A dreamy expression slowly spreads across Geza Weisz’s handsome face as he watches scantily clad young black women dancing around him at an Amsterdam nightclub. The scene appears in “Only Decent People,” a dark and provocative Dutch-language film that examines the fraught relations between the country’s Jews and other minorities and stars Weisz, a Jewish…
Workers in a Dutch town braved thin ice to remove Nazi symbols etched into the surface of a frozen lake. The workers first attempted to walk to the area where unidentified persons had carved the Nazi salutation “Sieg Heil!” and swastika into the ice, according to a Jan. 23 report in the AD/Rotterdams Dagblad, a…
The mayor of Amersfoort in the Netherlands returned a box of jewels to a Jewish man 70 years after his parents hid the box in their pharmacy. According to De Telegraaf, a Dutch daily, the parents of 73-year-old Bert Manasse hid the box in the cellar of the building and fled to Soest, a nearby…
A former Dutch prime minister reportedly said that the Jewish state should have been established in Germany. “Jews need a safe place. Why couldn’t they get a safe place in Germany, at the time?” Dries Van Agt said on Nov. 8 during a seminar Nijmegen, according to the Dutch daily Telegraaf. The paper described Van…
The director of a soccer team from the Dutch city of Utrecht has vowed to punish fans who sang anti-Semitic chants during a recent match. “Racism will not be tolerated in the stadium,” Wilco van Schaik, general director of FC Utrecht, told the Dutch news agency ANP. The report did not specify what steps would…
A Netherlands church official apologized to a Jewish group for a memorial ceremony that commemorated Holocaust victims with soldiers who died fighting for Nazi Germany. Rob Mutsaerts, a bishop from Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands, in a letter last week expressed his regret to the small Jewish organization JFN. Mutsaerts apologized for a sermon…
Ajax, the Dutch, the War: The Strange Tale of Soccer During Europe’s Darkest Hour By Simon Kuper Nation Books, 257 pages, $15.99 Bill Shankly, the legendary soccer coach of the British club Liverpool FC, is often quoted as saying, “Football is not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that.” The attribution…
Following protests, the Dutch town of Geffen will not display the names of German Wehrmacht soldiers along with Jewish Holocaust victims on a new monument. The monument, scheduled to be unveiled Saturday in the eastern Netherlands town, “was meant to promote reconciliation but instead caused controversy,” Mayor Roel Augusteijn said at a televised news conference…
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