JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
As villains go, you can’t do much better than the one at the center of Netflix’s latest, a man called “Doctor Death.” In “Jaguar,” a crew of Spanish Holocaust survivors in 1960s Madrid hunt down Aribert Heim, a real-life Nazi physician who escaped justice for nearly half a century. “He was a doctor at Mauthausen,”…
In the summer of 1936, when Ruth Rebecca Davidow was 25, American newspapers began to report political chaos in Spain: General Francisco Franco had launched a coup against the democratically-elected Spanish Republic with support from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Less than a year later, Davidow, a working-class Jewish nurse, set sail for Spain to…
Sygmunt Stein, a humble Paris button-maker of Polish-Jewish origin, left a compelling account of his volunteer service fighting Fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Stein (1899-1968) first published his recollections in 1950s articles in the Yiddish “Forverts,” as prepared for publication by the paper’s then-Paris correspondent, Avrom (Abraham) Shulman, better known by the pen name…
Leigh Kamping-Carder tells the story of the Mexican Suitcase, a collection of photographs from the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour that got lost in Mexico for almost 70 years. Ilan Stavans wonders why we can’t escape from Harry Houdini. Shoshana Olidort reviews Avi Steinberg’s “Running the Books: The Adventures…
