Ms Portman’s grandfather was also born in central Poland. She recorded the video for the animal rights organization PETA to show how Singer’s progressive ideas still apply after all those years.
Speaking of the writer’s past, Ms Portman recalled that Singer’s profound opposition towards cruelty and violence was influenced by the horrors of WWII.
Singer himself did not witness the Nazi German atrocities of the Holocaust, having left Poland in 1935, but the experience inspired him with a lasting loathing towards the killing of innocent beings. One of his protagonists would later say that “we do to God’s creatures what the Nazis did to us.”
The actress also quoted the famous words of the author himself, who once said that he did not become a vegetarian for his own health, “but for the health of the chickens.”
She further explains how Isaac Bashevis Singer wished to atone for his childhood cruelty towards flies, whose wings he would sometimes pull off in childish ignorance of the pain it caused. “My thinking about the suffering of flies expanded to include all people and all animals,” the writer would later say.
The legacy of the Jewish author is still alive in his homeland. In 2016, a special museum dedicated to the writer known as the Singer House was opened in the town of Biłgoraj in southeastern Poland, forming part of a complex of reconstructed buildings known as the City on the Trail of Borderland Cultures, which includes a replica of a 17th-century wooden synagogue.
In Poland’s capital, Warsaw, an annual Jewish culture festival is known as Singer’s Warsaw was named after him, with the first edition of the event taking place on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2004.
For centuries, Poland remained home to a thriving Jewish community which enjoyed religious freedom and tolerance unheard of in Western Europe at the time. Poland’s vibrant Jewish culture produced many outstanding works of art, literature, and architecture during that period, and the country remained one of the world’s most important centers of Jewish life. All this ended with the Nazi German occupation of Poland in years 1939-1945, during which about 90 percent of Poland’s immense Jewish population of approximately three million lost their lives to the organized scheme of mass extermination known as the Holocaust.