Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
By Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
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Culture A Kabbalah for Architects?
● Kabbalah in Art and Architecture By Alexander Gorlin Pointed Leaf Press, 192 pages, $60 ● Constructing Memory: Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums By Stephanie Shosh Rotem Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 217 pages, $71.20 Although architecture has long been thought of as enjoying minimal importance in the Jewish tradition, present-day scholarship continues to show…
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Culture Two World Wars Face Major Milestones in 2014
Numerologists and war buffs have much to anticipate this year thanks to an unusual confluence of commemorative events. 2014 marks both the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and the 75th anniversary of the start of World War II. Given the enormous attention that numerically significant anniversaries have acquired in Western culture,…
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Culture Hitler’s Willing Hollywood Collaborators
Since its publication this past summer, Ben Urwand’s book, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, has sparked intense debate. Its claim that Hollywood’s major (Jewish-run) film studios colluded with the government of Nazi Germany to protect their economic interests has elicited angry responses from critics who have objected that the book’s thesis is deceptively sensationalistic…
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Culture Did Jews Win the Second World War?
● How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism By Benjamin Ginsberg Rowman & Littlefield, 234 pages, $35 Benjamin Ginsberg’s intriguing new book, “How the Jews Defeated Hitler,” offers a provocative new answer to an old question. In seeking to explain why the Jews failed to resist…
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Culture How We Got Hitler-ized
It has been dismissed as a tempest in a teapot, but the recent brouhaha over JC Penney’s now-infamous Hitler teakettle may be more significant than it initially appears. Click to enlarge/Kurt Hoffman illustration. Far from being an isolated incident, it is merely the latest in a long series of news stories in recent years about…
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Culture Author Guy Saville Imagines ‘Afrika Reich’ Where the Nazis Won
The Afrika Reich By Guy Saville Henry Holt & Co., 400 pages, $28 Recently, fictional Nazis have been enjoying a resurgence in contemporary literature. As seen in high-brow novels such as Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly Ones,” works of young adult fiction, such as John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” and mass market books,…
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Culture Ironies Behind A Stunning Synagogue
Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture By Joseph M. Siry University of Chicago Press, 736 pages, $65 When Rabbi Mortimer J. Cohen contacted Frank Lloyd Wright in November 1953 about designing a new sanctuary for his conservative congregation, Beth Sholom, in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park, the legendary architect had…
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Culture From Mussolini’s Estate to Shoah Memorial
In August, the city of Rome is expected to give its final approval to plans for Italy’s new Holocaust museum, the Museo Nazionale della Shoah. Designed by Rome-based architect Luca Zevi, son of famed architecture critic Bruno Zevi, together with co-designer Giorgio Tamburini, the museum will be built on the historically resonant site of the…
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