This is a talk I delivered yesterday afternoon at the Holocaust commemoration ceremony of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in Pan Pacific Park. My theme could probably best be summed up by quoting Joe Hill’s final message to Big Bill Haywood: “Don’t waste time mourning. Organize! The Talmud teaches us that from the…
Nelson Mandela with wife Winnie Mandela and Jewish comrade-in-arms Joe Slovo, May 1990 / Getty Images When I heard on Thursday afternoon about the death of Nelson Mandela at age 95, my mind was a jumble of complicated thoughts. I thought about the day I first learned about the South African freedom struggle, in the…
Hundreds of people, including many journalists and foreign tourists, waited in long lines and filled the square outside the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened Sautrday for the first time. The visitors weren’t disturbed by the fact that the $100 million museum’s permanent exhibition has not been installed yet; they came to…
Sirens wailed in two Polish cities as the country commemorated the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The sirens in Gdansk and Warsaw Friday were part of a series of commemorative events in memory of the failed but fierce armed rebellion that Jews led in the Polish capital in 1943 against…
In a city built on the scars of its destruction, I’ve come to Warsaw hobbled with old scars of my own. As the daughter of Polish Jews, I never felt drawn to the country where they died. Until last month, when it became clear that I must make the trip to attend the 70th commemoration…
Last week, Deborah Lipstadt wrote about eerie anniversaries and Hannah Arendt. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: This blog entry appears during the time that we mark Yom…
The year is 1943. The place is Warsaw. The ghetto uprising has been crushed, but one man, a Hasid by the name of Yosl Rakover, is still alive, and he is busy recording his sordid tale for posterity. After recounting the events of the last few years — the deaths of his children and grandchildren,…
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