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…
Jan Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa, expects his upcoming book to be controversial in his native Poland. But if a proposed new law is approved by Poland’s parliament this fall, as expected, Grabowski’s book, which examines the role of Poland’s police force in robbing and murdering Jews under the Nazis, may also…
During a dinner conversation a year or two ago, my father briefly alluded to a “gross” lard-like product his mother used for frying. I had forgotten the name of it until a recent walk-through of “Nourishing Tradition: Jewish Cookbooks & The Stories They Tell” at the Center for Jewish History, where a pamphlet published by…
— French authorities allocated approximately half a million dollars toward the preservation of what is believed to be Europe’s oldest known Jewish building. Restoration works are to begin in October to save the damaged parts of the Sublime House, which some historians believe was the seat of a 12-century yeshiva – a Jewish religious seminary — in…
This past March, three weeks before she passed away, my bubbe, Charlotte Friend, celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday. On that day, as on every other birthday she’d had over the last twenty or so years, she received several phone calls from her Russian friends — women (and a few men) to whom she had taught English…
WALTHAM, Mass. (JTA) – When Jonathan Sarna was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1999 at the age of 44, it changed his life. Already a highly regarded historian at Brandeis University, Sarna was in the midst of writing his seminal study of American Jewish history when he realized with alarm that he might never finish…
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