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The Holocaust survivor writer who can help us through this ominous era
This fall, I read a story set in Prague during World War II in which three boys, two of whom escaped from a concentration camp, watch as armed Czechs consider forcing two Germans to jump out an apartment window to certain death — but decide to hand them over to authorities instead.
One of the three boys then “had an unquestionable feeling that what he had just experienced had been justice.” At first, this perhaps reads as a bit strange. Why would a Czech boy think letting Germans go, after they occupied his city and took over his life — not to mention imprisoned and tortured members of his community in concentration camps — constitutes justice? Yet all the same, the boy “felt satisfaction that those two people, whom he’d seen for the first time in his life, and probably for the last, hadn’t jumped. That they didn’t have to jump.”
Justice, in this story, isn’t doing to your enemy what he’d done to you. It’s having the opportunity to do so, and instead choosing not to become your enemy.
That story, “Black Lion,” was written by the Czech Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig, who would have been 99 this December. (He passed away in 2011). Lustig drew on the unthinkable series of events he was forced to endure — being forced into the Nazi ghetto of Theresienstadt at the age of 15 and then sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald — and made it into art. And while his novels, short stories and films look unflinchingly at the worst of humanity, they always treat their characters humanely.
This year, we have lurched from crisis to crisis, at home and abroad, while many in power around the world demonstrate a capacity for cruelty matched only by their cynicism. So, as we come to 2025’s end, I have found myself thinking of “Black Lion,” and Lustig’s work more generally. What does it mean, I’ve wondered, to stare into the darkest void of inhumanity and pronounce, as Lustig did, that life is still a miracle?
As Lustig’s daughter, Eva Lustigová, told me, “The leitmotif in all of his work is: what can we do in a world where people kill one another? That was the thematic question.”
‘That darkness never breaks him’
Lustig’s works are largely set during or immediately after the Holocaust. His protagonists are often Czech or other Central Eastern European Jews; and the stories and books often feature children and teenagers.
The short story “The Last Day of the Fire” zooms in on one old man and his grandson during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the novel Dita Saxová is about an 18-year-old concentration camp survivor making her way in postwar Prague, balancing the hell from which she just emerged with considerations like which boy to date; The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S., is about a 17-year-old in Theresienstadt working as a prostitute; Darkness Casts No Shadow, the novella that became the (beautiful and wrenching) film Diamonds of the Night, is about two boys trying to escape a train carrying them to a camp.
The choice to so often focus on the very young does two things.
First, it makes the juxtaposition between darkness and light that much starker. The worst things imaginable are happening to people who should be out playing or daydreaming or shuffling their schoolbooks. Yet they still, in Lustig’s works, hold onto their humanity, even as their innocence is stolen from them.
As Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow focused on European affairs at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote me in an email: “Lustig writes about a lot of very dark stuff…but somehow that darkness never breaks him.”
But second, Lustig’s focus on the young gives his work, as specific as it is, a kind of universal urgency. Read a novel about teenagers running from transports in Central Europe and how their neighbors treat them — and then go and read the news about ICE raids and schoolchildren here in the United States. The point isn’t that the situations are one to one — they never are — but that, as people, we all grapple with similar challenges: What it means to be human; what we owe to our own and other people’s children; how to refuse cynicism when it seems like moral depravity is a prerequisite for holding actual power.
“I write about people under pressure, I write about tests that people are not ready for and which they did not expect,” Lustig said in 2002.
We are in an era of such tests. It sometimes feels like I spent the past year talking about crises: of liberal democracy, of American and Jewish identities, of human rights. So many are in so much pain; so many worry that 2026 will represent a continuation, or worsening, of tests we have no idea how to meet.
Perhaps fittingly, 2026 is also the centenary of Lustig’s birth. The Arnošt Lustig Foundation is preparing a year-long festival in 10 countries over four continents. One goal, Lustigová said, is to promote the idea, which so often appears in Lustig’s work, that humanism “doesn’t need to be imported or exported. It just needs to be cultivated.”
“The answer is, yes, we can keep our humanity,” she added. “We decide that ourselves, even under the harshest of circumstances. It’s a choice to be able to live with our conscience and keep our human dignity.”
“You can put that into Gaza, Israel, Sudan, Tanzania. You can put it anywhere.”
Listening to her, I thought again of what it means to live in pursuit of dignity and justice at a moment when that can feel at best foolish and at worst impossible — and of “Black Lion,” and the stories that can help to show us how.
The post The Holocaust survivor writer who can help us through this ominous era appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran appoints AMIA bombing suspect to National Security Council
(JTA) —
For the second time this year, Iran has named a wanted suspect in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires to a top security role.
A spokesman for the Islamic Republic’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said Monday that Mohsen Rezaei had resigned as an adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, and would assume the role of secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council. Rezaei is a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Rezaei is wanted by Argentina and is subject to an Interpol Red Notice issued at Argentina’s request over his alleged role in the 1994 attack, which killed 85 people and remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history.
Earlier this year, Ahmad Vahidi, another suspect in the AMIA case and also the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, was appointed IRGC commander.
In a landmark ruling in 2024, an Argentine court held Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, responsible for the bombing, setting the stage for international legal action.
In June 2025, Argentina’s federal judiciary ordered that 10 Iranian and Lebanese suspects accused in connection with the deadly 1994 AMIA bombing be tried in absentia. Rezaei and Vahidi are among them.
The eight other suspects accused by the late AMIA special prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, are: former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahijan, former Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, former Iranian ambassador Hadi Soleimanpour, former Iranian cultural attache in Buenos Aires Mohsen Rabbani and former Iranian diplomat Ahmad Reza Asghari, as well as suspected Hezbollah operatives Salman Raouf Salman, Abdallah Salman and Hussein Mounir Mouzannar.
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Israel and AIPAC on the ballot in the Minnesota Senate and U.S. House races
(JTA) — A pair of Democratic primaries in Minnesota on Tuesday are among a string of high-profile battles between progressive and moderate candidates, where Israel and the pro-Israel lobby serve as key wedge issues.
The state’s highest-profile race is the U.S. Senate primary between Rep. Angie Craig, who has been endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and Lieutenant Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who says she would reject AIPAC’s money and accuses Israel of committing a genocide.
The most recent data gathered in late July through early August has Craig with a 2-percentage point lead, within the 5.3% margin of error. Another poll, conducted in late July by a group supporting Flanagan, shows her with a 14-point lead. The Democratic nominee, whether it be Flanagan or Craig, is expected to win the general election in November.
The race, and the candidates’ sparring over AIPAC, comes as the lobby and Israel under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have become increasingly unpopular among Democratic voters. Israel is also an issue in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in neighboring Wisconsin taking place on Tuesday.
Flanagan has referred to Craig as “AIPAC’s candidate” in the Senate race, which prompted Craig to distance herself from the group’s spending during a TV debate in June.
“AIPAC has not contributed at all, the PAC, to my Senate campaign,” said Craig, whose wife, Cheryl Greene, is Jewish. “Not one penny.”
Flanagan countered that, while AIPAC itself has not donated to Craig’s campaign, it has held fundraisers for the four-term congresswoman. AIPAC did not respond to a request for comment.
Just last week in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, progressive Abdul El-Sayed defeated the moderate Rep. Haley Stevens, whose AIPAC endorsement was the frequent target of opposition attacks.
Flanagan has drawn the support of American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian super PAC that aims to counter AIPAC. The group spent about $54,000 on ads boosting her candidacy, according to FEC filings.
Flanagan’s platform includes blocking offensive weapons sales to Israel — a position that all but seven Senate Democrats voted for in April — and advancing a two-state solution that “allows for a secure Israel and Palestinian self-determination.”
Craig, who also backs a two-state outcome, voted against the recent amendment proposed by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie that would have halted $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.
In a statement explaining her vote, Craig panned Netanyahu and the war in Iran, but wrote that the amendment would endanger Israelis and American troops and allies in the region. After the vote, Flanagan wrote, “A vote to send $3.3 billion of taxpayer money to fund additional weapons of war to Benjamin Netanyahu is unconscionable. Enough.”
Craig has the endorsement of a number of Democrats in Congress and the Senate, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. She is also endorsed by lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel, former Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg, and Minneapolis’ Jewish mayor, Jacob Frey, who rose to national prominence for his response to the deadly results of the deployment of immigrant enforcement officials in his city.
Flanagan has drawn endorsements from a swath of major progressive figures including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and outspoken pro-Palestinian Reps. Ro Khanna of California and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Flanagan is also endorsed by the state’s Democratic Party affiliate, the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
On Sunday Sanders posted on X,”There is a reason why the super PACs and billionaires are flooding Minnesota with $20 million to defeat Peggy Flanagan. Same thing as Michigan. They do not want somebody in the Senate who will stand up for the working class.”
Spending by political action committees affiliated with AIPAC has also come to the fore in the Democratic primary race for the House seat that Craig is vacating.
The most moderate of the three leading candidates is State Sen. Matt Klein, who has expressed support for the U.S.-Israel relationship and is endorsed by DMFI. Last-minute spending by outside groups has sparked accusations that AIPAC is indirectly involved.
“AIPAC is coming after me,” said former Lakeville mayor Matt Little, one of Klein’s opponents, in a video.
Klein’s two opponents — Little and state Rep. Kaela Berg — both accuse Israel of committing a genocide, and have both speculated that AIPAC is behind some of the Klein spending.
Berg supports placing conditions on U.S. aid to Israel and halting weapons sales, and Little says the U.S. must end all military aid and weapons sales to the country. On the policy page of his campaign website, Little refers to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack as “an act of wanton slaughter against innocent civilians” and says that people should condemn “the anti-Semitism that followed.”
Berg is listed as “primary approved” by the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group J Street, while Little has been boosted by American Priorities, which has spent about $64,000 in his favor. He is also endorsed by the DFL and Congressional Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
The latest polling in the district — conducted at the end of May by a group that favors Klein — found Little leading Klein with a 7-percentage point lead, and Berg trailing by another 3 points. 39 percent of voters were undecided, and Little and Klein were about even after voters received more information about the three candidates.
Craig has declined to endorse any of the candidates to replace her.
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Sister of pro-Israel stalwart Lindsey Graham wins runoff slot
(JTA) — South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham and a second Republican candidate will advance to a special primary runoff in two weeks, when voters will decide which GOP candidate might take the vacant seat of her late brother Lindsey Graham.
Just over an hour after polls closed, at about 8:15 pm, the Associated Press declared that Darline Graham would advance to a runoff election, noting that “one additional candidate will also advance.” At that point Graham had secured 32.6% of the vote, with 39% of ballots counted.
Graham was up against nine fellow Republicans, with her biggest competition including U.S. House Reps. Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, who were closely vying for the second spot in the runoff at the time of the AP’s call. In South Carolina, the top contender would have needed to win a majority of votes in order to avoid the two-candidate runoff, scheduled for August 25.
In the November general election, the winner will face Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who is unlikely to prevail in this solidly Republican state.
Tuesday’s race marked the second time in two months that GOP voters came to the polls to select a Senate candidate, and now they will need to do so a third time. Longstanding Sen. Lindsey Graham, a top ally of Israel in the U.S. Senate and supporter of military action against Iran. won the original primary in June but died suddenly from an aortic dissection on July 11.
Graham, who was 71 years old, served 23 years in the Senate and eight in the U.S. House. He was a member of the Senate’s Armed Services and Budget committees and had traveled to Israel about a dozen times since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Heading into Tuesday’s primary, analysts expressed no doubt that the winner would be pro-Israel. They stressed, however, that matching Graham’s level of foreign policy experience and focus on Israel, a place he often visited, would be a formidable task.
“Whoever wins this is going to be an ally of Israel,” Christopher Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in the lead-up to the race. “The question is whether they will be the champion for Israel that Lindsey Graham was.”
A few days after Graham’s death, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, appointed Darline Graham to complete the late senator’s term. Despite having minimal policy experience, such as a past role on the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, she earned President Trump’s support and soon declared her candidacy in the full race.
While 10 candidates were running in the Tuesday primary, only about two others were considered serious competition for Graham, Norman and Fry: businessman Mark Lynch and Mark Sanford, whose governorship was plagued with scandals and who briefly ran against Trump in the 2020 presidential primaries.
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