All posts tagged: Jewish history

Europe’s stained glass is stained with antisemitism

Europe’s stained glass is stained with antisemitism

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — I have done my share of traveling in Europe, and when I am there, I visit cathedrals. Most are majestic, and they are filled with Christian art that would take a decent docent a decade to unpack for me. I have never been to Brussels, though I would like to visit. And when I am there, I expect to make a special trip to the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula. That is the subject of Flora Cassen’s new book, “Stained Glass: A Reflective History of Antisemitism.” The cathedral is, by all accounts, a masterpiece. Built between the 13th and 15th centuries, it rises above the old town on its own little hill, and when the lights hit the stonework at night, it looks like lace carved out of sky. “Stained Glass: A Reflective History of Antisemitism” by Flora Cassen. (Courtesy image) But I imagine myself stepping inside. I would look intensely and intentionally at the stained-glass windows — the ones donated by Belgium’s first two kings in the 19th century. And …

Finding Gertrud Kauders | Simon During

Finding Gertrud Kauders | Simon During

Published by José Betancourt

In the last years of his life my father wrote a memoir. Born in 1916 in Munich to Bohemian parents—his father Jewish, his mother not—he had spent his boyhood at a Bavarian boarding school, until the Nazis made it impossible for him to stay on in Germany. At that point he fled to Czechoslovakia, then to England and finally to New Zealand, where I was born and raised. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I didn’t immediately look at the fifty or so typescript pages he produced for family consumption only. But, in 2019, after my partner and I had bought an apartment in Berlin and I’d applied for German citizenship, I fished out his reminiscences and read them, newly curious about the life into which he had been born. The memoirs were more engaging than I’d expected. Though he had been dead for fifteen years, my father’s bleak, anachronistic worldview—a mix of old haute European class consciousness, bitterness, and civic-mindedness—became vivid again. One section left an especially strong impression on me. He devoted several …