Lex Lesgever was born on 1 May 1929 in the historic heart of Amsterdam, where Jews had thrived for centuries. He was barely 11 when the Germans occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. By May 1945, approximately 107,000 of the 140,500 of the country’s Jewish population were wiped…
It is no exaggeration to say that Modernity and the Holocaust by sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman transformed the way historians have understood that tragic period of the 20th century. Abandoning the perplexed…
Since my schooldays, I’ve had a thing for TS Eliot – despite overtly antisemitic lines in his poetry. “Rachel née Rabinovitch tears at the grapes with murderous paws” (Sweeney Among the Nightingales, 1920) gave me pause for thought all right. Our English teacher called him out…
Never a Native is for every woman who has ever yearned, aspired or been driven to activism against unethical attitudes and behaviours to women. It is also for every woman who, like the author Alice Shalvi, has the courage to face her failures, doubts and guilt resulting from her…
The title of Angelika Bammer’s book recalls two other important post-Holocaust accounts by second-generation writers: Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996) and Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge (2004). The difference…
Written by Steve Leder, senior rabbi at Wilshere Boulevard Temple in LA, More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us takes readers on a journey through the cycle of life. From the naivety of childhood to that familiar…
