Jerold S. Auerbach began reading The New York Times, one of America’s preeminent daily newspapers, way back in 1945. He has since started his day with the broadsheet, but claims it has a “Jewish problem.” A professor emeritus of history at Wellesley College, he sets out his argument in Print to Fit — The New York Times, […]
Saudi Arabia was mired in the medieval past when American prospectors discovered oil deposits beneath its desert sands in 1938. Prior to this seismic event, the Arabian peninsula had hardly changed in centuries, its deeply conservative inhabitants still dependent on traditional ways of earning a livelihood –raising livestock, working in agriculture, fishing and pearl diving, […]
Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini persecuted its Jewish citizens and played an integral role in deporting thousands of them to German extermination camps. Italy, nevertheless, has tried to distance itself from this shameful period, attempting to leave the misleading impression that Italians had only positive feelings for Jews and blaming Germany, its former ally, for […]
Three months before Japan attacked the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Charles Lindbergh addressed a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, to rail against the prospect of American intervention in World War II. Speaking as a member of the American First Committee, a non-profit isolationist organization that was officially incorporated in September […]
The Six Day War, Israel’s greatest military victory over its Arab foes, opened up a can of worms, to put it in the vernacular. Israel’s conquest of the Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1967 ignited a passionate debate about the future of the occupied territories. Today, with Israel having withdrawn […]
With the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia a fait accompli, Jews were tarred with the accusation that they had fomented and directed it. “Judeo-Bolshevism — the idea that Jews had created and supported Bolshevism and were therefore responsible for its crimes — was an explosive charge that had dangerous and often lethal consequences for Jews […]
Krystyna Bierzynska is a Holocaust survivor par excellence. Born in Warsaw in 1928, the daughter of assimilated Polish Jews who perished during the six-year German occupation of Poland, she managed to leave the Polish capital as Jews were being herded into the doomed Nazi ghetto. In 1944, as a member of the underground Home Army, she […]
Founded in the 19th century as a manufacturer of brewing and malting equipment, J.A. Topf and Sons branched into a new business in the 1930s. From that point onward, the family-owned company, based in Erfurt, Germany, began producing industrial-scale ovens and ventilation systems to meet a growing demand for human cremations, a more modern, regulated […]
On September 6, 2007, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the still unfinished al-Kibar nuclear reactor in northeastern Syria being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy. Yaakov Katz’s absorbing book, Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission To Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin’s Press), tells the story of this daring mission from […]
It comes as no surprise that home-grown fascists in Western Europe collaborated with the German occupation of their respective countries during World War II. Philip Morgan, in Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Oxford University Press), mentions them in his wide-ranging book, of course. But what really interests him are not […]