Shortly after World War II, the German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in their book, The Dialectics of the Enlightenment, that antisemitism was no longer possible after the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust. Six decades on, their thesis appears incredibly foolishly and profoundly naive. What were they thinking? After Auschwitz, antisemitism never vanished, […]
My father, David Kirshner, does not appreciate publicity, though he is increasingly fond of talking about his past as a soldier in the Polish army and a Holocaust survivor who endured the rigors of the Lodz ghetto and the horror of Auschwitz extermination camp. I realize that this short essay may upset or anger him. […]
In a disturbing development which should set off alarm bells in Europe, nearly one million Hungarians voted for Jobbik, The Movement for a Better Hungary, in Hungary’s April 6 national election. Twenty percent of voters cast their ballots for Jobbik, making it the second largest bloc in parliament. Responding to Jobbik’s electoral success, the president […]
On Aug. 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain for the New World, ushering in an era of boundless exploration that changed the world. He started his historic voyage one day after a royal decree, signed by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, went into effect. The decree, which ordered all professing Jews […]
The new interim government in Ukraine, led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has been acclaimed in the west as a plucky defender of freedom and liberty resisting Russian intimidation and aggression in Crimea. Last week, in a show of sympathy for Ukraine, Yatsenyuk was invited to the White House by U.S. President Barack Obama, and […]
On March 19, the Hungarian government is scheduled to unveil a statue in Budapest’s Freedom Square in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Hungary, an event that robbed Hungarians of their independence and doomed Hungary’s Jewish community. The stylistic statue, brimming with historic symbolism, portrays a rapacious German imperial eagle attacking the […]
The grainy and seemingly innocuous photograph on the cover of Jan Tomasz Gross’ disturbing book, Golden Harvest, published by Oxford University Press, shows a group of Polish peasants standing together in a group. One of them, a woman, holds a shovel. The photograph in question, which first appeared in Poland’s largest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on […]
On Feb.7, the Spanish government announced it will offer citizenship to Sephardi Jews around the world whose ancestors were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. Spain’s justice minister, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon, disclosed that legislation enshrining this historic decision will be passed within months, if not weeks. More than 500 years after tens of thousands of Jews […]
Laura Z. Hobson’s claim to fame is Gentleman’s Agreement, a disturbing novel about antisemitism in postwar America. Serialized in Cosmopolitan in 1946 and published in 1947 in book form, it was a blockbuster, selling 1.6 million copies. Adapted for the screen by the playwright Moss Hart and directed by Elia Kazan, it starred Gregory Peck […]
Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, the French comedian known as Dieudonne, likes to crack “anti-system” jokes that infuriate the politically correct in France. But all too often, his barbed humor veers into antisemitic rants and denigrations of the Holocaust, while the hand gesture he invented, the quenelle, is little more than an inverted Nazi salute intended to offend […]