By Rafael Medoff
Seventy-five years ago this month, 5-year-old Rudy Boschwitz, tightly gripping his mother’s hand, gingerly stepped down the gangplank of the S.S. Majestic and onto the dock at New York City. It was the third night of Hanukkah. After two years of wandering from country to country, the future United States senator and his family had finally found a place they could call home.Read More
By Rafael Medoff
Seventy years ago, Benzion Netanyahu stood on the balcony of his small Manhattan apartment and wondered how his world had suddenly turned upside down.
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By Rafael Medoff
Newly released tapes of President Richard Nixon’s private conversations in 1973 include a remark that antisemitism will increase in the United States if American Jews “don’t start behaving.” As outrageous as that comment was, it should be kept in mind that Nixon was not the first American president to privately express antisemitic sentiments — nor is it clear how such views affected those presidents’ policies regarding Jewish concerns.
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By Rafael Medoff
Robert Morgenthau’s announcement that he will retire after more than three decades as Manhattan’s district attorney caps an impressive career in law enforcement. With his latest case, against banks illegally aiding the governments of Iran and Sudan, three generations of Morgenthaus have now confronted perpetrators of genocide — which is as tragic a commentary on the persistence of human rights abuses in modern times as it is a tribute to a remarkable family that has fought those abuses.
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By Rafael Medoff
‘I dig absolutely.” Those three awkward words, spoken by Leonard Bernstein to a Black Panther spouting pseudo-Marxist rhetoric at a soiree in the Bernstein home in 1970, immortalized the stereotype of the guilt-ridden upper-class liberal embracing violent radicals. The composer found himself publicly mocked, first by William F. Buckley Jr. in a newspaper column titled “Have a Panther to Lunch,” and then in the pages of The New Yorker by Tom Wolfe — who was inspired by the incident to coin the term “radical chic.”
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