Sarah Wildman
By Sarah Wildman
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Fast Forward Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter’s Top Aide, Had Secret Jewish History
(JTA) — Hamilton Jordan, President Jimmy Carter’s wunderkind adviser and chief of staff, discovered at age 20 that his family’s story wasn’t a straightforward Christian Southern experience. At the cemetery service for his maternal grandmother, Helen, Jordan was puzzled to discover her plot was nestled alongside that of a Jewish family. They weren’t strangers; they…
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Opinion Why Refugees’ Plight Is Personal for Me — and All Jews
They come by the thousands now. Day after day, night after night. By sea and overland. They have been coming for far longer than just this summer, but suddenly, in the past few weeks, in their tremendous numbers and their family units, their presence is finally seen. They are body to body in Keleti station…
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Fast Forward AIPAC Quietly Courts Liberals Under Cloud of Iran
(JTA) — At the AIPAC conference, a sea of 16,000 Israel supporters spent their time talking Iran policy amid the swirling controversy over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. To the sidelines fell discussion of the Israeli elections, the peace process and Israeli innovation — as well as another quieter aim of the three-day…
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Books The Girlfriend He Left in Vienna
In my parents’ basement I found a box of my grandfather’s, marked “C.J. Wildman, personal”; inside it I discovered another, smaller file box labeled “Patient Correspondence, A–G.” The letters were not from patients; they were from the life he left behind in Vienna when he fled the Nazis: half-siblings, cousins, friends — and a girlfriend….
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Opinion Genocide Is Always Wrong
It seems impossible to me that I am typing this line: Genocide is never permissible. Full stop. That one would even need to type such a line destroys me. That an author proposed such an idea? A horror. But It is also his newspaper. It is also the world he – they? We? – live…
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Culture The Other Kindertransport
One hundred and fifty: a number simultaneously enormous and tiny. One hundred and fifty Czech Jewish teenagers left behind everything and everyone — the lives they’d known, their parents, their siblings, their grandparents and aunts and uncles. One hundred and fifty Czech teens, selected by the Jewish Agency’s Youth Aliyah and the Denmark branch of…
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Culture Documenting The Other Kindertransport
In 2009, a group of school children in the Czech town of Velký Beranov was doing research for a project called “Neighbors Who Disappeared” — an effort to get kids to understand all those who are missing from their towns, their cities, their world. Together the kids discovered the strange, melancholy story of Helena Böhmová:…
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Books Rachel Tzvia Back’s Verse Confronts Devastating Loss
A Messenger Comes By Rachel Tzvia Back Singing Horse Press, 110 Pages, $15 Mourning propels us. We are, none of us, immune. It is the first thing children fear: loss — of a parent, a friend, a sibling, a grandparent — and the first lie we tell them, or half-truth we impart, as parents, promising,…
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Fast Forward Jewish postwar epic ‘The Brutalist’ picks up 10 Oscar nominations, with ‘A Complete Unknown’ close behind
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