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 […]
Historically, the Middle East has not been a priority for Canadian foreign and defence policy, yet this turbulent region still matters to Canada. Although Canada, as compared to the United States, plays a relatively minor role there, Canada has been affected by events in the Mideast, from Israel’s struggle with the Palestinians to the West’s […]
Seventy five years ago this month, amid the burgeoning Cold War pitting Western capitalist democracies against the communist Soviet Union and its allies, the Hollywood blacklist emerged, upending and ruining the careers of scores of movie directors, producers, actors and screenwriters, many of whom were Jewish. As Larry Ceplair writes in The Hollywood Motion Picture […]
Pierre Anctil’s History of the Jews in Quebec (University of Ottawa Press) is, as he notes in the preface, a “response to a sustained and growing interest” among French Canadians for “a better understanding of a religious minority that had previously received very little attention from Quebecois historians despite the fact that it had played […]
Suriname, a Dutch colony from 1667 to 1975, borders the Atlantic Ocean to the north and is bounded by French Guiana to the east, English-speaking Guyana to the west and Brazil to the south. The size of the U.S. state of Georgia, this fertile tropical outpost produced sugar, coffee, cacao, cotton and hardwood lumber during […]
From Schindler’s List to The Pianist, feature films about the Holocaust have been ubiquitous. Since 1945, 443 Holocaust movies have been produced for theatrical, video and television release, according to Rich Brownstein, an American writer who has lectured at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. Brownstein, in Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis […]
Saul Friedlander, the eminent historian, is a child of the Holocaust whose passage from adolescence to adulthood was marked by enormous turbulence and change. In his lucid, thought-provoking memoirs, When Memory Comes and Where Memory Leads, both published by Other Press in a paperback edition, he recalls pivotal events that shaped him to the core. […]
The displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel, an event known as the nakba, has been a topic of international concern for more than seven decades now. During and after this upheaval, close to 850,000 Jews in the Arab world and Iran left or were compelled to leave their homes. […]
Nine months after Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany, a Polish Jewish socialist named Mikhal Astour published an article in a Warsaw Yiddish journal warning of the dark future that awaited Poland’s 3.3 million Jews and the three million Jews of Hungary, Romania, Latvia and Lithuania. “That which has happened in Germany … is only […]
Ruth Wisse was one of the lucky ones. As she writes in the first paragraph of her wide-ranging, stimulating book, Free As A Jew: A Personal Memoir Of National Self-Liberation (Wicked Son), “I was four years old when my parents engineered our escape from Europe … Had they not managed our flight in the summer […]