The Yiddish Yiches of a New Top Diplomat
Should a jealous Jewish store owner keep tabs on his beautiful young wife, seemingly smitten with “a college man”?
05
Jan
15
Mar
Visual Moment | Lost & Found: Solving a Holocaust Mystery
Lost and Found exhibit at Yeshiva University’s museum traces the story of a photo album smuggled out of Lithuania’s Kovno Ghetto, from its original disappearance through the investigation that found the owner’s descendants teaching Yiddish in the United States.
29
Jan
What Will Be the Fate of the House of Fates?
The House of Fates is ground zero in a struggle over history and memory, raising questions that are pertinent today not only in Hungary but also across post-communist Europe. The struggle is about the politicization of the Holocaust by an increasingly autocratic government and about who gets to tell its story, and how.
10
Apr
Jews and the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution
Twenty-first century Ukraine, as Marci Shore notes in her extraordinarily deft, astute, and riveting new account of the dramatic 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, The Ukrainian Night, was too “heir to the grandeur” of the intentions of Nazism and Communism.
16
Jan
Photo Essay | Eli’s Town
I decided to to seek out and capture images of the place in Eastern Europe where my Jewish grandfather and namesake Eli (pronounced “Ellie”) had come from.
17
Apr
Photo Essay: Inside the Story of ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’
In 2014, inspired by reading Ackerman’s book, Moment editor Nadine Epstein, visited the zoo as a guest of the foreign ministry of Poland.
13
May
Reframing Roman Vishniac’s Legacy
Maya Benton was a high school senior living in Los Angeles when the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac’s first posthumous book, To Give Them Light, came out in 1993. Renowned for his iconic images of Eastern European Jews taken between the two World Wars, Vishniac had died three years earlier at age 92.
03
Mar
The New Sultan of Turkey
Former Prime Minister—now President—Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist Party are more powerful than ever. Is the nation’s democracy under siege?
By Yigal Schleifer
Adiminutive 63-year-old with dyed blond hair and a raspy smoker’s cough, Mücella Yapici hardly fits the profile of a criminal mastermind. But Turkish judicial authorities see it differently. Since last year, the architect and urban planner has been on trial for organizing and maintaining an “illegal criminal organization.” If convicted, Yapici could face 30 years in jail.
Despite the legal proceedings, I found Yapici in a buoyant mood during a visit to her office, located in Karaköy, a neighborhood on the European side of the Bosphorus that has served as one of Istanbul’s ports since Byzantine times. “I am Al Capone!” Yapici told me by way of introducing herself and her case. “It’s not a...
15
Sep
Becoming Jan Karski
One of the lesser-known heroes of World War II was Jan Karski (1914-2000), an officer in the Polish Underground resistance who infiltrated the Warsaw Ghetto twice… This past April, actor David Strathairn took on the role of Karski in a dramatic reading of Derek Goldman’s play, Remember This: Walking with Jan Karski, at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
04
Sep
Our Man in Warsaw: Konstanty Gebert
Born in 1953 when Poland was under communist rule,Konstanty Gebert viewed his Jewish lineage as a “biographical accident” until he was 15.