In Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, writer and illustrator Art Spiegelman inquires of his Polish Jewish father: “When did you first hear about Auschwitz?” His father, a Holocaust survivor, replies: “Right…
The personal story of an Israeli Jew’s longing for peace
In the contemporary mix of international politics, media reports of distant battles and casualties, or impassioned diatribe from armchair analysts, it is easy to forget that war, terrorism and injustice are written in the personal stories of real people. To…
‘While there is still time’: American churches, violence and conspiracy theories
In his classic book Night, the late Boston University professor Elie Wiesel described how the first warnings of what became the Holocaust found their way into his family’s village of Sighet, Transylvania, in 1942. The messenger was an “outsider” called…
History shows the view is best from the margins
Sometimes an obscure social science dissertation about historical events tells you exactly what you need to know about what is going on right now. I have just read a little-noticed 2019 book called Protectors of Pluralism: Religious Minorities and the…
Delegate up, deflect away and deny: lessons from Nazi Germany about responses to atrocities today
It’s easy to condemn the moral evasion of a past generation and people. The challenge is to see ourselves in them – and to do today the just deeds that will bring no regrets tomorrow.
Never again? Remembering Auschwitz amid enduring anti-Semitism and increasing acts of hatred
Two irreconcilable statements must be heard as one: Auschwitz was liberated 75 years ago. Yet, anti-Semitism endures, now unleashed with new vigor in the American public square.
How churches that don’t think they are anti-Semitic promote anti-Semitism
The church has not just been on the wrong side of history, but on the wrong side of Christianity. Anti-Semitism is by definition a repudiation of Christianity as well as of Judaism, and an enemy of pluralism and democracy.
How to live in perilous times: a pope and a priest’s contrasting responses to Hitler’s Final Solution
We, too, live in perilous times that will define us for all time. Will history remember us as protectors of ourselves, our institutions and our borders? Or as protectors of God’s children, as people who truly believe O’Flaherty’s motto: “God has no country.”
Silence in the face of evil: learning from an obscure schoolteacher who urged Karl Barth and other theologians to stand in solidarity with the Jews in Nazi Germany
If I thought Nazi-era Germany was an aberration I could probably move on; but in Donald Trump’s America, who can think that? The Church of Jesus Christ is confronted by an anti-Gospel once again. The German Church never acknowledged her complicity with the National Socialists, and the white churches of America are equally resistant to truth.