I discovered a long lost relative who survived the Holocaust in Soviet gulags
Jews who survived under Stalin rather than Hitler are largely absent from mainstream film and literature
Stalin
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Film & TV WATCH: New Documentary Recounts The Search For Isaac Babel
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The film “Finding Babel” portrays theater professor Andrei Malaev-Babel’s journey across the former USSR seeking traces of his grandfather, Russian-Jewish author Isaac Babel. The film was recently released on Vimeo in English-, Russian- and Ukrainian-language versions. In the English version of the film, Isaac Babel’s quotes are…
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Opinion Is Communism Worse Than Nazism?
In the new normal of 2017, in which far-right and far-left militants clash openly in America’s public square, a contentious 20th century debate is newly relevant: is the extreme left as dangerous and repugnant as the extreme right? Should the hammer and sickle be as offensive as the swastika? Was Communism as evil as Nazism…
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Forverts in English Finally, Der Nister Gets a Gravestone
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Abez. A small station on the Northern railway line more than 2,200 kilometers from Moscow – and only 7 kilometers before the Arctic Circle, where the taiga forest turns into the endless tundra. You won’t find the name Abez on any train station because there is no…
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News Bernie Sanders Stint at ‘Stalinist’ Kibbutz Draws Red-Baiting From Right
It didn’t take long after news broke that Bernie Sanders had volunteered decades ago on a hard-left kibbutz in Israel for right-wing critics to start lobbing ever-scarier adjectives at him. The Democratic presidential candidate’s stint at Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’Amakim in northern Israel proves to conservatives that he isn’t just a “socialist” but a hard-core Marxist…
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Life Throwback Thursday: From Stalinist to US Spy
Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Seemingly waiting for her thoughts to fuse, Ruth Fischer’s photo in our archive depicts her with notepad in hand at the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1946, in a…
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Life Throwback Thursday: Yiddish Novelist Takes On Stalin’s Terror
Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Vera Hacken was the Odessa-born memoirist of a Czernowitz childhood, and an early novelist of the intricacies of life under the Soviet Union’s police state apparatus — but much…
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The Schmooze Englander’s Inspiration
The Forverts’s Rukhl Schaechter once heard a Yiddish professor complain that his American students knew nothing about Stalin’s execution of 13 Soviet Jews, which took place in August 1952. Even more discouraging, he added, was their “complete lack of interest” in the Yiddish culture that once thrived in the Former Soviet Union. Two days before…
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