Six years before South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was released from imprisonment on Robben Island, launching his career as South Africa’s future first Black president and starting the historic process of phasing in Black majority rule, I visited South Africa in my capacity as a journalist. It was 1984 and South Africa, a pariah […]
The far-right National Democratic Party, known in German as the NPD, is an ugly, festering sore on Germany’s body politic. The NPD is shamelessly xenophobic, jingoistic, racist and, worst of all, antisemitic. Given Germany’s central role in the Holocaust, it beggars the imagination that there are still German politicians, even on the fringes of society, who […]
I had the privilege of knowing Joseph Baruch (J.B.) Salsberg, who was already a legendary figure when I met him in the autumn of 1974. I was a reporter on The Canadian Jewish News and he was one of its freelance columnists. Salsberg, tall, irrepressible, witty and always nattily dressed, would usually arrive at the […]
The Holocaust in the Baltic nation of Lithuania exacted a greater toll on Jews than in nearly any other Nazi-occupied country, with more than 90 percent of its Jewish citizens having been murdered by Lithuanian antisemites and German forces. Out of a pre-war Jewish population of about 208,000, upwards of 195,000 Litvaks, or Lithuania Jews, […]
Poland’s Jewish community, the biggest in Europe before World War II, was virtually obliterated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. As if to rub salt into the wound, the Communist government, in 1967, launched an antisemitic campaign under the thinly-veiled guise of anti-Zionism, prompting many of the remaining Jews to emigrate. Since the advent of […]
During the Nazi era in Germany, Jews were robbed of their valuable art collections or forced to sell them at ridiculously deflated prices. Paintings by such masters as Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall were shamelessly expropriated by Nazi officials like Hermann Goering, a self-styled art connoisseur, and by fellow travellers. In one of the most notorious […]
The historical relationship between Jews and French Canadians is fundamentally important in understanding the history of Jews in Canada, but as a topic it remains controversial due to the occurrence of antisemitism in the province of Quebec, Canadian historian Ira Robinson told a symposium in Toronto on Nov. 17. Robinson, a professor of Judaic Studies […]
Pierre Anctil may well be an anomaly: a French Canadian scholar who has learned Yiddish and writes extensively on the history of the Jewish community in Montreal. But on second thought, as he suggested in a lecture on Yiddish scholarship in Canada today, he may not be an oddity at all. Speaking at a symposium […]
After meeting Manfred Rommel, the son of legendary World War II German field marshal Erwin Rommel, I realized that yesterday’s enemies can be today’s friends. Or to put it another way, Germans are not intrinsically hostile to Jews. Far from it. Manfred Rommel, who died a few days ago at the age of 84, was […]
Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888-1969) was the patriarch of one of America’s greatest political dynasties. Kennedy’s son, John, the first Roman Catholic president, was assassinated 50 years ago on Nov. 22. Robert, John’s attorney general and a U.S. senator, was gunned down in 1968. Edward, who died four years ago, enjoyed a stellar career in the […]