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by Lawrence Bush
IN THE COURSE of researching JEWDAYO, my historical blog, every day for the past six years, I’ve come across more than two dozen acts of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance that I never before knew about — notwithstanding my three decades as an editor of Jewish magazines and my upbringing as a leftwing secular Jew who was raised to be well aware of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This experience of discovery has prompted me to think hard about the origins of the “sheep-to-slaughter” idea, and its impact upon contemporary Jewish identity.
That thinking, in turn, has led me to the creation of a special issue of Jewish Currents, coming this autumn, that will be devoted entirely to the subject of anti-Nazi resistance — in the ghettos, in the camps, in the woods. It includes eyewitness accounts of the Sobibor uprising and the Buchenwald liberation; translations of the final letters by French Jewish resisters hours before their execution; analyses of the “sheep-to-slaughter” question and the meaning of resistance; photographs and written portraits of partisans and ghetto fighters, both men and women; and much, more more. It’s turning out to be an extraordinary document, which will serve to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps — and the 70th anniversary of our continual publication as a progressive Jewish magazine.
The issue will also include greetings from supporters of our magazine — and I’m writing here to readers of Jewdayo, whether you are subscribers to the magazine or not, to urge you to participate in that fundraising campaign.
Frankly, it’s been very weird for me to be entering, daily, into the minds and hearts of desperate Jews in their life-and-death struggles while, at the same time, fretting endlessly about how I’m going to pay the bills to bring their stories to light.
I need your help. I don’t often ask for it at this website. I’m asking for it now. Help me publish an amazing resource.
Basic greetings in this 70th anniversary issue of Jewish Currents are $36. You can also do a sixth of a page for $75, a quarter page for $100, a third of a page for $150, a half page for $300, a full page for $600. Please make a donation by clicking here, and then send me the text of what you’d like to say at editor@jewishcurrents.org.
I greatly appreciate any help you can give, and I thank those of you who have already responded via the mail.
I also want to know if there’s a reader among you experienced with crowd-sourcing campaigns at Kickstarter or Indiegogo. If so, and if you’re willing to volunteer to help us set one up for this project, please be in touch with me.
Hopefully and busily yours,
Lawrence Bush, Editor
