Humanities educators from secondary schools across the globe — from California to North Carolina, Ohio to South Africa — are competing to win $5,000 in a contest sponsored by Facing History and Ourselves, an organization dedicated to bringing lessons about the Holocaust and other genocides to classrooms everywhere.
The USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosted its annual Ambassadors for Humanity gala on June 6 with its customary panache, and there was good news and bad news.
President Obama marked Holocaust Remembrance Day with calls to combat Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, as well as for vigilance against current and future atrocities.
Speaking on the Holocaust and 20th century genocides, Mark Gudgel, executive director of the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights, began his March 12 lecture at American Jewish University (AJU) with a declaration.
The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is home to more than 52,000 videotaped testimonies about the Holocaust, and people searching the archive’s index enter a single keyword into their queries more than any other: “Auschwitz.”
An array of Jewish groups praised President Obama\’s initiative to develop a strategy to prevent genocide.
It was the British establishment at its finest. Six years ago, several hundred Holocaust survivors filed into the Palace of Westminster for the annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations. The day also marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau. Her Majesty the Queen, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, and members of Parliament and the House of Lords were in attendance. The London Philharmonic Orchestra provided the music, and BBC reported the proceedings. Earlier that day, the Holocaust survivors had sipped tea with the queen at St James’ Palace. And the person who organized this day of remembrance was a Muslim.
We have no way of knowing whether God spoke to the dead of the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany during the winter and early spring of 1945, but I am fairly certain that He did not speak to either the living or those who were dying. What could He possibly have said to them? What words of comfort could He have given them in a place that one of the camp’s liberators compared to Dante’s inferno?
Filmmaker Rob Lemkin’s most famous relative is the late Raphael Lemkin, a Polish attorney who spent his life crusading against mass murder and who invented the term “genocide” to describe what the Nazis had done to the Jews, including 40 members of his family.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told the Israeli people not to support their government, which he described as genocidal on Friday, the second day of his trip to Syria.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.