Wielding Holocaust memory to make America look good is an American tradition.
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Sheila Heti’s Motherhood addresses a family’s post-Holocaust grief—without addressing the Shoah outright.
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Two grandchildren of Holocaust survivors exchange letters on making art and meaning from the Holocaust.
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor OCCASIONALLY DERIDED for being too broad and hasty in its estimation of individual films, Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 study, From Caligari to Hitler, nevertheless stands as a classic of film criticism. Its old-fashioned, Old-World vision of German cinema from its beginnings until the arrival in power of Hitler, and its focus on the unity […]
Read MoreOn this date in 1944, two days after occupying Hungary, the Nazis set up a Jewish Council (Judenrat or Zsidó Tanács in Hungarian) in Budapest, headed by a banker, Samu Stern. At the same time, Adolf Eichmann was meeting with Hungarian Interior Ministry officials: “That evening,” he would later write, “the fate of the Hungarian […]
Read Moreby Ralph Seliger IT WAS the evening of February 22 when Prof. Jan Gross spoke to a packed hall at New York’s Center for Jewish History to discuss the newly amended Polish law “for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation” as well as other efforts of the current rightwing Polish government to […]
Read Moreby Dvora Zylberman I HAVE ALWAYS wondered what qualifies someone to write an article on a given topic. I had always assumed that one needed to be an expert in a given field to give an interesting and insightful angle on a given issue. It is fair to assume that an expert qualified to write […]
Read MoreYouth Aliyah (originally called the “Committee for the Assistance of Jewish Youth”) opened its office in Berlin on this date in 1933 — the same day that Adolf Hitler took power as chancellor of Germany. “The utter senselessness of Jewish life in the Diaspora stood palpably before my eyes,” wrote Recha Freier, a poet, musician, […]
Read MoreMarcel Dassault (Bloch), a French aircraft engineer who became a major force in the country’s airplane and defense industries until he was imprisoned by the Vichy government for refusing to build aircraft for the Nazis, was born in Paris on this date in 1892. In 1944 he was confined in Buchenwald, where he was targeted […]
Read Moreby Jeff Greenberg HOW HE CAME to be locked into the sanctuary alone overnight was a story he would tell over and over. In truth it was a mix of serendipity and stupidity. The evening was late. The absent-minded caretaker left at 7:00; the heavy walnut door of the hall was double-bolted. Stupid. It was […]
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