This is the Forward’s coverage of the Holocaust (also called the Shoah), the genocide of Europe’s Jews committed by the Nazis during World War II.
Holocaust
The Latest
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Film & TV An Oscar winner gives new life to a classic story of exile
When Caroline Link reread “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,” decades after she first read it for school, she underlined a passage where Swiss boys throw gravel at the young Jewish protagonist. She couldn’t wait to direct that scene. It’s a curious, if not quite startling moment in the chapter book, a 1971 semi-autobiographical novel of…
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News What makes you feel Jewish? For most Jews, Holocaust remembrance is at the top of the list.
The vast majority of American Jews view remembering the Holocaust as essential to their Jewish identities — more than religious activities like observing Jewish law or cultural ones like eating Jewish food, according to “American Jews in 2020,” released today by the Pew Research Center. More than 75% of survey respondents said that remembering the…
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Culture Prairie Sonata: A new novel of Canadian Jewish life
Read this article in Yiddish. Prairie Sonata Sandy Shefrin Rabin FriesenPress, 2020, 288 pp. Yiddish culture always had better luck in Canada than in the United States. Partly this was because Jewish immigrants to Canada were more cohesive and better organized, and Canadian society in general displayed greater respect for cultural diversity. As a result,…
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Culture Jewish music in Germany after the Holocaust
Read this article in Yiddish. Tina Frühauf Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 Oxford University Press, 2021, 644 pp. Immediately after World War II, the German rabbi Leo Baeck, who had survived the war in the concentration camp Terezin, declared: “The history of German Jews has ended once and for…
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Culture Can a new ritual shift our relationship to the Holocaust?
How will we remember the Holocaust when all the survivors are gone? This question has driven Jewish educators and historians as survivors have aged. Many educators treat it as a crisis; without testimony from those who actually experienced the atrocities, they will become easier to forget and deny. Holocaust denial is on the rise. There’s…
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News Your guide to 2021 (virtual) Yom HaShoah commemorations
Despite a year of isolation and pandemic restrictions, Jewish communities around the country are finding ways to come together for Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration to honor the more than six million Jews murdered by Nazis and Nazi collaborators during the Holocaust. From coast to coast, synagogues, cities, museums, Jewish community centers, and others are…
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Culture 2 generations of Germans look to the past and future of the country’s Jews
Semon Shabaev and Anja Baron were born in two different Germanys. Baron, 55, grew up in a Berlin with no visible Jewish life; filling that absence was a profound sense of guilt. Shabaev, who turns 21 in April, is a member of a thriving Jewish community and part of a generation committed to thinking beyond…
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News Jewish history, and RBG, shaped Rachel Wainer Apter’s path to New Jersey’s top court
When Rachel Wainer Apter told her three children that she had just been nominated as a justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, they were overwhelmed with excitement. “They laughed, they cried, and they screamed – all at the same time,” Apter, an Orthodox Jew and resident of Englewood, NJ, told the Forward in an…
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News Meet the Jews who helped elect Zohran Mamdani
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Fast Forward Calling itself ‘MechaHitler,’ Elon Musk’s AI tool spreads antisemitic conspiracies
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Opinion This German word explains Trump’s authoritarian impulses — and Hitler’s rise to power
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Fast Forward For the Jewish community in central Texas, deadly flooding hits close to home
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Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
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Looking Forward A handcrafted Torah ark perished in the L.A. wildfires. My dad’s was seeking a new home.
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Opinion This German word explains Trump’s authoritarian impulses — and Hitler’s rise to power
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Opinion I’m a Zionist Democrat. Mamdani has me asking if I must choose between my ideals and identity
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