As pro-Russian separatists battled to decouple eastern Ukraine from the rest of the country from 2014 onward, the Russian government claimed that Jews and other minorities were endangered by the new, pro-Western Ukrainian government, or, as it called it, the “fascist junta.” “Of course, this was pure agitprop, but that didn’t stop Russia’s state-controlled media […]
A small minority of emancipated Jews in 19th century Europe, having tasted a whiff of liberty and freedom as equal citizens under the law, went one step further. They converted to Christianity, leaving behind Judaism once and for all and fully integrating themselves into Christian societies. Ellie R. Schainker, a professor of history and Jewish […]
Of all the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis before and during World War II, the wanton theft of Jewish-owned books is probably the least known. Under the direction of Adolf Hitler’s fascist regime, Nazi thieves plundered millions of books in Germany and throughout Europe, in what was “the largest and most extensive book-looting campaign in […]
Karl Marx was a thinker whose theories about capitalism were revolutionary. Yet he was not a revolutionary activist. Marx’s Jewish background was common knowledge, but he never referred to it publicly. Yet he wrote “On the Jewish Question,” a controversial essay in which he advocated equal rights for Jews while defaming Judaism. Shlomo Avineri, a […]
Irving Berlin, the legendary American composer and lyricist, wrote some 1,500 songs, including God Bless America and White Christmas, and two Broadway musical hits, Call Me Madame and Annie Get Your Gun, and was widely considered the greatest songwriter of the 20th century. “Berlin has no place in American music,” his fellow composer, Jerome Kern, wrote […]
Very unusually, Massoud Hayoun describes himself as “an Arab American man of the Jewish faith” and an “Arab first and last.” “Judaism is an adjective that modifies my Arabness,” he writes in his nostalgic-drenched book, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History (The New Press). Hayoun, a Los Angeles-based journalist who has reported for […]
The philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a towering figure in academia, an interpreter of Jewish mysticism and Hassidism, and a dissident figure in the Zionist movement. The first major biography in English of this seminal German-Jewish thinker in more than three decades has been published. It is written by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a professor emeritus at […]
Roughly 130,000 German and Austrian Jews immigrated to the United States from 1933 until 1945. Victims of Nazi oppression, they struggled to adjust to a new society as they learned English, adapted to different customs and looked for jobs. For many of these emigres, particularly in New York City, the German-language newspaper Aufbau was a […]
White supremacist John Timothy Earnest attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, on the last day of Passover in 2019, killing a 60-year-old congregant and wounding its founding rabbi. In a manifesto posted online, Earnest, 19, invoked an incident that occurred on Easter Sunday in 1475 in the town of Trent. As he wrote, “You are […]
Israel and the Soviet Union were enmeshed in an intense clash of arms in the Sinai Peninsula from the end of the 1967 Six Day War until the conclusion of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Soviets poured more than 50,000 advisors, technicians and pilots into this effort on behalf of its defeated Arab ally, […]