By Symi Rom-Rymer Reuters reported this week that 100 French and American plaintiffs are suing SNCF, the French national railroad company, for their role in transporting French Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust. The group, made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendents, insist that...
By Symi Rom-Rymer When a Muslim and a Jew walk into a bar, it’s a joke. When a Muslim discovers he was born Jewish, it’s a movie. The Infidel, shown as part of the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, is the story of Mahmud Nasir (Omid Djalili),...
By Symi Rom-Rymer A picture is worth a thousand words, so goes the old cliché. But as Alana Newhouse’s recently published New York Times article on Roman Vishniac demonstrates, what that picture is actually saying is often more complicated than it seems. Her piece focuses on Vishniac’s...
By Symi Rom-Rymer The New York Times recently published a piece recently about a former Polish neo-Nazi who discovered his Jewish roots as an adult and is now ultra-Orthodox. As he acknowledges in the article, “he was drawn to extremes.” Pawel’s (now Pinchas’) story is certainly engrossing. ...
By Symi Rom-Rymer This year’s Oscars brought us some surprises (Sandra Bullock), some truly painful dance sequences (I’m looking at you Adam Shankman), and some deserving winners (The Hurt Locker). It also proved, once again, that Hollywood wouldn’t be funny without the Jews. From a running gag...
By Symi Rom-Rymer Michael Kimmelman’s recent article, “When Fear Turns Graphic,” offered a peek into the process behind making political art, with the recent Swiss pro-minaret ban ads as his focal point. Unfortunately, for me, whatever insights he hoped to share were overshadowed by a surprising...
By Symi Rom-Rymer While perusing the bookshelves at Barnes and Nobel yesterday, I came across a wonderful graphic novel entitled The Rabbi’s Cat by the French author, Joann Sfar, best known in the US for his children’s series, The Little Vampire. The Rabbi’s Cat tells the...
By Symi Rom-Rymer Well, the mystery is solved…sort of. The infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign stolen from Auschwitz on December 18 has been recovered on the other side of the country from where it was taken. At this point, the Polish police are refusing to comment...
By Symi Rom-Rymer "My name is Henio Zytomirski. I am seven-years-old. I live on 3 Szewska Street in Lublin.” So begins the profile of Heino Zytomirski, a young addition to Facebook. Why should we care? Because Heino is dead--a young victim of the Holocaust. His profile and status updates...
By Jeremy Gillick The Forward has published its annual list of America’s 50 most important Jews: the Forward 50. Winners include Rahm Emanuel, Obama's newly appointed Chief of Staff, about whom you can read here. There's also Morris Allen, a Conservative Rabbi from Minnesota who helped re-invent kashrut...