Noel Hidalgo/Creative Commons

JTA correspondent Michael J. Jordan visits with the diplomats in Geneva preparing for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism as they seek to widen the definition of anti-Semitism to include Islamophobia – Arabs are Semites, after all – and talk of the importance of focusing on “state racism.” Guess which state?

(more…)

Did Darwin’s theory of evolution provoke the Holocaust? That’s the claim being advanced by actor/economist Ben Stein in his new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Called “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time” by the New York Times, the film, which debuted last week to dismal modest* box office response, proposes a direct correlation between evolutionary science, Social Darwinism, “godlessness,” and Nazism.

Stein’s assertions about the evil intentions of evolutionary biologists have some in the scientific community crying foul.

(more…)

ESPN looks back at the almost-successful attempt to get the United States to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics:

Seventy-two years ago this summer, Hitler’s Germany played host to the Games of the Eleventh Olympiad in Berlin.

The games are now best remembered for the brilliance of Jesse Owens — who won four gold medals — and the success of the Nazis’ propaganda machine. For the first time in the history of the modern Olympics, the Games were held hostage by the political goals of the host nation.

What’s largely forgotten is the fact that a powerful American movement to boycott the Nazi Olympics nearly succeeded. The final vote of the AAU’s delegates was 58.25 to 55.75 in favor of participation. If three more delegates had voted to boycott the Games, the Nazis would have presided at a meaningless event.

The New Jersey Jewish News reports on a new musical comedy that looks at life in the annex from the perspective of Anne Frank’s little sister. (What’s next — “Long Night,” a comic romp on Auschwitz from the perspective of an inmate having to listen to Elie Wiesel moralize all the time?):

What if Margot, Anne Frank’s big sister, also kept a diary? What if hers offered a different perspective on life in the annex?

What if her diary revealed different truths — that it was she and Peter who were in love, not Anne and Peter, or that Albert Dussel, really Dr. Fritz Pfeffer, was actually a lovely fellow and not the fat, bald, selfish man as portrayed in Anne’s diary?

And what if Anne were actually, in Margot’s words, “a conniving little [rhymes with witch]”?

Most of all, what if someone wrote a play based on the premise and turned it into a musical comedy?

MTV has produced two Holocaust awareness ads as part of its “Think” initiative.

THE FAMILY ROOM

THE SUBWAY

The Times of London examines challenge of tastefully examining and displaying Hitler’s vision of Berlin as a city full of bloated marble architecture, capital of the Nazi-run world:

For decades his plans were regarded as so crazed that they were confined to specialist books and institutes.

Yesterday the taboo was broken. Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, unveiled a scale model of Germania, the Führer’s supersized city. Centrepiece of the display was the domed Great Hall, planned by Albert Speer, Hitler’s master architect, to accommodate a crowd of 150,000. …

The positioning of the exhibition, in a pavilion next to the Holocaust Memorial and two minutes’ walk from Hitler’s bunker, has made it easier to open it to the public without seeming to glorify the Nazi’s aesthetic vision. …

My favorite headline from the ADL’s recent press release touting its annual audit of anti-Semitic acts: “Swastika Symbol of Choice for Anti-Semites.”

There’s been plenty of Jewish news the past few days over at the New York Times (and that’s before you even get to the Israel coverage) … (more…)

Reuters reports that a photograph of the boy with the “beautiful brown eyes” who Anne Frank described as her “one true love” is set to go on display in Amsterdam.

The photo of Peter Schiff was donated to the Anne Frank museum by his former childhood friend Ernst Michaelis who realized after rereading Anne’s diary recently there were no known pictures of Schiff, a museum spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

In her famous diary, Frank wrote: “I forgot that I haven’t yet told you the story of my one true love.”

“Peter was the ideal boy: tall, slim and good-looking, with a serious, quiet and intelligent face,” Anne wrote of the 13-year-old she had fallen for in 1940 when she was just 11.

To see the photo, click here.

Anshel Pfeffer has a story in Ha’aretz about Pinchads Zlotosvsky, 32, a Polish skinhead who became a fervently Orthodox Jew after learning of his Jewish roots.

The transition in Zlotosvsky’s life occurred after his mother told him she comes from a Jewish family. Her parents, she said, sent her to a monastery when she was a small child so that she would survive the Holocaust.

All her relatives were murdered, as far as Pinchas Zlotosvsky knows.

“I realized I was Jewish according to Judaism. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror for a whole week after I found out,” he recalls. After he recovered from the shock, he spent the past few years rediscovering his Jewish roots. He has also become very active with the Jewish community.

Ha’aretz caught up with Zlotosvsky at an annual conference for hidden Jews in Lodz. The newspaper reports that official figures put the number of Jews living in Poland at 4,000 — but the number of people who are Jewish according to Halacha.

The discrepancy stems from the fact that thousands of Jews who survived the war preferred not to reveal their Jewish identity for fear of anti-Semitic persecution by the local population. … Another significant portion of the hidden Jewish population consists of people like Pinchas Zlotosvsky’s mother, whose parents sent them to monasteries to be raised as Christians. Despite efforts by international Jewish organizations to locate these people, not all have been found, and many are assumed to have remained Christian.