Gandhi on the Holocaust

On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi propaganda, rhetoric, and discriminatory laws bore their inevitable fruit. After a mentally imbalanced Jew killed a German official in Paris, Germany and Austria erupted in hate-fueled violence against Jews. Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses throughout Nazi Germany and Austria were destroyed. Two hundred

Though the British had declared their support for the idea of a Jewish state in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, progress was slow. They turned from ambivalent to hostile; in the 1930s, the British began blocking Jews from immigrating to Palestine, frustrating Zionism’s fledgling hope that it could create a viable state. Then, between 1939 and 1945, t

European anti-Jewishness was becoming more complex. In eastern Europe, much of it was fueled by theological claims or the accusation that the Jews had killed Jesus.* In central and western Europe, though, which was now infatuated with science, race theory developed. Now, said European racists, the problem with the Jews was their race, not their rel

On December 17, 1942, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, declares in Westminster that Nazi Germany is exterminating European Jewry.

AS JEWS IN THE YISHUV were slowly learning to defend themselves, Jews in Europe were becoming ever more vulnerable. As horrific as World War I had been, an even more devastating war for the Jews was about to erupt. The violence that had erupted in Kishinev and Hebron would soon pale relative to what was about to transpire in Europe. The darkest, mo