BERLIN (JTA) — A club supporting Germany’s right-wing populist “Alternative for Deutschland” party has raised hackles by using a World War II resistance heroine to pump up support, suggesting that Germany’s current leaders have something in common with the Nazis. “Sophie Scholl would vote for AfD” reads the advertisement posted last weekend on Facebook by a local division of AfD near…
● 110 French Jewish Women Who Changed France: the 19th and 20th Centuries By Michèle Bitton Les Éditions Normant, 678 pages, $38 Although overachieving Jews can transform their native lands triumphantly, the way their countries change them can often be tragic. This is one conclusion to be drawn from “110 French Jewish Women Who Changed…
Palestinian and Israeli activists at a joint protest in the occupied West Bank in 2014 / Getty Images The Jewish and Israeli press is quick to report any and all Palestinian violence against any Jew, anywhere. Which makes sense, of course. Israelis and Palestinians are at war, Jews everywhere have a dog in the fight,…
A pig’s head was left on the doorstep of a synagogue being built in Sevastopol, the Ukrainian city’s Jewish community said. Amid intensifying opposition to the synagogue’s construction, the news site zarusskiy.org reported Wednesday that the head was discovered Monday by members of the Jewish community. The Chabad movement began building last year in the…
A new facility in Lyon, France tells the story of the local — and largely unsung — heroes of World War II. The Centre de l’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation — Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation, or CHRD — aims to educate visitors about the role of the…
It is difficult, if not impossible, in this town to forget World War II, and that is a matter of not-inconsequential pride. The Resistance movement was born here, and the reminders are everywhere. The Maternity Hospital, a short walk from the city?s center, hid Jews in its basement, repelling Nazi searches with a sign that…
The last great résistant standing in France, Raymond Aubrac, died on April 10. He was 97. With his passing, France has lost a political and moral figure who helped redeem the nation’s past and stood witness to its present. At the same time, France’s Jews have lost one of their own who courageously, though not…
Although Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett is known for his tragicomically inert characters, he himself was an anti-Nazi activist during World War II. Unlike the ever-absent Godot, the bedridden vagrant protagonist of his novel “Molloy” or the despairing characters in his play “Endgame” who lack legs and the ability to stand, Beckett — though painfully…
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