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 […]
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. […]
The first Palestinian Arab rebellion in Palestine broke out in 1936 and flickered out in 1939. It would be the final revolt of its kind during the British Mandate era, but hardly the last Palestinian uprising. Two more revolts erupted long after the birth of Israel, the first in 1987 and the second in 2000. […]
It was, as author Lucy Adlington aptly observes, a “hideous anomaly.” Tucked into a building at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland was the Upper Tailoring Studio. Established by Hedwig Hoss, the camp commandant’s wife, and staffed mainly by European Jewish women who had been deported there, it catered exclusively to the wives of SS officers […]
A new variant of antisemitism, taking the form of a hostile Christian reaction to the legal emancipation of Jews in France and other Western countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, virtually supplanted the religious-based animus toward Jews that had been shaped and promoted by the Catholic church since time immemorial. This transformational shift was […]
A useful skill could be the difference between life and death for a Jewish person during the Holocaust. This was certainly true for the Polish brothers Khil (Harry), Mailekh and Moishe Lenga, who owe their survival to an ability to repair watches, a talent they inherited from their father. The Lengas, hailing from a Chassidic […]
In 2009, Javier Sinay, a journalist in Buenos Aires, received an email from his father alerting him to a 1947 newspaper article written by his great-grandfather, Mijl Hacohen Sinay, concerning the murders of 22 European Jewish settlers in Moises Ville from 1889 to 2006. The email piqued his interest in Moises Ville, one of the […]
From the end of the 18th century to the second decade of the 20th century, virtually every Jewish person in the Russian empire was required by law to live in the Pale of Settlement, a vast region comprised of modern-day Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania. Starting in the 19th century, liberalization set in as […]
Hal Wallis, the prolific American producer whose movies ran the gamut from Casablanca and The Life of Emile Zola to The Adventures of Robin Hood and True Grit, was an accidental Hollywood luminary, as we learn in Bernard F. Dick’s thorough biography, Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars, published by University Press of Kentucky. Wallis, […]
Spain was supposedly a neutral power during World War II, yet the Spanish government was resolutely in Germany’s camp. In the summer of 1941, Spain dispatched a largely voluntary expeditionary force, known as the Blue Division, to fight alongside Germany in the Soviet Union. Recruited by the Spanish army and the Fascist Party, or the […]