It’s springtime in other parts of the world, but Chicago is still dark and grim. This is a good week for going to a museum and getting all existential and gloomy. As it happens, there’s a unique chronicler of the Holocaust coming to town who fits the bill. On Tuesday, May 16, Father Patrick Desbois,…
What lies ahead for the US relationship with Israel, under President Trump, his son-in-law confidant, Jared Kushner, and his ambassador to the Jewish state, David Friedman? All are surely eager to overturn recent Israeli diplomatic setbacks, such as the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2234 condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Much has…
The other day, 12,000 Jews from all over the world marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) as part of the annual pilgrimage known as the March of the Living. Students spend a week in Poland and then another week in Israel; they are at Birkeanu for Hom Hashoah and in…
In springtime, when the flowers of olive trees open in Jerusalem, pollen catches the Mediterranean winds and sails east. The pollen travels over the walls of the Old City, across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives. It flies over walls, villages and settlements, then down from the hills and across the caves at…
Decades after officials worried they might be sheltering the infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, members of the Mennonite sect in Paraguay are coming to terms with their historical ties with the Third Reich. Mennonites are supposed to embrace non-violence and shun political life. But that was not the case in Fernheim, the Paraguay settlement where…
As many around the world worry about Donald Trump’s presidency and the potentially fascist future of the United States, it is worth remembering a little known anecdote about the famed mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. You likely know Gödel’s name in relation to the “incompleteness theorems” – two theorems of mathematical logic dealing with axiomatic systems…
In the Fall of 1936, Sam Sherman, an officer of the historically Jewish Phi Epsilon Pi fraternity (PhiEp) circulated a call to his fellow Greeks asking for funds to help Central European Jewish student refugees. The plea intended to assist young men who had been prohibited from completing their university studies because of Hitler’s rise…
Sean Spicer, the new White House Press Secretary, is, well, a very weird guy. Leaving aside his unfashionable, dogmatic loyalism and his , we still have his tweets. His glorious glorious tweets. The long standing Dippin’ Dots feud (“Dippin dots is NOT the ice cream of the future,” Spicer declared in 2010. “I think I…
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