The Holocaust
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J’Accuse: The Case That Never Closes June 07, 2023
We can spend all of our lives paying for some decisions. In the case of a nation, the process of coming to terms with such decisions and taking responsibility for their consequences is the work of generations, and it requires eternal vigilance. This ...
Calm Down About 'The Little Mermaid' June 05, 2023
‘I do not think we do our children any favours by pretending that slavery didn’t exist,’ wrote Royal Academy of Dramatic Art chair Marcus Ryder, in a blog about the newly remade Disney adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Merm...
How to Survive a Nuclear Holocaust June 05, 2023
Termush is a luxury resort unlike any other. Enjoying a remote coastal location, the hotel provides exceptional facilities for the discerning guest. Housed in secure above-ground suites, residents have access to subterranean gourmet food stores and f...
The Odd Knight of the Cinnamon Shops April 11, 2023
On Nov. 19, 1942, at the age of 50, Bruno Schulz, writer, artist, and idiosyncratic dreamer, was murdered in the ghetto of Drohobycz, Galicia. Earlier that month, Felix Landau, the SS officer who forced Schulz to produce works of art for him, had sho...
Italy’s Non-Cancel Culture April 07, 2023
On the periphery of Rome, not far from the Vatican, stands a towering obelisk named for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler. On a recent visit to the city, my taxi driver knew exactly where it was and found nothing rem...
The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save February 10, 2023
Censored and then forgotten, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s "Babi Yar," about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, is again painfully relevant.Born in 1929, Kuznetsov lived on the outskirts of Kyiv with his Ukrainian schoolteacher mother and his grandparents (his Russi...
Jew People February 08, 2023
You People, a “romantic comedy” that premiered on Netflix on Jan. 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as the day on which seven Jews were murdered by Palestinian terrorists in a synagogue in Israel), has been generating considerable ...
All Anyone Can Do: A Midwestern Journalist’s Retrospective February 07, 2023
The distance travelled from Elvis to Trump is a lifetime. Which, like all history, is best appreciated in retrospect, and most rewarding when gleaned from first-hand accounts - provided these are forthright and, above all, well-written. These require...
'Maus' and the Repressive Power of Jewish Trauma January 30, 2023
There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the arti...
Ken Burns on His Most Important Film January 30, 2023
Ken Burns is the most famous documentary filmmaker in America. He has made 35 films over the past five decades on subjects like the Civil War, Vietnam, Jefferson, Franklin, the Roosevelts, the Statue of Liberty, baseball, jazz, Muhammad Ali, and many...
The New Jew January 11, 2023
It was early December when The Chosen Comedy Festival came to Miami. It had been a tough few weeks for Jews.Kanye was on his “I love Hitler” tour and it seemed like too many people wanted to hear what he had to say. The New York Times was running reg...
Defenders of the West January 02, 2023
Wokeism, which has taken off in the United States but has its deepest intellectual roots in Europe, is only the latest variant of thought dating back to the 1960s that has subjected Western civilization to relentless criticism. While there is no shor...
‘Conspiracy U’ – an Urgent Read for Our Times July 22, 2022
What happens when an ugly false narrative – a conspiracy – takes hold in our culture’s most prominent institutions? On this topic of how ideologies masquerade as scholarship and pollute our public square, I had the opportunity to interview Scott Shay...
'The Survivor' Asks Something of Its Audience July 20, 2022
Oscar and Emmy Award–winning writer-director Barry Levinson has adapted the true-life story of Holocaust survivor and professional boxer Harry Haft for HBO. Is this a fitting summation of a long, topsy-turvy career?...
Arendt and Roth's Uncanny Convergence May 17, 2021
In 2014, the mystery writer Lisa Scottoline wrote an instructive essay for The New York Times about two undergraduate seminars she took with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. One of the courses was the literature of the Holo...
How Americans and Germans Cope With Past Evils August 29, 2019
What can be compared to the Holocaust? Everything? Detention camps on America’s border? Nothing? This history war, generally the province of academics, has recently become part of American political discourse.Into this discussion comes Susan Neiman’s...
