Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute and a professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.
There is a fierce anger at the core of Ruth Linn\’s work, the anger of a woman who suddenly and irrefutably discovers that the story she has been told by her Israeli teachers, Israeli society and Israeli culture from childhood onward regarding the Holocaust is but a partial narrative.
The Chabad telethon is an appropriate occasion to consider one of the anomalies of contemporary American Jewish religious life.
Reichminister Joseph Goebbels delivers a speech to a crowd in Berlin urging Germans to boycott Jewish-owned businesses. He defends the boycott as a legitimate response to the anti-German \”atrocity propaganda\” being spread abroad by \”international Jewry.\” April 1, 1933.
The top 10 reasons why the vulnerability of the 1930s cannot be compared with contemporary Jewish vulnerability:
Persecution is something that religious groups have known elsewhere. Religious freedom has allowed them to flourish in the United States — religious freedom and tolerance.
\”A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair\” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. (Knopf, 2002). $25
After provoking a furious debate over the role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust with his book, \”Hitler\’s Willing Executioners\” (Vintage, 1995) Daniel Goldhagen tackles an even more explosive subject, the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust, in his new book, \”A Moral Reckoning.\” The power of the book is neither in the answers it gives nor the evidence it marshals, but in the questions it poses. None is more central than the one that frames the book: \”What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, to make amends with its victims and to right itself so that it is no longer the source of a hatred and harm that, whatever its past, it would no longer endorse?\” Goldhagen approaches the question in three parts: Clarifying the Conduct, Judging the Culpability and Repairing the Harm.
One of the most depressing of the many depressing aspects of the second year of the new millennium has been the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the importation into Islam of anti-Semitic motifs that were abandoned and discredited in the post-Holocaust Christian world.
The announcement that Richard Joel has been named as president of Yeshiva University (YU) is an important and salutary development in American Jewish life. Joel is a gifted leader, able spokesman and prolific fundraiser. He has been able to establish the national Hillel organization which he heads as a \”big tent\” for American Jews — one that embraces unaffiliated and under-affiliated Jews at a vital stage in their lives (college), while also serving the most committed Jews who enter its buildings to eat, study, pray and socialize with other Jews.
\”The Holocaust: A History\” Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, $27.95).
There is great modesty — appropriate to the subject and to the stage of our knowledge — in the title of this work: \”The Holocaust: A History.\” Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt recognize that with a subject so complex there are many ways of writing the history of the Holocaust — they have chosen but one way — but their choice is certainly defensible and comprehensive. Their history of the Holocaust is not only worthy of note; it is worthy of the subject.
A new president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) was inaugurated in a moving ceremony held Oct. 13 in the ornate Plum Street Temple in downtown Cincinnati.
