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In Israel, she’s a national heroine — Americans are starting to understand why
Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews During World War II
By Douglas Century
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $30
In Israel, Hannah Senesh, the 23-year-old poet and paratrooper who died trying to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, is a national heroine. Her verses are memorized by schoolchildren and encoded in prayerbooks, her kibbutz home is a memorial, and Israeli streets and settlements bear her name.
In the United States, recognition of Senesh’s achievements has come more slowly. Roberta Grossman’s 2008 documentary, Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, told her story with archival footage, interviews and dramatic recreations. In 2010-11, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage hosted an exhibition, Fire in My Heart: The Story of Hannah Senesh.
Now, when the notion of Israeli military heroism seems particularly contested, Senesh has surfaced again. This fall, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene revived David Schechter’s play with music, Hannah Senesh, a collaboration with Lori Wilner that originated in the 1980s. And a major new biography, Douglas Century’s Crash of the Heavens, excavates the brilliant young woman — frustrated, lonely, headstrong, determined — long encrusted in myth.
Century’s powerful book, whose title derives from a Senesh poem, depicts both a unique 1944 Jewish rescue mission and its historical context: the chaotic final months of World War II, when Europe’s remaining Jews were both targeted victims and bargaining chips.
An emigrant from fascist Hungary to British Mandatory Palestine, Senesh was one of a cohort of Jewish volunteers — 37, including two other women — chosen to infiltrate the inferno of Central and Eastern Europe that other Jews were desperate to escape. Trained by the elite fighters of the Palmach, as well as the Royal Air Force and British Intelligence, they had a dual mission: to locate and evacuate downed Allied airmen and escaped prisoners of war, and to save Jews. For the latter, it was almost too late, though the paratroopers did ultimately rescue an unknown number of Jews.
While Senesh is the focus, Century’s cinematic narrative alights periodically on several of her colleagues. Among the most notable was Enzo Sereni, an Italian Jewish intellectual, “a remarkable man with prodigious appetites,” who died in Dachau. The Romanian-born Surika Braverman, phobic about heights, was unable to parachute. But she did fly into Yugoslavia, link up with Tito’s partisans, and later establish the Women’s Corps of the Israel Defense Forces. Yoel Palgi, the lone survivor of the three paratroopers who infiltrated Hungary, became a key source of information about Senesh’s ordeals.
Her story, told here with great intimacy and detail, is riveting. Those who knew her underline her uniqueness, including a courage that ultimately impressed even her captors.
Born Anna Szenes in 1921 Budapest, she was the daughter of a celebrated Hungarian Jewish playwright and journalist who died of heart failure at 33. At 13, Senesh started a diary. In 1938, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law restricting Jewish participation in the economy, and her country’s growing antisemitism transformed the teenager into a Zionist.
Accepted to an agricultural school in Palestine, Senesh made aliyah in 1939. She graduated with expertise in poultry farming, but was assigned to the laundry of Kibbutz Sdot Yam (Fields of the Sea), near Caesaria. The location inspired one of her most famous poems, but the daily routine was mind-numbing. She longed to return to Budapest to inspire Jewish resistance and help her mother escape.
As luck would have it, her kibbutz connected her to a fellow Hungarian refugee involved in organizing a secret rescue mission. “I see the hand of destiny in this,” she wrote at the time. “I’m totally self-confident, ready for anything,” she later added.
The mission was delayed, in Century’s telling, by mutual distrust between the British military and the Jewish leadership in Palestine. But Senesh finally was able to train as both a paratrooper and wireless radio operator. She chose the code name Hagar, for the second wife of the Biblical Abraham, “the slave girl who’s redeemed, who speaks directly to the Lord, who is told that she must return home.” Before leaving for Europe, she was able to see her brother, Gyuri, and give him a poignant letter in which she wrote: “Will you sense that I had no choice, that I had to do this?”
After parachuting into Yugoslavia, Senesh joined Tito’s partisans. But within days, the Germans had marched into Hungary, complicating her mission. She crossed the border anyway, and was quickly captured by Hungarian gendarmes — likely because of a betrayal, or more than one, Century suggests.
He graphically describes the vicious beatings and torture she endured, and her stoic silence. One of her fellow paratroopers had declined to give her a cyanide pill, so an easy death was impossible. Her suicide attempts failed. Believing her mother had left Budapest, she finally offered her real name. That led to a heartbreaking reunion between a bruised and battered Hannah and her anxious mother, Katherine. Both spent time in a Gestapo prison, where they had occasional contact.
Katherine eventually was released, and her daughter experienced a mild reprieve: She was able to teach her fellow inmates Hebrew, distribute hand-made dolls as gifts, and counsel a pregnant Jewish prisoner on an escape route. Then came a trial for treason and espionage. In her defense, Senesh eloquently denied betraying Hungary and chastised her judges for allying with Nazism. As Soviet and Romanian troops descended on Budapest, she was abruptly informed of her conviction and an immediate death sentence, with no chance of appeal.
Integral to her legend is that the youthful Senesh went defiantly to her execution by firing squad, declining to beg for a pardon and refusing even a blindfold. She left behind a trove of diaries, letters and simple, emotionally direct poems — a dazzling literary as well as moral legacy.
One poem, from a period of torture and solitary confinement, concludes: “I gambled on what mattered most,/The dice were cast. I lost.” Another famous verse emphasizes redemption, declaring, “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.” Century’s biography — which also recounts Senesh’s prodigious cultural afterlife — is a stirring testament to both her undeniable gifts and tragic fate.
The post In Israel, she’s a national heroine — Americans are starting to understand why appeared first on The Forward.
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A Super Bowl Ad Against Antisemitism with No Consequence Misses the Mark
Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons
I greatly respect Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his efforts to warn about the dangers of antisemitism. The Jewish community has largely failed in fighting this disease, for which there is no cure.
Some will also say that no ad will stop antisemitism, and argue that it’s a waste of money to run advertisements at all. But I strongly disagree.
There are a range of people in America, including some who have hatred in their hearts but have not yet acted on it, or some who don’t even know Jews personally. In a world where millions are listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and laughing at Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler,” it would be useful to have some persuasive media strategy against antisemitism.
I’m not sure how many Americans watch Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or follow Hillel Fuld online, but more than 100 million watch the Super Bowl annually.
It is a fantastic decision to spend money on an ad against antisemitism if it can get people’s attention, be emotionally impactful, show consequences for a perpetrator of hate, and make people think for a second.
Many tools must be used in the fight against antisemitism, and there is no reason why ads can’t be one of them. While they won’t likely change the mind of people planning to assault Jews, they might change the minds of others. I have a friend whose son was called a dirty Jew in school. The student likely called him that because he figured there would be no consequence.
This year’s ad — which follows ads in 2024 and 2025 — featured a Jewish boy who is pushed. We see a post-it calling him a “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student puts a blue square on it, and notes that Black people have experienced similar hatred.
The ad is a failure because it doesn’t grab your attention, shows no perpetrator, and more importantly — shows no consequences.
It is a slight improvement over last year’s ad with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg, as that had zero authenticity. This ad has some authenticity, but by showing no perpetrator, it actually normalizes antisemitism — as if we should expect students to write “Dirty Jew” on the backpacks and lockers of students. We should have seen the student writing it, and seen some repercussions — be it a suspension, students looking at them as losers, or something of that sort.
There should be funds allocated to making meaningful ads about Jew-hatred both on regular TV and online. It is inexplicable that this is not being done, and there are so many Jewish celebrities that could be involved. I just wished Kraft’s ad had done a much better job.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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Beyond the Bunker and the Billboard: A New Approach to Fighting Antisemitism
Tens of thousands joined the National March Against Antisemitism in London, Nov. 26, 2023. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Earlier this month, Bret Stephens delivered the “State of World Jewry” address. At the risk of oversimplifying his speech, Stephens’ message was a somber pivot: the millions of dollars spent fighting antisemitism are largely wasted. We cannot “cure” the world of this hatred. Instead, we should spend those resources strengthening Jewish identity — funding Jewish day schools, summer camps, and building a fortress of internal resilience.
On Sunday, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism continued their diametrically opposite approach. During the Super Bowl, they ran an ad featuring a Black student showing allyship to a Jewish student who is being bullied. The message is optimistic: Education, awareness, and cross-cultural empathy can win the day.
One strategy is retreat and fortify; the other is reach out and persuade.
I believe both are destined to fail.
Stephens is right that we cannot logic our way out of hate, but his solution surrenders the public square. Kraft is noble in his pursuit of allyship, but his solution relies on empathy that simply may not exist in large enough quantities.
There is a third path. It does not rely on Jewish introspection, nor does it beg for non-Jewish affection. It relies on universal enforcement.
The Failure of “Particularism”
If you poll Americans on how they feel about “antisemitism” (or its modern fraternal twin, “anti-Zionism,” which is a label that now mostly serves as a cover for Jew-hatred), the results are messy. Resistance to these specific bigotries is not universal; it is partisan, generational, and fraught with “context.”
However, if you poll Americans on the universal moral taboos — overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence — the consensus is overwhelming. Even in our divided era, I am certain that more than 90% of the country agrees that persecuting a racial or religious group or celebrating violence is socially unacceptable.
This is the strategic flaw in both the Stephens and Kraft approaches: They treat antisemitism as a unique problem requiring a unique solution.
But we don’t need a “Jewish” solution. We need a universal solution, and fortunately one already exists.
The most effective way to protect the Jewish community is to stop asking society to protect Jews specifically, and start demanding society protect civilization generally and all of its people equally.
We must broaden the fight. We recruit the entire country not to defend Jews against Jew-hatred, but to defend the core American value that all overt hatred is an inadmissible taboo.
When we make the standard universal, we strip away the “exceptions.” If society agrees that “dehumanization is a firing offense,” then a person dehumanizing a Zionist must be fired the same as if they dehumanized Black or gay Americans — not because the employer loves Zionists or Black or LGBT people, but because the employer fears tolerating and normalizing these taboos of hate regardless of the group being targeted.
To do this, we must re-acquaint the mainstream with the concept of moral taboos.
As Jonathan Haidt explored in The Righteous Mind, true moral taboos are not intellectual; they are visceral. We don’t debate whether incest is wrong; we recoil from it. We need to restore that same visceral recoil to bigotry and the endorsement of violence, which largely exists, but then we must re-familiarize society with the mechanism for enforcing taboos: social consequences.
Stephens gives up on the outer world. Kraft tries to persuade it with carrots. The Third Path uses the stick of social ostracism. Social consequences are society’s immune response. When the immune system is working, a “Rejoicer” who cheers for violence is expelled from the body politic — not by law, but by consensus.
The Binary Choice
While restoring these taboos sounds like a generational challenge, the alternative makes the choice obvious.
We are either going to restore these universal guardrails — punishing those who egregiously violate them, just as we did to the KKK — or we will allow hate to be normalized until it spills over into political violence that no amount of Jewish Day Schools or Super Bowl ads can stop.
We don’t need to beg the world for its affection, nor should we retreat into a fortress. We need to remind the world that the taboos which protect us are the same ones that hold civilization together. If we lead the fight to restore those universal standards, we won’t just be securing a future for the Jews — we’ll be saving the country from itself.
Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.
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How the Palestinian Authority Hides ‘Pay-for-Slay’
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visiting the West Bank city of Jenin. Photo: Reuters/Mohamad Torokman
On Feb. 10, 2025, under intense pressure from Western countries, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas announced the cancellation of the PA Commission of Prisoners’ terror rewards program known as “Pay-for-Slay,” saying that the payments to terrorist prisoners and so-called Martyrs’ families would be moved to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (PNEEI) and be based on social welfare criteria.
While many Western leaders have praised the PA for promising to stop paying terrorists in prison, the PA has another huge terror rewards program for released terrorist prisoners with more than 10,000 hidden Pay-for-Slay recipients receiving more than $230 million a year. And the PA has no intention of disclosing it or stopping it.
The PA enlarged this already existing program in 2021, when it took nearly 7,500 released prisoners who were receiving payments and moved them from the PA Commission of Prisoners into other frameworks. In addition, there are more than 13,500 families of Martyrs and injured living outside the PA areas who are receiving over $86 million a year.
The PA Prisoners and Released Prisoners Law requires the PA to reward terrorists who were imprisoned for more than five years with lifetime salaries. After Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) exposed in 2020 that there were at least 7,500 released prisoners to whom the PA was paying monthly terror reward salaries, the PA was condemned by the donor countries.
As the PA explained: “Europe, the US, and Israel” did not accept that the PA paid released terrorists merely because “they killed.”
The PA acted quickly. In early 2021, Mahmoud Abbas issued a Presidential Order to “integrate” all the thousands of released terrorists receiving Pay-for-Slay salaries into government and PA Security Forces (PASF) jobs, and he changed PA pension laws to enable thousands of ineligible terrorists to receive PA pensions.
The PA set up a special committee to work continuously, “even on vacation days,” to hide these recipients. By the end of 2021, all 7,500 recipients of terror salaries were erased from the Commission of Prisoners lists and, although unqualified, were granted jobs and pensions to receive their hidden Pay-for-Slay without Western scrutiny.
These recipients are so well hidden that some Western donor countries, to avoid funding Pay-for-Slay, have been designating their support specifically to pay civil servants or PASF salaries and pensions — the very places that the PA has hidden its terrorists.
With this terror reward program below the West’s radar, the PA is not planning to stop these terror payouts to released terrorist prisoners. PMW estimates that with these two programs, at least 23,500 terrorists received hidden Pay-for-Slay payments in 2025, amounting to $315 million in hidden Pay-for-Slay.
Part 3 of our recent report includes transcribed conversations between recipients of Pay-for-Slay in the first months of 2026, confirming that the PA is expanding its Pay-for-Slay by at least 6,000 recipients. The PA is intentionally lying to the US, the EU, France, and other Western countries, while working continuously to find ways to secretly reward Palestinian terrorists.
The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.