Books
Warsaw Is My Country
Krystyna Bierzynska is a Holocaust survivor par excellence. Born in Warsaw in 1928, the daughter of assimilated Polish Jews who perished during the six-year German occupation of Poland, she managed to leave the Polish capital as Jews were being herded into the doomed Nazi ghetto. In 1944, as a member of the underground Home Army, she […]
Architects Of Death
Founded in the 19th century as a manufacturer of brewing and malting equipment, J.A. Topf and Sons branched into a new business in the 1930s. From that point onward, the family-owned company, based in Erfurt, Germany, began producing industrial-scale ovens and ventilation systems to meet a growing demand for human cremations, a more modern, regulated […]
Shadow Strike
On September 6, 2007, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the still unfinished al-Kibar nuclear reactor in northeastern Syria being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy. Yaakov Katz’s absorbing book, Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission To Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin’s Press), tells the story of this daring mission from […]
Hitler’s Collaborators
It comes as no surprise that home-grown fascists in Western Europe collaborated with the German occupation of their respective countries during World War II. Philip Morgan, in Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Oxford University Press), mentions them in his wide-ranging book, of course. But what really interests him are not […]
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, […]
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