In this volume Yehudi Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry's chief ...representative abroad. Drawing on the mass of unpublished material in the JDC archives and other repositories, as well as on his thorough knowledge of recent and continuing research into the Holocaust, he focuses alternately on the personalities and institutional decisions in New York and their effects on the JDC workers and their rescue efforts in Europe. He balances personal stories with a country-by-country account of the fate of Jews through ought the war years: the grim statistics of millions deported and killed are set in the context of the hopes and frustrations of the heroic individuals and small groups who actively worked to prevent the Nazis' Final Solution. This study is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the American Jewish response to European events from 1939 to 1945. Bauer confronts the tremendous moral and historical questions arising from JDC's activities. How great was the danger? Who should be saved first? Was it justified to use illegal or extralegal means? What country would accept Jewish refugees? His analysis also raises an issue which perhaps can never be answered: could American Jews have done more if they had grasped the reality of the Holocaust?
RESUMEN: La pregunta que guió la reflexión en este texto es si el Holocausto tuvo características que no existieron en ninguna otra forma de genocidio. Cuando se discuten elementos sin precedentes en ...un fenómeno social, la pregunta inmediata es ¿sin precedentes en comparación con qué? Por medio del método comparativo y tomando en cuenta que el horror del Holocausto no es que se desvió de las normas humanas sino que no lo hizo, en este artículo se revisan los genocidios de tutsis, armenios, khmer, chams musulmanes, vietnamitas y romas, para arribar a la conclusión de que el Holocausto es una forma extrema de genocidio. A su vez, se argumenta que las diferencias deben ser analizadas con el objetivo de aprender lo que ha sucedido. Adquirir conocimiento deja al descubierto la relación dialéctica entre particularidad y universalidad del horror. El Holocausto conlleva una advertencia. No sabemos si tendremos éxito en difundir este conocimiento, pero si hay una oportunidad siquiera en un millón, ese sentido debe prevalecer; tenemos una obligación moral, en el espíritu de la filosofía ética -moral- kantiana, de intentarlo.
After the horrific events of October 7, what we face today are, basically, two completely different worlds. One is exemplified by Hamas—a fundamentalist Islamic movement with genocidal intentions. ...The other is the Jewish State. To be sure, Israel is a democratic country, but one riddled with internal conflict and controversy. There is a segment of the Jewish public and certain institutions, including a few under state auspices, which are fanatically religious, but they and their Jewish brethren of varying degrees of religiosity do not aspire to spread the Jewish religion globally as Hamas does with Islam. As a result, there can be no overarching common platform on which to conduct a dialogue. Hamas seeks the destruction of the Jewish State and the elimination of its society basically by annihilating those who do not convert to its credo. Israel is, as we well know, a very complicated society, but in that sense it is hardly unique; most—perhaps all—democratic societies are.
There is a historical background to the Ukrainian crisis, and it is hotly disputed. There is no agreement on when Kyiv was founded, but in the ninth century, Varangians (Vikings) established a hold ...over the site, and the term Rus’ may be a Scandinavian word. Russian nationalist historians dispute this notion, insisting that Slavic tribes controlled the area and possibly built a fortress there.Mongol and Tatar tribes held sway in the area, and by 1240, the Mongol Empire, with Genghis Khan's cavalry at the fore, had conquered not just what is now Ukraine, but the thickly forested areas to the north. Moscow fell in 1238. Tatar communities sprang up, then and later, and some still exist in Northwestern Belarus and Lithuania.
