On December 19th, during the final death throes of the city of Aleppo, I wrote the following words, “What do we mean when we say “never again?” These days, do we mean anything at all? Perhaps when the phrase was coined in 1961 by filmmaker Erwin Leiser in his Holocaust documentary, “Mein Kampf,” we might…
Imagine, for a moment, that after the Holocaust the official German position was one of denial. That the German heads of state have, since 1945, consistently asserted that the events of the Holocaust were nasty, yes, but both the Jews and the Germans bear some responsibility, and in the end, well, such things happen in…
Never again. My husband and I heard these words, playing through tinny headphones in heavily accented English. We must remember so it never happens again. Remember, not simply through thought, but through visits to museums, to sites of murder, to dark buildings lined with photographs of skeletal bodies. Remember, not in the typical sense: not…
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning By Timothy Snyder Tim Duggan Books, 462 pages, $30 In two generations, we have witnessed a massive shift in our attitude toward the Holocaust: from regarding it as incomprehensible, defying human understanding, to trying to construct rigorous, often competing historical explanations for its causes and contours. There…
Do Jews focus too much on the Holocaust? Natalie Portman thinks so. The actress, who directed and stars in an adaptation of Amos Oz’s autobiography, told The Independent that the Jewish community needs to reassess the Holocaust’s place as the defining event in our, and broader society’s history. “I think a really big question the…
The Union for Reform Judaism urged President Barack Obama to use the word “genocide” in describing the murder of 1.5 million Armenians. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the union’s president, made the call in an open letter he sent to Obama on Thursday, ahead of the centennial anniversary of what is widely known as the Armenian Genocide….
By any measure, the Warsaw Ghetto was hell on earth. An urban prison zone in the middle of German-occupied Warsaw, after November 1940 the ghetto was enclosed by a ten-foot high wall that was topped with barbed wire and tightly guarded. German authorities packed over 400,000 Jews of all ages into an area of just…
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach apologized to U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice for his organization’s full-page ad in The New York Times accusing Rice of turning a blind eye to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In an Op-Ed in the Washington Post titled “Dear Susan Rice, I’m Sorry,” Boteach said that the ad placed by This…
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