More in ‘history’

Armenians and Turks aren’t known for sharing a historical perspective on the Armenian genocide—generally, the Armenians support its recognition, the Turkish deny it happened—but a book out this month describes a conspiracy theory that actually has a foothold in both populations. In this version, Jews are to blame for the massacre. According to this counter-history, ...

I guess I just wondered why he did this project. >>

Israel’s Ministry of Education is pulling copies of a high-school history textbook off bookshelves because of concerns over its previously approved content—in particular, Palestinian views on Israel’s War of Independence, Haaretz reports. The textbook was approved by the ministry prior to the appointment of its current chief, Gideon Sa’ar, in March. When it was published ...

Growing up in Israel, I was filled with leaden dread leading up to one day each year. On that day, all of us schoolchildren all over the country were instructed to wear a white shirt and, the caressing sun of spring be damned, sacrifice recess to attend a ceremony. Gathering in the school’s auditorium or basketball court, a few poems were recited, a song was sung, and six candles lit, one for each of the Nazi death camps. The day is still known in Israel simply as Yom Ha’Shoah, Holocaust Day.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag, which opened last night at the Laura Pels Theatre in New York, recounts an imagined meeting between two giants of the American songbook: Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin. The two were famous and successful in the same pre-World War I period—Berlin starting his career; Joplin late in his—and though they were both living and working in New York, there’s no record they ever met. Playwright Mark Saltzman spoke to Tablet about his play, Tin Pan Alley, and the Jews who invented it.

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper scheduled to air today, President Obama brings up a somewhat fraught connection—finding a parallel between black slavery and the Holocaust. While visiting the African nation of Ghana, Obama visited a slavery dungeon, which he found “reminiscent of the trip I took to Buchenwald,” and which similarly reminded him ...

Every Holocaust museum visitor has likely encountered examples of the Nazis’ ghastly “recycling” of human bodies: gold teeth melted down, cremains used for fertilizer. So why is the Nazis’ alleged use of human fat to make soap so rarely presented alongside these other grotesqueries? That’s the central question of a new play by Jeff Cohen, ...

It’s not news anymore that Richard Nixon disliked Jews. But the twist revealed in tapes and documents released by the Nixon Presidential Library yesterday was that the 37th president was not just a practicing anti-Semite but a theorist of anti-Semitism. His basic gist: They ask for it. Take, for example, Nixon’s philosophizing in a 1973 ...

Eichmann in hiding, Tucuman, Argentina, 1955
The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann captured for the public the horror of the Final Solution. But getting the Nazi known as the Architect of the Holocaust” to a courtroom in Jerusalem took no less than 15 years.
Exactly how was Eichmann caught? In Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors ...

A century ago, many Jews dreamed of a utopian world of universal brotherhood. Those dreams haven’t aged very well. Rosa Luxemburg’s claim that she felt “at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears,” can make even a sympathetic listener roll his eyes. Ludwig Zamenhof’s universal language, Esperanto, seems ...