An unusual chapter in Russian history unfolded between 1827 and 1856, when Jewish boys and men were kidnapped and forcibly brought to camps, known as cantons, to be trained as soldiers in the Tzarist army. Often snatched when they were as young as six years old, they were sent to vocational schools, after which they […]
The Ku Klux Klan, the most powerful far-right American movement during the 1920s, was far more potent than its white supremacist forebearer, which emerged following the U.S. civil war. With a membership of over one million within a few years of its founding, it amassed more political power than any Klan before or since. Its […]
It was unlike any day in Israel’s history. On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip stormed into southern Israel, unleashing an atrocity on a scale that Jews thought was no longer possible after Israel’s creation in 1948. Israel was caught “completely by surprise,” write Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot in […]
There have been no shortage of books about Jews in Canada in the past three decades. What comes to mind are the following: None Is Too Many, by Harold Troper and Irving Abella; The Jews in Canada, edited by Robert J. Brym, William Shaffir and Morton Weinfeld; Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish […]
The saga of Germans who despised the Nazi regime and struggled against it can be inspirational. Rhonda Lauritzen delves into that topic in A Child In Berlin (Post Hill Press). She does so through the lives of one German woman, Heidi Posnien, and her mother, Kathe Wypych. The Posiens were German citizens of Polish ethnicity from […]
Christophe Lebold’s lyrical biography of the Canadian singer and literary figure, Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw The Angels Fall (ECW Press), is definitive in its comprehensiveness. The author, a professor of literature at the University of Strasbourg in France, befriended Cohen, and his admiration of him shines through the pages of this massive book, […]
Jan Grabowski, the Polish Canadian historian, grapples with an extremely sensitive topic in his latest book, Whitewash: Poland And The Jews (New Jewish Press/University of Toronto). A specialist in Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, he examines the degree to which the previous right-wing government in Poland attempted to control the narrative regarding the role […]
October 7, 2023, a day of infamy when hordes of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel in an unprecedented attack, was Marsha Lederman’s “last normal night.” Lederman is a child of Holocaust survivors from Poland who grew up haunted by nightmares of being hunted by Nazis. This “ludicrous, irrational fear came to life” as Hamas gunmen wreaked […]
On January 25, 2011, the Los Angeles-based journalist and publisher Elio Zarmati received a phone call from an old friend in Switzerland he had grown up with in Egypt. Their conversation was about the popular uprising, centered in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, that had erupted in Egypt and would lead to the resignation of […]
Germany, in 1941, launched a vigorous propaganda campaign to curry favor with Muslims in the Middle East, the Balkans, Crimea and the Caucasus, territories the German army had conquered or intended to capture. Two of Germany’s major allies, Italy and Japan, made similar efforts to recruit Muslims on their side during World War II. Germany’s […]