A friend pointed me to this small collection of photographs of the deportation by the Nazis of the Jews of Ioaninna, Greece, on March 25, 1943, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have seen many moving photos of the deportation of Jews, including...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 16, 2008 02:34 PM
Jennifer at Mixed Race America relates another episode in the seemingly endless debate over the use of the term "concentration camps" to describe what the U.S. government termed Japanese American "Relocation Centers" in World War II. This is not a...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 13, 2008 03:38 PM
The other day, when asked about waterboarding, GOP presidential front runner Rudy Guiliani would not say it was torture and, in fact, said that whether waterboarding was even wrong depended on who did it -- according to the fair and...
Posted in Is That Legal? on October 26, 2007 04:49 PM
In about a month, the University of North Carolina Press will publish my new book "American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II." It tells the story of the enormous system of bureaucratic tribunals that was...
Posted in Is That Legal? on September 6, 2007 02:48 PM
We still have an opened box of Manischewitz matzoh in the kitchen that we raid for snacks, even though Passover ended weeks ago. Yesterday, as I was munching, I happened to notice that this box was one of a special...
Posted in Is That Legal? on May 1, 2007 03:40 PM
This is my great-uncle Leopold’s "kennkarte," or identity card, issued in his hometown of Bad Kissingen, Germany, in February of 1939. Its cover, with the stylized capital "J," shows that he was a Jew. I discovered the kennkarte in Leopold's...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 24, 2007 12:05 AM
Unbelievable:WASHINGTON - Former Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson told Jewish activists Monday that making money is "part of the Jewish tradition," and something that he applauded. Speaking to an audience at the Religious Action Center of Reform...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 16, 2007 04:02 PM
Nearly a year ago, I posted "The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz." The post took Pope Benedict to task for depicting the Volk of the Third Reich as a group of innocents coerced and intimidated by a "cabal of criminals,"...
Posted in Is That Legal? on March 29, 2007 06:22 PM
I went to Germany this past week to continue my several-year-long search for traces of the life of my great-uncle Leopold Müller, who lived in the spa town of Bad Kissingen and was deported to Poland and his death, along...
Posted in Is That Legal? on March 17, 2007 08:27 PM
Incidentally, the reason I am in Germany this week is that I'm doing research about the story of my great-uncle Leopold Müller, who perished in the Holocaust. I have written about him here a number of times before. Until recent...
Posted in Is That Legal? on March 14, 2007 03:05 AM
Bradley Burston updates us on "this week in Jew hatred." To the extent that Burston is suggesting that Mitt Romney's choice of the Henry Ford Museum to launch his presidential campaign reflects animus against Jews, I think he's wrong. On...
Posted in Is That Legal? on February 15, 2007 10:11 AM
Here's the question about Mitt Romney's decision to launch his presidential bid at the Henry Ford Museum: does Romney not know that Henry Ford detested Jews (and was even rewarded by Hitler for it), or does he not care? It's...
Posted in Is That Legal? on February 12, 2007 05:53 PM
Tussling with Vdare.com brings many rewards, but the emails from its readers are the savoriest bits. Here are my three favorites thus far, each just special in its own way:--"VDare has a right to be heard. Of course , you...
Posted in Is That Legal? on January 2, 2007 07:01 PM
Ed Cone yesterday noted the 144th anniversary of General Ulysses S. Grant's notoriously anti-semitic General Order Number 11. Inexplicably, Ed took some heat over his post in his comments. The little-known episode from the Civil War is really quite fascinating:...
Posted in Is That Legal? on December 18, 2006 02:13 PM
Dear Members of the Institute for Political and International Studies of the Foreign Ministry of Iran, I understand you've just hosted an academic conference on whether the Holocaust happened. I'd like you to meet my great-uncle Leopold. He was my...
Posted in Is That Legal? on December 12, 2006 04:17 PM
Readers of this blog may recall that I am on an on-again, off-again quest to learn more about the life and murder of my great-uncle Leopold Muller. Leo was my grandfather's brother, a German Jew who lost his arm fighting...
Posted in Is That Legal? on July 27, 2006 07:37 AM
This time it's Jim Carroll of the Boston Globe.In Germany itself by now, there is an established tradition of a much fuller recognition of national complicity in the Nazi project. For a generation, Germans have declined to portray themselves as...
Posted in Is That Legal? on June 5, 2006 09:28 AM
This comment in the thread on the pope was so wise that I thought it worthwhile to reproduce it here:Living near Karlsruhe, I can also add a certain extra note or two about German attitudes. One of our neighbors is...
Posted in Is That Legal? on June 3, 2006 10:44 AM
Looks like I've been channeling Daniel Goldhagen. "Benedict clouded historical understanding, evaded moral responsibility and shirked political duty. Benedict falsely exonerated Germans from their responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming only a "ring of criminals" who "used and abused" the...
Posted in Is That Legal? on May 31, 2006 09:17 PM
Dean Esmay responds to my post of yesterday about Josef Ratzinger's disastrous Auschwitz speech in the very best tradition of revisionism. You'll recall that I argued that no respectable scholar sees the evil of the Third Reich [as Ratzinger does...
Posted in Is That Legal? on May 31, 2006 08:50 AM
When the white smoke told the world that Josef Ratzinger had been elected pope, it took some of us a moment or two to get our minds around the idea that the College of Cardinals had elevated a childhood member...
Posted in Is That Legal? on May 29, 2006 11:12 PM
But I do know the apes are the Jews and the swine are the Christians. I learned it in school. Absolutely horrifying behavior from these trusted allies of ours. UPDATE: The Saudi ambassador to the United States responds. All of...
Posted in Is That Legal? on May 21, 2006 09:47 PM
Why is it that we Jews, who can be so damn funny, can also be so not funny?...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 4, 2006 12:23 PM
I was out of the country when Russ Feingold went all censurious on the President's you-know-what -- a move, incidentally, that I quite admire -- but a friend who is an astute political observer captured the "debate" I missed in...
Posted in Is That Legal? on March 15, 2006 02:24 PM
Chris Bray brings to my attention this disturbing little essay by Sebastian Vivar Rodriguez on a Spanish website called "Gentiuno." Although it was published almost a year and a half ago, it continues to make its way around the web,...
Posted in Is That Legal? on February 26, 2006 08:28 PM
Living in a small German town in the early 1950s, American professor Milton Mayer pressed former members of the Nazi Party on whether they and other ordinary Germans had "known" about the regime's treatment of the Jews. He relates the...
Posted in Is That Legal? on February 23, 2006 01:47 PM
A year or so ago, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., published a book with Regnery Press entitled "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History." Readers of this blog may recall my efforts to shine a little light on the author's secessionist...
Posted in Is That Legal? on January 17, 2006 08:40 AM
One more new thing I learned this morning at the National Archives. I knew that the U.S. military declined requests to bomb the train tracks leading to the Nazi concentration camps in Poland. I didn't know we declined to do...
Posted in Is That Legal? on December 7, 2005 07:40 PM
Perhaps the best thing about doing research in the National Archives is that you never know what's going to show up in the files adjacent to those you've requested. In WWII, the War Department filed all of its correspondence under...
Posted in Is That Legal? on December 7, 2005 01:51 PM
I wish I could recommend to you this lengthy article from the LA Times magazine in which a Jewish journalist author muses about the differences between his Japanese American wife's family's (and, by extension, all Japanese American families') effacing of...
Posted in Is That Legal? on November 26, 2005 08:06 AM
Ethan Leib reports that during his time at Yale Law School, he found the place very Jewish, and "was sensitized to the way this annoyed and alienated some of [his] fellow students." He asks for comments from other YLS alumni....
Posted in Is That Legal? on November 16, 2005 04:37 PM
David Kopel commemorates the 67th anniversary of Kristallnacht by getting to the nub of the problem: Jews didn't have guns to defend themselves against the Nazis. That must be right. The Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had guns, and look...
Posted in Is That Legal? on November 9, 2005 03:20 PM
Consider the following passage: "If Herschel Grynszpan, a presumptively loyal, apolitical German Jew, would assassinate a German government official in Paris, what might we expect from other Jews in Germany? Anti-semitism doubtless exaggerated passions, and "political considerations" played their role...
Posted in Is That Legal? on October 14, 2005 09:54 AM
Tim Tyson, author of the book "Blood Done Sign My Name," has again graced my blog with a comment. Earlier pieces of this thread are here, here, and here. I continue to disagree with Tim about the merits of columnist...
Posted in Is That Legal? on August 29, 2005 12:30 PM
Somebody once mocked the then-liberal coverage of the New York Post with the phony headline: "Record Cold Hits City: Jews, Blacks Suffer Most." I think of this every time I see the way my town newspaper, The Chapel Hill News,...
Posted in Is That Legal? on July 31, 2005 11:06 AM
Eugene Volokh: "The main reason that people dislike Holocaust deniers isn't just that they're factually wrong, methodologically wrong, or even foolish. Rather, it's that we strongly suspect that the deniers either dislike Jews, or want to make apologies for Nazis."I...
Posted in Is That Legal? on June 16, 2005 09:12 PM
What do Blue Öyster Cult, Paula Abdul, Mick Jones, Vanessa Carlton, Pink, Peter Yarrow, Geddy Lee, and the Knack all have in common? The answer--which will probably surprise you (it did me)--can be found here....
Posted in Is That Legal? on June 7, 2005 08:12 PM
Three crosses were burned in Durham, North Carolina last week. A naïve person might mistake a cross-burning in the South for a racist act, but no: Durham resident Teresa Lovell argues in a letter to the Durham Herald-Sun that these...
Posted in Is That Legal? on June 1, 2005 10:03 AM
Commenter Beth has been making all kinds of sense in her comments on the pope, and her most recent is no exception: He witnessed the spirit of noninvolvement up close, and even if he wasn't conscious of the scope of...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 27, 2005 04:39 PM
A commenter on my blogging about the new pope's memories of Nazism thinks he has it all figured out: "This is merely a proxy fight for an attack on dogmatic Catholicism and everyone here knows it. You're not fooling anyone....
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 21, 2005 09:37 AM
Just finished teaching my last of 6 classes on American criminal law here at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3. It was a wonderful experience, even better than four years ago. The students this time seemed more eager to talk...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 7, 2005 08:22 AM
Saul Bellow: the season of death continues. Language Hat notes an oddity in the NYT obit: "his birthdate is listed as either June or July 10, 1915, though his lawyer, Mr. Pozen, said yesterday that Mr. Bellow customarily celebrated in...
Posted in Is That Legal? on April 6, 2005 03:00 PM
I have just learned that the French University I am visiting, université Jean Moulin, Lyon III, named for the murdered French leader of resistance to the Nazis, has, over its 30-plus-year life, been the French academic hotbed of Holocaust denial....
Posted in Is That Legal? on March 24, 2005 09:46 AM
Thomas E. Woods, author of the NYT Bestseller "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," Fox News darling, and founding member of the secessionist, neo-Confederate League of the South, on the Jews: "God still desires the salvation of the Jews,...
Posted in Is That Legal? on March 15, 2005 02:43 PM