Jonathan Weisman’s cri de coeur, Semitism: Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump (St. Martin’s Press), is unsettling. Published several months before 11 Jews were slaughtered by a crazed neo-Nazi in the Tree of Life Congregation massacre in Pittsburgh on October 27, it’s a polemic on the alt-right and antisemitism set against the […]
When Polish-Jewish relations are discussed at any length, one of the topics that usually evokes heated debate revolves around the relationship between the Home Army (AK) and Jews. The largest resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe, the AK had an estimated membership of 350,000 and represented a cross-section of Polish society. In general accounts of modern […]
A vast and incredibly beautiful preserve of mountains, forests, meadows, lakes and rivers northwest of New York City, the Catskills were the first great vacationland in the United States. Discovered in its pristine form by the British explorer Henry Hudson in 1609 and by tourists in its holiday mode about two centuries later, it was a […]
Canadian scholar Anna Shternshis focuses on the lives of Jews in the Soviet Union before, during and after World War II in her thoroughly-researched and wide-ranging book, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin (Oxford University Press). A Soviet immigrant herself and the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Center for […]
James Grover McDonald, the first U.S. ambassador to Israel, kept a diary from the moment he arrived in the Jewish state in 1948 until the day he finished his duties in 1951. An academic and a journalist, he was personally chosen for the post by President Harry Truman after Washington’s recognition of Israel. At first, […]
The strategic relationship between the “mosque” and the “market” is explored by Aisha Ahmad in her bracingly original book, Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power, published by Oxford University Press. Ahmad, an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Toronto, focuses her attention on unstable and ungovernable parts […]
When the Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer was researching his now-published biography of Benjamin Netanyahu, he requested interviews with him. All his requests, formal and informal, were ignored. But when Pfeffer — the Israel correspondent of The Economist — and senior editors of the British magazine met Netanyahu in his office one day, the Israeli prime minister turned […]
It was, as Steven J. Zipperstein writes in his cinematically vivid book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright Publishing), “a dreadful moment” burned into the souls of Jews. He is referring to the unbridled anti-Jewish violence that broke out in Kishinev — a provincial Bessarabian city on the edge of the Russian empire — […]
During the interwar period, Poland, with a Jewish population of 3.3 million, was an incubator for the development of right-wing Zionism. Its foremost proponent, the Russian-born Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, was the founder of Betar, one of the most popular Zionist youth movements in Europe. Claiming a world-wide membership of some 60,000, of whom 45,000 lived […]
In one of the most iconic photographs of World War I, printed by the mass-circulation Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in August 1914, a young German soldier mounted on a horse reaches down to two civilians to bid farewell as his cavalry battalion makes its way to the front from Berlin’s elegant Unter den Linden thoroughfare. Unbeknownst to readers […]