Jew Oughta Know

Today I interview Kathy Kacer and Jordana Lebowitz, who have written a book, To Look a Nazi In the Eye. It's an account of Jordana's experience attending the 2015 trial of Oskar Groening, a Nazi SS officer stationed at Auschwitz. Was he complicit in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews? Is it too late for justice? And how did this experience inspire Jordana to devote herself to human rights and Holocaust education?

The Zionist Movement achieves one of its major objectives: international recognition for a Jewish national homeland. Thus begins the British Empire's three decade long reign in Palestine.

With the start of World War One, the Zionist project had an extraordinary opportunity: to create the first Jewish fighting unit in almost two millennia. From the shores of Gallipoli to espionage in Palestine, these were the first heroes -- and martyrs -- of the future Israeli Defense Forces.

You know the story of Hanukah -- or do you?

How to revive a language that hasn't been spoken for 18 centuries? The Jews had been working to revive Hebrew for decades, but it was the Zionists -- led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his family -- who succeeded in turning Hebrew into the national language.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: the Arab natives of Palestine. Who came first -- the Jews or the Arabs? And how did the early Zionists feel about the Arabs?

It's not enough just to create a new Jewish homeland. We need a New Jew. Physically strong, spiritually renewed, and connected to the land through hard physical labor. The big picture of Zionism that is emerging is that it's a movement to create an entirely new kind of Judaism for a new phase of our history.

In contrast to Herzl, Ahad Ha'Am wants "a Jewish state, and not merely a state for Jews." As the Zionist movement takes off at the turn of the century, a new branch, the Cultural Zionists, form to bring the Jewish. But events conspire to make the Zionist project more urgent.

What is Zionism? It's a tree. And Theodore Herzl outlines his vision of what the Jewish state should look like.

The trial of Alfred Dreyfus in France rallied Western European Jews around the idea of Zionism, and gave one man in particular, Theodore Herzl, a really big dream about creating a Jewish state.