The Ambiguity of Virtue by Bernard Wasserstein

Book Review // The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews

At the very beginning of his probing, disturbing account of the Nazis’ destruction of Dutch Jewry, Bernard Wasserstein asks what is no doubt the most terrible question that can be posed about Jewish behavior during the Holocaust: “Confronting the absolute evil of Nazism, was there any middle road between outright resistance and abject submission?”

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Sanctioned vs. Degenerate Art

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.

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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.

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Book Review | Countrymen by Bo Lidegaard

Shortly after my bar mitzvah in 1943 at the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen, where my father had arrived from Czechoslovakia in 1934 to be the chief cantor, the roof caved in with all the uncertainties, terror and threats of annihilation. My family, along with some seven to eight thousand Danish Jews, were forced to flee their homes.

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