Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, the three most famous Confederate heroes, have hundreds of memorials and monuments in public spaces throughout the United States dedicated in their memory. Judah Philip Benjamin, the most significant Jewish political figure in the United States during the 19th century — often called the “brains of the…
Phil Mazo, a comedian based in Jersey City, NJ, was reading through the to-do list on his phone when he decided it might be time to check off one item that had been on the list for some time: Buy a take-home genome testing kit from the company 23andMe. After finding a deal on a…
The success of Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” in theaters this summer is a welcome sign, amidst the usual summer cinematic fare, that history still interests us. Britain’s mettle in evacuating some 340,000 British and allied troops from French shores amidst the German attempt to destroy them remains one of history’s great inspirations, particularly when one considers…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The extreme poverty that Jews once experienced in the cities and towns of Eastern Europe has been well documented, but what exactly was their diet like? According to the memoirs of Hirsh Abramovich, a Yiddish writer in pre-war Vilna, the Jews in Lithuania were probably the poorest…
For the past 26 years, Susan Goldstein Snyder, a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has traveled across the U.S. and Europe meeting with survivors (and, increasingly, their children and grandchildren), listening to their stories, and persuading them to donate their artifacts to the museum. Over the course of her career, she has…
A “beloved” history professor at the University of San Francisco was killed in a light aircraft crash near San Francisco. William Sachs Goldman, 38, was piloting a single-engine plane when it crashed ,1000 feet from a regional airport in Sonoma County on Thursday. Goldman’s two grade school-aged children and their au pair were on the…
Researchers from Cambridge have identified the author of an 10th century collection of biblical scriptures: Samuel ben Jacob, the same scribe who penned the Leningrad Codex. The Codex is the main Hebrew copy of the bible on which most modern translations are based. The manuscript contains sections from Prophets, Judges and Kings, and was likely…
Amid the rolling prairie, under the vast Dakota sky, a small fence encloses 20 headstones with surprising Hebrew markings in a field outside the town of Ashley, population 750. Local farmers pass it as they drive for groceries into the town, which has no Jews among its residents. But the graveyard’s most frequent mourners are…
100% of profits support our journalism
