java and C++ interoperability

I am looking for the best approach for calling C++ code from java (with callbacks from C++ back to java). What is the best/easiest/fastest performance way to get interoperability between java and C++? I have been programming in python and C++ for a while and have come to depend upon pybind11. I am looking for something similar to (or better than) pybind11 for java.

I am aware of jni and jna. But jni is too low-level, tedious, and error prone. And according to this blog post "JNA is significantly slower than the JNI." That blog post uses bridj, but in the three years since that article was written bridj seems to have gone from being "a relatively young project" to one that has only two commits since then.

I appreciate any guidance.