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 […]
Nearly 20 years after a suicide bomber driving a van detonated a powerful bomb in front of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the worst antisemitic crime since the Holocaust in terms of casualties, it has yet to be solved. The blast, coming shortly on the heels of the bombing of Israel’s […]
To say that the late Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera is a divisive and polarizing figure in contemporary Ukraine would be to understate the case. More than five decades after his assassination in West Germany, allegedly at the hands of KGB agents, he inspires both adulation and loathing. Bandera’s ambivalent legacy was on martial display a few […]
They died in 2013, leaving a lasting legacy… Saul Kagan, 91, was the founding director of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which was established in 1951 by major Jewish organizations to seek reparations from Germany for the Nazi genocide during World War II. Thanks to Kagan, born in Lithuania, 600,000 Holocaust survivors […]
Udo Klausa regarded himself as a “decent” Nazi. From 1940 to 1942, he was the principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, a mid-sized town in Poland that, in September 1939, was the scene of one of the very first Nazi atrocities against Jews. Klausa was not at his post in Bedzin when these crimes were committed, but […]
On my last visit to Egypt 14 years ago, I could sense that the Jewish community was already a relic of history. Doomed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Egypt was deeply enmeshed by virtue of its pan-Arab foreign policy and its four wars with Israel, Egyptian Jews became the scapegoats of regional politics. The […]