Why Was Season Four of Stranger Things Filmed in a Nazi Prison?
Based on Lukiškės Prison’s past, its present can be a little jarring.
26
Jul
13
Jan
A Headstone for Zach
People told us that it would get better, the grief. But how was this different from forgetting?
22
Feb
In 2021, the Pandemic Has Spawned Anti-Semitism Around the Globe
As the world came to grips with the seriousness of the pandemic last spring, conspiracies arose linking COVID-19 and anti-Semitism.
04
Aug
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...
04
Aug
What to Watch | Harlan Coben’s “The Woods”
The next stop on our diaspora tour of lockdown streaming TV series brings us to Poland, although the route to this locale is a circuitous one.
In 2007, the best-selling American thriller writer Harlan Coben published a novel called The Woods. It was set in the 1980s at a Pennsylvania summer camp, and 25 years later in Essex County in northern New Jersey. Coben, a Jew and himself a former camp counselor with a history of summer romance, drew on these experiences for the novel.
The novel’s protagonist is a New Jersey prosecutor, Paul Copeland (formerly Pavel Copinsky), the son of a Jewish Soviet emigre, whose medical license was taken from him by anti-Semitic government officials. (Not surprising, in the land that produced Stalin's Doctors Plot, in which only the dictator's timely demise saved Jewish physicians further...
01
Dec
Talk of the Table | Why Feminists Should Eat Dairy on Hanukkah
Hanukkah is associated with the bravery of the Maccabees, the group of heroic Jews who rebelled against the Greek-Syrian empire, defeated it against all odds and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem. They lit a menorah with a little oil that lasted for eight days, sentencing us to centuries of eating fried food to excess.
But there is an interesting feminist alternative to this male-dominated and oil-laden narrative. For some, Hanukkah is a time to celebrate the courage of a Jewish heroine, a woman who defeated, against all odds, a powerful enemy with her wit, daring—and some salty cheese.
This is the story of Judith, a rich and beautiful widow who lived in the Judean town of Bethulia more than two and a half millennia ago. When the army of Assyrian King Nebuchadnezzar led by Holofernes invaded,...
08
Nov
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.
08
Mar
Opinion | Gagging History, Un-Gagging Hate
The debate over Poland’s new ‘Holocaust law’ stokes rising anti-Semitism.
07
Mar
Jewish Poland: A Lost Connection, a Forgotten Identity
“What did I have of a childhood? Nothing!” she exclaims, because from her childhood she remembers mostly the lack of food, missed years of education and years spent in Siberia to escape the Nazi occupation. It is hard to say she really grew up in Poland, hard to find something for which she is grateful.
02
May
Auschwitz, in 2011
by Kayla Green
Today marks Yom HaShoah, the day we commemorate those killed during the Holocaust. Across the world, people share stories of those who survived and those who didn’t, of yellow stars and barbed wire, of a terrifying life lived in ghettos and camps. Among the camps, Auschwitz is often pointed to as the pinnacle of the Nazis’ brutal science. The horror that occurred at the three death camps that comprise Auschwitz should be memorialized as, in the words of a plaque at the camp, “a cry of despair and a warning to humanity.” However, to some people, Auschwitz, or rather, Oświęcim (the Polish pronunciation of the word, which was used before Nazi occupation) is more than the site of the world’s most terrible genocide: To this day, Oświęcim still exists as a town.
More specifically,...