In 1979, as Iran was in the throes of a violent revolution, my mom, my sister, and I came to the U.S. on a day’s notice. We went from couch-surfing with relatives in Tel Aviv to moving in with my grandmother in suburban Los Angeles, until my dad finally fled Iran to join us here. I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life, and I’ve never returned to Iran. But as one of nearly 140,000 Iranian Americans—and 50,000 Iranian Jews—in Southern California, I have stayed tied to my homeland through food (I’m currently working on a cookbook of recipes by Iranian Jewish matriarchs), and music.

Life in Los Angeles can’t not be a mishmash: I have birria with my matzah (and dip it in consomé), and Taiwanese noodles are as much a taste of home to me as my mom’s gondi. Music is no different: Once I graduated from the alt-rock sounds of KROQ, I’d drive around listening to Superestrella, the local Spanish pop station, with a Spanish-English dictionary in the passenger seat so I could look up unfamiliar words at red lights. Persian music was my parents’ music, and I was a rebellious third-culture kid who favored Tori Amos over Mahasti. But you can bet that at every bat mitzvah, every wedding, as soon as certain songs started playing, my hands would shoot up, and I’d run to the dance floor.

Viguen—“Baba Karam”

In the early ’80s, as new immigrants finding our way, what grounded us the most were family gatherings. Whether it was Passover seders, our strange takes on Thanksgiving meals, or just a simple dinner with family, getting together with my aunts and cousins created that rare space where we could speak our native language and be fully understood.

Now, here’s the thing about Iranians, in my experience: It’s perfectly normal, at even a casual gathering, for everyone to get up and start dancing in the middle of the living room. Hear a certain beat and we all break into gher—that near-subconscious groove of the hips essential to Persian dance. At my Auntie Mohtaram’s house, this was also the moment when her husband, Nasser Khan as we called him, would pull out a tombak and join in with his own percussive drumming.

“Baba Karam” is a classic Persian song with a slow-like-molasses beat that has moved people to gher for decades. This version, by the beloved white-coiffed Armenian Iranian singer Viguen, is my favorite.

Bijan Mofid—“Avaz, Agha Moosheh” from Shahr-e Ghesse

We did a lot of road-tripping as a young family in a new country—up to Sacramento and Yosemite, or out to Las Vegas. And the soundtrack was always cassette recordings of musicals by the great Iranian playwright and theater director Bijan Mofid. His most famous, Shahr-e Ghesse (City of Stories), appears to be a children’s story populated by singing animals—but this avant-garde show was actually a dangerous act of resistance, exploring the clash of Iran’s traditional values with rapidly approaching modernity.

I didn’t understand all that as a child, but I definitely picked up on the sad, discomfiting undertones—including the heartbreak of the Mouse character on this song. I connected to it as a small child, and I still tear up listening to his squeaky, high-pitched voice.

Morteza—“Del Beh Tou Bastam”

My bat mitzvah was a great party. I recall a delicious spread of herbed rices and grilled meats, cocktails flowing freely, and a dance floor filled with family who’d come from Chicago, the East Coast, London, and Israel.

There is no line between pop stars and banquet singers in the Iranian community. My bat mitzvah singer was Morteza, one of the foremost Persian pop stars/wedding singers of the late 1980s. This song, with its gher-inducing tombak and violin intro, pulled the whole party—kids, grannies, and everyone in between—into a multi-generational dance party for the ages.

Alabina—“Alabina”

Los Angeles Iranian Jews’ musical tastes aren’t limited to Persian music, but there is a very specific mix of genres and nationalities that make up a typical Iranian Jewish party playlist. Obviously Persian dance songs reign supreme, but you’ll also find the Turkish singer Tarkan’s “Kiss Kiss,” Gipsy Kings’ “Bamboleo,” Omer Adam’s “Tel Aviv,” the Egyptian pop classic “Nour El Ein” by Amr Diab, any Ricky Martin banger, and of course, “Despacito.” Alabina brings this world of influences together in one band.

Led by an Israeli vocalist of Egyptian and Moroccan Jewish descent, and backed by a band of Spanish-speaking Gypsies from Montpellier, France, Alabina performs in Hebrew, Arabic, French, Spanish, and English, and the band’s live performances bring out the Los Angeles Middle Eastern constituency (Iranians included) in droves.

Omid Walizadeh—“Asemoon”

For years, I lived a double life. My friends from school would not have recognized the brainy, quiet girl they knew running to the dance floor in heels to get down with cousins, aunties, and even her own mother to unabashedly saccharine Persian pop songs.

So my first visit to Discostan blew my mind. At a dark, divey bar called Footsies, tucked away in Los Angeles’s Cypress Park neighborhood, DJs spun a mix of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian songs. Blond hipsters sidled past the pool table to the tiny dance floor to groove to the very songs that played at our bat mitzvahs decades ago. The decidedly uncool soundtrack of my brown girl family life was suddenly hip!

Omid Walizadeh frequently spins at Discostan events, and I can’t get enough of his modern mixes of nostalgic sounds.

Galeet Dardashti—“My Flower (The Bride)”

A guiding principle of my work is to fight Ashkenormatism—the idea that Eastern European Jewish traditions are the only Jewish traditions. So many people know about the Yiddish language, but there are countless Judeo-Iranian dialects, including Kashi, the Judeo-Kashani language my grandparents spoke. During a series of virtual presentations from the Jewish Language Project, Galeet Dardashti performed this song in Judeo-Isfahani. It’s the wailing plea of a young bride to remain in her father’s home, and feels like an auditory time capsule from my grandmother’s generation.

Backed by an estimable Iranian Jewish musical heritage—her father is a cantor, her grandfather was a renowned singer of Persian classical music—and a PhD in anthropology, Dardashti brings traditional music to a new generation. Her latest album, Monajat, blends recordings of her grandfather singing traditional Yom Kippur prayers with her own vocals.

Adja Pekkan—“Viens Dans Ma Vie”

I was recently at a potluck dinner for “creative, artsy, blacksheepy Iranian babes,” and amid a playlist by one of our hosts, Rose Ghavami, aka DJ Rose Knows, was a French song with very eastern riffs and a definite ’70s sound. I couldn’t tell you a thing about this song, but I instantly recognized it from when I was a kid.

It turns out it’s a 1977 song by Turkish pop star Ajda Pekkan. Surely it was on one of the many bootleg cassettes my dad would ship to my mom in the U.S. while he was still in Iran. A core memory I didn’t know I even had—this French song from Turkey that was popular in Iran over 45 years ago—made its way back to me in a backyard in Lincoln Heights at a dinner for misfit Iranian women like myself.

Hooshmand Aghili—“Vatan”

As part of my culinary research, I attended a ladies’ lunch this spring in the West Los Angeles home of a Jewish woman from the Kurdish city of Sanandaj. All of the guests were in their 70s and up, and sported blown-out hair, manicures, and the chicest outfits. They chatted and gossiped in a mix of Persian and Judeo-Kurdish Aramaic as they took tea and Kurdish Passover sweets, then beer and cocktails, then a spring feast crowned with huge platters of fragrant herbed rice. After lunch, they gathered in the living room and to my delight, started singing.

One woman with a professional-level voice belted out a song I’d never heard, entitled “Vatan,” the Persian word for home. The lyrics loosely translate to, “This city is beautiful, I know. Its colors are bright and its waters clear, I know. It’s like a picture postcard, I know. But it’s not home, it’s not home, it’s not home.” Forced diasporic life in one verse.

Shervin Hajipour—“Baraye”

Last September, I sat, astonished, as images of Iran’s mass protests erupted all over my Instagram. For the past few years, social media has offered me a window into contemporary Iran—chic cafe culture, bustling Tehran city life, old men selling handicrafts in tiny shops. Now, it showed me courageous women fighting the same oppressive regime that forced my family out of the country so many decades ago. “Baraye,” young singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour’s somber ballad of freedom, quickly became the anthem of the movement, and captured hearts all around the world. I cried the first dozen or so times I heard “Baraye,” and over a year later, it still makes me emotional.

Chloe Pourmorady Ensemble—“Elohai Neshama”

On October 8, 2023, I hosted an intimate event in my living room spotlighting Iranian Jewish culture. This was supposed to be a night of joyful cultural exchange, with delicious home-cooked food and a performance by L.A.-based vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Chloe Pourmorady. But after the brutal attacks on Israel the night before, everyone felt shaken and frightened for what might come next. For a moment we considered canceling. Then Chloe—whose work blends her Iranian Jewish roots with a diverse set of global influences—said, “We will hold each other up and hold space for healing.” Her music did just that.

“Elohai Neshama” is a daily prayer of gratitude for the purity of our individual souls. That night, while it couldn’t fix anything, Chloe’s ethereal rendition was a timely reminder of our shared humanity and a needed moment of unity.

The post Tannaz Sassooni’s Diaspora Jukebox Playlist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The house from the old photograph. The house my mother once called home.

For a moment, the curtain seems to flutter and everything else stands still. I am not overcome with emotion or moved to tears; I simply feel this jolt, and a little voice inside shouting, “Give me back our stuff.”

The real “stuff,” of course, cannot be preserved under glass. Along with a few gold coins hidden in a jar of cold cream and a box of photographs, the beating heart of the family escaped with my mother in 1939, on Kindertransport #8.

While more than 1 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust, my mother, Anita Heufeld, was one of 10,000 rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief). Just short of her 14th birthday, she became an unaccompanied minor, fleeing for safe haven in England. Her parents and most of her extended family remained behind and were killed. She never went back.

My trip to Fischach was instigated when the Jewish Museum of Augsburg launched an exhibition on what had happened to the Kindertransport children from the region after they escaped. The curators wanted to include my mother’s story, and I surprised myself by deciding to travel to the opening of the exhibition, accompanied by my husband and my nephew. I wanted to honor my bracingly intelligent mom, fondly called Ni, who had emerged from her disrupted childhood remarkably intact, running her dress-making business and our family with aplomb. I was also goaded by the resurgence of white supremacy in the U.S. and Europe, and by a president who gleefully incited hatred in a way that my immigrant parents would have recognized with horror, betraying the American ideals they had taught us to value.

While my mother did not hide the past, she also did not dwell on it. But in the mid-1980s, when she was about 60, Ni agreed to an oral history and told us about the close-knit family she had left behind. We learned that Aunt Mina loved growing strawberries; that my mother’s parents were very happy together, their twin beds were pushed together, “no space between”; that my grandmother Erna wrote skits and my grandfather Samuel grew red carnations. Samuel was the respected secular head of the Jewish community, who “was just as anxious that other people should be safe as that we should be safe,” Ni said. When her children grew up to became social justice activists, my mother claimed us as the inheritors of the values her father had embodied.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fischach had 853 inhabitants. That included 127 Jews. Today there are none. Yet in our absence, a curious phenomenon has emerged: Small committees, comprised largely of non-Jewish older women, have made themselves guardians of Jewish history and cultural memory in towns around southern Germany. In Fischach, the local history committee of the Historical Synagogue Locations Network is headed by retired schoolteacher Anne-Marie Fendt and a deputy to the mayor, Marianne Koos. “It was my mother who told me what she remembered about the Jewish families,” Anne-Marie recalled. “I think of her as an empathetic woman … She always called your grandparents’ home the ‘Heufeld Haus,’ When I started school, I passed the house every day.”

Marianne, who moved to Fischach as a young adult, grew up as part of a new generation that held their parents accountable for being “the perpetrator generation.” Her interest in history drew her to the committee. “When you hear the stories of the families who lived here, and you know the houses where they laughed and loved, had children, and thought they would live their whole lives there because they were Germans, like everyone else in Fischach—I think that changed my way of thinking a bit, it became more personal. It was no longer just German history; it also became my history.”

As the Fischach women showed us around the village, my mother’s memories took physical shape: the former Jewish school next to the building that had once housed the synagogue; the corner bakery where the Jewish families had taken their Sabbath challah to be baked, and where each child could recognize the family loaf by how it was braided. And the awareness, too, revealed in the census maps that Anne-Marie had constructed, that this community had not been ghettoized, that the Jews had lived side by side with their non-Jewish neighbors.

The incremental rise of Nazism put an end to that existence. In May of 1932, the Nazis came to Fischach, plastered the town with anti-Jewish propaganda, and beat up a young man for tearing a poster off the synagogue wall. In 1933, the Jews were tossed off the city council and the volunteer fire department.

Even if townspeople had better angels, most fell in line. Jews were ousted from the town chorus and the garden club. Children were banned from the soccer team, and then from attending school. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the Nazis incited open warfare on the Jewish population, destroying synagogues and businesses, the Jews of Fischach—stripped of most livelihoods and restricted from travel—could neither feed their families nor flee. And then, all the Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 60 were arrested and hauled off to KZ Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Among them were my mother’s father and her brother, Walter.

Through the intercession of the town mayor and my grandfather’s tenacity, or perhaps simply by happenstance, the men were released by December. But from that moment on, my mother’s mother made it her mission to get the children out. Walter left first, when relatives in Great Britain arranged for his emigration. When a neighbor told my grandmother about the planned Kindertransport, she wrote a letter requesting spaces for my mother and her cousin Rudi.

Of all the details in Ni’s story, I always linger on her departure. Her tough and smart mother prepared her for the trip: hiding pieces of jewelry in her belongings so she would have something to sell if she was hungry; trying to fill her with all the information a growing girl might need; making meringues with whipped cream for her last dinner at home—the dessert my mother would love for the rest of her life.

But in the end, it was her beloved father who saw her onto the train full of fleeing Jewish girls.

My mother didn’t come to the train station with us, she stayed outside the house and waved goodbye. I had a little navy coat and a hat with red ribbons down the back, and a navy-blue dress I had made myself, with red buttons. And on the platform in Munich my father checked me in with the leader of the transport. And he put his hands on my head gently, blessing me, and he cried, and he kissed me goodbye, and he put me on the train. And that was the last time I ever saw him. And there was a train full of children. And there was a platform full of parents, all weeping.

The End of the Road

As one of the final stops on my Fischach journey, the Fischach committee women led me up a little gravel road to the old Jewish cemetery, resting behind a locked iron gate on a tree-shaded hill above the village. The committee played a key role in restoring the cemetery and lovingly oversees its maintenance.

My great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, is buried here, but my great-grandmother Amalie isn’t resting beside him in the space reserved for her. Instead, at age 79, she was among the village’s last 10 Jewish elders who were rounded up in August 1942 and carted off to their deaths at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Kim at the cemetery where her great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, was buried. Courtesy of Kim Fellner.

Fifty-six younger people from the village, including my grandparents, had been deported earlier that year, sent to Piaski, a prison town near Lublin, Poland. As best we know, they were all taken out to Piaski’s Jewish cemetery and shot—except for my grandfather, who was sent to nearby Trawniki as part of a work detail. By winter, he too would be dead, shot in another mass murder, dumped in another unmarked grave.

Decades later, my mother’s brother would return to Fischach and, on Amalie’s side of the gravestone, carve the names of those in the family who had been killed: Amalie. Samuel and Erna. Samuel’s two brothers and their wives. His sister Mina, only 36 when she was deported, well-remembered as the proprietor of the family kiosk, from whom many villagers had purchased their spirits, cigars, chocolate, tea and coffee. And my mother’s little cousin Rolf, deported from Munich to Theresienstadt along with his parents in June 1942 and killed at Auschwitz. My mother, her brother, and their cousin Rudi, who escaped on another Kindertransport for boys, were the only immediate family to survive.

Truths and Reconciliations

My mother recalled going to the movies in England in 1945 and seeing the ghastly first newsreel footage of the concentration camps, with their mass graves and skeletal survivors. She never looked at the footage again. “I never let myself specifically think about the people I knew going through that,” Ni told us. “I always include them in with all the other people. What happened to my parents is never far removed from my consciousness. But I have never allowed myself to individualize them in the event. That would have been intolerable.”

No wonder that I too insulated myself by seeing the murder of my family as part of a grim collective. But as I returned to the place of their existence, I was able to fully reclaim them as my own, and to confront the difficult knowledge of my grandparents’ final months on earth. Standing in that graveyard, I recognized for the first time that my family had constituted the largest grouping of victims from that village, and that they had mostly been in their prime, living full and nuanced lives, and so much younger than I had imagined them.

Sifting through that past with Anne-Marie and Marianne, we acknowledged that our current moment has discomfiting echoes of the history that had brought us together. As in Nazi Germany, the bluster about national greatness, comingled with a narrative of racial supremacy, is like a magician’s sleight of hand; what we are ostensibly seeing and hearing about current emergencies distract us from the concurrent erosion of civil rights and democracy. We are always warned not to make these comparisons, that doing so always undervalues the unique evil of the Holocaust and Hitler, while overstating the evil of the event or person to which they are compared. But real parallels reside in the sneaky accretion of particulars—from propaganda and dehumanization to inciting people with fear and hatred, to bullying and punitive legal action, to the stripping of rights and freedom, to acts of brutality and murder. We can only hope that we have more success than those thinkers and journalists who opposed the onset of Nazism if we want to save our democratic values, our neighbors, the people we love, and ourselves.

But Marianne and Anne-Marie, thoughtful and willing to engage, gave me hope. They reminded me that history does not always evolve as the tormentors of the moment might wish—and that the children of the perpetrator generation and the children of the victims can find themselves on the same side of the struggle a generation or two later.

“I learned a lot, and like you, had a lot to think about,” Marianne wrote me after our visit. “What would I have done if I had lived at those times? I know for sure that I never would have been one of those Nazis! But what about being a coward? Saying nothing, doing nothing…. Maybe our generation isn’t responsible for the past, but we are responsible for the future.”

Like them, I know which side I’m on. And taking a stand is not someone else’s responsibility; it’s our own.

The post Coming Home to the Holocaust appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This poses a problem not just for the city but also for those who want to create the broadest and most complete understanding of Jewish heritage.

As the cradle of the Jewish history in America, New York City, and especially the Lower East Side, represents that breadth. Advances in literature, comedy, café life, politics, and labor can all be traced to the Jewish experience here. The city’s popular culture—from Fiddler on the Roof to Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld—has mainstreamed a nostalgic version of “schmaltzy” New York culture as a wellspring of American culture.

Yet all this heritage hasn’t drawn Jewish heritage tourists in large numbers—a predicament that reflects a profound shift in Jewish heritage tourism over the past few decades.

In the mid-1970s, in the wake of the blockbuster TV series Roots, people rushed to participate in destination travel around the world in search of their heritage. Cities began looking to tourism, including heritage tourism, as an alternative economic engine for their deindustrializing urban economies.

The United States, which provides the greatest number of heritage tourists worldwide, shows how big this trend was. The U.S. State Department reported the number of passports issued grew from 7 to 113 million between 1989 and 2013, an extraordinary 16-fold increase in a quarter of a century.

But all these passports didn’t help New York. To the contrary, the passport surge showed that Jewish Americans were leaving the country in search of their heritage. And New York City lacked what many Jewish Americans wanted to visit: Holocaust sites.

This shift in sensibilities first drew attention at a 1999 conference in New York. The conference had been called to commemorate the quarter-century anniversary of Irving Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history World of Our Fathers (1976), which chronicled the heyday of Yiddishkeit and Jewish socialism among the millions of Jewish immigrants who peopled the Lower East Side after 1880.

At the event, the critic Kenneth Walzer noted a troubling new consensus about the shifting terrain of Jewish heritage: “Yiddishkeit, socialism, and Jewish labor have been displaced by the new centrality of the Holocaust, Israel, and new forms of Jewish particularity.” The historian Peter Novak attributed this new focus to an increased Jewish self-conscious commitment to witness the Holocaust in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War.

Since then, other scholarship and my own travels around the world for a book on Jewish heritage and tourism have confirmed the truth that a nationalist redemptive Holocaust narrative has come to dominate Jewish heritage tourism. Cities such a Budapest, Berlin, Krakow and Warsaw are hot destinations that can sate Jewish appetites for Holocaust remembrance.

The irony is that New York’s Jewish history, while broad and varied, has heritage institutions that for all their strengths don’t match the moment.

Today, the City has three major Jewish museums, but its oldest, the Jewish Museum, is an art museum far removed from the Lower East Side. Founded in 1904, since 1947 it has been located in the former home of the banking titan Felix Warburg on the Upper East Side at 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue. While it displays its vast collection of fine art, Judaica, folk art, and ceremonial artifacts to depict Jewish culture and identity around the world, the Museum primarily focuses on Jewish artists, many of whom are New Yorkers of the contemporary era.

The two other major Jewish museums do address Jewish history more directly, though again, with special attention to the New York experience and limited attention to the long and worldwide story of Jewish heritage. Both emerged as part of the major growth of Jewish heritage at the end of the twentieth century. One, the Jewish History Center, opened in 2000 on 16th Street. It is home to five partner Jewish research institutions—the American Jewish Historical Society, the Yeshiva University Museum, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. But the Center is less a museum than a major site for historical research.

Each institution within the Center mounts small temporary exhibits. And these exhibit spaces, in a nod to demand, do tend to draw more upon the German and Polish historical archives of the institutions than on records for the history of Jews in New York. Exhibits hosted by the American Jewish Historical Society, often in conjunction with another Center institution like Yeshiva’s Museum, are the exception. They address themes in Jewish history and occasionally detail Jewish heritage in New York. But despite the high quality of the programming, the site is not a major stop on the heritage trail.

Neither is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located on Orchard Street. At first glance, it would seem to make the ideal center for Jewish heritage tourism. Founded by two Jewish women, Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson, with strong senses of their own heritage, the Tenement Museum is however, by design, a museum dedicated to the story of American immigrants. A series of rooms have been outfitted to reflect how individual families of particular ethnic groups including the Irish, the Germans, Jews, and Italians lived in the tenement during different eras. The museum’s cause is not Jewish heritage per se, though the framework adds an illuminating comparative perspective.

Would a direct appeal to interest in the Holocaust work in New York? For tourists seeking sacred ground for a ritual of mourning and remembrance, the answer is a frustrating no. The Museum of Jewish Heritage, opened in 1997 and located in Battery Park, has a focus reflected in the first part of its title: “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.” The museum’s core exhibit is principally dedicated to the story of the Shoah. But this museum has struggled to turn a profit and match the crowds that visit the uptown Jewish Museum and the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum. Its 41,000 walk-up visitors per year are one-quarter the number who visit the Tenement Museum and the Jewish Museum.

Beyond the museums, the staple of Jewish heritage tourism in New York remains the walking tour. But such tours in the Lower East Side stick to the Tenement Museum’s broader focus on immigration. To be sure, Jewish themed tours exist. The Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy advertises a roster of nine different tours, but during the eight months between April and November 2016, they advertised public walking tours on just 11 days. In contrast, the Chassidic Discovery Center in Brooklyn offers daily—except on the Sabbath—bus and walking tours of its specific Jewish New York experience: the Chabad synagogue, a mikvah (ritual bath), a matzo factory, and a Torah scribe/repairs shop.

Joyce Gold, described by CNN as the “doyenne of walking tours in New York,” typically offers about 20 public walking tours each year, only one of which (offered each fall and spring) on Jewish Colonial Manhattan is Jewish. And so forth. In sum, Jewish tours are few, and the trend finds them increasingly folded into the kinds of edutainment tours about moguls, scamps, artists, and food lore that can win guides a favorable TripAdvisor review.

In the last decade, I took several tours with Big Onion Walking Tours, whose president Seth Kamil legitimately claims it to be “New York City’s premier walking-tour company.” The company leads over 2,000 tours a year for upwards of 40,000 customers, offering a “rotating roster of thirty history-based neighborhood tours.” A few include Jewish history sites, but only one, “Jewish Lower East Side,” has Jewish heritage as a focus. Most of Big Onion’s LES tours begin in Kleindeutschland, the one-time German immigrant area, and move on to Little Italy, Chinatown, and then northward to the Jewish rialto on Second Avenue.

Others reverse the order and begin at the northern end of the area near Astor Place. Both starts allowed guides to reference the earlier history of the Irish and German immigrants, with stops at the site of the notorious Five Points Irish slum visited by Dickens or the site of the Astor Place Riots of 1849. The Italian, German, Irish, Chinese and other immigrant sites are interspersed with old Jewish sites.

It was not always so. When Kamil began giving tours in 1990, clients wanted to learn about Yiddishkeit and the life of the Lower East Side; twenty years later, this history was eclipsed by interest in the Holocaust, about which the Lower East Side has little to say. Big Onion’s Jewish tour business has now been reduced to about 15 tours a year, 20 percent of what it had once been. As of 2013, the “Original” Big Onion Walking Tour, “Immigrant New York,” had once again become the bread-and-butter of Kamil’s business.

Kamil roots New York’s declining Jewish heritage tourism to the opening up of tourism in eastern and central Europe after 1989. As part of the rise of Holocaust tourism, third- and fourth-generation American Jews identify with the Holocaust, not the Lower East Side, as the core Jewish heritage experience. Increasing numbers want to “go back” to homelands in which grandparents and great-grandparents perished or from which they fled.

Remembrance though has become a religious experience and Holocaust tourism commodified, a ritual of atonement. As important as this is, the focus on concentration camps and memorial sites narrows Jewish identity to a devastating moment in time and space, ignoring the long, lived history of a vibrant Jewish culture.

Kamil’s tourists commonly ask to meet Holocaust survivors in the neighborhood. While measuring his words carefully, Kamil playfully echoes this view.

“If the Germans had invaded Brooklyn and established a concentration camp there,” he quips, “I’d be making a fortune.”

The post Why Don’t American Jews Search for Their Heritage in New York City? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kubrick was, according to Frederic Raphael, who co-wrote the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), “known to have said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents.” Jewish by birth through both his mother, Sadie Gertrude Perveler, and his father, Jacob (also known as Jack or Jacques) Kubrick, the director was given by his parents a very typical first name for Jews born in that era. In addition, he steadfastly stuck to using that name in an industry where fellow Jews—at least the actors with whom he worked—had frequently changed them.

Born in 1928, Kubrick grew up in the heavily Jewish West Bronx, surrounded by Jewish neighbors and immigrants. The Bronx was, at that time, home to 250,000 Jews, from which Kubrick drew his early circle of childhood friends. His maternal grandmother spoke Yiddish; Kubrick adored Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), set in Rockaway Beach in Queens, identifying with the little boy, Joe, the film’s protagonist. The language of that film, and the tastes and smells it conjured up, were those of Kubrick’s childhood in the 1930s and 1940s.

However, as an assimilated American-Jewish family, the Kubricks were not religious. They practiced little, if any, Judaism. Jacob had changed his own Hebrew name to the more cosmopolitan Jack/Jacques. When asked once by an interviewer, “Did you have a religious upbringing?” Kubrick replied, “No, not at all.” His education was completely secular. He received no formal Jewish instruction and, as far as is known, never attended a synagogue or Hebrew School or was bar-mitzvahed. None of these things interested him.

Some collaborators have characterized Kubrick as a self-hating Jew. Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), accused the director of being “a guy who is a Jew, and he’s a man who hates Jews. He has said to me that the Jews are responsible for their own persecutions because they have separated themselves from the rest of humanity.” In his memoir of working with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, Frederic Raphael claimed Kubrick said that Hitler had been “right about almost everything.”

Yet Kubrick’s Jewish identity was much more complex than these labels—and unproven assertions—suggest. Kubrick was more than just Jewish by birth; he was a Jew by culture and feeling. He was acutely aware of his Central and Eastern European Jewish origins—his ancestors emigrated from Poland, Austria, and Romania to the United States around 1900. This cultural inheritance deeply influenced Kubrick. He loved the Jewish literature of the region: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Jacob Schulz, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig. His father, who was a well-read man, owned an extensive personal library, which he encouraged his son to read, supplying an informal Jewish education during Kubrick’s childhood.

Kubrick’s lifelong interests manifested a Jewish sensibility. He was passionate about photography, chess, drumming, boxing, jazz, and filmmaking, all extraordinarily Jewish professions and pastimes in the 20th century. He married two Jewish women in succession (albeit in civil ceremonies), both daughters of first-generation European immigrants, Toba Metz and Ruth Sobotka.

Kubrick also can be described as a gastronomic Jew. He loved lox, bagels, salt beef, and pastrami. His long-time assistant, Tony Frewin, recalled, “I think of Stanley going to sleep at night dreaming of Carnegie Deli.” Kubrick objected that the nearest deli was miles away from his home north of London.

Unfortunately, he also experienced anti-Jewish prejudice. In an interview with Tachles, his third wife, Christiane Harlan, recalls how, “Early on, as a photojournalist for the magazine Look, he was confronted with anti-Semitism.” When traveling in the U.S. Southern states, he was barred from restaurants and hotels. Even in Vermont, he once was denied a table. Kubrick never, as far as we know, responded. He did not comment on it publicly or in any letter I have seen.

He also experienced it later when working in Hollywood, on Spartacus. “Get that little Jewboy from the Bronx off my crane,” grumbled veteran cinematographer Russell Metty. How Kubrick reacted in these instances is unknown, but it led him to further embrace his relationship with Tony Curtis, another Jewish Bronx native. No doubt, these experiences hardened him and lay in part behind his reason to relocate to England in the early 1960s to make Lolita (1962), where he lived until his death in 1999. But he never felt truly comfortable in certain social circles there, either. He was often invited to social events and refused to go.

Maybe this was because, as his brother-in-law and producer, Jan Harlan, said, “he knew he looked Jewish and his big beard emphasized this.” In the opinion of Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001, the director’s full and untrimmed facial hair gave him the “aura of a Talmudic scholar” and the look of a “slightly cynical rabbi” that he retained for the rest of his life.

As a parent, his daughter Anya described him as “a very nice, good, rather Jewish father—probably overprotective.” The Kubricks always had a Christmas tree, and Kubrick also loved bacon. Although they did nothing Jewish, his eldest daughter, Katharina, said, “He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all. But given that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust and researched it for years, I leave it to you to decide how he felt about his religion.”

Indeed, Kubrick read many books about the Holocaust throughout his career, and not only in preparation for his never-to-be-made Aryan Papers. This included Raul Hilberg and Primo Levi, whom he recommended to various collaborators, including Michael Herr and Brian Aldiss. He just could never complete the film he dreamed of making. When asked if he would adapt Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, he said, “I don’t see how I could make it? … I’m Jewish….”

In the final analysis, Kubrick had no faith. In an interview with Playboy in 1968, he stated, “I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions.” His driver and handyman, Emilio D’Alessandro, recalled, “Stanley wasn’t particularly interested in religion, nor did he really understand religious fanaticism.” Yet, Jan Harlan says, he was “always taking a big bow to the great Unknowable.” Maybe this explains why the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, was performed at his funeral in 1999.

Nonetheless, if you watch Kubrick’s films often and closely enough, the Jewish moments will gradually rise to the surface. Private Sidney, played by Jewish actor Paul Mazursky in Kubrick’s first feature film Fear and Desire (1953), very much resembles the stereotypical Jewish soldier of so many World War II combat films. Davey Gordon, the boxing hero in Killer’s Kiss (1955), very much fits into that period of Jewish boxing movies. The Jewish loan shark played by Jay Adler in The Killing (1956) has a Jewish sensibility encapsulated by the Yiddish saying, “Man plans, God laughs.”

Kubrick’s two films with Kirk Douglas, Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), project the new 1950s creation of the macho-mensch character type. Douglas and his co-star Tony Curtis were both Jewish but had taken on non-Jewish names, seemingly playing non-Jewish characters. Kubrick’s two films with the British Jewish actor Peter Sellers—Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964)—were both imbued with a ’60s Jewish shtick of the type at which Lenny Bruce excelled. A poster of Lenny Bruce can be glimpsed in The Killing (as can a young Rodney Dangerfield, a Jewish comedian). Lolita also stars Jewish actress Shelley Winters, and there’s even a Jewish navigator in Dr. Strangelove. Both films have an underlying Holocaust theme.

Kubrick then made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, a film rich with allusions to the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, and especially Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. His next two films also featured Jewish actors—Steven Berkoff and Aubrey Morris in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Berkoff again in the period film Barry Lyndon (1975), as well as Marissa Berenson and Ryan O’Neal, both of whom had Jewish ancestry. While the former film deals with the nature of free choice, a key Jewish tenet, the latter explores the interloper in WASP society, something that Jews confronted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a host of countries. As a shabby-genteel Irishman, Barry Lyndon was clearly an interloper in 18th-century elite Anglo society. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford’s status as a party-crashing “outsider” is similarly based on social class, being out of his depth among the superrich elite in 1990s New York City. The protagonists of both Spartacus and A Clockwork Orange also fit into this interpretation of the outsider/anti-hero who disrupts the dominant social order.

While there was seemingly no one or nothing Jewish about The Shining (1980), adapted from Stephen King’s bestselling horror thriller, the story draws heavily upon Genesis 22, in which a father, the Jewish patriarch Abraham, seeks to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at the bidding of a higher power.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) perhaps comes closest of all Kubrick’s work to referencing the horrors of the Holocaust, in its depiction of how ordinary men can become hardened killers. In this Vietnam War drama, young boys are degraded and dehumanized in boot camp so they can kill with hard hearts in Vietnam.

And all of this was capped off by Eyes Wide Shut, an adaptation of Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, a story that was Jewish to its very core but seemingly scrubbed clean of any trace—except for casting Sydney Pollack in a key role as Victor Ziegler, a rich, unsavory, and morally suspect Jewish businessman. Pollack, like Kubrick, was a Jewish director and his physiognomy added what might be described as a stereotypical Jewish “look.”

As alluded to above, the ritual of unmasking and expulsion which Dr. Bill undergoes is something that Jews metaphorically feared and actually underwent in European society.

Kubrick and his films were complicated and defied simple readings. We can read them as Jewish, but this is just one element to be added to the mix of interpretations that already exist and no doubt will keep coming in the future.

The post How Jewish Was Stanley Kubrick? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Very few readers today will have heard of Menasseh ben Israel; but in the 17th century he was arguably the most famous Jew in the world, in no small part for trying to move Jews and Christians past centuries of mistrust and hatred.

Menasseh was one of the most accomplished and cosmopolitan rabbis of his time, and a pivotal intellectual figure in early modern Jewish history. He was among the three rabbis of the “Portuguese Nation” in Amsterdam, a community founded at the beginning of the 17th century that would quickly earn great renown (and envy) worldwide for its mercantile and scholarly vitality. Menasseh played an essential role in that community’s reputation because his books and other writings—in Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and English—reached a broad and very appreciative audience, among both Jews and gentiles.

Menasseh, a true Renaissance man, did more than anybody in the 17th century to advance the Jewish cause, whether in learning or in politics, and to educate Christians about Jewish religion, literature, and history. He was a scholar, philosopher, diplomat, educator (he was the philosopher Spinoza’s elementary school teacher), editor, translator, printer, and bookseller; no activity seems to have been outside his considerable talents. His network of friends and admirers stretched across the continent. He was, for many, the go-to person for all things Judaic.

And yet, Menasseh felt that, somehow, he did not receive the respect he deserved from his own local community.

He was right.

Menasseh was born Manoel Diaz Soeiro in Lisbon in 1604. His father had suffered horribly there under the Inquisition’s torturers, and there was reason to believe that he would be arrested again; even though his family was converso and ostensibly Catholic, the authorities suspected them of secret Judaizing. As soon as they could, the family fled Iberia, first to Madeira, then to La Rochelle, in southwestern France, and finally, around 1610, to Amsterdam. The Portuguese authorities’ suspicions of Judaizing were well grounded—when the family reached Holland, the men were all circumcised and took the name “ben Israel,” son of Israel.

Unlike almost everywhere else in 17th-century Europe, Jews in the Dutch Republic were allowed to live where they wanted and practice their religion openly. There was no ghetto, and while there were some restrictions on Jewish activities—they were excluded from most guilds—they could socialize and do business as they wished. It was a remarkable display of toleration in a generally intolerant era. Over the course of the century, Amsterdam and other Dutch towns became a haven for Jews fleeing persecution in Iberia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Menasseh’s family joined the Beth Jacob congregation, the oldest in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community, founded just a few years before their arrival in the city. Manoel, now Menasseh, was a precocious student and had a particularly fine command of both Portuguese and Hebrew. By the age of 18, he was appointed rabbi (hakham) of the Neve Shalom congregation. Many non-Jews came to the synagogue to hear his sermons, which were reportedly both rhetorically splendid and intellectually stimulating. He was also praised for his knowledge of Scripture.

Other rabbis of the community, however, had doubts about his skills as a Talmudist. And he took it as a great insult when, in 1639, with the merger of the three congregations, he was appointed third in rank among the rabbis. His relations with the congregation’s lay leadership were rocky, and he chafed under what he believed were undignified limitations put upon him—such as not being allowed to preach as often as he would have liked, and being required to teach in the elementary school. The highlight of his career occurred in 1642, when he was chosen to deliver the welcoming address on the occasion of a visit to the synagogue on the Houtgracht by Stadholder Frederik Hendrik (the highest political and military officer in the Dutch provinces) and Queen Henrietta Maria of England (wife of Charles I). It was one of the few times that Menasseh was actually given a position of honor.

With the narrow scope of his rabbinical duties, as well as his meager compensation, Menasseh had no choice but to direct his energies into other projects. He ran one of the community’s yeshivot, sponsored by the brothers Abraham and Isaac Pereira (Spinoza, as a young adult but before his excommunication in 1656, may have been one of its attendees), and was a beloved teacher. But his work there demanded much of his time.

Menasseh, like the other rabbis, also engaged in business. With his brother and brother-in-law, he imported goods from the West Indies and Brazil. But he felt that having to supplement his salary as a rabbi in this and other ways was demeaning. “At present, in complete disregard of my personal dignity, I am engaged in trade … What else is there for me to do?”

Menasseh’s real love was his printing press. He was the first printer of Hebrew books in Amsterdam, and he quickly gained an international reputation for the quality of his work. He published Pentateuchs, Hebrew Bibles, prayer books, and editions of the Mishnah, as well as numerous treatises and literary works in Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Latin. He even collaborated on various projects with gentile scholars and artists, including, it seems, Rembrandt. Because of Menasseh ben Israel, Amsterdam was, for a time, the center of the Jewish publishing world in Europe.

Menasseh also acquired great fame for his own writings, especially among Christians, to whom some of them were directly addressed. He was seen among non-Jews as the foremost Jewish spokesman of his time. Gentiles sought him out as a teacher and consultant. “[He is] a learned and pious man”, wrote Gerard Joannes Vossius, the celebrated Dutch scholar and theologian whose son studied Hebrew and Jewish literature with Menasseh. “If only he were a Christian.”

Menasseh, more than anyone else, assumed responsibility for explaining the doctrines and beliefs of Judaism to the gentile world. He never shied away from controversy, and he was willing to be the Jewish representative in exactly the kinds of polemical debates that many Christians sought (to convince the Jews of the error of their ways and lead them toward salvation) and most Jews feared. For many of the Portuguese Jews in Holland, Menasseh’s international celebrity was a source of pride. These wealthy Sephardic merchants and professionals appreciated the renown he brought to the community.

His extracurricular activities, however, caused the rabbis and lay leaders of the Amsterdam Portuguese no small amount of concern. They were constantly warning congregants that, since they were still technically refugee-guests in the Netherlands, it would be best to keep a low profile. They were especially cautious about crossing the line that the Dutch had explicitly drawn regarding theological debates between Jews and Christians. Menasseh’s cosmopolitanism and many relationships outside the community may explain the troubles he had with the other rabbis and with the members of the ma’amad, or governing board. (He was even issued an excommunication (herem) on one occasion for a disturbance he had been making over the way one of his relatives had been treated by the board.)

Throughout his life, Menasseh was guided by the Messianic hope for divine redemption and the idea that this would not happen until the people of Israel were completely scattered across the globe. Only then could they be reunited and restored to their kingdom by God’s anointed one. This conviction was behind what Menasseh hoped would be the crowning achievement of his life: arranging for the readmission of the Jews to England, from which they had been banished since 1290.

Accompanied by his son Samuel, Menasseh crossed the English Channel to make his petition for readmission in 1655. In his presentation to the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, he appealed to both theological and (perhaps more importantly) economic considerations. He wanted to bring to Cromwell’s attention the financial benefits that usually accrue to a country with a thriving Jewish community. After noting that “merchandising is, as it were, the proper profession of the nation of the Jews,” Menasseh went on to remind Cromwell that “there riseth an infallible Profit, commodity, and gain to all those Princes in whose Lands they dwell above all other strange Nations whatsoever.”

Cromwell was quite taken with the Dutch rabbi and gave him a sympathetic hearing. Public opinion, however, was by no means so well-disposed toward readmission. Some argued that strong and humiliating restrictions should be imposed on the Jews; they would certainly not be granted many of the privileges or rights that they had been enjoying for decades in Holland.

After several sessions, the conference convened by Cromwell to consider the issue was deadlocked, and in the summer of 1657 it adjourned before anything was formally resolved.

Menasseh was greatly disappointed by this turn of events, particularly since he had devoted several years of his life (two of them in England) to this project. Cromwell’s tacit permission for Jewish settlement would not begin evolving into formal readmission for another decade or so, but Menasseh did not live to see it.

He was devastated by the sudden death of his son Samuel in London that September, and as Menasseh bore Samuel’s body back to across the Channel for burial two months later, he was a broken man. He died several weeks later.

The post The Amsterdam Rabbi Who Became the Most Famous Jew in the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My work is a passion and a calling. Sometimes it surprises people to hear that it grows out of an inheritance I received from both of my parents: my Native American mother, to be sure, but also my Austrian-Jewish father, who fled the Nazis in 1938.

My mother’s Native American roots dominate my looks. I have brown skin and even as a kid often had long hair. At home I was just an Indian. But when I went to school, I was THE Indian. I always caught a lot of looks and comments. My first grade teacher, in Washington, D.C., decided that long hair on a boy was too much of a novelty. She dressed me up like a girl in front of the class. That was the first time I noticed America’s racial fault lines—its limits on opportunity and fair treatment.

The story we all hear of the American dream—work hard, have good morals, and you get sweet American apple pie—I feel like it’s half true. Obstacles persist for people of color and women. We can make it here, but it’s in spite of these barriers, not because there’s a level playing field.

My mother, Margaret Seelye, was born in Cass Lake, Minnesota and raised in the village of Bena, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. She is from the Ojibwe tribe, who have inhabited the Great Lakes for millennia. We’re famous for our wild rice and birchbark canoes, but also for our many brilliant activists, warriors, and writers—people like Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, and Winona LaDuke.

When my mother was a girl, many of the native families at Leech Lake were reeling from federal policies that took away all but four percent of the land inside the reservation. Her family had buried their dead in the Bena cemetery at Leech Lake longer than America had been a country, but by the 1950s, they had to buy plots from non-native land owners to lay their loved ones to rest next to relatives. They were very, very poor. Harvesting wild rice was less a cool cultural pastime than it was a necessary means of survival. Even as a small child, my mother worked hard—at everything from the Ojibwe seasonal harvest to her school work to her jobs at the local cafe. Eventually she went to nursing school, and was hired to run the new comprehensive health program at Red Lake.

That’s where she met my father, Robert Treuer. He had fled Austria at the height of Nazi power. As a Jewish boy in Vienna, he had to run from armed Hitler Youth. He watched SS officers force his mother to scrub the streets. Many of his family members simply disappeared. My father was 13 years old when my grandparents managed to get him to London. He stayed for a while in a camp for child survivors of the Spanish Civil War, and then moved on to a boarding school in Waterford, Ireland. It took a year for my grandmother, working as a domestic servant in England, to earn enough money to bring the family to America. My father, his parents, and two cousins survived the war. Hundreds of other family members took their last gasps of breath in Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen.

Immigration papers of the author’s father, Robert Treuer, whose family fled Austria at the height of Nazi power.

My father, too, had an uphill climb to find his place in America. Once here, he sat often by the radio, listening to news broadcasts and repeating every word uttered, until his English was so clean that everyone thought he was American-born. At age 17, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, hoping to kill Nazis. He was shipped to the Pacific Theater and served honorably in the Philippines. After the war, he worked as a labor union organizer. He married young and had three sons. His first wife was from Minnesota, and he fell in love with the place. Money was tight, but he put in a bid on a piece of tax-forfeited property. Soon he was teaching high school English and planting pine trees on the land by his house. Robert’s first marriage failed, but he stayed in Minnesota, taking work in the Bureau of Indian Affairs that would lead him to Margaret, his second wife—my mother.

He was trying to restart his life and she was building a pathway out of poverty when they joined fates. They moved to Washington, D.C., where my mother pursued a law degree and where I was born. But we spent summers on the property in Minnesota. It was a humble beginning. My parents refurbished a small cabin, which had no electricity or running water. We used to pick wild rice, as my mother had as a child, and traded with our neighbors, the Schlueger family, for milk and eggs. We kept the milk in a glass jug and sunk it in the creek to keep it cold in the summer.

Over time my mother graduated from law school and we all moved home so she could take the Minnesota bar, becoming the first female Indian attorney in the state. Our family’s finances improved dramatically. I soon had three younger siblings. My dad called each of us another victory over Hitler. My mother called each of us another victory over Andrew Jackson.

I didn’t tell my parents about the incident in first grade, when my teacher embarrassed me in front of the class, until I was an adult. I was channeling my warrior ancestors—who I imagined would never have cried over something like that—and internalizing my shame, from that and numerous other small injustices and microaggressions. Over time, I began to feel like the things I learned in school had little to do with me, and that I was not important or relevant in America. It’s a feeling that derails a lot of students of color.

But then my father’s gifts to me kicked in. I had watched him advocate for oppressed people, as a union leader and as a writer for the local paper. I had watched him support my mother’s advocacy for tribes and native people as a defense attorney, law professor, U.S. magistrate, and tribal judge. From both of my parents, I came to realize that the world wasn’t fair, but there was something we could do about it.

My parents raised a high bar, and I was determined to jump over it. College, at Princeton University, taught me that America was a diverse place in much more than name. From friends there I learned to interrogate my own beliefs, in the best way possible. I graduated and returned to the north woods to lean into my native roots. My mother had already made sure that I knew how to hunt, snare rabbits, and process maple syrup, but I set out on a quest to learn more about the Ojibwe language and culture. I landed in the living room of Archie Mosay, a renowned spiritual leader from the St. Croix Reservation in Wisconsin. He spoke English, although he was most comfortable in Ojibwe. I did everything I could to learn what he knew. I spent every summer at our tribal religious ceremonies and eventually went to graduate school in history.

Throughout it all, both of my parents, whose experiences gave them firm faith in their own agency, remained my steadfast supporters and inspiration. Today, I still live on the tree farm my dad started decades ago. I’ve written 14 books on Native American history and the Ojibwe language, and I travel often to do racial equity work with K-12 schools, colleges, and businesses. I have nine children, and together we harvest wild rice, process maple syrup, hunt, and fish. My mother lives around the corner from us.

My father passed away about a year ago, but the pine trees he planted when he first bought the farm stand over 70 feet tall. This forest around me keeps my own roots strong—the ones planted here by my father after World War II, and the ones my mother’s family have nurtured here for millennia, before America was a country. This forest is where I do my life’s work. It contains the challenge and the hope of America. We just need to keep planting the seeds.

The post The Passion for Ojibwe Culture I Inherited from My Native-American Mom—and Austrian-Jewish Dad appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Carvalho was 38 years old and an unknown portrait artist and daguerreotypist when he received an offer from Col. John C. Fremont, the most famous adventurer of the day, to serve as the official photographer of Fremont’s Fifth Westward Expedition. For years, Fremont had been consumed with mapping a route for the transcontinental railroad. He had always included a sketch artist among his crew, but this time he wanted to use photography, a new technology, to document the terrain.

It was a risky proposition. Fremont’s previous foray had ended in disaster when ten men froze to death in the Rockies, and Carvalho was totally unprepared. An urbane city dweller raised in Charleston, S.C., he had never traveled West. In fact, he had never even saddled his own horse. No daguerreotypist had ever attempted anything like this before. Daguerreotopy, which was the earliest form of photography, had only been invented fourteen years earlier, in 1839. It was a cumbersome process involving polished silver-coated copper plates and lots of gear and chemicals, and it was prone to failure. Of the handful of professional daguerreotypists in the United States, nearly all worked indoors, shooting portraits. Capturing wide landscapes in extreme weather conditions was almost unheard of.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho in 1850. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Yet two weeks after accepting Fremont’s offer, Carvalho set out, with a seasoned group of explorers, teamsters, hunters, and guides. It would be the journey of his lifetime. The team included white Americans, a German, a few Mexicans, ten Delaware Indians, and of course Carvalho, who was an observant Sephardic Jew of Spanish-Portuguese descent. From the very start, the group faced challenges: torrential rains, raging prairie fires, injuries, infighting. Col. Fremont became injured early on, and had to turn back to seek medical attention. After a six-week delay, Fremont rejoined his men in Western Kansas, and then led them, perhaps foolishly, toward the Rocky Mountains just as winter was about to set in.

Along the way, Carvalho dutifully worked at his craft and, against the odds, succeeded in capturing image after image of the landscapes, buffalo, and the expansive terrain of the West.

The expedition encountered the Cheyenne village at Big Timbers in late November, during a supply stop along the Santa Fe Trail. It wasn’t easy photographing the Native Americans, Carvalho found. “I had great difficulty in getting them to sit still, or even submit to having themselves daguerreotyped. I made a picture, first, of their lodges, which I showed them,” he later wrote.

Carvalho’s daguerreotype of Big Timbers shows a pair of teepees nestled up against the edge of a forest of tall pines. Atop a thicket of logs and tree branches, several skins or hides are set out to dry. Two human figures, faded to an almost ghostly pallor, anchor the image in time. Their faces are hard to make out, but one has long braids and both are dressed in traditional native outfits.

An engraving based on Carvalho’s daguerreotypes.

Princeton historian Martha A. Sandweiss, an expert in photography of the American West, credits Carvalho with creating a painstakingly deliberate scene. “Carvalho sensed he needed to preserve a certain amount of information,” she told me, in an interview. “He stepped back from the scene, and he has carefully framed the image. He’s not doing a close up, at least in this picture, of the two people, or of the teepee, or of a piece of meat on the ground. He’s trying to show us something about native life.”

Fremont was thrilled with Carvalho’s work. “We are producing a line of pictures of exquisite beauty, which will admirably illustrate the country,” he wrote to his wife, Jessie Benton Fremont. He described the pictures of Big Timbers as “jewels.”

Sandweiss believes the daguerreotype tells us as much about the photographer as it does the subject. “I think what we see in this picture is evidence of a collaboration. It’s important to remember that Carvalho was working with a camera on a tripod. This is not a snapshot. These Indian subjects knew they were being photographed, and they are looking Carvalho in the eye.”

Of the 300 or so daguerreotypes Carvalho made on the expedition, this image is the only survivor.

After the expedition, photographer Mathew Brady’s New York studio converted Carvalho’s daguerreotypes into hand-drawn printing plates, so they could be turned into etchings and published. At the time, converting photographs to etchings was the only way to reproduce them for large numbers of people to see. It seems inconceivable to us today, but at that early time in photographic history, the daguerreotypes themselves were considered worthless—just a means for carrying back visual information that would be enshrined forever on a steel printing plate. Years later, they ended up in a storage unit belonging to Fremont, and were destroyed in a fire in 1882—gone forever, and barely missed. The Big Timbers daguerreotype somehow, luckily, ended up in Brady’s personal collection, which now resides at the Library of Congress.

Rio Grande, painting by Solomon Nunes Carvalho. Courtesy of Oakland Museum of California.

The sixty-odd surviving etchings made from Carvalho’s daguerreotypes tell a spectacular story of discovery, but the one surviving image does more: It provides a spiritual connection to the past. For most of the years I worked on my documentary film, Carvalho’s Journey, I relied on various reproductions of the Big Timbers image. I finally had a chance to see the real thing during a visit to Washington, D.C. last year.

It is smaller than I had imagined, just four by five inches. In real life, the damage is worse than in reproductions. But holding it in my hands, I was struck by an intense proximity to history. This piece of copper was the same tool that miraculously captured the Cheyennes’ likenesses, their teepees, their hides drying on the line. It was the same bit of metal that an urbane, Southern-Jewish photographer carried thousands of miles on horseback and heated over a fire to develop. The moment captured on the plate, faded as it is, was the exact image Solomon Carvalho saw that day. Native people who had never seen a photograph before—and whose lives would never be the same after their collision with Europeans—would have seen it too. It was the vessel through which an unlikely visitor and a pair of Indians faced each other and forged a quintessentially American encounter.

Daguerreotypes, which are in many ways an art form lost to history, are reflective just like mirrors. On one as faded as Carvalho’s, the mirrored surface makes it almost impossible to see the image detail when you look directly at it. You instead see yourself, peering into it, looking into history.

The post A Jewish Photographer’s Nearly Forgotten ‘Collaboration’ with Cheyenne Indians on the Santa Fe Trail appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In its storied 1914-to-1986 existence, Jennie Grossinger’s family boarding house was called Longbrook House (the original name when the Galician Jews first started to rent out the spare bedrooms of their rundown farmhouse), Grossinger’s Terrace Hill House, Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel (which built upon the original framework of the Terrace Hill House), and then finally, at the peak of its grandeur, just plain Grossinger’s (or, even better, simply the G). The press referred to the place as the Waldorf of the Catskills.

Grossinger’s eventual 1,200-acre, 35-building “Kingdom of Outdoor Happiness,” which boasted indoor and outdoor Olympic-sized pools, its own ski slope, a summer ice rink, a dining room that seated 3,000, and a 24/7 staff that catered to every guest need, including matchmaking, was the New York City escape to which all other Catskills operations—indeed, lodgings throughout America—aspired.

In the establishment’s post-World War II heyday, when it welcomed some 150,000 guests a year, it evolved into the prototype of a particularly successful version of American leisure—the everything-under-one-roof facilities that to this day take the form of Las Vegas hotels, Disney Parks and the international cruise-line industry. And even if you don’t know Grossinger’s by name, you may be familiar with the cinematic sensation it inspired,—1987’s Dirty Dancing.

In an era when the finer hotels and resorts in America freely discriminated against admitting Jews, and, in a gentleman’s agreement with one another, even shared information about prospective guests with potentially Jewish-sounding names, the Catskills’ Borscht Belt—so named because of a favorite menu item—grew to rival anything a WASP enclave could offer. It had golf, tennis, even better food to be found elsewhere (and more of it), and a training ground for the fertile minds of show business, who filled the resort showrooms with everything from lavish musicals to hilarious stand-up routines from comics who had yet to make a name for themselves, from Jerry Lewis to Jerry Seinfeld.

The Grossinger story in America started with Jennie’s father, Selig Grossinger, who had been a land overseer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire area of Galatia when he alone set sail for America in 1897. After pressing pants on the Lower East Side of New York for three years, he sent steerage-class tickets for wife Malke and their two young daughters, Jennie and Lottie. It wasn’t necessarily an auspicious beginning for an aspiring businesswoman: The family butcher shop, followed by a restaurant, failed. The restaurant had at least provided Malke a venue to show off her cooking, although the enterprise allegedly went belly up because she was too generous with her delicious portions. (Or so claimed Jennie Grossinger’s authorized biographer.) Better yet, the teenaged Jennie was able to hone her blossoming skills as a hostess and waitress on guests whose names she impressively always seemed to remember.

What also failed was Selig’s health, the years of pants pressing over hot coals having taken their toll. (Tuberculosis was another constant threat on the Lower East Side, as well as the better neighborhoods of the city.) A neighbor suggested buying land in the Catskills because, besides resembling Galatia, land up there was fairly cheap—at least cheaper than in Connecticut, which also interested Selig. In 1896, a tuberculosis sanitarium had opened in the town of Liberty, New York, which immediately sent the wealthy WASPs who had long vacationed in the region fleeing and real estate prices plummeting.

Selig found a farm with a house in the Sullivan County town of Ferndale. The farm, like most in the Catskills, sat on soil that was too rocky to produce crops, and the house was ramshackle, despite the best efforts to patch up its holes by Malke and Jennie—who, since 1912, had been married to her cousin, Harry Grossinger, a salesman in the garment district.

The Grossinger house took on its first guest in 1914. A Mrs. Carolyn Brown, originally from Romania but now from the Bronx, recognized from the sight of the traditional Orthodox Jewish wig worn by Malke that the family had to be religiously observant. Unhappy with her current accommodations in the Catskills, Mrs. Brown asked if she and her husband might board instead with the Grossingers. The Grossingers said yes, welcoming the first of the hundreds of thousands of those who would enter the Grossinger establishment.

Throughout the resort’s long existence stood Jennie, a female Jewish Horatio Alger. While her impoverished early years came back to haunt her—she was long treated for severe depression, a fact she kept well out of public view—she also strove to keep improving, both herself (she hired “an English professor, a Spanish teacher, a piano teacher, an elocution teacher, a literature teacher, a painting teacher—she learned how to guide a motorboat in the canals in Miami Beach,” said her daughter) and the business that bore her name. She inspected all the first-class hotels along the Eastern seaboard and then instituted their rules at her resort, such as jackets on gentlemen at dinner time—Grossinger’s, she insisted, was to be second to none).

Hers wasn’t an impersonal corporate institution, but a thriving component of American family life. “A resort isn’t the buildings and kitchens and lakes or nightclubs,” she said. “The real hotel is the people who work here.”

And that magic started at the top. The hotelier’s daughter, Elaine Etess, was struck by the fact that even though her mother left school in the fourth grade to support her family by sewing on buttons in the New York garment industry, Grossinger grew up “to hold her own with the first ladies of the United States. Eleanor Roosevelt was a dear friend of hers.” As was Nelson Rockefeller, Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman, and Eddie Fisher, who was not only discovered at Grossinger’s but also honeymooned there with first wife Debbie Reynolds before later bringing the second Mrs. Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor. Jennie (whom everyone addressed by first name—just as Disney was called Walt) possessed, according to her daughter, an unpretentious “ease with people . . . She was as comfortable sitting at a head table as she was sitting in a chair in her living room.”

The ability to create a comfortable environment for every guest helped Grossinger’s become the Rolls-Royce of the predominantly Jewish Borscht Belt, but Jennie also took special pride in catering to a highly diversified clientele of races, religions, and classes. “Quietly and without fanfare, Grossinger’s has become a social laboratory,” The New York Times, in her 1972 obituary, quoted Grossinger as having said upon receiving an Interfaith Movement award. Racial integration was going on at Grossinger’s decades before federal laws mandated it, and few guests thought anything of it.

What distinguished Jennie Grossinger was how she skillfully combined the old-world notion of a man’s home being his castle with a modern American commercial marketing sense. She hired an experienced publicist to get the Grossinger’s name before the public and then knew to put herself forward as the face of her resort, and by doing so branded herself and her establishment. This made her a pioneer in the field. “There weren’t many businesses open to women in those days,” said historian Jonathan D. Sarna, “and the values and virtues that made you a good hostess and someone whom people wanted to entrust their summers to made you a very successful matron of the hotel.” Grossinger was a millionaire woman entrepreneur in an era when those three words were rarely if ever joined. Martha Stewart and Sheryl Sandberg, meet your spiritual godmother. And have a little something to eat.

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German was her native language; Yiddish as well. Julia Staab was a German Jew from a small village in Prussia. I don’t know how her marriage to my great-great-grandfather Abraham Staab came about—if it was arranged beforehand, or if they chose each other. But I do know that they were in a hurry to begin their married life in Santa Fe—to inhabit their American Dream.

Abraham was, anyway. He had left their village a decade earlier, at 15, to make his fortune. That he did, hauling merchandise—“Hats Boots & Shoes, Hardware, Groceries etc. etc.”—along the Santa Fe Trail between St. Louis and the American Southwest. He became a U.S. citizen on July 10, 1865, only a few weeks after the last shots of the Civil War were fired, and promptly departed for Germany in search of a bride. My great-great-grandparents married on Christmas Day, 1865. Julia was 21 years old, Abraham 26.

Julia and Abraham Staab

They shipped out on the RMS Scotia, a luxury liner that was at the time the fastest ship on the Atlantic, and on January 12, they landed in New York. From there, they climbed onto a train, and then a steamboat, and then rode for two weeks in a stagecoach across the snow-cloaked Great Plains to make a life among New Mexico’s stark and rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Santa Fe, in 1866, was not yet the elegant city of artists and tourists and well-heeled retirees. It was a rough and unruly town, sandy and treeless. Its central plaza was crowded with carts, wagons, teamsters, roustabouts, soldiers, veterans, fortune-seekers, consumptives, Navajos, Apaches, Jewish merchants, freed slaves, miners, gamblers, prostitutes, shysters, horses, burros, pigs, and goats—a confusion of commerce, a babel of languages. The houses were constructed of mud, the streets clouded with billowing dust. Beyond the town’s edges stretched a bewildering landscape of uncompromising sky and chisel-topped cerritos, so different from anything a young bride from the green and gentle valleys of northwestern Germany would ever have seen. New Mexico was all tans and reds, the ground littered with rocks and reptiles, with hematite-seeped rocks and bleached bones and spiny flora—cactus, greasewood, Spanish bayonet.

This desert was, certainly, an unforgiving land. But it was nonetheless a place that seemed willing to forgive the fact that Julia and Abraham were Jews. In Lügde, the village in which they were raised, local records describe a 1866 cholera outbreak that killed “126 people and one Jew.” That Jew was Julia’s cousin Philipp Schuster—singled out because, in Julia’s time, a Jew in Lügde was not a person but an invasive species, taxed and fined and snubbed at every turn.

Julia Schuster Staab

Not so in Santa Fe. In the New Mexico that Julia encountered in 1866, the newspapers of the territory spoke kindly of the local Jews (“Many of the best residents are of the Jewish faith,” wrote the Santa Fe New Mexican). Perhaps this was because the Jewish merchants were advertisers, or perhaps because there weren’t enough of them to seem threatening. There were, in Santa Fe, no temples, no Hebrew schools, no Jewish ghettos. The stores stayed open on Saturdays; a rabbi traveled from Denver every few years to circumcise the boys. My great-grandmother Bertha’s diaries from those days mention riding parties and sewing circles and teas and Christmas celebrations with gentile and Jewish friends alike—champagne and oysters, boxes at the Albuquerque opera. But not once in the diary did she mention the fact that her family was Jewish. It didn’t seem to matter.

The Staabs were American. They occupied the heart of Santa Fe, with a huge storefront right on the Plaza and a towering family mansion—a mansard-roofed French Second Empire–style brick building—just a few blocks away. The three Staab girls rode sidesaddle and carried gold-headed riding crops. The four boys wore tennis whites and striped sweaters. Abraham was elected county commissioner twice; he helped bring the railroad, the gasworks, and the territorial prison to Santa Fe. He prospered alongside this former Mexican outpost: brick by brick, railroad tie by railroad tie, he worked to transform Santa Fe from a foreign colony into an American city. The town was parched and unkempt and far from the “civilized” world. But Abraham flourished in that hard soil.

Julia did not. She struggled there; indeed, she seemed to wither in the desert. She bore seven children in quick succession, and lost an eighth. She suffered miscarriages and health problems, and from “hysteria,” as they called it then. Whenever she fell into a decline, she traveled to Germany to recover, visiting health spas and German doctors and her many sisters who lived there and tended her when she was unwell. Julia was the only one of the family’s eight girls to leave Germany. She felt terribly unlucky to have done so.

In her last years, Julia shut herself in the upstairs bedroom of the European brick home her husband had built among the adobes, and never left. While the family celebrated weddings on the ground floor, she stayed upstairs in her room, and she died there in 1896. It is said that her ghost still haunts the building. And that she was also haunted: by the life she might have lived in Germany, and all that she had left behind.

Of course we, who came after, know what became of all that she left behind—what became of her nieces and nephews and of her sister Emilie, who lived long enough to die, at the age of 81, in a Nazi concentration camp. We know how it ended. And we are haunted by a ghost life, too—the life that might have been ours, had Abraham not dragged Julia across the ocean and plains to this open desert land.

Abraham Staab

To become American is to accept a staggering loss of self—of the people we once were, in the places we once came from. It may take a generation, perhaps two. But inevitably, it transpires. The surge of conquering culture sweeps down through the generations, much as the spring floods scour the desert arroyos. Washed away, we must lay down new roots.

Julia believed her life in the desert was a curse. But five generations downstream, I find that I can’t agree with her. That sere and serrated Western landscape is the only place I have ever felt at home. My father and grandfather came from there; my great-grandmother too. The high desert is in my blood. And I can only see that it was a blessing.

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Food does indeed provide one of life’s greatest pleasures. And yet, for much of human history food also has been associated with difficulty, controversy, confusion, and conflict. Most people, for most of life on Earth, have fretted over where, or if, they would get their next meal. But the matter of food, and particularly food’s relationship to immigration, has long merited more ambitious historical treatment. Food has always functioned simultaneously as a barrier that sets one group of people apart from others and as a bridge linking people with little else in common.

But truth be told, the subject grabbed me because of the problematic and opposite ways it spoke to my personal memories. Those recollections of my childhood as an American-born daughter of immigrant parents who came to Milwaukee in the 1940s involved, on the one hand, remembrances of great food eaten at home: potato latkes at Hanukkah smothered in sour cream and apple sauce; chicken soup every Friday night with lakes of fat floating on the surface and around which swam homemade noodles, known as lokshn; gefilte fish; and cheese blintzes at the spring holiday of Shavuot, followed by a dessert of cheesecake. My mother, a frightened newcomer to America, not only prepared all these Eastern European Jewish specialties, inspired by American abundance, but also made her own cookies, jams, pickles, rolls, noodles, soups, and some of the family’s bread.

I remember sharply the chasm between the foods I loved—prepared by my mother, a Holocaust survivor who defined her cooking as her only real contribution to a complicated and not very happy home—and the American world of consumption. Visits to friends’ homes, families more thoroughly American than ours, meant encounters with store-bought cookies, Lorna Doones and Mallomars. In the homes of non-Jewish pals I saw boxes of Oreos, forbidden because Nabisco baked them with lard, rendering them unkosher. (Only in 1997 did Oreos remove the offending substance.) I discovered in other kids’ kitchens jars of peanut butter, laid out on their tables next to loaves of white bread in plastic wrappers, and jelly in jars, usually grape. Why, I wondered, did we not eat any of those foods and so many more like them? Some, like those Oreos, I understood not to be kosher. But it’s not as if peanut butter, canned tuna fish, Welch’s jelly, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Kraft cheese, or Campbell’s soup violated Jewish law.

Even Thanksgiving represented something of a cultural minefield. Besides the fact that pie and cranberries could have been food from some other planet, as far as my mother was concerned, she questioned the rationality of having an enormous meal with a turkey—a slightly problematic and new food—on a Thursday. After all, we were already going to sit down as a family the next night for our typical Friday dinner of fish, chicken, soup, chopped liver, kugel (a noodle dish), and baked apples—a meal whose preparations always started the day before. While my parents loved America, viewing it as a haven for Jews, they found the Thanksgiving dinner an absurd way to express that gratitude. My father proposed having the holiday meal on Friday night as a compromise, but my sister and I dug in our American heels. Thanksgiving had to be on Thursday.

Many of my friends came from immigrant homes as well. A significant number of my classmates were the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors and had been born in displaced persons camps, coming to Milwaukee via the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. But their parents—possibly younger, more flexible, more urbane than mine—seemed to have caught on that part of being American involved, even if they kept kosher, learning to know and love America by its foods and iconic brands.

Over time, my parents relented on some of the commercial brands made of ingredients that did not violate Jewish law, and which seemed to me so utterly American. Each little victory, whether over peanut butter or Triscuits, put me on the path toward being what I considered a normal American youngster. But father and mother always sneered at these foods, referring to them as goyish, not Jewish, and not tasty at all.

Junior high is an anxious time for many teens, and so it was for me on the food front. Seventh grade meant for the first time eating lunch at school, in the hall of horrors known as the lunchroom, packing a paper sack with whatever came out of your home kitchen, unless you were lucky enough to buy your lunch, which was never an option for me. What came out of our kitchen included home-baked hallah bread, irregularly cut, unlike the uniform slices of white bread between which my co-diners in the Steuben Junior High School cafeteria stuffed their fillings. On those days when my mother packed me a sandwich of leftover chicken, she lubricated the hallah or the rye bread with a layer of schmaltz, rendered chicken fat. The gooey yellow substance (which I now crave) would leak out of the wax paper wrapped around the sandwich to stain the brown paper bag, announcing to the world that I had brought some weird, totally alien food, which betrayed my lack of sought-after normalcy. (On more than one occasion I threw out the lunch bag because the schmaltz stain proved too much to bear.). My lunch bag also contained no store-bought cookies, but instead mandlebroit (almond cookies) or a hunk of sponge cake.

Suffice it to say that my culinary traumas became even deeper and more fraught when we girls had to take home economics, two wretched semesters of cooking. Here we learned the words, tropes, and themes of the American kitchen. Cinnamon toast, Welsh rarebit, macaroni and cheese stick in my mind as encounters with new and exotic dishes. I even learned about pizza. We were instructed to tell our mothers that when they prepared their evening meals, they should make sure that each family member ate off a plate that contained foods of various colors, though I was never exactly clear which ones, and I was not about to go home and critique the colors of mom’s cooking.

My class of Jewish girls experienced a moment of truth when our cooking teacher announced that the next week we would be cooking bacon and eggs. Some, not all, of the Jewish girls eyeballed one another. What would we do? The rules of the class mandated that you had to cook it, and you had to eat it. One girl with incredible moxie raised her hand and told the teacher that some of the girls could not eat this dish. The teacher asked why not, and the seventh grader explained, however stumblingly, the matter of kashrut, or the Jewish dietary laws. The student helpfully went on to point out that the local supermarkets carried a product, I believe made by Hebrew National or Best’s, called “kosher bacon”—no oxymoron there!—that were basically strips of kosher beef that could be fried, and resembled bacon. The teacher went into her wallet, took out some money, handed it to the brave defender of our people, and asked her to buy a few packs. Those of us who would not eat the real thing, the porky product, could sit together and keep up the faith.

These personal memories informed how I came to think, in my professional life, about immigration, religious and ethnic difference, and the ability of the dominant American culture both to accommodate difference and foster conformity. These recollections of meals eaten, thrown out, and negotiated convinced me that food is never just food. Food is about more than fun, nutrition, or even survival—it is the landscape upon which people meet each other in new places, and learn how to remain who they had been, while becoming someone new at the same time.

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