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Jewish Affairs

The Red Army And The Holocaust

The Red Army liberated Nazi extermination camps and freed the greatest number of Holocaust survivors, but its unsurpassed record of liberation loomed as a taboo topic in the now-defunct Soviet Union until the late 1980s, three scholars told an academic forum in Toronto yesterday during Holocaust Education Week. The role played by the Soviet Union […]

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Jewish Affairs

American Antisemite

October 26, 2015 was a blessed day in the United States. Willis Allison Carto, the most influential American antisemitic propagandist of his generation, died, or should I say croaked. He was 89. By any measure, Carto had a greater impact on public opinion than all his vile contemporaries and predecessors, ranging from George Lincoln Rockwell […]

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Jewish Affairs

My Mother Reaches 100

My mother turned 100 today. It’s an auspicious moment leavened by sadness. By any yardstick, she has beaten the odds. She might have been a victim of the Holocaust, like nine out of 10 Polish Jews. She has battled health problems all her life. And now her body and mind have succumbed to the frailties […]

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Jewish Affairs

Neo-Nazi Hate Crimes In Russia

Muslims from the Caucasus, not Jews, are the chief targets of race-based hate crimes in Russia, according to a researcher who studies right-wing extremist and vigilante groups in the Russian Federation. From the czarist era to the last gasp of communism, xenophobic Russians tended to turn their racial animus on Jews. But since the collapse […]

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Jewish Affairs

Shamelessly Distorting The Holocaust

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his energy minister, Yuval Steinitz, have both mangled the fundamental facts of the Holocaust for cynical political ends. Shame on them. Netanyahu, in a speech to the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20, claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, persuaded Adolf Hitler to exterminate the […]

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Jewish Affairs

The Geniza Sleuths

Marina Rustow belongs to a fairly new school of historians/sleuths who’ve revolutionized the field of medieval Middle Eastern Jewish history. A Princeton University professor, and one of the recipients of this year’s prestigious MacArthur fellowship, she’s a social historian who’s played a leading role in modernizing Cairo Geniza research. During the Fatimid caliphate, which stretched across […]

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Jewish Affairs

American Jews Embrace A Liberal Political Ethos

Jews in the United States have embraced a liberal political ethos since the 18th century, claims an American scholar. This ethos, developed and nurtured by German Jews, was challenged by new immigrants from Eastern Europe after the great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but their challenge was handily rebuffed, University of […]

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Jewish Affairs

Polish Rescuers Should Be Honored With A Memorial

Opposition has arisen to a sensible proposal by American businessman/philanthropist Sigmund Rolat to build a memorial in Warsaw to honor Polish Christians who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Rolat, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, hopes it can be built in Warsaw’s former Nazi ghetto, next to the new Museum of the […]

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Jewish Affairs

White Supremacists Are Violent-Prone

American white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. was recently convicted of capital murder, reinforcing the thesis that the overwhelming majority of extremist-related murders in the United States in the last decade have been committed by racists of his ilk. Miller, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, attacked two Jewish institutions in Kansas on April 13, […]

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Jewish Affairs

Iran Nuclear Deal Splits Jews

The nuclear agreement signed by six world powers and Iran in July has split the American Jewish community institutionally and politically like no other event in memory.  Taking their cue from the Israeli government, major Jewish organizations and federations, as well as conservative and Orthodox Jews, have generally come out against it. Supporting it, in the […]