September 2, 2026

On June 28, somewhere over the Atlantic, I celebrated the 100th birthday of the 2,000-year-old man by watching a documentary about him, made when he was 99. Of course, I am talking about Mel Brooks.

“Robin Hood: Men in Tights” was the first Mel Brooks movie I ever saw, and I have loved Brooks for as long as I can remember. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if Rabbi Tuckman, the traveling rabbi in the movie, was the rabbinic voice in my head all along. The speed, the irreverence, the willingness to turn sacred cows into chopped liver. Brooks had a way of making almost anything, especially the things we were told to take seriously, fair game for a joke.

Brooks came up in the Borscht Belt. He worked the Catskills as a drummer and comic, eventually becoming a tummler, part social director and part entertainer, at Grossinger’s before Sid Caesar hired him in 1949. He was hardly alone. The resorts became one of the great proving grounds of American comedy.

The Borscht Belt became what it was in large part because Jews were excluded from much of the vacation world around them. Hotels advertised themselves as places where Jews were not welcome, so Jews built their own. The Catskills developed into miniature Jewish societies, places dense enough that accents, anxieties, humor, food, references and assumptions no longer needed explanation.

Brooks remembered the Borscht Belt as the place where he learned his craft. “The audiences were very tough,” he wrote. “They didn’t give it away. When you got a laugh, you really earned it.” Being Jewish did not get you the laugh. You still had to be funny. 

Brooks learned that lesson early. His first feature began life as “Springtime for Hitler.” When Joseph E. Levine agreed to help finance it, he told Brooks that Jewish movie-house owners would never put that title on their marquees. Brooks wanted the movie distributed, so he changed the title to “The Producers.” He did not change the joke. He knew the difference between getting through the door and letting the person at the door decide what you make.

Eventually, Jews could stay at the other hotels. The doors opened much more widely than the generation that built the Borscht Belt could have imagined. Jews entered universities and professions that had once limited their access. They moved through Hollywood, publishing, the arts, business and public life. The talent formed in places like the Catskills did not remain there. It moved outward and flourished in American culture.

American Jews did not merely survive here; we flourished. The American promise that inherited difference did not have to determine the possibilities of one’s life was revolutionary for a people accustomed to societies in which being Jewish could do exactly that. Jews became profoundly American while remaining recognizably Jewish. We helped make the country, and the country remade us.

But because exclusion had helped create the dense Jewish world of the Catskills, we came to treat that density as a temporary response to exclusion. Once the walls fell, the spaces behind them seemed less necessary. We confused the circumstances that produced the density with what that density made possible.

Acceptance also began to feel less like a historical achievement and more like a settled fact. America became remarkably comfortable with Jewishness as religion, ethnicity, memory and public identity. America was home. Israel could be loved, supported, visited, worried over and fought about from a distance without calling our Americanness into question. But acceptance, however genuine, is still something somebody else does to you.

Today, Jewish and especially Israeli artists are facing exclusion unseen in half a century. Musician Noga Erez has described festival and media appearances disappearing because she is Israeli. PEN America recently interviewed more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals who described cancelations, disinvitations, new barriers to publication and pressure around the Jewish or Israeli content of their work. American cultural life has not closed itself entirely to Jews. But admission has again become conditional in places where many of us had convinced ourselves that the question had been settled.

We should want the doors open, and when exclusion is discriminatory, we should fight it. But even acceptance at its best does not become something a minority permanently owns.

The first time we built Jewish worlds that dense, we did it largely because we had little choice. Now we do. If a festival decides it does not want an Israeli singer, we can object and fight to reopen the door. But we can also build another stage, back the artist, find the audience and decide for ourselves whether the result is worth a damn.

That is not taking our toys and going home. It is closer to: to hell with you, we are building anyway. And you are invited. The point is not to retreat from the wider culture. It is to stop making somebody else’s invitation the condition on which Jewish cultural life depends.

Building another stage means more than finding a substitute venue. The Borscht Belt created an entire Jewish world for adults without pretending to be an educational intervention. People went to Grossinger’s on vacation. They swam, flirted, complained, watched shows, fought with their families, and ate too much. Jewishness was powerful partly because it did not have to keep insisting on its own importance. The point is not to recreate that world. It is to recreate the conditions that allowed great culture to emerge from it, so that something new can emerge from ours: recognizably Jewish, confident in its own references and good enough to travel.

We now have an example of that on a much larger scale. Israel is a Hebrew-speaking Jewish society of millions in which Jewishness is not a special feature added to the surrounding culture. It is the environment. A comedian can make a joke without first explaining the Jewish world that makes the joke possible. A musician can fill a song with Hebrew, religion, history and politics without first translating all of it for an outside audience. 

Israeli comedian and musician Tamir Bar’s recent song “College” begins with the life he would rather be worrying about: taking his son to the park, being a good husband, discovering that the milk has run out. Instead, as far as the world is concerned, his problem is that he is Jewish. Then he goes on living. He watches FC Barcelona. He listens to Roger Waters even though, as he puts it, Waters boycotts him. In London, he eats kebab and pretends to be surprised that the British have somehow discovered spices.

The refrain is ya Amalek, ani f—ing chai, “Amalek, I’m f—ing alive.” By the end, even Amalek has become Amaleki-beki, something closer to baby talk than a battle cry. A reference as heavy as Amalek is not placed behind glass. Bar can play with it, deform it, make it ridiculous. He doesn’t need to explain the reference before he can use it because the audience is already in the conversation.

In Brooks’ hands, “Hitler” became “The Producers.” He did not need Jewish history to become less terrifying before he could turn Hitler into material for comedy. He came from a culture confident enough in its own references to do more with them than preserve them.

Exclusion is a pathetic basis for a civilization. Jewish institutions should not become emergency shelters for artists rejected elsewhere. An Israeli novelist is not good because somebody refused to publish her. A mediocre Zionist play does not become less mediocre because the playwright was treated unfairly. If renewed exclusion teaches us only to become more protective of Jewish work, we will have learned the wrong lesson from the original Borscht Belt.

I keep kosher. Walk me into a grocery store and the first question I have about a babka is whether I can eat it. If there is only one kosher babka on the shelf, there is a decent chance I am buying it whether or not it is particularly good. Kashrut has already done most of the choosing for me. Put me in a kosher bakery where every babka is kosher, however, and the calculation changes. I no longer have to congratulate the babka for being kosher. Now I can ask the question I really care about: which babka is actually good?

I do not want institutions whose principal standard is that the work is Jewish and its creator deserves our solidarity. I certainly do not want a Jewish stage where affirmation earns applause the work itself has not earned. I want enough Jewish cultural density that Jewishness can become the condition rather than the achievement. Is the joke funny? Is the novel good? Does the music surprise me? Does the argument hold? Is there anything here another Jew might actually want 50 years from now?

Mel Brooks did not stay at Grossinger’s. The Borscht Belt gave him somewhere to become Mel Brooks, and then he walked straight into American culture and helped transform it. Hollywood did not make the Catskills worthwhile after the fact.

Ishay Ribo came from Israel to Madison Square Garden with music that is unmistakably Hebrew, Jewish and religious. About 15,000 people came in 2023, and he returned the following year. He did not make the music less Jewish before bringing it to New York.

This summer, Zusha traveled the other way. The band emerged from New York’s Jewish musical world and played three sold-out shows at the Barby in Tel Aviv. They were not bringing Israelis an imitation of Israeli music. They were bringing something formed here and discovering that Jews there could hear themselves in it.

A Jewish cultural world large enough to be interesting should contain different politics, religious commitments, aesthetics, arguments, and tastes. Density does not eliminate disagreement. It gives disagreement somewhere to happen.

The first Borscht Belt was built under conditions nobody should want to recreate. Exclusion pushed Jews together, and something extraordinarily generative emerged from that proximity. Then America opened, and we walked through the doors, as we should have.

We can fight to keep those doors open and still build Jewish worlds thick enough to create from within them. The mistake was not walking through the doors. It was assuming that once they opened, we no longer needed the room behind us. 

---

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is founding director of the Z3 Project.

PRAGUE — There are places where history does not feel dead.

The crypt beneath the Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague is one of them.

I stood there recently, in the place where seven Czechoslovak resistance fighters made their final stand against the Nazi war machine on June 18, 1942. The bullet scars remain. The small crypt remains. And the story remains almost unbearable in its courage.

Among the seven were Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, the two Czechoslovak soldiers who carried out Operation Anthropoid: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

I left convinced that Gabčík and Kubiš were two of the most courageous men of the Second World War.

And I left thinking about a question that has haunted their story for more than eight decades:

Was killing Heydrich worth it?

The question cannot be dismissed.

The Nazi reprisals were monstrous.

Thousands of Czechs were arrested or killed. Families of resistance members were exterminated. The village of Ležáky was destroyed. And the name Lidice became synonymous with Nazi barbarism.

On June 10, 1942, German forces descended upon Lidice, a village outside Prague that in reality had no meaningful connection to the assassination.

They separated the men from their families.

They shot 173 men and boys almost immediately. More were murdered afterward. The women were deported, most to Ravensbrück. Most of the children were eventually murdered, many apparently by gas at Chełmno.

Then the Germans burned the village, demolished its ruins and attempted to erase its name from the earth.

That was the price Hitler imposed for the death of Reinhard Heydrich.

So the question is legitimate.

Why assassinate one Nazi, even a leading Nazi, if Hitler would retaliate by murdering thousands?

The moral responsibility for Lidice belongs entirely to Hitler, Himmler and the Nazi murderers who destroyed it — not to the heroes who resisted them.

There is something dangerous about the premise of the question itself.

It risks transferring moral responsibility from the murderer to the resistor.

The Nazis destroyed Lidice.

The Nazis murdered its children.

The Nazis chose collective punishment.

The Nazis decided that the price of resistance would be innocent blood.

Gabčík and Kubiš did not murder the people of Lidice. Hitler did.

And if we say that resistance becomes immoral whenever a tyrant threatens retaliation, then we hand every tyrant in history the ultimate weapon.

Kill enough innocent people and nobody will resist you.

Threaten enough children and nobody will challenge you.

Commit sufficiently monstrous reprisals and courage itself becomes immoral.

That cannot be our conclusion.

WHO WAS REINHARD HEYDRICH?

It is also essential to remember who the target was.

This was not the assassination of some obscure German bureaucrat.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most terrifying human beings in Nazi Germany.

He headed the Reich Security Main Office, which controlled the Security Police and SD. He was deeply involved in the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings that murdered Jews across Eastern Europe. He helped construct the machinery through which European Jewry would be hunted, deported and exterminated.

And on January 20, 1942 — only four months before the Prague attack — Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, where senior German officials coordinated implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

He was not merely an antisemite.

He was not merely a Nazi.

He was one of the principal architects and administrators of the Holocaust.

When Gabčík and Kubiš attacked him, the Holocaust was unfolding around them.

Jews were already being murdered by the hundreds of thousands.

And Heydrich was helping organize their annihilation.

Gabčík and Kubiš did the Jewish people an extraordinary service: they killed one of the principal architects of our extermination while the extermination was actually taking place.

As a Jew, I cannot regard that as a historical footnote.

The Jewish people owe these men gratitude.

They did what so many governments failed to do.

They struck directly at one of the men engineering the murder of Europe’s Jews.

A NATION BETRAYED

Operation Anthropoid must also be understood against the humiliation that preceded it.

In September 1938, Britain and France signed the Munich Agreement and permitted Hitler to seize the Sudetenland without Czechoslovakia’s participation in the negotiations.

Czechoslovakia had an army. It had fortifications. It had a democratic government prepared for the possibility of war.

But its supposed allies abandoned it.

Then, in March 1939, Hitler violated even Munich and occupied the Czech lands.

The Nazis marched into Prague.

There was no conventional national war against the German invasion.

That fact became a wound in Czech national consciousness.

But it is profoundly unfair to turn that into the claim that “the Czechs did not resist.”

They did.

They resisted underground. They sabotaged. They gathered intelligence. They helped Allied operations. They hid parachutists at mortal risk to themselves and their families.

And ultimately, Czechoslovakia’s government in exile decided that the world needed an unmistakable demonstration that the nation was still fighting.

That demonstration became Operation Anthropoid.

British Special Operations Executive personnel trained Gabčík and Kubiš. They were parachuted into occupied Czechoslovakia in late December 1941.

Their mission was astonishingly audacious:

Kill Reinhard Heydrich.

THE ATTACK

On May 27, 1942, Heydrich was traveling through Prague in an open Mercedes.

He felt so secure in occupied Czech territory that his vehicle was not heavily protected.

Gabčík and Kubiš waited near a sharp bend where the car would have to slow.

As Heydrich’s Mercedes approached, Gabčík stepped forward with his Sten submachine gun.

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

The weapon jammed.

Imagine that moment.

Months of preparation. Enormous personal risk. A Nazi executioner sitting only yards away.

And the gun fails.

Heydrich could have ordered his driver to accelerate away.

Instead, displaying the arrogance that characterized the Nazi occupation, he ordered the car stopped and attempted to confront his attackers.

Kubiš acted.

He threw a modified anti-tank grenade toward the Mercedes.

It exploded beside the vehicle, sending fragments into Heydrich.

The assassins escaped.

Heydrich was taken to a hospital.

For several days it appeared he might survive.

Then his condition deteriorated.

On June 4, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich died.

One of the highest-ranking Nazi leaders killed by resistance fighters during the entire war was dead.

HITLER’S REVENGE

Hitler was enraged.

The Nazis imposed martial law and launched an enormous manhunt.

The terror culminated in Lidice and Ležáky.

The horror should never be minimized in telling the heroic story of Anthropoid. Indeed, Lidice must be part of the story.

But the lesson cannot be that Gabčík and Kubiš should therefore have done nothing.

The lesson is what Nazism was.

Hitler’s message was simple: If you resist us, we will murder your children.

The answer of the resistance was equally fundamental:

You may murder us, but you will not make us consent to slavery.

That distinction matters.

THE BETRAYAL

For weeks the Nazis could not find the assassins.

Then came betrayal.

Karel Čurda, another Czechoslovak parachutist, went to the Gestapo and provided information that helped expose the resistance network.

The trail eventually led to the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

Seven parachutists were hiding there:

Jozef Gabčík.

Jan Kubiš.

Adolf Opálka.

Josef Valčík.

Josef Bublík.

Jan Hrubý.

Jaroslav Švarc.

On June 18, 1942, German forces surrounded the church.

What followed deserves to be remembered as one of the bravest last stands of the Second World War.

“WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER”

Three of the fighters — Kubiš, Opálka and Bublík — fought from the church above.

Four others, including Gabčík, defended the crypt below.

They were hopelessly outnumbered.

The Germans attacked repeatedly.

The paratroopers fought back.

The Nazis attempted to force them from the crypt. They used tear gas. Firefighters were brought in and water was pumped toward the crypt in an attempt to flood the defenders out.

Still they refused to surrender.

The battle lasted for hours.

Kubiš was terribly wounded and later died.

Eventually the Germans discovered the entrance to the crypt.

The remaining defenders understood what capture meant.

Gestapo interrogation.

Torture.

Forced betrayal of others.

Public execution.

They chose death instead.

Gabčík, Valčík, Hrubý and Švarc died in the crypt rather than allow themselves to be taken alive.

Seven men against overwhelming Nazi force.

No escape route.

No realistic expectation of rescue.

No surrender.

The Nazis could conquer Czechoslovakia. They could occupy Prague. They could destroy Lidice. But in that church they discovered something they could not conquer: men who had decided that there are things worth dying for.

Standing in that crypt today, you understand something that cannot be conveyed by statistics.

Courage is physical.

These were not mythical superheroes.

They were young men.

They knew fear.

They knew what the Nazis did to prisoners.

They knew what was happening to the people who had helped them.

And they fought anyway.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

We return to the terrible question.

Was Heydrich’s death worth Lidice?

The question must be answered carefully because no decent person can place a numerical value on murdered children.

No military objective makes their deaths insignificant.

Every murdered Czech civilian was an entire world.

But there is another side.

What happens to humanity when evil becomes immune from attack because evil promises retaliation?

What would that principle have meant for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising?

Should Mordechai Anielewicz and his fighters have surrendered because German retaliation was inevitable?

Should Jewish partisans have remained passive because Nazis might execute civilians?

Should occupied peoples have accepted slavery because resistance carried terrible consequences?

No.

The Warsaw Ghetto fighters knew they could not defeat the Wehrmacht.

Their victory was not measured in territory.

Their victory was that Jews marked for extermination stood up and fought their murderers.

Operation Anthropoid belongs to the same moral universe.

Resistance to genocidal evil cannot be judged solely by whether it reduced the immediate body count. Sometimes resistance is the declaration that human beings will not collaborate in their own degradation.

And Anthropoid had political consequences.

The assassination demonstrated to Britain and the Allies that Czech resistance was real. The brutality of the Nazi reprisals horrified the world. Lidice, which Hitler intended to erase, instead became an international symbol of Nazi barbarism.

The Nazis tried to obliterate its name.

They immortalized it.

STATUES IN CENTRAL PARK

I believe Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík deserve far greater recognition in America.

Indeed, I would like to work toward erecting statues honoring them in Central Park in New York, alongside a memorial to Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Not because their circumstances were identical.

They were not.

But because all three represent a principle our generation desperately needs to recover:

There is a moral obligation to resist genocidal evil.

That message is especially urgent at a time when Jewish life is again treated cheaply by too many people in public life, when antisemitism is rationalized as politics, and when the murder of Jews can be contextualized before the bodies have even been buried.

And it would carry particular resonance in New York under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric and positions on Israel I believe have repeatedly shown contempt for the fears and security concerns of many Jewish New Yorkers.

A monument to Gabčík, Kubiš and Anielewicz would answer hatred not with hatred, but with memory.

It would tell every child walking through Central Park:

These men lived.

These men resisted.

These men refused to surrender their humanity.

THE BRAVEST MOMENT

I have visited many sites connected to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Few have affected me like that crypt in Prague.

The men who died there could have surrendered.

They could have told themselves that survival was more important.

Instead, they made their final answer to Nazism with bullets and with their lives.

The Holocaust teaches us about the abyss of human cruelty.

Operation Anthropoid teaches us something different.

It teaches us about the heights of human courage.

Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík helped kill Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.

The Nazis answered by committing atrocities against innocent people.

The guilt for those atrocities belongs to the Nazis forever.

The glory of resistance belongs to the men who refused to kneel.

Hitler wanted occupied Europe to believe that resistance was futile. Gabčík and Kubiš answered that some acts are necessary precisely because the world must know that evil has not been accepted.

Their mission did not end the Holocaust.

It did not liberate Czechoslovakia.

It could not resurrect a single murdered Jew.

But in May 1942, at the height of Nazi power, two young men stood on a Prague street and attacked one of the most feared architects of genocide on earth.

And they succeeded.

Weeks later, surrounded in a church, they and their comrades made their final declaration.

They would not surrender.

That is why I believe Operation Anthropoid was not merely justified.

It was one of the bravest acts of the Second World War.

And eighty-four years later, standing in Prague, I found myself wanting to say two simple words to Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík:

Thank you.

For the Czech people.

For the Jewish people.

And for every generation that must learn anew that when genocidal evil rises, Never Again cannot merely be a slogan.

It must sometimes be an act.

---

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international bestselling author of thirty-eight books, translated into more than twenty languages. He has been hailed as “the most famous rabbi in America” (The Washington Post, Newsweek), “arguably the most famous Orthodox Jew on earth” (The New York Observer), and named one of the fifty most influential Jews in the world (The Jerusalem Post). Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.