In David Baerwald’s epic tale of espionage and wartime horrors, family history is stranger than fiction
Veteran musician and first-time novelist Baerwald tells his grandfather Ernst's incredible story in 'The Fire Agent'
Family History
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Books In 3 centuries of Southern Jewish life in the Big Easy, no easy way to be Jewish
Nicholas Lemann’s ‘Returning’ is a sprawling family history of the limits of assimilation
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FIRST PERSON What would you do if you got a Nazi relic in the mail?
Unlike Clarence Thomas’ billionaire pal Harlan Crow, I couldn’t wait to get that thing out of my house
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Film & TV In this overlooked documentary, the son of Holocaust survivors embarks on a seemingly impossible mission
In 'The Presence of Their Absence,' Fred Zaidman searches for evidence of his family's lost story
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Looking Forward ‘Things have souls’: How a handwritten letter from 1879 became a very special bar mitzvah tallit
This tallit weaves multiple generations and cherished family artifacts into its fabric
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Yiddish World Favorite Heirlooms: Bubbie’s challah cover with an upside down letter
My great-grandmother Chana Klein, whom we all called Bubbie, was a powerhouse at 4’10” and an accomplished Jewish cook who didn’t share recipes. When she was a widow, all the men in the morning minyan at my shul chased her, but she was faithful to her beloved husband who she met only once before her…
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Culture ‘Once We Were Slaves’ examines fluidity of race through a Jewish lens
Have you heard the story of the Jewish mother and children who were born enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York? Professor Laura Arnold Leibman was researching Jewish communities in Barbados when she discovered two small ivory portraits belonging to a Jewish heiress from New York. She traced…
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Yiddish World Reclaiming my great-great-grandfather’s prayer book and the Yiddish world he lived in
Read this article in Yiddish June 2020 through August 2021 was supposed to be a gap year for me as I moved from my undergraduate to graduate studies. I didn’t plan for the pandemic, let alone its impact on my Jewish, scholarly and music communities. We were all forced to adapt to online formats, reshaping…
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Opinion The latest victim of the culture war over Israel is a leftwing, lapsed Catholic Bible scholar
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Fast Forward Antisemitic incidents in Germany remained elevated in 2025, fueled by rise-in far-right cases
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Culture The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite
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Fast Forward Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why?