By Peter Ephross
Leon Trotsky’s legacy has been a source of debate for decades, from his supporters and detractors alike. Joshua Rubenstein’s new book seeks a more balanced approach, if that’s possible.
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By Peter Ephross
When I was contributing to Simon Wiesenthal’s obituary in 2005 for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, I learned something that surprised me: The legendary Nazi-hunter didn’t personally hunt down a lot of Nazis. Sure, Wiesenthal helped capture some Nazis and their collaborators, and sure, he pioneered efforts to bring the issues of Holocaust memory and unprosecuted war criminals to international attention, but he didn’t track down as many war criminals as the world thought he did — and he wasn’t aggressive about correcting the record.
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By Peter Ephross
A producer of the hit reality TV show “The Simple Life,” which stars Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, is now trying to boost the image of nice Jewish guys — one month at a time.
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By Peter Ephross
The search for the absent father — whether he’s literally or emotionally absent — is a pervasive theme in theater, books and film. Rarely, however, does an author inject this theme into a work of scholarship, as Beryl Satter has in “Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America.” Satter’s approach makes a lot of sense. She began to explore racist real estate practices in Chicago after she read her father’s papers detailing his efforts to defeat these practices in the 1950s and ’60s. This never-resolved creative tension between the personal and the academic animates Satter’s book.
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By Peter Ephross
In the aftermath of World War II, roughly 250,000 Jews — most of them Holocaust survivors — lived in displaced persons camps in Europe. Many of these people were attracted to Zionism, and about two-thirds of them eventually would move to British Mandate Palestine or to Israel. In his new book, “Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (Wayne State University Press), Avinoam J. Patt, who holds the Philip D. Feltman Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Hartford, explores the role that Zionism played in the lives of the refugees, particularly among the younger generation. Peter Ephross spoke with Patt recently about Zionism’s appeal to displaced persons, and the controversy stoked by Israeli historians on the topic.
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