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This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel
(New York Jewish Week) — In May of 1937, 7-year-old Inge Eisinger lived in a luxurious Vienna apartment with a pantry stocked with favorite foods and a staff to keep her company. Though she had a strained relationship with her mother and an absent father, Inge, who was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother Anna, was living a charmed life.
This is the scene that opens “Running for Shelter,” a young adult novel about the Holocaust written by a young adult herself: 16-year-old Suzette Sheft, who is a junior at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. In the novel, Sheft retells her grandmother’s story of surviving the Holocaust.
Published by Amsterdam Publishers, which specializes in Holocaust memoirs, the book is a delicate and powerful reminder of the importance of recording one’s family history. It’s a lesson Sheft learned too early in life: Her father died of pancreatic cancer when Sheft was just 13 and she soon realized she was forgetting all the stories he told her about his childhood.
“I fantasized about rewinding time, so I could go back and record my favorite stories about his childhood,” Sheft writes in an author’s note. “I wished I had taken the time to write these stories down when I had the chance, because his death allowed me to understand the vitality of preserving the stories of our loved ones before it is too late.”
In memory of her father, Sheft recorded the story of his mother, her grandmother Monique Sheft, who was once the Viennese school girl Inge Eisinger.
In pre-war Austria, Eisinger had been living a completely assimilated life — so much so that her parents never even told her that she was Jewish. Following the Nazi takeover of Austria, her mother managed to whisk the two of them away to Switzerland, then Paris, but soon abandoned her. After a twisting and tragic story, Eisinger eventually reunited with her grandmother and moved to a village in Central France to wait out the war, changing her name to the more French “Monique.”
Sheft’s novel ends in 1946, when the two are on the boat to New York after the war and Eisinger’s grandmother reveals to her that she and her family are actually Jewish.
In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Sheft, who lives in Manhattan with her mom, her twin brother and two dogs, is very committed to her Jewish identity. “Although my grandmother never really practiced Judaism, my dad was very involved in the Jewish world,” she said. “He was very passionate about Jewish causes and just Judaism, in general. So I felt very connected to the Jewish world because of him.”
The New York Jewish Week talked with Sheft about what the book means to her, why its subject matter is important and what she learned in the process of putting it together.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: What was the process of writing the book; how did the idea begin and how did you collect your grandmother’s story?
Suzette Sheft: I had heard a lot of my grandmother’s stories from my dad. I always had an interest in the Holocaust — I would go to Holocaust museums in every city I visited, and I almost exclusively read books about World War II and the Holocaust growing up. So I kind of knew in the back of my head that I wanted to do something like this, but [my father’s death] sparked and ignited the necessity of doing it as soon as possible.
As for the process, a few summers ago I spent a week with my grandmother, interviewing her every day about her escape from Austria to France. At first she shared physical elements of her life, like her apartment and her family dynamics and her school life, but then she began to talk to me about the time leading up to the war — the years before the Germans invaded Austria. As she spoke, I recorded everything she said in bullet point form and I would periodically stop and ask for more detail. The next day, at the beginning of the conversation, I would recap what we had talked about, and then allow her to elaborate or clarify the story.
Later, I wanted to widen my perspective and uncover other stories and details that she may have forgotten, so I watched an interview she did with the USC Shoah Foundation. This was really helpful because there were some details that she had forgotten or that she had left out.
Even though the book is about your grandmother’s life, you wrote it as fiction. How much of the story came from your grandmother’s details, and how much did you have to research or create on your own?
Every event that happens is true, and everything actually happened to her, but there are some small details that I embellished. For me, it was really helpful because, while I love creativity and writing, I sometimes struggle to pick an idea. So the fact that she had all these little stories, and I could expand from those, was something I loved while writing this. I had to use fiction when describing the atmosphere of certain places and also to write the dialogue because I can’t know exactly what they said or how they said it.
Do you have a favorite story your grandma told you that you made sure to get in the book?
Inge goes to a boarding school [in France] with her host family and there the children play a game where they pick someone to be the “torturer,” who is usually whoever they think the ugliest person is. My grandma had red hair and green eyes, and I guess she wasn’t the traditional standard of beauty. They picked her to be the torturer and she would have to pull people’s hair and scratch them. There would also be a queen, who was usually the prettiest girl with blond hair and blue eyes, and she would be protected. I thought it was interesting because to me it was the children’s way of understanding what was going on in the world around them. It’s a bit complicated, but when she told me this story I was completely shocked. It was really fascinating.
For people your age, why do you think Holocaust education is still relevant and important?
Some people my age don’t know anything about the Holocaust. I recently came across a statistic that talked about how little Gen Z knew about the Holocaust. There’s also been a spike in antisemitism and a decrease in awareness of history. For example, with Kanye West, who has a lot of followers, saying antisemitic remarks, a lot of people are going to just go along with what he says. There’s also just been a lot of hate crimes towards Jewish people, especially during COVID.
Lastly, the number of living Holocaust survivors is diminishing by the day. Gen Z is the last generation probably that is ever going to have the ability and the opportunity to speak with Holocaust survivors before they’re all gone. It’s important that we share this book now and then we educate people now before it’s too late.
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The post This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Academic BDS Gains Ground in Europe, Poses Strategic Threat to Israel, New Report Warns
Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Advocates of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel have intensified efforts to sever ties between the European Union and Israeli academic institutions, according to a new bombshell report published on Thursday.
Israel’s Association of University Heads (VERA) Task Force to Combat Academic Boycotts said it has documented a surge in “academic BDS” activity across Europe and other Western countries, including the United States, since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
VERA warned that mounting political pressure against Israel’s participation in the European Union’s Horizon Europe research initiative could increasingly influence the continent’s approach to academic cooperation with the Jewish state. The report went so far as to call Brussels’ stance on BDS “closer to establishing itself as an official foreign policy.”
Founded in 2021 as a seven-year EU project, Horizon Europe funds research related to sustainability, climate change, medicine, and emerging technologies. Israel’s participation in the multi-billion-euro initiative has long reflected both the country’s scientific reputation and its integration into major European research networks.
In recent years, however, several member states and activist groups have challenged Israel’s participation in the program, while the share of Horizon funding awarded to Israeli researchers has declined sharply.
According to VERA’s report, which covered the period from October 2025 to April 2026, there has been a 150 percent increase in efforts to exclude Israel from Horizon Europe.
In 2022, Israeli researchers received 5.4 percent of all Horizon grants. By 2025, that figure had fallen
to 2.5 percent — a decline of more than 50 percent.
“Israel’s participation in the ‘Horizon Europe’ association agreements is a strategic objective and
national goal of the State of Israel. For adversaries in this arena, this represents a major vulnerability
for Israel,” the report said.
It seems for this reason anti-Israel activists have specifically targeted the program. Indeed, VERA found that nearly 25 percent of all recent boycott reports were associated with Horizon Europe.
“Participation in the Horizon program provides not only an irreplaceable boost of valuable funding, but also enables Israeli researchers to establish research partnerships, maintain interactions with researchers from European countries and from countries outside Europe, and influence from within the scientific-academic agenda of Europe,” the report explained.
“This is the most prestigious and largest scientific club in the world,” VERA added. “Israel has earned a place within it, and every effort must be made to remain there in order to preserve scientific leadership and maintain our status as the ‘Start-Up Nation.’”
However, the BDS movement and other efforts to weaken Israel’s international standing create “a significant threat to Israel’s continued participation in the existing Horizon agreements,” VERA warned, “and a serious danger to its inclusion in the next Horizon agreements that will be signed during 2027 and implemented in 2028 for the years ahead.”
The report described the BDS movement’s string of victories as posing a “clear and immediate danger” to Israeli scientific and academic interests, while calling for a broader effort to improve public perceptions of Israel and its military operations in the Middle East.
VERA previously documented about 500 incidents of academic boycotts were reported just during the half-year through February 2025, a 66 percent increase compared to the six months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Since then, the onslaught has continued, although at a slower rate.
“There has been a relatively moderate increase in the number of reports concerning new academic
boycotts of all types, whether at the level of the individual researcher, the academic institution, or
professional associations. This is most likely the result of the fact that anyone who wished to boycott
Israeli researchers and institutions has already acted in this direction over the past two years, and
therefore, there are now fewer new participants in such boycotts,” VERA found.
“At the same time, there has been no decline in the scope or quantity of the existing boycotts. The
meaning is that the broad academic boycott trend continues, and there is clearly a pattern of
gradual strengthening,” the report added.
The initiatives included efforts to exclude Israeli academics from conferences, research collaborations, publications, and other forms of scholarly exchange.
In May 2024, for example, Ghent University in Belgium banned partnerships with Israeli universities altogether.
The exact number of academic boycotts remains unclear. According to the Israeli news outlet Ynet, which first reported on VERA’s latest findings, 1,120 boycott complaints were recorded during the period examined in the report. However, Daniel Chamovitz — president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a member of VERA — wrote that nearly 1,000 academic boycotts against Israeli universities have been recorded since the Oct. 7 attack, and a quarter of them came last summer.
“Academic boycotts do not pressure governments,” he posted on LinkedIn. “They isolate scientists. They sever the collaborations that science depends on, and they send a message to a generation of young researchers that their work is unwelcome. Not because of its quality, but because of their passport. That is not a political position. It is a betrayal of what science is for.”
The VERA report argued that the rise in academic boycott campaigns reflected a broader surge in antisemitism and anti-Zionist activism across Europe following the Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, an overwhelming majority of 2,030 EU teachers surveyed in a study released in January said antisemitic incidents occur daily in classrooms and workplaces. Seventy-eight percent “encountered at least one antisemitic incident between students,” and 27 percent “witnessed nine or more such incidents.” Another 61 percent saw students promoting Holocaust denialism, while others reported students drawing or wearing Nazi symbols. Forty-two percent said they had witnessed “other teachers being antisemitic.”
Amid the academic boycott campaign, Europe has seen a relentless wave of antisemitic incidents on campuses across the continent.
At the University of Strasbourg, a group of Jewish students was assaulted by an individual shouting “Zionist fascists,” while the University of Vienna hosted an “Intifada Camp,” a pro-Hamas encampment.
At the Free University of Brussels campus in Solbosch, a pro-Hamas group illegally occupied an administrative building and renamed it after a terrorist. Elsewhere, anti-Zionist demonstrators damaged property to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Euros, desecrated Jewish religious symbols, graffitied Jewish students’ dormitories with swastikas, and assaulted Jewish student leaders.
Antisemitic violence in the streets of Europe’s major cities is perpetrated regularly, too. In July 2025, a group wielding knives attacked Jews walking home from an event on the Greek island of Rhodes. In Davos, Switzerland, a man spat on, attacked, and verbally abused a Jewish couple — behavior he reportedly repeated multiple times against other Jewish individuals.
Jewish communities across the West continue to face similar threats and require stronger governmental protections for their civil and human rights, the Special Envoys and Coordinators Combatting Antisemitism (SECCA) group proclaimed on Tuesday after convening in Geneva.
“Antisemitism is a threat to Jews — and that alone would be reason enough to fight it,” the group said.
“But it also erodes the very foundations of democratic societies: human rights, dignity, equality, and the rule of law. A society in which Jews cannot live openly and safely is one in which fundamental rights are under threat for everyone.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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The profound internal contradiction that could spell doom for Hillel
Shortly after I graduated from Swarthmore College, it became the first campus to formally break with Hillel International. The campus Jewish organization began, instead, to call themselves an “Open Hillel,” then rebranded entirely after the parent organization threatened legal action over a civil rights panel it deemed too critical of Israel.
Swarthmore Jewish students lost the name, but they kept their integrity. Jewish students at Middlebury just faced the same question. They answered it the same way. And they were right to do so.
What happened in Vermont is not just a local story about one campus organization. It is a story about a deep contradiction at the heart of Hillel International — one that the organization may no longer be able to sustain.
Hillel presents itself, publicly and forcefully, as the Jewish student organization at colleges and universities across the United States. It’s the home of Jewish campus life, where Jewish students celebrate the High Holidays, eat kosher meals, light Hanukkah candles and gather for Shabbat. It describes itself as the world’s largest Jewish campus organization, serving nearly 200,000 students at more than 850 colleges and universities. It is, at many of those colleges, the only such institution that exists.
Precisely because of that monopoly position, Hillel and its allies have argued — with some justification — that protests targeting Hillel are a form of antisemitism. To make Jewish students feel unwelcome at the one place on campus where they can observe their religious obligations, they argue, is to attack Jewish students as Jews, not merely to criticize a political organization.
That argument has real force. Jewish students deserve to celebrate their holidays without running a political gauntlet. No one should have to defend their views on the West Bank occupation before they can get a bowl of matzo ball soup.
But the problem is that Hillel is also an explicitly political organization. And as such, it should be fair game for protesters.
Hillel International has a mandatory political line that all affiliated chapters must enforce: Its guidelines declare that Hillel is “steadfastly committed to the support of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” and campus chapters are prohibited from partnering with or hosting any group or individual that supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, “delegitimizes” Israel by Hillel’s own definition, or questions Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
When the Middlebury Jewish students met with Hillel International representatives, they were told that board members must universally adopt the organization’s political values about Israel. Universally. There is no asterisk, no opt-out, no room for the challenging pluralism of Jewish life in 2026.
This, from an organization that recently used imagery showing the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as part of Israel, without distinguishing the West Bank and Gaza.
This is not a neutral cultural position. It is a political one, and a fairly aggressive one at that. Hillel sends students on trips to Israel through Birthright and similar programs and received $22 million from a $66 million Israeli government initiative called Mosaic International to promote pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. These are choices a political organization makes.
So which is it? Is Hillel a cultural and religious organization that provides communal Jewish life for all students, in which case it has no business enforcing political litmus tests? Or is it a politically committed advocacy organization with a defined ideological position — in which case it cannot claim special immunity from protest on the grounds that criticizing it means attacking Jewish students’ ability to celebrate Passover?
The answer, uncomfortable as it is, is that Hillel is both. For students like those at Middlebury, the tension between those two identities has become impossible to manage. I suspect more will soon follow their lead.
This contradiction matters now more than ever, because the American Jewish community is changing.
A major recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America found that 14% of Jews ages 18 to 34 identify as anti-Zionist. Even among younger Jews who support Israel’s existence, the survey found, less than half agreed that Israel makes them feel proud to be Jewish. The Jewish Electorate Institute’s most recent survey found that only about a third of American Jews self-identify as Zionist. As the government of Israel moves further and further to the right, the divide between American Jews and the state of Israel is only likely to grow.
Under current Hillel rules, the meaningful and growing number of Jewish students who identify as non-Zionist or anti-Zionist are effectively excluded. If they choose to participate, they are required to keep their politics at the door — but the organization doesn’t require the same of itself.
The Middlebury case illustrates the absurdity with unusual clarity.
The students’ discomfort with Hillel International began, they explained, after a November 2023 challah sale raised $656 for World Central Kitchen, an organization that provides food relief in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. That act of simple, universalist charity created friction with the chapter’s parent body. Co-president Caroline Jaffe put the stakes plainly: “How are we ever going to get to peace in Israel and Palestine if we can’t even have a Middlebury Jewish group and a Middlebury SJP” — Students for Justice in Palestine — “talk to each other in Vermont, pretty much as far removed as you could be?”
That should not be a radical question.
The solution is not to try to reform Hillel International from within; that project has been tried repeatedly, by the Open Hillel movement and others, and the structural incentives against change are too powerful. The solution is instead what the Middlebury students are pointing toward: decentralization.
Political pluralism within Jewish campus life is not a threat to Jewish students. It is a reflection of the actual diversity of Jewish opinion, which surveys consistently show to be far wider than Hillel International’s guidelines allow. An American Jewish community that can only cohere by suppressing internal dissent is far more fragile than one that has learned to argue openly and remain in relationship. The students at Middlebury, by renaming themselves the Jewish Association of Middlebury and insisting on a more pluralistic identity, are not abandoning Jewish community. They are building a community that is more honest about what it is and who it is for.
I remember the moment at Swarthmore when Jewish students stopped asking permission and started asking a different question: not “what will Hillel International allow?” but “what do our Jewish students actually need?” The answer turned out to be more interesting, more contested, and, in its way, more Jewish than anything the guidelines had room for.
The post The profound internal contradiction that could spell doom for Hillel appeared first on The Forward.
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US May Ask Israel to Put Palestinian Tax Money Toward Trump’s Gaza Plan, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump takes part in a charter announcement for his Board of Peace initiative aimed at resolving global conflicts, alongside the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF), in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The US is considering asking Israel to give some tax money it is withholding from the Palestinian Authority to Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to fund the US president’s post-war plan for Gaza, five sources familiar with the matter said.
The Trump administration has not yet decided whether to make a formal request to Israel, said three of the sources, officials with knowledge of US deliberations with Israel.
The two other sources, Palestinians with knowledge of the deliberations, said that under the proposal a portion of the tax money would go to a US-backed transitional government for Gaza and other funds to the PA if it makes reforms.
The PA puts the amount of tax being withheld at $5 billion.
The prospect of the Palestinians’ own tax money being repurposed toward Trump’s Gaza rebuilding plan, over which their government has had no input, could further sideline the Western-backed PA even as Israel‘s withholding of the funds begets a financial crisis in the West Bank.
The PA exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank but has not had any sway over Gaza since it was exiled from the territory after a brief civil war with terrorist group Hamas in 2007.
Trump’s plan for Gaza, shattered after more than two years of war, has been held up by a refusal by Hamas to lay down their weapons.
‘MONEY HELD IN A BANK DOES NOTHING’
The Board of Peace declined to comment on whether a proposal to use Palestinian tax money was under consideration.
A Board official said it had asked all parties to leverage resources to support Trump’s rebuild plan, estimated to cost $70 billion.
“That includes the Palestinian Authority and Israel. There is no doubt that money held in a bank does nothing to further the President’s 20-Point Plan,” the official said.
That appeared to refer to the PA tax revenue that Israel has withheld from the body in a long-running dispute over payments it makes to Palestinians and their families for carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis.
Under this policy, official payments are made to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and Palestinians injured in terrorist attacks.
Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of the PA’s budget has been allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.
Israel collects taxes on imported goods on behalf of the PA and is meant to transfer the revenue under a longstanding arrangement. The PA is supposed to use the funds to pay civil servants and fund public services.
The sources did not say how much of the tax money Washington was considering asking Israel to transfer to the Board.
The US State Department, Israeli government, and PA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The US and Israel have long pressured the PA to abolish payments to Palestinian prisoners and families of those killed by Israeli forces, arguing it encourages violence.
In response to US pressure, the PA in February 2025 said it was reforming the payment system, but the US said those changes did not go far enough. As punishment, Israel has withheld taxes it collects on the PA’s behalf, an amount that Palestinian officials say has reached $5 billion – well over half of the PA’s annual budget.
That has set off a financial crisis in the West Bank, with the PA slashing salaries of thousands of civil servants.
Israel accepted a US invitation to join the Board of Peace. The PA was not invited.
Under Trump’s plan, a group of Palestinian technocrats dubbed the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza would take control of Gaza from Hamas as the terrorists lay down their weapons.
Nickolay Mladenov, Trump’s Board of Peace envoy for Gaza, said during a press conference in Jerusalem on Wednesday that reconstruction planning was in advanced stages.
“We’re doing it sector by sector. We’re costing things. We’re coordinating with donors and we’re ready to begin in earnest once the conditions allow it,” Mladenov said, without mentioning the tax issue.