Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

Quentin Tarantino’s next film:

In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as “The Basterds” are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.

Yeah, Jews brutally killing Nazis. Not sure what the point is, but we hope it’s not another stock-in-trade Tarantino where the good guys and the bad guys are inverted and gratuitous violence abounds. We’re kind of sick of that genre already.

German Jews, 1935

The German government will release a list of 600,000 Jews who lived in the country during the Nazi period. The material will be given to the archives at Yad Vashem in Israel, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Jewish Claims Conference and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, to aid in genealogical searches. More than half of the Jews who lived in Germany when the Nazis assumed power in 1933 had emigrated by 1939, but many were trapped later in the countries they thought were safe havens. Following World War II, some 20,000 Jews were living in the country, but few of them were of German origin. Most were Eastern European Holocaust survivors who had ended up in German displaced persons camps in 1945. Privacy laws prevent the full release of the list to the public as yet.

Germany’s federal archive prepared the list using deportation records, and city and federal archives. Funding for the project, which reportedly cost US$ 2.4 million, was provided by the ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ Foundation, which was established with money from the German government and industry as a form of atonement for the use of slave labor during the Nazi era. Gunter Saathoff, executive chairman of the foundation, said that the list would help document the suffering of Jews in Germany.