Holocaust
Eichmann Goes DigitalMonday, April 18, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
This year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Eichmann trial, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, together with the Israel State Archives, has posted to YouTube an extraordinary series of videos: over 200 hours of courtroom sessions and testimonies in the original Hebrew, German, and Yiddish, as well as a parallel set with English voiceover. What do they tell us?
Gandhi and the JewsTuesday, April 5, 2011 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) has set off stormy protests in India for implying that the country's founding father was bisexual. That's only the beginning of it.
Is Israeli Democracy Finished?Tuesday, January 25, 2011 by Benjamin Kerstein | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
In a now somewhat notorious story published on January 11, Time magazine announced that Israeli politics was taking an ominous "rightward lurch," and concluded that the Middle East's only democracy is on the slippery slope toward something like . . . fascism.
Kiefer’s ChallengeWednesday, December 15, 2010 by Richard McBee | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The German artist Anselm Kiefer has once again taken New York by storm. Ensconced at the prestigious Gagosian Gallery, Next Year in Jerusalem, his latest show, has met with reviews ranging from the gushing to the grudgingly respectful.
EasterThursday, April 1, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17. The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus:...
Holocaust DaysThursday, January 28, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Yesterday, Shimon Peres delivered an address, in Hebrew, before the Bundestag as Germany and other nations marked International Holocaust Day, commemorating the date in 1945 when Soviet forces arrived at Auschwitz. Israeli and American Jews conduct their own Holocaust remembrances in the spring, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, uneasy with the Zionist emphasis on force and resistance, hold their memorials on the tenth of Tevet, one of the traditional fast days for the destruction of the Temple. In short, the Holocaust remains as open to interpretation, reinterpretation—and misunderstanding—as is the hole it blew through all the history...
It Isn’t Even PastThursday, January 7, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The recent theft and recovery of the sign Arbeit Macht Frei from the gate of Auschwitz, and the emotional responses elicited by the incident, drive home just how deeply embedded the Holocaust and its imagery remain in contemporary consciousness. No doubt, this world-historical event will long continue to occupy a central place in human memory—along with, unfortunately, whatever permutations, distortions, and outright falsifications time will add to those that have already accumulated in the overheated political rhetoric of our own age. That is why, here and now, as we enter perhaps the final decade of the event's living memory, the issue...
Editors' Picks
Hitler’s Greatest Enemies Elisabeth Sifton, Fritz Stern, New York Review of Books. “One truth we can affirm: Hitler had no greater, more courageous, and more admirable enemies than Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
How Bulgaria Saved Its Jews John O’Rourke, BU Today. A new exhibition at Boston University testifies to the courage of the people of wartime Bulgaria, who defied their government’s attempt to deport Jews to the camps.
Romania’s Final Solution Michael Gesin, H-Net. Romania’s wartime leaders were so enamored of Nazi Germany that they developed their own Final Solution. So, why did half of Romania’s Jews manage to survive?
Drawing a Line Sarah Glidden, Jewish Quarterly. Angoulême is proud of its history as the center of France’s comics and animation industry. The city is less keen to acknowledge the role it played during the Second World War. (Comic)
Holocaust Museums, Yesterday and Today Edward Rothstein, New York Times. It isn’t only the history of the Holocaust that you see on display in Israel’s Holocaust museums. It’s also the history of the history of the Holocaust.
The Talmud in Dutch, a Tribute Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA. Holocaust survivor Jacob de Leeuwe has finished translating the first tractate into Dutch, in a tribute to a vanishing community and a work of "tikkun."
Amis on Evil, Amis on Levi Ron Rosenbaum, Smithsonian. Until recently the problem of understanding Hitler had bedeviled Martin Amis. Then he read a passage of Primo Levi’s.
What Was Yad Vashem Thinking? Meir Wikler, Times of Israel. Six years after the museum was called to task for its systematic underrepresentation of religious victims of the Holocaust, there’s not much evidence of change.
Poland’s Casualties of War Suzanne Rozdeba, Tablet. In Nazi-occupied Poland, Wladyslaw Gugla risked death as a Jew and a teacher of Slavic children. Protected by villagers, he survived—only to die from habits formed in hiding.
Open Doors Nena C. Benigno, Philippine Daily Inquirer. In 1940, the last Jews to escape from Nazi Germany found no country willing to take them in until President Quezon of the Philippines invited them to live and work in Manila.