All cultures have a tendency to make their building blocks into part of a collective myth, oversimplifying them in textbooks and in the collective consciousness of their members. We Jews are hardly immune from this impulse. Indeed, we have performed this very simplification upon a touchstone of our culture: the Hebrew language. Hebrew plays a…
An upcoming auction of historical items at Christie’s in New York includes a 1798 letter from leaders of the Jewish community of the Caribbean island of Curacao protesting the anti-Semitism of the French colonial ruler. The two-page manuscript, written by community leaders David Cohen Henriquez and Jacob de Castro, protested a statement from the French…
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — A Polish historian who said the country’s Nazi invasion was not so bad for Jews on Friday received a medal from the Polish Minister of National Education “for special merits for education.” Tomasz Panfil, who is responsible for education at the Institute of National Remembrance, earlier this month wrote an article in which…
An influential Chinese blogger wept as he met with Holocaust survivor and author Solomon Perel, Ynet News reported. Yan Jingsheng has millions of followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, and Perel is author of the book “Europa, Europa.” The two met when Perel gave a talk to a delegation of Chinese bloggers in Israel…
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) – The Polish Institute of National Remembrance has distanced itself from one of its historians who wrote in an op-ed that the situation of the Jews “did not look very bad” after the Nazis entered Poland. The piece by Tomasz Panfil, the historian responsible for education at the Polish Institute of National…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The whole world was recently unnerved to learn that North Korea successfully tested a hydrogen bomb on September 3rd, 2017. According to an analysis of the seismic activity measured from the blast, North Korea’s nuclear scientists seem to be familiar with the Teller-Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons….
Update, 3:00 p.m.: It was later determined that the coin is actually a souvenir from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and is not 2,000 years old. (JTA) — An 8-year-old Israeli girl found a rare coin from the Second Temple period. The half-shekel coin dates from a time when it was used to pay a…
(JTA) — Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson … and Peter Stuyvesant? One of these things is not like the others. Amid the impassioned debate over whether, when and how to remove statues memorializing the Confederacy, an Israeli nonprofit is seeking a piece of the action. On Tuesday, Shurat HaDin, which represents terror victims…
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