At the end of 1943, with the Soviet army fast approaching Nazi-occupied Lithuania, the Germans selected 80 able-bodied Jewish prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp to work in the Ponar forest, where an estimated 100,000 people, including 70,000 Lithuanian Jews, had been murdered in the past three years. Chained by the legs, the prisoners were instructed to […]
The legalization of cannabis in Western countries may well have inspired the creation of the six-part French-language comedy series, Family Business, which is now available on the Netflix streaming network. The plot is very current. The Hazans operate a modest kosher butcher shop in the Marais, a once heavily Jewish-populated neighborhood in Paris. It’s a […]
Chris Tarrant, the host of Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways, embarks on a harrowing journey in his latest episode, Hitler’s Holocaust Railways, which was broadcast on the PBS television network earlier this month. A British train enthusiast, he discusses the role of trains in the Holocaust, travels to places like Terezin (Theresienstadt), Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lodz, and talks […]
She was a radical revolutionary and a professional agitator. Emma Goldman, a headstrong woman of conviction and resolve, was an advocate of free speech, free love and birth control in an era when such liberties were usually regarded as subversive. Above all else, she was an anarchist, a non-conformist staunchly opposed to capitalism. Her life […]
Some survivors of the Holocaust were little more than children when they were subjected to cruelty beyond the imagination. The traumas they experienced are etched into their souls, if not their faces. Several of these individuals turn up in Arthur Cary’s absorbing documentary, The Last Survivors, which will be broadcast by the PBS television network […]
One of the wonders of the world, the Dead Sea, is dying a slow death. A horrible thought, but depressingly true. Rich in medicinal minerals, like magnesium, the world’s saltiest, lowest-lying body of water has shrunk by about one-third and its depth has fallen by 65 feet. The Dead Sea has receded because it has […]
On June 27, 2007, Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian hailed as one of Israel’s greatest spies, was killed when he fell to his death from a fifth-storey apartment balcony in central London. To this day, no one is certain whether he jumped or was pushed. Nor can one be absolutely sure whether he was an Israeli […]
Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) was one of the giants of American journalism. The owner and publisher of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York World, he was an exemplar of the rags-to-riches saga so beloved by Americans. Arriving in the United States as a penniless Jewish immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he finagled his way to […]
Reconstruction, one of the most complex, turbulent and divisive eras in American history, left a legacy of hope and terror that still haunts the United States. Extending from approximately 1865 to 1877, it raised a mountain of contentious racial, social, political and economic issues as Northerners and Southerners grappled with the outcome of the 1861-1865 Civil War. […]
As a fringe movement, the alt-right in the United States had its “15 minutes of fame” in August 2017, when it organized a Unite the Right rally in the quaint town of Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the scheduled removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commander of Confederate forces during the American Civil […]