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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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The post The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘The first time my band ever encountered such hostility’
[On Aug. 2, a performance by the klezmer band Dobranotch at a large folk festival in Galicia, Spain, was cut short when pro-Palestinian members of the audience began heckling the musicians and then throwing stones and other objects at them, targeting the band over recent concert appearances they made in Israel.
Afterwards, the festival organizers released a statement, explaining that they cancelled the concert out of concern for the musicians’ safety. The organizers also condemned the fact that “an event historically rooted in peaceful cultural exchange, community gathering, and musical celebration was disrupted by violence.”]
Dobranotch has a special connection with Galicia. In the early years of the band, we visited and performed there many times and developed a deep affection for its traditional music and culture. After many years away, we were glad to be invited back to perform at Festival de Pardiñas, a large local folk festival.
A few months before the event, the organizers informed us that the festival supported Palestine and that some members of the audience might display Palestinian flags. They asked how we would feel about this, given that our music is associated with Jewish culture. We replied that we had no objection, but did not want to be pressured into making political statements from the stage. This appeared to be fully understood.
We received a warm welcome, and the festival was well organized, with several thousand people in attendance. When we stepped onto the stage, a couple of Palestinian flags were visible in the audience. During our performance, more flags were attached to the barrier in front of the stage, and an enormous Palestinian flag was unfolded. A small but very vocal group at the front of the stage began chanting and held up handwritten signs demanding that we “say something about Palestine.”
I do not usually make political statements from the stage on behalf of the band. However, as the pressure continued to grow, remaining silent no longer felt possible. I therefore decided to share my personal views. I said that we are living through a period of growing polarization and radicalization in many parts of the world, visible in very different contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and political divisions in the United States. My message was simple: We need to be kinder to one another.
But the pressure only intensified. They wanted me to speak more, and they tried to hand me a Palestinian flag to wave from the stage. I tried to explain that, in my view, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complicated — and the moment I said the word “complicated,” the crowd erupted.
I wanted to continue my statement, but I was not given the chance to do so.
A group of people shouted, insulted us and made hostile gestures. A person carrying a flag managed to get onto the stage. Objects began flying towards the stage, including stones. One of my fellow musicians was hit by a stone. At that moment, we realized that the situation had crossed a line and decided to stop the concert.
escândalo em Pardinhas, algum sionista no palco pic.twitter.com/yh6JNZDZEY
— maNu 🌰 (@nuMaGz) August 2, 2026
As we were leaving the stage, someone from the festival team, obviously shocked by the situation, suggested that I simply say “Free Palestine” so the performance could continue.
I support the right of all people, including both Israelis and Palestinians, to live in freedom, dignity and safety. But repeating political slogans under pressure would have been both meaningless and unacceptable.
The organizers subsequently announced that the concert was being stopped for safety reasons and reiterated the festival’s support for Palestine.
After the concert, we discovered evidence suggesting that the protest had been planned and coordinated in advance. We found social-media posts published before the festival accusing us of having performed in “occupied Palestine,” apparently referring to a previous concert in Tel Aviv, and calling for a boycott of our performance.
This was the first time Dobranotch had encountered such hostility, whether as a group performing Eastern European Jewish traditional music or as anti-war emigrants from Russia. It is deeply regrettable and disturbing that such a radicalized and hostile atmosphere could have developed at a traditional culture festival.
The incident shows how difficult public discussion has become when artists are expected to repeat prescribed political formulas rather than being allowed to express a thoughtful position — or simply to choose not to make political statements from the stage at all.
We look with deep sadness at the amount of violence and radicalization in the world, and we wish for peace, safety and freedom for everyone. We believe that our music can do more to bring people together than political arguments ever could. This is where we want to focus our energy.
The post ‘The first time my band ever encountered such hostility’ appeared first on The Forward.
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After settling antisemitism claims, Columbia now faces lawsuit from Palestinian students
A group of current and former Palestinian students and faculty at Columbia University filed a lawsuit this week, alleging that the university discriminated against them because of their Palestinian identity and treated them less favorably than other students engaged in political advocacy.
Filed in New York State Supreme Court, the complaint accuses the university of encouraging the mistreatment of Palestinian students by holding “unfair and biased disciplinary hearings” and creating a “hostile and unsafe environment” following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel that sparked university-wide protests and tensions on campus. The lawsuit alleges that the university “actively participated in and amplified the racially, ethnically, and politically motivated targeting of Palestinian students, staff, and faculty.”
The case is the latest in a string of legal battles born out of Columbia’s handling of campus protests. In July 2025, the Ivy League university on New York’s Upper West Side agreed to pay $21 million to settle charges by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that alleged a hostile work environment for Jewish employees as a part of its federal resolution agreement with the Trump Administration.
In February 2026, the university also settled with a group of Jewish plaintiffs that had alleged the university failed to protect them from antisemitism. As a part of that settlement, Columbia agreed to implement additional programming to address antisemitism.
The new lawsuit alleges that Columbia discriminated against Palestinian students by, among other things, retaining private investigators to surveil students involved in a March 2024 “Resistance 101” teach-in. The event featured Khaled Barakat, whom the U.S. State Department has identified as a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. Following the event, the lawsuit states that six students were suspended from the university and evicted from Columbia housing.
The suit also accuses the university of failing to treat physical assaults of Palestinian students seriously, citing alleged incidents where keffiyehs were forcibly removed from Palestinian students, and an incident where a student sprayed a foul-smelling substance at pro-Palestinian demonstrators in January 2024.
That incident was initially investigated by the New York Police Department as a possible hate crime, with some claiming that the substance was a military grade chemical weapon, but Columbia later announced that the substance was a legal, non-toxic novelty fart spray. The students involved were suspended, but eventually reached a settlement with Columbia after arguing that they had wrongfully portrayed the incident as a chemical attack rather than a “harmless expression of his free speech.”
It also challenges Columbia’s decision to call in New York police to clear protest encampments and arrest demonstrators in the spring of 2024.
Plaintiffs include lecturer and former anthropology student Hadeel Assali, who allegedly canceled her classes so that students could attend Pro-Palestinian protests and who made headlines earlier this year when she gave a talk at the City University of New York’s law school called “The Underground in Gaza.” That lecture, and her dissertation at Columbia overseen by Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, sought to examine “the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization,” apparently referring to the Hamas tunnel network.
Other plaintiffs include Bahia Munem, a former lecturer at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race; Mahdi Sabbagh, a Ph.D. student; Maryam Alwan, who graduated from Columbia in 2025 and was a student leader in the pro-Palestinian movement who was arrested during the encampment protests; and Layla Saliba, who earned a master’s degree in social work from Columbia in 2025.
In April 2025, the Columbia office of Institutional Equity investigated Saliba and Alwan for their role in writing an op-ed in the campus newspaper Columbia Spectator that called on the university to stop admitting Israeli students who had served in the Israel Defense Forces. The university later dropped its investigations into the two activists.
The lawsuit seeks monetary damages under New York City Human Rights Law, which prohibits discrimination or harassment based on race, creed, national origin, immigration status, or citizenship.
Columbia University did not immediately respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
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Francesca Hong, pro-Palestinian democratic socialist, polling far ahead in Wisconsin governor’s race
(JTA) — One week after notching a significant primary victory in a Midwestern purple state, pro-Palestinian progressives are looking to repeat their success in Wisconsin.
The Badger State’s chaotic Democratic primary for governor ends Tuesday with state Rep. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, polling comfortably in the lead. Despite the best efforts of the state’s Democratic establishment, and the concerns of Wisconsin Jewish groups, Hong appears well positioned to win the primary — leaving many in the state concerned about her electability in the general.
Hong’s record on Israel and antisemitism is of concern to Wisconsin Jews, as well as Democratic figureheads more broadly. She has appeared on livestream fundraisers with Hasan Piker, the left-wing strident Israel critic who has also rallied with Hong, as well as twice with Michael Beyer, a.k.a. “Mike from PA,” who has called Jewish identity “a constructed ethnicity, this demonic ethnicity, wholly invented.”
On one of her appearances with Beyer, Hong urged constituents to fundraise for people on the “front lines in Gaza.”
A poll of likely voters one week before the race, conducted by nonpartisan outlet State Navigate, showed Hong with a commanding lead. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said they favored Hong, twice the total who backed Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the next-closest candidate. Only 17% of the same voter sample said they identified as democratic socialists, possibly indicating that Hong — whose platform has emphasized working families, healthcare, and data centers — has found wider appeal beyond her movement.
The party’s left flank is buoyed by Abdul El-Sayed’s victory last week in the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, and hopes that a repeat success is possible in a neighboring Great Lakes state with a similarly purple voting bloc. But El-Sayed performed far short of the comfortable victory many polling outlets had predicted, squeaking a winning margin of just under 1%.
That may not be the case this time. Polling from Marquette Law School, considered the gold standard in the state, has also consistently shown Hong with a wide lead. Despite entering the race with little name recognition, Hong has benefitted from both a national progressive populist push and a crowded, musical-chairs Democratic field that burst with seven candidates at its peak.
The race has today whittled down to four candidates, with Crowley having re-entered the field after previously suspending his campaign. The flip came after Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the preferred candidate of Crowley and many other institutionalist Democrats, dropped out of the race following an accounting scandal. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the party’s 2022 U.S. Senate nominee and a once-promising figure in the state, also dropped out after failing to gain traction.
During her campaign, Hong apologized for having called the police on a vandalized Israeli flag in her district in December 2023, which at the time she had called “highly antisemitic” and urged to be investigated as a hate crime.
Explaining why she now regrets making the call, Hong recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “The image was cropped and incomplete to misrepresent anti-Zionism as antisemitism – a distinction I take seriously.”
Hong’s impact on Israel policy as governor of Wisconsin would be limited. But she has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “genocidal” and pushed the state to overturn a ban on government contracts with businesses that boycott Israel. She has also criticized Wisconsin’s current moderate Democratic governor for backing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s controversial definition of antisemitism.
Hong’s general-election success may hinge on the broader electorate’s views of the Democratic Socialists of America. This week a co-chair of the DSA drew further concern from Jewish Democrats after appearing in a viral interview on The New Yorker’s podcast. Megan Romer called the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel “largely inevitable” and said she “probably would have” joined a pro-Palestinian rally in New York the day after the attacks if she’d been able to attend.
Prior to Oct. 7, Hong’s state house campaigns had expressed some positive feelings toward Jews and Jewish causes. In January 2023 her campaign sold a Hebrew-language shirt, with proceeds going to Jewish Social Services of Madison.
“Team Hong has upped our commitment to uplifting multiculturalism,” Hong’s campaign wrote on Twitter at the time. She included praise of the symbolic significance of the number 18 in Hebrew and of the Hebrew phrase “L’chaim.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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