(RNS) — Rabbi James Rudin had a front-row seat to all the major developments in Jewish-Christian relations in the second half of the 20th century.
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Probably no other rabbi has traveled as widely or met with as many global religious leaders as Rudin, who for 32 years worked at the American Jewish Committee, retiring as its national interreligious affairs director in 2000.
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At 87, he’s now written a memoir chronicling his efforts to improve Jewish-Christian ties in the wake of the Holocaust and give Jews a measure of dignity and respect they were often denied.
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Rudin’s book, “The People in the Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, and Presidents,” tells of his many travels — 42 times across the Atlantic — and his meetings with popes, presidents, Protestant denominational leaders and world-famous evangelists.

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​"Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero" (McFarland) is the provocative title of Roy Schwartz' detailed analysis of the most famous comic book hero in history. The book is very big, as befitting Superman: it weighs a pound and a half, contains 364 pages and measures 7x12 inches.

Israeli-born Schwartz, a director of marketing and business development for a law firm, has merged his keen knowledge of all things Jewish with his childhood love of comics. The result is a highly readable volume replete with many pages of notes, numerous illustrations, website listings, and a bibliography.

Schwartz presents a fascinating thesis: in 1934, a year after Hitler gained power in Germany, two Jewish young men from Cleveland - Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel - created Superman. Their mythical "Man of Steel" provided their fellow Jews, and indeed the entire world, with an invincible and beloved anti-Nazi warrior who ultimately morphed over the ensuing decades into a universal fighter for Tikkun Olam, the need to repair a world filled with injustice, evil, and brokenness.

As millions of people know, Superman was born in outer space on the planet Krypton and his father had the Hebrew sounding name Jor-El. The youngster, named Kal-El, leaves Krypton in a rocket ship and is deposited in rural "Smallville, Kansas" at the home of Martha and Jonathan Kent. The couple take in the mysterious visitor and give the child from space a mundane, earthly name: Clark Kent. In time, "the mild-mannered" Clark becomes a newspaper journalist in a Manhattan look-alike city called Metropolis.

Eighty years ago on January 20, 1942, the infamous Wannsee Conference took place in a large lakeside three-story mansion in suburban Berlin. Fifteen Nazi German leaders attended the meeting that coordinated plans to "orderly execute" ---murder--- millions of Jews during World War II.

The conference minutes, written by Adolf Eichmann, a conference participant, noted that: "Due to the war, the emigration plan [for Jews to leave Europe for other lands and nations] has been replaced with deportation of the Jews to the East, in accordance with the Fuhrer's will."

The Nazis often employed euphemistic phrases to conceal the true sinister meaning of their policies. "Deportation… to the East" meant sending Jews---men, women, and children--- in locked overcrowded filthy railroad boxcars to German death camps located inside occupied Poland.
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The object of the conference, convened and led by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the dreaded SS Security Service, was "to make all the necessary preparations for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the German sphere of influence in Europe." "Final Solution" was repeatedly used at Wannsee to describe the mass murder of millions in order to solve the alleged "Jewish Question."
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(RNS) — In a year in which we expected the news to get better, the stories followed most closely by the Jewish community in 2021 were for the most part sequels to the difficult and dire stories of 2020: COVID-19, surging antisemitism and strife between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. But a new government in Jerusalem and Israel’s broadening ties to Arab countries brought glimmers of hope for peace. Here are the 10 most important stories on topics of Jewish concern this year:
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1. Benjamin Netanyahu is ousted as Israeli prime minister.
In June, after four indecisive elections in two years, Israeli leaders Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid assembled a broad-based coalition that enabled Bennett to replace Netanyahu as prime minister. In power for 15 years, Netanyahu was the longest-serving PM in the nation’s history.

An early major achievement of the new coalition was the Israeli parliament’s adoption of a national budget, something that had not been done for three years.

December 7 marks the 80th anniversary of the surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. The attack led to America's formal entry into World War II. What ensued would have a profound impact on Jews everywhere, including the American Jewish community. Three examples:
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1. A SILENCING OF AMERICA'S MOST VOCAL ANTISEMITES
Adolf Hitler's declaration of war on the United States 4 days after the assault on Pearl Harbor led to the dissolution of the 800,000-member isolationist and antisemitic "America First Committee." The AFC's leading public spokesman, the aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, delivered a speech in Des Moines 3 months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, calling out the British, American Jews, and the Roosevelt Administration for agitating America toward war. His pro-Nazi sentiments earned him a special "Fuhrer Medal" in Berlin from Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering.
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Another virulent public antisemite of the pre-war period was Roman Catholic Father Charles Coughlin of Detroit, whose weekly radio program on 36 stations attracted millions of listeners. In his broadcasts, Coughlin called FDR's New Deal policies, including Social Security, the "Jew Deal." It was not until May 1942 that Catholic Church authorities finally silenced Coughlin's hate filled tirades.

Pittsburgh’s quaintly named Squirrel Hill had been one of the oldest and safest Jewish neighborhoods in the United States. That changed on Shabbat morning, October 27, 2018, when a lone shooter murdered 11 worshippers in the Tree of Life synagogue. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.

Mark Oppenheimer’s Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood (Knopf), focuses not on the killer, but on the reactions of Pittsburghers in general, and especially the responses of Squirrel Hill residents. That is why it is likely to become the definitive study of the horrific massacre that attracted global attention.
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Oppenheimer, the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative and a former religion columnist for The New York Times, is uniquely qualified to describe the shooting and its aftermath. His great-great-great grandfather settled in Pittsburgh in the 1840s, and the author’s father was born in the city.

In the course of his research, Oppenheimer made 32 trips to Pittsburgh from his home in Connecticut. He writes: “The question that I started coming to Pittsburgh with,” he writes,  “was how does the fact of Squirrel Hill, with its close-knit neighborhood—close-knit both geographically, but also emotionally and spiritually—affect people’s recovery in the aftermath of a mass tragedy?”