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 […]
Three Nazi extermination camps were built in German-occupied Poland to murder Polish Jews on a systematic basis. The first one, Belzec, was 125 kilometres southeast of Lublin. The second one, Sobibor, was near Chelm and northeast of Lublin. The third one, Treblinka, was about 100 kilometres northeast of Warsaw. Situated on or close to major […]
Cyril (Cy) Endfield, an American movie and theater director, will be remembered for his intense action dramas and his flight to Britain to rebuild his shattered career after he refused to cooperate with a U.S. congressional committee investigating purported communist influence in the Hollywood film industry. Nearly thirty years after his death, Endfield’s star has […]
When The Third Reich collapsed in 1945 after 12 miserable years of existence, the victorious Allies vowed to hunt down Nazi war criminals “to the ends of the earth.” Fixated on this objective, the Nuremberg war crimes trial went ahead and a de-Nazification process was launched in the newly-created Federal Republic of Germany. But as […]
The title of Efraim Shmueli’s book, The Last Generation of Jews in Poland (Academic Studies Press), is a little misleading. Shmueli, a Polish Jew born in Lodz in 1908, focuses on the storied Jewish community of Poland during the 1920s, when it was home to 3.3 million Jews, representing nine percent of its population. It […]
Anna Marie Rosenberg may be the most famous American woman you have never heard of. Life magazine, in the 1950s, described her “far and away the most important woman in the American government, and perhaps the most important official female in the world.” Life may well have been engaging in hyperbole, but Rosenberg was certainly […]
During a ten-month period from December 1938 until September 1939, Britain admitted more than 10,000 refugees up to the age of 18 from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland under a special immigration program known as the kindertransport. Introduced a month after the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, it was a hastily assembled visa waiver scheme financed […]
One of the most successful European politicians of the 20th century, Bruno Kreisky, was an Austrian Jew who was successively foreign minister of Austria, leader of Austria’s Socialist Party, and, from 1970 to 1983, Austria’s longest serving and only Jewish chancellor. Kreisky is the subject of Daniel Ascheim’s biography, Kreisky, Israel, and Jewish Identity, published […]