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 Today, with Israel having withdrawn […]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 […]
Of the roughly 400,000 Jews who’ve settled in the occupied territories since the 1967 Six Day War, approximately 60,000 are originally from the United States. These settlers have played an outsized role in establishing settlements beyond the old Green Line. Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a specialist in Israeli studies at Oxford University, zeroes in on this […]
For about two centuries, from the late 1700s to the 1920s, the itinerant Jewish peddler was a perennial fixture in mostly rural landscapes around the globe. Weighed down by a pack on his back, or steering a horse-drawn cart crammed with trinkets and household products, he went house to house, farm to farm, mining camp […]