- News

- Opinions

- Culture

News

- As Democrats shift on Israel, Josh Shapiro stands firm: ‘I don’t waffle or waver because of polling’

- Was Charlie Kirk a martyr? Here’s why Christians are divided and Jews should care

NEWS | SEP 17, 2025, 7:05 AM EDT | UPDATED SEP 17, 2025, 12:49 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

As Democrats shift on Israel, Josh Shapiro stands firm: ‘I don’t waffle or waver because of polling’

Jacob Kornbluh

The Pennsylvania governor and potential presidential contender first visited the Jewish state at age 16

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Nov. 4, 2024. Photo by Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Like many of his mainstream Democratic colleagues, including fellow governors and potential presidential contenders, Josh Shapiro has accused Israel of overreaching in its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, called for an end to the war, and denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an obstacle to both a peace settlement and stable U.S.-Israel relations.

But Shapiro, a rising national figure who has been widely regarded as a potential first Jewish president, remains on the narrow path he has carved out for himself, despite the party’s base — particularly younger Democrats — shifting away from support for Israel.

“The roots of my faith and support of Israel were formed decades ago,” Shapiro said in a phone interview on Tuesday, following a speech on hate-fueled violence. He first visited the Jewish state at age 16 and his position is grounded in a long history with the country, he said.

“I don’t waffle or waver because of what the polling said,” he told the Forward. “I focus on doing what I think is right. And what I think is right is to have these hostages return home, have the war end, have the people of Gaza be able to live with food and shelter and health care and dignity, and to hopefully one day be in a position where a two-state solution can be a possibility. I recognize we are a long way from there. But those views have been cemented by years of having a relationship with Israel, and visiting Israel, not by the momentary blip of a political poll.”

Shapiro’s balancing act shows the challenge for Democrats with national ambitions: trying to appeal to a base that is growing more critical of Israel while still keeping the trust of Jewish voters and pro-Israel allies. His stance has yet to satisfy Democrats who want sharper opposition to Israel.

Shapiro, who was subjected to antisemitic attacks from the right during his run for governor in 2022, has come under fire from progressive Democrats for his staunch defense of Israel, his refusal to call for a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza since the conflict started in October 2023, and his highlighting expressions of antisemitism at the nationwide pro-Palestinian protests. Last year, he faced scrutiny during his vetting for vice president. His pro-Israel stance and critique of campus protests raised concerns within the Kamala Harris campaign, according to a recent book.

Earlier this year, Shapiro’s home was firebombed on Passover, hours after his family’s Seder, by an attacker who said he wanted to beat the governor with a sledgehammer over what he claimed was a lack of empathy towards Palestinians.

The Pennsylvania Democrat also faced a wave of vitriolic online comments after he criticized Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, for declining to clearly condemn the pro-Palestinian “globalize the intifada” slogan.

In the interview, Shapiro said his defense of Israel and approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been “consistent,” even when he blasted the Israeli government’s rejection of international hunger reports in Gaza, calling it “abhorrent” and “wrong.”

“I think certain audiences choose to tune in at different times, and certain people choose to ascribe different beliefs to me and about me based on their own perception,” he said. “I think it is common sense and humane to want children who are hungry to be fed. And I think it’s common sense and humane to want hostages that are being held by a terrorist group, Hamas, to be returned home. I think it’s also common sense to want the war to end.”

Shapiro refused to address waning support for Israel among Democrats or whether he is concerned about colleagues and future candidates adopting a more anti-Israel posture in response to public opinion. Recent polls show that Democratic voters are increasingly sympathetic to Palestinians. In July, a record 27 Senate Democrats, a majority of the caucus, supported a pair of resolutions introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Vermont independent and longtime critic of U.S. aid to Israel, calling for the blocking of weapons transfers to Israel.

“I can just tell you what I think,” he said.

Nevertheless, Shapiro had no hesitation in blaming Netanyahu for deepening the crisis. “I am concerned that he is placing Israel in greater danger because of his conduct,” he said.

Rosh Hashanah prayers

Shapiro is running for reelection next year. He and other Jewish Democratic governors, including JB Pritzker of Illinois and Josh Stein of North Carolina, are consistently mentioned as possible contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

Asked if he will be praying for his political success during services in the upcoming High Holidays, Shapiro said, “I never pray about work. I’ll just continue to pray for the safety and well-being of my family, of the people I represent, and for peace in America.”

Jacob Kornbluh is the Forward’s senior political reporter. Follow him on Twitter @jacobkornbluh or email [email protected].

- [email protected]

- @jacobkornbluh

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/769786/josh-shapiro-israel-gaza-pennsylvania-governor/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

NEWS | SEP 15, 2025, 2:21 PM EDT | UPDATED SEP 16, 2025, 10:55 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Was Charlie Kirk a martyr? Here’s why Christians are divided and Jews should care

Benyamin Cohen

The Trump family and Republicans are sanctifying Kirk’s death as part of a spiritual war, but for Jews his canonization is more complicated

A makeshift memorial for Charlie Kirk outside of the Turning Point USA headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, on September 14. Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

House Speaker Mike Johnson called Charlie Kirk a “happy warrior” and “a man of deep faith and conviction” at a prayer vigil that drew hundreds to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Sunday night — including dozens of members of Congress. He told the crowd that Kirk’s “movement was a ministry,” rooted in the belief that “our rights do not derive from the state or a king. They come from the King of Kings.”

Johnson insisted Kirk’s work was not political but spiritual: “He was trying to save souls,” he said, describing the young conservative who was killed Wednesday as someone who reached out even to opponents because they were “lost, spiritually.” He closed with a prayer, commending Kirk as God’s “good and faithful servant.”

Authorities have not identified a motive in the killing. The alleged gunman, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, has not been connected to any political group and is not cooperating with authorities, said Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. But that uncertainty hasn’t stopped religious and political leaders from casting Kirk’s death in theological terms.

The vigil, which drew Republicans, Trump administration officials and Kirk’s loyal followers, crystallized the narrative that has come to dominate the conservative universe in the days since his assassination: that he was more than a political activist — he was a martyr in an existential struggle between good and evil.

For Jews, this matters not because all Christians see Kirk the same way, but precisely because they don’t. His death has exposed a clash of theologies: Some evangelical leaders are casting him as a Christ-like martyr, while other pastors warn against sanctifying his politics. That debate, unfolding at the high levels of American power, raises questions for Jews about how comfortably language of religious martyrdom is being fused into the nation’s politics — and what that means for pluralism, dissent and the separation of church and state.

And Kirk’s canonization is complicated for Jews, too, because he was a champion of Israel and yet trafficked in antisemitic tropes. That tension also explains why Jewish leaders are watching closely as many of his supporters elevate him into martyrdom.

A martyrdom narrative

Kirk himself seemed to anticipate this storyline. On a podcast in June, when asked how he wanted to be remembered, he said without hesitation: “I want to be remembered for courage, for my faith. That would be the most important thing.”

After his death, his widow Erika leaned into that framing in a video posted on Friday. “Two days ago, my husband Charlie went to see the face of his savior and his God,” she said. “Now and for all eternity, he will stand at his savior’s side wearing the glorious crown of a martyr.”

Pastor Greg Laurie, a California evangelical who often shared stages with Kirk, told Fox News that Kirk’s faith was paramount: “The moment that Charlie took his last breath on earth, he took his next breath in heaven.”

The martyrdom language reached the Trump family, too: Eric Trump called the killing “a hit on Christianity; it’s a hit on religion.”

Thousands waited in line to attend a prayer vigil for Charlie Kirk at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Sept. 14. Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images

At the prayer vigil, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, compared Kirk to Martin Luther King Jr. She called protesters outside the Kennedy Center “empty” because of “their rejection of God, their desire to be God,” concluding that “they have made God their enemy.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, echoed the crucifixion of Jesus when he told the crowd, “Charlie gave his life so that the rest of us didn’t have to suffer those fates worse than death.”

Modern-day Christians ‘under attack’

Jesus came to aid the oppressed, not the powerful. For American Christians in the majority, this posture creates a paradox.

The rhetoric taps into a familiar theme: modern-day Christian persecution. Despite being part of the nation’s largest faith group, many evangelicals frame themselves as under siege, their values under attack by secular culture and hostile elites. That posture reflects a deeper theological current: In the Gospels, the faithful are meant to be meek, humble and persecuted — Jesus came to aid the oppressed, not the powerful.

For American Christians in the majority, this posture creates a paradox. If they are not suffering, are they truly faithful? The solution has often been to interpret cultural slights, political debates, or in this case, Kirk’s death, as proof that Christians are besieged. Leaders like Johnson cast Kirk’s killing as a contemporary echo of the crucifixion itself, Jesus’ death as the archetype of righteous suffering.

That sense of embattlement has fueled fights over school curricula, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights — themes Kirk himself often invoked when railing against progressives.

But some Christian theologians argue that canonizing Kirk as a martyr in a holy war strips the Gospel of its nuance. “Kirk himself — a Christian activist who opposed war in favor of a Gospel-centered peace — would have hated this kind of reaction,” Charles Camosy, a professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America, wrote in an essay.

“I have no doubt that if Charlie had survived he would have wanted to meet with the person who tried to take his life, as St. John Paul II did, and offer him forgiveness,” Camosy continued. “He would have been curious about the person’s story and would have tried to use persuasion and the power of a genuine encounter to change his mind and heart.”

Up for debate

Bill Borror, a 65-year-old pastor and podcaster in Vermont, was also uncomfortable with the way Kirk’s death was being portrayed. Watching the wall-to-wall tributes, he heard something different. “He was a martyr for a cause,” Borror said. “I would not call him a Christian martyr.”

Borror’s critique carries weight precisely because it comes from outside the evangelical bubble. He leads a mainline Protestant congregation, is a gun owner himself and is married to a Jewish woman. The couple are also members of their local synagogue — a vantage point that makes him sensitive to both Christian and Jewish debates over martyrdom.

On Sunday morning, Borror’s church was unexpectedly full as he prayed for victims of violence — not just Kirk’s family but “the families of the kids shot at a Colorado elementary school last week, the families in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan.” He believes his fellow pastors should be the ones lowering the temperature when it comes to the country’s divisiveness. “I pray that we can be vessels of mercy in a really graceless age.”

In his view, the rush to beatify Kirk says more about America’s polarization than about Christianity. “He was a 31-year-old guy who still hopefully was going to evolve in his thinking,” Borror said in an interview.

To illustrate how views can shift over time, Borror pointed to his synagogue. After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, one congregant demanded harsh action against Palestinians. Nearly two years later, that same person has become critical of the Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war and grieves the loss of innocent life in Gaza.

For Borror, the example was a reminder that people’s perspectives are rarely fixed — and that Kirk’s, too, might have evolved had he lived. That possibility, he suggested, complicates the rush to define Kirk forever as either a saint or a sinner.

The Jewish lens

For Jews, the canonization of Kirk carries particular resonance. In Israel, tributes have been swift: a street named for him in the city of Netanya, a mural painted in Ashdod, even a missile inscribed “In memory of Charlie Kirk.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him “a lion-hearted friend of Israel.” (Concurrently, some online conspiracy theorists were blaming Israel for Kirk’s death.)

Yet Kirk’s own record was complicated. He cast himself as a defender of Jews and of Israel, but also trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric about Jewish bankers and the Great Replacement Theory. Many liberal Christians, and many Jews, recoiled at those comments.

The aftermath of Kirk’s death may reveal less about him than about the country that is now at odds over his legacy. For some, he is proof of a righteous war between Christianity and its enemies; for others, a reminder of how theology can be used to sanctify the powerful.

And for Jews, the stakes are especially high. The more American leaders normalize Christian martyrdom in public life, critics worry, the narrower the space can become for dissent — whether from liberal Jews who criticized Kirk, or from anyone who resists a politics cast in biblical terms. In a nation founded on the ideals of the separation of church and state, Kirk’s canonization may be seen by some as a warning that martyrdom is rarely simple — and almost always a reflection of the values of the day.

Benyamin Cohen is a senior writer at the Forward and host of our morning briefing, Forwarding the News. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect.

- [email protected]

- @benyamincohen

- benyamin_cohen

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/news/769333/charlie-kirk-christian-martyr-debate/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

Opinions

- Netanyahu’s pitch for Israel as ‘super-Sparta’ is a dystopian death wish

- Hollywood’s boycott of Israeli filmmakers is an act of spectacular self-sabotage

OPINION | SEP 16, 2025, 2:41 PM EDT | UPDATED SEP 16, 2025, 4:16 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Netanyahu’s pitch for Israel as ‘super-Sparta’ is a dystopian death wish

Dan Perry

The prime minister’s dark new vision would drive the country into ruin

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to members of a bipartisan delegation of American legislators at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem on Sept. 15. Photo by Debbie Hill / POOL / AFP / Getty Images

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, for once, been almost honest about the direction in which he is dragging the Jewish state.

In a speech yesterday, he shocked Israelis by warning that Israel may soon be forced to become a globally isolated “super-Sparta” with “autarkic features” — meaning little or no engagement with international trade. This vision is a disaster that would erase the qualitative edge that has enabled Israel to build a society that is not only a refuge but also a magnet — for immigrants, investors, trade, cultural exchange and tourism. A preview of the isolation it would bring was evident in today’s United Nations committee ruling that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The next stop on Netanyahu’s path to building his “super-Sparta” is a takeover of Gaza City, and the likely subsequent creation of a military administration in the entire Gaza Strip. These plans were finally set in motion this morning, as the army announced that after about a week of airstrike demolitions of apartment towers in the city, troops were starting to move in.

This plan portends more years of bloody guerrilla war; more hostages dying in captivity; many more soldiers killed in ambushes; and vastly more civilian Palestinian deaths. The economic costs will be staggering, the moral costs greater still.

Israel’s security establishment understands this. Generals, intelligence chiefs and defense officials all oppose reoccupation of Gaza. They would prefer a deal to free the hostages, force Hamas to disarm, and end the war — and, if Hamas refuses, to enable Gazans who wish to leave. This path would allow Israel to repair ties with the world and pursue normalization with Saudi Arabia, followed by agreements with Lebanon and even Syria.

Netanyahu’s Sparta notions, articulated on Monday, would throw all that away.

He assumes that enough people will continue to buy his mantra that Hamas has not yet been eliminated, and that voters will forget that in early 2024 — now almost 2 years ago — he said Israel was “one step from victory.” Since then, each new operation has been presented as an existential matter of security. In practice, the army moves in and out of the same areas, over and over again. It is, at this point, obvious that Netanyahu’s real goal is war without end — so long as it props up his coalition and keeps his corruption trial at bay.

Past Israeli leaders, whatever their flaws, cared deeply about internal legitimacy and external alliances. Netanyahu focuses only on two audiences: his domestic base of far-right and Haredi parties, and President Donald Trump’s United States, indulgent and transactional, yet ultimately indifferent to Israel’s long-term survival. Everyone else — Europe, American Jewry, the global economy — he treats as expendable.

Why? Because his overriding interest is in securing his own hold on power. This pathological obsession explains, for instance, the grotesque spectacle of Netanyahu appearing at the site of last week’s Jerusalem terror attack — not to unite the country, but rather to disparage the Supreme Court, by forging a fantastical connection between the attack and a recent ruling ordering the government to adequately feed detained Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s strategy is transparent: to prepare his base — some of it, thanks to far-right National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, armed to the teeth — to view the court as an enemy, because it is the last barrier against election fraud in the next election, which must be held within 13 months.

Netanyahu’s far-right allies, on whom his coalition depends, want Gaza to be resettled; this new operation is an obvious effort to appease them. Ben-Gvir has already promised that a luxury community for police veterans will be developed along Gaza’s coast.

If this comes to pass, Israel’s international isolation would become unbearable. Its credit ratings would sink, its economy would suffer, and what’s left of its social cohesion would collapse.

And now Netanyahu presents this disaster as a cosmic necessity. Once again, he’s peddling an illusion.

His talk of “autarky” is wishful, for the simple fact that Israel cannot be self-sufficient on that scale. It imports nearly all its oil and coal, and even the discovery of natural gas has not changed its structural dependence on foreign energy. Nor can Israel feed itself: Despite its leadership in developing drip irrigation and desert agriculture, it lacks the land and climate to supply enough wheat, rice or animal feed to support its people and its economy.

It is equally short of the metals and raw materials that power its tech sector and industry. Steel, aluminum, copper, chemicals and countless industrial inputs must come from abroad.

Even more decisive is the structure of the economy itself. Almost a third of Israel’s GDP comes from exports. The country sells software, cyber technology, defense systems, and services to the world — and the world must be willing to buy. Autarky would not mean independence, but collapse.

And what of “super-Sparta”?

The ancient state of Sparta was intensely militarized, culturally barren and reliant on repression. Children were taken from their families at age 7 and molded into soldiers. Its discipline inspired fear, but it contributed nothing lasting to humanity. In time it collapsed and disappeared.

By contrast, ancient Athens was dynamic and open. Athens defended itself, but its strength came from trade, ideas and creativity. It gave the world democracy, philosophy, theater and science. Its legacy endures two-and-a-half millennia later.

From the beginning, Israel saw itself as Athens rather than Sparta. It aspired to be a light unto the nations, and in many ways it succeeded and flourished. It made the desert bloom, gave the world desalination technology, produced a start-up ecosystem admired around the globe, and turned scarcity into innovation.

It produced Nobel laureates in literature and economics, and formative thinkers like Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari. It built a cultural canon in literature, cinema, music and the arts. The economy soared: GDP per capita surpassed $54,000, higher than Britain or France.

Until Netanyahu began burning down the house, Jews came to Israel not only out of desperation but by choice, drawn by creativity and prosperity. The Jewish state’s achievements weren’t just sources of pride — they were the foundation of survival. They allowed Israel not just to deter the Arab world, but also to draw parts of it into alignment.

If Israel follows Netanyahu’s call to become a “super-Sparta,” all of that will disappear.

Europe will abandon Israel; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has already threatened to suspend Israel’s associate membership in EU research programs. The developing world will turn its back and side with the Palestinians in every forum.

American Jewry — once Israel’s lifeline in Washington — may well disengage as Israel becomes increasingly illiberal, authoritarian and theocratic. Israel will lose not only the Democrats but also face erosion among Republicans, a growing number of whom now favor isolationism and view Israel as just another foreign entanglement. And boycotts will spread: universities, technology partnerships, trade agreements.

Worst of all, a brain drain will accelerate. The very people who gave Israel its edge — scientists, entrepreneurs, artists and academics — will leave in droves. The so-called “start-up nation” will vanish.

Such will be Netanyahu’s “super-Sparta.” What Netanyahu forgets is that, in the end, the ideas of Athens triumphed over those of Sparta. That is what survived from ancient Greece. So, I hope, it will be here: Israelis will eventually shake off their oppressor, and better days will come.

Dan Perry is the former chief editor of The Associated Press in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books about Israel. Follow his newsletter “Ask Questions Later” at danperry.substack.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/opinion/769675/gaza-city-invasion-netanyahu-super-sparta/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

OPINION | SEP 15, 2025, 4:17 PM EDT | UPDATED SEP 15, 2025, 4:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Hollywood’s boycott of Israeli filmmakers is an act of spectacular self-sabotage

Rob Eshman

Actors like Emma Stone and Javier Bardem aren’t helping Palestinians — they’re silencing Netanyahu’s harshest critics

Javier Bardem on the red carpet at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, CA, on Sept. 14. Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Emma Stone and Javier Bardem think that, by pledging to boycott Israel’s film industry, they’re helping Palestinians. Instead, they’re actually helping a man they likely despise: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu and his supporters have long claimed that Israel’s filmmakers, whose works tend to examine uncomfortable truths about Israeli history and contemporary life, are a fifth column that undermines the nation by making movies and TV shows that depict the harsh realities of war or — god forbid — humanize Palestinians.

“The irony of what they’re doing is that the people that they want to boycott — Israeli artists and film companies — are actually the people that are marching in the streets to affect change,” said Rick Rosen, co-founder of the WME agency. In other words: A successful boycott won’t end the war. It will just help eliminate Netanyahu’s critics from Israeli media.

A petition circulated by a group called Film Workers for Palestine made headlines across the world last week, as Oscar-winning directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Pedro Almodover, alongside stars like Stone and Bardem, joined some 4,000 signatories in vowing “not to screen films, appear at or otherwise work with Israeli film institutions … that are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

Bardem literally wrapped himself in the cause at Sunday night’s Emmy Awards, wearing a kaffiyeh and telling an interviewer on the red carpet that he won’t work with Israelis.

“I cannot work with someone who justifies or supports the genocide,” Bardem said.

But it makes as much sense to boycott these Israeli artists for their government’s actions, Rosen pointed out, as it would to boycott Iranian filmmakers for what their government does.

Rosen was instrumental in bringing the Emmy-winning TV series Homeland, based on an Israeli drama, to American screens, a feat he’s repeated with several other Israeli-originated shows. He represents many Israeli filmmakers, as well as Keshet, the country’s leading commercial television broadcaster.

“This is what makes no sense,” Rosen said in a phone interview about the boycott: Israeli filmmakers “are the people demanding an end to the war, and the release of the hostages.”

Netanyahu’s government has been systematically targeting Israeli filmmakers. In December 2023, Culture Minister Miki Zohar threatened to claw back public funds from directors who made documentaries about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Just last week, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi — who has been trying to withdraw financing and shut down public broadcasting in Israel for two years — said he would cut off Israel’s public broadcaster Kan’s funding over its choice to air a documentary about the 1948 war, told through Jewish and Arab voices.

The government wants to silence these artists because they are fearless, and committed to truthtelling. Now, those same voices are even more worried — because celebrities like Stone and Bardem have, by joining a movement that will only serve to silence artists opposed to Israel’s government, inadvertently give more power to Israel’s most powerful and reactionary voices.

Still, it might make sense for Hollywood artists to boycott the filmmakers in Israel who are on their side — if doing so stood a chance of actually persuading Netanyahu to end the war.

But consider that two weeks ago, Israel’s Mossad strongly opposed Netanyahu’s decision to attack Qatar — and he went ahead with it anyway. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said that invading Gaza City would endanger the hostages, but Netanyahu went ahead and ordered a new operation.

In late August, 500,000 Israelis took the streets of Tel Aviv to demand an end to the war. Proportionally, that’s the equivalent of 17 million Americans — and Netanyahu didn’t budge.

If none of these efforts to dissuade him from his course could stop him, celebrity signatures won’t either.

Instead of boycotting Israel’s anti-Netanyahu voices, the celebrities who signed onto this boycott should amplify them. They could use their genuine concern, and their talents, to support the courageous groups in Israel working toward a just society for Arabs and Jews.

Or they could consider directing their powers of persuasion at the only person in the world whom experts say has the real leverage to change Netanyahu’s behavior: President Donald Trump.

“Trump has unique influence with the prime minister and scarcely any of the political constraints that have affected his predecessors in dealing with Israel,” wrote Daniel Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, in a recent essay.

If the American president represents the best hope for bringing an end to the Gaza conflict, does that mean we should boycott the U.S. film industry to pressure Trump? If that sounds crazy and self-defeating, imagine how this new boycott strikes the Israeli artists it targets.

I’m not joining the chorus of pro-Israel activists calling the petition’s signatories hypocrites and antisemites. Bardem, for one, is simply continuing his longstanding practice of speaking out against atrocities around the world.

In 2016 he made a movie about the slaughter in South Sudan. The Last Face was distributed by Saban Films, founded and run by the Israeli-American Haim Saban — further evidence that filmmakers can accomplish a lot more when they join forces rather than build walls.

That helps explain why Rosen, who sits on the board of directors of the Israel Policy Forum, a centrist think tank, didn’t hesitate when I asked him if he would still work on a project that involved Stone.

“Absolutely, yes,” he said. “She’s an excellent actress. I’d like to foster dialogue with these people, not division.”

Rob Eshman is a senior columnist for the Forward. For his food writing and recipes subscribe to his Foodaism newsletter.

- [email protected]

- @foodaism

- foodaism

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/opinion/769399/hollywood-boycott-israeli-filmmakers-javier-bardem/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

Culture

- An unprecedented, and unfinished, work of Yiddish scholarship is now an opera

- Pleading with God, pleading with Social Security

- Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish

- Bob Dylan, my mother, and the unknown painter behind ‘Blood on the Tracks’

- How often does Tim Blake Nelson think about ancient Greece?

- To play in the orchestra in Auschwitz was a gruesome affair, but it was better than the alternative

THEATER | SEP 17, 2025, 11:03 AM EDT | UPDATED SEP 17, 2025, 6:06 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An unprecedented, and unfinished, work of Yiddish scholarship is now an opera

PJ Grisar

‘The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language’ chronicles a quest to save a forgotten world

Gideon Dabi as Max Weinreich and Jason Weisinger as Yudel Mark in Alex Weiser and Ben Kaplan’s The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language. Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

When Ben Kaplan and Alex Weiser started working at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, they heard one of its essential legends in the form of a joke.

The 100-year-old library and archive, whose holdings date back centuries and are filled with countless artifacts of Yiddish life that barely escaped the Shoah, once endeavored to create an academic dictionary of the Yiddish language. The punchline? They couldn’t get past aleph.

“It’s a kind of version of the two Jews, three opinions, kind of joke,” said Weiser, a Pulitzer-prize finalist composer and YIVO’s director of public programs.

When Weiser learned his former YIVO colleague Leyzer Burko’s dissertation at the Jewish Theological Seminary featured a chapter on the unfinished dictionary, he was eager to read it.

What he found explained some of the gridlock. Heading the project was the linguist and educator Yudel Mark, who saw the task of completing a dictionary as holy work. Undertaking the project in New York in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Mark saw himself rescuing the words of an exterminated civilization. They weren’t merely words to him, but “sparks” of the divine.

But in Mark’s desire to be comprehensive — including the argot of thieves, tradesmen and children — the undertaking became untenable.

The project wasn’t only too large; it was a fight for the soul of Yiddish. Max Weinreich, the head of YIVO, had made his life’s work standardizing Yiddish spelling and grammar; he resisted Mark’s draft for deviating from those principles, called the takones. The debates over these spelling conventions created factions and led to hourlong shouting matches that would often stretch well into the night.

Reading Burko’s account, Weiser thought it had the makings of an opera, and took the idea to Kaplan, YIVO’s director of education, as well as to a librettist with whom he’d previously worked on an opera about Theodor Herzl. Kaplan thought he was indulging Weiser, but quickly saw the story’s dramatic potential.

“It wasn’t just about a dictionary,” Kaplan said. “It was about grief. It was about postwar Jewish life. It was about what you have to leave behind that you can’t take with you. What do you choose to save?”

The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, Weiser and Kaplan’s chamber opera, which is mounting its first full production Sept. 18 at the Center for Jewish History, dramatizes the postwar debates, bounding between Marks’ cramped office and the mystical sphere of a language driven to near extinction by genocide.

Kelly Guerra, Kristin Gornstein and Kate Maroney as the three alephs. Courtesy of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

The show opens with Mark (played by tenor Jason Weisinger) resting his head on a book. From this hard pillow, he, like Jacob the patriarch, receives a vision. Not a ladder, but the three alephs of the Yiddish language, mezzo sopranos who appear in a heterophonic roar of sound.

“Veln zey lebn,” they say — “will they live?”

They are referring to dried up Yiddish words, which stretch out before Mark on a barren landscape like the valley of bones glimpsed by Ezekiel. The Shtumer, Komets and Pasekh task him to speak to the words, breathe them, fill them with life and efn zeyere kvorim — open their graves.

The action then follows Mark’s showdown with Weinreich, and his efforts, in Israel, to finish the work. He never did get past aleph, but he estimated he saved over 200,000 words. While he falls short in his mission — imagined at 10 or 12 volumes — he is reassured by the Shtumer Aleph, traditionally a silent letter, here speaking for a lost world.

“We are time, we are history,” she tells Mark. “Remember us, gather us, read us, before we are dust.”

At YIVO, Mark’s legend and work continues, with staff members like Weiser and Kaplan making its millions of artifacts accessible. (Mark died in 1975, well before the internet and digitization proved essential tools for preserving historical memory.)

Mark’s daughter saw the opera in a concert version last year, as did many others who knew Mark and Weinreich. As Weiser and Kaplan float from their jobs at YIVO upstairs, down to the ground-floor auditorium at the Center for Jewish History, they see the opera as an extension of their work.

“If there’s any way this can illuminate the history for people, I think we’d both be very proud of that as a result,” said Kaplan. “And if it gets people more excited about Yiddish, about Yiddish history and culture, Jewish history and culture more broadly, all the more so.”

Weiser and Kaplan’s The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language has performances Sept. 18 and 21 at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Tickets and more information can be found on YIVO’s website.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

- [email protected]

- @pjgrisar

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/music/769876/yivo-yiddish-dictionary-opera-alex-weiser-ben-kaplan/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

CULTURE | SEP 16, 2025, 11:03 AM EDT | UPDATED SEP 16, 2025, 1:53 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Pleading with God, pleading with Social Security

Judah Sussman

For this author, the High Holiday prayer Hineni has special resonance now

Photo by pexels / Cottonbro Studio

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

Every year on the High Holidays, one of the most striking prayers is called Hineni. It begins with the leader admitting: “Hineni he’ani mima’as” — “Here I am, poor in deeds, trembling and afraid, yet standing before You to plead on behalf of the community.”

You don’t need to understand the Hebrew to recognize the feeling. It’s the posture of someone who knows they’re not in control, but has no choice except to ask for mercy.

I thought about that prayer recently when I received a letter from Social Security denying my disability claim. Like so many others who go through this process, I had put together all the documentation, all the medical support, all the evidence that seemed obvious. And then: one form letter, bluntly stating “denied.”

That moment felt like Hineni. Here I am, I’ve done everything I could, and yet I still have to stand before a power that can dismiss me with a few words. In synagogue, the hope is that God listens. With Social Security, you’re not so sure.

For people unfamiliar with synagogue liturgy, pleading with God may sound foreign. But pleading with a government office? That’s something many Americans know too well. Whether it’s a denied medical claim, an immigration case, or a disability application, we all recognize the feeling of having to beg a system to see us as human.

That’s why I think Hineni still matters. It isn’t just a prayer from another era. It’s a mirror of how powerless we can feel in modern life.

In the prayer, there’s at least the belief that God responds with compassion. In government, shouldn’t we expect at least the same? Shouldn’t a system be designed to help people err on the side of mercy rather than denial?

I’m not asking Social Security to be a synagogue. But I do believe the test of a society is how it treats those who are vulnerable. Right now, our disability system too often leaves people pleading like supplicants instead of being treated like neighbors.

Whether you stand before God or before a government office, saying “Here I am” deserves an answer rooted in dignity.

As the High Holidays approach, I’ll hear the Hineni prayer differently. Not just as a religious tradition, but as a reminder of what it feels like to stand small before power, asking simply to be heard.

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/769624/pleading-with-god-pleading-with-social-security/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

FILM & TV | SEP 16, 2025, 9:59 AM EDT | UPDATED SEP 17, 2025, 9:43 AM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish

PJ Grisar

The actor and director shared the screen with Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and Paul Newman

Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand filming The Way We Were. Photo by Art Zelin/Getty Images

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

Robert Redford, the actor, director and film festival visionary, has died at 89.

Remembered for his ruddy good looks, accomplished pivot to directing and help ushering the film industry into its independent era by spearheading the Sundance Film Festival, Redford embodied an age. That age was one of increasingly visible Jewishness in film, and Redford often stood in as the visibly gentile foil.

Beginning his career in New York City, Redford, a California native, starred on Broadway as an anxious newlywed in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, and later reprised the role in the 1967 film. The movie, helmed by Gene Saks, was a hit, but Redford’s cachet as a film star came later.

In 1969, Redford had his breakout role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, playing the quickdraw counterpart to Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy. In a stretch for Redford, who learned to surf as a kid on Hermosa Beach, Sundance couldn’t swim. (William Goldman wrote the script, as he did for five Redford vehicles.)

Redford and Newman’s relationship continued with director George Roy Hill in 1973’s The Sting — the pair switched mustache duty — with a ragtime score adapted by Marvin Hamlisch.

That same year, Redford played opposite Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, also featuring music by Hamlisch, who won three Oscars in 1974 split between the two films.

“Redford and I were very different on the surface,” Streisand recalled in The Way They Were, a recent history of the film. “I was raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, playing skelly with bottle caps in the street. He was the blond, suntanned California guy, surfing and riding horses — while I was afraid of them. But inside, we were alike: shy, sensitive, and both of us appreciated the mystery of relationships.”

The doomed relationship in the film, directed by Sydney Pollack, remains an iconic touchstone in Redford’s career. Pollack, the son of Jewish immigrants, would direct Redford in seven of his 21 films.

Perhaps Redford’s best-recalled Jewish-Gentile teamup was in All The President’s Men, in which he played Bob Woodward opposite Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein, breaking open the Watergate scandal. The two were so simpatico, they were said to have learned each other’s lines so they could interrupt one another in William Goldman’s dialogue.

In 1980, Redford directed Ordinary People, Alvin Sargent’s adaptation of Judith Guest’s novel about a grieving, WASPy family. Judd Hirsch starred as a Jewish psychiatrist, earning him an Oscar nomination. Redford won best director.

Redford’s filmography as a director was decidedly mixed, but an Oscar-nominated highlight was 1994’s Quiz Show, about a 1950s scandal in which NBC positioned a well-to-do WASP to beat out a working-class Jew.

While Redford couldn’t help but present as what he was — razor-jawed, scotch-Irish — he made a gripping indictment of a TV studio’s efforts to elevate someone who looked more like him than one of his many Jewish co-stars. (For what it’s worth, when they had to cast Bernard Malamud’s all-American slugger in The Natural, Barry Levinson got Redford in the role.)

Redford announced his retirement from acting in 2018. While one of the most dependable leading men in movies, he never won an Oscar for acting. But his 2002 honorary Academy Award for his work with the Sundance Film Festival may be the greater tribute to his legacy.

The filmmakers who emerged from the festival are a litany of household names, but two, from its early years under Redford, stand out.

In 1985, a neo-noir debut feature set in Texas took home the grand jury prize. It was called Blood Simple, and while credited to one director, Joel Coen, it was truly a collaboration with his brother, Ethan.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

- [email protected]

- @pjgrisar

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/film-tv/769588/robert-redford-dies-barbra-streisand-jewish-legacy/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

MUSIC | SEP 15, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT | UPDATED SEP 16, 2025, 3:58 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Bob Dylan, my mother, and the unknown painter behind ‘Blood on the Tracks’

Sam Sussman

Dylan once said that Norman Raeben was the man who ‘taught me how to see’

‘Untitled,’ by Norman Raeben, dated between 1932-1950s. Courtesy of Josh Raeben

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

The period in which Bob Dylan struggled through personal and artistic crises to write Blood on the Tracks is veiled with mystery. Dylan has rarely discussed the origins of his most revered album. He hardly wrote about it in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, except to claim that Blood was inspired by Chekhov stories rather than his divorce. “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album,” Dylan infamously told Mary Travers in 1975. “It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, people enjoying that type of pain.”

I know a few things about this period in Dylan’s life, because my mother had a romantic relationship with him at the time. He wrote portions of Blood on the Tracks in the New York apartment in which I live today.

One of the few public comments Dylan has made about Blood is to credit its genesis to Norman Raeben, his enigmatic Ukranian-Jewish painting teacher. When Dylan walked into Raeben’s studio, my mother was a student in the class, twenty years old and recently arrived in New York to pursue her ambitions as an artist. As I wrote in a memoir essay in Harper’s Magazine,” The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son,” my mother and Dylan soon began a romantic relationship. She later recounted to me that he often played her the songs that became Blood on the Tracks, and spoke to her about how their painting teacher was influencing what came to be regarded as Dylan’s greatest album.

“He taught me how to see,” Dylan later told Rolling Stone. “He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt…I had met magicians, but this guy is more powerful than any magician I’ve ever met. He looked into you and told you what you were.”

The story of Raeben’s transformative influence on Dylan in this pivotal moment of his life has never been fully told. Two recent painting exhibitions offer glimpses into the story.

In London, the Halcyon Gallery exhibited “Bob Dylan: Point Blank,” a show of ninety-seven new paintings, this past May 9 to July 6. A thousand miles southeast and a few months before (November 24, 2024 to March 9, 2025), the Venice Jewish Museum exhibited, “Norman Raeben (1901-1978): The Wandering Painter,” the first retrospective of Raeben’s life work.

Dylan met Raeben at a low point in his creative life. It was 1974 and for years Dylan had sequestered himself away in upstate New York, certain that he had to escape celebrity to write meaningfully. He’d released seven albums in eight years but wasn’t satisfied with the work. He was 33 and felt his best music had been written before he was 25. He sensed that if he didn’t find his way back soon, he never would. One day, he overheard friends of his wife, Sara, “talking about truth and love and beauty and all these words I had heard for years, and they had ‘em all defined. I couldn’t believe it…I asked them, ‘Where do you come up with all those definitions?’ and they told me about this teacher.”

Sam Sussman is the author of ‘Boy From the North Country.’ Courtesy of Sam Sussman/Penguin Press

Nochum Rabinovich was born in the Russian Empire in 1901, the youngest child of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. When the family immigrated to New York, in 1914, he took the name Norman Raeben. As a young painter, he came under the influence of Robert Henri and the Ashcan School, and won critical acclaim for synthesizing figurative realism with the high modernism of the School of Paris. Raeben’s aesthetic commitment was to the mundane beauty of ordinary life. He believed that painting was a way of life, a method of seeing, that the artist must learn to react to every moment and thus heighten the experience of life itself. Raeben studied and exhibited beside contemporaries ––Rothko, Chagall, Soutine–– whose work, like his, sought to bridge old world Yiddish culture with the vitality of Paris and New York. Then, in the 1940s, Raeben suffered a debilitating mental breakdown and ceased to exhibit his work. He retreated to an 11th-floor studio in Carnegie Hall, where he taught grueling painting classes and was largely forgotten.

Raeben’s work is almost exclusively held in private hands, with the notable exception of several works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Norman Raeben (1901-1978): The Wandering Painter” comes with a 126-page catalogue, compiled by art historian Fabio Fantuzzi, that is the most complete compilation of Raeben’s work. From the 1930s onward, Raeben did not title, date, or sign his paintings. Looking through his oeuvre feels like a journey through memory, with no official beginning or ending. Raeben’s paintings often appear as photographic flashes: Cars, streets, sky, and light merge together for one kinetic moment. In an untitled work dated in the catalogue as “1932–1950s,” two yellow cabs maneuver through what appears to be a Manhattan street. Crowds hover on either side of the cabs; the street is not marked by any sidewalk or dividing line. The whitewashed building at the center of the canvas seems pressed inward by the sheer force of the city. Look once and see urban chaos; look twice and all is held together by the calm logic of Manhattan in motion — and Raeben’s steady eye. This is painting as Raeben understood its purpose: a reaction to an ordinary moment, a way of seeing the every day.

Raeben understood himself as part of a vanishing tradition, the sliver of breathing room between figurative painting and high modernism that he forged under Henri’s inspiration. He castigated the dominant styles of the century — Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop Art — and referred to the tastes of the postwar New York art world as “idiot wind,” a phrase Dylan borrowed. In his Carnegie Hall studio, Raeben sought to pass on what he knew to anyone determined enough to learn. Raeben spoke in Yiddish, English, French, Ukrainian, and Russian as he painted, often explaining his aesthetic theories by way of Proust. Raeben valued artistic diligence above all else: The studio floor was cluttered with rags and stained with thick impasto paint. He could be brutal. My mother told me that he once flicked paint off a brush into the eyes of a younger student, shouting, “You like being blind? Everything you’ve done is worthless!”

Dylan arrived at Raeben’s studio in spring 1974. Soon, my mother later told me, he was playing guitar in her third-floor walk-up in Yorkville and explaining why Raeben seemed to him like a prophet. Raeben, Dylan said, was teaching him that his problems were rooted in the wrong perspective of time. Raeben understood that, “You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room,” as Dylan later told Rolling Stone. Raeben, Dylan told my mother, painted in one stroke from the perspective of his Russian childhood and Parisian twenties and New York middle age. He slipped between languages, colors, thinking, feeling, time. Dylan often told my mother that he felt blind and Raeben was teaching him how to see. He wanted to write music with the multiplicitous perspective with which Raeben painted. He wanted to transform the rawness of his inner life into music, the way that Raeben believed that the most worthwhile painting came from reacting to the depth and impulse of feeling.

One night that summer my mother’s phone rang in the early morning hours. Dylan was on the other line, singing before he said hello. It was a new song about a man in search of lost love. In each stanza the man and the woman were always the same people and always different people. Dylan shifted between first person and third person. Every stanza described the present while imagining the future and recalling the past. Dylan told my mother he was calling the song “Tangled Up in Blue.”

Later, Dylan would write of “Tangled,” on the jacket of Biograph, his 1985 compilation album, “I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole…with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.”

Last month, I went to see “Bob Dylan: Point Blank” at the Halcyon Gallery in London. Dylan paints melancholic landscapes and portraits at once ordinary and mythic. It’s not work that sits easily within any major postwar tradition––except the one stubbornly taught by Norman Raeben. Dylan’s eye drifts to the banal beauty of everyday life to which Raeben devoted his work. He paints the interior of American homes, creaky floorboards, open doors that lead nowhere. Gray garages on autumnal brick roads. Men in tuxedos, kings of their small town. Egg cartons, grandfather clocks, pocket mirrors, binoculars, old pick-up trucks; no object is too plain for the painter’s gaze. There’s a hint of self-portraiture in the young man with a pen and a spiral notebook. There’s a quick-draw artist, too; maybe the man in “Idiot Wind” who “shot a man named Gray / and took his wife to Italy.”

In a series called “Train Crossing (red),” Dylan situates us behind the wheel of a train, rendered in varying color schemes in four otherwise identical paintings. The train track below hurtles us inexorably toward the horizon at the high end of the frame. “The only thing I knew how to do,” Dylan sings in “Tangled,” “was to keep on keepin’ on,” and these tracks give us no other choice. Staring at those tracks, I wasn’t sure for a moment where I was. The London gallery and Raeben’s studio and the Yorkville apartment in which Dylan wrote and my mother and I lived fifty years apart were all happening at once, that train taking me into the past and future on the same line. If you’d asked me where I was standing, I don’t think I could have said.

Sam Sussman is the author of the novel Boy From the North Country, available from Penguin Press Sept. 16.

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/music/765628/norman-raeben-bob-dylan-sam-sussman-boy-from-the-north-country/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

THEATER | SEP 15, 2025, 12:52 PM EDT | UPDATED SEP 15, 2025, 2:02 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How often does Tim Blake Nelson think about ancient Greece?

PJ Grisar

The actor-writer-director talks about his new play, Kafka and antisemitism

Tim Blake Nelson Photo by Stephanie Diani

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

Tim Blake Nelson, the writer, director, actor and Jewish Okie, had a regimen for his three sons.

Outside of school, Nelson — known for his folksy-but-cerebral turns in collaborations with the Coen Brothers, a handful of Marvel films and HBO’s Watchmen — required the boys to read with him and his wife every day. His oldest and youngest read newspapers: The New York Times, The Economist and editorials in the Wall Street Journal. The middle child read fiction. One day they picked up Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” in which an explorer is given a tour of an execution device that bloodily inscribes a prisoner’s offense on their bare skin.

Nelson was struck by the dramatic potential of the grisly, oddly detached tale of crime and punishment, but felt it wasn’t quite right to do a strict adaptation.

“It was more broadly philosophical, but kind of less relevant than what I’m sure it was at the beginning of the 20th century for Kafka’s audience,” Nelson, 61, explained in an interview at a rehearsal space near the Bowery in Manhattan.

But as Nelson noodled with the idea, a variation arose. He was then reading Richard Powers’ novel Galatea 2.2, a metafictional account of an AI that can write stories. Nelson was thinking about how the book connected to Moore’s Law, an axiom about the steady growth of computing power. And every time he turned on his computer, Nelson felt it was anticipating his next move. This was, mind you, around 2019, before the popular ascension of tools like ChatGPT.

Nelson melded the idea of algorithmic thinking with Kafka’s story, spawning the drama And Then We Were No More, debuting at La Mama in Manhattan on Sept. 19.

The play takes place in an unnamed country, a carceral surveillance state governed by “the function,” a superintelligence that decides career tracks and destinies. The function assigns a lawyer to defend a woman who poisoned her mother, husband and children.

As in Kafka’s story, the characters are never identified by name, and central to the action is a revolutionary machine that both delivers a death sentence and serves as a powerful deterrent to criminals. But while Kafka’s contraption palimpsestically writes the crime over the body of the condemned with a harrow full of needles, the one Nelson imagines is supposedly painless.

Even so, the inmate is appealing for a more conventional end to her life. Taking her on as a client, the lawyer soon learns that she was “harvested for physical data,” tortured with daily blood draws and brain tissue samples in a search for “genetic and environmental predispositions to violent criminality.”

While the setting suggests the future, the show’s ideas — including eugenics, authoritarianism and capital punishment — are old. And they’re ones Nelson has tackled in the past.

Nelson’s play The Grey Zone, which he adapted and directed as a 2001 film, is about the 1944 Sonderkommando Uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Jewish men who guided new arrivals to the gas chambers and disposed of them in the ovens also destroyed crematoria with the help of women prisoners smuggling explosives. The story is drawn in part from an account of Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor who performed autopsies under the infamous Nazi physician Mengele, who, like some characters in We Were No More, conducted cruel experiments in the name of medical “research.”

Nelson’s most recent play, Socrates, which played at the Public Theater in 2019, deals with the philosopher’s state-mandated death by hemlock.

Asked if he saw a theme, Nelson, wearing worn brown cowboy boots tucked under gray khakis, connected it to questions that have dogged us since Socrates’ time.

“I’m obsessed with the ideas that came out of ancient Greece and spread through a kind of intellectual diaspora, mainly then through Central Europe, and a lot of the debates that evolved in the middle of the 20th Century,” Nelson said, adding that this Greek thought first came back in fashion during the Enlightenment.

Foremost among the ideas is how utilitarianism — the greatest good for the greatest number — collides with individual rights. In the play, the conflict is dramatized by an analyst for the death machine, who argues AI-backed surveillance takes away “meaningless freedoms” and replaces them with greater ones. On the other side, the lawyer contends constant monitoring makes the idea of freedom “a lie.”

But beyond that dialectic, Nelson said he’s preoccupied with the question of whether an objective, morally right position exists.

Paying the bill for surviving

He thinks this idée fixe comes from growing up with his mother, Ruth, a childhood Holocaust refugee who left Germany in 1938 with her parents, resettling in London before coming to the United States in 1941.

“I always felt like my mother considered her very life a privilege and was kind of retroactively paying the bill for that privilege with the way that she conducted herself morally,” Nelson said of Ruth, a Tulsa housing activist and philanthropist who was active with organizations like Planned Parenthood; she passed away in 2023. “The question of what is good, what is morally right, and the ultimate bankruptcy of thinking that way, even though we really must, has obsessed me for my whole life. And I keep going back to it in the stories I write.”

Nelson started writing seriously as a grad student at Juilliard, often penning material for his classmates. He’s continued — his fellow alum Elizabeth Marvel plays the lawyer and is also in his forthcoming film, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, set in an Oklahoma prison.

In the room with Marvel, he chats about the U.S. Open, asks if she read The Alchemist (and asks this reporter if he’s yet tackled the English translation of Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters or Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel about a 1933 Jewish German family, The Oppermanns). He effuses over a courtroom scene, where Marvel appeals to the audience for mercy a la Shakespeare’s Portia, saying it’s a “nice run of crispness.”

I can tell he’s in his element in the rehearsal room where we met, but Nelson says he’s never happier than when writing a draft of something he knows will work. His second novel, Superhero, about the production of a Marvel-like tentpole film, is due in December.

Nelson has starred in three superhero films, most recently Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World, which proved controversial both due to Shira Haas’ Israeli character — and, later reports that the studio would change her nationality to do an end-run around the outrage — and also for its original title New World Order. Critics said it was insensitive to use that phrase, associated with an antisemitic conspiracy theory, in a film where Nelson, a Jewish actor, played the villain.

“It’s addressed in the book,” Nelson said of his upcoming novel.

In between rehearsals for the play and editing Wilson Shedd, Nelson went to the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of The Testament of Ann Lee, a musical about the founder of the Shaker movement.  (As if all this wasn’t enough, after a run at Tribeca, he’s also doing Q&As around the city for the film Bang Bang, in which he plays the lead role of an over-the-hill boxer.)

This year, Venice was a staging ground for pro-Palestinian protests. There was a petition to keep Gal Gadot from attending, and a film about slain Palestinian child Hind Rajab won second place — some speculated it only didn’t take the top prize for political reasons. Nelson and I spoke a few days before hundreds of his peers in Hollywood signed a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people. “

That pledge seems to mark a change from a time earlier in Israel’s war with Hamas, when pro-Palestinian activism — at least when not carefully couched — meant career consequences.

“People in my industry, by and large, are only able to have one public point of view,” Nelson said, reaffirming that he is for a two-state solution, but adding that “if somebody feels differently they should be able to articulate that without worrying that they’re not gonna get hired.”

Nelson has said that growing up in what his wife jokingly refers to as the “Upper West Side of Tulsa,” with a small but vibrant Jewish community, he didn’t encounter antisemitism.

He’s alarmed by what he sees today, but takes particular umbrage at the idea that Jews are somehow “worse than white privilege” for supposedly having power and influence, and the false assumption that Jews benefit from “all the advantages that your cabal has managed to arrange for itself.” (Nelson, whose grandfather was a lawyer disbarred by the Nuremberg Laws, knows better than most how flawed this premise is.)

While he’s surprised by an uptick in antisemitism, beyond a conflation of Jews and Israel, he’s also shocked how timely his play, about using an artificial intelligence to enforce the law, feels during the second Trump administration.

“I never anticipated the cultural conflict, and the vehemence of the cultural conflict that’s going on right now between a zeal for law and order and the protection of individual rights,” Nelson said. “And that was going on with BLM and now it’s evolving into asylum cases and we also have a reaper drone taking out a drug boat without due process. And probably if you were to poll most people in the United States, they are in favor of that policy, even though it flies in the face of principles upon which this country was founded.”

Coming from refugees, raised in the Southwest and playing such icons of Americana as cowboys and chain gang escapees, in his writing, the polymath embodies yet another American ideal: dissent.

It was there with the ancient Greeks, and lives on in Nelson.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

- [email protected]

- @pjgrisar

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/film-tv/769201/tim-blake-nelson-play-jewish-kafka-antisemitism/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

BOOKS | SEP 15, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT | UPDATED SEP 16, 2025, 3:10 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

To play in the orchestra in Auschwitz was a gruesome affair, but it was better than the alternative

Julia M. Klein

Anne Sebba traces the grim history of ‘The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz’

Holocaust survivor Anita Lasuer holds up a portrait of herself playing the cello. She survived Aucshwitz in part, because she played in the orchestra. Photo by Getty Images

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival

By Anne Sebba

St. Martin’s Press, 400 pages, $32

Being a musician in the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau was a gruesome endeavor. It meant playing brisk marches, under SS command, as other concentration camp inmates headed out to backbreaking labor — and then returned at night, exhausted or worse. It meant performing regular Sunday concerts for prisoners and SS guards. And, on occasion, it meant supplying a deceptive and calming soundscape for those being selected for the gas.

Still, being a musician was less gruesome than the alternative. Assigned their own barracks, orchestra members enjoyed better hygiene, skipped outdoor roll calls in the freezing Polish winter, and sometimes received supplements to the usual starvation rations. When they became sick, they had a chance of being nursed back to a semblance of health.

Anne Sebba notes in The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz that she has a personal link to the story: Her father was part of the British forces that liberated Bergen-Belsen, where some of the Jewish orchestra members spent the war’s final weeks. That connection, she says, impelled her to learn more about the Auschwitz women’s orchestra: how its members survived, and at what cost, and what their music-making meant to them and others.

Anne Sebba, the author of The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. Photo by Serena Bolton

Her book assembles accounts from both the orchestra and other former prisoners, with an emphasis more on comprehensiveness than readability. One challenge is the sheer number of people that pass through its pages. They offer a mosaic of recollections that sometimes make the loosely chronological narrative hard to follow. Sebba seems to realize the problem: She includes a reference list of orchestra members — among them two Hélènes and one Helena, as well as two Evas, two Marias, a Lili and a Lilly.

The book’s focus, to the extent it has one, is on Alma Rosé — niece of the composer Gustav Mahler, daughter of a famous Austrian violinist, and a violin virtuoso herself. Rosé was the most talented and effective of the orchestra’s three principal conductors during its brief existence, from April 1943 to October 1944. (Before Rosé, the orchestra was helmed by the Polish music teacher Zofia Czajkowska, and after her by the pianist, singer and Red Army officer Soja Winogradowa.)

An assimilated Austrian Jew who converted to Catholicism, Rosé was a controversial figure. She was ingratiating to her Nazi supervisors, especially the brutal but music-loving Maria Mandl, and a tough disciplinarian to her musical charges. “She inspired loyalty but she also aroused jealousy,” writes Sebba, who is mostly a Rosé defender.

The French singer and pianist Fania Fénelon, in an account that Sebba calls “novelized and sensational,” was particularly scathing about Rosé’s idiosyncrasies. Her book, The Musicians of Auschwitz, became the basis for the 1980 television film Playing for Time, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Alexander.

Sebba’s book favors comprehensiveness over readability. Courtesy of St. Martins Press

Under perilous circumstances, and balancing conflicting imperatives, Rosé managed to mold a small core of musically gifted professionals and a variety of desperate amateurs into a creditable ensemble. She wanted the best players; to please the Nazis, she needed to recruit Christians as well as Jews; and yet she “seems to have been intent on saving as many young Jewish women as possible,” Sebba writes.

During marathon practice sessions, as the musicians struggled with hunger and fatigue, Rosé reminded them: “The orchestra means life.” Ironically, Rosé herself died, at 36, of what was probably accidental food poisoning, despite efforts by Nazi doctors — including the notorious Josef Mengele — to save her.

Sebba sees the musicians, forced into complicity with their oppressors, as denizens of Primo Levi’s morally ambiguous “grey zone.” And she understands that the subject of music in Nazi concentration camps — where there were many musical ensembles, but apparently just one all-female orchestra — is a vexed one.

Music could both heal and hurt; it could provide a fragile refuge from horror, or deepen trauma. For those able to compose their own music, play privately for themselves or other prisoners, or collect and catalogue the music of others, the exercise was often a salve. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist at Auschwitz, later described one private concert as “a link with the outside world, with beauty, with culture, a complete escape into an imaginary and unattainable world.”

But the orchestra’s official duties aroused darker, more complex emotions. And the prisoners compelled to hear their music were often vituperative, with one survivor describing being forced to listen as “another way of killing us.”

“I realize that merely to speak of cultural life in the camps is a perversion, since this was a world never free of fear and full of crises, coercion, disease and death, all of which automatically destroyed or damaged anything of beauty,” Sebba writes. “Yet at the same time playing Mendelssohn, Chopin or Beethoven, forbidden music on the grounds that the composer was Jewish, Polish or too great for ‘inferior’ Jewish musicians, in secret, provided occasional moments in the darkest history of the 20th century when a handful of women showed their defiance of the Nazi system in which they were trapped.”

Sebba also emphasizes the importance of the orchestra’s friendship networks, affiliations mostly arising from a common nationality or language. By contrast, Jews and non-Jewish Poles were often at odds. In the end, orchestra membership saved at least 40 lives, Sebba says.

Along with collating other accounts, Sebba interviewed the orchestra’s last two living members, both in their late 90s: Lasker-Wallfisch in London and Hilde Grünbaum Zimche in Israel. After the war, Zimche told her, she never played music again. Through Sebba, the two friends, who had recently lost touch, were able to reconnect, before Zimche died in February 2024.

Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.

- @juliamklein

This article was downloaded from https://forward.com/culture/books/763387/anne-sebba-womens-orchestra-auschwitz-book-review/ at Sep 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM EDT.

Table of Contents

The Forward: 2025 Sep 17

News

As Democrats shift on Israel, Josh Shapiro stands firm: ‘I don’t waffle or waver because of polling’

Was Charlie Kirk a martyr? Here’s why Christians are divided and Jews should care

Opinions

Netanyahu’s pitch for Israel as ‘super-Sparta’ is a dystopian death wish

Hollywood’s boycott of Israeli filmmakers is an act of spectacular self-sabotage

Culture

An unprecedented, and unfinished, work of Yiddish scholarship is now an opera

Pleading with God, pleading with Social Security

Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish

Bob Dylan, my mother, and the unknown painter behind ‘Blood on the Tracks’

How often does Tim Blake Nelson think about ancient Greece?

To play in the orchestra in Auschwitz was a gruesome affair, but it was better than the alternative