Early on in her book, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press), Mary Fulbrook writes, “The Nazi past continues to disturb.” What an understatement. In this massive and erudite work, Fulbrook — a professor of German history at University College in London — delves deeply into an interrelated web […]
It is 1930 and Edgar Feuchtwanger, a six-year-old German Jewish boy, is standing adjacent to one of his neighbors, Adolf Hitler. The up-and-coming Austrian-born politician is waiting to be picked up outside his elegant apartment building on 16 Prinzregentenplatz in a sedate residential district of Munich. “I can see he’s cut himself shaving, as my […]
Polish Jews invested high hopes in Poland’s campaign for independence from Russia and its rebirth as a sovereign state in 1918. But the period during which these events transpired coincided with the most widespread and possibly deadliest antisemitic violence in modern Polish history. Nearly 300 pogroms and anti-Jewish riots erupted in areas either still under […]
New Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States in the first years of the 20th century usually settled in big northern cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston or in nearby smaller towns. Scarcely any went to, say, Mississippi, an antebellum southern state defined by the strictures of segregation and populated by a very small […]
The immortal words of Emma Lazarus’ poem, The New Colossus, are cast on a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my […]
The roller coaster process during which Jews in Germany were emancipated in the 19th century, only to be deprived of all their rights during the Nazi era and then murdered in the Holocaust, is the subject of Jay Howard Geller’s superb book, The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoise From Emancipation To Destruction, published […]
American historian Rafael Medoff has written an impressive and important book about the United States, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The Jews Should Keep Quiet: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society) is an unsparing condemnation of a president who was slow to help Jewish refugees and […]
Known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Salonica — an Aegean port situated at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East — was once home to the world’s largest Sephardic Jewish community. One of the jewels of the sprawling Ottoman Empire, the city was annexed by Greece in 1913 and renamed Thessaloniki, an upheaval that […]
Zalman Shoval was Israel’s two-time ambassador to the United States during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Shoval, posted to Washington from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1998 to 2000, served four Israeli prime ministers. His term of office coincided with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the outbreak of the first Gulf […]
It’s essentially an irrational, delusional and absurd phenomenon, but it’s been around for ages and has gotten stronger of late. This corrosive and destructive conspiracy theory, otherwise known as antisemitism, is the world’s oldest form of hatred. Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, casts a practiced […]