Since the collapse of communism in Poland more than three decades ago, Poles have been engaged in a passionate debate over what kind of a country it is and should be. Traditionalists believe that Polish identity is inextricably bound up with the Catholic Church and conservative values emphasizing Polish martyrdom. Liberals promote secularism, civic nationalism […]
Kiryas Joel, a New York town in the Catskill Mountains 80 kilometres northwest of New York City, is a quintessential European-style shtetl designed to evoke a traditional East European past. KJ, as it is often called, is inhabited mostly by ultra-Orthodox Jews from the Satmar sect, which was founded by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979) in […]
The first historians to conduct research on the Holocaust in Poland were its Jewish survivors. “They pioneered the study of the Holocaust from the perspective of the Jewish experience,” writes Mark L. Smith in The Yiddish Historians And The Struggle For A Jewish History Of The Holocaust, published by Wayne State University Press. As he […]
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, […]