9 November 1938

"There was a lot of glass on the streets. We lived in the West End, surrounded by shops, many of them Jewish. This was late at night and it was dark; but we had no trouble in picking out the Jewish shops. They had been looted, the windows had been smashed, and there were ashes, rubble and debris outside some of the shops. We had not seen how our fellow Jews had been treated: beaten, taken to prison, some of them never to return. But in our hiding place, listening to our friends, we heard more and more of the story of Kristallnacht."

Albert Friedlander

photograph by John Offenbach (series "Jew") via

The Dearborn Independent

Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent and published it from 1919 to 1927. The weekly, widely distributed paper (circulation reached at least 900,000 by 1926) covered business and economic news as well as world events. It also became a source of antisemitism. The front page read "The International Jew: The World's Problems", each week, the paper published antisemitic articles. It also republished The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While The Dearborn Independent did condemn violence, it also blamed Jews for provoking the violence. 

Ford's antisemitism provoked protests and a boycott of his automobiles in the 1920s. The Anti Defamation League launched a campaign to oppose Ford. In 1927, a lawsuit was brought against Ford. As a consequence, the paper shut down, Ford apologised, his apology was received with skepticism. In 1931, Hitler gave an interview saying "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration" (via and via and via).

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photograph (Ford Levacar, 1959) via

Borrowed Time. Photographs by Dennis Darling.

In 2012, Dennis Darling started photographing the ageing population of Holocaust survivors of Terezin, once a holiday resort for the nobility, then turned into a ghetto, then concentration camp. Officially, Terezin had not been an extermination camp. However, about 33,000 people died there due to malnutrition, disease and other reasons. From there, about 88,000 were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. 

Above: Andula Lorencova née Weinsteinova, b. 1927, Prague, 2012

When the war ended, there were only 17,247 survivors. Dennis Darling made more than 150 portraits of survivors in seven countries. Many of the survivors are photographed within personal spaces (via).

In late 1943 an inspection of Terezin was demanded by Christian X, king of Denmark, to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there in October of that year. The review panel was to include two Swiss delegates from the International Red Cross and two representatives of the government of Denmark. The Nazis permitted these representatives to visit Terezin in order to dispel rumors about the extermination camps.

The Germans immediately engaged in an infamous beautification program – “Operation Embellishment,” a ruse intended to mollify the king’s concerns. Weeks of preparation preceded the visit. The area was cleaned up, and the Nazis deported many Jews to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding in Terezin. Also deported in these actions were most of the Czechoslovak workers assigned to "Operation Embellishment". The Nazis directed the building of fake shops and cafés to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort.

 

The inspection was held on June 23, 1944 (...).

The Danish Jews whom the Red Cross visited lived in freshly painted rooms, not more than three in a room. (...)

As part of the charade the Nazis compelled Schächter to give a performance of the Requiem. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Red Cross issued “a bland report about the visit, indicating that the representatives were taken in by the elaborate fiction.” Eichmann was later quoted as having said, “Those crazy Jews—singing their own requiem.” Rafael Schächter was deported to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944, and died the following day in the gas chamber.

Following the successful use of Terezin as a supposed model internment camp during the Red Cross visit, the Nazis decided to make a propaganda film there. It was directed by Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron, an experienced director and actor. Shooting took eleven days, starting September 1, 1944. After the film was completed, most of the cast and the director were deported to Auschwitz. Gerron was murdered by gas chamber on October 28, 1944. (via)

Above: Otto Greenfield, North Yorkshire, England

Above:Raja Zadnikova, Prague

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photographs by Dennis Darling via and via and via

Which Statements Are Antisemitic And Islamophobic? On Differences in Sensitivity.

Hargreaves and Staetsky (2019) analysed differences between British Jewish and Muslim respondents in terms of sensitivity towards antisemitism and Islamophobia. Statements designed to reflect antisemitic attitudes were shown to ca. 1,500 Jewish people living in the U.K., and statements designed to be Islamophobic were shown to 1,000 Muslims (via and via).

a) Attitudes towards Jews

Israelis behave "like Nazis" towards the Palestinians
Does not consider Jews living in the UK to be British
Jews are not capable of integrating into British society
The interests of Jews in the UK are very different from the interests of the rest of the population
Jews have too much power in British economy, politics, media
The Holocaust is a myth or has been exaggerated

b) Attitudes towards Muslims

Most Muslims sympathise with terrorists
British Muslims do not share western values
British Muslims have no interest in integrating into British society
The interests of Muslims in Britain are very different from the interests of the rest of the population
Muslims have too much influence in Britain
Muslims often overreact to criticism of their religion

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Within the Jewish group, there was more certainty about what constituted antisemitism. Only 1% to 3% of Jewish respondents chose "don't know" for the antisemitic statements while 15% to 22% of Muslim respondents answered "don't know" when the Islamophobic statements were presented.

The groups also differed in their sensitivity. The most offensive anti-Jewish statement was the one about the Holocaust being a myth or exaggerated (96% of Jews agreed it was antisemitic). Large absolute majorities (82% to 94% of the Jewish respondents) perceived other statements as antisemitic, The smallest absolute majority (73%) was observed when presenting the description of Isrealis being Nazi-like towards Palestinians. "In stark contrast, none of the statements about attitudes towards Muslims were seen as Islamophobic by a majority of Muslim respondents."

In addition, age was a factor in the Jewish group whereas it was of no significance in the Muslim group. Jewish respondents aged over 40 were 80% to 90% more likely to be sensitive to antisemitism than those aged between 18 and 39. The authors explain the findings with the role of memory around the Holocaust and events in the 1940s and 1960s, and pivotal events shaping Islamophobia taking place in the 1990s and more recently. "When it comes to British Muslims and Islamophobia, perhaps the present matters more than the past."

Being born in the U.K. had an impact in both groups. Jewish respondents born in the U.K. were 40% less likely to be sensitive to the linking of Israelis and Nazis than those born in other European countries. UK-born Muslims respondents, however, were more or less twice as likely as those born in Asia to be sensitive to all Islamophobic statements. The authors speculate that the present conditions in the U.K. might be more likely to shape sensitivity towards Islamophobia than antisemitism. The study was carried out before the Hamas attack on Israel on 7th of  October, findings might differ now.

Education played an important role for both groups, but seemed to push sensitivity in opposite directions. Muslim respondents with degrees were 63% more likely to find all statements offensive. They were 70% more likely to be sensitive about Muslims not sharing western values. By contrast, Jewish respondents with degrees were 35% less likely than those without to be sensitive towards the linking of Israelis and Nazis. Jewish respondents in education were 66% less likely than those in employment to be sensitive to all the statements. They were 56% less likely to be sensitive to the linking of Israelis and Nazis.

The main conclusion of the study:

The study shows that assuming all Jews and all Muslims react to antisemitism and Islamophobia in the same way is likely to be inaccurate.

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- Hargreaves, J. & Staetsky, L. D. (2019). Antisemitism and Islamophobia: Measuring everyday sensitivity in the UK. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(12).
- photograph (UK, 1970s) via

... a state of latency waiting for the right circumstances

"There is a large research literature showing how antisemitism exists in many locations and how it spreads like a virus, or rather, how it never disappears but simply goes into a state of latency waiting for the right circumstances to become manifest." (Brekke, 2021)

- Brekke, T. (2021). Islamophobia and Antisemitism are Different in Their Potential for Globalization. Journal of Religion and Violence, doi: 10.5840/jrv202142689 

- photograph by Robert Frank (Detroit, 1955) via

Niklas Frank. The Unforgiving Son of the "Butcher of Poland"

"I am against the death penalty, but not in the case of my father."

Niklas Frank

On 19 December 1918, Hans Michael Frank (1900-1946) wrote: "Lord God, send us now the man who will bring us order ... I wish for our nation men who can once again restore it to universally acknowledged prominence (...)" Soon after, he heard Hitler and was impressed by his anger, aggression, self-confidence and passion, by Hitler expressing Frank's own fears and desires. Everything Hitler said seemed "absolute, uncommpromising, irrevocable, undeviating, final"; he was the Chosen One with the divine mission. Hans Frank joined the German Workers' Party (DAP) which in 1920 beame the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). There is an early photograph showing Frank in his Storm Division (SA) uniform, looking proud (O'Connor, 2013). Frank joined the Nazi Party, participated in a failed coup, became Hitler's personal attorney, ascended to the Minister of Justice in Bavaria, became the head of the National Socialist Jurists Association and President of the Academy of German Law, obtained the position of Reich Minister without Portfolio, of the Chief of Administration to von Rundsted (a military official overseeing the Nazis' rule in occupied Poland), was soon promoted to Governor-General of the newly "acquired" Polish territories. Hans Frank was ambitious and powerful. In the Nazi system, he made one career move after the other (via) and sort of became Hitler's vice-king (via).

R.C. Lukas agrees Poland was ‘a laboratory’ in which National Socialism tested its methods of administration and exploitation with a view to applying the results elsewhere in its Lebensraum empire. Analysis of the events at stake here cannot be carried out in terms of economic utility and institutional functioning alone. A vibrant variable underwrote the unity and trajectory of the system. A racism burned at the top of the Third Reich which was so thorough and uninhibited that it implicated the subordinate institutional hierarchies deeply. It was like a flame running along a system of fuses towards explosives. Poland experienced the ‘purest expression’ of National Socialism and mass murder grew up there as deliberate policy. It became ‘a trial ground for the extermination and enslavement policy’ planned for the Soviet Union. (via)

Hans Frank was the one responsible for tearing Jewish people from their homes and sending them into death camps. He oversaw six death camps in Poland (in Belzec, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór). Frank, the accomplice to genocide known as the "Butcher of Poland", later testified at the Nuremberg trials that he had had no idea what was had been going on in the death camps and had only heard of rumours (see: testimony from 18 April 1946). 

Frank was indicted for his war crimes and stood trial in Nuremberg in 1945 where he was one of only two Nazi officials to show guilt and remorse. After eleven months, the trial came to an end on 1 October 1946. He was declared guilty and sentenced to death. On 16 October, Hans Frank was executed by hanging (via).

This guilt he showed at the trials was, according to his son Niklas Frank, all lies. Niklas Frank was born in 1939 as the youngest of five children. In 1987, he published an accusatory book about his father; more books followed. Chronicling his father's crimes was not appreciated by his siblings and a great many others in Germany. Within his family, the reception to his father's book was, in fact, negative. Some of his siblings sent letters to newspapers saying: "This is not a proper son". One day, his older brother told him: "I hated your books, but I am grateful that you wrote them." (via). Not only in his books does Niklas Frank attack his father. The reactions are not always positive since there seems to be a disturbing element in this son despising everything about his father:

Reactions to what was said that evening varied but one strong theme did emerge. Widespread sympathy for Niklas’s attacks on his father was tempered by discomfort at the sheer level of vitriol and apparent absence of filial warmth. His father was a “big coward”, Niklas said, a man who “knew everything about the Holocaust” yet “went on and on and on”; a man who refused to take responsibility for the crimes he had committed. (via)

Niklas Frank's book "The Father: A Revenge" is irritating, from the very beginning (see excerpts below). According to Dahlke (2007), Frank forces the reader to take a voyeuristic position. Frank imagines a dialogue with his father, addresses him; the dialogue is doomed to fail since his dead father can neither respond nor listen. Dahlke asks the question whether Frank forces his readers to take over the dead father's role. With his hatred, the author tries to distance himself from his father but fails to do so. His emotions, in fact, are not under his control. The father is defeated but still has an enormous impact on the son who is turned into a stuttering, self-hating adolescent without self-reflection, an attempt to judge his father becomes a failed attempt to save himself, so Dahlke. 

You told me once I should make peace with my father. I have peace with my father because I acknowledged his crimes, and so I could lead a really good life, and also a happy one.
Niklas Frank

> This is how the book starts:

Top Nazi sperm enters a top Nazi egg.

She had no orgasm when you came - when I came.

She had no lofty sensations when you were lying on top of her, fat as you were - not even at the time you were siring me. You never knew that. I got it from Aunt Margot. "Can't imagine what men find in all that," Mother would say in astonishment - and then she would have one pregnancy after another. (Were you always the father?) Yet she bore me for you, the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio, the President of the Academy of German Justice, the Governor General of Poland and today a bloody footnote to the history of our times - executed, thank God, cremated and scattered in the Konwentz Brook at Solln near Munich, your ashes mixed with those of Göring, of Streicher and Ribbentrop, of Jodl and Kaltenbrunner, of Frick, Keitel, Seyss-Inquart, of Sauckel and Rosenberg - a nauseating water-soluble Nazi mess.

Your final photograph is on the table in front of me. There you are, still fresh in your death, at rest on your blanket, with your neck broken, your eyes closed, your mouth half open, your full lips maybe just a touch too pale - did you bite your lips under your black hood at the moment of your plunge?

> Some more excerpts:

(...) The suit in which you dangled out your life is really quite becoming. Or did they dress you in it after the fact? Was this when they also wiped the blood from your lips? As you were falling through the trapdoor, did you strike your chin on its wooden edge on the way down? Was that the reason for the blood? How unfair it would have been if the blow had knocked you out. You deserved to enjoy, in full awareness, every last millietre of rope, right up to the final shock. (...)

As a child I made your death my own.

The nights just before 16 October became sacred for me. I took pleasure in your death. (...) Maybe you have one more thing to tell me? Here is your opportunity. For even in your case the executioners insist on honouring that foolish tradiiton and letting you - you dreadful chatterbox - say a few final words. Well, get on with it, then: give me your final greeting. maybe now is the time for that word of advice about paper clips; or maybe very loudly you could shout, "My God, how you have all pissed on me!"; or "Hello, Herr Hoegner - my wife will never forgive you for being here!"; or: "What a life that was and what a death!" But no; you had to remain a smarmy bastard to the very end, for the present and for the hereafter. And so you say: "My thanks for the kind treatment shown to me during my imprisonment. I beg the Lord to accept me mercifully."

That sentence is only gramatically in order, Father.

(...) Were those words your ticket to Paradise?

The rope took your breath away even before the fall - the very second before, when you were standing up there, high above the others, your head in the black hood, your heart a high-pressure pump, your body stiff with the frenzy of fear. Yes, Father, it is a goddamned shitty shame to die completely awake and fully conscious, fit a as a fiddle, having been tested and declared by the officials at Nuremberg to belong to the top third of Nazi criminals, well-fed while all of Europe is starving - and then for you to give in and in a loud whisper say, "Jesus, have mercy"!

"I heard him say it very clearly. Before the snapping sound. That, you see, was the terrible thing about your father's death, that sound of his neck cracking. You could hear it all over the gymnasium." I weep, Father, I weep. Why do I weep? What was the snapping like? Like a cork being pulled from a bottle? Like the sound of a willow walking stick breaking? Like the splitting  of a log? Like the clicking of your tongue against the roof of your mouth?

It was the last sound you made; the only thing that followed it was your death fart. You are hanging. You are left there hanging. You are swaying gently back and forth. (...)

The end of a criminal, a big shot gets hanged, a thoroughly cultivated German, someone who had known the truth of poetry and music and who sold out for a Horch, a Mercedes and a luxury private railway carriage with mahogany and decadence on all sides.

(...) Well, Father, I've got to congratulate you on the creation of a post-war Germany, a new country in your spirit. (...) a raped land (...).

Once again, a choking, suffocatig, putrid mantle of political self-glorification has settled down over Germany. The arrogance of power is on the march just as you were then. They have your same shameless, sordid manner; they manipulate the law, they disdain the average citizen. No, your ties were not swept away with your ashes in the waters of the Konwentz at Solln. Your goddamned sahses fertilised far too many plants along the edge of that brook; they germinated again. Because of people like you, your Eternal Germany is threatened more from within than from without and its conscience is like yours - which is to say, it does not exist. One fateful initiative, one evil impulse, coming from almost anywhere and you can take over the reins once more, you and a thousand others like you. (...)

I have wicked fantasies lodged in my brain, one of them an image of millions of gallows erected along the autobahns right after the war; of the American Hangman Woods driving slowly past them in your confiscated Maybach and releasing the trapdoors one after the other. What a wholesome chorus of cracking necks would have resounded over Germany, the snapping neck bones of all those judges, lawyers, industrialists, guards, wardens and informers. (...)

Imagine a second that you survived, you the prototype of the German criminal (...). After a bit of de-Nazification, your metamorphosis from Nazi to good Christian Democrat would have taken place without a hitch. (...) your inspiring voice would reflect your ardour for the new democracy and your condemnation of the brownshirt dictatorship, to which, alas, you had falle a helpless victim (...).

The snapping of your neck spared me from having a totally screwed-up life. You certainly would have poisened  my brain with all your drivel, the fate of the silent majority of my generation who did not have the good fortune of having their fathers hanged.

That's why I'm happy to be your son, How poor by comparison are all the millions of other children whose fathers spouted the same rubbish filled with deceit and cowardice, with bloodthirstiness and inhumanity, but who were not so prominent as you. Their tirades were not worth recording, their journals not worth preserving. I have it good. (...)

There is no doubt about it: you will also lose the second Nuremnberg trial, this mini trial with your son as prosecutor, judge and hangman in one. (...) Almost every person who has ever spoken with me about you has had a remarkable urge to defend you to me (...). They told me this was utterly appalling and kept insisting on the virtue of filial piety - a virtue that evidently is meant never to be consumed, not even by the flames of the ovens that were packed with Jews. (...)

(...) you were a real arsehole of a human being. (...) And only after I die will I let my inner swine loose; will I let loose of you, you swine. (...)

When was your death? The first time you heard Hitler speak? (...)

(...) Your mother had run off to Prague by this time, a fabulous woman. Did she perhaps have an inkling that she had given birth to Rosemary's Baby?

(...) and I sit there in the Philharmonic Hall like an evil little sprite on your rounded shoulders (you already had that greasy look that came upon you with the years, already fat and paunchy) - I sit like a sprite on your shoulders with not a thought in the world for Meister Furtwängler; and I whisper in your ear:

Father, you have only nine more years to live. This neck of yours that I'm holding tight between my little legs... in exactly 3,567 days the sound of its snapping will reverberate through the gymnasium at Nuremberg. (...)

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- Dahlke, B. (2007). Familienpornographie. Niklas Franks Abrechnung mit dem Täter-Vater. In. I. Stephan & A. Tacke (Hg.) Geschichte(n) erzählen. Nach-Bilder des Holocaust (53-65). Böhlau Verlag; link

-  Frank, N. (German original published in 1987). The Father.: A Revenge. A Son's Judgement on His Nazi War Criminal Father. Biteback Publishing.

- O' Connor, G. (2013). The Butcher of Poland. Hitler's Lawyer Hans Frank. History Pr.

- photographs of Niklas Frank via and via and via and via

Becoming "The" Ernst Haas

Ernst Haas was born in Vienna in 1921. As a child, he decided to become a painter, however, he was drafted into the military for two years after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich in 1938. When returning to Vienna after his service, he entered medical school which he was forced to leave after one year of study because of his Jewish ancestry (via).

His father was an amateur photographer. After his death in 1940, Haas started printing his father's negatives teaching himself technical aspects of photography and developing an interest in the creative ones. In photography, he saw the chance to combine his two goals, i.e. becoming an explorer and a painter (via). Haas, in fact, became an early master of colour photography, a member of Magnum, the man behind the iconic photograph of the Marlboro Man, and much more (via).

photographs by Ernst Haas via and via and via

The City Without Jews

"The City Without Jews" (1924) is a satire about "a terrible possibility that became horribly real" some years after being published, a film about anti-Semitism foreshadowing nazism and one of the "most prophetic, provocative films of the 20th century". The book was written by Hugo Bettauer (1872-1925), a Jewish Austrian labelled an "Asphaltliterat", a term Joseph Goebbels used during the book burning in 1933 to refer to literature that was considered to be too urban and not patriotic enough. In 1925, the Nazi Otto Rothstock (1904-1990) shot Bettauer five times. Bettauer died sixteen days later as a result of the shooting and Rothstock, who defended the assassination as a patriotic attempt to protect so-called German culture from the menace of "degeneration", spent a few months in prison and less than two years in a psychiatric clinic before being released. In 1977, Rothstock boasted in an interview of being responsible for Bettauer's "extinction". 

Hans Karl Breslauer (1888-1965) directed the film and changed some parts of the book. For instance, Vienna became Utopia aiming to avoid problems with censorship.

The movie is about a city resembling Vienna in which failing economy leads to rising anti-Semitism and the Jewish population being scapegoated. Finally, a law based on fear, prejudice and populist rhetoric is passed expelling all Jews from the city. Only a decade later, the Third Reich turned this fiction into haunting fact and atrociously killed millions of children, men and women (via and via and via).

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photograph of Hans Moser via

J'accuse. By Emile Zola.

French novelist and journalist Émile Zola (1840-1902) reacted to the Dreyfus affair (Zola called it "the most preposterous of soap operas") by publishing an open letter to the president entitled "J'accuse".  In the letter, which ran on the front page of the newspaper "L'aurore", he accused the army of conspiring to convict Dreyfus using the public's anti-Semitism. 200.000 copies of the newspaper were sold in Paris alone, Zola was convicted for libel (via).       

 

Letter to Mr. Félix Faure,
President of the Republic 

Mister President,
Allow me, in my gratitude for the kind welcome you once gave me, to be concerned about your just glory and to tell you that your star, so happy so far, is threatened with the most shameful, the most indelible stain? You came out safe and sound from slander, you won hearts. You appear radiant in the apotheosis of this patriotic celebration that the Russian alliance has been for France, and you are preparing to preside over the solemn triumph of our Universal Exhibition, which will crown our great century of work, truth and freedom. But what a patch of mud on your name - I was going to say on your reign - that this abominable Dreyfus affair! A council of war has just, by order, dared to acquit an Esterhazy, the supreme bellows of all truth, of all justice. And it's over, France has this stain on its cheek, history will write that it was under your presidency that such a social crime could have been committed. Since they dared, I will also dare. The truth, I will say it, because I promised to say it, if justice, regularly seized, did not do it, full and whole. My duty is to speak, I don't want to be an accomplice. My nights would be haunted by the specter of the innocent who atones over there, in the most dreadful of tortures, a crime he did not commit. And it is to you, Mr. President, that I will shout it, this truth, with all the strength of my revolt as an honest man. For your honor, I’m sure you don’t know. And to whom will I denounce the harmful peat of the real culprits, if it is not you, the first magistrate of the country?

(...) O justice, what frightful despair sinks the heart! We go so far as to say that he was the forger, that he fabricated the telegram card to lose Esterhazy. But, great God! Why? What purpose? Give a reason. Is that one also paid for by the Jews? The beauty of the story is that he was justly anti-Semitic. Yes! We are witnessing this infamous spectacle, men lost in debts and crimes whose innocence is proclaimed, while the very honor is struck, a man with a spotless life! When a society is there, it decays. So there you have it, Mr. Speaker, the Esterhazy case: a culprit that was to be found innocent. (...)

And what a nest of low intrigue, gossip and squandering, has become this sacred asylum, where the fate of the fatherland is decided! We are horrified by the terrible day that the Dreyfus affair has just thrown into it, this human sacrifice of an unfortunate, a "dirty Jew"! Ah! all that has been agitated there about insanity and foolishness, crazy imaginations, practices of low police, mores of inquisition and tyranny, the good pleasure of some braided men putting their boots on the nation, entering it in the throat his cry of truth and justice, under the pretext liar and sacrilege of reason of State! And it is still a crime to have relied on the filthy press, to have allowed oneself to be defended by all the scoundrel of Paris, so that this is the scoundrel who triumphs insolently, in the defeat of law and simple probity. It is a crime to have accused of disturbing France those who want it generous, at the head of free and just nations, when one plots the impudent conspiracy to impose error, before the whole world . It is a crime to mislead public opinion, to use this opinion which has been perverted to the point of delirium for a death task. It is a crime to poison the small and the humble, to exasperate the passions of reaction and intolerance, by sheltering behind the odious anti-Semitism, of which the great liberal France of human rights will die, if she is not cured of it. It is a crime to exploit patriotism for works of hate, and it is a crime, finally, to make the saber the modern god, when all human science is at work for the next work of truth and justice. (...) I have said it elsewhere, and I repeat it here: when we shut up the truth underground, it accumulates there, it takes on such a force of explosion that, the day it bursts, it blows everything up with she. we’ll see if we don’t just prepare for the most resounding disasters for later. (...)

I have only one passion, that of light, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and which has the right to happiness. My fiery protest is only the cry of my soul. So dare you put me on trial and let the investigation take place! I wait. Please accept, Mr. President, the assurance of my deep respect. 

::: link to complete letter: LINK

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photograph via

Saul Steinberg. A Genius Facing Antisemitism.

Romania is an anti-Semitic country, as Saul finds out when he moves to the capital with his family. His scholastic career in the Liceu Matei Basarab in Bucharest would be made difficult by this climate. After enrolling in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, in 1933 he decides to study architecture but is not admitted: there is a limit to the number of Jewish students. Years later he would write: "My childhood, my adoslescence in Romania were a bit like being a Negro in the State of Mississippi" (Reflections and shadows, 2001). (literally from the exhibition at the Triennale Milano currently showing Saul Steinberg's works)

Saul Steinberg was born on 15th June 1914 in Ramnicu Sarat, a small town north of Bucharest, in Romania. His parents, Moritz Steinberg and Rosa Iacobson, belonged to the Jewish middle class. In 1915 the family moved to Bucharest and Moritz set up a bookbinding shop and then began to produce decorative boxes. Some of the family had already emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century. In 1925, Saul enrolled in the Liceu Matei Basarab and three years later graduated to its upper school. Having gained his diploma in 1932, he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Bucharest. He received good grades but the university's anti-Semitic atmosphere kept him from regularly attending courses. (text from exhibition, Triennale Milano)

In 1933, he applied for admission to the Faculty of Architecture but was denied entrance because a quota system limited the number of Jewish students who could be accepted. Instead, he went to Milan and enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Regio Politecnico, arriving in the city in November. (...) But in 1938 the Fascist regime promulgated racial laws and Steinberg risked expulsion from Italy. He was able, however, to complete his studies in 1940, but his efforts to leave Italy for the US failed. After various ups and downs, including being arrested and confined in an internment camp, he managed to leave for Santo Domingo, where he spent a year waiting for a US visa. He finally arrived in New Yorsk in July 1942. (...) (text from exhibition, Triennale Milano)

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photographs via and via

"In the end, it all comes down to what kind of world we want."

At times, some critics have said my comedy risks reinforcing old stereotypes. The truth is I've been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life. As a comedian, I have tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice. Borat did reveal people's indifference to antisemitism. When as Bruno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria, I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when disguiised as a ultra woke developer I proposed building a mosque in one rural community prompting a resident to proudly admit "I am racist against Muslims", it showed the growing acceptance of islamophobia.



Today, around the world demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It's as if the age of reason, the era of evidential argument is ending and our knowledge is increasingly delegitimised and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths is in retreat and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities. Fake news outperforms real news because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. The rantings of a lunatic seems as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

In the end, it all comes down to what kind of world we want. If we prioritise truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference, and experts over ignoranuses, then maybe, just maybe, we can save democracy. We can still have a place for free speech and free expression, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today these rights are threatened by hate, conspiracy and lies. So allow me to leave you with a suggestion for a different aim for society. The ultimate aim of society should be to make sure that people are not targeted, not harassed and not murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love or how they pray.
Sacha Baron Cohen 

::: Full speech: LISTEN/WATCH  

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Anti-Semite and Jew. An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. By Jean-Paul Sartre (1944)

In 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) wrote his essay "Anti-Semite and Jew", a critique of anti-Semitism. The critique is criticised for not being based on research and being a philosophical speculation written on an abstract level. Nevertheless, the result is "a powerfully coherent argument that demonstrates how theoretical sophistication and practical ignorance can, sometimes, usefully combine", as Walzer writes in his preface. Here are some excerpts:



Anti‐Semitism does not fall within the category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. Indeed it is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a passion. No doubt it can be set forth in the form of a theoretical proposition. The "moderate" anti‐Semite is a courteous man who will tell you quietly: "Personally, I do not detest the Jews. I simply find it preferable, for various reasons, that they should play a lesser part in the activity of the nation." But a moment later, if you have gained his confidence, he will add with more abandon: "You see, there must be something about the Jews; they upset me physically." (...)



This involvement is not caused by experience. I have questioned hundred people on the reasons for their anti‐Semitism. Most of them have confined themselves to enumerating the defects with which tradition has endowed the Jews. "I detest them because they are selfish, intriguing, persistent, oily, tactless, etc” – “But,at any rate, you associate with some of them?” – “Not if I can help it!" A painter said to me: "I am hostile to the Jews because,with their critical habits, they encourage our servants to insubordination."Here are examples a little more precise. A young actor without talent insisted that the Jews had kept him from a successful career in the theatre by confining him to subordinate roles. A young woman said to me: "I have had the most horrible experiences with furriers; they robbed me, they burned the fur I entrusted to them. Well, they were all Jews." But why did she choose to hate Jews rather than furriers? Why Jews or furriers rather than such and such a Jew or such and such a furrier? Because she had in her a predisposition toward anti‐Semitism.

A classmate of mine at the lycée told me that Jews "annoy" him because of the thousands of injustices that "Jew‐ridden" social organizations commit in their favour. "A Jew passed his agrégation the year I was failed, and you can't make me believe that that fellow, whose father came from Cracow or Lemberg, understood a poem by Ronsard or an eclogue by Virgil better than I. " But he admitted that he disdained the agrégation as a mere academic exercise,and that he didn't study for it. Thus, to explain his failure, he made use of two systems of interpretation, like those madmen who, when they are far gone in their madness, pretend to be the King of Hungary but, if questioned sharply, admit to being shoemakers. His thoughts moved on two planes without his being in the least embarrassed by it. As a matter of fact, he will in time manage to justify his past laziness on the grounds that it really would be too stupid to prepare for an examination in which Jews are passed in preference to good Frenchmen. Actually he ranked twenty‐seventh on the official list. (...) To understand my classmate's indignation we must recognize that he had adopted in advance a certain idea of the Jew, of his nature and of his role in society. And to be able to decide that among twenty‐six competitors who were more successful than himself, it was the Jew who robbed him of his place, he must a priori have given preference in the conduct of his life to reasoning based on passion. Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti‐Semite would invent him. (...)



I noted earlier that anti‐Semitism is a passion. Everybody understands that emotions of hate or anger are involved, but ordinarily hate and anger have a provocation: I hate someone who has made me suffer, someone who condemns or insults me. We have just seen that anti‐Semitic passion could not have such a character. It precedes the facts that are supposed to call it forth; it seeks them out to nourish itself upon them; it must even interpret them in a special way so that they may become truly offensive. Indeed, if you so much as mention a Jew to an anti‐Semite, he will show all the signs of a lively irritation. If we recall that we must always consent to anger before it can manifest itself and that, as is indicated so accurately by the French idiom, we "put ourselves" into anger, we shall have to agree that the anti‐Semite has chosen to live on the plane of passion. It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than one of reason. But ordinarily they love the objects of passion: women, glory, power, money. Since the anti‐Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves. Ordinarily this type of emotion is 'not very pleasant: a man who passionately desires a woman is impassioned because of the woman and in spite of his passion. We are wary of reasoning based on passion, seeking to support by all possible means opinions which love or jealousy or hate have dictated. We are wary of the aberrations of passion and of what is called mono‐ideism. But that is just what the anti‐Semite chooses right off. (...)

The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned a while back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. (...)



(...) By treating the Jew as an inferior and pernicious being, I affirm at the same time that I belong to the elite. This elite, in contrast to those of modern times which are based on merit or labour, closely resembles an aristocracy of birth. There is nothing I have to do to merit my superiority, and neither can I lose it. It is given once and for all. It is a thing. (...)



We begin to perceive the meaning of the anti‐Semite's choice of himself. He chooses the irremediable out of fear of being free; he chooses mediocrity out of fear of being alone, and out of pride he makes of this irremediable mediocrity a rigid aristocracy. To this end he finds the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise to whom would he be superior? Indeed, it is vis‐à‐vis the Jew and the Jew alone that the anti‐Semite realizes that he has rights. If by some miracle all the Jews were exterminated as he wishes, he would find himself nothing but a concierge or a shopkeeper in a strongly hierarchical society in which the quality of "true Frenchman" would be at a low valuation, because everyone would possess it. He would lose his sense of rights over the country because no one would any longer contest them, and that profound equality which brings him close to the nobleman and the man of wealth would disappear all of a sudden, for it is primarily negative. His frustrations, which he has attributed to the disloyal competition of the Jew, would have to be imputed to some other cause, lest he be forced to look within himself. He would run the risk of falling into bitterness, into a melancholy hatred of the privileged classes. Thus the anti‐Semite is in the unhappy position of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy. (...)

A destroyer in function, a sadist with a pure heart, the anti‐Semite is, in the very depths of his heart, a criminal. What he wishes,what he prepares, is the death of the Jew. To be sure, not all the enemies of the Jew demand his death openly, but the measures they propose — all of which aim at his abasement, at his humiliation, at his banishment — are substitutes for that assassination which they meditate within themselves. They are symbolic murders. (...)



Until the nineteenth century the Jews, like women, were in a state of tutelage; thus their contribution to political and social life, like that of women, is of recent date. The names of Einstein, of Bergson, of Chagall, of Kafka are enough to show what they would have been able to bring to the world if they had been emancipated earlier. But that is of no importance; the fact is there. These are Frenchmen who have no part in the history of France. Their collective memory furnishes them only with obscure recollections of pogroms, of ghettos, of exoduses, of great monotonous sufferings, twenty centuries of repetition, not of evolution. (...)



What we propose here is a concrete liberalism. By that we mean that all persons who through their work collaborate toward the greatness of a country have the full rights of citizens of that country. What gives them this right is not the possession of a problematical and abstract "human nature," but their active participation in the life of the society. This means, then, that the Jews — and likewise the Arabs and the Negroes — from the moment that they are participants in the nation enterprise, have a right in that enterprise; they are citizens. But they have these rights as Jews, Negroes, Arabs — that is, as concrete persons.

In societies where women vote, they are not asked change their sex when they enter the voting booth; the vote of a woman is worth just as much as that of a man, but it is as a woman that she votes, with her woman intuitions and concerns, in her full character of woman. When it is a question of the legal rights of the Jew, and of the more obscure but equally indispensable rights that are not inscribed in any code, he must enjoy those rights not as a potential Christian but precisely as a French Jew. (...)



But we who are not Jews, should we share it? Richard Wright, the Negro writer, said recently: "There is no Negro problem in the United States, there is White problem." In the same way, we must say that anti‐Semitism is not a Jewish problem; it is our problem. Since we are not guilty and yet run the risk of being its victims — yes, we too — we must be very blind indeed not to see that it is our concern in the highest deg is not up to the Jews first of all to form a militant against anti‐Semitism; it is up to us.



Sartre, J.-P. (1944/1995). Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. With a new preface by Michael Walzer. Translated by George J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, download



photographs of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir on the beach of Nida, Lithuania, 1965 (by Antanas Sutkus) via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via

Born this day ... Ingeborg Rapoport

(Very) loose translation: This is to certify that Miss Ingeborg Syllm has written a doctoral thesis on the influence of adrenaline, pilocarpine, calcium, potassium, and barium on surviving guinea pigs' small intestine on the basis of a sample of healthy animals and those suffering from diphteria. I would have accepted her doctoral thesis if the laws on ancestry had not made it impossible for Miss Sylm to receive her doctorate.
Prof. Dr. R. Degkwitz, Head of University Children's Clinic Hamburg
30th of August 1938



Ingeborg Rapoport was born on 2nd of September 1912 in Cameroon, at that time a German colony. Soon after she was born, her family moved to Hamburg - her father was Protestant, her mother Jewish. Ingeborg was raised as a Protestant which did not make things easier for her. She studied medicine and was a doctoral student in 1938 when she was not allowed to submit her doctoral thesis or to conduct a thesis defence. She was denied the doctorate degree. The same year, she left Germany for the US where she completed her studies, started working as a neonatalogist and became head of the paediatric department. Due to reactions to her "un-American" activities, i.e., handing out copies of the "Daily Worker" in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Cincinnati, she moved back to Europe where she established the first clinic of neonatology in Berlin, at the Charité. Ingeborg Rapoport submitted her doctoral thesis in 1938 and could finally defend it before the University of Hamburg faculty committee in May 2015 - at the age of 102. An injustice righted after 77 years (via). Happy birthday, Ingeborg.



Her former professor Rudolf Degkwitz (1889-1973), Head of University Children's Clinic Hamburg, by the way, was suspended from work for six months for openly communicating a critical stance in the early 1930s. He continued criticising antisemitism, children's "euthanasia", the killing of people with disabilities and refused to make the Nazi salute. In 1944, he was sent to prison for seven years for criticising the regime but could escape in 1945. That year, that marked the official end of Nazi terror, he started working again as a head physician in a hospital and advocated "cleaning" the hospital from all the doctors that had actively supported Nazi Germany and were working there again. He did not succeed, was opposed, left Germany for the US and only returned to Germany shortly before his death (via).

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