A Holocaust-studies center in Norway, which the government had created as compensation for complicity in the genocide, announced plans to discuss the nakba—the “catastrophe” Palestinian Arabs call the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948—triggering a sharp-worded rebuke this week.

Israel’s embassy in Oslo, a prominent Holocaust scholar in the United States and an influential Norwegian-Jewish pundit responded strongly to a lecture titled “Nakba and Holocaust as cultural traumas,” which is planned to be held on Thursday at the Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities.

Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., called the planned lecture a form of “Holocaust-inversion” and a “shocking desecration of the memory of the 6 million Jews, including Norwegian Jews.”

Contacted by JNS, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Holocaust studies center said the institution was trying to reply to all queries it has received on the matter, though did not reply in time for publication.

The lecture asks, “What meaning does the entanglement of the Holocaust and the ‘Nakba’ gain in the shadow of Oct. 7 and the war on Gaza?” The Center wrote in advertising the event.

Delivering it is Nadim Khoury, a professor at the Department of Law, Philosophy and International Studies of the University of Inland Norway. In November 2023, about a month after thousands of Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 Israelis, Khoury penned an op-ed lamenting Western concerns about Israel’s security.

“This requires arming an already militaristic society to the teeth, providing diplomatic cover for its occupation and aggressions, and offering it unconditional political and moral support,” he wrote of such concerns.

The fact that “this desecration is being undertaken with funds intended to commemorate the Jewish victims makes the center’s partisan agenda all the more offensive,” Medoff added.

The Norwegian Holocaust studies center was established in 2001 “as part of a collective settlement related to the extermination of 230 Jewish families and Jewish institutions during World War II,” the institution’s website says.

The center’s creation accounted for 16% of the 250 million kroner (the equivalent of about $42 million today) that the government had allocated towards this compensation. It is housed in the former residence of Vidkun Quisling, Norway’s Nazi-collaborating ruler, whose last name became synonymous with treachery in the English language.

Israel’s embassy in Oslo wrote in a statement about the event: “A center founded to preserve Holocaust remembrance has chosen political activism over historical responsibility. This is not education. It is moral failure. The planned events should be canceled immediately, and the center must return to its core mission: safeguarding Holocaust remembrance and confronting antisemitism – not legitimizing its modern forms.”

Henrik Beckheim, a Norwegian-Jewish author and podcaster, called the Holocaust studies center “rotten to the core.”

He told JNS: “It’s supposed to be a center to fight against antisemitism and uphold the memory after the Holocaust, so that we never forget. It’s even founded with Jewish money, for exactly that cause. But its leadership is now made up of pro-Palestinian activists working hard to undermine the Jews in Norway and even trivialize the Shoah.”

On Elpeleg, an activist against antisemitism who’s based in Norway, told the Idag newspaper: “Instead of preserving memory and helping educate new generations about the Holocaust, the center distorts, dilutes and trivializes history—a grave betrayal of facts, common sense and the victims of the Holocaust.”

Medoff noted that one of the upcoming events at the Center has as its theme the question: “How can and should we remember the Holocaust in light of the war in Gaza?”

That lecture is to be delivered by Omer Bartov, an Israel-born Holocaust scholar who has accused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza, an allegation rejected by top historians from the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and others.

The “obvious answer” to the question, Medoff told JNS, “is that Oct. 7 should be remembered as the day on which a Palestinian Arab terrorist army tried to commit another Holocaust, and perpetrated atrocities that were all too similar to those committed by the Nazis. The Norwegian Holocaust Center’s refusal to recognize this basic truth is a betrayal of its own declared mission.”

Federal authorities said on Wednesday that the December 2025 shootings at Brown University and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor were not acts of terrorism, concluding that the gunman acted alone and was driven by personal grievances.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts identified the shooter as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and U.S. legal permanent resident. Investigators said he killed two students and wounded nine others in a classroom at Brown in Providence, R.I., on Dec. 13, before fatally shooting MIT professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Mass., two days later.

“His actions were determined to have no nexus to terrorism,” the FBI stated.

Valente “made a series of audio files and short videos in which he confessed to committing these crimes, showed no remorse and provided no reason for his actions” after the shootings, according to the findings of the investigation.

Valente, who lived in Miami, came to the United States in 2000 on a student visa at Brown University. He was found dead on Dec. 18 in a storage unit in Salem, N.H., with two legally purchased 9mm handguns nearby. Both weapons were used in the attacks, the FBI said.

The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit concluded that “Valente’s victims were symbolic in nature” and that he “was driven by an accumulation of grievances that he collected throughout his life.”

“Brown University as a whole and Dr. Loureiro represented to the shooter his personal failures and injustices he perceived were inflicted by others over time,” the unit stated. “By attacking them, Neves Valente was likely able to overcome his shame and envy by using violence to punish those communities that he perceived contributed to his downfall.”

Investigators said Valente had lived a transient and socially isolated life and had engaged in long-term planning, factors that limited opportunities for others to recognize warning signs.

By platforming Ussama Makdisi as a moral voice on Israel, America’s newspaper of record handed its op-ed page to a man who publicly said he wished he had been among those who massacred 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7.

There are editorial decisions that make you scratch your head. And then there are decisions so staggering in their moral recklessness that they demand a public accounting. The choice by editors at The New York Times to publish an op-ed on April 23 by Makdisi, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley—positioning him as a credible, sober commentator on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—falls firmly, irredeemably, in the second category.

This is not a close call. This is not a matter of reasonable people disagreeing about which voices belong in the public square. This is the Times conferring the prestige of its op-ed page—the most coveted platform in American journalism—on a man whose public record on this subject is not merely controversial, but morally indefensible. The editors who authorized this piece owe their readers an apology.

Let’s begin with the statement that, on its own, should have ended any conversation about Makdisi as a Times contributor on this topic.

In the aftermath of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—in which 1,200 Israeli men, women and children were slaughtered, babies were beheaded in their homes, elderly Holocaust survivors were dragged from kibbutzim, and young people were gunned down at a music festival—Makdisi took to social media and shared an article with this title: “I Could Have Been One of Those Who Broke Through the Siege on October 7.”
Read that again. Slowly. A tenured professor at one of America’s most prestigious public universities openly expressed that he could identify with the men who committed the deadliest mass killings of Jewish people since the Holocaust.

This statement was so alarming that it was raised explicitly during congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) confronted UC Berkeley’s chancellor directly: “On Oct. 7, Makdisi described the Hamas attacks against Israel as ‘resistance,’” Fine said. “Why would you give a position to someone who said Oct. 7 was justified?”

The chancellor’s response—that Makdisi is “a fine scholar” appointed on “academic standards”—might be a defensible answer for a university trying to protect faculty speech. It is not a defensible answer for a newspaper that presents its contributors as moral guides for millions of readers. Academic freedom and journalistic platform selection are two entirely different things.

The editors cannot claim they didn’t know who Makdisi is. His views are not hidden. They are voluminously documented, widely published and entirely consistent across years of public advocacy. This is a man who has built an academic and public career on a singular, uncompromising position: that Israel is an irredeemably illegitimate enterprise that must be destroyed.

In a 2023 podcast, Makdisi declared flatly: “Colonial Zionism has to end.” He did not qualify this. He did not suggest reform, negotiation or a two-state framework. He called for the end of the foundational ideology of the Jewish state—a state of 10 million people, including 2 million Arabs. He dismissed Israel as an “ethnoreligious settler-colonial state [born] entirely of Western imperialism,” a framing that, conveniently, leaves no room for any legitimate Jewish national claim to the land whatsoever.

In a 2014 op-ed that drew fierce criticism, Makdisi characterized Israel’s founding as born of “terrible violence” and described Zionism as a “settler-colonial enterprise”—language that, stripped of its academic veneer, reduces the entire enterprise of Jewish self-determination to an act of conquest with no more moral legitimacy than apartheid South Africa. He has repeatedly described the situation in Gaza as “genocide,” and in essays published in prominent journals has framed Israeli military operations as the deliberate, systematic destruction of Palestinian civilization.

In essays for the New Left Review, he has written that “fighting antisemitism often implies erasing Palestine,” a formulation that positions virtually any effort to combat Jew-hatred as an act of oppression against Palestinians. And he has consistently portrayed the pro-Israel community in America not as fellow citizens with sincere beliefs, but as a conspiratorial force—accusing “Zionist institutions and pro-Israel donors” of “routinely smearing” Palestinian voices, and describing congressional scrutiny of campus antisemitism as evocative of “the McCarthy show trials of the 1950s.”

Perhaps the most revealing dimension of Makdisi’s public record is not any single statement, but his consistent pattern of contextualizing Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians in ways that systematically minimize or justify it. In published writing, he has argued that “if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it”—a formulation that, applied to Oct. 7, amounts to a conditional defense of the massacre. Hamas butchered 1,200 people, his framework suggests, because Israel made them do it.

This is not historical analysis. It is moral inversion. And it is precisely the kind of framework that The New York Times, by lending Makdisi its platform, has now implicitly legitimized for its global readership of millions.

The New York Times editorial page has, for generations, prided itself on curating a diversity of serious, credentialed voices—voices that challenge readers, provoke debate, and yes, include sharp critics of Israeli policy. That is entirely legitimate. Criticism of Israeli government decisions, of settlement expansion, of military tactics—all fall within the broad, legitimate scope of democratic debate, and the Times has published plenty of it. Nobody is arguing that Israel is beyond criticism.

But there is a categorical difference between a critic of Israeli policy and a man who has declared that Zionism itself “has to end,” who frames the worst massacre of Jewish people in 80 years as “resistance” and who publicly expressed identification with the perpetrators of that massacre. Publishing such a person as a moral authority on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an act of editorial courage or intellectual diversity. It is an act of editorial negligence.

The Times would not publish an op-ed on racial justice by a man who had publicly expressed solidarity with those who bombed a black church. It wouldn’t publish a piece on women’s rights by someone who had declared their desire to have participated in an assault or rape. The editors know this. Which makes their decision here not merely a lapse in judgment, but a troubling signal about whose pain they take seriously and whose they do not.

Makdisi’s appointment as UC Berkeley’s inaugural chair in Palestinian Arab Studies—and his subsequent elevation by The New York Times—is part of a broader and deeply troubling pattern in which the American academy and media have increasingly normalized a genre of anti-Israel advocacy that would be instantly recognizable as rank extremism if directed at any other nationality or people.

Makdisi is the nephew of the late Edward Said, whose intellectual framework has shaped a generation of Middle East scholars. That lineage carries enormous prestige in certain academic circles. But prestige is not a substitute for moral accountability. And no amount of academic credentialing can launder the moral content of publicly expressing that one could have been among the murderers of 1,200 people, ranging from infants to the elderly.

Jewish Americans—and Americans of every background who were horrified by the atrocities on Oct. 7—deserve better from the newspaper that bills itself as the paper of record. They deserve editors who understand that platforming someone who wishes he had been at the fence on Oct. 7 is not “presenting a perspective.”

It is an insult to the dead.

Originally published on the Investigative Project on Terrorism site.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s book, When We See You Again, has reached the top spot on The New York Times nonfiction hardcover best sellers list, a week after its national publication.

Hamas terrorists executed Goldberg-Polin’s son Hersh Goldberg-Polin in cold blood in an underground tunnel in Gaza, 330 days after he was taken hostage from the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023.

The book is “a searing portrait of a mother’s grief and strength in the wake of unthinkable tragedy,” publisher Random House writes.

Goldberg-Polin is an American who moved to Jerusalem 18 years ago with her husband, Jon, and three children. Hersh, her only son, was at the music festival with his best friend, Aner Shapira, when he was kidnapped.

Shapira and Hersh hid in a bomb shelter with other young festival goers. Hamas terrorists threw grenades into the shelter. Shapira threw back 10 before being killed. Hersh took his place, losing an arm while trying to toss back a grenade.

Hersh was shot at close range six times, shortly before his body was found by Israeli soldiers on Aug. 31, 2024. It is believed that his captors panicked when shelling came close to their hiding place, leading them to kill their hostages.

A bipartisan House resolution introduced on Wednesday condemns antisemitic rhetoric by online personalities, including far-left streamer Hasan Piker and conservative commentator Candace Owens, and calls for stronger action from public officials and social media platforms to counter hate speech.

The measure, introduced by Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), denounces “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content disseminated by prominent online personalities” and urges elected officials to “unequivocally condemn antisemitism,” including when amplified by high-profile media figures.

Piker is cited in the resolution for past antisemitic comments, including referring to Orthodox Jews as “inbred.” The Anti-Defamation League has said he “has a history of rhetoric that sanitizes violence and denigrates Jewish people” and has “expressed support for designated terrorist organizations and antisemitic ideas on many occasions.”

Owens, also named in the measure, is described as promoting conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel. The ADL has said she “actively amplifies antisemitic figures on her shows,” giving a platform to individuals who have praised Hitler, trivialized the Holocaust or promoted “Jewish mafia” narratives. Owens was named “Antisemite of the Year” in 2024 by the group StopAntisemitism.

“Hatred is hatred, period. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the far right or the far left,” Gottheimer stated. “We cannot be selective in calling out antisemitism. When influential voices spread conspiracy theories, promote terrorism or dehumanize Jewish people, it fuels real-world violence and intimidation. We must stand up and speak out.”

Owens has an estimated 35 million followers across platforms, while Piker has about 11.5 million, according to the ADL.

“With an audience of millions, they have a responsibility to confront hatred and bigotry in every form, not to amplify it to the masses,” Lawler said. “So if they won’t call it out, I will.”

For the first time in the United States, a golf event will be held to strengthen support for Jewish settlement in Israel.

The event, initiated by AFJS-American Friends of Judea and Samaria, will take place in May at a prestigious golf club on Long Island, N.Y. Designed to connect leading figures in the American business world with Israel’s settlement enterprise, the event is expected to attract key decision-makers and opinion leaders for a day combining sport and Zionism.

The event is expected to host more than 100 golf participants, including business leaders, influencers and public figures. Among the attendees will be Sen. Jim Dotson and Rep. Mindy McAlindon, both Arkansas Republicans, who are among the first in the United States to advance legislation in support of Judea and Samaria.

Additional senators currently in advanced stages of promoting similar legislation are also expected to attend, alongside senior figures from the U.S. administration. From Israel, prominent officials are expected to be as well, including Knesset Constitution Committee chairman Simcha Rothman.

AFJS board member Marcus Mizrahi and supporter Michael Albala, who have organized and led golf tournaments across the United States, are bringing their experience to the AFJS Golf Tournament. For them, Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is a cause close to their hearts.

Yigal Dilmoni, CEO of AFJS, stated: “We are breaking new ground by bringing the story of Judea and Samaria to some of the most influential arenas. Our goal is to create a meaningful connection, through a distinctive experience, between key American decision-makers and the heartland of the Bible. On this day, they will be exposed to the historical significance of the region, the work being done, and the growth taking place in Judea and Samaria. This event presents an opportunity to strengthen support for Israel.”

The lawsuit, filed in Ontario Superior Court, seeks $300,000 in general damages and $1 million in punitive damages.

Plaintiff Liat Schwartz alleged TMU allowed “intimidating, offensive, demeaning, threatening” behavior to worsen over time.

“TMU’s self-proclaimed TMU Commitments and TMU Conduct Policies are mere platitudes, and the TMU Conduct Policies are not applied equally to those in the university community,” the claim states, citing the university’s failure to enforce or apply its own policies.

It points to statements by TMU and by Mohamed Lachemi, president of the university, released in the weeks following Oct. 7, against antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric, that “did not provide any guidance on what rhetoric TMU considered problematic.”

The claim describes rhetoric used on campus, including “Globalize the intifada,” “Only one solution, intifada revolution” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as well as interference with pro-Israel events, including one instance where attendees required police assistance to enter after demonstrators blocked access.

It highlights an off-campus event in November that was allegedly infiltrated by protesters who shouted slogans and shattered a glass door, injuring attendees. It also included an incident in February, when a masked individual threw a liquid at Jewish students staffing a table on campus.

The claim states that Schwartz had to hide her identity and ultimately leave the university. “The environment at TMU pushed me to a place I never thought I’d be—feeling like I no longer belonged on my own campus,” she said.

Richard Marceau, senior vice president and general counsel for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said that “no student should have to choose between their safety and their education.”

He stressed that “policies mean nothing if they aren’t enforced.”

A new Holocaust memorial planned for Fairfield University in Connecticut will serve as both a site of remembrance and an educational resource, with programming already underway ahead of its expected installation in July and public unveiling in September.

The bronze sculpture, titled “She Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots,” will be donated by the nonprofit Shoah Memorial of Fairfield, Conn., and installed on the private Catholic university’s campus as a permanent monument honoring victims of the Holocaust.

Created by artist Victoria Milstein, the work is based on a photograph taken in Liepāja, Latvia, Dec. 15, 1941, during the Nazi mass killings of Jewish women and children on the Baltic coast.

One woman, identified as Frume Purve, refused to remove her boots before her death, an act the memorial describes as “a symbol of hope, defiance and the enduring strength of the human spirit.”

The sculpture depicts five Jewish women, including Purve, and incorporates a bronze camera that viewers can look through. Organizers say the feature is intended to evoke the perspective of the Nazi photographer who documented victims’ final moments, transforming viewers into witnesses rather than passive observers.

“By interacting with the camera’s lens, viewers, especially students, become witnesses, observing the stark contrast to the photographer’s original intent,” Shoah Memorial stated. “This immersive experience creates a deep, personal connection with the history and lessons of the Holocaust.”

The memorial project includes educational components such as guided tours and a documentary intended to accompany the installation and expand Holocaust education on campus.

The concept builds on an earlier installation of the same sculpture in LeBauer Park in Greensboro, N.C., completed in 2023. The Fairfield version will be a second casting of the original work.

Paul Burger, chair of Shoah Memorial, was inspired to bring the project to Connecticut after seeing the Greensboro installation. The nonprofit says Fairfield University quickly supported the initiative, citing its educational mission and existing Judaic studies programming.

Fairfield University will also host its annual Holocaust memorial program on April 16, featuring Shay Pilnik, director of the Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University.

(JNS) 

Fairfield College Preparatory School in Fairfield, Conn., is investigating antisemitic social media posts allegedly made by a group of students targeting members of the New Canaan High School boys ice hockey team, school officials said.

In a statement released on April 4, Fairfield Prep Principal Timothy Dee and President Christian Cashman said the “ongoing investigation indicates this recent incident involved a small number of individuals within our student body who acted anonymously on social media.”

“This is not who we are, what we stand for or what we teach,” they wrote. “So we ask ourselves, if our dedication to formation is true, as we know it to be, how then can acts of such painful intolerance occur in Prep’s name? It happens because of our shared human frailty, especially among our young people who fail even as we seek to form them in our Ignatian way.”

The posts surfaced around the time of the teams’ March 23 matchup in the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference Division I final, in which New Canaan defeated Fairfield Prep 3–1 to win its first state title in 54 years, according to CT Insider.

“Win or lose, we booze, and at least we’re not Jews. Hail Fairfield,” read one of the images that appeared on Instagram, The New York Times reported.

About 10 social media posts were posted in all, including one showing “a hockey player wearing a yarmulke and an Israel jersey with a Star of David emoji over his face,” and a caption that read “Netanyahu Cannan,” with the song “Hava Nagila” playing in the background. One post included a video depicting what appeared to be a simulation of a sexual assault, according to the Times.

“We will never tolerate, condone or accept hate speech of any kind, and we are taking appropriate steps to support the students and families affected,” Bryan Luizzi, superintendent of New Canaan Public Schools, and NCHS Principal Bill Egan wrote in a district-wide email on April 3.

Local officials and community groups condemned the posts. The New Canaan Democratic Town Committee called them “horrific acts of racism and antisemitism.”

“Since Oct. 7, 2023, there has been a dramatic increase in antisemitism, which has made Jewish communities fearful,” the committee stated. “Living under such unimaginably toxic national rhetoric that demeans all sorts of marginalized groups, including Jews, we should not be surprised to see hatred and bigotry reach our community.”

Q: Your new book is A NOVEL CRIME. Authors May Cobb called it “uproariously funny” and “ingeniously plotted,” Samantha Bailey described it as a “wickedly hilarious delight,” and Gregg Hurwitz said it “packs in the drama and tabloid-worthy conniving.”
The tag line reads, “She wanted to write the perfect novel. Instead, she became the perfect villain.” Can you give us a peek inside?

A: The story is about Marcy Jo Codburn, a wannabe romance writer who is desperate to fulfill her dream of writing a bestseller—and win the approval of her daughter in the process. A chance encounter with a glamorous celebrity author sends her down a rabbit hole of mayhem, leading to a crime caper she never imagined. Her behavior goes from questionable, to slightly unethical, to downright illegal. The characters are envious, immoral, even ruthless… but there are some touching mother-daughter dynamics, too.

Q: Your first two books couldn’t be more different. Is there any overlap between them and A NOVEL CRIME?

A: You’re right – on the face of them, they are all so different: THE CRATE is true crime/nonfiction, about a horrific discovery, murder investigation, and trial that involved my family. A NEST of SNAKES is a novel inspired by real-life cases of abuse in elite Connecticut private schools. Both are heavy and serious, whereas A NOVEL CRIME is tongue-in-cheek satire. The first two are told from the point of view of the victims and those impacted by crime, while A NOVEL CRIME is told from the perspective of the bad girl.

All three weave together themes of family – in THE CRATE, families, including mine, are torn apart by the ideological hatred of the Holocaust in the past as well as domestic violence in the present. In A NEST OF SNAKES, a boy who was neglected and molested later craves justice and a relationship with his son. In A NOVEL CRIME, a newly divorced woman, who put aside her own needs and aspirations for her husband and daughter, seeks to fulfill her dreams by any means necessary.

Q: Did you enjoy writing this book, or was it challenging?

A: It was lots of lighthearted fun when I started in the spring of 2023. Between April and September of 2023, I’d written about 90% of the story. Then October 7 happened, and I was paralyzed…I couldn’t write for months, especially anything to do with kidnapping or a hint of violence, even if it was supposed to be satire. Months passed before I could finish the manuscript, and there were many parts I had to cut because they just didn’t seem funny anymore.

Q: Do you outline your plots or discover the story as you go? Do you know the endings when you start writing, or do they evolve?

A: I stopped counting at 250 author talks and panel discussions, and I can say that the single most common question I get asked is: Did you know the ending?

In A NOVEL CRIME and A NEST OF SNAKES, I knew how the books would start and end but I had to connect Point A to Point B. Obviously, since THE CRATE is nonfiction, the events had already happened – the question was how to structure their telling.

In life I’m a meticulous planner, but for some reason all good intentions fly out the window as I write. I start with a big poster board and pretty multicolored post its, with this grand plan of plotting, and then before I know it the chapters take off in directions I hadn’t anticipated. In THE CRATE, the surprises came as I researched the ghettoes and concentration camps which my parents had survived. In A NOVEL CRIME and A NEST OF SNAKES, the characters took me down unexpected paths. I found that no matter how much I plotted ahead of time, the characters had a mind of their own.

Q: A NOVEL CRIME is available on audio. Who is the narrator?

A: Out of three auditions we chose Tanya Eby Schaeffer, whose voice hit the perfect note of desperation and delusion and brought the whole cast of characters to life. She got a real kick out of the story. I’ve been really lucky with all my narrators – Audio Hall of Fame’s Cassandra Campbell narrated THE CRATE and mastered the Hungarian dialogue. Andrei Florea narrated A NEST OF SNAKES, which was a beast in that there were so many different characters. He nailed it.

Q: How much of the publishing world in the book reflects real experiences?

A: There are tropes, like the Brooklyn publishing type, the bulldog agent, and the envious author. I can relate to Marcy’s rejections when querying manuscripts, or her feeling of being completely overwhelmed when facing a re-write. Like her, I follow the seemingly effortless success of other authors on social media and need to remind myself that they probably had their fair share of frustrations. And like Marcy’s, my launch party featured cupcakes.

Q: What do you hope readers feel when they reach the final page?

A: All the feels! Chuckles for the laugh-out-loud bits, shock in that they didn’t see the twist coming, anger at the misbehavior of the characters, catharsis at the end.

There’s one scene that made me sob as I wrote it. I was literally bawling, and I hope that readers find it poignant, too. If I can make a reader both laugh and cry in a story, the experience for them is richer.

Q: Do you prefer writing fiction or non-fiction?

A: I loved both. With THE CRATE, I felt a tremendous responsibility to get the stories right: to honor the memory of the Six Million and to preserve my parents’ stories in the retelling of their experiences. Also, to advocate for the present-day victim and her family. I tried very hard not to embellish in any way. History is history, and we can’t twist it to suit our narratives. In that sense I didn’t have a lot of leeway.

In A NOVEL CRIME, however, I allowed for plenty of chaos within the framework I constructed, and I could manipulate it any way I chose. When the world outside the window feels upside down and surreal, it’s comforting to be able to control events the way I want them to play out…even if only on paper.

Q: What’s next?

A: I’m partway through another crime novel, this time set against the backdrop of the pearl industry. My in-laws worked in the pearl business, and I think the process is fascinating – the stamina needed to deep dive for natural oyster beds. In my story, a husband and wife who are on the brink of divorce try to salvage their marriage with a trip to Tahiti. While there, they find a priceless pearl, and when word gets out, all kinds of bad actors crawl out of the woodwork.

Q. Are you doing A NOVEL CRIME book tour?

A: At the moment I have 25 events set up, from the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City all the way up to Toronto and northern Ontario. In this area, I’ll be signing books at Barnes & Noble in West Hartford on Sunday, May 3, 1 PM to 4 PM, and on Tuesday, June 2, 6:30 PM, I’ll be at Avon Library in conversation with the one and only Marilyn Simon Rothstein.

For a full listing of events and to connect with Debbie, visit her website: www.DebbieLevison.com, or find her on Facebook and Instagram at Deborah Levison.