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 […]
For a relatively brief moment after World War II, the Zionist movement and the newly-formed state of Israel enjoyed the unanimous support of the Soviet Union, its East European allies and the United States. This short-lived interregnum was a unique period when, as Jeffrey Herf observes in his superb book, Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition […]
Israel and Syria, the bitterest of enemies, have been locked in a state of war for more than seven decades now, notwithstanding several diplomatic attempts by the United States and Turkey in recent years to broker a peace agreement. The last such effort, initiated by the U.S., took place secretly from April 2009 to March […]
Ehud Olmert was Israel’s prime minister for a relatively short time during a consequential era in its turbulent history. A hawk who reinvented himself into a dove on key security issues, he was in office from 2006 to 2009. His predecessor was Ariel Sharon. His successor was Benjamin Netanyahu. During these eventful years, Israel fought […]