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The Nazis sent them to Hawaii to spy for the Japanese
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
By Christine Kuehn
Celadon Books, 272 pages, $30
Surely this must be historical fiction.
Here’s the premise: In 1930s Germany, a teenage girl has an affair with chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. When he somehow discovers she is half-Jewish, her immediate family (excepting one ardently Nazi brother) is banished to Hawaii, where mother, father and daughter are tasked with spying for the Japanese — and facilitating the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Decades later, an American writer inherits this unlikely story and the resulting generational trauma. She sets out to uncover more details, spurring an intermittent, emotional 30-year quest and, finally, this book, Family of Spies.
Which, it turns out, is not fiction, but rather an astonishing blend of history and memoir.
“Christine Kuehn was cocooned in the sanctity of a quiet suburban life when a mysterious letter in 1994 pierced that bubble,” the author’s biographical blurb states. The letter, from a screenwriter, seeks information about a grandfather involved with the Nazis. It sends the skeptical Kuehn and her husband to a bookstore, where, in the World War II section, sure enough, they find scattered references to a man named Otto Kuehn and his daughter, Ruth. Both are linked to anti-American espionage.
By this point, Otto and his wife, Friedel, are dead. So, too, is Leopold, the brother who stayed behind and fought for Germany during the war. But living witnesses remain: Christine’s father, Eberhard, and, even more tantalizingly, Ruth herself.
“You don’t need to know about the family, the past, or Pearl Harbor,” Ruth had told Christine years earlier. Christine’s father, too, had supplied only “vague, whitewashed snippets” about that past.
But after some prodding, Eberhard Kuehn shares memories of his Hawaiian boyhood, an idyll of swimming, surfing and fishing during which he was unaware of the family’s spying. When the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor happened, on Dec. 7, 1941, he was 15 and, though not yet a citizen, thoroughly American. He enlisted in the U.S. Army as soon as he could, fought at Okinawa, and remained estranged from his parents for the rest of his life.
As Christine investigates, Eberhard, always a teller of fantastical stories, is ravaged gradually by dementia. His recollections fade, leaving her to continue her fraught pilgrimage through family history alone.
As for Ruth — if this were indeed a novel, the climax would be a confrontation between aunt and niece, with attendant revelations. But Ruth is intent on concealment. On a visit to Germany after her mother’s death, she and another brother, Hans, burn a cache of family papers. She dies having kept her secrets.
Kuehn’s narrative weaves back and forth between the history itself and her quest to discover and decipher it. She reports deeply on the intricacies of espionage and counterespionage in Hawaii, relying largely on FBI files. Her structure and style are clear and effective. But it is really the improbability of the tale that hooks readers.
Its precipitating events take place in Berlin, where Ruth, like the rest of the family, is immersed in Nazi culture. Encountering Goebbels, a vicious antisemite who is also a charming womanizer, she succumbs, and for a while he does, too. But it turns out that her biological father is not Otto Kuehn, a failed businessman trying to rise in Nazi ranks, but a Jewish architect with whom Friedel was involved before the marriage. That, of course, is a problem.
Otto Kuehn’s own history includes missteps and near-misses. One family anecdote has him loaning the financially strapped Rudolph Heydrich, his competitor for a top SS post, train fare to get to the job interview. Heydrich beats Kuehn out for the position, later becoming Gestapo head and a key architect of the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, Otto works as a secret agent, first for the Weimar-era German navy and then for the Nazis. So, drafting him, in 1935, for Hawaiian espionage makes a certain sense. But in his granddaughter’s telling, he is “vain, grandiose, a risk-taker,” a less than superlative spy. He and Friedel are too ostentatious, parlaying cash windfalls from their Japanese handlers into real estate purchases and lavish parties. Ruth is seemingly more subtle in prying military information from U.S. naval officers charmed by her. “Dating was the perfect cover,” Kuehn writes.
At one point, Ruth becomes engaged to a German steel executive living in Tokyo, a man who happens to be the family’s Japanese handler. But when Friedel travels to Japan to collect money owed to the Kuehns, she finds Ruth’s fiancé living with another woman.
Here, the story (which evokes the great FX spy thriller The Americans) becomes stranger still. The FBI and U.S. military intelligence have by now grown suspicious of the Kuehns. An FBI operative, Robert L. Shivers, is assigned to Honolulu in 1939 to stake out the family, as well as other suspected spies. A cat-and-mouse game of surveillance and surreptitiousness erupts.
One of Otto’s principal contributions to the attack on Pearl Harbor was devising a code that involved using light signals to broadcast U.S. ship movements to the Japanese military. Cables from the Japanese consulate to Tokyo describing the signals were intercepted by American intelligence, but not decoded or translated until after the attack.
Kuehn describes the terror of Pearl Harbor, with its massive American casualties and damage to the U.S. Pacific fleet — and what happened to her family next: imprisonment, separation, wandering, exile, a Biblical level of catastrophe. Otto, convicted of espionage by a military tribunal, barely escaped a firing squad. But imprisonment with hard labor broke him, and his subsequent life — first in Argentina; then in Germany, with Friedel – was unhappy. It cannot have helped that after leaving the United States he never saw his son Eberhard again.
While there is no climactic confrontation with Ruth, Christine does find some closure by traveling to Germany. There, long-lost cousins share documents and photos and help her collate the family history. Lisa, who had reached out to her, is the daughter of Otto’s brother. “We are very excited for you to tell the story,” she tells Christine, marking the end of an intergenerational conspiracy of silence.
The post The Nazis sent them to Hawaii to spy for the Japanese appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
I have long been obsessed with the Vatican and the inner workings of the papacy. (I majored and did my Master’s in religious studies.) But usually other people are not as tickled as I am by analyzing the newest theological statements from the Holy See.
Not this week. Pope Leo XIV just put out his first encyclical — the term used to refer to official statements outlining the church’s stance on a topic — and it has gone viral. “Spitting fire right out the gate,” said one of many similar trending posts, as though the encyclical was a rap song.
The topic is buzzy: AI, which the pope casts as one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and morality. (The encyclical is titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” in English, if that gives you the gist.) “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” it opens, “ is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The document notes many of the concrete risks of AI — sexual abuse, distortion of facts, job loss — and calls for pragmatic solutions. But it is, at its heart, a testament to what makes humans human, written with palpable adoration for the people of the world: our creativity, our empathy, even our weaknesses. It’s a declaration that machines can never have the ineffable qualities of God’s children.
Structuring our world around technology, Leo writes, reduces “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Later, in a paean to the importance of deep thought over easy answers, he goes on: “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” he writes, calling on the world “to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine” and warning against rendering “human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“Magnificatus Humanitas” is a major statement, both in length — more than 43,000 words — and in symbolism. A pope’s first encyclical indicates the issues they believe are most important to the church, and signals the likely direction of their papacy.
That direction, for Pope Leo, is to be a voice for moral leadership, writ large. He addressed the encyclical not only to Catholics or even Christians, but “to all men and women of goodwill,” and cited thinkers like Hannah Arendt and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside the Bible.
It’s a declaration of a new — or, arguably, very old — relevance for religious leaders. As people rush through our increasingly fast-paced, frantic world, striving to keep up with the newest technology or geopolitical shift affecting markets and jobs, the slow-moving, zoomed-out perspective of religious leaders seems to be more and more important.
The Vatican held massive authority both moral and military for much of Western history. But its sway faded in the modern age. As democracy rose, Christianity broke into factions and religion’s prominence weakened, leaving the Church without the same ability to bestow a divine mandate on nations and rulers.
So many modern popes have kept their sights more narrowly focused on the theological. Even Pope Francis, who was a liberal, modernizing force for the church, and spoke out strongly on topics like the environment and immigration, focused three of his four encyclicals on Christian theological concepts like the Sacred Heart and Christianity as the world’s guiding light.
Pope Leo, however, seems to have found his way to modern, secular relevance by speaking out clearly on major issues of the day. He notes that he drew inspiration for “Magnificatus Humanitas” from Pope Leo XIII, an influential pope in the late 1800s and the inspiration for the modern Leo’s own papal moniker, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on the economy and conditions of the working class, was criticized for insufficient focus on the Gospel. The current pope’s own document is remarkably concrete and political.
Making political statements isn’t new for Leo, but the encyclical canonizes his boldness into an official form. In the past few months I’ve written about the ways in which Pope Leo has used sermons and statements to directly counter those made by U.S. leaders. After Pete Hegseth made a speech implying the U.S. military is doing God’s will, the pope gave a homily saying that prayers for war cannot be heard by God. He has made strongly worded comments about the rights of immigrants as Trump announced increased ICE raids, and made a point of appointing foreign bishops in American parishes. He has refused to visit the U.S. despite the fact that he is American and has been invited numerous times, including for the nation’s 250th birthday; he is instead planning to visit an island that serves as a refugee landing point in the Mediterranean.
It’s not all that surprising that Leo is making pronouncements on the justness of wars; popes have always given commentary on the world, albeit often less pointedly. Of course, Catholics have always looked to the pope for moral leadership — though that is increasingly under question, as renegade Catholics doubt the pope. (Even J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert with a book coming out about his conversion, has warned the pope to be “careful” with his theological interpretations — a near heretical statement. That’s how Protestantism came about.) The difference today is that everybody is listening.
I think the reason is that there is a certain ineffable quality that can’t be accounted for in so much of modern-day discourse in our metrics-focused world. Everything needs to be provable with a statistical analysis or some quantifiable indicator, or it needs to be as profitable as possible to extract value. But so much of what is most valuable in the human experience is intuitive — experiences and emotions like love, joy, transcendence. Connection with each other. Religious leaders have been honing the language to talk about these qualities for centuries, and they guard one of the only arenas in which the intangible remains central.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with religious institutions, and the Vatican in particular is famous as a site where abuses of power were hidden and protected. But “Magnifica Humanitas,” and its virality, points toward a new relationship with religion, and a newly important role for it to play.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking, a hope for my own increased importance as a religion reporter.
The post Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement appeared first on The Forward.
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How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.
The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.
This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.
A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.
Since then, the realm in which I feel safe as a visibly Jewish person has been shrinking from all directions.
After the Oct. 7 attack, the bulletin boards in my apartment building began filling with calls to boycott Israel. Campaign flyers for a Jewish political candidate who came to speak there were defaced with Hitler mustaches. I learned to scan the walls before I scanned my mail.
This was not happening on a campus quad or in some distant place. It was happening where I live.
Then, among my mother’s things, I found a Star of David necklace from the 1930s — marcasite set against black onyx, delicate and old. A boyfriend had given it to her when they were both 14.
I put it on in Florida, where I spend much of my time caring for my mother. I loved wearing it. It felt like more than jewelry. It felt like inheritance, memory, and a small way of carrying my family with me.
But when my mother knew I was going back to New York, she told me to take it off.
My mother is 102. She is not easily frightened. She has lived long enough to know when the temperature in the room has changed. She was not making a political argument. She was trying to protect her daughter.
I still wear that Star of David. But I admit I am selective. In New York, there are moments when I leave it visible and moments when I tuck it under my shirt. That calculation itself tells me something about the world I am moving through.
Recently, in a private Facebook group for women essayists, I shared a personal piece I had written for the United Kingdom-based Jewish Chronicle about how Oct. 7 changed life for my mother and me. It was not a political manifesto. It was a reflection on fear, Jewish identity, aging and visibility.
And still, I was attacked by other writers.“What about Gaza?” I was asked. The message was clear: even my personal Jewish pain had to pass a political test before it could be acknowledged.
That is the narrowing.
This ugliness is coming from more than one direction now. It stems from old conspiracy theories on the right and newer moral certainties in some of the progressive spaces where I once felt most at home. Different language brings about the same result: Jews become less human, less particular, less entitled to fear.
That collapse is what frightens me most: the definitional collapse between Jew and Israeli; Israeli and Israel’s government; Jewish symbol and political provocation; mezuzah and target.
As Jews like me reckon with that collapse, we must reckon with how much we’ll go along with it.
Right now, too often, Jews are being asked to choose between our own safety and our compassion for others. We should be able to prioritize both. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. I also believe Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, dignity, and protection from suffering.
These beliefs should not cancel each other out. They should make us more careful, more humane, more committed to truth.
Yet now we must choose between speaking about antisemitism and being accused of indifference to other hatreds. That is no way to live.
Since Oct. 7, I have found myself going to synagogue on Shabbat, something I never did before. I was a High Holiday Jew. Now I seek out rooms where I do not have to explain why this moment feels frightening. I have learned where I feel seen. I have learned who can hold my fear without turning it into an argument.
The mezuzah I did not put back up is small. It fits in the palm of my hand.
But what it represents is not small: memory, faith, survival, home, and the right to be visibly Jewish without fear.
When I did not put it back up, I told myself I was being practical. But now — after Oct. 7, the bulletin boards, my mother’s warning, and the explosive allegations I’ve seen travel through respected media without sufficient care or verification — I understand it differently.
I was not just protecting a doorframe. I was learning to shrink.
The post How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe? appeared first on The Forward.
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Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
ס׳איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ פּאָדקאַסט מיט דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע אין ישׂראל, ליאַ קעניג, וועלכע איז הײַנט צום בעסטן באַקאַנט ווי די ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע באָבע פֿונעם פּערסאָנאַזש שלום שטיסל אין דער ישׂראלדיקער טעלעוויזיע־סעריע „שטיסל“.
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך אויך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג — דער מחבר פֿון אַ נײַער ביאָגראַפֿיע וועגן איר אויף ענגליש; דער איבערזעצער און דראַמאַטורג מיכל יאַשינסקי, און דער ייִדישער זינגער און קולטור־טוער חיים וואָלף. דעם פּאָדקאַסט האָט טראַנסמיטירט די באָסטאָנער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“.
ליאַ קעניג גיט איבער אירע זכרונות במשך פֿון איר לאַנגער קאַריערע אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, ווי אויך אינעם העברעיִשן טעאַטער, טעלעוויזיע און קינאָ. כּדי צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
The post Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig appeared first on The Forward.