I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir By Lee Grant Blue Rider Press, 480 pages, $28.95 Oscar-winning American Jewish actress Lee Grant is one of the rare performers (along with Zero Mostel) to have eventually triumphed over the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. She did so through a combination of fierce determination, zesty…
Polish MP Slawomir Kopycinski called for the shuttering of the Regulatory Commission for Jewish Communities, a Polish body that restores property owned by Holocaust victims to its legal heirs. Kopycinski called the commission ”the fourth partition of Poland” in a Thursday press conference, alluding to previous partitions of the country in the 1700s and again…
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister, was being remembered by the Jewish world for fighting anti-Semitism and as a friend of Israel. Mazowiecki, a former journalist, died Monday in Warsaw. He was 86. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of a great statesman and friend,” Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish…
A portrait of Abraham Cahan is the first thing that greets a visitor to the Forward in New York City. It attracted me from the moment that I, then a young newspaperman in my midthirties, first stopped by the paper’s editorial rooms. It was early in 1983. Published in Yiddish and known as the Forverts,…
On both occasions that the KGB arrested the Yiddish writer and poet Naftali Herts Kon, it burned his writings. When Kon escaped from the Soviet Union to Poland in 1959, he thought everything would be different — but it wasn’t. When the Polish Communists arrested Kon in 1960, they simply confiscated his writings and refused…
Marilyn Monroe has been dead 50 years, but she continues to fascinate. Classified files released by the FBI in response to a request by the Associated Press reveal claims that the actress’s Jewish marriage ceremony was “a cover up.” Monroe married Jewish playwright Arthur Miller in June 1956, but a redacted FBI document quotes an…
In recent years, China’s foreign policy has turned more assertive than it has been in decades. When it comes to the Middle East, it has expressed this aggressiveness mostly through the veto power it wields in the United Nations Security Council, protecting Iran, for example, from tough sanctions over its nuclear program. With regard to…
Over decades, together with her husband, Serge Klarsfeld, Beate Klarsfeld has forged a name for herself as a fearless Nazi hunter, one whose achievements include bringing to justice Klaus Barbie, the so-called “Butcher of Lyon.” During this time, she has also been a staunch defender of Israel. But today, Klarsfeld is engaged in quite a…
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