Good afternoon! We’re continuing to face technical issues interfering with our standard newsletters. So, this afternoon, we have a slightly different kind of roundup for you. Read on! |
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👂 My dad stormed Normandy on D-Day — and relived the fight against Nazis every night.Growing up with a father who had fought on the front lines of WWII left Beth Harpaz, an editor at the Forward, with an unusual set of stories to tell in grade school: “I knew what it was like to kill a Nazi soldier at point-blank range by the time I was in third grade,” she writes. On the 78th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, she reflects on her father’s life and the lessons she learned from it. Read the story ➤ ✡️ How an elite group of Jewish refugees helped to defeat the Third Reich. The D Day landings changed the course of WWII. The X Troop, a unit of Jewish commandos — many of them refugees from the Nazis — helped lay the groundwork to make the mission possible. Read the story ➤ |
🎥 George Carlin’s ‘Class Clown’ is 50 years old — does it still hold up? Carlin’s seminal comedy record helped establish his reputation as a countercultural icon. Half a century later, a new Judd Apatow-helmed HBO documentary on the late comedian is putting the album back in the spotlight. Read the story ➤
🤔 How an extremist Jewish politician has become the ‘auteur’ of his own demise. The far-right French politician Éric Zemmour, who is Jewish, has entered a legislative race — a bid expected to be unsuccessful — after failing in his campaign for the country’s presidency. Part of Zemmour’s downfal, writes Forward critic Robert Zaretsky, has to do with his obsessive focus on telling a story that violates what “traditionalists call truth and facts, decency and humanity.” Read the story ➤ |
💥 Before WWII, Jewish mobsters kept Nazis at bay in the US — with their fists. A new book traces the history of how an unlikely alliance of a Jewish judge and a squad of Jewish gangsters, including Meyer Lansky, led to a coordinated series of attacks on American Nazi groups before the war. Yes, it sounds like a superhero story — one the book’s author, Michael Benson, thinks has lessons for today. “Who’s going to be Captain America?” he asked. “Who’s going to be the Judge Perlman and Meyer Lansky?” Read the story ➤
✍️ British poet Siegfried Sassoon ignored his Jewish heritage. A new biopic does the same. Sassoon’s haunting body of work is one of the greatest artistic reflections on the devastation of WWI. A new film overlooks his Jewish background — and his complicated, occasionally antisemitic response to it. Read the story ➤
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