This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The whole world was recently unnerved to learn that North Korea successfully tested a hydrogen bomb on September 3rd, 2017. According to an analysis of the seismic activity measured from the blast, North Korea’s nuclear scientists seem to be familiar with the Teller-Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons….
Update, 3:00 p.m.: It was later determined that the coin is actually a souvenir from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and is not 2,000 years old. (JTA) — An 8-year-old Israeli girl found a rare coin from the Second Temple period. The half-shekel coin dates from a time when it was used to pay a…
(JTA) — Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson … and Peter Stuyvesant? One of these things is not like the others. Amid the impassioned debate over whether, when and how to remove statues memorializing the Confederacy, an Israeli nonprofit is seeking a piece of the action. On Tuesday, Shurat HaDin, which represents terror victims…
Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, the three most famous Confederate heroes, have hundreds of memorials and monuments in public spaces throughout the United States dedicated in their memory. Judah Philip Benjamin, the most significant Jewish political figure in the United States during the 19th century — often called the “brains of the…
Phil Mazo, a comedian based in Jersey City, NJ, was reading through the to-do list on his phone when he decided it might be time to check off one item that had been on the list for some time: Buy a take-home genome testing kit from the company 23andMe. After finding a deal on a…
The success of Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” in theaters this summer is a welcome sign, amidst the usual summer cinematic fare, that history still interests us. Britain’s mettle in evacuating some 340,000 British and allied troops from French shores amidst the German attempt to destroy them remains one of history’s great inspirations, particularly when one considers…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The extreme poverty that Jews once experienced in the cities and towns of Eastern Europe has been well documented, but what exactly was their diet like? According to the memoirs of Hirsh Abramovich, a Yiddish writer in pre-war Vilna, the Jews in Lithuania were probably the poorest…
For the past 26 years, Susan Goldstein Snyder, a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has traveled across the U.S. and Europe meeting with survivors (and, increasingly, their children and grandchildren), listening to their stories, and persuading them to donate their artifacts to the museum. Over the course of her career, she has…
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