In a survey published this month, the Claims Conference estimated that 66 percent of American millennials do not know what Auschwitz was. The news comes as alarming, as we live in an age in which access to resources and information on the history of World War II and the Holocaust is virtually immediate.

Just a few decades ago, the Shoah was hardly part of the public discourse in the States, and was rarely included in school curricula. Many American young people, in the ’60s through the ’80s, learned for the first time about the topic where they learned a lot about good and evil: comic books.

A new book entitled We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust, written and curated by comic book legend Neal Adams, historian Rafael Medoff, and cartoonist Craig Yoe, delves on the history of Nazi-related comic book stories, publishing a selection of those strips with rich background and commentary. Nazis, reads the book, “have been among the most ubiquitous of comic book evildoers.”

Adams and Medoff joined forces in 2008 to create a comic shedding light on the fight of Jewish artist and Holocaust survivor Dina Babbitt to reclaim the artwork she had been forced to create as a prisoner in Auschwitz from the Auschwitz Museum in Poland.

While working on the Babbitt case, the two decided to collect those older strips and compile them in a book.

“These are stories that people don’t know about,” Adams said in an interview. The stories, featuring superheroes like Batman, Superman, and Captain America, come from some of the best publishers, including the “Big Two”: DC Comics and Marvel.

Adams was ten years old when his family moved from the United States to West Germany; his father was serving in the US Army’s occupying forces. While there, Adams was shown three hours of raw footage taken during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

“I couldn’t speak to my mother for a week,” he recalled. “Watching that footage took the life out of me . . . It was horrible.” His long-standing commitment to raise awareness of the Holocaust comes from that traumatic experience.

“People think of comic books as entertainment,” said Rafael Medoff. “They don’t realize that, in addition, over the years they have tackled very serious issues. When I was growing up in the 1970s, I encountered topics like racism, drug abuse, the environment.” Some of those stories were illustrated by Neal Adams himself.

In regards to the Holocaust, American comic books “shared a very important lesson from history that was not being taught in schools,” continued Medoff. “Most Holocaust survivors were still not talking about their experiences, and you didn’t have movies like Schindler’s List.”

The first Nazi-related strips, published in the 1950s, did not always refer to the Jews as the victims of the Holocaust. One story, for instance, called them “prisoners of war,” though Adams claimed that this grave omission was not the norm. At the end of the day, comics were a very “Jewish” medium, he explained, many of their creators being Jewish.

These strips taught their readers about Auschwitz, Kristallnacht, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and many more chapters from the history of the Shoah.

One of these stories, “From The Ashes,” was featured in a 1979 issue of Captain America. In an interview published in the book, Don Perlin, one of the artists, said that he had questioned the idea of depicting the Holocaust in comic books: “The Holocaust was real, people were tortured and murdered—was it appropriate to have Captain America come in and beat up all the Nazis and save everyone?” But he ultimately answered his own question: “If even one person started to think about the Holocaust because of a comic strip that I worked on, it was worthwhile.”

While the authors completed the book, the fight to get Dina Babbitt’s portraits back from Poland is still on. International lawyers and a coalition of artists have been committed in pressuring the museum to return them to Babbitt’s family, but the museum has been inflexible.

Josef Mengele forced Babbitt to paint those portraits—which ended up saving the artist’s and her mother’s lives. It’s startling that the museum won’t return them. But the comic creators and historians of We Spoke Out understand the significance of art and human dignity.

“In the world, you’re not just fighting evil,” Adams said. “You’re fighting stupidity and ignorance, too.”

Image courtesy of IDW Publishing/Yoe Books. Art by Joe Kubert. All DC comic artwork, its characters and related elements are trademarks of and copyright DC Comics or their respective owners

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On a Friday evening of February last year, Ruben Shimonov was waiting in his friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Everything was ready for the traditional Shabbat dinner to begin: The table was set, the food ready to be served. Now, it was time for the guests to come in.

What he had prepared was not an ordinary Shabbat dinner. Through a secret Facebook group, he and his friend Ramiz Rafailov had organized their first-ever Shabbat gathering for queer Jewish 20s and 30s with Sephardic and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) backgrounds in New York.

When he proposed the idea of hosting the dinner, Shimonov had no idea how many people would show up. About thirty people ended up coming; including some with a Persian background, some Iraqi, some originally from Azerbaijan. “There was a gap that needed to be filled,” Shimonov said in an interview. “This showed there was the desire to have a space where we could unapologetically be our full selves.”

Shimonov was born in Uzbekistan, and moved to the States with his parents as refugees seeking asylum when he was six. He was raised in Seattle in a Bukharian Jewish family. After moving to New York, he began working as a communal leader in organizations like the Queens College Hillel and the American Sephardi Federation.

He had recently joined the small Facebook group for Sephardic queer Jews, when he and his friends started wondering: “Where do we fit? Is there a place where we can bring our full selves? The answer was, ‘Not really.’” They felt that they could not fully belong to queer Jewish spaces—which are predominantly Ashkenazi—or to Sephardic synagogues and cultural spaces, where LGBTQ identities are often a taboo.

Shimonov, who is now 30, believes that whenever “you want change, you should make it yourself. I wrote in a post [in the Facebook group], ‘Maybe we can take this beautiful digital space to the next step and meet somewhere.’ . . . I started getting positive responses.”

That first dinner was so successful, that ever since he has organized similar gatherings on a monthly basis—each time in a different private home, always on Shabbat. Some participants said they felt as if they had regained possession of their Jewish roots without compromising their LGBTQ identity.

The Facebook group, which remains secret to protect the identities of its members, not all of whom are publicly out of the closet, has grown from fewer than 100 members last year to over 300. The group, which has now evolved into a grassroots organization, will gather at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center for its first weekend retreat this coming Friday. The Shabbat dinners and the retreat are both taking place thanks to the support of Moishe House, COJECO, OneTable, and Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Rebecca Davoudian, who lives in Great Neck, New York, and hosted one of the dinners, said that homosexuality is often a taboo in Sephardic communities. “It’s nice to give people a space where they can be Mizrahi and Sephardic and queer and Jewish.”

Another participant, Jonathan Cohen, felt similarly. “We’re a minority within the minority within the minority,” he said. Cohen’s family is originally from Iraq and Yemen. He recently moved back to New York after spending eight years in Israel; in Tel Aviv, he laughed, “half of the people are Mizrahi and gay. But when I moved to America, I wondered, ‘Who is my friends group going to be?’”

Cohen described the dinners as fun and intimate. Shimonov usually breaks the ice between the attendees, asking them to share their thoughts or memories on a specific concept or word.

“The Mizrahi identity is complex,” continued Cohen. “We’re not one people, we come from different countries and speak different languages. But being the ‘other’ unifies you. Seventy years ago we thought we’d lose our culture, but now we’re reviving it.”

Until a few years ago, Shimonov himself thought he could not merge his Bukharian and queer identities. But now he thinks differently.

“It’s difficult,” he said, “but many of us refuse to forego part of our identity for another. We are a composition of all these different tiles of the mosaic that makes us up. We want to hold on to all these different parts of our identity, because they’re beautiful.”

Photo from March 2018’s Shabbat dinner, courtesy Ruben Shimonov.

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Etai Shuchatowitz loves watching documentaries; but he also finds them hilariously self-serious. It’s only natural that he be a fan of mockumentaries, like Comedy Central’s Review. So one day after binge-watching Ken Burns, he decided to write his own documentary spoof series. It’s called Untold Genius and it’s a ten-episode web series on the tragicomic stories of ten celebrities whose careers are on the verge of collapse.

Shuchatowitz, originally from Boston, recently graduated from Yeshiva University and now, at 22, he’s working as a software engineer for BAMTech, a subsidiary of Disney, in New York. He’s never studied filmmaking. “I’ve always liked storytelling,” he told Jewcy, and he’s dabbled in comedy before.

Now, that dream may turn into reality, as he’s raising money to fund Untold Genius. Together with actor and producer Moshe Lobel, who appeared in HBO’s High Maintenance, he shot the pilot episode.

The first episode of Untold Genius follows the decline of Dwayne “Not The Rock” Johnson, a Vietnam War protest musician who makes a tragic decision that will forever change his career as a trumpet player. The characters of the future episodes include a Russian mathematician and a teenage popstar named Rapzilla. As the series will go forward, viewers will learn more about the narrator, Art Fisher, as well, in a parallel storyline. Shuchatowitz defined the show as “a story about a deluded idiot, who is so convinced that he’s making meaningful art that he’s going to ruin his life and the lives of people around him to make that a reality.”

“We had to learn everything as we went,” said the writer. Sometimes, they had to improvise. “We bought a toy trumpet so that we could take a picture of our character playing it, but it wasn’t shipped in time for the shooting,” he said. The producers looked at each other, not knowing what to do. So they decided to rewrite the script, creatively adding that the character did not allow anyone to take a picture of him with the trumpet.

The two creators recently created a Kickstarter campaign to get funding to produce the entire series. They’re close to reach the $6,000 goal, but they only have a few days left.

“Untold Genius is truly a labor of love,” said Shuchatowitz. “It’s a story I’ve been excited about before anybody knew about it, and it’s a story that continues to excite me as time goes on. I can’t wait to bring it to life.”

Photo courtesy Etai Shuchatowitz

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Maxwell Bauman is not running out of imagination. When he’s not creating some magical construction out of Lego, he writes outrageous, Jewish-inspired horror stories. Six of these stories have made it into his first published collection, titled The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook (Clash Books, 2017).

No, it’s not a literal cookbook. It’s an unpredictable mix of morbidly sexual, irreverent, at times hilarious narrative elements, manifestations of Bauman’s Jewish humor. This Cookbook may not rewrite any popular recipes, but it does rewrite some of the teachings and stories every nice Jewish boy is told at a young age.

Think of the Biblical episode of God manifesting itself to Moses through a burning bush. In Bauman’s story, the “bush” happens to be a Jewish woman’s pubic hair. She wakes up one morning to find her bush in flames. The pubic hair speaks: “I will open your womb only for the Junior Rabbi Kauffman.” The woman is torn between following the will of God and staying faithful to her gentile partner.

Bauman, 28 years old, was born and raised in the Bronx, but now lives in Massachusetts. He likes to describe himself as a “halfway-decent Jewish boy.” By day, he’s the editor in chief of a small literary magazine titled Door is a Jar. The morning we spoke on the phone, Bauman had just finished creating a black raven with Lego (You can see a photo in Bauman’s Twitter account, where he shares all sorts of Lego-related news).

Both of his parents are Jewish, but Bauman was not raised in a religious household. “I even protested having a Bar Mitzvah,” he said. “Because I didn’t want to lie and say I was going to dedicate myself to God and serve the community all for a dumb party.” This episode inspired one of the collection’s characters, who goes through a much-relatable bar-mitzvah crisis.

“I rewrote the stories many times,” he said. As he began writing the book, he adopted what’s known as the snowflake method, developing what was at first one joke into a larger picture.

In one story, that core gag is how the return of the Messiah interrupts a couple’s honeymoon is Martha’s Vineyard. The savior, however, turns out to be a disgusting, deformed man that does indeed raise the dead and turn them into a horrific army of zombie-like creatures. The book’s titular Anarchist Kosher Cookbook story is written as a list of instructions to create a golem to fight Neo-Nazis and anti-Semites and, why not, also get some late-night loving (“You can find the parts of old golems in the attic of any synagogue. It’ll be in the box labeled ‘Xmas Decorations’”).

Bauman has some brilliant ideas, albeit ones that are sometimes polluted with less hilarious, at times cheaper humor. In more than one instance, the narration goes on tangents that can detract from the core, more creative ideas. These passages may not contribute to the overall quality of the work, but with leviathans, dybbuks and Baphomitzvahs, the Cookbook will still leave you hungry for more stories.

Photo by Simone Somekh

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Imagine if the night of Purim you could walk into the home of Queen Esther. A drink in your hand—let’s say, a Huntsman… or even better, a HuntsHaman—you’d let her transport you into her sensual, mysterious world.

Maybe you’re in fifth-century B.C. Persia. Or maybe you’re in Trump-era New York City. It doesn’t really matter: let your imagination run wild…

A powerful and brave figure in the Jewish tradition, Esther will be at the center of an immersive performance taking place for two nights this week in Brooklyn, New York. FolksbieneRU, the Russian division of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (also affiliated with Genesis Philanthropy Group), has created this new interactive theatrical experience, House of Esther, as a creative way for New Yorkers to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim.

The eponymous heroine of the book of Esther is many things— seductress, regal queen, savior of the Jewish people. So this work might better be titled House of Esthers, given that Esther’s multifaceted nature is fractured into several entirely different people.

“The event explores the many faces of Esther,” said Lena Kushnir from the National Yiddish Theatre, explaining that the show will show six different characters inspired by Queen Esther, who will each emerge as a different strong, sexy, modern woman. Think of it as the Jewish answer to Sleep No More, the hit interactive experience that’s been running in New York since 2011 (House of Esther is content to run for two days, coinciding with the beginning and end of the holiday). 

Audience members will explore the space at their own pace and dive into a series of  thought-provoking, sexually-charged scenes involving the six Esthers. At the end of the performance, the space will transform into a club, with a bar selling Purim-inspired drinks, such as Queen’s Landing and Paper Cut.

So if you’re tired of feeling like Purim is a holiday for kids, it’s time to have a definitively more adult experience.

House of Esther is playing at The Paper Box on Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. Entry is 21+, tickets are selling for 25$ online, 30$ at the door.

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Remember that time Jerry Seinfeld was kicked off a plane? If you know all 180 Seinfeld episodes by heart, you must recall the flight attendant asking him to leave the aircraft:

“The pilot doesn’t want you on this plane.”

Jerry protests: “He can’t just throw me off the plane!”

“Yes he can, if he has cause to believe a passenger will be a disturbance,” replies the flight attendant.

Does she legally have a case to remove Jerry from the plane? Or does Jerry have a case against the airline for being kicked off? If you’ve ever watched any episode of Seinfeld and asked yourself these kind of questions, now there’s an entire website dedicated to the analysis of the legal issues from the show. It’s aptly called “Seinfeld Law,” and it was created by four Manhattan-based law students.

It all started off as idea of Aharon and Zachary Schrieber, 27-year old twins from New Jersey. Both are currently in their last year of law school—the former at New York University, the latter at Columbia—and love Seinfeld. After toying with the idea for months, they made it happen and launched the site. Their schoolmates love the project, as well as many fellow Seinfeld fans they found on Reddit and Twitter.

“We started watching Seinfeld while in our sophomore year of high school. We’d run from the school bus into our basement every night to watch it,” Aharon told Jewcy. “Watching the show is like reading a great novel, or the Bible—each time, you can see new nuances or jokes. You’re never really done with it.”

The four students dive into episodes of the show and analyze potential legal issues that the characters face in them. “Seinfeld is known to be the show about nothing,” said Aharon. Zachary convened: “It’s about what happens in the characters’ day-to-day life, and that’s where most legal issues come up. Other shows don’t deal with these little things.”

In the blog, they discuss whether a store owner is allowed to reject a payment made in legal tender; whether it’s possible to claim back an engagement gift if the receiving couple breaks up; and whether it’s legal to send pornography through the mail. (Yes, all of the above happens on Seinfeld.)

Of course, some laws have changed since the show aired in the nineties. The contract of carriage of United Airlines—which would likely make Jerry entitled to a compensation after being removed from the flight, I learned from the blog—has definitely changed since then. But the idea that anyone can learn some useful legal insights with the help of a popular sitcom is fascinating.

“We don’t want [the blog] to be too high brow, too legal,” said Aharon. “It’s not only for people who are in law school.”

The group of students is considering expanding their idea to other television shows. The characters from Friends and How I Met Your Mother could make guest appearances on the site in the future. The twins even hope that in the long run they could turn this project into a book.

In the meantime, what of the infamous finale— should the gang have actually gone to jail for refusing to help a carjacking victim?

We’ll wait and see.

Image via “Seinfeld Law”

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For almost 14 consecutive years, Idan Raichel was on tour. Alongside with his motley crew of singers and musicians, he traveled across the globe, performing for large and small audiences, bringing life each night to his unique mix of Middle Eastern sounds and lyrics. While on his most recent tour, the now 40-year-old Israeli musician received a video-call from one of his daughters. “Papa,” she said. “Are you angry at me? Why are you not coming home?”

Raichel was taken aback. For him, that was a moment of truth; he understood that while he was out there performing, someone else was paying the price for it. So after completing the tour, he returned to his home in Tel Aviv, and began a new routine, dominated by his daughters’ needs (“Every morning, I prepare shoko for them”), their kindergarten, the coffee shops in Tel Aviv and the people who bring them to life.

Nine months later, he’s ready to hit the road again. But this time, it’s without his band, the Project, with whom he created some of his greatest hits, including his break-through song, Boee, which featured a blend of whispered Ethiopian vocals and a lightly-tapped percussions.

When I called Idan Raichel to discuss his impending North American tour, he was at his parents’ house, on the countryside, just a 20-minute car ride away from the chaos of Tel Aviv. It was 5 p.m. in Israel and I could hear the chanting of birds; Raichel was taking a walk outdoors.

Going solo was both a relief and a challenge, he explained. The attention is now cast solely on him, which translates into more pressure, but also the chance to create a more intimate dynamic between performer and audience; Raichel wants his new show to feel like an evening in his own living room. “I won’t be surprised if the audience asks questions during the concert—or even asks me to play a song.”

During his time off, he still took the time to release a new album, Idan Raichel – Piano – Songs. It’s the result of his last tour and his transition into solo artistry; it’s a moment for himself and, of course, his piano. Leading the publication of the record, there’s a new song, Lisloach Ve’Lishkoach (To Forgive and to Forget), an introspective, delicate piano ballad which describes a cathartic moment of pause. “It’s time for cleansing, time for self reckoning,” he sings.

Raichel speaks of self-reflection, but his new music is also a result of changes in the world around him. “I felt like there was a lot of anger in the streets of Israel. It’s the same in the United States. Everything is so fast, everyone is telling you what they think to your face… there is no politeness, no class. It’s too much.” The song was also inspired by a tragedy that hit very close to home: one of his good friends has been paralyzed for eleven years after being wounded during his army service in Israel. “He can’t move a finger,” said Raichel, who tried to write the song from his friend’s perspective.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to remove Israel, including those streets filled with anger, from Raichel’s music. He is Israeli. And because of that, for the past decade, his shows abroad have been relentlessly targeted by the BDS movement, which advocates for a boycott of everything—products, artists, academics—made in Israel.

Raichel is a gentleman.

Whenever protesters camp outside of the venue where he’s performing, he visits them, tries to strike up a conversation, invites them inside. If it’s cold, he offers them tea; sometimes he even gives out his personal phone number, inviting them to call him, discuss their point of view, hear his perspective. (Most times, they decline. Only in Amsterdam, recently, someone took his email and reached out to him).

“When people stand in the middle of February outside of my concert calling for my boycott, and it’s minus zillion degrees, I must say—I have respect for them,” he said. “I invite them to ask questions, if they want to create a dialogue. I invite them to Tel Aviv and Ramallah, to come and see it with their own eyes. I don’t take it personally.”

Raichel is no stranger to critiques. Most commonly, he’s been criticized for cultural appropriation. “Cultural….what?” he asked me, not understanding my question. I explained to him the meaning of the term.

“Let me give you an example,” he said. “Let’s say… there is a farmer who wants to grow the perfect tomato: with a beautiful red color, with the richest and sweetest taste. He finds the right temperature to grow it. And then, I come in, take the tomato, chop it, add it to a cucumber, make a salad out of it, and use it as a side dish to my schnitzel.”

I could easily imagine the horrified look in the farmer’s face. But Idan Raichel has made his point: “I’m not trying to make Ethiopian music—I’m making something Israeli that is influenced by the Ethiopian community. I’m taking the sounds of minorities into the mainstream. We were the first to bring Palestinian, Moroccan, Yemenite chants into the Israeli mainstream.”

A rabbi once criticized him for including biblical texts in his lyrics; he thought Raichel was “manipulating” the Bible into pop music. A day later, another rabbi praised him for the same reason, telling him that when people wonder about the origin of the lyrics, they might discover where they come from and learn something from the Bible they did not know before. “It’s a matter of perspective.”

As we were about to end our phone conversation, I asked him where his walk had led him.

“I got to the old house of my grandmother. She passed away, but we kept her house for the family. I wanted to see how it’s changed,” Raichel said. “I grew up here.”

I left Idan to his memories, eager to find him again in a few days—this time, in New York, where he’s performing on February 21st.

Photo by Eldad Rafaeli 

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After Donald Trump won the election, Kristen Plylar-Moore felt demoralized and fearful of what was to come. For months, she had been writing songs to cope with that fear—until she had gathered enough material for an entire live show. The music project was called Revival. “I wanted to give people a sense of hope, even despite what we were facing,” she recalled. 

Now, those songs about healing, spirituality and moral issues may become one studio album. Or so Kristen and her folk-rock band are hoping.

The musicians of Revival have created an Indiegogo campaign for their friends and fans to support their project, and they’re already well on their way to their goal of $6,700.

“Support spiritual folk-rock music for love and justice!” reads the campaign slogan.

It all began in the fall of 2015, when composer Plylar-Moore was feeling overwhelmed by Trump’s presidential campaign. “The political rhetoric was becoming intense, particularly towards minority groups and immigrants,” she said. Kristen was born in San Antonio, Texas, where she was raised Catholic. Later in life, she was drawn to Judaism. As a kid, she had always considered spirituality and music as ways to advocate for social justice. So she gathered a group of people—her wife Julia Ostrov (who also does Jewish prayer-leading professionally), a soprano, Lea Kalisch, alto, and three other instrumentalists, and created Revival.

https://vimeo.com/253382414

Some of the songs are rooted in Hebrew biblical texts, such as the track “Tent Revival,” which was inspired by some passages from the book of Isaiah: “It’s time to revive, raise your tent to the sky/ Drive your stakes deep, draw your ropes wide/ Let the people in, it’s time.”

Other songs, “celebrate the divine in all of us,” said Kristen. One song is based on the story of Susanna, from the apocryphal Book of Daniel. Susanna is a Jewish woman who is falsely accused of promiscuity; at the end of the story, the truth emerges. “It’s an empowering song for women, it’s particularly resonating in these times.”

The lyrics are “morally conscious,” with themes ranging from immigration to LGBTQ empowerment, feminism and climate change, and help envision the world that the members of the ensemble dream of living in. The ultimate goal, Kristen explained, is rooted in the Jewish concept of tikkun olam— repairing the world.

“It’s necessary, but it can be hard and despairing,” she said. “There is so much we’re going up against… Music plays an important role in revitalizing ourselves.”

So far, they’ve performed the show in what they call “progressive spiritual spaces” in New York. These include small theaters, recreation centers and synagogues, such as Congregation Beit Simchat Torah and the 14 Street Y.

When asked about the risk of targeting a narrow, alike-thinking audience, Kristen said she believes music is “ought to be accessible” to people with different political views. “Apart from some extreme elements… I think most people are not that far apart. None of the songs put down other people. They express the ideas that we should be good to each other and that there is room for all of us.”

Kristen, who as a Texas native knows plenty of conservative people, believes that if they heard her music, they would have a positive response. “It’s not about politics. It’s about values.”

Foreground, left to right: Lea Kalisch, Julia Ostrov. Background, left to right: Ugene Romashov, Samantha Gillogly. By Harold Levine

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