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Standing on Albania’s Jew Street, I learned firsthand the country’s lifesaving culture of hospitality
BERAT, Albania (JTA) — Stone paths wind through the Ottoman-style houses built into the hillside of Berat, Albania. They lead to an imposing 13th-century castle at the peak — the top priority for most visitors to this 60,000-person town 90 minutes south of the capital, Tirana. I had other plans.
Albanians take pride in their ancient code of “besa,” which translates to “keep the promise” and leads them to prioritize guests and religion in their homes. For Albanian Jews or those who fled there from elsewhere in the Balkan Peninsula as German forces advanced during World War II, it promised safe harbor with Albanian families and even throughout entire towns. Albania is the only country in Europe whose Jewish population grew during the war.
Berat’s Solomoni Museum explains this history and that of earlier Jews in the area. At least, so I hear: Under the stone arches off the plaza, I found only locked doors.
Some people collect souvenir spoons or Starbucks city mugs when they travel, others collect memories. I collect fragments of Jewish identity. Planning this trip to Albania with friends, I insisted on a stop in Berat to see the small museum and wasn’t about to give up.
“I’ll call her,” offered the woman behind the desk at the Ethnographic Museum across the street. “Her” referred to the caretaker, the widow of the Orthodox Christian professor who started the museum — Albania’s only one dedicated to Jewish history — as a passion project funded by his pension. After Simon Vrusho’s death in 2019, the museum closed until a French-Albanian businessman heard the story and donated funds for it to reopen in a larger, permanent location.
But the call ended with bad news: The caretaker was sick, and the museum would remain closed. I grimaced. Seeing my reaction, the Ethnographic Museum docent did what all Albanians do — anything she could to make me feel better, to make sure I enjoyed my stay in her town. In this moment, that meant explaining everything she knew about Jews in Albania.
A view of the exterior of the Solomoni Museum, the country’s only museum about its Jewish history. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews first arrived in the country as Roman captives, almost 2,000 years ago. But the first major wave, especially to Berat, came from Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area at the time, offered nominal religious freedom.
This month, the country’s prime minister announced plans to open a museum in Tirana dedicated to the stories of Albanian citizens who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, when the country was occupied by both fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority, has recognized at least 75 Albanians as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews.
“You can see the street where the Jews lived,” the docent noted. I perked up and jotted down her directions.
Six blocks away, I found a simple black plaque with white lettering, barely the size of my forearm and posted high on a white brick wall. It read, “Rruga Hebrentje.” I stared at it. Two millennia of Jewish history in the country, and one closed museum forced me to take heart in a little sign saying “Jew Street.”
A sign in Berat, Albania, reads Rruga Hebrentje, or Jew Street. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews have company in this razing of history: The brutal post-World War II communist regime of dictator Enver Hoxha shuttered all religious institutions in 1967, declaring Albania the world’s first atheist state. His forces destroyed more than 2,000 mosques, churches and other sacred buildings, arresting priests, clerics and imams, many of whom disappeared forever into labor camps and hidden graves. “Religion is the opium of the people,” Hoxha wrote, quoting Karl Marx.
It felt selfish to pout about the lack of Jewish history when so much religion, so many people and huge swaths of Albanian culture had been so recently and violently erased. I joined my friends to explore Berat’s exceptions to the wanton destruction, starting at the Sultan’s Mosque, which dates to the 15th century and boasts an intricately carved wooden ceiling. We expected to admire just the outside, since our guidebook said the doors opened only around Friday prayer.
But as we stared at the somewhat ordinary façade, a friendly gentleman chatted us up. He spoke Albanian, Greek and a bit of Italian, the last of which proved useful at matching up to our Spanish and French. He told us a little about the mosque and the casual styles of observance by most Albanian Muslims, but we only realized he worked there when he invited us inside, retrieving a key when we responded with excitement.
We marveled at the green, red and gold ceiling, illuminated by a round chandelier. He asked if we wanted to climb up the minaret, warning us about the ascent. Narrower than the width of my hips, the tightly coiled spiral of 94 stairs featured a layer of dust and cobwebs that stuck to our bare feet. But at the top, swallowing my fear of heights, confined spaces and bugs, I reaped the reward: a 360-degree view of the “thousand windows” that give the town its nickname, flanking both banks of the Osumi River, and the double eagle of Albania’s red flag flying proudly above it all from the castle.
A view of the ceiling inside the Sultans Mosque in Berat. (Naomi Tomky)
Back on the ground, we thanked the man profusely and dropped donations in the box outside the mosque door as we prepared to say goodbye. Instead, he led us across the square to another building – the Halveti Tekke, or Teqe. Light flowed through the high stained-glass windows onto the walls of the 700-year-old gathering place belonging to the mystic order of Sufi Muslims called Bektashi. Chains hung from the ornate gold-leaf-decorated ceiling over a space where, according to our new friend, the bektashi, or dervishes, used to perform their whirling rituals.
“You want to go up?” he asked my friend’s eight-year-old daughter. She nodded excitedly, and he tossed her a ring of keys, pointing the way to the balcony. As she climbed the stairs, I noticed a pair of six-pointed stars framing the main doorway, a reminder of my original mission, even if they were likely not Stars of David.
But if I felt sad about missing out on the Jewish museum, I was heartened by what I did receive: a first-hand lesson on Albania’s life-saving culture of hospitality.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
The post Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
The post ‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes
Sometimes a statement can contain multitudes, or at least provide a crystallizing moment in an election campaign. So it was when Benjamin Netanyahu, while criticizing the detention of about 40 Haredi draft evaders by military police at Ben-Gurion Airport this week, declared in a radio interview: “We need to protect the world of the Torah … But whoever doesn’t study must serve in the military.”
Netanyahu was effectively saying that yeshiva study should continue to be, as it has been under an informal arrangement, a free pass out of military service – and he went on to repeat a pledge to turn this into law. It is a position opposed by the overwhelming majority of Israelis.
The statement came amid such a calamitous two-week stretch for Netanyahu’s campaign leading up to the Oct. 27 election that it has some people joking that agents of the opposition might have infiltrated Likud headquarters and taken charge.
In a tragicomic episode, one of Netanyahu’s chief propagandists called leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot – a former military chief who is of Moroccan Jewish background – a “monkey” who is under the control of Ashkenazi elites.
Yinon Magal, who has described himself as a vessel for Netanyahu’s messaging, made the comments on Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu propaganda TV channel where he is the leading host. He later filmed himself explaining that the simian reference, in Israel’s mafia parlance, merely refers to a junior criminal who is a puppet of more heavyweight mafiosi. His clarification did little to stem the tide of criticism.
As Netanyahu awkwardly tried to distance himself, he also charged that opposition figures had used racist slurs, referring to a recent podcast interview with businesswoman Galia Albin in which she said his supporters are Mizrahis who plan to vote for him mindlessly.
Then came leaked comments (made last year) by Haredi Rabbi Dov Lando, leading spiritual leader of the Netanyahu-allied United Torah Judaism party – proclaiming that Zionism had brought disasters upon the Jewish people, that life under Arab rule would have been preferable and that religious Zionist soldiers were being killed because their rabbis taught them “distorted Torah.” Once again, outrage boiled over, and received mostly silence from the Likud.
Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of Netanyahu might have qualified as good news – but the U.S. president seemed to connect a Bibi reelection to a renewed assault against Iran. That rests on the dubious assumption that Israelis are eager for another few weeks (or more) in bomb shelters.
A punctuation mark arrived a few days later with reports, albeit unverified, that Netanyahu actually had planned to attack Iran earlier this month but was blocked by Trump. Many expected that scenario, which would have been interpreted as a gambit to delay, by dint of national emergency, an election in which he’s badly trailing in credible polls.
Polling is not available on every such twist and turn of the campaign, but decades of studying Israel and a nose to the ground tell me none of this is popular. And there is no question that most Israelis want to end the draft evasion by Haredim. Recent polls put support for that at 85 percent, which essentially means all non-Haredim.
The issue, as I have said before, is easily the most effective axe for the opposition to grind – because the current situation with the Haredim is utterly untenable.
Tens of thousands of Haredi men of military age remain outside the draft system, while soldiers and reservists from other communities carry an increasingly intolerable burden that has ,in many cases, reached hundreds of days a year.
Whether all those registered as yeshiva students genuinely study – a central question for some people – should be beside the point. Why should Torah study confer a privilege unavailable to Israelis studying physics, medicine, engineering or law? Why should one form of education exempt citizens from defending the country while every other form does not?
The consequences of the Haredi parties’ extortion extend far beyond the army. Israel has created an incentive system in which prolonged religious study preserves military exemptions, public subsidies and a way of life often characterized by economic dependence. Many Haredi educational institutions reject the core curriculum essential for participation in a modern workforce, even as the state helps finance them.
This is an extraordinary arrangement for a country whose security depends on its economic strength, and whose economic strength depends on scientific education, technological innovation and a highly skilled workforce.
Demography makes the issue existential. Haredim already account for roughly one-sixth of Israel’s population, and their exceptionally high birth rates – almost seven children per family on average – mean their share will continue to skyrocket. Unless patterns of education, employment and military participation change dramatically, Israel faces the prospect of an ever-smaller proportion of its citizens supporting and defending an ever-larger population.
The danger is compounded by the mobility of the people on whom Israel’s prosperity depends. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and physicians have opportunities elsewhere. If enough conclude that the country’s trajectory has become irreversible, the resulting brain drain could be catastrophic.
Earlier this year, my friend Rabbi Hershel Grossman arranged for me to meet senior rabbis associated with the Mir and Hebron yeshivot. They were gracious and pleasant, but strikingly candid about their opposition to compulsory core education, military service and ordinary employment whenever these conflicted with Torah study. More troubling was their confidence that demographic change would eventually give their community decisive political power.
The necessary alternative is a comprehensive overhaul of the incentives governing Haredi education, military service and employment. Every child should receive a core curriculum. Young adults should perform military or meaningful national service, with appropriate accommodations for religious observance. Public funding should encourage economic participation rather than prolonged dependence.
Opposition parties promise various versions of such plans. None of this will be easy, and it will not be accomplished by dialogue alone. But the alternative is a version of national suicide. There is no question that – alongside accountability for Oct. 7 and the demand for an independent state commission of inquiry – the future of Haredi military service, education and economic participation belongs at the center of this election.
So why would Netanyahu effectively say that studying Torah should entitle an able-bodied young man to exemption from military service?
There are several possible explanations for this – and the rest of the parade of seeming political misjudgments.
One might be a calculated strategy of mobilizing the base through fear and resentment rather than persuading the center. This might be useful in various scenarios involving a messy outcome of the election.
The others might be overpowering hubris, a toxic contempt for the public or the myriad other pathologies that often accompany too long a time in power.
The post Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes appeared first on The Forward.
