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In memory of Chandler Davis, mathematician and human rights advocate

Chandler Davis, who died on Sept. 24, 2022, at the age of 96, was a distinguished mathematician whose work on linear algebra and operator theory in Hilbert space resulted in no less than three significant theorems which bear his name, including the oft-cited Davis-Kahan-Weinberger dilation theorem. A fellow of the American Mathematical Society, he was also a distinguished teacher who inspired the work of generations of graduate students at the University of Toronto including John Benedetto, director of the Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications....

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Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, and Adolf Hitler

How Munich became the world capital of antisemitism and the birthplace of the Nazi Party

byMichael Brenner

Feb. 26, 1919, marked a unique moment in the history of Germany and its Jews. On this cold winter’s day, a crowd of a hundred thousand assembled at Munich’s Ostfriedhof cemetery to mourn Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner, the first Jewish head of state in German history. Eisner had toppled the Wittelsbach dynasty that had reigned in Bavaria for seven centuries. He and his socialist government had ruled Bavaria for three months until he was assassinated by a right-wing extremist. Another German Jew, Gustav Landauer, who would himself assume a powerful position in one of two short-lived council republics established in Munich in April 1919, held the eulogy for his friend Eisner. Both had long since broken with the Jewish religion of their ancestors, and yet both identified with the values of Jewish tradition as they defined it. Standing before the casket of his murdered friend, Landauer told the crowd: “Kurt Eisner the Jew was a prophet because he sympathized with the poor and downtrodden and saw the opportunity, and the necessity, of putting an end to poverty and subjugation.”...

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The Jews and the Pope

Looking at the ambiguous, still-evolving relationship between Jews and the Vatican

byFredric BrandfonandRiccardo Shemuel Di Segni

In 2021, after reading an article in Tablet, “When Pope John Paul II Came to the Great Synagogue in Rome,” by Riccardo Shemuel Di Segni, chief rabbi of Rome, I asked the chief rabbi if he would agree to co-author an article concerning the ambiguous history of papal-Jewish relations. He agreed, and what follows is our collaboration. As a historian, I handled the first half of this article, which concerns medieval and early modern Jewish interaction with the Vatican. Rabbi Di Segni wrote the second half from his own personal experience with Popes Benedict XVI and Francis. -Frederic Brandfon

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library of libraries

40,000

The number of Judaic books from Yeshivat Khochme Lublin rescued and stored in the Łopaciński Library after the Nazis confiscated them at the beginning of the war. Via Warsaw, the books were returned to a new Jewish library in Lublin in 1946. After its establishment in 1930, Yeshivat Khokhme Lublin had aspired to create the largest Jewish library in the world, seeking to collect 100,000 volumes of religious literature, Biblical and Talmudic commentaries, and philosophical treatises. Throughout the thirties, priceless old prints and manuscripts were sent to Lublin from private donors. Though the yeshiva had not yet reached its goal by the time the Nazis conquered Poland, it had created one of the largest and most valuable Jewish religious libraries.

Regaining Jerusalem

Jewish slaveowners celebrate Passover in 17th-century Suriname

byNatalie Zemon Davis

Nazi Antisemitism & Islamist Hate

A review of recent scholarship on the shaping of the modern Middle East in the aftermath of the Holocaust

byJeffrey Herf

Soviets attacking the Czar's police in the early days of the March Revolution

The Dark Centennial of the Russian Revolution

byPaul Berman

Nazi Antisemitism & Islamist Hate

A review of recent scholarship on the shaping of the modern Middle East in the aftermath of the Holocaust

byJeffrey Herf

The Dark Centennial of the Russian Revolution

byPaul Berman

jewish museum

The above synagogue donation recorder was an invention of one Moyshe Cohen in 1913 in the United States. With it, Cohen figured out how a congregant may record pledges and other nifty information without desecrating the laws of the Sabbath or holidays when writing is prohibted. Cohen might have designed it to replace the relatively unruly practice of “shnodern” (a Yiddish word created from the Hebrew phrase “hu she-nadar" or “he who promises”), the oral pledges made in synagogues around the Jewish New Year.

Zelig and Rivele Kalmanovitch with their infant son, Sholem, in Soviet Minsk, 1920

Under the Hammer of History

Such is the task of the heavy hammer—it shatters glass and forges steel

byZelig Kalmanovitch

The Yiddish Journalists of Argentina

byJavier Sinay

Diving Into the Vilna Collections

byAlyssa Quint

The Floating Space City of the Jews

In a tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Jews unhappy with the Temple of Jerusalem imagined a mythological paradise rooted in Zoroastrian mythology instead

byDan Shapira

The Yiddish Journalists of Argentina

byJavier Sinay

Diving Into the Vilna Collections

byAlyssa Quint

Newsletter

Those who do not remember the past are ... probably not Jewish

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U.S. Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and U.S. Senator from New York John Foster Dulles in conference at the Assembly Hall of the United Nations in 1949

How British and American Elites Failed to Stop the Jewish State

Two new books bring to life the knife-edge moment when the British Empire was being liquidated and the U.S. national security establishment tried and failed to block the birth of Israel

byMike Watson

Belongings of newly arrived prisoners are seized by the Ustasha in Jasenovac. The Ustasha (Croatian Revolutionary Movement) was a fascist organization, active between 1929 and 1945.

The Auschwitz of the Balkans

The Croatian concentration camp Jasenovać is the site of fierce ongoing controversy, muddled by extremists and cover-ups, about the extent of its horrors

byEfraim Zuroff

Recognizing Jewish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust

byPatrick Henry

German Jewish Women Resist the Nazis

byRobert Rockaway

Recognizing Jewish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust

byPatrick Henry

German Jewish Women Resist the Nazis

byRobert Rockaway

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sunny composition

The celebrated photographer André Kertész (1894-1985) bought his first camera (an ICA box camera) in 1912 and his first 35-millimeter camera, a Leica, in 1928. He was born in Budapest to a Jewish bookseller, Lipot Kertész, but was raised by his mother Ernesztin and her brother after his father died of tuberculosis when André was still young. “Kertész had two brothers: Imre, who was older, and Jenö, the youngest. Here, they pose for André’s camera, showing off their athleticism as they enjoy a moment of frolic and fun at a waterside resort.”

cleveland museum of art

The American Zionist Dream

How William Blackstone, Henry Cabot Lodge, and their fellow Christians saw a Jewish state as deeply American

byWalter Russell Mead

On March 5, 1891, Secretary of State James G. Blaine presented William Blackstone of Chicago to President Benjamin Harrison. It was a miserable March, and the day was wet and dismal, with temperatures hovering around freezing. But as Blackstone entered the White House, he was bathed in light. The White House of the day was not the austere Federalist mansion that we know today: In 1882 Chester A. Arthur sold the old decorations at auction and asked Louis Tiffany to redecorate the interior in a more modern style. Tiffany’s pièce de résistance was a 50-foot-long screen inlaid with stained glass that stood across the entrance hall. In 1891, the rooms were already beginning to look dated. President Harrison had electricity installed that year, though both he and his wife, Caroline, refused to touch the light switches for fear they would be electrocuted. ...

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Whitman and the American Revelation

The epiphany that led to a national literature’s single greatest achievement: tucked in a prosaic, newly discovered early novel are the seeds of ‘Leaves of Grass’

byPaul Berman

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), 'Shoshone,' 1867-72. Many of the men in the photograph are wearing U.S. Army hats and shirts, paraphernalia probably acquired through barter at the Army’s trading posts. When O’Sullivan made the picture, the delicate ecology of the Shoshone’s food sources (buffalo, small game, roots, berries, and grass seed) had been virtually destroyed over the preceding 30 years by the heedless practices of emigrant white settlers. The resulting degradation and the marauding, murderous retaliation of the Shoshone and associated tribes became known as the ‘Indian question,’ which the U.S. government attempted to resolve through legislation, the establishment of reservations, and, on occasion, slaughter. As an exploratory visitor rather than an exploitative settler, O’Sullivan met little hostility from Native Americans. If some of his subjects were reluctant to pose for the ‘shadow-catcher,’ the 13 Shoshone depicted here seem resolute and patient. Expressed as a pyramid, the group’s corporate solidarity appears as permanent as an ancient cairn, in contrast to the American and expeditionary flags, tents, and distant plain which, through the photographer’s choice, are rendered as flat and insubstantial as his own shadow.

In Praise of Native Americanism

Appropriation of identities we cannot claim has been a dangerous constant in American history. In an age of identity politics, it is still the best way of understanding our national character.

byJustin E.H. Smith

Whitman and the American Revelation

The epiphany that led to a national literature’s single greatest achievement: tucked in a prosaic, newly discovered early novel are the seeds of ‘Leaves of Grass’

byPaul Berman

In Praise of Native Americanism

Appropriation of identities we cannot claim has been a dangerous constant in American history. In an age of identity politics, it is still the best way of understanding our national character.

byJustin E.H. Smith

Alternating between happiness and sadness, we chatted about Sighet, my ancestral relationship with the city’s chief rabbis, his rabbinical ordination at 15 years old, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, the Nazis’ murder of his entire prewar family, Yeshivas Chaim Berlin, his father-in-law, Reb Mendel Hager of Visheve, and his mentor, professor Saul Lieberman.