Twenty one years ago, a historic conference in Washington, D.C. ended with representatives of 44 governments endorsing a set of principles designed to assist the heirs of Jewish collectors recover works of art that Nazi Germany had looted. Under the terms of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, or the Washington Declaration as it is […]
Benjamin Netanyahu marked a historic milestone on July 20 amid speculation whether he will still be Israel’s prime minister after the September 17 general election. Having held office for 4,876 days, or slightly more than 13 years, he surpassed David Ben-Gurion — Israel’s first and probably greatest leader — as its longest-serving prime minister. Netanyahu, a […]
Kellyanne Conway, U.S. President Donald Trump’s advisor, asked a very odd and potentially troubling question on the very day her impetuous, mercurial and unpredictable boss tore into four Democratic congresswomen in a racially-charged rant during which he advised them to “go back” to the “places from which they came.” During a press conference on the […]
Israel’s new minister of education, Rafael Peretz, appears to have a penchant for spouting nonsense. Peretz, appointed to his position in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s caretaker government last month, stirred anger when he likened Jewish intermarriage around the world as a “second Holocaust.” He compounded his maladroitness by endorsing “conversion therapy” for gay young men […]
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 […]
Lamentably, Donald Trump has done it again. In a series of provocative and wholly inappropriate tweets unworthy of the office he holds, the president of the United States verbally lashed out at four of his most ardent Democratic critics in the House of Representatives — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida […]
The Holocaust could not have been implemented in its entirety without the web of railways that crisscrossed Europe. Jews from as far away as Greece and as close as Poland were transported to Nazi extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Treblinka. They were built on the express premise that national railroad companies would deport Jews […]
Turkey’s troubled relationship with the United States took another hit on July 12 when the Turkish armed forces received the first components of the vaunted S-400 Russian air defence system. Just days after acting U.S. Defence Secretary Mark Esper warned Turkey that it would face economic sanctions if it went ahead with the controversial $2.5 […]
After a lengthy absence, I was back in Tel Aviv, the lively and sophisticated seaside city on the Mediterranean that is so synonymous with Israel. Jerusalem is Israel’s spiritual and political capital, a flashpoint in the seemingly endless struggle between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, but Tel Aviv is its temporal and secular heart and soul. […]
The Holocaust is a fact in the broad sweep of history, like Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, or Iraq’s incursion into Iran in 1980. The truth of these events is never questioned, yet the veracity of the Holocaust is […]