Harold Brackman
ARTICLES BY: Harold Brackman
Joe McCarthy and the Jews
Larry Tye, a longtime Boston Globe reporter, writes fine popular biographies like his life of Robert F. Kennedy. His new book is Demagogue: The Life...
The Evil of Louis Farrakhan vs. the Morality of Frederick Douglass
In W. E. B. Du Bois’ view, every generation of African-Americans has had to contend with “two souls,” or clashing visions. Today, there is no...
Jewish Run-ins with the Police — Past and Present
When New York was still New Amsterdam, Asser Levy demanded the right to serve in the citizen militia -- the colonial equivalent of the police. New...
Jews in Advertising and Public Relations
What’s the difference between advertising and public relations? Advertising has a boulevard -- Madison Avenue -- named after it! But both professions reflect the decisive...
Jewish Scholars and the Tangled History of Race Relations
Bruno Bettelheim survived pre-war Dachau and Buchenwald to come to the US, where he won acclaim as a psychoanalytic authority on concentration camp victims and...
Remembering a Jewish Crusader Against Racism
A gruff old professor when the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s opened, Franz Boas was nevertheless an intellectual trendsetter during that youth-oriented decade. Boas was born...
The Jews and Prohibition
In 1920s New York City, prohibition agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith were confronted with an endless number of illegal “speakeasies.” Prohibitionists who were also...
From the Kaiser to Hitler
Among the ideological causes of World War I were hubris and hatred by Germans that reinforced Kaiser Wilhelm’s -- and ultimately Adolf Hitler’s -- antisemitism. In...
Charles Lindbergh’s ‘America First’ Antisemitism Also Embraced Eugenics
Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, now an HBO miniseries, is an alternative history in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940...
The Troubling Rise of the Right in Germany
The AfD -- the ultra-nationalist “Alternative for Germany,” the first far-right party to enter the German parliament since the 1950s -- is dedicated to “normalizing”...
Benjamin Franklin’s Unintended Influence on the Jewish Community
The 1880s marked the beginnings of the mass migration to the US of Jewish immigrants from Imperial Russia’s Pale of Settlement, whom Germans and German...
Nazis and the Occult
Explanations of Hitler crisscross like tracks in a railroad switch yard. “Functionalist” historians see the Holocaust as moving along a bureaucratic track with inevitable momentum....
Imperfect Friends: Quakers and Jews
There has been a spate of articles about the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) serving as the preeminent Quaker apologist group for Palestinian rejection of Israel’s...
Hitler as Plague Doctor
Hermann Esser was a second-tier Nazi and friend of Hitler. He has made a recent internet list of “Ten Dead Nazis You’ve Never Heard Of.” Starting...
