Jews in ancient Israel lived under a succession of foreign imperial invaders ranging from the Egyptians and the Assyrians to the Babylonians and the Persians. But as Katell Berthelot argues in Jews And Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge To Israel (Princeton University Press), the Roman Empire posed “a unique ideological challenge for Jews ” […]
It goes without saying that the Nazis had no interest whatsoever in the well-being and health of the captive Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto. But because they feared that diseases and epidemics might spread beyond it and endanger German personnel and afflict the general Polish population, they provided a bare modicum of assistance to […]
A new, more positive phase in Christian-Jewish relations was ushered in when the Vatican, in the 1960s, officially modified its public attitude toward Jews. At the Second Vatican Council, which convened from 1962 to 1965, the Roman Catholic church issued its historic Nostra Aetate declaration, which renounced the deicide accusation against Jews, underscored the common […]
Lucy Dawidowicz was one of the eminent historians of the twentieth century. She was the author of three critically-acclaimed books — The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (1967), The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975) and From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 (1989). She was also the first recipient […]
Iranian photographer Hassan Sarbakhshian spent two years travelling around Iran documenting its Jewish community, the largest in the Middle East outside Israel. He joined Jews at family gatherings, during holidays and at their workplaces, providing a rare glimpse of an ancient community whose origins can be traced back to the Babylonian exile 2,700 years ago. […]
Helene Jawhara Piner’s cookbook, Sephardi: Cooking the History, is unique. “It is not based on family recipes but on the history of the Jewish people from Spain, and by extension the Sephardim, from the thirteenth century to the present,” she writes. Published by Cherry Orchard Books, an imprint of Academic Studies Press, this is a […]
Harry Cohn, the chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures from 1932 until his death in 1958, prided himself on being unique. Regarded as the youngest Hollywood mogul, he was also the only president of a major studio who was head of production. In addition, he had the most diverse background of any of his contemporaries, […]
As Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu observes very early on in his lengthy, intensely interesting autobiography, Bibi: My Story (Simon & Schuster), he owes his political career to his older brother, Yoni, who was killed in 1976 during Israel’s Entebbe raid to free Israeli and foreign airline passengers held hostage by Palestinian and German hijackers in Uganda. […]
Like Jews, Mennonites are a people of the diaspora. Reclusive, peaceful and pacifist in outlook, they are a Protestant sect that emerged in Dutch and Germanic lands during the Reformation. Scattered throughout dozens of countries, Mennonites outside Germany were often opposed to nationalism and rarely regarded themselves as Germans per se, despite their affinity to the […]
Shortly after Germany’s defeat in World War I, a Munich-based Jewish socialist/journalist named Kurt Eisner toppled the venerable Wittelsbach dynasty, formed the short-lived Free State of Bavaria, and became the first Jew ever to govern a German state. On February 21, 1919, three months after his accession to power, he was assassinated by an antisemitic […]