Leaders of Jewish communities throughout Hungary met with representatives of the Hungarian government almost a year after the suspension of contacts between the sides. The more than four-hour discussion on Tuesday at the Hungarian Parliament building centered on eight topics of importance to the Jewish community, according to Janos Lazar, the chief negotiator representing the…
To my knowledge, there seem to be only two Hungarian films that address the plight of the country’s Jews during the Holocaust. One is the 1983 gem “Revolt of Job.” Now, there’s the puzzling macabre “The Notebook” (“Le Grand Cahier”) which hints at Hungarian Jews’— one scene shows the Jewish population of a small rural town…
I was never much of a fairy-tales kid. Or a fan of anything that was slightly gorier than Maisy books. I had to leave the movie theater halfway through “Babe” (because the farmer points a gun at Babe, the pig), “Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter” (because one character shows up with a cut on his forehead…
Hungary’s newly appointed ambassador to Italy, who has been described as a far-right activist and anti-Semite, withdrew from the position. Peter Szentmihalyi Szabo told Hungary’s foreign ministry Friday that he “does not wish to fill any ambassadorial position,” according to the Hungarian news agency MTI. The World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League had urged…
Opposition parties in Hungary are protesting the nomination of a figure described as a far-right activist and anti-Semite as the country’s new ambassador to Italy. The Parliament’s Committee for European Affairs accepted the nomination by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s rightist government of Péter Szentmihályi Szabó, but he still must face a hearing in the Committee…
A controversial Nazi occupation monument was erected in downtown Budapest in the middle of the night after an appeals court rejected a petition to halt its construction. Workers completed the main components of the memorial in Freedom Square after midnight Sunday following the decision by the Budapest Court of Appeals the previous evening, according to…
(JTA) — Peering through dusty apartment widows isn’t an uncommon pastime in this capital city’s crime-infested 8th District, with its many drug addicts and alcoholics seeking for a fix. But Adam Schoenberger wasn’t scouting for a place to rob on his peeping tour of the district earlier this month. An activist who recently moved his…
Love and Treasure By Ayelet Waldman Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 A historical novel, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács argued, should reach only as far backwards as the era of the author’s grandparents. That is because novelists build not balanced panoramas, but rather individual portraits. Real human beings are unrealistic, because they are improbably idiosyncratic….
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