The incendiary and critically acclaimed new documentary, “The Act of Killing,” might at first seem to have little connection with the Jewish experience aside from the background of its director Joshua Oppenheimer: Its subjects are veterans of the 1965 massacres in Indonesia, during which 1,000,000 men, women and children were slaughtered over the course of…
Israel was born as a sanctuary for a people banished from their homeland, harassed in exile and ultimately subjected to mass murder. But there is more than one population here that meets this description. For, the Jewish state is home to another dispersed, insular and tradition-bound nation that has suffered through the trauma of exile…
Like the Holocaust itself, Holocaust denial is a well-known if often misunderstood phenomenon. In its most naked form, it denies the historical fact that during the Nazi period, Germans, helped by many other Europeans such as Ukrainians, sought to kill the Jews of Europe and managed to slaughter roughly 6 million of them. In somewhat…
Israel is definitely making progress on the subject of the Armenian genocide. In late December, during the Knesset’s first ever open-door debate on the issue, nobody was reported to have questioned whether the deliberate killing of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-’16 should be called a genocide, nor whether the Ottoman Empire was the guilty party,…
The spirit of the holiday season has just swept across the French National Assembly. On December 22, the nation’s representatives — or, more accurately, the handful in attendance — passed a bill that would criminalize the denial of the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in 1915. It was as much a gift to the government…
Deborah Lipstadt’s most recent book, “The Eichmann Trial,” is now available. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: It was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Eichmann…
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is threatening a confirmation fight in an effort to press the Bush administration to reverse America’s longstanding policy of avoiding the use of the word “genocide” to describe the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to vote…
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