Eighty years ago, on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi German “Fuhrer,” began World War II by invading Poland. He hurled 1.5 million troops, 2,000 tanks, and 1,900 warplanes against his neighbor on the east. The outnumbered and outgunned Polish army was no match for the Nazi assault.

The Polish capital, Warsaw, fell on September 17, and 11 days later, Soviet troops linked up with Hitler’s military juggernaut and divided Poland as part of the Berlin-Moscow non-aggression treaty signed a month earlier.

It was a bitter defeat, but for Poland’s 3.5 million Jews, 10 percent of the country’s population, it marked the beginning of the end of an extraordinary community which dated back more than 1,000 years.
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It was because of Poland’s huge Jewish population that the engineers of the “Final Solution” built their largest death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, inside occupied Poland. And once Hitler invaded his former “ally,” the Soviet Union, in June 1941, even more Jews came under his brutal control.

(RNS) — While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently called human slavery America’s “original sin,” he dismissed calls for the federal government to pay financial reparations to descendants of slaves.

It has been 400 years since “20, odd Negroes” in chains arrived aboard the English ship “The White Lion” in Point Comfort, Virginia, in August 1619. A short time later, a second ship, “The Treasurer,” brought more Africans to be sold to the white Virginia settlers who had arrived in Jamestown a dozen years earlier.
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Transporting Africans by ship across the Atlantic Ocean as slaves did not end until 1808, and scholars estimate about 455,000 Africans — including children — were brought to what became the United States. Besides being sold as property, the Africans were also stripped of their original names, languages, cultures and religions. Most slaves were forcibly converted to Christianity, their masters’ religion.

Hitler (Oxford University Press) is the definitive biography of Adolf Hitler.

Author Paul Longerich is a prominent German historian, professor of modern German history at the Royal Holloway College, University of London, and founder of the College’s Holocaust Research Center. From 2003 to 2004, he served as a senior scholar-in-residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Because Longerich has written biographies of leading Nazis Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, it is no surprise that he finally turned his attention to Hitler himself. The result is a 968-page exploration of the Nazi leader with an additional 247 pages of notes and a 70-page bibliography.  
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Despite its length, Longerich’s book is no ornamental “door stopper;” it is, rather, an “eye opener” that sets this book apart from those of many other Hitler biographers.

While the title of Kenneth Stow’s book, Anna and Tranquillo (Yale University Press), may sound like the name of an Italian opera, it is actually the story of the Papal State’s 300-year effort to forcibly convert the Jews of Rome to Catholicism. The officially sanctioned campaign included kidnapping youngsters, harsh incarceration, and mind manipulation.

The book centers on the case of Anna del Monte. On May 6, 1749, Vatican police arrested the 17-year-old Jewish girl at her family home in Rome’s Jewish ghetto. She was placed in solitary confinement for 13 days inside the dreaded Casa dei Catecumeni, the House of Converts.
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Anna was forced to listen to hours and hours of conversionary sermons, a tactic priests, including Cardinals, employed to compel physically and psychologically battered prisoners to affirm “the one true faith” at the baptismal fount.

The U.S. and Israel, allies for more than 70 years, are sometimes at odds on specific policies and actions. Yaakov Katz’s new book Shadow Strike:Inside Israel's Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin’s Press) details one such disagreement involving a high-stakes threat to Israel in 2007.

As Katz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, tells it, in mid-April of that year, the director of Israel Intelligence, Meir Dagan  “… a short, bald and burly man with a limp and a cane walked into the West Wing of the White House” to meet with President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and members of the national security staff. He showed them photographs of a secret nuclear reactor in a remote part of Syria; it had been supplied by North Korea and was nearing an operational or “hot” stage.
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The Mossad director also made it clear that Israel could never tolerate a hostile neighbor acquiring the capability to produce an atomic weapon. He did not need to remind the Americans that in 1981, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) destroyed a nuclear plant in Iraq.

Karl Marx!

The name conjures up an intimidating bearded revolutionary intent on violently overthrowing society.
Shlomo Avineri, professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University and former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, shatters that conception in his superb new biography, Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution (Yale University Press).
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Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, a region in Germany’s Rhineland under French rule, where Jews enjoyed the fruits of emancipation. Both of his grandfathers were rabbis. With Napoleon’s defeat, the repressive Congress of 1815 ceded control of Trier to Prussia. Under the new regime, Karl’s father, changed his name from Heschel to Heinrich and had his family converted to Lutheranism to gain a position in the Prussian civil service.

​Marx  never practiced any form of Christianity, but his baptism permitted him to marry Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of an aristocratic German family. His in-laws, however, did not provide the couple and their three daughters with much financial support.

Rabbi Stephen Fuchs and his wife, Victoria, had a choice to make, a choice that would transform their lives. Should they cut all ties with Germany, where their parents were born and survived the Holocaust, or should they begin a positive dialogue with Germans?

They opted for the latter, devoting themselves to a simple yet profound message of reconciliation and hope: Wir können die Vergangenheit nicht ungeschehen machen, aber wir können gemeinsam an einer besseren Zukunft arbeiten. (We cannot undo the past, but the future is ours to shape.)
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The couple’s bittersweet mission is laid bare in …And Often the First Jew(Mazo, Jerusalem), a 136-page collection of diary-like essays.  The title represents the sad fact they are the first Jews many people living in postwar Germany had ever met.

​An apocryphal story describes how children in Jerusalem would yell “Elohim! Elohim!” (God! God!) when they saw Martin Buber (1878-1965) with his full “silken white beard.” According to the account, Buber smiled at the adoring youngsters and said,” Yes!”

In his highly readable and concise biography – Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press) – of the famous philosopher, Paul Mendes-Flohr, chief editor of the 22-volume German language collection of Buber’s works, described him as a man who championed “a life of dialogue” and taught that “all real living is meeting.”
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At his birth in Vienna, “faulty obstetric forceps” left Martin with an “embarrassingly twisted lower lip” (as an adult he made certain to cover much of his “deformed” mouth with a beard). His mother “eloped” with a Russian officer and abandoned her son at age three. Buber later recalled how he looked out a window and “tried desperately to catch his mother’s attention, but she disappeared over the horizon without looking back.”

James Rudin, BA ’55, today a rabbi, scholar, author, and professor at Saint Leo University in Florida, was a GW Hatchet sports editor in 1953-’54 and he covered the first GW men’s basketball team to make the NCAA Tournament. The Colonials, Southern Conference champions that season and ranked as high as seventh by The Associated Press, went 23-3 overall and 10-0 in the conference, and lost in the NCAA Tournament’s first round to North Carolina State, 75-73.

Rudin, then 19 years old, carpooled with players to road games as part of multi-car caravans and he got to know the team, as well as then-GW coach Bill Reinhart.
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On the 65th anniversary of GW’s first NCAA Tournament team, the now-84-year-old Rudin remembers the laconic Reinhart, the man who (purportedly) invented the fast break and built Oregon’s program in the 1920s, mentored future Hall of Fame Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach, BS ’40, MA ’41, HON ’93, and finished with a 319-237 record at GW over 24 seasons between 1935 to 1966*. No coach has won more basketball games in GW history.