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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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The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel
Towards the end of Birthright, a new play that just made its New York City debut at the MCC Theatre, two characters are arguing over Israel and Zionism in the wake of Oct. 7. The talking points will be familiar to anyone who’s been ensconced in the discourse of the past few years: Izzy says that Zionism is and has always been a colonialist project, and Chaya blames the conflict on Palestinian leaders who rejected early two-state solutions.
As they argue, each is frantically Googling; their phone screens are projected onto the walls of the set. We can see the chasm between their echo chambers: Izzy goes to the Jewish Voice for Peace website, Chaya to The Jerusalem Post. Each time they focus on their own screen, the sound of the argument becomes muffled and indistinct until they resurface to throw a new piece of evidence into the conversation.
It’s a clever piece of production magic that effectively drives home the schism over Israel in the Jewish world, and our inability to hear each other.
Birthright, commissioned by Miami New Drama from Tony Award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector and here directed by Teddy Bergman, is nominally about the eponymous free trip to Israel. But really it’s about a group of six friends that formed on the trip, and their personal journeys — through Judaism, and through life — as the somewhat motley crew diverges and reconnects over the years.
The show is a long one, three and a half hours once you include its two intermissions. Each act depicts a single night, spaced over the course of nearly two decades — first, right after they’ve returned from their trip to Israel in 2006, then in their early 30s as their careers are taking off in 2016, and finally a year after Oct. 7. While the runtime is admittedly long, it allows for well-developed characters, which are essential to approaching such a touchy topic with any nuance, and the fast-paced dialogue keeps things moving briskly. (A reasonable helping of humor, including a Kanye reference in every act, doesn’t hurt.)
And the show does manage an astonishing amount of subtlety for a topic that has become so factionalized. The characters represent a reasonably diverse range of Jewish thought and experience, though certainly leaves some out. (There are no Jews of color or converts, for example, and no true right-wing hawks.)
There’s Chaya (Zoe Winters, best known as Logan Roy’s secretary and mistress on Succession), who grew up Conservadox, but spent college rushing a sorority and dyeing her hair blonde; she ends up working for the Democratic establishment. Noah (Eli Gelb, Tony-nominated for Stereophonic) is a political wonk with a Facebook-addled dad prone to right-wing conspiracy theories. Izzy (Molly Bernard), a queer Jew who eschewed law school, has worked on the Jewish left long before it became buzzy. Lev (Hale Appleman), a lost soul wanderer with a penchant for Jewish philosophy — he name-drops Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor — has family who survived the Holocaust. Alona (Molly Ranson), a sociology PhD who fell for an IDF soldier on the trip, eventually marries an Israeli and moves to Tel Aviv. And Emerson (Nate Mann), a musician, is barely aware that he’s Jewish when he lands on their trip half by accident.
This long summary represents only a smidgen of the events in the group’s lives. The play makes sharp use of production gimmicks, opening the second and third acts by projecting a montage of messages, summarizing the events of the group’s intervening years — and also cleverly reminding us of the quirks of bygone eras. Before the second act, we see wedding invitations and job announcements sent out by email, and then newborn photos posted on Facebook. Before the third, there are group chats on iMessage and then Whatsapp, where we see more birth announcements. Later, they exchange articles about the Israel-Hamas war.
This glut of information is how the show achieves its depth. On paper, one could slot some of these characters into obvious archetypes: The Zionist who makes aliyah, the queer anti-Zionist activist who has made politics her whole identity, the centrist liberal who staunchly supports Israel. But every character has real depth and pathos, and none of the action plays out to its stereotypical end.
When someone asks Izzy, the JVP-type activist, why she hates Israel so much, she doesn’t list out its sins; instead, she’s affronted. “I don’t hate Israel. I love it,” she says. “What it could be at its best.” She doesn’t believe she’s fighting against the nation, but for it.
Meanwhile, Alona, who made aliyah, does not launch into a speech about how Hamas has to be eradicated before the war can end; Bibi, the rest of the Israeli government and settlers, she says, are just as much of a “cancer” as any terrorist group.
Though the political discussions are impressively nuanced, Birthright finds its true success in spending as much time on the rest of the characters’ lives as it does on their political stances. There are the complications of falling for a non-Jewish partner. The ways having children changes life in inalterable ways. Divorces. Substance abuse. The way a dream career can still disappoint. For a topic that is so often turned into a polemic, the play takes a broader view.
In presenting stories of real, believable Jewish lives that are not solely defined by their Judaism, the play demonstrates that Jewishness doesn’t mean just one thing to anyone. Instead, it explores the ways Jewish identity layers on, mingles with and sometimes challenges the rest of one’s choices, values and beliefs.
There are views left out of Birthright, to be sure. No one is right wing (the characters call their group “BirthLeft”), and in the first act they all make fun of their trip as a way to get Jewish kids laid. No one is truly hawkish about the war; in the first act, the characters make fun of George W. Bush and fantasize about working on Democratic campaigns. No one is making an argument, as plenty of people have in the past few years, that Palestinians should be exiled from Gaza or deserve to die.
But the overall point can apply equally: Judaism, and Israel, is not one clear thing. There’s no perfect answer. We aren’t all supposed to agree — but that doesn’t have to tear us apart. It’s a simple message, but one that is hard to believe these days; Birthright makes it feel tangible.
As Lev says when considering their Birthright trip, and his confused feelings about it. “History, Jewish history, it’s never been a straight line, and it’s never meant only one fixed thing. It’s more a thing you interpret, that you find meaning in.”
The new play Birthright is playing at the MCC Theater in Manhattan through Jul 26, 2026.
The post The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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New York Times hires Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg to cover Jewish American life
(JTA) — The New York Times has hired Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg to launch a national beat covering Jewish American life, bringing a widely known journalist on antisemitism and Jewish affairs to a newspaper whose coverage of Israel and the Jewish community has been under unusually intense scrutiny since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The appointment, announced Monday by National Editor Nestor Ramos, creates a dedicated beat focused on American Jews at a moment when questions of antisemitism, Israel, religious identity and political polarization have moved to the center of public debate.
It is the first time that the newspaper, published in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population, has a beat dedicated to Jews.
“Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat,” Ramos wrote in a memo to staff. “Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.”
The move brings Rosenberg to a publication that he has occasionally criticized for its coverage of Jewish affairs, but without echoing some critics’ charges of institutional bias.
For the past five years Rosenberg has written The Atlantic’s “Deep Shtetl” newsletter, blending coverage of antisemitism, American politics and Jewish culture with essays on history, religion and popular culture. Before joining The Atlantic in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Tablet, a magazine of Jewish affairs.
Over the years, Rosenberg has broken or advanced reporting on online extremism and antisemitism while also becoming known for explaining Jewish issues to a broad audience. His work has ranged from investigations into antisemitic disinformation networks to historical features. He has written about antisemitism on the far left and on the Republican right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, an Anti-Defamation League study found Rosenberg was among the Jewish journalists most frequently targeted with antisemitic abuse on Twitter. Rosenberg became known for responding publicly to trolls and for developing technological tools — including an “Impostor Buster” bot — designed to expose white supremacists posing online as minorities in order to inflame social tensions. The effort drew widespread attention before Twitter eventually suspended the tool.
He later described those experiences in a New York Times guest essay titled “Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter,” and has remained a frequent public speaker on combating online hate while preserving free expression.
Ramos’s announcement emphasized that Rosenberg’s beat would extend beyond antisemitism.
“Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today—not even close,” Ramos wrote, citing stories on Hanukkah traditions, Jewish representation in popular culture and other facets of American Jewish life.
The Times, through a spokesman, declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement. Rosenberg did not respond to a request for an interview by press time.
The hire comes as The New York Times continues to navigate a complicated relationship with many Jewish readers.
For decades the newspaper has occupied an outsized place in American Jewish public life, employing prominent Jewish reporters and editors while producing influential coverage of religion, Israel and antisemitism. Yet the newspaper has also faced sustained criticism from parts of the Jewish community over its Israel coverage, criticism that intensified after Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Media watchdog organizations, some Jewish communal leaders and a number of current and former journalists have accused the Times of factual errors, headline framing and insufficient skepticism toward claims made by Hamas officials in some early coverage of the conflict.
A May 2026 column by Nicholas Kristof, alleging systemic sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinian detainees, was widely criticized for amplifying unverified claims and platforming biased sources. The Times stood by Kristof’s column in an editorial note.
Defenders of the Times argue that accusations of institutional anti-Israel bias often conflate disagreement over editorial judgments with evidence of systemic prejudice.
At Tablet and The Atlantic, Rosenberg occasionally criticized aspects of the Times’ reporting on both Israel and antisemitism. In a 2018 Tablet article he criticized The New York Times Book Review for offering a platform for the novelist Alice Walker to recommend a book by the English author David Icke that was heavily saturated in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The next year he called out the Times for a profile of former CIA officer and would-be congressional candidate Valerie Plame that failed to mention her history of tweets sharing antisemitic theories. He has also regretted that the Times in 1937 dropped its subscription to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication service because of the perception at the time that JTA’s coverage of Nazi Europe was alarmist.
Unlike some Jewish media watchdog groups, however, Rosenberg has not argued that the Times is institutionally or inherently biased against Israel or Jews. Against that backdrop, Rosenberg’s hiring is likely to be watched closely by Jewish readers across the political spectrum.
According to Ramos, Rosenberg will begin work July 20 and will be based in New York while traveling nationally for the beat.
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Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders
(JTA) — After weeks of backlash from Jewish groups and leaders, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights this weekend opened its exhibit on the Nakba, the narrative of Palestinian defeat and displacement upon Israel’s founding.
The Winnipeg, Manitoba, exhibit is called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” and features photography, poetry and everyday objects that document the experience of Palestinian-Canadians impacted by the Nakba. Palestinians use the term, meaning “catastrophe,” to describe their mass displacement upon Israel’s establishment.
The exhibit has drawn fierce condemnation from some Jewish groups, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“Materials that are one-sided and driven by a political agenda can contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students,” the group wrote in a post on X last week. “The federal government must hold the CMHR’s leadership accountable for this egregious mishandling.”
The museum’s only Jewish board member, Mark Berlin, was upset enough by the exhibit to resign.
“Because the museum chooses to proceed with this exhibit in its present form despite repeated concerns raised by myself and members of the mainstream Jewish community and others seeking a more balanced and historically complete presentation, I can no longer, in good conscience continue to serve as a Trustee,” Berlin wrote in a resignation letter dated June 22.
In the letter, Berlin argues that the exhibit omits the context that “hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands” were also displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“A story detached from the surrounding factual details is not the truth, it is just a story,” Berlin continued. “The museum has a statutory and moral obligation to tell the full truth, not to sacrifice it at the altar of politics.”
The museum has vigorously defended the exhibit. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Isha Khan, the CEO of the museum, said that “focusing in this one exhibit on the human violations faced by of Palestinian Canadians does not negate the human rights violations faced by Jewish people.”
“Sharing the stories of one community in no way minimizes the experiences of another,” Khan continued.
Khan added that the exhibit had drawn “both criticism and support from Jewish Canadians.”
Several progressive Jewish groups in Canada, including Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and United Jewish Peoples’ Order, defended the exhibit in a joint statement Thursday, writing that it was the “result of dedication, persistence, care and advocacy, especially from the Palestinian Canadian community.”
“We are proud to celebrate a Canadian institution that has remained steadfast in the face of unfounded criticism and pressure and chose to move forward with integrity,” the statement continued. “We hope this historic opening, and the ongoing inclusion of the exhibition in the Museum, encourages learning, reflection and action.”
The dispute over the exhibit comes as Jews in Canada have faced a spate of antisemitic attacks in recent months, including in March, when shots were fired at three Toronto-area synagogues. In 2025, there were 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada, marking a 9% rise from 2024, according to B’nai Brith’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents.
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