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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
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Trump urges Iran to make a deal after Iran fires missiles at Israel for first time in 2 months
(JTA) — Iran fired multiple barrages of missiles toward northern Israel on Sunday night local time, in the first direct fire from Iran on Israel since early April.
No one was immediately reported injured in the barrages, according to Israeli media, and the Israeli military said it shot down all the missiles aimed at the country on Sunday night.
The attack came hours after a stabbing attack by an Israeli Arab on Jews in central Israel killed one person and left several others injured.
The Iran salvo added to the turmoil for Israelis living in the north, who have been under constant fire from Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, and upsetting an uneasy quiet in the rest of the country. Schools across Israel will be closed on Monday.
Iranian officials said the barrage was a response to Israel’s strike earlier Sunday on a Hezbollah installation in the suburbs of Beirut, which the Israeli army said targeted a command center used to direct attacks on its troops.
Hezbollah last week rejected a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal that would have halted Israeli strikes in Beirut, saying that it could not abide by terms that would have required it to exit southern Lebanon.
During a five-week war that Israel and the United States initiated against Iran on Feb. 28, at least two dozen Israelis were killed when Iran fired hundreds of missiles at the country in near-daily barrages. Active hostilities involving Israel ended when U.S. President Donald Trump initiated a ceasefire on April 8. He and Iran have not yet agreed to terms that would permanently end the war.
Trump said he was “not happy about” Israel’s strike in Beirut and signaled that he did not see Iranian barrage as an impediment to a future deal.
“It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” he told Fox News. “We’re very close. I would say an agreement would be signed on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of this coming week. And now this takes place.”
Addressing Iran directly, Trump said, “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond publicly to the Iranian attack on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump urges Iran to make a deal after Iran fires missiles at Israel for first time in 2 months appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner, as Jewish Democrats withhold support
Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner on Tuesday to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most important Senate races this year. But a series of recent domestic violence allegations and controversies surrounding Platner could become a major political problem for the party in its effort to regain control of the Senate.
The controversy extends beyond questions about electability. Jewish Democratic organizations have withheld support from Platner over his past Nazi-linked tattoo, criticism of Israel and rhetoric that some Jewish leaders view as troubling, even as top national Democrats rally behind his candidacy.
The primary was effectively decided weeks ago when former Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign after lagging in polls and struggling to raise money. Mills never formally withdrew from the ballot, leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will use Tuesday’s primary as a protest vote against Platner
The dilemma facing Democrats is unusually stark.
Maine, considered a purple state, is widely viewed as one of the party’s clearest opportunities to flip a Republican-held Senate seat. Collins, 73, is running for a sixth term, though critics argue her image as a political moderate has diminished in recent years. In her last reelection campaign in 2020, Collins defeated her Democratic challenger 51-42. Sara Gideon, who is married to a Jewish lawyer, ran a competitive race and drew support from Maine’s estimated 15,000 Jewish voters and outside Jewish Democratic groups.
The 41-year-old Platner, an oyster farmer and former Marine, appeared to be the kind of insurgent candidate Democrats dream about. He led Mills by a significant margin and consistently ran ahead of Collins in public polling.
But the past two weeks have left Democrats struggling with his candidacy.
Reports about explicit messages sent to women while married and allegations from former partners describing threatening and troubling behavior, along with scrutiny of past online posts, put the Platner campaign on defense.
For Jewish voters, Platner’s rise and the party’s embrace of him were already hard to swallow. Platner faced backlash last year after acknowledging that a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest resembled a Nazi symbol. He has since covered it up. In past posts on Reddit, Platner defended a man with a Nazi SS lightning bolt tattoo who impersonated a federal officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas in 2020.
A New York Times story last week cited an ex-girlfriend who said Platner knew for years that the tattoo on his chest was associated with Nazi imagery, an allegation he has forcefully denied.
Also troubling to Jewish Democrats, Platner has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and suggested the U.S. should cut off all aid to Israel. Last week, Platner accused Collins of taking money from AIPAC and being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”
Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an April interview that her group was not prepared to back Platner. JDCA had endorsed Mills in the primary before she suspended her campaign. On Sunday, Soifer said the group continues to stand by its endorsement of Mills, signaling that voters who remain uneasy about Platner still have the option of casting a vote for the former governor, whose name remains on the ballot.
“If he were running in Jersey, he’d either be thrown off the ballot or buried under the Meadowlands,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat from New Jersey, said on Friday.
Top Democratic strategists told Politico that Platner could face pressure to drop out of the race if Mills receives a significant amount of votes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S., has so far continued to show support for Platner. After meeting with Platner last week in Washington, D.C., Schumer told reporters that defeating Collins remains a top priority for Democrats seeking to reclaim power in the Senate.
The likely result is a question Democrats increasingly cannot avoid: If Platner wins Tuesday as expected, how much longer can national Democrats continue treating him as their standard-bearer and excuse conduct they would condemn in a Republican candidate? Jewish Democratic organizations, having already distanced themselves from Platner, will also have to decide how to respond if he becomes the party’s nominee, as other nominees are also coming under scrutiny for past remarks and associations with antisemitic influencers.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in an interview Sunday on Fox News, was asked whether he’s concerned that his party “has an antisemitism problem,” citing Platner’s rhetoric and that of other Democratic candidates.
Platner is “going to have to speak for himself, and that’s what any candidate, particularly in a high-profile race, is going to be called upon to do,” Jeffries said. He added that the effort to crush antisemitism is an “American issue” and shouldn’t be a partisan issue. “It can’t be a red or blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
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Some Jewish Republicans say Tucker Carlson is no longer a threat. Others worry he’ll run for president.
(JTA) — At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gala last November, much of the discussion centered around right-wing antisemitism. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned that there was “an existential crisis in our party” as figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes built their online audiences, while right-wing firebrand Rep. Randy Fine of Florida slammed Carlson as an antisemite.
At the RJC’s “America 250” gala six months later, the mood was cheerier, and the cautionary words gave way to declarations that emerging antisemitism on the right was being dealt with properly.
Fine reminded the audience at the RJC event held in Manhattan on Sunday that in his speech to the RJC in November, he’d called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Now, he said, “I don’t know that that’s true anymore.”
Fine and other Republicans at the RJC gala told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that enough Republicans had spoken out against Carlson – most significantly, President Donald Trump – and his ilk to damage their image and dampen the threat they might pose. They also pointed to major GOP critics of Israel who had lost their seats in recent months.
But others have warned that it’s a mistake to celebrate too soon, or think Carlson’s star has really faded, especially amid speculation that he might launch a presidential run as a Republican.
Fine told JTA in a text that he now believes the country’s “most dangerous antisemite” is Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s anti-Zionist mayor. In contrast, he said, Carlson’s impact had only plummeted in the past half-year.
“I think that brand has been destroyed [in] the last six months,” he wrote, attributing the change to politicians like himself calling Carlson out, as well as “the damage he has done to himself.”
A number of speakers at the RJC who lauded Republicans’ response to antisemitism in the party also pointed to the recent primary defeat of outspoken Israel critic Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Brooks said to loud applause that the group spent $5 million in that race, and called the effort “a fight worth having and a victory worth celebrating.”
Speakers also recounted the resignation from Congress of Marjorie Taylor Greene in January, maintaining that the Republican Party is squashing its anti-Israel voices, while the Democratic Party is electing them.
“Being anti-Israel in today’s Republican Party is not — unlike the Democratic Party — a path to success,” said RJC CEO Matt Brooks during his remarks. Brooks later told JTA that Carlson, Owens and Fuentes’ “influence and credibility is less than it’s ever been” and that “they don’t represent” the mainstream of the MAGA movement.
But the Anti-Defamation League warned that it would be a mistake not to see the audience and impact of Carlson in particular as worthy of continued concern.
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, said in an interview with JTA that his organization’s biggest worry regarding Carlson is “not merely his relationship with any conservative or elected officials” but also the “normalization” of his views.
Segal pointed to the accusation that an Israeli attack on an American spy ship during the 1967 Six-Day War was intentional — used by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Jewish state cannot be trusted — despite U.S. investigations determining that it was a mistake.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty Conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” he said.
Segal added that it would be “absurd” to count out anyone as a potential presidential contender, while several political observers have speculated that Carlson may be weighing a run.
New York University professor Scott Galloway recently said on his New York Magazine podcast “Pivot” that the former Fox News host could be a serious contender. There is an “enormous lane,” he assessed, for a candidate who, like Carlson, has “very conservative values, an enormous media platform, an enormous army of acolytes that he could weaponize right away, and is anti-Trump and anti-the war on Iran.”
Some of Carlson’s allies are gunning for a campaign. Speaking Thursday on Russian state television during a trip to St. Petersburg, Owens said she personally did not plan to run for office but said Carlson would be a great candidate for president.
“I would love for him to run,” she said, adding, “I would gratefully get behind someone like Tucker Carlson.”
Back in March, TV host Piers Morgan asked Carlson whether he has White House ambitions. Carlson said that politics is “not what I do,” adding, “The whole idea of, ‘I’ve been a successful cable news host, I should be president!’ — that whole way of thinking is disgusting to me.”
Asked about the possibility of Carlson running for president, Brooks told JTA in a statement that the RJC would continue to push back against Carlson and similar anti-Israel figures.
“There is only one party where American Jews can be proudly pro-Israel, and it is the Republican Party — and those who imperil that will have to come through the RJC first,” Brooks said.
Others who attended Sunday’s RJC gathering felt the possibility of a Carlson candidacy was overblown. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a prominent Jewish conservative activist who sued Harvard University over alleged antisemitism, dismissed concerns that Carlson could be a serious presidential candidate.
In an interview, he pointed out that Carlson’s support of Massie and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Casey Putsch did not yield electoral success. Putsch, who has a history of dog whistling to neo-Nazis, received 17.5% of the vote in Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Unlike Massie, Carlson did not issue an endorsement for Putsch, but he did host Putsch on his podcast last year.
“His endorsements mean absolutely nothing, and outside of the ‘Podcastistan’ universe, his words carry very little weight,” Kestenbaum said of Carlson.
Brooks said in an interview with JTA that he feels “very pleased” with how the party has responded to voices like Carlson’s. President Donald Trump has publicly cast Carlson aside since his former ally sharpened his objections to the administration’s war in Iran.
“It’s been marginalized,” Brooks said of the party’s anti-Israel wing. “They tried to hijack the term MAGA. Groups like ours, but equally important, the president, has made it clear they are not MAGA.”
Asked about Vice President JD Vance, who has not offered a condemnation of Carlson to some Jewish Republicans’ chagrin, Brooks said, “When you have the president speaking, that’s the voice that matters right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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