Holocaust
Jews, Law, and Human RightsThursday, December 27, 2012 by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
International human rights institutions were created as a response to the Holocaust. But, in recent years, they have been turned against Jews and Israel. [Part I of II]
Does Jacob Hate Esau?Monday, October 29, 2012 by Jerome A. Chanes | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Jews have traditionally kept non-Jews at arm’s length. The rabbinic approach to anti-Semitism may be summarized as Halakhah hi b’yadu’a she-Eisav sonei et Yaakov, “It is an established normative principle that Esau hates Jacob.”
Adorno, Butler, and the Death of IronyFriday, September 28, 2012 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Irony cannot exist in isolation; something is ironic only in relation to a larger pattern of events or behavior. Every three years, the city of Frankfurt awards its Adorno Prize to honor scholarly achievement in philosophy, music, film, and theater.
At Last, ZionFriday, September 21, 2012 by Charles Krauthammer | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as "one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it." Israel is a small country. This is not to say that extinction is its fate. Only that it can be.
Return to FuldaTuesday, September 11, 2012 by Kenneth R. Weinstein | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Once my son Harry’s bar mitzvah teacher told him he was ready to read Torah and Haftarah fluently anywhere in the world, Harry decided that after his bar mitzvah in Washington, D.C. he would have a second bar mitzvah in Fulda, Germany.
Through Night and FogMonday, August 20, 2012 by Eitan Kensky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
My father and I visited Auschwitz for the first time this summer. It was toward the end of a long trip to Eastern Europe. We had already gone to the killing fields and forests of Lithuania, and to Warsaw, where my father broke down . . .
Holocaust Reparations: The Back StoryMonday, August 13, 2012 by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
On July 10th, dignitaries from the U.S., German, and Israeli governments attended a curious ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
The Postmodern GolemTuesday, August 7, 2012 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
To Elizabeth Baer, the recent spate of golem literature, going beyond novels to comic books, artwork, even The X-Files, is an “intentional tribute to Jewish imagination as well as to the crucial importance of such imagination in the post-Holocaust period.”
I. B. Singer’s Last LaughMonday, August 6, 2012 by David G. Roskies | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Like millions of his fellow immigrants to America, Isaac Bashevis Singer started over. In the beginning, he was a deadly serious Polish-Yiddish writer with world-literary ambitions.
Evil and IdWednesday, July 11, 2012 by Ben Cohen | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
In Freud's Last Session, Mark St. Germain's superlative play about a hypothetical encounter between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, there is a telling moment when the founder of psychoanalysis admits that he was slow to grasp the boundless evil of Nazism: "It took near tragedy for me to see Hitler for the monster he is."
Editors' Picks
Learning Jazz James Hughes, Atlantic. There was a jazz scene in Europe even under Nazi occupation. Certain Nazis’ love of jazz even managed to save the lives of a few Jewish musicians.
“Ihr zint frei!” Margalit Fox, New York Times. In 1945 Rabbi Herschel Schacter, who has died at age 95, entered Buchenwald with Patton’s Third Army. “Shalom Aleichem, Jews,” he shouted to the inmates in Yiddish, “you are free!”
The Anti-Semitism of Progressive Scandinavians Liam Hoare, The Tower. Scandinavia was never a hotbed of traditional anti-Semitism. But now its political discourse displays a "failure to distinguish between Israel, Zionism, and local Jewish communities."
From the Exodus to the Holocaust Harold Klein, Moment. Less than a week after celebrating the Exodus at Passover, we mourn the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah. Both commemorations demand that we remember the events as if we were there.
Schindler's List Turns 20 Tom Carson, American Prospect. The reverence for Schindler's List as "the" Holocaust story "amounts to a posthumous marginalization of every innocent Hitler succeeded in killing."
A Marriage Made in Hell Rafael Medoff, JNS. Seventy-five years ago this week, German troops entered Austria to impose the Anschluss—and found the people, in the words of Sigmund Freud, "entirely at one with their brothers in the Reich."
The Brothers Göring Gerhard Spörl, Spiegel. While Hermann Göring was Hitler's right-hand man, Albert Göring took advantage of his older brother’s protection to rescue Jews. But Albert Göring remains unrecognized at Yad Vashem.
Underestimating the Holocaust Eric Lichtblau, New York Times. New research has revealed that the number of Nazi camps and ghettos was six times greater than previous estimates—too many to have remained invisible to the German people.
FDR and the Jews Marc Fisher, Moment. “Roosevelt sounded at times like a Zionist, at times like a skeptic about Palestine’s capacity to absorb new settlers, and at times, when speaking to anti-Semites, like an anti-Semite himself.”
Five-Star Refuge Erica Lyons, Asian Jewish Life. The Peninsula in Hong Kong remains one of the city's finest hotels. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, it was a shelter for 283 Jewish refugees.