At the ripe old age of 84, the political war horse Bernie Sanders is still going strong. The longest serving independent in U.S. congressional history, he has been fixture in American politics since the early 1980s. He was mayor of Burlington, the biggest city in the state of Vermont, from 1981 to 1989. He was […]
Certain Polish nationalists were prepared to reach an accommodation with Nazi Germany, despite its record of atrocities in Poland. As might be recalled, six million Polish citizens, including three million Jews, perished during the six-year German occupation. The Israeli historian Yaacov Falkov meticulously documents the sporadic negotiations between the Polish government-in-exile in Britain and Germany […]
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), the Polish Jewish sociologist and philosopher, lived through the hardest of times. He experienced a glimpse of the Holocaust in Poland before fleeing to the Soviet Union. And, as a communist in the postwar People’s Republic of Poland, he was ostracized as a Jew and compelled to leave. After an interregnum in […]
President Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized the Hollywood film industry to boost national morale and enhance understanding of the United States’ participation in World War II. Jewish directors and screenwriters ranging from George Cukor to Budd Schulberg played a significant role in wartime filmmaking. They produced documentaries and movies that were at once educational, entertaining and […]
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, […]