Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom in Nazi Germany carried out Nov. 9-10, 1938.
Kristallnacht
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Opinion After Kristallnacht, My Grandmother Hoped We’d Shatter a Different Glass on Election Day
November 9th, 1938 On this day, my grandmother, living in Leipzig, Germany woke up to shattered glass. It was the morning after Kristallnacht, the night where Nazi sympathizers burnt synagogues, smashed windows, and let the Jewish people know once and for all they were not welcome in Germany. My grandmother’s love for Germany and German…
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News Kristallnacht Trending on Twitter — and Not Just for a History Lesson
People on Twitter are using the hashtag #Kristallnacht to comment on Donald Trump’s election — and not everyone is OK with that. The November pogroms – more commonly known as Kristallacht or Crystal Night – were a serious of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. Paramilitary forces and German civilians burnt…
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Opinion Misogyny Was Enough To Tarnish Donald Trump — but Neo-Nazism Wasn’t?
On November 9, 1938, the Nazi paramilitary force known as the SA led a pogrom against German Jews that is now known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass. They torched synagogues, smashed Jewish businesses and ransacked Jewish homes, sending an estimated 30,000 of their occupants to concentration camps. The two-day orgy of…
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Breaking News Firebrand Arab Lawmaker Compares Israeli Actions to Kristallnacht
Arab-Israeli lawmaker Hanin Zoabi equated Israel’s actions against the Palestinians to the violence against Jews that led to the Holocaust during a speech commemorating Kristallnacht in Amsterdam. “Kristallnacht didn’t suddenly fall from the sky, come out of nowhere, it was the result of a development over time. We can see a similar development happening in…
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Opinion My Sephardic Guilt on Kristallnacht
Postcard of Madeira While other Jewish families suffered unimaginable brutality in the Holocaust, my family lived like royalty in the Portuguese paradise known for its wine, Madeira. I know: I sound like an entitled, unsympathetic brat. And what I’m trying to say is, I feel guilty about this. I always have. Every time a Holocaust…
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Breaking News Dutch Protestant Church Pulls Out of Kristallnacht Event Over Sponsors
A senior official from the Dutch Protestant Church pulled out of a Holocaust memorial event co-organized by Socialists who commemorated a Hamas leader. Arjan Plaisier, secretary of the PKN umbrella of Dutch Protestant churches, announced Friday that he would neither be speaking nor attending the Kristallnacht commemoration event organized by the Platform Against Racism and…
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Opinion A New Kristallnacht for Today’s European Jews?
Protesters took to the streets of Paris this summer to demonstrate against Israel / Getty Images (JTA) — Each year on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, we recall the opening salvo of the violent assault on Jews that foreshadowed the Holocaust and ask ourselves what should have been done at that moment. In thinking about Kristallnacht,…
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Opinion Why the Nazis Are Still Winning Kristallnacht
Wikimedia Commons Broken and Burning: The main synagogue in Frankfurt-am-Main burns in the November pogrom, 1938. The word Kristallnacht is poetic, alluring: A night of crystal — perhaps in today’s context we might think of Cristal champagne. The name the Nazis gave the violence of November 9 and 10, 1938, is redolent of European sophistication…
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