Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute and a professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.
A decade ago, distinguished Orthodox filmmaker Menachem Daum produced and directed the documentary “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” a restrained and loving effort to introduce the seemingly strange and alien world of Chasidism to outsiders.
Frank Lautenberg’s rise to wealth and prominence is a classic rags-to-riches story.
Jackie was the first. Jackie could not just play the game for himself. He was playing the game for every one of his race who had been denied a chance, whose future was closed because of racism and segregation. Indeed, as I remember it, Jackie played the game for every minority kid whose opportunities were constrained because of discrimination.
I began reading Jonathan Kirsch’s “The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris” (Liveright Publishing Co., 2013) with considerable skepticism.
My daughter, Ilana, then a young college student, asked if she could go with me to the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on April 22, 1993 (the date was tied to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 50th anniversary). I said: “I will be leaving very early.” She responded: “I’ll be up.”
Rabbi David Hartman has gone to his eternal rest, but not before he made a monumental contribution to Jewish life and a significant contribution to Jewish thought.
Were it not so sad, so absurd and so stupid, I might be amused by the recent attacks against former Senator Chuck Hagel as being anti-Semitic for his failure to distinguish between the Jewish lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.
It is an oft-repeated cliché of the Holocaust that “those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” That statement — first made by Edmund Burke and usually attributed to George Santayana, who wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — is too simple a truism.
A couple of years ago a private conversation between then French President Nicholas Sarkozy and President Obama was caught on a live mike. Sarkozy said I can\’t bare Netanyahu, he\’s such a liar.\” Obama responded: \”You\’re fed up with him but I have to deal with him more than you do.\”
One of the most significant losers of Election Day was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who openly opposed President Barack Obama from the very beginning of his administration, first on settlements and then on the question of Iran.
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