When Freedom Summer Came To Town
In 1964, The Jews of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and other southern towns didn’t always welcome their northern cousins or join the front lines of the civil rights movement...
Visual Moment // “Degenerate” Art
In July 1937 Germany’s National Socialist Party opened an exhibition in Munich it termed “Entartete Kunst,” or “Degenerate Art.” Intentionally housed in cramped, poorly lit conditions and awkwardly hung, the works on view were accompanied by inflammatory, denigrating labels. The exhibition was an open declaration of the Nazis’ state-run war on modern art and the effort to impose their officially sanctioned conception of art through propaganda and force.
Inside the Germany/Israel Relationship
In the wake of the Holocaust, Konrad Adenauer and David Ben-Gurion forged an unlikely partnership. More than 60 years later, Germany continues to be one of Israel’s staunchest defenders and most dependable allies. But can the relationship withstand the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment in Europe and the fading memories of a new generation?
Book Review // The Story of the Jews
The great Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died in 2009, famously declared that history was “the faith of fallen Jews.” Yerushalmi had trained under the preeminent 20th-century Jewish historian Salo Baron, whose epic (and unfinished) 18-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews was celebrated for its paradigm-shifting rejection of the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history. Despite a life lived in the shadow of Jewish history’s most lachrymose moment—both his parents were murdered in the Holocaust—Baron insisted that Jewish history was defined not by dying but by living, by the astonishing creativity and vitality of an ever-changing Jewish culture.
Book Review // The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe
The history of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia has a singular place in the Jewish imagination today. To some, it is a dead subject, poisoned by the Holocaust and the lethal anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries: Either we know everything we need to know about it or there is nothing worth knowing. To others, it is shrouded in the nostalgia-laden distance of the Old Country...
Visual Moment // Persian Jewish Art
Illuminating the History of Iranian Jews
By Diane M. Bolz
Jews have lived in Persia, now Iran, for nearly three millennia. The first Jewish community dates back...
The Secret History of X & O
An investigation into the religious roots of the symbols for hugs & kisses.
Jewish Word // Philistine
How Philistine Became a Dirty Word
by Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil
It’s a story nearly everyone knows: The young shepherd boy uses nothing but his wits and a slingshot...
The Holocaust Through the Eyes of Women
For the first four decades after the Holocaust, most memoirs and historical studies viewed life in the camps through male eyes. But since the early...
Book Review // Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising
By Konstanty Gebert. Over the past few years, a series of books has brought to the attention of English-speaking readers the morally challenging, historically important and often overlooked or forgotten story of the Polish contribution to the Allied war effort in World War II, and of the terrible fate of the Poles under German rule.
Visual Moment // Medieval Cairo
By Diane M. Bolz // Today, fewer than 50 Jews remain in Egypt, but for thousands of years the country was home to a series of important Jewish communities.
Moment in Music // Michael Bloomfield
By Josh Tapper
On February 15, 1981, Michael Bloomfield’s body was discovered in a parked car on a San Francisco side street. The 37-year-old Jewish blues guitar...