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 […]
Avi Shlaim’s intriguing, ideologically-driven book, Three Worlds: Memoirs Of An Arab Jew (OneWorld), is a bitter-sweet autobiography of an accomplished Iraqi Jew who left his homeland under duress, an impassioned look back at Iraq’s lost Jewish community, and a stinging critique of Zionism and Israel. He acknowledges that this is a “revisionist tract,” a “challenge […]
Some of Hollywood’s best films, notably It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town and You Can’t Take It With You, were written by Robert Riskin, one of its finest screenwriters. During his heyday in the mid-1930s, when he was one of the most high-profile, well-paid scriptwriters, he basked in critical acclaim and enjoyed […]
In the winter of 1947, Theodor Korner, the socialist mayor of Vienna, went to the city’s central train station to greet 760 Viennese Jews returning from exile abroad. Like tens of thousands of other Jews, they had been driven out after the Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. On the eve of World […]
Bruno Schulz, the great graphic artist and luminous writer, was a displaced and uprooted person par excellence. He was born an Austrian during the Austro-Hungarian empire. He held Ukrainian and Polish citizenship during the duration of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Second Polish Republic. And he died as a persecuted Jew during the […]