Leonard Cohen once told me something I’ll carry for the rest of my life. At the time, I thought it was probably the least poetic thing I’d ever heard from a man celebrated for finding poetry in almost everything. It took an unsettling encounter with a group of earnest young anti-Zionist music fans outside a Chicago music venue a few weeks ago to understand what he was really pointing toward. To explain why, I have to take you back to a winter Saturday morning outside a synagogue in West Los Angeles. 

I wasn’t looking for anything more profound than a synagogue. I was married, at the time, trying to get my bearings in a new city, and it seemed like a sensible thing for a Jew to do. 

Just trying to be a grown-up Jew. 

A friend suggested a Rabbi.

“You’d like Mordechai Finley,” they said.

“Former Marine.”

Then, after a pause:

“Hardcore.”

That was the entire recommendation.

The first morning I went, I was late. I’ve never been especially good with time. My friend Sholem, a local Chabad rabbi, still calls me JFK.

Just For Kiddush.

He’s not entirely wrong.

Services were ending by the time I wandered into the courtyard. People lingered in little knots, wishing each other Shabbat shalom, hugging, catching up, in no particular hurry to leave.

The first person I focused on looked an awful lot like Leonard Cohen carrying a tallis bag.

I’d seen the photographs. I’d heard the records. I’d read enough to have formed a picture of him long before I ever met him. There he was, walking through a synagogue courtyard with a tallis bag tucked under his arm somehow made perfect sense.

I walked over.  I told him I liked his tallis bag.

“Thank you, friend.”

“I’m Steve.”

“Leonard.”

I never asked his last name. I was pretty sure I knew it already.  

“Shabbat shalom.”

“Shabbat shalom, friend.”

That was our first conversation.

My impression was that he had a way of lowering the temperature around him. He never seemed rushed. He listened carefully. He spoke thoughtfully. For someone whose voice was recognized around the world, he spent an awful lot of time listening. 

What I liked most was that I could greet him simply as a Jew. And I dined out on it.

“Good Shabbos, Rav Cohen.”

He’d grin

That was enough for me.

Every now and then I’d ask him about growing up in Montreal, what he thought of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, or whatever happened to be rattling around in my head. He was always gracious.

Like a lot of people my age, I associated Leonard with a certain kind of sophistication that existed somewhere beyond my pay grade.

And if a cool woman took you home and put on a Leonard Cohen record, you took that as a promising sign—I’m sure he felt the same.

One crisp Saturday morning, my friend Marvin and I were sitting outside before Rabbi Finley’s Torah class. There weren’t many people there yet. We had a huge round table mostly to ourselves.

“May I join you?” It was Leonard.

I told him we’d been discussing (of all things) anti semitism   . 

“You know why they hate the Jews?”

“Why?”

“Because everyone thinks Jews are racist motherfuckers.”

I laughed. 

“Yeah, well, what do you think?” I asked.

Without missing a beat:

“I’m the biggest racist motherfucker there is.”  

At first, I couldn’t see much beyond the sheer irreverence of it. 

He detonated the premise with absurdity. And I loved it.  Of course we had better things to discuss. That was it. 

Over the years, the remark became its own kind of running commentary. It would quietly surface while I read the news, watched another argument unfold, or wondered where all of this was headed.

Somehow, it kept describing a part of the world I was living in.

By then, I’d been back in Chicago for well over a decade. It was the Thursday evening of Memorial Day weekend. Spring  finally arrived in this windy corner of Cook County.

I’m not going to name the venue where all this happened.

I’ll just say it rhymes with the name of my late great aunt.

Luba’s.

Heading downtown, I sat in the back seat of my neighbor’s car listening to two old friends tell stories while the tires hummed against the pavement. We were on our way to hear one of their grandsons play.

John and Tom met as teenagers in Gainesville, back when that college town was the county seat of North Florida hippiedom. They traded stories about rock and roll, old bands, and those legendary gatherings out at Tom Petty’s band Mudcrutch’s Farm.

Solid guys.

By the time we got downtown, they’d put me in an unusually good mood.

So there I was…

Back in general population.

Schmoozing.

I’ve always liked talking to people.

What’s not to like?

Years ago, when I waited tables, my coworker Jimmy used to draw cartoons of us during slow shifts.

One was basically me in a nutshell: leaning halfway across a customer’s table, peppering some poor stranger with questions.

The other was even simpler.

Just me pointing at myself.

“I’m Jewish.”

Apparently, I’m quick to volunteer the information. 

After a few songs, I wandered back outside.

People arriving.

People leaving.

Someone stepping out for a smoke.

Someone checking a phone.

The little ecosystem outside every music club. It’s a familiar tableau. 

A young woman, talking to her friends, jokingly announced loudly, “I’m Filipino.”

I just happened to be standing close enough to hear.

“Ever go to Jollibee?” I asked.

That got a laugh.

Jollibee is about as beloved among Filipinos as Portillo’s—or Lou Malnati’s—is around here.

Just like that, we were talking.

One of the young men was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He had that slightly bohemian look that somehow survives every generation. He even reminded me a little of Basquiat.

As the conversation wound down, I wished everyone a good night and started back toward the door.

“Hey,” the young man with the cigarette called after me.

“Where are your people from?”

“Chicago,” I said.

He smiled.

“No… before that.”

Ah.

The problem with asking someone like me where his people are from is that you’re liable to get a longer answer than you bargained for.

“Eastern Europe,” I said. “More or less. Latvia down to what’s now Moldova… and most points in between.”

I almost added, You want the oblasts?

I spared him.

“Why’d they leave?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know… why’d they leave?”

Depends which branch of the family. Some left because there was opportunity.

Some followed relatives.

Some fled.

Some just kept moving until they found a place that might let them stay.

“So where’d they end up?”

“Here,” I said. “All over North America.”

“And Israel.”

The second word came out almost as a whisper.

“Isn’t it sad,” I said, almost to myself, “that I feel like I have to whisper that now?”

His expression changed instantly.

“Oh no.”

“We don’t fuck with Zionists.”

He didn’t so much respond to me as announce it to everyone within earshot.

Then he turned toward the others.

“You guys need to hear this.”

The conversation we’d been having was over.

Something else had begun.

I wandered over anyway

The four young women I’d been laughing with a minute earlier suddenly looked at me very differently. One of them even moved away from me.

As though I’d revealed something about myself they couldn’t reconcile with the conversation we’d just been having.

“Can I just say something?” I asked before continuing.

“Respectfully…that word does not occupy the place you seem to think it does. Jewish people don’t walk around introducing themselves as Zionists. At least not in my experience.”

“Maybe they should.”

I asked if any of them had ever been to Israel.

The answer came back almost in chorus.
“No.”

“You should go,” I said. “I think you’d meet people who would surprise you.”

That was all I meant.

I wasn’t trying to win an argument.

I was trying to complicate one.

I mentioned Israel’s Ethiopian Jewish community and it being world’s largest  African American expatriate community.

The young man waved it away.

“A bunch of ‘Toms.’”

I winced.

“You don’t get to use another race to make your point.”

“You don’t seem to allow for the possibility,” I said quietly, “that someone could see this differently than you do.”

Nothing landed.

Then came the yes-or-no questions.

“Yes or no. Is it stolen land?”

I answered.

Before I could get very far, another one.

“Yes or no. Is it genocide?”

I answered that one, too.

It didn’t seem to matter.

The answers had already been decided.

Every time I tried another angle, the young man steered us back to the same refrain.

“Stolen land.”

I’d continue.

“Stolen land.”

I’d mention something I’d seen.

“Stolen land.”

Soon the word genocide joined the chorus.

After a while, we weren’t really talking anymore.

Another one of their friends appeared and joiner the passion play. Still, I introduced myself and held out my hand.

He looked at it

“No.”

“You’re really not going to shake my hand?”

“Nope.”

That one stung.

A few moments later, one of the musicians wandered outside to join the conversation. He looked like he’d just stepped off-stage. Wondering who the stranger was talking to his friends, he motioned toward me

“Who’s this guy?”

I shrugged.

“They say I’m a Zionist.”

He chuckled, like I had to be kidding.

“Oh… did you guys hear me yell ‘Fuck Israel’ from the stage?”

“So,” I asked, “how’d the show sound from the stage?”

For just a second he started to answer. Then he looked back toward the group. You could almost see him reconsider.

Whatever he was about to say simply disappeared.

He turned toward the front door.

He had to pass right by me.

“Hey, man,” I said. “I’m Steve.”

I put out my hand.

He looked at me as though I’d asked him for cocaine.

“I’m not gonna shake your fucking hand.”

I started toward one of the young women I’d been talking with.

Before I reached her, the first young man who refused to shake my hand stepped between us.

“Don’t touch her.”

I stopped.

I remember looking around, almost instinctively, as if another grown-up might wander into the scene and restore some sense of proportion.

A cyclist rolled by.

For one hopeful second I thought, Good. Maybe this guy…

“You guys talking about Israel?”

“Yeah,” somebody answered.

“Fuck Israel!”

The sidewalk erupted in applause.

That seemed to be all the encouragement my young friend needed.

He launched into an impromptu pantomime—marching, saluting, throwing his arms into the air.

“Say ‘Free Free Palestine.’”

“Genocide.”

He wanted me to repeat after him.

I didn’t.

I remember wondering what my face looked like.

“Don’t you think you’re making it awfully hard for us to get to know each other?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

So I turned and walked back inside.

”…Jah sitteth in Mount Zion that rules all creation.”

The way the word Zionist gets used now really troubles me.

I’d watched it seep into protests, social media, campus politics, even everyday conversation. I knew the temperature.

What I hadn’t experienced was standing still while the word was fastened to me.

It was a designation.

And designations have consequences. I’d spent enough years interviewing Holocaust survivors to recognize the mechanism.

In the space of a few minutes, it had come to mean I was complicit in stolen land. Complicit in genocide. Complicit in every accusation that followed. Ordinary courtesies seemed negotiable.

The ride home was relatively quiet.

I spent most of the drive replaying the evening.

Every now and then I’d slip into a kind of Alvy Singer internal monologue.

Can you believe the way that kid carried on? I mention one word, Israel, and now he thinks he’s Nureyev. 

For a while I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d somehow managed to spoil what had otherwise been a perfectly good night.

It stayed with me.

As I started writing this, I found myself thinking about Leonard again.

I never made it to the final tours.

The Leonard I keep returning to is the one I knew from Saturday mornings at Ohr HaTorah.

That’s still the picture that comes first.

I remembered hearing him called up for  an aliyah, and realized there was one thing I wanted to get exactly right.

His Hebrew name.

And his father’s.

So I called my friend Willie Aron.

Willie, like Marvin and Rabbi Finley  was one of the native Angelenos I gravitated toward most. Willie and Marvin have known each other since Fairfax High School.

Before anybody gets excited about the word native, let’s just say they were indigenous to Canter’s.

Willie was Ohr HaTorah’s lay cantor and one of the people who, along with Rabbi Finley’s wife Meirav, and others helped shape its musical life. If the Finleys gave the place its intellectual center, Willie helped give it its musical soul. 

These days we spend a fair amount of time talking about what’s happening to Jews. We’ve both watched the temperature rise in the headlines.

I called because I’d just taken it at street level.

“Peter [Himmelman] and I played sold-out shows at Lubas.”

Leonard eventually found his way to Ohr HaTorah through a show Willie played with Rebecca Pidgeon at the Hotel Café on Cahuenga. Before long, he was showing up for Rabbi Finley’s classes and had simply become part of the place.

When Willie’s father died, he was stunned when Leonard showed up to pay his respects at the shiva.

Years later, Merav told Willie’s then-fiancée, Belinda, “Leonard loved Willie.”

For years afterward, Leonard kept turning up.

Mostly it was Hallelujah. Sometimes a documentary. Another interview. Another tribute concert. Jeff Buckley’s beautiful cover. Innumerable bad versions. I’m half convinced some high school marching band somewhere in the Midwest has already given Hallelujah the full halftime treatment—blaring brass, overworked clarinetists, rudimentary snare drumming, color guard, the whole pageant.

Recently on the High Holidays, years after I’d moved back to suburban Chicago, my rabbi quoted Leonard during his sermon.

Uh oh.

I looked around the sanctuary.

In my head, I could see Leonard’s lips moving again. I heard the voice getting even deeper.

I had to step outside for a minute to compose myself.

Willie told me one more thing.

If Leonard really liked you, he’d sometimes sign his emails with his Hebrew name:

Eliezer.

I never got one of those.

What I got probably deserved one of those Parental Advisory stickers I first saw on a 2 Live Crew album cover.

With profound apologies to Leonard Cohen’s family, friends, biographers, scholars, devoted fans…

…that astonishing little piece of irreverence he handed me one Shabbat morning on Olympic Boulevard—

I think it was his finest hour.

Most people only see the final act: the busts, the courtroom transcripts, the heroin, the heartbreak. They remember the slurs, the obscenity charges, the chaos. Some call him a martyr for free speech. The headlines called it an overdose. His mother called it persecution.

But that’s the legend.

The man who broke taboos also loved language—precision, rhythm, play. He was tender, curious, sharp as hell. He could be kind. He could be brutal. He was never boring. Before the myth calcified—there was a boy from Long Island.

And he wasn’t always Lenny Bruce.

Leonard Alfred Schneider was born on October 13, 1925, in Mineola, New York. That part of Long Island still had farmland and trolley lines. It was close enough to the city but far enough out that a kid could be raised with a mix of old-country histrionics and American mischief.

A boy from Long Island, not yet Lenny Bruce.

Lenny grew up between homes and between parents, often living with relatives like Aunt Mima—immortalized in his act as a melodramatic kvetch. But he soaked up everything: the radio, vaudeville, movies, street talk. Language was oxygen. He learned when to hit a beat, when to stall for effect. By the time he was a teenager, he had a library of cadences in his head. His mother, Sally Marr—born Sadie Kitchenberg—a tough, fast-talking showbiz striver who did comedy, dance, whatever it took to stay afloat. Sally didn’t just raise Lenny. She shaped him.

His father, Myron (Mickey) Schneider—quiet, responsible, gentle. But Sally? Sally was everything else. Fire. Motion. A hustler with punchlines. She was a dancer, a comic, a force. She saw early that Lenny wasn’t just bright—he was sponge-smart. He picked up voices, characters, and accents. He’d sit at the kitchen table and do bits: rabbis, bus drivers, neighbors. “He was like a buddy of mine,” Sally said later. “I could talk to him like an adult.” And she did.

He was melancholy, introspective, funny without trying. Not hardened, but self-aware. Sally said he grew up without guilt—at least not about sex. She raised him to mistrust shame, especially the kind peddled by institutions. When Lenny was twelve, she took him to a burlesque show. The doorman balked. “You mean my son’s gonna grow up and never see a woman’s breast?” she snapped. Inside, Sally leaned in and asked, “Baby, aren’t these women beautiful?” Lenny looked around and whispered, “You’re the only woman in this theater, Ma.” Sally replied, “Would you believe it’s because they think it’s dirty—and that’s why this theater is packed.”

U.S. Navy ID for Seaman Leonard Schneider, issued before combat tours in the Mediterranean.

At sixteen, still soft-featured and sharp-tongued, Lenny wanted to join the Navy. “Ma,” he said, “they don’t shoot at ships.”

He was wrong.

On December 15, 1942, a Navy log shows: Schneider, Leonard A., S2c, reporting aboard the USS Brooklyn—a light cruiser fresh from Operation Torch in North Africa. Lenny arrived in time for the next round of fire. He’d just turned seventeen.

Aboard the Brooklyn, Lenny worked one of the ship’s loudest, dirtiest, most dangerous posts: the five-inch anti-aircraft gun crew. He hauled toddler-sized shells and drove steel into the breech as sirens blared. The gun crew moved like muscle memory—backs straining, sweat pouring, ears ringing, skin rattled from the concussion of each blast. There was no cinematic glory here. Just exhaustion, steel, and survival. “I’d scramble up the ladder,” he later wrote, “just in time to get my helmet knocked off and my nose bloodied from the concussion vacuum in the hatch cove.”

On Liberty in the Mediterranean, 44

He saw action in Sicily. Salerno. Anzio and Nettuno, where over 29,000 Allied servicemen were killed. The Brooklyn laid down suppressing fire ahead of beach landings, targeting anything that could kill American boys. The ship came under fire. Lenny saw German shells hit the surf. Saw bodies float. Saw men burn.

“The smell of spent shell powder at Anzio and Salerno,” he told Paul Krassner, never left him.

By the time Lenny arrived onboard the ship, the Holocaust was in full swing. Over a million Jews had already been shot in forests—not far from where both the Kitchenberg and Schneider families had once lived. Massacres at Babi Yar. Deportations from France, the Netherlands, Greece, Poland. The gas chambers and crematoria were running at full capacity.

Lenny may not have known the full scale, but he knew enough. He knew what Nazism meant—and what being Jewish meant in its path.. So he fed the guns.

Anti-aircraft and naval batteries at full tilt during the Salerno assault, September 1943

You want to talk about the ugly parts of fighting Hitler? Start with naval bombardment. Clearing the way by lighting up towns. Blasting homes, train lines, apartment blocks—knowing civilians were still inside. You cracked a fascist regime by turning Europe into a blast zone. The war shaped him. It even found its way into his act

Later, on his record, Sex Is Dirty, he barked: “You don’t think those kids have heard this since 1942? ‘You know what those Americans did to your mother? They lined her up… your father had to throw up his guts in the kitchen while some master sergeant schtupped your mother for our chocolate and cigarettes.’”

That wasn’t a bit. That was memory. That was shadow work. That was grief—flipped into fury and scored to a rimshot.

Discharged in 1945 after faking a psychiatric episode—telling the Navy he was the half-brother of a dead admiral and launching into monologues from his hammock—Lenny secured an honorable discharge. One of the clinchers? He told a Navy psychiatrist he had fantasies about other sailors. “I said I was a homosexual,” he later admitted, “because I figured that was the quickest way out. And it was.”

It worked.

The kind of stunt that, late at night swinging in that same hammock, probably struck him as hilarious too. Not because it wasn’t loaded—but because he’d found a way to outmaneuver the system with performance, with voice, with nerve. Even then, he was testing boundaries. Making authority squirm. Telling the truth—or at least enough of it—to get what he needed.

He wasn’t ready to sit still.

So he signed on with the Merchant Marine, shipping between New York and the Caribbean while searching for what came next. The sea gave him a paycheck, mobility, and time to think.

Father and son, reunited after the Navy—Mickey Schneider and Lenny

Eventually, he drifted toward show business.

It started small: an Arthur Godfrey talent contest. A few MC gigs. Booking burlesque acts for his mother Sally. He didn’t view strip joints as low-class. Quite the opposite. They were alive—charged with timing, rhythm, conflict, and character. He wasn’t working “blue” yet, not quite. But the seed was there. So was the pull: the women, the pulse, the scent of something wild under the surface. It fascinated and invigorated him.

As a comedian, Lenny’s watchword was “get a laugh every 15 to 25 seconds, make money for the club owner, and, “If he can upgrade the moral standards of his community and still get laughs, he is a fine craftsman. He had a face that could go warm or wolfish, depending on the bit. He was a master mimic.

And then came Honey.

She was beautiful. Gentile. Tough. A dancer with a sharp tongue and good instincts. She understood timing. Dreamt big, and loud, and messy.

Lenny Bruce and Honey Harlow

He brought her into the act. They performed together in nightclubs and dives. “The Schneider & Honey Show.” Behind it all, Lenny was finding his voice.

Lenny Bruce began to take shape.

The 1950s were supposed to be a time of clean-cut order. Eisenhower, Cadillacs, conformity. Lenny came at it sideways.

Honey wanted a baby. Lenny did not. The couple broke up before Lenny finally agre!ed. Then in 1955, their only child, Brandy Kathleen, “Kitty,”was born.

Lenny finding his voice in the clubs

But then something changed.

He eventually split with Honey, getting custody of Kitty. He wasn’t just a comic anymore—he was growing into something. He was looser. Hotter. More sexual, existential—more Lenny. His routines were arcs. Improvised, balletic. He fused the pulse of jazz with the timing of the Catskills and the moral bruises of a combat vet. He didn’t just make crowds laugh—he tested them. Sometimes he didn’t care whether they laughed at all. But he did want to make the musicians on the bandstand laugh.

At Carnegie Hall, on February 4, 1961, a snowstorm blocked the highways—but the hall was full. In the set “Black Black Woman, White White Woman,” he alternated indignation and reflection, troubling stereotypes with esoterica and Jewish self-reflection. “We have experienced thirty percent of what Negroes in the U.S. endure…” he said.

Then came the most infamous routine of his career:

“Are there any niggers here tonight?”

The room froze.

He didn’t stop. He ticked off every slur in the American lexicon—kike, spic, wop, dago, chink, mick, coon, Polack. It was a litany of ugliness, delivered like a sermon. Not for shock. For exposure. For evisceration. To defang their power. To make you sit with the filth society pretended not to hear.

“It’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.”

He wasn’t performing hate. He was unmasking it.

That’s why Black comics revered him. Dick Gregory called him the first white man to tell the truth about race from a stage.

And it cost him.

Lenny Bruce and the law, mid-tsuris

And Lenny needed insulation. Heroin. Speed. Barbiturates. Not to escape—but to manage the noise. The noise that builds inside someone who sees too much, thinks too fast, can’t slow down. He didn’t use drugs to get high. He used them to stay level. To keep the demons at arm’s length long enough to finish the bit.

Then came the busts.

It started small: obscenity complaints, fines. And, all of it, escalated. Police came not just to watch but to record, to transcribe. Soon his stage banter blurred into the courtroom. Sometimes, they were in the same room. He kept tapes of every set, transcribed them by hand, and prepared legal defenses like they were new routines. He’d read them aloud onstage, verbatim. Across the country, a few loyal lawyers stood between Lenny and total erasure. In Chicago, one of his defenders was attorney Maurice Rosenfield—a quiet giant who understood that Bruce wasn’t just fighting for himself.

But the dragnet tightened.

Lenny, daughter Kitty (born 1955), and his mother Sally Marr. A rare moment of stillness in a life that rarely allowed it.

He was still a father. Amidst the court battles and chaos, he won custody of his daughter, Kitty. But the siege was constant.

And here was a man running out of room.

The obscenity trials had begun. The transcripts are surreal—judges interpreting punchlines, stenographers typing out routines that once shook nightclubs into hysterics. He was arrested over and over—Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York.

Cops sat in the audience with notebooks, pretending to laugh. But they weren’t there for the show. They were there to catch him crossing a line. He toured relentlessly. Slept poorly. Obsessed over routines. Argued with censors. Defended himself in court, on tape, on stage.

And he crossed them all. On purpose.

But truth has a toll.

Lenny Bruce sits in court with his lawyers during one of many obscenity trials.

Lenny was drowning in legal bills and banned in multiple cities. He’d go on stage with court transcripts, reading them aloud in place of jokes. Some nights the audience walked out. Other nights, they sat frozen, unsure if they were witnessing stand-up, a breakdown, or both.

Even Bill Graham, who adored him, later said: “What people saw was a person who had been fucked with for a very long time. It was the living death of a genius. He took on the law and he lost..”

He didn’t trust lawyers anymore. Didn’t trust allies. Didn’t trust the world.

Except a few.

Supporters like Paul Krassner. Phil Spector. attorneys who stuck with him to the end.

And Lotus Weinstock.

She was his fiance near the end. A young comic, twenty years his junior. A witness.

“In the last months,” she told filmmaker Robert Weide, “he had two very clear messages he was giving himself. One was his plan to live. One was his plan to die.”

One Friday night, he said to her: “I just need to air something and I don’t want you to have a dramatic reaction. I feel like I'm going to die this year.”

She joked, sweetly and heartbreakingly: “If I get you raisin cookies, will you hold off a bit?”

That made him laugh and he said okay.

But he didn’t hold off for long.

On August 3, 1966, Lenny Bruce was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home. Needle in his arm. Phone off the hook.

He died broke. The court had officially declared him a pauper. Alone. Not at all finished.

A decade later, the New York State Court of Appeals posthumously overturned his obscenity conviction. It was the first time in American history that a stand-up comic’s words had been legally unshackled. The precedent opened space for everyone from George Carlin to Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle.

Free speech wasn’t invented by Lenny Bruce.

But he stood trial for it.

He never backed down. And he paid with his life.

Opening day with Christie Hefner (left) with Kitty Bruce at Brandeis

Today, his archive lives at Brandeis University, thanks to Kitty Bruce. Trial transcripts. Tape reels. Handwritten routines. Even the phone recordings. Preserved by an institution Lenny might’ve sued in 1962 and dined with by 1965.

He’s also part of the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York—alongside Lucille Ball and Carl Reiner. A man arrested for jokes, now curated by the state.

Lenny’s story doesn’t end in 1966. People are still telling it, still fighting to get it right.

Ronnie Marmo’s stage show, I’m Not a Comedian… I’m Lenny Bruce, directed by Joe Mantegna, is touring across the country. It’s not just theater—it’s a resurrection.
Check the tour. Bring it to your city. Lenny would’ve loved this one.

Joe Mantegna (left) and Ronnie Marmo (right) in rehearsal for I'm Not a Comedian… I'm Lenny Bruce.

Nowadays, Lenny has been flattened into iconography. A martyr for free speech.

But the real story is messier—and more rewarding for anyone willing to take the deep dive.

Because Lenny’s routines assumed shared understanding. He forced you to think. Hashtags and hot takes don’t leave much room for nuance. Would anyone today understand the intent behind: “Have rokhmones (pity) for Adolf Eichmann?” A grotesque role reversal meant to expose evil, not preach it? Probably not.

And in a country still arguing about what can and can’t be said—he’s never stopped being relevant.

Or dangerous.

Lenny Bruce, 1925-1966

“The truth is what is.”

That was his north star.

Not a punchline. Not a plea.

A principle.

He used to say “emes”—the Hebrew and Yiddish word for truth. It has its own “now dig this,” bite.

Today, the seal of Brandeis University, where his papers now reside, bears that same word: אמת — emet.

Their motto reads: “Truth, even unto its innermost parts.”

Lenny would’ve gotten a dark laugh out of that.

The comic hauled into court for telling the truth too loud, too Jewish, too raw—

Now preserved under glass. On campus. In script.

He never stopped wanting to be heard.

Heard.

And when they asked him what he believed, what he meant, what he wanted—

He said it plain:

“The truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy.

A terrible lie that someone told the people long ago.”

Emes.

But there’s one story I keep returning to. Especially today.

On D-Day morning, hundreds of Jewish refugees who had escaped Nazi Europe landed with Allied forces. Not as victims — but as soldiers. Some had survived camps. Others had fled with little more than their lives. Now they faced the soldiers of the regime that had tried to destroy them.

"None of them felt they had betrayed Germany," historian Helen Fry told me. "Rather, Germany had betrayed them."

By the time of the invasion, nearly 9,500 German and Austrian Jewish refugees were serving in U.S. forces — the second highest concentration of refugee soldiers in the Allied armies. Nearly 13,000 more served in the British forces. Many landed on D-Day, while others came ashore in the critical weeks that followed — as infantrymen, combat engineers, medics, interrogators, and elite commandos.

I had the honor of interviewing several of them. Their stories stay with me.

Lothar Kahn, Jewish refugee and U.S. Army combat engineer. He landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach.

One in particular.

Lothar Kahn.

He was the bridge between two of the darkest chapters of the last century: the Holocaust, and D-Day.

At 19, he was a U.S. Army combat engineer of the 146th Engineer Combat Battalion, part of Gap Assault Team #11, carrying 50 pounds of C2 explosives and a rifle — tasked with clearing obstacles on Omaha Beach’s Dog Green sector to open lanes for the 116th Infantry landing behind him.

"The most dangerous job on Omaha Beach was performed by the men of the Gap Assault Teams," said historian Joseph Balkoski. "The German defenses were designed to slaughter the engineers first, since they were the men who could open lanes for the following troops."

And Lothar had already survived more than most could imagine.

His older brother Arthur — a brilliant medical student — had planned to go into cancer research. He had been studying abroad at Edinburgh University, and returned to Würzburg in 1933 to retrieve his student records.

"Apparently Arthur Kahn was involved in anti-Nazi movements at the University of Würzburg — which was very typical of Jewish students at the time," Timothy W. Ryback, author of Hitler’s First Victims (Knopf, 2014), told me."The astonishing story is that he was planning on going into medicine — cancer research — had been studying abroad at Edinburgh University, and while back at Würzburg getting his student records, was spotted by some brown-shirted SA, was snatched and put into a detention center."

"During Easter week, 1933, Arthur Kahn and three others — Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario, and Erwin Kahn — arrived at Dachau. They were identified as Jews on arrival and beaten terribly. Five minutes after five o'clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 12, these young men were given shovels, marched out into the woods, and just gunned down. Arthur was the first one shot."

"These were the first four victims of the Holocaust," Ryback said. "Their deaths involved intentionality, chain of command, selection, and execution — which are the constituent components for these processes we call genocide, and ultimately related to the Jewish population, the Holocaust."

Lothar’s father, Levi Kahn, had to pay money to retrieve his son’s body from Dachau for a proper Jewish burial. Even worse, Arthur’s mother insisted that his sister, Fanni — working as an au pair in England — return to Germany immediately. Fanni later married, and was murdered along with her seven-year-old son in Minsk.

The family fled — thanks to relatives in the U.S., they obtained visas and emigrated to New York, four weeks before the war broke out. Two children had already been lost.

Lothar went to work to support the family — and, like his brother Herbert, was drafted into the military in 1943.

Left to right: Lothar and Herbert Kahn — two of the four surviving Kahn children.

Before shipping out for the invasion, Lothar’s team was assigned to the Assault Training Center at Saunton Sands in England.

"All of the divisions preparing for the invasion came through us," he told me. "We built obstacles, they blew them up, and we built them again. It was very hard work."

"During training I was carrying a full pack of dynamite and collapsed. A captain stood over me and asked, 'Soldier, do you smoke?' I told him I did. And he said, 'Well, you have a choice. You can keep on smoking and get your ass shot off on the beach — or you can stop smoking and have a chance of getting off the beach.' That scared the daylights out of me. I stopped."

Lothar reflected on the morning of the invasion:

"We approached the beach at low tide. The landing craft was packed — seasick men, explosives, rifles. I carried 50 pounds of C2 on my back, plus my rifle and gear. We knew we had to clear the obstacles or no one would get through."

"When the ramp dropped, I jumped into the water and struggled forward. The surf was waist-deep. The German fire was already coming in heavy. Machine guns, mortars — it was chaos."

"I got against a cliff with six, eight people, and there were guys lying around. I said to someone, 'Boy, these guys must be tired.'..."

"‘Tired? These are dead people.’"

"When I heard that, I jumped up — and the guy pulled me down and yelled, 'Don’t jump up, you’ll get shot.' I had never seen a dead person before. And they were all around me."

For two hours, Kahn’s team huddled against the seawall as German shells burst all around them.

"You could hear the shells coming... first a slight rumble, then a terrible noise... they exploded nearby and shrapnel was flying everywhere."

They crawled through wreckage and bodies to the obstacles — Belgian Gates, Teller mines, steel hedgehogs — and began laying charges under withering fire.

"I didn’t think I was going to make it," he told me.
"The beach was red with blood, littered with helmets, equipment, dead and wounded."

At one point, he heard a fellow soldier crying out in panic.
"I tried to calm him down. You had to. Because if someone lost it, it would get us all killed."

And somehow, he kept moving.
"I was just a refugee from Germany. A kid. But at that moment, you have no time to think. You move, or you die." After surviving that day, Lothar told me:

"I knew they killed my brother. That I knew."

"Revenge, certainly. But I didn’t want to get killed either. In those moments — especially on D-Day — it’s a matter of preserving life."

The very next day, the Army sent him to interrogate captured German machine gunners.

"We killed them and they kept coming," they told him.
"There was nothing we could do."

Lothar wasn’t the only Jewish refugee who came back that day.

Maurice Eis — who had been an inmate at Dachau — came ashore as a U.S. Army medic with the 67th Medical Clearing Company.

"The Germans had put barricades in front of the beach, and there was shooting all around us," Eis told me.
"No one — but no one — can imagine wading or swimming through approximately 100 yards to be shot at. No one can describe the massacre on Omaha Beach. It was hell on earth."

And beyond the assault waves, Jewish refugee soldiers served in some of the most dangerous roles in Normandy. Among them were members of 3 Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando — an elite unit of German-speaking refugees trained for reconnaissance and frontline intelligence.

Before deploying, these men had to adopt British-sounding names and wear Church of England dog tags — a desperate precaution, in case of capture by the Germans.

Left to right: Manfred Gans, Peter Masters, and Peter Terry — German-Jewish refugees who returned in British Commando uniforms to fight in Normandy. Members of the elite 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando — an all-Jewish unit trained for some of the war’s most dangerous intelligence and reconnaissance missions.

Peter Masters landed at H-Hour on D-Day, seaborne with No. 6 Commando — scouting enemy positions and helping intercept fleeing German troops.
Manfred Gans came ashore with 45 Royal Marine Commando, operating deep behind German lines in reconnaissance and prisoner interrogation — and later personally liberated his parents from Theresienstadt.
Peter Terry landed with a Royal Marine Commando unit — conducting dangerous intelligence work across Normandy until he was badly wounded in a German ambush weeks later.

And Fritz Weinschenk — another German Jewish refugee — landed with the US Army’s 293rd Joint Assault Signal Company.

Fritz Weinschenk, German-Jewish refugee and U.S. Army Signal Corps soldier, returning to Omaha Beach in later life. Still from About Face: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Soldiers of World War II, directed by the author (currently airing on PBS).

His LST hit mines before it even reached the beach. German machine guns tore into the packed landing craft. Weinschenk jumped overboard into the cold surf, swimming ashore with his helmet, rifle, and grenades strapped to his body.

"I got to the beach with my last strength," he recalled.
"The noise was deafening. The smoke and the stink of burning oil was overpowering. The beach looked like a train wreck — burning landing craft, trucks, and dead Americans everywhere."

Later, Weinschenk worked on the Normandy beaches as a radio operator — watching captured German prisoners unload Allied cargo.

"The captured Germans worked like hell for the Allied war effort," he told me. "And got paid in cigarettes and good food — which they loved."

One German sergeant with an Iron Cross looked out at the sea of American ships and equipment and said:

"If we had had this, we would have won."

"Thank God you didn’t," Weinschenk replied.

When I met Lothar Kahn, he was already in his 90s — living in Lincolnwood, Illinois.
He still spoke with a faint German accent.
He still remembered every detail of that day.

Now he is 101.

I don’t know how many more D-Day anniversaries we’ll have veterans like him to bear witness.
Or how many more opportunities we’ll have to remind ourselves what it meant to come back — not as a victim, but as a soldier.
A Jew in an Allied uniform.
A survivor who would not stay silent.

Lothar Kahn is still here.
And so is his story.

If you think more people should know stories like Lothar’s, please share this post. These voices deserve to be heard while they’re still with us.

I wasn’t courting an identity crisis when I opened one of the less-lit corners of a dating app. Just a dispassionate scroll. Looking for someone like-minded in absurdity. Someone who wouldn’t hold it against me that I’m still raising a teenager. And still Jewish, in a world that increasingly treats that like a disclaimer.

Dating now feels like crashing someone else’s lifestyle brand. Or auditioning for The White Lotus. I’ve never seen more spas, Taj Mahal backdrops, warrior poses on Balinese beaches. Who has that kind of time or money? I can’t remember half of my daughter’s orthodontist appointments.

I’m still learning about my “love language” and a host of acronyms. For weeks, I thought HSP meant a herpes disclosure. (It’s actually Highly Sensitive Person.) I even added it to my profile. In solidarity.

And there she was again.

We’d chatted the summer before. Beautiful. Articulate. A trauma therapist. And she was the real thing—a clinician who works with war victims. Not for everyone, but I was smitten.

This time, something stopped me cold. Her new photos.

A raised fist. A keffiyeh. A tight mask. A sign in her hand that read:

Ukrainian Jewish Trauma Therapist for Free Palestine

Each word—Ukrainian, Jewish, Therapist, Palestine—carefully arranged. A confession and a declaration all at once. She even noted that she brought snacks.

On most apps, you’re prompted to complete lines like, “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page about...”
Her answer? “It’s not Israel. It’s illegally occupied Palestine.”

She followed it with a postmodern manifesto:
“Write me a poem. Come to a protest. Feed me vegetables you’ve grown.”

It read like a fantasy, right out of the Levant. Earthy. Sensual.

The gummy I’d taken kicked in just as the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” came on. That hypnotic drone pulled me into a fog. Magnificently unhinged. I pictured her beneath a eucalyptus tree eating a fig. Beaming and unperturbed by the jagged volley of Kalashnikov fire from a few boisterous militants, probably celebrating a cousin’s acceptance to Harvard.

Then a knock at the door.
Not her. DoorDash.
Baba ghanoush and dolmas combo from Pita Inn.

Mid-bite, I thought: maybe dating a trauma therapist could be perfect.
Someone who who could mend what Roger Miller called a “walkin’, talkin’, cryin’, barely-beatin,’ broken heart.”

But I got the message. I wasn’t her type. And by then, I’d stopped imagining myself to be.
She’d said: “I’ll brag about you to my friends if you’re an outspoken fighter for Palestinian independence.”

Fair enough. I’m still figuring out my dating goals.

Her profile shifted further—from human to propaganda. A recruitment brochure for the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. She doubled down. Still leading with “I am a trauma therapist who works with victims of war and genocide.”

Then:
“The genocide didn’t start on October 7.”

I felt something snap.

What happened that day wasn’t murky or debatable. And it was livestreamed.

I’d just watched footage of a pickup truck ripping through Gaza. Five men in the back, rifles raised. A man crouched over the crumpled, bloodied body of Shani Louk. Stripped. Broken. Paraded like a hunter’s trophy without reverence. The vehicle slowed for others to spit and pummel what was left of a girl who’d been dancing at the Nova Music Festival two hours earlier.

Still, I was compelled to reach out.
My first message?
“You should be on a no-fly list.”

I didn’t send it. I took a walk. Put on Sam Harris’ mindfulness app. Let my breath catch up to my brain. Then I sat down. Erased it. And wrote something more composed.

I referenced the DSM-5—the professional manual for diagnosing mental disorders.
I wrote:
“So which DSM-5 category fits a Jewish trauma specialist who vanishes when the trauma is Jewish?”

No response.
I must’ve pissed her off.

But I saw her sign again in my head. The word Jewish. Center-aligned. Committed. Perfectly branded.

Then my brain flicked—like a View-Master—into another image. Another protest. Decades earlier.

Jack Wasserman protesting outside the Civic Opera House in Chicago, 1985, during a Bolshoi Ballet performa

Chicago, 1985. A teenager with a bullhorn outside the Civic Opera House during a Bolshoi Ballet performance. The rally was organized by Chicago Action for Soviet Jewry.

That teenager? Jack Wasserman. USY rep from Beth Hillel—the synagogue with the giant “Save Soviet Jews” sign off the Edens expressway. He’d been cast in On the Right Track with Gary Coleman, a homegrown celebrity from a closer Zion. Zion, Illinois.

In the Soviet Union, Judaism was functionally outlawed. Hebrew schools were shut down. Torah scrolls were seized. Teaching or even learning Jewish history could get you watched, detained, or worse. By the 1970s, Jews who applied to leave—Refuseniks—were fired from jobs, denied exit visas, and sometimes arrested. Even then, “Zionist” had become shorthand for “traitor.”

That’s why Jews got organized. They showed up. Not to intimidate or chant slogans through megaphones in libraries. They handed out leaflets. Lit candles. Marched in the cold so strangers could get out of Moscow or Lviv and build a life somewhere else. One of them was Jack Wasserman.

When I met Jack and his family years later, he told me he’d been denied a student visa by the Soviets. Flagged by the KGB. Maybe it was the bullhorn. Maybe they’d screened On the Right Track.

Another Jewish name that stays with me: Robert Schrayer. My parents took me to a fundraiser at his house in Highland Park, Illinois—the Risky Business house.
Joel, listen, this is my cousin, Reuben. He's from Skokie
That house

Schrayer was a lion of support for Jews in need, no matter where they were.

When he died in 2008, my friend’s dad, Steve Nasatir, said: “Bob would travel to Israel, the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia—anywhere Jewish lives were in danger.”

He helped get thousands of Refuseniks out. Including my friend Leah’s family, who left Kyiv, passed through Vienna and Rome, and landed in Chicago. They stayed. They built.

And maybe—just maybe—the woman with the sign found safe harbor too. Because people like Jack and Bob showed up and put their names and reputations on the line for strangers. For Jews they didn’t know, and would never meet.

It wasn’t charity. And it wasn’t vitriol, colonization, or some settler blueprint.
It was Jewish peoplehood in action. Quiet, rooted, and alive.
A born belief that you show up for each other across oceans, across generations.
That was the ethic. The instinct. Just the act.
The quiet essence of Zionism before the word became malignant.

Jimmy’s cousin Reuben from Skokie, left. The Risky Business house—also the site of a mid-’80s fundraiser for Soviet Jewry.

And she shows up too, along with the other “As a Jew” Jews.
They lead with it, but only as a credential.
A disclaimer.
A backstage pass to disavow the whole project, loudly, publicly, defiantly.

Branded keffiyehs. Face masks.
Like Etsy launched a terror franchise.
They show up in fatigues and Hamas-green headbands—identical to the ones in the GoPro carnage from October 7.

The grotesque absurdity of it would be laughable if it weren’t so devastatingly real.
Behind the declarations and pedantic slogans is something worse: the weaponization of identity.
“Zionist” was once a broad, even aspirational term—a belief in Jewish continuity, security, and the right to exist among nations.
Now it’s a slur so expansive it erases everything it touches—context, conscience, the capacity for grief.
Jewish grief.
But here’s the thing they won’t let you say out loud: it’s possible to grieve for the murdered without abandoning your grief for the displaced. You can mourn a festival-goer and a child in Rafah. You can feel broken by both without being broken yourself.

What’s collapsing isn’t empathy. It’s permission to feel it without preconditions.

And somewhere in that performance is the slogan I keep seeing everywhere:
“Know the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”
It’s not a distinction. It’s a deflection—designed to shut you up before you’ve even spoken.
It suggests that Jews are too reactive to tell the difference between disagreement and dehumanization.
That anyone who calls it out must be hysterical.

But how obscene the proposition—
Ask the young man who called his parents from the phone of a woman he’d just murdered at a kibbutz.

“I killed ten Jews with my own hands,” he said, imploring them to check WhatsApp.
Did he pause to parse the nuance?

Or ask what was done to Bracha Levinson, a 65-year-old woman from Kibbutz Be’eri.
Shot, stripped, and dragged into the street.
One of her killers livestreamed it from her Facebook account.
That’s how her granddaughter in Japan found out she was dead.

Nova Music Festival, October 6, 2023. Dancing. Laughing. Alive.
(Source: Business Insider)

And what was Nova, other than DJs, music, open sky, and unguarded joy?
A rave steeped in aspirational peace.
Coexistence.

The attacks were so grotesquely gendered, so sexually sadistic, that even UN Women eventually issued a statement expressing “alarm” at the scale of gender-based atrocities.
And still, from the loudest activist circles—on campuses, at rallies, in digital spaces—not a word.
Not from the conspicuous Jewish activists.

A recent “Jews Against Genocide” protest in Toronto

Apparently, when the victims are Zionists, rape becomes debatable.
The “Not In My Name” crowd helps bend history into whatever shape the moment demands—distorting language, scrubbing context.
No footage, no facts, no mountain of evidence seems to interrupt the fantasy that October 7 was resistance.

Memes began circulating images of Zivia Lubetkin, one of the only surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, juxtaposed with masked Hamas fighters.

You’ll have to excuse me for breaking ranks, but I struggle to think of anything more insulting to memory, history, and reason. Never mind that it’s intellectually dishonest—it’s not even in good taste.

Zivia Lubetkin (right), one of the few surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

As if starving, untrained partisans with pistols and no exit strategy were somehow equivalent to the armed wing of an Iranian proxy state, operating from an elaborate underground tunnel network stocked with encrypted comms, foreign weapons, drones, fuel, and hostages.

The Jews in the ghetto weren’t hiding behind civilians.
They were civilians.
They didn’t take hostages.
They were the hostages.

This isn’t just a twisted analogy.
It’s a moral grift.
It weaponizes Jewish misfortune to hurl back at us—without knowing, or caring about, the details.

And if mid-twentieth century history feels too far removed—how about just a few years ago?

At its height, ISIS claimed a caliphate spanning over 35,000 square miles—more than four times the size of Israel.
And yet, none of those actual colonizers sparked the kind of moral disruption we’re seeing now.
No campus encampments.
No hostage posters for the girls of Sinjar.
No TikTok tributes to the Yazidi dead.

But the footage existed—hours of it.
Mass shootings of Kurds, Christians, Yazidis.
Slavery markets. Executions in stadiums.
Men kneeling at the edge of rivers, gunned down in rows.

But they didn’t get murals in Brooklyn.
Or rallies in Sydney.
Apparently their suffering wasn’t brandable.

Whether ISIS or Hamas, the soundtrack is the same: Allahu Akbar.

The intonation of the divine, used to bless the slaughter.
You hear it in the final voicemails.
In WhatsApp recordings.
In phone calls, mid-conversation, as parents tried to calm their daughters—just before the line went dead.
It’s there behind the crying. Behind the pleading for their lives.
Behind the short bursts of gunfire.
A phrase repeated like punctuation.
Allahu Akbar.

The executions were endorsed the same way—by invocation.
The same words Zarqawi and comrades bellowed while sawing off Nick Berg’s head.
The same chant echoing as Daniel Pearl’s life ended.

Where they danced and died that day.

Daniel Pearl’s final words, spliced into the video:
“My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.”
He said it clearly. Without apology.
Not in shame—but in truth.
And that was the point.
They wanted the world to hear it.
It was the charge.
And the death sentence.

And it’s not the first time Jewish identity has been flattened into a target.

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and rights—by legal definition. The classification came first. Then the loss of rights. Then the murder. What the Nazis codified, others now sanctify in chants, sermons, and charters.

Today, the same thing is happening—digitally. You don’t need a Nuremberg edict when a hashtag will do.

TikTok. Twitter. Campus flyers. They do the job now.

“Zionist” doesn’t mean Jew—unless you’re shouting it at a synagogue, a deli, a student wearing a Magen David or kippah. Or spray-painting it on a dorm door. Or targeting Israeli fans at a soccer match in Amsterdam.

“Genocide” isn’t a description anymore. It’s an accusation. A weaponized claim that tells you what Zionists are inherently believed to be guilty of perpetrating.

Never mind that the word was coined by a Jew to describe the Third Reich’s systematic murder of one-third of the world’s Jewish population.

And in the middle of it are young, educated, well-meaning Jews trying to stay in the conversation by shaving off the parts of themselves that might make others uncomfortable.

They host Seders in the university encampments. They sing Yiddish labor songs from the Jewish Socialist Bund like it's 1936 in Warsaw, not 2025 in Morningside Heights. Equal parts earnest and absurd.

As if Jewish identity is only safe when it’s symbolic, never sovereign.

And that’s the part I still can’t square:
Why claim it at all?
Why march with “Jewish” on your sign, if everything you’re doing is to distance yourself from what that identity has meant?

If you claim the identity, the history comes with it. The exile, the ache, the accusations. The contributions—in medicine, art, science, service—offered without condition. Achievements wildly out of scale with their numbers.

Maybe it’s about wanting perfection from your people, maybe even from yourself—perfection no nation or community could ever meet. But you’re tethered to more than just the parts you like.

So… what kind of Jew are you?

And anyway, the part of her profile where she once described herself as Jewish? Gone. All that’s left is a nod to “my people,” just enough to call them out for genocide.

The keffiyeh draped across her shoulders. And watermelon emojis.

It’s smart, in a way, if she’s expanding her search for suitable life partners.
In Montreal or London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Paris—wherever Greta Thunberg draws a crowd—there’s no shortage of would-be suitors, all on the same page.

And if that doesn’t work out, she may consider moving to Qatar.

So this is the part where I ask her directly:

What would the trauma therapist say if the names on her new intake forms were:
Goldberg-Polin. Bibas. Silver. Katsman.
Not the dead—their families. Their friends. Their survivors.

Would she refer them out?
Suggest they journal through their Zionism?

Or tell them to go back—to Morocco. Iraq. Iran. Egypt. Syria. Poland. Ukraine—where Zionism didn’t emerge from conquest, but from fear. From flight. From massacres.
In Odessa. In Berdichev. In Kyiv at Babi Yar. In the woods outside Kryvyi Rih, where President Zelenskyy’s ancestors—and perhaps yours too—were murdered.
Where a million Jews were killed by bullets all over Ukraine before the Nazis made murder more efficient with gas.

At one point, her profile read:
“Who can date during a genocide?”
I don’t know.
I told you—I wasn’t courting an identity crisis...

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Steve Karras writes about culture, memory, and music. His work has appeared in Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone (online), No Deppresion, Military Quarterly, and beyond. His documentary film *About Face*, about Jews who fled Nazis and came back as Allied soldiers, airs on PBS this year.

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