The title of Efraim Shmueli’s book, The Last Generation of Jews in Poland (Academic Studies Press), is a little misleading. Shmueli, a Polish Jew born in Lodz in 1908, focuses on the storied Jewish community of Poland during the 1920s, when it was home to 3.3 million Jews, representing nine percent of its population. It […]
Anna Marie Rosenberg may be the most famous American woman you have never heard of. Life magazine, in the 1950s, described her “far and away the most important woman in the American government, and perhaps the most important official female in the world.” Life may well have been engaging in hyperbole, but Rosenberg was certainly […]
During a ten-month period from December 1938 until September 1939, Britain admitted more than 10,000 refugees up to the age of 18 from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland under a special immigration program known as the kindertransport. Introduced a month after the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, it was a hastily assembled visa waiver scheme financed […]
One of the most successful European politicians of the 20th century, Bruno Kreisky, was an Austrian Jew who was successively foreign minister of Austria, leader of Austria’s Socialist Party, and, from 1970 to 1983, Austria’s longest serving and only Jewish chancellor. Kreisky is the subject of Daniel Ascheim’s biography, Kreisky, Israel, and Jewish Identity, published […]
Akira Kitade tells two interlocking stories in Emerging Heroes: World War II-Era Diplomats, Jewish Refugees, And Escape To Japan, published by Academic Studies Press. First, he introduces readers to Tatsuo Osaka, an official in the Japan Tourist Bureau — later known as the Japan National Tourist Organization — who helped Jewish refugees travel from the […]
You’ve probably never heard of Henry Mandel. Neither had I until I read Without Permission: Conversations, Letters, And Memoirs Of Henry Mandel, published by Cherry Orchard Books, distributed by Academic Studies Press, and edited by Mandel’s grandson, Samuel Flaks. A machinist who died in New York City in 2015, Mandel was an ardent American Zionist […]
Exactly a century ago, Germany was on the edge of the precipice, muddling through a year that could easily be classified as annus horribilis. Still struggling from its ignominious defeat in World War I, Germany was reaping its whirlwind. France and Belgium, having lost patience with Germany’s failure to honor its crushing reparation commitments, invaded […]
Judy Rakowsky, an American journalist of Polish-Jewish descent, visited Poland in a succession of trips from 1991 onward in an effort to solve an enduring mystery on behalf of her older cousin, Sam Rakowsky. The issue at hand was the fate of his 16-year-old relative, Hena Rozenek, who vanished after her parents, sisters and brother […]
Hamas, the Islamic movement that has been embroiled in fierce combat with Israel in the Gaza Strip since the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and foreigners on October 7, was founded by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin 36 years ago this month during the opening days of the first Palestinian uprising. Its status as an important component of […]
Israel’s fifth war in 25 years is the subject of Uri Kaufman’s masterful book, Eighteen Days In October: The Yom Kippur War And How It Created The Modern Middle East, published by St. Martin’s Press. Oddly enough, Kaufman is a real estate developer rather than a historian, but readers should not draw hasty and unwarranted […]