America and the Holocaust

2019 ◽  
pp. 162-189
Author(s):  
William vanden Heuvel
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policies ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
American Policy

This chapter presents Ambassador vanden Heuvel's views on American immigration policies towards Jews before and during WWII. In response to a documentary by the historian David Wyman criticizing Roosevelt and his administration, vanden Heuvel began his own research to set the record straight. He demonstrates that American policy toward refugees was more generous than any other country at the time and that efforts by FDR to encourage Congress to revise refugee quotas would have resulted in a reduction of those quotas by an isolationist Congress. He refutes the idea that the exact details of the death camps were widely known at the time and thus could have prompted a military plan to save the Jews. He also recalls his intervention with President Jimmy Carter to challenge such claims by Elie Wiesel and others.

Antisemitic or Bordering on Antisemitic? Grey Areas in Romanian Fake News Discourses in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Anca-Simina Martin
Keyword(s):  
Influenza Pandemic ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
Working Definition ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubonic Plague and, according to some scholars, the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic. This practice reemerged in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when more and more fake news outlets in the US and Europe started publishing articles on a perceived linkage between Jewish communities and the novel coronavirus. What this article aims to achieve is to facilitate a dialogue between the observations on the phenomenon made by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and the latest related EU reports, with a view to charting its beginnings in Romania in relation to other European countries and in an attempt to see whether Romania, like France and Germany, has witnessed the emergence of “grey area” discourses which are not fully covered by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.

scholarly journals Kilka słów na marginesie Dziennika z getta Miriam Korber-Bercovici

2021 ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Monika Borzęcka
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Jewish Woman ◽  
World War ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
The Holocaust

A Few Words on the Margin of the Diary Written in the Djurin Ghetto by Miriam Korber-Bercovici The purpose of the article is to present fragments of the diary of Miriam Korber-Bercovici, a young Jewish woman deported with her whole family from Southern Bukovina to the Transnistria Governorate under the Antonescu regime. The excerpts translated from the original Romanian into Polish mainly concern the author’s experiences of deportation and everyday life in the Djurin ghetto. They were selected in order to acquaint Polish readers with the situation of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia displaced to the Transnistria Governorate during World War II. The diary was first published in Romania in 1995 as Jurnal de ghetou. The presented translation is based on the second edition of the diary published in 2017 by Curtea Veche Publishing House and Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania.

scholarly journals Against All Odds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Schwass
Keyword(s):  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Bear Witness

More than eighty years on from the Holocaust, what Elie Wiesel called the ‘duty to bear witness for the dead and for the living’ continues to find literary expression. This year alone, a forgotten novel written at breakneck speed by an exiled German Jew in the aftermath of Kristallnacht – Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s, The Passenger,  described as part John Buchan, part Franz Kafka – was unearthed and published in translation by Pushkin Press in London, while previously-unheard testimonies of Nazi ‘death march’ survivors have been transcribed to form the centrepiece of an important new exhibition in the same city.

All in Good Measure

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Lupia
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Word Recall ◽  
School Students ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Times

This chapter is about how to word recall questions effectively. An example of why this topic matters occurred just days before the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. At that time, a New York Times headline proclaimed that “1 of 5 in New Survey Express Some Doubt About the Holocaust.” The Times article’s lead paragraph described the finding in greater detail (emphasis added): . . . A poll released yesterday [sic] found that 22 percent of adults and 20 percent of high school students who were surveyed said they thought it was possible that Nazi Germany’s extermination of six million Jews never happened. In addition to the 22 percent of adult respondents to the survey by the Roper Organization who said it seemed possible that the Holocaust never happened, 12 percent more said they did not know if it was possible or impossible, according to the survey’s sponsor, the American Jewish Committee. . . . Reactions to this finding were swift. Benjamin Mead, president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, called the findings “a Jewish tragedy.” Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Laureate and concentration camp survivor, conveyed shock and disappointment: “What have we done? We have been working for years and years … I am shocked. I am shocked that 22 percent … oh, my God.” Similar headlines appeared across the country. In the months that followed these reports, many struggled to explain the finding. Some blamed education, as a Denver Post editorial described: . . . It’s hardly surprising that some Americans have swallowed the myth that the Holocaust never happened… . [E] ither these Americans have suffered a tragic lapse of memory, or they have failed to grasp even the rudiments of modern history… . Such widespread ignorance could lull future generations into dropping their guard against the continuing menace of ethnic intolerance, with potentially devastating consequences… . To this end, the public schools must obviously do a better job of teaching 20th century history, even if it means giving shorter shrift to the Civil War or the Revolution. . . .

Gary Weissman. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 288 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Berel Lang
Keyword(s):  
Direct Experience ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Popular Representations

This is a compelling, meticulously argued, subtle, and literate book on an important subject—although the question of what that subject is remains oddly open. Gary Weissman interprets a number of authoritative and popular representations of the Holocaust (principally those by Elie Wiesel, Lawrence Langer, Stephen Spielberg, and Claude Lanzmann) as evidence of their—and presumably their audiences'—post-Holocaust “efforts to experience the Holocaust” and somehow to recapture that horrific reality in feeling. These efforts, Weissman shows in a measured discussion that contrasts with the high-pitched register of much Holocaust writing, encounter what he sees as fundamental difficulties—and not only because of Primo Levi's chilling reminder that if direct experience is a requirement for authenticity, the only true witnesses of the Holocaust are not those who survived but those who died. The difficulties he identifies vary in the works discussed, and his book's concluding chapter, in which he ends up questioning the warrant for any “fantasies of witnessing,” provides only a brief conspectus. He thus leaves his readers to make their own way back to the Holocaust from the post-Holocaust—from which, when the survivors are gone, everyone will set out.

Art and the Holocaust: Positioning Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-226
Author(s):  
Richard Raskin
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
Alain Resnais ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Relationship

Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto will be considered here in the light of two radically different views of the relationship between art and the Holocaust – one proposed by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the other by the film-maker Alain Resnais.

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