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Cliché has it that Election Day is a holiday for democracy. It’s the political moment in which citizens use their mandate to shape the economic, judicial, cultural, educational future and other aspects of the society in which they live to reflect their wishes. Israel’s 71 years of democracy are just a blink of the eye In comparison to the length of Jewish history – when the definition of Jewish politics morphed time and again. Generally speaking, the status of Jews in Islamic nations was for hundreds of years that of “Ahl al-Dhimma,” protected inferiors. In Europe, Jews were at first[…]

Adi Akunis Club Med’s vacations have always appeared tailor-made for the global rich: Exotic locations in remote regions that offer an “all-inclusive holiday” in the original sense of that term. Food, recreation, sports, organized activities, rest, and good company. But long before this vacation concept was born, it was the idealistic brainchild of two Jews who survived World War II and only wished to benefit Holocaust survivors. Gerard Blitz was born in Antwerp, Belgium to a pious Jewish family of diamond dealers with a passion for water sports. His father Maurice and his uncle – also Gerard – played in[…]

The Alliance school network has been considered for years an educational empire. More than a million students have graduated from its hundreds of schools in dozens of countries around the world, since its founding in 1860. Much has been written about Alliance’s educational message. Its leaders’ proficiency in integrating the old and the new, tradition and progress, and excellence and humanity led to a significant cultural and social revolution among the Jewish boys and girls who lived in Islamic nations – from the North African city of Tetouan to the Land of Israel to Tehran. That is all well and[…]

The possibility of imitating winged creatures has always sparked the French imagination. The Montgolfier brothers were the first to fly a human-carrying hot air balloon, and Louis Blériot was the first inventor-adventurer to complete an international flight – from France to Britain in July 1909. Several months after Blériot crossed the La Manche (English) Channel, a 17-year old Jewish boy crossed Montien Boulevarde toward the Eiffel Tower, when a wondrous and life-changing specter burst through the clouds. A strange winged contraption flew lightly and elegantly over the boy’s head, bearing a grinning Count Charles de Lambert, a pioneer of French[…]

In 1887, American-Jewish physicist Albert Abraham Michelson developed the interferometer, a remarkably precise system for measuring the speed of light rays. Two decades later, another Albert – Albert Einstein – used Michelson’s system to discover the theory of special relativity. It’s a fair bet that none of you have heard of Michelson. His portrait is unknown; his name has not become synonymous with genius; and if you google him, you’ll get very few results. He is not alone. Many fine men and women have been crushed under the wheels of history. These anonymous figures took a hit on behalf of progress and received no credit[…]

These European Jewish boys fled the Nazis to America, leaving parents, siblings, friends and the beloved continent that stabbed them in the back behind. They did not imagine in their wildest dreams that they would return to the scene of the crime as soldiers in the Allied Forces’ special corps. No, this is not a trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” This is the story of “The Ritchie Boys”, Jewish refugees who arrived in America during the war and seized that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to avenge the Nazi extermination machine that killed their families and so many members of their People. Fred[…]

In 1926, Albert Einstein and his student Leo Szilard worked on the invention of a new refrigerator that did not rely on electricity or polluting gases. The new refrigerator did not catch on. But the sale of its patent to Swedish giant Electrolux earned Szilard the handsome sum that allowed him to devote his time to academic research in atomic energy and his hobby – reading sci-fi in his Berlin flat. One of those sci-fi novels exposed Szilard to the concept of producing weapons of mass destruction from an exponentially growing chain reaction. The concept roused the talented Jewish scientist’s[…]

Like many Jews, Herschel Grynszpan and his uncle Abraham were glued to the radio on March 12, 1938 when Nazi militias marched into the streets of Vienna in what would come to be called the Anschluss, the Third Reich’s annexation of Austria. Herschel and his uncle listened with great trepidation to the Austrian chancellor’s obsequious speech and the calls for revenge of Austrian citizens of German extraction. The latter spewed 20 years of acerbic poison born of the demeaning Versailles Treaty that forced Germany to kowtow to the Allied Powers. When the Fuehrer himself entered the capital at midnight –[…]

Bernard Baruch said that you don’t need to be a genius to succeed in investments. That you need only need to control the urges that make people make mistakes. You need impulse control, restraint, and a level head. It’s no wonder that the man who said that coined the term “the Cold War.” Bernard Baruch checked the box of every cliché in the vernacular of the land of limitless opportunity. The son of Jewish immigrants from Prussia was born into poverty and grew to be a resounding success as an adult. He made a million by the time he was[…]