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 […]
The launch of a glossy coffee table book on Jewish-Ukrainian relations provided its co-authors with an opportunity to discuss their complicated topic. At a symposium earlier this month at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern — a professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University — and Paul Robert Magocsi — the […]
On April 20, 1889, at 6:30 p.m., Klara Polzl gave birth to a boy in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria adjacent to the German border. The boy’s name is inscribed in crabbed letters in a mouldering registry kept behind lock and key in St. Stephen, Braunau’s preeminent Roman Catholic church. A Gothic pile whose spire […]