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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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AIPAC attacked a Democrat for funding ICE. Now it’s backing one who voted the same way.
AIPAC’s super PAC is spending big to boost Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — over a record that includes the same ICE funding vote the group used to attack a different Democrat earlier this year.
Stevens is one of three leading candidates in the primary, running against progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed, who called the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. A new 30-second ad from AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, praises Stevens for confronting Trump’s immigration policies — citing legislation she introduced to create an independent prosecutor for ICE misconduct, and her calls for then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
The ad is part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to boost Stevens, a longtime AIPAC ally, whom the group helped elect in 2018 and reelect in 2022.
But the message is hard to square with AIPAC’s own record elsewhere. Earlier this year, the group spent more than $2 million attacking former Rep. Tom Malinowski in a New Jersey special election for voting to fund ICE as part of a bipartisan border bill. “We can’t trust Tom Malinowski to stand up to President Donald Trump,” that ad said. Stevens voted for the same funding bill. Last June, she also voted for a House resolution thanking ICE agents “for protecting the homeland.”
An AIPAC spokesperson and a UDP representative did not immediately respond to explain why the vote to fund ICE was presented as a liability in Malinowski’s race but not in Stevens’ case.
AIPAC has spent years cultivating ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, many of whom strongly support aggressive immigration enforcement.
The Israel-boosting organization’s brand has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats in recent years. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the word “monsters” to describe AIPAC at a rally for progressive candidates he backed, all of whom won their primaries.
In the Michigan race, shaping up as one of the starkest tests of the Democratic coalition and how the party navigates policy towards Israel in Congress, United Democracy Project has already spent $10.7 million backing Stevens, making the Michigan contest one of its largest Senate investments this election cycle. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign, effectively erasing its fingerprints in public data.
McMorrow has the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that supports a two-state solution. The Jewish Democratic Council of America issued a rare dual endorsement of Stevens and McMorrow.
El-Sayed, the progressive frontrunner, is increasingly trying to transform AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed has released videos accusing AIPAC of attempting to buy Democratic elections and police debate over Israel. In recent months, he has also reached out to Jewish voters while seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which protested the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza. The state is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Arno Rosenfeld and Hannah Feuer contributed to this article
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Adam Sandler officiates Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce wedding, fueling theories about singer’s Israel stance
(JTA) — A Jewish comedian who played one of cinema’s most notable Israeli characters took center stage — literally — at Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden on Friday.
Adam Sandler officiated the ceremony between Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, a spokesperson for Swift confirmed to media after the wedding.
The event included a wide range of Jewish attendees, including the Haim sisters, who recently attended a Knicks game with Swift; the writer and actor Lena Dunham; Joshua Kushner, the businessman whose brother Jared is a top Middle East advisor to President Donald Trump; and Kelce’s former teammate Mitchell Schwartz.
Sandler’s presence in particular fueled criticism from anti-Israel voices, who argued it was significant that someone who has described himself as “very pro-Israel” officiated the wedding. Sandler has discussed his friendship with Swift and Kelce publicly, saying that it developed through his daughters, who are Swift fans.
Swift has largely avoided wading into polarizing political issues, and her outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a source of confusion for many fans, who have struggled to interpret her silence on the topic at a time when many celebrities have publicly voiced support for Gaza. Her decision not to publicly criticize Israel is seen as having bolstered her popularity among Israelis. At the same time, some pro-Palestinian fans have decried her silence and protested at her concerts, while others have speculated that she is privately pro-Palestinian but has avoided speaking out for fear of alienating fans.
“For all the Swifties defending Taylor Swift regarding her silence on Palestine she had Adam Sandler … a well-known Zionist, officiate her wedding so I think we know where she stands now,” tweeted an account called Land Palestine that had nearly 2 million followers on Instagram before being suspended last year.
“They’re all Zionists, clearly, and no doubt about it,” tweeted the Oxford University student Kate Crawford, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice on X who identifies as partly Jewish.
Some pro-Israel voices joined in the speculation. “I wonder if she is publicly aligning herself with certain people for a soft launch of her views. If she were to say some pro-Israel or pro-Jewish things, I think it could go a long way amongst the younger generation,” wrote one user on Reddit’s “Jewish” forum, in a post that was deleted but yielded nearly 200 comments parsing Swift’s possible Israel attitudes. (Among the evidence offered for possible pro-Israel leanings: She and Kelce recently dined at a buzzy Israeli restaurant. But other commenters noted that Gigi Hadid, a Palestinian-American celebrity who has spread anti-Israel rhetoric, was also at the wedding.)
The chatter about the wedding and Israel swelled so much that the parody account Buzz Crave riffed off of it with a viral post proclaiming: “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have left the U.S. for Israel to start their honeymoon.”
Like Swift, Sandler is not among the celebrities to engage in activism on Israel or Gaza. In fact, Sandler — whose early hits included “The Hanukkah Song” — is not known to have visited Israel, after disclosing in a 2022 interview that he had never traveled to the country of one of his signature characters. He played Zohan Dvir, an Israeli soldier who prefers partying to war, in the 2008 comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
Sandler made the “very pro-Israel” comment in 2015 while criticizing artists who boycott Israel during an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show. He has said little publicly about Israel since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack that began the war in Gaza, when he said his “heart is shattered” and signed onto an entertainment industry letter calling on then-President Joe Biden to help return the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.
For some, the reaction to Sandler’s officiation added to a growing sense that no Jewish figure can escape being targeted by anti-Zionist activism. “You can stay silent. You can avoid politics. You can try not to get involved,” the pro-Israel influencer Ran Alkalay posted on Instagram. “For antisemites, none of that matters.”
For other Jewish voices commenting on the wedding, the guest list was immaterial. On Facebook, Rabbi David Glickman of Kansas City noted that Swift and Kelce had doled out $26 million in charitable gifts ahead of their nuptials.
“Jewish tradition says that a bride and groom have the ear of God on their wedding day — so the couple will say silent prayers for folks in need. I’m grateful your prayers weren’t only silent,” Glickman wrote. “You gave an example for all of us that personal celebration is made greater through tzedakah and generosity. Your charitable gifts are more impressive than a wedding at MSG — I hope it will get the same publicity.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In the pickles and babka of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, a glimpse of a lost New York
It was an early Sunday morning when my grandmother and I arrived at Sander’s Bakery in South Williamsburg for a “Pickles and Babka” food and culture walk through Williamsburg and the Lower East Side.
Since 2024, Sammy, our leader, has been showing off his favorite kosher food spots on @kosher.hopping, an Instagram account, which now boasts more than 17,000 followers and features a variety of mouthwatering dishes — including kosher sushi, kosher smashburgers and historic businesses like the ones we would be visiting.
It was Sammy’s last stop in Williamsburg of the season: Business owners were already closing up shop for the summer and heading upstate.
As our group gathered — city natives along with visitors from Westchester and Long Island — Sammy described South Williamsburg as a glimpse of what the Lower East Side used to be. Unlike the Lower East Side, which has experienced gentrification in recent decades, this neighborhood has retained its distinctly Jewish identity since immigrants first crossed over the Williamsburg Bridge.
When my grandmother and I entered Sander’s, opened by a Holocaust survivor in 1959, the smell of yeast and chocolate was so tantalizing that we couldn’t help but purchase a Danish and cherry turnover before the tour even began. We then tried slices of chocolate and cinnamon babkas, which were rich and nutty.
As our group walked towards Flaum’s, an appetizing store reminiscent of Russ & Daughters, but kosher — buses lined the streets, each bound for a different yeshiva. There was a grocery store at each corner, shops with beautiful silverware and strings hung up to designate the eruv. At the shop, we sampled small cheese danishes and sugar cookies with custard. The cookies were my favorite “bite” of the tour; they were sweet with great texture, and the custard provided a necessary moistness.
When we walked to the subway to head to the Lower East Side, the neighborhood took a decidedly different turn. All at once, the local businesses and Yiddish signs were gone and replaced with fast food chains. As we climbed up the steps and the train pulled into the station, we returned to the city’s usual chaos, leaving Williamsburg behind.
Upon exiting the subway, we made a pit stop at Essex Street Market. Its origins stem from Jewish open air markets that were once crowded with pushcarts. Under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, these sellers were forced to move inside. The original indoor market, located across the street from its present-day location, retained its Jewish character, but the market doesn’t currently house any kosher vendors.
As we continued on to our remaining stops, I felt aware of what was lost. Entering The Pickle Guys, located on the corner of Grand Street and Essex Street, a deliciously briny smell filled the air from the dozens of barrels at the center of the shop. We tried pickled corn and carrots and — my favorite — mango, which had a delightfully spicy aftertaste.
We could feel the presence of what was formerly “Pickle Alley”: the neighboring road that featured more than 80 vendors. Now, The Pickle Guys is the last pickle shop left in the Lower East Side. Even the pickles, made with plastic barrels, are not what they once were; Sammy told us that the New York Department of Health banned wooden barrels in the 1970s, and even now vendors swear that they don’t taste the same.
We ended our walk at Moishe’s Bakery, the last kosher bakery on the Lower East Side. Many Jews still live near the bakery; the community mikveh is in the building across the street. Until it closed this year, East Side Glatt, the neighborhood’s last kosher butcher, was located right next door to Moishe’s.
Though The Pickle Guys had been packed, Moishe’s felt intimate and at the center of a community, like the shops we visited in Williamsburg. We tried chocolate and poppy seed versions of Kokosh cake, loaves similar to babka that stem from Hungarian origins. We also picked up some of my dad’s favorite rainbow cookies to bring home with us.
After the tour, I made my way to Eldridge Street Synagogue’s “Egg Rolls, Egg Creams, and Empanadas” festival. On the way, I walked past the old Forward Building, which once bustled with whirring printing presses and Yiddish-speaking reporters. A large graffiti “JET” had been painted on the side of the building.
When I first came back to the city this year, my best friend texted me to ask whether I thought New York was changing. She felt that it had been modernizing; sometimes, she said, she looked around and couldn’t find the “old New York.” As I toured South Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, I felt as though I was looking into a bygone era, seeing remnants of what had mostly been lost. I would have given anything to return to the Lower East Side crowded with pushcarts and Yiddish music to be heard.
Still, as I listened to the singing trio of the Mamales crooning “Yidel Mitn Fiedel,” while the smell of empanadas filled the air and festivalgoers played Mah Jongg, the culture of the Lower East Side felt bustling and alive. The Lower East Side isn’t the neighborhood it had once been, but its legacy remains — in the people making babka and those who choose to share their story.
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