May 5, 2024

Thinking about The Zionist experiment

I watched the well spoken young man being interviewed on TV.  I think he was a student at UCLA, but I could be mistaken.  He was defending the protests, claiming to be a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, lending his heritage in su...

April 26, 2024

Jews, patriots, and the ignorant among us

The explosion of demonstrations at college campuses has made me fearful for my fellow Jews, but as an American, it has made me red-hot angry. I’ve been trying to make the distinction between the clearly foreign-born and the growing young fol...

November 9, 2023

A brief history of Kristallnacht

November 9th marks the eighty-fifth anniversity of Kristallnacht, the infamous “night of broken glass.” The pretext for this part-pogrom, part state-sponsored riot was the assassination of German embassy official Ernst vom Rath in Pari...

October 30, 2023

Lessons from 1920s Germany and today

There has long been an assertion, mostly advanced by people who also deny the scope of the Holocaust, that some Jews actually supported the Nazis in the early days. It is mostly the stuff of anti-Semitic legend, although certainly Jews, like every...

April 27, 2022

Survivors of the Holocaust and other heroes

I have heard it asked why is it that we have two annual remembrances of the Holocaust.  Often it is a question based on genuine curiosity.  Sometimes it is a convenient expression of resentment of Jews by people who don't real...

January 15, 2021

Why parallels between today and the Reichstag Fire are flawed

What are we to make of the news from Capitol Hill?  The political posturing is out of control, and the comparison to Nazis once again creeps into the conversation on both sides.  It's so unserious, yet it could have profound i...

April 20, 2020

Holocaust victims and heroes

Tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Throughout the world, communities gather, albeit virtually in most cases, to remember the victims — including well over one million children; hear from survivors; and in general reflect on the l...

June 24, 2018

Descriptions of evil and their misuse

The term "Nazi" has lately been transformed from a garden-variety political slur into pointed but wildly inaccurate or completely false description of actions taken by politicians and other government officials. Since the 1960s, "Na...