As part of Holocaust Education Week in Toronto, Beth Tzedec Congregation’s Reuben and Helene Dennis Museum is hosting an exhibit by Canadian photographer David Kaufman called The Posthumous Landscape: Jewish Sites of Memory in Poland Today. Officially opened on Oct. 29, it runs until Feb. 2, 2014. Kaufman’s visually remarkable photographs, all in luminous color, […]
Gerard Jugnot’s Monsieur Batignole recreates the period in Nazi-occupied France when French collaboration with the German occupiers was not an unusual phenomenon. Many French men and women risked life and limb to resist the Germans. But some chose the path of least resistance and preyed on Jews, the objects of demonization and persecution, to gain […]
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The Power of the Past
In early 2011, I read The Jews of San Nicandro, a book written by a professor, John Davis. It’s about a group of Italian Roman Catholics in a small village who underwent a mass conversion to Judaism in fascist Italy, and who, over a period of 20 years of observing Jewish practices, left Italy and […]
Films reflect historical reality, registering the feelings and attitudes of an epoch. As the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote,”The fact that film has been the most potent vehicle of the American imagination suggests all the more strongly that movies have something to tell us not just about the surfaces but about the mysteries of […]
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The Fathers of Superman
He rocketed to earth from a dying planet and grew up with supernatural powers. Faster than a speeding bullet, he masqueraded as a mild-mannered newspaper reporter named Clark Kent. When called upon to perform a good deed or save the planet from nefarious enemies, he changed into the Man of Steel, wearing a blue costume […]
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Barack Obama and the Middle East
The Middle East has kept Barack Obama extremely busy, if not preoccupied, since he assumed office in 2009. Obama has had to grapple with a multitude of challenges in this turbulent region, from Israel’s perennial struggle with the Palestinians and Iran’s quest for an atomic bomb to the revolutionary Arab Spring rebellions that have toppled […]
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Holland’s Conspiracy of Silence
The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his The Order of Things, stated that dominant powers determine discourse and, as a consequence, what is preserved in an archive. With this in mind, I started research into Dutch civil law notaries and their professional behavior during World War II. Their role was almost absent from historical discourse […]
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The Converts of San Nicandro
Donato Manduzio, a disabled veteran of World War I, transformed himself into a messianic figure after returning to San Nicandro, his remote ancestral village in southern Italy. As he resumed his trade as a cobbler, he turned to faith healing, and after reading the Old Testament for the first time, he discovered the Hebrew scriptures. With […]
American democracy, its virtues notwithstanding, was deeply flawed for far too long. The stains that grotesquely blemished the United States for at least a century were slavery, segregation and Jim Crow racism, all maliciously directed at African Americans. While whites enjoyed the benefits of freedom and liberty in the land of the free, blacks bore […]
Seventy years ago this month, amid the terror of the Holocaust, the forces of decency prevailed in Nazi-occupied Denmark. At a time when millions of Jews throughout Europe were being systematically murdered in German extermination camps in Poland, the Jews of Denmark were being saved by their fellow citizens, in one of the […]