Even with New York’s complicated history as a port for new arrivals, the photographs this summer of more than a hundred migrants sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk outside the once-elegant Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan were shocking. So were scenes of young migrants idling on sidewalks, stoops and park benches, desperate to work […]
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In August 1944, in a city near Paris, Robert Capa took a photograph of a woman cradling a baby in the middle of a jeering crowd, her head shaved and her forehead marked with a swastika. The woman, Simone Touseau, would become infamous — first as a symbol of the brutality of post-occupation France and […]
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In the same way, Palestinian insight into the devouring specters of antisemitic persecution awakened in Jews by the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack appears negligible. Mutual empathy is very hard to find. “Each side begs for the status of five-star victim,” said Mohammad Darawshe, the director of strategy at the Givat Haviva Center for Shared […]
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The Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, sitting just at the border with Germany, has a 15th-century church tower, cobblestone streets and cluttered rows of charming, colorful houses, some in green, pink and blue. It also has a fraught historical burden. On the upper floors of the house at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 on April 20, […]
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When I’m trying to get my head around a topic, I often like to approach it somewhat diagonally: reading not just about the thing in question, but also about similar problems that have come up around the world. So after briefly writing about the issue of forced population transfer in Gaza a few weeks ago, […]
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The skeletons are never far away from Konstantin A. Dobrovolsky. Sometimes he sleeps above them in a tiny olive-green trailer in the woods. The people they might once have been appear in his dreams. For 44 summers, he has traversed the hilly scrabble northwest of Murmansk, the most populous city above the Arctic Circle and […]
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In a moment heavy with symbolism, Germany on Thursday marked the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the eruption of murderous Nazi violence against the country’s Jews on the night of Nov. 9, 1938. In a nation used to painful soul-searching about its Nazi past, the date marks the moment when Hitler and the National Socialists accelerated […]
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Amid the heightened tensions in Germany, the newspaper’s report prompted Jewish leaders and politicians to speak out. Christoph Heubner, executive vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, issued an open letter, in which he said the town’s mayor and others responsible for the center were consciously turning their backs on Anne Frank. “When people, especially […]
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In southern Brazil in July, Laureano Toscani and João Guilherme Correa were smoking cigarettes along a busy road in their prison-issued garb, shorts and sandals, waiting for a ride after seven months in jail. Mr. Toscani was once convicted of stabbing a group of Jewish men, and Mr. Correa has been accused of murdering a […]
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Angst is, indeed, palpable across the continent. From Britain to Italy, tensions have risen sharply. In the period between the Hamas attack and Oct. 27, Britain’s Community Security Trust, a charity, said that it had recorded 805 antisemitic acts, the highest number in a three-week period since it began reporting episodes of this kind in […]
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“My wife, Sandy, and I have five grandchildren,” he said, “and it’s the tradition to wrap each child in it at their birth, be it a boy or girl.” Hayden’s search for his grandfather’s Judaica collection began in earnest decades later in his grandfather’s boxes: 15 cartons containing thousands of documents, vintage stamps and photographs, […]
Read MoreWanda Poltawska, a Polish psychiatrist and author who after World War II sought spiritual help to cope with the horrors she had experienced in a Nazi concentration camp and became a lifelong friend of her counselor, a priest who would one day be Pope John Paul II, died on Oct. 24 at her home in […]
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For 37 years, Canada has kept close guard on an explosive roster of names. The classified report lists 883 possible Nazi war criminals who found harbor in the country after World War II, and many believe it offers insights into exactly what the government knew about how they got there, the extent to which they […]
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Mr. Biden did not evince the same empathy for the Palestinians early in his career. “There was very little public appetite in the U.S. for pro-Palestinian sentiments — or even a relatively balanced approach,” recalled Mr. Blank, the former aide. “That’s changed: Recognizing the humanity of Palestinians is no longer political suicide.” Even so, he […]
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There is a reason so many Jews cannot stop shaking right now. The concept of intergenerational trauma doesn’t begin to describe the dark place into which this month’s attack plunged Jewish communities around the world. On Oct. 7, a Jewish holiday, Hamas terrorists went house to house in southern Israel murdering and abducting children and […]
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The strategy was intended to cement the notion that there was no viable Palestinian partner for peace. Certainly, a partner was hard to find, with Hamas committed in its Charter, if not always in its shifting statements, to the destruction of Israel. Many Palestinians drifted toward a one-state idea that most Israelis read as code […]
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Andy Ayers of St. Louis recommended another passage in The Times, from Peter Beinart’s effort to envision some peace and progress following that slaughter: “It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take […]
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Amid rising alarm this summer in Poland and the Baltic States over a possible military attack from the east, the Polish Embassy in Lithuania requested an urgent meeting with the head of Germany’s diplomatic mission. Polish embassies in other European countries made similar requests. What the Polish diplomats wanted to talk about, however, was not […]
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There is a memorable scene in “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster film about the building of the atomic bomb, in which Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is reading a newspaper while getting a haircut. Suddenly, Alvarez leaps from his seat and sprints down the road to find his colleague, the theoretical physicist […]
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News that someone is into Nazi memorabilia or more generally that there’s a ready supply of and demand for Nazi memorabilia is met, predictably, with widespread outrage (if perhaps also with some measure of titillation). If no one seems all that shocked that it’s legal — the sanctity of the First Amendment is baked deep […]
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The 18th-century French writing desk that once belonged to Ulrich von Hassell, a German diplomat executed on the orders of Adolf Hitler, had sat for 12 years in a self-storage unit in Queens. The desk had been passed down five generations to Christian Agostino von Hassell, his American grandson, who had stowed it with hundreds […]
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The Ukrainian man sitting in the gallery of Canada’s House of Commons was a “hero,” the speaker of the House said on Friday, drawing applause from lawmakers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who had just addressed the chamber during his first visit to Ottawa since Russia invaded his country. But […]
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Seven works by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele will be handed over on Wednesday to the heirs of the Viennese cabaret artist who had owned them before he was murdered by the Nazis, according to Manhattan prosecutors, marking a major turning point in one of the art world’s longest-running Holocaust restitution cases. The ceremony to […]
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Yosef Chaim Bernfeld, a young businessman from New York who is trying to clean up his life, journeyed to Uman this weekend for a “spiritual fix.” Every Jewish New Year, even this one during a raging war, thousands of Hasidic pilgrims turn this city in central Ukraine into a mini Jerusalem. They roam around in […]
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A letter found among the private papers of Pope Pius XII suggests that the Holy See was told in 1942 that up to 6,000 people, “above all Poles and Jews,” were being killed in furnaces every day at Belzec, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Though news of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hitler was […]
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