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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
In a long overdue development that speaks to Germany’s ongoing efforts to acknowledge its Nazi past and achieve a historic reconciliation with Jews, a major university in Germany plans to establish a permanent academic chair in Holocaust studies in 2017. The scholar who’ll fill the position will also be in charge of Frankfurt’s Fritz Bauer […]
Ten years after four homegrown Muslim radicals attacked London’s transportation system, killing 52 civilians and wounding more than 700, Prime Minister David Cameron has laid out a “counter-extremist strategy” to confront the scourge of Islamic radicalism in Britain. In an important speech in Birmingham on July 20, Cameron correctly described the ongoing battle against Islamic […]