Yermi Brenner
By Yermi Brenner
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Culture Walking the Cobblestones of My Great-Grandparents’ Berlin
I am 35 years old, but until recently, all I knew about my great-grandparents, Carl and Paula Brenner, was one vague, frightening sentence: They lived in Berlin and tried to escape the Nazis but were murdered in the camps. I grew up in Israel, and relocated to the German capital one year ago. Since becoming…
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News 79 Years After Nazi Olympics, Jewish Athletes Flood Berlin for Maccabi Games
Melissa Perlman has participated in countless running competitions, but none were as emotional as the half marathon race in Berlin last Sunday. “To come to Germany 70 years after the Holocaust and represent Jews and take a stand for something so much bigger than ourselves was an opportunity I could not turn down,” said the…
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News German Left Haunted by the Holocaust — Split Over Israel
Growing up in reunified Germany, Eva Meyer remembers being overwhelmed by the Holocaust studies that were part of each school year. Meyer and her classmates were assigned to read books about the Holocaust. They heard personal stories from Holocaust survivors. They had to write essays about the Holocaust, too. Learning so intensively about the horrors…
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News Celebrating Holiday of Freedom in an Israeli Desert Jail
Perhaps the most relevant Seder in Israel took place in the most isolated of places. The Holot Residency Center is located near the border with Egypt, an hour’s ride southwest from the city of Beersheba into the desert. This detention facility is home to people like Mutasim Ali, who fled the war-torn Darfur region in…
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Opinion An Israeli and German Alliance Decades in the Making
Yermi Brenner When Yakov Hadas-Handelsman was born in Tel Aviv in 1957 the passports Israel was issuing to its citizens still bore the inscription “Valid to any country except Germany.” Today, Hadas-Handelsman is the Israeli ambassador to Germany. He devotes much of his time to nourishing and deepening the relationship with the German nation, which…
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News Why Are Jews Supporting a German Right-Wing Movement?
Standing on an improvised stage and wrapped in the black, red and gold German flag, Rotem Ahituv stared out at thousands of protesters spread below him and offered the demonstrators a kind of absolution that only someone like him could give. “I am Jewish,” he told the crowd. “My family has lived here in Germany…
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Culture How To Leave the Neo-Nazis in Two Easy Lessons — and One Hard One
Four years ago, when he was the leader of a neo-Nazi group in Thuringia, a federal state in central Germany, Steven Hartung organized demonstrations and other political actions that promoted extreme right-wing ideology. He believed that ethno-pluralism — a view supporting ethnic or racial separation and opposing cultural diversity — was the only way to…
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News How Germany Is Attempting To De-Radicalize Muslim Extremists
Right-wing extremism is not the only kind of extremism Germany faces. An estimated 300 German citizens of Muslim background are currently fighting in Syria as part of the radical-militant organization Islamic State. The number of Muslim Germans who adopt extremist ideology is tiny in comparison with the portion of right-wing extremists in the German society….
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