Universities are supposed to be havens of civilized discourse where rationality, civility and tolerance prevail, but of late, this hallowed tradition has taken a battering in Britain and the United States. Consider these unsettling developments: Prior to her recent election as president of Britain’s National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia made comments that can only […]
An obscure village in a remote corner of southeast Poland, the kind you can drive through in seconds, was in the spotlight recently. On March 17, an array of personalities descended on Markowa, in Poland’s Podkarpacie district, for the official opening of The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II. The ceremony, […]
Tellingly enough, neither the Israeli government nor Austria’s embassy in Tel Aviv were involved in planning Heinz-Christian Strache’s visit to Israel, which took place a few days ago and was organized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. One can understand why Strache, the leader of the far-right, xenophobic Austrian Freedom Party, is officially shunned […]
Rzeszow, the largest city in southeastern Poland, is a paradigm for inconsolable loss. Like scores of Polish towns, cities and villages where Jews were demonized, marginalized and murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, Rzeszow lost an important part of its multicultural heritage with the destruction of its substantial Jewish community. On the eve of […]
Appropriately enough, the sky was gray and ominous on my first visit to Majdanek, the former Nazi concentration camp in eastern Poland. Adjacent to the city of Lublin, Majdanek is an eerie tableau of wooden barracks, guard towers, a gas chamber, a crematorium with an uncommonly high chimney and barbed wire fences. Even on a […]
Should Jews leave Europe and head to Israel in the face of growing Islamic terrorism on the European continent? That was the question put to a prominent historian and a high-profile journalist at a panel discussion at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs on April 7. The panelists were Derek Penslar and Bret […]
Under the impact of the increasingly assertive and effective Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, launched by Palestinian activists about a decade ago, scores of American university campuses, particularly in California, have become contentious ideological battlegrounds. In attempting to consign Israel to the status of a pariah state worthy of condemnation, isolation and, ultimately, destruction, BDS […]
The status of Soviet Jews deteriorated sharply after World War II as the Cold War intensified and Jewish citizens in the now-defunct Soviet Union developed a more acute national identity, says a European scholar. Alongside this development, the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the Soviet state, headed by Joseph Stalin, was damaged by a […]
Sebastian Rejak, Poland’s envoy to the Jewish Diaspora, has spent the past two-and-a-half years assiduously cultivating relations with Jewish communities throughout Europe and North America to improve his country’s ties with the Diaspora. Most recently, he worked behind the scenes to stir awareness of the new Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World […]
Governments can play a decisive and positive role in shaping public opinion about Jews. Diana Dumitru, a Moldovan scholar, learned this lesson while conducting research on regional variations in civilians’ attitudes and behavior toward Jews in the borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union during the Holocaust. To determine how ordinary Christian civilians responded to […]