History fated Emile Zola and Alfred Dreyfus to forever be footnotes in each other’s stories. Dreyfus, a military officer wrongly convicted of treason, sparked an antisemitism scandal that split French society into factions. Zola, the celebrated writer who penned the famed pro-Dreyfus open letter “J’Accuse,” would face legal trouble of his own for doing so….
In 2015, Matthew Teitelbaum left Toronto to head one of Boston’s foremost cultural institutions, the august 150-year-old Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). From the start, he wanted to see a significant culture shift. He was well on his way to accomplishing that when a racial incident threatened to derail his best efforts, and intentions….
A new exhibit of Hebrew manuscripts at the British Library in London includes plenty of stuff you’d expect: Among other items, it boasts a Hebrew Bible from the 10th century and the earliest known copy of Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed.” But there’s one very surprising artifact at the exhibit, which stateside Judaica aficionados can…
A Riga Holocaust museum has survived an attempt by developers to force it out of the city’s chic warehouse district, but must sign onto a compromise in which it gives up some land and might have to forego a planned renovation. “In this sense, the decision on the fate of the museum is symbolic, it…
Every time I visited Dr. Uri Herscher in his office, I stopped to look at an old photo of him standing on top of a landfill beside a freeway. The freeway is still there, but the landfill has since 1996 been the Skirball Cultural Center, a nexus for education, community and culture in Los Angeles….
(JTA) — Neo-Nazis in Sweden blocked the entrance to an exhibition of portraits of Holocaust survivors and intimidated visitors already viewing the display. In the incident Tuesday in the southern city of Visby, several men from the Nordic Resistance Movement gathered outside the venue displaying the exhibition “Fading Stories – pass them on” by the…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reiterated its “unequivocal” rejection of analogies to the Holocaust in the wake of debate about concentration camps sparked by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. The museum “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the museum said in a statement….
For a Jew, visiting the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah is an unsettling experience. Arafat, who would have turned 90 this year, is the closest thing Palestinians have to a Founding Father — their George Washington or David Ben-Gurion — except that his dream of an independent Palestine still is not realized 14 years after…
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