Let the Real Housewives try this for a change.
May 182013
“The present situation of the Jews, apparently triumphant in Israel and at the apogee of their prestige in the capitalist world, is more tragic under this glory than it often was under humiliation.”— Maxime Rodinson, 1968.[1]
This month marks 70 years since the Jewish uprising at Warsaw. By early 1943, Europe’s main Jewish population centre – concentrated by Nazi decree in 1940 into a ghetto whose inhabitants soon numbered more than half a million – had in successive waves of liquidation been reduced to well under one hundred thousand (about 35,000 registered with the Nazis, but possibly double that number in total). Many had been starved to death, many gunned down, most deported in July-September 1942 for extermination at Treblinka. On the morning of April 19 1943, an SS-led force deployed against the Warsaw Ghetto with orders to complete its liquidation in an operation projected to last three days. Its captive population, finally mobilized into coordinated resistance organizations, met the SS with intense, lightly armed resistance and dealt the Nazis a series of limited defeats; several weeks of determined rebellion ensued. “At the end of June,” writes Hannah Arendt, “the underground newspapers were still reporting guerrilla skirmishes in the ghetto streets.”[2] Continue reading »
