Akira Kitade tells two interlocking stories in Emerging Heroes: World War II-Era Diplomats, Jewish Refugees, And Escape To Japan, published by Academic Studies Press. First, he introduces readers to Tatsuo Osaka, an official in the Japan Tourist Bureau — later known as the Japan National Tourist Organization — who helped Jewish refugees travel from the […]
You’ve probably never heard of Henry Mandel. Neither had I until I read Without Permission: Conversations, Letters, And Memoirs Of Henry Mandel, published by Cherry Orchard Books, distributed by Academic Studies Press, and edited by Mandel’s grandson, Samuel Flaks. A machinist who died in New York City in 2015, Mandel was an ardent American Zionist […]
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a nasty habit of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany when he’s in a foul anti-Israel mood. Since the outbreak of the current war in the Gaza Strip, which was triggered by Hamas’ slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and foreigners in southern Israel on October 7, Erdogan has repeatedly denounced Israel […]
No one should be blinded by the illusion that the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip can be wound up soon. If anything, it will be a long and bitter struggle. U.S. officials from Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin to President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, have urged Israel to complete the main […]
Exactly a century ago, Germany was on the edge of the precipice, muddling through a year that could easily be classified as annus horribilis. Still struggling from its ignominious defeat in World War I, Germany was reaping its whirlwind. France and Belgium, having lost patience with Germany’s failure to honor its crushing reparation commitments, invaded […]
Rising to stardom in the early 1940s, Leonard Bernstein fulfilled his ambition of becoming the first great American conductor of a major symphony orchestra. He filled these big shoes in 1943, when, in a last-minute switch, he replaced the revered Bruno Walter as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall. He was only […]
The New Yorker recently published an article by staff writer Masha Gessen in which she erroneously compared the Gaza Strip to Nazi ghettos in Eastern Europe. Understandably enough, her shameful comparison embarrassed the Heinrich Boll Foundation, which had awarded Gessen the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Having deplored her thesis as “unacceptable,” the foundation withdraw […]
Holocaust denial is a vicious form of antisemitism, a cudgel antisemites brandish to doubly punish Jews. Having implicitly or explicitly applauded the mass murder of Jews, they then vastly underplay its scale and severity, or deny it ever took place. In pursuit of their malicious agenda, they fabricate evidence and twist the facts. Bashar al-Assad, […]
Judy Rakowsky, an American journalist of Polish-Jewish descent, visited Poland in a succession of trips from 1991 onward in an effort to solve an enduring mystery on behalf of her older cousin, Sam Rakowsky. The issue at hand was the fate of his 16-year-old relative, Hena Rozenek, who vanished after her parents, sisters and brother […]
Fred Cavaye’s Farewell Mr. Haffmann is a searing morality tale on the fickleness of human nature under duress. Scheduled to be released in south Florida theaters on December 22 after appearing at Jewish film festivals in the United States, this absorbing movie unfolds in Nazi-occupied Paris between May 1941 and July 1942. This was an incredibly […]