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Michael Wolffsohn (born 17 May 1947) is a German historian. Wolffsohn was born in Tel Aviv, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and today is Israel. His parents were German Jews who fled in 1939.
In 1954, the Wolffsohns moved to Germany, settling in West Berlin. In 1966, Wolffsohn began his studies at the Free University of Berlin and continued his studies at Tel Aviv University and Columbia University. [1] He obtained a PhD in History in 1975. From 1967 to 1970, Wolffsohn served in the Israeli Defence Forces. From 1975 until 1980, Wolffsohn taught at the University of the Saarland. Since 1981, Wolffsohn has served as a professor at the Bundeswehr University Munich as a professor in Contemporary History. His major interests are Israeli history, international relations, and German Jewish history.
Wolffsohn has argued in favor of German patriotism and has claimed that the crimes of National Socialism represent no reason why modern Germans cannot be proud of their country. In his book Eternal Guilt? (1993), he argued against the idea of Germans having to bear guilt for the Holocaust for all time.
Wolffsohn has strongly supported Israel and has argued for greater Western understanding and support of the Jewish state in face of what Wolffsohn regards as fanatical Islamic extremism. Likewise, Wolffsohn has supported the War on Terror and the administration of George W. Bush. In May 2005, he was a leading critic of the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Franz Müntefering, who compared a group of American capitalists attempting to purchase a German company to a “plague of locusts”. Wolffsohn noted that the capitalists in question were Jewish, and that the Nazis had often compared Jews to locusts, and labeled Müntefering an anti-Semite. Wolffsohn wrote that as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, he was grateful to the Americans for liberating his grandparents and that as a German Jew, he felt deep shame over increasing German anti-Americanism. More recently, Wolffsohn has been a leading critic of the novelist Günter Grass over his disclosure about his membership in the Waffen-SS during World War II.
Wolffsohn is a strong supporter of Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policy calling migrants "a gift from the heavens" in an August 2015 guest column for leading German language business newspaper Handelsblatt. In the same article, he called the native German population's fear of "peaceful immigrants in search of sanctuary or a better life", "hysterical, dumb and their expulsion immoral as well as detrimental to their own interests." [2]
A Judenrat was an administrative body established in German-occupied Europe during World War II which purported to represent a Jewish community in dealings with the Nazi authorities. The Germans required Jews to form Judenräte across the occupied territories at local and sometimes national levels.
Max Isidor Bodenheimer was a lawyer and one of the main figures in German Zionism. An associate of Theodor Herzl, he was the first president of the Zionist Federation of Germany and one of the founders of the Jewish National Fund. After his flight in 1933 from Nazi Germany, and a short sojourn in Holland, he settled in Palestine in 1935.
Aaron Tänzer was a rabbi in Austria and Germany, chaplain and author.
The Bertelsmann Stiftung is an independent foundation under private law, based in Gütersloh, Germany. It was founded in 1977 by Reinhard Mohn as the result of social, corporate and fiscal considerations. As the Bertelsmann Stiftung itself has put it, the foundation promotes "reform processes" and "the principles of entrepreneurial activity" to build a "future-oriented society."
Meyer Kayserling was a German rabbi and historian.
Israelitisches Familienblatt was a Jewish weekly newspaper, directed at Jewish readers of all religious alignments. Max Lessmann and Leo Lessmann founded the Familienblatt, which was published by the printing and publishing house Buchdruckerei und Verlagsanstalt Max Lessmann first in Hamburg, and then in Berlin (1935–1938). The Familienblatt was the only newspaper dealing with majorly Jewish issues in Germany which was run by a private business not aligned to a Jewish organisation of any kind. The editorial and printing offices were located in ABC-Straße 57 in Hamburg. The Hamburg agglomeration, consisting of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Danish-Holsteinian cities of Altona and Wandsbek as well as the Hanoverian city of Harburg upon Elbe, had been an important Jewish centre in Europe and in number with c. 9,000 persons, the biggest in Germany. Only by the first third of the 19th century did Berlin, Prussia's capital, overtake with Jews migrating from the former Polish provinces, which Prussia annexed in the Polish Partitions. Originally directed to readers in Hamburg's metropolitan area the Familienblatt gained more and more readers and spread nationwide in Germany. Israelitisches Familienblatt was prohibited to appear any further after the November Pogroms on 9–10 November 1938.
The history of the Jews in Regensburg, Germany reaches back over 1,000 years. The Jews of Regensburg are part of Bavarian Jewry; Regensburg was the capital of the Upper Palatinate and formerly a free city of the German empire. The great age of the Jewish community in this city is indicated by the tradition that a Jewish colony existed there before the common era; it is undoubtedly the oldest Jewish settlement in Bavaria of which any records exist.
Adolf Kober was a rabbi and a historian.
The history of the Jews in Hamburg in Germany is recorded from at least 1590 on. Since the 1880s, Jews of Hamburg have lived primarily in the neighbourhoods of Grindel, earlier in the New Town, where the Sephardic Community "Neveh Shalom" was established in 1652. Since 1612 there have been toleration agreements with the senate of the prevailingly Lutheran city-state. Also Reformed Dutch merchants and Anglican Britons made similar agreements before. In these agreements the Jews were not permitted to live in the Inner-City, though were also not required to live in ghettos.
Shlomo Shafir (1924–2013) was an Israeli journalist and historian. His work included the underground Hebrew-language publication Nitzotz, circulated in the Kovno Ghetto and Dachau concentration camp; the Israeli Labor Party newspaper, Davar; and other Hebrew, German, and English language writings.
Dr. Willy Cohn was a German historian and teacher. During the Nazi era, he documented the Jewish life in Breslau in his diaries, until he and his family were deported to German-occupied Lithuania and killed.
The old Rottweil Synagogue is a synagogue in Rottweil in Baden-Württemberg. It was established in 1861. The desecrated Synagogue is located in Kameralamtsgasse 6, former Judengasse, close to Kapellenkirche and next to Bischöfliches Konvikt and gymnasium. The construction of a new synagogue in Rottweil began in March 2016.
Simone Lässig is the director of the German Historical Institute Washington DC and a cultural and social historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Salomon Korn is a German architect and an Honorary Senator of University Heidelberg. Since 1999 he serves as Chairman of the Jewish Community of Frankfurt am Main and since 2003 as Vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
The "Jewish parasite" is a notion that dates back to the Age of Enlightenment. It is based on the idea that the Jews of the diaspora are incapable of forming their own states and would therefore parasitically attack and exploit states and peoples, which are biologically imagined as organisms or "peoples bodies". The stereotype is often associated with the accusation of usury and the separation of "creative", i.e. productive, and "raffling", non-productive financial capital.
During the National Socialist era, "Aryan persons" who lived in so-called "mixed marriages" with a "Jewish person" were referred to as "jüdisch versippt". "Jüdisch Versippte" were discriminated against; they were excluded from certain professions and career opportunities, dismissed from public service, and, from 1943, were deemed as "unworthy of military service" and were used for quartered forced labor in "Sonderkommandos" of the Organization Todt.
Herbert Arthur Strauss was a German-born American historian.
Jüdische Rundschau was a Jewish periodical that was published in Germany between 1902 and 1938. It was the biggest Jewish weekly publication in Germany, and was the origin of the Zionist Federation of Germany.
Viola Roggenkamp is a German journalist-commentator and, more recently, book-author. The themes to which she most often returns are those surrounding Feminism and Judaism in Germany during and following the brutish middle years of the twentieth century. Although these topics have been much revisited by scholars and critics throughout her lifetime, several of Roggenkamp's own perspectives and conclusions are well outside the mainstream. Her output includes literary portraits, essays, opinion pieces and novels.
Albert Katz, also known by the pen name Ish ha-Ruaḥ, was a Polish-born rabbi, writer, and journalist.