dropping out.
Following a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Belafonte was bitten by the acting bug when, working as a janitor’s assistant, he was given a pair of tickets to the American Negro Theater as a gift. “It was there that the universe opened for me,” he told NPR in 2011. “I decided with any device I could possibly find, I wanted to stay in this place. What I had discovered in the theater was power: power to influence, power to know of others and know of other things.”
In the late 1940s, Belafonte enrolled in acting classes, where he met his lifelong friend Sidney Poitier. The impoverished pair would often share a single theater ticket, trading places at intermission. He also befriended Jewish actor Tony Curtis, writing in his memoir: “He lived in the Bronx with his family; why live downtown, he’d say, when he could live uptown for free? And who cared if they still greeted him up there as Bernie Schwartz?”
He and Curtis frequently went to parties together, he wrote, sometimes with the actress Elaine Stritch, “who swore more colorfully than any sailor I’d known,” and “the blunt Jewish comic” Bea Arthur, “who’d start matching wits with Elaine until the two of them had everyone in uncontrollable laughter.”
To pay for acting classes, Belafonte began dabbling in singing at nightclubs, and it was there that a true superstar was born. One of Belafonte’s early successes were his performances of the Hebrew dance hit “Hava Nagila” at the classic downtown folk club the Village Vanguard. His rendition, Belafonte joked to The New York Times in 2017, made him “the most popular Jew in America.”
In that same interview, Belafonte recalled the tough uptown streets of his childhood, and how he was drawn to the fast money his uncle’s number-running business earned. “Everybody in that world were role models in how to survive, how to be tough, how to get through the city, how to con, the daily encounters,” he said. “But my mother saw to it that unless I wanted to live life absent of testicles, she wasn’t going to have me follow her brother Lenny. Somewhere in there is a Sholem Aleichem — a rich story to be told of the lore of that time.”
With his 1953 breakthrough album, “Calypso” — which included his most iconic work, “The Banana Boat Song” — Belafonte “almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music,” according to The New York Times’ obituary. “Calypso” climbed to the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release and stayed there for 31 weeks; it is reported to be the first album by a solo artist to sell more than a million copies. By 1959 he was the most highly-paid Black performer in history, according to the Times.
Known around the world as the “King of Calypso,” Belafonte recorded and performed a wide range of global and folk classics throughout his wide-ranging musical career — Jewish standards among them. In 1959, he performed “Hine Ma Tov” in England, with what appears to be an Israeli military choir; his 1963 album, “Streets I Have Walked,” includes a rendition of “Erev Shel Shoshanim” (“Evening of Roses”), a popular Jewish wedding song.
Belafonte’s greatest passion, however, was neither acting nor singing — it was civil rights activism. There, too, he worked closely with many Jewish activists, as part of the historic Black-Jewish civil rights alliance of the 1950s and 1960s. But, as he recalled in his memoir, it was racism delivered by a Jewish TV executive that first inspired him to take on racial segregation in the United States.
The executive, a Jew from Montreal named Charles Revson, asked Belafonte to stop hosting white dancers on his performance show, citing the preferences of Southern viewers. Belafonte said he rejected the instruction and let Revson cancel the show. He realized, he wrote, that TV could only reflect societal attitudes, not change them. “To change the culture you had to change the country,” he concluded.
Through his civil rights activism, Bellafonte befriended Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956; the pair remained close until King’s assassination in 1968. “My apartment was a retreat for him,” Belafonte told NPR of King and his 21-room apartment in 2008. “He had his own entrance, his own kitchen. The home became, for him, a place where he could think and reside, take his shoes off, have his collar open and be him.”
Belafonte helped provide the seed money to launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he was one of the lead fundraisers for that organization and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was “deeply involved” in the 1963 March on Washington and helped fund the Freedom Rides.
Belafonte’s commitment to social justice endured throughout his long life and career. In the 1980s, he helped organize the Live Aid concert, and he served as UNICEF’s goodwill ambassador after Jewish entertainer Danny Kaye pioneered the role. He was also a co-chairman of the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, along with Gloria Steinem, though ill health kept him from attending.
Though primarily famous for his singing, Belafonte continued to make movies throughout his career; in 1970 he produced and co-starred in “The Angel Levine” alongside the original “Fiddler on the Roof” star Zero Mostel. Based on a story by Bernard Malamud, Belafonte starred as the titular Jewish angel. (The “project had a sociopolitical edge,” the Times noted, as the entertainer’s Harry Belafonte Enterprises hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to work on the film’s crew.)
The cause of Belafonte’s death was congestive heart failure. He is survived by his two children with Robinson; the two children he had with his first wife Marguerite Byrd, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte; and eight grandchildren. After divorcing Robinson in 2004, he married photographer Pamela Frank in 2008; Frank also survives him, along with stepchildren Sarah Frank and Lindsey Frank and three step-grandchildren.
“There’s just so much left that’s in my basket of possibilities,” Belafonte told The New York Times ahead of his 90th birthday in 2017. “I’m not as young as I feel, or as young as I would consider myself to be. The 90 figure is a blur. But I do know that if there’s anything left for me to do, I had best hurry up and do it, because time is not an ally.”
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Can this suburban kibbutz and civil rights trailblazer maintain its identity in the 21st Century?
POMONA, NY— The Skyview Acres Cooperative is located about 30 miles north of New York City. Think of it as a suburban kibbutz.
“One felt like they had many parents,” recalled Carol Bowman, a professor of education at Ramapo College who grew up in this close-knit housing development in leafy Rockland County. “When I was growing up I could just walk into any of the houses where I had friends.”
“It was just a giant united family,” said Jo Simons, a retired piano teacher whose parents taught music and organized community singing events at Skyview.
Skyview was created in the aftermath of World War II as an intentionally integrated community. Quakers figured prominently in its creation. The land for Skyview was purchased in January 1947 with loans totaling $16,500 from two Quakers, who were strangers to the founding families and to each other. The loans came with terms that could’ve come from the Hebrew Free Loan Society: They were interest-free and simply said, “Pay us back when you can.”
The founding families scraped together the rest of the $29,500 purchase price. Today, Skyview consists of 115 acres and about four dozen homes. Most of them have at least two acres of land.
About a third of the original 45 or 46 families at Skyview were Jewish, according to Naomi Kleinberg, a retired editor and children’s book author, whose parents were among the original families who cleared land to build homes, make roads and create a swimming pond here. Key residents who played pivotal roles in Skyview’s evolution as a progressive bastion and a caring community included Jo’s father, Edward Simons, who founded what is now the Rockland Conservatory of Music, and Irving Wolfe, a political organizer for whom the cooperative’s ball field is named.
At the community’s recent 80th anniversary celebration, Wally Glickman recited an original poem. Skyview, he wrote, is a “ magic island in suburbia.”
‘My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods’
Jack and Lena Kleinberg were among four Jewish couples who came to Skyview together from the Lower East Side. Back in the city their social lives revolved around the University Settlement House on Eldridge Street.
They raised a son and three daughters at Skyview. The son, Joseph, remains in the family home where he makes a living as a beekeeper and vegetable farmer.
“My father wanted nothing more than to live in the woods,” Naomi Kleinberg told me.
Jack Kleinberg was a World War II veteran who considered himself an atheist but was “adamantly, proudly, belligerently Jewish,” she said.
His maternal uncle’s entire family perished in Poland during the Holocaust and Kleinberg resolved that his family would know how to defend itself, so he taught them how to shoot revolvers and rifles.
“My father said he would never allow his family to be led like sheep to the slaughter, like in Europe,” Naomi Kleinberg said.
Her parents grew up on the Lower East Side amidst much misery and poverty. That experience prompted her late mother, who was raised in an observant Sephardic household on Orchard Street, to work as a social justice activist. In the 1930’s, Lena Kleinberg campaigned on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, the Black men wrongfully charged with the rape of white women in Alabama. During the 1940’s, Lena worked for the establishment of the Jewish state, volunteering with the American League for a Free Palestine. During the Cold War, she demonstrated at missile sites near Skyview and, in more recent years, stood vigil at a local abortion clinic, to counter anti-abortion protesters intimidating patients.
“All this involvement in social justice, making tikkun olam, it’s so Jewish,” Naomi told me.
‘Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the ’40’s?’
Although there were seders and Hanukkah parties held at the cooperative, Kleinberg remembers only two Skyview families who attended synagogue regularly.
The other families had “Jewish upbringings, Jewish identities,” Kleinberg said, “but not a Jewish existence.”
For the most part, religious tradition was supplanted by political activism. Skyview residents attended seminal civil rights marches in Washington, brought medicine to Cuba, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and went to Nicaragua to aid the Sandinista regime. To this day, residents demonstrate regularly against the Trump administration at an intersection in Nanuet that has long served as Rockland’s town square for political protest.
A handful of key political activists lived at Skyview during the 1960s. Among them were Conrad Lynn, the Black civil rights attorney who defended Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown and one of the Puerto Rican nationalists who carried out the attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954; George Houser, a co-founder of both the Congress of Racial Equality and the American Committee on Africa; and Alfred Hassler, a Methodist minister who served as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the interfaith peace and justice group. Lynn, Hassler and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin went on a freedom ride down south in 1947.
“They did that in the 40’s, not in the 60’s,” noted the poet Wally Glickman. “Can you imagine how dangerous that was in the 40’s?”
Skyview has also been home to some prominent entertainers, including Krishna Das, a globe-trotting Jewish performer of Hindu devotional music. The late Steven Hill, born Solomon Krakovsky, had starring roles in the TV shows Mission: Impossible and Law & Order. Hill left Skyview after becoming an observant Jew and moved to nearby Monsey. Eliot Asinof, who wrote for such classic western TV shows as Maverick and Wagon Train and authored the nonfiction account of the Chicago “Black Sox” World Series scandal in 1919, Eight Men Out, rented a home at Skyview during summers in the 1950’s and 60’s. And two founding members of the Grammy-nominated jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra currently live at Skyview.
But no one in showbiz had quite the run as Ed Simons, who was said to be the oldest working conductor in the country when he wielded a baton at the age of 100. The maestro’s career included performing in the military band that accompanied President Harry Truman to the Potsdam Peace Conference in the Summer of 1945 and conducting pit orchestras for eight Broadway musicals, including My Fair Lady.
Edmund Gordon, a Black psychologist who was one of the architects of the federal Head Start program, is still professionally active at the age of 105. He treads water in the indoor pool at his Skyview home.
Several people I spoke with offered the same quip to comment on the longevity of the cooperative’s residents: “There must be something in the water.”
‘I was the first Skyview baby’
Some of the children who lived at Skyview Acres inherited their parents’ political sympathies. In the 1950’s, several Skyview kids refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or participate in the “duck and cover” drills held during the Cold War to prepare students for a nuclear attack. In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign set up a tent city dubbed Resurrection City on the National Mall in Washington D.C., some teenagers at Skyview erected their own Insurrection City in the woods. And, no matter how liberal and left-leaning the cooperative’s grown-ups may have been, young people skinny dipping in Skyview’s man-made pond upset some of the adults.
Several people who grew up at Skyview and are now in their 70s or 80s, recall attending the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Skyview’s roughly four dozen households filled two buses for the march. That year, Skyview block party attended by some 400 Rockland County residents raised money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The contribution elicited a signed thank-you letter from Dr. King, then SCLC’s president.
And many of the Skyview kids carried on the good works of their parents.
Two of Edmund Gordon’s children are tenured college professors. Ted Gordon teaches Black Studies at the University of Texas. Jessica Gordon Nembhard teaches political economy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Then there is Laura Hassler, the daughter of Skyview co-founder Alfred Hassler, a conscientious objector during World War II and the man responsible for introducing Martin Luther King Jr. to the Vietnamese monk Thich Nnat Hanh in 1966, a connection credited with influencing King’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
“I was the first Skyview baby,” Laura Hassler told me during a phone interview. “I wear it with pride.“
Hassler started the Netherlands-based non-profit Musicians Without Borders. She recalled kids at school calling the Skyview students hippies and communists. One oral history of the cooperative recounted a local hardware store that refused to service Skyview because its residents were “commies.
Some of the Skyview residents had, in fact, been members of the Communist Party earlier in their lives. Conrad Lynn was active in the party during the 1920’s and 30’s. Irving Wolfe was also a member. Wolfe, whose Honda sedan bore a VIVA CHE license plate, defied the U.S. embargo against Cuba 16 times to bring humanitarian aid to the island. In the 1980’s, he served on a construction brigade in Nicaragua.
Ed Simons, the conductor, was suspected of communist sympathies and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 where he was successfully represented by a lawyer from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.
‘Still a genuine community’
Skyview is located about six miles north of the burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey. New Square, another Haredi hamlet, is even closer. Those communities have a pressing need for more housing. Many current Skyview residents told me they are reluctant to speak publicly about the threat posed by new housing development, fearing that their efforts to limit development might be interpreted as antisemitism.
A number of Skyview residents have been active in the NAACP, which has been battling the East Ramapo school board run by Orthodox Jews who tend not to send their children to public schools. Test scores, graduation rates and other data indicate that the school district, once the best in New York State, is now among the worst, according to Oscar Cohen, a Jewish NAACP activist and retired school administrator who lives nearby. A 2026-2027 U.S. News & World Report ranking of high schools noted that Ramapo High School had proficiency rates in math and English of 18% and 44% respectively.
Skyview residents are particularly concerned about the future of a 75-acre forested parcel known as the Stryker property that borders Skyview to the south, according to Anna Friedberg, a lawyer who serves as president of the Skyview’s board. Friedberg noted that the property’s development could impact traffic in the area, as well as the local watershed, which includes a stream that feeds Skyview’s pond and the west branch of the Hackensack River, a source of water for Nyack and Northern New Jersey.
“There have been some plans by the town to suggest that they would develop that entire property,” she told me at the cooperative’s annual Winter Doldrums party in March. “There is a tremendous population boon in this area and so there’s significant pressure to find more housing for folks.”
The Stryker property was purchased with a public bond approved by residents of the Town of Ramapo that earmarked the land for open space and low-income, clustered housing for first responders. But the town subsequently commissioned a planning study that cited a religious campus as one potential use of the Stryker property. Michael Specht, the Ramapo town supervisor, wrote in an email, “There are no plans at this time to develop the Stryker property or use it as a religious campus.”
“I would take anything that the town says with a grain of salt,” said Bob Trostle, a retired builder who grew up in Skyview and now lives just outside its border. “We’ve learned that the hard way, especially concerning development planning, zoning, and things like that.”
In 2015, the Skyview Acres Land Trust was created to preserve the cooperative’s greenery. Membership in the trust is voluntary but once a homeowner joins, subsequent owners of that home can’t add more buildings to their property or clear-cut trees. The trust is headed by Paul Nagin, a longtime Skyview resident who now lives in Connecticut. Nagin not only continues to be involved in the land trust but is still active in the Spring Valley NAACP, which has been in court fighting the East Ramapo school district.
“As far as I’m concerned, the Stryker property is a sword of Damocles hanging over Skyview,” Nagin told me. “It’s going to be an ongoing issue for sure.”
Skyview is “a pretty blue dot in the middle of a reddish part of Rockland County,” according to Robin Shapiro, a Skyview resident who describes himself as a checkbook Democrat active in J Street. He sees the concerns over housing development in the area as “a special case of NIMBYism with an overlay of religion and politics.”
“I don’t think that you can explain the opposition to development plans as antisemitic,” he told me. “There are legitimate and long-standing concerns about preserving open space, water quality, traffic that you’d see in any community that was encountering very rapid growth from new folks of any kind.”
Will Skyview retain its unique political and communal character as its properties turn over? Will it continue to be the kind of place where Wally Glickman and his fellow Skyview poet Brian Kates post their poetry on trees along a pathway in the woods?
“This is still a genuine community. I don’t really see that ending,” said Kates, who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing when he worked at the New York Daily News. “I think it’s something more than politics. It’s an ethos of people helping each other, of being kind to each other, a kind and caring community.”
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American music producer Justin Goldner at work on a Yiddish album
How many Yiddish rock stars do you know?
Maybe more than you think.
If you watched the Grammy Awards back in 2018, you might have seen one of them, Justin Goldner, accompany Ben Platt as he sang “Somewhere” from the Broadway musical West Side Story.
A multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and lute, Goldner has worked with an all-star array of artists as a session musician and producer, including Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Ricky Martin and Macy Gray. Goldner also appeared on Broadway and in Madison Square Garden, performed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and recorded music for Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Goldner is no stranger to the spotlight, but for his latest project, he stepped away from the roaring arenas of pop stardom to inhabit a more intimate space: a dive into Yiddish culture. His work in progress, Songs of Longing and Belonging (Vi shturem a benken in Yiddish), sets Yiddish poetry to music, creating tracks that sound refreshingly contemporary even as they plumb the Yiddish literary archives for inspiration.
By the end of the project — which is being supported by a fellowship from the Jewish Writers Institute — the songs will comprise an entire album. Goldner estimates the full album will appear next spring. For now, he has been releasing them one at a time on YouTube under his Yiddish moniker, Reb Tsudek.
Like many younger people interested in Yiddish today, Goldner didn’t grow up with the language. Although Judaism was part of his upbringing in suburban Philadelphia, it was not a central part of his identity. “I grew up in what I would imagine is a pretty typical Reform family,” Goldner said when I spoke with him. “I had a bar mitzvah. I went to Jewish summer camp. But in retrospect, my memory of my Jewish upbringing was a little bit like: ‘Here’s Judaism. Don’t get too close to it.’”
If he had anything resembling religious commitment, it was to music, specifically the guitar, an instrument he took up at 13. “Relatively quickly it became an all consuming pursuit,” he recalled. “In high school, I barely did anything else. I was a very obsessive listener and wanted to devour as much music as possible.” After graduating high school, he earned a degree in music from NYU.
Goldner said he began to think differently about his Jewish heritage when he saw how his friends related to their own cultural backgrounds. “The thing that sort of primed the pump for me was getting into Greek and Spanish and Arabic and other languages and cultures,” he said. “I just found that so engaging. I was really inspired by my friends and colleagues who come from these backgrounds and carry their culture and their heritage with them, but they’re not living in the past.”
That epiphany, combined with the experience of getting to know a great-aunt with dementia who increasingly reverted to her native Yiddish, led Goldner to purchase a copy of College Yiddish, the classic textbook by Uriel Weinreich. For many years, Yiddish was a linguistic passion that he nurtured privately. Now it has become central to the evolution of his musical career.
The Yiddish title of Goldner’s project — Vi shturem a benken — comes from “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), a poem by Anna Margolin, a 20th-century Yiddish poet who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1906. Previously unfamiliar with her work, Goldner was drawn to the “intensity” of Margolin’s lyric, which he translated for me as “it rocks me like a storm, this yearning.”
“I feel like she, as a writer, leaps off the page,” Goldner told me. “The intensity of wanting to do something or be something and not even knowing what, but just feeling like you can’t hold yourself back.”
Featuring vocalists Temma Schaechter and Ben Abraham, Goldner’s version of “The Song of a Girl” reveals another facet of Songs of Longing and Belonging: its blending of heritage languages and diasporic experiences. Besides Yiddish and English, “The Song of a Girl” also includes lyrics in Indonesian, one of the languages spoken by Abraham’s parents.
Future songs will take a similar approach. For example, “Meyerkepl” ( Seashell), based on a poem by the Yiddish writer Yehoash, will include words by Cuban poet José Marti. “I’ve been fascinated by Cuban music for a very long time,” Goldner said. “My wife’s family is Cuban. I was struck by how this sense of exile, of diaspora, of being far away from something or someone that we construe as home, manifested with these two very different authors in very similar imagery.”
In taking up Yiddish as a medium of musical expression, Goldner joins a growing group of artists recording contemporary music in the language, including Daniel Kahn, whose Yiddish versions of classics by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are ingenuous feats of translation; Isabel Frey, whose 2020 debut album Millennial Bundist repurposes Yiddish labor and protest anthems; and the Bashevis Singers, a Melbourne-based folk band who, like Goldner, frequently turn to Yiddish poetry as a source of musical inspiration.
Meanwhile, independent record labels like Borscht Beat are producing Yiddish music that runs the gamut from traditional to experimental.
This thriving world of Yiddish popular music reflects a larger cultural and linguistic renaissance in which Goldner is a passionate participant. He has attended the Yidish Vokh, an annual week-long retreat for Yiddish speakers in upstate New York, takes online Yiddish classes, and has even developed a Yiddish keyboard app, YidShrift, that aims to bring familiar features like autocorrect and autocomplete to modern Yiddish communication.
Beyond the Yiddish lyrics he sets to music, Goldner has incorporated his affinity for the language into Songs of Longing by including Yiddish interviews with some of his collaborators, emphasizing the currency of Yiddish as a medium of colloquial expression.
While Songs of Longing and Belonging is firmly rooted in Goldner’s engagement with Yiddish language and lyrics, he also believes that the texts he is drawing on speak to shared human experiences.
“I think that there is a longing for connection that is universal and that manifests itself through the concepts and stories of who we are,” he said. That longing often pushes people to ask themselves probing questions of identity like “Who are my people?” or “where is my home?”
“I don’t think that there are ever simple answers,” he said.
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Katie Zacharia’s brief White House stint included a rebuke from the Auschwitz Memorial
Katie Zacharia’s five-day stint as White House Press Secretary ended almost as soon as it began. But before she was fired on Friday, she managed to draw a rebuke from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
The museum’s reprimand came in response to a claim Zacharia posted to X in November 2025, asserting that the abortion pill is “connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”
The supposed connection? A company descended from the conglomerate involved in producing Zyklon B later owned the company that developed the abortion pill, Zacharia intimated in her post.
The official Auschwitz Memorial X account rebuked Zacharia on Monday, calling the argument “a misleading chain of guilt by association.”
Mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill, was first synthesized in 1980 — more than three decades after World War II’s end — by Georges Teutsch, a chemist at the French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf, based on an idea developed by Jewish endocrinologist Étienne-Émile Baulieu.
The tenuous connection to the poison gas used in concentration camps goes something like this: Zyklon B was distributed by a company called Degesch, which was partly owned by the German conglomerate I.G. Farben. After World War II, I.G. Farben was broken up into successor companies, including Hoechst AG, which in 1997 acquired a majority stake in the French company that developed mifepristone.
“A corporate relationship between companies separated by decades is presented as if it proved continuity of products, purposes, or chemical composition,” the Auschwitz Memorial wrote on X. “That is not historical analysis, but the selective combination of unrelated facts to produce a predetermined conclusion.”
Zacharia offered another version of the claim in a June 2025 podcast episode of We the People with Gates Garcia, saying that “the abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the exterminant (sic) camps in Nazi Germany.”
Suffice it to say, mifepristone, a steroidal progesterone blocker, is not the same as cyanide. Zacharia, the Auschwitz Memorial wrote, “confuses corporate history with chemical composition.”
After the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, anti-abortion activists have increasingly set their sights on banning the abortion pill nationwide. Prescribing, dispensing, or mailing mifepristone is currently banned in 13 states. In May, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court ruling that would have effectively ended mail delivery and telemedicine prescribing of mifepristone nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal.
Zacharia has framed her opposition to abortion as deeply personal. Zacharia said that, when she met her biological mother at 18, she learned she was “approximately 20, 30 minutes away from being aborted.” A Christian counselor, Zacharia said, convinced her mother to place her for adoption instead.
On the podcast, Zacharia also spoke about her work on the board of the White Rose Resistance, an anti-abortion advocacy group named for the Nazi resistance movement of the same name.
Groups including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League have condemned comparisons between abortion and the Holocaust, arguing that they trivialize the Holocaust and exploit its victims’ memory for political ends.
Zacharia has also made Nazi comparisons in other contexts: According to CNN, in September 2022, she reposted a Truth Social post comparing then-President Joe Biden and anti-fascist protesters to Nazis. It included the hashtags #Antifa, #PedoHitler and #WrongSideOfHistory.
The White House Press Office did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment Friday morning, before Zacharia’s firing had been announced.
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