Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
By Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
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Culture Exactly How Did Hitler Become Hitler Anyway?
Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi By Tom Weber Basic Books, 464 pages, $35 Today, historians are in the unfortunate position of having to describe new books on the Nazi era as “timely.” This description is especially apt for Tom Weber’s new book, “Becoming Hitler.” Had it appeared prior to Donald Trump’s election in…
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Culture Trump Gives Frightening New Relevance To ‘Man in the High Castle’
In case anyone needed reminding, the transition of presidential power to Donald Trump’s administration from Barack Obama’s confirms that context matters. In the dueling aerial photos of the two presidents being inaugurated, Obama in 2009 and Trump in 2017, one shows the National Mall filled to overflowing, the other shows it with glaring open spaces…
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Culture Finding a Jewish Homeland — Just Northwest of Buffalo
Isra Isle By Nava Semel, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen Mandel Vilar Press, 240 pages, $16.95 The boom in Jewish alternate history continues. Following on the heels of Lavie Tidhar’s novel, “A Man Lies Dreaming” (about Adolf Hitler failing to become the Führer of Nazi Germany), Emily Barton’s “The Book of Esther” (about…
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Culture When An Actual Nazi Spoke on an American College Campus
Hundreds of college students gathered outside the auditorium carrying signs protesting the evening’s speaker. Dozens inside were poised to heckle him and condemn his views. Many fumed that their university had extended an invitation to a veritable Nazi. The scene could easily describe any number of recent campus protests where students have used inflated rhetoric…
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Culture After the Holocaust, A Jewish State in Saxony
Judenstaat By Simone Zelitch Tor Books, 320 pages, $12.99 Counterfactual history has never been more popular in American culture. The success of Amazon Prime’s recent hit series “The Man in the High Castle” (based on Philip K. Dick’s famous novel about the Nazis winning World War II) and the Hulu series “11.22.63” (based on Stephen…
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Art Nazi Museum Documents Munich’s Ignominious Past — and Puts Hitler in His Place
What would Adolf Hitler say today if he walked by Munich’s recently opened Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism? I posed this question to the German novelist Timur Vermes when we visited the city’s newest and most overdue museum together. Vermes was the perfect person to ask, as he is the author of…
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Culture Will the Real Adolf Hitler Please Stand Up?
Incongruous as it may initially sound, “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s immortal line from “Romeo and Juliet” lies at the core of Matt Ogens’s endearingly offbeat documentary “Meet the Hitlers.” In the play, Juliet Capulet famously raises the question to declare that the stigma associated with the surname of her lover, Romeo Montague, will not…
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Culture What If World War I Had Never Happened?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I By Richard Ned Lebow Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $27 In the introduction to his new book, “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I,” Richard Ned Lebow discloses a poignant personal reason for his interest in counterfactual history. The professor of international political…
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