Let's write about the history of performing magic

Echo essay by Richard Segal* published in The New York Times:

Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.”

It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to read about sleight of hand than quantum mechanics.

His rummaging stopped when he spotted a title called “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.” Hatch had spent four years of his youth in Germany so he translated it instantly: “Jews in Magic.” The card said the book was written by someone named Guenther Dammannand published in Berlin in 1933.

He paused. A book about Jews in magic, from Germany, in the very year that the Nazis assumed power and started burning “un-German” books in bonfires across the country. It seemed obvious. This was an antisemitic tract, identifying Jews to make it easier for the government to persecute them and the public to shun them.

Awful, Hatch thought. He then looked for a magic book he actually wanted to read.

Hatch would go on to earn two graduate degrees in physics but left the field in 1983, after realizing that his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science. 

He became a full-time “deceptionist,” as he calls it. While he honed his craft and looked for gigs, he translated a 1942 German book about the famed Austrian magician J.N. Hofzinser. That brought him to the attention of a collector of Judaica and magic books who urged him to translate a fascinating rarity he’d acquired: “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.”

“That’s when I realized that the book was about the great contributions that Jews have made to magic,” Hatch said in an interview.

Dammann, it turns out, was a 23-year-old Jew and amateur magician, the son of a well-off banker, who lived with his parents and brothers in Berlin when he self-published his book. It was 100 pages long and, historians say, the first attempt to inventory the great Jewish magicians, both living and dead.

Most of “Jews in Magic” is devoted to brief biographical essays inunadorned prose of more than 50 renowned professionals. One entry told the story of the Frenchman Alexander Herrmann, who, in decades of touring, dazzled Abraham Lincoln, Czar Alexander, and the prisoners of Sing Sing and who pioneered the suave devil look — goatee, tuxedo — that became the industry standard. Another profiled Harry Houdini, the Hungarian-born son of a rabbi, who escaped from handcuffs, jails and straitjackets and became one of the most famous showmen of his age.

The book was an oddly timed exercise in ethnic pride and a singular artifact of a life cut short. In 1942, Dammann and nearly 800 others were transported on rail cars to Riga, Latvia, where, Nazi records show, they were shot upon arrival.

Hatch, who lives in semiretirement in a small town in northern Utah, finished his translation of “Jews in Magic” four years ago and is strategizing about how to get it published, with annotations and photographs. At 68, he is a kind of one-man historical preservation society dedicated to Dammann.

Everyone Has a Theory

Since Dammann’s death, the ranks of Jewish conjurers has only grown. Among the notable: David Copperfield, David Blaine, Ricky Jay, Teller — who is the silent half of Penn & Teller — and Uri Geller, who, for the record, has long denied that his spoon bending is a trick. Gloria Dea, born Gloria Metzner, was the first magician to play Las Vegas. Max Maven, born Philip Goldstein, was one of the world’s most admired mentalists.

Why have Jews been so prominent in magic? In his book, Dammann does not speculate. So in January, I visited MagiFest, one of the country’s largest conventions of magicians, held annually in Columbus, Ohio. I went to hear Hatch give a lecture about Dammann, but the convention proved the ideal setting for an informal survey on the question.

MagiFest was three days of lectures and performance
“There’s a saying that we all die three times,” Hatch said. “The first death is the physical one, when your heart stops beating. 

Moreover, the second is when your body is consigned to fire or the grave. And the third is the last time someone utters your name. Life was so cruel and unfair to him, I just thought, it’s a worthy cause to keep Dammann’s name alive for as long as I can.”

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

“I played a week at Mystique Dining which is about a mile from my parents’ house in San Diego and they basically sold out the whole run,” said Michael Feldman, who at MagiFest demonstrated tricks from his book “The Pages Are Blank.” (Note: The pages are not blank.) “They called all of their friends and they were like, ‘You have to come see our son perform, he’s doing this run.’ And it was great.”

Egg Bag Redux

Richard Hatch spent part of his adolescence in Frankfurt because his father, a nuclear physicist, served as a civilian working for Naval intelligence in the late 1950s, debriefing scientists who had defected from East Germany. The younger Hatch initially gravitated to physics because he found his father’s work intriguing, but after four years of graduate studies at Yale, he ditched it all for magic. He loved nothing more, he explained, and by the late ’70s, breakout stars like Doug Henning and David Copperfield had proven that careers in the field were financially viable.

“I thought I’d married a theoretical particle physicist,” said his wife, Rosemary Kimura Hatch, a professional musician. “But one day he came up to me and said, ‘I really want to try magic.’ And I said, ‘Well, if that’s your passion, give it a try.’ I was the bread winner the following year.”

Richard Hatch was raised as a Mormon but left the church years ago. Asked why he’s spent so much time studying a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, he first offered a go-to quip.

“My grandfather was a polygamist (Morman❓😯) and his first wife was Jewish,” he said. “But my grandmother was the second wife. So I like to say I was nearly Jewish.”

More seriously, he said he was fascinated by the reaction to Nazism in Germany’s magic community, which quickly divided into Nazi sympathizers and Jews. And he found the story of Dammann’s life an irresistible mystery: Who was this guy? And why did he write a book about Jews and magic at one of the darkest moments in history?

Hatch answered those and other questions during a Friday afternoon at his presentation about Dammann at MagiFest. He was dressed in a blue suit and sported a gray beard, looking like a chief executive who’d come to rev up the sales team.

He explained that Dammann’s interest in magic started when he was 12 or 13 and that a retired illusionist and family friend named Ernest Thorn, who would later turn up as an entry in “Jews in Magic,” became a mentor. At 21, Dammann joined the Magic Circle of Germany, a hybrid of professional society and fraternal organization, though there were women members, too. Inspired by the Who’s Who’s books he read, Dammann decided to assemble “Jews in Magic.”

He clearly understood the dangers of the project. As Hatch told the crowd of about 700, Dammann asked living professionals for permission to include them in the book, usually through the mail. 

Apparently, some said "no". Among the names omitted from the work is Arnold de Biere, dubbed the “Prince of Entertainers, entertainer of Princes,” who frequently toured Germany.

Among his best known pieces was the egg bag trick, a parlor magic staple in which an egg keeps appearing and disappearing in a black bag that has been turned inside out, slapped against a hand and inspected by the audience. Versions of the trick have been performed for centuries. David Leendert Bamberg, born in the late 18th century and part of the six-generation Bamberg dynasty from the Netherlands — Page 25 of Dammann’s book — had a version that ended with a live hen.

Hatch estimates that Dammann printed 500 copies of his book and that it sold poorly. The few contemporaneous magic publications that mentioned “Jews in Magic” — the copies were sent by Dammann, who handled publicity, too — were startled by its very existence. In 1933, Germany was becoming a dictatorship. By September, Jews were not allowed to perform onstage for non-Jewish audiences and the number of Jews in German universities had already been sharply curtailed. The notorious Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of civil rights and citizenship, were two years away.

Dammann’s parents were both dead by 1937 — the causes are not known — and the family’s house had been emptied and seized by the following year. Gunther and his two brothers attempted to flee to Palestine.

“They tried to convert their assets, which were obviously less considerable than they had been,” Hatch told the audience at the MagiFest lecture, which he gave with a series of slides projected on a huge screen. “They were caught doing so. This is his younger brother’s mug shot.”

Gunther became a slave laborer at a Siemens factory in Berlin, where he put rubber coating on cables. None of the Dammann brothers survived the war.

More than a few of those featured in “Jews in Magic” were murdered by the Nazis. One was Hermann Kurtz, who performed under the name Mahatma, and who gained fame with the “inexhaustible hat,” an illusion in which a menagerie of items — plates, flowers, flags, livestock — pour out of a borrowed top hat.

Others fled Europe and continued their careers in the United States. Fred Roner, born Alfred Rosner in Vienna, lived in Manhattan and toured with a pickpocket act, which he performed as after-dinner entertainment in the ’50s in what were called Knife and Fork Clubs. Most memorably, he snagged the wristwatch of the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. (He gave it back.)

Roner is the only performer from “Jews in Magic” whom Hatch actually met. The two had lunch in Roner’s apartment in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in 1986, and Roner talked with pride about his version of card to wallet — an effect in which a card chosen by a spectator vanishes from the deck and appears in the magician’s wallet.

“He was really proud that in his version, the wallet belonged to the spectator,” Hatch said. “He told me that getting the wallet wasn’t difficult. The real challenge was putting it back in the spectator’s pocket.”

Today, Hatch sustains the memory of those memorialized by Dammann with more than just historical research and lectures. About once a month, he performs at private homes, country club banquets or night clubs, typically near his home or in Salt Lake City.

When scheduling allows, he appears with his wife and adult son, a violinist and pianist. Wearing white tie and tails, Hatch performs tricks that were sensations a century or two ago in an hourlong act that would have worked in any Victorian-age parlor.

One highlight is a version of the egg bag popularized by Max Malini, who billed himself as “The Conjurer of the Century” — see page 78 of “Jews in Magic.”

“The classics are classics,” Hatch said. “They’re a good place to start, and not a bad place to get stuck.”

David Segal is a business reporter for The New York Times, based in New York, a reporter in the Business section, who has written several stories about magic, including a feature about the world’s most baffling card trick.

Donald Trump cannot be trusted to lead the nation because he is a chronic liar and frauster

 Convicted fraudster echo opinion letter published in the Daily Inter Lake, a Montana newspaper: 

Guilty❗

By now, we’ve all heard the news that Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury decision of all 34 felony counts of falsifying his company’s business records to keep information from voters that he knew would harm his 2016, presidential campaign. (Trump did not want the 2016, voters to know about his sexual encounter with porn actress Stormy Daniels while his wife Melania was recovering postpartum from giving birth to their son. He paid hush money to Stormy Daniels to try to hide his sinful, philandering and aberrant behavior.)

This isn’t only about “hush money”💰 payments. It’s about breaking the law to hide the truth from the American people, 11 days before a presidential election.

Trump has a clear pattern of lying to the American people and trying to undermine our elections in order to cling to power. He still faces three additional indictments and 54 criminal charges, including federal charges for inciting an insurrection to overturn the 2020, election. In spite of all of this, he’s still running for president.

Donald Trump is a convicted fraudster and criminal who still poses a massive threat to our fundamental freedoms. We can’t let him hold the highest office in our land in 2025. It’s up to all of us to hold him accountable and defeat him at the ballot box in November.

From Hannah Plumb, in Whitefish, Montana

Let's write about Hawaiins in Las Vegas

Echo essay On and Off the Menu published in The New Yorker magazine:

The Decades-Long Romance of Las Vegas and Hawaii
The city is home to a great number of transplants from the islands—and to dozens of restaurants serving plate lunches and poke.

Thank you Hormel Foods!😃*

Yup! Aloha! You can enjoy SPAM and gamble too!
In fact, fans of the SPAM® Brand Come Together to Support Maui Relief Efforts.

Late one recent evening at the California Hotel and Casino, in downtown Las Vegas, a few miles north of the Strip, I tried my luck at a slot machine for the very first time. Fifteen minutes later, I was down by twenty bucks or so—thirty if you count the exorbitant A.T.M. fee I’d been determined to win back—and feeling defeated. No matter; it was time for a vastly surer bet, the real reason I was here. Every night, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., the hotel’s twenty-four-hour restaurant, the Market Street Café, serves one of Vegas’s most iconic dishes. 

Minutes after I’d been seated at the counter, next to an eighty-seven-year-old woman in oversized sunglasses, a server presented me with a large bowl of Hawaii-style oxtail soup, a glistening, fragrant broth brimming with carrots, celery, and hunks of oxtail bone, from which supple shreds of purple meat loosened easily. It came with a scoop of rice and a hefty pinch of pounded ginger and fresh cilantro. Had I been sick—with a head cold or a longing for Hawaii, or both—I imagine it would have cured me.

If an oxtail soup from Hawaii seems an unlikely thing to eat in Las Vegas, you have a lot to learn about both places, as I did, and still do. Census data from 2020, showed that Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, was the U.S. county with the largest population of native Hawaiians outside of Hawaii, a statistic that tells onlypart of the story. 

Actually, the word “Hawaiian” typically applies to the islands’ Indigenous population, the descendants of the Polynesians who first settled Hawaii, between 1000 and 1200 A.D., and who were nearly eradicated by the arrival of Europeans, in the late eighteenth century. 

Other people born and raised on the islands—many of them the descendants of migrant laborers from Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Puerto Rico, who came to work on sugarcane and pineapple plantations—are known as kamaaina (residents), “Hawaii people,” or “locals.” The last of these terms applies even in Vegas, where there are so many Hawaii people that they’ve given the city an affectionate nickname: the Ninth Island.

The California Hotel—the Cal, to regulars—has played a central role in the Hawaii-to-Vegas pipeline. Opened in 1975 by Sam Boyd, an Oklahoma-born entrepreneur, it was the first property in what would become Boyd Gaming, one ofthe largest casino-management corporations in the country. According to William Boyd, Sam’s son, who wrote the foreword for a book about the hotel from 2008, the Cal was named for its original intended audience, gamblers from California. But, a year in, “we were struggling,” William wrote. “One day [my dad] said to me, ‘You know, we’re going to need a niche market here and that’s going to be Hawai‘i.’ ”

After living and working in Honolulu for several years, Sam Boyd had developed an affinity for the islands and their people, whom he found to be “industrious” and who seemed to love gambling, which has always been illegal there. The Cal lured guests from Hawaii with promotions that included discounted airfare, free rooms, and credits for meals at a restaurant called Aloha Specialties, which is still part of the hotel today. The answer to where you vacation when you live in paradise was, apparently, Las Vegas. Gamblers from Hawaii were “unlike anything the Vegas market had experienced,” according to one of the 2008 book’s authors, Dennis M. Ogawa, a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Not only did they spend much more money per day than the average tourist, Ogawa writes, but they’d also “arrive in groups, laden with luggage they had filled with gifts for the staff: fresh pineapples, Maui onions, Kona coffee, and boxes of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.”

When I arrived at the Cal on a sunny Monday afternoon, a down-on-his-luck man, slumped in a tree bed on the sidewalk outside, looked up at me with a grin and said, “Aloha.” The Cal, and downtown Vegas more broadly, has seen more glamorous days, but, inside, a wholesome sense of nostalgia hung in the air, along with the scent of cigarette smoke. The carpeted floor of the casino was patterned with enormous hibiscus flowers; outside the Ohana conference room, I met a man wearing a midnight-blue T-shirt printed with the word “spam” in the brand’s signature yellow font—a show of support, he explained, for Spam’s parent company, Hormel Foods, which had helped to rehabilitate Maui after the devastating wildfires in 2023. “I thought maybe you were a Spam fanatic,” I said. The man, whose name was Gene, laughed and said, “Well, isn’t everyone from Hawaii a Spam fanatic?”

Gene was at the Cal for the sort of event that has become commonplace there over the years: a reunion for a high school in Hawaii, in this case Hilo High, class of 1955. (The Maui High class of ’53 was meeting on the same dates.) SPAM (Hormel Foods) was introduced to the islands when Gene was a child. Originally served to G.I.s stationed there during the Second World War, it became a staple of the local diet, incorporated into everything from musubi—Hawaii’s version of onigiri—to saimin, a dashi-based noodle soup. In general, the Cal’s clientele seemed to skew elderly; at check-in, the young woman behind the front desk greeted guests in line ahead of me as Auntie and Uncle.

Better jobs and plentiful real estate beckoned, oasis-like, from the Mojave; in Vegas, Vergara and her husband, who have two kids, are employed as nurses and own a three-bedroom home.

Perhaps nothing so clearly reflects this ongoing exodus as the city’s landscape of restaurants. It would be easy to define the food in Vegas by the offerings at its lavish casinos and hotels, many of them pandering to the tastes of high-rolling tourists, all caviar and king crab and Wagyu. But, off the Strip, there are hundreds of humbler, family-run, counter-service establishments, a strip-mall ecosystem reminiscent of greater Los Angeles. From the airport, I drove to a restaurant called 2 Scoops of Aloha, which shares a shopping plaza with two insurance offices, an acne clinic, and an iPhone repair store. There, I ordered what’s known in Hawaii as a plate lunch. Born of the hearty appetites of plantation laborers, a plate lunch usually includes two scoops of rice and one of macaroni salad, plus meat or fish. I opted for fried chicken two ways—one portion smothered in a garlicky gravy, the other slicked in a sweet-spicy Korean-style glaze—and a side of poi, a Polynesian dish of boiled taro, pounded into a viscous paste.

The meal illustrated the infusion inherent in the islands’ cuisine, a collision of cultures that don’t cohere so much as happily coexist. Johnathan Wright, a restaurant reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal who was raised in Honolulu, defined the cuisine as “whatever I grew up eating”: galbi (Korean short ribs), Cantonese roast duck, manapuas (Hawaii’s take on baos), Spam. Jeremy Cho, a Korean American professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was born in Hawaii, told me that he’d been surprised by the city’s abundance of Hawaii-style Korean food, distinct from the Korean food you’d encounter in L.A. or Fort Lee, New Jersey. In Vegas, as in his home state, it was easy to find a plate lunch featuring what’s known in Hawaii as meat jun, a pancake made of egg-battered beef.

Beyond the hotel, I found a vibrant, multigenerational world of Hawaii people. In the decades after the casino opened, the appeal of Vegas grew as not only a place to vacation but also a place to live. In 1992, the Hawaii-born playwright Edward Sakamoto published a play called “Aloha Las Vegas,” about a widower named Wally who is weighing a move from Honolulu. An old friend named Harry, who has already relocated, urges him to do the same. “Aeh, it’s a mass exodus to Vegas,” Harry says, in Hawaii pidgin. “Lodda people in Hawai‘i house-rich and cash-poor.” Thirty years later, the line holds up. When I asked Jennifer Vergara, a forty-two-year-old transplant from Honolulu, why so many Hawaii people of her generation had left home, she replied matter-of-factly: “Gentrification. Developers. Inflation.” 

In Honolulu, most of her friends—schoolteachers, policemen—were struggling, and in many cases living with their parents, even after having kids of their own. Better jobs and plentiful real estate beckoned, oasis-like, from the Mojave; in Vegas, Vergara and her husband, who have two kids, are employed as nurses and own a three-bedroom home.

Some people visit Las Vegas in order to feel as though they’re somewhere else entirely: Venice, Paris, a post-apocalyptic Earth imagined by Darren Aronofsky. Eating poke in a strip mall, I couldn’t help but think about how much better it would taste if I were near the ocean, a salty breeze blowing off the waters where the fish had been caught. But eating poke at ‘Ai Pono Cafe, in the high-gloss food court of a brand-new casino called Durango, is transportive, an experience that delivers on the city’s promise. 

Gene Villiatora, ‘Ai Pono’s chef and owner, moved to Vegas from Hawaii in 1993, “the same night as the grand opening of the MGM Grand,” he told me, and worked as a dishwasher at Aloha Specialties, in the Cal, before bouncing around some of the Strip’s toniest kitchens and then competing on “Top Chef,” in 2008. 

At Durango, ‘Ai Pono’s storefront mimics a cartoonish beach shack. Inside, Villiatora serves what he calls “Hawaii street food”: a refined spin on a Korean-inspired plate lunch, featuring a strip of tender galbi and a meat jun, griddled golden and crisp; a spectacular fried chicken thigh shellacked in a chili-pepper-guava glaze that tastes strikingly of the juicy fruit. A dozen yards away, on the casino floor, animated bison stampede across the screens of digital slot machines, a game called Buffalo Ascension promising gold. ♦

*The SPAM® brand team cherishes its special relationship with the people of Hawaii, a community that consumes more than 7 million cans of SPAM® products every year, more than any other U.S. state. The genesis of the islanders’ love for SPAM® products dates back to World War II, when the luncheon meat was served to GIs. By the end of the war, SPAM® products were a part of the local culture and today remain a popular comfort food.