Max Wallace

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Max Wallace
Max Wallace 01.jpg
BornMaxwell Wallace
United States
OccupationWriter, filmmaker, historian, disability advocate
Language English
Nationality Canadian
CitizenshipCanadian
EducationUniversity
Periodpresent
Genrenon-fiction

Max Wallace is a New York Times-bestselling author and historian specializing in the Holocaust, human rights in sport, and popular culture. He is also an award-winning filmmaker, and long-time disability advocate.

Contents

Literary works

In the Name of Humanity: The Secret Deal to End the Holocaust

Winner of the 2018 Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Holocaust category.) Published by Penguin/Random House, this work focuses on the heroic actions of a Swiss-based rescue committee headed by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish couple, Recha and Isaac Sternbuch. The book presents evidence linking Himmler's decree to these secret negotiations after the author discovered documents housed in an Orthodox Jewish archive at New York's Yeshiva University linking Himmler's orders to the Musy negotiations. Among these documents is a cable sent by the Sternbuchs through the Polish diplomatic code to the Vaad ha-Hatzalah in New York on November 20, 1944 detailing Musy's negotiations with Himmler. The cable informed the Vaad that Musy had received a "promise to cease extermination in concentration camps." On November 22, the Sternbuchs sent another cable revealing that the Papal nuncio in Switzerland had "received a promise that the slaughters will cease." Three days later, Himmler ordered the destruction of the Auschwitz extermination apparatus. The Canadian Jewish News described Wallace's book as "an impressive piece of scholarship and a compelling chapter of Holocaust history." The book was also a finalist for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize for the best work of literary non-fiction.

The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich

This work, published in 2003 by St. Martin's Press about the Nazi sympathies of two American icons, received a cover endorsement by two-time Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In the book, Wallace details the close collaboration between the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the automotive pioneer Henry Ford and traces the evolution of their sympathetic views on Nazi Germany. As the first unauthorized biographer ever to gain access to Lindbergh's archives at Yale University, Wallace presents details of the flier's many trips to Germany during the 1930s and his increasing admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. He reveals evidence that the Germans used Lindbergh as an unwilling dupe so that they could vastly inflate German air estimates although the German air force was much weaker than it pretended. The book argues that Lindbergh's well-publicized description of German air superiority played a major role in the western decision to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. Only weeks after the Munich Agreement, the Nazis presented Lindbergh with their highest civilian honor, the Order of the German Eagle. Wallace also traces the mysterious evolution of Ford's anti-Semitism, and reveals evidence proving that Ford's private secretary, Ernest Liebold, had been a German spy during the First World War and who was largely responsible for turning Ford against the Jews by convincing him that Jewish communists were conspiring to unionize his company. Liebold also used the Independent as a vehicle to blame Jews the defeat of Germany in the First World War and for the rise of Bolshevism. A series of articles trumpeting that theme was translated into German and published in book form as The International Jew . The book was later cited by many Nazis as deeply influential, including the leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, who testified at the Nuremberg Trials, "I read it and became anti-Semitic."

Who Killed Kurt Cobain?

As a former music journalist, Wallace coauthored the international bestseller Who Killed Kurt Cobain? with Ian Halperin in 1998 (described as a "judicious presentation of explosive material" by The New Yorker). Much of the book explores the phenomenon of the 68 copycat suicides following the death of Cobain in April, 1994.

Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain

Published in 2004, Wallace wrote Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain with Halperin, [1] which reached the New York Times bestseller list.[ citation needed ] The book presents explosive tapes recorded by Beverly Hills Private Investigator Tom Grant, who was hired by Courtney Love to find her husband after Kurt Cobain went missing from a Los Angeles drug rehab facility in April 1994. Among the tapes is a recording of Cobain's entertainment lawyer Rosemary Carroll, godmother to the couple's daughter Frances Bean Cobain, casting doubt on the official suicide theory and revealing Carroll's belief that the suicide note was "forged or traced." On the tapes, Carroll also revealed that Cobain was in the process of divorcing Love at the time of his death.

Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight: Cassius Clay vs. the United States of America

Written in 2000, this book covers Muhammad Ali's long battle against the US government over his stand against the Vietnam War. Ali wrote the foreword. In 2013, the book was adapted into a movie directed by two-time Oscar nominee Stephen Frears, starring Danny Glover, Christopher Plummer and Frank Langella. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2013.

Film

Since 2009, Wallace has written video description for AMI-TV, the world's first television network serving blind and visually impaired people. He is also a documentary filmmaker whose first film, Too Colorful for the League , about the history of racism in hockey for CBC TV, was nominated for a Gemini Award. The film documents a crusade to enshrine the black superstar Herb Carnegie into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Wallace has also contributed to the BBC and the Sunday New York Times. His second film, Schmelvis ,( featuring singer songwriter Dan Hartal ) about the Jewish roots of Elvis Presley, had a US theatrical release and played in more than 75 film festivals around the world. In the 1990s, Wallace was the director and co-founder of both the Ottawa Folk Festival and the Ottawa International Busker Festival when employed as station manager for CKCU-FM, Canada's largest community radio station.

Holocaust historian

Wallace is a former Executive Director of the Anne and Max Bailey Centre for Holocaust studies in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. During the 1990s, he worked for several years with Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, recording the video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. For more than a decade, he has been researching Holocaust-era rescue operations and secret negotiations with high level Nazis during the waning days of the Second World War II to prevent the annihilation of the remaining Jews in Europe.

Published works

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Marie Musy</span> Swiss politician

Jean-Marie Musy was a Swiss politician.

<i>The Dearborn Independent</i> Former American newspaper established by Henry Ford

The Dearborn Independent, also known as The Ford International Weekly, was a weekly newspaper established in 1901, and published by Henry Ford from 1919 through 1927. The paper reached a circulation of 900,000 by 1925, second only to the New York Daily News, largely due to a quota system for promotion imposed on Ford dealers. Lawsuits regarding antisemitic material published in the paper caused Ford to close it, and the last issue was published in December 1927. The publication's title was derived from the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan.

<i>The Plot Against America</i> Novel by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more acceptable in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are rendered makes the novel as much about the mysteries of growing up as about American politics. Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee, and on his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The novel received praise for the realism of its world and its treatment of topics such as antisemitism, trauma, and the perception of history. The novel depicts the Weequahic section of Newark which includes Weequahic High School from which Roth graduated. A miniseries adaptation of the novel aired on HBO in March 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yehuda Bauer</span> Israeli historian of the Holocaust (born 1926)

Yehuda Bauer is a Czech-born Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Browning</span> American historian of the Holocaust

Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian who is the professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Becher</span> SS officer (1909–1995

Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was a mid-ranking SS commander who was Commissar of all German concentration camps, and Chief of the Economic Department of the SS Command in Hungary during the German occupation in 1944. He is best known for having traded Jewish lives for money during the Holocaust.

The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 is a 1984 nonfiction book by David S. Wyman, former Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wyman was the chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. The Abandonment of the Jews has been well received by most historians, and has won numerous prizes and widespread recognition, including a National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Present Tense Literary Award, the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award."

<i>The International Jew</i> Antisemitic set of publications of the 1920s

The International Jew is a four-volume set of antisemitic booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by the Dearborn Publishing Company, an outlet owned by Henry Ford, the American industrialist and automobile manufacturer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Kranzler</span>

David H. Kranzler was an American professor of library science at Queensborough Community College, New York, who specialized in the study of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.

<i>Theresienstadt</i> (1944 film) 1940s German propaganda film

Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, unofficially Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, was a black-and-white projected Nazi propaganda film. It was directed by the German Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron and the Czech filmmaker Karel Pečený under close SS supervision in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and edited by Pečený's company, Aktualita. Filmed mostly in the autumn of 1944, it was completed on 28 March 1945 and screened privately four times. After the war, the film was lost but about twenty minutes of footage was later rediscovered in various archives.

Norbert Masur (Mazur) was a representative of Sweden to the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The WJC was founded in Geneva in 1936 to unite the Jewish people and to mobilise the world against the Nazis. He aided in the rescue of 7000 victims of Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Ian Halperin is a Canadian investigative journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker. His 2009 book, Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson was a #1 best-seller on the New York Times list on July 24, 2009. He is the author or coauthor of nine books including Celine Dion: Behind the Fairytale, Fire and Rain: The James Taylor Story and Hollywood Undercover. He coauthored Who Killed Kurt Cobain? and Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain with Max Wallace. Halperin has contributed to 60 Minutes II and was a regular correspondent for Court TV. He is a graduate of Concordia University in Montreal.

Irving M. Bunim was a businessman, philanthropist and a lay leader of Orthodox Jewry, in particular the Young Israel movement in the United States from the 1930s until his death in 1980. As an assistant to Aharon Kotler, he was involved in aspects of Torah dissemination, philanthropy and Holocaust rescue.

Recha Sternbuch was a Swiss Orthodox Jewish woman who was a major Holocaust-era Jewish rescuer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catholic Church and Nazi Germany</span> Overview of the relationship between the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

Popes Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pius XII (1939–1958) led the Catholic Church during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Around a third of Germans were Catholic in the 1930s, most of them lived in Southern Germany; Protestants dominated the north. The Catholic Church in Germany opposed the Nazi Party, and in the 1933 elections, the proportion of Catholics who voted for the Nazi Party was lower than the national average. Nevertheless, the Catholic-aligned Centre Party voted for the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Adolf Hitler additional domestic powers to suppress political opponents as Chancellor of Germany. President Paul Von Hindenburg continued to serve as Commander and Chief and he also continued to be responsible for the negotiation of international treaties until his death on 2 August 1934.

Leopold Itz, Edler von Mildenstein was an SS officer who is remembered as a lead supporter in the Nazi Party of some of the aims of Zionism during the 1930s.

<i>The Popes Jews</i>

The Pope's Jews: The Vatican's Secret Plan to Save Jews from the Nazis is a 2012 book by the British author Gordon Thomas concerning the efforts of Pope Pius XII to protect Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. The Observer reported in 2013 that "Gordon Thomas, a Protestant, was given access to previously unpublished Vatican documents and tracked down victims, priests and others who had not told their stories before" and had uncovered "evidence on Pius XII's wartime efforts to save Jewish refugees".

Ernest G. Liebold was the business representative and personal secretary of Henry Ford. A fervent antisemite, he took an active part in the antisemitic campaign conducted by the industrialist's weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, from 1920 to 1927. He was also put under investigation by the United States Department of War for being a suspected German spy during the First World War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Lower</span> American historian

Wendy Lower is an American historian and a widely published author on the Holocaust and World War II. Since 2012, she holds the John K. Roth Chair at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and in 2014 was named the director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont. As of 2016, she serves as the interim director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

<i>Who Killed Kurt Cobain?</i> 1998 book by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace

Who Killed Kurt Cobain?: The Mysterious Death of an Icon is a 1998 book that explores the premise that the death of Kurt Cobain, frontman of American rock band Nirvana, was a case of murder and not suicide. It is a collaborative investigative journalism book written by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace. It went on to be an international bestseller.

References

  1. Wallace, M.; Halperin, I. (2004). Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain . Atria Books. ISBN   9781416503316 . Retrieved 2015-04-14.
  2. "2001 Gemini nominees - Playback". Archived from the original on 2019-01-30. Retrieved 2019-01-29.
  3. "Rebecca Rosenblum, Max Wallace nominated for $10K Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature | CBC Books".
  4. "Canadian Jewish Literary Award winners announced". 13 September 2018.