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Musing: Message for a Maniac
New York’s tabloids and international news services alike took note of a New Jersey court appearance by Nazi admirer Heath Campbell, who named his first-born ‘Adolf Hitler’ (yemach shemo – although Mr....
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Defining History Down
Under siege by some of his countrymen for seeming to have acknowledged the Holocaust, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tried to walk that Chihuahua back at a forum this week sponsored by the Council on...
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Seeing Privilege As A Pain
Sometimes a first-person account is just so sad you could cry. And when the writer seems oblivious to the sadness, well, then it’s sadder still The Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently offered a piece...
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The Road to Heil
If ever there were a question to inspire ambivalence it might be whether the current push in Israel to outlaw the word “Nazi” and Holocaust-era German symbols is a good idea. On the one hand, the word...
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Retroactive Prophecy
There exists a mentality, even among some who should know better, like the respected popular historian Rabbi Berel Wein, that any one of us can, and even should, second-guess the attitudes and...
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Retroactive Prophecy Redux
As I expected, my critique of some recent writing of Rabbi Berel Wein has generated many comments and communications. There were, also as expected, yeas and nays The nays focused on either or both of...
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Children’s Programming
“Nahoul” is a giant bee, or, better, a man in a furry bee costume. He is one of the intended-to-be-lovable characters on “Pioneers of Tomorrow,” a children’s television program produced in Gaza. In a...
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Of Peoples… and People
Commuting to and from Manhattan daily on the Staten Island Ferry brings me into the vicinity of many a tourist. The boat sometimes resembles a United Nations General Assembly debate, without the...
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Stubborn Spirit
The birthday cake was ablaze with 105 candles, and many among the scores of people present at the Czech embassy in London this past spring for the party would not have been there – or anywhere – had it...
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Irony Trumps Iron
A piece I wrote about Purim and a famous Nazi was published by the Forward today. It can be read here. The post Irony Trumps Iron appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.
View ArticleGovrov Selichos, 1939
This time of year in 1939, in a Polish town called Ruzhan, a 14-year-old boy had his plans rudely interrupted. The boy, who, fifteen years later, would become my father, had made preparations to...
View ArticleThe Professor Stumbles
You just can’t, as they say, make this stuff up. A performer recently made news by implying that 1) Holocaust denier David Irving deserves reconsideration, and 2) that the earth is flat. The...
View ArticleUnrighteous Indignation
And here, all this time, we thought Auschwitz was a Polish death camp. It was, of course, at least in the sense that it was a place in Poland where upward of a million souls, the vast majority of them...
View ArticleA Window into the Past
It’s barely visible. Taped to the inside of the front bay window of a neat, modest house on a nondescript street in Toronto is a photocopy of a spoon. The window, off the living room, is dominated by...
View ArticleLoss and Legacy
Like so many of his generation in Europe, he had an all too short childhood. At the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was 14, he found himself, along with his family and others from the small...
View ArticleAn Impossible Pretzel
Some people, it seems, like some dogs with teeth planted firmly in mailmen’s legs, just can’t let go. Take Peter Beinart. I have no problem with the columnist and former The New Republic editor’s...
View ArticleWindow on the Warped
Interested in making a quick $14.88? Well, you might want to consider writing a racist or anti-Semitic article and submitting it to “The Daily Stormer,” one of the more famous neo-Nazi websites that...
View ArticleRemarkable Bordering on Incredible
Senator Orrin G. Hatch’s announcement of his retirement at the end of the year brought me back to the summer of 1995. That’s when I returned to my family’s former home of Providence, Rhode Island to...
View ArticleStatement of Agudath Israel of America on Polish Holocaust Law
February 2, 2018 Statement of Agudath Israel of America on Polish Holocaust Law The thousands of Polish citizens who courageously hid and aided Jews during the Holocaust are legend, and deserving...
View ArticlePoland Isn’t Denmark
Poland has a point. The country’s legislature passed a controversial bill last week aimed at quashing the use of the phrase “Polish death camps” for Nazi extermination enterprises built and operated...
View ArticleNo, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Did Not Sin Against The Memory Of The Holocaust
We do no favors to the memory of the Holocaust when, for political purposes, we unfairly accuse people of dishonoring it. Whatever one may think of incoming Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she...
View ArticlePolar Vort
“Not as cold as Siberia.” That’s what my father, a”h, would say with a laugh if I complained over the phone about the frigid weather in Providence, where my family lived in the 1980s. And indeed it...
View ArticleAll The Days of Your Life
I often feel terribly pampered. Especially when I think of my parents’ generation. At the age when my father, z”l, and several others from the Novardok Yeshiva in Vilna were captured for being Polish...
View ArticleLove, Hate and the Holocaust
Considering that a survey last year revealed that 31 percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and that 41 percent of...
View ArticleThe Nazis Knew
A dear friend who had a secular upbringing and maintains an irreligious outlook took issue, gently, if a bit cynically, with something I had written for Aish.com, a website that reaches out to a broad...
View ArticleA Misleading Morph
I’ll never forget coming across the phrase “the Holocaust” – complete with the definite article and capitalized second word – in, of all things, a translation of the Mishnah. More unnerving still was...
View ArticleLocusts, the Holocaust and Today
The 17-year locusts, as many call them, won’t be singing their deafening song this spring on the East Coast. The particular brood (there are several) that we easterners are familiar with, though, is...
View ArticleBlood and Soil
Some recent reading led me to wonder if there might be something about German soil that somehow resonates, in susceptible people, with cruelty and murder? Might the Nazi slogan “Blut und...
View ArticleTwo Jews Walk Into a Palm Springs Shul
A piece I wrote for Forward about my late father-in-law’s friendship with the celebrated novelist Herman Wouk — whose second yahrtzeit was last Shabbos — can be read here. The post Two Jews Walk Into...
View ArticleYetzias Kaufering
Pesach Sheni is a special day in my family, because in 1945, on that day of the Jewish calendar, my father-in-law, who passed away earlier this year, was liberated from Dachau by American soldiers....
View ArticleDesecrations of the American Flag
A piece I wrote about the misuse of the American flag was published by NBC-THINK on Flag Day, earlier this week. It can be read here. The post Desecrations of the American Flag appeared first on Rabbi...
View Article80 Years Since Babi Yar
Wanton murder of Jews was a prominent feature of Ukrainian history from time immemorial. But the most infamous massacre of Jews on Ukrainian territory came in 1941, when the Nazis and their Ukrainian...
View ArticleFire, Ice, Air
My father, a”h’s, fifth yahrtzeit is tomorrow. Several years before he passed away, he and I collaborated on a book about his experiences in Poland, Siberia and Baltimore. It is titled: “Fire, Ice,...
View ArticleDefining Indecency Down
It may have started back in the summer of 2020, when a Kansas Republican county chairman posted a caricature of the state’s Democratic governor Laura Kelly on his newspaper’s Facebook page. Ms. Kelly...
View ArticleLoony Librarian Lesson
Just when it seemed the news stream couldn’t get nuttier, we were graced with the lovely story, first reported by The Washington Post, of third-graders at a Washington, DC, elementary school allegedly...
View ArticleUnrighteous Indignation
The Polish envoy entrusted several months ago with the mission of improving relations with Jews recently called his country’s 2018 law criminalizing claims that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust...
View ArticleWe should hire Deborah Lipstadt to combat antisemitism, not punish her for...
Also, an essay I wrote for Religion News Service about the stalled Deborah Lipstadt nomination can be read here: The post We should hire Deborah Lipstadt to combat antisemitism, not punish her for...
View ArticleJoys and ironies of Purim echo through history
The joys and ironies of Purim echo through history The post Joys and ironies of Purim echo through history appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.
View ArticleEmpathy and History
We should all feel outrage at the Russian onslaught against Ukraine and sympathy for the beleaguered innocent citizens under attack. But letting those proper feelings obscure history is the opposite...
View ArticleTake Two – Pesach Sheini’s Special Significance to My Family
“Second Passover,” or Pesach Sheini, a minor Jewish holiday, is anything but minor in my family. It was on that Jewish date, which, in 1945, fell on April 27 (and this year, falls on May 15), that my...
View ArticleHer Father’s Daughter
You might not recognize the name Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro, but you surely know the lady by her current name: Nancy Pelosi. Her original surname, though, resonates with some of us Jewish...
View ArticleDays of Deceit
Fact-free fantasies are all the rage Shameless charlatans and flagrant fabulists are nothing new. But they seem to be proliferating rather wildly these days. In only the latest of a slew of recent...
View ArticleRepulsive Raid Reaction
Think you’re smart? Well, let’s see. Can you spot the pattern in these quotes from public servants and other personalities about the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and the...
View ArticleHa’azinu – The Secret, Unveiled
Although I appreciate most humor, even jokes about Jews, I have always found comedian Alan King’s wry summary of Jewish holidays, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” profoundly unfunny. Not...
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Name, Rank, Courage
If you aren’t familiar with the story of Roddie Edmonds, a Tennessee-born non-Jewish sergeant who fought in World War II and was captured by the Nazis, you can read it here. The post Name, Rank,...
View ArticleA Defense of Holocaust Remembrance Day
A piece I wrote about the uniqueness of the Holocaust was published at Religion News Service and can be read here. The post A Defense of Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on Rabbi Avi Shafran.
View ArticleSholom Aleichem and Mah Nishtana
Rosh Chodesh Nisan would seem a propitious time for a Kiddush Hashem. And one occurred this year, when a large group of Israeli anti-government protesters, mostly secular citizens aiming to “get in...
View ArticleParshas Re’ei – Survivors
Kol yimei chayecha – “All the days of your life” – is a phrase we first meet in the Torah when Hashem pronounces the fate of Adam after the sin of eating from the eitz hadaas: “Cursed is the ground...
View ArticleA Nazi’s Revealing Order
There are railcars and there are railcars. A document from a horrible moment in Holocaust history was recently discovered by a Tel Aviv University PhD candidate. You can read about it here. The post...
View ArticlePresident Biden Echoes the Haggadah
Something in particular struck me about President Biden’s October 10 speech about Israel. To read what it was, click here. The post President Biden Echoes the Haggadah appeared first on Rabbi Avi...
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