So just to sum up the state of the Democratic race in the first week of primaries: Jewish donors are attacking a Jewish candidate for being too old to run, and a Jewish candidate is calling out Jewish donors for being part of a “big money” billionaire class. It can only go downhill from her.
Documentary filmmaker Roberta Grossman is obsessed with the Holocaust, always has been. Its ever-present evil—the ultimate “rift in humanity,” she says—just won’t let go. “It’s not that I can’t pull away from it, but rather why others can.” So she asserts on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. Producer Nancy Spielberg (yes, Steven’s sister), with whom Grossman collaborated on the Holocaust documentary Who Will Write Our History, is participating in the conversation from her New York home. Their film, which has already been screened at various festivals worldwide, will make its television debut on the Discovery Channel on January 26 at 3 p.m. The telecast is part of Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations. It’s also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
A new exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the former death camp examines how faith helped sustain people during the Holocaust.
Throughout his eighty-five years, Thomas Buergenthal has experienced justice from all angles. He has been deprived of it, reclaimed it, fought for it for others, and worked to strengthen it worldwide.
When Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York used the term “concentration camp” last week to describe the current situation on the U.S. southern border, she sparked a vicious debate that became less about the crisis at the border and more about what the term really means.
Helena survived three concentration camps and when the last one was liberated she was flown by the Red Cross to a hospital in Sweden. She was 5’4″ and weighed 52 lbs. Her roommate in the hospital, a fellow survivor, knit the sweater for her while they were there. She told me she has worn that sweater every Passover since.
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.
“What are your earliest memories of Greece?” I ask. He does not hesitate. “Running and hiding with my mother,” he says. “Hiding and running.”
Billionaire George Soros has been accused of being a Nazi collaborator. This story tells how this anti-Semitic trope went from the extreme to the mainstream.
While Jews honor heroes like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, the name of Carl Lutz is virtually unknown.
It is easy to find love in a beautiful place. But to find love in the shadow of death is most remarkable. And remarkable were the young Jews who, caught in the Holocaust, held onto life in ghettos, forests, transit camps, slave labor camps and death camps.
When Moshe Ha Elion sings, his clear, strong voice intones the rise and fall of a life lost too soon.
