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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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Israel gives in to the politics of debasement
A small episode this week crystallized the broader pathology of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu more clearly than any grand speech or ideological argument ever could: the Knesset vote for state comptroller, one of the most sensitive institutional positions in Israeli public life.
In Israel, the 120 members of the Knesset elect the comptroller by secret ballot. The office audits government ministries, investigates failures of governance, oversees public integrity, and possesses enormous influence over public accountability. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Gaza war, the role carries even greater significance. The comptroller may shape future investigations into catastrophic national failures and wartime decision-making.
This week — in a move straight out of United States President Donald Trump’s playbook — Netanyahu nominated his longtime personal lawyer, Michael Rabello, for the role.
Historically, the comptroller’s office has been occupied by senior judges, jurists, or respected public servants with reputations for independence. Figures such as Miriam Ben-Porat, Eliezer Goldberg, and Micha Lindenstrauss embodied a certain ethos: they were stern institutional guardians standing somewhat above partisan warfare.
The idea of placing the prime minister’s own attorney into the country’s central oversight institution struck many Israelis as grotesquely inappropriate.
Yet the truly astonishing part came during the voting itself, in which the opposition candidate was a former justice on the Supreme Court — an institution Netanyahu’s coalition has long vilified. The first round reportedly revealed substantial defections among Netanyahu’s coalition. His preferred candidate fell short. Panic spread.
Suddenly, allegations and reports emerged that coalition lawmakers were being encouraged to photograph or film their ballots in order to prove their loyalty. There was a pause in the proceedings as the Knesset speaker, Likud’s Amir Ohana, received legal advice to not allow phones in the voting area. He restarted the vote anyway. Israeli media filled with coalition lawmakers posting images of themselves voting the right way. The images and reports were the excruciating stuff of banana republics.
I cannot recall ever seeing a similar scene in a functioning democracy. Rabello was elected.
Secret ballots exist precisely because democracies understand that free voting collapses when superiors can verify obedience. The entire purpose of ballot secrecy is to protect individuals from coercion, intimidation, retaliation and patronage systems.
Modern democracies adopted secret ballots in the nineteenth century to break the power of bosses, landlords, oligarchs, and political machines that demanded proof of loyalty.
The blatant violation of these norms by Netanyahu’s coalition helps explain why so many Israelis react to him not merely with opposition, but with exhaustion, fury, and moral revulsion.
It’s not just the corruption trials, the permanent manipulation, the serial falsehoods, the failed strategic assumptions about Hamas, the relentless cultivation of tribal resentment, the attacks on state institutions, the politics of personal loyalty and the transformation of every disagreement into an existential struggle between patriots and traitors. It’s the cumulative exhaustion of watching every institutional norm eventually be subordinated to the most vulgar politics imaginable.
The episode revealed something larger than one parliamentary scandal: the culture Netanyahu has spent years cultivating. It is a system organized increasingly around personal allegiance rather than institutional responsibility. A political environment in which independent judgment becomes suspicious, dissent becomes betrayal, and every institution gradually bends toward one man’s political ambition.
So we have here a prime minister under criminal indictment pushing his own lawyer into a top civil service oversight role.
Opposition leaders Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid plan to appeal Rabello’s election to the Supreme Court, calling the vote “tainted.” Even that might not work. Several government ministers, including the justice minister, have suggested in recent months that they no longer consider court decisions binding.
And that is what outsiders often miss about Netanyahu fatigue in Israel. The anger does not emerge from one scandal, one trial, one war, or one speech. It comes from the constant sense of humiliation. This week, inside Knesset voting booths that were meant to be hidden from view, Israelis saw the whole story compressed into a single degrading scene.
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My irrational, possibly problematic obsession with an $85 yarmulke
Growing up, we had a rule of thumb about yarmulkes: the closer yours was to your forehead, the more strictly religious you were. The frum bochurim placed theirs practically on their noses; the boys from Conservative families bobby-pinned their kippahs on the back of their heads, like climbers gripping a rockface. The cool kids, of course, stuffed theirs in their pockets.
The Jewish skullcap, in other words, was a signifier of much more than the religious precept it embodied. Over the years not only a yarmulke’s positioning but also its style, size and material have come to place its wearer somewhere on a continuum of Jewish identity. Trends in yarmulke wearing, then, may tell us a story about where Judaism is — forgive me — headed.
So what kind of Jew wears an $85 yarmulke, and what kind of Judaism demands it? These questions gnawed at me when I first learned about Rubenstein Paris, a new kippah couturier whose ads found me on Instagram. Available in a range of expensive-looking solid colors (copper, cream, sapphire) and fabrics (velvet, corduroy, even horsehair), these kippahs are here to replace your tattered souvenirs.
“Everybody’s just walking around with their kippot from — I don’t know, Mendel and Rachel’s wedding, 2019,” Jonathan Hirsch, Rubenstein’s German-Israeli founder, told me recently. “I was like, ‘It’s such a sacred item, you know? Why isn’t there any beautiful kippah, that you can really acknowledge for what it is?’”
He’s onto something. Even as an image-conscious, Shabbat-observant millennial, I had largely neglected the yarmulke; when I wanted to look sharp, I ditched it. I was not completely out on Jew-caps, to be sure — like every other frat boy who thought Mac Miller was Moses, I went through a vintage snapback phase in college. But when I’ve had to clip up, I’ve made do with whatever I had lying around — usually something suede, dark, and folded more times than an origami fortune teller.
Hirsch offered to send a freebie, but at $85, accepting it felt compromising. The loaner we agreed to instead came in a branded drawstring bag, which was accompanied by a sleek black storage box. Though I’d secretly hoped for the horsehair model, the kippah Hirsch sent was more utilitarian: a ribbed velvet, golden brown, with the rise and structural integrity of one of those dome-houses you see in Architectural Digest. Velvet piping twisted around its circumference; its cloth inner lining depicted a globe and a shofar.
I put it on.
Skullcap semiotics
The story of the kippah begins in the Talmud, when 3rd-century sage Rav Huna proclaimed that he never walked more than four cubits without his head covered to symbolize that the divine presence was always above him. After rabbinic law codified the practice in the 1500s, the kippah evolved into a marker of Jewish cultural mores.
For example, 20 years ago, most Modern Orthodox boys wore black suede kippahs, but today, as people debate whether Modern Orthodoxy is dead, suede is disappearing, replaced by black velvet, the standard among Haredi Jews, and the kippah sruga — the crocheted yarmulke associated with the Israeli Religious Zionist movement. Pluralism out, orthodoxy in.
But it’s also a fraught moment to be displaying any marker of Jewish identity. Wearing a kippah in public makes you subject to a certain type of attention these days: the glare of being Jewish at a time when the Jewish state is embroiled in enormously unpopular and destructive wars. Hirsch, who is 29 and lives in Berlin, knows this firsthand — these days he doesn’t feel safe wearing a kippah in public.
And yet I suspect that growing Jewish isolation also puts the lie to our assimilation fantasies; it makes us more likely to wear the things that attach us to each other. Indeed, there is a renaissance in Judaica today driven by new designers and younger consumers finding joy in their heritage. The name Rubenstein is a play on Hirsch’s middle name, Reuven. But he also just thought it sounded cool.
All about the Benyamins
First ironically, then with some resignation, I found that the Rubenstein was the only kippah I wanted to wear — my fancy kippah became my everyday kippah. Putting it on was a daily treat — I was humored by the upgrade. I began picturing how gloomy and shallow life would be without it. I debated the unthinkable — ponying up to keep the loaner.
I was still conflicted about the idea of the object, which felt like a metaphor for the sticker-shock that accompanies Jewish life, especially Orthodox life, in the U.S. today. There’s the skyrocketing cost of real estate in Jewish neighborhoods, the eyewatering day school tuition, even the price of kosher meat and grape juice. Was it an $85 kippah, or a yeshiva-league Sorting Hat?
I put the questions to Hirsch. There are very few ritual objects, he pointed out, from the kiddush cup to candlesticks to one’s tallit, that we pride ourselves on buying cheap. Why should kippot be the exception? “You’re giving your humility a bigger meaning,” he said, “by the fact that you’re wearing this on your head.”
It was true — I felt more humble than ever before, and expected others to acknowledge my commitment and my sophistication. I can see you are a man of taste, they would say, presumably lowering a monocle. (I would nod, then dip my double-dark chocolate Milano cookie into a steaming teacup.)
It was true my designer yarmulke was not the conversation starter I’d anticipated. Only one person complimented me on it unprompted — that singular infallible judge of quality, my mother. Everyone else, I’m certain, was stealing covetous glances. But they didn’t need to praise, ask about, or even notice my beloved yarmulke, which I’m sure I’ll return soon. The premium fabrics, the shofar in the lining and the devotion it all symbolized were between me and Hashem.
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How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews
The prosecution of an Iraqi national in connection with thwarted alleged terror plots in the U.S. and Europe has put the behind-the-scenes role of Iran in the spotlight — part of what security experts say is a growing and hard-to-trace threat.
Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi national accused of ties to an Iran-backed militia, pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court this week to charges linking him to a series of attacks and alleged terror plots targeting American interests and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States.
Prosecutors allege Al-Saadi was connected to attacks, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in London’s heavily Jewish Golders Green neighborhood and an arson attack on a synagogue in North Macedonia. They also accuse him of attempting to recruit individuals online to firebomb synagogues in New York, Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona.
He also reportedly planned to attack Ivanka Trump, who is both the president’s daughter and an Orthodox Jew — making her a “double target,” in the words of Oren Segal, vice president at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.
Iranian attacks on Jewish and Israeli institutions abroad are not new. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran and its proxies have targeted diplomats, Jews, Israelis, political dissidents and others perceived as aligned with the West.
Matthew Levitt, director of the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, maintains a detailed database of such attacks. He told the Forward that since the current war began, such plots have significantly increased.
The Al-Saadi case is a prime example of what Levitt calls Iran’s “gig economy” model of terrorism. Rather than dispatching trained operatives directly from Iran, Iranian-linked actors and proxy groups are recruiting individuals online who live in the country they wish to target. Some are not even aware they are attacking on behalf of Iran or its proxies.
In court filings, prosecutors allege that Al-Saadi, who prosecutors link to the terror organization Kata’ib Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, sent maps and photographs of a prominent Manhattan synagogue and other Jewish institutions to an undercover agent he was attempting to recruit to firebomb them. He allegedly offered the agent $10,000 in cryptocurrency in exchange for carrying out the plot, and discussed whether the recruit should “set the place on fire” or use an improvised explosive device.
Iranian-linked operatives, who are either part of Iran’s security apparatus or within its network of terror proxies, reach out to potential recruits on encrypted platforms like Telegram.
According to Levitt, the operatives are ordered by “very senior” elements of the Iranian regime to find recruits. “It stretches the limits of credulity to think that plots like this in the United States could be done without very senior top-down instruction,” Levitt said. “These are not rogue actors.”
Those they manage to recruit online are often financially motivated, agreeing to carry out attacks like vandalism, surveillance, or assaults in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. Others appear driven by ideology or online radicalization. Over the years, Iran’s recruits have included teenagers as young as 13.
“These are inexpensive plots,” said Levitt. “It requires just a few people to sit at a computer and try to recruit people and direct people.”
For Iran, this method is particularly strategic amid wartime. “Iran can’t go toe to toe with the U.S. or Israeli militaries, but it can engage in these asymmetric plots to show that they can still reach out and touch us to increase the cost of continuing to prosecute the war and to make people feel afraid,” said Levitt.
By relying on online recruits and loosely connected operatives, Levitt says Iranian-linked actors can obscure their involvement and maintain reasonable deniability. The calculation, he explained, is that authorities will be satisfied with arresting and prosecuting the individual carrying out the attack, rather than blaming Iran. This allows Iran to limit the risk of direct military escalation with the United States while continuing to conduct operations against it.
The Online Battlefield
According to Segal, Iranian influence increasingly permeates online.
“The threat to Jewish communities right now is multidimensional — Iranian-linked plots, cyberattacks, online propaganda,” he said. “They’re all converging at once, making it one of the more complex threat environments for the Jewish community in a long time.”
For years, Iranian state media outlets such as Press TV have targeted Western audiences with antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial, claims that Zionists control world events and other extremist narratives. A 2023 report by the ADL and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Press TV receives roughly one million monthly visits, with more than half of its traffic coming from Western countries.
Segal said Iranian-linked propaganda networks also increasingly operate in online spaces that overlap with broader activist communities. One such example is Resistance News Network, a Telegram channel with over 150,000 subscribers frequented by members of pro-Palestinian activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. The channel is filled with official Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi propaganda that is then reshared by American activists on mainstream social media accounts.
“What that does is enable the exchange of ideas, of propaganda, and of narrative that we then see show up at actual events on the ground,” he said.
Segal argues that exposure to such propaganda can make recruitment efforts easier.
“Our concerns are not only from somebody who may have been placed here or somewhere in Europe,” said Segal, “but from individuals who are animated by the propaganda they ingest every single day.”
Levitt agreed, stating that rising antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment since the outbreak of the Gaza war has created a larger pool of individuals who may view attacks on Jewish or Zionist targets as justified.
“A lot of people are going to be much more willing to do something … especially if it’s not actually killing someone, but fire bombing something and/or targeting property that has symbolic value,” he said.
But the threat is not limited to physical violence.
Since the war began, Segal said Iranian-linked cyberattacks have “gone into overdrive.”
He says Jewish organizations and media outlets have faced hacking attempts on their websites, while Jewish individuals have had their identities stolen, with personal information being exposed online in mass doxxing campaigns.
Many such attacks are conducted by Iranian hacking collectives. One of the most notorious among them is Iranian hacker group Handala Hackers, which has conducted several attacks against Jews, Israelis and Americans. The FBI reported that in March, the group claimed to have stolen 851 gigabytes of confidential data from Sanzer Hasidic Jewish community members, which the hackers described as “documents of financial cooperation, witchcraft ceremonies, and secret correspondences with Netanyahu …” They added, “We warn the leaders and members of the Sanzer Hasidic community: No place is safe for you. Betrayal of the oppressed leads to nothing but disgrace and shame. Expect more documents to be revealed.”
Despite the growing number of plots, experts say the relative lack of successful attacks inside the United States reflects the effectiveness of American counterterrorism efforts.
Still, Jewish communities across the United States are investing heavily in security upgrades. Asher Lopatin, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, said synagogues in Michigan have increased security following a March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield by a Hezbollah-linked man. Communities are installing bollards, expanding surveillance systems, and hiring additional guards.
“People are definitely doubling up on security,” Lopatin said. “Everyone is traumatized.”
Levitt says that even after the war concludes, he does not expect the plots targeting American interests and Jews to cease.
“I do not think that when the war ends, these necessarily stop,” Levitt said. “The pace may change, but Iran has a distinct interest in exacting revenge for all the damage that was done to it.”
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