Will the Holocaust Museum in Budapest Be Forced to Collaborate With Known Holocaust Distorters? anti-semitism in the Hungarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidez party
07 Oct
Anti-Semitism Monitor, Jewish World, Latest

Will the Holocaust Museum in Budapest Be Forced to Collaborate With Known Holocaust Distorters?

In September, the Hungarian publication Népszava reported that the sole institution in Hungary that is dedicated to preserving the record of the Hungarian Holocaust, the Páva Street Holocaust Memorial Center, may be coerced to collaborate with three other Hungarian research institutes. These three institutes, which are controlled by the government, have engaged in Holocaust distortion and/or employed anti-Semites.

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04 Aug
Anti-Semitism Monitor, Jewish World, Latest

Anti-Semitic Tropes, Abroad and at Home

In July, we documented incidents in 16 different countries to add to the Anti-Semitism Monitor database. However, for the July roundup column, we are focusing on two particular regions of the world and two very different types of anti-Semitism. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian, right-wing leaders spin anti-Semitic conspiracy plots to appeal to the most xenophobic portions of their voting populations. In the United States, misguided luminaries supporting racial justice use their social media megaphones to employ similar anti-Semitic concepts. Europe In Eastern Europe, the two governments most brazenly trying to undermine the rule of law are Poland and Hungary. In July, ultra-nationalist, ruling parties in both countries employed prejudice against minorities for political gain.  Poland held a two-round presidential election in June and July, and President Andrzej Duda's Law and Justice party (PiS) played the anti-LGBT and anti-Semitism...

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08 Nov
2018 November-December, World

Opinion | Poland and Hungary Are the Tip of the Iceberg

The news from Central Europe seems to be uniformly bad: democracy threatened, rule of law subverted, historical revisionism triumphant. It all carries a nasty 1930s flavor. To Western readers, moreover, most of that news seems to come from Budapest and Warsaw. We don’t hear much from such places as Bratislava, Bucharest or Ljubljana—and no news is good news, right? Look again.

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11 Feb
Arts & Culture, Culture, Latest

People of the Book: Interview with Julie Orringer

By Symi Rom-Rymer Sitting on a faux cowhide bench with rock music blaring at full volume in a small coffee shop in one of Brooklyn’s hipper neighborhoods, it would be hard to feel further away from the turbulence and romanticism of 1930s Paris.  But I was swept back to that era as I spoke with Julie Orringer, whose debut epic novel—The Invisible Bridge, among the New York Times’ 100 best books of 2010—I wrote about in a recent post.   Inspired by her grandparents’ experiences before and during the Holocaust, Invisible Bridge follows the fate of Andras Lévi, a young Jewish Hungarian architectural student on the cusp of a new life in interwar Paris.  Refreshingly, unlike many Holocaust novel protagonists, Lévi is not from the East European shtetl.  He is urban, ambitious and, like many of his...

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16 Jan
History, Latest

Jewish Ghosts of Budapest

By Merav Levkowitz On the last evening of 2010, a Friday, about 35-40 (mostly) young adults, gathered in a non-descript apartment in the center of Budapest’s—actually on the Pest side of the Danube river—Jewish quarter. This is Budapest’s branch of Moishe House, an organization that maintains 33 houses around the world in which young Jews can gather for Shabbat, holidays, and activities. I spent the last Shabbat of the year at Budapest’s Moishe House, which had become my brother’s Jewish community during his semester abroad. Hungary’s Jewish community has a unique, but tumultuous history. Jews have resided in the Austro-Hungarian empire and in Buda, Obuda, and Pest—the three towns that came together as Hungary’s capital, Budapest, in 1873—since medieval times. As in other European countries, Jews in the region experienced waves of safety and success interspersed with...

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