Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Human Rights Studies
Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Human Rights Studies
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Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Human Rights Studies
Florida Gulf Coast University
10501 FGCU Blvd.
Fort Myers, FL 33965
Myra Mendible
Office : 239-590-7182
mendible@fgcu.edu
News Articles
'You don't forget': Medic's Holocaust diary tells story of hell
Washington (CNN) -- The tattered journal, its pages yellow with age, contains the painful memories of a U.S. medic, a man who recorded the deaths of soldiers who survived one of World War II's bloodiest battles yet met their end as slaves in Nazi Germany.
32. Hamilton 4-5-45
33. Young 4-5-45
34. Smith 4-9-45
35. Vogel 4-9-45
36. Wagner 4-9-45
"Some were dying," said its author, Tony Acevedo, now 86. "Some died, and I made a notation of that."
Flipping through the pages, you encounter a horrific part of world history through the eyes of a 20-year-old inside a slave labor camp. Amid the horror, the journal captures extraordinary human moments of war.
Auschwitz survivor teams up with rap band
BERLIN — Esther Bejarano says music helped keep her alive as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz and in the years that followed.
Now, 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp, the 85-year-old has teamed up with the hip-hop band Microphone Mafia to spread her anti-racism message to German youth.... About two years ago, Kutlu Yurtseven, a Turkish immigrant rapper from the Cologne-based Microphone Mafia, got in touch with the band to see if they'd team up with them.
"Our band wanted to do something against the growing racism and anti-Semitism in Germany," Yurtseven, 36, said in a phone interview Tuesday.... Yurtseven, a Muslim, also sees a message of religious harmony.
UN urges Uganda to scrap harsh anti-gay legislation
January 25, 2010
The UN's top human rights official has called on Uganda to drop a proposed anti-homosexuality law that would impose the death penalty on some gay and lesbian people.
Navi Pillay, the UN's high commissioner for human rights, joined a growing chorus of opposition condemning the bill as discriminatory and called for homosexuality to be decriminalised in the country....
Hitler's non-German accomplices
May 20, 2009 "Der Spiegel"
... Experts such as Dieter Pohl of the German Institute for Contemporary History estimate that more than 200,000 non-Germans -- about as many as Germans and Austrians -- "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder." And often they were every bit as cold-blooded as Hitler's henchmen....
Book review: "The Slave Next Door"
May 18, 2009
Although the United States abolished slavery officially in 1865, it has never ended in practice. In 2009, slaves work in the homes of diplomats in Maryland and in the tomato fields of Southwest Florida. "There has never been a single day in our America, from its discovery and birth right up to the moment you are reading this sentence, without slavery," write renowned human trafficking expert Kevin Bales and respected historian Ron Soodalter. Their new book, The Slave Next Door, examines modern-day slavery in America....
Denial of Armenian Genocide Continues
Los Angeles — This year, on Armenian Remembrance Day — when the mass killing of more than 1 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire is commemorated — Armenian-American activists had high hopes that a president who ran on a message of change would indeed change the pattern of previous administrations. That is, they hoped President Obama would use the term “genocide” to describe the human tragedy that occurred nearly a century ago.
But on April 24, their hopes were dashed. When Obama — who, during the campaign season and as a senator in the United States, pledged to describe the events of 1915 as a “genocide” — released his statement in acknowledgement of the tragedy, the term was nowhere to be found....
“UN report on human trafficking exposes modern form of slavery”
February 2009
A Global Report on Trafficking in Persons launched today by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) provides new information on a crime that shames us all….
Read more (includes link to full report)
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New York Times, March 26, 2009
Palestinian Children Serenade Survivors in Israel
HOLON, Israel — For just over an hour on Wednesday, a club for elderly Holocaust survivors on a side street in this suburban town south of Tel Aviv came alive with an encounter of an extraordinary kind.
A youth orchestra came to play for the elderly Israelis, a good turn that might pass in other countries as routine. In this case, though, the entertainers were Palestinians, a group of musicians 12 to 17 years old from the Jenin refugee camp, once a notorious hotbed of militancy and violence in the northern reaches of the West Bank....
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"The Holocaust and the U.S. Bishops"
New York Times, Jan. 31, 2009
... Another common misconception, the bishop would also say, is that the church is an absolute monarchy, with popes as religious versions of Louis XIV declaring, “L’église c’est moi.” The bishops themselves, he would add, are not just papal branch managers but descendants of the apostles, each bishop, no less than the pope himself, recognized as a “vicar of Christ.”
Given that teaching, one would expect that at least one of 433 active or retired Catholic bishops in the United States might have voiced some misgivings or raised some questions about Pope Benedict XVI’s recent action in revoking the excommunication of four bishops — including one who has denied the Holocaust — of an ultratraditionalist schismatic group, the Society of St. Pius X.
As of Friday afternoon, Catholic News Service knew of not one who had done so....
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Local connection to Bielski Brothers: "Seeing Her Father in a New Light," Naples Daily News, Jan. 29, 2009
Tuvia Bielski never wanted fame. He rarely talked about his life before coming to America. Even when he did speak of the old days in Belarus, he talked mostly to people who had been there before.
“We always knew there was something special about him,” says daughter Ruth Bielski Ehrreich, a south Fort Myers resident. “People were always coming to visit him and saying nice things about him. But it was a long time until we knew why.”...
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New film on Jewish resistance: "Defiance," based upon the story of the Bielski Brothers, who organized a Jewish partisan army as well as a rescue operation.
"Zwick’s film, a true Holocaust story that most people do not know, suggests some startling new ideas about resistance, sex, and class in the doomed provinces of Jewish Eastern Europe.... After Tuvia died, in 1987, Nechama Tec rescued him from obscurity, and Edward Zwick and Daniel Craig have now sealed the case for his immortality."
full review: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/01/12/090112crci_cinema_denby
"Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons"
August 28, 2008
On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally....
Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) fights human-rights abuses in Florida
Updates on CIW campaign to force Burger King to pay decent wages to Florida workers:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/320200
Amnesty Int'l: “Migrants’ rights are human rights”
One person in every 35 lives outside the country in which they were born. Many of those are migrant workers or their family members. Reasons for migration can vary between the need to escape poverty, inequality and conflict, the desire to pursue better work and educational opportunities, or even wanting to live in a cleaner environment or better climate....
Making Sense of Darfur, Books and Articles Relevant to Darfur, Socio-economic Issues: Online Scholarly Resources on Darfur
by Alex de Waal
This posting is a guide to three online sources of scholarly material on Darfur (and Sudan in general) that provide different resources for the student or professor.
Armenian Genocide
Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect
The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.
