Contemporary Israeli food is a fusion of diverse cuisines. Foreign conquerors, from the Greeks and the Romans to the Crusaders and the Ottomans, have swept through Israel, leaving behind gastronomic traces. But Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish immigrants, as well as Palestinian Arabs, have had the greatest impact on Israeli food, judging by Abraham’s Kitchen: Israeli and […]
Al Jolson was in a class all by himself. From about 1912 until 1934, he was the most highly paid entertainer in the United States. What Enrico Caruso was to opera, Jolson was to popular song. Jolson’s friend, the comedian George Burns, once said, “There was nobody as good as Jolson. When he got through, […]
Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and of the Soviet Union in 1941 set off mass migrations of Polish Jews eastward. Precise figures are hard to come by, but hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens participated in this desperate flight for survival. This topic was the subject of a conference at the Polin Museum of […]
Pandemics have shaped the world and Jews, in particular, have been victimized by them. Jeremy Brown, the author of The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to Covid-19 (Oxford University Press), argues that pandemics, such as the bubonic plague and typhus, have impacted Jews profoundly. “It was a story of which I was […]
Fredericka Mandelbaum was no ordinary immigrant. A German Jew, she arrived in New York City in a near penniless state in 1850. Within a few years, she had created one of the first organized crime rings in the United States. One of the most infamous underworld figures in the last half of the 19th century, […]
Hollywood aficionados are familiar with legendary movie moguls such as Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn or Jack Warner. But they often draw a blank when the brothers Joseph and Nicholas Schenck are mentioned. Their obscurity comes as no surprise, since they were reclusives averse to publicity. Despite their aversion to the spotlight, the Schencks were […]
Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Israeli soldiers guarding the border along the Gaza Strip noticed signs of an imminent attack. Around the same time, the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, General Yaron Finkelman, returned to his post after a vacation. At 6:29 a.m., as several thousand enemy rockets began raining […]
An inflection point in American history, the U.S. Civil War erupted less than a century after the formation of the United States. Resulting in the deaths of 620,000 soldiers, or six million by today’s calculation, it was the costliest war ever waged by the United States. Breaking out in 1861 and ending in 1865 with […]
They were burdened with the most gut-wrenching, repulsive job a Jewish inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland could possibly be assigned. Their gruesome task was to escort Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, remove their lifeless bodies, salvage valuables, transport the corpses to the crematoria, and destroy all evidence of their murders. Known […]
The fate of Jewish cemeteries in Poland has been abysmally dismal. Many of the estimated 1,200 Jewish graveyards in Poland, a country once home to 3.3 million Jews, have been bulldozed, built over and vandalized. Still others, having been totally neglected due to the mass murder of the Jewish population during the Holocaust, have been […]