When the Jewish Brigade appears today in Italian public debate, it is rarely about the British Army unit, formed largely by Jewish volunteers from Mandatory Palestine, that was sent to fight in Italy in the final months of the Second World War. The Jewish Brigade has become a screen onto which other conflicts are projected: […]
Continue Reading
I remember being freaked out, and fascinated, by my parents’ copy of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. It featured these especially lurid illustrations; I can still see a little girl in a red coat, trapped in a spider’s web and tormented by lizards, bats and a huge black spider with a skull and crossbones on […]
Continue Reading
Jonathan Freedland didn’t set out to write a guidebook to resistance. He was researching the story of Rudolf Vrba, the young Jewish escapee from Auschwitz who became the subject of his 2022 book, “The Escape Artist.” Freedland stumbled upon something odd: Heinrich Himmler, in an August 1944 speech, casually referred to a “reactionary cabal … […]
Continue Reading
Sasha Vasilyuk was surprised to be named a finalist for the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, wondering if the judges were going to honor an author whose “last name isn’t Jewish, and whose main character avoided being Jewish.” Nevertheless, her debut novel, “Your Presence Is Mandatory,” won the $100,000 prize for a story […]
Continue Reading
There’s an ignoble tradition of falsified memoirs. “The Hitler Diaries,” a forgery published in 1983, fooled even a Hitler expert. “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” published in 1997, was sold as a survivor’s testimony but turned out to be a hoax (the part where the author was raised by wolves might have been […]
Continue Reading
