Dear friends


I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a more promising New Year in which, through continued loving dialog with each other, we can become better inoculated against the destructive influence of Putin, Trump and Hamas on our lives. This personal integration with those we don't quite feel we can accommodate is so time-consuming that I will try to make my annual navel-gazing review shorter :-)
If it's still too long - for I did not edit out all the stuff only Danes understand - you can choose to go directly to the section that might interest you, or skip the whole thing with a quick "Ctrl F" search on your own name to make sure you haven't gotten any bad publicity this year :-)

1. My nuclear family
 in the Middle East and elsewhere
2. My "work" as an involuntary pensioner
3. My new book "American Pictures through 50 years"
4. My exhibitions
5. Our vacations
6. My work in my dialogue center The Ubuntu House
including more about the Israel-Gaza war
7. Deaths and other events of the year
8. Revisiting the past

 

MY NUCLEAR FAMILY

Most of you end your Christmas letters to me with a bit about your family, but as you know, I put the family at the center :-) and will therefore start with it before you fall asleep ..... 

.....our son Daniel started the year by hitchhiking around some of the only countries he hadn't seen yet, namely Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. The people were extremely hospitable - even female drivers picked him up - but mostly he felt at home with the poor foreign guest workers, living on their carpeted floors.

But of course he also wanted to see everything that is forbidden to Christians, and since no Arabs dared to drive him to Mecca, he instead borrowed a car and drove in Arab disguise into the middle of Mecca, which was teeming with Muslims from all over the world.
 

Later in the year, he hitchhiked for two months around Kazakhstan and the surrounding 'stan's, which he had come to love from previous visits. On this trip, he invited a Danish friend who had struggled with mental health issues for many years. The friend blossomed throughout the trip and gained a new lease of life. So when Daniel had to travel home to his social and healthcare assistant job, the friend chose to travel home alone through Turkey. Shortly afterwards, Daniel received the terrible news from his friend's family that he had been found killed in Turkey - probably by throwing himself off a mountain. It knocked Daniel out for a long time.


.....our daughter Lalou this year traveled mostly on shorter Interrail tours in Europe, but in the spring she attended a special course in San Francisco to improve her skills in her specialty of trauma psychology. She had previously used this in Gaza, so a few days after the Hamas massacre in Israel, I posted this message on Facebook:
Today is our daughter Lalu's 36th birthday and we have just had the pleasure of traveling with her for a week in Tuscany where the picture with her here is from Doriana's house.

But the reason I'm thinking of her in particular today is because it wasn't more than 5 years ago that we were dealing with the same anxiety as many Israeli and Palestinian parents right now. She worked as a psychologist training women in Gaza to help the many traumatized children, 77% of whom have ptsd and half of whom are suicidal. Without the necessary psychological treatment, they easily devolve into desperation and lack of hope for the future and one day become Hamas terrorists.
 

But suddenly Lalou herself came under heavy Israeli bombardment and called us in fear. We could hear the bombs crashing around her on the phone. Luckily, she managed to be evacuated behind the wall in the West Bank. But over there, she felt guilty about abandoning the women she had come to know and love, as they can never get out of the world's largest prison. So she sneaked back into Gaza to continue her work.
And damned if she didn't come under Israeli bombardment again. And this time she was so shaken that she fled to our home and, in disappointment and relief, emptied several bottles of wine with us in the summer house.
We were proud that she had even had the courage to try to make a difference in this explosive cauldron that the whole world has turned its back on for too many years. With the terrible consequences we are witnessing right now.
I borrowed the images from her own Instagram profile.

.... My wife Vibeke continues to drive me crazy in retirement. From morning to night, she throws herself into her absolutely important projects of painting both house and summer cottage - much of the year in her white spacesuit and waving brushes while setting our new neighbors, who have a painting company, to repaint both our and other neighbors' houses. I dare not say more about her here, partly because I have hardly been in contact with her throughout the year, as she shuts herself away in audiobooks and podcasts while working 😊

And partly because our sweet new summer house neighbor Christian Lund refers to her what I write in the Christmas letter - and then the Christmas peace is immediately spoiled 😊
Together they go around planting rhododendron bushes in the cottage gardens, I think.
Yes, every now and then I get a word in; if I mention something I would like, she has immediately found it used and cheap on the internet and to my surprise it comes flying in from all over the world just two days later. No one is a better procurer than Vibeke - whether I need it or not.

.....our dog Tajo..... is now 11 years old and has followed me everywhere since his birth as he refuses to be left home alone. He especially loves going to church every Sunday to Kathrine Lilleør's 35-minute uplifting sermons, which he is probably the only one - besides my 80-year-old cousin Birgit - who falls asleep to in our crowded St. Paul's Church. Every morning we wake up at 7am to run our 7-8 km route along The Little Mermaid or on the beach to Hornbæk. So I have calculated that he has so far run over 25,000 km on his little legs - or 71,425 dog steps of 0.35 m (according to ChatGPT4) - or more than 20 times as far as my big Danish cross country race in 2000 and over half of the way around the world - here in the winter darkness with a lantern on so that we can find each other when female dogs get him derailed for too long.

.... and myself?..... Well, not much happens after my morning runs. I recently realized that I now have regular subscriptions to all these newspapers: Politiken, Berlingske Tidende, Information, Kristeligt Dagblad, Altinget and POV. 
But especially my favorite newspaper from my vagabond years, the New York Times as well as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, Aljazeera, Haaretz and during the Gaza war also The Times of Israel. 
Supplemented during the day with TV from CNN and BBC and Fox News. 
And not least Harlem's New York Amsterdam News, which my longtime friend Elinor Tatum both owns and is editor-in-chief of.
It has the briefest overview of new articles on racism, which I use for my book, along with all the more scholarly articles from both the UK and US editions of The Conversation. 
So you can imagine that with all that newspaper reading around the clock, there's not much to report on in my own life 😊.
 

But luckily, you can ask ChatGPT BING what I also do and get this more accurate description 😊

"Jacob Holdt is a Danish photographer who became known for his images of American society in the 1970s. He traveled around as a hitchhiker, staying with both poor and rich families while taking thousands of photos with a cheap pocket camera. He's also been involved in the civil rights movement, fought against apartheid and rebuffed attempts by the KGB to use his book for propaganda. But did you know that Jacob Holdt also has a secret passion for cat food? Yes, that's right. He found that cat food was a cheap and nutritious way to survive when he was short of money for food. He developed a taste for the different flavors of cat food and has even written a cookbook of cat food recipes. Some of his favorites are cat food lasagna, cat food burgers and cat food ice cream. He has also created a website where he reviews different brands of cat food and gives tips on how to save money by eating cat food. Jacob Holdt is not only a talented photographer and a committed activist, but also a cat food enthusiast."
  

A LITTLE ABOUT MY REAL "WORK"

Fortunately, my lectures "On saying yes" are still catching on. Only at the music school Viby Efterskole, they have now for the 29th year in a row used my old musical, American Pictures, instead.
As its 4 hours are too short for these gifted students, I combine it every year with "On saying yes" and thus have Denmark's longest lecture - a full school day of 7 hours, where the teachers take time off.
 

But this year, I also experienced the highest hourly speeking fee of my life as a speaker at Novo Nordisk for doctors from all over the world. Because when they all suddenly stood up after only an hour of intense listening, I asked: "Why are you leaving? We had agreed on two hours." No, they all had to rush off to the airport, which is why I spent the rest of the day getting questions in emails from all over the world about everything I hadn't had time to tell them.
I'm far too embarrassed to tell you what I got for that measly one hour lecture, but Novo Nordisk can afford it with all the weight loss medicine you order - litterally bancrupting the American Medicare 😊.

I felt like I had become a real slacker in my old age, as in 40 years on the American lecture circuit I got the worst hourly pay of any lecturer for my 11 hours of daily work (2 hours of setting up and taking down equipment + 5 hours of slide show + 4 hours of workshop the next day in addition to driving and flying and dinner with faculty and late night drinking with students).
 

But like my lecture at the International People's College the following week, it was a fantastic experience to help build bridges between Japanese, Indian, Arab, African, Latin American, American and European people about something I had been warned about beforehand, "Many of them leave after an hour of our lectures if they don't understand them, so don't get upset."
But they didn't do that for the 4 hours IPC had set aside for it - and even assaulted me in a large circle with questions throughout dinner and afterwards in the rogue room and all the way to the car when I finally tried to get out of there. It gives me hope and proof that there are certain messages we all share across the globe if only you can express them in a non-divisive way.

And yet, this is also where IPC invited a large group of Israelis and Palestinians to dialog workshops with myself and Garba Diallo as counselers in 2001 ..... And look what since came out of that!
I just remember that I was sure I could tell them apart, but I was constantly mistaking who was Palestinian and who was Jewish. It was as if their faces were the same, shaped by the pain and anger of their long mutual oppression. I have carried this powerful testimony of their victimization in my mind ever since in order to feel disarming sympathy for both of them.

 

New lecture at The People's Meeting
(A yearly gathering where our politicians meet their voters in eye to eye dialogues)

I even created a couple of new lectures during the year. At Folkemødet, Bornholm's head librarian Jon Madsen has arranged my lecture every year, "but now I no longer want to hear People's Meeting's only monologue about how we should engage in dialog with each other. Make a new one called "Jacob Holdt - my life as an activist." And then I made a completely new commissioned lecture, which both he and the audience said was the best I had ever given.
Dialogue is not something you should just talk about, but something you have to put into practice, such as with the Koran burner Rasmus Palludan, who was roaring outside my lecture.
 

Jon Madsen has had a warm heart for me ever since I murdered his father, my old Danish teacher Erik Madsen, in this essay in highschool, which was a pastiche of the Greek comedies he was known for translating.
 

Lecture about Nan Goldin
In March, I got another fun booking assignment when Nordisk Film's former event manager, Lars Møller, who for years booked American Pictures in all the country's cinemas, wanted me to introduce the new film about photo artist Nan Goldin "All the beauty and the bloodshed."
"But why me? I don't know anything about photography," I protested, even though I'm always being compared to Nan Goldin in books about photography. And then came his provocative reply, "Because I thought you had slept with her." 😊 
 

Well, in the face of such strong prejudices about me, I couldn't say no. So I asked famous photographic artist Trine Søndergård, with whom I had shared the Fogtdal Photographer Award, to give an introductory speech about Nan Goldin as a photographic artist.
I myself made a more entertaining speech about why it could actually have been true that I had slept with Nan Goldin - and not just because we were neighbors for many years on the Lower East Side where my lesbian Jewish roommate (as seen in the film) hung out with her.
No, more because Nan Goldin represented the super activist "Russian Jewish" minority without whom I would never have been able to make American Pictures. So the whole talk ended as a big thank you talk to American Jews and with all the anti-Semitism they are currently exposed to, you too can probably benefit from reading my illustrated speech here.

But also check out Louisiana Channel's interview with activist Nan Goldin with her advice to our youth to show more empathy.
It's currently viewed by hundreds of thousands on Instagram:

"You have a lot more to say than Instagram. And a lot to experience in the real world. The most important thing is standing in front of another person and feeling empathy for them."

 

MY NEW BOOK:
"American Pictures - A 50 year journey through black/white history"
 
The book has been on hold due to my busyness. As well as problems with the demands of the woke culture in the US that black topics should preferably be described by blacks, while as a lecturer in the 80s I experienced the opposite, that the slide show for white students got credibility by being presented by a white and not by "an angry black spokesman" (as white students would say).
But lately, I've had two lucky breakthroughs.
Probably the best-known American artist in the US today, Arthur Jafa, has agreed to write a foreword for the book. The Danes know him from his exhibition at Louisiana.

He became nationally known during the Black Lives Matter movement when his video "Love is the message, the message is death" suddenly went viral. Although he immediately agreed to "write" the foreword, since he is often saying that American Pictures was instrumental in him becoming an artist, it wasn't so easy in practice. He is so busy with exhibitions all over the world that he doesn't have time to write, but only communicate via Zoom talks.
So first I had to find a suitable hotel in Italy - twice on our Interrail trip - to zoom from. But when I woke him up in Los Angeles at 8am, he was so dazed from working all night before that we had to postpone it. Only after a month did we succeed and we talked for several hours, which was then transcribed and shortened by my friend Lærke Rydal from 25 pages down to the 5 pages needed in the book. So here you can now read it - for now hastily put together. 
 
One result of this was that since he consistently refers to the book, which he has frequently bought and given to his friends, as "American Pictures" and not as my planned heavier title "Roots of Oppression", I have decided to use the old more powerful and well-known title in the form of "American Pictures - a 50 year personal journey into black/white history."

Another major breakthrough has been the promise of financial support from a patron who also supports the Guggenheim Museum to fund a very expensive artistically designed new book. A good publisher friend, who has eagerly supported me, feels that my own layout was too "70s" and has suggested a whole new up-to-date layout by a well-known graphic designer who has made incredibly beautiful art books. Who they all are, I will reveal in next year's Christmas letter after the book release.
http://www.american-pictures.com/roots/

MY EXHIBITIONS

This spring I got a call from my first black girlfriend, Leslie Manselle, to remind me that it was our 50th anniversary and "shouldn't we be traveling together in Europe to celebrate." We had also celebrated our previous anniversaries for the wedding that was then denied to us due to black social control, as I describe in Leslie's and my relationship here in my new book. I then suggested that we could travel together to my exhibition in July in Panicale, Italy, so that she could be photographed by the press - now as an old woman in front of my picture of her as a young woman. Unfortunately, the exhibition was suddenly postponed until July 2024 and it's not quite so beautiful to celebrate a 51st anniversary, so we'll see. 
Another exhibition I'm looking forward to is in February at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, which we're preparing right now. That museum bought the entire slideshow of four old Kodak Carousels that the Folkswang Museum in Essen also bought, as seen here. But otherwise, I'm still waiting for the planned exhibition in the Buffalo Museum's beautiful new extension here.
I can wait, as I've stopped flying anyway .....and think there's more than enough art to see on Interrail here in Europe.

 

OUR VACATIONS

 Spring - Our 5th Interrail trip - now to Slovenia and Croatia

 This spring's Interrail trip went down over Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and by ship to Italy and can best be experienced in pictures here.

 

There are some wonderful old castle towns in Croatia, but the problem was that even in April they are too crowded with tourists - not least Dubrovnik - and by train it's not easy to get to smaller towns.
On my birthday, we stayed in the middle of Diocletian's palace on top of his Temple of Jupiter. This Eastern Roman emperor, who founded Split in 305, is Vibeke's 39th great-great-grandfather. 

Since we had accommodated two Bosnian refugees, Dragana and Brana Galic, from Sarajevo plus one from Croatia during the civil war in 1992 (with the result, as I described in the Christmas letter of 1993, that the whole civil war also broke out in Gernersgade), it was a great experience to experience both Mostar with the bridge and Sarajevo 30 years later in peace.
 
 

During the years of insane Serbian shelling of Sarajevo, no one thought there would ever be peace. Yet everyone confirmed that all three groups - Muslims, Serbians and Croats - were now living in peace and harmony with each other, even though everyone knew which of their neighbors had shot whom. It was a huge inspiration to me and gave me hope that the same can happen in so many other parts of the world that are currently gripped by a similar blind and divisive hatred.

It was shocking to see the genocide museums in both cities about all the massacres that the Serbs in particular had carried out. And since those in Serbia have still not expressed any remorse, the Serbs - not least reinforced by the re-election of Vučić last week - are probably the last Eastern European country I want to welcome into the EU.
Hey, sorry, I think I just slipped out a prejudice as unforgivable as their own....oops!

Since we couldn't take Tajo into Montenegro and Albania due to rabies, we had a week's relaxing sunshine vacation on the wonderful island of Hvar before taking the ferry over to Italy, where it poured down in the rain storm of the century. 
Fortunately, our now 80-year-old friend Annemarie Ræbild picked us up and gave us shelter in the wonderful old castle city house which she has donated after her death to San Cataldo with her entire large Danish/Italian book collection. She is a treasure trove of literary knowledge.

Here her new boyfriend Laust Strandby Nielsen, who, like me, has received the Government's lifelong artist's allowance, sat and read his poems for us in the evenings while we took long walks in the mountains during the day. And here, at a party, I met Margherita Belaief, who lived just below our floor and runs the museum L'Arca di Pan, which will host my exhibition next summer. So we'll definitely be moving in with you again, Annemarie and Laust!

But on our way home, we were almost washed away in the climate change tidal wave that ravaged Emilia-Romagna in May, with the result that all trains stopped. We tried to escape into France, but all trains were sold out for the same reason. Then we used a trick that the rest of you can use too. You just have to get into the dining cars, which even in Germany have switched to climate-friendly vegan food, and that's how we got home almost on time without seat reservations.

 

The fall - Our 6th Interrail trip to Romania

Since we have such a rich community with our summer house neighbors and much of Southern Europe was in flames all summer, we didn't go on our next Interrail trip until October. First with Lalou down to Tuscany to see and stay in a beautiful house she had found and wanted us to buy. "Big enough for all our friends to live here at the same time."
Yes, take a look inside if you have the time and inclination to live in the three-storey house. I tried my hardest to be enthusiastic, but I've always preferred living (for free) in other people's houses. Why be a caretaker here for Vibeke in her own house when I'm also a caretaker for Özlem Cekic in the Ubuntu House at home and when you on an Interrail you can stay much cheaper in new, beautiful Bed & Breakfasts every day where the beds are made and all the hassle of maintaining old houses is taken care of?

And nearby in Lucca, my old Italian girlfriend Doriana (from before I went to the US in 1970) has a wonderful apartment we can stay in for free in addition to her three other houses. So thankfully we left there unsettled and said goodbye to Lalou and Doriana to drive into the more unknown country of Romania through beautiful Budapest just as the Gaza war broke out, resulting in Europe's largest synagogue closing right under our noses in our own shock. After all the anti-Semitism my Jewish girlfriend Marly (seen here in Budapest) and I experienced in Hungary during our hitchhiking trip in 1971 and after the harrowing Holocaust story I experienced and described in my Christmas letter in 1996, it is surprising that Hungary today has the largest Jewish population in Eastern Europe.

Romania disappointed us a bit. The best part was all the old historic cities that the Germans built in Transylvania in the 1500s and not the "Romanian" cities with their lack of the outdoor cafes you appreciate as a tourist in the south - especially when you have to take turns going to museums with a dog. However, it was great in the morning to run with Tajo along the Black Sea and look out at the hundreds of ships waiting to come to Odessa to pick up Ukraine's grain and feed the starving poor countries without being shot at by Putin.
 The disappointment was probably mostly due to our difficulty in integrating with the local population. Everywhere in the trains, they sat closed behind their cell phones without showing interest in us strangers - even though it is on an Interrail that you usually get to talk to people. Just as they hardly talked to each other either. It didn't really hit us until we woke up on the way home in the "West" - in Austria and Germany - after the long sleeper train ride north through Hungary, and immediately felt completely liberated by experiencing hospitality, empathy, interest and lively conversation on the trains.
We experienced the same thing last summer during my lecture in Weimar in the old East Germany and had discussed it with my old East German spy friend, Jörg Meyer (page 459 here), who agreed and said that it was this closeness that had made him move to Bavaria. People are shaped by the systems they live in and 40 years of oppression of living in the "closed system" of communism, which stifled free initiative and empathy, has left just as strong a mark as, for example, the oppression the Palestinians have been subjected to for so many years in their "closed system.". 
 An incipient "cold" in Romania also suppressed my own "empathy", coughing up so much snot that I finally got reactions from the passengers - but only in Germany. And when we reached Berlin, I had to be locked up in a hotel for three days with a Corona so bad that I could hardly bear to go out on the streets to watch the daily violent Palestinian demonstrations that unfolded on Hermann Platz right below my windows.

Luckily, my old traveling companion in the US from 2007, the film maker Christina Voigt, brought me some soothing medication, during which we had long conversations about the rampant anti-Semitism that shook her now in Berlin - not least in the very Muslim Kreuzberg she lives in, but also in her artistic circles. She herself is a former Eastern European and grew up at the age of 5 with my "American Pictures", which made her long for traveling. So after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I invited her on tour with me in the US, where she met a lot of my Jewish friends, KKK leaders, etc. and "opened her up a bit" (yes, yes, Christina, I'm teasing you a bit here).

 

So before we - once again - blame the victims, it might be wise to take a moment to look inside ourselves, since the source for any mutual integration lies buried within ourselves. And I forgot to mention here about "the closed system" that another important reason to go on long Interrail trips is that on trains you can read all the books you never have time for in your busy everyday life, traveling inwardly rather than outwardly.
 

And this trip included two Nobel Prize winners that I had accidentally picked up, one of them "Paradise" by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Probably mostly because I had dinner with him in Louisiana's Boathouse, when my friend Christian Lund had the brilliant idea to bring him together for the first time with Africa's other great Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka. For me, Gurnah's art is that he almost neutrally describes both the oppressors of colonialism and the oppressed as victims of an insane system and a way of thinking that prevailed right up to my youth and helped shape my outlook.

The other great Nobel Prize-winning experience was Annie Ernoux, whom my son's first father-in-law, as mentioned in last year's Christmas letter, had at the award ceremony. I highly recommend her "The Years" to anyone my age because she manages to write her autobiography so that it becomes for all of us a portrayal of all the events around us that came to shape our generation.

But on Interrail, we can also help shape the conditions for the next generation. Since most of our trains were only half full but run according to the same hourly timetables as always, we traveled on Interrail in principle completely CO2 free..... while travelers on airplanes keep expanding the number of planes the more people use them.


 

As I wrote on July 17th on Facebook:

Do I get it? We're going from one worsening climate crisis to the next .... and yet everyone is flying off like never before .... even many of my highly educated and otherwise thoughtful friends .... and even on short vacation trips in Europe .... although you can reach Sicily's glowing beaches in less than two days on Interrail from the cold North..... and even have plenty of time on the trains to immerse yourself in books .... or go on social media and tease all the high-flyers who don't feel they have time to use their heads :-)

 

MY WORK IN THE UBUNTU HOUSE

 The Ubuntu House group "100% for the children"

Unfortunately, The Ubuntu House is not entirely climate-friendly either, as the work that 100% for the children does for Africa's vulnerable and marginalized children involves a lot of travel for Camilla Legendre and Charlotte Lea Jensen, with whom I just attended a Christmas party. God will one day figure out if their flights save more children than all those lost because we are drying up their livelihoods and sending them fleeing to Europe. As I concluded in 1993 after myself having done aid work in Africa, sending white people out to "develop others" can be more destructive to the initiative of the natives than the value of what you do. The only mole-stomping white people you should send out, I thought, were photographers like me, as I had to communicate the projects to the Danes at home in order to get them to contribute more money. 
Yes, behind every idealist you will always find an egoist 😊

 

The Ubuntu House's "Bridge Builders"
Özlem Cekic's work in Bridge Builders is less high-flying in bringing Danes together in dialog to reduce our prejudices towards each other. That's why it's so much fun now to regularly meet the board members who I once had momentary prejudices against, such as Jyllands-Posten's caricature-creating Flemming Rose (who I've been good friends with at countless Muslim events ever since).
And Marianne Munis, who as a black woman once scared the life out of me when Ibis in 2001 had installed me in their guesthouse in Windhook, Namibia. There were so many break-ins that I had to fight my way through many double locks and alarm systems to get in and out every night, and yet robbers broke in every night while I was staying there all alone.

Then one night someone rang the doorbell and I almost didn't dare go out. And when I saw a black person with a huge afro trying to get in, my heart sank to my waist. But then the woman with the afro, Mariane Munis, shouted to me in Danish, "Let me in Jacob!" and I pulled myself together and we've been laughing about my prejudices ever since. I had long ago learned not to fear black people in the US, but this was a completely new unknown country with a whole different psychology I had just arrived in, and then you have to start all over again to unlearn your prejudices. I knew the answer, so the next day I chose to move in with the people I feared and had my black driver take me to the border of the most crime ridden slum (he didn't dare to drive there himself) and then moved in with the most wonderful lesbian women, where I never felt afraid when the criminals knocked on their tin shed all night to buy drugs from them.

I often use this story to show how we can all have fears and prejudices - and how easy it is to work through them by engaging in a dialog with those who otherwise fall victim to our prejudices.
And that is exactly what the Bridge Builders do in schools, when Chief Rabbi Jair Melchior and Özlem Cekic (Muslim) together engage in dialog with students - especially in the aftermath of the explosion of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia after the Gaza war.
I was particularly pleased to be present at the Bent Melchior Prize award to Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, with whom we in Critical Muslims had such a close collaboration - not least because he - like myself - has been exposed to Weekendavisen's prejudices through the shitstorm that the newspaper - also with Søren K. Willemoes  at the helm - raised against him.

 

Still, I must confess that I had a sudden prejudice against Özlem Cekic when she didn't chose me - her longtime dance partner -but Thomas Evers Poulsen as her dancing partner in "Strictly Come Dancing" :-)
 

New Outlook, our Jewish peace group in the Ubuntu House
The Jewish peace group "New Outlook"'s dialogs in the Ubuntu House took a different turn this year after the Hamas attack. Like many other places in the world, we had to cancel both Kristallnacht and the Chanukah Festival of Lights.
 

(I think Hanukkah belongs naturally in the Ubuntu House. Afterall, it is my own carnal family that started the tradition, as it killed more Jews than Hamas. But at the same time, it was also my family who became the savior of the Jews 😊 )

However, this year the Chanukah light festival was picked up by Danish-Israeli Tali Padan, who has previously organized interfaith Pesach celebrations and other dialogs for European Muslims and Jews. It was a poignant and unforgettable dialog, not least because there were many very young Israelis there.

 

A couple of them were young women who, in my dialog group with Imam Naveed Baig, spoke almost tearfully about their prejudices and fears because their husbands are currently fighting inside the Gaza Strip. I also spoke honestly about my prejudices towards Israelis. After my aforementioned enthusiasm for the generosity of the outgoing American Jews, I was shaken to my core during my first visit to Israel in 1989 by encountering the tough "Sabra" Israeli Jews, shaped by living in a closed system with a constant fear of war. My father-in-law, who was with me, had always fanatically supported Israel and was therefore the most disappointed by the "rudeness" and "inhospitality" of the Israelis - unlike what I experienced among the Palestinians - even though they almost stoned me in Gaza when I thoughtlessly drove in there on Israeli license plates.

 So when, many years later, I had to give lectures on both sides of the wall, but live in the West Bank surrounded on three sides by the wall, I didn't want my prejudices to shut down my positive integration with the Israelis, and brought along the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish's book "I Ahall Not hate", which I read every night as counteracting vaccine. (Read here if I succeeded).
 For Dr. Abuelaish saw all his daughters in Gaza killed by Israeli shells in their bedrooms, but continued his operations and dialogs in Israeli hospitals. And now that the bombs are once again - and far more ruthlessly this time - murdering the children of Gaza, I thought of this book again, so as not to close myself off from feeling the trauma that these Israeli visitors to Ubuntu House were also dealing with.

How far my balancing act still can hold, I dare not predict, but at least in May, during the Jewish Culture Week in the Synagogue, I was presented with the Jewish Peace Prize. And since I was previously presented with the Muslim's Dialogue Award, I hope the books are balanced for the time being 😊

In the Ubuntu House,  I had recently had another uplifting experience when the Ukraine Peace Engineers came to visit, among other things to show me how they had used the photo Susanne Gupta took of my lecture slogan about feeling loved - now with their own Ukrainian translation. They had used it in workshops for the senior police officers who in 2014 were behind the massacre at Majdan Square - the start of the current Ukraine war.
 

Here is the translated image, which also, I feel, explains how Hamas emerged in Gaza's closed system - and how Netanyahu's inhumane overreaction came about (by using the tired Old Testament "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" dead-end methods instead of the New Testament reconciliation and dialog a la St. Paul the Jew):

First and foremost, I want to be loved If I cannot be
loved, I want to be respected If I cannot be
respected, I want to be recognized If I cannot be
recognized, I want to be accepted If I cannot be
accepted, I want to be noticed
If I cannot be noticed, I will be feared If I cannot be
feared, I will be hated


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I missed this attempt to try to understand in our many daily Palestinian demonstrations with their traumatizing "From the river to the sea" slogans, but I also experienced that something good always comes out of integrating with those you disagree with. Because here I met Toufik Bounaas, who was one of the 30-60 refugees from mostly Algeria and Palestine that my Ubuntu House opened up for in the 1980s. Now he is fully integrated - married to a judge at the High Court and with two children, one of whom they had chosen to call Jacob after the man who first gave Toufik shelter in Denmark. It makes you happy that something succeeds in the name of integration.

 

Another uplifting experience from the Ubuntu House was with one of the female imams at the Mariam Mosque, who captured me and my video footage with her most beautiful and graceful Quran recitations. I therefore photographed her frequently in her Somali beauty inside.

Then suddenly this summer, to my surprise, she, Amina Elmi, wrote to me asking if I would please come and photograph her book release at Gyldendal. In the meantime, she had entered writing school and came out with the poetry collection "Barbar", which also caught the eye of my friend Christian Lund, which is why she appeared at the Louisiana Literature Festival the very next day - the same day the book was praised to the skies in the newspapers, so she hardly knew which leg to stand on.

 

Almost simultaneously, I was contacted by another of my former coworkers at the Ubuntu House. It was Howie Pinderhughes, who drove around with my slide show in Scandinavia from 1977-1982, to tell me that his now famous son, Samora Pinderhughes (named after Samora Machel after our fight against apartheid in southern Africa), was now a famous musician and would be playing at Danish State Radio Concert House. As my daughter has often stayed with Professor Howard Pinderhughes in Berkeley, she came to the concert, just like Daniel, who played with Howie in the Ubuntu House as a child. Samora's sister Elenor is just as famous and has played at the White House and the NY Philharmonic

 

But check out all our other events and history here:

www.american-pictures.com/ubuntu/



 

DEAD OF THE YEAR

Ebbe Haarder 1947-2023
Ebbe and his wife, Eva, played an invaluable role for us - especially as neighbors in the summer house. Ebbe the architect was incredibly helpful and helped build both the terrace and the guesthouse for us. But most of all, they were extremely hospitable and hosted countless summer and Easter parties for the residents of Månedalen. So it was a shock when Ebbe was suddenly found dead at home in March - just five years after Eva's death.

Dr. Charles Godfrey - 1918-2023 - 105 years old
I have often enough referred to the Godfrey family as my saving angels, without whom I would never have made American Pictures - both here and in the movie "An American love story". 
And not least here in my memoir.
 

Lauretta Williams 1948-2023

Lauretta was best friends with my first black girlfriend, Denia Hester. Here you can read my lengthy diary about how I met them on one of my first days in the United States - the first black people I stayed with. During the 17 years Denia was married to a white man, I frequently stayed overnight as a lecturer at Lauretta's house, but then moved back in with Denia, who also later vacationed with Vibeke and me in Denmark, as you can see.

 

Hans Frederik Sillasen 1948-2023
My playmate from when I was very small. Read more about his poor upbringing in my speech at his funeral in Grimstrup.
 

Kresten Søndergård 1934-2023

 Kresten was the son of our tenant family in the vicarage, which played an invaluable role for us children as an escape from our mother's wrath.
 

Ritt Bjerregård 1941-2023
Ritt (former minister in many Danish governments) was not part of my social circle, but miraculously I had her at the table twice just before her death.
 

Henrik Nordbrandt 1945-2023
Being the lazy reader that I am, I only read people's books when I get to know them. This happened when Henrik Nordbrandt moved into our house in Gernersgade as a homeless. Since then, we've had many debates about my relationship with Islamists. It would be going too far here, but read the whole background story on my Facebook post on his death.
 

Lise Nørgård 1917-2023
Lise Nørgård (famous Danish author) was not part of my social circle, but shortly before her death she called me over to the church to ask me about American Pictures, which she remembered almost better than I did. And since she also loved Tajo as a dog lover, I chose to go to her funeral with Tajo. There was a photo ban in the church, but here's how I got around it and made a minute-by-minute report.

 

Kirsten Jacobsen
With all that death, it can be important to process your grief, and I have recently been pleased to see several of my old friends, who I would never have imagined going to church, seeking out Kathrine Lilleør to find hope and joy after having ended up in a black hole after the loss of their loved ones. One of them is my friend Henrik Højmark from The Adventurer Club and another is my open-minded and thoughtful friend from the American Pictures' collective in 1977, where her then boyfriend from Algeria worked for us. Namely the author Kirsten Jacobsen, who has written the book The Promise about how her husband was kept alive against his will. After her soul-searching with Kathrine Lilleør - chair of the government's "Committee for a more dignified death" - she got Kathrine to change her mind, "I have always been against euthanasia, but then I read Kirsten Jacobsen's book."
 Which leads to the following sad story....
 

Ebbe Preisler
The reason I'm mentioning this is that I'm currently in a huge shock at Christmas to learn what has happened to another old friend from the Ubuntuhus collective, Ebbe Preisler. He has just taken the life of his terminally ill wife Mariann with Parkinson and also attempted to take his own life, as the media has just reported. 
Ebbe Preisler, this incredibly sweet man, was the first film director to take the initiative to make American Pictures as a movie and together we formed the company Holdt-Preisler film. Later, we wanted to get the movie with the large revenues we imagined, into our Africa Foundation, but we should never have done that, as the movie ended up losing a million kroner.
But my friendship with Ebbe Preisler continued and we visited him and Mariann in their summer house during their happier times together. 
Vibeke was devastated when we heard the news yesterday, as she watched her own father fall apart from Parkinson's.

 

REUNION WITH THE PAST


 A reunion with Joan Baez


I was thrilled to see Joan Baez again here in Copenhagen. Because it was exactly 48 years ago that we marched with the United Farm Workers - yes, believe it or not - to demand, among other things, that a wall be built against Mexico - 41 years before President Trump demanded it. For Cesar Chavez tried to organize the Chicano workers with higher wages. This was impossible with the pool of cheap labor that the rich landowners wanted to keep flowing in from Mexico.
I marched several times with Joan Baez, as the photos show - once on March 1, 1975, all the way from San Francisco to Modesto. She was an avid photographer herself and teased me about photographing me when I tried to get a good picture of her. 
The now 82-year-old Joan Baez was in Copenhagen to present her new movie "JOAN BAEZ, I AM A NOISE" at the Bremen Theater, which can be seen in the last photos in this series of my old photos of her

 

And a reunion with our downstairs neighbor in Gernersgade, Mario Scharff, now as an artist.
 

And a reunion with Brian Cox in Succession

Reunion with me?

Well, how long can we go on when we reach my age?
In gratitude for saving my life three times, I just gave my doctor Mette-Marie Tidlund this picture, which she has requested for her waiting room. However, she has closed for new patients, so don't get your hopes up for a longer life there 😊.

 I've always wanted to give the best of my art prints, which V1 Gallery is selling here for 5,000 $ each, to my old friends as a memento of our friendship. And many have received them for birthdays and the like. 

So this will be your possible Christmas gift this year - to get one of these - my most popular images - or any other of your choice - at the print price (but not numbered like the ones V1 Gallery sells to collectors). Let me know if you're interested.

Jacob Holdt
Gernersgade 63, 1319 Copenhagen K
Tel.  20-324412    jacob@holdt.us 
www.facebook.com/jacob.holdt/

 Follow my updated photo stories on Instagram:
www.instagram.com/jacobholdtofficial/

www.american-pictures.com

See the show American Pictures part one and two