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Article Author:  Article Title:  Article Subtitle:  The Interconnected World of NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous The battle we

“This Is My Life” is the movie that made me want to make movies. I first saw it in second grade, so I wouldn’t have articulated it as such, but that’s what was going on. I…

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I…

Richard, 28, and Christine (Crisy) Rowley, aged 27, have been married for five years and together for nine. They are buying their own home in Braintree, Essex, and they have aspirations. Richard…

Tony Judt in his office at New York University, June 2006 I was married to Tony Judt. I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s…

Until this fall, Ray Kachel had lived virtually all of his fifty-three years within a few miles of his birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught Jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry, who…

(Photo: Christopher Lane) Dont be sad, says Finklestein on his deathbed. Ive had 80 good years. But youre 98! says his wife.I know.

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name. She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed. "The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive." He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: "I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this."

For American Jews, the problem of the “ordinary German” is especially troubling, because it brings us directly to the darkest and most unassuageable suspicions about Jewish vulnerability. The most controversial books about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, have been the ones that try to explain how the Germans—citizens of an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews. For if this people could do it, the strong implication is that under the right (or, better, the wrong) circumstances, any people could do it. And the history of the world since 1945 seems to bear out this implication. Cambodians, Serbs, and Rwandans have all shown that people do not have to be Nazis, or anti-Semites, in order to slaughter their neighbors.