He Later Supported Israel as a Permanent Safe Haven — On a television news program in May 1952, James G. McDonald faced tough questions about a nascent country: the State of Israel. “As a supporter of this human experiment, you, yourself, are still confident it is going to work out satisfactorily?” asked journalist William Bradford Huie on Longines Chronoscope. Four…

Before being forced to disembark the SS Exodus 1947, Mike Weiss removed the Zionist flag that had flown from the ship’s mast as it approached the shores of Mandatory Palestine, which was under British rule.

From a young age, Jewish artist Halina Olomucki was constantly drawing the world around her. So when she and her family were forced into the Warsaw ghetto in 1940, Halina began to record daily life there through her art. “My job was simply to … draw what was happening,” said…

February’s massive earthquake brought already grievous suffering to a new level in northwest Syria, an area held by the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s government and under constant attack. In that region of four to six million people, the majority of whom have fled the Assad regime, rescuers could do little…

Purim, a Jewish holiday observed for centuries, is a day for joyful celebrations and fun traditions such as sharing sweets, performing skits in costume, and reenacting the biblical story that Purim is based on. The villain of that story, Haman, had persuaded the king to wipe out the Jews of…

Everyone’s favorite analogy is back (as if it ever went away). To cast yourself as an innocent victim, just label your enemies Nazis. …

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, is at once a stirring work of art and a powerful call to conscience. Words are central to this experience and many of them are integrated into the architectural design of the building. Among the many notable figures whose quotes are…

Abraham and Masza Swislocki, a writer and an industrial chemist, had a son, Norbert, in 1936. Family photographs from his early years show smiling faces during a trip to the beach. But the charred edge of those photos belie a change in their fates. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in…

In May 1940, the Pentcho, a paddlewheel steamboat, departed from the Danube River in Bratislava, present-day Slovakia. One of the passengers was 18-year-old Karl Schwarz. Originally from Vienna, he fled Austria after Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938. He found work in a machine shop in Bratislava and became…