The first historians to conduct research on the Holocaust in Poland were its Jewish survivors. “They pioneered the study of the Holocaust from the perspective of the Jewish experience,” writes Mark L. Smith in The Yiddish Historians And The Struggle For A Jewish History Of The Holocaust, published by Wayne State University Press. As he […]
Toward the end of Tarzan Triumphs, the seventh of twelve Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller as the fictitious ape man, he exclaims, “Nazis bring trouble.” What an understatement! Tarzan should have reached this conclusion much sooner in this wartime film, but what do you expect from a primitive man cut off from the world and […]
Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yet again, was sworn in on December 29, nearly two months after he and his allies won a parliamentary majority in the November 1 general election, the fifth since 2019. By any yardstick, this is the most right-wing, religiously conservative government in Israel’s history. Critics, lambasting […]
Among the distinguished historians of the Holocaust, Michael Marrus was the sole Canadian in that exalted group. A University of Toronto professor for close to 50 years, he was the author of eight books, at least two of which are standards in the field, and a panoply of monographs. It would be fair to say […]
Jews in ancient Israel lived under a succession of foreign imperial invaders ranging from the Egyptians and the Assyrians to the Babylonians and the Persians. But as Katell Berthelot argues in Jews And Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge To Israel (Princeton University Press), the Roman Empire posed “a unique ideological challenge for Jews ” […]
It goes without saying that the Nazis had no interest whatsoever in the well-being and health of the captive Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto. But because they feared that diseases and epidemics might spread beyond it and endanger German personnel and afflict the general Polish population, they provided a bare modicum of assistance to […]
A new, more positive phase in Christian-Jewish relations was ushered in when the Vatican, in the 1960s, officially modified its public attitude toward Jews. At the Second Vatican Council, which convened from 1962 to 1965, the Roman Catholic church issued its historic Nostra Aetate declaration, which renounced the deicide accusation against Jews, underscored the common […]
In Israel’s most recent general election on November 1, its fifth in three years, right-wing parties triumphed and a left-wing party was all but decimated as Benjamin Netanyahu roared back to power after 18 months in opposition. Netanyahu and his allies — the Religious Zionist Party, United Torah Judaism and Shas — won 64 out […]
A kind of justice prevailed in the recent war crimes trial of Irmgard Furchner, one of the last surviving Germans who worked in a Nazi extermination camp as a civilian employee. Now 97, Furchner was employed in Stutthof, a camp near Gdansk, Poland, where about 65,000 people, 28,000 of whom were Jews, perished by way […]
It was a brief political partnership, yet it was remarkably eventful and predictably disappointing. Naftali Bennett, a rightist, and Yair Lapid, a centrist, formed an expedient alliance after the inconclusive 2021 general election in Israel. They agreed to share power in a rainbow coalition government of right-wing, centrist and left-wing parties whose overarching objective was […]