A Tale for our Time: Shira Piven and Joshua Salzberg on “The Performance”

It was not an ideal spot for a phone call but there I was, balancing between cars on a train traveling back home to Berlin, talking with Joshua Salzberg, who was calling from Budapest, where he was working on a film.  

Salzberg knows I am a religion nerd. The film he adapted with co-writer/director Shira Piven — “The Performance”— featured a cast of characters with varying religious identifications. The team wanted to get the details right. Down to the minutest items. 

So, there I was, rocking back and forth as the German state of Brandenburg flitted by, talking to Salzberg about the ring a club owner in 1930s Berlin might foreseeably be wearing.  

That attention to detail impressed me. The care and concern that Piven, Salzberg and the entire team brought to the film is a testament to its overarching message of resisting hate and finding people’s humanity in the unlikeliest of places.  

“The Performance,” starring the director’s brother, Jeremy Piven of Emmy-nominated “Entourage” acclaim, is adapted from an Arthur Miller short story of the same name. The story has been described as, “a strange midnight train ride” by Seattle Times critic Richard Wallace, and tells the tale of Harold May, a down-on-his-luck New York tap dancer who heads to Europe in the 1930s in search of new opportunities.  

While dancing on the tabletops of a Hungarian night club, May and his troupe attract the attention of Damian Fugler (Robert Carlyle), who invites them to give a special performance at a Berlin nightclub, hefty paycheck included. May, who is Jewish but can “pass” as a blond-haired Aryan, and his fellow performers — including Adam Garcia as the politically attuned Benny Worth, Isaac Gryn as a closeted Paul Garner, Lara Wolf as the namesake of a Persian princess “Sira” and Maimie McCoy as a recently divorced, single dancer Carol Conway — are fast-tracked through a series of ethical, moral and professional through stations as they tap their way into a performance none of them really want: a private show for Adolph Hitler.  

The story chugs along like “a modern, gothic folktale,” with the personal stakes becoming ever greater until it all falls off the rails, when their experience of opulent luxury at the behest of their German hosts contrasts too starkly with the increasingly evident persecution of Jews, homosexuals and other so-called “undesirables” around them. 

How they do it in Deutschland: Signposts for Interreligious Dialogue in Germany

The Christmas market attacks in Magdeburg — and the heated political atmosphere that followed — have stressed a range of issues ahead of Germany’s snap elections on February 23.  

Voters across Europe’s largest economy are concerned about domestic security, immigration, upholding the rule of law and strengthening democracy against perceived enemies within and without.  

An important aspect of this equation is how followers of Germany’s various religious communities might work to address these concerns together.  

With a total population of nearly 85 million, there are an estimated 23 million Catholics (27 percent), 21 million Protestants (25 percent) and nearly 5 million Muslims (5.7 percent). There are also smaller populations of evangelicals (2 percent) and Orthodox Christians (1.9 percent), as well as Jews, Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hindus, Yezidis, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Pagans and Sikhs. Notably, 44 percent of Germans (or 37 million) claim no religious affiliation, but may practice some form of spirituality or hold some kind of enchanted worldview.  

In my latest for Interfaith America, I explore how members of these various groups work together — or against one another — is of great importance for the future of plural, open societies like Germany. 

Diverse Democracy: Reflections Covering Religion and the 2024 Elections

In the wake of elections, there are scores of analyses and proffered insights on how the results speak to the future of the country and its democracy.  

This year, what looked to be razor-thin margins and minuscule measures in swing states shifted the media’s focus to a range of demographics among the U.S. voting-eligible populace and how they could sway the election one way or another.  

This included a wide range of “swing faith” voters — religious actors from a range of traditions who could push the polls in favor of one party or another.  Covering several of these communities in recent months, and breaking down the data and demographics among different faith groups across the U.S. for ReligionLink, I found myself wondering (with many, many others) what it all means for the U.S.’s diverse, interfaith democracy in the decades to come.  

In my latest as Senior Columnist, I offer reflections on what happened with, and what might be in store for, America’s diverse democracy.

Interfaith Action at American Borders

Every border has a story. Every dividing line on a map, every marker and monument and wall and fence comes with a narrative.  

And at the U.S./Mexico border, that story is an increasingly international and interfaith one.  

Not only are people on the move arriving at the U.S.’s southern border representing a broader swathe of global society and the world’s religions, but organizations across a range of faith traditions are teaming up to provide for their needs — both immediately and in terms of securing their rights to movement and to seek asylum once they arrive safely in the country.  

“An increasingly interfaith affair”  

Rick, 46, a San Diego resident who volunteers with various organizations at the U.S. border with Baja California, Mexico, said he’s noticed the uptick in migrants with backgrounds he would not necessarily expect. 

“I mean, across the years, it’s traditionally been a lot of people from across Latin America — Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala,” he said, “but nowadays, my Spanish is pretty useless. 

“People from all over the world are making their way here,” he said.  

In spring 2024, Rick regularly came down to the Iris Ave. trolley station in South San Diego — just 3 miles from the San Ysidro Border Crossing — to hand out waters to new arrivals waiting for onward transportation in the shade of eucalyptus trees next to the station.  

When he showed up, Rick said he was surprised by the people he met there. “There were Sikhs from Punjab, Buddhists from China, Christians from Haiti, Muslims from Bangladesh and Afghanistan,” he said, “it was like the United Nations in South San Diego.” 

That was quite the shift, Rick said. “It used to be mostly Catholics, a smattering of Pentecostals and Protestants; I met a few Mormons from Mexico a few years ago. But now, it’s an increasingly interfaith affair,” Rick said.

“It’s Changed Everything”: Interfaith Dialogue in the Wake of October 7, 2023

I sat down for tacos with a colleague in Culver City, California, one early summer’s eve. The conversation was light.   

That is, until it wasn’t.   

Involved with interreligious dialogue at the local, state, national, and intergovernmental level, my acquaintance was concerned about the impact of Hamas’ attack on Israel that killed nearly 1,200 individuals and the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) brutal reprisal against Gaza and its people in the months that followed had done irreparable harm to cause of peacemaking in the U.S.   

The intense, seemingly endless violence and the chilling prospect of a ceasefire without lasting peace, my acquaintance feels, is having a profound emotional, psychological, and practical impact on people who care about connecting across religious, cultural, and political differences.   

“It’s set us back at least 20 years,” they said. Communities that used to connect, colleagues that used to be in conversation, groups that used to meet, and initiatives that used to be shared have all been impacted. “It’s changed everything.”   

As Thomas Banchoff wrote for Commonweal, “the Israel-Hamas war illustrates the fragility of interfaith diplomacy” and dialogue.   

While many said numerous theological, social, and political gains had been made through interreligious engagement in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, the damaging impact of savage violence, polarizing discourse, divisive protests, and tiptoeing around political landmines is a stark reminder of interfaith dialogue’s delicacy and potential limitations.   

Since October 7 last year, the strain between the Jewish and Muslim communities — and beyond — has challenged the ability of interfaith spaces to function as facilitators for positive dialogue, let alone spaces for solidarity.   

While various initiatives can claim decades of leadership in interreligious dialogue and relationships built between leaders and laity from numerous traditions, many have struggled to gather communities during the conflict. 

In various private exchanges, leaders and community members express their frustrations with their community’s lack of speaking out but are unwilling to call out a lack of mutual accountability for what happened and continues to happen.   

This, say practitioners nationwide, has eroded and stifled opportunities for sustainable peace. 

Lessons Learned Reporting on Religion and Climate Change

“The road,” wrote Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “is made by walking.”    

Often adopted as a metaphor for pilgrimage, Sarah Moring, a climate activist living in Manchester, England, said she walked with this quote every day as she joined the Young Christian Climate Network (YCCN) — an advocacy community of young Christians in the U.K. — on its relay before the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), in September 2021.  

Stretching over 750 miles and cutting through Cardiff, London, and Oxford, YCCN participants joined a “crusade for climate justice” by walking the route between the end of the G7 meeting in Cornwall on June 13 and COP26’s opening ceremony on October 31 that year.  

When I covered the pilgrimage for Christianity Today, I had not done much reporting on people like Moring. But over the last two years, I have reported from India and Israel, Lisbon, and London, where people of faith are coming together to respond to climate change and demand action based on their religious beliefs.  

It was with a desire to see more widespread coverage of faith actors advocating for environmental justice that I teamed up with abby mohaupt to write a “Reporting Guide on Religion and Climate Change” for ReligionLink, a nonpartisan, monthly newsletter with source guides and story ideas for journalists reporting on religion.  

Developing the guide, I learned how diverse faith groups view climate change and are coming together to address it.