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Being Palestinian

What is it like being a Palestinian living outside the homeland? Seventy years after the eruption of the first Arab-Israeli war, which led to the dispossession of some 500,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel and to the intensification of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, this question remains very relevant. […]

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A Magisterial Biography Of Hitler

Delivering a lecture in 1979, the German scholar Eberhard Jackel nailed it when he said, “We Germans were liberated from (Adolf) Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off. Hitler will always be with us … He is present — not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are […]

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Ernest Hemingway: A Biography

From the moment I learned to appreciate fine literature, Ernest Hemingway became one of my favorite authors. I admired his style, his lean, supple, simple, flowing, effortless and evocative prose, which manifested itself beautifully in novels such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and in short stories such as The Killers.   Mary V. Dearborn’s illuminating […]

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A German Against The Third Reich

Friedrich Kellner, a German civil servant, kept a secret diary from 1939 to 1945 in which he charted Germany’s inexorable descent into war, totalitarianism and genocide. A committed Social Democrat and a steadfast opponent of Nazism, he was born in Mainz and lived in the small Upper Hesse town of Laubach, 73 kilometres northeast of […]

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Einstein’s German World: Hospitality And Hostility

German Jews found a “spiritual home” in German culture, philosophy, literature and music after their emancipation in 1871. During this period, when Germany was on the ascendancy as a great power, Germans generally related to Jews with a mixture of hospitality and hostility. In plain language, the tentative acceptance of Jews into German society was […]

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The Holocaust Through Muslim Eyes

Mehnaz Afridi is appalled by two troubling phenomena in Muslim communities — the “lack of understanding” of the Holocaust and the “growing antisemitism.” She should know. An Indian Muslim born in Pakistan, she’s director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College, a Catholic liberal arts institution in New York City. It’s […]

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Revolutionary Yiddishland

The Jewish working class of Eastern Europe has passed into the mists of time, but during its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it produced a remarkable cadre of utopian revolutionaries ranging from Socialists and Communists to Bundists and Zionists. Whether manual workers or intellectuals, they emerged from what was the Pale […]

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Becoming Ottomans

Julia Phillips Cohen’s path-breaking book, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era, published by Oxford University Press, is the first to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. The process, which began with the Tanzimat reforms enacted by the Ottoman Empire from 1839-1876,  emancipated non-Muslim minorities. From that […]

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Jewish Volunteers In The Spanish Civil War

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was a defining moment in the leadup to World War II. Pitting two diametrically opposed ideologies against each other, the three-year conflict was ostensibly a struggle between the left-of-center Republicans and the right-wing Nationalists. On a broader level, it was effectively a proxy war between the fascism […]

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Arab Nationalism In The Twentieth Century

Arab intellectuals and leaders have long been animated by the holy grail of Arab nationalism, an ideology which proclaims that Arabs are one nation, glorifies Arab civilization, language and literature and espouses the necessity of a single Arab state. This utopian idea was in its heyday during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s presidency of Egypt, but in […]