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Jonathan Garfinkel (born 1973 [1] in Toronto) is a Jewish-Canadian playwright and author. He gained prominence especially for his play The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret.
Coming from a Zionist family, Garfinkel learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He attended the Bialik Hebrew Day School in Toronto, graduating in 1987. [2]
As an adult, he left Zionism. Before he dedicated himself to writing, he worked as a waiter, carpenter and English literature teacher. [1]
He published his poetry collection, Glass Psalms, in 2005. In 2007 he followed with his autobiographical work Ambivalence, in which he describes how he broke away from Zionism, triggered by a trip to Israel. [1] During his stay in the West Bank he visited several Palestinian refugee camps. [3] Jean Hannah Edelstein reviewed his book in New Statesman, saying: ”This is a book both painful and beautiful to read”. [4]
The Demjanjuk Trials premiered in Canada in 2004 and was staged in Germany at the Theater Heidelberg by Catja Baumann in 2010. Discussing his play, Christian Gampert states on the Deutschlandradio Kultur:" Jonathan Garfinkel […] takes the liberty to say: Such trials are absurd and only scratch the surface. However, to unsettle his audience Garfinkel uses theatrical devices which have never been used before in this topic in Germany: sympathy for the perpetrators, vicious songs, courtroom skits, Holocaust jokes." [1]
His play House of Many Tongues was also staged in Germany by Kristo Šagor in the Schauspielhaus Bochum. [5] Sven Westernströer wrote in Derwesten.de: [6] "The playwright is jewish-canadian. This is important to know in order to understand why in his play Garfinkel approaches a highly sensitive and emotionally charged topic like the Middle East conflict in his play with respect, but also with a certain distance and liberating irony. His characters, whether Israeli or Palestinian, are all likeable characters […]". [7]
He writes articles for the Jüdische Allgemeine , The Globe and Mail , and Walrus, among other publications. He lives in Toronto, Budapest and Berlin. [8]
Garfinkel has received several awards, including the Toronto Arts Council Senior Writers scholarship in 2006,[ citation needed ] and the K.M. Hunter Award for best young playwright in 2008.[ citation needed ] In 2009, he received a scholarship from the Akademie Schloss Solitude.[ citation needed ]
John Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-American who served as a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg. Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as "Ivan the Terrible", a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. In 1993 the verdict was overturned. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany as an accessory to the 28,060 murders that occurred during his service at Sobibor.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was a Polish-born German literary critic and member of the informal literary association Gruppe 47. He was regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and has often been called Literaturpapst in Germany.
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Nathan Birnbaum was an Austrian writer and journalist, Jewish thinker and nationalist. His life had three main phases, representing a progression in his thinking: a Zionist phase ; a Jewish cultural autonomy phase, which included the promotion of the Yiddish language; and a religious phase, when he turned to Orthodox Judaism and became staunchly anti-Zionist.
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Kenneth S. Stern is an American attorney and an author. He is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, a program of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. From 2014 to 2018 he was the executive director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation. From 1989 to 2014 he was the director of antisemitism, hate studies and extremism for the American Jewish Committee. In 2000, Stern was a special advisor to the defense in the David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial. His 2020 book, The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, examines attempts of partisans of each side to censor the other, and the resulting damage to the academy.
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Shaul Bustan, is an Israeli composer, conductor, Oud player, mandolinist and double bassist who has worked with several influential orchestras and ensembles throughout Israel, Germany, Austria, Netherlands and the USA including the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, Koninklijke Harmoniekapel Delft, the Tiroler Ensemble für Neue Musik and klezmer-maestro Giora Feidman.
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Viola Roggenkamp is a German journalist-commentator and writer. The themes to which she most often returns are those surrounding Feminism and Judaism in Germany during and following the brutish middle years of the twentieth century. Although these topics have been much revisited by scholars and critics throughout her lifetime, several of Roggenkamp's own perspectives and conclusions are well outside the mainstream. Her output includes literary portraits, essays, opinion pieces and novels.
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