Joseph Berger

The papers of Abbie Hoffman, the puckish activist who gained a national reputation as a radical hippie, make clear the extent to which the tumult of that era regularly swirled around him: the showering of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, the nomination of a pig as a presidential candidate, the turbulent demonstrations that rattled the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Now the trove of letters, manuscripts, photographs, FBI surveillance reports, Christmas cards and thousands of other papers that memorialize Hoffman and his contentious role in U.S. history have been sold to the University of Texas at Austin by Johanna Hoffman Lawrenson, his third wife and companion for the last 15 years of his life.

They will be housed at the university’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, where some of the items are to go on display Tuesday after a ceremony to mark the acquisition. Later, after much sorting and cataloging, the rest of the collection will become available to scholars and students.

“Abbie Hoffman has not gotten his proper due historically,” Don Carleton, executive director of the Briscoe Center, said. “He really was a pathbreaking guy in terms of the street theater approach to gain attention for the causes he advocated, particularly the anti-Vietnam War movement.”

Hoffman, whose infamously anarchic work, “Steal This Book,” included tips on how to shoplift, might be amused to have his papers end up in so solemn a setting as a university research library. He was arguably the most emblematic figure of the youthful protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a man who helped coin the term “Yippie” and co-founded the group that took that name. But he was always more of a comic provocateur than an ideologue, specializing in thumbing his nose at institutions and formalities in zany ways.

In 1970, for example, when he and the other so-called Chicago Seven were being tried on charges of conspiring to disrupt the 1968 convention, he taunted the judge, Julius Hoffman, for having the same last name by calling him his “illegitimate father.”

The Briscoe Center, which has major collections of papers from figures in the civil rights and anti-war movements, paid Hoffman’s widow $300,000 for the collection. The payment was covered by a donor’s gift.

In an interview, Lawrenson, a photographer and former fashion model, said she had been living in a one-room Manhattan apartment with 75 boxes of Hoffman’s papers for 30 years and felt it was time to give them a useful home.

“I’m hoping the archive will help keep his spirit and his radical legacy alive and serve as a great resource for scholars studying 20th-century activism and organizing,” she said. “Abbie dedicated his life to social change, to creating a more egalitarian, compassionate world.”

Another archive of Hoffman’s letters and family photographs was collected by his younger brother Jack Hoffman, who donated it about 10 years ago to the University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

The trial of the Chicago Seven ended with Hoffman’s conviction for crossing state lines with intent to riot, but an appellate court overturned that decision in 1973. The same year, he was arrested on cocaine trafficking charges, later jumped bail and spent years as a fugitive, living with Lawrenson partly in Europe and partly in a remote hamlet in upstate New York, where, under the name Barry Freed, he campaigned to protect the St. Lawrence River.

He surfaced in 1980 with typical Hoffman panache, appearing for a Barbara Walters interview on national television. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in the cocaine case and served a four-month sentence. (Mailer later wrote Gov. Hugh Carey seeking a pardon for this offense.) Through most of the 1980s, he earned a living lecturing at colleges, focusing his activism on environmental issues.

Hoffman, who had long experienced bouts of depression, was found dead at 52 in 1989 at his home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, an apparent suicide.

Some of the artifacts in the collection display other sides of Hoffman’s protean personality: a sober term paper he wrote at Brandeis University about “Internal Group Conflict in the Jewish Community of Worcester, Massachusetts,” for which he received an A grade; a stub of a $150 ticket to Madison Square Garden for the 1971 so-called Fight of the Century between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali; several letters defending his authorship of “Steal This Book” in the face of charges from an East Village buddy that he had stolen the text from him.

One note in the collection suggests that despite Hoffman’s reputation as an anti-establishment prankster, the seriousness of his intentions was apparent to a broader audience.

Former President Jimmy Carter wrote him in 1988, two years after his daughter, Amy Carter, had been arrested with Hoffman at a protest over campus recruiting by the CIA, and discussed the delays in securing the release of U.S. hostages in Iran, who were notably held until the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. In the note, the former president absolved Hoffman of any responsibility for the arrest of his daughter, whom he referred to as a “strong and independent” woman. All the protesters were acquitted in 1987.

Robert Abzug, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Texas, said he was particularly intrigued by documents that outlined the changes in Hoffman during his years at Brandeis.

He came to the school as a relatively conventional student, wearing a jacket and tie, winning spots on the tennis and wrestling teams, even becoming the tennis team’s captain. But two unconventional professors, Abzug said, exerted significant influence: Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist who advocated social revolutions, and Abraham Maslow, a psychologist who argued that fostering human growth and self-actualization was more important than repairing neuroses.

Drawing on their ideas during rising ferment among the young, Hoffman felt liberated and was able to “unleash his personality” and lead “the theatrics ring of the New Left,” Abzug said. An example in the collection is a poster featured during the 1968 Democratic convention protests picturing Hoffman with an obscenity scrawled on his forehead and the caption: “The system is falling apart by itself. We’re just here to give it a little push.”

Hoffman’s style, Abzug said, entertained young people drawn to the movements of the 1960s and helped break down a stodgy culture as quickly as the ideas of more serious-minded radicals like Tom Hayden.

“It would have been a different era without the yeast of the Yippies and his making fun of a culture that was about to be challenged,” Abzug said.

This article originally appeared in

Steal This Archive? Abbie Hoffman's Papers Become a College Collection

There are notes and letters from other icons of the 1960s. Cards from John and Yoko. A letter from Allen Ginsberg, the poet, offering to help him raise defense money. A plea by Norman Mailer to the governor of New York, seeking executive leniency on his behalf.

But when it comes to doing business, Hasidic Jews have become enamored with a distinctly 21st-century company: Amazon.

The ability to sell merchandise easily and relatively anonymously on Amazon has transformed the economies of Hasidic enclaves in Brooklyn, suburban New York and central New Jersey, communities where members prefer to keep to themselves and typically do not go to college, let alone graduate from business programs.

But Amazon allows Hasidim to start selling without much experience and without making the investments required by a brick-and-mortar store. It permits Hasidic sellers to deal with the public invisibly — almost entirely by mail, by email or through package-delivery firms.

“Amazon doesn’t ask for your résumé,” said Sam Friedman, a marketer who designs trade show exhibits and works with many Amazon sellers. “And your picture is not on your business. The investment is minimal. You can work out of your bedroom.”

And if Amazon takes over the packing and shipping, according to some interpretations of Jewish law, owners can operate their businesses through the Sabbath and on holidays like Rosh Hashana and the Sukkot festival without violating the proscription against working on sacred days.

Amazon also provides men who at certain ages spend a good deal of their day studying the Talmud and praying and women who tend to the seven or eight children common in Hasidic families the flexibility to become full-time and successful merchants.

Danny Khaimov, 33, works out of a 10,000-square-foot storage space in Brooklyn and uses Amazon to sell new and refurbished electronic goods that he buys from various closeout sales.

“You open a store, you get five, 10 people,” said Khaimov, whose workspace is filled with volumes of the Talmud and a set of tefillin, sacred leather boxes and straps used for morning prayers. “On Amazon you get 1,000 people. If your merchandise is a known brand, it sells pretty quickly. Once you start selling items it’s like a drug.”

Selling goods on Amazon has become so popular in the heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn, that there is a square-block, six-story loft building chock-full of merchants, including Khaimov, who take advantage of the platform.

The 140 tenants are overwhelmingly ultra-Orthodox, and roughly 50 sell their cornucopia of products through Amazon. The building has a kosher cafeteria and a large room for the three required daily worship services.

Conferences in New York and New Jersey designed to help merchants sell on Amazon have drawn large numbers of Orthodox Jews, according to BuzzFeed, which chronicled the company’s growing appeal among Orthodox businesses.

Nuchem, a 32-year-old father of four who asked that his last name not be published to protect his privacy, said that after completing advanced yeshiva study he was uncertain about how he might earn a living.

Then friends selling pet supplies on Amazon let him observe their operations. He started selling health supplements — pills and powders — out of his Brooklyn home and now has a business with an office, a warehouse, three workers and 800 orders a day.

“Whatever you decide to sell doesn’t matter as long as you meet Amazon’s requirements,” he said.

Alexander Rapaport, who runs soup kitchens in Brooklyn and Queens and often serves as an informal guide for reporters to insular Hasidic communities, said the number of Hasidic businesses that were reliant on Amazon was surging.

“It’s the basic shtetl market, basic peddler economy that Hasidim are very into,” Rapaport said. “Being on Amazon is kind of doing that virtually.”

He was referring to the ragtag village marketplaces that grandparents and other ancestors of those in Brooklyn and other Hasidic communities had to leave behind as a result of Hitler’s drive to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Destroyed were dozens of Hasidic hubs whose roots stretch back to the Baal Shem Tov, the 18th-century mystic who in western Ukraine founded a movement stressing passion and joy in worship as an alternative to more intellectual strains of Judaism. Through ardor, he preached, the ordinary unlettered Jew could feel the equal of a scholar.

While aspiring businesspeople of all stripes have flourished with Amazon, the prevalence of Amazon-linked firms among Hasidic Jews is notable because it runs counter to the notion that ultra-Orthodox Jews spurn modern-day conveniences.

Hasidim embrace computers and cellphones even if they may add filters to keep out objectionable material.

Amazon, like many other tech companies, closely guards the data it collects on users. A spokesman, Joel Sider, would say only that “Brooklyn is home to many impressive independent retailers selling on Amazon.”

A company official, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to provide any information about sellers, said that “we are certainly aware there is a significant concentration of businesses” in Hasidic neighborhoods like Borough Park.

Amazon has also opened the door for many Hasidic women whose time is consumed taking care of their large families to become entrepreneurs.

Zlata Bernstein runs a full-time business out of her Brooklyn home despite having eight children, ranging in age from 1 to 18.

Through Amazon, she offers custom printing and sells iron-on and stick-on labels to identify the clothes of children at summer camp and more recently branched out to clothing labels for nursing home patients and children at day care centers.

While her older children are in school and the 1-year-old is cared for by a baby sitter, she hunkers down in the basement of her semiattached home and produces labels with a $20,000 color printer, a smaller black-and-white printer and a cutting machine.

She then packages sets of 100 labels into stamped envelopes to deliver to retailers and individual customers.

She knows customers looking for labels will find her niche business, Starlight Labels, among many other label sellers on Amazon and will choose hers as long as her products are high quality and she delivers on time. Many of her products earn four or five stars on Amazon’s five-star rating system.

Bernstein’s husband had been selling camp labels in a Brooklyn variety shop but it failed and now he drives a bus for a Hasidic yeshiva and helps out with the cooking.

“I think Amazon has allowed more women to get into business,” Bernstein said, mentioning a Hasidic friend who sells needlepoint designs, another who sells strictly kosher gluten-free and other health foods, and a third who sells Judaica.

Samuel Heilman, a distinguished professor of sociology at the City University of New York and an expert on Hasidic life, said that Amazon allows Hasidic men and women to avoid face-to-face transactions, liberating them from the strict rules of gender separation that govern their community: A man does not have to worry about spending too much time selling to a woman and vice versa.

“Privacy is very important in a community that is very conservative,” Heilman said, “and where everybody knows everybody’s business and where doing something off the standard path is looked on askance.”

While many so-called third-party sellers like Bernstein ship products they keep on hand directly to their customers, others operate entirely through their smartphones or laptops and never bother stocking merchandise.

They usually email orders to a foreign manufacturer, which ships it in bulk to Amazon, whose employees or robots individually pack, ship and track each order, and handle any returns or refunds.

Their sales are “fulfilled by Amazon,” as the service is known, for a variable fee, in most cases roughly 15% of the price of each item, which Hasidic entrepreneurs said is still cheaper than the cost of renting a store or warehouse space combined with other overhead.

If Amazon is fulfilling orders, the business may effectively be running on Sabbath and Jewish holidays, though how that is carried out is the subject of vigorous debate. With a Talmudic twist of logic, some Hasidic entrepreneurs take on a non-Jew as a presumptive partner, attributing profits made on the Sabbath to that person.

One drawback to working with Amazon is the inability of Hasidic business owners to answer customer queries and complaints on holy days, which can lower customer ratings since Amazon rules require prompt replies.

With all the competition on Amazon, Hasidic Jews are learning to game the system and its algorithms.

Bernstein, like many other Hasidic merchants, hires search engine optimization specialists to generate keywords that will get their businesses high on Amazon’s product lists and in Google searches.

Friedman is also organizing a business, advertising and marketing expo in Brooklyn in December to help Hasidic merchants expand their online sales by contracting with experienced copywriters, web designers, videographers and other professionals whose occupations the Talmudic Sages never even dreamed of.

“We’re not college students,” Friedman said, “but the yeshiva makes us smart enough to figure things out.”

How Amazon Has Transformed the Hasidic Economy

They are a religious community known for clinging to 18th-century fashions and mores — strict rules that keep men and women apart and constraints on attire, with men favoring black suits and formal hats and women in long sleeves and long skirts.

One developer even offered him $24 million, almost quadruple the market value of both buildings.

The developers, Schaller and preservationists believe, want to demolish the buildings and add another soaring tower to the Yorkville neighborhood landscape that historically was composed of working-class walk-ups and mom-and-pop shops, though dappled with expensive terraced high-rises of more modest scale.

But Schaller has turned every offer down, even those that promised he could reopen the store in the proposed tower.

“This store is iconic and its aesthetic would be compromised if we knocked down the buildings,” said Schaller, 40, the third generation of Schallers to run the shop.

Other building owners, however, have been unable to resist such offers, and so the neighborhood where Schaller’s store has long sat is rapidly disappearing.

The relentless march of tall buildings that has spread across New York has overtaken Yorkville, as the Second Avenue subway, the city’s newest transit line, attracts new settlers and makes the neighborhood particularly enticing to developers.

A dozen towers with prices or rents as lavish as their amenities have opened in the past five years or are nearing completion in a neighborhood once celebrated for its homespun immigrant Middle and Eastern European character. Some of the buildings soar to 50 and 60 floors, far higher than the 20- or 30-story high-rises that residents are accustomed to.

Another dozen building projects have started construction or are on the drawing boards.

As a result, longtime residents see a neighborhood that took shape in the last decades of the 19th century receding and shrinking.

Most of the descendants of the German, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak immigrants who found work in the breweries and cigar plants are long gone. So are all but a handful of the restaurants and shops that served those families — places like Paprikas Weiss, once the Hungarian Zabar’s, and Glaser’s Bake Shop, celebrated for its black-and-white cookies.

The neighborhood’s boundaries are sometimes debated, but Yorkville is generally thought to stretch from 72nd or 79th streets to 96th Street between Lexington or Third avenues and the East River. But it still retained a distinctive small-scale charm, and neighborliness that urban thinkers like Jane Jacobs prized.

In recent decades, the walk-ups and other low-rise buildings have provided homes for newly minted college graduates, young families, older pensioners and strivers from the country’s heartland. They were willing to wash their clothes in a coin laundromat. They appreciated shoe-repair shops, fishmongers and diners whose workers they got to know.

Now the neighborhood is losing what Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Municipal Art Society, a preservation group, calls its “sense of place.”

Margaret Price, who has lived in the neighborhood since the early 1980s, said the new towers erased Yorkville’s singular character.

“We could be living anywhere now,’’ she said, “and you can’t distinguish it from any other place.”

The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, however, believes it must put a priority on maximizing housing as the city’s population mushrooms toward an anticipated 9 million and the homeless population swells. Several towers, officials said, have 20% or more of their apartments set aside for low- and modest-income families.

“In the face of a widespread housing shortage, we must not impose restrictions preventing high-opportunity, transit- and service-rich neighborhoods like this one, adjacent to the nation’s largest jobs center, from doing their fair share to address the housing needs of New Yorkers,” Melissa Grace, a spokeswoman for the Department of City Planning, said in a statement.

One of the city’s leading developers, Gary Barnett, who completed a nearly 400-foot building on Third Avenue in Yorkville and is planning three more tall towers in the neighborhood, said new buildings must be high because land in Manhattan is finite and expensive.

“Would you have a New York City that doesn’t build anymore?” he said. “People move in and say no more development, but is this what you want? We’re a city of 8 million people. We’re not a little village.”

Much of the grumbling, Barnett added, is driven by “wealthy Upper East Siders who want to keep everybody else out.”

Still, preservationists and other critics say that what is happening in Yorkville is also happening in Long Island City, downtown Brooklyn, Crown Heights and the Lower East Side, gradually erasing features that make each neighborhood distinct.

“Everyone in the city who cares about the cultural identity of their neighborhood should be watching Yorkville as a warning sign,” said City Councilman Ben Kallos, a grandson of Jewish Hungarian immigrants whose district includes Yorkville. “The last thing a residential neighborhood needs is more glass towers for billionaires.”

The new buildings are replacing apartments in walk-ups and town houses that were affordable because they were rent regulated, said Kallos, who is working on legislation to require buildings over 210 feet to include affordable apartments with preferences given to current neighborhood residents.

Barnett, however, contended that most of the walk-ups on the avenues had been emptied by small landlords seeking to sell to developers and that many buildings, including his, contain apartments that sell below market rate to make them more affordable.

The debate in Yorkville is also playing out in many American cities that are grappling with a housing shortage as neighborhoods fight new housing plans by complaining of increased traffic, blocked views and overburdened services. To accelerate development, Minneapolis, for example, recently eliminated zoning that restricted land to single-family homes.

In Yorkville, Alida Camp, the chairwoman of the local community board, says that the neighborhood’s “shared sense of community” is fast disappearing, and that the area is becoming a “more anonymous neighborhood.”

“For me personally, it’s like watching New York melt,” she said.

The ever-taller architecture is certainly transforming the neighborhood’s look. “The sky is disappearing,” said Irene Merbo, a retired nursing administrator who was born in the neighborhood in 1933.

But some urban experts say new glass towers reinvigorate neighborhoods.

“Yorkville had to change as Manhattan is becoming even more of a magnet for people to live and work here,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University. “What makes New York different from other cities is that we’re constantly replenishing our population and reinventing ourselves. Cities that stand still are dying.”

Most of the new development is being spurred by the 2017 opening of the Second Avenue subway, whose three new stations and one renovated junction shortened walks to and from Yorkville’s eastern stretches and eased crowding on the nearby Lexington Avenue lines, among the nation’s most congested.

Most of the mid-blocks are protected by zoning limits of six and seven stories, so almost all the new construction is taking place along the avenues — First, Second, Third and York.

Those avenues are chock a block with five- and six-story buildings whose railroad apartments and one-bedrooms have provided housing for generations of modest-income workers like David Rosenstein, who works in public relations and lives in a Second Avenue railroad apartment.

“For me the only question is what do we do with the people who are displaced,” he said.

One building in the neighborhood that has generated controversy stretches over 520 feet, a height the developer achieved by inserting a 15-story mechanical void — space for systems like air conditioning and water pumps that builders have taken advantage of to build higher. An even taller 68-story building is planned along Yorkville’s northern border.

A stroll through the neighborhood reveals several rows of long-vacant stores, a telltale sign not only of fading retail in the age of Amazon, but — as has proved the case in many parts of the city — of a developer closing down businesses to assemble a footprint for another tower.

Curiously, Schaller, 40, has found that business actually picked up more than 20% after the Second Avenue subway spurred new construction, with more deep-pocketed residents spending more on his selection of 100 German beers, cured hams and European cheeses.

“It’s good for business,” he said, “but the neighborhood has lost a lot of its community feel.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-tall-buildings-nyc.html" id="242174e9-da2a-3d3e-a89d-07a755699b86">The New York Times</a>.

'It's Like Watching New York Melt': As Towers Rise, an Old Neighborhood Fades

NEW YORK — Almost every week, Jeremy Schaller gets a call from a developer who wants to buy the two unremarkable four-story buildings that house Schaller and Weber, a German sausage and sauerkraut landmark on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The boxcar stationed outside the entrance of the Museum of Jewish Heritage near Battery Park in Manhattan. It looked like the one that had brought him to Auschwitz.

“I woke up, and I was surrounded by a hundred people,” he recalled. “Thank God I was with my family, but I couldn’t move, and we were packed like that for four days and three nights. There was no pail for relieving yourself. Water to drink was a problem.”

Inside the museum, he spotted a caldron. It was the type used to make the thin turnip soup that was fed once a day to the famished, along with an ounce and a quarter of bread.

“You calculated when to get in line,” he said. “At the end of the line, you got more vegetables in the watered down soup, but you risked that they may not have any soup left.”

On May 8, the museum will open an exhibition to the public that will, unavoidably, also open wounds. Titled “Auschwitz, Not Long Ago, Not Far Away,” it will tell the story of that emblematic death camp, and the Holocaust, with 700 artifacts, most borrowed from Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people were killed, 1 million of them Jews. The traveling exhibition, largely produced by Musealia, a Spanish for-profit company, with the cooperation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, was first seen in Madrid over a 14-month stretch by more than 600,000 people.

On Wednesday, three floors of the exhibition and its accompanying explanatory panels and film clips were in place, and the museum permitted a reporter to tour with Kent, a camp survivor and chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

Kent, 90, and frail, was subdued, but resolute as he was escorted around the galleries.

That changed when he confronted a dozen battered suitcases taken from arriving Jews about to be split into those who would work and those who would die immediately. Kent remembered the SS officers shouting at his family, “Mach schnell! Mach schnell!”

The beatings of the men. The beatings of the women. The biting dogs. The horses trampling the prisoners. This was the last time he saw his mother, he recalled, as the prisoners were divided. For a moment he could not bring himself to talk.

The museum expects to see many visitors like Kent who live in the New York City area, which, in 2017, had 50,000 Holocaust survivors. Many of them have died since then, and those who remain are in their late 80s or their 90s.

Museum officials say the exhibition’s effort to depict the brutalities of the past is an urgent one at a time of rising anti-Semitism, which was recently underscored by the deadly attacks against Jews in San Diego and Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth Edelstein, the Jewish Heritage Museum’s vice president for education, said the museum regularly talks with survivors about “what aspects of this painful history they feel should be explored, how content reflects their own experiences.” Such conversations prompted the museum to include stories of the “myriad ways ordinary people responded to the unfolding genocide, including inspiring stories of resistance, resilience, courage and altruism.”

Along with activists like Elie Wiesel and Benjamin Meed, Kent spent much of his adult life calling public attention to what had been done to the Jews after the relative silence for decades after the war. He has been back to Auschwitz — now a museum — near Krakow, Poland, several times and has seen these artifacts in that pained setting.

He was raised in comfort in the industrial city of Lodz, Poland, where his father, Emanuel, owned a large textile factory. Wealth did not shield the family from the Nazis, though, and they were forced to relocate to an overcrowded ghetto. His father died of malnutrition. Kent; his mother, Sonia; younger brother and two older sisters were discovered in a hideout behind an apartment wall and deported to the sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in the middle of 1944.

Arriving when he was 15, Kent does not recall precisely how long he was in Auschwitz. “One day in Auschwitz was a month, one week a year, one month was an eternity,” he said. “How many eternities can one have in one’s lifetime?”

After being transferred to other camps, Kent and his brother, Leon, were liberated by the 3rd U.S. Army while on a death march to Dachau. The brothers later reunited with their sisters, who also survived. But one, Dasza, sickened at Auschwitz, died a couple of months later in a Swedish hospital. His oldest sister, Renia, remained in Sweden.

The brothers immigrated to the United States in 1946 as part of a government program to admit 5,000 orphans. They chose to live in Atlanta, where they attended Emory University. Leon became a neurosurgeon. Kent thrived in the export-import business, and he met his wife, Hannah, on a visit to the New York area, where they eventually settled. They had two children and three grandchildren. His wife died in 2017.

During his visit to the museum, as he moved from gallery to gallery, Kent paused to gaze at a section of a barracks, at fence posts braced with barbed wire — “most of the time they were electrified,” he said tartly — at a triple-tiered bunk bed, striped uniforms and the confiscated shoes of women and children.

There was even a chess set made by an inmate in 1943. The box to hold the pieces was once a sardine can.

Kent said he had no such diversions.

“I was too busy trying to be alive,” he said.

At another gallery, he was struck once again by the demonic efficiency the Germans displayed in creating an assembly line to exterminate Jews. The gallery contained a shower head from a building that the Nazis billed as a “disinfection” house, used for removing lice. Actually it was a killing chamber. Here on display was a rusty canister for the cyanide-based Zyklon B, a pesticide adapted to poison humans. There was an ingenious chute where the pellets, which turned to gas, were dropped from portholes in the roof so they could be retrieved by gas-mask wearing Sonderkommandos — workers, usually Jews, forced into these jobs — after the victims expired. Other Sonderkommandos carried out the corpses.

“How is it possible for a man to be so cruel,” Kent murmured.

One display case had metal hatches from a furnace in a crematory where corpses were turned to ash, then dumped in a nearby river. In a film clip, a surviving former Sonderkommando recalled hearing the women being gassed muttering a prayer, “Shema Yisroel,” as they clawed futilely for air.

As detailed and accurate as the museum exhibition is designed to be, Kent said nothing, not even a visit to the site today, can convey the horrors that occurred there.

“What happened in Auschwitz, no human being can comprehend,” Kent said after his tour. “It is beyond comprehension.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/design/auschwitz-museum-of-jewish-heritage.html" id="10998882-62d7-3861-a293-0591ee85f2bd">The New York Times</a>.

At Auschwitz Exhibition, a Witness to a History He Can Never Forget

NEW YORK — Each weathered piece of history set off a mental reel of flickering images for Roman Kent.

A young man yearns for an older woman but must contend with the meddling of a domineering father. The father, a widower, is on the prowl himself, though he seems as captivated by the tasty dishes eligible women cook as he is with the women themselves. Meanwhile, his daughter painfully copes with a husband who has taken off on a business trip that cloaks a romantic fling.

But what makes the Israeli series “Shtisel,” currently on Netflix, such groundbreaking television is that the characters are the black-hatted, side-curled men and bewigged women of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, a group that is known in Hebrew by the umbrella term Haredim and includes Hasidim.

It is an insular subculture that is obscure to most Jews, let alone to Americans of other faiths. While there have been a handful of movies about the group, like “Felix and Meira” and “Fill the Void,” “Shtisel” is the first television series in the United States exclusively focused on it, according to Jane Klain, manager of research services at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan.

A word-of-mouth grapevine of emails and Facebook posts lauding the show’s touching characters and its humor has flourished online, particularly among Jewish viewers.

Netflix does not comment on ratings. But interviews and anecdotal evidence suggest that Jewish viewers, some gentile viewers and even many Haredim (literally “tremblers” before God), who generally shun television, are bingeing on the series.

The response on social media has been so strong since the show started streaming on Netflix in December that the creators are contemplating a third season, four years after the most recent season aired, said Dikla Barkai, a producer for Abot Hameiri Barkai, the production company behind the show. They have not discussed plans with any broadcasters.

“When magic happens then you try to understand why it’s happening,” she said.

An American version of “Shtisel” is also in the works. Marta Kauffman, a creator of “Friends,” and her daughter Hannah K.S. Canter have sold a version of the show set in Brooklyn, titled “Emmis,” to Amazon and have recently completed a script they will propose to broadcasters, according to Barkai.

Kauffman told Variety she was not concerned about the unfamiliarity most Americans have with ultra-Orthodox rituals. “Make sure the stories, and the universality of those stories, is what people take in,” she said. “The rest is just background.”

“Shtisel” was produced in Israel, which in recent years has won plaudits for a number of television dramas including “Fauda” and the shows on which the American series “Homeland” and “In Treatment” were modeled. “Shtisel” was broadcast for two 12-episode seasons starting in 2013, and its first season practically swept the Israeli equivalent of the Emmys.

It is also another show that has seen a big spike in popularity after arriving on Netflix, joining American shows like “Riverdale” and “You.” The streaming service, which has dramatically expanded its library of non-American TV shows recent years as it seeks an ever-larger global audience, presents “Shtisel” in Hebrew with English subtitles. There is no dubbed version.

“Shtisel” focuses on a family living in the tightly-packed, squat apartment buildings of a Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem. The members include: the patriarch, Shulem Shtisel (Doval’e Glickman), a broad-bearded, stubbornly opinionated yeshiva teacher with a tender side; his youngest son, Akiva (Michael Aloni), a wispy-bearded teacher at his father’s yeshiva, whose real passion is for art; and Akiva’s sister, Giti (Neta Riskin), burdened by a scheming, apparent nogoodnik of a husband who has taken off for Argentina, leaving her to raise five children.

Following Haredi matchmaking customs, Akiva is paired with one young woman after another, but none arouse any joy. Then he meets Elisheva, (Ayelet Zurer) the twice-widowed mother of a pupil.

She is a dark-haired beauty a decade older. He is smitten, and so is she, but they struggle with the father’s meddling opposition and her own misgivings about marrying someone so young and quirky. The plot lines that follow — with no sex and barely any touching — treat the dilemmas with wit and pathos.

“While it is clothed in the world of the ultra-Orthodox, ‘Shtisel’ is a human story about family, love and community,” said Marty Greenfield, a retired chief financial officer of Warner Bros. Records (and the father of actor Max Greenfield). “You laugh, you cry and at the conclusion you want more.”

Fans of the show say it humanizes people who are often portrayed in bleak, derogatory caricatures. And the tension between the Jewish laws that guide their daily lives and the yearnings and whims of the characters makes for emotionally powerful television.

“It’s a wonderfully engrossing family story that gives us insights into a group we don’t really know much about, even those of us who are observant Jews,” said Lisa Kleinman, a marketing consultant in Brooklyn. “It’s not like I’ve been dying for a personal glimpse into the lives of Haredim. But the show is a beautiful, intelligent family saga that happens to be about Haredim.”

Shuly Rubin Schwartz, the provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan and a historian of American Judaism who has written about the portrayal of Jews in American culture, said the show seemed to satisfy a voyeuristic interest in a reclusive society, as with other TV depictions of subcultures like the Mormon polygamists in “Big Love” and British royalty in “The Crown.”

“Everybody’s talking about it,” she said, mentioning her Upper West Side neighbors and a friend who is a Catholic nun as well. “There’s something very attractive about a community with strong values we share: respect for parents, respect for elders, close knit families, modest lifestyles. We may not live that way, but we admire it.”

At the same time, she added, “it reinforces the views of many Jews about the claustrophobic nature of that society, the conformity, the regimentation.”

Her friend Mary C. Boys, vice president of academic affairs at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, said the “very human stories” shatter stereotypes of Haredi families just as well-crafted works about Catholic nuns shatter those stereotypes.

“One of the most important things we can do is engage in fiction or nonfiction that complicates our understanding of the other, whoever the other is,” said Boys, who belongs to the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary.

The show so accurately captures the granular mores of daily Haredi life partly because one of its creators, Yehonatan Indursky, grew up in an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. The men wear fringed ritual garments even while relaxing at home. The women sleep in snoods covering their hair. Married couples sleep in separate beds.

A blessing is said every time food or drink is consumed, and no one enters a room without kissing a mezuza, a narrow doorjamb fixture that contains the sacred Shema prayer. First-time meetings to check out a possible match take place in public hotel lobbies. Even the way a man sits, pulling up the flaps of his frock coat away from his backside, feels authentic.

Emma Goldman, 30, a human rights professional for a nonprofit, who grew up in an observant home, not only was beguiled by how Haredim experienced “the same internal struggles, hopes and dreams, heartbreaks and betrayals,” but she also could recognize the loopholes some Orthodox Jews find to bend laws to their needs. Elisheva, for example, stealthily listens to popular music on the Sabbath and justifies doing so because she left the audio player on overnight.

Secular Jews are intrigued as well, as evident from a host of comments by the more than 4,000 members of a Facebook group “Shtisel: Let’s Talk About It.”

Hasidim and other Haredim, largely the group known as in Yiddish as Yeshivish (they may have a similarly austere appearance, but they do not revere a particular Grand Rabbi as Hasidic sects do), generally decline to own television sets. In Israel, the show was denounced by one Haredi columnist as a “Trojan horse” crafted to influence a pious community with foreign values. But Haredim do have laptops and cellphones and, though often loath to admit it, some will watch surreptitiously.

“My wife watches it — off the record,” said one communal leader in Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York’s largest Hasidic neighborhood, smiling mischievously and asking not to be identified.

Chanie Apfelbaum, a 38-year-old Lubavitch Hasid and mother of five who hosts a popular food blog on Instagram, was more forthright, calling the series “the most honest portrayal of an ultra-Orthodox community ever.” (Lubavitch Hasidim have long used television broadcasts to proselytize Jews to become more observant.)

Alexander Rapaport, who runs a Borough Park soup kitchen called Masbia, said that had the show been on Amazon Prime Video instead of Netflix, it might have been watched more widely because many Hasidim run their businesses through Amazon deliveries. Watching on Netflix, he noted, requires the deliberate act of subscribing.

Those who do watch (and admit to it) extol the show’s affecting moments. Frimet Goldberger, a mother of two and freelance writer who left the Satmar sect of Hasidim, based partly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, recalled a scene when Giti is in agony during labor and her husband, by Haredi custom, cannot be in the delivery room with her. He calls her on a cellphone and tenderly sings a song to her, and she smiles and tears up, struck by his uncommon display of affection.

“It struck a visceral chord, and I intimately recognized Giti’s conflicting emotions — her desire to be held during this painful and momentous occasion, and following the law that forbids husbands from touching their wives during labor,” Goldberger said.

As she watched, she remembered the birth of her own two children and the deprivation of not being able to feel the embrace of her husband during labor, and she too cried.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/arts/television/shtisel-netflix-orthodox-judaism-hasidim.html" id="ad02f40d-a11b-3de8-ae9a-8e481ac3efed">The New York Times</a>.

The stories are the standard stuff of television dramas, sitcoms and soap operas.

Netflix's 'Shtisel' Is Binge-Worthy TV on a Strict Form of Judaism

The cause was complications of cancer, his son Charles said.

Vorspan, as an executive vice president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, led the social justice efforts of a movement with 1.3 million members and another 700,000 adherents.

With riveting speeches and well-composed essays, he traveled the country urging Reform congregations to partner with local organizations on social action, focusing on civil rights, women’s rights, opposition to apartheid and poverty relief.

In June 1964, Vorspan, although not a rabbi himself, traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, with 16 Reform rabbis at the invitation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to protest segregation and Ku Klux Klan influence there, the nation’s oldest city.

They were arrested for holding an integrated prayer service in front of a segregated restaurant and joining young black people at the lunch counter of another. The men spent the night in jail and issued a widely publicized letter exhorting the Jewish community to take part in the struggle and not fall prey to silence, which they called “the unpardonable sin of our time.”

“We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” the letter, written mostly by Vorspan and Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, said. “We came because we know that second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”

As a leading denominational figure, Vorspan was more attracted to political action than spirituality, his son Charles said. Rabbi David Saperstein, a senior adviser to the Union of Reform Judaism, as the congregational arm is now called, said Vorspan had been motivated by the Bible’s ethical traditions, which, for example, urge people to care more about the hardships of the widow and the orphan than about the impeccable performance of rituals.

Vorspan, he said, wrestled with the question “How do you express Judaism through commitment to social justice?” And just as other leading social-justice figures of his time, like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel, responded to that question in their own ways, Vorspan shaped his answer “through the institutions of Reform Judaism,” Saperstein said.

Vorspan could trace his work with Jewish organizations to the experiences of his youth. As a teenager, he was dismayed by the routine anti-Semitism he saw in Minnesota and heard on the radio, in the fascist-supporting broadcasts of the Rev. Charles Coughlin. Vorspan had been equally distressed by what he saw as U.S. passivity in the face of the beatings of Jews and the burning of synagogues in Nazi Germany before the war.

For many years Vorspan took part in dialogues with black leaders about rising tensions between blacks and Jews. In 1969, during a battle over school decentralization in a Brooklyn district, he called on his black counterparts to condemn anti-Semitic statements by some black teachers. At the same time, he took some Jewish spokesmen to task for stirring the Jewish community “to the very brink of hysteria.”

A Navy combat veteran of World War II, Vorspan publicly assailed the war in Vietnam as early as 1965, when most Americans still supported it. He helped persuade the Reform movement to become one of the first Jewish organizations to pass a resolution opposing the war — an action that prompted some congregations to bolt the movement.

Vorspan wrote several books on social justice, including “Justice and Judaism: Searching the Prophets for Values” (1981, written with Rabbi Balfour Brickner). The works have become mainstays of Reform schools and adult education programs.

A bespectacled onetime pipe smoker with a jovial laugh, Vorspan was famous in the Reform movement for his jokes as well. In addition to his tracts on social justice, he published four humor collections. One is titled, “My Rabbi Doesn’t Make House Calls: A Guide to Games Jews Play (1969).

But he also had his share of critics. In 1988, he drew attacks from a number of Jewish leaders for an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine that in part faulted Israel for not offering greater autonomy to Palestinians.

The article appeared at the outbreak of the first intifada, or uprising, to which Israeli soldiers responded with tear gas and bullets.

“Whether we accept it or not,” he wrote, “every night’s television news confirms it: Israelis now seem the oppressors, Palestinians the victims.”

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, accused Vorspan of engaging in “too much public posturing and too little private discourse.”

Vorspan responded to the backlash with characteristic humor: “Behold the turtle. It only makes progress when it sticks out its neck.”

Albert Vorspan was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Feb. 12, 1924, to Ben and Fanny Vorspan, observant immigrants from Warsaw who had fled the pogroms of the 1880s and landed in Galveston, Texas, before making their way to Minnesota. His father was a peddler, his mother a homemaker. Al, as he was always known, was one of four sons. (A sister, Rose, died in infancy.)

Vorspan was educated in public schools. Appalled by the rise of Hitler, he joined the Young Judean Trailblazers, which sought the creation of a Jewish state. He also became an enthusiast of Hubert H. Humphrey, then a populist Minnesota Democrat who championed farmers and workers.

Vorspan started college at the University of Minnesota but left to enlist in the Navy. He saw action as a gunnery officer on the destroyer Wesson in the South Pacific. The ship was north of the island of Okinawa when a Japanese kamikaze fighter plane dived into the vessel, killing six sailors instantly in the explosion and wounding others, two of whom later died. Vorspan was greatly affected by his tending to the wounded on a flaming ship, his son Charles said.

Upon discharge, Vorspan finished college at New York University. After a brief stint as a newspaper reporter, he took a job at the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (now the Jewish Council on Public Affairs), where he was spotted by Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and recruited. When Eisendrath died suddenly in 1973, his successor, Alexander Schindler, asked Vorspan to be his senior vice president.

In that post he helped organize the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, the hub of the movement’s social-justice activities. He also decided to run for Congress from his own Long Island district, in western Nassau County, in 1968, fueled by his opposition to the war.

Although endorsed by the Democratic organization, he was soundly defeated in the primary by a far more celebrated war opponent, Allard Lowenstein. Unlike Lowenstein, Vorspan refused to attack Humphrey, the Democratic presidential candidate and his fellow native Minnesotan, beyond questioning his support for the war as Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president.

Vorspan had retired to New Paltz. At his death, Charles Vorspan said his father was writing a memoir; its most recent title was “Dying at 95 Is the Least of My Problems.”

His wife of 72 years, Shirley (Nitchun) Vorspan, an artist and potter, died last year at 93. In addition to his son Charles, he is survived by two daughters, Roberta and Deborah; another son, Kenneth; a brother, Chet; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Friends said he had recently been deflated by continuing episodes of anti-Semitism in the United States, in particular the anti-Semitic marches by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Albert Vorspan, who steered the Reform movement and other Jewish organizations toward immersing themselves in social causes, particularly the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans and opposition to the war in Vietnam, died Sunday in New Paltz, New York. He was 95.

Joseph Berger

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