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Michael Shafir, who played a key role in Holocaust memory in his native Romania, dies at 78
BUCHAREST (JTA) — When Michael Shafir moved to Israel from his native Romania as a teenager in the 1960s, it wasn’t because the Jewish teen was burning with Zionist fervor. Instead, it was the first country that agreed to take him.
“I would have left for wherever there was no communism, because I could no longer live with the feeling that you say one thing outside the house and another at home,” Shafir once said in an interview with Romanian media.
More than four decades later, Shafir would return to the country where he was born, as a professor of international relations. From his post at Babes-Bolyai University, in northwestern Romania, Shafir studied and published extensively on how post-communist right-wing nationalists distorted the past and trivialized or denied the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Shafir, who died Nov. 9 at 78, was known in his work and in his personal life for his straightforward and often humorous presentation of difficult truths.
“He was among the first to see the early emergence of nationalism in the [Romanian] communist regime’s politics,” his friend and colleague Liviu Rotman, an Israeli historian of Romanian Jewry, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Rotman said Shafir’s 2004 book “Between denial and trivialization. Holocaust denial in post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe” represented a “real encyclopedia” of Holocaust denial, as it outlined three forms that Shafir observed in post-communist states — outright, deflective (which “minimizes own-nation participation”) and selective (a combination of the other two). Shafir also took aim at what he called “comparative trivialization” of the Holocaust, or denying its uniqueness by equating it with communist crimes.
“I used to joke with Michael and told him that he produced a Mendeleev Table of Holocaust denial,” Rotman wrote on Facebook after his friend’s death, referring to the formal name for the periodic table that organizes elements according to their characteristics.
Known in Romania for his irreverent sense of humor and his chain smoking, Shafir’s massive figure wearing a trench coat — and occasionally a hat — could often be seen in the threshold of the conferences and events he attended.
“He was a person with an exceptional sense of humor, who always sent his friends jokes, who always found things to laugh about,” Jewish studies scholar Felicia Waldman told JTA.
“He liked to share everything he discovered, everything he thought,” added Waldman, who also recalled Shafir’s “undiplomatic” vehemence. “Sometimes that created problems for him.”
Shafir promoted his ideas in books and scholarly writing and conferences, but also in the Romanian press, where he proved to be a redoubtable polemicist. As a member of the International Commission for the Holocaust in Romania, he worked to make sure that people in his country understood the truth about the Holocaust and Romanian authorities’ collaboration with the Nazi regime. That history was obscured during the communist era and contested after it.
The commission was established by Romanian president Ion Iliescu in 2003 and headed by Romanian-born Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Shafir and his fellow commission members concluded that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered in territories under Romanian control during World War II.
In 2004, their report was officially adopted by the Romanian state, which for the first time acknowledged its participation in the destruction of the European Jews.
“Today’s negationism can no longer have the excuse ‘I’ve not read, I’ve haven’t access to information,’” Shafir said in a podcast by the Wiesel Institute in 2021, in which he warns about the crafty and convoluted nature of most contemporary Holocaust denial.
Shafir was still working with the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania at the time of his death, which the institute and his family members confirmed.
Born in Bucharest in 1944, Shafir managed to move to Israel as a teenager in 1961, during one of the periods when Romania relaxed emigration rules for its Jews. He had run afoul of the Communist regime and sought to escape it.
In Israel, Shafir served in the army before moving to Munich, to work as a researcher on audiences at Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-funded radio station for communist Europe. From then on he balanced journalism with academic work: He then returned to Israel, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and English literature at Hebrew University while directing foreign news at the Kol Israel radio station, a position he held until 1982. He had just earned a political science PhD at Hebrew University after writing a thesis on the Romanian intelligentsia under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Shafir rejoined Radio Free Europe in the mid 1980s and held positions there until well after the fall of the Iron Curtain. His return to Romania and reclamation of his Romanian citizenship in 2005 inspired the country’s progressive left.
“Shafir meant a lot to me; he’s been a reference for his honesty and intellectual courage, and someone capable, like not many others, to review his positions when new data or historical sources asked for it,” Romanian-American software engineer-turned-historian Andrei Ursu told JTA.
Ursu was recently appointed scientific director of the Institute of the Romanian 1989 Revolution, an organization whose mission is to study that year’s Romanian anticommunist revolution. Two of his great-grandparents and a grandfather were killed during the Holocaust.
Ursu — whose father Gheorghe died after being savagely beaten while in politically motivated detention by Romania’s Communist secret police, the infamous Securitate — has been fighting for decades to combat the whitewashing of the Securitate in the country’s public discourse.
He described Shafir as “a person with an endless humor” and “without the exaggerated vanity common to many Romanian intellectuals.” Despite his frail health, Ursu said, Shafir agreed to review part of Ursu’s latest editorial project on the 1989 Romanian anti-communist revolution, “The Fall of a Dictator.”
Like other specialists who collaborated with Shafir, Ursu praised his work ethics and the precision of his sourcing and investigative work.
His media comments and public appearances were frequently peppered with jokes and anecdotes. In 2019, while speaking in an interview about the tens of thousands of Jews whom Ceausescu let emigrate in exchange for cash payments from Israel, Shafir told an old Romanian joke that starts with the Romanian dictator visiting a cooperative producing corn.
“How much do you get for a ton of maize?” Ceausescu asked the apparatchik in charge of the cooperative. “Just that? I get more if I sell 10 Jews.” To which the apparatchik retorts: “Then it’d be good if we start sowing Jews.”
In the interview, Shafir also recalled that the Jewish community headquarters in Bucharest used to display a sign warning gentiles desperate to get a visa to Israel and escape communism that “no conversions are accepted.”
“In the end, a conversion is much less dangerous than crossing the Danube swimming,” Shafir observed.
Although Shafir left Israel, he remained close to his family there and invested in the country’s politics. An activist with Peace Now who defined himself as a “critical Zionist,” Shafir rejected characterizations of Israel as an apartheid state but saw the Israeli continued military presence in the Palestinian territories as incompatible with democracy in the long term.
“He was very much worried about our future here in a country that is drifting to the right,” his daughter, Maurit Beeri, wrote on Facebook after her father’s death. She said he had recently spent time in Israel with his family, including his grandchildren.
Shafir’s body lay in state Nov. 13 at one of his university’s buildings in Cluj, Romania, where he lived with his wife, Aneta Feldman-Shafir.
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Roald Dahl’s monstrous views have a seat at the table today
Roald Dahl’s house is falling down.
It’s 1983, and the children’s author’s Buckinghamshire estate is undergoing a gut renovation. Its exposed plumbing and naked beams bespeak an unseemly core behind the author’s facade of prickly charm, cracking after publication of his incendiary review of the book God Cried, about the 1982 Lebanon War. The article, which ran in the magazine Literary Review, crossed a then-clear line from legitimate critique of Israel into antisemitic tropes of the most noxious variety.
The play Giant, now on Broadway after an Olivier Award-winning run on the West End, imagines an afternoon in which Dahl’s publishers try to cajole him into an apology he’s determined not to make.
For the greater part of the first act in Mark Rosenblatt’s crackling script, the precise nature of Dahl’s comments remains obscure. We’re told that they were condemned in the press as “the most disgraceful thing to be written in the English language in a very long time.” They were so bad as to inspire a death threat credible enough to station a police constable outside Dahl’s home.
Finally, a Jewish-American sales director from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who has arrived to do damage control, quotes Dahl’s remarks at length following a tense lunch of salad niçoise.
“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,” Dahl wrote of Israelis — or was it simply Jews? “Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion. It is as though a group of much-loved nuns in charge of an orphanage had suddenly turned around and started murdering all the children.”
Is it bad to say I’ve heard worse?
Were Dahl still with us, he would have an ideological home with certain members of Corbynite Labour and the Greens, to say nothing of Roger Waters. He would not run afoul of the “Zionists in Publishing” X account that tells consumers which authors are insufficiently critical of Israel; perhaps he would be marked on reading lists as an acceptable, pro-Palestinian alternative to J.K. Rowling.
Even the context of war in Lebanon that Dahl decried has currency, as Israel now trades fire with the remnants of Hezbollah and videos of demolished apartment blocks in Beirut proliferate online. More than 1,000 have died in airstrikes, more than 1 million are displaced and a possible ground invasion looms. (The play, written well before Oct. 7, and certainly before the latest offensive in Iran, suffers from a poignant prescience.)
Can a drama built around Dahl’s screed still work with the shift of the Overton Window toward a strident, existential questioning of Israel and its influence? Remarkably, it does.
The credit is shared. John Lithgow, playing his whole repertoire from Churchill and avuncular alien to Dexter’s Ice Truck Killer, is a rangy stick of dynamite. He pivots from boyish jokes to cruel barbs that catch on his victims like nettles.
Also in the cagey chess game are Aya Cash — as the invented American FSG envoy Jessie Stone — and Elliot Levey’s Tom Maschler, Dahl’s real-life British publisher, who was a Kindertransport child from Germany.
Maschler embodies a certain Jewish-English self-effacement, angling to keep the peace and resenting Israel as an impediment to his full acceptance as an Englishman — he thinks of the country as something he’s made to defend at parties.
Stone’s more forceful, American approach — calling out Dahl for lumping all Jews together as a “single organism” — rankles her host.
Dahl waxes Goebellsian, calling her “Stein,” and has her take dictation to a Holocaust survivor bookseller in the Hudson Valley who refuses to stock his work: “The kinder of his shtetl in upstate Noo Yoik will have to make do – no, survive on a strictly kosher diet of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
Director Nicholas Hytner has staged a boxing match for today’s discourse, without changing a line from a pre-Oct. 7 script. What makes the work sing is its refusal to resort to caricature, humanizing Dahl through his fiancée Liccy Crossland (Rachael Stirling), the tragedies of his dead daughter and disabled son and, yes, his genuine concern and justified anguish for the Lebanese and Palestinians, particularly the children.
In a quieter moment, Dahl asks Stone if she read God Cried. She tells him she was moved by an image of a legless boy with crutches. (Dahl identifies him with ease, the victim of a penetration bomb near his school, and describes in typically gruesome fashion how “his arterial blood must have sprayed everywhere like a rogue garden hose.”)
“Why is that image not enough, on its own, for you to demand a halt?” he presses Stone. “And what’s wrong with insisting Jewish people, whose country it surely is, say ‘not in my name’? Surely it’s your voice we need above all?”
This cri de coeur is common now even in Jewish circles, but the sentiment is slippery when it hints at collective blame. After his encounter with Stone, Dahl clarifies his position in a verbatim interview, infamously opining that, when it comes to Jews, “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
That draws a gasp from the audience and a gobsmacked expression from Dahl’s housekeeper Hallie (Stella Everett).
But just how different is this claim to Ana Kasparian saying the goyim are waking up, Candace Owens claiming Satanic pedophile “Frankists” control the world, Young Republicans praising Hitler in group chats, Tucker Carlson platforming Holocaust deniers who suggest Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II or Joe Kent writing in his resignation letter that the U.S. is continually drawn into wars “manufactured by Israel”? At a point, the figleaf of anti-Zionism proves flimsy. Older innuendos peek out from behind.
In the literary world of today, an audiobook narrator’s call for Zionists to kill themselves is not a cancellable offense — a Zionist moderating a book talk is. (But then, being a Palestinian critic of Israel can lead to a disinvitation to a book festival or reading series — that may be cancelled when other authors withdraw in solidarity.)
Now that we are further from the Holocaust, the carnage in Gaza was broadcast to our phones and the monoculture has atomized into internet echo chambers, Dahl’s review seems pedestrian if not quite mainstream. A cause célèbre in 1983 is now a viral retweet or a chart-topping podcast. His claim that “ancient wounds” didn’t make Jews wiser, but gave them a “partial sight” of their own trespasses sounds a lot like the thesis of Peter Beinart’s last book.
With Giant’s move to Broadway, a local analogy may be in order.
Earlier this month, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, was revealed to have contributed freelance illustrations to a book of stories by young people in Gaza compiled by the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa. Abulhawa’s social media posts, which called Israelis “vampires” and “cockroaches” and refused to distinguish between Jews and Zionists, prompted Mamdani to call her words “reprehensible,” earning him grief from pro-Palestinian quarters.
What would the response be, had the First Lady of New York provided artwork on a book of Dahl’s and his comments came to light? Abulhawa cuts a different figure: She is the daughter of Palestinian refugees and writes movingly of her people’s suffering. Yet I suspect, like her, Dahl, would have his defenders.
Just as Dahl doubled down when reached for comment on his review — the occasion of his “Hitler stinker” quote — Abulhawa responded to Mayor Mamdani’s censure in an interview by claiming American Jews were the “most privileged demographic in this country” and “the resentment that they are seeing now is stemming from the world watching the so-called Jewish State commit a genocide.”
In other words, the logic follows, the world isn’t picking on Jews for no reason. The sleeping giant of this rationale — a proverbial light sleeper — has been awakened. Dahl, it seems, was just too early to rouse it.
The play Giant is now playing at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway. Tickets and more information can be found here.
The post Roald Dahl’s monstrous views have a seat at the table today appeared first on The Forward.
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New Report Reveals Rampant Human Rights Abuses in Iran as Activists Warn of Another Wave of Mass Executions
People attend Eid al-Fitr prayers, marking the end of Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 21, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
A new report reveals the widespread scale of human rights abuses in Iran over the past year, as activists warn the regime may carry out another wave of mass executions to suppress growing opposition amid deepening unrest.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an independent group monitoring Iran, released a report last week, timed for Nowruz, the Persian New Year, outlining a deeply concerning human rights situation over the past 12 months, citing crackdowns on protesters, harassment of activists, threats to minorities, executions of children, violations of women’s rights, and dire prison conditions.
According to HRANA’s Statistics and Documentation Center, 78,907 people were arrested on ideological or political grounds from March 2025 to March 2026, highlighting a pervasive climate of repression across the country.
But the report warns that the number of arrests is likely much higher, given the difficulty of tracking such cases — especially earlier this year during recent nationwide anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, leaving thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.
HRANA reports that at least 6,724 protesters, including 236 children, were killed during these protests, with an additional 11,744 cases still under verification. Multiple reports have put the death toll at over 30,000.
During the regime’s violent crackdown, the group also recorded 25,877 people sustaining serious injuries, with 53,777 arrests occurring on just Jan. 8 and 9 alone.
On women’s rights, HRANA reports that 105 women were murdered, including seven so-called “honor killings” — murders committed under the pretext of preserving family honor — and documents 68 cases of rape or sexual abuse.
Recent media reports indicate that Iranian security forces raped and tortured medical staff who treated wounded anti-regime protesters during the country’s nationwide uprising in January, targeting them in a campaign of intimidation against those aiding demonstrators.
As in past years, executions remain one of the starkest manifestations of human rights abuses in Iran, with at least 2,488 people executed last year, including 63 women and two children, 13 of them carried out publicly.
According to a report by Harm Reduction International (HRI), a global organization tracking drug policy and human rights, 955 people were executed for drug-related offenses in 2025 — an average of roughly three per day — with over 1,000 more currently on death row.
Nearly one in four of those executed were from ethnic minority groups, more than one in five were foreign nationals, and the majority were poor, accused of minor drug offenses, and denied proper legal protections, the report notes.
As the regime continues its campaign of executions, the report says at least 222 children have been left without parents.
United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran Mai Sato denounced the regime’s brutal treatment of individuals accused of drug crimes, highlighting the disproportionate impact on vulnerable families.
“Many of the drugs-related cases in Iran involve young fathers from minority ethnic backgrounds experiencing economic hardship who face not only execution but also confiscation of their limited assets – including family homes and farmland – devastating their families long after their execution,” Sato said in a statement.
According to HRI’s latest report, at least 65 executions were carried out in secret without prior notice, denying families the chance to say goodbye, and some occurred despite ongoing legal proceedings.
Iranian security forces also systematically used coercion and torture, while denying prisoners access to legal counsel, to force illegitimate confessions.
HRI also reports that under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, the principle of elm‑e‑qazi — which allows judges to determine guilt based solely on circumstantial evidence without confessions or witnesses — is frequently applied arbitrarily.
With an increasing number of reports exposing the scale of systematic abuses across the country, human rights groups are warning that the death toll may climb sharply, with over 100 detainees at risk of execution.
Last week, three young Iranian men, including 19-year-old wrestling champion Saleh Mohammadi, were executed as the regime intensifies its crackdown on dissent, The Associated Press reported.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, head of Oslo-based Iran Human Rights, told the AP the executions are “intended to instill fear in society and deter new protests” amid deepening unrest.
On Monday, Iran’s judiciary confirmed that cases tied to the January protests have reached final verdicts and warned that those convicted would face no leniency.
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‘Verbal sparring’ at a conference for religious Jews breaking from Israel orthodoxy? That’s not what I experienced
To the editors:
The Forward‘s article about the recent Smol Emuni conference seems to describe a different event than the one that I attended. There were certainly different viewpoints among the people assembled at the gathering for religious Jews who, per the organization’s mission, seek “justice, equality, and dignity for Jews and Palestinians.” And there were views and perspectives shared that felt challenging or even difficult to hear.
But to assert, as the Forward‘s article did, that the conference was riven by strife and anger is simply not true.
The basis of the article’s claim, and the focus of a flurry of subsequent op-eds and blog posts, was Rabbi Saul Berman’s address to open the afternoon session. Berman used his remarks to criticize the Palestinian activist who had spoken in the morning; in doing so, he invoked a broad, monochromatic description of Islamic theology that felt out of place to some of us, including me.
Berman argued that Islamic Law prohibits any territorial concession, suggesting that Islamic law, but not Jewish law, continues to make peace impossible. The implication that Jewish theology has not blocked work toward peace is quite problematic, given the central role of religious leaders and communities in building settlements and in right-wing politics in Israel.
It is precisely this line of argument that many came to this conference to escape. In too many Jewish communities, it feels impossible to acknowledge the ways in which Judaism has contributed to Palestinian suffering and injustice. Smol Emuni was created in part to end that silence. That is why Berman’s words felt jarring.
But reading the Forward‘s article, one might think that Berman spoke with anger or that the audience actively derided him.
In fact, Berman spoke for close to 20 minutes. As far as I could see, everyone listened to him attentively. Most of the audience applauded when he concluded; I heard no boos. While a few people came and went during his remarks, as is the case at any such event, I saw no evidence that anyone “walked out in protest.”
One of the organizers did feel the need to note, after Berman concluded, that the conference organizers specifically did not share all of his views. She did so gracefully, while thanking him warmly for speaking and affirming her deep respect for him. I do not know how Berman felt, but he was not visibly angered and he stayed for the remainder of the program.
It was an awkward moment, to be sure, but not one of rancor or disrespect. It certainly did not define the conference, which elevated a range of important voices and viewpoints that I found both thoughtful and thought-provoking.
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