Uncategorized
‘I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant’: The story of Westerbork prisoner 8331
As prisoner 8331 at the Nazis’ Westerbork transit camp in Holland, Jacob Boas must have witnessed the sorrow and fear of hundreds if not thousands of fellow inmates before they were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to die at Auschwitz.
But he has no memory of it. Jacob Boas, a Dutch Jew, was born in the camp on Nov. 1, 1943, and was captive there until he, his parents and older brother along with 876 other prisoners were liberated by Canadian troops 18 months after Jacob was born.
There’s nothing that Jacob, or Jack, as he calls himself now, remembers of those 18 months.
“My earliest conscious memory is in postwar Amsterdam. I must’ve been around 2 or so because I was stuck in a high chair, the coal stove started smoking, and my mother came rushing in from the kitchen for the rescue,” Jack told me.
Each week during the war, a train of cattle cars delivered Westerbork prisoners, including Jack’s grandparents and other relatives, to die at Auschwitz or Sobibor. A total of 102,000 Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and many of them came through Westerbork, including Anne Frank.
Jack, his brother and their parents beat the odds through sheer luck: a camp commandant at Westerbork who had a policy of not immediately deporting mothers in late pregnancy, and a father with tailoring skills.
“The fact of being born in the transit camp has struck deep, impenetrable roots within me, coupled with a seemingly unslakable need to know,” Jack wrote in a book published two years ago, Until Further Notice … Theresienstadt On My Mind.
As a historian and author of six books, four of which deal with the Holocaust, Jack has spent his adult life trying to satisfy that need. He has also taught university courses on the Holocaust and writes magazine pieces.
I met Jack at a second-hand bookstore in Portland, Ore., where we both live. He works there every Monday as a volunteer. Jack is a self-effacing man, the kind who listens more than he talks. He’s not apt to come right out and tell you that he is a victim of the Holocaust. Jack’s story has come to me in segments, as we discovered we had a common obsession — German history. And the more we talk, the more intriguing his story becomes.
A false sense of security
Jack and I were having coffee at a Portland cafe when he showed me a photograph of a 1944 registration card from Camp Westerbork. It bears the names of his family: parents Barend and Anna, Jacob and his brother Marcus.
“Wife’s pregnancy exemption canceled because the child was born on Nov. 1, 1943,” states the typewritten card.
The camp commandant, Jack explained, had a policy regarding pregnant women that might seem merciful, but was not. Women in their third trimester were exempted from deportation until six weeks after giving birth, along with their husbands and children. This was part of a larger camp charade. Living conditions at Westerbork were not as bad as other camps. There were soccer matches, chess tournaments and concerts, and inmates wore their civilian clothes instead of concentration camp pajamas, so that prisoners would have a false sense of security before they were sent east.
The trimester “exemption” was one of two cards that had been protecting the Boas family. The other was Barend’s skills as a tailor. After their arrival at Westerbork, Barend was put to work in the camp’s tailor workshop, and later at the Nazis’ headquarters in The Hague.
In 1944, the family learned they were going to be sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia, which — although the Nazis presented it as a model camp — served as a feeder camp to Auschwitz. But they never got to Theresienstadt. Canadian troops liberated Camp Westerbork on April 12, 1945.
The family began putting their lives back together in Amsterdam. Barend started a tailor shop. Anna was a seamstress. They moved to Montreal in 1957 because they had no living relatives left in the Netherlands and because of two events portending war: the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Jack got a BA in history and political science at McGill University in Montreal, married a McGill student and followed her to the University of California, Riverside, where he earned his PhD in European history. His dissertation was about German Jews living under Hitler from 1933–39. Research for his dissertation led to his first book: Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork.
Jack’s parents didn’t talk much about Westerbork. This was not unusual for Holocaust survivors. They just wanted to get on with their lives. But Jack loved tracing the lives of people in the past, including his relatives. It became the mission that shaped his life.
Survivor syndrome
As I was having coffee with Jack, he talked about his eight-year struggle to get financial compensation as a Holocaust survivor from Dutch authorities. Jack filled out the application in February 1979, and later sent a separate document pertaining to his physical and mental health.
Compensation requests were processed by Dutch authorities under a victims’ benefit act known by its Dutch initials, WUV. A WUV representative went to Jack’s San Francisco apartment to question him, which was followed by interviews by a psychiatrist hired by WUV administrators.
Reports written from these conversations said Jack suffered from “major identity issues,” struggled with depression, implied he was lazy and irresponsible, and noted that his marriage had failed. But the WUV psychiatrist said he was unable to “relate his (Jack’s) symptoms or his cognitive or identity issues directly with his family experience or with his wartime experience.” One report made the ludicrous assertion that approving Jack’s application for compensation would place “a heavy burden on the Dutch budget.”
So Jack’s application was rejected.
The WUV-hired psychiatrist was not a specialist in the problems of Holocaust survivors. Jack hired one who was, who concluded that Jack showed symptoms of “survivor syndrome,” which he listed as “repeated feelings of persecution, long-term depression, problems with authority, intense anxiety, displaced rage and aggression and obsession with the Holocaust.” Another psychiatrist engaged by Jack said Jack was suffering from “significant repercussions the camp experience had on him and his family.”
Jack’s application for compensation was finally approved in 1984.
It is important to note here that many thousands of Nazi survivors had to wait decades for compensation, partly due to racist or antisemitic attitudes as well as Cold War politics — including forced laborers, German military deserters, Sinti and Roma, and relatives of people murdered because they had disabilities. Even many Jewish survivors encountered long delays, especially those who fled early, lived in hiding, or lacked the documents postwar officials insisted on.
I went to a talk Jack gave on his latest book, Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant. “Burden of proof” refers to the ordeal he went through for compensation. The second part of the title refers to himself. “I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant,” he told his listeners.
Jack’s audience was mesmerized as he told of his lifelong pursuit to understand his identity in the context of the Holocaust — his research trips to Holland, an invitation by the German government to attend the commemoration of a victims’ memorial, his adventures as an extra in a Dutch docudrama about Bergen-Belsen. He is neither maudlin nor angry when he tells these stories. And he frequently jokes about his experiences.
So this is who prisoner 8331 has become: a surviving remnant who is piecing together a life from fragments, and who reminds us that even fractured memory can be an act of defiance.
The post ‘I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant’: The story of Westerbork prisoner 8331 appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
The post The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
The post Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
The post What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate? appeared first on The Forward.
