Holland, a nation celebrated for tolerance and compassion, had a mercurial relationship with the Holocaust. Dutch Jews who emerged from hiding and from German concentration camps in the wake of Holland’s liberation from Nazi tyranny in 1945 learned to their utter dismay and disgust that they would be fined for not having paid their property […]
Presiden Donald Trump finally did the right thing. He condemned antisemitism unequivocally after studiously avoiding the topic. Just hours before Trump issued a belated denunciation of antisemitism on February 21, Hillary Clinton, his opponent in last November’s presidential election, urged him to speak out against it after more than 170 graves were vandalized at a Jewish […]
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was created by the United Nations in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on January 27, 1945. But on a deeper level, this solemn day is supposed to memorialize the Holocaust and combat Holocaust denial and antisemitism. It’s painfully true that […]
Nearly 12 years ago, in Berlin, I covered the official opening of one of the most important and poignant monuments in Germany, the Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Composed of 2,711 rectangular concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field in the center of Germany’s cosmopolitan capital, it pays […]
A regional court in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has upheld the bizarre and troubling verdict of a lower court. Last week, the regional court ruled that the firebombing of a synagogue in the town of Wuppertal, in the summer of 2014, was an act of criminal arson rather than antisemitic animus. The synagogue, […]
To its credit, the highest criminal appeals court in Argentina has reopened a murky and convoluted case relating to the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history, the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994. In a unanimous decision recently, the Court of Cassation decided to reopen a file turning on […]
It’s outrageous but true. If you type the word “Holocaust” on the Google search engine site, a wave of mostly reputable articles relating to this unprecedented event in European and Jewish history appears. But if you enter the phrase “Did the Holocaust happen?”, you’ll be taken by surprise. Incredibly enough, the first item that pops up […]
Film is a powerful tool in mobilizing public opinion in support of a cause or idea. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s rabidly antisemitic propaganda minister, instinctively understood this principle as he launched campaigns to marginalize and demonize German Jews. As commissar of the German movie industry, Goebbels had the authority to commission films. Three of them […]
The majority of Arabs regard Jews as enemies because much of the scholarship about pre-1948 Muslim-Jewish relations is refracted through the lens of the Arab-Israeli conflict, says an American scholar who specializes in the topic. Typically, such Arabs have never met a Jew, nor can they imagine a time when Jews were an indigenous and […]
An acrimonious debate is raging in Poland and the Jewish Diaspora concerning the attitude of Poles toward Jews during Nazi Germany’s brutal occupation of Poland in World War II. The debate, which has drawn in the right-wing government of Poland, turns on Polish-Jewish relations, a sensitive subject even in the best of times. Poland is currently […]