The Times Are Screaming For Satire

Last Monday at the Leo Baeck Institute was a great success. New Yorkers are, evidently, interested in Berlin, since more than one hundred people came. Sadly, Professor Julius Schoeps from Berlin could not make it after all. However, Eugene Dubow, who founded the office of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, delivered a fabulous speech, as did Anne Nelson, who pointed out that Tucholsky's books had been burned exactly eighty years prior in May 1933.

For everybody who keeps asking, who the heck is Tucholsky, here is the Wikipedia link.

In addition, we now have a Kindle Sort with his landmark story Berlin! Berlin!, and The Times Are Screaming for Satire. The latter is an ironic take on the hardships a cabaret writer suffers. It is also an extremely funny and probably only slightly exaggerated behind-the-scenes description of political cabaret in Weimar Berlin and the constant infighting between desperate authors, ruthless agents, anxious directors, bossy theater owners, vain actors and actresses—and the befuddled audience, and the press, who is watching it. This story has not aged one little bit and could very well take place in today's New York.

And, of course, there is also a T-shirt: