Russians destroyed the Holocaust memorial near my native city of Kharkiv: The memorial stands in the place of one of the largest mass graves of the slaughtered Kharkiv Jews. My Jewish grandparents didn’t end up there because they managed to flee. 11,000 Jews were murdered and buried in this spot. Sadly, this taught people nothing.

Rabbi Aviezer Pilz knows what’s worse than Auschwitz and was happy to share the insight. In the Rabbi’s opinion, educating women is worse than burning Jews in furnaces. Rabbi Nosson Zochovsky advanced the idea that if women are paid good wages for working, that’s a tragedy in and of itself. He didn’t mention if it’s … Continue reading Holocaust Studies: Worse Than Auschwitz

I wasn’t going to read Snyder’s Black Earth because I did not expect it to tell me anything new about the Holocaust. But then I read a pissy review of the book and realized that only something very good could provoke such a fit of poutiness in a reviewer. So I bought the book and … Continue reading Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Everybody probably knows this but I had no idea, and I’m really taken by the story. Throughout WWII, the British prohibited Jews from coming to Palestine. Still, a group of Zionist Jews managed to get there and start fighting for a Jewish state. These Jews had been kept by Stalin in concentration camps in Siberia. … Continue reading Holocaust Studies: From Siberia to Palestine

President Obama has spoken about the environment on campuses, and this is the part that caught my attention: And I say to them, Listen, if you hear somebody using a racial epithet, if you hear somebody who’s anti-Semitic, if you see an injustice, I want you to speak out, and I want you to be … Continue reading Holocaust Studies: Talking about Anti-Semitism

Middle schoolers who join debate teams are warned to avoid the “that’s just like Hitler” argument because it’s intellectually vacuous and morally unsustainable. Reaching out for an easy, tear-jerking analogy is a sign of an impotent mind. Lazy, primitive brains love nothing as much as they do analogy. They dismiss any new information that reaches … Continue reading Holocaust Studies: Just-like-Holocausters

From just a single example of Nazi apologia that gets published daily by seemingly normal people: Do you know why the Nazis built gas chambers? I mean, gas chambers are a lot more expensive than bullets, right? Well, it turns out they had a shortage of soldiers willing to put bullets into the heads of … Continue reading Holocaust Studies: Nazi Apologia

There were Jews who survived Auschwitz. But there were none who survived Babiy Yar, Sobibor, Belzec, Krupki, Chelmno, etc. Yet for most people Holocaust is synonymous with Auschwitz, even though the majority of Jews had already been slaughtered before Auschwitz started its work of mass murder. The reason why Holocaust is limited to  Auschwitz in … Continue reading Holocaust Studies, 5

Where did the Holocaust begin? We all know where it originated – Berlin, obviously, but what geographic area saw the first mass annihilation of all of its sizeable Jewish population within a very short period of time?

In 1941, within months of each other but completely independently of each other two groups of nationalists addressed formal requests to Hitler to liberate their land from oppressors and help them form their own nation-states. What were these new nation-states going to be called? The answer is under the fold.