Despite Problems, U.S.-Mexican Trade Negotiations Continue

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

While Canadian-American trade negotiations are at an impasse, U.S.-Mexican talks continue and seem to be moving towards a deal.

The divide-and-conquer tactic is not new for U.S. President Donald Trump. In Trump’s first term, when U.S. officials were negotiating the CUSMA free trade deal, they also pushed ahead with negotiations with Mexico, while threatening to jettison Canada.

In an interview with The New York Times this past January, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, maintained that there was no “natural reason” that CUSMA needed to be one pact. “We’re not wedded to any particular agreement or format of an agreement simply because it’s there,” he explained.

U.S. officials began meeting with the Mexican government about a separate trade deal in January, and Mexicans say they are optimistic, even though Washington has criticized Mexico for welcoming investment from Chinese factories, which can then export their products to the United States under the preferential terms of the trade deal. Trump also wants to broaden liberalization of Mexico’s energy sector, and to advance a range of other manufacturing, labour, and farming-related goals.

In 2025, Mexico became the top trading partner of the United States, above China and outpacing Canada, for the first time in 30 years. Mexico to overtake Canada as the main buyer of American goods: U.S.-Mexico trade reached a record $94.8 billion in July with Canada second at $62.8 billion.

More than 80 per cent of Mexico’s exports -- cars, appliances, fresh produce -- now go to the United States. Each day, approximately one million individuals and 40,000 trucks cross the border. In 2024, roughly $800 billion of goods were transported across the border, and over one billion dollars in commerce between the two countries occurs daily. Mexico is the top source of both automobiles and automobile parts imported into the United States.

Of course, non-economic friction between the two countries revolves around illegal migration and drugs, especially fentanyl, coming into the U.S. This leaves Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in a bind. She must appease President Trump enough to avoid threatened air strikes while firmly standing up for Mexican sovereignty and maintaining her own domestic political support. She has kept trade flowing and tariffs manageable while defusing calls for military strikes from MAGA elements who view the country as more of an enemy than an ally.

“We have a president on the Mexican side who is more interested, much more interested, in cooperating than her predecessor was,” Roberta Jacobson, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told Atlantic magazine journalist Nick Miroff, who covers immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, referring to former President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. “I think she has done an amazing job navigating that minefield.”

Mexico’s security cooperation with the United States had fallen to a low point under Lopez Obrador, who lashed out at the Drug Enforcement Administration after U.S. agents arrested a former Mexican defence minister at Los Angeles International Airport and accused him of working with traffickers. Lopez Obrador ordered Mexico’s military to shun the agency.

Sheinbaum has drawn a red line at U.S. strikes on Mexican soil and insisted that they would not happen. Her government has set other firm limits on what it considers to be nonnegotiable matters, rejecting the possibility of joint operations that would allow armed U.S. forces to embed with Mexican troops.

Mexico’s national identity is deeply entwined with the legacy of U.S. conquest and imperial bullying. So this remains out of the question for members of Sheinbaum’s leftist Morena party, the Movement for National Regeneration, which has held the reins of governance in Mexico since 2018.

As Sheinbaum herself has noted, the first American intervention cost the country half its territory. The Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 resulted in the acquisition of more than 1.3 million square kilometres of Mexican territory by the U.S., including all of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Texas had already been acquired.

For Morena, therefore, the sovereignty of the nation comes first, even before its own capacity to police itself, and before the safety and lives of its citizens. But the prime beneficiaries of this approach have been the drug cartels, which control somewhere between a third and a half of Mexico, according to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.

Now, however, Mexico’s drug smugglers are under pressure. There has been a slowdown in drug trafficking at sea since the U.S. began striking smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The cartels are already contending with the loss of revenue from human smuggling and extortion payments because of Trump’s border crackdown.

On April 19, a vehicle carrying four officers engaged in an anti-drug operation in the northern state of Chihuahua crashed, and all four were killed. Two were CIA officers. Americans had died in an operation on Mexican soil, apparently in cooperation not with the Mexican federal government, but the government of the state of Chihuahua, which is controlled not by Morena but by the rival PAN, the National Action Party. This was hugely embarrassing to Sheinbaum.

However, on Sept. 14 she authorized the entry into Mexico of 139 U.S. Army troops to participate in joint training exercises with Mexican military personnel in Chihuahua. After all, a major trade deal still hangs in the balance.

 

Book Review: A Yiddish Play about an American Miscarriage of Justice

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, by Leib Malach, edited by Alyssa Quint,  translated by Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint (Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2026; 128 pages, $89.50USD hardcover, $29.50USD paperback).

On March 22, 1935, enthusiasts of Warsaw’s avant-garde theatre scene slipped into a community hall at 19 Dluga Street to see an edgy, new play called “Mississippi” performed by the Yiddish experimental theater group, Yung Teatr (Young Theatre; in Polish, “Teatr Mlodych”).

A new book that includes a translation of the play retells the story of the notorious Scottsboro Affair. Alyssa Quint, the editor, is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater and the editor of two forthcoming volumes on the Yiddish theatre, Women on the Yiddish Stage and Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis: a Critical Edition. Ellen Perecman holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the City University of New York. Her book, Ten Yiddish Plays in Translation, includes translations of plays by Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Peretz Hirshbein, H. Leivick and David Pinski.

Although devoid of any Jewish themes, “Mississippi” is, nonetheless, an original Yiddish play. In their English translation” Perecman and Quint have undertaken what the publishers call “a work of cultural salvage.” Penned in 1935 by Polish-Jewish playwright Leib Malach, “Mississippi” was performed on the Warsaw stage by the experimental Yiddish theatre company Yung Teater (Young Theatre) led by legendary director and drama theoretician Mikhl Weichert. Yung Teater dramatized favorite themes of the international left, including the trials of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro trial. Malach and Weichert were keen to depict a dramatic episode from contemporary life that reflected their humanistic and leftist political ideas as well as avant-garde theatrical practices. Weichert praised the cultural activities of the Soviet Union, especially its innovations in the theatre, but he and Malach were not members of the Communist Party, as Communism in interwar Poland was illegal, though they saw their production as contributing to this movement.

Writing in the weekly Literarishe Bleter on the eve of Mississippi’s premiere in March 1935, Malach explains how watching Weichert’s theater group inspired him to write about the Scottsboro Affair:

“I itched to write something with a social theme. I had just been in America. . . . I had attempted to represent in dramatic form the tragic event of the Scottsboro incident, the tragic lynch-sentence of nine Black boys. The event is well known to everyone. But the living drama is so big that my first attempts at capturing it struck me as lifeless . . . But seeing the youth of Yung Teatr in their performance [. . .] brought the Scottsboro tragedy back to my head.”

Malach, Quint tells us, researched and laboured over the play “in the context of a growing corpus of literature by Yiddish writers who trained their focus on racism in the Jim Crow South, and who identified with the socialist and Communist Party politics attached to the ordeal of the Scottsboro Boys. Moreover, they also found that the racism and lynchings depicted in the play bore a deep resemblance to the injustices perpetrated against Jews both historically and contemporaneously.”

Quint notes that historically, Malach’s most significant encounter with Black Americans and Black American culture was in Harlem, and the very specific details with which one of the Scottsboro Boys, Peter, dreams of Harlem are likely a product of this encounter.

The Yiddish composer Henekh Kon wrote all the songs that appear throughout the play. They are in Yiddish but based on Kon’s understanding of African-American genres including gospel, freedom songs and jazz. A self-taught musician who grew up immersed in Jewish music -- tunes of the Hasidim, of the klezmorim and of the wedding jesters -- and who later trained at the Music Academy of Berlin, Kon composed music for over forty works, including the film version of S. Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk (1937).

“Today’s readers of Mississippi will note that it is not a play that might have been written or performed today,” Quint writes. “Its portrait of African-American life tilts toward stereotype, its Communist ideological aspirations are also too baldly expressed, and the play lends itself to charges of cultural appropriation.” Since the actors are all white, they also perform in blackface. Presumably, there were few, if any, Yiddish-speaking Black actors in Poland, so the problem of how to present the actors playing the Scottsboro Boys as Black Americans without the production’s resorting to make-up might have seemed insurmountable.

I’ve written books and articles on American Jews and Communism, so I’m familiar with the story of the “Scottsboro Boys.” But I knew almost nothing about Leib Malach and “Mississippi,” though it has been mentioned in some books by, among others, Amelia Glaser, in Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine; Joshua Morris, in The Many Worlds of American Communism; and the very many others who have written shorter articles on the Jewish left and theatre, like Zack Rothbart and Jeffrey Veidlinger. In fact Alyssa Quint herself has written about the play in a volume, Oyfn Sheydveg: At the Crossroads: Jewish Intellectuals and the Crisis of 1939, edited by Joshua Karlip.

Leib Malach (the pen name of Leib Zalzman, 1894-1936) was born in Zwolen, Poland where he received a traditional Jewish education. He moved to Warsaw as a teenager, supporting himself by working in various trades. His literary talents were discovered by Hersh Dovid Nomberg, who helped him publish his first ballad in 1915. He later became a prose writer and noted dramatist. He emigrated to Argentina in 1922 and traveled widely in South America. After his return to Poland in 1929, he continued to travel and write popular travel sketches. He lived in Mandate Palestine from 1934-35 and was active with the Labour Zionists. Many of his plays reflect his leftist politics and concern with social injustices. He died after an illness in a Paris hospital, aged 41.

Born in Podhajce in eastern Galicia and raised in Stanislawow, Weichert received his education at kheders and in Polish schools. He attended law and humanities programs at universities in Lwów, Vienna, and in Berlin, where he studied avant-garde theatre with the preeminent German director Max Reinhardt. 

“Mississippi” is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. It was staged in Warsaw in early 1935 and hundreds of times thereafter at various theatres in Poland, Israel, Canada, and Argentina. While the Scottsboro trial played out in the state of Alabama, the playwright thought it best to set the play in Mississippi, a name closely associated with the American South. The internationally acclaimed play highlighted the injustices of the American South, resonating with Eastern European Jewish audiences. It demonstrated how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of American Blacks.

In her introductory essay, Quint treats the political aspirations that animated Malach and Weichert, and the vulnerability felt by European Jewry that it saw reflected in the experience of Black Americans. It was the first play on the Yiddish stage -- and possibly on a Polish stage -- to depict the oppression of Black Americans. It traveled to multiple Polish cities and was met by the Jewish press with almost uniform enthusiasm and curiosity. That the Scottsboro trial unfolded against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism in Germany lent Jewish works more urgency in seeking solidarity across ethnic lines.

In the 1930s, the story of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama, was reported in newspapers around the world. From the American south to the Yiddish stages of Eastern Europe, news of the affair and the injustice that followed spread quickly. Many believe the high-profile series of events was an inspiration for the book and movie To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Scottsboro Boys case began on March 25, 1931, when nine young Black men and boys hopped aboard a Southern Railway train in search of work in Memphis, Tennessee. At some point a fight with whites on board erupted, and the Black riders forced some white travelers off the train. The ejected riders then claimed that they had been attacked, and two of the female white riders then asserted that they had been raped. An all-white jury convicted the nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old, were sentenced to death. Numerous retrials followed, all resulting in guilty verdicts.

No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred -- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as this one did. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the Scottsboro Boys launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to African Americans, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America.

The Scottsboro Boys, thanks to the efforts of, among others, a New York Jewish lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, who later took over their defence and was himself under attack by antisemites, avoided execution. The fact that Leibowitz was Jewish and brought in by Communists certainly did not help his cause, nor that of his clients, once the retrial commenced. His style and bravado were not welcome in Alabama.

But he prevailed and they were all ultimately spared the death sentence. In the years and decades that followed, all of them had their convictions overturned or were pardoned. This included three posthumous pardons granted by the governor of Alabama in 2013, more than two decades after the last of them had passed away.

A cause celebre, Scottsboro has been the subject of countless articles and books, and this new one, about a Yiddish play that dramatized the affair, provides an interesting lens to how deeply it resonated with Jews in Canada, the United States and Europe.