Honoring the Holocaust in the Land of the Liberators and Bystanders: A Jew in the Motherland

By Jonathan Katz April 16, 2015

Seventy years ago, on April 15, 1945, the British Army liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and its 60,000 mostly Jewish, starved, and diseased prisoners. Among these prisoners was my maternal grandmother – who had survived several deportations, from Kovno (Kaunas) to Vaivara to Bergen-Belsen – and had lost her first child, first husband, and most…

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Born on the 4th of July (Bris scheduled for the 12th)

By peil July 3, 2009

It would have been nice if, in honor of July 4th, U. S. Independence Day, I wrote a sweeping, lyrical tribute to my American Jewish heritage. But as hard as I tried to come up with something awe-inspiring – combing through anecdotes about the Alamo and the text of “New Colossus” – I kept coming…

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