Who betrayed the celebrated Dutch Jewish diarist Anne Frank? That’s the burning question Canadian historian Rosemary Sullivan addresses in her deeply-researched, probing book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (HarperCollins). Anne and her family, along with four other Jews fleeing Nazi genocidal tyranny, lived in a claustrophobic attic in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district during […]
When Pearl (Polly) Adler disembarked at Ellis Island in 1913, she was among 13,588 “unaccompanied Jewish girls” from Eastern Europe who had landed in New York City in that year, according to the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society. On the day she left her home in Yanow — a sleepy and changeless village of […]
When World War I ended in 1918, a wave of antisemitic violence erupted in about 500 cities, towns and villages in territory contested by Ukrainians, Russians and Poles. During the course of this blood-soaked era, which coincided with the outbreak of a civil war in the newly-created Soviet Union, almost two-thirds of all Jewish homes […]
Canadian historian John-Paul Himka has written an illuminating, important, ground-breaking and grim book about an exceedingly dark chapter in Ukraine’s history. It goes without saying that most Ukrainians would probably prefer to shove this terrible, blood-soaked interregnum under the carpet, all the more so since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Himka, a professor […]
David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021, is a true believer. A committed Orthodox Jew, he fervently believed that U.S. policy toward Israel was insufficiently supportive. A hardliner, he thought that Israel was entitled to build settlements in the West Bank, annex parts of it, and block the creation of an […]
Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest, was the voice of the Christian Front, an extreme right-wing organization dedicated to cleansing the United States of Jews and communists. One of the most popular American broadcasters of the 1930s and 1940s, he was also the editor of Social Justice, a widely read newspaper that disseminated […]
The biggest threat to Israel’s long-term stability is its lack of a formal constitution, says Arye Carmon, the founding president of the Israel Democracy Institute, which is dedicated to promoting and strengthening democratic values in the Jewish state. Carmon, a philosopher and historian, expounds on this theme in Building Democracy On Sand: Israel Without A […]
Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defence League, was an exponent of counter-culture politics and a voice of illiberalism. Assassinated more than three decades ago, he is the subject of Shaul Magid’s erudite and penetrating book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, published by Princeton University Press. […]
Harry Frank Guggenheim was an American capitalist titan who guided his immensely wealthy family into modernity. He was also a visionary who foresaw that aviation would be fundamental to the transportation infrastructure of the United States and a financial backer of the father of modern rocketry, Robert Goddard. In addition, he was instrumental in the […]
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 […]