Jerome A. Chanes

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How, Why, Who Hates Us

By Jerome A. Chanes

Historian Victor Tcherikover used to say that there are few phenomena in history that have a history of 2,000 years. Antisemitism is one of those phenomena. The cultural antisemitism of the ancient world; Christian religious antisemitism; the racist forms of the modern era, beginning with Voltaire and culminating in the horrors of the destruction of European Jewry — all add to these the “new” antisemitism of radical Islam and virulent forms of “Israelophobia,” and you have a cluster of issues and events that we, in 2009, cannot adequately address. For scholars, it is not merely of theoretical interest to grapple with these issues, but it is also crucial to know how to face them, both now and in the future.Read More

Kasztner: Hero or Devil?

By Jerome A. Chanes

Gaylen Ross’s splendid new documentary, “Killing Kasztner,” comes at a time when a new generation of Israelis is rediscovering a forgotten conflict, one that threatened to tear apart Israeli society in the 1950s. Until recently Rudolf Yisrael “Rezso” Kasztner had been the forgotten person in Israel. An ironic and puzzling situation since in the mid 1950s, the “Affaire Kasztner” was the flashpoint in Israel. It was an event that split Israeli society more deeply than even the Lavon Affair.Read More

Remembering (Not) Remembering

By Jerome A. Chanes

Hasia Diner is a historian who believes that things actually happened in history. She is also comprehensive, indeed dogged in her research, which her oeuvre amply demonstrates. Diner, who teaches history at New York University, made a major contribution with her superb “A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), which articulated for many of us a vocabulary for understanding mid-19th century American Jewish history.Read More

Art and Apocrypha: The Fraught Beauty of the Dead Sea Scrolls

By Jerome A. Chanes

They survived, untouched, for nearly two millennia, but the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been, since their discovery in 1947, fraught with controversy. Ownership, religious patrimony, Christian-Jewish relations and the odor of antisemitism emanating from some Christian scholars who controlled access to the scrolls — these have roiled the academic and public-affairs worlds for decades. Hovering above all these, of course, are the ultimate questions: Who wrote the scrolls, and when? And why were they written?Read More

What Makes Edgar Run?

By Jerome A. Chanes

One has to be in a coal mine in Uzbekistan to be unaware of the Bronfmans, particularly Edgar M. Bronfman and his Jewish communal activities. Top dog at the World Jewish Congress for more than a quarter-century — it was Bronfman who rescued a financially floundering WJC in the early 1980s and steered it into the lead role in the Waldheim Affair, the Swiss-banks matter and other hot-button international Jewish issues — Bronfman has been among the world’s most visible and effective Jewish communal functionaries. As a philanthropist, he has had a critical involvement in the acclaimed Birthright Israel programs — and so has his philanthropist brother Charles, benefactor of one of the more creative foundations in the Jewish world. But the story begins earlier, with the family patriarch, whiskey baron Samuel Bronfman (a nomen omen if there ever were one: Bronfn is the Yiddish word for booze), whose Seagram Company fueled the clan’s fortunes in Canada and the United States during the Prohibition Era and beyond. Various Bronfman progeny dot the Jewish communal map of the 21st century, with greater or lesser impact on the Jewish agenda.Read More


 

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