One rainy December evening, Agatha Christie left her house and never returned. The disappearance of the bestselling mystery writer shocked the British nation, including Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who took a surprising part in the unprecedented search mission…
Who Are You Calling a “Shluh”?!
In modern-day Israel, the word “shluh” is sometimes used as an offensive term to describe a person of disheveled or messy appearance. The word in fact hails from Morocco, where it referred negatively to a certain ethnic group, and was used disparagingly by city dwellers to describe uncultured village folk…
The Story of Israel’s First Shelter for Battered Women
“We didn’t think we were making history. All we wanted was to work on behalf of women”: The story of the first shelter for battered women in Israel, established in Haifa in 1977, and the women who founded it
‘Toyve the Black Cantor’ and His 1930 World Tour
When celebrated African-American Yiddish soloist Thomas Larue crossed the Atlantic, he didn’t know what was in store…
His Sugar Cube Vaccine Beat Polio. Then He Took a Shot at Middle East Peace
Albert Sabin may be less famous than Jonas Salk, but he probably shouldn’t be
Manmade Climate Change 150 Years Ago? In Yiddish?!
1871 article: “Hardly anybody knows that war affects the weather strongly and causes heavy rain falls, strong winds, thunder and lightning.”
The Emotional Reunion With Hannah Senesh’s Notebook
In the 1950s, Katherine Senesh donated four pages containing poems handwritten by her paratrooper daughter to the National Library. Now, with the deposit of the full Hannah Senesh Collection, these pages will be reunited with the notebook from which they originally came
The Last Bar Mitzvah Before Kristallnacht
At Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue, Fredi chanted Moses’ song of darkness and redemption
The Kaiser’s Favorite “Carmen”? A Jewish Star from Budapest
After years in the Berlin Royal Opera, an aging Teréz Rothauser was sent to Theresienstadt
How a Map Torn From a Newspaper Helped Decide a Critical Battle of the Yom Kippur War
The Yom Kippur War of 1973 was utter chaos. Armored corps soldiers who joined the battle in the Valley of Tears on the Golan Heights were not familiar with the terrain and couldn’t find a proper map to guide them, so they improvised…
