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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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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”