Sherry Lansing broke the glass ceiling in Hollywood. The first woman to head a major movie studio, she was president of 20th Century Fox and chair of Paramount Pictures. As Stephen Galloway writes in the paperback edition of Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker (Three Rivers Press), she came of […]
The “Fourth Reich” is an emotive slogan that conjures up diametrically different meanings. Originally a rallying cry for anti-Nazi resistance following the emergence of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the Fourth Reich was a progressive slogan promising a hopeful post-Nazi future. German Jewish refugees who had fled Germany after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 were […]
With the 74th anniversary of Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II fast approaching, spare a thought for the nearly 17,000 Jewish men and women who served in Canada’s armed forces and the 450 who laid down their lives for their country. Among the fatalities was Rose Goodman of Montreal, the first female officer in […]
Germany tried but failed to conquer the British mainland during World War II, but German forces nevertheless occupied a small bit of Britain, the Channel Islands. Lying closer to France than Britain, these predominately rural islands, near the coast of Normandy, were captured by the Germans on June 30, 1940 and held until May 9, […]
The Holocaust unfolded along two broad trajectories. In western and central Europe, Jews were deported to Nazi extermination camps in Poland, while in Soviet republics like Ukraine and Lithuania, they were usually murdered in mass shootings. While the deportations were often carried out in secret or at least discreetly, the executions took place in public, […]
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board in 1944 to rescue European Jews imperilled by the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany and like-minded allies like Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. Although it was established long after millions of Jews already had been murdered in mass shootings and in […]
The 19th century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.” What an insightful prophecy! As the Holocaust — a Nazi genocidal project — unfolded throughout Europe during World War II, Germany engaged in the greatest book theft in history, ransacking private and public collections. “The […]
Israel has never been as safe, prosperous and internationally accepted as it is today. Yet its future is uncertain, Gregg Carlstrom argues in How Long Will Israel Survive? The Threat From Within (Oxford University Press). According to Carlstrom, the Israel correspondent of The Economist and The Times of London, the Jewish state has never been so […]
Derek Black, the great white hope of the neo-Nazi movement in the United States, disavowed his beliefs in 2013, transformed himself and disappeared from view. Eli Saslow, a Washington Post reporter who wondered what had happened, tracked him down and interviewed Black and his family and friends. Saslow’s compelling book, Rising Out of Hatred: The […]
Founded in 1866, just a year after the U.S. Civil War ended, the Ku Klux Klan was established as a secret fraternal organization whose aim was to promote white supremacy and reimpose servitude on African Americans by various means of terrorism, including lynchings. Concentrated in southern states that had formed the Confederacy, the Klan faded […]