The Mitzvah, a 23-minute, one-person stage performance (see the video) — and the first segment of the three-part Mitzvah Project — dramatically explores the nature of prejudice through the interconnected lives of a Polish-Jewish Auschwitz survivor and a half-Jewish Wehrmacht officer who cross paths during the darkest days of the Holocaust. The play’s third character is a Groucho Marx-esque American-Jewish comedian-cum-social critic (“the Chorus”) who leavens the drama with acerbic commentary, probing the boundary between the absurd and the horrific.
The Mitzvah is presented with a post-performance lecture and Q&A led by Grunwald or one of three Mitzvah Project Teaching Artists. In the lecture the presenter sheds light on their own family's Holocaust story and examines the unique — and tragic — history that produced tens of thousands of half and quarter Jewish Wehrmacht soldiers (mostly junior and senior officers) who were the product of two centuries of German-Jewish assimilation, intermarriage, conversion and the striving of a people committed to calling the German Fatherland their home.
The presenter segues to American history and examines the role that America’s Jim Crow Laws played in providing a model for the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws. They go on to explore the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021 in our nation's capital and its connection to the recent upsurge in white supremacism and the ways in which prejudice in its many forms has been manifesting, most tragically, in our schools. "Young hearts and minds are up for grabs and the forces of intolerance, most especially the alt-right, have become more and more sophisticated at luring young people, in particular, but not exclusively, young white boys, into their web of hate," says Grunwald.
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The last section of the presenter's talk examines how advances in human biology and genetics totally debunk racialist mythology.
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The Mitzvah Project adds to the historical narratives about the Holocaust at a time when few survivors remain to tell their stories to younger generations. It was inspired by the lives of Grunwald’s mother and aunt, survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, respectively. It premiered at the Emerging Artists Theatre’s “Illuminating Artists: One Man Talking” festival in New York City and is currently being presented at high schools and colleges around the country. The Mitzvah was originally directed and co-authored by Grunwald and Annie McGreevey. NEXT PAGE
The play and lecture engage several socio/cultural/historical issues: How did the American Eugenics movement influence Federal and State legislation in the U.S, which, in turn, inspired the Nazi’s promulgation of several Nuremberg Laws? What responsibility, if any, do we have to the dead? Does killing another human being have a place in a moral universe? Do human beings have the capacity to learn from history?
"For a number of years my mother spoke in front of groups of students about her experiences during the war. What she and other survivors have done is teach this critically important history experientially. My mother died in 2001 and more and more Holocaust survivors are dying every day. As a child of a survivor, as a performing artist and as a human being — born less than six years after the end of the most murderous decade in the history of the world — The Mitzvah Project represents my promise to keep in focus the history that must never be forgotten." — Roger
Recommended Reading:
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Click here to read The German Law Journal article about the book: Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. The book is authored by James Whitman, Ph.D. (The article was published online by and appears courtesy of Cambridge University Press: June 24, 2019)
To learn more about the story behind the “mischlinge,” the two books at the top of my list are: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military and Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: Untold Tales of Men of Jewish Descent Who Fought for the Third Reich both by Bryan Mark Rigg.
The other must read book is The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 by Amos Elon. ​