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    What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

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    And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Roald Dahl Is Antisemitic, but Not a Cartoon Villain, in ‘Giant’

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      A new play in London portrays the beloved children’s author as a rounded character, while making no apology for his bigotry.It started with a book review.In the August 1983 issue of Literary Review, a British journal, the beloved children’s author Roald Dahl reviewed an eyewitness account of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In a strident piece, Dahl mourned the disproportionate loss of Arab civilian life in that conflict, and appeared to crassly conflate the actions of the Israeli state with the will of the Jewish people. He also asserted that all Jews had a responsibility to denounce Israel.Later that month, in an interview in The New Statesman newsmagazine, he was asked to clarify those remarks. Dahl went further, saying, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.” He went on: “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”This shameful episode, which left a stain on Dahl’s reputation, is the subject of a new play, “Giant,” written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner, that runs at the Royal Court Theater in London through Nov. 16. It is an admirably evenhanded treatment that walks a delicate tightrope: “Giant” portrays Dahl as a rounded — and occasionally sympathetic — character while making no apology for his bigotry.We meet Dahl (John Lithgow) and his fiancée Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling) in the living room of their countryside home, which is under renovation. (The set, with dust sheets and ladders here and there, is by Bob Crowley). Dahl is poring over the proofs for his next novel, “The Witches.” The Literary Review article has come out and Dahl is facing a backlash. His British publisher, Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), and an emissary from its American counterpart, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, descend on Dahl and urge him to make an apology, but he’s having none of it.The U.S. publisher’s representative, Jessie Stone (Romola Garai), who is Jewish, suggests to Dahl that “The Witches” — about a secret society of evil child-snatchers — could, in light of his offensive remarks, be interpreted as dog-whistle antisemitism, echoing the Jewish blood libel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Amid Outcry, Academy Museum to Revise Exhibit on Hollywood’s Jewish Roots

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      When the museum first opened, it was criticized for omitting Hollywood’s Jewish pioneers. Now it is under fire for what its new exhibit says about them.When the popular Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021 with exhibits celebrating the diversity of the film industry, the museum was criticized for having largely omitted one group: the Jewish founders of Hollywood.Last month, the museum aimed to correct that oversight by opening a permanent new exhibition highlighting the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in creating the American film industry.But the new exhibition, which turns a sometimes critical eye on Hollywood’s founders, ignited an uproar. An open letter that a group called United Jewish Writers sent to the museum on Monday objected to the use of words including “tyrant,” “oppressive,” “womanizer” and “predator” in its wall text, called the exhibit “antisemitic” and described it as “the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate.”In response to the growing outcry, the Academy Museum said in a statement Monday that it had “heard the concerns from members of the Jewish community” and that it was “committed to making changes to the exhibition to address them.”“We will be implementing the first set of changes immediately — they will allow us to tell these important stories without using phrasing that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes,” the museum said.The museum announced the changes just before receiving the open letter, which was signed by more than 300 Hollywood professionals. “While we acknowledge the value in confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming only the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, antisemitic,” said the letter. “We call on the Academy Museum to thoroughly redo this exhibit so that it celebrates the Jewish founders of Hollywood with the same respect and enthusiasm granted to those celebrated throughout the rest of the museum.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Jerry Seinfeld Can No Longer Be About Nothing

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      The comedian, long beloved for his apolitical riffs, has been wrestling with what it means to be Jewish amid the Israel-Hamas war. Not everyone is pleased.Jerry Seinfeld became a mic-cradling, cereal-eating, “did-you-ever-notice”-ing avatar of American Jewish life with a brazenly shrugging persona: a merry indifference to weighty material as a comedian and in his megahit TV show about nothing, as petty and apolitical as he seemed to be.Now — off-camera, at least — Mr. Seinfeld appears to have reached his post-nothing period.Since the attacks of Oct. 7 in Israel, and through their bloody and volatile aftermath in Gaza, Mr. Seinfeld, 70, has emerged as a strikingly public voice against antisemitism and in support of Jews in Israel and the United States, edging warily toward a more forward-facing advocacy role than he ever seemed to seek across his decades of fame.He has shared reflections about life on a kibbutz in his teens, and in December traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with hostages’ families, soberly recounting afterward the missile attack that greeted him during the trip.He has participated, to a point, in the kind of celebrity activism with which few associate him — letter-signing campaigns, earnest messages on social media — answering simply recently when asked about the motivation for his visit to Israel: “I’m Jewish.”And as some American cities and college campuses simmer with conflict over the Middle East crisis and Israel’s military response, Mr. Seinfeld has faced a measure of public scorn that he has rarely courted as a breakfast-obsessed comedian, intensified by the more vocal advocacy of his wife, Jessica, a cookbook author.This week, as the couple and their children appeared together at the premiere of Mr. Seinfeld’s new movie (“Unfrosted,” about Pop-Tarts), Ms. Seinfeld attracted attention for another reason: She promoted on Instagram, and said she had helped bankroll, a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, where clashes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators have turned violent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Ye Is Sued for Hostile Work Environment at Donda Academy and Yeezy

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      A former employee sued the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, claiming a hostile work environment at Yeezy, his fashion brand, and Donda Academy, his private school.Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, was sued Tuesday by a former employee who accused him of discrimination and creating a hostile work environment by calling Adolf Hitler “great,” disparaging Jews and saying that “gay people are not true Christians.”The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by Trevor Phillips, who says he was hired in November 2022, around the time a series of antisemitic remarks publicly made by Ye lost the artist his major-label record deal and put his businesses in jeopardy.Phillips was initially hired to oversee “projects related to growing cotton” and other plants in an effort to make Yeezy, Ye’s fashion brand, “self-sustainable,” the lawsuit said, and then went on to work for Donda Academy, Ye’s private school in Southern California.Phillips’s lawsuit claims that Ye made antisemitic comments in front of staff members at Donda Academy, including, “the Jews are out to get me” and “the Jews are stealing all my money.” After Adidas ended its decade-long partnership with Ye over his public remarks, the lawsuit claimed, the rapper told Phillips: “The Jews are working with Adidas to freeze up my money to try and make me broke!”The lawsuit claims that Ye treated Black employees at Donda Academy, including Phillips, “considerably worse than white employees.”Representatives for Ye and Donda Academy did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Criticism of Israel at Berlin Film Festival Stirs Antisemitism Debate

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      The backlash to some winners’ speeches at the festival shows how polarized and fraught Germany’s culture scene has become.When Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra walked onstage at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday night, they had come to talk about more than movies.Abraham and Adra, an Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking team, had just won the festival’s award for best documentary for “No Other Land,” a movie about Palestinian resistance to Israeli campaigns in the occupied territories. It was “very hard,” Adra said, to celebrate the award “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.”He called upon German lawmakers to “stop sending weapons to Israel,” before Abraham called for a cease-fire and an end to Israel’s occupation.The audience, which included the culture minister of Germany, Claudia Roth, applauded loudly, and there were whistles and cheers in the hall.In the days since, Abraham and Adra’s speeches have become the latest flashpoint in a long-running debate in Germany around whether public statements by filmmakers, musicians and other artists should be described as antisemitic if they don’t line up with Germany’s official stance on Israel.Scores of German journalists and politicians have denounced the speeches. On Sunday, Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, said in posts on X that the filmmakers’ statements were filled with “intolerable relativization,” because they left out any mention of Hamas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Ally,’ a Play About Israel and Free Speech, Tackles Big Issues

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      Itamar Moses wrote a drama of ideas about Israel and antisemitism. Then Oct. 7 happened.Before his audition for “The Ally,” a new play by Itamar Moses, the actor Michael Khalid Karadsheh printed out the monologue that his character, Farid, a Palestinian student at an American university, would give in the second act.The speech cites both the Mideast conflict’s specific history and Farid’s personal testimony of, he says, “the experience of moving through the world as the threat of violence incarnate.” Karadsheh — who booked the part — was bowled over.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Karadsheh, whose parents are from Jordan and who has ancestors who were from Birzeit in the West Bank.Farid’s speech sits alongside others, though, in Moses’s play: one delivered by an observant Jew branding much criticism of Israel as antisemitic; another by a Black lawyer connecting Israel’s policies toward Palestinians to police brutality in the United States; another by a Korean American bemoaning the mainstream’s overlooking of East Asians. These speeches are invariably answered by rebuttals, which are answered by their own counter-rebuttals, all by characters who feel they have skin in the game.In other words, “The Ally,” which opens Tuesday at the Public Theater in a production directed by Lila Neugebauer and starring Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”), is a not abstract and none too brief chronicle of our times, a minestrone of hot-button issues: Israelis and Palestinians, racism and antisemitism, free speech and campus politics, housing and gentrification, the excesses of progressivism — even the tenuous employment of adjunct professors.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Michael Khalid Karadsheh, who plays Farid.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      ‘Vultures 1’: Where the New Ye Meets the Old Kanye

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      “Vultures 1,” the rapper’s album with Ty Dolla Sign, arrived on the 20th anniversary of his debut, “The College Dropout.”The old Kanye, the new Kanye. Kanye then, Kanye now. Few, if any, popular musicians have made as much hay from the tension between their prior selves and their current one. And no famous person perpetually sheds old fans and acquires new ones quite like Kanye West, now known as Ye.He is forever testing loyalty, which is a polite way of saying that he often leans into odiousness, never more so than in the last 16 months, which have been peppered with bursts of antisemitic remarks and revelations about similar past behavior.For a while, these latest provocations seemed to do what few of his past outbursts have done: remove him from the center of the conversation.And yet, “Vultures 1,” his new album, opened at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, and most of the past two weeks have been heavy with Ye news — about his earning a self-reported $19 million in a day from selling items from his clothing line for just $20, about the predictably chaotic release of the album, including ticketed listening sessions in arenas and pushback from artists who were sampled without approval.Hundreds of thousands of fans, or millions, have boarded the train — in part because public opinion can be elastic, but also because even in this era of Ye, glimmers of an older Kanye remain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Kanye West’s ‘Vultures 1’ Debuts in New York

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      The rapper formerly known as Kanye West has been mired in controversy after making a string of antisemitic remarks. Thousands showed up to hear “Vultures 1” on Friday night.Adidas severed ties with him. His talent agency dropped him. But on Friday night, an arena on Long Island was filled with thousands of people who most certainly had not turned their backs on Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.Shortly before releasing “Vultures 1,” his first album since making a string of antisemitic remarks that cost him business deals and drew widespread condemnation, Ye previewed his new collaboration with the R&B singer Ty Dolla Sign at a listening party at UBS Arena, further testing the boundaries of his fandom with lyrics that did not tiptoe around the controversy.“‘Crazy, bipolar, antisemite,’ and I’m still the king,” Ye raps in “King,” the final song on the LP, which drew a modest wave of cheers.Ty Dolla Sign and Ye appeared a bit before 11 p.m. on a smoke-filled stage — at least, that was the impression, though it was hard to confirm who was there. Wearing a full mask, the rapper, designer and longtime provocateur never showed his face as he exulted in his new music, which included samples from Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and the Backstreet Boys (“Yeezy’s back, all right!”).Originally slated to come out in December, delays and false starts pushed the release of “Vultures 1” to early Saturday morning, soon after the hourlong listening party had ended.Fans awaiting entry to the “Vultures 1” listening event at UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y.The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More