In June 2 and 3, 1941, a pro-Nazi pogrom (farhod) was perpetrated against the Jewish community of Baghdad with 900 Jews killed, thousands injured, and millions of dollars in property looted, burned and destroyed. Many of the dead were not identified and were buried in a mass grave. This is a personal memoir of what […]

Before the Germans captured the city of Warsaw in the 1939 Blitzkrieg, there were 360,00 Jews in the Polish capital. It was a city enriched by centuries of Jewish life. The Warsaw Ghetto was established November 15, 1940 in a small area within the city that would become a halfway stop to death for hundreds […]

The crackdown was swift and brutal. Though the government was deeply divided between hardliners and those favoring more negotiation with the Palestinians, the hardliners won. Towns and refugee camps that had raised the flag of the Republic of Palestine were shelled, while Yasser Arafat proclaimed a "genocide" and urged his people to resist. There were […]

Israel Broadcasting Authority’s English news, the raid on Entebbe was so compelling a moment that he immediately decided to name his first son Yoni. “Entebbe was such an important thing for all of us,” says Ledhosvia, “I had come abroad before that, in 1974, and was in the US doing my masters degree when Entebbe […]

The complete trust Cohen enjoyed among his unwitting informants is illustrated by the following incident, which might have had serious consequences for Israeli agents. One day, Cohen was sitting in Saif’s office reading a classified document while the Syrian was on the phone. One of the ministry’s directors entered the room unannounced. “How is it […]

The Israeli army captured the Golan Heights in 1967, just as the Six-Day War was drawing to a close. After suffering for years from relentless Syrian shelling, the inhabitants of the Israeli towns and kibbutzim of the northern Galilee were finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. No longer could the Syrians shoot down […]

Shortly after 5:30 p.m. on June 7, 1981, Israel saved the world from the threat of nuclear blackmail. In less than two minutes’ time, Israeli jets laid waste an atomic reactor on the outskirts of Baghdad, and so deprived a brutish dictator the potential for mass destruction. The world was outraged. Voices that had been […]

WEDNESDAY, 9 JULY 1941 – THE EIGHTEENTH DAY: As always, we were up early and waited to be marched out to the prison yard, but time passed, and there was no command to leave our cells. After awhile, we could hear something that sounded like the backfiring of trucks on the embankment highway. The traffic […]

Marc Chagall in Green and Blue: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dreamer Marc Chagall: a great artist or a great Jewish artist? Decidedly both, I would argue, after seeing “Marc Chagall, Early Works From Russian Collections,” on view through October 14 at New York’s Jewish Museum. Indeed, the exhibit, which brings together […]

Every Sunday morning, the old cathedral of Toledo, Spain, is witness to an incongruous sight. Protruding from the jacket of one of the worshippers are the white fringes of a Jewish prayer shawl. Jose Luis is not a “Jew for Jesus;” he is a descendant of Conversos (Jews converted to Catholicism at the time of […]