“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank
A reflection from Rob Piotrkowski:
One of the earliest camps established during World War II was in Lublin, Poland. The camp, named Majdanek, had people of various nationalities detained there. They all had the characteristic of being “other” or somehow undesirable. Many were of Jewish descent. Those who were gassed and cremated at this site had their ashes placed in The Mausoleum. When I visited this site, I asked about the inscription on the dome. The loose translation I was given said “our suffering so that you might remember.” The more formal translation: “Let our fate be a warning to you.”
The following articles and interviews are meant to provide a range of topics surrounding the lives of Jewish people, from centuries past (see Thomas Sowell), to WWII and the Holocaust, to the current war between Israel and Palestine. It also delves into the spreading antisemitism on University campuses. It is certainly not an exhaustive list. Each serves as an introduction to the issue.
From The Free Press, Niall Ferguson’s article on the Treason of the Intellectuals. “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.”
https://www.thefp.com
An excerpt:
“A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans.”
“A critical factor in the decline and fall of the German universities was precisely that so many senior academics were Jews. For some, Hitler’s antisemitism was therefore—not unlike woke intersectionality in our own time—a career opportunity. “
Niall’s interview with The Hoover Foundation can be found here.
The origins of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/origins-international-holocaust-remembrance-day
Resources for those living in Calgary can be found at the Calgary Jewish Foundation.
https://www.jewishcalgary.org/
More resources can be found at the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.
https://agpiworld.com/
History of Jewish peoples from around the world. The excerpt is from Thomas Sowell’s book Migrations and Cultures, A World View.
An interview with Glenn Loury and Tabia Lee on how DEI offices are driving campus antisemitism. The full episode can be found in the show notes.
An interview with Coleman Hughes and Dr Benny Morris on the origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The interview states it as a conflict as it was recorded early in 2023.