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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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Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually
A group of Jewish Theological Seminary students were furious with the chancellor’s position on Jewish statehood. In protest, they draped flags around campus before graduation, which the administration removed before the ceremony.
The year was 1948. The flags were Israeli. And the dissenting students were protesting Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s refusal to make support for Jewish statehood part of academic commencement. Some students even arranged for the bells at nearby Union Theological Seminary to play “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, after JTS officials declined to include it in commencement.
As a historian of American Zionism, I have been thinking about that episode while reading the many vitriolic reactions to a few JTS undergraduates who spoke out in opposition to the seminary’s decision to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog as this year’s graduation speaker. Once again, a JTS commencement has become a battleground over Israel, but the sides are now reversed.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the right moment to extend an invitation to Herzog to speak at commencement. What deserves attention is the outraged reaction to a group of students raising objections, and the speed with which those students’ concerns have been cast as a deviation from the historical contours of mainstream American Jewish politics.
A recent Times of Israel blog post, for example, argued that the mere fact that JTS students raised concerns about Herzog was a rupture with Judaism. “Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile,” wrote the author, Menachem Creditor, adding that “the founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination,” and that Herzog “represents the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These claims erase JTS’s long and sophisticated engagement with Jewish nationalism and the conception of Jewish peoplehood. Reading American Zionism backward risks collapsing peoplehood and statehood, and creating traditions to ratify present assumptions out of a past that never existed.
The relationship between Zionism and JTS was nuanced from the start. Both founding president Sabato Morais and the seminary’s third chancellor, Cyrus Adler, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Morais believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention at the dawn of a messianic era. Adler thought of the growth of a non-religious community in the land of Israel “as the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”
Solomon Schechter, as chancellor, brought a measure of support for the Zionist movement to JTS; shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am, Schechter insisted that Zionism transcended statehood. Its primary aim, he argued, was the national regeneration of global Judaism, not the creation of a secular state that would hollow out Jewish life from within.
And the controversies over the 1948 graduation exercises revealed how far Louis Finkelstein stood from political Zionism, even after the establishment of Israel. Where some Zionists celebrated sovereignty, Finkelstein remained focused on the Jewish character of the land and its people. That orientation drew him toward Judah Magnes’s binational vision — that of a federated framework in which Jews and Arabs would each hold recognized rights and a measure of national autonomy within a single shared political entity.
This reticence to conflate Judaism, Zionism and Jewish sovereignty was not limited to the seminary’s chancellors.
Henrietta Szold, JTS’s first female student, a central figure in its intellectual orbit, and the founder of Hadassah, similarly supported a binational vision from her new home in Jerusalem. Mordecai Kaplan — a longtime JTS faculty member, committed Zionist, and one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers of the 20th century — expressed concern throughout his career about the mistake of equating Jewish nationhood with Jewish statehood. In Judaism as a Civilization, he called for a “more ethical conception of nationhood fundamentally as a cultural rather than as a political relationship.”
After Israel’s founding, Kaplan went further, arguing to David Ben-Gurion in 1958 that “the basic assumption that the state of Israel is a Jewish state is itself open to question.” The Israeli government’s task, he insisted, was to establish “a modern state, not a Jewish state, an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.”
These questions did not disappear even as JTS evolved under new leadership.
Gerson Cohen, whose chancellorship beginning in 1972 marked a shift toward a more pro-statist posture, embraced the state’s significance for Jewish life and identity in ways his predecessors had not. Yet even Cohen insisted that commitment to Judaism must rest “not on political statehood or upon geography but solely on the idea of covenant and commitment to ethos.” He argued that a flourishing diaspora was a necessity for Jewish civilization as a whole, not adjunct to Israeli interests.
His successor, Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch, was more direct, saying in a recent warning that Jews must ensure that “Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.”
One can disagree with any of these perspectives. In fact, the disagreement itself is the point.
The leaders who built JTS debated Jewish self-determination, Zionism and statehood while living through the Holocaust, the collapse of European Jewish life, existential danger in Palestine, and the precarious birth of the state of Israel. They were not naïve about antisemitism, indifferent to Jewish survival, or ignorant of Jewish sources. Nor were they unsophisticated about Zionism.
Instead, they offered a more demanding account of Zionism: one that affirmed a Jewish homeland and insisted that Jewish power remain answerable to Jewish ethics, all without diminishing Jewish life in the diaspora.
This is precisely the perspective that has been crowded out of our contemporary discourse, not because these questions were answered, but because the space to ask them has collapsed. As the boundaries of acceptable Zionist discourse have narrowed, issues that arose from within Zionism itself — the potential dangers of equating the Israeli state with the Jewish people, the risks of elevating political statehood above other ethical and communal commitments, and the need to have diaspora Jewish life be seen as carrying independent religious and moral weight — have come to be treated as anti-Zionist rather than part of a living internal debate.
The furor over the JTS undergraduates’ letter objecting to Herzog is a troubling sign that, across American Jewish life, it has become harder to think honestly about the risks of treating support for the state of Israel not merely as a Jewish commitment, but as one that takes precedence over other all other Jewish commitments. When the past is rewritten so that the equation of peoplehood and statehood appears inevitable, American Jews are left with a false choice: either embrace the state as an unquestioned and unquestionable expression of Jewish identity, or abandon Jewish life altogether.
JTS has offered its students a richer education because, in its halls, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been debated and contested. That discourse is not a failure of Jewish commitment, but an expression of it. The sustained engagement with the hardest questions of Zionism is one of the best things JTS has given American Jewish life, and one of the most important gifts it still has to offer.
The post Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually appeared first on The Forward.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.
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UK Police Charge Two Men in Connection with Filming Antisemitic TikTok Videos
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
British police have charged two men with religiously aggravated harassment offenses after they were alleged to have traveled to a Jewish area of north London to film antisemitic social media videos.
The two men, Adam Bedoui, 20, and Abdelkader Amir Bousloub, 21, are due to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court, a statement from the Crown Prosecution Service said on Saturday.