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Viennese Jews After The Holocaust

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 […]

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Bruno Schulz — An Austrian, A Jew And A Pole

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 […]

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Confronting Saddam Hussein

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the most consequential American foreign policy decision of the 21st century, is scrutinized in minute detail by the historian Melvyn Leffler in Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press). Leffler, an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Virginia, […]

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The Montreal Shtetl

From 1947 until 1950, Canada admitted just over 98,000 European refugees, of whom 11,064, or 11 percent, were Holocaust survivors who had spent the previous postwar years in displaced persons camps in Germany. My late parents, David and Genia Kirshner, who barely survived the war in the Lodz ghetto, the last Nazi ghetto in occupied […]

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The World The Plague Made

Known as the Black Death, the bubonic plague was probably the most devastating pandemic in history, far more deadly than the most recent coronavirus virus outbreak. It began in 1345 and lasted for more than 300 years. Consisting of 30 major epidemics, it killed upwards of one-third of Europe’s population and depopulated much of the […]

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Down And Out In Paradise

Anthony Bourdain, the bestselling author and successful television host, hanged himself in a rustic hotel in Kaysersberg, France, on June 8, 2018 at the height of his fame. He was 61. At his death, he was in the midst of filming the latest episode of his immensely popular food and travel show, Parts Unknown, which […]

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Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father Of Modern Poland

Jozef Klemens Pilsudski, the dominant personality in Polish politics from 1918 to 1935, was surely one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Revered as the creator of a reborn Poland in the wake of World War I, he was loved and admired by most Poles, particularly Polish Jews. During the communist interregnum, […]

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Hollywood And Israel: A History

Hollywood’s relationship with Israel is deep and wide-ranging and reaches back to the days when Zionists sought to establish a sovereign state in Palestine. Historians Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman examine this topic in Hollywood and Israel: A History, published by Columbia University Press. Their comprehensive and readable volume touches every conceivable angle. “It is […]

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We Are Not One

Years ago, the United Jewish Appeal attempted to popularize the catchy slogan, “We Are One,” by promoting the facile notion that Jews in the United States and Israel share common values and interests and are separated only by physical distance and nothing else. This slogan was superficial and misleading because it ignored the very real […]

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The Escape Artist

Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were the first known Jewish inmates to escape from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, where 1.1 million Jews perished. They escaped in April 1944, nearly one year before the end of World War II. The vital information they conveyed to Jewish communities and Allied powers was timely and explosive. […]