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…
In the summer of 1990, the newly elected president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, caused not a small degree of controversy when he announced his attendance at the Salzburg Music Festival in Austria. Classical music galas tend not to be scenes of political dispute, but this involved the resurrection of European ghosts other than Mozart. Austria’s…
In the aftermath of Israel’s victory over Egypt and Syria — key Soviet allies — in the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviet Politburo, which had already barred Jews from positions in the Communist Party, seized on the war as a way to weaken Poland’s opposition movement and purge what they labeled the Jewish “fifth…
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