Shortly after his appointment as prime minister in 1940, Winston Churchill ordered the detention of thousands of German and Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution. Known as enemy aliens, they were rounded up in the prevailing belief that German spies in the country posed a security threat to Britain. […]
For decades, Jews lived under the thumb of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its subservient satellite states in Eastern Europe. They were not always treated equally, notwithstanding the communist dogma that every citizen enjoyed equal rights. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, turned against Russian Jews in the late 1940s, marginalizing them and crushing […]
As Israeli troops swept into West Beirut in mid-September of 1982, they raided a high-rise building housing the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Research Center on Colombani Street in the heart of the cosmopolitan Ras Beirut neighborhood. In short order, they seized a vast library of books about Israel, Zionism, Judaism and Jews and […]
Algiers was a major trading port in the Mediterranean Sea at the end of the Napoleonic wars in the late 18th century and four decades into the next century. Merchant ships brought in a constant flow of luxury goods prized by the ruling Turkish elite, stevedores loaded outgoing vessels with Algerian grain, wool, meat, leather […]
Tony Bernard’s thoughtful and absorbing book, The Ghost Tattoo (Citadel Press), is dedicated to his late father, Henry Bierzynski Bernard, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who was traumatized by it. At the very least, his memoir is intensely personal. As he writes, “It is also a part of my long journey to get closer […]
The distinguished American food writer Joan Nathan began writing her latest book, My Life In Recipes: Food, Family And Memories (Alfred A. Knopf), at a sad but portentous time. Her husband of 42 years, Allan Gerson, had just died, and she had reached the golden age of 80. In this, her twelfth book, she covers […]
Marty Glickman was a renowned radio broadcaster, having been the voice of the New York Giants football team and the New York Knicks basketball club for close to half a century. But his real claim to “fame” was his shocking removal from a signature track and field event at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. […]
Adolf Hitler captured hearts and minds because the bulk of Germans shared his beliefs and grievances. They embraced Nazi ideology, an amalgam of nationalism, socialism, militarism and antisemitic conspiracy theories, and rejected the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which blamed Germany for the outbreak of World War I, reduced its territory, limited its armed forces, and […]
According to James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank, he was the greatest banker of his generation. Edmond J. Safra, the object of his admiration, was the founder and chief executive officer of the Republic National Bank of New York, the Banco Safra in Brazil, the Trade Development Bank in Geneva, and Safra […]
The war that Israel has been waging against Hamas and other armed groups in the Gaza Strip since last October has raised some unsettling issues and truths. Since its eruption, we have seen that a minority of Jews in the United States are anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. Jewish Voice for Peace has mounted demonstrations calling for […]