Tag: Wyman Institute

George McGovern is widely remembered for advocating immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam and sharp reductions in defense spending. Yet despite his reputation as a pacifist, the former U.S. senator and 1972 presidential candidate, who died Sunday at 90, did believe there were times when America should use military force abroad.

By the summer of 1947, British Mandatory Palestine was in flames. Jewish underground fighters waged guerrilla warfare against the British administration. Refugee ships, such as the S.S. Exodus, challenged London's refusal to let Holocaust survivors enter the Holy Land. A United Nations committee visited the region and returned with a plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

Bob Weintraub chuckled appreciatively the first time he heard that Barack Obama described his job before he went into politics as “community organizer.” Bob knows a thing or two about community organizing: during the late 1940s, he helped organize a series of remarkable grassroots election campaigns in New York City that sent a powerful warning to President Harry Truman about the Jewish community’s unhappiness over his administration’s waffling on Zionism.

By the time he was 26, Jan Karski had been imprisoned by the Soviets, tortured by the Gestapo, and nearly drowned while escaping from a hospital in German-occupied Slovakia.

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Benzion Netanyahu – historian, one-time political activist and father of Israel's prime minister – died Monday in Jerusalem at 102. An accomplished scholar and the patriarch of one of Israel's most important political families, he also played a surprising and little-known role in American political history.

This past weekend Harvard hosted a One-State Solution Conference, designed to promote the dissolution of Israel. It is only the latest example of that university’s longstanding practice of facilitating the spread of anti-Semitism.

The news that a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic recently conducted a posthumous proxy baptism of Anne Frank, the most famous diarist of the Holocaust, undoubtedly will cause some offense in the Jewish community. Evidently the baptizers believe they were saving Anne's soul. Of greater significance, however, is what Mormons tried to do to save Anne's life.

A Palestinian mufti has called for violence against Jews, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is demanding Palestinian leaders disavow him and America's presidential race could be affected.

The campaign for recognition of the Bergson Group’s Holocaust rescue efforts took another step forward last week when a prominent historian who previously had been unsympathetic to the group publicly praised Bergson.

Miami Beach was certainly a fitting choice as the site for this month's reunion of passengers from the ill-fated SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees that sailed from Nazi Germany in May 1939. As children, they gazed at the lights of Miami as the St. Louis hovered off the Florida coast, hoping desperately for permission to land.

President Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust is a serious issue that merits careful consideration of the historical facts. Listing FDR's Jewish acquaintances, or the number of Jews hired by his administration, tells us very little about his response to the Nazi genocide. A meaningful discussion of the issues needs to move beyond arguments along the lines of "some of his best friends were Jewish." And name-calling likewise does little to enhance understanding of the issues.

The "Bergson Boys" have finally come home.With an international conference at Yad Vashem, a reinterment ceremony in Israel, and the publication of a new book, the controversial Holocaust rescue activists last week took a major step forward in gaining the public recognition they were long denied.

The enthusiastic response Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received when he addressed Congress on May 24 came from both sides of the aisle. Democrats and Republicans both took part in the numerous standing ovations.

Israeli generals probably don't cry very often. These are men of steel nerves, professional soldiers toughened by the rigors of battle and a lifetime devoted to strict military discipline.

President Obama and his supporters have defended U.S. military action in Libya by invoking America's failure to respond to mass murder in Rwanda, Bosnia and even the Holocaust. Do those experiences indeed offer useful lessons for the current crisis?

This is one "top ten" list no author wants to find himself on.

Sixty-five years after they shook the political establishment with their newspaper ads and rallies against the Holocaust, the activists known as the Bergson Group have been officially acknowledged by New York City.

Americans who tried to rescue Jews from the Holocaust - and those who tried to interfere with the rescue efforts - were the subject of a major conference in New York City last week.

WASHINGTON - The campaign to win public recognition for the Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group took another step forward recently when Hadassah became the latest major Jewish organization to pay tribute to the 1940's activists.