Tellingly enough, neither the Israeli government nor Austria’s embassy in Tel Aviv were involved in planning Heinz-Christian Strache’s visit to Israel, which took place a few days ago and was organized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. One can understand why Strache, the leader of the far-right, xenophobic Austrian Freedom Party, is officially shunned […]
Rzeszow, the largest city in southeastern Poland, is a paradigm for inconsolable loss. Like scores of Polish towns, cities and villages where Jews were demonized, marginalized and murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, Rzeszow lost an important part of its multicultural heritage with the destruction of its substantial Jewish community. On the eve of […]
When I visited Warsaw in the summer of 2009, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a monumental $100 million project, was still a figment of the imagination of its founders and still in the planning stages. When I returned to Poland last month, Warsaw’s newest museum had been opened for more than […]
Appropriately enough, the sky was gray and ominous on my first visit to Majdanek, the former Nazi concentration camp in eastern Poland. Adjacent to the city of Lublin, Majdanek is an eerie tableau of wooden barracks, guard towers, a gas chamber, a crematorium with an uncommonly high chimney and barbed wire fences. Even on a […]
It’s 1979 and Miles Davis, the great jazz musician, has not been heard from in five years. His fans miss him, but it isn’t clear why he’s become a recluse, a latter-day Howard Hughes. The raspy-voiced composer, trumpeter and band leader whom Don Cheadle portrays in Miles Ahead, in an amazing performance, has reached a nadir. He rarely […]
Should Jews leave Europe and head to Israel in the face of growing Islamic terrorism on the European continent? That was the question put to a prominent historian and a high-profile journalist at a panel discussion at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs on April 7. The panelists were Derek Penslar and Bret […]
Under the impact of the increasingly assertive and effective Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, launched by Palestinian activists about a decade ago, scores of American university campuses, particularly in California, have become contentious ideological battlegrounds. In attempting to consign Israel to the status of a pariah state worthy of condemnation, isolation and, ultimately, destruction, BDS […]
Blood libel, the scurrilous ritual murder accusation that has been levelled against Jews, is one of those terribly false myths that has caused untold suffering over the centuries. The accusation, which has been repeatedly denounced by Christian churches, is bound up with the patently absurd tall tale that Jews kill Christian children for ritual or […]
The status of Soviet Jews deteriorated sharply after World War II as the Cold War intensified and Jewish citizens in the now-defunct Soviet Union developed a more acute national identity, says a European scholar. Alongside this development, the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the Soviet state, headed by Joseph Stalin, was damaged by a […]
Adolf Hitler is the epitome of evil, the arch aggressor who ignited World War II and the malevolent force who conceived and implemented the Holocaust. For much of the period after 1945, Hitler’s Nazi regime was viewed through this prism, as the Federal Republic of Germany accepted full responsibility for Hitler’s unprecedented crimes against Jews […]