Books
City On A Hilltop
Of the roughly 400,000 Jews who’ve settled in the occupied territories since the 1967 Six Day War, approximately 60,000 are originally from the United States. These settlers have played an outsized role in establishing settlements beyond the old Green Line. Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a specialist in Israeli studies at Oxford University, zeroes in on this […]
Roads Taken: The Jewish Peddler
For about two centuries, from the late 1700s to the 1920s, the itinerant Jewish peddler was a perennial fixture in mostly rural landscapes around the globe. Weighed down by a pack on his back, or steering a horse-drawn cart crammed with trinkets and household products, he went house to house, farm to farm, mining camp […]
Leading Lady
Sherry Lansing broke the glass ceiling in Hollywood. The first woman to head a major movie studio, she was president of 20th Century Fox and chair of Paramount Pictures. As Stephen Galloway writes in the paperback edition of Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker (Three Rivers Press), she came of […]
The Fourth Reich
The “Fourth Reich” is an emotive slogan that conjures up diametrically different meanings. Originally a rallying cry for anti-Nazi resistance following the emergence of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the Fourth Reich was a progressive slogan promising a hopeful post-Nazi future. German Jewish refugees who had fled Germany after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 were […]
Canadian Jews In The Military In World War II
With the 74th anniversary of Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II fast approaching, spare a thought for the nearly 17,000 Jewish men and women who served in Canada’s armed forces and the 450 who laid down their lives for their country. Among the fatalities was Rose Goodman of Montreal, the first female officer in […]
Germany’s “Model” Occupation
Germany tried but failed to conquer the British mainland during World War II, but German forces nevertheless occupied a small bit of Britain, the Channel Islands. Lying closer to France than Britain, these predominately rural islands, near the coast of Normandy, were captured by the Germans on June 30, 1940 and held until May 9, […]
Mass Murder By Bullets
The Holocaust unfolded along two broad trajectories. In western and central Europe, Jews were deported to Nazi extermination camps in Poland, while in Soviet republics like Ukraine and Lithuania, they were usually murdered in mass shootings. While the deportations were often carried out in secret or at least discreetly, the executions took place in public, […]
U.S. Rescue Board Saved Jews
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board in 1944 to rescue European Jews imperilled by the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany and like-minded allies like Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. Although it was established long after millions of Jews already had been murdered in mass shootings and in […]
The Book Thieves
The 19th century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.” What an insightful prophecy! As the Holocaust — a Nazi genocidal project — unfolded throughout Europe during World War II, Germany engaged in the greatest book theft in history, ransacking private and public collections. “The […]
How Long Will Israel Survive?
Israel has never been as safe, prosperous and internationally accepted as it is today. Yet its future is uncertain, Gregg Carlstrom argues in How Long Will Israel Survive? The Threat From Within (Oxford University Press). According to Carlstrom, the Israel correspondent of The Economist and The Times of London, the Jewish state has never been so […]
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