Castles’s Reviews > The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living > Status Update

Antisemitic laws against Jews owning land or joining professional guilds, the authors argue, did not appear in many places until the late medieval era. Yet Jewish communities’ disproportionate involvement in trade and finance predated this period by many centuries. The more convincing explanation, these scholars conclude, is something much more basic: literacy.

Hollywood has always been a famously Jewish industry, which is itself a result of American antisemitism. Beginning in the 1920s, Jewish writers who couldn’t get jobs in the more prestigious industries of publishing or journalism often wound up in Hollywood. That was because the movies were considered lowbrow and vulgar, and therefore open to Jews.

Presiding over the handoff of the children’s corpses was the Red Cross, one of the venerable humanitarian organizations that never visited the Israeli hostages, but that attended the Durban conference in 2001. In 1944, the same Red Cross had also conducted a formal inspection of the Nazi “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt, where Herzl’s daughter was murdered. They told the world the Nazis were treating the Jews well.