With Passover looming, it is a fine time to meditate on the idea of exile. As we know from the Haggadah, we were exiled in the land of Egypt, enslaved by the Pharaoh, and eventually liberated and returned to our native land in Israel. We remind ourselves of the story year after year, of the…
Crossposted from Haaretz Since 2002 Lodz, an industrial city in western Poland, has been holding a festival called Four Cultures, which packs into a few days in September events from all areas of the arts, including interdisciplinary arts, representing the four major cultures of the inhabitants that make up the city: Polish, German, Russian and…
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…
Although her centenary is not until July 13, the Swiss Jewish philosopher Jeanne Hersch (1910-2000) is already being remembered as a gimlet-eyed defender of freedom. Born in Geneva to a Polish Jewish statistics professor and his doctor wife, Hersch studied with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose career suffered in Germany after 1933 because his own…
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