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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]