Mary Phagan Case News

July 29, 2024 Leave a Comment on Neo-Nazis came to Broadway to protest ‘Parade.’ All the more reason for the show to go on. – Yahoo News Canada

Mary Phagan

Neo-Nazis came to Broadway to protest ‘Parade.’ All the more reason for the show to go on. – Yahoo News Canada

There were neo-Nazis on Broadway last week.

The night of the first preview of the newBroadway production of "Parade,"audience members waiting to enter the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater were harangued by members of a far-right white supremacist group, The National Socialist Movement.

"Parade" tells the story of Leo Frank, the Jewish superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta,who in 1913 was falsely accused and wrongfully convicted of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan. It is a signal event in thehistory of antisemitism and white supremacist terrorism in this country, and the case was behindboth the creation of the Anti-Defamation League and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

There is a website about the Leo Frank case that is not hard to find on Google. It has been around in some form or other since we first opened "Parade" in the late 1990s, and perhaps even before then. Its quite extensive and you might even think it was a legitimate research archive if you didnt dig too deep.

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But then youll run across something like this article from Oct. 28, 2019, written by the sites curator, N. Joseph Potts: Jewish Men Dying In Jail For Ravaging Young Girls: (Jeffrey)Epstein v (Leo)Frank.

And suddenly there you are, deep in the world of antisemitic conspiracy theory and fearmongering that has followed Jews around since Ptolemy ruled ancient Egypt.

When Jews first encounter this stuff at a young age, our instinct well, let me not generalize myinstinct was to laugh; surely no one believed this. We had horns? We baked matzah with the blood of Christian children? We secretly ran the worlds banking systems? Madness, obviously.

As I got older, I developed a wary familiarity with the nonsense. It didnt seem to affect my life too much, but it was always there, this persistent mockery and hostility that seemed so ridiculous on the surface but was continually being given little infusions of oxygen.

You dont need me to tell you that its all been getting a whole lot more oxygen recently. Correlation might not equal causation, but the Jew haters have certainly gotten noisier and bolder since DonaldTrumps election. You know that. I know that. They know that. Lets not be coy.

'I don't know how we survived': A new generation of the antisemitism we thought was behind us

Fear, hate and ignorance live in darkness: On Hanukkah, the 9th candle reflects how anyone can fight antisemitism by sharing truth

Its not that "Parade" hasnt been on their radar before. Mary Phagans grandniece, Mary Phagan-Kean, has been loudly denouncing Leo Frankand our showsince we opened at Lincoln Centerand has been duly embraced and amplified by antisemitic groups.

There was a certain degree of hubbub when we opened our tour in Atlanta in 2000; and there are many websites (including the one I mentioned above) that include "Parade" in their list of sins against the good white people of Georgia and America, but by and large, to be honest, the show itself hasnt had a large impact on the general public, so it hasnt drawn out the crazies as much as it would have had it been, say, "Hamilton."

But before we had our gala presentation at New York City Center last fall, our producer, Jenny Gersten, called me to ask whether there had been a history of threats against the show. I didnt need to ask why she was calling. I took a deep breath. Ah, I thought. Thats where we are now.

I feel terrible that audience members waiting in line to see our show on Broadway may be accosted by neo-Nazis. (I cant believe Im writing that sentence.) But I'll tell you the truth: Im glad the thugs showed up. Im glad they feel threatened enough to emerge into the light and show their faces. They are what "Parade" is about.

'An Innocent Man Was Lynched': Reporting exonerated Leo Frank in the murder of Mary Phagan

I suspect they dont particularly know or care about the case; they just want to yell out the words Jew and pedophile. They wont really engage with you, they cant; everything they could tell you about Leo Frank and the case has been decisively debunked, over and over again.

No legitimate conversation about the murder of Mary Phagan will end with you believing Leo Frank was guilty.

There is plenty of research, much more than there was when AlfredUhry and I started work on this show, which details in stark clarity the myriad ways in which Leo Frank was targeted and attacked by a society that did not care about the evidence or the law.

The wounded, frightened populace of Atlanta wanted a Jew punished, and in the same way that some people will tell you that there was fraud in our last election no matter how much you show them that there wasnt, the people of Georgia in 1913 believed that a Jew killed that girl no matter how much you proved that he couldnt have. Some of them still do.

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The evidence presented at trial and collected over the past 110 years suggest pretty clearly that Leo Frank was a difficult man to like. He was no hero. He was no martyr. But one of the things "Parade" says is that you dont have to praise or admire Leo Frank to see that he was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, fueled by rage and fear and antisemitic hysteria.

For the past couple of months, lots of people have been saying to me how important it is that were bringing "Parade" to Broadway right now, how the world needs to see this story at this moment in time. Honestly, Ive been kind of skeptical; the storys been there all along.

But I have to acknowledge in light of last weeks events that theres something about Ben Platt, a Jewish star, leading this American story about prejudice and scapegoating, right there in our weird little corner of the national cultural conversation, that really counts. Clearly it affects our audience. Obviously its affecting the other side as well.

The conversation was brought right to the stage door last week. Thats where we are now.

Jason Robert Brownis a Tony Award-winningAmerican musical theatre composer, lyricistand playwright. He is the composer and lyricist of "Parade."

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Neo-Nazis protest Broadway musical 'Parade.' That's where we are now

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Neo-Nazis came to Broadway to protest 'Parade.' All the more reason for the show to go on. - Yahoo News Canada

Leo Frank

What we can learn from Leo Franks 1915 lynching – The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Atlanta was not yet a city of two major newspapers who politely contradicted each other. That came later. During Franks trial, competing newspapers were omnipresent, each pressed to produce those multiple editions daily so that the news of which there was only so much got bled dry and was reduced to opinion, scandalmongering and, sometimes, wholesale lies. They serviced the ravenous appetite of the people of Atlanta and beyond, throughout the state, throughout the country and, eventually, throughout Europe.

When it came to Franks trial, a cacophony of loud voices argued the case in print, with the intention of making a reputation or whipping up sales. Some were eager to take down a New York Jewish factory manager in the service of ending child labor. Some were socialists. Others were garden-variety Jew haters. The result? Antisemitic hysteria, death by lynching and savage treatment of Franks corpse.

During the trial, the Atlanta Journal performed as Franks chief defender, while the Atlanta Constitution straddled the fence or performed as friend to the prosecution. They, too, were not above large-type headlines and illustrations, photographs from the morgue, light-fingered reporters, purloined evidence. Sworn enemies might be too harsh a term, but the two newspapers didnt like each other. That they could come together 35 years later in a historic joint operating agreement maintaining two newsrooms to keep ideological antagonists apart and the Constitutions morning edition the Journals afternoon intact was something of a miracle. Fifty years after that, the walls of Jericho fell and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution merged into a single pressroom and one harmonious voice.

Media in 2024 is as wild as anything Frank knew but on a grander, more expansive scale. To feed it, we have presidential candidates and first sons subject to multiple trials that vamp the publics attention, and foreign wars used to inflame the impressionable. The internet has created innumerable news portals so that one can pick and choose support for ones preconceived notions as easily as dropping a nickel in the palm of a late-edition hawker in 1913. Again, the molding of public opinion is in the grasp of too many reckless and often powerful hands.

As we teeter on the brink of despair that the two ends of our discourse left and right shall ever meet again, we need to believe that the kind of hopefulness, of civility, the kind of commitment to years of trust-building that created The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 75 years ago is not impossible to achieve again.

To regard her history inspires hope that all over the country antagonistic opinion makers recognize the blowtorch methods of the distant and recent pasts are clearly not going to work. So much has burned down already.

That The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has survived nearly a centurys worth of conflict and compromise is proof of its strength. As always, the creation of consensus while entertaining conflicting views is a mighty achievement.

Bravo.

Mary Glickman is author of six historical novels focused on antisemitism and racism in the Deep South. Her latest book, Aint No Grave, focused on the Leo Frank tragedy, was published July 9.

Excerpt from:

What we can learn from Leo Franks 1915 lynching - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Mary Phagan

Ugly slice of history unveiled in Parade – Washington Examiner

Theres something sweet and simple and wonderful about Jason Robert Browns music written for Parade, a kind of melodic honesty that hearkens back to early Gershwin or the efficacious elegance of Lerner and Loewe. And when you consider that its written for such hefty subject matter as the tragic story of Lucille and Leo Frank and its bitter mark on American history, the cotton-candy lightness of Browns score suddenly lands with a dark, reverberating thud. You can imagine that a musical set in 1913 Georgia isnt going to be a lively romp in the sun for a New York Jew transplanted to Hotlanta. But history shows that Leo Frank was falsely accused of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan, one of the young workers in the same pencil factory where Frank was superintendent. From the absurd spectacle and sensationalist drama of the courtroom to Lucille Franks desperate attempts to prove her husband innocent, Parade serves as an ugly reminder of the power wielded by public opinion alone.

Its a long evening at Fords Theatre, and in their co-production with Theater J, director Stephen Rayne milks every opportunity to showcase his strong ensemble cast.

Theres that infectious pop and ragtime score with the soaring melodies of Brown, and here, Steven Landaus musical direction takes front and center stage. Its all brought together by the couple of Franks Euan Mortons brainy, bumbling Leo and Jenny Fellners timid but tough-minded Lucille who carry the evening from bouncy brass to harrowing horns and finally, toward a most foreboding drum cadence.

Morton is expertly cast as a man braving a terrible destiny with courage and character, and Mortons voice is as clean and pure as Franks conscience. Whether hes cutting a rug to Come Up to My Office or serenading his sweetheart in All the Wasted Time, Morton makes it all look and sound effortless. Together, Fellner and Morton journey through arguably the shows best duet, This is Not Over Yet, with reserved, yet skillful, precision.

Of the noteworthy ensemble, Kevin McAllister delivers more than one show-stopping number, and alongside Kellee Knighten Houghs sweet and spicy vocals, the two nearly bring the house down with A Rumblin and a Rollin at the top of the second act. Its moments like these that make this a Parade that shouldnt pass you by.

Leo Frank

Leo Frank case inspires novel that blends history and magical realism – The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The novel is set during the trial of Leo Frank, the Jewish superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta who was convicted many people believe wrongly so of the 1913 murder of 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. Antisemitic sentiment roiled the city, and a mob of men busted Frank out of jail and lynched him in Marietta.

At the heart of Nyes story, which blends historical accuracy and fantasy, is the Felicitous Five, a group of teenage girls whose friendship is bound by their infatuation with Frank, while they also secretly identify with Mary Phagan, their contemporary. Devastated when Frank is killed, they create a golem in his image that starts to run amok.

What inspired Nye to write The Curators was a minor detail in the case thats come to be called the murder notes.

The murder notes were a set of two handwritten notes that were found beside Mary Phagans body in the pencil factory, Nye said, speaking from her mothers home in Maryland. They were written in a kind of decipherable pidgin as though her dead body had described the assault ... like in her dying moments she wrote down an account of everything. And in them theres this line, Play like the night witch did it.

The detective and the press and history has interpreted that as the night watchman because it was, in fact, the night watchman Newt Lee who found her body, she continued. But its written night witch, two words. And I was like, that is such a surreal detail to be embedded in such a tragic and morbid set of circumstances. And I began thinking about child narrators and how children might interpret such a detail and might spin that out into a fantasy, and thats how I got to the collective narrators that are in charge of my novel.

For historical accuracy and local color Nye relied heavily upon archives of the Atlanta Constitution after she saw the newspaper cited in Steve Oneys definitive account of the case, And the Dead Shall Rise, published in 2004.

The newspaper proved indispensable to her in learning how people lived and how the media shaped what they were thinking and how people talked and what people were interested in and what was popular.

As far as historical newspapers go, Nye said the Atlanta Constitution was fairly balanced in its coverage of the case. But, of course, there was interest in the sort of salacious and morbid details of the case. Thats what sells extras, right? I think it reflects the historical attitude of the men in power, largely.

She admits she doesnt paint a flattering picture of journalists in her novel. I was really interested in how newspapers and journalism shape public perception and can kind of rally and incite anger, bitterness and violence.

Ouch. That was then, perhaps. This is now. Ill go to my grave believing newspapers are a force for good.

Nye has two author events coming up this summer. Shell participate in the Lost in the Letters Festival July 27 (www.lostintheletters.org) and shell give a reading on Aug. 14 at Bookish Atlanta (bookishatl.com).

Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.

Original post:

Leo Frank case inspires novel that blends history and magical realism - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Mary Phagan

Ben Platt Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Neo-Nazis Who Protested His Broadway Show – Yahoo Lifestyle UK

Ben Platts long-awaited return to Broadway got off to a troubling start this week as incoming theatergoers were accosted by members of a far-right, neo-Nazi hate group.

A video posted to Twitter by journalist Jake Wasserman of the Forward shows a masked man representing the National Socialist Movement distributing antisemitic flyers outside of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in New York, where Platt began preview performances in the musical Parade Tuesday.

Youre paying $300 to go fucking worship a pedophile, the unidentified man says in the video.In the background, another person shouts:Romanticizing pedophiles, wow, Leo Frank.

According to Playbill, the man was joined by a small but vocal group of demonstrators carrying handwritten signs with hateful, antisemitic rhetoric.

Written by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown, Parade is based on the life of Leo Frank (played by Platt), a Jewish man who in 1913 was wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a 13-year-old factory worker,Mary Phagan.Two years into his life sentence,Frank was abducted from a Georgia prison and hanged by a lynch mob.He was posthumously pardoned in 1986.

Platt, who rocketed to fame in 2016 for his Tony-winning performance in Dear Evan Hansen,addressed the protest in a short video posted to his Instagram page.

Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt in "Parade."

For those who dont know, there were a few neo-Nazi protesters from a really disgusting group outside of the theater, bothering some of our patrons on their way in and saying antisemitic things about Leo Frank, who the show is about, he said in the clip. It was definitely very ugly and scary, but a wonderful reminder of why were telling this particular story and how special and powerful art and, particularly, theater can be. And just made me feel extra grateful to be the one who gets to tell this particular story and to carry on this legacy of Leo.

After assuring fans who came to see Parade that they would be super safe and secure, the actor went on to note,Now is really the moment for this particular piece.

On Wednesday, the shows production team echoed Platts sentiments in a statement denouncing the vileness on displayoutside the theater the previous night.

Parade premiered on Broadway in 1998,winning two Tony Awards. The current production openedto rave reviews at the New York City Center in November of last year before its Broadway transfer was confirmed in January.

According to Deadline,the Telecharge ticketing site briefly crashed due to high demand for tickets.The musical will officially open March 16.

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Ben Platt Blasts 'Disgusting' Neo-Nazis Who Protested His Broadway Show - Yahoo Lifestyle UK

Leo Frank

Leo Frank, murdered by the Knights of Mary Phagan – Aurora Israel

His trial, conviction, and appeals attracted national attention. His lynching two years later, in response to the remission of his death sentence, became the focus of social, regional, political and racial concerns, particularly regarding anti-Semitism.

Frank (1884-1915) was born in Texas to a Jewish home of German descent. He lived for a time in New York and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University. He worked in various companies, until in 1907 he was hired to run the National Pencil Company pencil factory in Atlanta. In 1910 he married Lucille Selig, a young woman from a prominent industrial family, and became actively involved in the city's Jewish community, being elected president of the local B'nai B'rith.

Court case and lynching

He was convicted on circumstantial evidence of the rape and murder of an employee: thirteen-year-old girl Mary Phagan. The trial was followed by the sensational press. Frank's extrajudicial murder is the first known anti-Semitic lynching in the United States. Georgian politician Tom Watson capitalized on the case to bolster public support for the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been dismantled by the federal government more than 40 years ago.

The jury unanimously found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life in prison after Georgia Governor John Slaton reviewed the evidence. On the night of August 17, 1915, a group of men calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan arrived at the Milledgeville State Penitentiary, kidnapped Frank, and led him in handcuffs to a farm in nearby Marietta, where he was hanged. His last words were: I think more about my wife and my mother than about my own life.

Mary Phagan's Knights included former Georgia Governor Joseph Mackey Brown, Judge Newton Morris, and former Marietta Mayor Eugene Herbert Clay; Also present were the famous lawyer John Tucker Dorsey, the city's sheriff William Frey, lawyers and even doctors.

In 1982, Alonzo Mann, a former employee of the factory, declared that he was convinced that Leo Frank was innocent. He claimed that he saw Jim Conley, an African-American janitor, take Mary Phagan to the basement, but that he threatened to kill her if she spoke about her.

In 1986 Leo Frank was posthumously pardoned because of Alonzo Mann's testimony, although he was never officially acquitted of the murder charge.

The story of his trial, his conviction, his lynching and the subsequent events was told in the miniseriesThe murder of Mary Phagan(1988)

Source: Wikipedia

Read the rest here:

Leo Frank, murdered by the Knights of Mary Phagan - Aurora Israel

Mary Phagan

Ben Platt Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Neo-Nazis Who Protested His Broadway Show – Yahoo Movies UK

Ben Platts long-awaited return to Broadway got off to a troubling start this week as incoming theatergoers were accosted by members of a far-right, neo-Nazi hate group.

A video posted to Twitter by journalist Jake Wasserman of the Forward shows a masked man representing the National Socialist Movement distributing antisemitic flyers outside of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in New York, where Platt began preview performances in the musical Parade Tuesday.

Youre paying $300 to go fucking worship a pedophile, the unidentified man says in the video.In the background, another person shouts:Romanticizing pedophiles, wow, Leo Frank.

According to Playbill, the man was joined by a small but vocal group of demonstrators carrying handwritten signs with hateful, antisemitic rhetoric.

Written by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown, Parade is based on the life of Leo Frank (played by Platt), a Jewish man who in 1913 was wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a 13-year-old factory worker,Mary Phagan.Two years into his life sentence,Frank was abducted from a Georgia prison and hanged by a lynch mob.He was posthumously pardoned in 1986.

Platt, who rocketed to fame in 2016 for his Tony-winning performance in Dear Evan Hansen,addressed the protest in a short video posted to his Instagram page.

Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt in "Parade."

For those who dont know, there were a few neo-Nazi protesters from a really disgusting group outside of the theater, bothering some of our patrons on their way in and saying antisemitic things about Leo Frank, who the show is about, he said in the clip. It was definitely very ugly and scary, but a wonderful reminder of why were telling this particular story and how special and powerful art and, particularly, theater can be. And just made me feel extra grateful to be the one who gets to tell this particular story and to carry on this legacy of Leo.

Story continues

After assuring fans who came to see Parade that they would be super safe and secure, the actor went on to note,Now is really the moment for this particular piece.

On Wednesday, the shows production team echoed Platts sentiments in a statement denouncing the vileness on displayoutside the theater the previous night.

Parade premiered on Broadway in 1998,winning two Tony Awards. The current production openedto rave reviews at the New York City Center in November of last year before its Broadway transfer was confirmed in January.

According to Deadline,the Telecharge ticketing site briefly crashed due to high demand for tickets.The musical will officially open March 16.

Leo Frank

A searing indictment of antisemitism in the South – Simi Valley Acorn

Its been over a 100 years since Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old Atlanta pencil factory worker, was horrifically murdered. Leo Frank, the Jewish man who managed the factory, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. Though his sentence was later commuted to life by the Georgia governor, an antisemitic mob kidnapped Frank from jail and lynched him.

Many believe Frank was wrongly convicted. The thunderous consequences of the case can still be felt in todays news as incidents of antisemitism and violence against Jews continue to reverberate throughout the country.

A play, television movie and a musical have all recounted the tragedy and each one has been critically praised. The musical version, titled Parade, debuted in 1998 and it has proven especially enduring, having recently completed a highly regarded revival on Broadway.

Actors Repertory Theatre of Simis current production, which opened Feb. 24, shows why Parade should be regarded as a milestone in American musical theater. ARTS production is gripping, disturbing and often thrilling, keeping its audience on the edge of its seat from the first martial drumbeat to the last.

The parade takes place in 1913 during Georgias annual Confederate Memorial Day celebration honoring its Civil War dead, but also suggests the methodical procession toward Franks ultimate injustice, caused by a systematic cortege of tainted witnesses.

Alfred Uhrys book pits a trio of protagonists against an equal number of antagonists. On one side is Frank, a bespectacled Jewish college graduate from Brooklyn who arrives in Atlanta to work as the superintendent of the National Pencil Company, supervising over 100 underage female workers. The inordinately talented Aaron Ellis, a gifted actor, singer and son of a cantor (his Shma will bring tears to your eyes), plays Frank as an unsympathetic hero, complaining of his fish-out-of-water existence: an immigrant in his own country. Obsessive-compulsive, the mild-mannered Frank ignores his Georgia-born wife while immersing himself in his work. Even while incarcerated, facing the death penalty, he obsesses about paying his bills.

Franks wife, Lucille, is beautifully played by Samantha Craton, who gives a stunning performance as the woman who stands by her man, pleading for his freedom even after he is railroaded for committing the heinous crime for which he is accused. Her song You Dont Know This Man is one of her many achingly beautiful moments in the show. Ellis and Craton are terrific as they show the Franks relationship grow from distant and strained to tragically tender (All the Wasted Time). Both are a revelation.

Lew Stowers plays the conscientious outgoing Georgia governor John Slaton, who refuses to vacate his office before conducting his own investigation of the case. Stowers imbues his convincing performance with a perfectly honeyed Georgia accent, learned by studying the speech patterns of former president Jimmy Carter.

The three antagonists are ambitious prosecuting attorney Hugh Dorsey, played with sly guile by Mark Haan; antisemitic newspaper publisher and religious zealot Tom Watson (the excellent Joey Grady), who uses yellow journalism to inflame the citizens against Frank; and the amazing Keith Borden as Jim Conley, a Black janitor who is coached by Dorsey to implicate Frank in the murder (Thats What He Said). The confrontation between Stowers, as Gov. Slaton, and Borden, as the cunning Conley, is the musicals dramatic highlight. To a pulsating chain gang ostinato, Slaton and Conley square off, with Borden providing the thunder on the rafters-raising blues shout Feel the Rain Fall.

Other outstanding performances are turned in by Noah Gephart-Canada, who delivers a smoldering performance as young Frankie Epps, a friend of Marys; Maxwell Oliver as opportunistic journalist Brit Craig (Real Big News is his tour de force); Noa Levy as the unfortunate Mary; Joshua Ray as fearful night watchman Newt Lee; and Sarah Steiker as Mary Phagans grieving mother.

Gary Poirots upstage orchestra plays Jason Robert Browns Tony-winning score, with its Charles Ives-influenced references to Southern folk and sacred tunes, spirited marches and dissonant counter-melodies. Parade is produced by Jan Glasband (who also designed the drab, earth-toned costumes) and directed by David Ralphe.

The musical continues through March 24 at the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center. Due to mature themes, its not recommended for anyone younger than 13. For tickets and information, go online to actorsrepofsimi.org.

Here is the original post:

A searing indictment of antisemitism in the South - Simi Valley Acorn

Mary Phagan

OPINION: Antisemitism in Georgia: Will fear or hope prevail? – The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Franks trial unleashed a wave of antisemitic rage. Crowds gathered outside the Fulton County Courthouse to cheer on prosecutor Hugh Dorsey who later was elected governor as he arrived for court each day. According to news reports, the crowds celebrated wildly when news of the conviction reached the street.

The frenzy of antisemitic hatred peaked after Gov. John Slaton, citing what he called insufficient evidence of Franks guilt, commuted his sentence from death to life imprisonment. On the night of Aug. 16, 1915, a group of men calling themselves The knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from his cell at the state prison farm in Milledgeville, drove him to Phagans hometown of Marietta, and hanged him from an oak tree.

Following Franks death, many Atlanta Jews felt the isolation, loneliness and fear that Schumer spoke of.

The New York Times reported that as many as 3,000 Jews fled Atlanta after the lynching. Steve Oney, author of And the Dead Shall Rise, which is considered the most exhaustively researched book on the Frank case, told ArtsATL he believed that number may be inflated, but he called the Frank lynching a blunt-force trauma to the Jewish community (with most) living in fear and confusion.

Adding to the fear was the fact that the lynching revived the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia after it had been moribund for decades.

Forty-three years after Leo Franks death, on Oct. 12, 1958, another violent antisemitic event shook the Atlanta Jewish community. On that day a white supremacist group detonated a bomb at The Temple, an iconic Atlanta home for Jewish worshippers. No one was killed or injured, but the bomb caused major damage to the Peachtree Street synagogue.

This time, though, many non-Jews rallied in support of the Jewish community. Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield filmed a statement for TV news as he pointed to the wreckage caused by the bomb:

My friends, here you see the end result of bigotry and intolerance

And Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill wrote When the wounds of hate are loosened on one people, then no one is safe.

Rabbi Alvin Sugarman, who grew up at The Temple and later became its long-serving chief rabbi, told me that its assembly room was renamed Friendship Hall to honor the support The Temple received from all parts of Atlanta in the wake of the bombing.

But antisemitism isnt a thing of the past in Georgia, and in fact, there are signs that its growing.

Just weeks ago, a white supremacist hate group calling itself the Goyim Defense League projected a laser image praising Adolf Hitler onto an overpass on I-75 in Cobb County. That same group has been responsible for other displays of hatred in metro Atlanta, tossing leaflets with vile antisemitic messages into suburban yards and staging a protest last summer waving Nazi flags in front of a Cobb County synagogue.

And since the war between Israel and Hamas began, Hillel of Georgia has called on the states universities to step up security as pro-Palestinian demonstrations have sparked fear among Jewish students at Emory, the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. Anti-Muslim activities have increased, too, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

By coincidence, I talked with Rabbi Sugarman on the first day of Hanukkah, which is known as the Festival of Lights because it celebrates a time more than 2,000 years ago when the Jewish people fought out of the darkness of occupation by an invading army in Jerusalem into the light of freedom.

Rabbi Sugarman told me that Hanukkah kindles his spirit of eternal optimism. Skeptics might call his hope misplaced, but Sugarman said he believes that people of goodwill will come together as they did in the days after the Temple bombing to fight the darkness of antisemitism and bring light to the lives of the Jewish people.

As the old Jewish saying goes, Rabbi Sugarman, from your lips to Gods ear.

Leo Frank

The universalist tradition has been forgotten, the Enlightenment … – The New Statesman

You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember, said Benjamin Netanyahu on 28 October. Theres no point wasting words over the lifelong secular conmans sudden interest in biblical texts, or even in asking whether its kosher to follow an injunction to wipe out enemy tribes if your main object is to prolong a war in order to stay out of jail.

Im more interested in how the Amalek passages have guided Jews more often, lately, than the ones I was told to remember as a child: You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Some version of that injunction is repeated 36 times in the Torah. Its hard not to wonder if it corresponds to the number of righteous people for whose sake, says the Talmud, the world keeps turning.

I was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1955, the year Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. The number of Jews lynched by the Ku Klux Klan never approached the number of African Americans, but the murder of Leo Frank was still in living memory, and most members of the citys small Jewish community lived in fear of attracting attention particularly after the Reform synagogue was bombed in 1958. It was clearly a warning from the Klan, for what distinguished the Temple from the other two synagogues in Atlanta was that its rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, worked with Martin Luther King not only before he won the Nobel Peace Prize, but before it was acceptable for black and white people to dine together.

Heres a chilling story: our neighbour and fellow synagogue member invited the rabbi and his wife to dinner along with Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. Unable to find their way, the Kings arrived late and apologised, explaining they had stopped at another house to ask for directions. But dont worry, said Coretta, We told them we were coming to serve at your dinner party. Had they said they were guests, they could have endangered their hosts.

Rabbi Rothschild and a few members of his community, among them my mother, grounded the risks they took in the universalist Jewish tradition: since we were slaves in Egypt, our place was with those who were slaves in Georgia. That was the Haggadah interpretation that reigned at our seders, so it was a shock to learn as a young adult that there was anything else on offer. Though an extraordinary number of white Jews were involved in the civil rights movement at a time when it could be dangerous, the number of Jews who were remembering Amalek began rising in the late 1960s. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 seemed to seal it: in every generation, someone or other rises up to destroy us.

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Same memory, different conclusions. We were strangers, then slaves, and even after liberation our troubles were not over. Its a myth of Jewish suffering common to those who are learned and those who are not, to the secular and the observant, those who lean tribalist and those who lean universalist. If most of us agree on the power of the story, we disagree fiercely on the conclusions we draw from it. For universalists, that we suffered means we understand the pain of strangers and are bound to do something about it. For tribalists, the fact that they made us suffer means no stranger can ever be trusted, and we ought to watch our back.

I asked my rabbi, Jim Ponet, if the contradiction was resolvable by the sort of literary scholarship that posits several biblical authors and tries to determine their respective contributions. Perhaps the Amalek passages there are, after all, only three were written by a different author? Not so simple, Ponet answered: this is the civil war thats divided the Jewish people from the start.

It was easy enough for left-wing Jews to uphold the universalist tradition so long as the international left itself was firmly universalist. But what are we to do when what now calls itself the left has gone tribalist, rejecting universalism like other Enlightenment ideas as Eurocentric hype designed to dominate the rest of the world? This view is so distorted that if Enlightenment thinkers were alive they could sue for defamation. It was they who invented the critique of Eurocentrism and condemned slavery and colonialism.

Woke has become a right-wing slur, but the mishmash of ideology called progressive today is built on a confusing contradiction between feeling and thought. Todays progressives are driven by emotions any leftist will share: we want to stand on the side of the oppressed, to do what we can to right historical wrongs. But those emotions are undermined by a series of reactionary intellectual assumptions: most importantly, the belief that tribal identities are the ones that define us takes us back to Amalek.

These past weeks have devastated progressive Jews not prepared to celebrate Hamas carnage as an act of liberation by the Global South. Many speak of betrayal by the left. But the problems began earlier. Rejecting postcolonial theory doesnt make you an imperialist; the anticolonial tradition that overthrew empires in the mid-20th century was not tribalist. When so many progressives are impaled on a spit of binaries, its time to remember our own universalist tradition. Whoever you think was the author, parts of the Torah still have a message for the rest of the world, as well as for the government that excuses its war crimes with references to Amalek.

This article is part of the series What It Means to Be Jewish Now.

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The universalist tradition has been forgotten, the Enlightenment ... - The New Statesman