Hitler

There were plenty of words last Sunday morning on East 92nd Street, but not the sort The Jewish Museum had hoped for when it planned a provocative exhibition of contemporary art meant to rekindle dialogue about Holocaust memory.

About 100 yeshiva students, politicians, Holocaust survivors and other community members, most of them from Brooklyn, directed chants of “Shame on You” and “Don’t go in” toward anyone who approached the museum’s front doors at the 10 a.m. opening of “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art.”

A month after controversy engulfed The Jewish Museum’s upcoming exhibition of Nazi imagery in contemporary art, the real thing is now on display in a Chelsea gallery.

Scheduling Leni Riefenstahl’s first New York solo show of photographs from “Olympia,” her film about the 1936 Berlin Games, to coincide with the Salt Lake Olympic Games, gallery owners Marianne Boesky and Marla Hamburg Kennedy are now scrambling to soften the impact of their exhibition of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.

A politically aware teenager in Queens in the 1960s, Gary Krupp shared the prevailing opinion of Pope Pius XII, the controversial leader of the Roman Catholic Church during World War II. “I grew up hating him,” Krupp says. Today, he is one of the pope’s most vocal defenders in the Jewish community.

Jerusalem: Sitting in a converted bomb shelter in the basement of the hotel at the Ramat Rachel Kibbutz here, about 40 American Jewish college students are sharing their anxiety.
Like a group therapy session, they talk about their frustration, fear and anger over the recent rising levels of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments on their campuses by pro-Palestinian activists, as violence continues unabated in the Middle East.

With the curtain about to rise on the world's most famous Passion Play, a team of Christian and Jewish scholars is giving it a thumbs down. It's not the acting or pacing the reviewers are concerned about. Rather it's the script for the latest production of the 366-year-old Oberammergau Passion Play, produced and performed by residents of the little Bavarian town.
More specifically the reviewers, brought together by the American Jewish Committee's Department of Interreligious Affairs, panned the English translation of the German text because of its anti-Jewish content.

While recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor earlier this month, Cardinal John O'Connor composed his annual New Year's letter to his many friends in the New York Jewish community.
In fact, the 79-year-old leader of New York City Catholics has been sending heartfelt holiday greetings twice a year (on Rosh HaShanah and Passover) to Jewish leaders for at least 10 years.

David L. Kertzer’s explosive new book “The Popes Against The Jews” already has tongues wagging among interfaith experts, and it hasn’t even officially come out yet.
They say the disturbing revelations and conclusions by the respected Brown University historian is sure to cause further tension in an already stressful relationship between the Vatican and Jewish leaders.

Jews and Catholics are at odds over a new book charging Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII with being pro-Hitler and an anti-Semite.
Vatican supporters are slamming as “scurrilous” the forthcoming book, “Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII,” by British author John Cornwell, whose evidence reportedly includes “secret” documents from the Vatican archives.
Cornwell claims Pius XII, Pope from 1939 to 1958, was a visceral anti-Semite who condoned Hitler’s policy towards the Jews and did nothing to stop the Holocaust.

Sitting in a Park Avenue hotel coffee shop Tuesday, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen speaks rapidly and passionately about his latest controversial enterprise.
The 43-year-old Boston native, clad in a black sports jacket and black knit sports shirt, wants nothing less than the Roman Catholic Church to finally and fully acknowledge its crimes towards Jews during the Holocaust and effect a lasting moral restitution — including dealing with anti-Semitic passages in the New Testament and liturgy.

Washington – The specter of the 1930s overshadowed  the Convention Center here as the pro-Israel lobby this week decried Iran as an existential threat to Israel and the West unseen since World War II.
In comparison, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s three-day annual policy conference largely played down the Jewish state’s longstanding conflict with the Palestinians.