(1) Prayer for the French Republic. Playing through this weekend at Theater J. Let’s do the negatives first. The play is 3 hours long, with 2 intermissions. Second, the plot, while interesting, is relatively ordinary.

Now the positives. First, the 3 hours pass quickly, so you won’t get fidgity. Secondly, “relatively ordinary ” does not mean uninteresting.

The Solomons have been in France forever. Their piano business goes back five generations. Marcelle Solomon’s husband, Charles, was born in Algeria, but forced to leave. Everyone in the play is Jewish. Marcelle’s father is the only one of his siblings to live through the Second World War. Her grandfather spent time in a concentration camp. Her great grandparents were able to stay in their Paris apartment during the war.

Marcelle has a son who becomes religiously observant and, because of his kippah, religiously observed. He is attacked on the street. The question presented: should the family leave France and move to Israel?

More positives. The acting is first class. Some of the writing is masterful. And…you always run into people you know at Theater J.

It’s an age old Jewish  question, right? Where do you belong? What is your identity? Who gets to answer these questions?Where will you be safe?

I am not going to tell you what the family decided. But I will tell you that I think they decided wrongly.

A week or two ago, I wrote about a podcast we listened to after the Amsterdam soccer riot. Aayan Hirsi Ali talked about the growing number of Muslims in Europe living in a “parallel society” and how that would inevitably make life more difficult for Jews in Europe, whose numbers were not increasing. Maybe so.

But for the playwright, I have a suggestion.  Write a second ending for the play. At the end of the second act, poll the audience. Let them decide. Go, or stay? Would be very interesting to see what the observers who are not participants, think.

(2) Centered: Joe Lieberman. Last night, we went to the DCJCC (which is also where we saw Prayer for the French Republic) to watch a new documentary about Senator Joe Lieberman, best known as my law school classmate. The film is premiering in DC this week, and the crowd on the third night of its showing was large. It’s a well done and interesting film, concentrating on Joe both as a Jew and as a centrist Senator, who could reach so far across the line that he wound up being considered as vice presidential candidate for Republican Senator John McCain and being elected to the Senate from Connecticut as an independent.

The film is good history and is presented by and large chronologically. Historical footage is interspersed with what was apparently a 7 hour interview with Joe, and additional conversations with his wife, two of his children (the ones living in this country; the third is in Israel), and many who worked with him over the years.

As the film was being made, there was no thought to the possibility that Joe would not live to see it released. At least, no one thought about that except perhaps Joe himself. For Joe had been diagnosed with a dangerous blood cancer, about which he told no one (at least, he did not tell his children; I do not know whether his wife knew), and when he died suddenly after falling last March, his illness was first disclosed and his fall likely attributed to his weakened condition.

A number of things occurred to me as I watched the film. First, although there was a fair amount in the film of Joe as a Yale undergraduate, there was virtually no reference to his time as a law student. I guess this did not surprise me, as I recall Joe paying little attention to his law school years while he was living them. He married after his first year, and did not live on or (to my knowledge) very near campus, so he had a life beyond the law school classes. And he was working (perhaps volunteering) at the time (again as I remember it) for the Connecticut Democratic Party, so very busy elsewhere.

I also thought about his career before his successful run for Connecticut Attorney General. Joe practiced law in New Haven for a couple of years at what was then, I think, New Haven’s largest law firm. I don’t know what his work there consisted of, but a few years out of law school, he left the firm and ran for and was elected to the Connecticut Senate, where he served for 10 years. And then he became Attorney General. In other words, Joe Lieberman became Attorney General of the State of Connecticut, having no extensive law practice experience, and never having been a prosecutor (and probably his law practice had no involvement with criminal law).

Of whom does that remind you? Yes……Matt Gaetz. Oh, well.

(3) The Nazi Titanic. Robert Watson, a Florida academic, gave his second presentation for the Haberman Institute Monday night. He was talking about the subject of his 2017 award winning book, The Nazi Titanic. I gave the talk an A+ . You can see it either on YouTube or on the Haberman website (habermaninstitute.org) – no cost.

I will give you a very basic outline. The German ocean liner, the Cap Arcona, made over 90 trips between Europe and Latin America between the two world wars. It was perhaps the most luxurious of the many quality German ocean liners.

During the Second World War, the ship was first used as a troop carrier, having been stripped down, and then allowed to rot in the Nordsee; otherwise, it would have been an obvious target. But at one point (hard as this may be to believe), Hitler, who was a big American movie fan, decided that Germany should make its own epic film as a major public relations effort, so that the rest of the world would see how powerful and creative the Nazi regime was. So the ship was refloated, and restored to its pre-war elegance and made to look as much as possible like the Titanic itself, and the very expensive film was in fact made. The subject of the film was the 1912 sinking of the real Titanic, and the remade Cap Arcona was the star of the show. (This film is available to watch on YouTube. It did not do what Hitler expected it would for Germany’s reputation.)

The ship was again mothballed until the very final days of the war, when it was packed with Holocaust victims, of course mainly Jewish, who had survived the death marches from the east back to Germany. And “packed” means “really packed”, no room to move around at all. It was all about getting rid of evidence; the ship could always be sunk so that any remaining prisoners would disappear from potential rescue.

Clearly this was a tragedy, and the tragedy was compounded when the Royal Air Force, assuming the ship was still being used by the German military, bombed the ship and sunk it, killing perhaps 7000 prisoners on board.

This event was not spoken about because everything involving it was declared confidential by the British government, , embarrassed at Britain’s involvement in so many innocent deaths, to be held without release for, I think he said, 100 years. All RAF crew members were sworn to lifelong secrecy. And it was only by accident that Watson got on the trail of the Cap Arcona, and was able to have the British agree to release the previously confidential material. This is part of the story.