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Reexamining FDR's Response to Kristallnacht
As the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht is marked with solemn ceremonies at synagogues around the country this week, a new film and book are hailing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the...
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In Chicago, Fatal West Bank Stabbing Hits Close to Home
My mother-in-law was a hidden child in France during World War II. Like most survivors, she didn’t speak much about that time in her life, but she did share some memories when we took a family trip to...
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Who Is Max Blumenthal, and What Does He Want From Us?
Late last year, Germany was captivated by a mesmerizing, almost absurdist video at the heart of something eventually dubbed Toiletgate. In it, anti-Zionist activists Max Blumenthal and David Sheen...
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Arthur Miller’s Forgotten Masterpiece: 'Incident at Vichy' Turns 50
“The German Refugee,” originally published in 1963 under the title “The Refugee,” is one of my favorite stories by Bernard Malamud. Set in New York in 1939, it’s told through the eyes of Martin...
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Article 27
Was there ever a more favorable time to be an American in Germany? I wasn’t here during the Berlin airlift as the sky filled with small parachuted packages of raisins floating down from U.S. bomber...
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Article 26
There’s much to say about Monday’s Vox Tablet podcast, in which host Sara Ivry interviews singer-songwriter Clare Burson about her new album, Silver and Ash. The hauntingly beautiful song cycle culls...
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Article 25
I cannot recall any Jews being particularly shaken by the familiar French Canadian ritual of throwing stones at synagogues when I was growing up in Montreal’s multiethnic Outremont neighborhood in the...
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Article 24
Two days after my husband and I moved to Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, in 2008, an old German man whom I will call Otto introduced himself. He was dressed in shorts, knee-highs, and sandals, his hair gray...
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Article 23
• Dennis Ross, the Obama Mideast adviser long seen as the White House official most sympathetic to the current Israeli government, will leave his post next month. [NYT] • The European Union is...
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Article 22
• For the first time, an openly gay Orthodox rabbi married a same-sex couple, at the historic 6th and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C. [+972] • New Anti-Defamation League and Israel Project surveys find...
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Article 21
Residents of Highland Park, a small New Jersey community with a sizable Jewish population, awoke this morning to find the front windows of five Jewish-owned businesses dotting the city’s mile-long main...
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Gertrude Stein’s Ties to Nazis, Revisited at the Metropolitan Museum,...
In a rare move for a museum nearing the end of a popular exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced last week that it was amending a wall text at “The Steins Collect,” which brings together...
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A Discovered Drawing, an American Comic Artist, and the Fate of German Jewry
“We buy junk, we sell antiques.” The kind of store that features a sign like this has long attracted me and my partner in research and family, Isabella Ginor, avid collectors of objects whose hidden...
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German Spa Sorry About Offering 'Kristallnacht'-Themed Deal on the 75th...
The fine folks at SorryWatch bring our attention to the utter marketing fail of the day, courtesy of the Kristall Sauna Wellnesspark, a German spa promoting a special event they were calling a “long,...
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Uncovering My Family’s History—or a Clever Scam—75 Years After Kristallnacht
This is a story of my own foolishness. I got scammed on the Internet. I lost some money—not a fortune, but enough to sting a little. I didn’t offer assistance to a deposed Nigerian government minister...
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President Obama Marks 75th Anniversary of Kristallnacht
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 Nazis torched synagogues and destroyed Jewish businesses across Nazi Germany. Below, via Mother Jones, is President Obama’s...
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Conservative Catholics Disrupt Jewish Relations Pope Francis Helped Build
In Argentina, Kristallnacht has come to be known as “el pogrom de noviembre”—the “November pogrom.” Last week, on the 75th anniversary of that tragic night, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Buenos Aires,...
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How St. Patrick's Day Became My Jewish Family's Favorite Holiday
My father arrived in America from Germany in 1939, 75 years ago. It was March 17, St. Patrick’s Day—a holiday my father had never heard of—and New York City’s marching bands and colorful parade amazed...
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What More Could Have the U.S. Done in 1939? Plenty.
Last month, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Sir Nicholas Winton, the London-born son of German Jews who has become known in England as “the British Schindler” for his efforts to rescue hundreds of...
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A World Without Jews: Hitler’s Dream Still Makes Us Uneasy
At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World at the Last Cinema in the World is the title of a David Cronenberg short shown at Cannes in 2007. During the 4-minute-long movie, eager TV commentators coax...
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'Kristallnacht': Shouldn't the Inaction of Bystanders to Mass Crimes Be Illegal?
I am child of the Holocaust. Both of my parents are Holocaust survivors. This essay seeks to answer three questions essential to my understanding of the Holocaust, the bystander, and my understanding...
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One Last Accused Nazi, 92, Lives Quietly in Queens
Last week, CNN published a story about Eli Rosenbaum, dubbed the “Nazi hunter,” who’s the director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy. During the course of his career, Rosenbaum has led...
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Bookworm: A Noir Detective Named Bernie Solves Crimes in 1938 Berlin
Young Aryan girls have gone missing and are turning up dead. Who but the Jews could possibly be responsible for such a crime? Detective Bernie Gunther’s world, set in the late summer of 1938, is...
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Night Falls: German Jews React to Hitler’s Rise to Power
When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on Jan. 30, 1933, he gained the authority to implement his racist ideology toward Germany’s Jews, who then numbered 535,000 out of a general population of 67...
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The Jews Who Stabbed Germany in the Back
“Once said to be lost, it was,” Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2004 in a New Republic article in which he fingered Walter Cronkite, “the voice of the establishment,” as the culprit behind America’s...
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The Ghost Architect of Vienna
Vienna is a city of ghost-buildings: 180,000 Jews lived in the Austrian capital before World War II; the infrastructure that served them is long gone. The Hakoah Sports Center, with its famous soccer...
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To Be a German Jew in 1938 Was to Live in Disbelief
The night before my family had its property seized and was kicked out of Egypt, everyone went to the movies. This may seem like callous, even glib behavior on the eve of what was probably one of the...
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Why Jens Spahn Won’t Be Elected Chancellor of Germany
The word you hear most often in association with Jens Spahn is “ambitious.” Making the rounds of Berlin’s political correspondents earlier this year, this is how they all describe Germany’s 38-year-old...
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