The Jewish Photographer of Ghetto Life
From 1940 to 1945, Ross was the official ghetto photographer, tasked with providing a picture of every prisoner. About 3,000 of his images survive.
Book Essay // Refracted Identities, Mirrored Lives
Suleiman’s new book, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France, explores Némirovsky’s tragic career and the deteriorating civil society of pre-World War II France that first nurtured the writer and then ultimately turned on her. Drawing on parallels to her own life, Suleiman makes of the story a meditation on allegiance, foreignness and assimilation—one with uncanny echoes for today’s politics.
The Polish Republic of Untruth
It didn’t take long for the recently elected government to have a troubling impact on the state of the country’s democracy.
Opinion // Challenging History’s Taboos
The Holocaust (Shoah) and the Nakba (al-Karitha) share three characteristics. First, both terms mean catastrophe, disaster or calamity.
Book Review: Eichmann Before Jerusalem
Eichman Before Jeruslem: The Unexamined Life ofa Mass Murderer / Bettina Stangneth / Translated from the German by Ruth Martin / Alfred A. Knopf / 2014, pp. 579, $35
A Third-Generation Remembrance of Holocaust’s Horrors
Today, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the horrors of the Holocaust loom large in the world’s collective memory. But for those...
Book Review // The Zone of Interest
THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Martin Amis // Alfred A. Knopf // 2014 // pp. 306
Film Watch // Three Minutes in Poland
A teenager with a big smile grins at the camera. Another waves his hand and keeps moving to stay in the picture. A bearded man is helped down the stairs of a building as groups of young and old crowd the streets of a small town, all anxious to be a part of this remarkable movie.
How “Anti-Semite” Miklos Horthy Saved the Jews of Budapest
By Eliezer M. Rabinovich
In 1944, Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy saved more Jews than anyone else in the world. Yet today, next to the efforts of heroic...
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.
2014 Spotlight on Poland
PREVIEW OF THE CORE EXHIBITION OF THE MUSEUM OF THE HISTORY OF POLISH JEWS
My personal journey to Jewish identity has taken place by way of the past. Like many immigrants from Eastern Europe, my grandparents and great-grandparents rarely spoke of the Old Country, leaving me to spend years trying to piece together the clues. This longing to know more about my family’s origins led me to genealogical research and DNA testing, to towns and shtetls in Ukraine, and to Moment.
Book Review // Trieste
Creating art from the events of the Holocaust remains as daunting as ever. Soon, those awful events will move beyond the reach of living memory while the need for testimony grows more pressing, not less. But the responsibilities of art are different from those of history: Theodor Adorno’s much-misrepresented dictum that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz” can simply be used as a lazy shorthand for refusing to engage with difficult and challenging creations.