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
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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 Why not a Holocaust Survivors Day?
When more than 200 survivors gathered last year at the former Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its liberation, it struck Jonathan Ornstein that there were three days each year to remember Nazi victims but no day to celebrate the lives of Holocaust survivors. “Seeing all those survivors in Auschwitz…
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Opinion The latest victim of the culture war over Israel is a left-wing, lapsed Catholic Bible scholar
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Fast Forward Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
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Opinion Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon