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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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Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters
(JTA) — This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.
Jewish groups in the Bay Area are protesting a judge’s removal of a local Jewish district attorney from a case involving pro-Palestinian protesters accused of vandalizing Stanford University’s president’s office.
The district attorney, Jeff Rosen, was disqualified from retrying a felony case against five protesters after the judge ruled that Rosen had crossed a legal line when suggesting in a campaign message that the protest was antisemitic.
“Rosen is allowed to take a strong stance against crime in the community, against antisemitism. But caution and care need to be taken when utilizing active litigation in campaign communication,” Judge Kelley Paul said from the bench.
The judge said Rosen had erred when publicly labeling the incident antisemitic when it was not charged as a hate crime.
“This case is not a hate crime,” Paul said. “The characterization of the prosecution as a fight against antisemitism runs afoul of case law.”
In an email to J. The Jewish News of Northern California, Rosen’s office wrote that while it “disagrees with the judge’s ruling, we respect it.”
In a joint statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley wrote that they are “deeply troubled” by Paul’s decision and that the case “must proceed.”
“This decision uniquely targets minority prosecutors, suggesting they are incapable of pursuing justice in cases perceived to be impacting their own communities,” the statement says, adding that it “risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them.”
The five protesters face felony vandalism and conspiracy counts stemming from a June 2024 protest in which 13 people broke into Stanford’s executive offices and caused an estimated $300,000 in damages. A jury deadlocked in February, splitting 9-3 on the vandalism count and 8-4 on conspiracy. Rosen quickly announced his plan to retry them.
The disqualification motion was filed by deputy public defender Avi Singh, who argued that Rosen had compromised his office’s neutrality by featuring the prosecution on a campaign fundraising page titled “DA Rosen Fighting Anti-Semitism,” alongside a donation button.
Singh argued that the fundraising campaign falsely implied that the defendants were antisemitic. None was charged with a hate crime.
Rosen, who has spoken publicly about his commitment to fighting antisemitism and supporting Israel, has denied any conflict of interest.
In her decision, Paul pointed to Rosen’s remarks in a March 2025 speech he gave for the San Jose Hillel, about a month before his office filed charges against the protesters. A video of the speech is linked on the “Fighting Anti-Semitism” page on his campaign website.
In the speech, Rosen equated antisemitism and “anti-Americanism,” a phrase that Deputy District Attorney Robert Baker also used to describe the conduct of the protesters during the trial’s closing arguments. Paul ruled that the similarities in the language disqualified the entire DA’s office from the case, not just Rosen.
In their own statement, the local Jewish groups suggested Rosen was being disqualified because he is Jewish.
“Generations of American Jews in positions of public trust have all too often been treated as suspect or inherently conflicted,” JCRC Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley said. “This decision risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them, casting any public opposition to hate as grounds for disqualification.”
Rosen’s challenger in his June primary election, former prosecutor Daniel Chung, has turned the ruling into a campaign video. Chung called Rosen’s pursuit of the Stanford case “overzealous” and “a waste of time and money.”
“This is a humiliating loss for DA Rosen and his entire office,” Chung said in an Instagram video. “For years, millions of dollars have been spent trying to prosecute Stanford student protesters with felony charges.” Rosen’s actions, Chung said, “jeopardized the due process of the defendants” and “exemplifies the undermining of integrity, competence and compassion under DA Rosen for the last 16 years.”
The ruling hands the case to California’s attorney general, which will decide whether to retry the defendants — German Gonzalez, Maya Burke, Taylor McCann, Hunter Taylor-Black and Amy Zhai — or drop the charges.
The post Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran’s Deepening Water Crisis Threatens 35 Million as Economy Buckles Under US Pressure, Mounting Domestic Strain
People walk on a street near a mural featuring an image of the late Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran, May 6, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
As talks with the United States over a possible deal to end the war remain uncertain, Iran’s economy is under mounting strain, with prolonged water shortages, pressure on energy infrastructure, and slowing industrial output deepening what authorities describe as an “economic war.”
With Iran entering the summer months amid a deepening water and electricity crisis, government officials estimate that around 35 million people will face water shortages, intensifying concerns over deteriorating living conditions, mounting economic strain, and daily hardship across the country.
On Monday, Issa Bozorgzadeh, a spokesman for the country’s water industry, reported that rainfall has fallen “below normal” levels across 11 provinces, warning that Tehran is among the worst affected as it enters its sixth consecutive year of drought.
Now, Iranian authorities are urging citizens to cut consumption and adopt stricter usage habits, pointing to deep structural failures in the water and power sectors as public frustration rises over supply disruptions, mismanagement, and declining living standards.
Officials have also announced planned summer power outages, warning that the deepening energy crisis could lead to factory shutdowns, reduced industrial output, rising unemployment, and higher prices.
On Sunday, Arash Najafi, head of the Energy Commission of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, noted that household, commercial, and office blackouts are likely to continue daily throughout the summer, while the industrial sector will continue to be targeted for power cuts” or “will continue to bear the brunt of power cuts.
Given the damage to several petrochemical facilities in Israeli and US strikes and their reliance on electricity from the national grid, Najafi said most available power would now be directed toward keeping these complexes operational around the clock.
“The Islamic Republic will be forced to impose electricity consumption restrictions for about 120 days, and given the lack of effective means for people to significantly reduce usage, this will result in widespread blackouts,” the Iranian official said in a statement.
Amid growing public frustration over the ongoing crisis, Majid Doustali, a member of Iran’s parliamentary planning and budget committee, called on citizens to cut back on electricity, water, and fuel consumption as part of the country’s resistance efforts in what he described as an “economic war.”
“Every effort by the public to save resources represents a direct challenge to the enemy’s economic conspiracy,” Doustali said.
Even as the crisis continues to weigh heavily on the Iranian people, a nationwide internet blackout remains in place, having exceeded 1,728 hours as of Monday, after authorities imposed the shutdown more than two months ago, effectively isolating millions of Iranians from independent reporting on the war and access to global news.
Across much of the country, unstable internet forces many people to rely on illegal black-market virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that bypass government censorship — to stay connected beyond Iran’s borders, with access costing millions, and users risking imprisonment and national security charges.
According to a CNN estimate, Iranians have spent roughly $1.8 billion on internet access over the past two months.
Soaring costs and crumbling infrastructure have also forced businesses to cut jobs on a massive scale, leaving many workers unemployed and intensifying social and economic pressures across the country, The New York Times reported.
Dozens of major companies have reportedly laid off hundreds of employees across multiple industries, with the industrial sector alone potentially putting up to 3.5 million workers at risk, as the country’s economy reels from the impact of a US naval blockade on Iranian ports that began in mid-April.
The US blockade has prevented the regime from exporting energy through the Strait of Hormuz — a critical global energy chokepoint through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.
With companies sharply reducing or freezing production amid shutdowns and mass layoffs, the private sector downturn is further threatening the regime by reducing tax revenues, which the government has come to rely on heavily amid mounting sanctions and trade restrictions.
Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has attempted to contain the fallout by urging companies to avoid layoffs “to the extent possible.”
But the regime’s internet shutdown alone has cost businesses and companies an estimated $80 million in daily losses, The New York Times reported.
As the Iranian currency continues to plunge and inflation peaks near 60 percent, senior official Gholamhossein Mohammadi said the war has already cost around one million jobs, alongside “the direct and indirect unemployment of two million people.”
Meanwhile, Iran’s energy sector is also under severe strain, with exports falling sharply, storage capacity nearing its limits, and infrastructure under growing pressure.
According to data from commodity analytics firm Kpler, Iran could exhaust its oil storage capacity within 25 to 30 days if the crisis continues, prompting cuts in output at several oil fields to ease pressure.
Amid an export collapse exceeding 70 percent, the government now faces a critical decision between shutting wells to manage storage constraints or risking long-term damage to key oil fields.
Even though Kpler’s report estimates Tehran may not feel the full revenue hit for another three to four months due to payment delays and pre-existing sales flows, the regime is expected to face a heavy blow, with losses potentially reaching $200–250 million per day.
With domestic tensions rising and the internal economic crisis worsening, Iranian officials are increasingly wary that renewed protests could erupt in the coming days, further destabilizing an already volatile situation.
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Sen. Cory Booker Reaffirms Commitment To Maintaining Israel’s ‘Qualitative Military Edge,’ Criticizes ‘Reckless War’ In Iran
April 12, 2026, New York, New York, United States: (NEW) 2026 NAN Convention. April 11, 2026, New York, New York, USA: U.S. Senator Cory Booker speaks during Day 4 of the National Action Network (NAN) 35th Anniversary Convention at Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel on April 11, 2026 in New York City. (Credit: M10s / TheNews2)(Foto: M10S/Thenews2/Zumapress) (Credit Image: © M10s/TheNEWS2 via ZUMA Press Wire)
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) defended his continued support for Israel in a recent interview while distancing himself from what he described as a “reckless war,” underscoring the increasingly delicate balancing act facing pro-Israel Democrats amid mounting political pressure from the party’s progressive wing.
In an interview with the media outlet RealClearPolitics, Booker emphasized that his opposition was not directed at Israel itself, but rather at policies he believes risk further destabilizing the Middle East and weakening long-term regional security.
“Let’s be clear, I’m opposed to a reckless war that has made the United States and Israel less safe, as well as our other Arab allies. I will not support arms from the United States or any of our allies, including Israel, in a context of a war that is endangering our national security and Israel’s. I continue to support our US military being the strongest in the world,” Booker said.
The comments come as divisions within the Democratic Party over Israel have intensified following over two years of conflict in Gaza and escalating tensions involving Iran-backed militant groups across the region. While a growing faction of Democrats has pushed for stricter conditions on military aid to Israel, Booker sought to position himself as firmly supportive of the US-Israel alliance even as he voiced concern about the conduct and trajectory of the conflict.
Booker, however, emphasized that he still supports helping Israel maintain its military advantage over its neighbors in the Middle East, a position which analysts argue helps bolster American geopolitical interests in the region.
“I continue to support Israel having a qualitative military edge, the ability to defend themselves, and offer deterrents. But in the context of this war, I will not support more military armaments to conduct what I think is a disaster that’s endangering American lives, Israeli lives, and as we see in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, our regional allies as well.”
Booker, long viewed as one of the Senate’s more traditionally pro-Israel Democrats, has historically backed military assistance to the Jewish state and has frequently spoken about the importance of Israel as America’s closest democratic ally in the Middle East. His latest remarks appeared aimed at reassuring pro-Israel voters and donors wary of the party’s leftward shift on the issue.
However, Booker raised eyebrows recently when he joined a record number of Democratic senators to vote in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (D-VT) resolution against sending more arms to Israel, raising questions among some pro-Israel observers about his position on Israel.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs.
The failed votes represent the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Booker’s framing may reflect a broader strategy among mainstream Democrats: separating criticism of specific military operations from opposition to Israel’s existence or security needs.
Supporters of Israel argue that distinction is increasingly important as anti-Israel rhetoric grows more common in some activist circles following Hamas’ October 7 attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza. A growing number of Democratic officials and ambitious progressive candidates have accused the Jewish state of committing “genocide” in Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly argued that military operations are necessary to dismantle Hamas and prevent future attacks against Israeli civilians.
Booker’s comments may signal an effort to preserve bipartisan support for Israel at a time when polling shows younger Democratic voters becoming more critical of the Israeli government. At the same time, pro-Israel advocates have warned that weakening US backing could embolden Iran and its regional proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
The senator did not indicate support for ending military cooperation with Israel altogether, instead emphasizing that American leadership should focus on both protecting Israeli security and preventing a wider regional war.