Matt Lebovic

Jewish communal documents removed from book bindings, beginning of the 16th century (Bidspirit)

August 30, 2021, 4:50 am

Are online sales of pre-Holocaust communal records their doom or salvation?

After decades of silence about eastern European Jewish community documents ‘abandoned’ during World War II, the issue has started to ruffle feathers, from Brooklyn to Budapest

By Matt Lebovic

A man holds a placard during a protest organized by Jewish associations, who say justice has not been done for the killing of French Jewish woman Sarah Halimi, at Trocadero Plaza near Eiffel Tower in Paris, April 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

July 6, 2021, 10:26 pm

Amid rising US antisemitism, Jewish groups plan July 11 solidarity rally in DC

‘NO FEAR: A Rally in Solidarity with the Jewish People’ set to take place in Washington with a ‘big tent’ of Jewish groups; co-organized by Elisha Wiesel

By Matt Lebovic

Clockwise from left: A still shot From the play 'Anne and Emmett' (courtesy); Emmett Till, and Anne Frank. (Public domain)

June 13, 2021, 2:35 am

‘Child martyrs to national evils,’ Frank and Till’s legacies increasingly tied

Their deaths separated by 10 years, Anne Frank and Emmett Till are connected by historians, filmmakers and playwrights. On Saturday, Frank would have been 92

By Matt Lebovic

Hungarian Jews on vacation in Marienbad, the Czech spa town near the border with Germany (public domain)

June 7, 2021, 4:37 am

In pre-WWII Marienbad bubble, rabbis and royalty alike came to take water ‘cure’

Family memoir portrays spa town Marienbad’s heyday, when Jews from all over Europe flocked there for medical treatments, reunions, and healthy doses of politics

By Matt Lebovic

Illustrative: Tova Friedman, an 82-year-old Polish-born Holocaust survivor, holds a photograph of herself as a child with her mother, who also survived the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, in New York, December 13, 2019. (World Jewish Congress via AP)

May 28, 2021, 3:17 am

New Shoah Foundation podcast connects Holocaust testimony with today’s headlines

Drawing from USC Shoah Foundation’s audiovisual archive, ‘The Memory Generation’ seeks to ‘expand the pyramid of memory’ by giving survivors’ voices contemporary relevance

By Matt Lebovic

Some of the 250 Armenians who took up arms against Turkish forced on Musa Dagh in 1915 (public domain)

April 26, 2021, 3:22 am

How Armenia’s 1915 ‘Musa Dagh’ fighters inspired Jews to resist Nazi genocide

Passed around Jewish ghettos across eastern Europe, author Franz Werfel’s fact-based ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’ novel foreshadowed the Holocaust and galvanized resistance

By Matt Lebovic

Jews marched out of the ghetto during the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt in April and May, 1943. (public domain)

April 19, 2021, 3:42 pm

The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt was initially dubbed ‘fake news’ by some US Jews

New book ‘The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw’ traces the immediate aftermath of Holocaust’s most famous revolt, including the ‘gendering’ of resistance and politicization of its narrative

By Matt Lebovic

Screenshot from 'Muranów' by director Chen Shelach (courtesy)

April 7, 2021, 5:30 pm

Jewish ghosts haunting today’s Warsaw channeled by Israeli director in new film

Polish capital’s Muranów district was once Europe’s epicenter of Jewish life, and residents have plenty of spooky stories to prove it in a documentary screening April 7

By Matt Lebovic

Grammy-winning performer Joanie Leeds in New York City (courtesy)

April 1, 2021, 4:16 am

Meet Joanie Leeds, kids’ bday star turned Grammy-winning, girl-power sensation

With roots in Jewish music and song-leading, performer Joanie Leeds takes home a 2020 gilded gramophone for her acclaimed female empowerment album, ‘All the Ladies’

By Matt Lebovic

March 28, 2021, 9:33 am

Using rare archival films, Ukrainian director forces viewers to face Babyn Yar

Filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa grew up in ignorance close to site of Holocaust massacre. Now he’s creating 24 short films about the history — and its erasure — at the notorious ravine

By Matt Lebovic

Berta Berkovich 'Betka' Kohút and her family in 1942, before she was deported to Auschwitz. Berta is standing, second from right (courtesy: Tom Areton)

March 27, 2021, 12:57 pm

Sewing for survival: The last of Auschwitz’s forgotten ‘dressmakers’ dies

Final member of death camp’s ‘sewing circle’ dies of COVID-related complications; high-profile book based on women’s experiences to be published in September

By Matt Lebovic

Editorial cartoon by Theodore Geisel for PM daily newspaper, depicting Hitler and French collaborator Laval, who was executed after the war (public domain)

March 9, 2021, 10:00 pm

During WWII, Dr. Seuss tried to slay anti-Semitism, but also promoted racism

With late author’s estate declining to republish six of Theodore Geisel’s books, we present a look at Dr. Seuss’s foundational years as US Air Force propogandist extraordinaire

By Matt Lebovic

Jewish Cemetery in Karczew, Poland, 2017 (courtesy: Christian Herrmann/vanishedworld.blog)

March 5, 2021, 11:04 am

‘Annihilation’ of Poland’s Jewish cemeteries documented in provocative book

Krzysztof Bielawski publishes 1st ‘historical synthesis’ of Poland’s destroyed Jewish graveyards, emphasizing role of government-led campaigns and new grassroots efforts to rebuild

By Matt Lebovic

Atlanta-based historian Deborah Lipstadt in Jerusalem, July 2019 (Raphael Ahren/Times of Israel)

March 1, 2021, 4:13 pm

Top Holocaust scholar Lipstadt: CPAC Nazi-symbol stage was ‘a very big oops’

Historian also discusses latest outbreak of anti-Semitism in Congress and how she is helping bring white supremacists to justice in Charlottesville, Virginia

By Matt Lebovic

Purim with Holocaust survivors at the Landsberg DP camp in Germany, with a mock-tombstone for Haman and Hitler (Yad Vashem)

February 27, 2021, 11:30 pm

In post-WWII Nuremberg and New York, Purim’s future once hung in the balance

While American Jews debated the meaning of the holiday after the Holocaust, Hitler’s top ‘Jew-baiter’ — Nazi publisher Julius Streicher — invoked Purim from the Nuremberg gallows

By Matt Lebovic