Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Dear Sean Spicer, You had to do it, didn’t you? You had to play the Holocaust card. With Steve Bannon watching smugly from his perch on the president’s shoulder, you held Hitler up as a model fascist, because at least he didn’t use chemical weapons. You said this on the first day of Passover. And…
In 2013, I went through an educational experience in Poland courtesy of Heritage Seminars. The name of the program says it all. Not only did we visit the places where Jewish life in Europe vanished, but also the sites where the notion of Jewish community flourished. The latter needs be examined more in today’s society…
In Matthew Vaughn’s 2011 movie X-Men: First Class, Professor Charles Xavier tries to stop his friend Magneto—controller of all things metal—from killing American and Soviet navy servicemen during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis by telling him the sailors were just “following orders.” Magneto then delivers arguably the best line of the film: “I’ve…
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…
On a scorching day, during my Holocaust studies trip to Poland in the summer of 2012, a fellow student and I wandered through Birkenau like ghosts, pale despite the fact that the July sun was burning our backs, pondering the same question. It was the same question that we, and several others of our peers…
When I was a day school student, Yom ha-Sho’ah, or a Holocaust Memorial Day was a yearly occurrence. Every year, there were assemblies and meetings with Holocaust survivors, and it was all followed by what I assumed was survivor’s guilt. Following Passover, I inevitably felt like the Wicked Son at the seder: not on in…
A year-and-a-half hiding in an underground bunker with her mother. Trudging into the village to beg local residents for food scraps. Occasionally discovering berries in the nearby forest. This was Mrs. Lefman’s life during the Holocaust. As she spoke, she remained outwardly stoic, preventing her internal reactions from manifesting in tears. And meanwhile, she comforted…
“Lead us from the unreal to the Real; Lead us from darkness to Light; Lead us from death to Immortality,” the audience repeated after the speaker. Though they were there to memorialize the Holocaust, their words did not come from the Torah, nor are they found in Christian Bible or the Quran. The prayer came…
Hitler, the Holocaust, gas chambers, Nazis, concentration camps — these all loom large in our contemporary cultural consciousness. They call forth strong feelings and evoke vivid imagery. At the same time, it is no longer surprising to encounter cheap comparisons to them. It happens all the time: You’re walking down the street, on your way to…
It has been pointed out that director Steven Spielberg’s mainstream success has inspired a turn toward broad, “public interest” works. For Spielberg, pop-history and film preservation have taken precedent over purely artistic endeavors. If one were to mark this shift in Spielberg’s career, it likely started with the Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List,” for which the…
When I was in my Holocaust phase—and by that I mean the years I spent consuming every book about the Holocaust I could find, wildly curious about my own family’s personal Holocaust stories—I was transfixed by one person in particular: my grandfather’s brother, Todris. Both of my mother’s parents are survivors, and both had many…
I never know what to do on Yom Hashoah. Some students read names in the library foyer – a powerful experience, especially in a room with vaulted ceilings where sound reverberates throughout the entrence of the building. Some educators strive to reach out, to teach the messages of the Holocaust so that everyone, not just…
This is a response to Evan Krasner’s Why is Yom HaShoah not recognized by my high school?, which was posted yesterday on this blog. Evan asks an important question: How could a school that is mostly comprised of Jewish students not commemorate Yom HaShoah? This certainly seems odd, if for no other reason than the…
I cannot remember a time when my high school, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale, NY, commemorated Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). Even though the school has a large percentage of minority students, the majority of the students are white and Jewish. Many of these students have grandparents or family members that were either…
In South Africa, there’s a conspiracy theory that has spread among the white population since the fall of Apartheid. It goes by many names: Uhuru, Operation Vula, Operation White Clean-up, and – in a nod to Nazi Germany – Night of the Long Knives (in Afrikaans, Die Nag van die Lang Messe). Â What it says…