A murder and mass protests, then and now

On Slovakia, seven years later

We’re back!

Housekeeping notes: This Monday, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire. This month’s guest was Vivan Marwaha, author and researcher (and, of course, my pal).

Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India, and the wider world, ad-free and directly to their inboxes from me (these posts will now unlock later).

With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.

THE NEWS

• For Slate, I wrote about Trump, Ukraine, Russia, Havel, and lying about history through which we all literally just lived.

• Carol Schaeffer joined us from Berlin this week on the podcast to discuss the upcoming German elections.

• I am pretty sad about Landmark E Street Cinema closing! We were just there a week and a half ago or so to see I’m Still Here.

• Relatedly, from the New York Times: “Mass layoffs have begun across the city’s largest employer, tipping economic forecasts for the Washington, D.C., region toward recession. Real estate agents are bracing for a housing slump. And the existence of the municipal government itself, which manages the day-to-day affairs of a city with more residents than some U.S. states have, is under direct threat.”

• From the Washington Post: “Republican senators find themselves in an unusual position these days: begging Trump officials to release funds they themselves appropriated. Senators have in recent days made the case to Cabinet secretaries and other Trump officials to let money flow back into their states. They are trying to finagle exceptions to President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders or cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service that freeze hundreds of billions of dollars, including money for farmers and infrastructure projects.”

• From Meduza: “Mariupol, a Ukrainian city nearly wiped off the map by Russia’s 2022 siege, is getting a new museum — not to commemorate those who died, but to honor Andrey Zhdanov, one of the chief architects of Stalin’s repressions.”

MY VIEWS ON…

…on Slovakia, seven years later

I did not know Jan Kuciak. I know that he was born exactly two weeks after I was, not in New York City but in Štiavnik, Slovakia. I know that he grew up to be an investigative journalist. And I know that, seven years ago today, at the age of 27, he and his finacée were shot dead.

There were mass protests. The prime minister, Robert Fico, resigned. New elections were carried out. Investigations were made, people were arrested, vows were made that the country would have rule of law, that they would fight corruption, that it was not normal for a journalist to be shot dead in the heart of Europe. And for a while it looked like all that was happening.

But the pandemic happened, and people were frustrated, and the new government couldn’t deliver on making people’s lives better in the way that politicians had promised they would. Robert Fico was elected prime minister of Slovakia once again, and his government set about making changes to the criminal code and abolishing the office of the special prosecutor, which is to say making it harder, not easier, to hold those who had been accused of malfeasance and corruption accountable. And so people are back in the streets.

The impetus, this time, was Fico’s trip to Moscow and threat of the country taking a less Western/European/democratic position. But the core of it is, in some ways, the same as it was seven years ago: We refuse to accept that we have to live like this.

I edited a couple of English language translations of pieces commemorating the seven years that have passed since this young couple’s murder for VSquare. The first is an excerpt of a forthcoming book by journalist Tomáš Madleňák. The second is an interview that was translated into English with Ján Gálik, part of the movement For a Decent Slovakia and a co-organizer of the protests then and now. I found his answer to a question of what he would say to people who are burned out by and frustrated with being out on the streets again for the same things very moving:

“First of all, the motivation is that I love Slovakia very much. It's my home, it's where I was born, it's where I grew up, it's the country that my parents built, my grandparents built. I have a relationship with its nature, I have a relationship with its culture, and when I see the way people are appropriating it — who don't respect its traditions, who don't understand the culture, who are devastating the nature and who are attacking the very people who are building and protecting and somehow improving the country — then I am motivated to say something about it and to help, so that as a society, as citizens, we can show that we disagree. It drives me crazy that so many of these politicians have such weak character and absent moral compasses and don't take the power that they have been given as a responsibility, as a service to the country. Instead, they understand it as though they have become the owners of the country and they can do with it what suits them, what benefits them. And that makes me very, very angry, and that motivates me to stop them from doing that, to remind them that they don't own the land, that they have been given the people’s trust and they are paid by all of us and they should have our interests at heart first and foremost, and not their selfishness or their business. I guess that's kind of my motivation.

And maybe I should also say that it's not exactly easy, compared to 2018, those full streets don't fill me with as much hope as they did before. I'm trying to work on that somehow internally, but also to expand the collective, the people who organize these things, so that maybe we can bring that hope and vision for a better country to the streets.”

You can read the full interview here. It’s about Kuciak and protests and Slovakia but also, I think, about how we have to get up even if it’s only to get knocked down again. Maybe especially in that case.

AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS

• I’m not sure why this review of this 2023 documentary about klezmer (and more!) is just coming out now but it did make me want to watch the movie.

• The New York Times makes the case for Joan Micklin Silver’s 1980s Jewish romcom Crossing Delancey.

• From Haaretz: “The Knesset advanced a bill on Wednesday that bans Israeli citizens, authorities, and public bodies from ‘cooperating with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.’...Tamar Meggido, an expert in international law, warned that ‘the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.’ According to her, any journalist publishing an investigation that suggests a crime committed by IDF forces would also be at risk of imprisonment if the bill is passed.”

• Also from Haaretz: “The bodies of Israeli hostages Shiri Bibas and her two young sons Ariel and Kfir Bibas, and Oded Lifshitz, will be returned to Israel on Thursday under the Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement. The four were taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 and have been held in Gaza ever since.” But the IDF later said that “the fourth body was not Shiri Bibas -- nor was it a match for another hostage.”

• Steve Bannon does not deserve the benefit of the doubt about whether he did a Nazi salute, actually.

• I think I missed this when it came out last year but it’s making the rounds again so: this piece on Magneto and Jewish history and what you do with it is fantastic.

• The New York Review of Books has a very thought provoking piece on Henrietta Szold and the multiple meanings and potential uses, and not, of Zion.

-ET