The Holocaust was set in motion not by one single momentous decision, but by several key events. The Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942 was one of those pivotal moments, or turning points, in Nazi Germany’s inexorable march toward genocide. Eighty years on, British historian Peter Longerich has written Wannsee: The Road to the Final […]
Karol Modzelewski was an iconoclast writ large, one of Poland’s leading dissidents during the communist era. A dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, he was Jewish by birth, yet identified as a Pole. He belonged to the Communist Party, yet openly criticized it. His fearlessness cost him dearly. During the 1960s and 1980s, he languished in prison for a […]
Israel’s strategic alliance with the United States took shape between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1975 Sinai II disengagement agreement. This historic process was pushed forward on the American side by politicians in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Kenneth Kolander argues persuasively in America’s Israel: The U.S. Congress and American-Israeli Relations […]
Otto Preminger’s filmography is well known to cineastes. In a career spanning continents and decades, he directed movies ranging from Laura and Anatomy of a Murder to Exodus and Advise and Consent. Some were extraordinarily good. Still others, such as Skidoo and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, were rubbish. Born in Poland […]
German historian Volker Ullrich spent eight years working on his two-volume magisterial biography of Adolf Hitler, whom his colleague, Golo Mann, has rightfully labelled as a “repulsive subject.” In the first book, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, Ullrich meticulously charted his trajectory from Austrian-born demagogue to Germany’s chancellor. The volume under review, Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 (Alfred A. […]
It has been compared to Grunewald and Dahlem, two of the most sedate suburbs in western Berlin. Rehavia, a neighborhood in West Jerusalem near the Mahane Yehuda market and the old city in East Jerusalem, reminds the German writer Thomas Sparr of both cities. To him, Rehavia is new yet familiar. When he lived in […]
Ferenc Andai, a Hungarian Jew, was plunged into purgatory on May 16, 1944, when he was press-ganged into fascist Hungary’s forced labor service. He was only 19 when, along with 6,000 other Hungarians, mostly Jews, he was consigned to a copper mine in Bor, a town in Nazi-occupied Serbia. For the next four months, he was […]
Claudio Lomnitz’s ancestors were wanderers, as his book suggests. Lomnitz, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, has written a ruminative memoir about his family that will surely strike a chord with Jewish families that were forced to leave their ancestral homes in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th […]
Known as the Angel of Death, he was the personification of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and the embodiment of the Holocaust. Josef Mengele, a minor yet haunting figure in Nazi culture, was a German physician who cold-bloodedly determined the fate of new Jewish arrivals at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland and who conducted cruel […]
Ten thousand refugees from Germany and Austria settled in the greater Los Angeles area between 1933 and 1941. A significant proportion of the newcomers were Jewish writers, composers, artists, actors and film and theater directors. Among them were Salomea Sara Steuermann, an actress, and her husband, Berthold Viertel, a screenwriter. They were Nazi Germany’s gift […]