In the Shadow of the Shoah

Over the years, Tablet has fearlessly engaged with the unfathomable legacy of humanity’s greatest crime, looking back with new perspectives and forward into the future of a people’s heavy burden.

The Afterlife

Alexander ‘Sasha’ Pechersky led a successful prisoner revolt at the Sobibor death camp. His story of extraordinary courage was also the story of millions of Soviet Jews who lived and died in a country that refused to acknowledge their fate.

byDavid Bezmozgis

The Milk Can

Who gets to trifle with despair?

byLeslie Epstein

The History and Future of Holocaust Research

How newly opened archives, a wider European scope, transnational narratives, and integrated big data are changing our understanding of the Shoah

byWendy Lower

Would I Have Survived?

As the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, I ask myself that question

byShula Kopf

All In the Shadow of the Shoah stories

American Jews Must Stop Obsessing Over the Holocaust

Jacob Neusner shows how an identity founded on oppression and persecution limits the potential of the Diaspora

byShaul Magid

The Rescuer

Varian Fry led the effort to save Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and thousands of other European intellectuals from the Nazis. Why was he forgotten?

byDara Horn

A Public Hanging and the Trial of a Holocaust Poem

Seventy-seven years ago today, a landmark court case on Nazi war crimes began in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar. A Jewish poet in uniform tried to report on it in verse. His struggles challenged the Stalinist doctrine of universalizing the Soviet dead and obfuscating Jewish victimhood.

byMaxim D. Shrayer

My Father’s Holocaust Secret

A yellowed photo hidden with an heirloom watch led me to discover a prewar life I never knew existed

byItzhak David Goldberg

Blow Up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

What’s the right way to remember both victims and perpetrators of great crimes?

byAlex Cocotas

Primo Levi’s Comedy of Hell

Chemist, survivor, and author of the most necessary of all books about the Shoah

byDavid Mikics

The Last Poet of Lodz

The untold story of the great epic poem of the Holocaust—and the generous, tragic hero who wrote it

byChava Rosenfarb

Fredy Hirsch’s Lover

Could a homosexual love survive Theresienstadt?

byAnna Hájková

A dust cloud rises during the demolition of a Dodge factory in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1981

American ‘Auschwitz’

A late-1970s surge in interest in the Holocaust coincided with a new ‘survivor’ mentality found in unexpected places, including Detroit and the Bee Gees

byHenry Greenspan

‘The Holocaust and Genocide Don’t Start With Bombs, They Start With Words’
By Abigail Pogrebin

‘The Holocaust and Genocide Don’t Start With Bombs, They Start With Words’

A roundtable discussion with Holocaust survivors about the rise of antisemitism in America, and who will pass on the lessons of the Shoah when the last survivors are gone

byAbigail Pogrebin

Elie Wiesel’s Secret

A little-known Yiddish manuscript upends our idea of the secular saint of human suffering

byRon Rosenbaum

Holocaust Pulp Fiction

The Auschwitz survivor known as Ka-Tzetnik 135633 wrote lurid novels derided as pornography when they were published. Now he’s Israel’s Elie Wiesel.

byDavid Mikics

The Diary of Anne

The very private non-Holocaust-related life of Anne Frank: teenage manga girl, tampon-marketer, European traveler, and emblem of the twin evils of war and intolerance—and the Japanese ‘culture of apology’

byRobert Rand

Do Holocaust Survivors Dream of Electric Sheep?

The profound weirdness of the Shoah Foundation’s hologram effort

byMatthew Fishbane

The Man Who Saved My Grandfather

A war reporter visits Slovakia to meet the peasant-turned-doctor who risked his life to hide Jews

byDanny Gold

The Lie of Viktor Frankl

The author of the strangely misleading ‘Man’s Search for Meaning,’ repackaged as a psychotropic New Age guru, in the newly translated ‘Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything’

byDavid Mikics

Faustian Bargain

The singular horror of the Holocaust is being lost in exchange for enshrining rare moments of inspiration and universal narratives of suffering

byRon Rosenbaum

The Failure of Holocaust Education in Britain

Misplaced historical values, survivors dying off, the Labour Party’s new rhetoric, and pressures on secondary curricula are all contributing to a generation of U.K. children with little or incorrect knowledge of the horrors of World War II

byRosie Whitehouse