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 […]
Jason Greenblatt, one of the architects of Donald Trump’s ill fated plan to resolve Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, has written a comprehensive book about his days as a U.S. diplomat. As its longish title suggests, In The Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace In The Middle East — And How To Stop […]
On September 20, 1940, Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council (Judenrat) in the Warsaw ghetto, was summoned to the office of Ludwig Leist, the governor of German-occupied Warsaw. Leist ordered him to establish a Jewish police force. Known as the Jewish Order Service, it was modelled after the Jewish Council’s Security Guard, which […]
White supremacist movements in the United States have been on the ascendancy since the toxic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss writes in her trenchant book, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press), this sickening assemblage of white supremacists and […]
Polish American historian Jan Gross caused an enormous uproar in Poland following the publication of the first edition of his explosive book, Neighbors: The Destruction Of The Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Published in May 2000, and since translated into 13 languages, it generated an intensive nation-wide debate about collective memory and Polish-Jewish relations after […]
Cecil B. DeMille was a major force in the Hollywood movie industry for decades. From 1913 until the late 1950s, he directed more than 70 silent movies and talkies and worked with the leading actors of the day. More than 60 years after his death, he is probably best remembered for, among other pictures, The Squaw […]
Jewish gangsters and homegrown Nazis fought in brawls in the United States in the late 1930s. As Michael Benson writes in his informative book, Gangsters Vs Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America (Citadel Press), the gangsters were the “good guys.” Their targets were fascists from the German American Bund and the Silver […]
Before the creation of the state of Israel, American Jews immigrated to Palestine — a League of Nations mandate administered by Britain from 1922 to 1948 — in extremely small numbers But as Joseph B. Glass suggests in his deeply-researched and revealing book, From New Zion To Old Zion: American Jewish Immigration and Settlement In […]
Bolesław Prus, a central figure in Polish literature and journalism in the second half of the 19th century and the first years of the last century, was drawn into the complexity of the “Jewish question” in Congress Poland, or the Kingdom of Poland. In his essays and novels, he addressed this issue fleetingly or in […]