Holocaust Remembrance Day/Yom HaShoah, May 5, 2016. Jews and others will gather in synagogues, community centers, schools, and other venues to remember those lost in the Holocaust, and to decry the intolerance and hate that enabled the tragedy. “Never again” will be a common refrain. Who is Not Hearing the Message of Yom HaShoah and […]
I asked the same “why” questions as many before me have asked throughout history. Why the hate? Why the killing? And why the destruction of this beauty which God has created?
Krauthammer points to the growing Holocaust emphasis in Jewish education, from Sunday schools to university Holocaust studies programs, as one example of what he sees as an unfortunate trend tipping the scales from a necessary dedication to keeping alive the memory and the truth of the Holocaust to Holocaust memory emerging as the dominant feature of Jewishness in America.
On Sunday night, “Son of Saul,” a work of fiction set in 1944 at the very real Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. A unique aspect of this Holocaust film is its focus (literally its camera lens) on a single man, Saul Auslander, a Jewish prisoner forced to help […]
This review might have had a very different tone if I were in middle school, a girl—or a Palestinian. I chose to read Where the Streets Had A Name, published in 2008 by Randa Abdel-Fattah, because I am in the process of writing a middle-grade/young adult allegory based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wanted to […]