My father Philip Rudin was the son of Samuel, a bootmaker, and his wife Rose. They immigrated to Pittsburgh from Belarus at the turn of the 20th century. But because hand made boots were not in fashion for most Americans of that era, my grandfather was compelled to open a grocery store in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Young Philip lived behind the store with seven other family members.

After attending Schenley High School, my father graduated from the University of Pittsburgh Dental School in 1925. A year later, he married my librarian mother, Beatrice Rosenbloom, an Allegheny High School alumna.
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The daughter of Louis Rosenbloom, Beatrice and six other family members lived above her father’s clothing store at 856 East Ohio Street near Chestnut Street on Pittsburgh’s “Nor Side” – the area north of the Allegheny River. Louis and Beatrice’s stepmother, Jenny, were born in Lithuania.

In his new book The Survival of the Jews in France, 1940-44 (Oxford Press), Jacques Semelin, professor emeritus of history and political science at the Paris Institute of Political Science, focuses on a frequently overlooked statistic: 240,000 of the 320,000 Jews living in France in 1940 survived the war within that nation’s borders.

After the French armed forces and national government quickly collapsed when Nazi Germany invaded in May 1940, the conquerors divided France into a German-occupied area in the north and a pro-Nazi Vichy regime, the “Free Zone,” in the south. In both regions, French police and gendarmes were zealous in rounding up Jews for deportation “to the East,” a euphemism for German death camps.

A horrific example of French collaboration with the Nazis was the July 1942 roundup in Paris of 8,160 Jews. Before being deported, they were incarcerated for five days under appalling conditions at the Velodrome d’Hiver, an indoor sports stadium. The roundup shocked many people because it included women and children; fewer than 100 survived the war.
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Semelin, an expert on the Holocaust and civil resistance, focuses on how Jews “survived” the Holocaust by devising strategies and actions, such as fleeing Paris and moving to the sparsely populated countryside in the Free Zone, acquiring false names and identity papers, posing as Catholics, being hidden by non-Jews, and “blending in” with the general population.

Hatred of Jews and Judaism is the world’s oldest social pathology, and Andrew Goldberg’s PBS-TV documentary Viral: Anti-Semitism in Four Mutations (airing in the U.S. on May 26) presents important new insights into this omnipresent odium.

For Goldberg, whose parents were members of Chicago’s Emanuel Congregation, this will be his fourteenth documentary, and as he told me, this one is intensely personal.  During the three years required to complete the 90-minute program, acts of virulent, often-murderous antisemitism sharply increased in the United States and Europe.
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Goldberg posits that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews or with Jewish or Israeli behavior. It is, rather, a deep-seated, age-old pathological answer to the question: Why are bad things happening to me? It can't be my fault; someone else must be seeking to hurt me. Blame “the Jews,” then – who, anti-Semites claim, control the world. His documentary focuses on four current “hot spots” of deep-seated antisemitism: the traditional far right; Hungary and its state sponsored antisemitism; the emergence of far left; and the rise of Islamic radicalism.