Decades after officials worried they might be sheltering the infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, members of the Mennonite sect in Paraguay are coming to terms with their historical ties with the Third Reich. Mennonites are supposed to embrace non-violence and shun political life. But that was not the case in Fernheim, the Paraguay settlement where…
As many around the world worry about Donald Trump’s presidency and the potentially fascist future of the United States, it is worth remembering a little known anecdote about the famed mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. You likely know Gödel’s name in relation to the “incompleteness theorems” – two theorems of mathematical logic dealing with axiomatic systems…
In the Fall of 1936, Sam Sherman, an officer of the historically Jewish Phi Epsilon Pi fraternity (PhiEp) circulated a call to his fellow Greeks asking for funds to help Central European Jewish student refugees. The plea intended to assist young men who had been prohibited from completing their university studies because of Hitler’s rise…
Sean Spicer, the new White House Press Secretary, is, well, a very weird guy. Leaving aside his unfashionable, dogmatic loyalism and his , we still have his tweets. His glorious glorious tweets. The long standing Dippin’ Dots feud (“Dippin dots is NOT the ice cream of the future,” Spicer declared in 2010. “I think I…
BERLIN(JTA) – Non-Jewish Germans who have helped preserve local Jewish history, and interested young Germans in it, were honored at the 17th annual Obermayer German Jewish History Awards. Rolf Wieland, president of the Berlin House of Representatives, presented the awards – established by the late American philanthropist Arthur Obermayer – on Monday in the Berlin Senate. Virtually all awardees said they face…
Scholars usually avoid politics, content to plod around the stacks in the university library and write essays for obscure academic journals. But after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections, hundreds of Jewish historians signed an open letter pledging their opposition to many of the new leader’s ideas. “We condemn unequivocally those agitators who have…
— Yaffa Eliach, a prominent historian of the Holocaust who opened the first center for Holocaust studies in the United States, has died. Eliach, a Holocaust survivor, died Wednesday at 79, The Jewish Press reported. In 1974, she opened the Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn. It later merged with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New…
In August, Poland’s Cabinet approved a bill that would criminalize using the phrase “Polish death camp” or “Polish concentration camp,” with punishments ranging from fines to imprisonment. It’s one of several recent government reforms that critics have called anti-democratic. The bill also raises questions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust. It echoes the country’s communist-era…
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