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In a forgotten 20th century masterwork, a Holocaust story from the perpetrator’s perspective
On stage at the Dutch National Opera, an elderly woman clutching a funeral urn containing her husband’s ashes stands on her balcony on a luxury cruise ship, gazing out at the imagined ocean.
She is dressed neatly in a blue dress with a red sash, and seems serene, until she catches a glimpse of a woman with long dark hair on a veranda below. Suddenly, she is catapulted into a memory, and a younger version of herself wearing the same dress appears on the balcony beside her.
The widow and her younger self are both Lisa, a German woman who holds a terrible secret. During World War II, she served as a Nazi camp guard in the women’s barracks at Auschwitz — a fact her husband, a German diplomat, did not know.
Seeing the dark-haired stranger triggers a flood of emotions, and Lisa is suddenly wracked with fear and guilt. She thinks she recognizes the woman as Marta, one of her former concentration camp prisoners. Could she possibly still be alive?
This is the beginning of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera, Die Passagierin, (The Passenger), which opened Friday, April 17 at the Dutch National Opera and runs through May 2. The production, created in collaboration with the Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera) in Munich, where it premiered in 2024, is a modern adaptation of an opera that has been hailed as a forgotten 20th-century masterwork.
This extraordinarily powerful opera is by turns lyrical and overwhelmingly forceful, as it delves into the profound torment experienced both by the Holocaust’s helpless victims and their guilt-plagued tormentor. It presents Lisa with a surprising degree of compassion, but does not downplay her complicity, offering, instead, a twist at the end that reminds us who suffered most.
“You essentially hear mass killings, and later in the piece he shifts from such obvious descriptive writings and the music is much more a reflection of the internal world of the characters,” said Adam Hickox, the conductor of the Dutch National Opera production.
“It’s an illumination of Lisa’s internal world, then as we’re introduced to the prisoners in Auschwitz, an illumination of their experiences. You’ve got brutality and you’ve got sparseness and you’ve got lounge jazz, and all of this he puts together into one coherent whole.”
The Dutch production, directed by Tobias Kratzer, is only slightly changed from the Bavarian Opera’s version, with adaptations for the voices of the new cast of singers, said Hickox, including outstanding performances by soprano Sylvia D’Eramo (Marta), baritone Gyula Orendt (as her fiance, Tadeuz), and mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt, as Lisa.
The first act takes place on a modern ocean liner, while the second act is set in a dining hall which serves as a set for the moments in the 1960s, and in flashbacks to a Nazi banquet hall in 1944, when Lisa is transported into her horrifying memories of the war.
The opera was based on a 1962 novel, Pasażerka, by the Polish author Zofia Posmysz, a Roman Catholic resistance worker during World War II who was arrested at age 19 by the Gestapo in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz. After the war, she became a journalist and award-winning writer and lived mostly in Poland, until she died in Oswiecim at age 98.
Posmysz came up with the idea for the story when she was a journalist on assignment in Paris in 1959, said Laura Roling, the production dramaturg at the Dutch National Opera. She heard someone calling something out in German, and she said she felt “nailed to the ground,” because it was the same tone and pitch as the voice of her captor in Auschwitz.
“What Posmysz did was to shift the perspective,” said Roling. “What if the guilty party were to recognize the people they have wronged, and what would that mean in terms of perpetratorship and guilt, and conscience?”
It was an unusual literary strategy — few novels had attempted to tell a Holocaust story from a perpetrator’s perspective; in the 1950s, the French novelist Robert Merle published La Mort Est Mon Métier (Death Is My Trade) based closely on the life and career of S.S. officer Rudolf Hoess, but such books were rare. Although Pasarzerka was very popular at the time, translated into more than a dozen languages and a Polish feature film, Posmysz received criticism for her approach.
“Trying to make a perpetrator into someone you can comprehend also makes them human,” said Roling. “It defies very clear black-and-white, good-and-evil boundaries. If you can say perpetrators were inhuman, they were monsters, that’s it. But we know that in reality they were human beings, who also did the most inhuman things. So it’s important to ask: How could they live with themselves afterwards?”
Weinberg, a Polish Jewish composer, who lost most of his family during the Holocaust, “experienced it as a duty as a survivor to somehow incorporate what happened into his work,” said Roling.
A musical prodigy, Weinberg (sometimes spelled Vainberg or Vaynberg as a transliteration from Cyrillic), was a musical prodigy who entered the Warsaw Conservatory at age 12 to study piano. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he fled on foot to Minsk; the rest of his family was murdered.
In the Soviet Union, Weinberg continued to face antisemitism; he was followed by the Secret Service and arrested in 1953 and accused on trumped-up charges, according to Roland, of a conspiracy to create a Jewish state in the Crimea. There was apparently no evidence that he was involved in any such conspiracy, and he was released after a couple of months, when Stalin died.
He completed his operatic adaptation of the novel in 1968 for a production that was planned to open at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. For reasons that are still not entirely known, said Roling, the performance didn’t take place. It was produced for the first time in 2006, ten years after the composer’s death.
Die Passagierin’s concert premiere took place in Moscow at the International House of Music. After its first full staging at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, in 2010, critics hailed it as the “rediscovery of the year.”
The Forward’s Benjamin Irvy described the satisfaction, in 2010, of seeing “a long-underrated composer finally receiving a deserved place in the sun.” The production subsequently moved on to London, Warsaw and Madrid, and later New York and Chicago.
During his career, Weinberg composed some 150 works, including several operas, 26 symphonies, and 17 string quartets, according to the Berlin Philharmonic. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich praised Die Passagierin for its “beauty and grandeur.”
Subsequent productions have varied in the way that they have approached Holocaust imagery. A 2024 version at the Teatro Real in Madrid had some singers in striped shirts with shaved heads, and others in SS uniforms.
The Dutch National Opera’s version leaves more to the audience’s imagination, with all the players in both 60’s fashions and contemporary garb for the parts in the present; the concentration camp victims are in all black. Creating that distance from the facts of the Holocaust somehow makes the scenes even more poignant, as one calls to mind the real horrors without any prodding.
Conductor Adam Hickox said that Weinberg’s music has, until very recently, been under-appreciated. “The fact that he was a Jew meant that he was under increased Soviet censorship,” he explained. “He did have a certain amount of recognition in his life but it was short lived.” Only in the last several years, he said, has his enormous output been recognized, and his work been revived and championed.
A certain reluctance to produce Die Passagierin may also have something to do with a fear that any art about the Holocaust was somehow taboo in Europe, and among first and second-generation survivors. For the first two decades following World War II, there was a general feeling that creating art about the Holocaust would not be in good taste.
“In the 1960s, both survivors and perpetrators were still around and, of course, dealing with their own histories, responsibilities, or traumas,” said Roling. Today, she added, “There are still a lot of family secrets or even stories that have been lost because the people you could ask are no longer alive.”
This Dutch National Opera’s production of Die Passagierin may give some audience members a chance to open up conversations they haven’t had before, Roling said. “It’s a way into being able to discover what happened, what did my family do?” she said. “And also ask a question: What could a person do?”
Roling said the opera certainly does not let anyone off the hook for their behavior, but it might give some people pause when they consider their own actions today.
“I wouldn’t call it a cautionary tale, but it’s important to remember that nowadays we aren’t immune to this behavior, either,” Roling said. “It’s easy to think this was a specific time and place, and it couldn’t happen again, but I’m afraid that’s not true.”
The post In a forgotten 20th century masterwork, a Holocaust story from the perpetrator’s perspective appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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